Though I haven’t discussed it much publicly, diving was a huge part of my time in uniform. In the SDV teams, we took it to the bottom. Normal dives in the numbered teams are just a few hours long. Some of ours in the SDV teams took eight hours or more, in total darkness. My longest dive was over ten hours long. I actually have fallen asleep under water twice. And there’s nothing else like it. Locking out of a submerged submarine, we’d swim in from offshore, go over the beach, change into our dry gear, do a snatch-and-grab or a recon mission, and return the way we came, back into the arms of Mother Ocean. Nobody else can do it as well as SDV guys. It’s the womb we are born from and the home we always return to. It’s also the truest definition of suck.
With all that said, I knew I had to find something to keep the adrenaline pumping after I got out, so I started hunting to get that rush again. I know it’s probably the frogman in me, but I especially like to hunt dangerous game, an animal that’s capable of killing me if I screw up.
In 2011 I had an opportunity to travel to South Africa to hunt Cape buffalo. Long story short, when the moment of truth came, I was in the savanna, standing exposed in tall grass near the top of a hill, with one of those monsters just thirty meters away from me. My first shot didn’t do much to him, ripping his shoulder with a slug that would have penetrated an engine block. All it did was piss him off. He just shook it off as though it were a hailstone, then turned and started running away. Nineteen hundred pounds of fury went charging down the hill and into the thorns.
We set after him into the dense thicket of the valley below. He made such a huge swath in the grass that we felt like we were following a truck. But we couldn’t count on the idea that he’d always keep running away from us. Cape buffalo are known for drawing their pursuers into heavy brush, getting them hung up on thorns and briars, then charging back on them fast.
Once we were out of the high grass, the tracking got more difficult. The professional Zulu tribesman with our party was the best tracker I’ve ever seen. When we found the wounded buffalo the first time, I was impressed by his patience. I lifted my .416 Rigby to my shoulder and stayed on glass for twenty minutes, waiting for him to come into the open. When he finally did, I shot him again. This time the 10.57mm slug dropped him—for a few seconds, at least. Then he was on his feet—and a bad feeling swept over me.
For a moment, I was afraid he’d charge. If he did, I’d probably have time for only a single shot before he reached yours truly. Even a perfect head shot might still allow his momentum to carry him into me. And if I missed, it was all over. A lion will kill you by raking you with his hind claws and biting your neck once. He’ll get it over with and go about his business. A Cape buffalo is different. He’ll mash you with the crown of his horns and keep pounding until he can’t feel you anymore. Your body will be jelly before he stops. There’s something exciting about that ferocity. That fear can get into your head and put a tremble into your scope.
Fortunately, this one had a different plan and we kept up the chase. As we closed in on him, I shot him four more times before he finally let out a death bellow. When the Zulu tracker went to make sure he was dead, he tapped his rifle barrel a few times on the animal’s eyeball. Even from a prone position these animals can be up and on top of you before you know it.
As we took our trophy picture, I tried to lift the Cape buffalo’s head for a better photo, but managed to get that giant skull off the ground only a few inches. It took a dozen men and a pretty big winch to lift his dead weight into the truck. Worn out by the adrenaline surge and torn up by thorns, I came away humbled by the power and stamina of this great creature. The feeling was indescribable.
This is what we live for, in the teams. Choose whatever quarry you like: the pursuit generates the fear, and the fear gives you the rush. And even after you come home, it’s hard to kick that addiction. Domestic life isn’t anything like what you find in uniform. That’s one reason we try to vet our teammates’ girlfriends so carefully. We need to know they’re up to the challenge.
My mother says she gave two boys to the Navy and it gave her back men. When Morgan and I were first in the teams, life was simple. Our leaders would take us somewhere and point us in a direction, our only purpose in life being to hit the target we were shooting at. If the chief or LPO said, “Okay, point man, we need to get from this outpost to this house,” well, roger that, sir. We had a straightforward job to do.
After a couple of deployments and a couple of promotions, it was a different deal. We learned to see the big picture. We understood our missions in detail and also in context. When we went after someone, we knew not only who we were going after and what his location was but also who his associates were, who his wife and kids were, how many rings his wife wore, what kind of car he drove, where he worked, and where he used to work. We knew who his daddy, his momma, and his sisters, brothers, friends, and friends’ friends were. We knew what questions to ask him to get where we needed to go. Knowing all that, we could turn him in circles with our terp in the interrogation room.
By the time you retire and slow down, you may wonder what you’re supposed to do with those capabilities. They don’t have a lot of use in civilian life. You need to find other challenges. But when you look around, you may find that the world doesn’t offer them. The world doesn’t understand who you are, what you’ve been doing, or what you can do. I wrote earlier about Master Chief’s job interviews, in which the interviewers clearly had no idea what kind of man they were talking to. Morgan knew the score and didn’t like the thought of making the transition, either. Working that desk job in Virginia Beach prior to retirement was miserable, mind-numbing duty.
There were days when I wished my body would whip itself back into fighting shape so I could get back on line and reengage with the guys. But that wasn’t my destiny. When I came home, I was blessed to have a course of action set before me: bring the actions of a few to the attention of many. Too many of us who leave military service come home to a life without enough direction in it. I found mine thanks to the Naval Special Warfare community, my friends, my foundation, and my wife and kids.
It’s funny how serving your nation makes you part of something larger than yourself but also sets you apart. You realize this when you come home and find so many people who know what you’ve done but can’t personally relate to any part of it.
The military now stands apart from average Americans’ lives as it never has before. About 1.4 million people are on active duty in our armed forces today—about half the number that were on active duty fifty years ago. About 2.4 million have served in the Global War on Terror, as it’s known. That last number sounds pretty big but it’s just 0.77 percent of America’s population of 313 million—a truly shocking instance of the “1 percent versus 99 percent” problem. In Congress, where our political decisions are made (or not), only 21.8 percent of our representatives have served in the military. That’s down from 74 percent in 1971, when the numbers were pushed up by the draft. That was also a time when you didn’t need to be wealthy to run for elected office and most congressmen understood that the term “enemy” referred to someone with a gun on the other side of a demilitarized zone, not someone in the opposing political party.
Today, we don’t need to be trivializing war when we’ve had about 6,200 men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past ten years. Overall, we’ve lost 391 special operations personnel, and at least 1,820 more have been wounded, according to SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and the Department of Defense.
Military life and culture seem to be foreign territory for many of the people who write for national magazines and newspapers today. Every time they refer to Navy SEALs and other SOF outfits as “Special Forces,” which only describes the Army’s Green Berets, they reveal themselves to be as ignorant as someone who doesn’t know, say, a Shia Muslim from a Sunni. Recently, in a well-attended forum at a public university, a prominent journalist referred to the Joint Special Operations Command, the el
ite command that carried out the bin Laden operation, as “an executive assassination ring, essentially” for Vice President Dick Cheney. The fact that the guy who said this has a Pulitzer Prize might confirm your worst fears about those who write “news” for a living. (Naturally, in the same presentation, he also referred to special operations units as “Special Forces.”)
Those who serve in the military are the best of us. They’re capable, honorable, and less likely to be hung up on material belongings or themselves. An Iraqi military officer doing training at a U.S. base was asked by a journalist recently what he thought about Americans nine years after Saddam was taken down. “You are a better people than your movies say,” he said.
Yet for all the interest in the stories of our heroes at war, as reflected in Hollywood grosses and the bestseller lists, the military still seems to be more isolated from most Americans than ever before. The Army was basically a citizens’ militia when our nation broke free of England’s tyranny. Today we have a thoroughly professional volunteer force. It’s also a caste that stands mostly apart from civilian life. I’ve heard it said that the members of our military are like sheepdogs in a world full of wolves. If that’s the case, not enough people have direct experience in the pasture. Most people don’t pay much attention to the sheepdogs until the wolves come calling.
People who don’t know our military very well sometimes seem amazed whenever men like Jordan Haerter and Jonathan Yale make the headlines. On April 22, 2008, those two enlisted Marines were standing watch at a checkpoint outside a joint U.S.-Iraqi barracks in Ramadi when a large truck began accelerating toward their position. Their checkpoint controlled entry to a barracks in the Sufiyah district that housed fifty Marines from the newly arrived First Battalion, Ninth Regiment. They were alert to the VBIED threat and quickly and accurately assessed the situation before them—all the more impressive given that the level of violence in the city generally wasn’t what it had been a few years earlier. Both Marines opened fire immediately, Haerter with an M4 and Yale with a machine gun. Still the truck rushed toward them. Nearby, dozens of Iraqi police fired on the truck as well—but only briefly before their instincts for survival kicked in. Expecting a huge blast, they fled the area. But those two Marines stood their ground, pouring fire into the truck until it coasted to a halt in front of them—and exploded.
Later estimates pegged the size of that IED at two thousand pounds or more. The blast damaged or destroyed two dozen houses and knocked down the walls of a mosque a hundred yards away. An Iraqi who witnessed the attack, interviewed by a Marine general afterward, choked back a sob and said, “Sir, in the name of God, no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. No sane man. They saved us all.” Lieutenant General John F. Kelly, who investigated the incident to document the Navy Crosses they were to receive, said, “In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording [of a security camera nearby], they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons.” Yale, from Burkeville, Virginia, and Haerter, from Sag Harbor, New York, were decorated in 2009 for their steady nerves and heroism in the last six seconds of their lives, saving at least fifty people living in those barracks in the process.
Our officer candidates today face the challenge of preparing themselves to lead men like Jordan and Jonathan. Fortunately, they’re beginning their careers better prepared than ever before, in part because we’ve been at war for ten years now. At West Point, the Army is doing it right.
You can’t go far, in that beautiful stretch of forest overlooking the Hudson River, without hearing about morals and ethics as they apply to leadership. Both a strong body and a right mind are needed to ensure that we have the kind of commanders who make the right decisions where things really matter: down at the platoon level.
The influence of ten years of war on West Point’s pipeline is nowhere more evident than in the summer field-training program that seniors (or “firsties,” as they’re known) have to complete before they take a second lieutenant’s commission. West Point began shaking it up in 2007 to make it fit the realities the cadets will run into downrange. “We found that the product we were creating was not what battalion commanders were looking for,” an instructor told me. “They weren’t adaptive.” So West Point brought in the leadership from Fort Benning to take a look at the curriculum.
Now upperclassmen have to go through Cadet Leadership Development Training, a nineteen-day role-playing scenario designed to put them through their paces prior to deployment, much as our special operations selection courses do. In the woods of the Hudson River Valley, they run air-assault operations, simulate cordon and search missions, and deal with Arabic-speaking sheikhs, imams, and other tribal leaders. The program is constantly changing to stay current with what’s happening on the battlefield. In the old days, during the seventies and eighties, cadets ran through highly structured “approved-solution” scenarios. Now their decisions mean something, just as they will downrange. It’s hard to find an instructor in the Department of Military Instruction who doesn’t have several combat tours under his belt.
There’s also a new department at West Point, the Center for the Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning, which uses the Internet to connect company-level officers (captains and below) with each other and with cadets, bringing the lessons of the battlefield into the classroom. Like so many ideas whose time has come, the peer-to-peer approach to learning has caught on. The Harvard Business Review chose it as one of its top twenty business ideas of 2006.
Cadets are prepared physically, both outdoors and in the six-floor, 455,000-square-foot shrine to physical fitness on the post, the Arvin Cadet Physical Development Center. The man who was in charge of that facility when I toured it in 2010, Colonel Greg Daniels, holds the title Master of the Sword (the title is a legacy of the 1800s, when swordsmanship was still part of the curriculum). Responsible for the physical fitness and development of the entire cadet population, he presides over a program that includes rooms for boxing, judo, fencing, and so on, as well as the modern Combat Water Survival Swim Lab, fitted with smoke generators, wave machines, and other equipment that produces effects the cadets will likely encounter in the field. The old-school indoor obstacle course test (the infamous IOCT, an acronym that all cadets learn to dread) has eleven stations that test balance, coordination, agility, power, and strength—including rope climbs, medicine balls, and an eight-foot-high shelf, onto which cadets have to hurdle themselves from a standing position. That crushing physical gauntlet has to be passed through twice a year by every cadet, and it hasn’t changed much since it was established in 1944.
As a result of all of this forward thinking, new Army second lieutenants are much more likely to be effective when they take over their first platoons. (The really smart ones will still listen closely to what their sergeants have to say.) When your business is war, you don’t miss the distraction of having to break in new draftees all the time. When you volunteer today, you’ll serve with other volunteers, which means everyone has a certain level of motivation.
Of course, a Navy guy like me doesn’t need to tell you how special Annapolis is. Some of my best friends in the teams went to the United States Naval Academy. The Navy’s never-quit motto, “Don’t give up the ship,” hangs proudly in Bancroft Hall, and the USNA has a long tradition of sending naval and Marine Corps leaders to the battlefield. But West Point’s mandatory field-training program is something that any frogman has to respect. I don’t know what West Point was like in 1998, when I was entering the Navy, but if I had to do it over again, it would be tempting to heed its call. I had always thought of West Point as a cold, sterile place, a gray-walled castle on a hill. But it’s more modern, dynamic, and gritty than that, and its emphasis on preparing young warriors for ground combat will warm any
special operator’s heart.
No matter what route you follow into service, whether it’s the Naval Service Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois (my route), or another boot camp, from San Diego’s Marine Corps Recruit Depot to Cape May, New Jersey, where Coast Guardsmen are made, a military career will test you like nothing ever has. Then, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a long career and come out of the experience stronger, deeper, and wiser.
Morgan, who served on several deployments after I left the service, eventually had his own brush with death and faced a crossroads. I took a licking, too, and came out with a broader view than I’d had before. Chris Kyle confronted his mortality at Sadr City, and again back home at the service station, filling his truck.
At some point, you find that you recognize a certain look in a combat veteran’s eyes, the reflection of experiences he or she will never forget. You also may start feeling the mileage you’ve put on your body, and you’re left to face the rest of your days. Eventually you slow down, your thinking sharpens, your view broadens, and you find yourself becoming an old man.
May everyone be as blessed as I’ve been, to have a close family and loved ones who help ease the transition out of the fight.
At a reunion of Marines in South Carolina recently, R. V. Burgin gave the main address at the memorial service. He used the occasion to tell a story of the old days. The year was 1775, when the Marine Corps was founded. The call to form the new service’s first two battalions was given by the Continental Congress at a pub in Philadelphia. The first man to come forward did so on the spot. He was given a mug of beer and told to sit down at a table at the back of the room. The second man to volunteer was given two mugs of beer and directed to join the same table. Sizing up the newcomer, the first guy asked, “What gives? They only gave me one mug of beer.” The second guy shrugged and said, “I’m just following instructions. They gave me these two mugs of beer and told me to come over here and sit down with you.” The first guy considered this for a few seconds, then said, “Well, that’s fine, but I’ll tell you one damn thing: things weren’t that way in the old Corps.”