Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (11 page)

It was obvious that we were getting screwed with. I had no idea how many cans I’d have to find before I found the camp. It was now almost noon, so I started to jog. I found my remaining eight cans and covered another twenty clicks, twelve miles, before I arrived at the SEAL camp, well after dark. Though I’d run most of the way across country, I was the third man in. I had been given the longest course.

As the other students tromped in, we settled into camp. It was not much to look at: a series of mobile-home bodies covered with camouflage netting. The trailers had electricity, but inside were plywood shells filled with bunk beds. There were windows but no screens or glass. I selected a bunk, hung my pack, and spread my sleeping bag out on the stained mattress. Baby Zee told me not to get too comfortable—we wouldn’t be spending much time in the trailers.

I met Senior Chief Jaeger standing around the camp’s fire. I thought I was pretty cool because I’d jumped in carrying an insulated cup and an empty coffee can in my pack to use for heating water and preparing MREs (meals, ready to eat). I noticed that the senior chief had a coffee can, too. He was sipping a beer and watching the can by the edge of the flames. Every now and then he used the cutting end of a pair of demolition cap crimpers to rotate the can in the flames.

“I see you got a coffee can,
or so,
Mr. Pfarrer,” he said.

“Yes, Senior Chief.”

“Whatcha gonna use it for?” he asked.

“Boiling water,” I answered.

“Oh.”

It was then that I noticed the top of the senior chief’s coffee can was covered with aluminum foil. As I waited for my water to boil, I caught a whiff of something delicious. My can was boiling water, but the senior chief’s rig was a Dutch oven. In John’s coffee can was a pair of quail stuffed with wild onions and freshly picked morels. In a plastic bowl beside him was a salad made from wild watercress and cattail root. Senior Chief knew how to live off the land. He was a scrounge par excellence, and I would later watch him gather delicacies, munchies, and just plain weird stuff in every ocean and environment around the world. Seaweed, conch, tiny wild strawberries, sassafras roots, yucca plants, fish, birds, snakes, hickory nuts, and wild pineapples. All of it would end up in his pot and would emerge a marvel of camp cuisine. Before me was Euell Gibbons with a machine gun.

I poked at my beans and franks while the senior chief ate quail and drank beer. The fire crackled and snapped.

“How’d you like your walk,
or so?
” he asked.

“It was okay,” I said.

“If you liked today, sir, you’re gonna freakin’ love tomorrow.”

I watched him lick his fingers. He was right. I loved tomorrow, and the next day.

Senior Chief still didn’t like FNGs, and it took him a while to tolerate me. In my AOT section was another officer, a guy we called Dwight Light. Dwight was an enthusiastic and personable ensign who graduated four classes behind me in 118. Dwight’s blond hair was the color of snow, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. While a bandana was sufficient to cover my reddish locks on operations, Dwight’s hair made him stand out in darkness like a flashlight. Through night-vision goggles, Dwight glowed like a luminous object. And that’s how he got his name.

Dwight Light and I slowly came to realize that only one thing pissed the senior chief off more than new-guy officers, and that was preppy college boys. If you were trying to find a preppy from central casting, it would probably be Dwight Light. He’d grown up in Darien, Connecticut, spoke with a patrician lockjaw, and had been a varsity squash player at Penn. Dwight soon took any of the heat not directed at me, and eventually, he’d take all of it. We were very often the recipients of the longest compass courses, the hardest demolition problems, and the longest swims. Neither of us complained, pissed, or moaned. We just did it all. Dwight Light proved his mettle in AOT, and later, after he got out of the navy, he would set the human-powered crossing record for the Atlantic Ocean, cranking a pedal-powered boat nearly three thousand miles from Newfoundland to Plymouth, England.

The senior chief never did quite warm up to Dwight, but eventually I broke through. John Jaeger became my sea daddy. A sea daddy is a mentor, someone who shows you the ropes and teaches what the Team expects of you. He was an unlikely Yoda, and I was no Luke Skywalker. The lessons were hard, and the senior chief was a big fan of learning by doing. He’d let me make the mistake once, unless that mistake was going to kill him or someone on the cadre.

“If it freakin’ kills you,
sir,
that’s what we call Darwinism,
or so.
”

He was not above calling me a “donkey-dick motherfucker,
sir,
” when I screwed up, which was often. We soon came to realize that Fort A. P. Hill was the senior chief’s world, and we were just living in it.

It was called advanced operator training for a reason. We had been exposed to the basics at BUD/S, only the basics, and now it was time to mold us into frogmen. We focused on the three tasks a commando must master to prevail in combat: how to shoot, how to move, and how to communicate.

We had been introduced to Russian weapons at BUD/S, but now we became virtuosos. The RPG-7 antitank rocket launcher was a good piece of kit, and we learned to use it against bunkers, vehicles, and aircraft. We crawled low while AK-47s and RPD machine guns were fired over our heads. We came to know the distinct sounds of Russian-made AKs and American M-16s, a vital skill in the furious whirl of combat. We worked with demolitions a lot. We learned how to rig charges that would drop trees across roads, and how to set up deadly claymore mines to sweep and decimate the scenes of ambushes. We learned how to put a hurtin’ on bridges, how to crater runways and derail trains. We were shown how to use linear-shaped charges to do elegant little jobs, like blow the wheels off vehicles or cut through hardened steel such as a bank vault. We were taught where to strike a target with greatest economy, how to disable key pieces of equipment, and how to booby-trap almost everything. All of this we practiced with live ammunition and live explosives.

The training was structured to teach us component skills and subtasks; we would gradually assemble these skills into full mission profiles. We ran de-molition raids against elaborate target mock-ups, underground command centers, bunker complexes, and communication facilities. We learned how to take down surface-to-air missile sites, and learned Russian tactics for guarding, securing, and reacting when these sites were attacked. We worked with the navy’s Red Wolf helicopter squadrons to insert and extract from operations. We were taught how to attack and how to run away. We became masters of dirty tricks, like leaving booby-trapped backpacks along our line of retreat—claymore mines fused with time pencils to splatter anyone who attempted to follow. We learned how to fight guard dogs. We learned how to throw bloodhounds off our trails. We climbed fences, we climbed walls, we blew open safes and hangar doors. We made pizza-shaped platter charges and destroyed electrical substations. We had a blast, literally.

As our skills coalesced, we were instructed less and made to operate more. We planned, briefed, and executed under the watchful eyes of the cadre. We were accompanied in the field by Lane Graders, cadre members who geared up and patrolled with us. They gave no advice and offered no sympathy. They were there to keep eyes on, and to make sure we didn’t lie our asses off in the debriefs. In the SEALs there is an expression, “Cheat if you must, but don’t get caught.” The Lane Graders made cheating impossible. If the operation involved a six-mile hump, they went along to make sure you didn’t steal a truck. (Bear in mind, we were encouraged to do things like steal trucks.) The Lane Graders made sure our out-of-the-box thinking remained on the planet.

The most important thing I learned from the senior chief was how to be a leader. He taught me that though my men carried machine guns, the platoon was my weapon. John Jaeger trained me how to take care of the men in my charge and to make sure the concept of Team remained foremost. The platoon required ammunition, radios, batteries, and antiarmor weapons; they also required food, sleep, praise, discipline, information, and responsibility. “Take care of the lads,” John used to say, “and the lads will take care of you.” Small, simple things were important: Eat last, and only after everyone has been served. Buy beer. Praise publicly, punish privately. Take the heat when things go wrong. Ask questions and solicit the opinions of the enlisted operators, and, most important, delegate subtasks within the mission. Fully 50 percent of the officers in SEAL Team are Mustangs, men who served first as enlisted troops and gained their commissions through merit and dedication. This percentage is higher than in any other part of the military. The reason is simple: The lads are motivated. Officers come and go, but enlisted men are the backbone and experience base of the Teams. They don’t require micromanagement, they require guidance; it was often necessary only to wind ’em up and point them in the right direction. John taught me that if I trusted the men, the men would trust me.

Toward the end of AOT, our training ops were coordinated with a yearly army special forces exercise, a multiservice, multistate extravaganza code- named Robin Sage. The army uses Robin Sage to test its graduating classes of Green Beret candidates. The Green Berets are our counterpart units but not exactly our opposite numbers. Our roles are more complementary than reciprocal.

The Green Berets specialize in the organization and training of indigenous forces. They parachute into remote wadis and organize Afghani tribesmen into homegrown militia units. The army’s special forces specialize in training—everything from basic marksmanship to advanced infantry tactics, sabotage, and assassination. This process is called “force multiplication.” One Green Beret trains a dozen men. That dozen trains another twelve dozen. The special forces retain a considerable aptitude for direct action, and it goes without saying that to teach the black arts, you need to have mastered them.

The Green Berets inherited the mantle of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, in World War II—they teach and organize resistance units and instruct partisans behind enemy lines. The SEALs also were an outgrowth of World War II combat. They trace their lineage to the navy’s CDUs, or combat demolition units, the outfits that cleared the beaches of Normandy prior to D-Day, as well as the Underwater Demolition Teams and Scouts and Raiders who sneaked, peeked, and operated against the Japanese in the Pacific. The Green Berets and the SEALs were both created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. The president had been a small-unit commander, a PT-boat skipper, and he understood that a well-trained David can kick Goliath in the balls. If the Green Berets’ heritage is force multiplication, the SEALs’ mandate is hurting the enemy.

The operational element of the Green Berets is an A-Team, a unit roughly analogous to a SEAL platoon, that is, two officers and twelve enlisted men. A-Teams tend to specialize: One team may be scuba-trained, another might be trained demolitionists, another, arctic-warfare specialists, and still another, HALO-trained. In the SEALs, we do it all, and every SEAL is proficient in all aspects of special ops: Each of us is trained to jump, dive, do demo, boat work, and operate in all environs: jungle, swamp, and glacier. There are presently twenty thousand people wearing green berets. Let’s just say there are a lot fewer SEALs. A hell of a lot fewer. All of the SEALs who have ever served, since World War II, number fewer than ten thousand in total.

In Robin Sage, teams of Green Beret candidates are parachuted into remote locations, where they are expected to link up with partisan units operating against a conventional enemy force. The partisans are played by national guardsmen, reservists, and civilians specially recruited for the purpose. The exercise is as real as the army can make it. The student A-Teams have to find the partisans, convince them they are there to help, and train the locals to conduct a series of increasingly complicated special ops. The guardsmen selected as players tend to be clerks, cooks, and technicians with little skill in dirt soldiering. The civilians are, well, civilians. The partisan units are usually led by an experienced Green Beret or a SEAL who role-plays a local warlord. These partisan generalissimos prevaricate, make outrageous demands, and generally prove as difficult and mercurial as possible. Just like real warlords. For the student A-Team leader, it is an exercise in politics as much as tactics.

Our part in Robin Sage was to be OPFOR, opposing forces. We were to act in the capacity of the enemy’s special operations units. It was our job to locate, frustrate, and terminate the partisans and their capitalist masters. Lest you think the aim was a huge game of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ll point out that both sides were playing for keeps. The student A-Team had undergone months of training, and this was to be their final examination. If they failed, they’d be sent back to whatever evil world they came from, without the headgear of their dreams. For us it was the same, only worse.

Operations, even exercises, are taken with deadly seriousness in the Teams. SEALs are evaluated every time they operate. The job of the SEAL Teams is war fighting, not playing at war games; failure in a military exercise is unacceptable and inexcusable. SEAL officers have been relieved of command for screwing up on exercises. An operational SEAL platoon that cannot overcome a national guard unit and a mob of civilians has no business in the Teams. In this exercise, anything less than total success would be seen as a failure of leadership.
My
leadership. We were not expected to merely prevail, we were expected to dominate in this exercise and every time we geared up to operate. We were student SEALs with something to prove. We were up against men who desperately wanted to earn a Green Beret. This was war, and failure was not an option.

We did not get off to an auspicious start. I was given a five-square-mile radius in which I was told the special forces camp was
probably
located. That’s a great word, “probably.” I held a council of war with my senior enlisted guys, and we selected several likely camp locations within the area. We figured they would want to be far from roads or habitations but close enough so that Green Beret Lane Graders and exercise referees could check up on them. The camp would need a water supply and to be situated on terrain that was defensible and offered multiple routes of escape. There were five or six places that fit this description. The operations planning course was coming in handy. I would find the Green Beanies by deconstructing their operation. I knew that Robin Sage teams are usually inserted by parachute, and I also knew that the teams are quite often ambushed by Green Beret instructors after insertion and then force-marched to their camp. There appeared to be only one place on the map where jumpers could be inserted. That location was twenty clicks from the center of our five-mile radius. The drop zone was to the north, and that eliminated two of the probable locations at the south end of the zone. We were guessing, but these were educated guesses.