Service: A Navy SEAL at War

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I dedicate this book to my brother, for walking through
hell with me, and to my wife, for pulling me out
of the shadows.

FTWTTT.

Pseudonyms have been used for special operations personnel who are still active. Retired operators are referred to by their real names if they have given their consent.

I
’ve written this book to honor the skill, courage, and sacrifice of the exceptional people I know who serve not only in the SEAL teams but in all the other service branches who I’ve served with along the way. Really this is a book for all who serve. It’s for anyone who wears the uniform; who, when the shooting starts, move toward the gunfire instead of away from it. It’s for a brave breed of individuals, the warfighters, who put everything on the line because it is expected of them, because they stand up for the United States and sometimes die for the privilege.

There are a lot of things in life that matter. But nothing matters as much as who or what you decide to serve.

The people I write about in this book devoted themselves to something larger than themselves. Driven by a fire that burns within them to defend their brothers, their sisters, their neighbors, and their nation, they volunteered to stand in a dangerous place in the world and offer themselves as expendable.

In my years in uniform, I was one of the lucky ones. My pride in serving in the SEAL teams has enabled me to look at myself in the mirror every morning, after everything that’s happened.

I decided to write
Service
when I thought about all the selfless, brave souls I knew whose work “downrange” crossed paths with mine. In these pages, you’ll get a glimpse of our elite special operations warriors who occasionally make headlines but strongly
prefer to remain anonymous, quiet professionals. And you’ll hear about warriors from other branches of the military whose service means something to me. By the end of the book, you’ll see that we all share at least one trait in common: an ability to get back up and keep pushing forward, through war, through pain, and back into civilian life, where our service to our families and our communities is just as important as anything we did in uniform.

I was one of those quiet professionals. It was my fate to come out of the shadows. I wrote
Lone Survivor
to honor three of my brothers who went into battle with me one afternoon in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, and didn’t come home, and sixteen of America’s best who died on a helicopter, flying into hell to save us. Since then, sadly, that mission can no longer lay claim to being the darkest day in the history of the special operations world. The bad days keep coming. On August 6, 2011, we lost thirty of our most elite. None of us will ever forget our losses.

On the afternoon on June 28, 2005, I awoke to find myself alone, hidden in a crevice near the peak of the mountain known as Sawtalo Sar, after three of my teammates had been killed in action and the helicopter carrying the rescue team, unbeknownst to me, had been lost in action as well. I lost a little bit of myself out there. In failing in a task, in meeting a serious setback or a defeat on a mission or in our careers, we come out the other side changed. If we don’t, we’ve failed again. But long before that doomed operation, I had learned that part of my strength came from never letting a single experience in my life define me. I believe that there is a reason for everything. The situations I’ve found myself in are stepping-stones on a path to a larger and unknowable destination. I now have a wife and a son, so many glorious blessings. But this remains the same: after every step,
even the missed ones, I’ll pack up, push through, and soldier on. I can only hope to do this because I have a family who loves me. Some are family by blood. Others are family
in
blood, men who won the honor of wearing the Trident, and who as teammates proved the truth of the saying, “The only easy day was yesterday.” Many members of my family live, breathe, and work in dangerous, undisclosed locations all around the world. Some of them are no longer with us, having paid the ultimate price while doing their work, and in death still stand watch over us. They pledged themselves to that job and gave their last full measure to fulfill the pledge. Our family stays together not by training, courage, or skill but by the forces that bind us: love, honor, commitment, and loyalty.

This book is a salute to everyone who’s worn Old Glory on his shoulder, carried a rifle for this nation, and guarded the front line or been deployed behind it, into the enemy’s backyard—whether in today’s wars or in others. Too many heroes never get the recognition they deserve from the public. I am proud to be able to share a few of their stories from my own perspective. Since I wrote
Lone Survivor,
my personal story has become very public and I have felt strongly ever since that many others out there deserve to have their own service recognized. Service in wartime pushed them to the limit. They gave their all—and got something back that no one else can claim: collectively, they form a single thread woven into the fabric of this country’s history, part of something larger than themselves. There are other things in life that matter. But to me, nothing matters as much.

—February 2012

October 2009

Pensacola, Florida

I
t was about four in the morning when my cell phone started buzzing. I sat up, grabbed it off the nightstand, and looked at the display. The caller was one of my closest teammates, JT.

At that hour, I knew what the score was. Sliding my finger over the glass to answer the ring, I asked him, “What’s wrong with my brother?”

It had to be about Morgan, and it was.

“He’s stable, bro, but he’s really jacked up.”

My body went weak as I replied, “I’m on my way.” As I hung up, my stomach lurched. I ran to the bathroom and started throwing up.

JT was calling from the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia. That night, twenty-three miles off Virginia Beach, my brother and his platoon were on a training op. The skies were clear and the seas were rolling easily when their Black Hawk helicopter approached a U.S. ship. The helo descended from her port side and entered a hover over the upper superstructure. As the pilot eased closer to the ship, USNS
Arctic,
the crew let out
the ropes. As they dropped to the deck—basically a limp fireman’s pole running from the bird to the deck—Morgan and his squad sat at the ready, legs dangling down from the open right-side door.

With America’s effort to stop international piracy ramping up, search-and-seizure exercises like this one were a regular part of the training schedule. Six months earlier, after pirates took over the containership
Maersk Alabama,
one of our sniper teams set up on the fantail of a U.S. warship and killed the trio of criminals who were holding the American captain hostage.

But as my brother and his teammates were preparing to fast-rope down to the
Arctic,
their aircraft’s main rotor clipped a heavy guyline supporting one of the ship’s huge exhaust stacks. The blades gathered in the thick cable, reeling it in around the shaft. As the Black Hawk jerked downward, the guys perched in the door were thrown back into the crew compartment. They tumbled across the deck of the helo and piled into the left side of the fuselage. Then the helicopter crashed into the ship, steel on heavier steel, and rocked over onto its side.

Morgan was knocked dizzy by the impact, but cleared his head in time to see flames rushing at him as if they were shot from a giant flamethrower. Blinded by the smoke and with a fractured back, he struggled away from the inferno. Crawling out of the wreckage, he fell about fifteen feet down to the next deck of the ship. The impact was shattering, and it knocked him out cold.

As shipboard firefighters went to work, a hazmat crew was called out and all hands took care of the wounded. When they finished triage, they found that one man, the Black Hawk’s crew chief, had been killed, and eight more, including Morgan, badly
injured. Quickly, another helo landed on the ship, took the casualties aboard, and flew them to the hospital in Portsmouth. From there, the news traveled fast.

When JT called me, I was in Florida doing physical rehabilitation following back surgery. After my last two combat deployments, my spine was a constant project for the docs, but nothing was going to keep me from flying to Portsmouth to see my brother. Morgan and I always drop whatever we’re doing to cover each other’s backs—and “always” means
always.
I called a generous friend who had a private plane and prevailed upon him to help me. As he routed the plane to the Pensacola airport to pick me up, I packed a three-day bag, jumped into my rental car, and sped to the general aviation hangar. Within a few short hours the Gulf of Mexico was disappearing behind us.

The flight north seemed to take forever, and the nearer we got to the Norfolk airport, near Portsmouth, the slower time seemed to move. I reached the hospital to learn that Morgan was in the MRI lab waiting on a scan. When the elevator doors opened, he lifted his head and cut his eyes in my direction, and I sprinted as fast as I could to him. He was strapped down to a gurney, suffering from a bad case of the hiccups. Each one of those little spasms in his diaphragm whipped through his busted-up core and racked him with pain. Our eyes locked, and the sight of him lying there injured brought a wash of acid into my throat. My stomach flipped again, but there was nothing down there left to throw up.