PROLOGUE

Special Operations Command and Control Element (SOCCE) Task Force FALCON, Kosovo

THE BOSNIAN WAR HAD BEEN A NIGHTMARE. FOUGHT from 1992 to 1995, it was a largely territorial struggle for what was left of Yugoslavia, a war fraught with ethnic, religious, and political turmoil. “War crimes” doesn’t begin to describe the horrors perpetrated on the populace of the rival factions—but here’s one statistic: between twenty and forty thousand Bosnian Muslim women were raped during the conflict. The International Criminal Tribunal called it “genocidal rape.” Civilian deaths numbered 38,239, nearly 38 percent of the total casualties.¹ For a small, relatively limited war, those are staggering numbers, especially when you consider Bosnia and Herzegovina had a population of around 3.8 million in 2000. Basically, one in every one thousand civilians was killed during the crisis.

Even after the large-scale hostilities ceased, a NATO IFOR—Implementation Force—of eighty thousand personnel remained in the region. I had been in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo starting in the early 1990s beginning with IFOR, then Stabilization Force (SFOR), and finally Kosovo Force (KFOR). As in most military campaigns, the early years of the campaign allowed Special Operations Forces (SOF) to operate with high degrees of autonomy and freedom of movement to conduct small-unit missions composed of members of the navy’s elite SEAL Team and the army’s elite counterpart.

The US Navy knew that Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was concealing weapons caches in small, inaccessible towns—the same towns that were often stops for drug, military equipment, and human trafficking. Karadžić had been pretty open regarding his religion-based ethnic-cleansing atrocities, and the caches helped him keep up high, lethal momentum in his operations. Within the multinational force charged with stopping him, the SEALs and Special Forces—the US Navy’s elite special warfare operators—were at the forefront of the highest-risk operations.

The SEALs could already count numerous successes as part of the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict. Acting under the umbrella codename of Joint Forge and its predecessors Joint Guard and Joint Endeavor, SEALs and foreign military forces had conducted small-unit reconnaissance missions, search-and-rescue missions for downed pilots, intelligence-gathering operations, and Personal Security Detachment (PSD) missions that escorted and protected American and NATO leadership. We also ran PSYOPS (psychological operations designed to demoralize the enemy and shape the battlefield in our favor) and later conducted Personnel Indicted for War Crimes (PIFWC) operations to bring to justice those who committed unspeakable crimes against humanity. In Kosovo, the missions were almost exclusively Reconnaissance and Surveillance (R&S) in nature, designed to give eyes-on-ground intelligence concerning movement, smuggling patterns, and identification of possible arms caches.

On a night that will always burn vividly in my memory, SEAL Team Two was preparing to add another notch to its successful R&S missions completed: its members were to insert a small SEAL element via helicopters, conduct an overland patrol, observe and report on suspected arms caches, and extract back to the base safely. I’ll be talking more about who the SEALs are and what the numeric designations mean in a bit. For now, suffice to say they are elite Sea, Air and Land (SEAL) teams, established in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy as a Special Operations Force capable of operating in all environments.

A twenty-five-year-old sniper named Chad M. Burkhart was the point man for a delicate Reconnaissance and Surveillance (R&S) mission in hostile territory. That means among those who were “in first,” he was the guy out front and most exposed. Burkhart was young, talented, and the guy who commanders fought to have assigned to their units. He was the guy who showed up early, stayed late, and was committed to becoming an elite warrior in the teams. Kosovo was his first deployment, and he was about to conduct his first SEAL Team mission.

Burkhart’s platoon—as every SEAL platoon does—had rehearsed extensively for his first R&S mission. Every aspect of the mission was planned and every contingency was accounted for. Burkhart’s helicopter—a UH-60 Black Hawk—was to come in hot and fast for a quick drop-off after the Kiowas gave the “all clear.” The route was a short trip from the Forward Operating Base (FOB) located within the KFOR complex called Camp Bondsteel. The helicopters would quickly land and drop off the team and disappear into the night.

Once the team reached the target area, they would conduct a short reconnaissance to find any suitable observation points that provided both concealment and good communication links. The SEALs then would watch for any suspicious activity and identify individuals worth monitoring, either as targets themselves or as people who could lead us to higher-value targets.

Before any of this could happen, of course, the first step was to be inserted by helicopter on a small clearing. Burkhart had the task of being the first one off the UH-60 and using a handheld GPS and map in order to navigate his team through the darkness.

Let me tell you a little about the mind and psychology of a point man in the SEALs. Every SEAL is trained to place team over self: in hostile territory, you protect your fellow SEALs. In the front of Burkhart’s brain, going in, was not how far out in front he was or how deep into the mouth of danger he was; it was, What do I have to do to fulfill the mission and protect the men behind me? “Self” does not exist. It’s a group mind, if you will—a fist made of component fingers. The point man knows that he is generally the one to meet enemy fire first and is most likely to find a minefield or a booby trap. In Kosovo, Russian-made mines placed on trails and booby traps to protect arms caches were common.

In short, every muscle, every thought that was part of Chad Burkhart were fully invested in the mission.

The night of November 24 was pitch-black and starless—so black, in fact, that you could not even see your hand in front of your face. The helicopter pilots wore Night Vision Goggles (NVGs) and worked by the soft glow of their instruments: everything else in the cabin was, for all intents, invisible. Burkhart’s only illumination came from his open light-watch and his small handheld GPS. His adrenaline rush and nerves of the first mission no doubt kept him stealing glances of his instruments of navigation even though every glance negatively affected his natural night vision. Even the external navigation, formation, and anticollision lights on the helicopter had been muted: illumination, on this night, in this territory, was a tool that helped the enemy.

Inside Burkhart’s helicopter, the team faced two slight variations from how the mission had been planned and rehearsed. The first was that the crew chief was new—he had logged barely twelve hours total in that UH-60. Like Burkhart, it was his first Special Operations mission. While capable of the task, the UH-60 crew was not a dedicated Special Forces asset, and SEAL missions were just one of the many they had assigned to them. That introduced an unknown psychological component: Burkhart wasn’t familiar with the tactics and techniques of a SEAL platoon. And the second minor deviation from SEAL standard operating procedures (SOPs) was the last-minute decision to fly the short route with the doors closed—not open, as they had done in the practice drills. This was ordered to keep the wind down from the cool Kosovo night and assist in better communications. The inside of a Black Hawk is loud enough without the rotors and wind pounding through an open door. Since the flight was short, it was decided as the SEALs were being loaded that the doors would open at two minutes out. The night was starless, quiet, and black. Even the landing zone was still.

Fully loaded, the MH-60s linked up with the circling Kiowas, and the formation set off into the darkness. As planned the OH-58 Kiowas surged ahead and scanned the designated landing zone with their thermal imagers to look for any hotspots, which showed nothing but cool. There were no unidentified blips—not even a dog and definitely nothing hostile. At two minutes out, the MH-60s reduced airspeed and leveled off in anticipation of the quick dive. Hearts were pumping hard, and no doubt Chad checked his watch one last time.

The crew chief threw open the doors, Chad gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up, the crew chief answered, and Chad Burkhart stepped out into the Kosovo darkness.

But the helicopter hadn’t landed. The crew chief had misunderstood Burkhart’s enthusiastic thumbs-up and unfortunately returned a thumbs-up response himself, which is the SOP signal “to go.” The chopper was 350 feet above the forested hills of Kosovo when Gunner’s Mate Petty Officer Second Class Chad M. Burkhart stepped out and plummeted to his death. The crew chief, wearing night vision goggles, said he saw Chad step out and could follow his descent for only a few seconds before he lost him in the night.

Confusion and disbelief consumed the passengers and crew alike on board the helo, and the mission now turned from a preplanned Reconnaissance and Surveillance mission to an in extremis search and rescue.

As the Naval Special Operations Forces (NAVSOF) commander, I’d been tracking the mission from the Joint Operations Center (JOC) from our small Forward Operating Base (FOB) located within Camp Bondsteel, a megabase the United States had built in eastern Kosovo. The JOC was really nothing more than a plywood room containing a few maps, intelligence plots, and a communication plan listing call signs and supporting forces. JOC duty was typically characterized by long hours, pots of coffee, and Copenhagen for those who chewed tobacco. In this case, the JOC was the center for decisions to be made and commands given. Remaining forces at the FOB would assemble and prepare to assist as required, and the medical team was alerted. There was nothing more I could do except pray that somehow Chad had survived the fall and he could be saved.

The platoon found Burkhart pretty quickly. He was reported as being still alive but barely. The triage team administered CPR, his chest moved, and I scrambled all available forces to retrieve him and bring him to the field hospital, where he was pronounced dead. It remains uncertain whether he died on impact or whether the field CPR was giving false hope. Regardless, Chad Burkhart was killed in action while on his first mission in Kosovo.

Though I was not Burkhart’s commanding officer, I felt a deep sense of loss greater than ever before. I had lost teammates before in both battle and training whom I had been closer to. I reminded myself that being a SEAL is a tough business and being in charge bears both responsibility and accountability. That night I heard the words when the reports came in, understood what had transpired, and knew there are no guarantees. But while your brain grasps all of that, your guts, your soul, everything else is numb. It’s a protective mechanism, I suppose: you have to continue the mission. There’re the rest of the team and preparing for the next mission to think about. To dwell too deeply on the past may place the next operation in jeopardy as success is often measured by detailed planning and mission focus.

When the operation is over the real horror settles in. No SEAL—no soldier—is immune. Could I have prevented it? we all ask ourselves in some way. As a commander, did I miss something or not train hard enough? A brother has died, survivor guilt settles in, the hard realization that you could be next … all of that takes hold. The “it could be you” part isn’t even about your own mortality; it’s about how your death will affect your loved ones—parents, wife, siblings, maybe young children you haven’t even met and who may never get to meet you. That’s the worst part of the postmortem adjustment.

I felt I was responsible for making sure Burkhart’s family knew the circumstances of his death. It was the first time I was in position away from the front lines of the fight. As much as I wanted to be suited up riding in the Black Hawk with the boys, my job was to make sure every t was crossed and every i was dotted. I was to ensure the plan was solid, make sure the team was ready and had the right equipment, and push supporting assets to them in the field if needed. I’d lost other teammates before both in battle and training, but this death was different because it was my first time losing someone while being in a position separated and away from the men at risk. Though I influenced actions, I no longer directly controlled the actions at the pointy end of the spear. This was also the first time I had lost someone since becoming a father. At the time of Burkhart’s death, I had one young son and a daughter. It dawned on me that my role as a commander is really not different from that of a father. You give guidance and teach, provide resources, and make sure they have every opportunity to succeed. Unfortunately, you cannot be with them all the time.

We had a small field funeral service for Petty Officer Second Class Chad Burkhart at the FOB near where his helicopter took off. He and I shared a common background of growing up in small-town America, and he had a reputation of cheerfully working harder than his peers. He was an only son and made his family, state, and country proud of his accomplishments.

My daughter, Jennifer, wasn’t in the navy yet, but she and the man she married eventually both joined the navy and became navy divers—she a Diving Medical Technician and he a SEAL. I didn’t realize it at the time of the funeral, but something powerful hardened inside of me during the service: commitment. No, there is no way you can anticipate every contingency. Sometimes we pay for knowledge in the worst possible way, with lives. I hardened my resolve that our forces must have not only the best training, but the absolute right training and top-of-the-line equipment. Later, that fierce resolve would evolve into something even stronger: a conviction to ensure every soldier, sailor, airman, or marine in harm’s way has the right rules of engagement to win decisively on the battlefield. We have been sorely negligent in the latter department—I’ll get into that later—and when we don’t make those rules with winning in mind, our troops pay for it.

At the time of Chad’s death I’d been in Bosnia off and on for eight years. Bosnia was a morale-sapping war, survivable only because we believed in the value and morality of what we were doing. Extreme nationalism fueled by ethnic and religious tensions turned many ordinary citizens and soldiers into callous killing machines. Europe could not stop it, and Russia did not care to. America was the only hope. I know it’s unfashionable in some circles to tout American ideals as a compass for the world, but let me tell you: without them, the world goes to hell. Our nation is an exception, maybe the exception, to tyranny and crushing socialism. I will go back to John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech in which he proclaimed to the world that we would pay any price and bear any burden in the defense of liberty. We would always be on the side of those who cannot defend themselves. If we ever lose that sense of true north … well, let’s just say we cannot and will not.

We must not.

In 2000, I had been a member of the Navy SEALs for fifteen years. My time with the SEALs straddled the rough-and-ready early days when some SEAL units were known as much for their outlaw bearing as for their efficiency through their more buttoned-down—and more lethal—demeanor today. When I was with the SEALs, we trained constantly, both physically and mentally, to always be prepared just in case we were called to action. Even though the SEALs had been to Panama, Somalia, and the first Gulf War, the relative number of combat operations was few. The number of SEALs with actual combat experience was even fewer. It was strange that even the most elite of the SEAL teams was literally running to the sound of the guns to find combat, because back then a career in the SEALs did not mean you would necessarily see any action.

Today’s SEALs don’t have any uncertainty about being called to duty: when you put on the SEAL Trident, you’re going to go to battle. That’s just a fact. But back then, if you wanted to be sure you’d see action, you had to become part of the elite of the elite. And that’s where I was in the early years of the Bosnian conflict leading up to Kosovo.

Throughout my career, my role as a SEAL officer was less that of a door kicker—the guys who storm into hazardous situations with flash grenades and assault rifles (M4s then, SCARs now)—and more the role of a team leader, planning and resource expert, and decision maker. Sure, I kicked down doors and shot shoulder-fired rockets, but my job was to make sure the men around me were better than I was at doing it. That’s not the same as being a so-called armchair general: you have to know the same team battle skills and tactics—meaning you’ve been there, done that, and are able to feel every blow they take or success they achieve. You’re not the star of the show, but you feel like you are understudying every damn part.

There’s one more key component to being a good commander, especially when you’re leading elite teams: it’s knowing when to stay out of the flipping way and let your trusted talent do what they do best, injecting yourself only enough to make sure the team stays focused on mission and the momentum of success is maintained. A good plan executed early is better than a perfect plan executed late, and making adjustments on the fly often carries the day. Small-unit leadership requires cultivating innovation and building a team that nearly runs on its own, which, if your men have been properly briefed, trained, rehearsed, and equipped, should be easy. The right amount of oversight is an important point that I will come back to later.

As a commander of talented teams, my job was to ensure that everyone around me either was more talented or worked hard to be so. I was never the best jumper, diver, explosive expert, or sniper. I simply had to know who was and be able to build a team that could be counted on to win under any conditions.

As a commander of either a unit or a task force, I gathered intelligence on enemy forces and where to find the right resources to do the mission, briefed the highest-level officers, fought for missions and approvals, developed detailed plans and ensured the team could execute them, and, more importantly, was honored to lead the nation’s best in some of the most complex missions in the history of Special Forces.

My first experience in Bosnia was conducting small-unit Leaders Reconnaissance with members of both the elite navy and army units right after IFOR had been established. At the time the borders within the former Republic of Yugoslavia were still unsettled, and ethnic cleansing on all sides was common. Refugees were pouring into Europe, and rule by military strongmen and organized crime was the norm. Special Reconnaissance (SR) missions were the focus of Special Operations. Every highway was driven, every village was visited, and every military and civilian uniform was carefully documented. If we were to be assigned a mission, we would be at least familiar with the ground and what opposition may be in the area.

The second series of deployments to Bosnia was when I was attached as the unconventional warfare officer to commander in chief, US Naval Forces, Europe (CINCUSNAVEUR) in London. As the senior naval commander in Europe, Admiral Boorda wore many hats, including commander of Stabilization Force (SFOR), whose headquarters was in Sarajevo in the midst of the active civil war. Admiral Boorda was the first former seaman recruit to rise all the way to four-star admiral. He later became chief of Naval Operations and tragically took his own life in the Washington Navy Yard in 1997. I had just married my wife, Lola, and we were excited to take a break from the heavy deployment schedule stateside. We found ourselves living in a small flat in West Hampstead in northwest London. Both of us were working for Admiral Jeremy Boorda—Lola as a quality control civilian on the flag deck and I as the unconventional warfare officer.

Even though London and its subway system were frequently under bomb threats by the IRA, London was a welcome break from being gone from home more than 220 days a year. It was a good place to raise a family, and ours was growing: we had our daughter, Jennifer, and Lola became pregnant with Wolfgang while we were there. Wolfgang was born in London, in fact. (And, no, just because Lola and I were both American citizens does not mean he is a “natural-born” citizen and qualified to become president of the United States.)

Part of the reason we were comfortable expanding our family while we were in London was that for the most part, I thought I could actually be with Lola and the kids. Knowing my next tour would be back to the team with another heavy deployment schedule, I wanted to spend time with the family away from the daily grind. The irony was that my boss, Admiral Boorda, was being protected by members of my old command, and I would be tasked once again to be forward deployed to lead the Naval Special Operations Forces in Bosnia to conduct pilot rescue and other special operations as required. So much for the time off. Later, after we moved back to the shores of Virginia and had Konrad, I wound up overseas again and away from my family more than I had been when we were in London. That wasn’t easy on any of us.

Admiral Boorda did have a great sense of humor, though. When I was not deployed, part of my job was to conduct the daily theater brief on matters of the SEALs and Special Forces. On one occasion, a SEAL team platoon stationed in Scotland decided to have some single scotch whisky and Guinness while bowling at the local lanes. After damages were assessed, the local commander decided it met the threshold of writing an official Operational Report Naval Blue (OPREPNAVYBLUE) message to the headquarters. Such messages are typically reserved for significant losses or a major incident short of war. The text of the rather long message stated the SEAL platoon had consumed alcohol and had caused damage to the club to include divots in the floor of the bowling lanes and multiple ceiling strikes. No high score was mentioned. I finished reading the message, and the staff went silent and turned to Admiral Boorda for his response. He frowned, took a deep breath, and asked me if the bowling balls were sixteen pounds or twelve. He noted a ceiling strike delivered with a sixteen-pound ball isn’t easy. The room laughed. He loved sailors, and the sailors loved him. So did Lola, as she was invited to all the flag functions. That gave me an edge on the flag deck!

After returning stateside, I once again found myself heading back to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1997, this time as part of the effort to identify, locate, and bring to justice Personnel Indicted for War Crimes, or PIFWCs as they were known. I had returned to the team for a second tour as commander at one of the assault teams. We were known as the “meat eaters” within the compound and arguably the most elite fighting force in the world.

The Bosnia PIFWC operations were my first real introduction to combat leadership. I was a lieutenant commander at the time and feeling on top of the world. As team leader of some of the most talented warriors this country has ever produced, I knew from the moment I assumed the job that this would be the pinnacle of my SEAL career. I was junior enough to be at the front and senior enough to make decisions once I got there. Perfect. Our job was targeting—locating the PIFWCs, verifying that they were who we thought they were, determining the infrastructure and intelligence structure we needed to infiltrate their surroundings, getting a sense of their networks, and when the conditions were right, detaining those individuals.

A lot of this work had been built upon the reconnaissance missions that were conducted earlier during IFOR. Since we had established a pretty good network of contacts and knew where the brothels were, finding current intelligence was made easier but not easy. The brothels often served as a club for local leaders to meet and to discuss politics. If you wanted to know whether your target was in town, one of the first places to start was the local brothel. Conducting surveillance on patrons and paying the hired help for intelligence gave us an edge. Hundreds of hours of surveillance would be required to develop patterns and determine things such as where these individuals lived or worked, what their daily schedules were, whom they spoke with, what their security situation was, what sort of arms they normally carried, and where the nearest forces they could summon were. This is the sort of detailed intelligence collection work that enabled us to get Osama bin Laden. It involves patience and more patience. Intelligence collection is slow and methodical. Think of it as a big cat in the high grass watching prey, not just launching itself into a fray. When you’re conducting high-profile operations, you may be stalking your target for weeks or even months before you strike. I had one impatient general tell me to speed up the collection efforts and that I could afford an “intelligence casualty.” He would go hungry in the tall grass.

It was December 1997, and my team was assuming the watch. By “watch” I mean that each team rotated being on call for any crisis. Rotation periods at the time were divided to allow team members to attend professional development courses such as sniper and breacher training, conduct larger training and exercises as a team, and then have their bags packed and ready to go to war. In 1997, the entire command carried the old beepers that would simply produce an audible alarm with the numbers 0101. The range of the beeper was limited to about thirty miles, and failure to make it to the command in forty-five minutes meant dismissal. We would routinely get beeped at all hours of the day or night for Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercises (EDREs) to test our responsiveness. In the case of going after the PIFWCs, there was no need for a beeper. The practitioners, executioners, and monsters who had preyed on the populace in Bosnia were still at large and still active in ugly, hidden pockets.

After months of training for almost every possible method of interdiction, the team got the green light to focus our efforts on two high-value targets (HVTs). Our first target was Blagoje Simić—or, as he was also known, the Hitler of Bosnia. Simić was the mayor of Samac, a town just under fifty miles north of Tuzla. Simić, along with several other Bosnian officials, had overseen the dispossession, movement to concentration camps, and execution of thousands of non-Serbian Bosnians.

The second target was Police Chief Stevan Todorovic, a torturer, rapist, and mid-level thug who specialized in violating the rights of non-Serbian Bosnians. Women, children … Todorovic didn’t discriminate. If we wanted proof that these were bad people, all we had to do was look out our vehicle windows while on the roads to Tuzla: there were a lot of half-collapsed burned-out structures, former homes of people who had been ethnically cleansed. Of course, not all the homes were burned out: some Bosnian officials enriched themselves by taking these homes over and selling them for their own gain, just as the Nazis had done a half century earlier in countries like Lithuania and elsewhere. Evil never truly dies; it just changes its face.

Samac is a small town, the kind where everybody knows everybody else’s business, which of course makes intelligence collection tricky. Any vehicle entering the town—much less a stream of military vehicles—would be a tip-off, and we didn’t want any locals to know that Todorovic or his lynch men were under surveillance.

Both of these guys were in what was called the “sealed section”—they had been quietly indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. They hadn’t been told officially, of course, as they would have immediately gone into hiding … but they must have known. The only names on the list that weren’t sealed were people like Radovan Karadžić, those at the top ranks. The crimes of those who had been sealed were no less, but they were of lesser ranks in the government and military, so the hope was that they’d think they’d avoided international charges.

So there you had it. The SEALs going after the sealed. And each operation had to be done quietly so as not to alert the others. In the best possible case, the individual had to simply vanish without any trace until he showed up at The Hague for prosecution.

Before we left for Bosnia, we had decided to go in lean and mean, keeping our equipment needs to a safe minimum. We took our SIG Sauer 226s as our sidearms. For our sniper weapons most of us—because SEALs have a vast array of weapons to choose from—went with M4s.

The choice of the M4 assault rifle as our basic weapon system was based on some hard-earned knowledge: in Somalia, where we’d been a few years before, SEALs often carried the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. The MP5 is an excellent weapon for interior fighting. Light and highly accurate, it’s got great accuracy up to fifty yards. American SWAT teams use them all the time. But in Somalia the fighting wasn’t contained to single buildings or interiors. The battle quickly spilled out to the street and was fought building to building. The opposition had AK-47s, which have an effective range of a little less than four hundred yards, giving the enemy a significant advantage: they could hit our guys while being out of the range of our MP5s. So with the exception of the “grab and bag” men, we were going in with M4s with advanced optics.

When an assault team touches down in or near hostile territory, chances are pretty good it’s going to execute a mission fairly soon. The logistics of supplying berthing and food while maintaining operational security is a tough task even for a few days. The more complex the operation, the more support was required in terms of communications requirements and additional personnel. With every additional warm body and piece of equipment, the greater the logistics footprint. What I was witnessing on what would become a series of PIFWC operations is the only thing that was “light” was the actual force conducting abduction. It was the beginning of the trend that has only grown in recent years. In order to reduce operational risk, the headquarters requires more supporting assets in the form of communications, intelligence, and command and control that in turn require more logistics support. It is the rise of bureaucracy similar to what has occurred in every branch and division of government. Added requirements and red tape have almost always ensured that the smallest part of force is the part that actually conducts the mission or provides the actual service. In this case, advances in communications and technology could enable senior officials sitting in stateside command centers real-time information. Once unleashed, the rise of “armchair” quarterbacks was unstoppable. Well-thought-out tactical plans by experienced ground force commanders were modified by desk jockeys and political appointees. Even the most simple of operations often became a labyrinth of approvals and authorizations. The result was a loss of battlefield momentum and failures to quickly capitalize on emerging opportunities. In short, the battlefield was no longer being controlled by those who had the most at risk.

Meanwhile, back in Virginia the team continued planning for almost every contingency and conducted the training to master any option. Mock-ups of buildings were built, and even airborne assault tactics were devised should we have to take the target in a vehicle. We even went to the extent of deploying to Fort Campbell with the army’s Special Operations aviation wing, to experiment with techniques to stop a moving vehicle. We started with the idea of two snipers sitting on the mounted platforms on the side of MH-6 helicopters firing armor-piercing rounds into the engine block. We had purchased older vehicles and used the old brick-on-the-gas-pedal trick as a predecessor to today’s unmanned technology. The steering wheel was secured, and a line was tied to a mechanism that when pulled would drop the brick on the gas pedal and off the car would go speeding across the firing range. No one was really sure what exactly happened when the MH-60 took chase and caught up to the car. After the cloud of dust and debris settled, the helicopter lay on its side and the car sat idling next to it. Miraculously, everyone walked away except for the red-faced commander of the squadron, who was running toward us. Lesson learned: helicopters are vulnerable.

I should also mention while the intelligence-gathering operations were in full swing in support of the Bosnian operations, all teams were still required to keep up the critical skills in other potential tasks such as combat diving and free-fall parachute operations. We were the nation’s 911 force, and we had to be ready for any threat anywhere in the world.

For free-fall parachute training, the team would frequently train in Arizona where the weather was consistently sunny and the air traffic was light enough to jump out at high altitudes. The last thing you needed to worry about when jumping out of an aircraft at night, carrying equipment while at high altitudes, was hitting a plane on the way down.

My team had decided that while training out in the desert, we would request to jump out at thirty-three thousand feet and go for the world record for team high-altitude parachute jump. Why not? To our surprise we were approved for the airspace and the air force C-141 crew agreed. We finished our required night training jumps at eighteen thousand feet and twenty-four thousand feet and prepared for the record. The altitude would require hours of prebreathing oxygen to mitigate passing out before you had a chance to pull your rip cord.

As we were loading the bus to go out to the plane, I got a call and was told there was an emergency at home. Hey, I love the thought of being with the team for the big jump, but I love my family more. Konrad, my youngest son, was in the hospital, and I could catch the next commercial flight out in a few hours if I hustled, so I waved good-bye to the C-141 and made the flight home. It turned out that my two young sons were playing in the house on the base while Lola was making breakfast. Konrad was still in a walker with rollers, and Wolf was chasing him down the halls. Somehow a door was slammed with Konrad’s finger in the jamb. Lola heard a yelp and peered down the hall to see Konrad squirting blood like a lawn sprinkler. At the same moment the doorbell rang. Lola picked up Konrad and answered the door to find another SEAL officer stopping by to deliver a package. Together they calmly scraped the finger off the doorjamb, placed it in ice, loaded the car, and were off to the hospital in less than five minutes. The mission was accomplished with such minimum time on target that the finger was able to be reattached. I arrived later that night to find the whole family back at the table. Yet another example of how tough navy spouses are. This is one area of being a SEAL that is often overlooked. SEALs are older than many forces within the military. In fact, the average age of a SEAL candidate is twenty-three. As a result, by the time a SEAL qualifies and successfully passes the screening for the most elite assignments he is in his early thirties. Many are not only warriors but husbands and fathers.

The team made the jump, and when they arrived back to the command the word had come down from headquarters that we had been given the green light for key leaders to move forward. This was a good sign and meant that a few of us would go forward on our mission to grab Simić and Todorovic, verify that all the pieces were in place, and then move the team in to conduct the mission. The less time the team has to spend on the ground, the better. It is always better to get in, get the job done, and get out. Before getting on the plane, I briefed the team on the updates on who our targets were and the likely plan of attack. Our preparations were, as always, thorough: we had made ourselves familiar with the various vehicles we might encounter and different scenarios and contingencies of almost every kind. Though we were ready, we knew we’d be doing our own final recon and intelligence operations to solidify and confirm our plans. Intelligence guys are great, but if you can it’s better to see the field with your own eyes before committing the force. We divided our mission into phases and went over the top three things that could go wrong with each phase, strategizing how we’d handle any contingencies.

We also rehearsed our movements to the point where our actions would be near automatic. In general, we went through mock-ups of the various settings we anticipated for our mission: we were going to rely on vehicles and associated settings—garages, parking decks, places like that—and we wanted to be comfortable operating in the spaces our intelligence and reconnaissance had confirmed we’d be working in.

Finally, we set up our communications architecture and confirmed we would have good communications throughout the mission and that our supporting assets would be available to support us.

We traveled lean and mean because we knew that while the more equipment and personnel we brought meant the fewer operational risks we’d face, it also meant the larger the signature and more complex the supporting logistics would be and the more opportunities we’d offer prying eyes to compromise our operation security. The bottom line is, if our targets got wind of our being there, they would likely go underground. We struck a balance between required equipment and desired equipment, and if we didn’t require it for this mission we did without.

As the commander, I was responsible for ensuring all of this was in place and ensuring the team was properly trained and equipped. I also had to confirm that the contingency plans we had designed were viable and that the additional resources were in place should we need to call on them. I also had to convince the chain of command that the value of the mission was worth the risk. It was an easy sell. Letting these guys off the hook would serve to give notice to every thug in every future conflict that actions against humanity would be forgotten.

I said good-bye to the rest of the team and departed for a safe house outside of Tuzla with the rest of the leadership element. We kept a low profile, as the presence of heavily armed operators with specialized equipment would have put our targets on high alert and made snatching them much riskier, and we wanted our time in Tuzla before the mission to be as short as possible.

Serbian forces and those paid informants who would provide information for a dime were watching the airports, tracking the cargo that was unloaded at the airfield on base. Bringing in a number of “specialists” would have been a tip-off, alerting high-value targets to either go into hiding or beef up their security. In 1997, a team of British Special Air Service commandos had a mission compromised when a PIFWC was tipped off regarding their activities and surrounded himself with guards; we were not going to let that happen to us.

We conducted our final reconnaissance of the targets and confirmed the plan once again. The final Concept of Operations Brief was delivered and sent to the various senior officials for approval and comment. What was perhaps the most challenging was the number of flag officers and commands involved in the approval process. At the bottom of the food chain was my team, who was actually going to do the mission and take all the risk. Within the theater itself, there was the commander of all the tactical units, the commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and his boss, the commander of Stabilization Force. Then there was the administrative chain of command back in the States to include Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the way up to the Secretary of Defense and the National Command Authority (NCA). Counting the nonmilitary units and other special support units, I was told that the number of personnel supporting our handful of “meat eaters” numbered in the thousands. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy and the accompanying risk-adverse environment has not gotten better over time. The growth within the Department of Defense reflects this trend. Today there are more than 800,000 Department of Defense civilians and somewhere between 1.2 and 1.6 million contractors. There are so many agencies and flag level commands within the Department of Defense that keeping up with a current organizational chart requires, of course, its own division. Despite the layers of bureaucracy and oversight, the PIFWC operations were successful. The team was able to conduct R&S operations and locate our assigned targets. Patterns were revealed, rehearsals were completed, and, ultimately, missions were executed. Careful consideration of possible civilian collateral damage was evaluated and contingency plans put into place.

Standard military vehicles had to be replaced by civilian vehicles to reduce signature. This required the purchasing, licensing, and upgrading of the vehicles for special use. In our case, we used converted VW vans that blended in well but could also hold a small force of SEALs inside. Hundreds of hours of surveillance was conducted until the vehicles did not get a second glance within the small villages. At the time, many of the cars in Bosnia were stolen. There was a whole auto-theft mafia bringing vehicles into the Balkans. Lawlessness was more a rule than an exception. At one point, there was an estimated thirty thousand stolen cars on the roads of Bosnia-Herzegovina and another twenty-five thousand in Kosovo, and those figures were probably low.

Once the decision to execute the mission was made, the operations were tracked from start to finish. An execution checklist was developed and followed to provide a play-by-play. The execution checklist provided all forces a sequential activities map of the operation. Each significant action, such as the departure of a force from home base, is given a code word and an estimated time of completion. When the force completes the task or event, they call in the code word to inform the headquarters and others that the event has been completed so that the mission’s progress can be tracked. In the early years of Special Operations, there were just a few code words of major milestones such as force insertion, arrival of the target, actions against the target complete, and force extracted. Like most military operations over time, the execution checklist has evolved into a complex management tool driven by the ability of the headquarters to track and control operations from afar. The first SEAL team operation I did had fewer than ten code words; the last had more than three thousand line items. The execution checklist for the Bosnian PIFWC operations was a small book. There was no doubt, however, that if I needed to talk to somebody I could. The problem was, every flag in the country could talk to me too. There was never a moment where I was not in contact with multiple superiors who were following the operations, as well as the air assets and the medevac. If this sounds a bit like overkill, it was. Taken in the context of Special Operations still recovering from the stinging of the chaos in Somalia portrayed in the book and movie Black Hawk Down, I understood. Mitigate the risk and score a win. Coupled with increased innovation and technical advances in communications, the administration and the senior military commanders realized that they not only had the capability to monitor operations, but they now had the tools to actually remotely control ground operations. Small Tactical Operations Centers (TOCs) manned by a handful of staff became Joint Operations Centers (JOC) and eventually grew to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Forces (CJSOTF) with hundreds of staff and support. The point is that most of the military operations could have been executed with a smaller headquarters element, limited supporting assets, and a small and well-trained group of warriors. This is not to say that we should ever go into battle with a smaller force than what is needed to succeed, but supporting a large headquarters and support bureaucracy comes at a cost.

Back to the vans. One might be surprised to know that the vans themselves weren’t armored. We had to be very conscious about weight. Even though we’d beefed up the VW engines, the vans were never going to be fast getaway vehicles. The priority was more on other functions. If we had to get away in a hurry, the vans were accompanied by escort sedans that were much faster and had drivers trained in the art of blocking traffic and removing other threats. In an emergency we could pile into the sedans and scram.

So for protection, instead of armor we used bulletproof blankets. For this operation we weren’t anticipating being in a firefight, but if we were we could at least have some protection. An enemy could still shoot through the van’s body, but the blankets were better than nothing.

Our highest-value target in Samac was the dirtbag Blagoje Simić, the aforementioned town’s mayor. He, his wife, and his two kids lived in an L-shaped apartment complex with a parking lot next to it. Long before we tried to snatch him we began parking one of our yellow vans in the lot: we wanted people to get used to it being there. After a while, we figured it would effectively be a normal part of the parking lot.

But we were also going after Police Chief Stevan Todorovic, and he was the reason for the second van. We knew that if we snatched one target, the word would pass quickly and would jeopardize the chances of grabbing the second. Up to this point, the United States had not broadcast our intent of bringing PIFWCs to justice. Grabbing the first one would make the others nervous and likely lead to them changing their patterns. We decided to try to take them both at the same time. I was with the crew assigned to take Simić, and the simultaneous operations complicated the task, so timing would have to be impeccable at the site where we would take the Police Chief Todorovic.

Parking our van in Simić’s lot gave us the additional benefit of tracking his comings and goings. We used the van’s cameras to monitor him, with the images captured on VCR tapes, as digital imaging was still in its infancy. Of course, we were cutting edge then: not long before, surveillance was done with 16mm movie cameras or 35mm still cameras, and the film had to be developed on-site, a function that added a level of gear needed by special ops.

Speaking of film, I have a story that illustrates a theme I’m going to come back to: the idea that operations are best coordinated, and tactical decisions are best made, by forces on the ground and not by those drinking coffee in some remote office.

Reports came down that the theater commander along with senior military and intelligence officials were watching one of the many surveillance films when a dog ran across the parking lot where Blagoje Simić lived.

The general stopped the film and asked, “Is that dog neutered or not?” Laughter broke out, but as it turns out, he wasn’t kidding. He proceeded to launch into a dissertation about how unneutered dogs have better sensory capabilities than neutered dogs. The reason that it was important, he said, is because we had people in the surveillance vans and a dog might smell them and go over to the vans, thereby compromising our operatives’ position. Fair enough.

A senior Special Operations general muttered outside of the previous general’s earshot, “He might be able to smell them … and then again a beanstalk might grow out of his ass too.” Although the comment was true, it did not matter. We now had a new mission before we could launch: determine whether the dog in question had balls or not.

As ridiculous as the task was, it was a requirement that had to be answered before we got the green light to conduct the mission. In effect, taking out two of the worst war criminals in the entire Bosnian conflict came down to a dog’s balls. The easiest thing to do was just go out and conduct a shoot-and-recover operation of the dog in question. Now, if we had done that where we were doing our stakeouts, a number of things might have happened, none of which would have been good for the mission. We might have blown our cover, the dog we were aiming at might be injured without being killed and attract a lot of attention, we might have had to leave our station to look for the dog … and even if we did shoot a few dogs around the van, there were always going to be more dogs. We discussed the problem set with our Operational Support Team and the OGA experts.

The team conducted a complete mission analysis to include identifying similar sized villages, ethnic preferences, and even statistical comparisons of neutered versus unneutered dogs. At the end of the day, it was decided that we would conduct dog comparison operations in a nearby village to determine a statistical probability. The team should have gotten a medal just for dog-catcher duties alone. After expending untold resources, they gave a detailed analysis and conclusion that the probability of the dog being neutered was low to none. Case solved. We diligently forwarded the full report, including pictures, up the chain of command. I would have liked to have been the one to brief the theater commander on the results.

I’m not going to say that this little side excursion had no effect. It did. It slowed down the operation because we were out hunting dogs rather than war criminals.

This sort of thing happens more frequently in the military than one would think. A few years later when I was in Iraq, I got a call from the senior flag intelligence officer who had a “hot” priority tasking. She had set herself up in a little intelligence factory called Camp Victory in Saddam’s palace in Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). The typical role of army intelligence is to provide analysis and intelligence support based on the operational commander’s requirements. Using data derived from both signal and human intelligence sources, the intelligence professionals collect, analyze, and disseminate the collection cycle to those who request it.

But she had higher aspirations and wanted to be the commander and act on potential targets herself. When I met her at Camp Victory I could not help being amazed at the rows and rows of desks filled by uniformed support staff. Collectively, I am sure they outnumbered the active insurgents. She handed me some maps and satellite images and said, “We have a hot lead on a priority target. I want you to do a recon on this STAT. We believe it’s a military training site and housing for anti-coalition forces, and we’re going to hit it. I want you to take a reconnaissance team in there and report back to me.” Since she had three stars and I had three stripes, I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and returned to the FOB.

She was pushing for an AC-130 attack. Now, that’s some pretty serious air-to-ground firepower. The AC-130 carries a 105mm howitzer and a 20mm cannon. It’s like having an entire war chest on a single set of wings. You don’t bring it out for a milk run.

I took her material back to our intelligence guys. When I put the map she’d given me up on an overhead projector, a sergeant major who’d been on the ground for a while took one look and started laughing.

“You know what that is?” he asked. “That’s Abu Ghraib. That’s our facility.” I called her back and let her know. She never asked me to come over again.

Back to Bosnia. We continued our surveillance, uninterrupted by dogs, neutered or otherwise. By February 1998, we were ready to move against Simić and Todorovic. We’d done our research, so we knew of at least one potential complication. The apartment complex the mayor lived in had a glass atrium on the first floor that he walked through every day. The glass allowed him to see the parking lot, and of course if we were out of position, or if we had any sort of giveaway, he’d know immediately we were there.

Through our surveillance, we learned of another complication: Samac’s chief of police lived in the same apartment complex. He would leave his apartment and come down the stairs every morning between 7:00 and 7:15—armed of course. Our target—Mayor Simić—would usually leave half an hour or so later.

Unfortunately, we were only interested in Simić. I say “unfortunately” because reading the reports revealed numerous persons sponsoring and doing soul-wrenching evil, persistent perpetrators of heinous acts that no reasonable human being with power to prevent would stand by and simply allow. But you can’t do everything at once, however much you’d like to. When we finally made our move against Simić, we were going to have to be sure the police chief had already left. We didn’t want to have to shoot him. And, of course, we didn’t want Simić’s children to be with him if we could avoid it.

We planned our snatching operation with several factors in mind. One was that Mayor Simić was fairly heavy, and another was that he was rarely armed. We knew he wasn’t going to try to shoot his way out of a kidnapping, and we also knew that we could easily outrun him if he tried to flee. The plan was to position the van about twenty yards from him, open the door, and then sprint to him and scoop him up, hoping that shock would prevent him from doing much.

The building layout at the other site made that operation trickier. Chief Todorovic lived in a Y-shaped high-rise apartment complex right at the intersection of two major streets, both of which had to be covered. The good news—for us, at least—was that Todorovic parked his car in the area every day. The bad news was that he was known to be armed, which meant that the operation had to be extremely fast, as we did not want a gunfight in the streets.

Todorovic’s pattern of parking in the same place every day was his undoing. On the night before we were to take both men, we had several vehicles in his neighborhood. We waited until the owner of one of the cars next to Todorovic’s moved out, and then we drove a “bookmark” car—a sedan—into the spot, so we could control access next to Todorovic’s vehicle.

On the morning of the operation, we moved the bookmark car out and our van in. The van was positioned so its side door was opposite the driver’s side of Todorovic’s car. We had a small assault team waiting in the van.

Todorovic traveled with his family—his wife and child—and there was no way around taking him in front of them. But we wanted them to be out of harm’s way when we took him. Every day he would open the door for them, get them in the car, and then walk over to the driver’s side and let himself in.

On the morning of Todorovic’s snatching, we planned to wait until he had put his family inside the car and crossed over to the driver’s side. When he was focused on inserting his keys, we would open the van door and pull him inside.

We were watching the video monitors from the surveillance van. Since we had support of satellites and our people on the perimeter, we had a good idea what and who was in the vicinity. We could see whether approaching vehicles might give cover to our men. The goal was to pull off a snatch that would be invisible to civilians. If need be, we could give the “no-go” code based on whether there was any threat around or approaching the area of operation.

There wasn’t. As Todorovic stood fumbling with his keys, the team opened the door to the van. He attempted to run but didn’t make it more than a few steps before being thrown to the ground and quickly packed into the van. The operation that took more than a year to plan was over in a matter of seconds. Our other vehicles stationed in the area pulled out and escorted the team out of town, where it was met by a helicopter that flew Todorovic to the base in Tuzla. He was on an air-plane to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a United Nations–run court in The Hague, the Netherlands, within hours.

Back at Mayor Simić’s apartment, we ran into a roadblock. We knew that once one of our targets was grabbed, we had to take the other fast, because calls would go out to all high-level potential targets and they’d immediately take additional security precautions. We saw the police chief come down … and then nothing. We waited for Mayor Simić, but he didn’t come down. He might have been tipped off, he might have been sick, or there might have been a change in his routine.

Ultimately, the reason doesn’t matter. What was important was that once we took Todorovic, there would be additional Bosnian eyes around Simić’s apartment, and we couldn’t risk having our cover blown. We waited for about fifteen minutes after Todorovic was taken and then quietly left and returned to Tuzla.

Our mission had been a great success. We had grabbed one high-level target, and none of our operatives had been compromised. We knew we had the option of returning once things calmed down, because our cover hadn’t been blown. As it happened, we didn’t have to go back for Simić: he later turned himself in to the ICTY in 2001. He was released in 2011.

We waited in theater to see whether there were any follow-up missions we could run. We were there on a standby basis, and then our rotation was over. Just another three months at the office. Oh, and one more note: Todorovic served two-thirds of a ten-year sentence for war crimes including torture and denial of equal rights for non-Serbian citizens, was released, and fatally shot himself in 2006.

So be it.