Service: A Navy SEAL at War (33 page)

After about five thousand dollars’ worth of international cell phone charges, I knew I had to meet her as soon as she got home. We had a date planned for Friday, three days after she got back. But I decided not to wait that long. While she was still in flight to Houston, I texted her and said, “There is no way we’re going to be in the same state together and we’re not going to meet.” We met that night at a restaurant in the Woodlands. The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the one. We sat at the bar and talked until the place closed down. Then I walked her to her car, gave her a kiss good-night, got in my truck, and sent her a text saying, “This is the last time you will ever leave without me.” And it was. The day after that, we officially started our life together.

I would have married her in a heartbeat if it weren’t for one small complication: I had to wait for Morgan’s blessing. And Morgan was in Iraq. I understood quickly that my personal life couldn’t go far before Morgan got loose of the war.

Team guys look after each other, but some need the help more than others do. Take JT, for example. He would get so quickly
smitten with one woman after another that we were constantly having to save him from himself. His next girl was always the One. He was so easily swept away that the guys in his platoon nicknamed him True Love. His heart was always out there, looking for Mrs. Right. In a case like that, it was a team guy’s duty to protect his brother, to keep him whole, healthy, and focused. If he was going to get serious, his girl had to go through us. JT knew how to love and he knew how to serve. But it was always a team effort to keep love and service in practical harmony. With JT it was a full-time job.

A few months after Mel and I started dating, we entertained a visitor who had had a profound impact on me, to say the least. The last I’d seen of Gulab was the night he was taken, terrified, off Spanky’s helicopter at Asadabad. He was debriefed by our intel guys, then returned to Sabray. The military eventually repaid his friendship by having some engineers build roads and establish an electrical infrastructure in his village. Because of the danger posed by the Taliban, Gulab and his family were moved, for their protection, to an undisclosed location. But after he saved my life, I never had the chance to thank him personally. I was able to get in touch with him through some special friends in Afghanistan, a Green Beret named Joe, and an Army civil affairs officer, Major Clint Hanna. With these capable guys working their channels, I had been hoping to get him Stateside in time for the Lone Survivor Foundation gala, but a delay in paperwork kept that from happening.

By the time his flight finally reached Houston in late September, the only agenda I had was the one that really mattered: personal
gratitude. When we met Gulab at the Houston airport, he was carrying a single backpack for luggage and was in the company of two men: an interpreter and a military friend who had greased the wheels for his visit. Gulab was exactly as I remembered him: dark, sure on his feet, with chiseled facial features that even his heavy black beard could not conceal. I felt his serenity and his courage, too—the same qualities that had enabled him to refuse that Taliban commander who demanded that Gulab allow him to take me from the village.

Being reunited with Gulab brought me a feeling of comfort and ease similar to what I had felt with Morgan, JT, Josh, and JJ and my family after coming home from Afghanistan. Gulab was my teammate, just as they were, and I drew strength from his presence. He took care of me at his home; now it was my turn to take care of him.

He stayed with us for more than two weeks. Mel and I took him to places he wouldn’t be likely to see in his part of Afghanistan. At the Museum of Natural Science, he didn’t know what to make of the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The look on his face was priceless as he asked the interpreter whether something like that could really have walked the earth.

We found an Afghan restaurant that he seemed to like. (The only American food he really enjoyed was glazed doughnuts. He also knocked down bottle after bottle of antacid tablets.) Later, Mel and I took him to dinner at the Petroleum Club of Houston. I’ll never forget Gulab standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows in the forty-third-floor dining room, gazing out at the city’s sea of lights. He couldn’t believe the freedom we enjoyed in America, where you could get into a car and drive as far as the eye could see. Such liberty was as alien to him as the T. rex.

A few months before his arrival, he and one of his cousins were driving home when they were ambushed by some militia. During the fight, Gulab was hit in the hip and his cousin was killed. Just a normal day—that’s how he described it to me. Since our time together his house has been burned down, his car blown up, and he’s been shot. After I picked him up at the airport, I asked him what he wanted to do first. He replied, “Blow up your car, burn down your house, and then shoot you in the hip.” Of course he was joking, but it really hit home just how much he had sacrificed to save my life. He is a true hero.

Throughout his stay, we sensed his anxiety over his family. He still had family living in Sabray, as far as we could learn. He remained in contact with them, and what they told him didn’t always bring him peace. There were always firefights and explosions from IED attacks in the area.

On the last day of September, Morgan returned from his deployment and we all linked up with him in Washington. Mel and I thought it was pretty hilarious to see the expression on Gulab’s face when he saw how much my brother and I resembled each other. When Gulab and he embraced, I felt a circle becoming complete.

We visited the White House, got a tour of the Pentagon, and went to Arlington National Cemetery. At the Newseum, a news museum on Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s an exhibit devoted to 9/11. It features a huge wall displaying coverage of the attacks from the front pages of newspapers around the world. Seeing it brought home the reasons that I had been started down the path that brought me crashing into Gulab’s world.

He told us that he never wanted any gratitude—no money, nothing—for simply doing something Allah wanted him to do.
He said he couldn’t believe anyone could have survived what I had gone through. If the overwhelming force of militia didn’t kill me, the terrain should have, he said. He added that when he first saw me in his village, he saw mercy in my eyes and felt called by Allah to protect me to the end.

In Washington, Melanie was finally able to spend some time with Morgan. Thus began her audition, if you will, to join the family as his sister-in-law (or outlaw, as we like to say in Texas). It didn’t go well. Maybe because he felt that our relationship had gone too far while he was out of the loop overseas, he put up the wall and didn’t let her in, remaining as cold as bare steel. Hell, he’d only been home from Iraq for a few days—his nerves were still tuned for fast-roping out of helos on midnight raids, not dealing with his brother’s new girlfriend.

It was only later, when Morgan and Mel got back to Texas, that my brother finally thawed out. They spent some time alone together and got to know each other. It went great. It was all just a formality as far as I was concerned, but with the visit complete, I could breathe deeply. I was in the clear to propose to her, and with Morgan in tow, we got it done. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember if I asked her or if Morgan did. I remember being on a knee with the ring and then it was over. Either way, mission complete.

After I posted news of Gulab’s visit on Facebook, several hundred of the folks who keep up with me there sent greeting cards to him. I was glad to see the outpouring of love and respect. When we hauled the cards home from the Lone Survivor Foundation office and showed them to Gulab, he, too, was touched.

To further break the ice, Mel picked up some Rosetta Stone language-teaching software so that she could learn Pashto. Gulab thought it was the funniest thing ever. As she played with it, trying to familiarize herself with his language, he teased us, revealing a sarcastic, even smart-ass side to his personality that I hadn’t seen before. But when Brad asked him what he and his friends could do to help him and his village, Gulab became earnest and serious. Educational and medical supplies were urgent needs, he said. We shipped a couple of boxes of bandages, wraps, and antiseptic cream, and put word out on Facebook, where people responded generously, as they always do.

As Gulab’s visit ended, Mel and I began preparing for our wedding, and Morgan returned to Virginia. He was in a place similar to where I was when I returned from Iraq in 2006. After eight deployments and a training accident that he was lucky to survive, he’d put a whole lot of mileage on his chassis. Having earned the rank of lieutenant, junior grade, he decided it was time to hang up his fins. He accepted a transfer from his team to a headquarters at “the Creek” in Virginia Beach. His plan to was endure a year of riding a desk, then make the transition out of the Navy.

We all had our transitions to make. The last week of November, Mel and I tied the knot at her dad’s ranch, where our late-night talks had begun. In front of three hundred friends and family seated on the long slope behind the main house, we said our vows as the sun set behind the lake. It was a perfect night, pure magic. I couldn’t be more proud to call her my wife. Though the late autumn air was damn cold, my heart was warm and full. Marrying Melanie was the greatest accomplishment of my life. It took me a long time to find her, and I wasn’t going to waste another second more without her as my wife.

U
nless Morgan is overseas, I almost always keep my cell phone turned off after ten o’clock. For some reason that night in Washington, D.C., in the first week of August 2011, I left it on. After midnight, it began ringing on my hotel room desk, vibrating on a room-service menu. I didn’t answer. A few seconds later, it started a second time. I left it alone. When the phone rang again, I walked over to it and saw that the name on the display belonged to Boe, a former teammate of ours. Given the hour, I knew this was no social call.

I grabbed the phone, swiped my finger across the glass, and said, “Who did we lose?”

When he told me he didn’t know, but that things didn’t look good for some buddies of ours who had been in a helicopter that went down, my inability to sleep suddenly became convenient. I was going to be up for a while.

When I checked in with Boss, who was home in Virginia Beach, it turned out that he had sensed something had happened even before I gave him the news. Early every evening, when it was oh-dark-hundred in the Middle East, Boss thought of his teammates downrange, doing their thing. Knowing their work
made the world a slightly safer place each night, he always swelled with quiet pride. All of us do this. We try to keep up with who’s home and who’s overseas, who they’re with and what they might be doing. But that Friday night, Boss was sitting on the couch, chilling with his wife, Amy, and their curly-dark-haired baby daughter, Lulu, when something unusual happened. Suddenly he felt ill, a sickening, dehydrated sensation. He went upstairs to lie down for a while, stopping in the bathroom along the way. His urine was clear—this told him that, physically, he should have been good to go. He drank a glass of water and tried to rest, but couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling. He said to Amy, “I think JT might be involved in something. Something’s happened.” He tooled around the house a little, still never feeling quite right, then turned in around eleven thirty. About an hour later I buzzed him from D.C.

When Boss picked up the phone, I figured he had already gotten the news, so I said, “Hey bro, you got any updates?”

“Updates? On what?”

“On JT.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. JT and Morgan were his best friends in the world.

“His bird went down. We’re waiting for more news.”

Details were hard to confirm, but with each call, the magnitude of the loss was revealed in grim increments.

At first, the death toll was put at five. Though it was known that a troop from JT’s squadron was involved, no one knew anything more. A subsequent call raised the number of dead to eleven. Then seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-seven, and then the final tally: thirty-eight souls. Everyone on board that bird was gone: thirty Americans, eight Afghans, and a dog.

Twenty-two of the U.S. KIA were SEALs. There was a pair of Air Force PJs and a combat controller, five soldiers from the Chinook’s aircrew, and a brilliant Belgian Malinois attached to the unit as a military working dog.

When someone texted Boss the list of fatalities, he said out loud to no one, “This can’t be true.” He knew every one of those guys. They were some of the finest talent in the SEAL community and, more than that, friends: Aaron “Trey” Vaughn, Matt Mills, JT…. “There’s no way we’ve lost every single man,” he said.

But it was no mistake. As the phone lines continued to burn, we eventually confirmed the death toll. Proportionally speaking, the losses on that helo were to that team what losing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier would be to the Navy at large—almost 10 percent of its fighting strength. And Boss, for one, felt it happen from seven thousand miles away. The loss of those three men hit our circle hard. Morgan and Trey Vaughn were very close. They had shared space at our house in Virginia Beach. Matt was a great guy, a Texas boy from Dallas who I’d known my whole career. Our community is so small that any death will always make you feel the ripple. But JT’s loss stabbed us deepest of all.

After a sleepless night in my Washington hotel, I had little spirit left for the speech I was supposed to give later that day. It was a big event and I had to show. Before I went on stage, my hosts played a short video recounting Operation Redwing. It said that the losses we took—nineteen men—were the worst ever in the history of the SEALs. When I went on stage, the first thing I had to do was update the record.

“It’s been a crappy day,” I said. “And I’m sorry to say that video is now incorrect. The teams have had a mass casualty. We’ve lost
a lot of our teammates. Twenty-two SEALs died in Afghanistan last night.”