It was 1996 and I was stationed in San Diego. I had just finished my fourth peacetime deployment with SEAL Team 3. I had been to multiple locations in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast and Southwest Asia, including the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Egypt, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, and Guam.
Deployments are hard on everyone, including our families. We work six, often seven days a week, sixteen hours a day in preparation to move men and equipment around the globe. We’re away for six months only to return for a few weeks, unpack, do laundry, and then we leave to do it all over again. I had not been home much up till this point. I averaged three hundred to three hundred twenty-five days a year on the road while with SEAL Team 3. I was constantly having to get reacquainted with my own family after every long trip. My oldest daughter had been born before my first deployment. I did three more. I missed seeing my daughter’s first steps and her first everything. I missed every holiday and birthday. I wanted more time with the ones I loved.
After my fourth deployment, I requested and received orders to report to BUD/S as an instructor. The BUD/S instructor assignment would have kept me home in California with my family for three whole years.
While my new orders were being processed, I was offered another option: I could try out for the Leap Frogs, the Navy’s demonstration skydiving team. At that point, I had only logged thirty-five jumps. I showed up at the jump site with about fifteen other guys, all of them from different SEAL teams from either coast. Once we were all gathered and ready, we did a series of jumps, which proved to me that I had no idea what I was doing when it came to demonstration parachuting. It was fun to get the free training jumps using the Leap Frogs’ “cool guy parachutes,” but I was certain that I would not be selected for the team and would end up being a BUD/S instructor. The team trainer had recognized my lack of grace in the sky, but he also must have seen my hidden potential as a skydiver. He ended up picking me along with five or six other guys for the team. I’ll never forget his response to my disbelief at being selected: “If I had enough bananas, I could teach a monkey to fall out of a plane.” I think he meant it as a compliment.
He had over five thousand jumps at the time and told me about how even he’d had some trouble flying his first sixty or seventy jumps. Leap Frog parachute training has advanced since that old Frog had been shown how to put on a parachute and jump into the sky. The Leap Frogs regularly pushed the limits of skydiving and parachuting technology. We were innovators in canopy relative work (CRW) maneuvers and helped create and perfect some of the tricks and equipment used by sport skydivers today. Of all the jobs I’ve had as a SEAL, Leap Frogs was the most fun and beat me up the most. In 1996, we were a fifteen-man team of SEAL operators. Today, the team is open to SEALs, Special Warfare Combatant-Craft (SWCC) crewmen, and basically anyone in the Navy who is military free-fall qualified.
The whole “jumping out of a plane” thing is not the dangerous part of skydiving—opening the parachute and returning to earth safely, that’s where things can get complicated. When you’re free-falling to earth, you are basically an aircraft subject to all the same conditions as any other aircraft—pressure changes, turbulence, and of course gravity. Moving your body into the proper arch position while falling at high speeds takes extensive training, but once you get comfortable and relax, it’s just like riding a bike—you just do it.
There are two different ways to fall out of an aircraft: static line or free fall. A static line jump is when you are attached to a static line while you exit the plane and the connected chute is automatically deployed when pulled by the line attached. I’ve accumulated a total of seventy-eight static line jumps. A free-fall jump is exactly that: you free-fall out of some type of airborne vehicle—a plane, a glider, a helicopter, even a hot air balloon—and you pull the chute yourself. Static line jumps remove some of the chute deployment risk; however, there is always the possibility of a “jumper-in-tow” incident, which happens when a static line does not pull the parachute off the jumper’s back, resulting in a jumper being towed behind the aircraft. This is a horrifying scene, in which the jumper is tangled up outside the aircraft and is typically being slammed against the side of the plane as the crew desperately works to pull the jumper back in. Cutting the static line would release the jumper, but he would have to deploy his reserve parachute; however, the jumper may have lost consciousness from being slammed against the side of the plane. If the jumper can’t get free, the pilot has to land the plane with the jumper attached.
I did meet a person who survived a jumper-in-tow event where the plane landed with him attached to the outside. I’m grateful that I never experienced that kind of malfunction; however, I had a few others that were scary enough. The Leap Frogs were a Free Fall and Canopy Relative Work team. My first two cutaways happened jumping over Key West, Florida, and they were violent. A main chute cutaway is exactly what it sounds like: you pull a handle and release your main parachute from your body. Once that’s gone, all you have is your reserve chute. On my first-ever cutaway, we all got out of the plane clean and were building a stack—a vertical, chimney-like formation—in a fifty-mile-per-hour gust with 180-degree wind shear. We were in a seven-man stack doing rotations off the top to the bottom when we hit a terrible wind shear. The guy above me got his feet stuck in my risers; we twisted up and I got tangled in the chutes. These wind shears turned out to be pretty common at altitude in Key West. It felt and looked like two enormous hands compressed the top parachute all the way to the bottom one. The seven-man stack quickly turned into a falling mess of partially inflated parachutes, all going in multiple directions. It was a snarled mess; a couple of guys got shot out of the scrum and their parachutes reinflated. While we were all falling toward earth, another guy and I had to crawl out from under canopies to clear air space in order to cut away. I can’t say exactly how fast we were falling, as there were fully and partially inflated parachutes, but even slowly falling out of the sky can be deadly.
I was still recovering from the terror of my first cutaway when my second happened a few days later. Me and another guy got tangled up and caught in a helicopter spin. The deployment bag retraction system on the tops of our parachutes had somehow gotten tangled together. We were twirling around opposite each other, falling. He was looking directly at me and I at him, and we yelled back and forth at each other, “CUT AWAY!” “NO! YOU CUT AWAY!” Like the world’s most high-stakes game of rock-paper-scissors, he won and I cut away. I distinctly recall time slowing down during these episodes, exactly like what I would experience in that small room in Iraq years later.
It was after that second cutaway the guys on my team gave me the nickname “Cut-Away-A-Day.” I now have just over twenty-three hundred jumps with a total of eight cutaways; I know guys with over five thousand jumps who don’t have any. I guess I’m just lucky.
I had two very embarrassing landings. The first one happened in San Diego. The landing zone was a pier, and all the other guys nailed theirs. I was coming in on my final approach and was running out of pier, so I hooked hard at the last minute and landed in the water beside the pier. Everyone knew that it wasn’t planned, but at least only my pride was wounded. The second one was at a Little League opening day game. I was flying into the diamond headed toward the pitcher’s mound; everything looked great, until I got a little too close to the backstop. As I came in for the landing, my chute got all wrapped up on the top of the backstop. Nailed it—the backstop, not the landing. Everyone knew that that one wasn’t planned either.
A parachute works just like the wing of an aircraft. The performance and reaction of the parachute are subject to air turbulence, just like an aircraft. We would often jump into stadiums and between buildings where air currents would be blocked and air turbulence could get pretty nasty, or the wind would enter in one location and would swirl in circles around a stadium, creating a whirlpool effect. These jumps were extremely dangerous. Once, we jumped into a Medal of Honor event in South Carolina—our landing zone was located at the center of a group of buildings. I made it down to earth fine, but some of the other guys were coming in fast and hard, landing within twenty yards of me. Apparently, in that one location, the buildings cut off air flow, creating a dead spot. The buildings created wind eddies and bad turbulence. These obstacles can make parachutes fly like they have a mind of their own. One of our last teammates was on his final turn when he pulled his chute brakes to slow his descent, but instead of slowing down, he appeared to speed up. From the ground, I watched him pull on his toggles with no reaction from the parachute. He accelerated and then slid parallel to the earth across a road directly into a concrete street curb. I was ten feet away and watched both his legs snap like sticks. He should have been able to slow his forward air speed and land gracefully, but there was no response from the parachute other than to fly faster. His feet hit the curb at high speed; the impact crunched his legs and sent him into a violent somersault. He rolled a couple times and landed hard on his back. It was a gruesome injury; I will never forget the sound of his bones snapping on the cement. Everyone at the event saw it happen, and within thirty seconds he was surrounded by a dozen Medal of Honor recipients of every generation. Those guys sprang into action without a second thought, just like they were back on a mission. We got the guy to the nearest hospital, where he was put back together with pins and rods in both legs and feet. He ended up with thirty fractures in each leg from his knees down to his toes! A year to the day of the injury, that same guy was out jumping again like the injury had never happened.
My fellow teammates always seemed to be able to recover from all manner of injuries and traumas and get back in the saddle without any visible fear. I can’t speak for my fellow teammates, but I experienced plenty of fear, and I did what was necessary anyway. Surrounded by my fellow SEALs, I always had strong examples to follow.
There are other dangers when it comes to skydiving. Opening a parachute while falling to the ground at 120 miles per hour—terminal velocity—can result in what is known as a hard opening, which is a sudden hard jolt. There are other factors, including air speed, how the lines are stowed, and how the parachute is packed that can contribute to hard openings. If the parachute is not well organized when it’s packed, it’s not going to reorganize itself properly when it comes out.
I’ve had my fair share of hard openings. A “mild” one will clear your sinuses by knocking the snot out of you. I had a hard opening on a reserve parachute deployment that ripped my pectoral muscle from its connection point in my arm. I landed safely, then went and had both muscles surgically reattached to the bone.
According to the Navy, the primary mission of the Leap Frogs’ Navy Parachute Team is to help Naval Special Warfare recruit qualified candidates. The Navy has multiple recruitment programs that have a similar goal, but those often miss their mark; however, I can honestly say that the Leap Frogs promotions really worked. I know that I am personally responsible for at least one successful recruit, my half brother.
On a jump into Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, my younger half brother Sean—who I had not seen in nearly sixteen years—was in attendance. I loved jumping into stadiums—this one was tall, and the winds were high that day. We all flew backward into the stadium, from one end all the way to the opposite end. We nearly ran out of stadium, but we managed to put down “in bounds.”
After the Veterans Stadium performance, Sean came and found me. I didn’t recognize him—the last time we’d seen each other, I was twelve years old and being shipped off to Maine and he was asleep in his crib. He told me that after seeing me jump, he wanted to be a SEAL. I helped him get connected with a recruiter, and sure enough, a few years later, he graduated from BUD/S and earned his SEAL Trident. Coincidentally, he would end up in the same BUD/S class as Clarkie and a few others who were with me the night I was wounded.
I’m sure that there are countless stories of people who were inspired to become SEALs after seeing one of our performances or meeting members of our team. We were tasked to be ambassadors and would frequently do public appearances.
Missouri was by far my favorite jump location. We would jump into Kansas City Chiefs games, and the street around the stadium would be shut down for block parties. The team owner loved us—he had an apartment in the stadium and would invite us to watch the game while he fed us and opened the bar. One of my most memorable jumps was in St. Louis. This jump was one of those “don’t try this at home” types. We had been planning it for months, practicing nearly every day until we perfected the maneuvers. It was a clear day with only a few scattered clouds. We circled the target to get a closer look, and on our second pass we all jumped out in a tight group. The brown muddy waters of the Missouri River stretched as far as I could see, and beside the river on a big green patch of grass was St. Louis’s famous Gateway Arch. We were about a mile above it when we deployed our chutes, then got in a formation stacked on top of each other; we twisted and turned into position so that our feet connected. We built our canopies up into a vertical stack and were flying together attached as we approached the arch. We threaded the needle, flying through one side and out the other. It was cool looking down at my feet and seeing them connected to another parachute. I felt like we were one canopy rather than four; we had so much lift and control. The force and speed felt like flying a plane. On another jump into Kansas City, I flew past a big skyscraper with mirrored glass windows. As I passed by it, I saw my reflection in the windows floating down to earth. I literally shouted, “Hey, that’s me!” at it, I was so surprised.
After the jumps, I would go to the local high schools and talk with the kids for hours. I most enjoyed going to the schools in the tougher parts of town. There were times when I’d be in a gymnasium full of a few hundred kids and I was the only white person. They were mostly silent as I stood in front of them being introduced. These were kids who were growing up much like I had. I had no planned speech; I would just start talking. I would share with them that when I was about their age, I was fortunate enough after being expelled from high school to enter the Job Corps program, which helped me get out of a very violent and dysfunctional family situation and allowed me to earn my GED. Talking with the kids was strange, as it often felt like I was talking to the younger versions of myself. I would hang around after and meet privately with small groups of kids, who would share their own experiences and ask me personal questions about my life and career, which I would answer honestly.
People who have experienced trauma tend to attract others who have experienced similar trauma, and the kids who visited with me would share snippets of their struggles. While some may have considered me a role model, I viewed my story as a kind of exit strategy—a plan to get away from family dysfunction and violence, find a job, and be part of a new family. I wanted them to know that they could turn bad experiences into strengths. You can’t change what has happened to you, but our response to the trauma can be used to make us stronger, more equipped, more attractive, and more powerful.
I would do a skydive performance and then spend the next day with kids from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and others from the Shriners Hospital burn centers. I always felt privileged to meet these kids; they were real warriors in the fight every day. Meeting these kids and sharing time with them was one of the aspects of the job that I missed the most.