MIKE BEARDEN

It was still early, maybe one o’clock in the afternoon, and already creeping into the low nineties. It would get hotter still, we knew that for certain. Late spring in California’s Central Valley, dry and brown, a clear day, the barometer high and steady, but to us the atmospheric pressure felt like roughly ten thousand pounds per square inch.

My best friend, Glen Doherty, and I were crouched down side by side at the front of a thousand-yard high-power shooting lane, on the last day of the marksmanship phase of the Naval Special Warfare Sniper School, arguably the toughest military training program on the planet. We were about to start our final test of this phase, the test that would determine whether we went on through the rest of the school or returned home in defeat. We’d been here for six weeks. A third of the class had already washed out, and we were terrified that we were next.

The idea of sniper school probably sounds romantic, exciting, adventurous. It’s none of those things. It’s fucking miserable. We would come back to our tents at the end of every interminable twelve-hour day dirty as hell, beaten down, exhausted, and already feeling the crushing weight of what loomed ahead of us the next day.

That pressure is mostly mental. Of course you have to be in top physical condition, but we were all SEALs. Physically, we’d already had “normal” redefined for us and the bar set insanely high. But sniper school was not about sheer physical endurance. It was about absorbing complex skill sets and executing them flawlessly, at a machine-gun pace, and under conditions of constantly increasing intensity. Seven days a week, twelve hours a day, we were always on—up at six a.m. to run out onto the range with rifle in hand and a single round, which we had to fire with sleep-stiffened fingers through still-cold rifle barrels at whatever moment they told us, at whatever target they told us, and hit it. Miss that early-morning shot and the rest of the day would feel like one long battle to regain any sense of confidence and morale. It was the most exacting, focused state of concentration any of us in the course had ever experienced. We were the proverbial frog in the pot of water being steadily brought to a boil, and the only way out of the pot was to fail.

Which was exactly what many of our classmates had done. In the weeks leading up to this test, some guys had come unglued under the strain and ended up fighting with their shooting partners. By “fighting” I don’t mean “exchanging heated words”; I mean punching, mashing, and kicking, the kind of brawl you have to wade into and physically pull apart if you don’t want too many broken bones.

What made the pressure worse for Glen and me was that we were both still new guys. In the SEAL teams, “new guys” are SEALs who have made it through BUD/S but have not yet done a full year–plus specialized training workup and gone on an overseas deployment. A new guy’s job is pretty simple: Shut up and listen. Do what you’re told. Be invisible and act like you don’t know anything, because the truth is, you don’t. Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Sniper School has a global reputation; even within the teams it is the most respected school of them all. The idea of a couple of new guys having the privilege of attending sniper school was more than some could take.

Especially the instructor hovering over Glen and me right now as we inched through the ordeal of our final test. This guy, a genuinely nasty turd named Slattery, hated our guts. He wanted us to fail.

And he happened to be the one grading us today.

As Slattery bitched at us, the day continued creeping forward on its belly toward the hottest part of the afternoon, the rising temperature not only adding to our stress but also physically affecting our test conditions. As metal heats up it expands. That produces an increase in pressure on the bullet as it traverses the interior of the swelling rifle barrel, which in turn increases the round’s speed and alters the arc of its trajectory. As the mercury rose out on the California range, the increasing temperature differentials threading through the bone-dry foothills around us also caused the sporadic gusts of wind to intensify. Which put every critical factor in our environment in flux, increasing the difficulty level of our task to an insane degree.

In the field, your life often depends on making the shot. Out here on the range, it was just our careers on the line.

At this point Glen and I had completed the “snaps and movers” portion of the test. Snaps and movers involves targets that suddenly pop up out of nowhere at unpredictable time intervals (snaps), and others that slide continuously right and left in random and unpredictable patterns and speeds (movers). Now we were in the second portion, called UKD, or unknown distances, which employed targets of variable range and elevation, none of this communicated to us. In snaps and movers we at least knew how far away our targets were. Not in UKD. For this portion of the test the spotter had to employ complex observations and calculations, using the mil dot reticle in his scope (two tiny lines of illuminated dots arranged like crosshairs) to determine exactly how far away that damn thing was. And we weren’t using handheld computers, like we do these days in the field. We had to do all that math by hand, with the seconds ticking away.

I was shooting first, Glen reading the conditions, calling wind and elevation, and keeping track of our time. We had to move through a course with multiple lanes and multiple shots within a precise given time frame. Which meant a hell of a lot of calculation, preparation, and execution had to happen every sixty seconds without fail. We’d cleared two lanes and were setting up for the final shot on our third. As I focused on the image in my scope, time slowed to a crawl. Glen was taking it slow and careful, working to read the shifting wind currents.

Something felt wrong. We were taking too long. “How much time?” I muttered.

“We’re good,” I heard him murmur back. “Plenty of time.”

I felt my breath flow out and waited for that moment of complete neutrality that hangs motionless between exhale and inhale, the instant of maximum focus and minimum body interference, gently increasing my finger pressure on the trigger pull—

“Time!”

I whipped a look over toward that asswipe Slattery and saw a triumphant leer on his ugly puss. He was holding up his timepiece in one hand, like he’d just picked an especially big booger he was proud of and wanted to show his ma.

“Time, gentlemen,” he repeated, savoring the moment.

My heart stopped. What the fucking hell?

Not only had I not taken the shot, but we still had two more lanes and eight rounds to go. Something had gone wrong with Glen’s timepiece. We had fucked up.

“You guys are screwed,” Slattery crowed. “Good luck coming back from that one. You dipshits are going home.”

He was right: Coming back from this disaster would be close to impossible. In order to make up for all the shots I’d just failed to take and survive the test, Glen would now have to score no less than a 95 on his five lanes. Out of twenty shots, in other words, he could a miss a maximum of one. Any more than that and I’d be going home, and Glen might be, too, because in those days shooter-spotter teams were graded together.

And shooting a 95 on this range was an extremely rare occurrence.

I could see that Glen was much worse off than me. I was only freaked out. He didn’t utter a word, but he was obviously devastated. Oh, my God, his expression said, I just fucked you over.

“Look, dude.” I spoke quickly and quietly so Slattery wouldn’t hear. “It’s behind us. Forget it. We have to clean this thing’s clock. Let’s just shoot a hundred and move on.”

This was something sniper school taught me: no regrets. You can’t focus on the shot you just took. Once it’s out of the barrel, you’ll never get it back. And it’s not true just on the rifle. It’s true in any situation—every action, every word, every thought. It’s over. Move on. Assess, adjust, improve, and make the next one count.

We got to work, me calculating and calling every shot and Glen nailing it. In the first lane, the one with the closest targets, I heard four pings in succession as Glen aced four shots out of four. We moved on to lane two and he did the same thing, and again in lane three, and yet again in lane four. Now we were in lane five, shooting out to unknown distances up to a thousand yards on the big bolt-action .300 Winchester Magnum. The .300 Win Mag bullet doesn’t go subsonic until somewhere between 1,350 and 1,400 yards, which meant it would be traveling at well beyond the speed of sound all the way from the instant of ignition to the instant of impact. I called the shot, and Glen took it. The lead slug flew out to meet the steel silhouette—and I heard no ping. Nothing. The round had harmlessly passed the target by.

There it was: our one miss. One more and I was out.

Slattery audibly snickered and muttered something we both willed ourselves not to hear. We were busy.

Calculating your round’s flight path before the shot is only the first part of the spotter’s job. The next task is to follow the vapor trail the round leaves in its wake as it pierces the air, called its trace. I had followed that bullet’s trace the way a hawk tracks the path of a chipmunk dashing across a field for the safety of the forest. I’d seen exactly where it went, and I murmured an instantaneous course correction in Glen’s ear.

Ping . . . ping . . . ping—he hit the remaining three shots with clean precision. We were finished. I was safe.

We all stood around as they read off everyone’s score. Glen’s implausible nineteen out of twenty had given him a personal tally of 95, which not only had saved my ass but also was the highest score for the day. Except for one thing: As far-fetched as it sounded, another new guy in the class had shot a 95, too.

Which meant the day’s shooting was not over yet.

Someone had donated a beautiful SKS 7.62 semiautomatic rifle to the class. This thing was a work of art, a classic Soviet-made carbine (this was the service rifle that preceded the AK-47), and a piece any gun owner would be proud to have in his collection. Before our test that day the instructors had told us that whoever came out with the highest score would go home with that rifle. But you can’t exactly saw an SKS in half, so now Glen and the other guy were going to stage a shoot-off.

This time these guys would each be on their own, no shooter-spotter teams. Each shooter would have just a few minutes to do all his own spotting, calculations, wind call, and the rest, then get one shot—and only one shot—at that lane’s target. They would take turns, starting at the closest distance and ending at a thousand yards.

The rest of us huddled around, cheering on our favorite horse, me the loudest voice in the Glen camp.

In the first lane, both shooters nailed their targets. And the second, and the third, and the fourth. It was an electric experience, quietly watching the execution of perfection. These guys were both phenomenal shots.

On the fifth and final target, Glen sighted the thousand-yard distance and got himself ready, slowly squeezed the trigger . . . and missed. A groan went up in the crowd.

The other guy got down in the dirt, went through his preparations, squeezed—and also missed. Another groan went up, laced with laughter, catcalls, and the usual volley of insults and obscenities. SEALs are not known to be overly tender with one another’s feelings.

Glen lay down in the lane again, took his second shot . . . and missed once more.

The other guy hit it square.

Predictably, a roar went up, and we all grabbed the guy and started pounding on him in congratulation. The SKS was his, but victory belonged to all of us, as we stampeded off the range in a raucous mass to go track down adult beverages in large quantities. It was a heady moment. The shooting portion of the class was over, and we’d survived it. Even though my best friend had lost the contest, I really didn’t care, and neither did Glen. For one thing, we were both so relieved just to have passed the damn course.

But there was another reason we didn’t care. If anyone else had beaten Glen, we probably would have been at least a little ticked off. SEALs are over-the-top competitive, and Glen even more so than most. But it happened that the shooter who had edged Glen out and taken possession of that SKS was such a likable guy, so universally loved and respected, it was impossible to feel anything but happy that he’d won.

His name was Mike Bearden. They called him the Bear.

•   •   •

I first met Bearden two years earlier, in the summer of 1998. We were all fresh from BUD/S, the legendary seven-month training program that all SEAL candidates undergo and only a fraction complete. Except that’s a misnomer: BUD/S isn’t really training; it’s more like a seven-month entrance exam. What we were doing now in the summer of ’98, this was training. SEAL tactical training, or STT, was what happened to those who made it through BUD/S and came out the other end still standing. Over the three months of STT (these days it’s called SEAL qualification training, or SQT), we had drilled into us weapons skills, close-quarters battle tactics and coordinated room-to-room takedown, advanced land navigation and survival, extended dives and underwater demolition, and desert warfare. For this last, they took us to the Niland desert, one of the strangest places I’ve ever seen.

Along the edge of the Salton Sea, a huge, strongly alkaline runoff lake that lurks well below sea level at roughly the same elevation as Death Valley, the Niland desert is a vast stretch of lunar landscape in the wishfully named Imperial Valley, where the central Californian desert bleeds out to the Mexican border. Niland makes an excellent surrogate Middle Eastern battleground. Most of Jarhead and the sand dune sequences in Independence Day and Star Wars were filmed there. Great place to prepare for war in Iraq or Afghanistan—although we were still a few years away from knowing that was what we were doing.

Toward the end of our time at Niland, one of our instructors decided that, because the 75th Ranger Regiment (the Army’s Spec Ops guys) were doing a twelve-mile forced march as part of their course, we needed to do that, too. “Hell, we’re frogmen,” went the thinking. “If they can do it, we sure as shit can do it better.” Instead of twelve miles, he figured, we’d make it fourteen.

Which was fine, except for two things. First, the Rangers didn’t just wake up one day and do a twelve-mile loaded march. They built up to it throughout their training. Also there was no room in our existing schedule to slip in an exercise like that. No worries: This guy figured he would just tack it onto the end of a full day of training. Like a P.S. on a letter. A really long, really heavy P.S.

So here we were on a fourteen-mile forced run, with full gear (including fifty-pound ruck), on an evening after we’d already done a five-hour land nav course that day from noon till five. In the middle of the desert. In July. And we had to do it in three hours. Out of seventy-two guys, only four made it under the three-hour gun. Barely another dozen of us made it back at all. The rest of the guys were strewn over the fourteen-mile course, and corpsmen (medics) had to haul them in. Some of them plain passed out. We used every IV in the camp that night.

And Bearden? He just crushed it. It hadn’t even taken him that much effort.

All seventy-two of us knew what perseverance and focus were all about. We were SEALs, after all, which meant we were all maniacs to some degree. But the Bear was in a class by himself. As I watched him sauntering into quarters that evening, while dozens of our teammates were still getting IVs or draped near-comatose over their beds, I had this thought:

This guy is indestructible.

Mike Bearden had been through BUD/S just a few months before me, in Class 213. I had gone on to SEAL Team Three, while Mike went to Team Five. At Team Five the other guys called him the Commander, in part because he loved James Bond flicks. But it was that other nickname that stuck.

The Bear.

It wasn’t just that those were the first four letters of his last name. The guy looked like a bear. The joke about Mike Bearden was that “everyone else looked up to him.” The guy was enormous. But his height wasn’t the only reason we all looked up to him. There was something distinctive about Mike, a commanding presence that made everyone around him feel safer because he was there. While he never grabbed the spotlight, he was the kind of guy all eyes turned to when he walked into the room. And it wasn’t simply because he was huge. Mike carried himself with a sort of quiet dignity. He seemed somehow exempt from all the pushing and shoving. In a community where bragging is like breathing, he never talked about himself, and he never trash-talked anyone else, either. I never heard him bitch or complain, not about anything, not once. He just went about his business and got the job done.

Mike apparently had some sort of alchemy going on there, because he could make friends with anyone. It wasn’t as if he went out of his way to do that. It just seemed effortless. Once when he was in high school (as I later learned), Mike tackled an all-star fullback for the opposing team and hit him so hard he tore up the guy’s ankle. So what happened? The two became best friends. Before long Mike was going out with a girl who also happened to be very close friends with this same fullback whose ankle Mike had messed up. All three of them became close friends, and they stayed that way. The girl’s name was Derenda Henderson. A few years later it changed to Derenda Bearden. Classic Mike: wreck a guy’s ankle, become his best bud and marry his close friend, and everyone’s happy.

Mike was the guy who would take time out to help someone who was having trouble figuring out how to use some weapons system, or fill out some confusing piece of paperwork. He was everyone’s big brother. And that quality intrigued me.

Growing up I’d been close to my little sister (my only sibling), but I’d never had a big brother, and my relationship with my dad was troubled. We moved fairly often as our family fortunes rose and fell, and each time I’d feel uprooted once again, forced to carve out new territory and new alliances, usually with a mix of wits and fists. I’d spent much of my teenage years on the docks of southern California, leaving home altogether by the age of sixteen. Throughout my childhood I’d been mostly concerned with looking out for myself. Mike Bearden seemed like he’d lived his whole life watching out for everyone else. To me this was both fascinating and inspiring. I wanted to be more like Mike.

I needed to understand what made him tick.

•   •   •

When Mike was just one year old his family moved to the Houston area so that Mike’s dad, Michael Senior, could pursue a doctorate in education there. To support the family, Mike’s parents, Michael and Peggy, needed to scare up some income as well as a place to stay. Michael Senior had worked as a teacher, and Peggy had child-care experience, so they took a position running a home for 144 abused and abandoned children, a career they continued for the next two decades. Which meant that Mike and his three siblings grew up in a home together with dozens of kids who had been rescued out of situations ranging from bad to unthinkably bad, an experience that bred into the Bearden children a bone-deep sense of compassion for the downtrodden.

Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, during court-appointed visitation periods, some of the home residents would receive visits from parents or other relatives. Then there were those kids who, after looking forward to the visit all week, would simply sit and wait for a parent who never showed. Mike and his older sister, Wendy, would sit with them, wordlessly feeling their pain. It made an impression Mike never forgot.

No wonder the guy felt like everyone’s big brother when we were in the teams together. That was pretty much who he was.

And then there was that business of his indomitable spirit. As a kid, according to his parents, Mike was always determined to get into the game. Michael Senior had coached high school football while working his way through his undergrad degree, and now, to help give these disadvantaged kids as normal a life as possible, he started an athletic team for the boys, and Peggy started a team for the girls. Mike loved sports and would tag along with his dad to all their ball games.

When Mike was eight, the Bearden team was playing a visiting team from Austin. Bearden Senior had turned away from the field to take care of something on the sidelines that needed his attention, when suddenly a shout went up and a wave of laughter rippled through the crowd. He looked up and realized that everyone was yelling and pointing at something going on out on the field.

Oh, boy, he thought, what now? He strode out onto the field and sure enough, there was little Mike smack in the middle of the action. He had sneaked off into the locker room, wriggled into a full uniform, and run out onto the field to get into the game. The fact that the team jersey hung down around his knees like a dress didn’t seem to bother him a bit. He had his game face on. He was out there to play some ball.

When Mike was twelve he announced that he wanted to run a marathon. “You can’t run a marathon,” his dad told him. “You’re just starting seventh grade.”

“No, I’m gonna run,” he insisted. “Look right here.” He pointed to an announcement in the newspaper for the Houston marathon. His dad offered a compromise: They would take him to watch the race that year. “No,” repeated Mike, “I’m gonna run in it.”

Somehow he talked his dad into it, and when the day came, there was Mike out on the starting line, wearing his running shoes and his number on the back of his shirt. His parents figured he’d run a block or two and then quit when he realized just how outclassed he was. But “outclassed” was a foreign concept to Mike, then and always. When the gun went off he took off, too, and he didn’t stop. About half an hour later the Beardens heard an ambulance siren starting up. They looked at each other and shook their heads. Ten minutes later the ambulance returned with its twelve-year-old passenger. Mike had run that marathon until he collapsed in the street.

No matter what the sport, Mike wanted to get in there and carry the team on his shoulders. The problem was, he just wasn’t all that big—and by this time he was impatient to get growing. At his annual physical when he was eleven, the year before his marathon, he asked the family pediatrician, “Doc, you think I’ll ever grow? Am I always going to be this little?”

“Well, Mike,” the doctor said, “would you rather be tall, or would you rather be smart?”

That didn’t stop Mike for a second. “I want to be both!” he shot back.

Meanwhile, if he couldn’t be tall, he could make up for it by climbing up onto tall places. Which he did, constantly. Every chance he got to climb something and jump off, he took it—climbing trees, scaling walls, scurrying up statues, anything. One day when his parents were out, he invited all his friends to come over and swim in the pool they had on their property, which was situated right next to a good-size gymnasium they used for the children’s exercise and athletics. The Beardens later found out that while the other kids swam, Mike spent the afternoon climbing up on the roof of the gym and diving off into the pool.

As a boy Mike was a huge fan of comic-book superheroes. He had a Superman T-shirt with a big red S on it that he loved to wear around the property. Of course, that wasn’t unusual. A lot of kids his age had fantasies about being a superhero when they grew up. But Mike was serious about it. Firefighters captured his imagination. He could think of nothing more exciting than climbing up into a burning building, rescuing someone, and jumping out with them to safety. He was never one to pick a fight or go looking for trouble, and when arguments came up he would play the diplomat and try to persuade everyone to get along. But he didn’t like bullies, and he refused to stand by and let anyone pick on anyone else. Through his school years his teachers routinely pointed out that little Mike was someone who always stood up for the underdog.

One year, when he was in Scotland on tour with his church choir, Mike’s parents got a transatlantic call from the choir director. Uh-oh, they thought when they learned who was calling. What now? There was no problem, the choir director hastened to assure them; he just wanted to let them know what had happened. They’d all been walking around town that day as a group, and they happened to witness someone stealing something. Everyone else stood riveted to the spot and stared. As any true superhero would, Mike sprang into action, chased the guy down, and put a hammerlock on him.

In the middle of Mike’s fourteenth year, it finally happened: He starting growing . . . and kept on growing. His parents struggled to keep him in jeans that year, and the next, and the year after that. Before long he was six-foot-four, a lean, powerful 220 pounds, and the school’s star athlete.

From Little League on through high school, Mike had gotten into every sport he could, and he excelled in all of them. He was an all-star catcher, a valued linebacker, and a star swimmer. One year his high school football team was running an undefeated season, leading their district with one of the highest scores in the state. In a run-up to the state championship they lost a coin flip and had to play a preliminary game to qualify. Mike was the starting fullback in that game and scored all his team’s touchdowns. Two games earlier he had injured his knee and it had not fully recovered. Still, he played on. The two teams were neck-and-neck right down to the closing seconds, when the other team kicked a field goal and took the game by a point.

By the time he finished high school, Mike’s knee was pretty bad. For his last four games he had to stop in at the doctor’s office before each game to have the knee drained. The doc told him he shouldn’t be playing ball at all, but he was determined, and when Mike was determined, that was that. His knee might be suffering, but so what? He was Captain Indestructible.

After graduating from high school, Mike spent a few years working out what exactly he wanted to do with his life. After a year of college he took a job as an assistant coach at Derenda’s old high school, where he had the chance to accomplish as a coach the goal he had come so close to achieving as a quarterback: His undefeated team went right to the top and took the state championship that year. But as much as Mike loved coaching and loved football, he knew that wasn’t what he was here to do with his life. He was here to save people. He didn’t want to be a coach.

He wanted to be a superhero.

At the high school where he coached there was a picture in the school trophy case of a graduate who had gone on to become a SEAL. Mike was taken with it and started asking around, talking to anyone and everyone who had known that kid to find out whatever he could about him. One night not long after that his dad got a call.

“Dad,” said Mike as soon as his father picked up. “I know what I want to do.”

•   •   •

After STT I went on to my eighteen-month training workup with Team Three, and the Bear went on to train with Team Five, so we didn’t see each other much for the next two years, until we both showed up in Coronado for our initial sniper school briefing in April of 2000. It was in the crucible of sniper school that we became closer friends, right up to the day he beat Glen in their shoot-off for that SKS rifle.

From our six weeks of marksmanship training up in Central Valley we caravanned back downstate to the scorching Martian landscape at Niland to see who would make it through the next portion of the course. Of the original twenty-six, there were now about eighteen of us left. By the end of the course only a dozen would graduate.

Shooting is one thing. Being able to get close enough to take the shot—and with such complete stealth that you can extract again without being captured, blown up, or shot yourself—is a whole other aspect of the sniper’s craft.

In fact, while most people equate sniper with marksmanship, the truth is that the art of stalking—the ability to move about undetected while observing every aspect and detail of an environment—comes into play far more than the ability to place a well-directed kill shot. Make no mistake: When it’s time to take that shot, it has to be perfect. (If you want to know just how crucial that is, just ask Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama.) But practically speaking, in the field we spend a lot more time in stalking and reconnaissance than we do shooting.

Picture a sniper stalking, and chances are good the images that come to mind have to do with a guy snaking along stealthily on his belly, or lying motionless for hours. Yes, those things happen. But that’s not really what it’s about. The lion’s share of the skill of stalking, like that of shooting, is mental. The key is the ability to scan an entire environment and identify dead space, the three-dimensional area defined by a visual obstruction that can effectively shield you from an observer’s view. In a way, the art of stalking comes down to the ability to make yourself invisible—not exactly a Jedi mind trick, but pretty close. And for some reason, getting the knack of this stalking mind-set was something that seemed to click for me and one other guy before it did for the rest of our classmates. By the last week of the course, I was far ahead enough in points that graduating was in the bag, and I stopped wearing my ghillie suit (a special stalking outfit we would customize with twigs and bits of vegetation) and began going out onto the course in my regular desert cammies just to confound and piss off the instructors.

Especially Slattery. (And yes, it did piss him off.)

Now, I am not a tall guy, and you might think being shorter was a major advantage in stalking. But it turned out size has nothing to do with it, and my proof for that assertion is Mike Bearden—who was the other guy in our class who clicked into the art of stalking right away.

It was an amazing thing to watch: this monster of a guy, and he could just make himself invisible. I’d be a few hundred yards into a stalk and pause to look around, and there’d be Mike, slipping along nearby like a wraith. And then there were all the other guys back near the start line, inching along frantically on their stomachs.

In our Navy training before BUD/S we all went through a school called SERE, an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Until I got to BUD/S, this school was the toughest damn training I’d ever had. At SERE they wanted to make sure you knew how to survive, whether on your own out in the wilderness or under conditions of hostile captivity, and they didn’t pull any punches in the process.

I heard a story about Mike’s time in SERE school. When it came to the evasion exercise, where students role-play escaped prisoners and try to avoid recapture, they couldn’t find him. They’d rounded up all the other escapee-students, but even after scouring the entire area they couldn’t find Bearden.

He had vanished.

Even after the evasion exercise was over, they still couldn’t find him. The Bear, as the expression goes, was out in the woods. Finally they started combing the region in trucks, calling him in through loudspeakers. It turned out they couldn’t find him because he had stayed hidden underwater, breathing through a reed. The Commander wasn’t coming in till he was ready to come in.

•   •   •

On June 12, 2000, Mike, Glen, and I stood together with nine other classmates to receive our NSW Sniper School certificates. It was my twenty-sixth birthday; Mike was exactly twenty-seven years and three months old. His wife, Derenda, was there, along with their son, Holden, who was one day shy of nine months old. It was a proud time for all of us.

For most of us, deployment would be coming soon. First, though, Glen and I had a thirty-day leave coming, and we both took full advantage of it immediately after graduation. For the Bear’s part, he was moving right on to another school, this one involving one of his favorite activities: jumping from tall places. Mike was using this time to go through military freefall training right there in California.

Each of us had already been through rigger school, where you learn the basics of parachuting. There we had practiced a form of jumping called “static line,” a whole row of us jumping together with our chutes automatically pulled for us, what we call “dope on a rope,” and we’d also been through the exercise we call “hop-and-pops,” where you jump out over water at a few thousand feet and pull immediately, World War II–style, like the American airborne landings in Normandy. A funny story from Mike’s rigger-school days: While partying at someone’s second-floor apartment after hours, Mike was sitting out on the balcony when he looked out and glimpsed a guy snatching a purse from a woman on the street below. He leaped off the balcony, landing on his feet, and went after the guy. Seeing this giant appearing out of the air and plowing toward him, the terrified thief took off down the street as fast as he could run, but he didn’t have a chance. Just as he’d done on that high school choir trip in Scotland, Mike caught up with the perp and took him down with a flying tackle, then held him in a lock until the police showed up. That was Mike’s version of basic jump training.

But this school Mike was going through now would take jumping to a whole different level. In military freefall he’d be jumping out of aircraft at ten to twelve thousand feet with full combat equipment. On an earlier visit to Coronado, his parents had seen some guys jumping out of a helicopter, and later that day Michael Senior had asked Mike, “How do you do that? I mean, you just throw yourself out of that thing. You don’t hesitate.”

Mike shrugged. “Hey, somebody’s got to do it.”

“But seriously,” his dad persisted, “have you thought about how dangerous this all is?”

Mike said, “You know, Dad, I don’t think about that. You can’t think about that. This is our job. This is what we do. There are people out there who can’t help themselves. Somebody’s got to help them.”

One day shortly after graduating from sniper school, Mike passed by the SEAL quarterdeck in Coronado on his way to get himself set up for jump school. A BUD/S instructor was finishing up with a group of fresh recruits, taking them through their punishing paces on the broiling-hot asphalt grinder. The instructor glanced up and spotted Mike walking by, recognizing him instantly. Reputation is everything in the SEAL teams, and everyone on the teams knew how well the new guys had done at sniper school, especially Mike.

“Hey, Bearden,” the instructor called out. “Now that you’ve finished sniper school, what’s next?”

Mike reached a fist up behind his neck and yanked, miming the action of opening a parachute. He grinned.

“I’m gonna be a sky god,” he said.

A few weeks later, nearing the end of jump school, Mike drove himself, Derenda, and their infant son, Holden, the fifteen hundred miles home to eastern Texas to attend a cousin’s wedding. The day after the wedding, he saddled the family up to head straight back out west so he could rejoin the class.

“Man,” his dad said as Mike packed their bags, “I sure wish you could stay through the weekend. We could spend some time together.”

“I can’t, Daddy,” said Mike. “We’ve got a jump coming up.”

His dad nodded, said so long, and saw them off.

A few days later, on Tuesday evening, Mike called home to check in with his folks, as he was in the habit of doing. He told his dad he’d made a jump that day, and said his back was really sore. When you watch SEALs go through their paces in documentaries, it’s easy to get the impression that we’re invulnerable and nothing fazes us. The truth is, all that training takes its toll. Mike’s knees had been dicey ever since high school, and while he never said a word about it to the other guys, they would hurt after jumping.

“Well,” said his dad, “maybe you can skip tomorrow.”

“Dad, you don’t skip,” Mike explained. “Besides, we’re just about finished up here.”

There was a pause in the conversation; then his dad said, “So, what are you going to do next, Mike?”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do next?” said Mike.

“Your four years are fixing to be up. Have you thought about what comes after this?”

Mike was silent for a moment before answering.

“Dad,” he said, “I’ve found something worthwhile here. Yeah, I’ve had offers to go work for a few companies. And I’ve thought about working for the U.S. Marshals at some point. But for right now, I’m doing something I’m really good at.”

Michael Senior digested that, then said, “So, what are you saying?”

“I’m going to re-up, Dad,” Mike replied. “What we’re doing here makes a difference. People need us.”

“Okay,” his dad said, and they said their good-byes.

It was the last time the two men spoke.

Michael Senior was at school teaching the next day, Wednesday, the twelfth of July, when someone came into the classroom and said he was needed at home right away. When he arrived home the news was waiting for him. That day the Bear had run smack into any military trainer’s worst nightmare: His main chute had a rare malfunction and got tangled up in his secondary or backup chute, preventing the secondary from deploying.

He fought to the last second to get that canopy open—fought it all the way to the ground.

•   •   •

They held a funeral service for Mike Bearden on Wednesday, July 19, exactly one week after the freefall accident, at the First Baptist Church in Justin, Texas, the town where his wife’s family lived. About twenty of Mike’s teammates were there, flown out from the coast so they could be present for the service.

After the formal part of the service was over, little Holden looked over at my buddy Ed, who was a member of our sniper class, and pointed at his chest. Ed looked down. The boy’s finger was pointing at the gold SEAL Trident pinned to his lapel. Holden recognized it, because his dad had one just like it. He looked up at Ed and said, “Hey, mister. Do you know where my dad is?”

Barely keeping his composure, Ed bent down and said, “He’s in a better place, son.” And then immediately felt like an ass. But what else could he say?

There were a lot of tears shed by some very tough SEALs that day. Ed later told me it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, standing there in his dress blues as Mike’s little boy kept asking the SEALs in uniform where his daddy was. “It was a fucking tear factory,” is how he put it.

I wasn’t there. In fact, I didn’t even know Mike had died. I was fifteen hundred miles away, surfing off the California coast, oblivious to all of this. Immediately after graduating sniper school, I had gone on my thirty days’ leave and had no idea what had happened. To tell the truth, though, even if I had known, I don’t think I would have gone. I couldn’t. It was too much.

Over the years to come, a lot of my teammates would die, but I wouldn’t go to their funerals. It would be more than a decade before I would finally break down and attend a memorial service myself.

•   •   •

Mike’s death shook us all up, and I took it hard. It was the first time I’d come face-to-face with the fact that death is an unavoidable part of what we do.

From the vantage point of today, so many years after 9/11, it’s hard to remember what the world was like in July of 2000. In many ways, we in the United States were living in our own bubble. The Cold War had been over for a decade, and in terms of combat, there wasn’t that much going on in the world. We’d lost four guys in Panama in ’89, and had seen more than a dozen of our Spec Ops brothers slain in Mogadishu in ’93, but those tragedies were brief and singular events that already seemed far removed in time. There was a sense of, if not exactly safety, at least relative calm, a sort of age of innocence. Yes, there were occasionally fatal accidents in training, but they were rare. We knew the life of a SEAL was dangerous—at least, we knew it with our heads. But we didn’t really expect to have to deal with the death of a comrade.

I’d been wrong. I’d seen Mike as indestructible. But he wasn’t. None of us were.

When my friends and I were going through BUD/S a few years earlier, one of our instructors sat us down and told us, “Look around, gentlemen. Look at the guys on your left. Now look at the guys on your right. These are your teammates, your friends. And some of them are going to die. You’re going to lose them. That’s the way it is.” Yeah, yeah, I remember thinking, save the lecture and just let us get our four hours of sleep! At the time his little speech had seemed melodramatic. Now it hit me that what he’d said was the simple truth. They’re your friends. And you’re going to lose them.

What made Mike’s death all the more surreal was that it wasn’t as if he had been killed on the battlefield. It would be easy to decry his loss as senseless. But that wasn’t the truth. Tragic, yes. Wrenching, awful—absolutely. But not senseless.

The training we go through to become the most effective warriors possible is serious. It’s not safe. Mistakes happen, because we’re constantly stretching our limits. If we made the conditions of our training so safe that nobody could get hurt, the training would fail in its purpose. We have an expression in the teams: “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” But it isn’t just sweat. We bleed in training, too. We get pneumonia, break bones, and sometimes worse. The mortal dangers our Spec Ops guys face don’t occur only in the cauldron of political hot spots around the world, but at every step along the way. Special Operations is a dangerous path, and those who tread it are putting everything on the line from day one. Mike died in the service of our country’s safety and security—in other words, he died keeping you and your family safe—every bit as much as our friends who would die a few years later in the streets of Ramadi or the mountains of Afghanistan.

Mike died a hero’s death. And we all were left to fight the survivor’s battle: the one with shock, then anger and grief, and finally foreboding, knowing there were more losses to come. Because we all knew that death hadn’t simply paid us a visit. It had come into our midst, staked its tent, taken up permanent residence. From this point on it would be our constant companion.

“You read war books, Clive Cussler and Richard Marcinko, things like that, and you get one kind of picture,” Mike’s dad told me years later. “But there’s a human side to these guys you don’t always read about. These are kids that mothers have brought into this world, and have raised and loved and held dear to their hearts, and you never dream that they’re going to just lay down their lives for somebody else. But it makes you proud, too. They just see it as their job and don’t think twice about it. Because if they didn’t do it, who else would?”

•   •   •

It wasn’t until several years after Mike’s death, long after I’d been through the caves of Afghanistan and back, that I finally had the chance to go through my own military freefall training. Because of a fluke in scheduling, this had been the one piece of standard SEAL schooling that I hadn’t managed to make. I’d been through the basic dope-on-a-rope stuff, but this was different. This was the jump Mike had been doing.

As I sat in that little twin-engine plane, feeling it climb to twelve thousand feet (an altitude sufficient to cause hypoxia if you’re not wearing an oxygen mask) so we could throw ourselves out into the open sky, I felt a twinge of an emotion I wasn’t accustomed to feeling.

Fear.

Mike’s death had touched us all in a deep, dark place we don’t often show or talk about. SEALs don’t scare easily. Part of it is our training, and part of it is just who we are. To a degree every one of us on the teams shares that daredevil gene. But that doesn’t mean we don’t experience fear. We all have our own demons. Some guys have to conquer a fear of the water. In my case, Mike’s death triggered a fear of skydiving, and now that fear was rising up like a dragon.

I told myself this was crazy. I loved flying. Since I was a kid I’d always aspired to become a pilot. I’d trained for this, and never for a moment thought I would have any hesitation when the time came to do it. But there it was.

One classmate saw that plane’s rear ramp door open, sat himself right back down in his sideways-facing seat, and buckled himself in. “I’m done with this shit,” he said, and he refused to jump. I knew how he felt. An expression we have in jump school flitted through my mind: Why would you want to throw yourself out of a perfectly good airplane? Guys say it as a joke to take the edge off the tension of the moment. Right then I wasn’t seeing the humor in it. For a moment, I honestly didn’t know if I could go through with it.

Then I thought about Mike. “What we’re doing here makes a difference,” he’d told his dad. “People need us.” The fall may have killed his body, but I’d never forget that indestructible spirit.

I shook off the fear and jumped.