TEN

THE TEAMS

BY AUGUST 1986 I HAD MY TRIDENT AND WAS ASSIGNED to SEAL Team One. My first day at SEAL Team One was memorable. I showed up over the weekend and was told by the Quarterdeck Watch that the team was jumping on Monday after PT. Officer’s call was 0730. “Don’t be late.” I showed up Monday ready to go. After an hour of PT that was led by a master chief who started with three hundred flutter kicks, we were told to go to the parachute loft, grab a chute, and get on the bus. I waited in line like the others, grabbed my chute, and got on the bus. On the way to the airfield, I opened my parachute bag and noticed an altimeter mounted on an unfamiliar emergency chute. In fact, everything in the bag was unfamiliar. I had just completed the army’s basic static line parachute course, and in the bag was a parachute commander (PC) free-fall rig. The chief and petty officer next to me noticed the expression on my face. “Dude, are you free-fall qualified?” the petty officer asked. I responded with a negative. “It’s okay, just hang with us!” That was the beginning of my instruction in free-fall that lasted until the bus pulled up to the waiting C-130. In fairness, they stayed with me all the way until I exited the ramp at twelve thousand feet. I never saw them in the air, but when I landed they said I did a great job, and I owed them a case of beer for my first jump.

Once assigned to SEAL Team One, I made the most of my time in Coronado. I continued my education and received training in evasion and escape operations, intelligence gathering, training and advising friendly military forces, and a variety of clandestine functions in a variety of environments. I made my first six-month deployment as an assistant SEAL platoon commander and spent most of the deployment on board an older navy landing ship dock named the USS Anchorage. We conducted cold-weather operations in the Aleutian Islands and battled fifty-foot swells in the North Sea. At one point, the seas were so high that the navy’s flat-bottom Navy Landing Ship (LST) took such a heavy roll that her attached deck crane tore off and tumbled into the depths. The ship’s unfortunate navigator had a heart attack, died, and ended up spending the rest of the storm in the cooler until we pulled into Japan. We also visited Australia and Thailand, which was my first real introduction to jungle warfare.

Jungle warfare was not what I expected. When I first checked into SEAL Team One, most of the senior enlisteds and officers had fought in Vietnam and knew the ropes on fighting in the jungle. Training in the desert in Niland, California, and growing up in the thick forests of the Northwest did not prepare me for survival in the jungle. True jungle is so thick you have to hack your way in. Paths are preferred but can be booby-trapped. Everything bites or stings, and many things are poisonous. In this environment, my first SEAL squad was tasked to conduct a combined patrol with our Thailand counterparts in a region called the “devil’s triangle,” an isolated part of the world where Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos share a common border notorious for trafficking of all kinds: drugs, human, contraband, and anything that could be bought and sold. Our mission was to take a helicopter into a village north of the Cambodian border, meet our counterparts, conduct a long-range reconnaissance patrol, and report any observed activity. We were loaded for “bear.” Within the nine-man patrol, we went heavy and carried two M60 machine guns, four M-14s, and three M-16s with M203 40mm launchers. Plus, I was carrying an additional M79 40mm launcher just for fun. If there was going to be trouble in the jungle, we were going to come out on top.

The mission called for an easy fifteen-kilometer day patrol though a mixture of swamps and dense jungle, an overnight lay up on a hillside, and a similar day patrol on back to a designed landing zone where we would be extracted by a helicopter and taken back to our ship. The insertion went off without a hitch, and we found ourselves slow-going in the dense jungle. Walking trails were nearly nonexistent, and even small game trails were few and far between. Using any dirt road was a sure way to be spotted, so that was out. Instead, we spent the morning hours wading through swamps and watching for snakes. About noon, we found a dry high spot and decided to take a small water and food break. The patrol set security in pairs, and the men pushed out in different directions but within sight of myself and the radioman in the middle. Other than being slower than expected, the patrol was proceeding as planned. I decided to adjust my socks, and as I pulled up my pants, I was struck by the color of my leg. My calf was nearly black from being covered by leeches. I quickly released my H-Harness and unbuttoned my shirt. An inspection determined the same. My body was covered with leeches feasting on fresh blood. Not thinking, I created a little stir as I began to shed my clothes and rip off the little demons. The rest of the squad thought it was funny and laughed at my misfortune. Then the laughter turned to a distinct moment of silence and stark realization. If Zinke is covered with leeches, then I might be too! The stealthy SEAL patrol turned into a frenzy of clothes and leeches flying, ambushed by thumb-sized blood suckers! After removing the leeches and reassembling our clothing and composure, the patrol continued its march with pant legs tucked in and periodic stops to remove the new hitchhikers. Never did thirty kilometers seem so long. To this day, every time I look at a swamp, I think about what creatures may be hidden in the mud.

We made it back to the USS Anchorage and participated in training exercises in South Korea and the Philippines. The daily routine on board was PT, eat, PT, eat, PT, watch a movie, and repeat. By the time it was all over, I could do 140 push-ups and do flutter kicks for forty minutes.

During all this time, however, I wanted more. I knew the administrative and training work I was doing was contributing, but in my heart I was a warrior, and—it is a young man’s prerogative—I wanted to go to war for my country. In the back of your head, you think of the giants—John Paul Jones, Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton—and you want to uphold their traditions.

The Greeks had Alexander, the Romans had Julius Caesar, and the Russians had Prince Alexander Nevsky—but those heroes are quite removed in the rearview mirror of history. Us? We are a rough, pioneering people just a short handful of generations removed from our legendary heroes, from the famed to the anonymous, the everyday folk who packed their families into wagons and, with rifles and Bibles in hand, crossed uncharted plains for an unknown future. For a young man to want to be like one of those titans is not only aspirational or due to simple testosterone, it is damn near genetic. I do not want war. No one but an Armageddon-bent group like ISIS does. But when it was forced upon us, I wanted desperately to be a part of that bold and singular tradition.

In 1988, I got a little closer. I shipped out to the Philippines for the second of two deployments I’d ultimately have there. I was a lieutenant and platoon commander. I had fifteen SEALs and a small boat detachment and felt I was on top of the world flying to the Philippines.

The Philippines is where the SEALs had a base that fed into operations in and around Korea and, of course, our “friends” in what was then still called the Soviet Union. Between the Philippines and, potentially, Russia, the all-terrain training SEALs went through came in very useful. We reviewed surveillance technology from cutting-edge early-warning devices and did a lot of recon work.

Even beyond our proximity to the Russians and the North Koreans, the Philippines at the time weren’t exactly hospitable. During part of my time there, James N. Rowe, a Vietnam-era army officer, was serving as chief of the army portion of the Joint US Military Advisory Group stationed there. Rowe actually had a direct impact on my training: he was one of the few prisoners of war during Vietnam who escaped successfully. He developed the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) tactics that are at the basis of most elite US military forces’ SERE programs.

He wasn’t so fortunate in the Philippines, though. He’d been called back to active duty to design the SERE program—the compound at Camp Mackall in North Carolina where it’s taught is named for him—in 1981, and by 1987 he was in the Philippines, providing counterinsurgency leadership against the Communist-led New People’s Army.

In April 1989, Rowe was killed by members of the Sparrow Unit, the hit squad under the control of the New People’s Army. He was ambushed in his car while driving through Quezon City, which is part of the metro Manila area. The assassination wasn’t that far from us. It seems our enemies knew then what it has taken us so bloody long to embrace: attack the leadership to strike at the body.

We were operating against this hostile, ugly backdrop in the Philippines. We staged some combined operations with the Philippine marines and specialized units. We helped identify and hunt down the Sparrow squads throughout the islands, especially on Mindanao, where they had their base. We gathered intelligence on them and other forces hostile to the United States and Philippine governments’ interests.

Our primary mission, though, was to protect the US embassy in Manila. This contingency operation was called Silver Bullet—as in, we were the shiny, magic bullet that would be called on to reinforce embassy personnel if the embassy was compromised. The embassy overlooked Manila Bay, and it had a huge park next to it. Every once in a while, there would be a protest or a rally of upward of a million people in that park, and it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario in which a protest went bad and folks started coming over our fence. We were there after President Ferdinand Marcos’ government fell, and a few coup attempts had already been aimed at his successor, Corazon Aquino.

Under Silver Bullet, in the event of a disturbance, a designated SEAL platoon was to come by helicopter from Subic Bay and provide additional security. We spent a lot of time conducting security assessments, identifying and fixing shortfalls, making plans for securing the roof and the perimeter, and going back to our Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) roots to make sure Manila Bay in front of the embassy was free from obstacles should we have to evacuate by sea.

Manila Bay is notoriously polluted. As part of our mission, we performed the classic UDT mission of conducting a hydrographic survey to determine the depth of the water and the location of obstacles that could snare a small boat. Millions of people live in Manila, and I could see where the sewers spilled in. The survey was completed and every obstacle was recorded to include a few dead animals and a submerged barge. How the barge got there was anybody’s guess, but it was deep enough that it wasn’t an issue. Swimming in a sewer was not at the top of my bucket list, but we donned fins and facemasks and completed the mission in time to down a few San Miguel beers for medicinal purposes.

Despite all this, the Philippines had a certain charm. US-Philippine relations have been pretty strong for a long time: Americans and Filipinos fought side by side during the Spanish-American War, which resulted in Philippine independence after more than three centuries of Spanish rule. When President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world in a show of force, one of the highlights was demonstrating that the United States was prepared to protect its interests in the Philippines. And Filipino and American soldiers died side by side during World War II’s Bataan Death March, when the Imperial Japanese Army starved, beat, bayoneted, and tortured them during a sixty-mile prisoner movement.

Marching, fighting, and, sadly, dying weren’t the only things Americans and Filipinos did side by side. Many of the West Coast SEALs married local Filipino gals. In fact, the platoon responsible for Silver Bullet before I got there—part of SEAL Team Three—was headed by a guy who had married a Filipino woman.

He and I were supposed to do a turnover of target folders and intelligence updates, a process that usually includes some ground recon and briefings that last two or three days. But the C5 aircraft that was supposed to fly in my guys and me from Seal Team One was delayed, and by the time I got to the Philippines, we only had a few hours, as the same C5 was to turn around and bring them back.

Another digression, if I may. All military personnel have found ways to do a fast-unwind, whether it’s reading a Marvel comic book, playing a video game—or having a party like my contact in the Philippines. To each his own, right? Where I draw the line is when the participants don’t or can’t draw a line—as in the unfortunate matter of the fifty-six-year-old rear admiral who, late in 2015, was removed from his post as director of Strategy, Policy, Capabilities, and Logistics at US Transportation Command after the thirty-year navy man got so drunk during a conference that he could not stand and had to be helped back to his room—and, later, was found staggering naked through the hotel. Military service is tough and that goes beyond the obvious threat of physical injury; there’s deployment in unfamiliar places and the absence of family. Whatever branch of the armed forces, members need each other for support. You want to recognize and help someone in crisis before they get to that level of distress.

Anyway, my contact in the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters (BOQ) room didn’t bother to put on any clothes. He just went over to his dresser, opened a drawer, and took out a double handful of Silver Bullet files labe-led SECRET: the target folders, communication plans, and reports on everything he had done during the past six months. He handed all this to me and said, “Good luck. I’m leaving in an hour. You’re in charge now.” I grabbed the files and left him to get dressed, which I suspect required only three minutes of that last hour.

The executive officer of the SEAL unit in the Philippines at the time was a Vietnam Mustang SEAL officer named Edward C. Bowen, a tough, quiet warrior who had managed to amass three combat tours in Vietnam while earning Silver and Bronze Stars. He was one of the early Military Assistance Advising Group (MAAG) advisors and liked both the people and the mission. He was one of the few to deploy as both SEAL Team One and Two. Usually, once you did two deployments on a team, SEAL command said, “That’s it. You’re done. You’ve got to do shore duty or instructor duty.”

Bowen thought differently. He got out of the service with SEAL Team Two, drove across the coast, reenlisted, and was deployed again with SEAL Team One. He wanted to be in the jungle.

His men respected that. Having that many deployments was unusual back then. Nowadays, most SEALs have double or triple that if they’re in the same amount of time he was.

Bowen wasn’t the only notable officer there. The commanding officer was a guy named Wally Merrick, and, because of him, we called Unit-1 “Wally’s World.” Well, not so much because of him, but because of the little oddities he foisted on the headquarters. He used to make pencil marks around his flagpole on the quarterdeck to make sure that whoever was responsible for cleaning moved the flag and dusted around it. He’d put pennies around his office and surroundings to do the same thing. I’m not certain if that was to make sure people cleaned; maybe he just liked being surrounded by brass and zinc. One thing for certain, it kept us off the quarterdeck.

We also had a command master chief named Louis MacIntosh. Nobody called him that, though; we all affectionately called him Screwy Louis, because he had a sense of humor that could make anyone laugh. He was also a Vietnam vet who came up through the ranks. All these guys had seen combat and enjoyed giving the younger “tadpoles” a hard time. The first time I saw him, I was walking by Merrick’s office and Screwy Louis was on top of his desk while Merrick was reading some report. I didn’t know why and I didn’t want to find out, as spending more time in the gunsights could not have gone well for me.

I was there for other business, but I ended up having a pretty good time in Subic. Once you got off the naval base, life was sort of the way it was in Vietnam, I’m told; there was an “anything for money” attitude among the local residents, and you didn’t need much money to participate. For instance, a fifty-cent beer on base would be forty-five cents in a nearby barrio, and maybe thirty cents if you took a bus out to the more rural area.

Something else would happen as you got further from the base: the region’s rules, which were marginal at best, would vanish. Let’s just say the term “liberty” was folly applied.

So were the threats from local thugs. People in this part of the world weren’t—still aren’t—rich, and in-country military personnel usually have a bunch of cash on them … and often drink. Manila was worse. If you wandered off the main beat, chances were pretty good you’d be surrounded and rolled—at best. At worst, you could be knifed and killed. After all, these streets, the doorways, the shadows, were known to the locals and not to us. When I think back on those years, it’s amazing most of us came home in one piece.

With few rules holding us back, we were more than willing to take advantage of any opportunities for distraction that presented themselves. I remember one New Year’s Eve. The tradition was to set off fireworks. But these weren’t sparklers. They were more like giant bottle rockets with M80s that would come up to your hip. On this particular New Year’s Eve, we’d purchased several of those rockets, and one of my friends from the base wanted to set one off.

We’d been having a couple of San Miguel beers on a bar balcony—a cheap balcony structure, because Subic had zero in the way of building codes. If you had some nails and boards, you had a home. Or a bar. Or a balcony. At least, you did until the next big storm came through (or partly because those big storms came through, as they knocked down even well-built structures).

So we were on the rickety balcony overlooking the street, and my friend decided that the correct launching position would be to hang over the balcony rail upside down and ignite the fuse while holding the rocket in a beer bottle. The fuse flashed in a cloud of smoke, and the ignition nearly burned him alive. The sizzling rocket bounced off the middle of the road and shot straight through the door of a bar across the street. The bar was poorly lit inside.

A collective, “Oh, shiiiiit!” passed from our lips.

A second later there was a huge flash of light, a boom, then finally smoke billowing out of the bar’s door before a few marines who had been drinking in the bar exited.

Nobody got killed—or even seriously hurt—but the marines wanted revenge, so they went over to the cart where we’d bought our rockets, got themselves a double handful, and shot them at us on our balcony. Of course, we had to defend ourselves.

It was a terrific fight, but I can’t say definitively who won because soon enough the mayor of Subic came out and put a stop to things. In a world of no rules, we finally found the first one. He was polite enough, but he was pretty firm that our fun was over. There weren’t many rules in Subic, but burning the place down was clearly over the line.

I ended up shuttling to the Philippines quite often during the next six months. We actually had a chance to put the Silver Bullet contingency plans to a real test during that time: there was a coup attempt against Aquino’s government, or what looked like a coup attempt to the naked eye. But when we did our post-event analysis, we found that even though there had been hours of firefights, nobody had been killed or even seriously wounded.

We realized that despite the different factions, the people were Filipinos first, so they really didn’t want to battle each other, and they didn’t want to hurt any civilians. The fights were little more than various political factions flexing their muscles—more for show and control of power than military maneuvers. So they would warn each other when they would come around corners and fire their weapons knowing they weren’t going to hit anyone. They’d launch mortar rounds, but the rounds would be carefully targeted for minimal damage. The Filipinos are by and large a gentle people, and, unlike the factionalism of the tribes in Iraq, ultimately, they are one nation that more or less wants to live together.

The Philippine marines’ commander ended up putting down the coup and “saving” Aquino, and she rewarded him by making him her minister of defense, thus elevating the status of the Philippine marines.

This turn of events ended up working in our favor. We had a pretty good relationship with the marine commander, which ensured we would have little trouble as the Philippine government was run by connections, and those relationships were usually made on a local level. If your connections were solid, you could get what you wanted without a problem. If you were out of the circle, then you were generally out of luck.

I’m only going to be half-serious here, but I do have a story about how locally negotiated deals resulted in win-win situations. We did a lot of Special Operations training around Subic. For explosives and small training, we used an area called White Beach. In the small fishing villages, the Filipinos have a matriarchal society: females ran things, and when you wanted something, you had to negotiate with the head lady called the mama-san.

Most of the time, the trade was simple. We had Meals Ready to Eat (MRE), target material, and ammunition brass. She had chicken, rice, and beer.

So we’d go in and say, “We have three jeeps we brought over here for target practice that we’re going to blow up. You can’t have the vehicles, but you can take everything out of them that you can get, including the engines.”

If they agreed, we’d tow in the vehicles. When we did, you’d see a swarm of kids—maybe fifty or so, all with screwdrivers and pliers. They’d descend on those vehicles and in forty-five minutes the engines would be lifted out, put on wooden planks, and taken back to their village. The villagers used those engines to power their traditional banca boats or generators. Getting our engines into their banca boats was important: without them, the villagers couldn’t make a living or go and get the beer!

In return, the platoon would eat well for three or four days.

In addition to the good food, these negotiations made being in these areas a lot easier. We’d make a point to throw in a little money to sweeten the deal. What was a few bucks to us was a pretty big deal to the mama-sans, and we wanted them to be happy. If you made sure a mama-san made money, she’d look out for you.

The mama-sans also learned to negotiate for the brass from our bullet casings. In most cases, we had to guarantee them a certain amount of brass—usually around six thousand or so casings, which they would collect, melt, and turn into knives or belt buckles. I still have a belt buckle from the Philippines with a Trident on it.

Only when those local relationships were broken, and authority was moved from the front line to the command in the rear, did the supply system became clogged; at that point, you had bureaucracy trying to manage remotely what had been customized to local conditions. The bureaucrats were trying to impose one-size-fits-all systems on their operations, and, quite frankly, the whole machine became much less responsive.

The Mark 48 Torpedo has been a mainstay in the US Navy’s arsenal since 1972. It’s carried in every class of American submarine and is also used by several other countries. It’s about as blue chip a piece of armament as there is.

Despite this, every time there’s a minor modification to the Mark 48, the Department of Defense (DoD) insists on testing it as if it has never before been fired. The modifications and the tests have to be signed off on by dozens of bureaucrats. The excessive testing costs money, time, and resources, and does nothing.

This creates an environment in which there is absolutely no incentive to incur any risk. Nobody wants his signature on the order that pushes something into action if there’s any risk of error. Because of this, the navy is slow to deploy modified torpedoes—torpedoes that are vitally necessary to help our armed forces further their mission of defending us. It’s not that tests aren’t necessary; they most certainly are. It’s that there’s no reward, only risk, for saying yes and getting needed modifications, changes that would help us retain our edge, into the field. So someone looking for security over innovation has a huge incentive to say no.

Consider the Chinese. They steal blueprints, sure, but they’re able to go from design to fielding of their major weapons systems in just three to five years. It takes us between seventeen and nineteen years for a similar launch, which means that supposedly cutting-edge technology is outdated before the first unit is deployed. The F-35 fighter plane is a perfect example of this: it’s been in development since 1996. The marines took delivery of their first plane in 2015. The navy isn’t getting its fighters until 2018. Yes, it will be a good aircraft, but if we were truly concerned with maintaining our air superiority, we would be at the third generation of F-35s by now.

In the meantime, China’s J-31, which has more than a coincidental resemblance to the F-35, is already rolling off the production line, despite China not starting work on its planes until late in the last decade. By the time our F-35 is being delivered en masse, it likely won’t deliver the tactical air supremacy that decisive victory demands. Technological innovation is moving faster than our acquisition process. We’ve become process oriented, not results driven.

This problem goes beyond technology. The military’s priorities have gotten totally out of balance between fighting forces and the bureaucracy. Active-duty forces have been cut in favor of more desk roles. The budget lines year after year may be similar, but there’s been a shift from active-duty personnel to bureaucrats. There are currently more than eight hundred thousand DoD employees. That’s far more than the number of active US Army military personnel, and not too far behind the combined number of active army and navy military personnel. And the DoD figure doesn’t include contractors. I wish I could tell you how many contractors the military is currently using, but even SOCOM—the United States Special Operations Command—hasn’t been able to give an accurate count to Congress. We’ve asked. The best we can say is somewhere between 1.2 and 1.6 million.

What can we do about all this? A good starting point would be to push acquisition and much of the decision-making back to service chiefs and streamline the DoD process to assist rather than resist. Ideally, the same person responsible for setting requirements would be responsible for the outcome. We are too top-heavy across the board and there are too many bureaucrats whose job is nothing more than to say no. The way government spending is currently set up, the acquisition process is such a labyrinth of desks and processes that there is nobody one can point a finger at and say, “This is your fault. This is your success.”

Other measures include demanding a simple audit. Literally thousands of programs are not approved or authorized by Congress or even have the necessary oversight to determine value. A hiring freeze and the authority for commanders to reorganize as civilians retire would at least change the growth trajectory of overweight bureaucracy. Lastly, the entitlement and benefits side of the DoD needs to be reviewed and reformed; otherwise, our Defense Department will become a health care and disability system that also happens to fight wars.

I mentioned DoD spending as one instance where this happens, but it’s hardly the only one. This phenomenon occurs across all government agencies. Take the regulations that inhibit small businesses. The amount of paperwork and oversight small companies face is stifling innovation, hiring, and new product releases. Two small banks fail every day as a result of not being able to adhere to arbitrary regulations and government rules. Without access to local capital, small businesses struggle to expand.

Want another example that will almost certainly hit close to home? Sooner or later, everyone is going to interact with the medical field. In general, American medical devices are tops at advancing quality of life. But medical products, such as devices and pharmaceuticals, are taxed and heavily regulated by nonelected government entities. Any guess as to what happens to innovation when potential products have artificial costs built in due to taxes and regulations? Right. There’s no money left over to spend on innovation and advances.

Decentralization could actually work well in health care. As I suggested already, Obamacare has been a disaster: structurally it’s not viable, as only a dozen or so states operate their own exchanges. If the goal is to offer access to good affordable health care, several options work, such as individual health-care accounts and low-cost and cost-sharing clinics, where physicians provide basic preventive care. These clinics may not have an MRI—there are a lot of things they don’t have—but they do offer basic care and preventatives.

Community health clinics provide a better bang for the buck than the labyrinth of insurance, co-pays, and billing with which the medical community is currently struggling. Ask medical professionals these days how they like their jobs. Many of them are dissuading their kids from becoming physicians, because the amount of paperwork they deal with every day prevents them from practicing medicine. Doctors practice by checking off codes on their iPads, and patients have become little more than a billing entity.

States are in a better position than Washington, DC, to examine their needs and devise plans that can be better executed, and that are more relevant to their populations. Look at the amount of money the government spends and the number of people it covers; it would be better to buy everyone a premium plan and write a check for it. We’re spending an enormous amount and getting very little in the way of results. Under Obamacare, health care is more expensive and access to physicians has been reduced. Hospital parking lots are full; unfortunately, they are filled with compliance and billing specialists rather than patients and service providers.

If you’ve applied for a loan, you’ve probably encountered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent government agency whose directors never had to face the voting public or even answer to Congress. These folks restrict how banks make loans by making their processes and disclosures subject to government oversight. This means if you’re an established figure in your community, but you don’t meet a Washington bureaucrat’s rigid standards, you’ve probably been denied that loan.

Consider a farmer or a rancher subject to the rise and fall of commodity prices. His long-term income is going to be steady—he’s a prosperous farmer or rancher—but because some bureaucrat wanted to see two years’ worth of income statements, he’ll be turned down for that loan because his income is inconsistent … and some inflexible set of regulations says there can’t be any additional considerations. But a local banker would know his situation, because it was common to the region, and would be able to comfortably make that loan.

That scenario is frustrating when the money would be used for a personal expenditure, but it makes no sense when it could be used to bolster a business, create jobs, and otherwise benefit the country. Who does that legislation, which is supposed to be consumer-friendly, benefit?

We’ve run across this in Montana. I’ve said it before (a lot) and will say it again (also a lot): I’m a son of the state, and, like my hero, President Theodore Roosevelt, I love the outdoors and consider myself a traditional conservationist.

I also have special knowledge of Montana, unlike many DC bureaucrats who have publicly stated that oil and gas exploration is responsible for the decline of the sage grouse population in Montana.

Here’s the thing: at the time there was only one active oil derrick in the state of Montana. One. What Montana does have are ravens and crows and hawks, all of which are natural predators of the sage grouse. I know that because I’ve seen them. I also know that West Nile virus, coyotes and hawks, and wildfires are far more detrimental to sage grouse than a pump jack. What I don’t know is what a healthy population of sage grouse is, or how it’s changed, and I’m pretty sure the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Washington doesn’t either. What the BLM does knows is that false tears for the sage grouse offer a very real way to arbitrarily restrict energy exploration activities. If we were serious about the sage grouse, a start would be to determine what a healthy population would look like and develop a plan to maintain it. The BLM does not seem to be interested in the number of birds; they seem to be interested only in the number of acres they can control.

Conservatives in Washington try to rein in the excesses of regulatory entities, especially nonelected regulatory bodies. We’ve shrunk the BLM’s budget in hopes of reducing its reach, but there are pitfalls. Once we do so, bureaucrats counterpunch by listing a variety of wildlife on the endangered species list, which automatically causes a new set of restrictions to come into play.

Still think this is for the common good? Consider the number of wildlife organizations that use these causes to raise money, despite no wildlife census to back up their claims. Oil companies face thousands of dollars in fines for the alleged death of a handful of ducks, while wind farms are given a pass for killing thousands of birds, including endangered eagles. Look at the organizations that promote so-called alternative energy sources. Many of them have a personal pocketbook interest in stopping oil and gas exploration. Do they love the environment, or do they love their investors?

That is why moving decisions down to people who have relevant, ground-level data and experience makes sense. It’s entirely possible that there are man-made reasons for the sage grouse’s population drop—if there has been a population drop at all, of course. But the people most likely to have that data and experience are those who live and work where the sage grouse are, not those who go to work on the Interstate 395 in DC. The view from the Potomac is a lot different than the view from Yellowstone or the Missouri, so why does Washington think they are the same? It goes back to the same theme: Washington bureaucrats think they know how to manage nearly every aspect of our lives better than we do. But whether it’s our health-care system, our banking system, our water, or even a little bird on a prairie, Washington has it all wrong.

I sit on the House Natural Resources committee. I can draw on my studies in geology and my experience in the outdoors. I can ask the right questions, and I can make some informed inquiries, but, ultimately, there are people in forty-nine other states—and yes, Montana too—who are a lot more informed than I am about on-the-ground conservation issues. I’d like at least an opportunity to listen to them, rather than dictate to them.

For national concerns, such as the economy or criminal activity, federal lawmakers need to take local concerns into account. Yes, people in Congress represent their locales, but, ultimately, individual representatives and senators only have the bandwidth to monitor and review issues on a broad sense.

What happens is that they end up relying on their staffs, which are generally made up of the young and unpaid. And those individuals often move from office to office, or from committee to committee. Every time there’s noise about congressional term limits, I want to raise the point of limiting staff tenures too. Entrenched congressional staffers can wield as much or more influence than the congressman they “work for.” Few people know who they are, and nobody voted for them. They and their agency counterparts end up being the powerful fourth arm of government.

It’s not that I’m automatically opposed to centralized government functions. Our Constitution calls for national unity in a common defense, a monetary system, and commerce. There are some places where centralized government is necessary. Take cyber security, for instance. Twenty years ago it wasn’t an issue. Now it’s a major concern with international threats cropping up every day. The connected nature of the web means that there have to be nationwide standards for domestic security. Thing is, cyber security concerns are the sort of government issues that can produce concrete results—better protections. And those protections have to be universal: compromised systems due to patchwork security regulations can affect people across the country in a matter of seconds. The most sensitive systems also need to be isolated as they will always be vulnerable to new hacking techniques. The more integrated the system is, the more vulnerable the system is to attack. The drive toward centralization for convenience has to be weighed against risk.

But there’s a big difference between a common terrain like the web and America’s range of environments. So I say, keep the centralized oversight for concerns that are truly nationwide, but allow for greater flexibility for issues that are better managed by the states or at the local level. If the Washington bureaucrats would listen, they might even discover that the answers to better management are not found within the beltway.

Shift back to the Philippines. It may sound as if life in the Philippines was all fun and games. Yes, we had fun being SEALs overseas, but there were plenty of serious moments and training was rarely easy. One training exercise sticks in my mind because it provided a valuable learning experience at my expense.

I was a young lieutenant assigned as a SEAL team platoon commander on my second six-month deployment to the Republic of the Philippines. At the time, the US Navy maintained a base in Subic Bay and the SEALs maintained a forward deployed unit on the installation. The role of the SEAL unit was to provide logistics and command and control in support of fleet and Pacific theater operations. Since the Vietnam War the West Coast SEAL teams maintained a rotation of SEAL platoons to the unit that was highly trained in jungle warfare and other unconventional warfare skills. Eager to impress my new unit commander, I decided to conduct a combat swimmer operation that simulated an attack on the aircraft carrier USS Midway which was in port. The operation was divided into several phases and involved a night parachute jump, a small boat transit, a closed-circuit dive to the ship, the placement of a simulated explosive charge, and then a return to the waiting small craft at sea. My Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) ancestors would have been proud of the classic frogman operation. We had completed similar training missions in San Diego and the platoon felt comfortable that the task was well within our capability. Each phase of the operations was briefed to the unit commander and his staff for their comment and approval. By my calculations, the whole operation could easily be completed in the course of six hours. We could be done and all the equipment washed up and put away by midnight—perfect for those who wanted to celebrate our victory with a well-deserved beer out in town. The afternoon before the exercise was spent preparing equipment, studying charts, and conducting rehearsals. It was going to be a full moon; the water temperature was toasty warm, so there was no need for full wet suits. In fact, the decision was to go light and swim with just a thin polyester suit and minimal equipment. The simulated explosives were already heavy and six hours was easy. A few hours before we commenced the exercise, a final-five paragraph operations brief was delivered and approved by the senior officer at the unit. True to his nature, Commander Bowen sat quietly in the back of the room and took a few notes but made no comment as I went through the different sections.

That night the operation went flawlessly. The full moon made the parachute jump easy, the small boat navigation was spot on, and the dive to the ship and back out to the rendezvous point was routine. Even the tides were right as it made the swim relatively painless. As the swimmer pairs gathered at the rendezvous point in anticipation to the small boat pickup, I looked at my watch and wondered why the small boats were late. My answer came soon enough. From the bow of a small patrol boat speeding toward us, I saw Bowen. He was shouting, and as the boat drew closer, the words, “You have been compromised, Lieutenant—go on E&E” echoed across the water. As we floated and bobbed up and down in utter amazement, we pondered for a moment the significance of what E&E—Escape and Evasion—meant. I then remembered the outrageous E&E plan I had briefed him just a few hours before, and the slight smile on Bowen’s face as he took notes. My heart sank for I knew that the exercise that seemingly went so well was about to change for the worse. He was throwing us a curveball, and a quick inventory of our situation suggested that I would not make last call.

Up to this point, the exercise had been going just the way I had briefed it to the men. Like most exercises, my briefing was also observed by the unit headquarters—in this case, Bowen, who, true to his nature, sat quietly through it as I ran through the standard five-paragraph briefing format: Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration/Logistics, and Command and Signal. Each step was briefed and contingencies identified. After we covered those, we went through the final escape and evasion plan should we be compromised and have to evade enemy capture. The whole thing took about ninety minutes, which was standard.

We had hit the ship and placed the limpets exactly as we had briefed. We dove back out undetected and surfaced well away from any danger from being spotted. Now came the easy part: paddle along on the surface and let the falling tide do the work. I was feeling more than a little smug at how well the mission had gone. The water was pretty nice too; it was around seventy degrees, which made for a good, comfortable swim. We weren’t wearing full wetsuits: we’d put on thin black polyurethane suits that were almost like triathlon suits. The suits had hoods, so when we came to the surface there wouldn’t be white faces above the waves. Except for the Drägers, we were swimming light.

But when we got to the rendezvous point, the rubber boats that were supposed to take us to the mothership were nowhere to be seen. We waited, floating in the dark, for almost an hour before a little patrol boat showed up with Bowen standing on the bow. He was yelling, “E&E!” as the boat circled. The boat slowly pulled up close to the cluster of swimmers, and he looked down at me and said, “E&E. Your mission has been compromised, Lieutenant.” My heart sank, because what he was telling us was that he was throwing us a curve ball, and we were far from done.

E&E means Escape and Evasion. In short, Bowen was telling us that we had done everything correctly: we’d swum out to where the boat was supposed to pick us up, but he wasn’t going to let us come aboard. The idea was that we had to act as if the boat hadn’t shown up and go to our E&E plan. And the reason Bowen was doing this was because he had sat in on my briefing, and he knew I hadn’t spent a lot of time on that portion of the plan. He was making a point.

The so-called E&E plan that was briefed was one I simply made up in my mind. If compromised, we were going to swim all the way across Subic Bay, which was about five miles, and then hike over the peninsula to the next beach. Of course, in between these two beaches was a mountain range with a dormant volcano and jungle.

The equipment list did not include anything that would remotely prepare us for what we now faced. All of us were wearing booties suitable for short walks but not for hiking across volcanic rock and jungle. We had anticipated a swim into the bay, where we were going to get picked up, right?

We also didn’t have food, water, or any equipment other than a mask, fins, a knife, and a pistol. What we did have was all of our dive equipment, which was pretty heavy on land. Under the rules of the exercise, we weren’t allowed to leave anything behind.

So the E&E part of the exercise began. By the time we made it across the bay and onto the first beach, the sun was coming up. It was time that I took a little initiative, so I found the mama-san. With a little hard negotiation and some promissory notes, we were able to obtain sandals. We certainly weren’t going to walk in our fins, and the little rubber booties with the eighth-of-an-inch soles were next to useless on land. I wear a size twelve shoe: the biggest sandal in that village was about half the size of my foot, but I did the best I could.

We ended up trading fins, face masks, and a few IOUs for flip-flops, food and water, and even a couple of porters to help us haul the gear. Mama-san definitely got the better of that negotiation, but at least we didn’t have to carry those damned Drägers.

But I—and my team—got some valuable experience out of the exercise. When we made our action report and lessons-learned presentation to Bowen, we stressed a few important findings: Don’t do a combat swimmer operation without being prepared for the worst. Swim in cam-mies, because if you have to get out of the water, a wet suit isn’t going to be your friend as you’re walking. Carry weapons, which was a new way of thinking for us, more in line with the German view of combat swimming. When you get out of the water, you have to be prepared to fight.

Most of all, though, was to have a QRF—a Quick Reaction Force—set up and on-call if your main extraction plan went belly up. Bowen knew exactly what he was doing when he listened to my briefing; he zeroed in on the weakest aspect of it and quietly changed the exercise—without telling us, of course—to stress that aspect.

At the time it was enormously painful, but Bowen, like many of the frogmen who served in Vietnam, was a hard man, and he drilled into us an important lesson: don’t blow off any part of the brief, and make sure the elements within it are sound.

I learned a lot from instructors who had been battle-hardened in Vietnam. I had a commanding officer of SEAL Team One who once observed a desert training exercise my platoon was conducting. He’d been a platoon commander in Vietnam, and I was briefing a plan to conduct a coordinated ground assault of a well-fortified enemy position. I had a strategy for every enemy action and about nine different options to hit the enemy hard no matter what.

He looked at my approaches and offered a simple, but wise, assessment.

“Ryan,” he said, “your plan is great, but sometimes it’s better to step back and take the fight to tomorrow, unless there’s an absolutely compelling reason, such as not hitting that target today, resulting in a catastrophic loss. As a commander, you have to evaluate risk and return. If it’s not right, it’s better to live to fight tomorrow than to die fighting for nothing today.”

He was right. I was a young SEAL at the time, and I was gung ho to move on the target. Since that quiet lesson, I’ve always taken a step back, at least in evaluating the reality of a situation against my enthusiasm for an immediate solution.

I combined that with Bowen’s lesson—that when I brief I should consider every situation as though there is not just a possibility but a probability that something will go wrong. After that I took to heart my rule of threes: always have a list of the three most likely screw-ups at every step, and have in place plans for how to address those screw-ups.

I did love it all, even with the hard lessons learned. I spent a couple of years in the Philippines, on and off, and even though I was away from home more than I might have liked, I really enjoyed my time there.

I mentioned my Trident belt buckle before—the one I got from the Philippine craftsmen who were repurposing our brass casings. In addition, there was another souvenir from my days in the Philippines I wish I still had, but to tell you about it I have to mention something else: during Officer Candidate School, I got married. I met her at Oregon; she was fun, and we were young.

She played sports at Oregon, and we had a lot of mutual friends. We seemed to have similar interests, and we both were comfortable taking risks. So one night we had a beer or two more than we should have, and we decided to elope.

We were married in Newport, Rhode Island, on Easter weekend, and after I graduated OCS, we both went to Coronado. She went to work as a waitress; I went to BUD/S. We were married for five years, and I was deployed for more than three of those five years. Not exactly the makings for a successful relationship. Some estimate that the failure rate for a SEAL’s first marriage is well over 90 percent. Although I don’t have official stats on this, I knew my marriage was on the rocks and would not last.

During my last deployment in the Philippines, I had measured an L88 airplane pallet and commissioned a local craftsman to build a bar that could fit on the pallet. It was teak and mahogany, and it had three charts representing the three locations where the SEALs trained. The bar was beautifully carved. The Filipino craftsmen could carve a Trident overnight, so you can imagine the work they can do in six months. The bar was carefully brought back to the small house on base that I rarely saw. After a deployment, I came home to the house and opened the door. All the furniture was gone. I stepped back and checked that the address on the door matched the checkbook in my pocket. It did. Standing just inside the door of the empty house, I remember that my first thoughts were not about losing a wife. They were about losing the bar. God, I miss that bar. The marriage was over. I wished her the best.