For the final test I was working with a partner, and this meant we both had to stay well concealed. In the end, he finds the range and calls the shot, and I adhere to his command. At this stage the instructors have installed walkers all over the place, and they’re communicating by radios with the platform. If the walker gets within two steps of you, you’ve failed.
Even if you get your shot off unseen and hit the target, if they find you afterward, you still fail. It’s a hard, tough, thinking man’s game, and the test is exhaustive. In training, an instructor stands behind both of you while you’re crossing the forbidden ground. They’re writing a constant critique, observing, for example, that my spotter has made a wrong call, either incorrect distance or direction. If I then miss with the shot, they know the mistake was not mine. As ever, you must operate as a team. The instructor knows full well you cannot position, aim, and fire the rifle without a spotter calling down the range, and Jesus, he better be right.
There was just one day during training where they walked on me, which I thought was pretty damned nervy. But it taught me something. Our enemy had a damn good idea where we might head before we even started, a kind of instinct based on long experience of rookie snipers looking for cover. They had me in their sights before I even got moving, because they knew where to look, the highest probability area.
That’s a lifetime lesson for the sniper: never, ever go where your enemy might expect you to be. My only solace on that rueful occasion was that the instructors walked on every single one of us that day.
In the final test, I faced that thousand-yard barren desert once again and began my journey, wriggling and scuffling through the dusty ground, my head well down, camouflage branches firm in my hat, groveling my way between the boulders. It took me hours to make the halfway point and even longer to ease my way over the last three hundred yards to my chosen spot for the shot. I was not seen, and I moved dead slowly through the rocks, from gully to gully, staying low, pressing into the ground. When I arrived at my final point, I scuffled together a little hide of dirt and sticks, and tucked down behind it, my rifle carefully aimed. I squeezed the trigger slowly and deliberately, and my shot pinged into the metal target, right in the middle. If that had been a man’s head, he’d have been history.
I saw the instructors swing around and start looking for the place my shot had come from. But they were obviously guessing. I pressed my face into the dirt and never moved an inch for a half hour. Then I made my slow and careful retreat, still lying flat, disturbing not a twig nor a rock. An unknown marksman, just the way we like it.
It had taken three months, and I passed Sniper School with excellent marks. SEALs don’t look for personal credit, and thus I cannot say who the class voted their Honor Man.
The last major school I attended was joint tactical air control. It lasted one month, out in the Fallon Naval Airbase, Nevada. They taught us the basics of airborne ordnance, five-hundred-pound bombs and missiles, what they can hit and what they can’t. We also learned to communicate directly with aircraft from the ground — getting them to see what we can see, relaying information through the satellites to the controllers.
I realize it has taken me some time to explain precisely what a Navy SEAL is and what it takes to be one. But as we are always told, you have to earn that Trident every day. We never stop learning, never stop training. To state that a man is a Navy SEAL communicates about a ten thousandth of what it really means. It would be as if General Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned he’d once served in the army.
But now you know: what it took, what it meant to all of us, and, perhaps, why we did it. Okay, okay, we do have our own little brand of arrogance. But we paid for every last drop of that sin in sweat, blood, and brutally hard work.
Because above all, we’re patriots. We will willingly carry the fight to whoever may be the enemies of the United States of America. We’re your front line, unafraid and ready to go in against al Qaeda, jihadists, terrorists, or whoever the hell else threatens this nation.
Every Navy SEAL is supremely confident, because we’re indoctrinated with a belief in victory at all costs; a conviction that no earthly force can withstand our thunderous assault on the battlefield. We’re invincible, right? Unstoppable. That’s what I believed to the depths of my spirit on the day they pinned the Trident on my chest. I still believe it. And I always will.
6
’Bye, Dudes, Give ’Em Hell
The final call came — “Redwing is a go!” The landing controller was calling the shots...“One minute...Thirty seconds!...Let’s go!” The ramp was down...the gunner was ready with the M60 machine gun...No moon...Danny went first, out into the dark.
As day broke over the mighty sprawl of the U.S. base at Bagram in Afghanistan on that morning in March 2005, we checked into our bee hut and slept for a few hours before attending a general briefing. Dan Healy, Shane, James, Axe, Mikey, and I, the new arrivals from SDV Team 1, were immediately seconded to SEAL Team 10 out of Virginia Beach, led right now by the teak-hard Lieutenant Commander Eric Kristensen, standing in for the absent CO, who was on duty elsewhere.
Eric was funny as hell, always one of the boys, so much so it might have impeded his progress through the higher ranks in later years. These days 75 percent of all SEALs have college degrees, and the line between officers and enlisted men is more blurred than it has ever been. But Eric was thirty-two and the son of an admiral from Virginia. Despite his sense of humor and his often wry look at higher authority, he was a very fine SEAL commander, and he presided over one of the best fighting platoons in the entire U.S. Navy. Team 10 was brilliantly trained for the kind of warfare we were now entering. Lieutenant Commander Kristensen had a couple of right-hand men, Luke Newbold and Master Chief Walters, very special guys. I can only say it was a pleasure to work with them.
Our briefing, like everything associated with Team 10, was top of the line, a kind of grim educational lecture on what was happening up on the northwest frontier, which divides Afghanistan and Pakistan. The steep, stony mountain crevasses and cliffs, dust-colored, sinister places, were now alive with the burgeoning armies of the Taliban. Angry, resentful men, regrouping all along the unmarked high border, preparing to take back the holy Muslim country they believed the infidel Americans had stolen from them and then presented to a new, elected government.
Up there, complex paths emerge and then disappear behind huge boulders and rocks. Every footstep that dislodges anything, a small rock, a pile of shale, seems like it might cause an earthshaking avalanche. Stealth, we were told, must be our watchword on the high, quiet slopes of the Hindu Kush.
These paths, trodden down for centuries by warring tribesmen, were the very routes taken by the defeated Taliban and al Qaeda after the withering U.S. bombardment had all but annihilated them in 2001. We would find out all about them soon enough.
Within literally hours, we began our first mission. No one regarded us as rookies; we were all fully trained SEALs, ready for action, ready to get up there into those mountain passes and help slow the tide of armed warrior tribesmen moving back across the border from Pakistan.
We flew by helicopter up into those passes, into the hills above a deep valley. We arrived, maybe twenty of us, including Dan, Shane, Axe, and Mikey, and fanned out around the mountain. Axe, Mikey, and James Suh (call sign Irish One) were positioned about one and a half miles from Chief Healy, Shane, and me (call sign Irish Three).
This was a border hot spot, where multiple Taliban troop movements were taking place on a weekly, or even daily, basis. We expected to observe the Taliban way below us on that narrow, treacherous path through the mountains, moving along with their swaying camels, many of them loaded up with explosives, grenades, and God knows what else.
I was walking with great caution. We had all been warned these glowering Afghanistan tribesmen would fight, and none of them were likely to be pushovers. I also knew that one false step, a dislodged rock, however small, would betray our positions. Those t
ribesmen had lived up here for centuries, and they had eyes like falcons. If they heard us or saw us, they would attack immediately. Our high command had left no doubt in our minds. This was dangerous stuff, but we had to stop the influx of armed terrorists.
Carefully I moved along the ridge, occasionally stopping to scan the mountain pass with my binos. I was walking silently. Everything was clear in my mind. If a troop of wild tribesmen with camels and missiles came rolling into the pass, I must instantly whistle up reinforcements on the radio. If it was a lesser force, something we could deal with right here, we’d swoop and try to capture the leaders and take care of the rest by whatever means were necessary.
Anyway, I continued my silent patrol, hunkered down behind a couple of huge boulders, and again scanned the pass. Nothing. I stepped out once more, into steep, barren, open country, and below me I suddenly saw three armed Afghanistan tribesmen. My brain raced. There was seventy yards between me and Shane. Do I open fire? How many more of them were there?
Too late. They opened fire first, shooting uphill, and a volley of bullets from their AK-47s slammed into the rocks all around me. I hurled myself back behind the rocks, knowing Shane must have heard something. Then I stepped out and let ’em have it. I saw them retreat into cover. At least I’d pinned them down.
But they came at me again, and again I returned fire. But right then, they unleashed two rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and thank God I saw them coming. I dived for cover, but they blew out one of the boulders which had given me shelter. Now there were ricocheting bullets, dust, shrapnel, and flying rock particles everywhere.
It felt like I was fighting a one-man war, and Christ knows how I avoided being hit. But suddenly, the echoes of the blast died away, and I could hear sporadic gunfire from these three maniacs. I waited quietly until I believed they had broken cover, and then I stepped out and hit the trigger again. I don’t know what or who I hit, but it suddenly went very quiet again. As if nothing had happened. Welcome to Afghanistan, Marcus.
This was one type of patrol, standing guard up there over the passes and trying to remain concealed. The other kind was a straight surveillance and reconnaissance mission (SR), where we were tasked with observing and photographing a village, looking for our target. It was always expected we would locate him since our intel was excellent, often with good photographs. And we were always in search of some sonofabitch in a turban who had for too long been indulging in his favorite pastime of blowing up U.S. Marines.
On these sorties into the mountains, we were expected to pick out our quarry, either with high-powered binoculars or the photo lens of one of our cameras, and then swoop down into the village and take him. If he was alone, that was always the primary plan of the SEALs: grab the target, get him back to base, and make him talk, tell us where the Taliban were gathered, locate for us the huge ammunition piles they had hidden in the mountains.
That high explosive had only one use, to kill and maim U.S. troops, up there in support of the elected government. We found it well to remember those Taliban insurgents were the very same guys who sheltered and supported Osama bin Laden. We were also told, no ifs, ands, or buts, that particular mass murderer was right where we were going, somewhere.
Generally speaking, we were to grab our man in the village if he was protected by, say, only four bodyguards. No problem. But if there were more of them, some kind of Taliban garrison crawling with armed men, we were to call for a proper fighting force to fly in and take care of the problem. Either way, when we arrived, things ceased to look great for young Abdul the Bombmaker measuring out his dynamite down there in Main Street, Mud Hut Central, Northeast Afghanistan.
Our next mission was a huge operation, around fifty guys dropped into the mountains, in the worst terrain you’ve ever seen. Well, maybe not if there are any mountain goats or mountain lions among my readers, but it sure as hell was the worst I’d ever seen. There were steep cliff faces, loose footing, sheer drops, hardly any bushes or trees, nothing to grab, nowhere to take cover if necessary.
I have explained how supremely fit we were. We could all climb anything, go anywhere. But — you’re not going to believe this — we took eight hours to walk one and a half miles. Guys were falling down the goddamned mountain, getting hurt, bad. It was hotter than a Texas griddle, and one of my buddies told me later, “I’d have quit the teams just to get out of there.”
I know he didn’t mean it. But we all knew the feeling. We were tired, frustrated, roped together in teams, crawling across the face of this dangerous mountain with full rucksacks and rifles. To this day it remains the worst journey of my life. And we weren’t even facing the enemy. It was so bad we made up a song about it, which our resident expert banjo player put to the music of the Johnny Cash song “Ring of Fire”:
I fell into a hundred-foot ravine,
We went down, down, down, and busted up my spleen,
And it burned, burned, burned — that Ring of Fire . . .
Our dual targets on that next mission were two Afghan villages set into the mountainside, one above the other. We had no clues which one harbored the most Taliban forces, and it had been decided we needed to take them both at gunpoint. No bullshit. The reason for this was a very young guy. We had terrific intel on him, from both satellites and the FBI. We did not, however, have photographs.
I never knew where he was educated, but this young Taliban kid was a scientist, a master of explosives. We call them IED guys (improvised explosive devices), and in this part of the mountains, this kid was King IED. And he and his men had been wreaking havoc on U.S. troops, blowing stuff up all over the place. He’d recently blown up a couple of U.S. Marine convoys and killed a lot of guys.
Foxtrot Platoon regrouped in the small hours of the morning after the trek across the mountains and positioned ourselves high above the upper village. As the sun came up, we moved swiftly down the hillside and charged into the village, crashing down the doors to the houses, arresting anyone and everyone. We were not shooting, but we were very intimidating, no doubt about that. And no one resisted. But the kid wasn’t there.
Meanwhile the main force, SEAL Team 10, was in and playing hell in the bigger, lower village. It took them a while, because this required interrogation, a skill at which we were all very competent. In these circumstances, we were grilling everyone, looking for the liar, the guy who changed his story, the guy who was somehow different. We wanted the guy who was obviously not a goatherd, as the rest of them were; a young guy who lacked the gnarled, rough look of the native mountain farmer.
We got our man. It was my first close-up encounter with a fanatical Taliban fighter. I’ll never forget him. He was only just old enough to have a decent beard, but he had wild, crazy eyes, and he stared at me like I’d just rejected the entire teachings of the Koran.
I knew in that instant that if he could have killed me, he would have. No one had ever looked at me before, or has since, with that much hatred.
That second operation in Afghanistan, the snatch-and-grab of Abdul the Bombmaker or whatever the hell his name was, brought home two aspects of this conflict to us newly arrived SEALs. First, the rabid hatred these Muslim extremists had for all of us; second, the awkwardness of complying with our rules of engagement (ROE) in this type of warfare.
SEALs, by our nature, training, and education, are not very stupid. And along with everyone else, we read the newspaper headlines from all over the world about serving members of the armed forces who have been charged with murder in civilian courts for doing what they thought was their duty, attacking their enemy.
Our rules of engagement in Afghanistan specified that we could not shoot, kill, or injure unarmed civilians. But what about the unarmed civilian who was a skilled spy for the illegal forces we were trying to remove? What about an entire secret army, diverse, fragmented, and lethal, creeping through the mountains in Afghanistan pretending to be civilians? What about those guys? How about the innocent-looking camel drovers making their way through
the mountain passes with enough high explosive strapped to the backs of their beasts to blow up Yankee Stadium? How about those guys?
We all knew that we’d chosen to do what 999 Americans out of every thousand would not even think about doing. And we were taught that we were necessary for the security of our nation. We were sent to Afghanistan to carry out hugely dangerous missions. But we were also told that we could not shoot that camel drover before he blew up all of us, because he might be an unarmed civilian just taking his dynamite for a walk.
And how about his buddy? The younger guy with the stick, running along behind, prodding the freakin’ camels? How about him? How about if he can’t wait to scamper up those mountains and find his brother and the rest of the Taliban hard men? The ones with the RPGs, waiting in the hidden cave?
We wouldn’t hear him reveal our position, and neither would the politicians who drafted those ROEs. And those men in suits won’t be on that mountainside when the first grenade explodes among us and takes off someone’s leg, or head.
Should we have shot that little son of a gun right off the bat, before he had a chance to run? Or was he just an unarmed civilian, doing no harm to anyone? Just taking his TNT for a walk, right?
These terrorist/insurgents know the rules as well as they did in Iraq. They’re not their rules. They’re our rules, the rules of the Western countries, the civilized side of the world. And every terrorist knows how to manipulate them in their own favor. Otherwise the camel drovers would be carrying guns.
But they don’t. Because they know we are probably scared to shoot them, because we might get charged with murder, which I actually know they consider to be on the hysterical side of laughable.