TAYA:
Chris was always very aware of my feelings. He is extremely observant in general and it is the same with his awareness of my emotions. He doesn’t have to say much. A simple question or easy way of bringing something to light reveals that he is 100 percent aware of my feelings. He doesn’t necessarily enjoy talking about feelings, but he has a sense of when it is appropriate or necessary to bring things out that I may have been intent on keeping in.
I noticed it early on in our relationship. We would be talking on the phone and he was very caring.
We are, in many ways, opposites. Still, we seemed to click. One day on the phone he was asking what I thought made us compatible. I decided to tell him some of the things that drew me to him.
“I think you’re a really good guy,” I told him, “really nice. And sensitive.”
“Sensitive?!?” He was shocked, and sounded offended. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t know what sensitive means?”
“You mean like I go around crying at movies and stuff?”
I laughed. I explained that I meant that he seemed to pick up on how I was feeling, sometimes before I did. And he let me express that emotion, and, importantly, gave me space.
I don’t think that’s the image most people have of SEALs, but it was and is accurate, at least of this one.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
AS OUR RELATIONSHIP GOT CLOSER AND CLOSER, TAYA AND I started spending more time with each other. Finally, we’d spend nights at each other’s apartment, either in Long Beach or San Diego.
I woke up one morning to her yelling. “Chris! Chris! Wake up! You’ve got to see this!”
I stumbled into the living room. Taya had turned on the television and jacked the volume. I saw smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center in New York.
I didn’t understand what-all was happening. Part of me was still sleeping.
Then as we watched, an airplane flew right into the side of the second tower.
“Motherfuckers!” I muttered.
I stared at the screen, angry and confused, not entirely sure it was real.
Suddenly I remembered that I left my cell phone off. I grabbed it, and saw I’d missed a bunch of messages. The sum total of them was this:
Kyle, get your ass back to base. Now!
I grabbed Taya’s SUV—it had plenty of gas and my truck didn’t—and hauled down to base. I don’t know exactly how fast I was going—it might have been three digits—but it was certainly a high rate of speed.
Down around San Juan Capistrano, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a set of red lights flashing.
I pulled over. The cop who came up to the truck was pissed.
“Is there any reason you’re going so fast?” he demanded.
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I apologize. I’m in the military and I just got recalled. I understand you got to write me a ticket. I know I was in the wrong but with all due respect can you just hurry and give me the ticket so I can get back to base?”
“What branch are you in?”
Motherfucker, I thought. I just told you I have to report. Can’t you just give me the damn ticket? But I kept my cool.
“I’m in the Navy,” I told him.
“What do you do in the Navy?” he asked.
By now I was pretty annoyed. “I’m a SEAL.”
He closed his ticket book.
“I’ll take you to the city line,” he told me. “Go get some fuckin’ payback.”
He put his lights on and pulled in front of me. We went a bit slower than I’d been going when he nabbed me, but it was still well past the limit. He took me as far as his jurisdiction went, maybe a little farther, then waved me on.
TRAINING
WE WERE PUT ON IMMEDIATE STANDBY, BUT IT WOULD TURN out that we weren’t needed in Afghanistan or anywhere else at that moment. My platoon would have to wait roughly a year before we got into action, and when we did, it would be against Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden.
There’s a lot of confusion in the civilian world about SEALs and our mission. Most people think we’re strictly sea-based commandos, meaning that we always operate off ships, and hit targets on the water or the immediate coastline.
Admittedly, a fair amount of our work involves things at sea—we are in the Navy, after all. And from a historical perspective, as briefly mentioned earlier, SEALs trace their origins to the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs. Established during World War II, UDT frogmen were responsible for reconning beaches before they were hit, and they trained for a variety of other waterborne tasks, such as infiltrating harbors and planting limpet mines on enemy ships. They were the mean, bad-ass combat divers of World War II and the postwar era, and SEALs are proud to carry on in their wake.
But as the UDT mission expanded, the Navy recognized that the need for special operations didn’t end at the beach line. As new units called SEALs were formed and trained for this expanded mission, they came to replace the older UDT units.
While “land” may be the final word in the SEAL acronym, it’s hardly the last thing we do. Every special operations unit in the U.S. military has its own specialty. There’s a lot of overlap in our training, and the range of our missions is similar in many respects. But each branch has its own expertise. Army Special Forces—also known as SF—does an excellent job training foreign forces, both in conventional and unconventional warfare. Army Rangers are a big assault force—if you want a large target, say an airfield, taken down, that’s their thing. Air Force special operators—parajumpers—excel at pulling people out of the shit.
Among our specialties are DAs.
DA stands for “direct action.” A direct-action mission is a very short, quick strike against a small but high-value target. You might think of it as a surgical strike against the enemy. In a practical sense, it could range from anything like an attack on a key bridge behind enemy lines to a raid on a terrorist hideout to arrest a bomb maker—a “snatch and grab,” as some call it. While those are very different missions, the idea is the same: strike hard and fast before the enemy knows what’s going on.
After 9/11, SEALs began training to deal with the places Islamic terrorists were most likely to be located—Afghanistan number one, and then the Middle East and Africa. We still did all the things a SEAL is supposed to do—diving, jumping out of planes, taking down ships, etc. But there was more emphasis on land warfare during our workup than there traditionally had been in the past.
There was debate about this shift far above my pay grade. Some people wanted to limit SEALs to ten miles inland. Nobody asked my opinion, but as far as I’m concerned, there shouldn’t be any limits. Personally, I’m just as happy to stay out of the water, but that’s beside the point. Let me do what I’m trained to do wherever it needs to be done.
The training, most of it anyway, was fun, even when it was a kick in the balls. We dove, we went into the desert, we worked in the mountains. We even got water-boarded and gassed.
Everybody gets water-boarded during training. The idea is to prepare you in case you’re captured. The instructors tortured us as hard as they could, tying us up and pounding on us, just short of permanently damaging us. They say each of us has a breaking point, and that prisoners eventually give in. But I would have done my best to make them kill me before I gave up secrets.
Gas training was another kick. Basically, you get hit with CS gas and have to fight through it. CS gas is “captor spray” or tear gas—the active ingredient is 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, for all of you chemistry majors. We thought of it as “cough and spit,” because that’s the best way to deal with it. You learn during training to let your eyes run; the worst thing to do is rub them. You’re going to get snotty and you’re going to be coughing and crying, but you can still shoot your weapon and fight through it. That’s the point of the exercise.
We went up to Kodiak, Alaska, where we did a land navigation course. It wasn’t the height of winter, but there was still so
much snow on the ground that we had to put on snowshoes. We started with basic instruction on keeping warm—layering up, etc.—and learned about things like snow shelters. One of the important points of this training, which applied everywhere, was learning how to conserve weight in the field. You have to figure out whether it’s more important to be lighter and more mobile, or to have more ammunition and body armor.
I prefer lightness and speed. I count ounces when we go out, not pounds. The lighter you are, the more mobile you become. The little bastards out there are faster than hell; you need every advantage you can get on them.
The training was pretty competitive. We found out at one point that the best platoon in the Team would be shipped out to Afghanistan. Training picked up from that point on. It was a fierce competition, and not just out on the training range. The officers were backstabbing each other. They’d go to the CO and dime each other out:
Did you see what those guys did on the range? They’re no good . . .
The competition came down to us and one other platoon. We came in second. They went to war; we stayed home.
That’s about the worst fate a SEAL can imagine.
WITH THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ LOOMING ON THE HORIZON, OUR emphasis shifted. We practiced fighting in the desert; We practiced fighting in cities. We worked hard, but there were always lighter moments.
I remember one time when we were on a RUT (real urban training). Our command would find a municipality that was willing to have us come in and take down an actual building—an empty warehouse, say, or a house—something a little more authentic than you would find on a base. On this one exercise, we were working at a house. Everything had been carefully arranged with the local police department. A few “actors” had been recruited to play parts during the exercise.
My role was to pull security outside. I blocked out traffic, waving vehicles away as some of the local cops watched from the sidelines.
While I was standing there, gun out, not looking particularly friendly, this guy walked down the block toward me.
I started going through the drill. First I waved him off; he kept coming. Then I shined my light on him; he kept coming. I put my laser dot on him; he kept coming.
Of course, the closer he got, the more convinced I was that he was a role-player, sent to test me. I mentally reviewed my ROEs (“rules of engagement”), which covered how I was supposed to act.
“What are you, the popo?” he asked, sticking his face out toward mine.
“Popo” (a thug’s term for police) wasn’t in the ROEs, but I figured he was ad-libbing. The next thing on my list was to throw him down. So I did. He started to resist, and reached under his jacket for what I assumed was a weapon, which is exactly what a SEAL playing a bad guy would do. So I reacted in kind, giving a good SEAL response as I wrestled him into the dirt and busted him up a bit.
Whatever was under his jacket broke and liquid went everywhere. He was cussing and carrying on, but I didn’t take the time to think about all that just then. As the fight ran out of him, I cuffed him and looked around.
The cops, seated in their patrol car nearby, were just about doubled over laughing. I went over to see what was up.
“That’s so-and-so,” they told me. “One of the biggest drug dealers in the city. We wish we could have beat him like you just did.”
Apparently, Mr. Popo ignored all the signs and wandered into the training exercise figuring he’d carry on business as usual. There are idiots everywhere—but I guess that explains how he got into that line of work in the first place.
HAZED AND HITCHED
FOR MONTHS, THE UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL pressured Iraq to comply fully with U.N. resolutions, especially those requiring inspections of suspected weapons of mass destruction and related sites. War wasn’t a foregone conclusion—Saddam Hussein could have complied and shown inspectors everything they wanted to see. But most of us knew he wouldn’t. So when we got the word that we were shipping out to Kuwait, we were excited. We figured we were going to war.
One way or the other, there was plenty to do out there. Besides watching Iraq’s borders and protecting the Kurdish minority, who Saddam had gassed and massacred in the past, U.S. troops were enforcing no-fly zones in the north and south. Saddam was smuggling oil and other items both into and out of his country, in violation of the U.N. sanctions. The U.S. and other allies were stepping up operations to stop that.
Before we deployed, Taya and I chose to get married. The decision surprised both of us. One day we started talking in the car, and we both came to the conclusion that we should get married.
The decision stunned me, even as I made it. I agreed with it. It was completely logical. We were definitely in love. I knew she was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. And yet, for some reason, I didn’t think the marriage would last.
We both knew that there is an extremely high divorce rate in the SEALs. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard marriage counselors claim that it is close to 95 percent, and I believe it. So maybe that was what worried me. Perhaps part of me wasn’t really ready to think about a lifetime commitment. And of course I understood how demanding my job was going to be once we went to war. I can’t explain the contradictions.
But I do know that I was absolutely in love, and that she loved me. And so, for better or worse, make that peace or war, marriage was our next step together. Happily, we’ve survived it all.
ONE THING YOU OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT SEALS: WHEN you’re new to the Teams, you get hazed. The platoons are very tight-knit groups. Newcomers—always called “new guys”—are treated like hell until they prove they belong. That usually doesn’t happen until well into their first deployment, if then. New guys get the shit jobs. They’re constantly tested. They’re always beat on.
It’s a kind of an extended hazing that takes many forms. For example: on a training exercise, you work hard. The instructors kick your ass all day long. Then, when you’re done, the platoon will go out and party. When we’re out on a training mission, we usually drive around in large, twelve-passenger vans. A new guy always drives. Which, of course, means he can’t drink when we hit the bars, at least not to SEAL standards.
That’s the mildest form of hazing. In fact, it’s so mild it’s not really hazing.
Choking him out while he’s driving—that’s hazing.
One night soon after I joined my platoon, we were out partying after a training mission. When we left the bar, all the older guys piled into the back. I wasn’t driving, but I had no problem with that—I like to sit up front. We were speeding along for a while and all of a sudden I heard, “One-two-three-four, I declare a van war.”
The next thing I knew, I was pummeled. “Van war” meant it was open season on the new guys. I came out of that one with bruised ribs and a black eye, maybe two. I must have gotten my lip busted a dozen times during hazing.
I should say that van wars are separate from bar fights, another SEAL staple. SEALs are pretty notorious for getting into bar scrapes, and I was no exception. I’ve been arrested more than once through the years, though as a general rule the charges were either never filed or quickly dismissed.
Why do SEALs fight so much?
I haven’t made a scientific study of it, but I think a lot is owed to pent-up aggression. We’re trained to go out and kill people. And then, at the same time, we’re also being taught to think of ourselves as invincible bad-asses. That’s a pretty potent combination.
When you go into a bar, you’ll always have someone who will poke a shoulder into you or otherwise imply you should fuck off. Happens in every bar across the world. Most people just ignore things like that.
If someone does that to a SEAL, we’re going to turn and knock you out.
But at the same time, I have to say that while SEALs end a lot of fights, we usually don’t start many. In a lot of cases, the fights are the result of some sort of stupid jealousy or the need for a dumbass to test his own manhood and earn bragging rights for fighting a SEAL.
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When we go into bars, we don’t just cower down in the corner or lay low. We go in extremely confident. Maybe we’re loud. And, with us being mostly young and in great shape, people take notice. Girls gravitate toward a group of SEALs, and maybe that makes their boyfriends jealous. Or guys want to prove something for some other reason. Either way, things escalate and fights happen.
BUT I WASN’T TALKING ABOUT BAR FIGHTS; I WAS TALKING about hazing. And my wedding.
We were in the Nevada mountains; it was cold—so cold that it was snowing. I had gotten a few days leave to get married; I was due to take off in the morning. The rest of the platoon still had some work to do.
We got back that night to our temporary base and went inside to the mission-planning room. The chief told everybody that we’d relax and have a few beers while we mapped out the next day’s operation. Then he turned to me.
“Hey, new guy,” he told me. “Go grab the beer and the booze out of the van and bring it in here.”
I hopped to.
When I came back in, everyone was sitting in chairs. There was only one left, and it was kind of in the middle of a circle of the others. I didn’t think too much about it as I sat down.
“All right, this is what we’re going to do,” my chief said, standing in front of dry-erase board at the front of the room. “The operation will be an ambush. The target will be in the center. We will completely encircle it.”
That doesn’t sound too smart, I thought. If we come in from every direction, we’ll be shooting each other. Usually our ambushes are planned in an L-shape to avoid that.
I looked at the chief. The chief looked at me. Suddenly, his serious expression gave way to a shit-ass grin.
With that, the rest of the platoon bum-rushed me.
I hit the floor a second later. They cuffed me to a chair, and then began my kangaroo court.
There were a lot of charges against me. The first was the fact that I had let it be known that I wanted to become a sniper.