Inside SEAL Team Six (5 page)

After forty minutes or so, I got out and started making my way carefully across the big parking lot. I planned to run into the woods if I saw the police.

Halfway across the lot this car came speeding around a corner and stopped beside me. To my relief, there was a couple inside. The guy who was driving rolled down his window, but the girl seated next to him leaned over and did all the talking.

She asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Focusing on my ripped tank top that was stained with blood, she said, “You don’t look fine. You got into a big fight, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because the police were here and they took the guy’s body. We’re happy you did what you did. We’ll help you get out of here.”

I said, “That’s okay. I’m going back to the bar to look for the girl.”

“Don’t do that,” she warned. “The police are looking for you and your friends.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“No,” the girl said. “Let us give you a ride.”

I climbed in the backseat. As the car approached the entrance, police officers emerged from the bar. I ducked down, waited for them to drive off, then I got out of the car.

The two bouncers standing in front recognized me immediately and put their hands on my shoulders.

One of them said, “Get out of here, right away. But thanks so much for what you did.”

The second bouncer put in, “That big asshole is like public enemy number one around here. He’s been terrorizing this town for years. They put him in an ambulance.”

“Really?”

That’s when it hit me: I might have killed him. But I remember thinking that if I did, I didn’t feel bad.

He was a scumbag, a menace to society who got what was coming to him.

That incident was just one more example of how the scene around me was turning darker and more violent. The drugs that kids were taking got stronger. Guys I knew were starting to get hooked on heroin and cocaine. Girls I dated were turning to prostitution to pay for their drugs.

A quiet Flat Rat kid I knew and liked and who had been trying to stay out of trouble went out into his backyard one day, cut both his wrists, and shot himself in the head with a shotgun.

Not long after, Nicky, the Hells Angel I looked up to, got out of prison for stealing a police car and running over a cop. He returned to the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his father and brother and asked them both to sit with him at the kitchen table.

He said, “Dad, you’ve always hated me. We’ve never gotten along.”

As his father and brother watched anxiously, Nicky started putting bullets in his mouth. Then he pulled a .38 out of his pocket and said, “I should blow you both away.”

Finally, Nicky said, “To hell with you both,” put the pistol in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

I was shocked and deeply saddened by both deaths.

By the time I was finishing high school, kids I knew were stealing air conditioners out of their parents’ homes to buy drugs. My own younger brother, Ricky, joined a car-theft ring and became addicted to cocaine.

And it kept getting closer to home. Just after I graduated from high school, my parents held a big party at my house. Hundreds of our friends showed up. The streets outside were jammed with parked cars and motorcycles.

People young and old were dancing, drinking, and having a good time. My parents told jokes and made people laugh.

As the party was winding down, two girls I knew asked me if I could drive them home. Before I left, a friend of mine said she was cold, and I let her borrow my black leather motorcycle jacket.

While I was gone, three punks from a rival gang in nearby Milford, Connecticut, showed up at the party, roughed the girl up, stole my jacket, and left.

When I returned home, around three in the morning, I was told what happened and I immediately tore off on my motorcycle to go after them. Two fellow Flat Rats known as the Monaco brothers followed me.

The Monaco brothers and I drove all over but couldn’t find them. When we returned to my house hours later, the three punks from Milford pulled into my driveway.

“Unbelievable!” I got off my bike and walked up to the driver’s side of the car. Two of the Milford punks got out of the passenger side holding baseball bats. The guy wearing my jacket was sitting in the passenger seat with the window down. Before he had the chance to get out, I punched him in the mouth.

Then I grabbed the bat he was holding and charged after the other two, who ran off.

It wasn’t a big deal. But I’d recovered my jacket and made a point—don’t mess with me, or the Flat Rats.

I hoped it was over. But a couple days later, Mrs. Monaco was standing in a phone booth in a strip-mall parking lot when some guys from the Milford gang saw her and stabbed her to death.

It was an ugly, horrible, senseless act of retaliation.

I said to myself,
The hell with this place. I’ve got to get out of here.

When I invited my parents to come to my high school graduation, they’d asked if I was going to get a diploma. I barely squeezed through, graduating near the bottom of my class. But I was graduating, and moving on. Class of ’76.

Wanting to improve my chances of finding a decent career, I decided to go to Mattatuck Community College, in Waterbury, Connecticut. I remember going with my dad to register for classes and buying a T-shirt that read
TUCK U.

I thought it was cool. My dad wished I had selected a different one.

But for first time in my life, he seemed proud of me, his first son. My parents were even more pleased when I made the dean’s list the first semester.

But the transition from hell-raiser to college kid wasn’t easy. I had a burning desire to do anything but sit in a classroom listening to a professor and taking notes.

I thought maybe I’d be suited to being a policeman, because cops saw action and carried guns. I could be like my hero Evel Knievel, who had switched from black leather to white. So I signed up for a course in criminal justice.

The first day of class, the instructor asked, “How many of you here think you want to become cops?”

Practically everyone in the room raised his or her hand, including me.

He said, “You want to be cops because of what you’ve seen on TV. The chases, the shootouts. Isn’t that right?”

A bunch of us answered, “Yes.”

“Well, those things will never happen,” he said. “You pull your weapon from your holster, and you’re in court the next day defending yourself. The hours are terrible. So is the pay. The divorce rate is the highest of all civilian jobs. You spend most of your time writing parking tickets.”

Now I had to find something else. The question was, What?

I was still racing motocross, and even though it was expensive and dangerous, it remained a good outlet for my relentless energy. My friend Dave Kelliher, who was a professional rider, told me that if I wanted to get serious, I needed to start training.

“What do you mean? I’m at the motocross track all the time.”

“I’m talking about physical training,” he answered. “I run ten miles three times a week.”

At that point, I’d never run in my life.

The next morning, I met him at this house in North Haven. Dave had measured this one-mile loop in his neighborhood that he ran ten times. I completed the first mile with him at a leisurely pace but didn’t feel good. The second mile I was breathing hard and felt like I was going to be sick.

After the third, I sat on the grass and watched. I’d had enough.

By the time Dave was on his sixth mile, I was thinking,
I’m watching a professional motocross racer get fitter and stronger. And I’m sitting here on the grass like a quitter.

As I watched him complete the tenth mile, I felt completely pathetic.

The next day, I started running, and I haven’t stopped since.

When I ran with Dave a month later, I beat him.

About four months after that, I ran the Boston Marathon. It was brutal, but I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop running until I crossed the finish line. Bill Rodgers won that year, with a time of two hours, nine minutes, and fifty-five seconds. My time was three hours and forty-four minutes.

I was determined to get better. I trained hard every day. A month after that, when I ran a second marathon, my time was three hours and thirty-three minutes.

My third marathon, I got it down to three hours and fifteen minutes and finished in the top 20 percent.

A month after that, I clocked in at three hours and six minutes.

Now I had to beat three hours. A couple weeks later, I did, crossing the finish line at two hours, fifty minutes. I’d made the top ten.

I started to realize something important: if you push yourself, you can accomplish great things.

I wanted to channel all the energy I had into something worthwhile, to find a way to make up for some of the bad things I’d done and the misery I’d put my parents through.

I just needed to find the right outlet.

I joined the Navy like my dad.

T
he funniest story I’ve ever heard about joining the Navy involves a buddy of mine, a fellow SEAL. His name was Don, but we called him Boats because he was a boatswain’s mate.

Boats, a big, gruff guy covered with tattoos, described himself as a skinny, geeky kid in high school—the kind of boy that girls had zero interest in.

On the afternoon of Boats’s seventeenth birthday, one of the most beautiful girls in school approached him in the hallway. Her name was Patty.

She stopped in front of him and said, “I heard that today’s your birthday. Is that correct?”

Looking down at his shoes, he answered, “Uh, yes, Patty.”

Just being near her and speaking to her was exciting. When she actually touched his arm, he felt a tingle shoot through his body.

She purred, “That’s great. Congratulations.”

“Uh, thanks, but it happens to everyone.”

Patty trained her beautiful blue eyes on his and said, “You know, my parents are going out tonight. Why don’t you come over to my house at seven and I’ll make you dinner?”

Boats couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He stammered, “Wh-wh-what did you just say?”

“It’s your birthday and my parents are going to be out tonight. So why don’t you come over and I’ll cook you dinner? Would you like that?”

“Of course. Yeah. I mean…Are you sure?”

“Come on. Don’t you want to celebrate your birthday?”

“Yeah. What time?”

“Seven. You know where I live?”

Of course he did. How many times had he made a deliberate detour to go past her house on the chance that he might catch a glimpse of her through a window?

Now she was standing there before him like a dream come true, waiting for his answer.

He said, “Seven o’clock. I’ll be there.”

Boats went home, showered, put on his nicest clothes, spritzed himself with his dad’s cologne, then drove to a neighborhood florist to buy a bouquet of flowers. He splurged and bought red roses, arrived at Patty’s doorstep at seven, and rang the bell.

He stood rehearsing what he was going to say when Patty answered the door. She opened it and said, “Hi. Come in.”

Her smile was radiant. Almost blinding.

He mumbled, “Thanks,” and followed her inside.

She looked resplendent in a yellow and white sundress and smelled incredible. Patty showed him a place on a sofa and sat beside him.

She started to talk about how he was one of those people that she had always wanted to get to know better and how she was really excited that she’d finally gotten this opportunity.

Boats was having trouble thinking clearly. Just sitting next to a sexy, beautiful girl with perfect skin was driving him crazy.

When she touched his arm, he felt wild sparks travel through his body. Then she put her hand on his leg.

He nearly fainted.

Maybe Patty had only intended it as a friendly gesture, but the sensation sent a bolt of electricity into Boats’s groin. The sexual charge he felt was almost overwhelming. The second time she did it, Boats was in agony. He crossed his legs, squeezed them together, and bit down on his lip.

Then he heard Patty say, “If you’ll excuse me a minute, I think I’ll go upstairs for a minute and freshen up.”

Not knowing exactly what she meant, he said, “Sure. No problem.”

He watched her leave, then looked down at the lump in his pants. He realized he had to do something fast. It was a choice of fleeing the house or relieving himself immediately so he didn’t humiliate himself in front of Patty.

He chose the latter.

When he heard her reach the top of the stairs, Boats removed a handkerchief from his back pocket, unzipped his pants, kneeled in front of the sofa, and got to work.

Just as Boats was about to peak, he thought he heard something stir in the next room. A few seconds later a chorus of people shouted, “Surprise! Happy birthday!”

Looking up, he saw twenty-four members of his family—his mother, father, grandparents, brother, sisters, aunts, and uncles—rush into the room. Then he watched as their expressions changed from excited expectation to shock and horror.

Boats quickly yanked up his pants, ran out of the house, and drove himself directly to a Navy recruiter. By the time he got up the nerve to return home, five years later, he’d completely transformed and become a Navy SEAL.

My recruitment story wasn’t nearly as dramatic or embarrassing. But like Boats, I realized I had to get out of my hometown. In my case, I wanted to escape the cycle of drugs and crime that was consuming so many of my friends.

I took a train to get to Navy basic training in Great Lakes, Illinois, determined to make something of myself. It was my first real trip away from home and I spent most of the train ride flirting and making out with a young schoolteacher and then playing poker with a pimp who complained about how he had to keep all his girls supplied with cocaine. Just the thing I was trying to leave behind.

I took to military life immediately. Civilian life seemed chaotic and confusing, and the structured, ordered, and disciplined environment in the military enabled me to thrive.

A former basic-training bunkmate named Bob Klose, who is now a college professor in Maine, remembers me as something of a lunatic.

When I spoke to him recently, he said, “Don, do you remember how you used to push the bunk bed into the middle of the room so you could run around it three hundred times?”

“Sort of.”

“You measured the length of all the tiles and calculated the distance. I think your longest run was seventeen miles.”

“Sounds right.”

“What about all those times you used to get under the bunk and bench-press it?”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

Bob said, “I asked you, ‘Hey, Don, how many times are you going to bench-press the bunk?’

“And you answered, ‘Until my nose bleeds.’”

One day after swimming they asked all us new recruits if we wanted to watch a movie about the Navy SEALs.

What the hell are SEALs?

I saw a group of four very fit guys covered from head to toe in camouflage and riding a rubber Zodiac boat over high surf. The narrator said, “These elite commandos are defined by their extreme fitness and training and what instructors call the ‘fire in the gut.’”

I learned that the acronym SEAL comes from
sea, air, and land,
and that SEALs worked in small units and trained to perform the most difficult military tasks under any type of circumstance, in any type of environment—from deserts to frozen mountain peaks, jungles, and urban areas.

I was fascinated. I’d loved pushing myself since I was a kid, and I said to myself,
That’s the job for me!

Over the next few days I soaked up as much info about the SEALs as I could. From a book at the base library I found out that the SEALs had been created in the early 1960s when President Kennedy was looking for small units to resist the Vietcong in the jungles, coasts, and rivers of Vietnam.

Developed as a more versatile, state-of-the-art-of-war version of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams (UDTs), which had blown up bridges and tunnels during the amphibious phases of the Korean War, the SEALs quickly distinguished themselves by going behind enemy lines, raiding enemy camps, sabotaging supplies, cutting off enemy communications, and destroying stored ammunitions.

And I learned that their training was brutal—the toughest of any military force in the world.

All Navy SEALs have to graduate from a BUD/S selection and training course. I went to my commanding officer a few days later and said, “Sir, I respectfully request permission for orders to BUD/S.”

He read me the requirements. The candidate:

1. Has to be an active-duty member of the U.S. Navy
   
2. Has to be a man twenty-eight years or younger with good vision
   
3. Has to be a U.S. citizen
   
4. Has to pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
   

Check, check, check, check.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“You also have to pass a stringent physical screening test.”

“I’m ready, sir.”

A couple days later, I swam five hundred yards in fewer than 12.5 minutes; completed forty-two push-ups in under two minutes and fifty sit-ups in under two minutes; and did six pulls-ups. Then I had to run one and a half miles in boots and long pants. (Of course, these were Navy standards, and the SEALs wanted a lot more than that. Also, the standards in the 1970s were a bit different than they are today.)

Piece of cake. Now I had the score qualifying me for BUD/S noted in my new service record. Boy, was I proud!

I said, “All right, sir, I’m ready to join.”

“Not so fast, recruit.”

“Why not, sir?”

He said, “You think the SEALs want brand-new recruits with only eight weeks of training? You’ve got to go to corpsman school first.”

The Navy recruiter in New Haven—a real charming character who called himself Diamond Jim Brady—had told me that my aptitude test showed that I had the ability to be a corpsman.

“What’s a corpsman?” I had asked.

“It’s basically the Navy’s version of a medic. You’ll get to work with some pretty nurses, and you’ll get a chance to take care of people.”

So after basic training, I went to corpsman school, where I learned how to run sick call, stop bleeding, administer CPR, and give medications.

After completing two months of hospital corpsman training, I asked about joining the SEALs again. This time I was told that I needed at least a year of experience on a ship or at command or clinic first.

The Navy assigned me to the Naval Regional Medical Center in Newport, Rhode Island. It was an old brick hospital built at the turn of the century; seeing it today, you’d think it was the setting for the movie
Shutter Island.
And it reeked of mildew and disinfectant.

But Newport was gorgeous, had great places to run, and was near where my parents lived. So, all in all, it wasn’t a bad assignment.

I did rotations in the ER and OR—where I administered to all the young Marines who got into fights and accidents on the weekends—and in the ARS (alcohol rehab service), where I developed a friendship with a young drug addict named Ron. When Ron was told he was being released, he protested loudly, because he didn’t think he was ready.

I tried to calm him down by telling him that he’d be okay, he’d make new friends, and I’d come visit him. When that didn’t work, I went to the counselors to see if I could get them to change their minds.

But when I went back to look for Ron, I couldn’t find him. I searched his room, the rec rooms, the cafeteria, the halls.

Then I noticed that a door to a room that was normally left open had been closed. I turned the knob, but it was locked. After I knocked and got no answer, I kicked the door in, only to discover that the bathroom door was locked too.

“Hey, Ron, you in there? It’s me, Don.”

No answer. Just a faint gurgling sound.

I kicked that door in too and found Ron slumped on the floor in a pool of blood. He’d cut his inner forearms lengthwise from his elbows to his wrists—the serious way. Blood oozed out of his mouth.

Where was it coming from?

I’d learned the ABCs of emergency medicine during corpsman training. Airway, breathing, circulation: clear the airway so the patient can breathe, establish a pulse, stop the leaks.

I used my smock to wrap one arm, pulled off my T-shirt and used it to wrap the other. As I reached into his mouth to sweep his airway, something cut my finger.

I carefully extracted what turned out to be a razor blade. Ron had apparently tried to swallow it.

I shouted to my fellow corpsman, “Dennis! Dennis, I need some help here! Bring a stretcher!”

We lifted Ron onto the stretcher, then quickly ran him over to the ER, where the surgeons sewed him up. Ron survived.

Most of my shifts weren’t as eventful. They usually ran from 9:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. As soon as all the patients were in bed and I’d helped out wherever I could, I’d go to a little room downstairs that contained a couple of old Lifecycles and start pedaling. Most nights, I’d keep going past the time the TV stations went off the air, finish at 6:00 a.m., do my chores around the ward, then go home.

The hospital staff considered me something of a wild man but enjoyed that my name was being mentioned in the local newspapers and even on the evening news. That’s because I was competing in and winning races throughout New England—bike races, 10 Ks, marathons.

Then a friend named Wally who worked in the ICU told me about a new race that involved swimming, biking, and running in succession, something called a triathlon.

I thought,
That’s wild. A new challenge that combines three events. Bring it on!
At that point I wasn’t much of a swimmer, so Wally helped me learn the crawl stroke at the base pool.

At the Sri Chinmoy triathlon six weeks later, competitors swam one and a half kilometers, biked forty kilometers, then ran ten kilometers. I finished in the top ten.

My parents had come to cheer me on, and they were standing near the finish line after the race when my dad heard a few of the top competitors talking about something called an Ironman.

“What’s an Ironman?” he asked.

Someone told him that there was an article about it in the May 1979
Sports Illustrated
. I rode my bike to the library the next morning to look it up.

It turned out that a Navy commander named John Collins had organized the first Ironman competition in Hawaii in 1978 by combining three local events—a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike race, and a 26.2-mile run.

“Whoever finishes first,” Collins declared, “we’ll call him the iron man.”

The first race held had attracted eighteen people; fifteen of them started, and twelve finished. The winner was a twenty-seven-year-old Honolulu taxi driver and former military pentathlete named Gordon Haller.