No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL (4 page)

“Get the fuck up and head over to the pass line. You did it.” Those were great words to hear.

No one who makes it through BUD/S ever thought he’d fail. BUD/S is relentless and forced me to dig deep. I never doubted myself. I knew I’d pass. I think people mistake a SEAL’s confidence for arrogance. But after the fifty-meter swim, Hell Week, and dive training, where the instructors do
their best to drown you, we know our limits and we know how to push well beyond them. During BUD/S I overcame dozens of obstacles that looked insurmountable at the time, and that gave me the confidence to know I could do it again.

But bobbing in the near-freezing river in Alaska, I had to work hard to muster that confidence. I wasn’t sure I could do this, but tied to my buddy and nearing the opening to the pier, I didn’t have a lot of choice.

It took only a few minutes before I couldn’t feel my face. We let the current push us toward the harbor. At its widest the Ketchikan Creek is only about twenty feet and only five feet deep, so we bobbed at the surface until we crossed the first bridge. We were using Draeger diving rigs, which use pure oxygen. There are no bubbles when we exhale, keeping us much quieter.

As we passed under the bridge, I could hear the snow crunching under the tires of the cars above. Somewhere above us, I knew guards patrolled. Spotlights from the ship crisscrossed the black water, looking for us.

The water got deeper under the bridge, and before we crossed underneath we dipped below the surface. It was difficult to see anything in the ink-black water. We swam to the right bank and started searching for an opening in the pylons that led under the pier.

I could feel the tug of the rope on my belt as my partner swam nearby. I found the edge of the first pylon, figured out the direction I needed to move, and plunged farther into the darkness. I held my hand out in front and slowly kicked my
way past the first pylon. My hand brushed against it, sinking into the green algae clinging to the wood.

Any minute, I expected to be pummeled by the dolphin’s nose as it forced me to the surface. We crept more than swam as we picked our way through the maze of algae-covered pylons.

Debris littered the bottom. Several times my flippers brushed against metal or trash. Each time we got close to a pylon, we had to be careful of jagged nails. If we tore a hole in our dry suit it would be more than just cold; it could be fatal because water would fill the suit, making it impossible to surface. Drowning was a real possibility.

I knew my swim buddy was near because of the tension in the rope. It was so dark that I remember lifting my hand and putting it directly in front of my face. I couldn’t see anything. Besides the dark, we had to deal with the cold. Beyond the cold we had to worry about the dolphins, and besides the dolphins we had to worry about getting lost under a town built on pylons. It felt claustrophobic.

I could barely make out the reading on the glowing green compass on my wrist. I tried to keep a steady pace on the right heading, but every few feet I had to dodge around a pylon. It took us an hour to get to the ship. I was relieved when we finally reached the ship’s hull. It’s surprising when you’re swimming in the pitch black with your hands in front of you and you swim into the massive hull of a warship. It makes you feel so small. I quickly snapped out of congratulating myself for making it when I realized we were only half done. In order to
complete the mission, we had to place the device and make it back to our truck without being detected.

From below the water line, the ship was massive. I ran my gloved hand over the rough steel and waited for my partner to remove the collapsible pole strapped to my back. The pole was like the one used to replace letters on a sign at a gas station. The head of the pole had magnets and rollers on it. I pulled one of two dummy bomb devices out of a bag on my belt and attached it to the head. I ran my hand over the wheels on the head to make sure they rolled freely and tapped my partner on the shoulder. He placed the rollers on the skin of the ship and slowly slid the training device up the side, letting it roll along the hull until it was in place. The device attached to the ship by magnets. As it broke the water line, we got the device’s magnets too close to the skin of the ship. I felt the device grab hold of the hull of the ship with a “thunk.” I pushed the pole back and forth until the bomb came free. I worried the noise of the magnet pulling the device toward the ship had given away our position.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus. I was doing it all by feel only. I couldn’t see anything anyway, and my mind was playing tricks on me. I kept seeing movement in the black water. Each time, my heart raced, waiting to feel a dolphin or killer whale barreling into my side at full speed.

Inch by inch we slid the device up the hull of the ship until it reached the three-foot line.

After we got the second device in place, my partner helped me collapse the pole. He lashed it in place on my back and we
started the long, cold swim back to where the truck had dropped us off. It was a total relief when we swam back under the bridge. This time, there were fewer cars passing along the bridge and from a light posted by the road I could make out that it had begun to snow again. I was tired and my nerves were frazzled after working in complete darkness for well over two hours. But in my head I knew the only relief was up the creek and into the back of a U-Haul truck.

My legs shook when I stood up onshore. Someone threw a blanket over me and helped me drag my gear to the truck. I could barely talk because my face was still numb. Minutes later I was back in the dark as the truck rumbled back to the hotel. I couldn’t feel my face, but I know I had a smile.

We were a bunch of new guys fresh from BUD/S and we’d just completed the mission. It was a training mission, but diving under the pier wasn’t easy. We’d been on other training missions before, but this time our officer trusted us to plan and execute the mission on our own and we succeeded. It felt good to be trusted.

“Anybody see the dolphin?” a teammate said.

“Nope,” I said. “I couldn’t see shit.”

“Every time I felt the water move, I tensed up, ready to get the shit beat out of me,” my partner said.

It turns out the free-swimming dolphin had spotted the smorgasbord of fish in the harbor and taken off. The two dolphins in the cages—used to the warmer San Diego Bay—stayed near the surface and every ten minutes rang the bell to get a fish. The dolphins didn’t want to be in the cold water
any more than we did. The steady noise from the tanks masked our approach from the dolphins, and nobody had seen or heard us plant the training devices. We had actually pulled off the mission.

I was nervous the entire time. But I used the exact same focus to get through this mission as I did the fifty-meter underwater swim back in BUD/S. My confidence was growing, but it wasn’t a hundred percent yet. When I got into combat a few years later, I couldn’t focus on the negative—the dark, the cold water, killer dolphins. There can be zero thought of failure or quitting once the fighting starts. Looking back now, I can see that my confidence grew stronger with every experience, in training and in combat. The sense of purpose I had learned from my parents had gotten me started, and once my confidence kicked in, I was on my way to becoming an effective operator and an asset to the team.

Of course, I still had a lot to
learn.

The Three-Foot World

Fear

My body
was frozen against the smooth rock face.

I couldn’t move no matter how much I willed myself to get going. I could feel my arms shaking from the weight. Sweat ran down my face and my palms were damp, making my attempt to hold on even harder. My eyes shifted to the right and caught a glimpse of the glittering Las Vegas Strip far in the distance. I quickly closed my eyes, shaking my head and hoping when I opened them again I’d be in a better place.

When I finally opened my eyes, I was still more than one hundred and fifty feet up, barely hanging on to my hand- and footholds. I had a rope hooked to me, but I had no intention of testing its strength, because that meant falling, which was what I was scared of in the first place.

I had been a SEAL for four years, but I still hadn’t mastered my intense fear of heights. The rock face looked like a sheet of brown glass, with no place to get a handhold. My mind and body were in a full-on civil war. My mind screamed at me to move, but my body refused. All I could do was hold on and curse myself for losing one hundred percent of my focus.

By this early point in my career, I’d been on one training deployment to the Pacific and my platoon was training for its next rotation, which would be to Iraq, and which would be my first chance to get into combat. As we got toward the end of the training cycle, one of the last trips was to Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas. I’d gone on one other climbing trip, where I learned the basics, but on this trip we were going to learn how to lead climb and set our own protection.

I’ve never been a fan of heights, and I sure wasn’t thinking about falling or my fear of heights when I signed up for the trip. I was only thinking of downtime in Vegas and blowing off steam before heading to Iraq.

The night we arrived, we hit the Strip and enjoyed all Vegas had to offer. After a few hours of sleep—more like a quick nap—we drove out to the climbing site. We hired civilian instructors and they watched in awe as we pulled new, top-shelf gear out of our rental cars. I had the best gear that money could buy, and the command had hired the best instructors in the world, but I had none of the skills. I was definitely out of my league, especially compared to the professional instructors.

The five instructors were gathered in a group near the parking lot when we arrived. They wore ratty shorts, shirts, and sandals. Climbers are inherently poor, especially the good ones, because climbing is all they do. These guys don’t have any other hobbies. I’d seen the same thing with skydivers. All of their money went right back into buying gear and doing the sport that they loved. Our instructors came over to help
with the gear, shaking our hands and welcoming us to the canyon. Their hands were callused from hours on the rock face.

The first two days were no big deal. It was more of a refresher, with nothing too high or hard to climb. We had to make sure that everyone remembered the safety precautions and basics we had learned previously before getting into the newer, more demanding climbing the last day.

We split up into two-man teams. Each team had its own instructor. I was paired with Jeff, one of the newer SEALs in the platoon. He wasn’t a fan of heights either. There was no way I was going to show my fear, and Jeff was trying hard to hide his nerves from me as well. If your teammates ever see a weakness, you’ll never hear the end of it.

Our “billy-goat” instructor led us over to one of the climbing routes. He was short and stocky, with leathery skin and a long goatee. He had the strongest handshake I’d ever felt. A North Face beanie covered his scraggly brown hair. He was an ex-con who’d been to jail for assault. He’d beat up the guy who was banging his wife, or at least that’s what he told us during one of the breaks.

It was decided that I’d go first while Jeff would belay as I climbed. I kept up a steady soundtrack of what I was doing as I inched up the cliff face. None of my talking made sense. It was sort of gibberish, but it was comforting for me. I am sure it annoyed Jeff.

“Oh yeah, lucky cam number four,” I said, holding the cam in my open hand. “Lucky blue number four.”

Each camming device was a different color, based on the size. I set my own “pro,” or my own protection, as I climbed. That meant it was up to me to do it right, because if I fell—something I was trying not to think about at the time—the rope would be pulled taut in the camming devices. We were taught to place the cams roughly every ten feet into cracks in the rock face and ledges. If I fell with my closest cam being ten feet below me, I’d fall a total of twenty feet before the rope caught me. If I’d placed that cam wrong, I didn’t want to think about falling to the next one below that.

I decided to put them in at five-foot intervals as I climbed, in an attempt to make myself feel more comfortable.

“Yep, every five feet works great,” I said to myself as I set another cam into the rock face.

I made it up the first pitch without issue and belayed Jeff as he climbed up. Jeff led the next route, and I stayed below him to belay his climb. Once we both had several chances to practice our lead climbing techniques, the instructor took us up to a bigger wall. The shadow of the wall seemed to stretch out for miles. I tried not to look up to the top of the cliff, which blocked out the sun.

“You’re first,” the instructor said to me.

I didn’t have much to say this time. I was too nervous to talk. This rock face was much bigger and flatter than the others we had climbed. There were half the hand- and footholds available, and we would have to stay very focused on choosing a clean route up the face.

I climbed quickly at first, easily finding hand- and
footholds. As I climbed, I set pro into cracks or pockets in the rocks. I had been in such a good rhythm between climbing and setting my pro that I hadn’t noticed I was using entirely too many camming devices and was about to run out. Placing my last cam into a big crack in the rock, I was officially stuck. I couldn’t go any higher. To be honest, I didn’t want to.

For the first time since I started to climb, I took my eyes off the rock face in front of me and started to look around. I was pretty fucking high up. I could see the Las Vegas Strip and the desert stretching all the way to the horizon. I glanced down and saw Jeff, now a lot smaller. He looked like a garden gnome.

Any chance I had of keeping my fear in control was slipping away, a lot like my hold on the rock.

I wished I was anywhere else as I looked up into the crystal-clear blue sky. I was nervous and could feel myself losing focus on where my hand- and footholds should be. I lost “front sight focus.” When a SEAL shoots, we talk about focusing on the front sight of our pistol just before we pull the trigger because if it is lined up on the target and in focus, the bullet will hit. If you lose that front sight focus, you’ll miss, simple as that.

But all I could think about was the cold rock face, how high I was off the ground, and the instructor climbing up to me without a rope. I could also hear Jeff on the ground yelling up to me.

“You need me to climb up there and save you?” Jeff said in a smartass tone.

I struggled to find a new handhold, but my fingers were tired.

“I’m about to slip and fall,” I thought.

To my left, I heard something scrape against the rocks. I’d been so focused on my situation that I’d forgotten all about our instructor. I’d catch him climbing around like Spider-Man as he waited for me to set the next cam. It made me nervous watching him because he didn’t use a rope.

The guide finally scampered up to me. Dangling from a harness across his chest were about a half dozen cams. His crazy billy-goat ass had climbed down and collected up all the unneeded cams I had set below so he could pass them off to me and I could keep climbing. And he’d done it all without any rope or pro of his own, free-climbing around me without giving it a second thought. Somehow that fact wasn’t comforting.

A cigarette dangled from his lips as he hung there next to me. With one hand on the rock face, the instructor took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. It was obvious I was struggling.

“Hey, man,” he said in a lazy, raspy voice. “Just stay in your three-foot world.”

I was a couple of hundred feet up the rock face and I could barely think, let alone decipher his cryptic advice.

“What the hell are you talking about, bro?”

“Only focus on your three-foot world,” he said. “Focus on what you can affect. You keep looking around, and none of that shit can help you right now, can it?”

I shook my head no.

“You’re calculating how far you’re going to fall,” the instructor said. “You’re looking down at Jeff, but he’s not going to come up and help. You’re looking out at the Strip. What are you going to do, gamble your way to the top? Don’t look at me. I’m not going to help you either. This is up to you. You’re climbing this rock. Stay in your three-foot world.”

I’ll never forget those words: “Stay in your three-foot world.”

It was the only way I got off the rock face. Now reloaded with cams, I focused on wedging one into the nearest crevice. I slid the rope through the carabiner and started to climb again. My focus never went farther than my next hand- or foothold. All the beauty of the desert or Las Vegas sparkling in the distance was lost on me. But I could tell you every crack in the rock. I was so focused it shocked me when my hand reached over the lip of the cliff at the top of the climb.

I finished the climbing trip that week with a new perspective. Staying in my three-foot world became a mantra for me. It is liberating once you let go of the things that you can’t control. It seems to work for just about any situation. The three-foot world helped me get through everything from climbing to skydiving to night dives where the only way you can keep your bearings is to focus on the glowing compass on your wrist.

Of course, the other part of being a SEAL that makes a fear of heights a little bit of a problem is skydiving. I had been to jump school even before joining the Navy, but I was uneasy with every jump and it took years before I started to love it.

I remember one jump, just after I graduated S&T. My troop was on a military free-fall training trip in Arizona. I was “new meat,” which meant I was the new guy. I had to jump all the gear the more senior guys didn’t want to jump, like the collapsible ladder, sledgehammers, and extra ammunition.

The inside of the C-130 was lit by red lights. I couldn’t stand up straight as I shuffled onto the plane. It was hot in the cabin as we took off and climbed to twenty thousand feet above the Arizona desert. My mouth was dry and my breathing was ragged. The backpack I was jumping was new, and much bigger than the pack I usually used. It sat at my feet, full of ammunition and extra gear. The straps from the rest of my sixty pounds of gear cut into my skin.

I tried to adjust the weight of the pack, hoping to balance it better, but I didn’t have any luck. My body ached from dragging the pack, oxygen tank, and parachutes onto the plane. I rolled my neck, working out the kinks from the heavy helmet and night vision goggles strapped to my head. I just didn’t feel comfortable at all. Instead of focusing on what I had to do, I complained to myself about how much everything sucked. All I wanted to do was jump because at least I’d be closer to getting all of the gear off.

Most of the time we wear so much gear that it literally takes all the fun out of something. Jumping at a civilian drop zone wearing a small “sport parachute” can be fun. For our work jumps, I had a minimum of sixty pounds of personal combat gear strapped to me. Add another one hundred pounds from the parachute, an oxygen bottle, and a mask,
and then strap an additional sixty-pound backpack of extra “new meat” gear in front of me, and I was weighted down with well over two hundred pounds of gear, doubling my weight.

All my attention was focused on my discomfort when it should have been on the task at hand, a proper exit from the aircraft and the rest of the jump. We were conducting a night jump into an unknown drop zone, meaning we hadn’t been there before. I’d studied it on the map—an intersection of two dirt roads near the base of a mountain—but I wouldn’t get eyes on it until I was under canopy and looking through my night vision goggles. All I had to do was exit the plane; after a several-second delay, open my chute; and fall into line behind the lead jumper; and, if all went well, we would all land together. We all had the landing zone programmed into the GPS on our wrists in case we weren’t able to link up with the lead jumper, but that was usually an unused contingency plan.

It was the lead jumper’s job to guide the entire stack to the ground safely. When you are flying collapsible canopies in the middle of the night sky with more than twenty other SEALs, this is easier said than done. Since parachutes aren’t rigid like the wing of a hang glider or an airplane, if two parachutes collide with each other, the chutes collapse or wrap around each other, causing you to fall to your death.

I scanned the cabin, looking at my teammates, who were just shadows in the red glow of the lights by the ramp. Most of the guys just sat there silently, occasionally shifting the
weight on their laps. It was impossible to see faces or expressions, but no one looked like I felt, which was nervous.

I fiddled with my oxygen tank and repositioned my rifle for the third time. I was so wrapped up in my own suckfest, the whoosh of air as the ramp slowly opened startled me. The jumpmaster gave the signal for “Ramp” and then “Stand up.” My teammates, like old men under all the gear, slowly got to their feet and shuffled toward the ramp.

The wind was deafening. We huddled near the edge and waited for the green light to jump. For a second, it dawned on me that I was inside one of the movies that I’d watched growing up. It was surreal, as I looked over my brothers lined up in front of me. I’d worked my ass off to be here.

Had I really made it?

The stars bobbed up and down as the plane settled into its cruising altitude. At this altitude, the black sky was littered so densely with stars it was hard to tell them apart. Beneath us, the clouds slipped by, occasionally breaking open, revealing the black desert below. It was so dark that it was hard to tell the difference between the lights from buildings on the ground and the stars shining in the night sky. I looked at the green numbers on my altimeter.