In the violent, blasted side streets of Fallujah, the demented Sunni killer Ahmad Hashim had assumed a loose and terrifying control.
Through millennia the ancient Babylonian city of al-Fallujah has shuddered from violent atrocities and deeply profound mysteries. Did the Persian hordes really slay the teenage Emperor of Rome, Gordian III, on the banks of the Euphrates in the year 244? Centuries later, in 1920, was the English government’s envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Leachman, truly beheaded with one swipe of a two-handed sword by Sheik Dhari, right here in the Royal Palace of al-Fallujah?
And who, on the night of March 31, 2004, was directly responsible for the medieval butchering of four American security officers—all of them burned alive, dragged through the town, and then strung up from the old bridge across the Euphrates, turning it into a grotesque iron gallows, before a roaring crowd of Iraqi fanatics?
The Persians swore that the young Caesar, Gordian III, was cut down in battle, whereas the Romans, claiming victory, deny it, stating the gallant Emperor died much later, way upstream.
In turn the Iraqis dismiss the very thought that Sheik Dhari would have stooped to any such barbarism as murdering a British colonel with a scimitar. Efficiently, they produce records to show that his son, demonstrating commendable chivalry, shot the colonel in the back.
But the ongoing mystery of who slaughtered the American security officers rumbles on, shaking and shuddering like the bolted iron girders of the old bridge when the heavy US armored vehicles roar daily over the river, west of the city.
This most barbarous act of the twenty-first century, almost eighteen hundred years after the demise of Emperor Gordian III, was more brutal, more primitive, and less human than anything that had ever happened before. And the US intelligence authorities were faced suddenly with near-incontrovertible evidence that another terrorist serial killer was emerging who was even more of a psychopath than the rising “star” of al-Qaeda, the thirty-seven-year-old deranged Jordanian jihadist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Initially there was little doubt as to who planned the strike against the Americans, who had, after all, been attacked at gunpoint by a gang of armed guerrillas on a main city street and then incinerated, their vehicles set ablaze, while a big chanting crowd stood back and hurled rocks into the flames.
Thereafter things became particularly unattractive. Two charred corpses were tied to cars and dragged through the streets. Body parts were pulled off and hung from telephone wires. Two incinerated bodies were hauled up onto the old bridge and left dangling from the rafters.
All of this seemed somewhat beyond the pale, even for the savagely anti-American al-Zarqawi. And even if it were within the pale, these actions certainly represented a new and grim semitribal low for the apparent successor to Osama bin Laden.
And there was a planned tribal madness to the attack. The Americans all worked for the private security corporation Blackwater and were helping to safely transport supplies for a catering company. But there were more than 150 Iraqis shouting and chanting at the old bridge as the mutilated bodies swung in the light desert breeze: Long live Islam ... Allahu Akbar [God is great]!
One town official mentioned, unhelpfully, that this would be the fate of all Americans who entered Fallujah. And for several hours the crowd grew and grew, still chanting anti-American slogans. It took the sudden and thunderous howl of a US fighter-bomber, screaming in low from out of the southeastern desert, to finally scatter and disperse them.
And, of course, these four frenzied murders seemed to bear all the hallmarks of the work of al-Zarqawi. Although he was not yet a confirmed member of bin Laden’s inner councils, he very soon would be and, indeed, later that year would be proclaimed “Emir of al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers.”
But al-Zarqawi required no formal title in order to stand at the pinnacle of al-Qaeda’s anointed rogue’s gallery. His paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan was revered among all jihadists. In Iraq, however, he became famous for a vast series of bombings—roadside, suicide, and targeted IED blasts. He both planned and carried out hostage executions and beheadings. He masterminded the brutal assassination of the senior US diplomat Lawrence Foley right outside Foley’s home in Amman.
Al-Zarqawi was the scourge of the Jordanian security forces, who only just foiled his monstrous plan to slam chemical weapons into the US Embassy, the prime minister’s office, and the headquarters (HQ) of Jordanian intelligence. When Jordan’s G-men came crashing into the terrorist HQ they seized twenty tons of chemicals, including blistering agents, nerve gas, and sacks containing lethal poisons. In addition to a further five tons of high explosive, there were three trucks with heavy-duty iron plows that had been designed to ram through security barriers in front of the target buildings.
Al-Zarqawi—not for the first time—was subsequently sentenced in absentia to death. He was still on the loose, and a few short weeks after the outrage on the old bridge, he showed up, masked, on an al-Qaeda video, cold-bloodedly beheading an American civilian, Nicholas Berg, with a jagged tribal knife.
Everyone in authority knew this was not the only public beheading of an American that al-Zarqawi had carried out; indeed, his pitiless bloodlust appeared to raise the eyebrows of even the icy jihadist monarch, Osama bin Laden himself. In March 2004 US officials credited al-Zarqawi with over seven hundred killings in Iraq, the majority with bombs.
For more than fourteen years the militant Jordanian seemed to prefer to operate his own private terrorist army, which he named al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. There were times when he worked alongside al-Qaeda, but bin Laden was wary of him, troubled that the pure brutality of Zarqawi’s methods would do their cause no good and may infuriate the tough Republican president in the White House even further.
Knocking down New York’s World Trade Center with a smoothly orchestrated twenty-first-century suicide air attack was one thing, but bin Laden expressed concern over cleaving off a civilian’s head with a bread knife on television. Thus, he never allowed a formal partnership between his al-Qaeda councils and al-Tawhid wal-Jihad’s bloodstained leader, the most wanted man in both Jordon and Iraq.
In turn, al-Zarqawi was not in any way certain that bin Laden and his Taliban cohorts possessed sufficient fervor to carry out a holy war to the bitter end. His plan was simple: he and his “warriors” would carry on killing US and Western military and civilians until the whole lot of them went home, leaving the Middle East forever. Along this route, he intended to destroy the government of Jordan as part of a strategic master plan, and while at it, at the same time, take Israel off the face of the earth.
For al-Zarqawi, there was no compromise, nor room for maneuver. He possessed the psychopath’s messianic belief that there was no other point of view worth listening to except his own. And from the first moment he entered talks with bin Laden, there was dissent and disagreement, differences of opinion both operationally and in terms of doctrine. And the reasons for this were obvious.
Osama bin Laden was a man of religion, a slightly crazed zealot, who believed from his sandals to his turban that the Prophet Muhammad fought in his corner and that all of his actions were justified. Never did al-Qaeda’s founder make any kind of speech without invoking the will of Allah and affirming that there was no other God but Allah and that He alone would guide them on the path to righteous victory over the Great Satan.
Al-Zarqawi, however, used Islam essentially as a public relations aid, justifying the most heinous murders by mentioning that the Prophet had approved of the whole exercise and that in the end his troops, every one of them, would cross the bridge into paradise and into the arms of Allah ... DEATH TO THE INFIDEL!
Despite accepting large sums of money from al-Qaeda, principally to run his training camp, for several years he refused to take an oath of allegiance to bin Laden. Indeed, when the American bodies were strung from the Fallujah bridge, the Jordanian had not yet taken that oath and would not for another seven months.
And even when he did, the two men were never close because of fundamental differences. Bin Laden’s objectives were large scale and planned over the course of many months. Al-Zarqawi was too much of a mad dog for the elusive Islamist cleric.
Thus, when the savage events on the bridge first came to light, the CIA immediately assumed they were masterminded and, probably, executed by the mad dog himself. And so the CIA sent the word out immediately that they wanted the crazed jihadist murderer hunted down and brought in, dead or alive.
By this time al-Tawhid wal-Jihad had morphed into al-Qaeda in Iraq, but despite intercepting letters and communiqués of obvious disagreement between bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the American intel operatives made no distinctions. According to the United States, they were all al-Qaeda, all terrorists and ruthless killers. And this time they had gone too far, way beyond the boundaries of known guerrilla warfare.
The Americans threw a steel wall around the city of Fallujah and prepared for a surge by the US Marines that would last for six weeks, during which hundreds of Iraqi insurgents died. But while the city shook and shuddered to the thunder of artillery and pounding infantry boots through the sandy streets, stealthy CIA agents were uncovering a brand new possibility: al-Zarqawi was nowhere near Anbar Province at the time of the killings, and yet another rising al-Qaeda commander, a man whose methods made al-Zarqawi seem a paragon of restraint, had perpetrated the crimes.
The new field commander was an Iraqi of the blood, born in the city of Fallujah itself, a native son of the old desert trading post and a fanatical killer whose fevered addiction to random murder was becoming a modern fable, even within Arab communities in which violence and brutality had been a way of life for thousands of years.
His name was Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. His business was jihadist terror against the citizens and military personnel of the United States and their allies. In Al-Isawi’s world there were no holds barred; each “mission” was conducted without a grain of mercy toward anyone. Betrayal in any form always resulted in instant reprisals, with the murder of the suspect’s family.
Wives, children, and the elderly were massacred on a routine basis. No desert outlaw, in all the long history of Fallujah’s blood-spattered and violent history, had ever been more feared by his own people. He was sheltered, protected, and guarded even by those who trembled at the mention of his name.
Al-Isawi had successfully petrified the populace into becoming his unwilling helpers while also remaining deep in the shadows. He was feared as no other Iraqi commander since Yusuf Saladin, the ferocious Kurdish warrior who captured Jerusalem in 1187. Saladin, however, was famous for never turning his fury upon civilians. Al-Isawi had no such scruples.
His reputation had spread widely on the strange bush telegraph of Iraq, and US manhunts for the man were invariably met with blank stares. The Americans, however—particularly the Marines and the Navy SEALs—were not remotely afraid of Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi. They were simply unable to find the sonofabitch.
And the entire hunt jumped up about seven notches when the CIA disclosed that the March 31, 2004, murders of the US security men were simply too gruesome to be the work of al-Zarqawi, who had never, even in his most chilling acts of slaughter, resorted to tribal butchery and exhibitionism on this scale.
The burned corpses on the old bridge at Fallujah had brought a new dimension to terrorism in Iraq. And for the first time US and coalition forces were searching Iraq for someone other than al-Zarqawi—a different killer, someone even more deranged.
And they would need to be extra vigilant. Like the US Special Forces in the Middle East, Al-Isawi worked mostly after dark, and as one SEAL commander stated it: “This bastard will slit your throat before you have time to clear it. But we should bear in mind our brother, Scott Helvenston, a former SEAL instructor, whose body swung from that bridge. We need to track down this Al-Isawi, and do it quickly.”
He was right about that. Within hours of the four murders an IED blew up, killing five US soldiers. CIA agents believed this new and local killer had struck again.
The immediate aftermath, conducted during the first week of April 2004, was a heavy-handed US response, with the Marines taking on the insurgents in a five-day battle that saw six hundred Iraqis killed and more than twelve hundred injured. Fighting in the area near the bridge was so fierce that both the Fallujah and Jordanian hospitals were closed. Slowly the city calmed down.
But the insurgents regrouped and attacked again. There was little doubt among the Americans that this new al-Qaeda commander was a tough-minded and dangerous enemy. And for the first time they discovered he did have a quasi-religious side to his character. Marines found several major arms caches hidden in a couple of local mosques—heavy machine guns, AK-47s, several tons of high explosive, RPGs, and improvised homemade bombs.
At this time the name Al-Isawi was being freely mentioned. And, as ever, there was a cruel and sinister edge to any conversation that involved him—reports of civilians being used as human shields and firing on the American troops from inside schools, mosques, and even temporary hospitals.
Local people were forced to help the insurgents build roadblocks; others were barricaded inside their homes. And Al-Isawi’s men, as they turned certain city streets into armed fortresses, even roughly ejected some less lucky civilians.
As the month wore on, the situation worsened, despite US efforts to offer terms to surrendering insurgents. In one spectacular air strike US fighter pilots hit a flatbed truck and a following vehicle, both of which exploded continuously for about twenty minutes, shaking the entire area. The Iraqis fled, charging across the street into the shelter of a fortified house.
But the American pilot came screaming in low and fast for a second time, and he hit the house with a missile that blew it to smithereens. More accurately, the building blew itself to smithereens, as it contained literally tons of high explosive.
And this was just the start. All through the year, from the very moment the American bodies were strung up on the bridge, the city of Fallujah, riddled as it was by Sunni insurgents, rallied to the shadowy battle cry of Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.
It was now common knowledge that he had been directly responsible for the murders and was equally certain that the infuriated American military was going after him. By the end of 2004 the “City of Mosques” (Fallujah had almost two hundred of them) was wasted. The civilian death toll was virtually uncountable, though Iraqis claimed it was “several thousand.” More than eight hundred US troops also died fighting in Iraq that year.
It was an infamous year, sparked by an atrocity, and it concluded with a grand desert city in ruins, virtually wiped off the map. For Al-Isawi, however, the battle for Fallujah had put him well and truly on the map. In the coming years the old warlord al-Zarqawi would be forever looking over his shoulder at the rise of the newly titled “Butcher of Fallujah” as he moved ever forward on his blood-soaked journey to the peak of al-Qaeda command.
All of the above was written with the help of hindsight. But at the time things were not quite so clear-cut, and many CIA agents believed that al-Zarqawi was still at the root of all the evil in the benighted desert stronghold. But back in Langley, Virginia, deep in the “crime laboratories” where events were examined slowly, in infinitesimal detail, analysts definitely believed that the grotesque events at the Fallujah bridge were the work of someone else.
It was the pure public exhibitionism that steered CIA thinking away from al-Zarqawi. Because showing off was not his style. He would strike hard, causing total mayhem, mass death, and injury. And then, often several days or even weeks later, there would be a quiet news leak to Al Jazeera, the Arab television network based in Qatar, that the bombing had been the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
He had, in the past, hooded and somewhat anonymously, permitted himself a personal television appearance prior to publicly beheading a prisoner. But these events were always in pursuit of a gain for al-Qaeda, such as a reprieve for the prisoner in return for the release of captured bin Laden disciples.
But this public uproar on the Fallujah bridge, demonstrating the barbarity of the terrorist organization, did not ring true to al-Zarqawi’s mind-set. The analysts at Langley believed it was out of character. Particularly because television crews turned up at the bridge right on time to film the crowd kicking and stamping one of the bodies. That was not al-Zarqawi’s style; he saw himself as too serious to waste time boasting.
They drew the inevitable conclusion: there was a new man on the block in Fallujah, a fiend in desert robes. And as 2004 lurched bloodily forward, he was causing pandemonium in the city.
Al-Isawi had personally started on the rubble-strewn streets the worst close-combat fighting of the entire war. Because for a few weeks in the immediate aftermath of the hangings, the US Army removed the gloves and operated under shoot-to-kill orders against anyone standing outside their own private home with an AK-47 or rocket-propelled grenades.
This had the effect of driving the weapons of the Sunni resistance underground. The result was the formation of a tribal hotbed, a kind of Sunni Citadel, determined to fight to the last man. There were wild crowd-control confrontations and endless murders and bombings. The most violent area in all of Iraq was suddenly the blasted side streets of Fallujah, where the demented Sunni killer Al-Isawi had assumed a loose and terrifying control.
But no one, anywhere, had ever reported seeing the man. If they had mentioned such a sighting, their life would not have been worth four Iraqi dinars, and because at the time it took about four thousand of these to buy one US dollar, that would have been a tragically inexpensive life. Al-Isawi habitually took no prisoners. He fixed his own exchange rate down the sixteen-inch barrel of his Kalashnikov rifle.
He was wanted for murder all over the country. But chasing him was to chase the shadows of the desert. In the summer of 2004 the US military was already seeking a ghost. After each new uproar in the city of Fallujah, the SEAL briefings were edged with frustration.
This is a summary of a midsummer briefing by the commander of SEAL Team 4:
Gentlemen, for us there’s nothing so difficult as searching for the unknown. But right now, the way it’s been for God knows how long, we have only a name for this bastard Isawi. There’s no more doubt that he strung up the bodies on the bridge, matter of fact he seems proud of that. But we’ve never been able to grab him, never been able even to see the sonofabitch. Right now we don’t even have a friggin’ photograph.
By July 2004 Fallujah was once more in chaos. The insurgents had refused to hand over both their heavy weapons or Al-Isawi in return for a US ceasefire in the city. And despite close US air support, the city fell back under Sunni terrorist control.
But by November the Americans had had enough. They unleashed a full-blooded attack on Fallujah, and this resulted in the fiercest urban combat of the entire war. The US Marines overran the city, darn near flattening it in the process. They got everything and everyone except Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.
And then the new year came, 2005, and again there was this uneasy standoff. Attacks continued all through the spring and summer, and on August I a car-bomb ambush killed six US Marine snipers in the city of Haditha, a Sunni farming town on the Euphrates. In Langley Al-Isawi was suspected of moving his headquarters temporarily some 140 miles upriver. Suspicions grew even more so when a massive roadside bomb two days later detonated in Haditha, killing fourteen Marines plus their interpreter.
Another blast occurred in the same area on November 19, when a huge IED constructed of artillery shells and explosive-packed propane tanks blew up from under the asphalt, hurling a Marine Humvee into the air, splitting it clean in half, and killing the driver instantly. The rest of the Marines then reported they came under fire from civilian houses, and they immediately responded.
In the end, after a volley of machine gunfire and an exploding grenade, twenty-four apparently unarmed civilians lay dead. And it was six long years before the several Marines charged with assault and murder were ultimately cleared. None of them went to jail. Their defense attorney was Haytham Faraj, a former US Marine officer.
And once again investigators were faced with a situation that bore the marks of Al-Isawi—the particular construction of the bomb as well as the gunfire aimed at Marines that had come from civilian homes, according to the testimony of a Marine lieutenant. This was classic Al-Isawi, who thought nothing of firing at and murdering Americans from schools, hospitals, and mosques.
Winter 2006—Commander SEAL Team 7:
We now know more about this maniac than any other target, except where the hell he is, and what he looks like. ... The one thing we really know is, he’s smart, he’s an expert in bomb making, and he has excellent INTEL. ... He also has an unusual grasp of military ops, and this suggests he may have served somewhere. His men show up in unexpected places, all over the goddamned desert, and that means he knows a lot about map-reading in difficult terrain, as well as communications, weapons and high explosive. This is no goat-herding Bedouin tribesman. This is a serious operator. And ... the suits in Washington want results.
We got two more missions tonight. Both based on new Intelligence. One in the city, one somewhere out in the desert. I don’t like the sound of either of ’em much. So be darned careful. ... Even if Isawi doesn’t show up, there’s a couple of other al-Qaeda guys we really want to locate. That’s all.
All of these operations were and still are strictly classified by the US Navy. They are as significant today in Iraq and Afghanistan as they were in 2005. For that reason they are incomplete so that no material confidential to US military intelligence should be made public, not even to an American audience, because to do so achieves nothing but to alert the enemies of US armed forces.
Iraq has always been an extremely “leaky” spot in which to conduct any form of warfare. For instance, even the fighter pilots flying off US aircraft carriers in the Gulf and headed for the forbidden air space above the US-imposed No-Fly Zone were often astounded at how regularly Saddam Hussein’s rocket men, hidden in the desert, were absolutely aware of US flight-wing arrival times in Iraqi airspace.
It’s a country where no one could be trusted. No one living there understood who was al-Qaeda and who was a mere tribesman. Some Iraqis used every subversive trick in the book, with their hot cell phones, utter lack of loyalty, and propensity to sell information to the Americans for money and to the terrorists out of fear—Al-Isawi’s speciality.
Confronted by advancing US troops, insurgents knew how to get rid of their weapons faster than any stage magician. Men who had, moments before, been blazing away with the AK-47s were suddenly unarmed, hands held high, appearing utterly bewildered as to why they had come under suspicion.
They knew the US Rules of Engagement (ROEs) better than the American themselves. And they really knew the one about not firing on the enemy until fired upon. They knew exactly when to stop, often stranding advancing American troops in some kind of no man’s land in which Americans might get shot but were not permitted to open fire. As the months went by, Al-Isawi became a global authority on the US section of urban guerrilla warfare.
To the American soldiers it often seemed they must wait for someone to take a bullet in the head before they were legally permitted to fire.
The year 2006 wore on, and the insurgent attacks on US forces continued. Wave after wave of Navy SEALs crossed the ocean from Coronado and Virginia Beach, joining vast legions of US Marines in the fight to bring Iraq under control.
And night after night small groups of these Special Forces ventured out into the dark of the desert in search of the “bad guys,” the SEALs’ all-compassing term for the furtive al-Qaeda killers whose mission remained unaltered: to drive the forces of the West out of the Middle East forever.
The road was hard, but the Americans were winning. Slowly they hunted down the al-Qaeda leaders, grabbing, manhandling, and terrifying Osama bin Laden’s field commanders. But they were pursuing an elusive tribe, military intelligence was often sketchy, and sometimes days went by without a significant success.
Early in June 2006, however, Jordanian intelligence made a breakthrough. They alerted the Iraqi authorities that they had some kind of a fix on al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq. And the scene swiftly shifted to the city of Baqouda, capital of the Diyala Governate, situated thirty-one miles northeast of Baghdad and home to almost a half-million people.
In truth the Jordanians were only a couple of gunshots in front of US Navy intelligence, who were simultaneously on the trail of one of al-Zarqawi’s main lieutenants as well as his principal spiritual adviser, Sheik Abdul Rahman. They had him in the area of the old Silk Road way station of Baqouda but were still finalizing the finer details.
Heavy-handed US interrogation of al-Qaeda prisoners actually cracked the case wide open for the intelligence agents. Someone finally betrayed al-Zarqawi, and as early as late April, US Joint Task Force 145 was stealthily headed toward a terrorist safe house in a remote area five miles north of Baqouda.
They kept it under tight surveillance alongside Iraqi security forces, which were the first ground troops to arrive. Finally al-Zarqawi showed up for an obvious high-level meeting of the local mass murderers. And US intelligence finally had a bead on one of the worst killers in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was dethroned—Al-Isawi’s boss, no less.
The United States wanted no mistakes, and in the late afternoon of June 8 they whistled up a couple of USAF F-16C Fighting Falcons, which identified the house and came screaming in from the north. The lead jet unleashed two five hundred–pound bombs—one of them a laser-guided GBU-12—Lockheed Martin’s deadly accurate, finned hunter-killer, PAVEWAY II, made in Pennsylvania and unstoppable once launched. The other was a GBU-38—Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) pinpoint targeted, satellite-guided destroyer, utilized here to avoid extensive outer damage.
The GBU-12 blasted the safe house to high heaven, killing everyone in it, al-Zarqawi, Abdul Rahman, and five others, two male and three female, including one of al-Zarqawi’s wives and their child.
There was a huge sense of relief in Iraqi government circles, particularly as there had been a marked increase in violent atrocities in the city of Baqouba in recent days. One of them, which culminated in seventeen severed heads being found in fruit boxes, brought forward in intelligence circles the name of the fiendish Al-Isawi once more.
But then there was another mass murder, when masked Sunni gunmen suddenly killed twenty-one Shi’ites, including twelve students pulled from a minibus and shot. That was pure al-Zarqawi, again demonstrating the precise sectarian tendencies bin Laden detested. No one thought the killing would stop after al-Zarqawi’s lair was vaporized; Islamist fanatics would swiftly move forward to replace their brethren. But some thought the quality of terrorist commander might decline. The Americans had killed or captured so many of al-Qaeda’s top men; surely it would have some effect.
For now, however, the clinical brilliance involved in the total demise of the top al-Qaeda commander in Iraq inspired a grim sense of relief in all the clandestine SEAL bases both east and west of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Like al-Qaeda, the SEAL Teams constantly required new, young American blood—tough, dedicated men whose sense of idealism and duty matched or surpassed their Islamic counterparts.
That very summer two such recruits were making their separate ways toward the training cauldron of Coronado, home of the fabled BUD/S course, that baptism of ruthless indoctrination designed to answer just one singular question: Are you tough enough for us even to consider making you a Navy SEAL?
Every applicant with ambitions to wear the Trident must tolerate that six-month endurance test on the shores of the cold Pacific in order to even try. And the ancient proverb “Many are called, but few are chosen” understates the rigor of this test. On average, fewer than 12 out of 160-plus men finally make it through. In comparison, Harvard Law School has a higher acceptance rate than the US Navy SEALs.
Matthew Vernon McCabe, a small-town boy with modest high school grades, coming from the outer suburbs of Toledo, Ohio, was the first of the two. The second was Jonathan Keefe, Virginia State swim champion from an even smaller town, near Yorktown. Neither had achieved anything close to their academic potential as students, but both of them had been bound and determined to become Navy SEALs since an unusually young age.
Matt understood perhaps best the iron-clad boundaries of the “Many are called...” proverb, as it was first written in his namesake’s gospel. For him, a career in the Navy SEALs was beyond all realms of possibility.
He came from a broken home in Perrysburg, Ohio. His parents’ divorce when he was thirteen had the effect of loosening his parental guidelines, first living with his mother and sister, then moving to stay with his father, Martin McCabe, a second-generation proprietor of a prosperous auto body shop who was sometimes inclined to indulge his son.
“Guess that’s what kids do,” Matt says now. “Head for the area where life will be easiest. Looking back I understand better that my mom was a wonderful lady and laid down standards for me and my sister which could not be changed. She was absolutely certain of her own moral guidelines. And to this day she’s always been there for both of us. Hell, my mom worked three jobs to hold the family together after Dad left.”
Matt was a gifted, athletic midfielder on his high school soccer team, well on his way to his full five-foot, eleven-inch, 180-pound fighting weight. But the truth was that he was bored sideways by soccer before his sixteenth birthday and wholeheartedly entered another kind of world when his father, from out of the blue, presented him with a second-hand Ford Mustang GT convertible to mark his opening step into manhood.
Generally speaking Matt was happier driving around rural Ohio in his Mustang, accompanied by a veritable platoon of the best-looking girls Perrysburg had to offer, than being kicked and barged into by various schoolboy meatheads whose principal ambitions lay in the pursuit of a round ball.
In any event, his older sister, Megan, a student at Ohio State and a future New York fashion model, had already introduced him to a more sophisticated way of life. So he announced his retirement from the game in order to concentrate his energies on a form of Buckeye dolce vita.
“I have to say it,” he later recalled, “my dad, a thoroughgoing good guy at heart, let me get away with a few things. My potential college grades were rubbish, and I never took a blind bit of notice of anything my teachers tried to teach me.
“My dad rarely gave me a hard time for anything I did or didn’t do. He was kind of proud of me, which put me on the pig’s back, and I was loving every hour of it, especially the nights.”
And yet there was a ferocious contradiction in Matt’s character. At heart, deep in a place no one really saw, he was a hardworking kid, and with his truly moderate high school grades, he went to work locally to make up for his misspent youth, working long shifts as a counter-hand and short-order cook at a pizza chain, with the old Mustang parked out back, all set to go.
“I always worked,” he says. “But the longer and harder I did so, the clearer my position became. I’d only been going for seventeen or eighteen years, having a great time, but well on my way, I thought, to a momentous screwup ... summa cum laude in partying. Those 2.3 and 2.4 grades from Perrysburg High haunt me to this day. I shoulda been straight As. No bullshit. But only I knew that, and I’m not proud.”
That was not the only secret the young McCabe harbored, the other being that he somehow understood the long and historic connection his little town had with the US Navy. Situated right up there in the top left-hand corner of the state, Perrysburg was an early nineteenth-century shipbuilding center, right on the wide Maumee River, which flows into Lake Erie just a dozen miles to the north.
Perrysburg is in fact named for one of America’s greatest naval battle commanders, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who not only supervised the construction of the US Fleet along the Maumee but also fought the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.
In overall command of the US Fleet in the 240-mile-long lake, Commodore Perry faced the British head on, but in the opening exchanges he took a very severe shellacking, with his flagship, named after the immortal Captain Lawrence, almost sinking. The British commander demanded Perry strike his colors and surrender.
But Commodore Perry refused, and in the teeth of the battle and under withering gunfire, he ordered his men to row him to one of his other ships, where he personally fired the salvo that began the rout of the Royal Navy’s Task Force. Following the strategy of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, he drove forward, in the lee of the wind, and split the British line, pounding them until they surrendered. Altogether the commodore fought nine naval actions on that lake and won them all, and a grateful nation awarded him with both the Congressional Gold Medal and the thanks of Congress.
Still known as the “Hero of Lake Erie,” Commodore Perry had a decisive hand in the ultimate US victory in that war. An entire class of modern US frigates was named after him—and there’s twenty-four still serving: the heavily gunned anti-aircraft and ASW ships, Oliver Hazard Perry–class, renowned escorts to the US Navy’s largest aircraft carriers.
Today a mighty bronze statue of the commodore stands in downtown Perrysburg. Though not many people noticed the young Matt taking a few long looks at it while he was not really bothering with his schoolwork.
But at age eighteen Matt made what he described as the first mature decision of his entire life: he decided to rip one of the opening pages out of the commodore’s playbook and join the US Navy. And he kept his thoughts to himself. He did not have the slightest intention of rising to command a warship in battle.
Matt, retired soccer midfielder, secretly wanted to become a US Navy SEAL. Nothing else. And he never told anyone.
Jonathan Keefe’s long devotion to the US Navy SEALs began when he was in fifth grade. This was partially because he was born and spent his early years way south into the Virginia Peninsula, where the Atlantic rollers hit the Chesapeake Bay and where America’s mightiest warships are both built and stabled in the gigantic Norfolk Naval Yards.
It’s impossible not to have at least a passing interest in the US military if you happen to be from those warm, gusting ocean-side lands, which also stand to the north of the wide Hampton Roads, the busiest warship highway on earth.
All around there are signs of the world’s only superpower in action—the Langley Air Force Base, the NASA Langley Research Center, the vast shipbuilding yards of Newport News, where they build the colossal fortress at sea, the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
Young Jon was brought up watching warships shouldering their way out into the Atlantic and coming home from distant lands. The folklore of the US Navy was instilled deep within him. The Stars and Stripes was always prominent on the flagpole in front of the classy ranch-style house in which they lived, in the overwhelmingly middle-class Virginia country town of Tabb.
Patriotism was not taught in the household of Tom and Dawn Keefe; rather, it was engraved on their hearts from birth. A financial professional, Tom Keefe worked just a few miles away at Newport News Shipbuilding Company, where he was controller and treasurer of its industrial subsidiary, NNI, specialists in constructing and repairing nuclear power stations.
NNI was full of ex-US naval officers, several of whom were buddies with Tom Keefe, the man who controlled the budgets. One of them, a former commanding officer of the Sturgeon-class nuclear attack submarine USS Lapon, was Captain Chester “Whitey” Mack, who once silently shadowed a brand-new Yankee-class Russian ballistic missile boat for her entire patrol, an astounding forty-seven days!
Cruising right inside the Yankee’s baffles, dead astern, he never got caught and hoovered up enough priceless electronic information to fill a wing of Bancroft Hall at Annapolis. After that the six-foot, six-inch Whitey became a legend in the Atlantic submarine service and later joined NNI in Newport News, where they talk about him still. USS Lapon was, after all, built there, five miles from where the Keefe family lived.
Because he grew up in that community, it was little surprise that Jon knew the sights and sounds of US warships before he could recite the alphabet. His father was never in the US military, but, with his strict adherence to rules, sense of order, and punctuality, he would have made a superb naval officer.
The great pride of Tom Keefe’s life was being associated with an engineering corporation that built every last one of the US Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and one half of all of its nuclear attack submarines.
But curiously, his mother, Dawn, was the one who led Jon to the SEALs. She’d been a second-grade school teacher before her sons, Tommy and Jon, were born, and she returned to the profession when the boys were very young. A gifted and natural storyteller, she constantly read to her sons, and when she recounted them an adventure involving a group of men called the SEALs, her youngest was hooked. He was so captivated—and at such a young age—that he actually wrote his fifth-grade career project on the US Navy SEALs.
“I still remember it,” he says. “There were a lot of stories, but the ones I always liked most were about those daredevils from Virginia Beach, just twenty-seven miles to the south of the village of Tabb. I made Mom take us down there just so I could see where they lived and worked. Never caught sight of one, though.”
And when he was thirteen Jon persuaded his parents to allow him to go to San Diego, California, with a friend to enroll in the US Marines’ renowned ten-day “Devil Pups” mini-boot camp youth program on the seventeen-mile Pacific coastal sprawl of Camp Pendleton. This is the major West Coast base of the Marine Corps, the prime amphibious training grounds for Assault Craft Unit 5 and home to One Marine Expeditionary Force, masters of the sea-to-shore attack.
The course is designed to show students what it takes to become a combat warrior, with the accent on physical fitness, discipline, and devotion to country and the US Marine Corps. The young Jon loved it all, but the part he loved most was when his instructor pointed out in the distance a vast, low, flat grassy wilderness, strictly off-limits and apparently deserted.
“No one goes there,” he said. “That’s the secret off-limit range BUD/S training, the two hundred-yard rifle qualification.”
Jon stood on the edge of his personal heaven. “Can’t see anyone,” he muttered, staring into the horizon.
“No one ever does,” replied the instructor. “But they’re out there.”
But that was not simply the highlight of the trip for Jon—it was the highlight of his life. He had stood on the sacred ground where the Navy SEALs trained. On this great private enclave of the US military, he had seen the firing range of Special Warfare Command (SPECWARCOM), where they honed their skills. Not so many people had ever seen that, and for him, he now had a bond with the SEALs that would never be broken.
When the “Devil Pup” from the Virginia Peninsula finally returned home, he was utterly determined that one day he would find his way west again, but this time to Coronado, home of the world’s most elite warriors.
By now he was growing into a huge frame, headed for the six-foot, four-inch heavyweight he would one day become, with not one gram of fat—pure muscle and bone.
At sixteen he began to understand fitness and what it would take to get a tight control on his physical development. Brought up so close to the sea, he swiftly developed into a top-class high school swimmer, making the teams and powering through the swim-league encounters with kids who were largely older and weaker. Jon won the 2002 Virginia State championship, fifty-yard freestyle, scything through the water in a record-busting 21.18 seconds—a time that stood supreme for three years.
By now his given Christian name, “Jonathan,” had slipped away. Young Keefe, the human shark, was simply “Big Jon,” and he anchored the Tabb High relay swim team to victory after victory. They weren’t always in front when the third-lap man touched the wall, but every last time Big Jon hit the water like a Mark-8 torpedo, and the entire population of Tabb High almost went berserk with excitement as he hammered his way past the leaders. Altogether Jon won seven state championship events.
Unsurprisingly he was awarded a partial scholarship for swimming to East Carolina University, about one hundred miles south, over the border in Greenville, North Carolina. But from there things went even further south for Jon. First he flunked out of college altogether and then he went home to the local community college to study—somewhat ironically, as things turned out—criminal justice.
But, like the best buddy he had not yet met and who was, anyway, busy gunning that Mustang around Perrysburg, Ohio, Big Jon discovered the joys of rural Virginia’s dolce vita and devoted most of his time to majoring in having a real good time. Like Matt, he went for partying summa cum laude, somehow breaking loose from his old persona of great kid, big military ambitions, and dedicated athlete.
“My parents tried everything to guide me and continued to give me all of their support,” he said. “But I guess I was too big, too sure of myself, and a lot too stupid to listen. But after two of the most ridiculous years of my life, finally I woke up and decided to get a grip.
“I resolved to stop wasting everybody’s time, drove myself down to the local recruiting office, and joined the Navy. I told ’em straight out I did not have the slightest intention of being in the surface Navy. I was there to become a Navy SEAL. Sea, Air, and Land. Basic Underwater Demolition, right? Special Forces...just point me in the right direction, and get that Trident polished up.
“I didn’t actually say any of that. But they were my thoughts. Nearly. You stand right there in front of that recruiting petty officer, I’m telling you, even sitting down he looked about twelve feet tall. He handed me the papers to sign and sent me, instanto, to Navy boot camp up on the Great Lakes.”
The recruitment officer didn’t actually say it, but Jon could tell what he was thinking just by the way he looked at him: You think you’re so damned tough, kid ... then you go right ahead and prove it to us.
“Matter of fact, I felt a lot less tough when I walked out than I did when I walked in. But I went home and packed, obeyed my orders, the way I always would, just as soon as I pulled on the dark blue uniform of the United States Navy.”
Matthew McCabe joined the US Navy, and right after boot camp reported to the San Diego dockyards directly opposite Coronado, on the landward side of the bay. He was assigned to the USS Belleau Wood, the forty thousand–ton Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship that had been designed to land battalions of US Marines on distant shores.
She was, in fact, a small aircraft carrier and traveled with forty helicopters and Harrier jump-jets embarked as well as landing craft. Matt, who was not yet nineteen, was never especially interested in the cleaning, polishing, and maintenance routines of the ordinary seaman, as his singular ambition was to join the SEALs, the guys on the other side of the bay.
And as soon it was possible, he filed an application to be transferred to SPECWARCOM in Coronado, California. That application, in the time-honored tradition of huge organizations, became either lost, misplaced, mislaid, or thrown away. Either way, six months later Matt was still a member of Belleau Wood’s 930-man ship’s company, and still polishing.
Almost every day he watched the SEALs in action, training, fast roping out of helicopters in their wet suits into the ocean, sometimes really close to his ship. Matt wanted so badly to join them that it actually pained him to think about it.
But the Navy does not wait around. The Belleau Wood, it was announced, was scheduled for the Gulf at the center of a nine-ship battle group—a six-month deployment that would be conducted in searing heat.
Finally, just before the ship left, a platoon from SEAL Team 2 came on board for two months, giving Matt the opportunity to watch them every day as they trained. No one watching SEALs work is anything less than mightily impressed—their fitness, their strength, their speed.
As always they kept themselves to themselves, barely fraternizing with the crew of this small aircraft carrier. But their presence on board had an effect on Matt like a lightning rod, reaffirming that which he had known for so long: somehow he had to join these guys or die trying.
Once on station, way off the coast of old Persia, there were endless days of temperatures hovering at well over a hundred degrees. The flight deck shimmered as, all day long and much of the night, aircraft thundered into clear blue skies east of Saddam Hussein’s old kingdom.
When they returned to base the SEALs were still uppermost in Matt’s mind. And Matt once again in search of his application, only to be told that no one knew anything about it. So he filed another, and when that too produced only a kind of endless silence, he marched into the office and, as politely as possible, demanded an explanation.
“What the hell is going on?” he wondered. “You’d have thought someone might have at least acknowledged my request. But I got a very definite impression they just did not especially want me to go to Coronado. I have no idea why. And I asked, ‘How did this happen?’ And no one knew anything about that either.
“So I just filed again, and one year after my first application I was called in for interview and instructed to report to Coronado forthwith. It was March 2006, three months before my twenty-first birthday, and they sent me to BUD/S Class 259. There were more than 220 of us assigned, and I knew that out of that original intake they would take only a dozen. I have to say it never once occurred to me that I would not be one of them.”
By this time Matt had never lost the drive for perfection in terms of fitness. He looked like a highly trained light-heavyweight boxer—a fraction under six feet, devoted to working in the gym, and, weighing in at 180 pounds, light enough to be an excellent runner.
Compact, broad shouldered, and athletically muscled, he was an outstanding skier, having burned up the high slopes all over the place, especially Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains, one hundred miles east of Los Angeles.
Since early boyhood Matt had learned the art of downhill skiing in Michigan’s cold, hard-packed Boyne Mountains, at the north of the windswept Michigan Peninsula between the Michigan and Huron Lakes. When he finally hit the fast, powdery slopes at Vail, Colorado, it was a minor culture shock. But he soon got the hang of it. And when he did, pine trees swayed.
Matt was as strong as a bull and capable of lifting a 250-pound man and carrying him the length of a football field.
Pound for pound, he stood out, and even in the rarified arena of BUD/S, he could compete with the best of them. Matt did in fact have the perfect build for a SEAL—not too tall and very fast off the mark. Also, he discovered, he was academically as sharp as a tack and swift to memorize lists of facts. There are no dumb SEALs: 75 percent of them have college degrees, and as Matt moved through the early stages of his training, he was plainly up with the leaders in every conceivable discipline.
“New territory for me,” he grins ruefully. “I’d never put my mind to academic stuff before. I couldn’t believe my lousy high school grades, not after I’d been in BUD/S for a few weeks.”
No one “breezes” through this searching, brutal test of a young man’s strength, speed, brains, willpower, and ability to absorb pain. It’s all too demanding for that. Ask any SEAL about BUD/S and, in particular, about Hell Week, and you invariably receive a kind of stage groan, followed by “Hell Week? ... Don’t even remind me.”
Matt accepts the grueling part but chuckles and remarks, “C’mon ... it wasn’t that bad.” And for him, you sense it really wasn’t. His hard-trained skier’s legs carried him along the Coronado beach for the four-mile run day after day. He was always a good runner, finishing in the first ten. Same for the push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. Matt had the right build, enormous strength, and all the determination in the world.
But whatever he says about cruising through the course, more than one hundred guys quit in the first six weeks of the action. Twenty of them were gone before they completed indoctrination (INDOC), two weeks before BUD/S starts. Eight of them were outta there before lunch on the first day.
“Tell you the truth, I was just jogging along, trying to get through my tests. I didn’t have time to notice ’em much.”
Yeah, right, Matt. The whole of Coronado was talking about the DOR rate of BUD/S Class 259 (DOR: dropped on request, SEAL parlance for “I’ve had enough, and I retire forthwith from this madhouse”). The formal procedure is for the man who simply cannot take it anymore to walk to the office, place his helmet outside with the others, in a line on the ground, and then ring the brass bell.
The chimes of that bell, ringing out confirmation that a teammate has decided this is not the correct career path for him, can be heard down on the beach, where other class members were pounding along the tide line, looking for the firmer sand.
In Coronado there is a ban on ridicule. Anyone caught laughing or humiliating a man who has announced DOR is instantly dismissed, sent back to the fleet that day—wrong kind of person, lacking in team spirit, too self-possessed, too stupid.
A man who has decided the life of a Navy SEAL is not for him may very well make a perfectly fine surface ship commander or a navigator or a submariner. The life of a SEAL is not for everyone, nor is it superior to all other forms of service in the US Navy. But you’d never get one of Coronado’s finest to admit that. Not in a thousand years.
Meanwhile Matt was charging along the tide lineup with the leaders, trying to cope with everything the instructors threw at him. He knew how to row and was excellent in the Zodiac boats. He managed to get the hang of the feared obstacle course and eventually worked his way to finish near the top.
His honed and practiced lifting strength saw him through all the work of carrying inflatable boats on his head—the SEAL Elephant Walk. Even the back-breaking effort of lifting logs the size of telephone poles was, in the end, achievable for him.
And to think that once he had been scared half to death to hear the instructors’ practiced roar of “MCCABE, YOU’RE NOT TRYING!—YOU’RE NOT PUTTING OUT FOR ME! GET WET AND SANDY! AND YOU ... AND YOU ... AND YOU!”
It took him a week to understand they often picked out men who really were putting out everything, trying with every ounce of strength they had. Because these were the guys the instructors could see were ready to lay down their lives to finish the four-mile races in the top ten. Matt, more by instinct than design, was one of those, and every instructor knew it.
Understanding this, however, did not make it a whole lot better, as he ran into the freezing cold Pacific in full running kit and then came out and rolled in the freakin’ sand: “GET WET AND SANDY!” Screw that.
By the time Phase II concluded, Matt had only one glitch, and that was underwater in the pool competence section. “Got right back in and nailed it next time,” he said. “Half the class blew out on that one.”
For strength and athleticism as well as for confidence both in and under the water, Matt was a superbly confident baby SEAL. Always a quick thinker, he concentrated on every last lesson the BUD/S instructors issued. These included the heavy-duty laws of SPECWARCOM—the ones that include moral issues, the standards of behavior expected, the insistence on courtesy at all times to both your commanders and your teammates ... the iron-clad rule of honesty at all times.
Above all there was the sense of being a part of a team, a brotherhood, that binding sense of camaraderie beloved of all fighting forces. But none more than the SEALs—and Matt recalls he sensed that long before the BUD/S course was even halfway over. Even though he was not yet qualified, somehow he knew the high honor of acceptance right here in Coronado, that it was somehow written in the stars for him.
Young McCabe, who had never paid much attention in his school history classes, now found himself captivated by the long and glorious traditions of the Navy SEALs. He was especially touched by the instructors’ reminder that no SEAL has ever been left behind on the battlefield, no matter how grim the fight.
Matt relished all of this. He had a copy of the new Creed of the SEALs, formalized the previous year, 2005, to clearly delineate the values, duties, and expectations of the world’s finest Special Forces.
Matt kept it, and in both hope and determination—and a bit prematurely—he memorized the opening lines:
In times of war or uncertainty there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our Nation’s call. A common man with uncommon desire to succeed.
Forged by adversity, he stands alongside America’s finest special operations forces to serve his country, the American people, and protect their way of life.
I am that man.
My Trident is a symbol of honor and heritage. Bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before, it embodies the trust of those I have sworn to protect. By wearing the Trident I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day.
The very words sent a chill down his spine, even though he had not yet passed BUD/S. And never for one split second did he doubt that in the not-too-distant future they would pin the legendary SEAL Trident on the high left-hand side of the jacket of his dress whites.
For the very first time in his life Matthew McCabe had a true purpose to his life. And to this day he recognizes the debt he owes the US Navy. “They straightened me out,” he says. “They taught me discipline. They taught me honor, patriotism, and dedication. They even taught me how to study, sent me to a college where, to my amazement, I became a straight-As student. Despite everything, I owe them so much.”
Big Jon Keefe joined the Navy in the high summer of 2006 and reported immediately to Recruitment Training Command (RTC), the Navy’s one and only boot camp, set in an enormous campus forty miles north of Chicago on the western shore of Lake Michigan, seven miles from the Wisconsin border.
During the two months of basic training they turned him into some kind of sailor, with endless drilling on the great sprawl of the Ross Field Parade Ground, and he graduated on October 16. He took no time for vacation, driving through the gates of SPECWARCOM, Coronado, before the month of October was over.
Somehow Big Jon had been a lot more successful with his paperwork than Matt had been. But that was before the ex-dough flipper from Perrysburg understood he was a potential scholar. Anyway, the swim champion from Virginia was into the BUD/S course before you could say, “Hoo-yah!”
By mutual agreement, the names of still-serving Special Forces personnel will not be used in full in this narrative. And in the case of Jon’s first BUD/S instructor, this is just as well.
“He was,” recalls Jon, with that touch of old world charm that comes so naturally to him, “the biggest asshole I ever met. Everyone was scared of him. He was an ex-Marine and a full brother to Attila the Hun. But was he ever good at his job!”
That particular instructor was Jon’s proctor for INDOC, and he pulverized those guys—running, rowing, heavy lifting, climbing, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups—until they thought they’d collapse with exhaustion.
But that instructor instantly made it clear that the SEALs are not remotely interested in men who collapse with exhaustion in the first week. They are interested only in those with the iron will to never quit, men who will drive on through the pain, drag themselves forward even though they have nothing left to give.
Because those guys may become Navy SEALs. And they are always the only ones who count at Coronado. They are the young men who will fight their way to victory because, in their minds, nothing else matters. For them quitting is not even an option. They’d rather die than quit. And Jon Keefe was one of those.
From the very beginning all of his instructors had him pegged to fail. Unlike his classmates—and certainly unlike Jon himself—they understood it was in many ways harder for a very big guy than it was for a medium-size athlete like Matt McCabe.
For a start there’s the running. And although nature endows big men with heavier, stronger leg muscles, you don’t see many 250-pound marathon runners. Neither do you see that many 250-pound mountaineers, hanging on to the rock face a thousand feet above the valley floor. They usually weigh about one hundred pounds wet through. And as for those real long-distance runners, as the crisply observant Matt puts it: “I’ve seen a praying mantis heavier than them.”
In many of the disciplines a lighter man has a distinct advantage, especially the running. And the standard race for SEALs, each and every morning along the Coronado beach, is over four miles, two down to the hotel and two back, every man timed by the instructors.
The going is difficult. If they run too far up from the tide line, the men run into deep sand, which is murder for a heavyweight runner. Too far down below the tide line, they get their boots wet, which causes the sand to stick, making each foot even heavier. And the sheer bulk of a two hundred-plus–pound body just makes it harder to carry, no matter how fit and how well tuned that heavy-boned male body may be.
The instructors know also that the heavyweight SEAL, with his massive extra strength, is a priceless asset when a platoon is on the move through enemy lands, jungle or desert, mountains or rocks. Someone must carry the heavy machine gun and the ammunition belts, and big SEALs over six foot four always get the job of packhorse. It merely goes with the territory. And there are times when that extra strength may be required in other endeavors.
Jon Keefe, however, had to draw on his last reserves of stamina and determination for these long morning runs and the SEALs’ famous obstacle course. And this was, in its way, the worst part of all because of the climbing. The course comprises high rope climbs, the sixty-foot cargo net, walls, vaults, parallel bars, barbed wire, and rope bridges.
Generally speaking it’s many times easier for a small guy than for a tall one. And a dozen times easier for light guys than for the heavy dudes. Jon fell headlong into the latter category, but luckily he never fell badly off the ropes, bridges, and walls. Somehow he hauled himself up and over, fighting his way hand over hand up the ropes, gripping with his feet, fingers, and teeth if necessary.
The instructors taught the big boys technique, especially on the cargo nets, which were the same kind they use to embark SEAL Teams onto submarines midocean.
The teachers knew how much they had to put out for these aspiring SEALs. And none of them wanted to lose the big, striving Jon, who’d been trying to be a Navy SEAL since he was about ten years old.