Battle Ready: Memoir of a SEAL Warrior Medic (14 page)

“Neither do I,” he said with a smile.

“You think they’re sending a car to get us?”

“I hope not, Doc. There’s a casino about ten minutes from here by foot, if my memory serves me, and I think I need to show it to you.”

*   *   *

Like all other special operations warriors, SEALs are extremely detailed in their planning, but they’re also the most resourceful men I’ve ever known when it comes to executing strategy. My CO had mentioned this when I checked on board my first SEAL Team. He encouraged his men to have an “out of the box” mindset but within the limits of guidance from above. His words really didn’t click at first, but after a series of events similar to the plane crash in Honduras, I realized just how ingenious and dedicated these men could be.

11

METAMORPHOSIS

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

—L
AO
T
ZU

When I finally made it back from deployment, I began to understand the effect my job had on everyone else in my life. SEALs perform at an extremely high level. Our country expects it from us, and we expect it from ourselves. Maintaining a level of excellence requires constant practice and rehearsals in unfamiliar environments. That means travel, and a lot of it. Typically SEALs are on the road for 270 days a year. When not forward deployed on a mission, we’re traveling around the country training for one. We train the way we fight, intensely and with dead-serious focus and dedication. Our scenarios can’t be canned like large-scale military exercises that continually perform the same procedures year after year. That type of Big Military approach is unnecessary and inhibits our ability to accomplish the mission.

The teams, like other special operations units, are made up of a very small group of patriots that generally stay in the community for decades. There’s no need to retrain new members or leadership on action plans, or how to coordinate assets or operational procedures; we live it every day. Even a simple day of just jumping out of airplanes will have a midlevel, enlisted SEAL synchronizing with other warfare elements normally done by a midgrade officer. Now multiply that five- or sixfold. One team is on the range practicing sniping, another utilizing our minisubs to dive on ships, and a third perfecting direct action assaults at an urban training facility. Somehow we’re able to pull it off day after day while simultaneously developing and running full mission profiles on probable contingencies to ensure each team is ready for war. All the while, headquarters continues to run a multitude of real-world operations fighting the War on Terror.

If you want to know what a day is like in the SEAL Teams, that’s it. Unfortunately, that type of lifestyle comes with long hours and brutal work conditions separating a SEAL from the ones he loves the most. During my first five years in the teams, wives and families were few and far between. The divorce rate was high, and many of the team guys chose to wait until they hung up their spurs before thinking about putting a ring on a finger, but I wasn’t one of them. I married a hometown girl five years younger and tried to make it work. Although the love was there, the experience necessary to deal with the “team lifestyle” wasn’t. Tamara was a beautiful and intelligent twenty-one-year-old, so she really had no way of knowing what she was walking into, and neither did I. I guess the mystique of being married to a SEAL was as appealing to her as she was pretty to me. However, relocating to a city two thousand miles away was a lot for any young couple, especially when one of them was away from home three-quarters of the year.

Having grown up Roman Catholic and witnessed Mom’s dedication to my father, I didn’t want to consider the word “divorce,” so I started to look closely at the marriages that were able to survive. As with anything associated with Special Warfare, the best place to start is in the “goat locker,” or chief ’s mess. I sat down with a few chiefs who had strong marriages and took mental notes during our conversations. I even spoke with their wives during team activities to get a feel for their personalities. In the end I found all the successful “team wives” were levelheaded, discriminating with circumstances, and capable of handling responsibilities they never thought they would have to when they took their vows. Of course, there was love and dedication, too. All the wives and the long-term girlfriends had that, but their wisdom was far beyond the confines of passion. If there were one word to describe the quality all those women possessed, it would be “maturity.”

Bill was my platoon chief and one of the best SEALs we had. He had been a mentor for nearly every member of the team at one time or another, so when he called for a meeting it was usually something important.

“You wanted to see me, jefe?” I said. The team used interchangeably the Spanish word for chief or boss due to the work we were doing throughout Central and South America.

“Yea, Doc. Grab a seat,” he said, sitting down on the corner of the couch. “Doc, you know the baby you helped to deliver on your last trip down south?” He was alluding to a young Peace Corps volunteer who became pregnant by a local and decided to stay to personally continue her work despite losing her spouse.

“Yes, but babies really deliver themselves, so I’m not sure how much of a help I was. Why, is something wrong?” I asked, concerned about her and the child’s health. Rumor had it her husband was accidently killed by criminals or the cartel, simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I dreaded the idea of something similar happening to them.

“Turns out the skipper received a phone call from the CNO [the chief of naval operations, or head of the navy] about what happened out there,” he said as he put a dip of chewing tobacco between his lower lip and gum.

“I hope it was good news.” I was still unsure where this was going.

“I guess so. Seems Admiral Boorda has written a letter of appreciation to you, and the skipper is going to present it at Quarters on Friday.”

“So it is good news?”

“Yep,” he answered, then paused long enough to deposit some spit into an empty soda bottle. “But that’s not why I want to speak with you.”

OK, now I was really curious. What on God’s green earth could this all be about?

“Doc, you’ve been doing a lot of talking to me and some of the other mugs about how we manage to hold together our marriages. I also know yours isn’t as strong as it once was, and we both know this job isn’t going to make it any easier to repair.” I reminded myself to try to keep an open mind. “So I’ve been thinking. You always have your nose in a medical book, and when we’re in town you spend just as much time at Group Medical working with Revaz as you do here.”

Everything he said was right. Revaz and I had been working for Master Chief Cavolt, the SEAL corpsman in charge of Special Warfare’s East Coast medical assets, on updating our authorized medical loadout for deployment, which had begun to take up a lot of time.

“I may not understand it all, but I know what you’re doing is a good thing for all the force, so I want you to hear me out on this.” Chief reminded me of the story I had told him about wanting to be a corpsman. Then he explained there were two types of medics in the teams, those who chose the corpsman rating and those who were assigned it. “Doc, you love medicine and you’re good at it! You can’t kick doors forever, but you can make a career taking care of those who do.”

He looked me in the eye and said, “I know you’ve mentioned the idea of becoming a PA [physician assistant] to Norris, and you’ve started taking college courses to qualify for a commissioning program. What I’m saying is, you need to think about what’s in your heart, and what’s best for you and your family.”

I wasn’t sure what to say; a meeting that started out unclear turned into “Atta boy” and now was ending with “You need to reevaluate your priorities.”

“Kevin Charles will be putting in a package for PA school later this year. I think you need to give him a call. Think hard on it, Doc. Now get outta here,” he said with a smile as he returned to the papers on his desk.

On the drive home I thought about a conversation I had at the parish when I was a boy learning how to deal with all the troubles going on at home, and the cover-up that came with them. Following Mass, Mom gave me some time to meet with my favorite priest. Father Fangler listened to my problems for over an hour before finally answering my question with a question. “Marcos,” as he used to call me, “you’ve told me you prayed, but have you been listening for God’s answer?” Being a young kid, I wasn’t sure how to respond. I thought to myself,
Did I fall asleep or miss this class in Catechism?
Then he went on to explain that the Lord’s answer can be given a number of ways.

“When you hear a verse on the radio that suddenly wakes you from a daze to answer your question, who is stirring your thoughts? When a sentence in a book or writing on a billboard jumps out at you to answer your prayer, what is that saying? When someone answers the question you have put before God during a conversation that has nothing to do with your problem, which you never spoke about, who is actually speaking to you? Marcos, that might be God talking. We all pray. Even those with little faith pray to heaven for guidance. The question is, are you listening?”

I had been praying for an answer on how to deal with our marriage problems, especially with a child on the way. What the chief was saying hopefully would not only help my marriage but also help solve an internal conflict I had been wrestling with since I returned from a trip to areas bordering the Caribbean Sea.

It wasn’t the typical SEAL operation. Instead, I was fortunate enough to join my army counterparts in Special Forces on some civic actions assisting people in villages suffering from the drug trade. Outside of the obvious poverty, it was impossible to tell there were any problems, let alone criminal activity going on, but that’s how we knew the intel reports were accurate. When impoverished neighborhoods are without crime, generally that means a criminal element has taken control. However, intel was not my focus on that trip. My job was to work with the other health care professionals to provide aid for the downtrodden.

I knew the work we were doing was just scratching the surface, but we made a difference. The people were so thankful for our help, and I was immediately reminded of a powerful statement a marine captain shared with me while we were on a training mission together in California. The captain told me he had served as an enlisted sailor in the Coast Guard prior to attending school and becoming a marine officer. He spoke fondly of the rescues he participated in, and I could tell it meant a lot to him. Being naive, I jokingly asked him if he regretted his decision to leave the Coast Guard. He answered, “Yes, I do … I found saving lives is far more rewarding than taking them.” I never wrote down the captain’s name, and have long since forgotten it, but his words always stayed in the back of my mind, and now they came forward again.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the teams and couldn’t imagine taking care of better people, but ironically, I had to leave in order to do just that. It would be a big change in my life, but I knew I had to at least give it a try.

I firmly believe change is life’s biggest fear, and the more drastic the change, the greater the fear. I know men in special operations that would easily charge into a room full of enemy without hesitation, knowing their chance of survival was slim at best. Yet they would try with all their might to stay at the same command throughout their career. Some do this because it is the essence of who they are. However, others try to stay because they have become comfortable and fearful of what change will bring.

I know how fearful change can be. I went through it in the Marine Corps. I gave up a promising career that allowed me to attain more qualifications in two and a half years than most marines obtain throughout their entire career. I walked away from all my rank and a choice of orders for the opportunity to get a job I knew very little about. Now, a little over twelve years later, I found myself at the same crossroads making another monumental life-changing decision.

*   *   *

No use denying it—I had ambitions that were going to take me away from Naval Special Warfare, for the short term at least. Most importantly, I wanted to be a good father and husband. That meant no longer allowing myself to be whisked away across the globe solely because of world events or training opportunities. I might have had the self-discipline to become a SEAL, but I lacked any ability to control my selfish desires to operate rather than to accept orders to a shore command. Since my arrival I had remained in a deploying billet, jumping from one platoon to another, and with SEAL corpsmen in constant demand I wasn’t about to let that change. Now I was at another crossroads, though, and I knew I had to make a hard commitment to my family by putting myself in a job that would reverse the operational tempo I had been living for over a decade. I needed something that would allow me to be at home nine months out of the year but still train to deploy in support of our country should my services be needed. It also meant I needed to find an occupation that not only fulfilled my desire for a higher level of medical practice but kept me in contact with the sailors and ground pounders that did the job the military was built to support. As always, jefe’s advice was solid, so I picked up the phone and gave Kevin a call.