SEVEN

WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

In the late summer of 2000 our platoon embarked on a trans-Pacific run, headed for the Persian Gulf by way of Hawaii, Australia, and points west. Our first deployment. Thank God, we were finally getting out of here! We were attached to the USS Duluth, a troop transport ship, or amphibious transport dock. The Duluth was a fine old vessel, the last ship to be launched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the summer of 1965 before the yard’s closure.

The Duluth departed from California on August 14, 2000, with most of our gear aboard—but not us. We skipped the boat and boarded a plane for Hawaii. Rather than having us waste a lot of time on board, our command would fly us ahead to the ship’s next destination, where we could put in additional days of training while waiting for the vessel to catch up. This was a pattern we followed for most of the trip west. During those times we did spend on board we got a lot of kidding from the rest of the navy personnel, because in their eyes all we did was train. (They said the acronym SEAL stood for Sleep, Eat, And Lift, as in lift weights.)

In Hawaii we did some combat diving, paired off for a little hydrographic survey work, and occupied ourselves with the various ways SEALs continually train and retrain. In the daytime, that is. Once evening hit we’d go have fun. The single guys all chased girls, and we married guys had good times out with the boys. Chief Dan and I had both brought our surf boards along, and we’d meet up early in the mornings and surf for a few hours before joining the rest of the guys for our workouts. Later on, at other ports of call on our westward trek, we found a few days to peel away and go on surfing outings together. We got some pretty odd looks at various customs stations. (SEALs with surfboards? What were we going to do, take out bad guys by outsurfing them?)

The Hawaiian port where we put in was one with a unique place in American history. It was at Pearl Harbor that we had been attacked on our own soil nearly sixty years earlier. Being there on that historic site almost made you wonder: That could never happen again … could it?

Leaving Hawaii, we hopped on a C-130 transport plane and headed for Darwin, Australia. I have to tell you, flying in a C-130 is an absolutely fantastic way to travel. We could stretch out, go do push-ups in the corner, or do pretty much whatever we wanted. We brought our own food, had hammocks strung up all over the back of the plane, went up to the cockpit to shoot the shit with the pilots for a while, or rocked out to our headphones. I’ll take that over commercial flying any day of the year.

We made a few brief stops on our way to Australia, including one night in the Marshall Islands on the beautiful little atoll of Kwajalein, where a small contingent of defense personnel was stationed. This place was like paradise, and it made me think of Hiva Oa, the little island in the Marquesas where I had fallen briefly in love with a girl whose name I never knew. Ten years earlier I had been not far from this very spot, being booted off the family boat at Papeete. And now here I was, a U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, being deployed on a troop transport ship to the Persian Gulf to help keep the global peace. I still have a hand carving I picked up on our stopover in Kwajalein. Call it a keepsake, a reminder of a more innocent time—a time before everything changed.

We continued south and west through a week’s stay in Australia, three days of a humanitarian assistance operation off East Timor, brief stops at Singapore and Phuket, Thailand, and eventually north through the Indian Ocean into the Persian Gulf, where we put in at the little island country of Bahrain, which had a fairly liberal culture as Muslim countries went. By now we were into October.

We were there in Bahrain to conduct some training exercises with the neighboring Saudis. As an unofficial rule, we don’t train these guys in the Middle East too thoroughly. I mean, we’re there to help—but at the same time, when the sun comes up tomorrow in that part of the world, you never know for sure who’s going to be arrayed against you. After a few days we got back out onto the Duluth and into the Gulf, where we planned to spend a few days engaged in ship-boarding training exercises.

That’s when we got the call about the attack on the USS Cole.

*   *   *

To much of the world, September 11, 2001, was and still is “the day everything changed,” and it’s easy to understand why. In the summer of 2001 the public’s attention in the United States was focused largely on the debate over stem cell research and the latest political scandal about whichever congressman had been most recently caught with his zipper down. (In case you’re wondering, it was California Democrat Gary Condit.) The reality of war was mostly a fading memory, the topic of nostalgia. Stephen Spielberg’s made-for-TV World War II epic Band of Brothers had just premiered on HBO, on Sunday, September 9.

It had been a decade since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over, a new century had begun, and it was easy to be lulled into a sense that the kinds of global conflicts that had convulsed the twentieth century were already archaic relics of a distant past. We had left behind a world defined by the opposition of two vast global forces, Western capitalism and Eastern communism. But we hadn’t yet come to grips with what came next. For most of the world, what came next was suddenly, starkly defined that sunny, clear-sky New York morning in the fall of 2001.

Not for me. For me, it came eleven months earlier, on October 12, 2000.

Going into that fall, there was no significant conflict for our military forces to focus on. Still, the whole Mideast region was a political and military tinderbox that always loomed in the background. At the time, SEAL Team Three was involved in reinforcing United Nations sanctions against Iraq, and Saddam was smuggling out an awful lot of oil. We were expecting to participate in policing the area, which would mean doing a significant number of ship boardings on noncompliant vessels. The Iraqis would send these tankers out onto the Gulf to make a run for Iranian waters, where American and other NATO personnel could not legally pursue. Our job would be to catch up with them and intercept them while they ran that brief gauntlet through the narrow international shipping lanes.

This was a mission we were hoping to rotate in on. We had just gotten back on the Duluth and were mobilizing to get our equipment and go participate in that ship-boarding detail when we suddenly got word that an American destroyer, the USS Cole, had been hit in the nearby Gulf of Aden just off the coast of Yemen, and hit bad.

That morning, the Cole had put in at about 9:30 local time for a routine refueling stop. By 10:30 refueling had commenced. At 11:18 a small craft loaded with about a quarter ton of homemade explosives and manned by two individuals approached the ship’s port side and made contact. The explosion killed seventeen sailors and injured thirty-nine others, putting a 40' × 40' hole in the hull in the process.

Wait—what? Two guys in a speedboat? How the hell had that happened?

We took off and were on-site within shooting distance of the Yemeni coast within eight hours, putting our fast boats over the side. The marines had an outfit in Bahrain they called the Fast Company, and they earned their nickname: they were on the scene a few hours ahead of us and had already established a security command post on the injured Cole by the time we arrived. We immediately set up a 500-meter perimeter incorporating both the pier and the surrounding water. We were also directed to set up a sniper team on the bridge of the ship itself to monitor the situation, glassing the entire perimeter constantly to ensure that no other bad actors got into the mix.

This was where Glen and I came in. We set up two teams to rotate on round-the-clock sniper watch, twelve hours on and twelve off. We had a .50 caliber sniper rifle and four LAW rockets on the bridge. Our task was to protect both the ship and the rest of the crew while repair and containment efforts were under way.

It was a tense situation. Our relationship with Yemen was not great, and there was a powerful current of anti-American sentiment in the little country. Standing there on the bridge of the crippled destroyer, we were acutely aware of all the nearby Yemeni weapons that were trained on us. It had the anxious, volatile feeling of a standoff. Our orders were simple: Anything or anyone who breaches our perimeter, take them out.

Although no outright hostilities broke out, the perimeter was in fact tested a few times. Each time we saw a vessel encroaching on our perimeter we radioed the guys in the boats: “Hey, I’ve got someone coming in close at ten o’clock. It doesn’t look serious, but they’re on the fence.”

Meanwhile, crews were furiously at work pumping bilge out of that gaping hole in the Cole’s flank. It was a constant battle just to keep the vessel afloat, and for a while there it was touch and go. We nearly watched that destroyer sink.

It was a nasty scene. The suicide bombers had rammed the ship right where the galley is located, and just at the time of day when a large numbers of sailors were lining up for lunch. The carnage was awful. It was now nearly twelve hours since the explosion, and in the insufferable humid Middle Eastern heat we had both dead bodies and all the food in the ship’s hold decomposing rapidly. The stench was unbearable, and the trauma among the living compounded the nightmarish quality of the whole scene. When we first arrived, the guys who greeted us all sported the famous thousand-yard stare that reflects an intimacy with the horrors of combat casualties. Now night had fallen, and much of the crew had set up to sleep in cots out on the deck in what looked like a shantytown of shell-shocked catastrophe survivors—which was exactly what it was.

I talked with a few of the survivors to try to find out exactly what had happened, and how this absurdly low-tech assault had penetrated the Cole’s security in the first place. The answer, in essence, was “Security? What security?”

When they described their security posture, I was appalled. The lack of preparedness was ludicrous. Here we were, docked just off the coast of a hostile nation with an openly anti-American sentiment that included a history of kidnappings and sponsorship of terrorism—and as protection they’d set up a few guys to stand on the ship’s rail with M-14s. These soldiers had had no training on the M-14 and, in fact, did not even know what kind of rifle it was they were holding. And to top it off, there were no bullets in their magazines. I need to repeat that last point. They were protecting a billion-dollar vessel by standing on its deck brandishing weapons they were not familiar with—and that were not loaded. Really? What, as if the sheer appearance of force would be sufficient deterrent to any potential aggression?

As I soon learned, this was not an exceptional situation; it was widespread. For all intents and purposes, it was standard. At least it had been up until now. After the Cole was hit, things changed fast. Soon the military was making it mandatory for at least 30 percent of every ship’s crew to be actually trained in force protection, as opposed to the previous requirement, which was 0 percent.

It’s easy (and, frankly, justified) to jump all over the Clinton administration for this lax condition, but at the same time it’s also important to see the bigger picture. In a sense, this was part of a cycle that had gone on for decades—hell, for centuries. We had our forces in a high-security posture right after World War II, and then again after Korea, and then again after Vietnam. In the years in between, our sense of urgency would fade every time, and as a nation we would gradually be lulled into a false sense of security. Then all of a sudden something would go bam! and military readiness would once again become relevant.

Incredibly, earlier that year there had been a failed attempt on another U.S. vessel in the very same port. The would-be attackers had even used a similar crappy little boat and made a similar run up to one of our ships as it pulled into port, but in that instance their explosive-laden boat had sunk before they could consummate their deadly rendezvous. We had been lucky—but we had also been warned. So what happened? The incident was treated like so much background noise in the larger picture of global intelligence and sloughed off. Now we had paid for our complacency with seventeen American lives, thirty-nine more injured, and hundreds of million dollars’ worth of damage.

I’ve mentioned a number of times how fanatical about training we are in the teams. It’s not really fanaticism, though, it’s realism. If you want to become not just competent, not just good, but outstanding, you have to train like a maniac at whatever it is you’re intending to excel at—and then train some more. In his 2008 bestseller Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell does a great job documenting the secret behind the accomplishments of such outstanding achievers as Bill Gates, Mozart, and the Beatles. Turns out, surprise of surprises, they all worked their asses off training. Gladwell coins what he calls the 10,000-Hour Rule, which says that outstanding (outlying) success in any field is largely the result of a shitload of practice, like twenty hours a week for ten years, which translates into 10,000 hours. Amp that pace up to eighty hours a week and you’ll get it done in two and a half years—and that right there is one reason SEALs can do what they do.

I may have had a crazy childhood, wild and undisciplined in many ways, but one thing I’d always known was the rush that comes with pushing yourself hard, the thrill of seeing endless practice gradually producing a capacity for excellence. Whether it was wrestling or skiing as a kid, becoming a rescue diver on the Peace under the watchful eyes of Captain Mike and Captain Bill, or suffering through BUD/S with Shoulin, O’Reilly, and the rest of those crazy slave drivers, I’d always known what it means to train hard. If I could do anything significant to serve my country, it would probably be through sharing that capacity to train. Though I didn’t know it yet, even beyond my own service in Afghanistan and the Gulf, my contribution to training a new generation of twenty-first-century warriors would become the crowning achievement of my career. All I knew at this point was that this tragic fiasco was a failure of training, and specifically of the people in charge of the training.

When Glen took position on the bridge and I rotated off-watch, I went down a few floors to look around. I found a used coffee mug, washed it out, and brought it back up on deck to the temporary food station they’d set up at the back of the boat, where I used it to get a cup of hot coffee. I was just starting to get some of that hot java lift into me when I noticed one of the sailors staring at me.

“What?” I said.

He pointed wordlessly at my coffee mug. I turned it around and looked on its reverse side. I hadn’t noticed, but the guy whose mug it was had written his name on there.

It was one of the guys who’d been blown up in the attack.

Maybe some would have been spooked and set that thing down in haste. For me it was just the opposite. This sailor had been one of the first to give his life in a war we didn’t even know what to call yet. It was an honor to drink from that man’s cup. I kept that mug and used it for the rest of our tour.

We were there on the Cole for about seven days. The ship was eventually boarded onto a huge Norwegian craft designed to carry offshore oil-drilling equipment and hauled back stateside, where after fourteen months of repair work it was returned into service.

*   *   *

The attack on the USS Cole opened my eyes to how ill prepared we were for the threat that existed everywhere around us. An Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer, crewed by nearly 300 sailors, weighing close to 10,000 tons, and costing more than $1 billion to put in the water, was crippled and nearly sunk by two guys in the kind of motorboat you might see out behind a New England summer lake house. When it was all over, the destroyer would require about $250 million in repairs. This was not just a catastrophe, and it wasn’t just about whether we were adequately prepared for surprise attacks. There was a fundamental shift happening here, a shift in the very nature of military conflict, and this attack off the coast of Yemen was arguably its clarion call.

At the time we were still thinking in terms of the Cold War massing of NATO versus Soviet forces, which was a logical extension of how we had viewed warfare for centuries and longer. War had always been a matter of hurling masses of men and matériel against one another, from the phalanxes of Xerxes and legions of Rome to the endless troop lines of the Blue and the Gray lowering bayonets to charge after exhausting their weapons’ single shots. That kind of pitched battle of the masses reached its apotheosis in the midtwentieth century with the tank battalions of Patton and Rommel pounding each other in the North African desert.

This passage from Lee Child’s 2004 Jack Reacher thriller The Enemy beautifully captures that core sense of twentieth-century warfare:

What is the twentieth century’s signature sound? You could have a debate about it. Some might say the slow drone of an aero engine. Maybe from a lone fighter crawling across an azure 1940s sky. Or the scream of a fast jet passing low overhead, shaking the ground. Or the whup whup whup of a helicopter. Or the roar of a laden 747 lifting off. Or the crump of bombs falling on a city. All of those would qualify. They’re all uniquely twentieth-century noises. They were never heard before. Never, in all of history. Some crazy optimists might lobby for a Beatles song. A yeah, yeah, yeah chorus fading under the screams of their audience. I would have sympathy for that choice. But a song and screaming would never qualify. Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time. They weren’t invented after 1900.

No, the twentieth century’s signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It’s a brutal sound. It’s the sound of fear. It speaks of overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote, impersonal indifference. Tank treads squeal and clatter and the very noise they make tells you they can’t be stopped. It tells you you’re weak and powerless against the machine. Then one track stops and the other keeps on going and the tank wheels around and lurches straight toward you, roaring and squealing. That’s the real twentieth-century sound.

But that “overwhelming advantage in power” Child describes, that arraying of massive forces that had been so effective even as recently as Desert Storm, was no longer the trump card in the warfare of the new century. As weapons of war go, it doesn’t get much more massive than a billion-dollar destroyer—and one of those had just been nearly sunk by two guys in a dinky little speedboat.

We had entered the age of asymmetrical warfare.

We were no longer dealing fundamentally with huge ground forces rolling across the desert. We were up against tiny terrorist cells, a decentralized kind of guerrilla warfare on a scale we had never seen before. There’s a certain convenience to calling it al Qaeda, as if it is one centralized, organized entity run by a single central command, like Moscow’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Third Reich. The truth is probably a lot messier and more complicated, and therefore more difficult to deal with. There are a lot of other nonaffiliated terrorist groups that have sought to jump on the al Qaeda bandwagon, perhaps for the perceived clout that gives them. Whether you call them al Qaeda or Taliban or disaffected extremists in the West or Somali pirates, what it boils down to is that you have armed and fanatically dedicated combatants pursuing an entirely different sort of combat than we used to fight in the days of trench warfare or tank battles.

It was a new kind of war, and over the next few years it would prompt a radical shift in the makeup of our Department of Defense—especially in relation to Special Operations.

In the long story of war, Special Operations forces—the British and Australian SAS, the American Green Berets and Army Rangers, the Navy SEALs—were exactly that: special, something you don’t use every day. Spec Ops forces were kept on the shelf and brought out for deployment only in certain circumstances. In modern warfare, those of us in Spec Ops were the icing on the cake of massive destruction, the period at the end of a sentence of overwhelming forces. Special Operations were the bastard child of conventional forces, there mainly to support the larger mission.

Now that equation has changed. Today the relationship has been turned virtually on its head. Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, the entire strategy of American military organization has shifted toward one in which our massive assets, such as destroyers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, are reconfigured to support small field teams and tiny units. The Spec Ops warrior of the twentieth century was fundamentally an outsider who worked on the periphery of military strategy. Today he stands at its core.

Shortly after that experience in the Gulf of Aden I was talking about it with a friend, Thomas. “We really don’t understand the world we’re living in,” I said. “It’s totally different than we think it is—and a lot more dangerous.”

Thomas nodded.

“We’re in for it, you know,” I added.

He asked me what I meant by that.

“Sooner or later,” I mused, “there’s going to be a major hit, right here on U.S. soil. We’re not ready for it.”

*   *   *

After I got back from that deployment on the Duluth, two big changes were in store for me on a personal level. I was about to become a father, and although I didn’t know it yet, I would also soon be leaving GOLF platoon. Both changes would have a major impact on my life for years to come. They were also related, in a way. The reason I made the move to leave GOLF platoon, frankly, came down to a matter of family finances.

I was soon coming up for reenlistment again, which meant I had a cash bonus coming, something like $40,000. The problem was, reenlisting while stateside would mean I’d be heavily taxed, with a significant California tax on top of the federal bite. If I reenlisted in a tax-free combat zone, I would get the whole bonus. This would amount to a difference of something like fifteen grand. My wife was now pregnant with our first child, and fifteen grand can buy an awful lot of diapers.

It’s not uncommon for command to send a guy overseas for a short deployment to help him out in circumstances like this, so in July I went to talk with our ops officer, Keith Johnson, about the possibility of getting myself sent overseas. (The ops officer is typically a senior lieutenant, about to make lieutenant commander, who runs operations for the team, working directly for the commanding officer and executive officer.)

After hearing me outline my situation and what I was looking for, Keith thought for a moment, then said, “Look, Brandon, we’ve got a situation with ECHO platoon. Frankly, they’re a bunch of fuckups and we’ve just shaken the whole thing up. We fired the chief and OIC, cleared out the whole leadership team to wipe the canvas clean, but kept most of the guys.”

He hadn’t gotten to his point yet, but I knew where this was going, and I didn’t like it. He was talking about sending me to join this screwed-up ECHO platoon.

We had great chemistry in GOLF platoon, which is as crucial on a SEAL team as it is on a pro ball team. You can train all you want and have the most qualified guys in the world, but if the chemistry doesn’t click, the team won’t work. When that happened in a SEAL platoon, they would break the team up and reshuffle all the guys to other teams, much as you’ll see in pro sports. This is what had happened to ECHO platoon. Obviously, command was hoping to rescue this misbegotten team by bringing in some new blood, and Keith was on board with that plan. My coming to him with my tax-or-no-tax bonus problem happened to play right into the situation at hand.

“You should join ECHO,” he said. “They’re the next ones up to deploy, and you’ll get your tax-free bonus.”

I did not want to join this godforsaken platoon. They had a terrible reputation; everyone in Team Three knew they were a mess. Guys used to joke about them in the halls—and he was asking me to become part of this joke of a team? I had hoped there’d be some other avenue for getting me overseas, maybe joining DELTA platoon or some other excellent fighting force. Keith was selling it hard, though, and now that he’d proposed it to me it was going to be hard for me to wangle any other option. I realized it now came down to a choice: I could go join ECHO platoon or stay with my team at GOLF and give up the fifteen grand. GOLF platoon had a great reputation, and I pretty much had my pick of jobs there. Ultimately, though, I decided to put my family first and agreed to join ECHO platoon.

It was a move I would soon regret.

*   *   *

ECHO platoon was then at the tail end of their workup, doing some VBSS training operations, so I flew out to join them on the aircraft carrier where they were staged, about a hundred miles off the coast of San Diego. When I got there, I met up with Chris Dye, who had just taken over as the platoon’s new chief in the command’s efforts to rehabilitate the outfit.

Chief Dye was legendary in the SEAL community. A decade earlier, when he was at SEAL Team Two, he and his dive buddies had participated in a Special Op called Operation Nifty Package, part of Operation Just Cause, the United States invasion of Panama. As part of the op Chris and his dive buddy Randy Beausoleil planted the explosives that sank Noriega’s private boat. (You can read a riveting account of the whole mission in the excellent book SEALs: The US Navy’s Elite Fighting Force, written by my BUD/S classmate Chris Osman and Mir Bahmanyar.) A few weeks after this first meeting, I was helping Chief Dye move one day, and I noticed a plain stainless steel wheel among his stuff. It was about two feet in diameter, six spokes coming off an empty hub. Looked like maybe a steering wheel for a yacht or something.

“Hey, Chris,” I said, “what are you doing with this old wheel?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m just hanging on to it. That came off Noriega’s boat.” He had personally salvaged it off the wreck of the ship after planting the bombs that sank it. This dude had seen some interesting action in his time.

Finding out that Chief Dye would be running things at ECHO cheered me up quite a bit. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. The two of us were not really acquainted personally, but we knew each other by reputation, and I had been tagged with the role of general go-to guy to help him put things in order.

Chief Dye met me when I landed on the aircraft carrier where they were staging for their workup exercises. “Oh, man, am I glad to see you,” he said. “Welcome to ECHO. We have our work cut out for us.”

He told me they were planning to go out the next day to do some fast-roping off a couple of helicopters as part of a maritime ship-boarding op, and they were short one castmaster. The castmaster is in charge of rigging up the setup inside the helo, deploying the guys out on the rope, and making sure it all goes properly. He’s the last guy out. I wondered how the hell they’d been planning to go fast-roping with two helos and one castmaster, but I didn’t say anything. Chris would have figured out a way to do it. It might not have been exactly legal, but it would have worked. In any case, I was certified as a castmaster, so that was no longer an issue.

The next day we got out there up in the air and started the exercise. I was serving as castmaster in the second bird, watching the guys go out the door: one, two, three—and suddenly there was an MP-5 rifle flying through the air in free fall.

I nearly shit my pants. I could not believe what I was seeing. A SEAL team fast-roping out of a helo—and somebody dropped his frigging weapon?

It was downright embarrassing. Everything is supposed to be slung in and tightly attached—that’s rule one. When we say, “That guy has his shit wired tight,” this is exactly what we’re talking about. Working around water and heights, you always lanyard your gear to your body. I’ve seen guys lose night-vision gear off their heads: Turn, whack the door of the helo cabin, the night vision pops off—and if it’s not tied in to your body, it’s going over and into the drink. Losing an expensive piece of night-vision equipment is bad enough—but losing a weapon? In career terms, that’s suicide.

The moment that MP-5 hit the deck, the guy who’d dropped it scooped it up and kept right on going. Chief Dye was in the other bird, so he didn’t see it and didn’t have to suffer this humiliation in person. Nobody else on our craft even noticed that it had happened, but I sure as hell did.

Nothing like this would ever have happened in GOLF platoon, and if it had, the guy perpetrating the misdeed would have been sent back to the fleet with his trident ripped from his chest. I’d seen it happen. When we reached Pearl Harbor on our way to the Persian Gulf the previous summer, for a day or two we had one weapon unaccounted for. For a SEAL, this particular brand of carelessness is one of the worst offenses you can commit. It turned out to be Chuck “Liberty Risk” Landry’s fault. After that episode a few years earlier when Landry had gotten drunk and wrangled with the base security guards, they’d given him a second chance. Losing track of that weapon in Hawaii was strike two, and there would be no strike three. The weapon did finally turn up, but Landry got sent back home. Brutal, but that’s how we did things—at least in GOLF platoon.

I held my tongue throughout the rest of that fast-roping exercise, but once we got back on the aircraft carrier at the end of the day to debrief, I let them have it.

“Look, guys, I know I’m brand-new here, but I have to tell you, that was inexcusable. Who the hell dropped that gun? That thing could have easily gone over the side, and if it had we would be in some serious shit right now!”

A big guy named Gilroy Jones raised his hand. “It was me.”

This was my introduction to the realities of ECHO platoon. Jones was a tough dude but a complete train wreck of a soldier. First time through BUD/S he got to Third Phase and then came up against a domestic violence charge for hitting the lady he was with. He made it all the way through his second time, went to Team Three, and screwed up there. It was amazing to me that he hadn’t been fired from the team—and now, he had screwed up our exercise. Turned out, he had made some sort of jury-rigged sling for his MP-5 out of surgical tubing, and in the course of the exercise it got hung up and broke.

It wasn’t just Gilroy Jones. These guys were a mess in general. It was so clear that they had never had any really good leadership. They’d had no one to look up to or learn from.

We had a 90/10 rule in the teams: 90 percent of the guys on any given team are going to be solid, and 10 percent will be guys you hope will get kicked out or transferred to another team. That’s just the way it is, and you can live with that. The problem with ECHO platoon was that we had far more than our fair share of 10-percenters. In a platoon of sixteen guys, 10 percent means one or two fuckups at most. Right away I identified half a dozen guys there as weak links, including our third officer and AOIC (assistant officer in charge)! Oh, great. Even our second and third in command were misfits. (Hadn’t Keith said they’d shit-canned the whole leadership? What did they do—replace them with guys who were worse?)

I felt like I had been yanked from playing on a World Series team and kicked downstairs to a farm league. I wanted to go back and beg for my old place on GOLF team again. Screw the fifteen grand—I wanted to be back with my guys.

During that same fast-roping exercise I’d noticed that our corpsman, Jackie, had his entire med gear with him. Jackie was a really quiet guy and would speak sort of under his breath so you couldn’t quite hear what he said.

When I saw that he was lugging along this huge pack, I said, “Hey, Jackie, why are you fast-roping with this big pack?” He said something back, although I have no idea what, so I elaborated. “All you should be bringing on a jump like this is basic trauma gear. You need to shit-can that whole bag.”

Christ on a crutch. I wasn’t even a medic, and here I was telling him how to pack his medical gear.

Jackie wasn’t bad, though; he was just wet behind the ears and hadn’t had strong leadership. In fact, he ended up becoming a solid citizen in the platoon and going on to join a tier-one unit and have a solid career in the community. A handful of the others were consistent screwups, though. A few of them would very nearly get me killed in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Not that ECHO platoon was all bad. Our breacher, Shawn, had been a BUD/S classmate of mine and was a very solid guy. After this disastrous day of fast-roping I took him aside and said, “Shawn, what the hell? How can you stand there and let these guys be such a mess?”

“I know,” he said, “but I didn’t think it was my place to tell them what to do.” I understood his point. Thank God Chris Dye was our chief; this was a guy I could work with. There were quite a few other solid guys there, too. Patrick had joined the platoon only recently and therefore had not suffered through the previous “leadership” at ECHO. It was clear right off the bat that Patrick was very sharp and an asset to the team. Heath Robinson, another guy who was fairly new to the platoon, also had his shit wired tight. A few years later, on an op where a group of SEALs took back a merchant vessel from some Somalian pirates, one of our men was jumped by a hiding pirate, the clinch too close for anyone to shoot. Heath pulled out his knife and cut the guy’s throat—one of the few SEALs since Vietnam to have a certified knife kill to his credit. Then there was Garrison, who joined at the same time I did. Garrison had been a marine before going through BUD/S and had been through some solid experiences with the Corps. Garrison was squared away, although with his marine background it took him a little doing to get accustomed to the SEALs and our, shall I say, lack of military bearing.

Over the weeks after I arrived, things gradually started looking better as a trickle of additional guys joined us after finishing whatever workup they were on, further helping shore up the platoon. Two of these, like Shawn, were BUD/S classmates: Ali, our senior corpsman, and Chris Osman.

Osman and I went way back, all the way to that moment on the beach in Third Phase when he became an accidental hero. Throughout BUD/S I couldn’t stand him, but during our time together in Team Three we gradually became friends. Soon we would also work together closely as the platoon’s two snipers, and our time in the Gulf and Afghanistan would cement the friendship.

A former marine, Osman was an excellent SEAL and a very squared-away dude. He can also be a frigging nightmare to be around. He is an intense guy and has a personality that can grate on you. Spend much time with him and chances are you’ll end up either loving him or hating him.

Osman was also something of a legend among the marine scout snipers. When he and Patrick went through the marine sniper course together, as part of their final training exercise they developed a mission plan that included monitoring the Camp Pendleton residence of the marine two-star general in charge as a surveillance target. Osman took the exercise a little further than planned: He broke into the guy’s house, snapped a bunch of pictures of its interior, and took the general’s starched camouflage uniform with its two stars from where it hung in the closet and sneaked it back out with him as plunder. The marine sniper instructors were terrified shitless when they found out what he’d done, and everyone tried to hush it up. Osman wore the purloined uniform for his class graduation photo. For years afterward I would run into Marine Corps snipers in the fleet who would ask me, after learning that I was in SEAL Team Three, “Hey, do you know that crazy SEAL, you know, the guy who broke into the general’s house and pinched his cammies?”

Osman never went through the SEAL sniper course himself; as a former marine, he’d done that marine course instead. Because of this, one could make the plausible argument that he wasn’t technically a true SEAL sniper, something I proceeded to have a lot of fun giving him shit about. “Hey, Osman, how hard is that Marine Corps course?”

Don’t get me wrong. The Marine Corps has great shooters, and they’re some of the best marksmen in the military. Osman also could shoot.

With Osman and Ali joining the platoon, it was starting to feel like a minireunion. Those guys were happy to see me, and I was sure as hell glad to see them. I started feeling a bit better about my situation. Maybe life in ECHO platoon would be tolerable. I sure hoped so.