2

Baby Seals...
and Big Ole Gators

I wrestled with one once and was pretty glad when that sucker decided he’d had enough and took off for calmer waters. But to this day my brother loves to wrestle alligators, just for fun.

We flew on, high over the southern reaches of the Gulf of Oman. We headed east-northeast for four hundred miles, forty-five thousand feet above the Arabian Sea. We crossed the sixty-first line of longitude in the small hours of the morning. That put us due south of the Iranian border seaport of Gavater, where the Pakistan frontier runs down to the ocean.

Chief Healy snored quietly. Axe did a New York Times crossword. And the miracle was that Shane’s headset didn’t explode, as loud as his rock-and-roll music was playing.

“Do you really need to play that shit at that volume, kiddo?”

“It’s cool, man...dude, chill.”

“Jesus Christ.”

The C-130 roared on, heading slightly more northerly now, up toward the coast of Baluchistan, which stretches 470 miles along the northern shoreline of the Arabian Sea and commands, strategically, the inward and outward oil lanes to the Persian Gulf. Despite a lot of very angry tribal chiefs, Baluchistan is part of Pakistan and has been since the partition with India in 1947. But that doesn’t make the chiefs any happier with the arrangement.

And it’s probably worth remembering that no nation, not the Turks, the Tatars, the Persians, the Arabs, the Hindus, or the Brits has ever completely conquered Baluchistan. Those tribesmen even held off Genghis Khan, and his guys were the Navy SEALs of the thirteenth century.

They never tell us, or anyone else, the precise route of U.S. Special Forces into any country. But there’s a big American base in the Baluchistan coastal town of Pasni. I guess we made our landfall somewhere along there, long before first light, and then flew on over four mountain ranges for 250 miles up to another U.S. military base near the city of Dalbandin.

We never stopped, but Dalbandin lies only fifty miles south of the Afghan border, and the airspace is safe around there. At least, it’s as safe as anything can be in this strange, wild country, which is kind of jammed into a triangle among Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Baluchistan, its endless mountains a safe haven for so many fleeing al Qaeda recruits and exiled Taliban fighters, currently provides shelter for up to six thousand of these potential terrorists. And even though Chief Healy, me, and the guys were nine miles above this vast, underpopulated, and secretive land, it still gave me the creeps, and I was pleased when the aircrew finally told us we were in Afghanistan airspace, running north for another four hundred miles, up toward Kabul.

I fell asleep somewhere over the Regestan Desert, east of one of Afghanistan’s greatest waterways, the 750-mile-long Hel-mand River, which flows and irrigates most of the southern farmlands.

I cannot remember my dreams, but I expect they were of home. They usually are when I’m serving overseas. Home for us is a small ranch out in the piney woods of East Texas, near Sam Houston National Forest. We live down a long, red dirt road in a lonely part of the country, close by another two or three ranches, one of which, our adjoining neighbor, is about four thousand times bigger than ours and sometimes makes us seem a whole lot bigger than we are. I have a similar effect on my identical twin brother, Morgan.

He’s about seven minutes older than I am, and around the same size (six feet five inches, 230 pounds). Somehow I’ve always been regarded as the baby of the family. You wouldn’t believe seven minutes could do that to a guy, would you? Well, it did, and Morgan is unflagging in his status as senior man.

He’s a Navy SEAL as well, a little behind me in rank, because I joined first. But he still assumes a loose command whenever we’re together. And that’s pretty often, since we share a house in Coronado, California, hard by the SEAL teams.

Anyway, there’s two or three houses on our Texas property, the main one being a single-story stone ranch surrounded by a large country garden, which contains one little plantation for corn and another couple for vegetables. All around us, just about as far as you can see in any direction, there’s pasture, studded with huge oak trees and grazing animals. It’s a peaceful place for a God-fearing family.

Right from kids, Morgan and I were brought up to believe in the Lord. We weren’t compelled to go to church or anything, and to this day the family are not churchgoers. In fact, I’m the only one who does go to church on a somewhat regular basis. On Sunday mornings when I’m home, I drive over to the Catholic church, where people know me. I was not baptized a Catholic, but it suits me, its beliefs and doctrines sit easily with me. Since I was young, I have always been able to recite the Twenty-third Psalm and several others from beginning to end.

Also, I thought the late Pope John Paul was the holiest man in the world, an uncompromising Vicar of Christ, a man whose guidelines were unshakable. Tough old guy, John Paul. A lot too tough for the Russians. I’ve always thought if he hadn’t been a vicar, he’d have made a good Navy SEAL.

Down home, in our quiet backwoods area, it looks like an untroubled life. There are a few minor irritants, most of those being snakes. However, Dad taught us how to deal with them long ago, especially the coral snakes and those copperhead vipers. There’s also rattlesnakes, eastern diamondbacks, and king snakes, which eat the others. In the local lake you can find the occasional water moccasin, and he is one mean little sonofabitch. He’ll chase you, and while I don’t much like ’em, I’m not scared of them. Morgan goes after them as a sport, likes to hustle ’em up, keep ’em alert.

A mile or so up the road from us, there’s a mighty herd of Texas longhorns. Beyond the house there’s a half dozen paddocks for my mom’s horses, some of them belonging to her, others boarders from other people.

People send horses to her for her near-mystical power to bring sick or weak animals back to full fighting form. No one knows how she does it. She’s plainly a horse whisperer. But she has some special ways of feeding them, including, for a certain type of ailing racehorse, some kind of a seaweed concoction she swears to God can turn a cow pony into Secretariat. Sorry, Mom. Didn’t mean that. Just joking.

Seriously, Holly Luttrell is a brilliant horsewoman. And she does turn horses that seem very poorly into gleaming, healthy runners again. I guess that’s why those horses keep on coming. She can only cope with about ten at a time, and she’s out there in the barn at five every morning looking after them. If you take the time, you can see the effect she has on them, the very obvious results of her very obvious skills.

My mom’s a seventh-generation Texan, although she did once immigrate to New York City. Around here, that’s like moving to Shanghai, but Mom has always been a rather glamorous blonde and she wanted to make a career as an air stewardess. Didn’t last long, though. She was back in the big country of East Texas real quick, raising horses. Like all of us, she feels Texas is a part of her spirit. It’s in mine, in Dad’s, and it sure as hell is the very essence of Morgan.

None of us would live anywhere else. We’re right at home down here, with people we have known and trusted for many years. There’s no one like Texans for a spirit of expansiveness, optimism, friendship, and decency. I realize that might not be acceptable to everyone, but that’s how it seems to us. We’re out of place anywhere else. It’s no good pretending otherwise.

That might mean we just get real homesick quicker than other people. But I will come back to live here when I’m finished in the military. And I intend, sometime, to die here. Hardly a day goes by, wherever I am in the world, when I don’t think of our little ranch and my huge circle of family and friends, of having a beer on the front porch and telling tall stories full of facts, some of ’em true, all of ’em funny.

So while I’m on the subject I’ll explain how a farm boy from the backwoods of East Texas came to be made a petty officer first class and a team leader in the U.S. Navy SEALs.

The short explanation is probably talent, but I don’t have any more of that than the next guy. In fact, my natural-born assets are very average. I’m pretty big, which was an accident of birth. I’m pretty strong, because a lot of other people took a lot of trouble training me, and I’m unbelievably determined, because when you’re as naturally ungifted as I am, you have to keep driving forward, right?

I’ll outwork anyone. I’ll just go on and on until the dust clears. Then I’m usually the only one left standing. As an athlete, I’m not very fast, but I’m kind of sharp. I know where to be, I’m good at anticipating things, and I guess that’s why I was a halfway decent sportsman.

Give me a golf ball and I can hit that sucker a country mile. That’s because golf is a game that requires practice, practice, and more practice. That’s my brand of doggedness. I can do that. I play to a reasonable handicap, although I wasn’t born a Ben Hogan or anything. But Ben came from Texas like me. We were born about ninety-four miles apart, and in my country that’s the equivalent of a sand wedge. Ben, of course, was known to practice more than any other golfer who had ever lived. Must be something in the water.

I was born in Houston but raised up near the Oklahoma border. My parents, David and Holly Luttrell, owned a fair-sized horse farm, about 1,200 acres at one time. We had 125 head up there, mostly Thoroughbreds and quarter horses. My mom ran the breeding programs, and Dad took charge of the racing and sales operation.

Morgan and I were brought up with horses, feeding, watering, cleaning out the barns, riding. Most every weekend we’d go in the horse van to the races. We were just kids at the time, and both our parents were excellent riders, especially Mom. That’s how we learned. We worked the ranch, mended fences, swinging sledgehammers when we were about nine years old. We loaded the bales into the loft, worked like adults from a young age. Dad insisted on that. And for a lot of years, the operation did very well.

At the time, Texas itself was in a boom-time hog heaven. Out in West Texas, where the oil drillers and everyone surrounding them were becoming multimillionaires, the price of oil went up 800 percent between 1973 and 1981. I was born in 1975, before that wave even started to crest, and I have to say the Luttrell family was riding high.

It was nothing for my dad to breed a good-looking horse from a $5,000 stallion and sell the yearling for $40,000. He did it all the time. And my mom was a pure genius at improving a horse, buying it cheap and devoting months of tender loving care and brilliant feeding to produce a young runner worth eight times what she paid.

And breeding horses was precisely the right line to be in. Horses were right up there with Rolex watches, Rolls-Royces, Learjets, Gulfstream 1s, palaces rather than regular houses, and boats, damn great boats. Office space was at a premium all over the state, and massive new high-rise blocks were under construction. Retail spending was at an all-time high. Racehorses, beautiful. Give me six. Six fast ones, Mr. Luttrell. That way I’ll win some races.

That oil money just washed right off, and people were making fortunes in anything that smacked of luxury, anything to feed the egos of the oil guys, who were spending and borrowing money at a rate never seen before or since.

It wasn’t anything for banks to make loans of more than $100 million to oil explorers and producers. At one time there were 4,500 oil rigs running in the U.S.A., most of them in Texas. Credit? That was easy. Banks would lend you a million bucks without batting an eye.

Listen, I was only a kid at the time, but my family and I lived through the trauma to come, and, boy, I’ve done some serious reading about it since. And in a way, I’m glad I lived through it, because it taught me to be careful, to earn my money and invest it, get it somewhere secure.

And it taught me to think very carefully about the element of luck, when it’s running, and how to keep your life under control. I have long since worked out that when the crash came in Texas, its effects were magnified a thousandfold, because the guys in the oil industry sincerely believed money had nothing to do with luck. They thought their prosperity came from their own sheer brilliance.

No one gave much consideration to the world oil market being controlled in the Middle East by Muslims. Everything that happened had its roots in Arabia, assisted by President Carter’s energy policy and the fact that when I was five years old the price per barrel of crude was $40.

The crash, when it came, was caused by the oil embargo and the Iranian revolution, when the ayatollah took over from the shah. The key to it was geopolitical. And Texas could only stand and watch helplessly as the oil glut manifested itself and the price per barrel began to slide downward to an ultimate low of around $9.

That was in 1986, when I was not quite ten. In the meantime, the giant First National Bank of Midland, Texas, collapsed, judged insolvent by government financial inspectors. That was one huge bank to go belly-up, and the ripple effect was statewide. An era of reckless spending and investing was over. Guys building palaces were forced to sell at a loss. You couldn’t give away a luxury boat, and Rolls-Royce dealers darned near went out of business.

Along with the commercial giants felled by the oil crash went the horse farm of David and Holly Luttrell. Hard-running colts and mares, which Dad had valued at $35,000 to $40,000, were suddenly worth $5,000, less than they cost to raise. My family lost everything, including our house.

But my dad’s a resilient man, tough and determined. And he fought back, with a smaller ranch and the tried-and-trusted techniques of horse raising he and Mom had always practiced. But it all went wrong again. The family wound up living with my grandfather, Morgan sleeping on the floor.

My dad, who had always kept one foot in the petrochemical business ever since he came back from Vietnam, went back to work, and in a very short time he was on his feet, with a couple of huge deals. We moved out of Grandfather’s place into a grand four-story house, and the good times seemed to be back.

Then some giant deal went south and we somehow lost it all again, moved back out to a kind of rural skid row. You see, my dad, though born over the border in Oklahoma, is a Texan in his soul. He was as brave as a lion when he was a navy gunner in Vietnam. And in Texas, real men don’t sit on their money. They get back out there, take risks, and when they hit it big, they just want to hit it bigger. My dad’s a real man.

You could tell a lot about him just by the names he gave the ranches, big or small — Lone Star Farms, North Fork Ranch, Shootin’ Star. Like he always said, “I’d rather shoot for a star and hit a stump than shoot for a stump and miss.”

I cannot describe how poor we were during the time Morgan and I were trying to get through college. I had four jobs to pay tuition and board and make my truck payment. I was the lifeguard in the college pool and I worked with Morgan on construction, landscaping, cutting grass, and yard work. In the evening I was a bouncer in a rough local bar full of redneck cowboys. And I was still starving, trying to feed myself on about twenty dollars a week.

One time, I guess we were around twenty-one, Morgan snapped his leg playing baseball, sliding into second. When they got him to the hospital Morgan just told them we didn’t have any money. Eventually the surgeon agreed to operate and set the leg on some kind of long-term credit. But the anaesthetist would not administer anything to Morgan without payment.

No one’s tougher than my brother. And he eventually said, “Fine. I don’t need anaesthetic. Set the leg without it. I can take the pain.” The surgeon was aghast and told Morgan he could not possibly have such an operation without anaesthesia. But Morgan stuck to his guns. “Doc, I don’t have any money. Fix my leg and I’ll handle the pain.”

No one was crazy about that, especially the surgeon. But then Jason Miller, a college buddy of Morgan’s, turned up, saw that he was in absolute agony, and gave him every last dollar of his savings to pay the anaesthetist. At which point they put Morgan back together.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we were young, working the horses, my dad was very, very tough on us. He considered that good grades were everything, bad ones were simply unacceptable. I once got a C in conduct, and he beat me with a saddle girth. I know he was doing it for our own good, trying to instill discipline in his sons, which would serve them well in later life.

But he ruled our lives with an iron fist. He would tell us: “One day I’m not gonna be here. Then it’s gonna be you two, by yourselves, and I want you to understand how rough and unfair this world is. I want you both prepared for whatever the hell might come your way.”

He tolerated nothing. Disobedience was out of the question. Rudeness was damn near a hanging offense. There was no leeway. He insisted on politeness and hard work. And he didn’t let up even when we were all broke. Dad was the son of an Arkansas woodsman, another amazingly tough character, and he brought that stand-on-your-own-feet ruggedness into our lives at the earliest opportunity.

We were always out in the woods, in rough country in the East Texas pines, the red oaks, and the sweet gum trees. Dad taught us to shoot straight at the age of seven, bought us a .22 rifle, a Nylon 66. We could hit a moving Miller High Life beer can from 150 yards. Now that’s redneck stuff, right? Redneck kids in redneck country, learning life’s skills.

He taught us how to survive out there. What you could eat and what you couldn’t. He showed us how to build a shelter, taught us how to fish. He even taught us how to rope and kill a wild boar: drop a couple of long loops around his neck and pull, then hope to hell he doesn’t charge straight at you! I still know how to butcher and roast one.

At home, on any of the ranches, Dad showed us how to plant and grow corn and potatoes, vegetables and carrots. A lot of times when we were really poor we just about lived on that. Looking back, it was important training for a couple of farm boys.

But perhaps most important of all, he taught us to swim. Dad himself was an all-American swimmer and this really mattered to him. He was superb in the water and he made me that good. In almost everything, Morgan is naturally better than I am. He’s very gifted as a runner, a fighter, a marksman, a navigator on land or water. He always sails through his exams, whereas I have to slog it out, studying, practicing, trying to be first man in and last man out. Morgan does not have to strive.

He was honor man after his SEAL BUD/S class, voted for by his peers. I knew he would be before he even started. There’s only one discipline at which he can’t beat me. I’m faster in the water, and I have the edge underwater. He knows it, though he might not admit it.

There was a huge lake near where we lived, and that’s where Dad trained us. All through the long Texas summers we were out there, swimming, racing, diving, practicing. We were just like fish, the way Dad wanted it.

He spent months teaching us to dive, deep, first on our own, then with our scuba gear on. We were good, and people would pay us to try and retrieve keys and valuables thrown into deep water. Of course, Dad considered this might be too easy, and he stipulated we only got paid if we found the correct object.

During this time we had the occasional brush with passing alligators, but one of my great Texas friends, Tray Baker, showed us how to deal with them. I wrestled with one once and was pretty glad when that sucker decided he’d had enough and took off for calmer waters. But to this day my brother loves to wrestle alligators, just for fun. He is, of course, crazy. But we sometimes take an old flat-bottomed boat fishing in the lake, and one of those big ole gators will come sliding up alongside the boat.

Morgan makes a quick assessment — Nostrils about eight or nine inches from his eyes, so he’s eight or nine feet long. Morgan executes a ramrod-straight low-angled dive right on top of the gator, clamping its jaws shut with his fists, then he twists it and turns it, gets on its back, all the while holding those huge jaws tight shut and laughing at the panic-stricken beast of the deep.

After a few minutes they both get fed up with it, and Morgan lets it go. I always think this is the most dangerous part. But I never saw a gator who felt like having another go at Morgan. They always just turn around and swim away from the area. He only misjudged it once, and his hand bears a line of alligator-teeth scars.

You know, I think Dad always wanted us to be Navy SEALs. He was forever telling us about those elite warriors, the stuff they did and what they stood for. In his opinion they were all that is best in the American male — courage, patriotism, strength, determination, refusal to accept defeat, brains, expertise in all that they did. All through our young lives he told us about those guys. And over the years, it sunk in, I suppose. Morgan and I both made it.

I was about twelve when I realized beyond doubt that I was going to become a Navy SEAL. And I knew a lot more about it than most kids of my age. I understood the brutality of the training, the level of fitness required, and the need for super skills in the water. I thought I would be able to handle that. Dad had told us of the importance of marksmanship, and I knew I could do that.

SEALs need to be at home in rough country, able to survive, live in the jungle if necessary. We were already good at that. By the age of twelve, Morgan and I were like a couple of wild animals, at home in the great outdoors, at home with a fishing pole and gun, easily able to live off the land.

But deep down I knew there was something more required to make it into the world’s top combat teams. And that was a level of fitness and strength that could only be attained by those who actively sought it. Nothing just happens. You always have to strive.

In our part of East Texas, there are a lot of past and present special forces guys, quiet, understated iron men, most of them unsung heroes except among their families. But they don’t serve in the U.S. Armed Forces for personal recognition or glory.

They do it because deep in their granite souls they feel a slight shiver when they see Old Glory fluttering above them on the parade square. The hairs on the backs of their necks stand up when these men hear the national anthem of the United States. When the president walks out to the strains of a U.S. military band’s “Hail to the Chief,” there’s a moment of solemnity for each and every one of them — for our president, our country, and what our country has meant to the world and the many people who never had a chance without America.

These men of the special forces have had other options in their lives, other paths, easier paths they could have taken. But they took the hardest path, that narrow causeway that is not for the sunshine patriot. They took the one for the supreme patriot, the one that may require them to lay down their lives for the United States of America. The one that is suitable only for those who want to serve their country so bad, nothing else matters.

That’s probably not fashionable in our celebrity-obsessed modern world. But special forces guys don’t give a damn about that either. I guess you have to know them to understand them. And even then it’s not easy, because most of them are shy, rather than taciturn, and getting any of them to say anything self-congratulatory is close to impossible. They are of course aware of a higher calling, because they are sworn to defend this country and to fight its battles. And when the drum sounds, they’re going to come out fighting.

And when it does sound, the hearts of a thousand loved ones miss a beat, and the guys know this as well as anyone. But for them, duty and commitment are stronger than anyone’s aching heart. And those highly trained warriors automatically pick up their rifles and ammunition and go forward to obey the wishes of their commander in chief.

General Douglas MacArthur once warned the cadets of West Point that if they should become the first to allow the Long Gray Line to fail, “a million ghosts in olive drab, brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words, Duty, Honor, and Country.” No need for ghosts in the U.S. Navy SEALs. Those words are engraved upon our hearts.

And many such men way down there in East Texas were willing to give up their time for absolutely no reward to show kids what it takes to become a SEAL, a Ranger, or a Green Beret. The one we all knew about was a former Green Beret sergeant who lived close by. His name was Billy Shelton, and if he ever sees this, he’ll probably die of embarrassment, seeing his name in print on the subject of valor.

Billy had a glittering army career in combat with the Green Berets in Vietnam and, later, serving on a government SWAT team. He was one of the toughest men I ever met, and one afternoon just before my fifteenth birthday, I plucked up my courage and went to his house to ask if he could train me to become a Navy SEAL. He was eating his lunch at the time, came to the door still chewing. He was a bull of a man, rippling muscles, fair skin, not carrying one ounce of fat. To my eyes he looked like he could have choke slammed a rhino.

I made my hesitant request. And he just looked me up and down and said, “Right here. Four, tomorrow afternoon.” Then he shut the door in my face. I was a bit young at the time, but the phrase I was groping for was No bullshit, right?

Now, everyone in the area knew that Billy trained kids for the special forces. And when he had a group of us running down the street, cars driving by would blow their horns and cheer us on.

He always ignored that, and he showed us no mercy. Our program included running with heavy concrete blocks on our shoulders. When Billy thought we were strong enough, we stepped up the pace, running with rubber tires, which felt like they’d just come off the space shuttle or at least that big ole tractor out back.

Billy did not hold an exercise class; he operated a full pre-SEAL training program for teenagers. Over the years he had us in the gym pumping iron, hauling the torture machine, the ergometer, pounding the roads, driving our bodies, sweating and straining.

Morgan and I were terrified of him. I used to have nightmares when we were due to report to him the next morning, because he drove us without mercy, never mind our extreme youth. We were in a class of maybe a dozen guys, all midteens.

“I’m gonna break you down, mentally and physically,” he yelled at us. “Break you down, hear me? Then I’m gonna build you right back up, as one fighting unit — so your mind and body are one. Understand me? I’m gonna put you through more pain than you’ve ever been in.”

Right about then, half the class ran for their lives rather than face this bulldog, this ex–Texas Tech tailback who could run like a Mack truck going downhill. He had the support of a local high school, which allowed him to use their gym free of charge to train future special forces from our part of the world.

“I’m not your friend,” he’d shout. “Not right here in this gym. I’m here to get you right — fit, trained, and ready for the SEALs, or the Berets, or the Rangers. I’m not getting one dime from anyone to do this. And that’s why you’re gonna do it right, just so you don’t waste my time.

“Because if any one of you fails to make the grade in the special forces, it will not be because you were too weak. Because that would mean I’d failed, and I’m gonna make sure that cannot happen, because right here, failure’s not an option. I’m gonna get you right. All of you. Understand?”

He’d take us on twelve-mile runs, hauling the concrete blocks till we nearly collapsed. Guys would have blood on the backs of their heads from the chafing. And he never took his eyes off us, never tolerated idleness or lack of concentration. He just made us grind it out, taking it to the limit. Every time.

That’s what built my strength, gave me my basis. That’s how I learned the fitness creed of the SEALs. Billy was extremely proud of that; proud to pass on his knowledge.

And he asked only for undying devotion to the cause, the discipline of a samurai warrior, and lungs like a pair of bagpipes. He was absolutely relentless, and he really loved Morgan and me, two of only six survivors in the class.

Once, when I came back from a tour of duty in Iraq, I went to see him after a couple of weeks’ easy living and Mom’s cooking, and he threw me out of the gym!

“You’re a goddamned fat, pitiful excuse for a SEAL, and I can’t stand to look at you!” he yelled. “Get out of my sight!” Holy shit! I was out of there, ran down the stairs, and didn’t dare go back until I’d dropped eight pounds. No one around here argues with Billy Shelton.

The other skill I needed was still to come. No Navy SEAL can operate without a high level of expertise in unarmed combat. Billy told me I’d need to take martial-arts classes as soon as possible. And so I found a teacher to work with. All through my grade school and college career, I studied and learned that strange, rather mystical Asian skill. I worked at it for many years instead of becoming involved in other sports. And I attained all of my goals.

Morgan says the real truth is I don’t know my own strength and should be avoided at all times.

By any standards, I had a head start in becoming a Navy SEAL. I was made aware of the task at a young age, and I had two strong engines driving me forward: my dad and Billy Shelton. Everything I learned beyond the schoolroom, down from my early years, seems to have directed me to Coronado. At least, looking back now it seems that way.

Everyone understands why there’s a huge rate of dropouts among applicants for the SEALs. And when I think of what I went through in the years before I got there, I can’t even imagine what it must be like for guys who try out with no prior training. Morgan and I were groomed to be SEALs, but it was never easy. The work is brutally hard, the fitness regimes are as harsh and uncompromising as any program in the free world. The examinations are searching and difficult. Nothing but the highest possible standard is acceptable in the SEAL teams.

And perhaps above all, your character is under a microscope at all times; instructors, teachers, senior chiefs, and officers are always watching for the character flaw, the weakness which may one day lead to the compromise of your teammates. We can’t stand that. We can stand damn near anything, except that.

When someone tells you he is in the SEAL teams, it means he has passed every test, been accepted by some of the hardest taskmasters in the military. And a short nod of respect is in order, because it’s harder to become a Navy SEAL than it is to get into Harvard Law School. Different, but harder.

When someone tells you he’s in a SEAL team, you know you are in the presence of a very special cat. Myself, I was just born lucky, somehow fluked my way in with a work ethic bequeathed to me by my dad. The rest of those guys are the gods of the U.S. Armed Forces. And in faraway foreign fields, they serve their nation as required, on demand, and mostly without any recognition whatsoever.

They would have it no other way, because they understand no other way. Accolades just wash off them, they shy away from the spotlight, but in the end they have one precious reward — when their days of combat are over, they know precisely who they are and what they stand for. That’s rare. And no one can buy it.

Back in the C-130, crossing into the southern wastes of the Regestan Desert, the gods of the U.S. Armed Forces with whom I traveled were asleep, except for the beach god Shane, who was still rockin’.

Somewhere out in the darkness, to our starboard side, was the Pakistani city of Quetta, which used to be quite important when the Brits ran the place. They had a big army staff college down there, and for three years in the mid-1930s, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, later the victor of the Battle of Ala-mein, taught there. Which proves, I suppose, that I’m as much addicted to military trivia as I am to the smart-ass remark.

However, we stayed on the left-hand, Afghanistan side of the border, I think, and continued on above the high western slopes of the great range of the Hindu Kush mountains. The most southerly peak, the one nearest the desert, is 11,000 feet high. After that it gets pretty steep, and it was to those mountains we were headed.

Way below us was the important city of Kandahar, which a few weeks later, on June 1, 2005, was the scene of one of the most terrible Taliban attacks of the year. One of their suicide bombers killed twenty people in Kandahar’s principal mosque. In that central-city disaster, they killed the security chief of Kabul, who was attending the funeral of an anti-Taliban cleric who had been killed three days earlier by a couple of guys on a motorbike.

I think that Chief Healy and myself, in particular, were well aware of the dangers in this strife-torn country. And we realized the importance of our coming missions, to halt the ever-burgeoning influx of Taliban recruits streaming in over the high peaks of the Hindu Kush and to capture their leaders for interrogation.

The seven-hour journey from Bahrain seemed endless, and we were still an hour or more south of Kabul, crawling north high above the treacherous border that leads directly to the old Khyber Pass and then to the colossal peaks and canyons of the northern Hindu Kush. After that, the mountains swerve into Tajikstan and China, later becoming the western end of the Himalayas.

I was reading my guidebook, processing and digesting facts like an Agatha Christie detective. Chaman, Zhob, key entry points for the Taliban and for bin Laden’s al Qaeda as they fled the American bombs and ground troops. These tribesmen drove their way over sixteen-thousand-foot mountains, seeking help from the disgruntled Baluchistan chiefs, who were now bored sideways by Pakistan and Afghanistan, Great Britain, Iran, the U.S.A., Russia, and anyone else who tried to tell them what to do.

Our area of operations would be well north of there, and I spent the final hours of the journey trying to glean some data. But it was hard to come by. Trouble is, there’s not much happening in those mountains, not many small towns and very few villages. Funny, really. Not much was happening, and yet, in another way, every damn thing in the world was happening: plots, plans, villainy, terrorism, countless schemes to attack the West, especially the United States.

There were cells of Taliban warriors just waiting for their chance to strike against the government. There were bands of al Qaeda swarming around a leader hardly anyone had seen for several years. The Taliban wanted power in Afghanistan again; bin Laden’s mob wanted death and destruction of U.S. citizens, uniformed or not. One way or another, they were all a goddamned nightmare, and one that was growing progressively worse. Which was why they sent for us.

In the weeks before our arrival, there had been widespread incidents of violence, confirming everyone’s dread that the generally hated Taliban was once more on the rise and a serious threat to the new government of Afghanistan. Even with the support of thirty thousand U.S. and NATO troops, President Hamid Karzai struggled to control the country anywhere outside of Kabul.

A few weeks earlier, in February, the Taliban flatly announced they were increasing their attacks on the government as soon as the weather improved. And from then on they launched a series of drive-by shootings and bombings, usually directed at local officials and pro-government clergy. In the south and over to the east, they started ambushing American soldiers.

It’s a strange word, Taliban. Everyone’s heard it, like insurgent, Sunni, ayatollah, or Taiwan. But what does Taliban really stand for? I’ve suffered with them, what you might describe as close encounters of the most god-awful type. And I’ve done a lot of reading. The facts fit the reality. Those guys are evil, murderous religious fanatics, each one of them with an AK-47 and a bloodlust. You can trust me on that one.

The Taliban have been in prominence since 1994. Their original leader was a village clergyman named Mullah Mohammad Omar, a tough guy who lost his right eye fighting the occupying forces of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. By the mid-’90s, the Taliban’s prime targets in Afghanistan — before I showed up — were the feuding warlords who (a) formed the mujahideen and (b) threw the Soviets out of the country.

The Taliban made two major promises which they would carry out once in power: to restore peace and security, and to enforce sharia, or Islamic law. Afghans, weary of the mujahideens’ excesses and infighting, welcomed the Taliban, which enjoyed much early success, stamping out corruption, curbing lawlessness, and making the roads safe for commerce to flourish. This applied to all areas that came under their control.

They began their operation in the southwestern city of Kandahar and moved quickly into other parts of the country. They captured the province of Herat, which borders Iran, in September 1995. And one year later, their armies took the Afghan capital of Kabul, overthrowing the regime of President Burhanuddin Rabbani and his defense minister, Ahmed Shah Massoud. By 1998, they were in control of almost 90 percent of the country.

Once in power, however, the Taliban showed their true colors. They set up one of the most authoritarian administrations on earth, one that tolerated no opposition to their hard-line policies. Ancient Islamic punishments, like public executions for convicted murderers and amputations at the wrist for those charged with theft, were immediately introduced. I cannot even think about the penalty a rapist or an adulterer might anticipate.

Television, music, sports, and cinema were banned, judged by the Taliban leaders to be frivolities. Girls age ten and above were forbidden to go to school; working women were ordered to stay at home. Men were required to grow beards, women had to wear the burka. These religious policies earned universal notoriety as the Taliban strived to restore the Middle Ages in a nation longing to join the twenty-first century. Their policies concerning human rights were outrageous and brought them into direct conflict with the international community.

But there was another issue, which would bring about their destruction. And that was their role in playing host to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda movement. In August 1998 Islamic fanatics bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 225 people. Washington immediately presented the Taliban leaders with a difficult choice — either expel bin Laden, who was held responsible for the bombings by the U.S. government, or face the consequences.

The Taliban flatly refused to hand over their Saudi-born guest, who was providing them with heavy funding. President Bill Clinton ordered a missile attack on the main bin Laden training camp in southern Afghanistan, which failed to kill its leader. Then in 1999 the United States persuaded the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Two years later, even harsher sanctions were put in place in another attempt to force the Taliban to hand over bin Laden.

Nothing worked. Not sanctions nor the denial of Afghanistan’s U.N. seat. The Taliban were still in power, and they were still hiding Osama bin Laden, but their isolation, political and diplomatic, was becoming total.

But the Taliban would not budge. They took their isolation as a badge of honor and decided to go whole hog with an even more fundamentalist regime. The poor Afghan people realized too late what they had done: handed over the entire country to a group of bearded lunatics who were trying to inflict upon them nothing but stark human misery and who controlled every move they made under their brutal, repressive, draconian rule. The Taliban were so busy trying to enslave the citizens, they forgot about the necessity for food, and there was mass starvation. One million Afghans fled the country as refugees.

All of this was understood by the West. Almost. But it took horrific shock, delivered in March 2001, to cause genuine inter-national outrage. That was when the Taliban blasted sky-high the two monumental sixth-century statues of the Bamiyan Buddhas, one of them 180 feet high, the other 120 feet, carved out of a mountain in central Afghanistan, 143 miles northwest of Kabul. This was tantamount to blowing up the Pyramids of Giza.

The statues were hewn directly from sandstone cliffs right in Bamiyan, which is situated on the ancient Silk Road, the caravan route which linked the markets of China and central Asia with those of Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia. It was also one of the revered Buddhist religious sites, dating back to the second century and once home to hundreds of monks and many monasteries. The two statues were the largest standing Buddha carvings on earth.

And their summary destruction by the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan caused museum directors and curators all over the world to have about four hemorrhages apiece. The Taliban effectively told the whole lot of them to shove it. Whose statues were they, anyway? Besides, they were planning to destroy all the statues in Afghanistan, on the grounds they were un-Islamic.

The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in accordance with sharia law. Only Allah the Almighty deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else. Wraps that up then, right? Praise Allah and pass the high explosive.

The blasting of the Buddhas firmed up world opinion that something had to be done about Afghanistan’s rulers. But it took another explosion to provoke savage action against them. That took place on September 11, the same year, and was the beginning of the end for the Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

Before the dust had settled on lower Manhattan, the United States demanded the Taliban hand over bin Laden for masterminding the attack on U.S. soil. Again the Taliban refused, perhaps not realizing that the new(ish) U.S. president, George W. Bush, was a very different character from Bill Clinton.

Less than one month later, on October 7, the Americans, leading a small coalition force, unleashed an onslaught against Afghanistan that shook that area of the world to its foundations. U.S. military intelligence located all of the al Qaeda camps in the mountains of the northeast part of the country, and the military let fly with one of the biggest aerial bombardments in modern warfare.

It began with fifty cruise missiles launched from U.S. warships and Royal Navy submarines. At the same time, long after dark in Afghanistan, twenty-five carrier-based aircraft and fifteen land-based bombers took off and destroyed Taliban air defenses, communications infrastructure, and the airports at Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat. The U.S. bombs blasted the big radar installations and obliterated the control tower in Kandahar. This was the city where Mullah Omar lived, and a navy bomber managed to drop one dead in the middle of his backyard. That one-eyed ole bastard escaped, though.

The Taliban, its military headquarters now on fire, did own a somewhat insignificant air-strike capacity, just a few aircraft and helicopters, and the U.S. Air Force wiped that right out with smart bombs as a matter of routine.

Navy bombers taking off from the carriers targeted the Taliban’s other military hardware, heavy vehicles, tanks, and fuel dumps. Land-based B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers were also in the air, the B-52s dropping dozens of five-hundred-pound gravity bombs on al Qaeda terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan, way up in the border mountains where we would soon be visiting.

One of the prime U.S. objectives was the small inventory of surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, stolen from either the Russians or the old mujahideen. These were hard to locate, and various caches were removed by the tribesmen and hidden in the mountains. Hidden, sadly, for use another day.

One hour after that nighttime bombardment began, the Northern Alliance opened fire with a battery of rockets from an air base twenty-five miles north of Kabul. They aimed them straight at Taliban forces in the city. There were five thunderous explosions and all electric power was knocked out throughout the capital.

But the United States never took its eye off the ball. The true objective was the total destruction of al Qaeda and the leader who had engineered the infamous attack on the Twin Towers — “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” as the president described it. And that meant a massive strike on the sinister network of caves and underground tunnels up in the mountains, where bin Laden made his headquarters.

The cruise missiles had softened up the area, but that was only the start. The real heavyweight punch from the world’s only superpower would come in the form of a gigantic bomb — the BLU-82B/C-130, known as Commando Vault in Vietnam and now nicknamed Daisy Cutter. This is a high-altitude, fifteen-thousand-pound conventional bomb that needs to be delivered from the huge MC-130 aircraft because it is far too heavy for the bomb racks on any other attack aircraft.

This thing is awesome. It was originally designed to create instant clearings for helicopter landings in the jungle. Its purpose in Afghanistan was as an antipersonnel weapon up in those caves. Its lethal radius is colossal, probably nine hundred feet. Its flash and sound is obvious from literally miles away. The BLU-82B is the largest conventional bomb ever built and, of course, leaves no nuclear fallout. (For the record, the Hiroshima atom bomb was a thousand times more powerful.)

On the upside, the Daisy Cutter is extremely reliable, no problems with wind speed or thermal gradient. Its conventional explosive technique incorporates both agent and oxidizer. It is not fuel-air explosive, like the old FAE systems used for much, much smaller bombs. It’s nearly twelve feet long and more than four feet wide.

The BLU-82B depends on precise positioning of the delivery aircraft, coordinates gotten from fixed ground radar or onboard navigation equipment. The aircraft must be perfectly positioned prior to final countdown and release. The navigator needs to make dead-accurate ballistic and wind computations.

The massive blast effect of the bomb means it cannot be released below an altitude of 6,000 feet. Its warhead, containing 12,600 pounds of low-cost GSX slurry (ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene), is detonated by a 38-inch fuse extender a few feet above ground level, so it won’t dig a crater. The entire blast blows outward, producing overpressure of 1,000 pounds per square inch. Hence the nickname Daisy Cutter.

The United States has never specified how many of these things were dropped on the Tora Bora area of the White Mountains, where the al Qaeda camps were located. But there were at least four, maybe seven. The first one, according to a public announcement by the Pentagon, was dropped after a reported sighting of bin Laden. We can only imagine the crushing effect such a blast would have inside the caves where the al Qaeda high command and senior leadership operated. Wouldn’t have been too good even if you were standing in the middle of a field — but a cave! Jesus, that’s brutal. That thing wiped out hundreds of the enemy at a time.

The United States really did a number on the Taliban, flattened their stronghold in Kunduz in the north, shelled them out of the Shomali Plains north of Kabul, carpet bombed them anywhere they could be located around the Bagram air base, where, four years later, we were headed in the C-130.

In the fall of 2001, the Taliban and al Qaeda were mostly fleeing the U.S. offensive or surrendering. In the subsequent years, they drifted together on the other side of the Pakistani border, reformed, and began their counteroffensive to retake Afghanistan.

Somehow these hickory-tough tribesmen not only survived the onslaught of American bombing and escaped from the advancing Northern Alliance, but they also evaded one of the biggest manhunts in the history of warfare as an increasingly frustrated United States moved heaven and earth to capture bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the rest. I guess their propensity to run like hell from strong opposition and their rapid exit into the Pakistani mountains on the other side of the border allowed them to limit their human and material resources.

It also bought them time. And while they undoubtedly lost many of their followers after a front-row view of what the American military could and would do, they also had many months to begin recruiting and training a brand-new generation of supporters. And now they were back as an effective fighting army, launching guerrilla operations against the U.S.-led coalition forces only four years after they’d lost power, been driven into exile, and had nearly been annihilated.

As we prepared for our final approach to the great, sprawling U.S. base at Bagram, the Taliban were once again out there, killing aid workers and kidnapping foreign construction workers. Parts of eastern and southern Afghanistan have been officially designated unsafe due to increasingly daring Taliban attacks. There was evidence they were extending their area of influence, working closely again with bin Laden’s al Qaeda, forging new alliances with other rebel groups and anti-government warlords. Same way they’d grabbed power last time, right? Back in 1996.

Only this time they had one principal ambition before seizing power, and that was to destabilize the U.S.-led coalition forces and eventually drive them out of Afghanistan forever.

I ought to mention the Pashtuns, the world’s oldest living tribal group; there are about forty-two million of them. Twenty-eight million live in Pakistan, and 12.5 million of them live in Afghanistan; that’s 42 percent of the entire population. There are about 88,000 living in Britain and 44,000 in the U.S.A.

In Afghanistan, they live primarily in the mountains of the northeast, and they also have heavily populated areas in the east and south. They are a proud people who adhere to Islam and live by a strict code of honor and culture, observing rules and laws known as Pashtunwalai, which has kept them straight for two thousand years.

They are also the quintessential supporters of the Taliban. Their warriors form the backbone of the Taliban forces, and their families grant those forces shelter in high mountain villages, protecting them and providing refuge in places that would appear almost inaccessible to the Western eye. That, by the way, does not include U.S. Navy SEALs, who do have Western eyes but who don’t do inaccessible. We can get in anywhere.

It’s easy to see why the Pashtuns and the Taliban get along just fine. The Pashtuns were the tribe who refused to buckle under to the army of the Soviet Union. They just kept fighting. In the nineteenth century, they fought the British to the verge of surrender and then drove them back into Pakistan. Three hundred years before that, they wiped out the army of Akbar the Great, the most fearsome of India’s Mogul rulers.

Those Pashtuns are proud of their stern military heritage, and it’s worth remembering that in all the centuries of bitter, savage warfare in Baluchistan, during which time they were never subdued, half the population was always Pashtun.

The concept of tribal heritage is very rigid. It involves bloodlines, amazing lineages that stretch back through the centuries, generation after generation. You can’t join a tribe in the way you can become an American citizen. Tribes don’t hand out green cards or passports. You either are, or you aren’t.

Language, traditions, customs, and culture play a part, but, I repeat, you can’t join the Pashtuns. And that gives them all a steel rod of dignity and self-esteem. Their villages may not be straightforward military strongholds as the Taliban desire, but the Pashtuns are not easily intimidated.

The people are organized strictly by relationships; male relationships, that is. The tribal lineage descends from the father’s side, the male ancestors. I understand they don’t give a damn for Mom and her ancestors. Inheritances are strictly for the boys, and land rights go directly to sons.

They have a proverb that says a lot: I against my brothers; my brothers and I against my cousins; my brothers, my cousins, and I against the world. That’s how they do it. The tight military formation has, again and again, allowed them to knock eight bells out of more sophisticated invaders.

The tribal code, Pashtunwalai, has heavy demands: hospitality, generosity, and the duty to avenge even the slightest insult. Life among the Pashtuns is demanding — it depends on the respect of your peers, relatives, and allies. And that can be dangerous. Only the tribe’s principles of honor stand in the way of anarchy. A tribesman will fight or even kill in order to avoid dishonor to himself and his family.

And killing throws the whole system into confusion, because death must be avenged; killers and their families are under permanent threat. Which puts a big air brake on violence. According to the learned Charles Lindhorn, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, homicide rates among the Pashtun tribes are way lower than homicide rates in urban areas of the United States. I am grateful to the professor for his teachings on this subject.

The Taliban creed comes right out of the Pashtun handbook: women are the wombs of patrilineage, the fountainheads of tribal honor and continuity. Their security and chaste way of life is the only guarantee of the purity of the lineage. This seclusion of women is known as purdah, and it is designed to keep women concealed, maintaining the household, and it gives them a high sense of honor.

Purdah represents the status of belonging. A woman’s husband can go fight the invaders while she controls the household, enjoying the love and respect of her sons, expecting one day to rule as matriarch over her daughters-in-law and their children. That’s the basis of the Taliban view of women. And I guess it works fine up in the Hindu Kush, but it might not go over too well in downtown Houston.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of terrible fighting on the Pashtuns’ lands, mostly by outsiders. But the ole Pashtunwalai has kept them intact. Their tradition of generous hospitality, perhaps their finest virtue, includes the concept of lokhay warkawal. It means “giving of a pot.” It implies protection for an individual, particularly in a situation where the tribe might be weaker than its enemies. When a tribe accepts lokhay, it undertakes to safeguard and protect that individual from an enemy at all costs.

I, perhaps above all other Western visitors, have reason to be eternally grateful for it.

We were on our final approach to the enormous U.S. base at Bagram. Everyone was awake now, seven hours after we left Bahrain. It was daylight, and down below we could see at last the mountains we had heard so much about and among which we would be operational in the coming weeks.

There was still snow on the high peaks, glittering white in the rising sun. And below the snow line, the escarpments looked very steep. We were too high to pick up villages on the middle slopes, but we knew they were there, and that’s where we were probably going in the not too distant future.

The huge runway at Bagram runs right down the side of the complex, past hundreds and hundreds of bee huts, lines and lines of them. On the ground we could see parked aircraft and a whole lot of Chinook helicopters. We didn’t worry about whom we’d have to share with. SEALs are always billeted together, separate from anyone else, thus avoiding loose talk about highly classified missions. All of our missions are, of course, highly classified, and we do not talk loosely, but other branches of the services are not so stringently trained as we are, and no one takes any chances.

Here we were at last, in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas, landlocked on all sides, protected by the granite walls of mountains, war torn for years and years and still at it. Just like always, warlords were trying to drive out the usurpers. Us. And we weren’t even usurping, just trying to stop another bloody tribal upheaval and another regime change from the elected to the dictators.

Boy. It seemed like a hell of a task. But we were excited. This was what we joined for. In truth, we could hardly wait to get down there and get on with it. And in a sense, it was pretty simple. We somehow had to get out into those infamous mountain passes and put a stop to this clandestine infiltration of faceless tribal warriors making their way across the border, doggedly, silently, prepared to fight at the drop of a turban.

We knew their track record, and we knew they could move around the mountains very quickly. They had dominated those slopes, caves, and hideouts for centuries, turning them into impregnable military strongholds against all comers.

And they had already faced the SEALs in open combat up there, because the SEALs had been first in. They would be prepared, we knew that. But like all SEAL operational teams, we believed we were better than everyone else, so the goddamned Taliban had better watch it.

Danny, Shane, James, Axe, Mikey, and I. We were here on business, trained to the minute, armed to the teeth, all set to drive the armies of the Taliban and al Qaeda right back to where they came from, seize the leaders, and get rid of anyone too dangerous to live. And restore order to the mountains.

I was eight thousand miles from home, but I could e-mail my family and loved ones. I was a bit light on home comforts, but I had in my rucksack a DVD player and a DVD of my favorite movie, The Count of Monte Cristo, from the novel by Alexandre Dumas père. It’s always an inspiration to me, always raises my spirits to watch one brave, innocent man’s lonely fight against overpowering forces of evil in an unforgiving world.

That’s my kind of stuff. Backs to the wall. Never give in. Courage, risks, daring beyond compare. I never thought my own problems would very shortly mirror, albeit briefly, those of Edmond Dantès and the hopelessness of his years in the grim island fortress of Chateau d’If.

And I never thought those unforgettable words he carved with flintstones, into the granite walls of the cruelest of jails, would also provide me with hope; a forlorn hope, but hope nonetheless. During the peril of my own darkest hours, I thought of those words over and over, more times than I care to admit: God will give me justice.