The first night home, I took Cairo to my house for a celebratory steak dinner. More filet mignon—one slab for me, one for him. He spent the night at my place, hogging the bed, sleeping like a baby. The next day, when I brought him back to the kennel, I received a rather stern rebuke. The rule regarding working dogs remained in place: they were not allowed to go home with their handlers under any circumstances. I knew this. I also did not care.
“Come on, man,” I said. “It’s a special circumstance.”
“No, Will, really. You can’t do this anymore.”
“But we just killed bin Laden!”
“Understood. Great job. You still can’t take him home.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously.”
I wouldn’t say I got in trouble for that one, but it was certainly made clear to me that next time … well, there had better not be a next time. Hey, look, I get it. I understood the policy, and I knew it was coming from a place of logic and practicality. I’d been on enough deployments and had worked with dogs long enough to see what they could to a human being under the right—or wrong—circumstances.
So after that night, I didn’t push my luck. I was supposed to be separating from Cairo, anyway. I tried to get on with my life, which mainly meant getting on with work. As much as I missed Cairo, I was excited about the opportunity to do something different.
I made a point of staying in touch with him, visiting the kennel roughly once a week as long as neither one of us was away on a training trip, and he always seemed happy to see me. We’d play fetch for a little while, I’d take him for a walk—sometimes I’d just grab him and leave and we’d hang out for a few hours. Then we’d go our separate ways. I didn’t press anyone about taking him home, in part because the new master chief in charge of the kennel was, to put it mildly, a difficult personality. My best guess is that they had assigned him the kennel job because he had trouble getting along with people; maybe, they figured, he’d do better with animals. And it wasn’t like there was a lot of competition for the job.
The kennel manager and I did not get along, but since I was no longer a handler, we didn’t have to spend much time together, and I tried to keep a respectful distance even when I stopped by to play with Cairo. One day, a couple of months after the bin Laden mission, I came home from a training trip and drove over to the kennel. Cairo bounced into my arms, tried to dance with me as always, and generally seemed happy and healthy. I knew Cairo was getting plenty of high-quality training and care in case he was ever needed on deployment. So far, that hadn’t happened.
As I gave Cairo a hug and ran my hands along his back and legs, I felt a lump. And then another lump. And a third.
“Whoa, boy? What’s going on there?” I said as I rolled one of the lumps between my fingers. I’m no veterinarian, but I’d been around dogs long enough to know the lumps were not necessarily cause for concern. In all likelihood, they were merely benign cysts … fatty deposits. Dogs get those all the time. Then again, maybe it was a sign of something more serious, so I called the vet and got permission to bring Cairo in for an examination. The doc looked him over and determined the lumps to be nothing more than fluid-filled cysts. They would cause no long-term debilitation, and they were not a precursor to cancer; however, they did have to be drained. He lanced the cysts, cleaned up the wounds, and applied bandages. Cairo took all of this with his usual good spirits.
“He’ll be fine,” the doc said afterward. “Just take him home with you tonight and keep an eye on him.”
Uh-oh …
It made sense. Like humans, dogs have a tendency to find surgical wounds sensitive and irritating. Unlike humans, dogs do not understand that they should not mess with their wounds, regardless of how minimal they might be. At the kennel, Cairo would be one of a dozen dogs. It would be easy for him to start scratching or biting his wounds without anyone noticing. Surely, the kennel manager would agree with the doc’s assessment.
Then again, maybe not.
“No,” the manager said. “He does not leave the kennel.”
As I said, the kennel manager was also a SEAL master chief, so he outranked me. It wasn’t like I could argue with him. Instead, I called my master chief and explained what the doctor had said: that it was not advisable for Cairo to return to the kennel that night. I asked him to call the kennel manager. The two of them could thrash it out—master chief to master chief.
The master chief in charge of the kennel was not persuaded. Maybe it was because he didn’t like me; maybe he felt like his authority was being threatened; or maybe he was just a dick. Regardless, despite knowing that the doc felt it was preferable for Cairo to be at home with me, being closely watched, the kennel manager made his decision.
“Bring him back.”
I did as I was instructed. Cairo got through the night just fine and healed quickly, but that pretty much soured my relationship with the kennel manager for good. I’d still stop by once a week when I was in town. Sometimes, especially on holidays, I’d sneak in some food for Cairo. I talked with Angelo all the time and knew my dog was in good hands.
Meanwhile, my training was going well. As much as I missed Cairo, I’ll admit that it was kind of liberating to not be tethered to a dog all day, every day. I was in a good frame of mind, sharpening my skills as an assaulter, and looking forward to the next deployment.
And then the Extortion went down.
It happened very early on the morning of August 6, 2011. A U.S. Army Chinook bearing the code name Extortion 17 had just entered Afghanistan’s Tangi Valley. There were thirty-eight personnel aboard the Extortion, including a SEAL contingent of seventeen men and one military working dog, thirteen additional U.S. soldiers, seven members of an Afghan fighting troop, and one interpreter. The Extortion 17 had been called in as an Initial Reaction Force (IRF) in support of a strike force that had flown into the valley aboard a sister Chinook known as Extortion 16.
The strike force, comprised mainly of fighters from the 75th Ranger Regiment, had been inserted into the central portion of the Tangi on a mission to track down a Taliban leader named Qari Tahir. In the aftermath of a firefight, the Extortion 17 IRF was dispatched to support the mission. As the Chinook descended to an altitude of fewer than three hundred feet over the valley floor, the fighters prepared to land and exit. Under the cover of night, they did not see a pair of insurgents hiding in the tall grass below, each of them armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
To anyone who has experienced combat duty in Afghanistan or Iraq, RPGs are the stuff of nightmares. It may look like a comical mismatch—a guy in a man dress crouched in the weeds, with a six-foot tube resting on his shoulder, taking aim at a massive Chinook hovering a hundred feet or more in the sky overhead. But it is not a mismatch. While most RPGs do not find their mark, a few invariably do. And the results are often devastating.
So it was with Extortion 17 as an RPG tore into the Chinook’s rotor blade, creating an explosion that killed everyone on board.
The Extortion disaster was the deadliest incident in the history of U.S. Special Operations, which meant that it was also the deadliest incident in SEAL history. It was also the largest number of American casualties created by a single event in the long history of the Afghanistan conflict.
It’s no overstatement to say that the Extortion disaster rocked Naval Special Warfare. We all knew the risk of serving in combat, and we’d all lost close friends. It comes with the territory. But to lose so many good people—so many brothers—in a single night … to a single RPG …
It was overwhelming.
Everyone handles grief in their own way. If you’re a soldier—and I suppose this is especially true of anyone who has served in Special Operations—you just swallow it back and get on with life; you pretend it doesn’t affect you, because that’s what is expected. I went to a bunch of funerals after the Extortion went down, cried with some of my teammates … and then went back to work. I’d lost friends before; this was no different. The wounds would heal.
But a strange thing happened. They didn’t heal. Not right away. They festered and kept me up at night. I’d sit alone in the living room, watching TV for hours on end. I’d find myself waking in the dark at 3:00 a.m., sweating, panicky, unable to fall back to sleep. To counter the insomnia and sleep deprivation, I turned to a tried-and-true formula: alcohol. A little at first, and then a lot.
I would never try to imply that I’d been squeaky clean when it came to social drinking. The truth is, SEALs, when not on deployment or in the middle of a heavy training trip, can party hard. I liked going out with the guys, having a good time, building camaraderie. It was part of the brotherhood, and I won’t deny it or make excuses for it. I enjoyed it. We all did.
But I’m not talking about that kind of drinking. I’m talking about coming home from work and immediately cracking open a beer, all by yourself. And then another one. And another. And then eventually the evening grows late and you switch to something harder, and the hours go on and on, and eventually you wake up the next morning, on the couch or in a chair, with your head pounding and your stomach churning.
Every day.
The fact that a significant number of American military personnel—particularly those who see combat duty—suffer from post-traumatic stress, combined with or exacerbated by traumatic brain injuries, is no longer much of a secret. Nor is their tendency to self-medicate. As long as you’re still wearing the uniform, options are limited. If you fail a drug test, your career can end quickly. (An exception is Ambien, the use of which is so accepted in the treatment of jet lag and insomnia that it can and does lead to abuse.) But no one tests for alcohol; drinking is just part of the culture. It’s not a problem … until it is.
That’s how I dealt with the Extortion disaster. That’s how I dealt with grief. It was like a slow burn rather than an explosion. Eventually, the damage was noticeable. For one thing, my hair began falling out. Not like a few strands but giant clumps like I was going through chemo. I had thick hair in some places, bald patches in others. This was not a hereditary thing; it was much weirder and more sinister. Next, my fingernails began cracking and falling out. Not just the tips, either—entire nails. I didn’t know what was going on. I had always been in such great physical shape and so happy-go-lucky and confident. Now?
I was falling apart.
My deteriorating appearance, combined with a sudden inability to do my job as well I had done it in the past, led to an intervention of sorts. I’d been late for work a few times, and I reeked of booze early in the morning and was obviously hungover. There is a line you don’t cross in Special Operations, and that line is the one separating those who can do their jobs, under any circumstances, from those who cannot. I was getting dangerously close to that line. Thankfully, I was lucky to have some good friends who stepped in and called me on my bullshit from a place of love and concern.
“Cheese, this isn’t like you,” one of them said one day. “You need to get some help.”
I didn’t put up much resistance. I loved these guys; the look of disappointment I would see on their faces—Come on, man; get your shit together—was almost too much to bear. I knew I had problems, and if I didn’t address those problems, I was going to lose my career, my health … everything.
I agreed to enter an outpatient program to address not just my drinking but the reasons behind it. Honestly, it wasn’t all that complicated to me—Just stop drinking yourself to sleep every night, you idiot!—but obviously my own approach wasn’t working out very well. So I worked the program, cleaned up my act, and thirty days later went back to my team. Physically, I felt better, although it took a while for my hair and fingernails to grown back. The hair loss, they said, was stress-induced alopecia. The fingernails? I don’t know what they call that, but it also was triggered by stress.
Returning to active duty wasn’t exactly going to cut down on the stress in my life, but it did make me happy. I needed to get back to work with my teammates, and now that I had stopped drinking and gotten my head on straight, I was looking forward to the next deployment. Just get back out there, I figured, and everything will be fine. Kill a few bad guys and all will be right with the world, or at least my little corner of it.