EIGHT

INTO THE WAR ON TERROR

One fine fall day not long after wrapping up that workup with ECHO platoon, I got up at the crack of dawn to go surfing. Our platoon was about to rotate overseas (the whole reason I’d joined them in the first place), so I would soon be back out on the Persian Gulf, where we were scheduled to participate in the interdiction of oil-smuggling boats coming out of Iraq—the same mission I’d been hoping to participate in when the attack on the USS Cole tossed our plans out the window. That was still some weeks off, though. Gabriele was now eight months pregnant, and my command had granted me permission to stay stateside long enough to be there for the birth of our first child. After that I would go rejoin my platoon. For now, I was enjoying the R & R.

I knew this would be my last day of surfing for a few days, so I made the most of it. The next day I was booked on a flight to Texas for a Stinger missile school at Fort Bliss that would last a few days. Always training.

After an hour or two of surfing I returned home exhilarated and ready to start my day. Even after all the years and all the crazy things I’d done, from Dräger-diving underneath gigantic tankers to jumping out of planes at 20,000 feet, there was still no experience that beat being out in the surf in the chill of the early California morning, nothing but a sleek plank of lightweight foam like a membrane between my bare feet and the surging elements. It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world. I love it to this day.

When I got in, I found Gabriele sitting not five feet from the television, enormously pregnant, staring at the screen. It was early still, barely six o’clock, but she was already up. She turned to look at me, her face pulled into an expression of speechless horror. I sat down next to her and started watching the live broadcast from New York City, just in time to see the second plane hit the South Tower. The attack on U.S. soil that I’d worried about after standing watch over the crippled USS Cole was no longer an abstraction.

Within days I had joined my platoon on a nonstop flight to the Middle East. By the time our son Jackson came into the world on the last day of November, I was in the Persian Gulf and headed for Afghanistan.

*   *   *

We left North Island Naval Air Station in a big C-5 cargo plane, stopped off in Washington state to pick up some Army Rangers, made a short refueling stop in Iceland and then a brief overnight somewhere in Spain. Barely twenty-four hours after leaving San Diego we were receiving a briefing at Camp Doha, the principal U.S. base in Kuwait, where we were told we would be participating in, yes, the interdiction of noncompliant vessels in the Gulf.

Ironically, this was now a bit of a letdown. A year ago I’d been looking forward to exactly this mission. Hell, just a month ago we would have been thrilled to be on this assignment. Finally, some action! we’d have thought. Now everything had changed. Our country had been attacked in a brutal and unprovoked strike that slaughtered thousands of civilians. It was payback time, and we were champing at the bit to get our asses where we could do some serious damage in the name of our people back home. Interdiction of Saddam’s oil smugglers, until recently a cherry assignment, now seemed like a time-consuming detour.

Still, this was a perfect mission for SEALs, and we’d had teams in there supporting the operation for years, ever since Desert Storm. In violation of U.S.-led sanctions, these maritime operators were feeding a huge black market, getting illegal oil on the cheap and selling it on the open market for millions in profits. Some were Middle Eastern nationals; others were British sea captains gone rogue. I’d met a number of both varieties in the back-alley bars in Bahrain. Another term for these characters would be “pirates.”

These ships were coming out of Iraq sealed shut and tight as drums. To prevent being caught by boarding teams, these guys would literally weld themselves in so nobody could get to them. When the regular navy tried to board a vessel like that and take it over, they would be completely stymied and unable to get inside.

That was where we came in. We knew how to get on and into these boats silently, quickly, and effectively, boarding in minutes. We also didn’t screw around. If the metal ship doors were welded shut, we’d cut our way in through the roof with an acetylene torch. But we’d have to move fast, because the moment the smugglers realized they were being boarded they would take aggressive action and haul ass for nearby Iranian waters—and if they made it, that was game over. Once they were outside that narrow channel of international waters, there’d be nothing anyone could do but clamber back off their damn boat and head back empty-handed. So when it came time to take down a smuggler’s boat, we knew we had to move like lightning.

This was where that VBSS (Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure) training we did off the coast of San Clemente Island paid off. There’s a reason SEALs train constantly, and this was it. We nailed those guys.

Typically there’s a lot of adrenaline pumping during a maneuver like this. You’re going out in the middle of the night, coming up alongside a vessel doing 15 to 20 knots, keeping your craft even with it and trying your best to put your whole team on board before the bad guys are even aware you’re on them. Even in normal circumstances, this is an exacting and exciting procedure. Now everything felt heightened. With the events of 9/11 just weeks behind us like a fresh and gaping wound, the air crackled with an angry electricity. We would quietly shoot the shit to keep ourselves occupied, but none of us were feeling casual about what we were doing here.

Our platoon was outfitted in black from head to toe, wearing balaclavas, those Ninja-style masks that conceal the entire head except the eyes. A few of our guys who spoke Arabic had dubbed our team Shaytan abyath, “the White Devils,” after overhearing crews captured from a few of the smugglers’ ships we’d taken down muttering the phrase in our direction. We embraced the name, and I used the idea of it in a patch I designed for our platoon: an image of a white devil on a black background underneath “3ECHO.” In addition to our platoon patches, we also had NYFD patches sewn onto our uniforms to pay homage to fallen heroes back home. To say that we were in the mood to kick some ass is to put it mildly.

The platoon would leave at sunset for its late-night operation on a small high-speed Special Ops boat called a Mark V. The Mark V is a modern marvel of design, equipped to take sixteen SEALs out some 500 miles from source to staging; its angular shape and low silhouette reduce its radar signature, making it hard to detect. Once out in the middle of the international shipping lane, the platoon would sit there silently in the dark, staging for minutes or hours, waiting for the word to go. Meanwhile, the platoon’s sniper would be nearby in the helo, quietly trolling the area and looking for targets.

As a sniper, you have the big picture in the helo; you orchestrate the silent, deadly nighttime dance. It’s the sniper’s job to identify targets using the helicopter’s forward-looking infrared system (FLIR) and pass critical target information to the platoon. In the helo, we are the eyes of the operation; the FLIR, a glass bubble on the bottom of the craft, has a range of over 50 miles. Nestled in the back of the Sea Hawk, you sit there watching that 18-inch green screen with a clear view of what’s happening miles away down on the Gulf’s surface. Once the team begins boarding the ship, you are the one passing real-time intel on all onboard activity to the team leaders. It’s also your job to take out any targets that threaten the operation, if it comes to that, though this is a rare occurrence.

As Glen and I had done on the bridge of the crippled USS Cole, Osman and I shared this role. As sniper on duty, we’d participate in the nightly helicopter crew briefing, then hit the deck and take off in the bird to go cruising for targets. The rest of the platoon was stationed onshore at Camp Doha, and they would ride out every night in the Mark V, spend a few hours out on the Gulf, and then, about 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., ride back in to Kuwait for the night. Not us. Because the helo deployed directly off the deck of the destroyer out in open waters, one of us would live all week on board the ship right along with the helicopter squadron. They set up a cot for us in the weapons hold area where we would sleep with our guns. (We preferred to keep them on our person. What better way to know they were secure?) For all practical purposes, when not out on a mission we lived in that room.

We did this for weeks. Osman and I rotated out, trading off being on sniper watch and being part of the boarding teams. During the month or so we spent out there, we took down about half a dozen smuggling vessels. It was fun work, though not especially dangerous.

One day we got a briefing from some guys from the National Security Agency (NSA) about a terrorist transport boat they’d been keeping an eye on. They thought it might be coming out of Iraq soon with a substantial cache of weapons and HVTs (high-value targets) on board. Whether “high-value targets” meant a known terrorist, hostile intel asset, or other person of interest, I didn’t know, didn’t need to know, and frankly didn’t care. Whatever or whoever was on that boat, it was important. They described the target vessel’s profile and gave us its identifying mark: Alpha-117.

This was the same ship, they said, that had been used by al Qaeda operatives to smuggle out the explosives that had been used to blow up U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi back in the summer of 1998, while I was just finishing up my Seal Tactical Training and preparing for my Trident. Those attacks had killed more than two hundred people, including a dozen Americans, and injured over four thousand more. That was the terrorist attack that had put bin Laden on the map (and the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list) for the first time.

This was no measly oil-smuggling operation. This was for real. These guys were serious bad actors who had spilled American blood, and they would be armed. The intel guys were briefing all American assets in the region, they said, and then they gave us the rules of engagement for this particular situation. “If you guys see this target,” they told us, “you’re authorized to take it down.” Period.

A few days passed, and Osman rotated out to the team while I took his place on sniper duty. As much fun as it was being part of the team in a smuggler takedown operation, I looked forward to being back on sniper watch. I have always loved flying, and this gave me the chance to go out every night in a bird. The nights when we didn’t see any noncompliant vessels, the crew on the surface would have nothing at all to do, but even on those nights, up in the helo I was kept relatively busy manning the helo-based surveillance equipment, and I enjoyed it.

My first night back on watch, I sat in the back of an H-60 Sea Hawk helicopter, shooting the shit with the crew over our comms as we made our way in slow, lazy arcs across the water and back. I didn’t know which had a more soporific effect: the monotonous, high-pitched whine of the helo’s rotors or the sweltering thickness of the Middle Eastern air. We kept the helo door open as we cruised, which provided a slow, muggy breeze. To pass the time and keep ourselves alert, we talked about everything we could think of, from sex to our taste in music to war stories of our training days. It was a few minutes after midnight.

An hour earlier I’d been on the flight deck of a U.S. destroyer a few hundred miles away in the middle of the Gulf, sitting in on the helo crew’s briefing and adding my own input before takeoff. I’d grabbed my kit, and the four of us had saddled up—two pilots in front, the rescue swimmer/sensor operator (the role I was originally trained for before going into BUD/S), and me—and made our way toward our rendezvous with the rest of my platoon. Now here I was, crouched in the back of our blacked-out Sea Hawk in the murky nighttime atmosphere over the Port of Basra off the southern tip of Iraq, trolling for smugglers.

Chr chr chr chr chr chr … The Sea Hawk rotor chopped relentlessly through the hot, soupy atmosphere as we swapped stories in the sweltering moonless night.

I’d been staring at the FLIR screen for a while when I saw something that made me sit up straight. I glanced down to scan my notes from that intel briefing a few days earlier. What was that boat’s call sign again? I looked back up at the FLIR and murmured, “Holy shit.” Right there on the pale green screen I could see the identifying numbers on the boat’s stern: ALPHA-117. I was staring at the target the NSA had briefed us on, the ship that had supplied the explosives that had taken out our embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania.

In our nightly game of maritime poker, it looked like we had just drawn the joker from the deck.

This was hot. We thought we’d been sidelined while another platoon went ahead of us into the action in Afghanistan. Now it looked like maybe we were going to be the first to see serious action after all.

I radioed Lieutenant Chris Cassidy, our platoon commander on the Mark V, and told him I had the target ship on the FLIR. “Solid copy, stand by,” he replied and then clicked off. I waited, knowing that he was radioing command on the destroyer a few hundred miles out on the Gulf. Word would come back almost instantly. Sure enough, a few seconds later my comm crackled back to life. “Sniper One, this is Echo One, good copy on all. We are taking her down, get us good eyes on.”

Cassidy’s a good man, I thought. Just weeks from now he would be leading us through a complex reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan, and he would later go on to become a NASA astronaut and complete three space walks. Right now I felt good knowing he was in charge of the crew on the Mark V. I’d seen some bullshit leaders, and Cassidy wasn’t one of them. I was confident this would go smooth and fast.

Cassidy clicked off again to alert the platoon, knowing that I’d be back on comms in a moment.

Now I briefed the helo crew. Up to this point these guys knew nothing whatsoever about Alpha-117. As far as our intel went they were on a need-to-know basis, meaning I wouldn’t pass on any information unless something happened. Well, something was happening. We were ready to get it on, and it was time to read them in on the situation. I keyed up my ICS (internal communications system) mike.

“Guys, here’s the situation. We have a terrorist-sponsored vessel dead ahead. These are serious bad guys on board, and are most likely armed. This is the real deal. Time to go to work.”

I heard a murmured “Holy shit” from the pilot. My thoughts exactly.

This was a much different situation than taking down a bunch of smugglers. Typically Navy helo crews do not see much in the way of combat action. Don’t get me wrong. They have a tough job, and flying over these hostile waters in the dead of night at a bare few hundred feet off the surface is no joke. There’s no putting down on land and walking away from the mission on one of these maritime interdictions. As I had nearly experienced myself years earlier during maneuvers over these same waters under the “leadership” of Lieutenant Burkitt, that bird can easily be in the drink and upside down in seconds, taking its crew straight down to a briny grave. There was no margin for error here, and these guys were good—but they hadn’t been in this type of situation before, and they were clearly nervous. We were going in to take down a hostile terrorist ship, and if those characters saw us coming they wouldn’t be welding themselves in and waiting to see what we did. There were weapons on that boat for a reason. They’d use them on us.

I went back to Cassidy and started feeding him the information he needed to mount our silent attack. In this instant his concerns were pure physics and logistics. How do we get on board fast and clean? What class of ship is it? Where’s the superstructure located—midship? foreship? aft? What’s the ideal point on the ship to board? How long will it take the team to scale and board—how many feet of freeboard are we looking at?

In an operation like this, stealth and accuracy are everything. Unless you want to have the other guy’s arsenal start unloading in your direction, you need to strike with the speed and accuracy of a snake. This is the quintessential sniper’s task: instantaneous calculation, integration, and delivery of critical information, complete and with 100 percent accuracy.

I emptied my mind and focused my faculties like a laser sight. Right now I had to function as a precision instrument for surveillance and calculation. I started passing Cassidy the data he needed.

“Hull length 300 feet. Vessel speed, 18 knots. Twenty feet of freeboard…”

Eighteen knots is about 20 mph. Freeboard is the vertical distance from the water line to the hook point on the edge of the rail. Twenty feet is a pretty high freeboard, meaning there was a significant vertical distance to travel in order to put the team on board. This boarding would have to be surgically precise.

“Superstructure’s aft, with direct access to the bridge. I’d say hook on aft. Nobody on deck—looks like we can double-hook.”

This was good. If we could get two simultaneous hooks going, we could send two teams up and over at the same time, one on each side of the ship.

Cassidy spoke quietly into his comm, briefing the team. They hopped into two RHIBs—rigid-hulled inflatable boats. The RHIB is a very fast craft, with twin diesel engines delivering 1,000 horsepower. You come up alongside the ship, matching its speed, and pin your RHIB right up against the hull. This is a precision stunt, something like pulling up in a Hummer next to a bus going 60 mph on a highway and maintaining your position in perfect tandem while eight guys step over you and board the bus in full gear. One simple misstep can screw it up, and here that would have lethal consequences.

Now I communicated to the pilots our optimum standoff distance, and the choreography began. I had to be careful not to put the helo on scene too soon, because if the crew on the tanker was alerted by the sound of the approaching helo, we would lose the crucial element of surprise. I had to time it to the split second and coordinate the procedure precisely with the platoon on the water and pilots up front in the helo. Training, training.

Just as the RHIB teams reached the ship, port and starboard, we slipped the bird into position on the tanker’s port flank, hovering 150 feet off the surface. Our helo was completely blacked out. I was on night vision with the door still open, staring out into the black, silent scene below me.

Now we swung into the diciest part of the operation.

Up to this point I’d been giving Cassidy the playbook on how to board the ship. Now my role slipped into its most acute phase, because I had to deliver a stream of real-time intel as the situation began to unfold. If I saw someone emerging from below, from the wheelhouse, the engine room, or any other area of the ship, I’d need to let the right person on the team know instantly—“I’ve got a guy coming out of midship on the port side, heading your way”—so they’d know what they were dealing with.

And it was not all a matter of pure reconnaissance. I was, after all, a sniper. If a serious threat showed up, I was there to take it out.

It all happened fast.

In movies you see assault teams swarming over boats or buildings with someone in charge shouting “Go, go, go, go, go!” But this was not Hollywood, and in the waters off Iraq at midnight the assault sequence played out in a surreal silence, broken only by momentary brief murmurs into comms as critical bytes of information were passed on. From point man to breacher, every member of the team knew exactly what he had to do.

As I scanned the tanker’s deck for signs of discovery, one of our guys in the portside RHIB swung up a tall carbon fiber pole. Atop the pole sat a surgical tube quick-release mechanism attached to a titanium double hook, in turn attached to a narrow titanium caving ladder, some ten inches wide. The pole hooked the rail and popped off the quick release, and the ladder was in position. The same operation was happening in simultaneous mirror image starboardside. On each side of the vessel, while the designated ladder man held tension on the ladder, the other guys scurried up the 20 feet of freeboard, over the rail, and onto the ship’s deck.

This was a delicate step. I vividly remembered an event that had occurred a few years ago off the surly California coast during our eighteen months of training workup. As we had gone through exactly this type of operation, Shawn, our breacher, scuttled up a caving ladder outfitted with his acetylene torch and 60-pound tank. Some rookie was at the helm of the RHIB and accelerated too fast. The ladder suddenly snapped taut and twanged hard, sending Shawn, off and into the drink. Loaded with torch, full gear, and body armor, he sank a full 30 feet before he was able to shuck off enough equipment to start fighting his way back up to the surface.

It was a damn good thing this had happened to us in training. Because it had happened then, it didn’t happen now, and the operation went off like a precision electronic instrument. As the members of the assault team scrambled up the narrow ladders and slipped silently over the rails, I sat up in the helo, peering out the open door, scanning the length of the terrorist boat, scrutinizing the scene through my night-vision goggles for the slightest trace of movement.

There was no one on deck. We had caught them completely off guard.

I watched as one team headed for the wheelhouse and another peeled off to head below for aft steering. In moments the ship would be effectively taken over—if all went well. And it had to go well. Once you go internal the risk escalates, because in a firefight you can get ricochets.

Suddenly I saw a searing flash of light, nearly blinding in the pitch black. Explosively bright bursts of light streamed out through the wheelhouse windows, accompanied by sharp reports.

The helo pilot yanked on his stick, pulling us off station, ready to bank and haul ass out of there. I knew what he was thinking: We’re taking fire!

“Hold station!” I barked at him as the bird jerked hard left, nearly tossing me out the door. “No—don’t worry!”

It looked like hostile fire, especially on night vision—but it wasn’t. Our guys were just using standard hostile room-entry tactics, using flashbangs, a type of grenade simulator SEALs employ in operations like this. The flashbang is an effective (albeit somewhat dangerous) stun grenade. You crack open the door and roll this baby into the room, it goes off with a loud crash and burst of light, and everyone in the room is momentarily stunned and blinded, giving you a few seconds to move in and take them.

Our helo pilot put the bird steady back on course, and we watched the scene unfold below. Crash! Crash! Cabin after cabin they fanned out, scattering their explosive seeds and harvesting each roomful of stunned prisoners, clearing and securing area after area.

Without firing a shot, our guys had taken the ship.

One group immediately started a reclear, methodically going back through the entire vessel, room by room, making sure there were no stragglers. I heard it all happening over my comm. One of our guys had grabbed the hat off the ship’s captain’s head and now wore it himself. He lit up a cigar he must have found on the ship (the thing was loaded with illegal smokes) and started running from cabin to cabin reclearing the vessel, El Capitán’s chapeau perched on his cranium, chomping on his cigar and brandishing his M-4. Jesus, what a character.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew were hauling our prisoners out onto the aft deck, about thirty of them in all. Typically guys captured in a slam-bang operation like this will be so frightened they will be pretty submissive at this point, but occasionally you’ll get someone who decides to go aggressive. An incident like that had occurred back in 1999, when a guy from SEAL Team Three got into a scuffle with one of his team’s prisoners. His weapon went off and he took a round in the leg. Another SEAL patched him up. (No doc. Ouch.) Since then we’d started wearing weapons catches; we would slip our primary weapon to the side and into the catch so it would be fixed and not go flopping around (as had happened with Gilroy Jones on my first day with ECHO platoon).

I could see there were some pretty belligerent characters here, and our guys appeared to be giving them some tough love.

“Hey,” I said to the sensor operator, “move the FLIR forward of the superstructure.” And let these guys do their job, I added to myself. The image on the FLIR was being streamed back to the command post on the destroyer, and I wanted to keep these guys out of trouble. There was no outright abuse or wrongful conduct happening here, but our guys would do whatever it took to contain this situation fast and hard. This was not a time for waffling or second-guessing.

In a few hours we would be turning the boat over to a Maritime Interdiction Force, a specially trained navy crew who would steer it down to a holding area off the coast of Dubai, where it would be turned over to one of the alphabet-soup intelligence agencies. From that point on we would never know what happened or exactly what these characters were up to. But it didn’t take a high-level clearance to see that they were up to something big—and not good.

All told, we’d taken about thirty prisoners, a bunch of fake passports, over a hundred grand in U.S. dollars, and a lot of weapons. From start to finish, we pulled off this high-threat takedown in about five minutes, with maybe another ten to comb the ship and make sure everything and everyone was accounted for.

It was a textbook boarding.

*   *   *

In late November, not long after that successful nighttime op in the Gulf, about half our platoon was flown down to stage on Masirah Island off the coast of Oman, to the southeast of the United Arab Emirates and the easternmost tip of Saudi Arabia, where they would spend a few weeks modifying some army Humvees to ready them for us to use in Afghanistan. Because of my air quals, I stayed behind in Kuwait to pack up all our gear. I knew how to build a pallet, how to label all the hazmats, weight it all correctly, and work with the aircrews to make sure everything was safe and to spec. I got everything packed and all our pallets loaded onto a big old C-130 and boarded it to make the roughly 1,000-mile flight to Oman.

Once on the plane and nestled safely among the pallets, I settled in to grab some sleep.

A short while later, I woke up. Something was wrong. The plane was humming along, but at an odd pitch. I jumped up and headed for the cockpit to see what was going on. Didn’t take long to find out. We’d lost an engine.

I woke up our crew chief and told him what was happening. He freaked out. It was the middle of the night, and we were rapidly losing altitude over the Persian Gulf. Warning lights were going on all over the cockpit. I woke up the rest of the guys and briefed them in a few sentences. We had work to do.

To help compensate for the plane’s awkward angle and the resulting shift in its center of gravity, we had to move our gear. A crew of us got behind one big pallet and started pushing that sucker forward. It was mighty heavy, and because of the plane’s tilt the push was all uphill. We moved it about 10 feet and locked it into place, then got to work on another one. Pretty soon we had the plane leveling out, and the pilot made a successful emergency landing in Bahrain, about halfway to our destination, where we spent the rest of that night before giving it another try the next morning.

It was a mighty inauspicious way to start a mission into one of the deadliest places on the planet. It was a good thing I didn’t believe in omens. Or at least, not as much as I believed in our guys and our training.

The next day we and our C-130 made it the rest of the way to Oman, where we joined the rest of our platoon at a large staging area. By this time operations in Afghanistan were well under way. On October 7, while my buddies and I were boarding oil smugglers off the coast of Iraq, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair each announced the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom, a joint effort between the Afghan United Front and U.S. and U.K. forces to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda influence and destroy their terrorist training infrastructure in Afghanistan. That same day, American and British air forces began massive aerial bombardment of Kabul and a few other key locations in Afghanistan. By the time our platoon was staging in Oman, the Taliban’s control over Kabul had been decimated, and our guys were starting to establish a foothold.

We knew there was a lot going on over there and that we would be joining the action sooner or later, but we didn’t know exactly when or exactly where, or what we’d be doing when we got there. In fact, we didn’t know much of anything. They did their best to brief us in Oman, but information was sketchy. Maps of the area, for example, were either a mess or nonexistent. We had some old Soviet-era maps, but they were next to worthless. Our briefings covered the current political situation and the latest intelligence, both of which were in a state of constant flux. It was amazing just how little we knew about Afghanistan.

A lot of our C-130 gunships were based there in Oman. They would take off from our staging area and fly northeast across the mouth of the Persian Gulf and then through Pakistani airspace until they were over Afghanistan, where they would wreak havoc on Taliban enclaves.

The C-130s videotaped these raids, and the gunship crews would invite us over each day to watch their videotapes from the night before. We watched hours of this footage, and it was one of the most bizarre things I’d ever seen. It sounds trite to say it looked like nothing so much as a video game, but that’s about the size of it. There would be a basically blacked-out screen, dotted with dozens of tiny little green trails zipping around. These, we knew, were the heat signatures of people running for their lives into the mountains while the C-130s continued pounding them from the sky. These gunships fly at 20,000 feet with their howitzers trained on the ground below. They are so high up, those poor bastards on the ground couldn’t see or hear a thing up there—all they knew was that death was raining down on them. We called it Murder TV.

We watched them wipe out hundreds of enemy forces. Holy shit, I thought, and I was pretty sure the other guys watching were thinking the same thing. This is no joke. I knew one thing: I did not want to be a little heat signature on the end of that kind of firepower.

Meanwhile, we pitched in with the rest of the platoon, helping to get all our gear together and convert those Humvees, ripping off their doors and getting everything customized to save weight. This was not Desert Storm terrain or the relatively flat Somalian plateau of Mogadishu; Afghanistan was home to a section of the frigging Himalayas. As little prepared as we were for the terrain, we were similarly unprepared for the weather. Temperatures could be up into the high 90s and higher during the day and plummet to below freezing at night. More on that topic later.

Soon the word came down: We were heading to Kandahar Airport, one of the first bases we were establishing on the ground. Kandahar International Airport had been occupied by the Soviets at the beginning of their ten-year siege starting in December 1979 and was severely damaged during that decade. In recent months it had become one of the toughest Taliban strongholds, but the Taliban forces there had been squeezed by Afghan loyalists (tribal fighters) led by Gul Agha Sherzai, the pre-Taliban governor of Kandahar, and Hamid Karzai, who would later become the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan, and U.S. forces had ramped up the effort. An expeditionary force of marines was sweeping in from nearby Camp Rhino to the south, the Coalition’s first ground-based stronghold, to take the airport.

Kandahar Airport would now become the base of operations for Task Force K-Bar, the Spec Ops group we would be joining. One of the first ground assault teams in the U.S.-led invasion, Task Force K-Bar was composed of Special Operations forces from eight different nations: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Turkey, and the United States. Here also was some interesting news: Task Force K-Bar was being run by none other than Captain Bob Harward—our second CO at SEAL Team Three, the guy who had taught me how to take the lead in a beach run by tying up the other guy’s boots. Good. Harward was an animal, and I mean that in the best sense. He would pull no punches.

At Oman they went over the current rules of engagement (ROE) with us, and this was a surprise. The ROE seemed to boil down to this: You see any dark-skinned male of fighting age, i.e., fifteen years old or older, and you’re cleared to engage.

Now that was highly unusual. Normally the ROE for combat missions are pretty complicated and quite strict. If anything, SEALs can tend to feel frustrated and operationally hampered in combat situations by what often feel like unnecessarily restrictive (and perhaps more politically than strategically motivated) ROE. (For example, read Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor with an eye out for this point, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.) But they were not messing around here. This was something like the conditions that prevailed on the damaged USS Cole. At the time of that attack, the forces on the deck had felt hamstrung by ROE. By the time we got there eight hours later, the ROE had drastically changed by presidential order: Anyone gets within 500 feet of this ship, you kill him.

We got the general impression that there were Taliban and al Qaeda running around everywhere, and it was often difficult to know who was who and who was on which side. Some of these tribal leaders were smart fuckers, too, and knew how to take advantage of our own lack of clear orientation. They would tell Coalition forces, “Those guys over there, across that ridge, are Taliban,” and then U.S. troops would go wipe out those guys over there, across that ridge—only to learn later that they had just wiped out a rival warlord that the first guys had been battling for decades, and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda or Taliban. I did not learn about this latter complication until we’d been in-country for a while, but we did get the general impression that it was chaos over there.

We didn’t know what to expect. We’d seen all this footage from the C-130s, and it looked like a free-for-all, like the Wild West. I asked Chief Dye exactly what he thought we were walking into. “Man,” he said, “I don’t know. All I can tell you is, we’re going into the shit.”

*   *   *

Before we left Oman, an unfortunate episode occurred. Two Air Force Combat Controllers (also called Combat Control Technicians, or CCT) had been assigned to our platoon. They would go along with us on missions once we were on the ground in Afghanistan and be in charge of calling in whatever air support we needed.

Air Force Combat Controllers are fantastic, and we were glad to have them. All these guys do is comms, and they’re really good at it. Unfortunately, as we soon realized, these two particular Combat Controllers were quite young and inexperienced. Actually, I’m being nice. It wasn’t their lack of experience that was the problem, it was their attitude. Chief Dye wanted to make them feel they were part of the platoon and tried to get them to roll up their sleeves and participate, but they just did not play ball. They’d been in Oman for a while, and they were not that focused on what we were doing. They never offered to help out. We’d tell them, “Hey, guys, we need you here tomorrow morning to help us work on these Humvees,” and they wouldn’t show up.

Finally Chief Dye caught them playing grab-ass with some of the air force girls on base. That was the last straw, and he fired them, saying we would get some more mature air force guys once we got over into Afghanistan.

When the two guys came over to pick up their stuff, one of them tried to get back a pair of boots he’d traded to Chris Osman. Osman wasn’t about to give up those boots and was not that interested in whatever this guy’s problem was. In the course of the exchange the guy said something insulting to him.

Now, dissing Osman to his face is not a wholesome plan. The guy can go from zero to seeing red in seconds. He very calmly set down the MRE he was eating and quietly said, “Okay, you and me, we’re going outside right now.” He said it so evenly that the guy didn’t quite understand what he meant, but he immediately got uneasy.

“What,” he said, already backpedaling.

“You just insulted me in front of my guys,” replied Osman.

“Okay,” the guy said, “but what do you mean, we’re going outside?”

“Well,” Osman explained as he slowly got to his feet, “we’re going outside, and I’m going to kick the shit out of you, and then I’m going to come back in here and finish my MRE. That’s what’s going to happen.”

The guy literally started to tremble. It was sad. “Look,” he stammered, “I—I—I don’t want any trouble—you can have the boots, I’m out of here,” and he was gone.

The two air force guys felt they’d been embarrassed by the whole episode, and they were not happy about it. Months down the road, this would come back to bite us. It planted a seed of resentment that ended up costing me a medal and getting Osman sent home.

*   *   *

In the middle of December our boots hit Afghan soil for the first time. Rolling down the ramp of the C-130, hitting the ground and looking around, it felt like being dropped onto the set of a classic Vietnam movie like Platoon or Apocalypse Now. Helicopters filled the air; equipment was moving everywhere. Chaos. There was clear evidence of that initial firefight in which the marines had wrested control of the airport from Taliban forces: broken glass everywhere, and bloodstains all over the place. Our buddies from the Corps had clearly kicked some serious Taliban ass taking this place.

The first guys in hadn’t yet quite figured out our footprint here, and EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) teams were still working to clear the perimeter, which was no small task. When the Soviets had been here years earlier, they had blanketed the place with land mines. In fact, Afghanistan is one of the two or three most heavily land-mined countries on the planet. The morning after we landed, a marine went out walking and veered too far off perimeter. He stepped on a mine and blew his leg off. One of the SEAL corpsmen, Marco Gonzalez, put a tourniquet on the guy and patched him up.

That first week at Kandahar Airport things were pretty crazy, as our command structure worked to set up a tactical ops center and hammer out some kind of order in this place. Meanwhile, we got settled in as best we could. We constructed a homemade shower, built a fire pit, and a sort of lounge (though there was no alcohol on the premises, or at least there wasn’t supposed to be), and carved out little rooms for ourselves in some of the outer-perimeter airport buildings. We had taken over a set of buildings right next to the Army Special Forces unit where we had our compound, which looked like nothing so much as a little shantytown.

We set up camp with stuff that we foraged in those areas that had been cleared by the EOD team. It was like a treasure hunt, and we found all sorts of wild and crazy stuff. There were old Soviet tanks and MIGs rotting away on the tarmac. A few guys found AK-47s wrapped in rags and hidden in the bathrooms, locked and loaded and ready to go. We found torture rooms, including boards outfitted with leather straps that clearly had been used for some kind of prisoner interrogation, and not the polite kind.

Kandahar Airport also served as our prisoner-of-war staging camp. As the Afghanistan effort proceeded, all the Taliban, al Qaeda, and others who were captured in the field would be brought to Kandahar to be processed and interrogated before being flown to Guantánamo. By the time we got there, people had already set up a large prison camp facility that bore a striking resemblance to the POW camp I’d been incarcerated in at SERE school: guard towers, barbed wire, the whole package. Surreal.

*   *   *

On Christmas Day 2001, we went out on our first patrol in Afghanistan. We spent all afternoon packing our gear and were ready for anything. We had the Mark 41 automatic grenade gun, which launches a series of mic-mic (40 mm) grenades. It’s like shooting a machine gun, only instead of bullets, you’re firing a string of grenades. We had rocket launchers and LAW rockets strapped all over our vehicles, as well as a .50 cal and an M-60 machine gun. Our comm antenna was hooked up so our comms guys could link into satellite, and we were all outfitted with night-vision gear. We were, in other words, loaded for bear.

The environment was not the sand desert of Kuwait but a rough, high desert terrain. Just outside Kandahar it was more plains than mountainous, the largely flat area far more manageable for our vehicles than what we would experience later on, farther up north. We had two EOD guys with us, Brad and Steve, as well as our new Air Force CCTs, another Brad and Eric, who were solid, mature guys and fit in right away. Chief Dye had clearly made the right move firing the younger pair back in Oman.

On the ride out we didn’t encounter anyone, but the journey was a little hairy nevertheless because we kept seeing red rocks everywhere, which we assumed signified mines, or at least the possibility of mines. We’d stop, our EOD team would dismount and scope everything out, then they’d get back in the vehicle and we’d keep moving forward. Progress was slow and tense.

We had set out in the early evening, maybe 2000 hours (8:00 P.M.). After six or seven hours of this halting progress, we’d hit all our checkpoints and hadn’t seen anything worth noting. By now it was two or three in the morning, time to lay up for the night and get a few hours’ sleep. We had just come to a river and were looking for a good spot to cross. On the other side, we could see a series of massive, beautiful, dark red sand dunes that rolled on for miles. They were gorgeous, like something you’d see in an epic film.

Right in the middle of the dunes I noticed a small cluster of trees. I was in Cassidy’s vehicle, and I saw that he was focusing on this cluster of trees, too. Alarm bells went off quietly in my head. This was something we’d been taught in sniper school: It’s human nature to gravitate to an object of note in an otherwise featureless stretch of landscape. If you’re looking at a wide open stretch of beach, for example, and you see a cluster of rocks and not much else, you’ll automatically gravitate to those rocks. That was exactly what was happening with Cassidy and that little cluster of trees nestled into the endless stretch of sand dunes.

As snipers we were taught two things about this. First, it’s a natural tendency to be drawn to that unique feature. Second, fight it! Do not give in to the obvious. Not only do you not want to be predictable to the enemy, you also don’t want to be accidentally compromised. If you are drawn to that landscape feature, other people will be, too—and those other people might be there right now. Or they might be drawn there once you’re settled in and starting to relax.

I sidled over to Cassidy and said, “Hey, LT, that’s not a very good option. No doubt other people have been there and will use that place to hole up. We’d be better off going out into the open, setting up our own camouflage netting and camping out on the sand dunes.”

He fought me on it. “No,” he said, “we’ll go own that area. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. There’s no good reason to think that there’d be anyone else holed up there.”

I didn’t like it. I mean, why would we want to take the risk? Sure, we could bring serious firepower to anyone we might run across—but still, why do that when there was an entire open desert available to us? I could see that everyone was tired and wanted to get some shut-eye, and yes, choosing that cluster of trees as our site for the night would make setting up camp quicker and easier, which would translate into getting to sleep sooner, which might even translate into getting a slight bit more sleep. I understood all that—but I still thought that none of this was any reason to take the easy route.

We had a short, heated discussion. “Point taken,” Cassidy finally said, “but this is the decision we’re making.” After fording the river, we headed for the cluster of trees.

As we started setting up, I shone my flashlight on one spot on the ground—and sure enough, there at my feet was a fire pit. I nudged Cassidy and pointed with my flashlight beam. “Hey, LT,” I whispered, “there ya go.” It was as if we had followed Fodor’s Guide to Terrorist Afghanistan. It wasn’t just that one fire, either. There were fire rings everywhere, a few days old at most. Some forces, God knew who, had recently stopped by these trees and camped out exactly where we were standing right now. Fortunately there was no one there at that moment. But there easily could have been.

“Goddammit,” said Cassidy, and he nodded. He knew I was right. We set up a watch and pitched our camp.

I relate this not to toot my own horn but to make the point again about our training. Sniper school simply makes you into a better operator. It trains you to pay attention to things others might miss, even other Navy SEALs, and it trains you to pay attention when others might get lazy. Sniper school squeezes the lazy out of you. It forces you to make good decisions even when you’re tired. I saw similar things happen many times over.

One thing about Cassidy I really appreciated: He wasn’t afraid to admit when he’d been wrong. To me, this is one of the strongest marks of great leadership. Nobody is always right. Great leaders use that to learn and improve, instead of fighting it.

The patrol was otherwise uneventful, and we headed back the following day, patrolling as we went, and worked our way back to camp by evening. Although nothing much happened, it was good to shake out the cobwebs and get ourselves moving out in the field.

*   *   *

A few days after Christmas, an event occurred that shook us up and showed us how little margin for error there was here—and how far we still had to go to get our shit sufficiently together if we intended to come out of this place alive.

About a thirty-minute drive from the Kandahar Airport there was a place called Tarnak Farms, where the 9/11 attackers were said to have trained. (Tarnak Farms was also believed to have been home to bin Laden for a while and was the site of a narrowly missed opportunity to take him out a few years earlier.) Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the news channels had run a captured video clip of terrorists-in-training running an obstacle course and monkey bars at a training camp. That was Tarnak Farms.

The place had now been completely leveled by Coalition bombing raids, but it was still a useful training site. We had set up a mock shooting range there and would go out to test weapons, check our explosives, and blow off captured enemy ordnance. We had been out there not long before Christmas and had used the site to sight our .50 cal and grenade launcher and do some basic weapons training.

Now, a few days before New Year’s, we headed out there again to do some more testing on our weapons and make sure our zero was good. We didn’t have a lot of the technology we’ve developed since then. Today I wouldn’t need to go anywhere to confirm my rifle’s zero; I could just plug my local coordinates into my software and it would correct for that part of the world, with its particular elevation, degree of latitude, and environmental conditions. Back in 2001 we didn’t have that sophisticated software, and nothing could replace getting out on the range and physically testing the weapons. We also had a bunch of enemy ordnance we wanted to take out there to blow.

About half the platoon went out this time, maybe eight guys including our two EOD guys, and we took just two vehicles. We arrived and parked, and as I stepped out of the Humvee I’d been riding in I happened to glance down at the rear tire. My eye caught a glimpse of something that looked like a pink pig’s tail sticking out from under the tire. I bent down slowly to get a closer look. Damn, that looked an awful lot like det (detonation) cord.

It was det cord.

Shit. I froze. “Hey, Brad?” I called out to one of our EOD guys. “You want to take a look at this? It looks a whole lot like det cord to me.”

Det cord looks much like an M-80 fuse, only bigger. I’d done enough demolitions to know what I was looking at, but when you have an expert handy it never hurts to get a second opinion. This was a situation where it would certainly pay to be sure.

Brad stepped over cautiously to where I stood and angled in close for a good look. “Holy shit,” he murmured, and he looked around at the other guys. “Okay,” he said quietly, “everybody slowly step back.”

Everybody slowly stepped back.

Brad called over his buddy Steve, who slipped over to Brad’s side to become part of our tableau. Brad and Steve very slowly, very carefully, checked the whole scene out, inch by freaking inch. I heard Brad let his breath out, and it was not from relief. It was from the need to maintain maximum control, which you can’t do effectively when you’re holding your breath. “Okay, guys,” he said, “here’s the situation. We have parked directly on top of an antitank mine. Which happens to be tied into three antipersonnel mines.”

It did not take a degree in physics or expertise in demolition specs to know that the shit our Humvee was sitting on was enough to blow us all to Pakistan.

We stood in place while Brad and Steve dismantled the whole mess, wondering how on earth we hadn’t set the explosives off. I mean, we didn’t just lightly brush the damn thing. We parked a frigging Humvee on it. Why were we still standing here, left alive to tell the tale? Not that we were complaining any—but it was weird not knowing. Was the thing a dud, or were we just ridiculously lucky?

Our answer came soon enough. Brad came over to us after they’d finished their work and said, “Whoever set this thing up missed one step. They didn’t set up the drum correctly. As a result, the pressure plate didn’t rotate properly and failed to initiate the charge. Which, all things considered, was a good thing.”

We couldn’t argue with that. Without that one human error, the thing would have gone off and taken all of us with it—us in our Humvees with no armor and no doors.

I still have a picture of that little det cord, and with it, another picture of me standing in that same area initiating a charge later that day on some of our captured ordnance, and in this one you can see a bombed-out blue minivan in the background. We’ll come back to that second snapshot again, because that blue minivan took on new significance to me about three months later.

Here was the really freaky thing about our close encounter of the nearly fatal kind: Only a few days beforehand, an EOD team had been out there and cleared the whole area. So how was it we’d just driven in and parked our Humvee square on top of an economy-sized Armageddon, when the whole place had already been scoured and pronounced clean? There were only two possibilities. Either our EOD guys had completely missed this series of mines, which was extremely unlikely—or else someone was out there surveilling the area and had slipped in and booby-trapped the place after the EOD guys left, figuring that we’d be back. I was pretty sure it was the latter.

Three months later, I would be 100 percent sure of it.