The Operator Page 25

  So there he was in my 7-Eleven conspicuously taking his sweet time. He was a big, jovial guy wanting to chat up anyone who looked his way. I noticed one of the things he was buying: a USA Today with a Captain Phillips headline. Very patriotically, but very slowly, he slammed it down and said, “Man, I sure wish someone would do something about this.”

  I said, “Hey, buddy, pay for your shit, and we will.”

  To his credit, he instantly recognized where this particular 7-Eleven was located and what that implied. He kind of staggered out of the way as he collected his change, and I quickly purchased my items. I was out of the store, back in my car, and pulling up to work within minutes. Things were buzzing in the parking lot as I parked and jogged to the side entrance.

  I ran up the stairs to the second deck and went directly to the Team Room. The roster was on the wall, just like when we trained, so I signed it and logged the time. I’d made it with plenty of time to spare but still needed to hurry. There was a lot to do, and we knew the time would move quickly.

  Downstairs the team leaders and senior operators were talking tactics and finalizing jump order—who was jumping when, and who was in which boat on which plane. We all knew this stuff already, but a triple check couldn’t hurt. While this was going on, the junior assault team members were loading everyone’s bags into predesignated box-trucks. Every member of the squadron had four bags that were loaded and labeled prior to this specific mission. We took maintenance of these bags seriously. Each bag is stored in each operator’s cage, labeled for the environment—water jump, land jump, desert, jungle, high altitude, diving, whatever. Next to that is a laminated inventory of what’s inside and a dry-erase marker. That bag might be sitting there for a long time. If you want to train with a piece of gear from the bag, when you take it out you mark it off, so you know it’s no longer in the bag. After you’re done with the gear, you clean it and put it back in the bag, always being careful to mark it off, so you know the item has been returned.

  We would hand carry the first bag we were taking on this mission—the “Jump bag”—onto the aircraft. It contained all the gear that was necessary to jump out of the plane and swim to the boat. The second bag was labeled: “Underway, Counter Terrorism.” It was loaded into the hull of a designated boat and would be inside it when the boat parachuted down. This bag contained all of the equipment needed to conduct a hostage rescue—body armor, a rifle, helmet, night vision, and the like. Once the team jumped into the ocean and climbed aboard the speedboat, we’d put on all the gear and be ready to roll. The third bag was a “Forward Staging Base” bag, and it could be loaded into the boat and remain inside or be staged at a forward base by the aircrew if the boats were too heavy. This contained forty-eight hours of comfort items in the event the team was in place at a base or ship either before or after the mission. It had a shower kit, flip-flops, and extra socks and a uniform. The fourth bag was a “Follow-On” bag that would remain at the command in each shooter’s cage. It contained extra war-fighting items in case more missions appeared as the team was forward. If needed, someone else would fly it into theater.

  We loaded all the gear and drove to the airfield. We stowed the assaulters’ gear in the boats and grabbed our Jump bags. We counted the parachutes. Twice. It was time to go. We were “wheels up” at exactly the target time we’d been aiming at for years.

  The long flight to the Indian Ocean exposed something we call a “training scar”—a flaw that goes unnoticed no matter how realistically we train for a mission but that becomes obvious during the real deal. Whoever designed the C-17 mustn’t have figured we’d fly for sixteen straight hours with so many people on board—either that or they had a warped sense of humor and decided it would be hilarious to install only one shitter on the plane. With fifty people sharing, it didn’t take long for that thing to fill up. We had to use whatever we could find. MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) come in these really thick plastic bags, so guys started using those, and then throwing them in one huge common bag. It was nasty.

  When we weren’t engineering personal waste disposal solutions, we were planning the mission. The decision was made for us to jump as planned, and then ride our boats to a flat-topped amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer, which normally supports helicopter missions and amphibious landing craft. We hadn’t been given execute authority yet so we’d utilize the big Navy ship as a forward staging base. We originally intended to jump all four boats, and all the shooters. The backstage people, the enablers who’d flown in with us, were going to turn around with the two planes and land in Djibouti. But we started thinking that we might need all these people down there—the radio guys and tech people—to help get things set up. We’d brought enough tandem parachutes to take them with us on the jump. This new scheme complicated a few things, though: People who hadn’t planned on leaving the aircraft now had to, which meant the boats would be over capacity. That meant we needed to take some of our gear out. First to go were a lot of our comfort items, since they were “nonessential.”

  The other not-so-minor complication was that a lot of support personnel were about to make their very first skydive. Not everyone was happy to be going for a jump on such short notice. When I told one of the guys, “Change of plans, you’re jumping now,” he said, “No, no, I’m going to Djibouti.”

  “Negative,” I said. “You’re jumping. We’re going to hook you up to this guy.” I introduced him to Boots, who would be his tandem master. Boots was especially jovial and excited about the mission. His passenger wasn’t. He whined the whole time about how he’d never wanted to jump in his life and certainly didn’t today. I tried to motivate him, expounding on how warm the weather was and how clear and beautiful the water was going to be. A damn tropical vacation! He kept complaining, “I didn’t join the Navy to be a SEAL. I’m not a SEAL, and I can’t jump!”

  I said, “Well, you’re half right. You’re jumping!”

  When we were about an hour out from the drop, we all dressed out. I gave jumpmaster inspections to jumpers and tandems and had another jumpmaster check me out. When the time came, the ramp dropped for the first time, and I could see the beautiful Indian Ocean and a large gray rectangle: the USS Boxer. We moved to the skin of the plane because it was almost time for the boats to jump, and they came out really fast. Each plane would release both of its boats and the three crew members for each boat would follow for a total of six jumpers. As the green light came on, the boats were gone. The six boat guys followed.

  After that, both planes did a wide “racetrack,” or a big circle in the sky to ensure that the boats had all landed, and that all of the boat guys were accounted for. Down on the ocean’s surface, the boat guys began de-rigging the boats and we prepared for our jump. I was on the edge of the ramp looking down at the ocean. I could see the USS Boxer but not the four boats. It was critical that I find them, as I would lead the entire stack from both planes to them. If we missed the boats and landed too far away, the boats would have to come pick us all up one by one and that could severely throw our schedule off. The chances of our losing a guy forever became real, too. No pressure.

  While I was standing at the edge of the ramp, I took a look back at the line of jumpers behind me. Everyone was pumped. My eyes locked with those of the tandem passenger who was afraid of jumping. In a last ditch effort, I gave him a thumbs-up and a smile. He just shook his head in fear. Then Boots’s head popped out from behind his with a grin from ear to ear. He gave me a thumbs-up and let out a “Yeah, buddy!” His passenger turned to see what was going on and Boots said, “Don’t look at me, bro … I don’t know what half this shit does anyway!”

  The poor guy’s eyes popped wider than they were already.

  I got the signal from the primary jumpmaster, and I left the ramp. One thousand, two thousand, look thousand, pull thousand. We were in the air with 102 jumpers and 96 canopies: obviously six of our parachutes were tandems.

  With every one of those following me, I searched the water bel
ow for our four boats but could see nothing. I took a hard left turn to show the others who I was, and one by one they followed. I only had a few minutes to find our landing zone, and all I could see were the huge whale sharks skimming below the surface of the clear water. Very cool, but I didn’t have time to check them out. I was busy trying to find the speedboats, which turned out to be conveniently located in the middle of the sun’s reflection off the Indian Ocean. This was another training scar—in practice, the boats always drove around the landing zone in such a way that big circular wakes formed, creating a beautiful bull’s-eye. But now we were actually doing it and … nothing. I was thinking, Shit, I’m leading a hundred people and I have no idea where I’m going.

  I decided my best course was to transect the area at right angles, hoping whatever was obscuring my view would resolve somewhere along the way. I led the stack on a downwind leg, then turned right on a crosswind leg. We maintained this course for a few hundred meters, then turned right again at about five hundred feet above the water. There they were, all four boats, off to our left.

  Each guy knew which boat to land next to. I was aiming for the second boat and landed right beside it. On a big jellyfish. Perfect. Luckily, I had enough clothes on that I barely got stung. We all climbed in our boats and took a head count. We were good and started driving toward the Boxer. My pager had gone off fifteen hours and forty-six minutes earlier. Not bad for the first time.

  The Boxer craned our boats aboard, and we instantly found a place to plan. We didn’t have a big enough space for everyone, so the junior guys got busy finding a staging area for all of our gear and a place to clean up. They also secured us some berthing.

  When we boarded, the Boxer was about five hundred miles out from the Bainbridge. It’s too risky to skydive at night—if a guy got separated from the stack we’d never be able to find him. So the idea had been to station the Boxer well over the horizon, have our guys do a day jump, then sail into the theater, arriving after dark. That’s exactly what we did.

  When we arrived, our plan called for a small group of shooters to leave the ship and go to the Bainbridge where they could set up. My buddy Jonny was one of them. As he was leaving, he looked up at me and said, “Hey, Nizzro, this shit’s ending one way, you know that, right?”

  “I know,” I said. “We didn’t come here to fucking talk them out of it.”

  As the snipers waited on the Bainbridge for a clean shot and orders to execute, other SEALs would replace the team that had been delivering supplies to the captain and the pirates. The Bainbridge’s crew had been doing that up to this point, but now our guys would do it, dressed like the ship’s crew. Guys who knew how to end a situation quickly would get close to the pirates without tipping them off.

  Meanwhile, the lifeboat was slowly being reeled closer to the ship. The half dozen or so snipers, who’d set up shop at the stern of the ship, kept it in their sights, waiting. Snipers are champions at waiting. They rotated positions, three or four of them peering through their scopes for a couple of hours straight, then they’d either take a break or take a turn as spotter. They knew they could be doing this for days, and they were prepared.

  The pirates weren’t. As the hours passed, they became increasingly irritable. The guys on the fantail knew what was going on aboard the lifeboat because someone had brought in a Somali interpreter who was having sporadic shouted communication with the pirates. They were getting food and water delivered, but they were out of khat. They were all addicted to the chewable plant, an amphetamine-like stimulant. Add to khat withdrawal seasickness and confusion that flowed from their leader’s having been nabbed during a “negotiation” on the Bainbridge a few days before, and you had some extremely edgy pirates. One in particular seemed to be in a hot rage. He kept screaming at Captain Phillips and periodically hitting him.

  It was a tricky situation all around. Since the pirates weren’t part of any known terrorist group, and, technically, weren’t enemy combatants (since we weren’t at war with Somalia and were in international waters), the legal authority to take them out was far from clear-cut. Lawyers in Washington were still debating. However, it had been established that members of the American military could act with lethal force against an imminent threat to self, coalition partners, or coalition civilians. This is what Jonny was discussing with his teammates as they waited. They went over and over their justification for shooting. The pirates had proven they weren’t to be trusted. They’d shot at a helicopter. They’d taken shots at the ship. When Captain Phillips was showing them how to navigate the lifeboat, they’d grabbed him and kept him hostage. Walt, the SEAL officer on the fan deck with the snipers, had been granted tactical command of the situation by the commander of the Bainbridge. It was his decision to make. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be second-guessed, potentially even prosecuted, when the smoke blew away.

  Twenty-four hours into their tense and exhausting vigil, Jonny was taking his turn peering through the sight on his sniper rifle. From what he and his fellow SEALs could hear and see, the situation was deteriorating rapidly. The pirates were doing what bullies do when they get scared. They upped their aggression. The hotheaded pirate had begun to subject Captain Phillips to “mock executions,” putting an unloaded gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Now there could be little question that the threat to Richard Phillips was imminent. The problem was that the only vantage point was through the small porthole windows in the covered lifeboat. Two of the three pirates had remained steadily visible, but the third, the hotheaded one, kept bobbing out of sight. If they didn’t shoot—and kill—all three pirates at once, the survivor would almost certainly shoot the captain.

  As the snipers to either side of Jonny kept the two visible pirates in their sights, Jonny kept his trained on the empty porthole. Suddenly the head of the third pirate bobbed into view, and then disappeared again. Keeping his eye and rifle steady on that spot, Jonny said to Walt, “Hey, we may not get another chance. When I see him bob up again, I need to go hot.”

  Walt said, “You’re clear to go hot.”

  Within seconds, the hothead bobbed up again. Jonny had spent thousands of hours and millions of rounds of ammunition practicing on what we call pepper poppers—targets that pop up randomly and briefly that require an instant reaction and perfect aim. Now all that training paid off in a flick of the index finger, a suppressed pfffft from his rifle and a bullet traveled 2,550 feet per second into the head that had appeared in the porthole. The two other snipers fired virtually simultaneously.

  All the pirates disappeared from the windows, but the snipers on the Bainbridge had heard the sharp report of an unsuppressed gun a beat after they had fired their suppressed weapons. That could only be bad news. Jonny’s awful first thought was that he’d missed, and Captain Phillips had been executed. Jonny had to sit there, wondering if he’d just fucked up, while one of our other snipers slid down the tow rope from the fantail to the lifeboat—just like the “slide for life” in the BUD/S obstacle course. Every SEAL had practiced it thousands of times, and each time we wondered, “When in the hell will we ever use this??” It turned out that one guy needed it one time. This time. He found Phillips alive and all the pirates dead. He radioed back, “Hey, it’s all good. Phillips is safe. All three pirates are dead.”

  As one of the pirates went down, he must have squeezed the trigger in his death throes. Phillips, who’d been trussed up like a deer by the pirates—the rope tied so tight around his hands that they’d lost all sensation and had swelled up “like clown gloves,” he’d write later—couldn’t see what had happened. All he knew was that the pirates were about to shoot him. He was bracing to die when he heard BAM! BAM! BAM! followed by a silence he hadn’t heard in days. He thought maybe the pirates, who’d been increasingly at odds, had all shot each other, until he heard an American voice, the voice of a SEAL, ask, “Are you okay?”

  While all this had been going on, I’d been on the Boxer coming up with a plan with my boss. The
pirates had been asking to get towed back to Somalia where there were villages friendly to them. They wanted radios to communicate with the village elders and a ride home. We were going to give them all they asked for, but tow them a few miles north of where they believed they were going. They’d emerge from the lifeboat believing they were meeting the elders. When they showed themselves, my team and I would be waiting. It would be dark and they wouldn’t be able to see us, but we’d see them with night vision and take them out.

  We would have needed some pretty high clearance to get boots on the ground in Somalia. As our bosses were putting things in motion to carry out this and four alternate plans, I was sitting in the Chief’s Mess getting coffee. My phone beeped with a text message that said, “We got him.”

  We responded, “Got who?”

  “Who do you think? He’s fine.”

  Happy Easter, Richard Phillips.

  *

  THE FIRST THING PHILLIPS WANTED when he got out of the sick bay was a couple of beers. He was a bit shell-shocked. The movie did a great job of depicting the reality. He was shaken up, as anybody would be, but happy and very grateful. They eventually brought him out to the Boxer, where I was, and by then I’d gotten the brief from my buddy Jonny.

  When we saw Jonny, we all wanted to slap his back, but he said, “Everybody just leave me alone for thirty minutes,” and walked away to the edge of the ship.