They may not have been the precise same guys who planned 9/11. But they were most certainly their descendants, their heirs, their followers. They were part of the same crowd who knocked down the North and South towers in the Big Apple on the infamous Tuesday morning in 2001. And our coming task was to stop them, right there in those mountains, by whatever means necessary.
Thus far, those mountain men had been kicking some serious ass in their skirmishes with our military. Which was more or less why the brass had sent for us. When things get very rough, they usually send for us. That’s why the navy spends years training SEAL teams in Coronado, California, and Virginia Beach. Especially for times like these, when Uncle Sam’s velvet glove makes way for the iron fist of SPECWARCOM (that’s Special Forces Command).
And that was why all of us were here. Our mission may have been strategic, it may have been secret. However, one point was crystalline clear, at least to the six SEALs in that rumbling Hercules high above the Arabian desert. This was payback time for the World Trade Center. We were coming after the guys who did it. If not the actual guys, then their blood brothers, the lunatics who still wished us dead and might try it again. Same thing, right?
We knew what we were coming for. And we knew where we were going: right up there to the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, those same mountains where bin Laden might still be and where his new bands of disciples were still hiding. Somewhere.
The pure clarity of purpose was inspirational to us. Gone were the treacherous, dusty backstreets of Baghdad, where even children of three and four were taught to hate us. Dead ahead, in Afghanistan, awaited an ancient battleground where we could match our enemy, strength for strength, stealth for stealth, steel for steel.
This might be, perhaps, a little daunting for regular soldiers. But not for SEALs. And I can state with absolute certainty that all six of us were excited by the prospect, looking forward to doing our job out there in the open, confident of our ultimate success, sure of our training, experience, and judgment. You see, we’re invincible. That’s what they taught us. That’s what we believe.
It’s written right there in black and white in the official philosophy of the U.S. Navy SEAL, the last two paragraphs of which read:
We train for war and fight to win. I stand ready to bring the full spectrum of combat power to bear in order to achieve my mission and the goals established by my country. The execution of my duties will be swift and violent when required, yet guided by the very principles I serve to defend.
Brave men have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold. In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. I will not fail.
Each one of us had grown a beard in order to look more like Afghan fighters. It was important for us to appear nonmilitary, to not stand out in a crowd. Despite this, I can guarantee you that if three SEALs were put into a crowded airport, I would spot them all, just by their bearing, their confidence, their obvious discipline, the way they walk. I’m not saying anyone else could recognize them. But I most certainly could.
The guys who traveled from Bahrain with me were remarkably diverse, even by SEAL standards. There was SGT2 Matthew Gene Axelson, not yet thirty, a petty officer from California, married to Cindy, devoted to her and to his parents, Cordell and Donna, and to his brother, Jeff.
I always called him Axe, and I knew him well. My twin brother, Morgan, was his best friend. He’d been to our home in Texas, and he and I had been together for a long time in SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1, Alfa Platoon. He and Morgan were swim buddies together in SEAL training, went through Sniper School together.
Axe was a quiet man, six foot four, with piercing blue eyes and curly hair. He was smart and the best Trivial Pursuit player I ever saw. I loved talking to him because of how much he knew. He would come out with answers that would have defied the learning of a Harvard professor. Places, countries, their populations, principal industries.
In the teams, he was always professional. I never once saw him upset, and he always knew precisely what he was doing. He was just one of those guys. What was difficult and confusing for others was usually a piece of cake for him. In combat he was a supreme athlete, swift, violent, brutal if necessary. His family never knew that side of him. They saw only the calm, cheerful navy man who could undoubtedly have been a professional golfer, a guy who loved a laugh and a cold beer.
You could hardly meet a better person. He was an incredible man.
Then there was my best friend, Lieutenant Michael Patrick Murphy, also not yet thirty, an honors graduate from Penn State, a hockey player, accepted by several law schools before he turned the rudder hard over and changed course for the United States Navy. Mikey was an inveterate reader. His favorite book was Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, the story of the immortal stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae.
He was vastly experienced in the Middle East, having served in Jordan, Qatar, and Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. We started our careers as SEALs at the same time, and we were probably flung together by a shared devotion to the smart-ass remark. Also, neither of us could sleep if we were under the slightest pressure. Our insomnia was shared like our humor. We used to hang out together half the night, and I can truthfully say no one ever made me laugh like that.
I was always razzing him about being dirty. We’d sometimes go out on patrol every day for weeks, and there seems to be no time to shower and no point in showering when you’re likely to be up to your armpits in swamp water a few hours later. Here’s a typical exchange between us, petty officer team leader to commissioned SEAL officer:
“Mikey, you smell like shit, for Christ’s sake. Why the hell don’t you take a shower?”
“Right away, Marcus. Remind me to do that tomorrow, willya?”
“Roger that, sir!”
For his nearest and dearest, he used a particularly large gift shop, otherwise known as the U.S. highway system. I remember him giving his very beautiful girlfriend Heather a gift-wrapped traffic cone for her birthday. For Christmas, he gave her one of those flashing red lights which fit on top of those cones at night. Gift-wrapped, of course. He once gave me a stop sign for my birthday.
And you should have seen his traveling bag. It was enormous, a big, cavernous hockey duffel bag, the kind carried by his favorite team, the New York Rangers. The single heaviest piece of luggage in the entire navy. But it didn’t sport the Rangers logo. On its top were two simple words: Piss off.
There was no situation for which he could not summon a really smart-ass remark. Mikey was once involved in a terrible and almost fatal accident, and one of the guys asked him to explain what happened.
“C’mon,” said the New York lieutenant, as if it were a subject of which he was profoundly weary. “You’re always bringing up that old shit. Fuggeddaboutit.”
The actual accident had happened just two days earlier.
He was also the finest officer I ever met, a natural leader, a really terrific SEAL who never, ever bossed anyone around. It was always Please. Always Would you mind? Never Do that, do this. And he simply would not tolerate any other high-ranking officer, commissioned or noncommissioned, reaming out one of his guys.
He insisted the buck stopped with him. He always took the hit himself. If a reprimand was due, he accepted the blame. But don’t even try to go around him and bawl out one of his guys, because he could be a formidable adversary when riled. And that riled him.
He was excellent underwater, and a powerful swimmer. Trouble was, he was a bit slow, and that was truly his only flaw. One time, he and I were on a two-mile training swim, and when I finally hit the beach I couldn’t find him. Finally I saw him splashing through the water about four hundred yards offshore. Christ, he’s in trouble — that was my first thought.
So I charged back into the freezing sea and set out to rescue him. I’m not a real fast runner, but I’m quick through the water, and I reached him with no troub
le. I should have known better.
“Get away from me, Marcus!” he yelled. “I’m a race car in the red, highest revs on the TAC. Don’t mess with me, Marcus, not now. You’re dealing with a race car here.”
Only Mike Murphy. If I told that story to any SEAL in our platoon, withheld the name, and then asked who said it, everyone would guess Mikey.
Sitting opposite me in the Hercules was Senior Chief Daniel Richard Healy, another awesome Navy SEAL, six foot three, thirty-seven, married to Norminda, father of seven children. He was born in New Hampshire and joined the navy in 1990, advancing to serve in the SEAL teams and learning near-fluent Russian.
Danny and I served in the same team, SDV Team 1, for three years. He was a little older than most of us and referred to us as his kids — as if he didn’t have enough. And he loved us all with equal passion, both big families, his wife and children, sisters, brothers, and parents, and the even bigger one hitherto based on the island of Bahrain. Dan was worse than Mikey in his defense of his SEALs. No one ever dared yell at any of us while he was around.
He guarded his flock assiduously, researched every mission with complete thoroughness, gathered the intel, checked the maps, charts, photographs, all reconnaissance. Also, he paid attention to the upcoming missions and made sure his kids were always in the front line. That’s the place we were trained for, the place we liked to go.
In many ways Dan was tough on everyone. There were times when he and I did not see eye to eye. He was unfailingly certain that his way was the best way, mostly the only way. But his heart was in the right place at all times. Dan Healy was one hell of a Navy SEAL, a role model for everything a senior chief should be, an iron man who became a strategist and who knew his job from A to Z. I talked face to face with big Dan almost every day of my life.
Somewhere up above us, swinging in his hammock, headset on, listening to rock-and-roll music, was Petty Officer Second Class Shane Patton, twenty-two-year-old surfer and skateboarder originally from Las Vegas, Nevada. My protégé. As the primary communications operator, I had Shane as my number two. Like a much younger Mike Murphy, he too was a virtuoso at the smart-ass remark and, as you would expect, an outstanding frogman.
It was hard for me to identify with Shane because he was so different. I once walked into the comms center, and he was trying to order a leopard-skin coat on the Internet.
“What the hell do you want that for?” I asked.
“It’s just so cool, man,” he replied, terminating further discussion.
A big, robust guy with blond hair and a relatively insolent grin, Shane was supersmart. I never had to tell him anything. He knew what to do at all times. At first, this slightly irritated me; you know, telling a much junior guy what you want done, and it turns out he’s already done it. Every time. Took me a while to get used to the fact I had an assistant who was damn near as sharp as Matt Axelson. And that’s as sharp as it gets.
Shane, like a lot of those beach gods, was hugely laid back. His buddies would probably call it supercool or some such word. But in a comms operator, that quality is damn near priceless. If there’s a firefight going on, and Shane’s back at HQ manning the radio, you’re listening to one ultracalm, very measured SEAL communicator. Sorry, I meant dude. That was an all-purpose word for Shane. Even I was a dude, according to him. Even the president of the United States was a dude, according to him. Actually he accorded President Bush the highest accolade, the gold-plated Congressional Medal of Honor awarded by the surf gods: He’s a real dude, man, a real dude.
He was the son of a Navy SEAL, and his quiet, rarely uttered ambition was to be just like his dad, James J. Patton. He wanted to be a member of the navy jump team, as his father had once been. He completed basic airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia, before he passed his SEAL qualification exams and accepted orders to SDV Team 1, Alfa Platoon. Five months later he joined us on the flight to Afghanistan.
Everything Shane did, all through his short life, was outstanding. In high school he was the star pitcher and the best outfielder. He could play the guitar really well, ran a band called True Story, the quality of which remains a bit of a mystery. He was a super photographer and a skilled mechanic and engineer; he’d single-handedly restored and customized two old Volks-wagen Bugs. He had acquired another one that he told me would become “the ultimate customized Bug, dude. That’s what I’m all about.”
Shane was as good on a computer as anyone at the base. He spent hours on it, some Web site called MySpace, always keeping in touch with his friends: Hey, dude, howya been?
The sixth member of our group was James Suh, a twenty-eight-year-old native of Chicago who was raised in south Florida. James had been with SDV Team 1 for three years before we left for Afghanistan, and during that time he became one of the best-liked guys on the base. He had only one sibling, an older sister, but he had about three hundred cousins, every one of whom he was sworn to protect.
James, like his close buddy Shane, was another inordinately tough SEAL, a petty officer second class. Like Shane, he’d gone through basic airborne training at Fort Benning and gone forward to join Alfa Platoon.
His early ambition had been to become a veterinarian, a dog specialist. But James was born to be a SEAL and was passionately proud of his membership in one of the most elite combat outfits in the world and in his ability to defy the limits of physical and mental endurance.
Like Shane, he was a star high school athlete, outstanding on both the swim and tennis teams. Academically, he was constantly in the gifted and advanced classes. In our platoon, James was right up there with Axe and Shane as a SEAL of high intelligence and supreme reliability under fire. I never met one person with a bad word to say about him.
It took us almost three hours to reach the Gulf of Oman. We’d cut south of the Strait of Hormuz, staying well away from the superhighway of world oil and gas tankers moving to and from the massive loading docks of the Gulf of Iran. The Iranian navy does its exercises down there, operating out of their main base at Bandar Abbas and also farther down the coast, at their increasingly active submarine base.
Not that we imagined some trigger-happy Iranian missile director might take a pop at us with some fast heat-seeking weapon. But caution was usually advisable around there, despite the fact we had a very tough man in the White House who’d made clear his policy of harsh retaliation at the merest suggestion of an attack on U.S. air traffic, civilian or military.
You had to serve out here in the Middle East to understand fully the feeling of danger, even threat, that was never far away, even in countries generally regarded as friendly to America. Like Bahrain.
The rugged part of the Omani coast I mentioned earlier is around the point of land at Ras Musandam, with its deep fjords. This most northerly rocky shelf which juts out into the Gulf of Hormuz is the closest foreign point to the Iranian base at Bandar Abbas. The stretch of coastline running south from that point is much flatter, sloping down from the ancient Al Hajar Mountains. We began our long ocean crossing somewhere down there, north of Muscat, close to the Tropic of Cancer.
And as we crossed that coastline heading out toward the open ocean, it really was good-bye, from me at least, to the Arabian Peninsula and the seething Islamic states at the north end of the gulf, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, that had dominated my life and thoughts for the past couple of years. Especially Iraq.
I had first arrived there to join Team 5 back on April 14, 2003, coming into the U.S. air base fifteen minutes out of Baghdad with twelve other SEALs from Kuwait in an aircraft just like this C-130. It was one week after the U.S. forces launched their opening bombardment against the city, trying to nail Saddam before the war really started. The Brits had just taken Basra.
On the same day I arrived, U.S. Marines took Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, and a few hours later the Pentagon announced that major combat had concluded. None of which had the slightest bearing on our mission, which was to help root out and if necessary destroy what little oppositio
n was left and then help with the search for weapons of mass destruction.
I had been in Baghdad just one day when President Bush declared Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party had fallen, and my colleagues swiftly captured, that same day, Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front, which attacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean in 1985.
Forty-eight hours later, on April 17, U.S. forces captured Saddam’s half brother the infamous Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. That was the kind of stuff I was instantly involved in. I was one of 146,000 American and coalition troops in there, under the command of General Tommy Franks. It was my first experience of close-quarter combat. It was the place where I learned the finer points of my trade.
It was also the first inkling we had of the rise from the ashes of Osama bin Laden’s followers. Sure, we knew they were still around, still trying to regroup after the United States had just about flattened them in Afghanistan. But it was not long before we began to hear of an outfit called al Qaeda in Iraq, a malicious terrorist group trying to cause mayhem at every conceivable opportunity, led by the deranged Jordanian killer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (now deceased).
Our missions in the city were sometimes interrupted by intense searches for whatever or whoever happened to be missing. On my first day, four of us went out to some huge Iraqi lake area looking for a missing F-18 Super Hornet fighter bomber and its U.S. pilot. You probably remember the incident. I’ll never forget it. We came in low over the lake in our MH-47 Chinook heli-copter and suddenly we spotted the tail of an aircraft jutting out of the water. Right after that, we found the body of the pilot washed up on the shore.