The Operator Page 26
It was a big deal, what had just happened to him. He took out his Copenhagen, put in a plug, and stared out at the ocean for a while. When he came back in, I said, “You do realize that you’ve done the most historic thing in the history of the SEAL teams?” His response was, “That’s great. Can we go home now?”
Actually, no. It took us a few weeks to get back, because no one knew what to do with us. Yet another training scar: We put so much energy into designing the hostage rescue part of the mission nobody ever thought, “How are we going to get these guys home?”
We ended up in Qatar, at Camp Snoopy in Doha, living in tents for two weeks, with no clothes. With contingency funds, the command sent us to the Arab stores that sold counterfeit Oakley stuff. We were wearing all this faux-Oakley gear, and hats and shoes that the Navy bought us, with nothing to do but work out and con our beardless military brethren out of their beer rations. The whole time Jonny was struggling. He’d said he needed thirty minutes back on the Boxer, but clearly that hadn’t been nearly enough. He’d done something heroic, something that had made SEAL Team **** internationally famous in the instant it took to squeeze his trigger two times. He’d done exactly what he’d been training so long and so hard to do, and he’d done it perfectly.
But instead of feeling jubilant, what he felt was a great weight. Immediately, he sensed that some in this band of brothers who’d been more intimate with him than family for years—guys with whom he’d risked death and whom he trusted with his life—had begun to look at him with an unsettling mix of envy and distrust.
Jonny’s boss had been right there with him on the fantail of the Bainbridge, but didn’t get a shot. When we got home, we all had a little time off. When we came back to work—it was a Monday—there were already rumors: The boss wanted to fire Jonny, get rid of him, kick him out of the command. It was just a nasty vibe. I remember going over to Jonny’s house with some of his fellow snipers and sitting around, wondering, What the fuck is going on? We couldn’t understand. It made no sense at all. Jonny was the No. 1 guy out of the selection course, our first pick. I’d gone to Iraq with him. We’d had our first kills together. He was one of the best close quarters battle guys and an awesome sniper, top of the line. He took this incredible, heroic shot, and then all of a sudden, the people who weren’t quite ready to shoot got pissed at him.
I kept saying to him, “Hey, Jonny, take a dip.” I’d give him some of my Copenhagen. I just wanted him to hear me. I’d say, “You’re a hero. Don’t listen to this shit. You’re a goddamned hero. You did the best thing ever. Don’t listen to them.”
After a while, the head-on attacks against him died out, but the bad blood lingered. I wasn’t happy about it, but it never entered my mind that someday it would all come back to haunt me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There’s nothing like a new combat deployment to clear the mind.
That’s what we got less than two months after the Captain Phillips rescue—another return to Afghanistan to hunt high-value targets. There was a difference this time. Our team had just carried out the most high-profile mission in the history of the SEAL teams. We’d garnered worldwide headlines. And hype aside, we’d all been to Afghanistan and Iraq a bunch of times. We’d run different outstations and participated in a wide range of conflict situations, soup to nuts. We’d become the best of the best and we knew it. There were no more nerves.
New guys from other teams would approach us with a respectful curiosity—and these were combat-experienced SEALs who’d shot it out, killed lots of bad guys. Now they were chatting us up and getting excited that we were taking them seriously. You could picture their thoughts: Hey these guys are listening. They were good dudes who really wanted to pick our brains so that they’d get to the level they perceived us to be at.
We were assigned to a high-altitude base—Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika Province, an area where we mainly focused on fast-paced and exciting helo-borne vehicle interdictions. Our quarters were atop a big hill, high enough not to be so damn hot all the time. The living conditions were actually really good. The squadron before us had built it up and left us with an awesome gym with a huge seventy-inch or possibly even ninety-inch flat-screen TV—all I remember was, it was big. We used it to watch workout videos, and after we were done working at night, we went in the gym and played video games. At the time, Guitar Hero was really big. We turned the volume up to huge, and nobody cared. We were in a gym, after all! Jonny and I would play intensely competitive games of Madden NFL—we competed at everything, including who could make the best French-press coffee—and the gym was where we had our fantasy football draft. Did I mention we had a bar there, too? It was mainly to have a place where we could congregate and talk shop, make French press, and have a dip.
It was pretty good living. We’d get missions every third day or so. Most of the truly high-value targets had moved into Pakistan, but we had a lot of intel on IED makers—and again, we loved to hunt them because they were responsible for so many American casualties. They knew our tactics now and understood they were vulnerable at night, so they’d have one house where they made the bombs during the day, then slip back into Pakistan when it got dark. We tried to hit them when they were commuting. They’d usually be on motorcycles—they could ride the hell out of those things. Our intel guys would get a bead on them, and we’d mount up and off we’d go to hunt from the air. That was the most fun I ever had conducting ops, because you knew you weren’t going to be out there long, wouldn’t be walking your butt off, and would get to shoot at moving targets out of a helicopter.
It was fun, like I said, but still plenty dangerous. One of our new guys found that out fast. He’d just graduated from selection training and gone on his very first vehicle interdiction. We caught up to the usual group of bad guys on motorbikes and started shooting in front of the bikes to stop them. Our Gatling-style six-barrel mini-gun could fire two thousand to four thousand rounds a minute, so it wasn’t something you could ignore. One of the bad guys decided he wanted nothing to do with us. He jumped off his bike and ran like hell toward a field into the chest-high grass. I was pretty sure we’d hit him—we saw him go down—but now he was somewhere in the middle of that field in uncertain condition. We landed the helicopter in front of where we’d seen him go down and got out in a line to sweep the field. I was in the middle, and the new guy was right next to me. Our plan was to keep walking in that line until we found him. It was a dangerous tactic. At any moment, he could pop up and start shooting. But we were counting on having fast reactions.
We’d covered maybe half the distance when blam! something blew up just twenty feet ahead. A human arm flew out of the high grass right between me and the new guy. He followed the arm with his eyes, then turned to me and asked, “Hey, Rob, did you throw a grenade at that guy?” One of the other guys in the line said, “No, man. That’s a suicide bomber. Welcome to Sharana.”
One day, intel picked up four motorcycles speeding off from an IED manufacturing house. We launched in two helicopters. When the bad guys saw us, they split into two groups of two and went in different directions. I was in Chopper One, and we went after one group. Chopper Two went after the other. The guys we were chasing ditched their bikes and started running up a hill really fast into some trees so we couldn’t follow from the air. We touched down on the low ground. Tactically, we shouldn’t have given the enemy the high ground, but it was the only place we could get out to chase them. As soon as we hopped off, we started taking fire from up the hill. They were shooting close—the bullets zipped loudly past us.
This wasn’t a good situation. It was one of the few times when we were fighting at a disadvantage. Mostly on missions, we had other teams situated in other buildings, snipers on the roof, Rangers in blocking positions, and, ultimately, air protection. This time we didn’t really have any of that, and we were on the bottom, so we had to move up to them. If those dudes got set up on the high ground, it was going to be a long night.
I called my boss on the radio. “Just thinking,” I said. “I’m going to take these two guys here with me on a fire team. We’re going to flank.”
He rogered that, so we left the rest of the team and the dog, Cairo—one of our best dogs and one I’d personally bonded with—to hold that side of the hill. I took Harp, the bomb disposal guy, and one other guy to maneuver off to the side to try to flank the shooters.
As we were moving around the hill, we got an angle on one of the bad guys and fired. He went down, apparently dead, but you never know for sure. We had to go up the hill to clear him. When I was still a few meters away, I could see he was lying on his hands. When I see someone lying on his hands, that means he probably pulled a grenade and is just waiting like the guy in the field, because he knows he’s going to die anyway and figures he might as well take you with him. I stopped where I was and said, “Okay, enough of this.” I grabbed Harp, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal guy, and said, “I may need you to clear him.”
These EOD guys amaze me. It’s a very dangerous job, but it’s what they do, and they get right to it. He had no special equipment, just experience and ice in his veins. I walked about thirty meters away while he began to cut the pants off with scissors starting from the foot up, looking for any sign of a bomb. I was just hanging out while he took his time and did his tense and meticulous work. All of a sudden, he shouted, “Oh, my God. Get over here.”
I was like, “No. I’m not into it, dude. Sorry.”
He said, “No, no, seriously. He doesn’t have a bomb. Come see this.”
The bad guy may not have been packing a bomb, but he was definitely packing. Let’s just say: If he’d been in America, he could have made a fortune in the adult film industry.
As we were joking about this unexpected anatomy lesson, our radio squawked: “Hey, we’ve got an FWIA.” That means friendly wounded in action. Our moment of levity popped like a bubble. We asked who it was—we never say a name over the radio, so we expected a call sign. But this time they said, “Friendly wounded in action is Cairo.”
Whenever a dog gets shot, it’s just over. I remember thinking, Oh, shit. We just lost Cairo, the best dog we ever had.
We got the story later. As we were doing our flanking maneuver, the other half of our team sent Cairo after the bad guy. Cairo, a lean Belgian Malinois with a black muzzle, went tearing up the hill. He leaped a wooden fence and sniffed his way to the base of a tree. The bad guy had climbed into the low branches out of the dog’s reach. As Cairo snapped and growled, the guy hit him with a burst from his AK-47. One bullet pierced the dog’s leg and the other penetrated his working vest and lodged in his chest. Cheese, Cairo’s handler, couldn’t see what was happening but heard the shots and wanted to get his dog back. He used his remote to shock the dog’s collar, a signal to return. Poor Cairo, conscious but critically injured, couldn’t jump back over the fence, but Cheese didn’t know that. Even with two bullets in him and near death, Cairo dragged himself along the fence until he found an opening. Obviously, it took him a long time. When he finally arrived, Cheese wanted to smack him for not coming back as soon as he was signaled. Then he saw the blood-matted fur.
Cairo had taken a bullet from the bad guy so one of us wouldn’t have to. Now that we had the guy’s position in the tree, thanks to Cairo, the team spread out around his location and shot him off his perch.
But Cairo was in bad shape. We all assumed he was dying, but Cheese wouldn’t quit on him. He called another member of our team who’d been a medic, who treated Cairo exactly as if he’d been a human SEAL wounded in action. He shaved the wound, put on a chest seal, and applied pressure so Cairo wouldn’t bleed out. But everyone knew the chest wound was very bad news. They called for medevac. When the chopper arrived, Cheese and our point man, the medic, loaded Cairo in and flew with him to Bagram where they got a plane to Germany. None of us held out much hope.
Three days later we got word—Cairo had survived. He wouldn’t only fully recover, but before long he’d help make history.
*
NEAR THE END OF OUR second month on the Sharana deployment, on the morning of June 30, 2009, we woke up to the news that an American soldier had walked off base. Completely deserted. We knew it was a desertion because before he left he’d shipped his uniforms and all his stuff back home. He was a twenty-three-year-old private named Bowe Bergdahl, and he had a reputation in his unit as an oddball, a loose cannon.
When we woke up he was still missing, but he was quickly grabbed by the Taliban. Some of the guys in our tactical operations center had intercepted a phone conversation between a local villager and a Taliban commander. It went:
Villager: “Hey, we found this American. Do you want him?”
Taliban: “What do you mean you found him?”
Villager: “We found him on the side of the road taking a shit. Do you want him?”
Taliban: “Yeah, we want him. He’ll never shit right again.”
We heard a lot of stories about what a misfit this kid was. Later, it came out that before coming to Afghanistan he’d told a friend, “If this deployment is lame, I’m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan.” But we were sympathetic. Nobody deserved what the Taliban was going to do to him. I remember thinking, Oh, this poor kid. Man. We got to go find him.
Everything stopped. Everything that the military was trying to do to win the war in Afghanistan stopped, and it all turned into “Let’s go find this Bergdahl guy.” We knew we needed to get to him before the Taliban got him across the border into Pakistan.
We took a lot of chances. Remember that our tactics called for us to land a good distance away from the bad guys’ houses and walk in so they didn’t know we were coming. In our haste to find Bergdahl, we were putting down these huge helicopters right in people’s front yards. We didn’t know anything about these people—who they were or where their sympathies lay. Another no-no, but we were breaking the rules because we knew our time—and Bergdahl’s—was running out fast.
On one mission, we jumped out of the helicopter and a flood of people charged out of the house. For all I knew, they had AK-47s ready to fire. I’m so happy that my training worked and I didn’t shoot anyone when they rushed us. I could have killed ten men running at me, but I held back, wanting to make certain they were threats. They weren’t. They ran out not because they were bad guys trying to escape or attack, but because we’d freaked them out. They were just regular Afghans. We calmed them down and got them with the interpreter to find out what we could about this crazy Bergdahl.
We were getting so close, too. The people we were talking to knew stuff and were giving us good information. Not everyone in these villages is Taliban. All they’re trying to do is live their lives. Anyway, we learned enough to pinpoint a house belonging to the locals who’d tipped off the Taliban to Bergdahl’s location. When we got there we found a big wad of rupees, obviously the ransom the Taliban had paid for the information. We found it hidden—poorly—in one of the rooms, and it was way too big a stash to have been legit. I had it in my hands as we were interrogating the man of the house. I said, “Why do you have this?”
The guy was shaking, terrified because we’d nailed him. But he said, “Oh, my son works in Dubai in construction and he sent this.”
I don’t remember exactly how much it was, but it was obviously more than some guy working construction in Dubai could send home. I said, “Really? In packaged rupees? You’re lying. I’m going to take you with me and interrogate you or you can tell me who …”
He eventually came clean, and pointed us in a direction, but it was already too late. Members of t
he Taliban-aligned Haqqani network, among the baddest of the bad guys, had moved faster than we could track them. There wasn’t much more we could do. But in the first months after Bergdahl walked off the base, one of our troops that was deployed in Jalalabad made one more attempt. They got intel that the Taliban might be holding Bergdahl at a specific location south of Kabul, an hour and a half from them by chopper. They launched on the target and as soon as they landed they were immediately engaged by well-armed and very professional fighters with a machine gun. Before the SEAL team managed to kill all the insurgents, my friend Jimmy sent a dog after two of them and they opened fire. The fusillade of bullets slammed into the dog and smashed Jimmy’s femur. My buddy came close to bleeding out right there, but one of his teammates who’d been a medic saved his life. The dog didn’t make it.
Either Bergdahl had never been there, or the Taliban had gotten him out just in time.
The Haqqani network ended up keeping Bergdahl captive, moving him around to compounds in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for a month shy of five years. During that time he was locked in a cage, beaten with copper pipe, and nearly starved until a deal was made for his release in exchange for moving five key Taliban detainees from the American prison in Guantanamo Bay to Qatari custody.
It was a high price to pay to recover a deserter, especially when you added the price we had already paid in life and blood.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
By the spring of 2011, I’d been regularly going off to war for six years. That’s six years of saying goodbye to my kids at least once a year without knowing if I’d ever get to see them any older than they were the moment I kissed them on the forehead, turned away, and walked into headquarters for yet another deployment.
It was April, and I’d just come back from a five-month stint in Afghanistan, my seventh combat deployment with my squadron. Our first post-deployment training trip was combat diving in Miami. Tough assignment, I know, but we figured we’d earned it. It was always a wise move to have a “good deal” work trip after returning from war. We’d be able to get some quality open-water dive training, work on our tactics in dealing with Somali pirate “mother ships” in the Indian Ocean, and then chill and bond in the Miami evenings.