Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (15 page)

“You’re shitting me” was all I could think of to say.

“I wouldn’t shit you, sir.” The master chief grinned. “You’re my favorite turd.”

I was somebody’s favorite turd. It was true: I’d been released from bondage in the operations shop and chopped to a newly forming line platoon. I’d apparently made the right call out there in mid-Atlantic. As far as the captain and the XO were concerned, tethering the Zodiac to a sinking missile motor and expecting the air force to return and find us was a bullshit idea. Although the mission was recovery, I had been prepared on short notice to destroy the missile section and had denied the Russians material intelligence. In short, I did okay.

As Master Chief Boynton put it, “You showed good judgment, sir. And it ain’t like ensigns are necessarily known for that.”

Not only was I made operational, but two days later, Rick and I were unceremoniously given our Budweisers. We spent a couple hundred bucks at the Casino, got every frogman on the East Coast a cold one, and I had a headache for days.

We were Navy SEALs at last.

FOR A WEEK OR TWO,
Fifth Platoon was my temporary command. Rather, I acted as its commander. Operating out of a connex box in the back forty of SEAL Team Four, the Fifth was a provisional outfit, a skeleton of a platoon. Frank, my neighbor from San Diego, was slated to assume command after he finished Spanish-language school in Monterey, California. Before he arrived there was a lot to be done; we had yet to receive any equipment, any men, and in the first weeks we were a paper outfit—a name, basically—and that was about it.

Frank, an Annapolis graduate, had been commissioned a year before I joined the navy. Had I accepted my appointment out of high school, we would have been classmates. Frank had majored in naval architecture and graduated in the top ten of his class, considerably higher than I might have expected to place. I am hardly technically inclined, and I doubt I would have acquitted myself in the rigors of an engineering education. While I dallied in graduate school, Frank chose to serve two years on a minesweeper in San Diego, waiting for a slot in BUD/S. It was thought at the time that naval special warfare was a career path unworthy of an Annapolis man. As a penance for even attempting to become a SEAL, Frank had to earn a surface warfare designator. Although a minesweeper was on the bottom of the warship totem pole, Frank knew the wardroom of an oceangoing mine hunter is small, and no officer is superfluous. In those two years Frank served as first lieutenant and damage control assistant. He earned his water wings in half the usual time and put in his chit to transfer across the bay to Coronado and BUD/S. A natural, he assumed the mantle of 113’s class leader when the officer in charge broke his spine. It can’t be said that the job was a picnic. Of the 105 students who started 113, thirteen graduated. These men later became famous as the 13 of 113. To the surprise of no one, Frank was the honor graduate.

Fifth Platoon was to be Frank’s first command, and it had to be built from scratch—equipment and personnel assembled from the ground up, and the operators trained from square one. Our two seniormost operators were Stan and Tim, both ten-year veterans. In the weeks before Frank returned, these two proved their worth as scroungers, making the deals and steals that are frequently necessary in the military just to get the tools you need to do your job. At this, they excelled, and we were soon well and even abundantly equipped, if not fully manned.

The remainder of the platoon, ten operators, was to be taken in a single draft from BUD/S Class 117. This was unusual and not necessarily a good thing. All of them were fresh from Coronado and Fort Benning, and not one had been through Senior Chief Jaeger’s AOT program. They were young, in superb shape, and extremely motivated. They knew one another well and worked together reliably; that was the upside. The downside was they didn’t know their asses from their elbows.

Only four men out of the sixteen assigned to Fifth Platoon were rated as fully qualified SEALs. I considered myself qualified but hardly knowledgeable. As the platoon assembled, I saw that we would be short on experience. As Frank settled into command, we were informed that the Fifth was immediately to begin predeployment training, or PDT. PDT is normally undertaken after all operators have gone through advanced operator training. We were not to have that luxury. We were expected to form our own cadre and undertake the AOT curriculum as we prepared for the ORE, or operational readiness exam. Any training shortfalls would soon become apparent to our superiors, and to other people as well. Fifth Platoon was slated to deploy to Honduras and serve in the capacity of a mobile training team, military advisers, on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.

We settled in and worked our asses off. PDT was a well-scripted series of evolutions, and the additional work of AOT had to be crammed around and on top of an already full schedule. The bulk of the extra training would fall to Stan and Tim and our newly arrived chief petty officer, Doc Jones. If Frank and I were expecting our chief, the seniormost enlisted man, to provide some adult leadership, we were to be disappointed. Well, if not disappointed, then disconcerted.

Our platoon chief actually wasn’t even a chief yet. Hospitalman First Class Jack “Doc” Jones was a chief selectee, meaning he hadn’t assumed the rank and title of a navy chief petty officer. Strangest of all, Doc was not even a BUD/S graduate. You might ask what a corpsman, a medic, was doing in an operational SEAL platoon in the first place. Doc might not have been to BUD/S, but he was a SEAL, a damn good one, and a Vietnam combat veteran.

In the throes of that late unpleasantness between the Vietnams, the navy found it impossible to get hospital corpsmen through BUD/S in sufficient numbers. So they asked for volunteers to attend an abbreviated special operations technicians’ course. SOT was hardly eight weeks long, and all the corpsmen had time to do was learn one end of an M-16 from another, how to scuba dive, and how to spell “SEAL.” The graduates were then sent to Vietnam to join operational SEAL platoons and serve as medics. Well, not just medics. In the Teams, our corpsmen are armed, and patrol, jump, dive, and do demo just like everyone else. In short, they operate.

In Vietnam, SOT graduates were expected to fight Charlie and take care of wounded SEALs. Some lived and some died, and those corpsmen who survived a six-month combat deployment with an operational SEAL platoon received their Budweisers and earned the naval education code 5326, combat swimmer. Doc Jones was an SOT graduate and a freaking character even among a community of characters.

He would later prove to be one of the bravest men I have ever known. That could hardly be guessed at first look. Physically, he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Peter Falk, the guy who plays Columbo, and Doc had it down, rumpled clothes, wandering eye, and all. He was a short, compact man, and his reddish complexion and dark eyes sometimes made him look like a sturdy Portuguese fisherman. Doc was in fact a nearly full-blooded Cherokee Indian.

Initially, a few of the things Frank and I heard about Doc made us wonder about his sanity. As an SOT graduate, he had not attended jump school, but when he got back to his team stateside, he wanted to jump, so he followed a platoon out onto the drop zone and picked up a parachute. Using the ploy “Hey, could you help me buckle this,” he was assisted by his platoon mates into the parachute. No one guessed that he had no idea how to put on a parachute, and no one could have guessed that he had zero idea how to operate one once he got out of the airplane. Doc sat calmly through the jumpmaster’s briefing, then got in line and boarded the aircraft. Once inside the plane, he had his rig inspected by the jumpmaster just like everyone else. He hooked up his static line like everyone else, and then he jumped. Mercifully, the parachute gods smiled. Doc made ten water jumps and had legitimately earned his gold navy parachute wings before it was discovered that he never attended jump school. He was sent packing down to Fort Benning, and the story followed him throughout the navy.

Doc would soon have an opportunity to show off his aerial prowess. We jumped again into Fort A. P. Hill and ran live fire and demolition exercises against mobile and static targets. We jelled as an operational unit, and Doc became the growling, ass-kicking spark plug of the entire outfit. He addressed the men individually as “cock breath” and collectively as “you fucking idiots.” To Frank, Doc was deferential, calling him mostly “Boss.” As the 2IC, or second in charge, I was fair game. Doc called me
“Diawi,”
Vietnamese for “lieutenant,” and a bit of a jab when applied to guys like me who were in grade school during much of Vietnam. There was nothing Doc wouldn’t do, and few things he couldn’t do better and faster than men half his age. He was one of the best I ever worked with; certainly he was the bravest, and the best platoon chief I ever had. We needed him. Our work-ups were everything AOT was, and more; there were specific missions we had to train for: recons, direct action, air ops, and boat work. Doc was the driving force through it all. He would repeatedly tell me, “You know, Mr. Pfarrer, it’s not the little things that are going to kill you. It’s the fucking BIG things.”

Much of the training was out of the area, but there was the occasional weeknight and weekend at home. We worked hard and played harder. Friday nights, Frank and I would put on our working winter blue uniforms and make dramatic entrances into the Oceana officers’ club at 2300 hours, fashionably late and resplendent in our tridents and gold navy jump wings. The place would be jumping, filled to the rafters with women invited for one purpose.

At the O club you picked your poison; new wave played in one room and disco in another. We partied hard, danced, and flirted, and were as charming as possible. Lisa was slowly evaporating from my heart, and in her place there was a poisonous void. What interest I had in women was strictly transactional, and though I did my best each night to find someone to come home with me, I rarely cared what happened afterward. Sex was solace and release.

In hindsight, I can say that our job—the Teams, the secrecy, the clannishness—was gradually separating us from society. We were a group apart, and that separation would become more severe as my career progressed. I would bed any woman who let me, and I took and gave back almost nothing. I was unknowable, unlovable, and on my way to becoming fully encapsulated. Not antisocial—feral. As a potential boyfriend, I was the worst possible type: self-absorbed, smugly self-confident, and nursing a life-changing wound.

There were a few women who I remember very well. One, I can say with some embarrassment, I remember specifically for my own cruelty. Another I remember for my own credulous foolishness. I dated a navy nurse, a lieutenant commander though she was only a year older than I was. I was an O-1, and she was an O-4, a dating arrangement not encouraged in today’s action navy. Her name was Megan, and she was funny, smart, and blond, a delightful pixie of a woman. She had the most incredible freckles, and we had an absolutely torrid affair. We made love like bunnies with rabies, and over the course of a few wonderful months, Megan fell in love. I remained aloof. I deployed frequently. Sometimes I told her I was going away, and sometimes I did not. My inconsiderate behavior concerned and hurt her. She would have no idea where I’d gone or when I’d be back, and my teammates could give her no information. The end came when I got back from a three-week deployment and did not even call her. I ran into her in a parking lot on the base and said only “Hi.” I was ashamed when she broke down and cried as we spoke.

I felt sick as I drove home. I wondered what was happening to me. Why had I hurt her? Why had I let her hurt herself? I took no joy in it. She was a fine, loving person, and I was being an asshole. What was it in me that made me treat a good person this way? Some innate cruelty? Was it because Lisa had hurt me? For a guy with a psychology degree, I had a remarkable lack of insight. Too ashamed to face myself and not enough of a man to face Megan, I just moved on. I was without scruple or compunction, and apparently, now I was even without mercy. An iceberg drifting, waiting to claim another ship.

I started to go out with an athletic Virginia-born chemist named Jenny. She played semipro tennis, and I think she saw in me at first something that was dangerous and attractive. In that she may have been right, but for the wrong reasons. I was not nearly as wild as she was. Jenny was a danger junkie, and it turned out I was only a nuisance.

Through a hot summer, Jenny and I slept together several nights a week, and there were uniforms in her closets and sundresses in mine. I loved her laugh, and the little-girl way she looked when she woke up. I loved the womanly way she kissed me. I cared a lot for Jenny. I enjoyed her when we were together and looked forward to seeing her when we were apart. I was naive enough to think that the things I revealed to her, the big plans, the boyish selfishness, and the burgeoning egomania, could ever really be attractive to anyone.

Falling in love with her made me less dangerous. On the night I was preparing to tell Jenny that I loved her, she told me that she thought it was time we started seeing other people. She held me while she said this. In her dismissal of me, she was calm and polite, and her reasons were well presented and avoided direct insults. As she let me down, I remember thinking two things. I was glad that she’d spoken first, since I’d have felt even more stupid had I just told her that I loved her. My second thought was even more selfish: I remember thinking that this was probably a really bad time for this to be happening to me.

In the coming week Jenny and I were to attend a formal dining-in at the special warfare group. For me, attendance was mandatory, and before the hammer fell, Jenny had agreed to be my date. Rather than leaving me to go alone, she graciously put on an evening gown and went with me. The night was strained. We smiled though the agonizing black-tie affair—I was ner-vous and awkward, and the evening was made infinitely worse when I got drunk off my ass, drove her home, and begged her to reconsider. I asked for another chance. I asked to spend the night. On all grounds, and now with even better reasons, she declined politely. She suggested I come back Monday so we could talk. I agreed and staggered back to my car.