Inside SEAL Team Six (17 page)

Seven of us stood at attention. The captain made the introductions.

When he got to Adam, who was standing to my right, Captain Fitzgerald said, “This is Lieutenant Curtis. He’s the one who was kidnapped with his wife driving back from the airport.”

Secretary Cheney nodded and said, “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s when we decided to invade.”

As the new year, 1990, began, our pace at SBU-26 didn’t slow down. In fact, many of my teammates from ST-6 requested orders to SBU-26 because they wanted a piece of the action. Chasing the rainbow.

Our patrols started to expand up and down the Pacific coast of Central and South America, and throughout the rivers and waterways from Panama all the way to Bolivia. We were now on the front lines of the war on drugs, which had been declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and grown in intensity during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

The “war” was actually a campaign of foreign military aid and military intervention, with the assistance of participating countries, the goal of which was to reduce or eliminate the sale of illegal drugs.

Over the next two years, I worked with SBU-26 conducting hundreds of VBSSs (visit, board, search, and seizures) throughout Central and South America. We seized hundreds of tons of marijuana and cocaine. But our enthusiasm was quickly dimmed by the rampant local government corruption.

Whenever we entered a foreign country that was cooperating with us—Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, and so on—we’d always meet first with local officials, and they’d brief us on where we could operate. Inevitably they directed us to little villages in the jungle. We’d raid family-run cocaine labs that had fifty-gallon drums and burn down some huts. Seize drugs and equipment.

But it didn’t take long for us all to realize we were attacking the tip of the iceberg. The big drug dealers and labs were being protected by corrupt government officials and were, therefore, untouchable.

Another component of the war on drugs was something we called mobile training
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Many of the guys we trained were conscripts with no gear, no training, and little funding. Also, they understood that they had to operate within the political restraints of their country and region. So they weren’t allowed to fully execute their jobs.

Still, we taught them how to shoot, patrol, and establish comms.

One of the MTTs we conducted took place in Riberalta, a little town of about 78,000 on the edge of the Amazon basin in northern Bolivia. The town was primitive and filthy, like something out of the Wild West, but with lots of mosquitoes, and everybody rode a motorcycle.

It wasn’t unusual to see a family of four riding on a Suzuki 125—the wife on the back of the seat, one kid on the gas tank, and another one on the handlebars. Cars and trucks were luxuries that few of the locals could afford.

For some reason, the people who lived there dumped their sewage upstream, so the water we cooked and bathed with was badly polluted. Even though we were careful about what we ate or touched, all of us got sick.

One day we were in our room and the LT said, “Hey, Doc. There’s some guy outside selling rolls.”

All of us were hungry, so I went to check these rolls out. They were covered with seeds and in a plastic bag, and they looked clean. They tasted great.

We must have eaten a hundred of them over the next couple of days. One night we were chewing on the rolls when the LT stopped and closely inspected the seeds.

“These aren’t seeds,” he shouted. “They’re moving!”

The seeds turned out to be tiny bugs. But they tasted better than anything else we ate during that deployment.

Before we departed Panama, the commanding officer called me and the LT into his office and said, “Guys, I want you to make sure that nobody gets in trouble. I’m sending you down with a couple of trucks, our best boats, and I want them back looking like they do now, no scratches, dents, or dings.”

We were in Riberalta about a week more when one of the SBU-26 guys, a petty officer third class named Hutch, was driving one of the trucks down a dirt road to a four-way intersection when this eleven-year-old boy on a Honda 125 cut in front of him. Hutch slammed on the brakes but still hit the boy with the truck.

The boy flew off the bike, hit the road hard, and lay on the ground unconscious. Bolivian authorities arrested Hutch and threw him in a tiny, filthy, barbaric-looking jail cell.

The boy, meanwhile, was loaded into the back of a vehicle and dropped off at the so-called hospital.

I received a call over the PRC-77 radio to get to the hospital ASAP and was there in ten minutes. When I examined the unconscious eighty-pound, eleven-year-old boy, I saw that his pupils were unequal and not reactive to light—a sign of serious head trauma. Otherwise, he was breathing fine and didn’t appear to have any other injuries.

The hospital looked like a dirty garage—so filthy and ill equipped that you wouldn’t want to use it to work on your car. I introduced myself to the doctor on duty and told him that I was an American medic and was there to help the unconscious boy.

The doctor said, “Do not interfere. The boy will either live or die. Don’t bother this process.”

What?

“Doctor,” I said. “I don’t want to cause trouble here, but I insist that we take care of this boy immediately. Check his vital signs, do pupil checks, and order an MRI and a CAT scan as soon as possible.”

He became very agitated, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

It was obvious to me that we needed to get the boy to a real hospital. Brian L., also from ST-6 and executive officer at SBU-26, searched for a plane and pilot; he tracked down a confiscated drug plane and we used that to fly the boy to a real hospital in the city of Santa Cruz. (Note: Brian L. is now one of the highest-ranking admirals in SEAL teams.)

There I met a Bolivian doctor who had trained in the United States and had actually saved the life of a SEAL buddy of mine in Vietnam.

He assembled his OR team, which was made up of an anesthesiologist; an assistant, who wore flip-flops; and myself.

I asked him, “Where can I wash up?”

He said, “Don’t worry about that.”

None of the team scrubbed up or wore surgical masks or gloves.

The impact of the accident had caused the boy’s brain to slam forward against the front of his skull, then push back again—coup-countercoup, it’s called. His injury required brain surgery.

As the Bolivian doctor spoke to me in broken English, he took a scalpel, cut along the top portion of the boy’s head, then peeled down his face, exposing his skull.

Then, as I held the boy’s head, the doctor picked up an old hand drill that you wouldn’t want in your toolbox and started to drill into the boy’s skull.

As he was doing this, the doctor asked me, “So, how’s the pussy in Panama?”

I said, “Fine, Doc. But don’t you think we should pay attention to what you’re doing?”

As he drilled, he used a piece of gauze to catch the tiny bone fragments that were falling free from the boy’s skull.

The doctor drilled six holes in the boy’s head. I initially thought he was just drilling the holes to relieve the pressure on the boy’s brain. Instead, the doctor took a wire saw, put it in one hole, and started to saw through the bone. Then he did the same thing to the next hole. Once he’d finished with all six holes, he lifted off the top of the boy’s skull and placed it on a table.

The boy’s exposed brain was about the size of his fist and mostly gray.

While the Bolivian doctor continued to talk to me, he reached down and started to cut away pieces of the front of the boy’s brain that had turned black.

He said, “Black brain, no good.”

He was correct. The black parts of the brain were necrotic and would have caused infection and resulted in the boy’s death.

When he was finished with the frontal lobe, the Bolivian doctor sliced off the black parts of the temporal lobe and the back of the brain.

I said, “Doc, you’re cutting away so much of his brain. Is he ever going to be okay?”

“Oh, yes. He’ll learn to work around it. He’ll think differently. But he’ll be okay.”

As I watched, the doctor took a piece of IV tubing and cut some slits in it. Then he placed the tubing on the boy’s brain and pushed it down, so that the blood drained away. He said, “Look, drainage tubing made in Bolivia,” and he laughed.

Next, he picked up the skull section and put it back, saying, “Look, it’s just like a bowling ball.”

As I watched in a combination of wonder and horror, he mixed some liquid with the bone fragments and then used that as a superglue to hold the skull section in place.

He carefully peeled the face back up over the skull and lined up the nostrils and eye sockets.

“That’s it!” he announced.

Miraculously, the boy recovered. Months later, he was back on his motorcycle riding around town.

While I was attending to the injured boy, the LT was trying to get Hutch out of jail.

During the three days it took him to negotiate Hutch’s temporary release, Lieutenant Mike R.—who had a really sick sense of humor—continued to mess with him. He told Hutch, “I have bad news. The Bolivians won’t let you out of here, and they’re planning to give you the death penalty.”

He also walked in one day and said, “Sorry, Hutch, but the boy died. You killed an eleven-year-old boy.”

When Hutch started to scream, the LT said, “I’m only kidding.”

Once the LT knew Hutch was being temporarily released, he called us together and said, “I want you guys to load the plane quickly. I’m going to pick up Hutch, then we’re going to fly out of here illegally, as fast as we can.”

I thought,
That’s a pretty ballsy move.

Later that night, as we were loading the C-130, the LT drove up in a taxi with Hutch. As soon as they boarded, he ordered the pilot to fire up the engines.

We were pulling the rest of our gear up the back ramp when two platoons of Bolivian soldiers arrived and surrounded the plane, their weapons drawn.

They yelled in Spanish, “If you try to leave, we’ll shoot you.”

The LT refused to back down. Instead, he said, “Okay, guys. Open the cruise boxes and break out your weapons.”

It was going to be like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

We closed the ramp and taxied down the runway as all of us held our breath. Thankfully, the Bolivians (many of whom we had just trained) let us leave without firing a shot.

But when we returned to Panama, we caught hell. The commanding officer who had told us not to cause any trouble was pissed. And rightfully so.

M
y former German teacher Shannon and I were married in 1990, and she eventually moved to Panama with me. But even though we loved each other, our marriage got off to a somewhat rocky start.

When Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm to thwart Iraqi aggression. In Panama, where I was still stationed, I heard over the radio that the U.N.-authorized coalition force of thirty-four nations led by the United States was in dire need of special operators who were also medics, and I wrote to the SEAL commodore in Coronado, California, requesting orders to be assigned to the invasion. When Shannon found out, she protested strongly.

With good reason. She was pregnant with our daughter, Dawnie, who was born on March 22, 1991—which was one of the happiest days of my life.

Months before Dawnie was born, I had been sent with a group of ST-6 SEALs to help provide security to a regional drugs summit being held in the beautiful colonial city of Cartagena, Colombia. Tension was extremely high. Officials feared that Colombian drug barons would take revenge for the recent arrest of their friend and ally Manuel Noriega.

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who, in the style of machismo, wore black armbands with
DAS
printed boldly on them and roared through the streets on trail bikes.

We were staying at the same local hotel as the presidents of Bolivia and Peru. As ST-6 SEALs, we tried to remain low-key, but the seriousness of the summit didn’t stop the presidents and their friends from partying all night with loud music; people laughing, dancing, and screaming; and naked women being thrown in the hotel pool.

President George H. W. Bush was more discreet, arriving in the morning on Air Force One. After the Boeing 747 taxied to a stop near the terminal, the president emerged and waved from the top step of the stairway. At least, I thought it was the president. But when I looked closer, I saw that the man was not the president but an almost perfect double. When he wasn’t shot at or attacked, the real president emerged from the plane and was whisked quickly to an armored limo.

Since BUD/S, the pace of my workouts hadn’t let up. In addition to doing the required daily SEAL PT, I was on a thirty-year mission to work out every day. I hadn’t missed a workout since February of 1978, and that included fifty-mile trail runs, two-hundred-mile bike rides, twenty-four-hour mountain-bike rides, and fifty-mile kayak paddles.

In the fall of ’91, I was training with four guys from SBU-26 for the Run Across the Isthmus—a fifty-two-mile run across Panama, starting at the Atlantic coast and following jungle paths and railroad beds to the Pacific Ocean. The first man who won it, in 1940, was a future World War II hero named Fay Steele.

The guys at SBU-26 weren’t as committed to training as I thought they could be. Having some idea of the toll that fifty-two miles through the heat and humidity was going to take, I invited them over to my place and warned them by saying, “This is going to be the most miserable day of your life.”

As I was talking, I felt a series of sharp pains on the right side of my abdomen that caused me to double over.

One of the SBU-26 guys asked, “Don, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “I think I just have a slight case of food poisoning.”

A few minutes later I started feeling nauseous, and I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Shannon said, “Don, you better not do this stupid race. You’re sick and need to see a doctor.”

I said, “I’ll be fine.”

The guys I was planning on running with that night had never run an ultramarathon. So I explained to them the importance of hydration and electrolyte replacement, bringing extra shoes, and considering race tactics.

After they left my house, Shannon saw me lying on the sofa in pain, holding my side, and she said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this!”

Not about to let a little discomfort stop me, I answered, “I’m running the race.”

She said, “If you do, I’m out of here.” Then she picked up our baby daughter, took my stepdaughter, Chonie, by the hand, and left the house. (She was gone for two days.)

We were living in Navy housing at Fort Amador, which faced the canal, with SEAL neighbors on both sides.

Now I was alone, dry-heaving green bile, and feeling like someone had thrust a rusty sword in my side. The pain was so bad that when I tried calling the hospital, my eyes couldn’t focus enough to read the numbers.

When I stumbled out of the house, a neighbor’s wife saw me and screamed, “Don, what’s the matter with you? Oh my God!”

I asked weakly, “Can you take me to the hospital?”

She and her husband helped me into the backseat of their Volkswagen Bug and sped to the nearest hospital. I was in so much pain that I fell to the floor of the car and curled up in the fetal position.

The moment the emergency room orderly opened the door, I hurled all over his shoes. Turned out that I was in the process of passing kidney stones and had to spend the night. Regretfully, I never got to run the race.

During my three years in Panama, I had a full plate of responsibilities. When I wasn’t on missions, I directed the three-week Naval Special Warfare jungle-survival course in Panama, which was held in jungles filled with crocodiles and poisonous snakes. We taught members of the Naval Special Warfare community advanced-weapons tactics; small-unit-patrol techniques; how to plan and conduct small-unit missions; how to recon an area; how to tactically cross rivers; how to make improvised tools, set traps, and fish; food and water procurement and preparation; and jungle navigation.

The course culminated in a four-day SERE exercise designed to test each student’s ability to survive alone or in small groups while in hostile territory.

The crocodiles and snakes weren’t a joke. After I left, an Army soldier who was attending the course disappeared. It’s presumed that he was eaten alive by a crocodile.

Once, when I was leading a group of trainees on a run down a jungle road, I looked back to see how they were doing and saw a strange, whirling haze. While trying to figure out what it was, I was surrounded by a swarm of killer bees that started stinging me without mercy.

Soon all of us were jumping and screaming, looking like we were doing some kind of crazed Pygmy dance. The only way we could get away from the bees was to run a quarter of a mile and jump in the ocean. By that time, we were all covered with welts.

Another time, when I was driving down that same road, I saw an Army platoon sitting in a group. Two soldiers were huffing and puffing, and the face of one had turned white.

I stopped the jeep I was driving and asked, “Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah, we’re fine.”

I pointed to the one guy who looked liked he was having a particularly hard time and said, “He doesn’t look okay to me.”

One of the soldiers said, “He was stung by some killer bees and is allergic to bees.”

“Well, you are not fine. Where’s your medic?” I asked.

“He’s lost.”

“Then where’s your sergeant?”

“He’s with the medic.”

In the few minutes we were talking, the soldier lost consciousness. So I loaded him in my jeep, took him to a tent we had set up along a river, and administered Benadryl, epinephrine, and oxygen.

He woke up, looked at me, and asked, “Who are you?”

I didn’t tell him how lucky he was to still be alive.

In addition to directing the jungle survival course, I ran the Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) throughout Central and South America. This was an extension of the same program that had been used in Vietnam in which free medical care was administered to poor peasants and intel was gathered that could be of value in planning future operations.

I ran similar events in Honduras, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, and Nicaragua. First, I’d get a grant of seventy thousand dollars from an organization that managed Central and South American military aid, and I’d use it to buy medical, dental, and veterinary supplies. Then I’d recruit volunteer doctors, nurses, and medics from the different military hospitals and clinics in the United States and Panama. I’d look for dentists, OB-GYNs, and veterinarians too.

We’d strategically select a remote area filled with poor people in need of medical attention and set up field tents. We’d have a dental tent, an OB-GYN tent, an admin/registration tent, and a general sick-call tent where everyone came in to be checked.

Once we put out the word that we were going to be there, hundreds of men, women, and children streamed in, often accompanied by their farm animals. Some would walk for two or three days, then stop and bathe in a nearby river. They were proud people who wanted to look their best.

The native women were remarkable. They’d arrive dressed in their finest clothing. Some had never seen a dentist in their lives.

The people sat on the wooden dental chair, and the dentist would pull their bad teeth without using Novocain. The men and boys would cry. But the women never complained. We pulled bad teeth, rotten teeth, and teeth that looked like they might go bad. We used a fifty-gallon barrel to hold all the bad teeth. By the end of the week, it would be a quarter filled.

Meanwhile, the veterinarians and some of the medics would go into the fields and inoculate the cows, goats, and sheep.

Some of the people who attended were suffering from serious injuries that hadn’t ever been treated. I remember one girl limped in with a club foot. We managed to get her a flight to an Army hospital in Texas for treatment.

Another father and son carried in the almost lifeless body of a teenage girl. She weighed about seventy pounds and was running a 106-degree temperature; her unconscious body was hot to the touch. Upon examining her, we found that she’d had a spontaneous abortion and part of the fetus was still stuck inside her. It was infected and she had become septic. She’d probably had no more than an hour left to live when her father put her in my arms.

We worked on the girl for hours, and she survived.

I staged a number of MEDCAP programs in El Salvador. Since 1980, a civil war had been raging there between the military-led government, which was supported by the United States, and leftist rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The MEDCAPs we held there turned out to be great sources of intelligence. We’d set them up in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, near FMLN strongholds. Grateful patients would tell us where the rebel camps were located and what routes they used to smuggle in weapons.

I was wearing many hats in Panama—running missions and serving as director of the jungle survival course, director of MEDCAP, and liaison to SEALs who were deployed to Panama.

I also supported many of the military operations in El Salvador. The first SEAL funeral I attended was for Lieutenant Commander Albert Schaufelberger, who had been the security chief to the American military advisers stationed in El Salvador. Schaufelberger had been waiting to pick up his friend outside Central American University when he was approached by an FMLN gunman, who shot him three times in the head. In accordance with Schaufelberger’s sealed instructions, his ashes were scattered in the Pacific from a SEAL patrol boat.

I arrived in El Salvador toward the end of the conflict. By the time the government and the FMLN rebels signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords, in January of 1992, approximately seventy-five thousand Salvadorans had died.

From my point of view, the Salvadoran conflict was unique. For one thing, the Red Cross seemed to be openly supporting the rebels. Whenever we saw a Red Cross ambulance, we knew the rebels were nearby. In the evenings, armed fighters from both sides of the conflict would frequent the same restaurants and bars. We knew who they were, and they knew us.

One night I was on a joint SEAL–Special Forces op with an experienced SF operator named Chito. The two of us were lying in long grass dressed in Salvadoran garb—Levi’s, jungle-camo tops, and ball caps. We had a wheelbarrow filled with automatic weapons and ammo that we were supposed to push for about twelve kilometers, to a rendezvous point.

While we were lying in the grass in enemy-controlled territory waiting to launch the op, Chito couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Maybe he was nervous. Maybe he had a lot on his mind.

For whatever reason, it was the beginning of a strange night.

He started to tell me that before joining the Army he’d been the lead singer in a punk rock band called Luke, Puke, and the Vomits. No kidding.

And he told me about some songs he wrote dealing with the many intense things that had happened in his life. Like the time the remains of his best friend were returned from Vietnam. Or when his girlfriend was badly injured in a motorcycle accident.

He explained the elaborate stage act he’d worked out. Before his band performed, Chito would buy sheep intestines from a butcher shop and hide them in a plastic bag that he taped under his shirt. At the end of a particularly dramatic song, he’d take out a knife and slash the bag so that it looked like he was cutting his stomach and his guts were spilling out.

I liked Chito, but he was wound tight. The more he spoke, the more agitated he got. He’d been in El Salvador for years and was frustrated. He said, “We keep pushing human rights on the Salvadoran army troops, but every morning they find the headless body of another of their fellow soldiers in the river.”

As he started to tell me about visiting his girlfriend in the hospital after her motorcycle accident, I heard something moving toward us in the pitch-black night.

“Chito, be quiet!”

We slithered through the chest-high grass and hid behind a large tree. I was on the right; he was on the left. The sound was moving closer and growing louder. We had our fingers on the triggers, safeties off. I could feel Chito about to explode.