Service: A Navy SEAL at War Read online

  Boss is an integral part of the circle, too. Originally from Arizona, he was in my boat crew in BUD/S, the training course where frogs are born, and until he finally proposed to his bride-to-be, he was JT’s roommate as well. A loyal friend and teammate, he and JT developed a bond so strong that JT joked to Amy, then Boss’s fiancée, that their wedding wouldn’t go through until the two SEALs were officially divorced. Boss is a true free spirit. His spirit is so free that I can imagine it flying all the way back to ancient Greece and inhabiting the body of a Spartan hoplite surrounded at Thermopylae. A master parachutist and hell on wheels in a gunfight, he was born in the wrong century, I sometimes think.

  Josh, six foot six and all power and smarts, is one of us, too. After finishing at the Naval Academy, the redneck from Louisiana went on to BUD/S. Graduating with Class 232, right between Morgan and me, he served in several platoons before taking a break to pick up a graduate degree from Columbia University. After that, he returned to the fold and ran with our best. There’s something kinetic about the dynamic between us, and there’s no one other than my twin brother, Morgan, who I’d rather have watching my back.

  JJ, one of relatively few African Americans in the SEAL teams, hails from Oklahoma but calls Texas home now. He started his career with my original unit, SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1 (SDVT-1), the ultimate deepwater frogmen. His call sign was Underwater Brother, and he’s one bad mofo. A solid operator and a hellacious gunfighter, he’s been at my side through nearly my entire career. I’ve come close to losing my life more than once. I’m still here only because of things JJ has done.

  Then there’s Morgan, my twin brother—seven minutes my senior. He and I are simply inseparable. When I lay wounded on that mountain, with media reports suggesting I was dead, Morgan knew otherwise just from the feeling that filled his heart. He walked among the crowd of friends and strangers that had gathered at our family’s ranch outside Huntsville, Texas, assuring one and all in no uncertain terms that I was alive. He kept saying, “If they haven’t found his body yet, then he is not dead.” He just seemed to know. It was a twin thing. We often say we’ll be together “from the womb to the tomb”—FTWTTT for short.

  The SEAL community is one big circle, but these men are the core of my world. When I came home from Operation Redwing, all I really needed to get right again was to spend time in their presence. We’ve bled together, sweated together, and shed tears together. We’ve shared the same quarters and run through the same cycles of training and deployment. No matter what direction I might have been facing, I knew one of these guys always had my back. The longer we knew each other, the more we were aware of the fact that hung heavily in the air every time we got together: this day together might be our last. So we lived our lives as such.

  It was never good form to say it too often, but Morgan and I spent every day of our lives up to that point sure that we would never reach age forty. Something, somewhere, was bound to happen. We’d flame out in a blaze of glory, uncelebrated except within the brotherhood.

  I had nearly done that, over in Afghanistan. I was lucky to have made it home alive. Still, in a heartbeat, I would have traded my homecoming for the chance to bring any one of the teammates we lost that day home to his family.

  On June 27, 2005, near a mountain peak in the Hindu Kush, almost two miles above sea level, our four-man recon team had gone out on a mission to kill or capture a senior Taliban leader. The next day we were compromised when some goatherds came upon us with their flock. We discussed what to do with them—kill them or free them—and mercy won out. Soon after we let them go, they betrayed us to the enemy. In short order, we were fighting a group of heavily armed Taliban insurgents, primed for battle and pissed off by our appearance on top of their rock. Surrounded and outnumbered, we followed our training, moving together and fighting with discipline, retreating (and mostly falling) down a steep cliff face. Ripping off measured bursts from our rifles, we claimed dozens of enemy lives, but the incoming hail of fire was too much for us to handle.

  Danny Dietz, our comms guy and a damn good SEAL, was shot many times and ended up dying in my arms. Our officer in charge, Lieutenant Michael Murphy, stepped out of his cover to make a radio call requesting rescue, knowing it would cost him his life. Matt Axelson, our lead sniper, fought like a lion even after being shot in the head. He and I parted company when an RPG flew in and blasted us in different directions. I tried to find Axe—I didn’t want to be alone—but he was gone forever.

  These men fought with everything they had and then some. They never quit. They will never be forgotten. God bless them.

  Early that afternoon, having scrambled into the cover of a rocky crevice, I regained consciousness to find myself nearly buried between the steep slopes. As I tended to my wounds and took refuge from the enemy, who was scouring the hills in search of us, a Chinook helicopter, unbeknownst to me, was inbound to our rescue. Carrying a sixteen-man team, the aircraft met its end when a young Taliban fighter shot an RPG through the open rear ramp as the bird was hovering to land, dropping it to the ground and killing all the men on board.

  Laid up in the middle of nowhere, badly wounded, and slowly dying from blood loss, exposure, and dehydration, I called out to God. There came, at last, an unlikely group of saviors: a posse of Pashtun tribesmen—not loyal to the Taliban—who found me and showed me mercy. They took me into their care, fended off my pursuers, led me to their village, and protected me as one of their own.

  As it turned out, God heard everything I had to say. He put my life in the hands of a doctor from that tribe, Sarawa, and the village elder’s son, Gulab, who guarded and sheltered me for four days until my brothers in arms came for me, as they always do for one of their own.

  After all the headlines about the losses we suffered that day—unprecedented at the time—my homecoming was making news of its own. Just before I touched down in San Antonio, JJ took a call from a reporter for a national cable TV news network. Insisting that she be the first to interview me and demanding an exclusive, she told JJ, “The people want this.” JJ replied in his easy but firm frogman way, “Just tell the people to say thanks. That’s pretty much all the interview you need.” She was offering him money as he hung up the phone, and she promptly went on the air anyway, making up a few things for her story.

  About thirty minutes later my plane rolled up to the terminal and I was limping down the stairs to the tarmac to rejoin my brothers. In their company, I started my second lease on life. But on the four-hour drive home from the airport, the emotions were still too raw and I wasn’t able to talk much. The simple presence of these men was what I needed; just seeing them reminded me how I was supposed to be. I felt an overpowering urge to get right, to return to being like them again. When my body was ready, I’d be ready to say good-bye to the docs, get back on the horse, rejoin another SEAL team, have a wild laugh with my brothers, and do what every team guy is bred to do: find his way to the closest war.

  I’d hardly been home three weeks when Morgan got orders to rejoin SDVT-1 in Hawaii. That’s how we always rolled: whenever I’d catch up to him he was ready to head somewhere else—and vice versa. This happened wherever we found each other, from Afghanistan to Texas, Iraq to Hawaii, and everywhere in between.

  I followed him a few weeks later, rejoining our team at Pearl Harbor in August. I loved the SDV teams. They’re the hardest-working bunch of webfoots in the Navy. But every time I was with them, it felt like there was an empty hole without the guys from Redwing there. SDVT-1* had taken a devastating blow on June 28, 2005. Make no mistake about it: my lost teammates are still part of me. They reside in my soul. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about them and miss them terribly. I just needed to focus on work—but that wasn’t always easy.

  My twin brother is a great soul and twice the SEAL operator I ever was, no doubt about it. But we’re both stronger, more whole, in each other’s company. We’ve fought as a team all our lives—and we grew up fighting, from grade school th
rough college. Bar fights. Martial-arts tournaments. Street fights. We were and always have been a damn good team. Fighting side by side, we’re one person. If I go in low, he goes in high.

  FTWTTT.

  We’ve leaned on each other in good times and in bad. Dad made sure of that. If we ever came home from a night out and one of us had gotten into a scrape and the other was untouched, that meant trouble for the unscathed one, because Dad knew that one of us hadn’t stepped up. The few times Morgan and I got into it between us, Dad would size up the results and whip the winner for beating up his brother, then raise a hand to the other for losing. Having been brought up this way, it was natural for us to put on the uniform and go off to war together. More than ever, when I came home, I wanted it to be like old times in East Texas; I wanted to stand back-to-back with my brother again and take on the world.

  So I decided I wouldn’t spend another day in the teams without him by my side. With help from higher command, we both received orders to join Team 5—the next team in the hopper to go overseas. Because of the physical therapy required by my injuries, I was delayed getting into the training cycle, but I linked up with Morgan and my new teammates in Team 5 soon enough.

  On a beautiful stretch of beach in Coronado known as the Silver Strand, the screams and cries of the BUD/S students fighting to earn their Tridents and the hard cadences of the instructors dealing out hell reminded me what it had cost to become a SEAL. The smell of the mighty Pacific—freezing in December and merely cold as hell every other month—boosted my spirit and filled me with motivation to get back what I had lost.

  But climbing up on that horse again—that was going to be tough.

  Several of my spinal disks had been fractured and were grinding around like rods in a ruptured crankcase. My shooting hand was busted up so bad that the finest handiwork of the Navy surgeons who had pieced it together with metal bars and transplanted tendons hadn’t restored its full range of motion—and it hasn’t come back to this day. A strange parasite is still twisting up my guts and won’t go away. Nonetheless, I was charging hard with the boys of Team 5.

  My favorite book, The Count of Monte Cristo, is all about revenge. So is one of my favorite movies, The Boondock Saints, the story of two Irish brothers who take on the Russian mob in Boston. (The film has a cult following in the teams.) It’s an article of faith in our community: when you get hit, you get up and hit back. SEALs never quit and we never forgive or forget. Ever.

  We’re going to make them pay for Mikey.

  Pay for Danny.

  Pay for Axe.

  And pay for the sixteen warriors on that helo who flew in to save us that day, all of them in the prime of life, ages twenty-one to forty. There were the SEALs—Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen, Jacques J. Fontan, Daniel R. Healy, Jeffrey A. Lucas, Michael M. McGreevy Jr., Shane E. Patton, James E. Suh, and Jeffrey S. Taylor—and the aviators from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers: Shamus O. Goare, Corey J. Goodnature, Kip A. Jacoby, Marcus V. Muralles, James W. Ponder III, Stephen C. Reich, Michael L. Russell, and Chris J. Scherkenbach.

  No forgetting, no forgiveness.

  Working in the austere, all-business environment of the NSW (Naval Special Warfare) compound at Coronado, Team 5 had a heavy workload in preparing for deployment. When the training cycle was done, we’d be bound for Iraq, the trash can of the Middle East, teetering on the brink not only of civil war but of total existential breakdown. We understood that our mission there would be far larger than the agenda of retribution that I was harboring. But maybe, I thought, by going back to war I could keep the privilege, at least in my own mind, of wearing the Trident on my chest. We have a saying in the teams: “Earn your Trident every day.” It’s harder to stay a SEAL than it is to become a SEAL.

  Morgan always set me straight whenever I had doubts. Knowing my heart and soul, he asked, “Does a firefighter quit after going into a burning house? Does a cowboy stop riding if he gets thrown off a horse? No, he doesn’t. And you’ve got to get back on that horse and ride back into the fire.” I think he knew that this was exactly what I needed to hear.

  Every team has its own reputation. Team 1, a West Coast outfit, has been called Stalag 1 for its tradition of severe discipline. Team 2, from the East Coast, is known as BUD/S Team 2 for the tough physical training its commanders always insist on. Those two teams have glorious battle histories going back more than fifty years, to the founding days of the teams during Vietnam. Guys in the East Coast teams like to kid West Coast teams that Southern California is easy duty—beach detachments, complete with volleyball nets. But I’ve found that each team develops its own unique way based on the character of the guys who run things. At Team 5, the incoming skipper, Commander Leonard, put a powerful positive stamp on the way we’d do business.

  Morgan and I were immediately impressed with him. A veteran of the teams since 1979, he had come up through the enlisted ranks before taking his commission. The Navy term for an officer who follows that route is “mustang.” He had an approachable, blue-collar style. But he understood, too, that it was important for an officer to remain at a distance from the everyday life of his platoons. He was the kind of officer who looked around, saw what needed to happen, and made hard calls that no one could bitch about because of the way he commanded our respect. Hell, Skipper, as we called him, was leading SEAL teams in action all around the world when many of us were still in grade school.

  Commander Leonard didn’t seem to mind that Morgan and I were together in his squadron—a no-no in the risk-averse, post–Saving Private Ryan Navy. I think he realized we had a lot to contribute while together, and that the risk of something happening to one of us would be double if we were apart.

  The Skipper’s right-hand man was every bit as important and influential—his command master chief. Lean, scrubbed, fit, cool, and smart, Master Chief had a big job as Skipper’s senior enlisted adviser. A nineteen-year veteran of the teams at the time, and as skilled as SEAL operators come, he was a hard man who was also known for having a formidable intellect. It was his intelligence, clarity of mind, and smooth but direct way with people, both senior and subordinate, that put him in a class by himself, at least in my eyes. His presence was a constant reminder that brawn without brains is powerless.

  Based on his recent experience with another team, Master Chief gave Skipper a breakdown on the situation in western Iraq’s insurgent hotbeds. It was a full-on crisis in cities like Ramadi and Habbaniyah. He told him what was working and what wasn’t in the struggle to rid the area of Al Qaeda’s murder squads. The Skipper and Master Chief steered our training mind-set based on what he’d seen in the Sandbox.

  It felt good to get back into the mix with a bunch of running and gunning frogmen. Men like Skipper and Master Chief did me the greatest favor possible: they put me in a platoon as a regular frontline operator and demanded that I be treated as anyone else would be. Sometimes that wasn’t easy, and I hated it. Visiting dignitaries often wanted to meet the “lone survivor” of Operation Redwing and have me tell them the story personally. The calls came so frequently to my cell phone that the Skipper and Master Chief finally had to step in and ask people to direct all inquiries through them. They were always deferential and respectful. They heard the requests (usually made by an aide of some kind) and made a polite request in return: “Sir, if your boss can call me directly and tell me that Marcus needs to be pulled out of training for combat in Iraq, that it’s okay to interrupt preparations that will help him save lives and affect his platoon’s combat effectiveness, if your superior will call me and say that this is more important than the lives of our sailors, then I’ll bring Marcus to see him right now. But he does have to call me and tell me that first.” That next phone call never came.

  The guys never said anything out loud, but I’m sure that all the outside attention affected the platoon as a whole. Once our leadership put the brakes on that, though, things went back to normal: team first, pe
rsonal issues later. That’s what good leaders do for their men—they keep them free of distractions, their front sights zeroed on their most important work.

  By the time you become a master chief in the teams, you’ve gone places far past the back of beyond, and you’ve gained a whole encyclopedia of secret knowledge from firsthand experience. For instance, having served in the SDV teams, where a frogman spends more than half his waking hours under water, Morgan and I believed that the darkest place in the world was underneath an aircraft carrier at night. That was until we met Master Chief. He told us a story about a training dive he had done in the muddy waters of the Persian Gulf. He and his teammate found their compasses going haywire because they had swum about twenty meters into a large underwater sewage pipe. Just goes to show you that in the SEAL teams you’re always going to run into guys who’ve swum through far nastier shit than you have.

  In the teams, you’re an old man at thirty-five. I was thirty, but with my multiple injuries I was worried that I couldn’t keep up with the younger guys anymore. I remember Master Chief fixing me with a knowing look and saying that if, during predeployment workup, things ever reached the point where either he or I didn’t think I could deploy, he would quietly arrange for me to go somewhere else. He promised to make that call early and move on.

  During workup, we spent several weeks at a military and police marksmanship school. The facility had professionally designed assault courses and more than thirty target ranges, and our instructors tested us in almost every combat scenario imaginable. We shot targets in a variety of settings and practiced house runs, the techniques of assault, and clearing small buildings. Over and over we rehearsed our urban fieldcraft. Thanks to this constant practice, we had a way of getting it done.

  Workups often last longer than actual deployments do. The platoons need that time to sharpen their skill sets and allow that all-important chemistry to develop. A dedicated group of instructors known as the training detachment, or TraDet, is in charge. They keep a constant watch on what other special ops units are seeing downrange and draw the lessons into our training. There’s plenty of fieldwork and intensive classroom study, too. It’s the kind of thing you don’t see on many campuses: Blowing Things Up, Stalking Targets in the Night, Bashing Down Doors, and Dragging Bad Guys Away in the Dark. And we do a good bit of traveling around the country for various kinds of specialized training. It’s state of the art, informed by the experiences of the battle-wise SEAL operators who were most recently in harm’s way.