No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL Read online

  I quickly backed away from the stairs. I could feel the marble showering me as I ducked away from the burst. The roar of the AK-47 echoed through the first floor of the house, and thick smoke and the smell of gunpowder hung in the air, making it impossible to hear or think. Someone was spraying rounds down the stairs. The gunman wasn’t aiming as much as pointing the barrel in our direction and holding down the trigger. None of the fire was accurate, but that didn’t matter with the shooter only fifteen feet away from us.

  I wheeled around and started to fire up the stairs with my M-4, hoping to force the shooter to find cover.

  At least three of us were now returning fire when our platoon chief came up and started to organize us for an assault up the steps. The gunman had the advantage. We couldn’t see where he was hiding above us. We had no idea if it was just one or multiple shooters. Close air support from a fast mover or AC-130 was what we needed, but we were in downtown Baghdad. The threat of causing civilian casualties was too great. Our only choice was to assault up the stairs and clear the second floor.

  The thick smoke was making it harder and harder to see.

  The chief called for flash-crash grenades. The grenades are nonlethal and just make a ton of noise, stunning the target for a few seconds. The grenades would hopefully stun the gunman long enough for us to make our assault up the stairs.

  We had about a half dozen grenades. They look like small silver pipes with holes in the body. We pulled the pins and tossed them up to the second floor. The booms and crashes sounded like the end of the world. My ears were ringing and I had to yell to communicate with the guy next to me.

  My teammate and I took a quick glance at each other as the noise of the flash-crash started to taper off. We both knew it was time to head up the stairs. I took two deep breaths and tried to relax and stay focused on exactly what I needed to do.

  The grenades smashed the second-floor windows, and shards of glass littered the marble steps and floor. A heavy, acidic, white smoke hung in the hall. We both fired into the thick smoke at the top of the stairs as we climbed. It was a feeble attempt at providing some covering fire.

  I got about four shots off and was halfway up the stairs when my M-4 jammed. There was no time to fix it, so I let it drop. My rifle hung across my chest as I slid my pistol out of the holster on my leg.

  Sweat ran down my face, into my eyes. I tried hard to focus on my front sight as I picked my way down the hall, trying to avoid stepping on the glass. I knew at any second the gunman might jump out and start firing again. There was no cover in the hallway. If he showed his face, he was getting shot.

  There were three rooms on the second floor of the house. A balcony was at the far end of the hall. My teammates were right behind me. The SEAL beside me cleared into the first room on the right with some of the other guys. It was littered with sleeping mats. I continued slowly making my way down the hallway through the thick smoke.

  As we approached the second door on the right side of the hallway, I stepped past it as my teammates behind me entered the room. As we got to the last door along the hallway on the left, my teammates smashed it open and flooded inside. I could hear yelling from the guys in the second room on the right side of the hallway. They found an AK-47, but there was no sign of the gunman.

  Directly in front of me at the end of the hallway was the door to the balcony. I reached out and tried the handle. It was locked. My teammates had found an AK-47, but no one knew where the gunman had gone. I had an idea.

  I thought through the risks. Did he have a suicide vest on? Was there more than one shooter? There was still no sign of him inside. I was starting to get nervous. How had the motherfucker gotten away already?

  He couldn’t go down the steps. I took a knee and quickly unjammed my M-4. I unlocked the balcony door and slowly opened it up. Maybe he was hiding outside. It hadn’t dawned on me that there was no way he could have escaped outside and locked the door from the inside. It had all happened so quickly, and there was so much stuff going on around me it was hard to focus on the little things, like the balcony door being locked from the inside. I was obviously a bit overwhelmed. The whole fight was like being in a car accident.

  —

  When you’re in a car accident, you probably remember the last two to three seconds leading up to the crash. If you were in another car accident, and then another and another, you would begin to remember more and more details about what happened to cause each crash, as you got more familiar with the sights, smells, sounds, rhythms, and speed of a crash.

  Gunfights are like car crashes to some degree. They are things you try to avoid, they always surprise you when they happen, and because of the rush of adrenaline, it can become hard to focus and make good decisions. This was one of my first firefights, and I was having trouble staying focused.

  With my M-4 jam cleared and the rifle back in action, I opened the door and cleared out onto the balcony.

  No one was there. Where the fuck had he gone? I walked down to the end of the balcony, searching the courtyard below and the roof above. I could see our idling trucks in front of the house. There was no way he could have jumped down and escaped. The gunman had vanished.

  At the end of the balcony I peered into the window of the room where they’d found the AK-47. I could see my teammates standing in the room. It looked like they’d searched under the beds and in the wooden armoire at the far end of the room.

  I was about to walk back into the house when I spotted an adult male through the window, inside the room with my teammates. He was tucked in the windowsill, hidden by a piece of furniture. The male was in his early twenties, wearing a wife-beater T-shirt and shorts. His hair was a mess and he had a few wisps of a beard on his cheeks. His knees were pressed into his chest and I could tell he was trying to be as still as possible. He had his eyes closed and he had no idea I could see him.

  I leveled my M-4, but I couldn’t shoot. He was unarmed, and besides, my teammates were standing behind him and a stray bullet could hit them. Thick black metal bars covered the window. I slid the barrel of my rifle between the bars and smashed the glass. The breaking glass startled the gunman and he turned to face me.

  I reared back and drove the muzzle of my rifle into his face. His head snapped back and his lip split open, sending blood cascading down his chin and onto his dirty wife-beater T-shirt. He groaned and fell out of the windowsill onto the bedroom floor. Some of my teammates grabbed him, flipped him over on his face, and cuffed him with a plastic zip tie. We found out afterward he was the Iraqi officer’s son. He’d ditched his AK-47 before hiding in the windowsill.

  It was impossible for me to focus once we got back to base that night. I kept going over the mission in my head. The guys who found the AK-47 should have found the son, but none of us managed the stress of the situation very well.

  It wasn’t until a couple years later, and the hooded box test, that I started to really think about how to manage stress. I learned there that the key was to first prioritize all the individual stressors and then act. I break it all down into the little things I can manage. The stressors that I can’t affect, I don’t worry about. The ones I can affect, I simply deal with one at a time. In a lot of ways, it goes back to BUD/S and the elephant.

  You know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

  The hooded box test is meant to overwhelm. It is meant to force you to make very difficult decisions, right or wrong, good or bad, life or death, all in seconds. We face the same challenge in combat. I always tried to keep things as simple as possible. We don’t want guys to freeze when faced with multiple threats. But we also don’t want guys to immediately start shooting without assessing the situation. Take what’s there, assess the situation, prioritize, and break it down into small tasks you know you can accomplish or eliminate or fix immediately. Through constant practice, repetition, and experience, most SEALs can prioritize stressors fa
st enough that it feels more like an instinct than a process.

  Once that happens, everything starts slowing down.

  Take the hooded box drill from S&T. I shot the hostage taker with two paint rounds seconds after the instructors pulled off the hood. He was the first box on my checklist. The second box was the men behind me. I swung around and yelled at the two men behind me.

  “Show me your hands,” I barked, keeping my rifle up and at the ready. “Get the fuck back!”

  The men were dressed like the gunman in cargo pants and team shirts. But the men were unarmed and held up their hands right away. Both men slowly backed up, taking very small, deliberate steps. Once they were a few feet away, I told them to get down on the ground.

  “Put your face on the floor,” I said. “Spread your arms out.”

  They did what I ordered, and I turned to face the blonde again, but she had a pistol out and stuck it in my face.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” an instructor yelled from the catwalk above me.

  The instructors all started yelling at me for not acting quickly enough. I was too deliberate. I didn’t move from threat to threat quickly enough and it cost me. Luckily, just about everyone failed the first time. Car crash number one complete, and it wasn’t pretty.

  I cursed myself for being so slow. I spent too much time on the men and forgot about the woman. I didn’t see her as a threat, but overseas plenty of women, in Iraq specifically, would hide cell phones and weapons. On my first deployment with SEAL Team Five, we searched a woman after we arrested her husband, and found several phones and guns. During that same deployment, four women were arrested in Baghdad wearing suicide-bombing belts. A few months after the Baghdad arrests, a female suicide bomber—dressed like a man—detonated a suicide bomb outside of Tall Afar in northern Iraq. The insurgents knew we didn’t search women. After that, we made a point of searching everyone on target.

  I’d failed my first hooded box test at S&T, but the lesson learned wasn’t one I’d forget. Assess, prioritize, and act. I’d get in that “car crash” of combat hundreds of more times throughout my career, facing new stresses faster than I could have imagined back during the hooded box training, firing real rounds instead of nonlethal paint, my life and the lives of others on the line. I learned something vital every single time.

  CHAPTER 5

  Safe Return Doubtful

  Mind-set

  I slid my rifle behind me and started to climb up the metal ladder. I could hear it scrape against the side of the building as I reached for the next rung.

  Ahead of me, my teammate had already reached the roof and slid over the small parapet wall. I reached the roof seconds later and climbed over, dragging more than sixty pounds of body armor and gear with me. Below, I could see my teammates slowly moving into position at the front door of the target.

  We were the “roof team,” which meant we provided overwatch from the high ground. We were about to hit an insurgent safe house, and it was my team’s job to get to the roof to cover the assault. If we were able to enter the building from the roof, we assaulted down the stairs while the ground element assaulted up the stairs. Theoretically, we would capture the bad guys in the middle and hopefully before they had time to resist.

  It was 2006 and Iraq was the big priority. The Army unit assigned had taken some heavy casualties and needed replacements. I was only about a month into my first deployment with my own unit when my six-man team was sent from Afghanistan over to Iraq to help. At first, we thought our entire team would be attached as a unit, but when we arrived we got separated and sent individually to different teams.

  We flew into the military side of Baghdad International Airport and drove to the Green Zone, a walled-off area of the Iraqi capital occupied by Coalition forces. I’d been to Iraq with SEAL Team Five, so everything looked familiar. Toward the end of that deployment, I’d operated in Baghdad. At that time, we were all new, with little to no combat experience. But landing in Baghdad this time, it felt different. There was energy in the air, a confidence that pervaded the entire military because of our collective combat experience.

  I was still pretty new to my team, and I’d never worked with the Army but had heard rumblings about how the two services did not get along. There was always this competition between the two, probably driven by our shared quest to be the best. There were shooting competitions and other drills that always seemed to pit the two units against each other. In my mind, I expected to see or experience this tension, but it never came. All the old-school drama over which unit was better had faded since the war started. We were one team. The team opened up, pulled me in, and made me one of their own. No one cared about which unit shot better when we were all working together fighting a common enemy.

  When I landed, Jon, my new team leader, met me at the operations center and took me to my room. He also showed me the chow hall and gym and introduced me to my other teammates. My new team seemed to be made up of guys very much like the SEALs on my old team. We used all the same gear, tactics, and command structure. They were Army, and I was Navy, and there were some cultural differences, but the basic makeup of the guys was very familiar.

  Jon welcomed me and included me in all the planning. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel like I was part of the team, but more importantly I felt like Jon and the others were open to hearing my opinion.

  Once, we were planning a mission a few weeks after I arrived. My team was slated to land on the roof of the target on an MH-6 Little Bird and clear down from the roof. Jon was working on the manifest, the list of guys going on the mission.

  “Space is tight on this one, boys,” Jon said.

  He was crunching the numbers to make sure we stayed under the weight limit. I was sure I’d be cut from the mission. I was the new guy and the SEAL. The planning was over and the rest of my team left the operations center. I got my notebook and headed back to the room.

  “Hey,” Jon said as I started to leave. “You’re on tonight.”

  Later, I saw Jon talking to the other new guy on the team. He was staying behind. The next time we exceeded the weight limit, I stayed behind. Jon always made it a point to swap me out with his other new guy, ensuring I got as much love as the rest of his team. Yes, I was still considered a new guy both at my unit and the Army team, but it was nice to know that Jon thought of me as part of his team.

  After the first few missions, I folded myself into the team, and soon I was no longer looked at as the token SEAL replacement. I was just a teammate, one of two new guys on the team.

  I’d just met these guys, but I already trusted them with my life and they did the same. I knew that they would risk their lives to save mine and I’d do the same for them. I credit Jon with making the transition seamless. He was one of the best leaders I’ve ever worked for in the military. He didn’t have the respect of his team and others just because he was the boss. He earned everyone’s respect because of his character, his leadership, and his calm demeanor in combat. It seemed like nothing fazed him. I immediately looked up to him as someone I wanted to emulate.

  I realized over the course of my career that every special operations unit shared a common mind-set. We were all wired the same way. We all started with a shared sense of purpose. In the past, and in peacetime, there was a rivalry between the units. But once the shooting started, that rivalry was discarded in favor of teamwork, because if there was one thing we all agreed on, it was completing our mission and coming home safe.

  If you think of a special operations team—SEALs, Special Forces, Rangers, and the Air Force Pararescuemen and combat controllers—like a boat, everybody rows. The officers down to the newest guy are trained to care about the team first and do what it takes to accomplish the mission. I saw the same mentality when I worked with the international special operations units.

  Every single unit I’ve ever worked or trained with had that in common
. Some of the gear and tactics might be a bit different. Some of the units had better toys, but in the end it didn’t matter if you had the most expensive rifle or had special training. We all volunteered for the hardest training we could find in our respective countries. We all learned to push ourselves to go well beyond our mental and physical limits.

  Units like SEALs and other special operations units have been in existence since war was created. The Greeks had special units and George Washington’s army used sharpshooters during the American Revolution.

  But only after World War II did officials start figuring out how best to screen and train special operations forces. And the first step was always finding guys with the right mind-set to achieve the group’s common goal. Mind-set is the common denominator.

  Charlie Beckwith, after arriving in Vietnam in 1965, was given command of Project Delta—Detachment B-52. The reconnaissance unit was created to collect intelligence along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and in South Vietnam. Beckwith fired most of the soldiers in the unit when he took command and started to recruit replacements using a flyer.

  WANTED: Volunteers for project Delta. Will guarantee you a medal, a body bag, or both. Requirements: have to be a volunteer. Had to be in country for at least six months. Had to have a CIB (Combat Infantry Badge). Had to be at least the rank of Sergeant—otherwise don’t even come and talk to me.

  He wanted to find guys like my teammates, who possessed a never-quit attitude and a single-minded drive to accomplish the mission. Starting with the mentality from the flyer, Beckwith later created ................. based on what he learned from the British SAS.

  But the military is not the only example. Ernest Shackleton, who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic in the 1900s, reportedly placed an ad in a London newspaper looking for the same type of man: