Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (5 page)

“I have to say it,” he later recalled, “my dad, a thoroughgoing good guy at heart, let me get away with a few things. My potential college grades were rubbish, and I never took a blind bit of notice of anything my teachers tried to teach me.

“My dad rarely gave me a hard time for anything I did or didn't do. He was kind of proud of me, which put me on the pig's back, and I was loving every hour of it, especially the nights.”

And yet there was a ferocious contradiction in Matt's character. At heart, deep in a place no one really saw, he was a hardworking kid, and with his truly moderate high school grades, he went to work locally to make up for his misspent youth, working long shifts as a counter-hand and short-order cook at a pizza chain, with the old Mustang parked out back, all set to go.

“I always worked,” he says. “But the longer and harder I did so, the clearer my position became. I'd only been going for seventeen or eighteen years, having a great time, but well on my way, I thought, to a momentous screwup ... summa cum laude in partying. Those 2.3 and 2.4 grades from Perrysburg High haunt me to this day. I shoulda been straight As. No bullshit. But only I knew that, and I'm not proud.”

That was not the only secret the young McCabe harbored, the other being that he somehow understood the long and historic connection
his little town had with the US Navy. Situated right up there in the top left-hand corner of the state, Perrysburg was an early nineteenth-century shipbuilding center, right on the wide Maumee River, which flows into Lake Erie just a dozen miles to the north.

Perrysburg is in fact named for one of America's greatest naval battle commanders, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who not only supervised the construction of the US Fleet along the Maumee but also fought the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.

In overall command of the US Fleet in the 240-mile-long lake, Commodore Perry faced the British head on, but in the opening exchanges he took a very severe shellacking, with his flagship, named after the immortal Captain Lawrence, almost sinking. The British commander demanded Perry strike his colors and surrender.

But Commodore Perry refused, and in the teeth of the battle and under withering gunfire, he ordered his men to row him to one of his other ships, where he personally fired the salvo that began the rout of the Royal Navy's Task Force. Following the strategy of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar, he drove forward, in the lee of the wind, and split the British line, pounding them until they surrendered. Altogether the commodore fought nine naval actions on that lake and won them all, and a grateful nation awarded him with both the Congressional Gold Medal and the thanks of Congress.

Still known as the “Hero of Lake Erie,” Commodore Perry had a decisive hand in the ultimate US victory in that war. An entire class of modern US frigates was named after him—and there's twenty-four still serving: the heavily gunned anti-aircraft and ASW ships, Oliver Hazard Perry–class, renowned escorts to the US Navy's largest aircraft carriers.

Today a mighty bronze statue of the commodore stands in downtown Perrysburg. Though not many people noticed the young Matt taking a few long looks at it while he was not really bothering with his schoolwork.

But at age eighteen Matt made what he described as the first mature decision of his entire life: he decided to rip one of the opening pages out of the commodore's playbook and join the US Navy. And he kept
his thoughts to himself. He did not have the slightest intention of rising to command a warship in battle.

Matt, retired soccer midfielder, secretly wanted to become a US Navy SEAL. Nothing else. And he never told anyone.

Jonathan Keefe's long devotion to the US Navy SEALs began when he was in fifth grade. This was partially because he was born and spent his early years way south into the Virginia Peninsula, where the Atlantic rollers hit the Chesapeake Bay and where America's mightiest warships are both built and stabled in the gigantic Norfolk Naval Yards.

It's impossible not to have at least a passing interest in the US military if you happen to be from those warm, gusting ocean-side lands, which also stand to the north of the wide Hampton Roads, the busiest warship highway on earth.

All around there are signs of the world's only superpower in action—the Langley Air Force Base, the NASA Langley Research Center, the vast shipbuilding yards of Newport News, where they build the colossal fortress at sea, the Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.

Young Jon was brought up watching warships shouldering their way out into the Atlantic and coming home from distant lands. The folklore of the US Navy was instilled deep within him. The Stars and Stripes was always prominent on the flagpole in front of the classy ranch-style house in which they lived, in the overwhelmingly middle-class Virginia country town of Tabb.

Patriotism was not taught in the household of Tom and Dawn Keefe; rather, it was engraved on their hearts from birth. A financial professional, Tom Keefe worked just a few miles away at Newport News Shipbuilding Company, where he was controller and treasurer of its industrial subsidiary, NNI, specialists in constructing and repairing nuclear power stations.

NNI was full of ex-US naval officers, several of whom were buddies with Tom Keefe, the man who controlled the budgets. One of them, a former commanding officer of the Sturgeon-class nuclear attack submarine USS
Lapon
, was Captain Chester “Whitey” Mack, who once
silently shadowed a brand-new Yankee-class Russian ballistic missile boat for her entire patrol, an astounding forty-seven days!

Cruising right inside the Yankee's baffles, dead astern, he never got caught and hoovered up enough priceless electronic information to fill a wing of Bancroft Hall at Annapolis. After that the six-foot, six-inch Whitey became a legend in the Atlantic submarine service and later joined NNI in Newport News, where they talk about him still. USS
Lapon
was, after all, built there, five miles from where the Keefe family lived.

Because he grew up in that community, it was little surprise that Jon knew the sights and sounds of US warships before he could recite the alphabet. His father was never in the US military, but, with his strict adherence to rules, sense of order, and punctuality, he would have made a superb naval officer.

The great pride of Tom Keefe's life was being associated with an engineering corporation that built every last one of the US Navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and one half of all of its nuclear attack submarines.

But curiously, his mother, Dawn, was the one who led Jon to the SEALs. She'd been a second-grade school teacher before her sons, Tommy and Jon, were born, and she returned to the profession when the boys were very young. A gifted and natural storyteller, she constantly read to her sons, and when she recounted them an adventure involving a group of men called the SEALs, her youngest was hooked. He was so captivated—and at such a young age—that he actually wrote his fifth-grade career project on the US Navy SEALs.

“I still remember it,” he says. “There were a lot of stories, but the ones I always liked most were about those daredevils from Virginia Beach, just twenty-seven miles to the south of the village of Tabb. I made Mom take us down there just so I could see where they lived and worked. Never caught sight of one, though.”

And when he was thirteen Jon persuaded his parents to allow him to go to San Diego, California, with a friend to enroll in the US Marines' renowned ten-day “Devil Pups” mini-boot camp youth program on the seventeen-mile Pacific coastal sprawl of Camp Pendleton.
This is the major West Coast base of the Marine Corps, the prime amphibious training grounds for Assault Craft Unit 5 and home to One Marine Expeditionary Force, masters of the sea-to-shore attack.

The course is designed to show students what it takes to become a combat warrior, with the accent on physical fitness, discipline, and devotion to country and the US Marine Corps. The young Jon loved it all, but the part he loved most was when his instructor pointed out in the distance a vast, low, flat grassy wilderness, strictly off-limits and apparently deserted.

“No one goes there,” he said. “That's the secret off-limit range BUD/S training, the two hundred-yard rifle qualification.”

Jon stood on the edge of his personal heaven. “Can't see anyone,” he muttered, staring into the horizon.

“No one ever does,” replied the instructor. “But they're out there.”

But that was not simply the highlight of the trip for Jon—it was the highlight of his life. He had stood on the sacred ground where the Navy SEALs trained. On this great private enclave of the US military, he had seen the firing range of Special Warfare Command (SPECWARCOM), where they honed their skills. Not so many people had ever seen that, and for him, he now had a bond with the SEALs that would never be broken.

When the “Devil Pup” from the Virginia Peninsula finally returned home, he was utterly determined that one day he would find his way west again, but this time to Coronado, home of the world's most elite warriors.

By now he was growing into a huge frame, headed for the six-foot, four-inch heavyweight he would one day become, with not one gram of fat—pure muscle and bone.

At sixteen he began to understand fitness and what it would take to get a tight control on his physical development. Brought up so close to the sea, he swiftly developed into a top-class high school swimmer, making the teams and powering through the swim-league encounters with kids who were largely older and weaker. Jon won the 2002 Virginia State championship, fifty-yard freestyle, scything through the water
in a record-busting 21.18 seconds—a time that stood supreme for three years.

By now his given Christian name, “Jonathan,” had slipped away. Young Keefe, the human shark, was simply “Big Jon,” and he anchored the Tabb High relay swim team to victory after victory. They weren't always in front when the third-lap man touched the wall, but every last time Big Jon hit the water like a Mark-8 torpedo, and the entire population of Tabb High almost went berserk with excitement as he hammered his way past the leaders. Altogether Jon won seven state championship events.

Unsurprisingly he was awarded a partial scholarship for swimming to East Carolina University, about one hundred miles south, over the border in Greenville, North Carolina. But from there things went even further south for Jon. First he flunked out of college altogether and then he went home to the local community college to study—somewhat ironically, as things turned out—criminal justice.

But, like the best buddy he had not yet met and who was, anyway, busy gunning that Mustang around Perrysburg, Ohio, Big Jon discovered the joys of rural Virginia's
dolce vita
and devoted most of his time to majoring in having a real good time. Like Matt, he went for partying summa cum laude, somehow breaking loose from his old persona of great kid, big military ambitions, and dedicated athlete.

“My parents tried everything to guide me and continued to give me all of their support,” he said. “But I guess I was too big, too sure of myself, and a lot too stupid to listen. But after two of the most ridiculous years of my life, finally I woke up and decided to get a grip.

“I resolved to stop wasting everybody's time, drove myself down to the local recruiting office, and joined the Navy. I told 'em straight out I did not have the slightest intention of being in the surface Navy. I was there to become a Navy SEAL. Sea, Air, and Land. Basic Underwater Demolition, right? Special Forces...just point me in the right direction, and get that Trident polished up.

“I didn't actually say any of that. But they were my thoughts. Nearly. You stand right there in front of that recruiting petty officer, I'm telling you, even sitting down he looked about twelve feet tall. He
handed me the papers to sign and sent me,
instanto
, to Navy boot camp up on the Great Lakes.”

The recruitment officer didn't actually say it, but Jon could tell what he was thinking just by the way he looked at him:
You think you're so damned tough, kid ... then you go right ahead and prove it to us
.

“Matter of fact, I felt a lot less tough when I walked out than I did when I walked in. But I went home and packed, obeyed my orders, the way I always would, just as soon as I pulled on the dark blue uniform of the United States Navy.”

Matthew McCabe joined the US Navy, and right after boot camp reported to the San Diego dockyards directly opposite Coronado, on the landward side of the bay. He was assigned to the USS
Belleau Wood
, the forty thousand–ton Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship that had been designed to land battalions of US Marines on distant shores.

She was, in fact, a small aircraft carrier and traveled with forty helicopters and Harrier jump-jets embarked as well as landing craft. Matt, who was not yet nineteen, was never especially interested in the cleaning, polishing, and maintenance routines of the ordinary seaman, as his singular ambition was to join the SEALs, the guys on the other side of the bay.

And as soon it was possible, he filed an application to be transferred to SPECWARCOM in Coronado, California. That application, in the time-honored tradition of huge organizations, became either lost, misplaced, mislaid, or thrown away. Either way, six months later Matt was still a member of
Belleau Wood
's 930-man ship's company, and still polishing.

Almost every day he watched the SEALs in action, training, fast roping out of helicopters in their wet suits into the ocean, sometimes really close to his ship. Matt wanted so badly to join them that it actually pained him to think about it.