IN APRIL OF 2009, PIRATES OFF the coast of Somalia captured the American cargo ship Maersk Alabama. Many people followed the ordeal of Captain Richard Phillips and his crew, along with the successful rescue effort led by the US Navy, but it is less well known that there were a half a dozen other attempts by pirates to capture ships in the very same week.
Cargo ships, which are quite slow, were becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack. That summer, I was hired as a contractor to provide security for the ships belonging to a company called Pacific-Gulf Marine, Inc.
I flew to Cairo and then drove into Port Suez, a departure point for many cargo ships. These ships moved through the Red Sea like they were on a slow interstate highway through the Arabian Peninsula.
Most routes could be completed in five to ten days, so each journey was relatively brief. I had already had a few trips under my belt that summer when I boarded a boat headed for Cape Town. By this time, I knew that it was normal for pirates to run at us like wolves from their little fiberglass speedboats equipped with huge-ass Yamaha motors.
When we saw a boat like that heading toward us, we—the contractors providing security—would make a point of taking highly visible positions on deck with an M4 or a shotgun. That was usually enough to make a pirate boat change course, and we would watch it turn and roar off.
Imagine a Prius with a V8 engine on it. That is the closest analogy I can make for someone who has never seen one of these boats. Tricked-out boats like the ones the pirates favored can’t handle big waves, and they typically stay close to shore, so the cargo ships tended to sail as far from shore as possible without adding to the time it took them to make a delivery.
I tried to schedule my shifts on deck to coincide with sunrises and sunsets. We had some beautiful nights and mornings sailing the Red Sea. I couldn’t believe how gorgeous it was, watching the colors of the sky melt into one another before dissolving into the sea.
I also couldn’t believe how hot it was, even in the middle of the ocean. I began wearing shorts all the time that summer. Some people got a kick out of the fact that I spent the whole night fighting in Benghazi wearing cargo shorts. I only started wearing shorts on ops after my experience providing security on the cargo ships.
“I Can’t Fight Mother Nature”
Once a boat entered the Indian Ocean, the seas would start to churn. The weather had been pretty calm during the first couple of trips I had taken, but we hit some bad weather on this journey, about four days before we were scheduled to reach Cape Town.
As we were sailing past the coast of Somalia, the captain wanted to push farther away from the coast for security reasons, but the seas were unusually heavy. I told him that I’d rather fight pirates than fight those seas. That was the truth. I wasn’t scared of getting shot at, and I wasn’t scared of a fight, but I can’t fight Mother Nature. I was scared of the power of that ocean.
The captain disagreed with me, and it was his call because he was the captain, so we put more distance between our ship and the coast. We got hammered by twenty- and thirty-foot swells for days on our way to South Africa.
I remember going to the highest point on the captain’s deck during my shifts and feeling helpless as I looked out at those swells. The waves looked like monsters. We would rise up on them high, and sometimes we would come down light and just rock back and forth, but other times we would come down hard, almost like the ship was hitting concrete.
At one point, we passed a Thai ship that had lost its engines, which really put them at the mercy of the ocean. The ship was being tossed around like a toy boat in a bathtub. We radioed them to see if they needed help and they said they were in the middle of a repair and had it under control, but it made me uneasy to watch them. Even our crew was getting spooked. I knew that the cook and the first mate had made this trip a million times, so it was unsettling to see them act as though we had something to worry about.
For three days, the ocean rolled like this. It was intense, especially at night, like being on a slow roller coaster. I cringed every time we rose up, half expecting the ship to break in half when it came down hard.
Praying for Rain
There wasn’t a lot of rain, just heavy waves and wind. The boatman told me that actual rain would help to knock some of the waves down, which was hard to believe, but I started praying for some rain, just in case.
The captain arranged for us to dock in Durban in order to save the additional day it would have taken us to get to Cape Town. Miraculously, the sky opened up and it started raining a few hours before we docked. I quickly discovered that the boatman had been correct; the rain really did seem to knock the waves back, and the sea became calmer for the first time in three days.
As we pulled into Durban, the foul weather broke and turned into sunshine and blue skies.
When ships enter the ports, they are guided in because the ports are so crowded. Another captain is flown out in a helicopter, and he will rope down and guide a ship into an unfamiliar port for the last mile or two.
At that time, Durban was a dangerous place, but from my vantage point on deck during that last mile, it looked like a resort. The sunshine felt surreal and I experienced a peaceful rush as we glided toward the dock on calm waters.
For me, the previous three days of sailing to Durban were more gut-wrenching than getting shot at had ever been. I do not fear men. I can fight men. I can’t fight the ocean. I had no control over this display of nature’s power, and I had to trust the captain to make the correct decision. In this case, that single decision, whether to stay close to the coast or head farther out into the sea, could have been the difference between life and death. Once that decision was made, there was not much that I could do. After that, I kept my feet on the ground with GRS stuff.
I remember doing a thirty-mile ruck movement early in my training with the 75th Ranger Regiment, moving quickly through a tropical environment with thick undergrowth. We were learning how to move tactically at a fifteen-minute-per-mile pace with fifty- to seventy-five-pound rucks on our backs and approximately twenty-five additional pounds of gear on our bodies including our weapons systems and ammo. If you try that for yourself, you’ll find that the pace is very brisk and the ruck is very heavy.
Most of us were sliding over fallen leaves, tripping over tree roots, and trying to avoid the yellow jackets that were swarming around us.
At some point, I realized that the experienced point leaders seemed to be keeping us on track and moving right through every obstacle without even using a compass. I was just trying to keep up, slipping left and right, and they were gliding confidently forward like it was nothing. How did they know where we were?
Soldiers learn the basics of land navigation during basic training. If you have read my book The Ranger Way, you know that I completed infantry basic training twice, once in 1995 the first time I joined the Army and then again in 1999 when I worked hard to get back in. Each time, one of the first things we were taught was how to use a lensatic compass, which is a precision instrument used with a topographic map when someone needs to navigate an area without trails. We also learned how to shoot an azimuth, which requires sighting an object on the horizon in the direction you’re traveling and then adjusting the compass heading to make sure you’re still moving in the right direction.
In all branches of the military, learning how to read a map and even how to find a map are core skills that need to be mastered from the start. That can be more complicated than it sounds. When most civilians hear the word “map,” I’m betting they imagine one big image of a state or a town, and that image encompasses everything in a particular geographic area.
In the Army, the map you are working with might be nothing more than a bunch of coordinates, numbers that coincide with each other. A particular map might cover thousands of square kilometers or only a few hundred.
A map might have contour lines, which can help us figure out out how steep a mountain is before we climb it. If all the contour lines meet and come together? That is a cliff. One map might need to link to another map as though they are puzzle pieces. Soldiers are trained this way because we might need to find our way in the field without much to go on.
When I was on a deployment, it was a priority to really study a map of my location and commit it to memory. An American does not want to get lost in most of the places where I have deployed. When I am deploying, I continually practice my orienteering skills and consider it part of doing my job. I pin maps to the walls and I study them, building a mental picture that I can refer to when I walk or drive. I want to know my north, south, east, and west instinctively, wherever I am, and I want to know some key backstops and landmarks, so that I know if I am going to compound X but I get to bazaar Y, I’ll be clear that I’ve gone too far and I missed it.
When I was walking around on my own in Kabul, I couldn’t just pull out a map or my GPS. If you are involved in covert activity, you have to look like you belong. If you are a local, or if you belong in a neighborhood, you don’t need a map, right? My job also required a high degree of situational awareness, which is compromised if I have to be bent over a map trying to figure out where I am. I needed to be focused on the environment, not on myself.
Finally, we had to be on alert at all times, and if we got an emergency call, we had to respond as quickly as possible. To that end, we would memorize map tables and all their elements—the contents, the symbols, the colors. If we had time, our team would study a map before a mission and plan together.
In training, once we have been taught how to read different kinds of maps, we learn about grid coordinates. Our instructors would take our unit out to a land navigation range, which is a wooded area that has been studded with metal posts that have orange-and-white boxes on top of them.
The boxes are about ten inches square, and all four sides of the boxes have triangles with numbers on them. You might think that we would be able to see these boxes from a mile away, but we couldn’t—they are exposed to the elements of Georgia and they are rarely repainted, so they are not always easy to find. We’d be sent out into the woods with a map, a protractor, and a lensatic compass. We would have five points marked on the map and would be given a time limit to find them.
This activity takes place toward the end of basic training, when the groups should be working well together. No one has to get along; everyone just has to work together. Each group needs to use their map to strategize the best route to get from point A to point B. The shortest distance may not be the best route, depending on the topography of the area.
For example, it might not make sense to cross a marsh and then climb a big-ass hill to get to a box if another route takes longer but gets everyone there on relatively flat, dry land. Point A to D to C to B may be the best route. We had to use our protractors to figure all this out.
Learning How to Walk in a Straight Line
Try to imagine yourself in this situation: you shoot your azimuth, which means you put that compass in your hand, point it north and turn it to figure out which way you want to go. Let’s say you have figured out that you need to start walking 152 degrees in a straight line, but guess what? You’re in the forest. There are trees in the way. There are rocks. There are ridges and draws. In the woods, it is harder to read the terrain and orient your map than it would be in a city.
Since you can’t walk in a straight line, you need a pace count to track your distance. In the military, a pace count is in meters. I knew that every time my right foot hit, that was one meter. At a normal walking pace on flat ground, I cover one hundred meters in sixty-seven steps, counting each step I take on my right foot. So if I need to walk five hundred meters on unobstructed ground, I need to count to sixty-seven five times. While I’m counting, I have to pay attention to my direction, because if have to deviate from my angle in order to go around some obstacle, eventually I will be completely off the 152-degree angle that I determined from my azimuth.
In training, my groups always found this out the hard way. We always found our points eventually, but it usually took longer than the time we were given, and we would have to reshoot our azimuths and replot our course again and again because we kept drifting to the right. Over time, we got better and learned to trust that compass.
Navigating at night was the hardest for me to learn and become efficient at. I had the worst problems when it was dark out because I would feel like I was going the wrong way, even though I was following the compass. The face of the compass glowed in the dark, and I can remember looking at it and wanting to deviate a little bit because my body just didn’t trust it.
I would second-guess the compass, imagining that maybe I had dropped it or busted it up in some way. Second-guessing my training, and my compass, always resulted in my being late to the point. We used to navigate over and over, in all different kinds of terrain, and my skills improved, just as they would have with any other skill repetition. Over time, I developed more confidence in my equipment and stopped trying to outsmart myself.
Navigation skills don’t only help you get to where you are going; they can help you get out of a bad situation. I remember an episode in Kabul where some US military intelligence guys got into a car wreck and men who looked like the Afghan police on the scene were trying to yank the US military intelligence guys out of their vehicles.
The US military intelligence guys in that car put out a call on the SAT-COM radio channel that every American unit in the city knew to use to call for a quick reaction force: “We need help, whoever is in the area.” I then received a call on my GRS team radio calling all available GRS members to muster in the team room. Our standard operating procedure was to get our weapons, armor, and vehicles and then receive instructions as we were moving toward the location of the unit that needed help. When I got to the team room, four teams had already grabbed their gear and car keys and were shooting out of the gate. I kitted up and headed out with two other team members in a car. It’s important to get out of the gate. The worst thing you can do while someone is waiting for assistance is sit and wait for instructions. That is what happened in Benghazi: we were told to wait for instructions on site. In this situation, four teams were already out of the gate, my team was about two minutes behind them, and we all took different routes to converge on the location. As the Afghani police saw the show of force coming in, the cars and men kitted up with gear and rifles, they backed off and let the US Military guys leave their car wreck. The US Military personnel were allowed to leave and no one was injured.
The seed of an effective response to that call lies in everyone’s navigation preparation. When someone in trouble gives us their location, there is no time to start from zero figuring out where it is. A lot of the roads in Kabul didn’t have names, or they had multiple names for the same roads or intersections, but it didn’t matter because I knew the city like the back of my hand. All the good contractors did. We knew the grids and the roads and could respond without needing to look at a map or stop and ask for help.
Some cities or terrains are easier to learn than others. Baghdad is hard to navigate: it is completely flat, so there is usually no terrain to note, and, as in many of the Iraqi cities, it is possible to walk or drive down a road that becomes an alley without warning.
Something may look like a road on a map, but the walls of the buildings come in so close together that nothing wider than a donkey cart could pass through it. I have driven through rows of compounds with eight-foot-high walls in front of them, and I have been in situations where the road I am on just keeps getting narrower as I drive.
I could blink and, all of a sudden, I wouldn’t be able to get out of my car if I wanted to, because the walls are too close together for me to open the doors of my car.
The roads are not all paved either, so if the road you are on doesn’t have at least a little gravel, it will turn to quicksand every time it gets wet. If it starts to rain while you are driving, it will take no time for your car to get stuck on one of those roads. It doesn’t matter if the car is a four-wheeler.
We had a team in town once who didn’t know the back roads very well. They were great guys, but I guess they were too full of pride to ask for some basic information from guys who had been there longer. These guys were security on an op, and had a case officer with them. They were driving back to the base on a rainy day, trying to make sure they weren’t being followed, and they took a turn down what appeared on the map to be a road, but it turned out to be an alley that narrowed into what might more accurately be described as a walkway.
Stuck in the Mud
Once they figured out how narrow the road was, they went to put the car in reverse, and since it was raining, their car just sank and dug right into the mud. My team, along with two other teams, responded to their call for help. We got the case officer out of there, then switched vehicles and basically stayed out all night, digging them out. Of course, the cars were burned, which means that their identity was compromised because the locals knew they had been associated with Americans, so the cars could no longer be used.
There are a lot of things to worry about when we are working overseas. I understand why people might be tempted to prioritize other vital skills and objectives over basic work like orienteering, but doing so would be a mistake. That team that we dug out of the mud in Baghdad wasn’t a bad group, but mistakes can be made, even at a high level.
Preparing for Battle
In 2001, the 75th Ranger Regiment trained in a mountain-city environment in Fort Knox, Kentucky. This was a state-of-the-art facility in which the trainers could simulate battle conditions in a mock city. They could start fires right there, and sometimes they would employ people to act as bystanders during our missions so that we could learn to navigate civilians and protesters, as well as enemies, on the battlefield.
We practiced close-quarter battle techniques, clearing rooms within buildings as a squad and a platoon, techniques to minimize our visibility, or the choreography involved in clearing a building from the bottom up and top down simultaneously without teams shooting each other.
All of our training at this facility culminated in a night op that was considered to be the most challenging one at Fort Knox. Our mission was to locate an enemy and recover a teacher who had been kidnapped. I remember flying in to the scene on a Chinook, as part of a formation, and watching through the open doors of the helicopter as we approached our target.
We were banking it in order to see what was going on, and it was pure chaos on the ground. The mock city was on fire, protesters were rioting, and the sound of the helos was drowning everything else out in my ears.
I had been in on the op order because I was the acting leader for the weapons squad. The op orders are the directions provided by the leadership to coordinate the mission. This was odd for a junior Ranger, since weapons squads usually have the senior squad leader as the leader. My weapons squad leader had recently been promoted to acting platoon sergeant since our platoon sergeant was away at First Sergeant Academy. I was overwhelmed by the responsibility, and even though I was prepared, I did not feel fully prepared for the responsibility that I would hold during this training op.
My job was to provide support, putting up blocking positions as we cleared the buildings so that the line guys could get out with the kidnap victim when they found her. I knew where my teams were supposed to go and how they were supposed to fall out and coordinate so that we could start suppressive fire. I remember feeling somewhat overwhelmed but also knowing that my leaders had faith in me.
I tried to terrain associate from up in the helo to find my building and anticipate where we were going to land. No matter what your team has planned or hoped for, a helicopter may need to come in at a different angle, depending on the conditions in the field. We were aware that we might need to reorient on the ground at a moment’s notice.
I found our target building and recognized the area where we landed, so I knew which way to move. Our gun team used a specific method of movement as we approached the building. Another Ranger and I were supposed to get to a particular floor within the building to start the suppressive fire. We were running with our rounds, tripods, and machine guns. My ammo bearer had an M4, so I put him up front since he would be able to set up faster if we got in trouble.
The platoon sergeant had fast roped with his element onto the top of the building, so they were clearing from the top down. I could hear the platoon sergeant yelling at me over the radio, “Ranger Paronto, where the fuck are you guys at?”
I called back, “Roger, Sergeant. We are linked up. We are moving as fast as we can.”
There was fire and smoke everywhere, and the illumination from the fire was whiting out my night-vision goggles, so I raised them off my eyes since they were doing me no good. The civilian protesters were screaming, “Americans, go home!” at us, and even though they spread out when they saw us coming with our guns, they didn’t leave the scene.
We had a choice to make about whether to interact with the protesters or just keep an eye on them, which is the kind of call you have to make in real time. We decided to treat them as more of a nuisance and not engage them at the start.
We got in the building and, following our plan, raced up the different stairwells, trying to get our guns in the fight. On the third-floor landing, I met up with one of the leaders of another gun team. He told me that the staircase was not secure, so my team set up our guns in a room right there on the third floor.
We started laying the suppressive fire, shooting only when necessary and making sure not to hit the protesters. The sergeant was screaming at me on the radio, asking why we weren’t on the roof. I tried to tell him that we understood that the stairwell was not secure. He didn’t respond on the radio, so we finished that stage of the op there.
Over the radio, we got word that our people had taken out the bad guy and recovered the kidnapped teacher. There was an unexpected twist, which was that the teacher was in a wheelchair and unable to walk. She had been recovered in the same building that we were in, and, at that point, our job was to make sure that no one else got into the building while the rescue team was getting her out.
The building was large, six floors with fifty-meter hallways all around. I could see the blacked-out lights of the returning helos with my infrared vision through the windows. Our teams were moving back toward the birds at their predetermined positions.
We were blocking, holding a clear path and providing security for the team to come out with the schoolteacher. As they exited the building, the protesters started to group together, so we tried to provide some security for the squad leader who was pushing the wheelchair.
“Start Pushing, Ranger!”
Somehow, this squad leader had managed to lead the charge to the helo and was pushing the schoolteacher in a wheelchair right in front—with no cover.
We started running hard to get a gun up front and cover this guy. Remember, this is a training op, so people are going to make mistakes. By the time we got through this complete chaos and saw the ramp of the Chinook coming down, I was smoked as hell.
The schoolteacher got wheeled on, we did a quick headcount, the ramp went up, and we took off, leaving the city still burning below in the distance. The sensation of sweeping up away into the sky after an op never gets old, even an op that was for training.
My peace of mind was short-lived. The acting platoon sergeant was waiting for me when we got off the Chinook. The first words I heard were, “Start pushing, Ranger!” I immediately dropped to the ground with my face to the floor and started doing push-ups while he yelled at me.
“Why didn’t you get to the top of that building?”
“We were told…,” I started, but he cut me off.
“You should have found another way to get to me,” he said. “Keep pushing.”
I kept pushing and I didn’t complain. Another sergeant, Hopkins, came over and asked what was going on. I continued doing push-ups as the two leaders conferred with one another.
The truth is that I had had a job to do and I didn’t do what I needed to do from where I was supposed to do it. I didn’t get up to the top. I was thinking about how else I might have gotten there and whether we should have disobeyed Leonard and cleared the stairwell ourselves.
Before I had sorted it out, Hopkins—a big, soft-spoken guy and an outstanding leader—told me to get up. “Dude, you did good,” he told me. “Get out of here.”
My life changed when I returned to the United States after Benghazi. I felt betrayed by my government when the events of September 11, 2012, became politicized.
Many people were surprised that I wanted to continue working to defend Americans, and that I could still feel patriotic after what our team survived. But I have never lost faith in my brothers and I have never lost faith in the people of our country.
The truth is that if I could be my old self again, deploying and not doing any public speaking, I think I would go back in time. But I accept that I have been put on a new path. I believe that my story, and the stories of other patriots, have something to teach people, something that many Americans seem to need to hear right now. I know that listening to their stories helps me to be a better man.
I am still uncomfortable speaking in public. Sharing the story of our night fighting in Benghazi is emotionally draining. There have been moments during the last few years when I have been sorely tempted to quit. But if sharing the story of my experience in Benghazi corrects the historical record and keeps the memory of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty alive, it’s worth it. If I can bring attention to the stories of other men and women who serve and the issues that we care about, it’s worth it. If something in one of our stories resonates with a stranger and helps another person make a positive change in their own life, it’s worth it.
When I muster the courage to tell people about the ways that I have struggled and failed, I can see that it makes an impression, particularly in a time when many people go to great lengths to curate identities on social media that are perfect, enviable—and false.
I still struggle, but I try to stay positive, grateful for my second chances, and mindful of how I am using them. When I listen to the stories of other people who have sacrificed to protect our country, I am humbled. They help me put my own obstacles into perspective. They also make me proud to be an American.
There are many different ways to serve, and you need to have faith that you will come to know yours. If there is anything in these pages that causes you to reflect on your own values, that helps you to find your own mission, that brings you comfort or hope, or that helps you to appreciate the blessings of your citizenship, then I will feel grateful that I am continuing to serve. Our nation is stronger when we are all willing to sacrifice and to work hard to be the best possible version of ourselves. Never quit.