SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (35 page)

Scotty and Tim told him who I was.

“Aw, hell.” The Delta operator went to the other Delta guys and said, “Hey, Wasdin is here!”

They swarmed me, took me to Delta’s Charlie Squadron ready room, and gave me beers in both hands. We hung out, and they laughed when I told them about giving my medication to the Ranger at Landstuhl. Afterward Delta had a party, but I had a fever and didn’t have enough power in my engine to join them. I went back to my hotel room early.

Only Defense Secretary Les Aspin attended the memorial service. For the most part, the Clinton administration seemed to hope the Battle of Mogadishu would just conveniently disappear and America would forget.

*   *   *

After flying out the next morning to Georgia, I showed up at the hospital for my regular visit. I had diarrhea. My fever had worsened—my whole body ached like it was on fire. I felt disoriented. I was literally dying. A medical team descended on me and rushed me into the back, gave me a shot in each butt cheek, and put an IV in each arm. They removed the bandages from my leg and started working on it. The doctor, who had gone home, returned in his civilian clothes. “Where have you been?” he asked. “We’ve been trying to contact your house, but you weren’t there. The blood test results from your previous visit showed that you have a staph infection.” The deadly staph infection had crawled deep inside me via the pins in my leg. This partly explains why I didn’t feel up to attending the party with Delta after the memorial.

On the hospital bed, I floated up and looked down at myself lying there.
I’m dying. This staph infection sucks a lot worse than combat.

The next day, the doctor was visibly upset with me. “If you’re going to stay under my care, you’ve got to give us a way to stay in contact with you. If not, you need to go back to Virginia and let those navy doctors take care of you.” He was scared. The doctor had done me a favor by letting me rehab in his army hospital—and I repaid him by almost dying on him.

“Yes, sir.”

They kept me in the hospital a couple of days until I recovered.

Sitting at home in my wheelchair, I committed one of the Team’s gravest sins—feeling sorry for myself. I slipped deep into depression. After waking in the morning, I had to perform my pin care, cleaning the skin around the four big pins sticking out of my leg. If I didn’t, the infection would crawl down the pins and into my bone—causing another staph infection like the one that almost killed me. Then I’d bandage everything back up. The whole process took fifteen to twenty minutes. Twice a day. Doing the pin care by myself was tough. I asked my wife and brother-in-law to help, but they didn’t have the stomach. It looked terrible—there’s nothing normal about four pins screwed into a bone. My skin graft looked nasty, the meat visible.

The walls were closing in on me. I wasn’t accustomed to being trapped indoors, and my depression was bearing down on me. I had to get out of the house, so I decided to do something simple and routine, but even something as mundane as grocery shopping turned out to be a bigger blow to my weakened self-esteem. One day, while slowly wheeling myself down the aisle in a Winn-Dixie supermarket in Jesup, Georgia, I started to realize how good it felt to be out of the house, contributing to the family by shopping. Some return to a normal life.

An overweight woman with a chicken hairdo—short in the back and spiky on top, the Kate Gosselin haircut that is common in Wayne County—stared at my leg. Her face twisted like she’d eaten a lemon. I had cut the right leg of my sweatpants off above the knee to accommodate my external fixator. Although the skin-grafted area was bandaged, the pins were visible. “Why don’t you stay at home?” she said. “Don’t you realize how gross that is?”

I got my leg shot off serving her country. Our country.
Maybe this is how ordinary Americans see me. Are they fine with us going off to die for them but don’t want to see us wounded?
I was feeling too sorry for myself to realize that she didn’t know who I was or how I was wounded. At the time, when my spirit lay in the dirt, her words kicked me in the teeth. I desperately needed to bounce back, but I couldn’t. Those words punted me deeper into depression.

At home, I wheeled around the house in my chair, eating and killing time watching TV. I couldn’t take a shower or a bath because I couldn’t get my screws wet. I had to wash my hair in the sink and take a washcloth bath.

Every other day I did rehabilitation at the hospital in Fort Stewart. They gave me hot whirlpool treatments for my left foot, to shake loose the dead flesh. It hurt like getting shot again. They gave me crutches. They put me on bars to help me walk. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t stop tears from coming out of my eyes—I’d been still for too long before the rehabilitation. Then I had to have another surgery. Later I would have three more.

My internal clock hadn’t adjusted from Africa to Germany, then back to the United States. With time on my hands, it became easy to take a two- or three-hour nap, which kept me awake at night.

Pain and depression didn’t help matters either. Bone pain. As long as those screws stayed in my leg, I’d have pain. It’s understandable how people can become addicted to pain pills, but I despised the pills—they just made me numb. To some small degree, I wanted to feel pain, guilty that I had survived while a lot of good guys, special ones like Dan Busch, lay dead. I thought maybe I was strange for feeling this way.
Suck it up, take the pain.

Out of the SEAL Team Six loop and with no Team guys around, I suffered the withdrawal symptoms of being cut off from the camaraderie. I was in culture shock, too. People around town could talk to me about their lives, but I couldn’t talk to them about mine. I couldn’t joke with them about my Hell Week death leap to kill a rack of trays that I thought was a deer. Or laugh with them about the hospital in Germany where I gave the Ranger buddy my painkiller injections. People around town didn’t understand. I learned to shut up about those experiences. Now it occurred to me how different I had become from most people. Away from my Teammates, I felt forgotten, too. With no real-world missions, I had gone cold turkey from adrenaline. Now I couldn’t even walk. In the SEAL culture, where it pays to be a winner, I was the biggest loser. I was angry at the world in general and at God in particular.
Why did this have to happen to me?

In retrospect, I see that God was letting me know I was only human, and that being a SEAL was just a job.
Howard, you were too hardheaded to listen to Me after you were shot once. You didn’t listen to Me after the second shot. Here, big boy, let Me give you your third bullet hole. Now, do I have your attention? You are not Superman. You are God’s gift to special operations only for as long as I allow it to be. You are where you are because of Me. Not because of you
.
This is My way of getting your attention. Now that I’ve got it, let Me mold you further. You are not the finished product.
He humbled me and brought me back down to earth. Made me become a father to my children. At the time, no one could’ve convinced me of all that, but looking back, getting shot in the leg was the best thing that ever happened to me.

*   *   *

One day, a buddy of mine called me. On his ranch, he had a special hybrid of deer that he bred with American whitetail deer.

“Come over and let’s hunt a little.”

“Yes. Yes! Let me get out of this house! Anything!”

He picked me up in his pickup truck, took me out to the field, and set me down in my wheelchair on the ground. He pushed me nearly 30 yards through light underbrush, then stopped. He pointed to a spot about 150 yards away. “Over there is where the deer usually come out.”

My personal hunting rifle was a 7 mm Magnum with a nice scope. I was so happy—waiting there for nearly an hour and a half.

A huge buck came out. Sitting in my wheelchair, I brought my rifle to my shoulder, pulled the trigger, and the deer went down. Perfect shot. After laying my rifle on the ground, I wheeled my chair over to the animal. Pushing my wheelchair along a dirt road took me a while.

I parked my chair next to the deer. The beautiful buck looked up at me. It snorted, then laid its head back down. It made a last gasp, as if all the air had been sucked out of its lungs. Hearing it die, I thought,
I’d have been just as happy to come out and watch you, instead of taking your life
.
I’ve seen enough things die.

I took the buck and had the head mounted. In South Georgia, hunting is big. The boys head out before the crack of dawn and sit in their tree stands waiting for their prey during the season. I was still willing to kill someone to save myself or save another person—willing to kill in the line of duty—but I never hunted again.

*   *   *

The rehab people treated me like a celebrity. At that time, I was the only combat-wounded veteran in their hospital. Every time I went in, five or ten people would show up to talk to me.

After six or seven weeks, my niece brought me a device that slipped over the pins in my legs, creating a rubber seal, so I could shower. I stood on one leg in the shower and lathered up my hair. It felt like the best gift I’d ever received.

In early December, two months after the longest day in my life, my hometown of Screven, Georgia, threw me a hero’s welcome as part of the Christmas parade, with yellow ribbons everywhere. A big sign in the restaurant covered the front window:
WELCOME BACK HOWARD
,
THE HOMETOWN HERO
. Nearly all nine hundred of the townspeople must’ve signed it. People from Wayne County came out to line the streets, see me, and wish me well. They had no idea about the physical pain, the mental anguish, the loss, or the dark hole of depression that tormented me—before they honored me that way. They had no idea how much their welcome meant to me, appreciating me as part of the community. I didn’t feel like such a loser.

*   *   *

Mike Durant, the pilot of Super Six Four, the second Black Hawk to crash in Mogadishu, had broken his leg and back. Aidid’s propaganda minister, Abdullahi “Firimbi” Hassan, held him prisoner for eleven days until Mike and a captured Nigerian soldier were driven by their captors to a checkpoint at the UN compound. One of Durant’s captors pulled out UN credentials hanging on a chain around his neck and showed them to the guard. They waved him in. The checkpoint guard didn’t even realize Mike sat in the car. Nobody knew until he was already on the runway. His captors turned him over to the Red Cross. The United Nations showed enough unity with the enemy, but I didn’t feel like they showed enough unity with us. I never felt they could be trusted for operational security. You can only trust the people you train and fight with. I had trained with foreign counterterrorism units, and I trusted them. The UN checkpoint guard’s coziness with Durant’s captor, and the fact that his captor carried UN credentials, confirmed my distrust for the UN.

Mike Durant and I had just gotten to where we could walk unassisted. Our first meeting since Somalia was at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, to learn advanced Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. Although SERE schools like the one at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine, simulated being hunted, imprisoned, and tortured, this school took place in a classroom with ten to twelve students mainly learning the psychological aspects of captivity. With our experience in Mogadishu, Mike and I quickly became guest speakers for that particular class. The instructors called us to the front of the room, where we talked about our experiences and fielded questions from students
and
instructors.

*   *   *

The Navy flew Casanova, Little Big Man, Sourpuss, Captain Olson, and me to the Pentagon to award us the Silver Star. In Mogadishu, Captain Olson left headquarters to participate in rescuing men still pinned down. At our award ceremony, video cameras rolled and still cameras flashed. My citation read:

The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star medal to Hull Maintenance Technician First Class Howard E. Wasdin, United States Navy, for service set forth in the following citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against a hostile force during operation UNOSOM II in Mogadishu, Somalia on 3 & 4 October 1993. Petty Officer Wasdin was the member of a security team in support of an assault force that conducted an air assault raid into an enemy compound and successfully apprehended two key militia officials and twenty-two others. Upon receiving enemy small arms fire from numerous alleys, Petty Officer Wasdin took up a firing position and returned fire. As he assaulted down the alley with members of his unit, he was wounded in the calf. Upon receiving combat field condition medical attention, he resumed his duties and continued to suppress enemy fire. As his convoy exfiltrated the area with detainees, his element came under withering enemy fire. Petty Officer Wasdin, along with the security team, stopped to suppress enemy fire which had pinned down the Ranger blocking force. Although twice wounded, he continued to pull security and engage a superior enemy force from his vehicle. Later, while attempting to suppress enemy fire, during an attempted link-up for evacuation of the helicopter crash site, Petty Officer Wasdin was wounded a third time. His gallant efforts inspired his team members as well as the entire force. By his superb initiative, courageous action, and complete dedication to duty, Petty Officer Wasdin reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest tradition of the United States Naval Force.