Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (9 page)

The breacher needs to have every possible device in his personal armory, ready to blast the platoon into the area. And he better get it right if he doesn't want to become a human bomb.

It's the surprise element and the ability to handle the totally unexpected that makes a great breacher. The sudden appearance of a steel door, a barricaded passage, a door that is barred. There may even be a steel wall inserted into the concrete of a building, and that cannot be blasted out without taking down the whole structure.

Right there the breacher must make fast decisions. And he may have to go to the heat torch to cut the steel. This is hot and noisy and is likely to attract attention, forcing a firefight before the SEALs are even inside.

And then there's the sudden shock of a booby trap, the instant secondary blast, detonating from inside the building as soon as the door rockets inward off its hinges. The technique and skills required of the breacher, the lightning sidestep away from the entrance, inch perfect on the turn, is enough to make a matador gasp with admiration.

And then there's the possibility of running straight into the barrel of a Kalashnikov gun as the door blows into the house. There's probably a split second before the enemy recovers from the inward blast of the breacher's bomb, but no more. And the Team leaders need to move again, with terrific speed, hurling in the grenade with the instinctive reactions of a big-league short stop to first. Nanoseconds matter. Lost seconds might get them all killed.

And there's always the possibility the breacher may go down. He's first in the firing line, and someone has to step up. He must bring an understudy, whose duties would start instantly. If the Team leader arrives at the secondary door inside the building and finds it padlocked or barricaded shut, the number-two breacher must be right at his elbow, with the sledgehammer and the bolt cutters and the C-4. That's the way it works. No mistakes.

The breachers have a quaint name for the high-danger area as they enter; they call it the “fatal funnel,” because that's where the enemy will instinctively shoot. That's where the SEALs come under first fire. The role of the breacher requires high courage, and a lot of it. And that was Big Jon's stock in trade. Was he scared? Hell no. They'd taught him to be a US Navy SEAL. And everyone knows they're invincible. Jon loved every last and precious moment of it.

Any time you are privileged enough to see a SEAL Team on television, laying siege to some terrorist stronghold in Iraq or Afghanistan, remember you are watching the maestros of assault at work, banging and blasting their way forward to achieve their mission. You are seeing the results of hours and hours of practice, months and months of training, men whose unquestioning dedication to the American flag is, very simply, without end.

Sometimes they pay the highest possible price. And when these men make their final journey home, the Stars and Stripes always drapes the coffin. A rigid SEAL guard of honor stands motionless at the head for the duration of the journey, no matter the distance, which is often half a world away. No SEAL ever dies in vain. For each fallen man a new piece is added to the great mosaic of the Teams—a place where courage and daring are always paramount, but where valor is the unending constant.

And in the cold January of 2008, Jon stepped into the sharp end of this brotherhood. By year's end he would be a highly qualified Team 10 breacher, and after that would come the unit-level training (ULT), the last few months of fine tuning that everyone receives before deployment, probably to Iraq, possibly to Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Matt McCabe had arrived back from Germany and quickly discovered that the relentless search for perfection had not abated, even in the established Teams. His best friend, Jeff (no proper names for serving Special Forces), had been “rolled back” (sent to retake a course), so the first thing Matt did was to meet and befriend a big powerful new guy from Coronado, Jon Keefe.

Within a few weeks Jeff and Jon showed up in Team 10, in which Matt was in hard training, and the three of them became buddies,
traveling out to Reno, Nevada, for a part of a Special Forces driving course. This may sound like a huge amount of fun, but the SEALs treat it with the same grim, hard-eyed proficiency as pool comp.

SEALs need to be able to drive Humvees like stock-car drivers. The day may come when they need either a fast getaway or even (much more likely) a surprise arrival in a combat zone, and they do not want to be looking around for a decent driver.

In those platoons, as ever, everyone needs to be able to do everything. When three regular SEAL drivers arrive in Reno, they are just that—regular drivers. When they return to Virginia Beach they will be world-class experts in rallying—racing over rough terrain, up mountains, down escarpments, and through streams.

SEAL drivers may need to operate at high speed in any war zone. As men may be wounded, it may be necessary to engage in a running firefight from the vehicle, and the nearest man to the wheel needs to get in and move it. He'll need all the steering, braking, and timing skills they taught him in Reno.

All three of them loved it up there on the high slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as they slid, skidded, and tore up the mountain shale, hard cornering and making high-speed U-turns. And they all passed the examinations. It ended in late March, and they took a long weekend to drive down the Nevada border, crossing the enormous Yosemite State Park and heading for the ski slopes of Squaw Valley, California.

There Matt was the expert, once making an unbelievable Black run down from the rampart of Squaw Peak, nearly eighty-nine hundred feet above sea level, and disappearing at about 100mph down the steep Siberia Slope. “I never thought I'd see him again!” says Jon.

“You know, that's the thing about Matt. He can just do so many things so well, better than most people. But he never goes on about it. Just does 'em. He could win the light-heavyweight championship of the world and forget to tell you. It's what I first liked about him. He was never Mr. Too Cool, like a lot of guys are. He's a real easy character to like, I'll tell you that.”

For the record it should be recorded here that Jon forgot to mention for this book that he was one of the fastest high school swimmers on
the East Coast of the United States. He even forgot to mention his state championship and longstanding Virginia 50-yard-freestyle record. Someone else told the author.

Reminded, he said, pretty laconically, “Yeah, I guess I could chug along okay some days.”

“It's what I first liked about Jon,” says Matt. “He never tried to be the coolest guy around. Not even one time when he won a 5.5-mile SEAL swim race in the Pacific out near San Clemente Island. Sonofagun won. I never saw it, but everyone was talking about it. When I asked him, he said it was probably a fluke—he wasn't real sure the others were trying!”

When Matt and Jon reached their Teams, Special Training took a diverse turn. As Jon concentrated on becoming expert at demolishing anything that stood in his Team's way, Matt headed for probably the most cerebral part of SEAL Team missions: the complex business of communications.

For those who would specialize in this slightly secretive section of the dark arts, there was a demanding course in the on-base Comms School. This starts a candidate off right at the basics, which all SEALs must master (just in case), and runs all the way through to advanced satellite communications and space-age battlefield techniques, the ones that ensure no one is out of the loop.

The sheer complexity and myriad chances of the system going down appealed to Matt. Confident now that his goof-off schooldays were way behind him, he had already decided that a career in the SEALs was his natural spot in this world and that, in the long term, an officer's commission was not beyond him.

He swiftly grasped that communications on any mission was the heart and soul of the operation, the mission's critical path. Without top-class comms, there can be only chaos. Every SEAL is obliged to read Marcus Luttrell's
Lone Survivor
, and every SEAL shudders at those terrible moments when the Red Wings' chief comms man, Danny Dietz, could not raise home base to provide help.

And Danny was an expert. A real expert. And he simply could not make the connection. Up there in the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, towering rock faces and steep escarpments that rose above and below them blocked the quivering electronic signal lancing out from Danny's transmitter.

By the time the Red Wings had fallen down two mountains and been shot God-knows-how-many times, Danny's radio gear was history. In the end it was Lieutenant Michael Murphy's final sacrificial action—moving into a bullet-raked clearing and punching in the numbers on his satellite phone—that finally raised a five-alarm uproar on the Bagram Base.

By now Danny had died, and the other three were all badly wounded. Murphy's final act contravened the general practice of not using these special phones unless the situation was dire. And Mike Murphy knew that his situation was as dire as it gets. In the final few minutes of his life, mortally wounded, he made the connection, the very best he could do, which was only to be expected from a SEAL officer of his supreme quality.

Everyone knew the legend of the Red Wings and understood that that disaster, at least partly, involved faulty communications, when they were unable to summon help.

And so Matt went to yet another school as a part of his Special Training course. And right there he became acquainted with the regular SEAL radio that everyone takes on every mission. It's about nine inches long and fits into a special slot in the harness. With its antennae extended, it enables all the operators to talk to each other—probably across distances of five hundred meters, depending on the terrain and line of sight.

The problem is that this radio is encrypted, which although it makes it impossible for the enemy to listen in, it also increases the time required to program the radio and set it up with very complex codes before a mission.

And every step of the way, on any SEAL operation, the unexpected can happen, especially at night, when most Black Ops take place. If, for instance, they meet up with a new group, probably from another
Team, the first thing that happens is the radios must be synchronized, changed, in order to have standard codes, to allow everyone to be in contact whenever necessary.

But the big, heavy central radio transmitter is entirely different. This thing weighs about twenty-five pounds, and the comms operator carries it in a backpack. Matt, when qualified, would assume this duty, hauling the extra load across the desert without a word of complaint. He remembers that even Jon, one of the Team's resident packhorses, was startled when he saw it. “Wow!” said Big Jon, “Sonofabitch looks like a nuclear bomb!”

The sight of it was one thing, but for Matt, learning the areas of modern radio communication from scratch was entirely another.

First there was command and control, the SEAL standard practice of communicating every duty of every man in the patrol, thereby ensuring that even the most minor change was instantly communicated back to the Team leader and then to the Blue Force Picture back at command.

This is the hub of every operation, the one ops room where
everything
is reported and where they know every last detail of the mission, particularly the GPS reading that displays precisely where the Team is in the middle of some godforsaken pitch-black Iraqi desert, probably surrounded by bloodthirsty, tribal cut-throats.

It needs to be right there on the Blue Force Picture, accurate to the finest degree, so that any major rescue or deployment of reinforcements happens instantly, no delays. It's the sole responsibility of the comms operator to ensure that every last vestige of his platoon's information is communicated back to command.

Matt had to master the system of multiple channels. He needed to understand the complications of the SEAL reconnaissance men (recce), the shadowy warriors who operate way out in front of the main force, on their own, working in pairs and communicating back to the platoon their precise whereabouts, the terrain, the dangers, the areas of possible ambush.

This information initially comes back from the recce guys directly to the platoon comms man, who's working closely with the Team leader and helping to make fast decisions. In addition, he must keep
them posted on the Blue Force Picture, and all this in the middle of the night, moving behind enemy lines, watching through the green mist of the night-vision goggles.

Then there's the assault itself, the moment the SEALs go in. Everything gets reported: the volume of return fire, if any; the requirement for high explosive, casualties, prisoners, booby traps, and the route back out of the battle zone.

The comms man here is working flat out, probably accessing the satellite, aiming his transmitter, trying not to shout, pretending to be calm—all possibly under fire himself. And everything's still encrypted, incomprehensible to anyone else, and the comms guy is interpreting it, even if the roof's falling in around him.

Right now every single aspect of this wildly complicated process matters. The comms operator is checking that he's still making contact, perhaps giving a fast “satellite shout”—making doubly sure he's on the exact right angle to the heavens where, somewhere, twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, his electronic contact is speeding through inner space, somehow transmitting back to a guy like Matt, confirming the code numbers.