After three years with the Leap Frogs, I was assigned to a new SEAL team with a “Real Job.” While we refer to them as peacetime deployments, this is not altogether accurate. Somewhere in the world people are fighting. There are East vs. West proxy wars raging, or soon to be raging, around the globe every day. We call them peacetime deployments because the United States is not technically at war in the area. However, there may very well be a war going on, and this was the case in Kosovo in 1999. The landlocked country of Kosovo came about after the fall of the Soviet Union, which began in 1989, roughly about the time I was in boot camp. The former Soviet Union was comprised of a block of nations in Eastern Europe that included Yugoslavia, a gigantic land mass that bordered Italy to the north and Greece to the south and took up nearly the entire coast of the Adriatic Sea. Yugoslavia was broken up into several different countries based on their ethnic populations. Kosovo, whose population is comprised of mostly ethnic Albanians, was one of them. Most Americans are familiar with Bosnia, one of the other dozen countries that formed after the breakup.
Kosovo would be my first education in what humans are capable of doing to each other.
The mission was a six-month deployment in a battle space run by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). The Serbians and their Russian allies were fighting against the ethnic Albanians for control of the region, which was considered sacred to the Serbians. NATO was allied with the ethnic Albanian forces, and we were tasked with working with NATO to assist them in apprehending suspected war criminals and keeping an eye on the movements of the various warring factions. Kosovo was a real-world test: we would do seventy-two-hour special reconnaissance (SR) missions in rugged terrain full of natural and man-made threats. We did twenty-five SR missions in six months, averaging about one a week, with one day of prep, three days on, and a debrief on either end. It was a kick-in-the-butt deployment.
It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. We would hear movement behind us in the pitch dark and could tell they were crawling toward our hide site. We had been set up for two days on an overwatch mission in a wooded area. I was sure that someone had seen us and now they were moving in to spray us with bullets or try to capture us. Normally we would take turns sleeping in four-hour shifts, but now we were all wide awake, weapons ready, waiting to be overrun or shot. Whoever was out there was extremely disciplined—it could have been the Serbian militia, or maybe even the Russians. We listened for hours as they rustled around in the thick brush to our rear. My heart was pounding all night as I waited for them to ambush us. We finally got eyes on them at sunrise: there were about twenty of them, camouflaged in black and green. The biggest was about a foot long. They had worked all night to dig up our two days’ worth of poo and were eating it. Turns out, it wasn’t the Serbs or the Russians, but a troop of Hermann’s tortoises. We had nearly gotten into a gun fight with a group of slow-moving, crap-eating reptiles. Apparently, Kosovo is full of them and other reptiles, including horned vipers, the most venomous snake in Europe. We located one of these horned vipers and took pictures with it.
At one point during the deployment, we got dropped off into what our EOD tech believed was a minefield. Land mines were everywhere in Kosovo. Our EOD guy came to the front and began gently leading our patrol, picking his way carefully across the ground, waving his metal detector back and forth. The whole time, we were hauling ninety-pound packs uphill at night and needed to get to our hide site (about twelve clicks away) before the sun came up. In twenty minutes, we had moved maybe ten feet. At that pace, we would never get to our hide site in time.
I put the EOD tech at the back of the line and told him we would give him a call if we needed him.
One time while hunkered down in our hide site, we watched a group of kids moving a herd of cows and goats toward us. The cows got too close and started eating the foliage from our hide site. One of our guys had to smack it on the nose and the cow reared back. The kids knew someone was in the bushes, and they circled the cows behind us and ran them through our hide. We were all dodging and punching cows. Luckily for us, the herd of cows spooked and backed out. We waited until the kids and cows disappeared, then packed up and scrambled out of there fast. About fifteen minutes later, we heard gunfire coming from the direction that we had just evacuated. We assumed the kids had alerted some adults with guns as to our presence, and they were now throwing rounds into our hide site.
On another SR, we set up on a hill watching a Russian checkpoint when a Russian chopper flew over us. We decided to pack up and leave. Not long after, as we were departing the area, a couple of mortars hit the hill. The rounds were not close enough to see the splash of dirt, but close enough for us to hear and feel the explosions. More than close enough to put a hustle in our step.
When we were not doing SRs out in the Kosovo bush, we were on the business end of NATO’s intel-gathering operations. On these operations, we were tasked with tracking and picking up accused war criminals. On one SR, we reported pickup trucks at a secluded residence delivering and receiving large quantities of packages. When I returned to do the debrief, I was told that the boxes were filled with human organs, and the warehouse was a body parts factory. In 2010, the Guardian published an article titled KOSOVO PHYSICIANS ACCUSED OF ILLEGAL ORGANS REMOVAL RACKET.1 Apparently, the practice continues even today.
1 Paul Lewis, “Kosovo Physicians Accused of Illegal Organs Removal Racket,” The Guardian, December 14, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/illegal-organ-removals-charges-kosovo.