Service: A Navy SEAL at War (38 page)

Our officer candidates today face the challenge of preparing themselves to lead men like Jordan and Jonathan. Fortunately, they’re beginning their careers better prepared than ever before, in part because we’ve been at war for ten years now. At West Point, the Army is doing it right.

You can’t go far, in that beautiful stretch of forest overlooking the Hudson River, without hearing about morals and ethics as they apply to leadership. Both a strong body and a right mind are needed to ensure that we have the kind of commanders who make the right decisions where things really matter: down at the platoon level.

The influence of ten years of war on West Point’s pipeline is nowhere more evident than in the summer field-training program that seniors (or “firsties,” as they’re known) have to complete
before they take a second lieutenant’s commission. West Point began shaking it up in 2007 to make it fit the realities the cadets will run into downrange. “We found that the product we were creating was not what battalion commanders were looking for,” an instructor told me. “They weren’t adaptive.” So West Point brought in the leadership from Fort Benning to take a look at the curriculum.

Now upperclassmen have to go through Cadet Leadership Development Training, a nineteen-day role-playing scenario designed to put them through their paces prior to deployment, much as our special operations selection courses do. In the woods of the Hudson River Valley, they run air-assault operations, simulate cordon and search missions, and deal with Arabic-speaking sheikhs, imams, and other tribal leaders. The program is constantly changing to stay current with what’s happening on the battlefield. In the old days, during the seventies and eighties, cadets ran through highly structured “approved-solution” scenarios. Now their decisions mean something, just as they will downrange. It’s hard to find an instructor in the Department of Military Instruction who doesn’t have several combat tours under his belt.

There’s also a new department at West Point, the Center for the Advancement of Leader Development and Organizational Learning, which uses the Internet to connect company-level officers (captains and below) with each other and with cadets, bringing the lessons of the battlefield into the classroom. Like so many ideas whose time has come, the peer-to-peer approach to learning has caught on. The
Harvard Business Review
chose it as one of its top twenty business ideas of 2006.

Cadets are prepared physically, both outdoors and in the
six-floor, 455,000-square-foot shrine to physical fitness on the post, the Arvin Cadet Physical Development Center. The man who was in charge of that facility when I toured it in 2010, Colonel Greg Daniels, holds the title Master of the Sword (the title is a legacy of the 1800s, when swordsmanship was still part of the curriculum). Responsible for the physical fitness and development of the entire cadet population, he presides over a program that includes rooms for boxing, judo, fencing, and so on, as well as the modern Combat Water Survival Swim Lab, fitted with smoke generators, wave machines, and other equipment that produces effects the cadets will likely encounter in the field. The old-school indoor obstacle course test (the infamous IOCT, an acronym that all cadets learn to dread) has eleven stations that test balance, coordination, agility, power, and strength—including rope climbs, medicine balls, and an eight-foot-high shelf, onto which cadets have to hurdle themselves from a standing position. That crushing physical gauntlet has to be passed through twice a year by every cadet, and it hasn’t changed much since it was established in 1944.

As a result of all of this forward thinking, new Army second lieutenants are much more likely to be effective when they take over their first platoons. (The really smart ones will still listen closely to what their sergeants have to say.) When your business is war, you don’t miss the distraction of having to break in new draftees all the time. When you volunteer today, you’ll serve with other volunteers, which means everyone has a certain level of motivation.

Of course, a Navy guy like me doesn’t need to tell you how special Annapolis is. Some of my best friends in the teams went to the United States Naval Academy. The Navy’s never-quit motto,
“Don’t give up the ship,” hangs proudly in Bancroft Hall, and the USNA has a long tradition of sending naval and Marine Corps leaders to the battlefield. But West Point’s mandatory field-training program is something that any frogman has to respect. I don’t know what West Point was like in 1998, when I was entering the Navy, but if I had to do it over again, it would be tempting to heed its call. I had always thought of West Point as a cold, sterile place, a gray-walled castle on a hill. But it’s more modern, dynamic, and gritty than that, and its emphasis on preparing young warriors for ground combat will warm any special operator’s heart.

No matter what route you follow into service, whether it’s the Naval Service Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois (my route), or another boot camp, from San Diego’s Marine Corps Recruit Depot to Cape May, New Jersey, where Coast Guardsmen are made, a military career will test you like nothing ever has. Then, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a long career and come out of the experience stronger, deeper, and wiser.

Morgan, who served on several deployments after I left the service, eventually had his own brush with death and faced a crossroads. I took a licking, too, and came out with a broader view than I’d had before. Chris Kyle confronted his mortality at Sadr City, and again back home at the service station, filling his truck.

At some point, you find that you recognize a certain look in a combat veteran’s eyes, the reflection of experiences he or she will never forget. You also may start feeling the mileage you’ve put on your body, and you’re left to face the rest of your days. Eventually you slow down, your thinking sharpens, your view broadens, and you find yourself becoming an old man.

May everyone be as blessed as I’ve been, to have a close family and loved ones who help ease the transition out of the fight.

At a reunion of Marines in South Carolina recently, R. V. Burgin gave the main address at the memorial service. He used the occasion to tell a story of the old days. The year was 1775, when the Marine Corps was founded. The call to form the new service’s first two battalions was given by the Continental Congress at a pub in Philadelphia. The first man to come forward did so on the spot. He was given a mug of beer and told to sit down at a table at the back of the room. The second man to volunteer was given two mugs of beer and directed to join the same table. Sizing up the newcomer, the first guy asked, “What gives? They only gave me one mug of beer.” The second guy shrugged and said, “I’m just following instructions. They gave me these two mugs of beer and told me to come over here and sit down with you.” The first guy considered this for a few seconds, then said, “Well, that’s fine, but I’ll tell you one damn thing: things weren’t that way in the
old
Corps.”

I give the same kind of grief to my brother, because he became a SEAL just fifteen months after me. In truth, because my sins preceded him there, he had a harder time at Coronado than I did. When he showed up to begin BUD/S, he was standing on the sidewalk when a black Chevy Suburban screeched to a halt next to him. A bunch of instructors piled out, and one of them asked, “Are you the other Luttrell?” His affirmative reply brought dark promises of misery and hellfire ahead, and they pretty much made good on them during his twenty-one weeks on the Strand.

No matter how good a SEAL might become, there’s always someone with more seniority, experience, or skill nearby to bring
him back to earth. At the SEAL reunions I go to, the World War II UDT swimmers will tell the Korean War veterans, “Hey, new guy, go get me a beer.” The Korean War guys say the same to the Vietnam guys, all the way down the line. Once I was pushing through a crowded hospitality room when I bumped into a frog who was a lot shorter than me—because he was seated in a wheelchair. The first two syllables of an apology weren’t out of my mouth before he was laying into me with
You mother
this and
I’ll whip your sorry
that. I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt printed with the words BUD/S C
LASS
1. This man was nobody’s pushover. He was having a load of fun with me. Everyone around him was howling in appreciation. In the teams, you’re always a new guy to somebody. That’s how we keep each other honest. And if you stick around the teams long enough, well, you’re asking for a lesson in humility, because at some point, in some school, or a new command you’re going to be nobody all over again.

On Flag Day of 2011, I visited Mr. Burgin at his house in Lancaster, south of Dallas. The town’s tree-shaded streets were lined with red, white, and blue. He greeted me at the door of the home he’s occupied since 1965. On the wall of his living room, he showed me a photo of his brother, J. D., killed by German artillery fire in Alsace-Lorraine in 1944, when he was eighteen. There was that photo from Peleliu, too, showing eighty-five weathered veterans of that battle, including Mr. Burgin, shirtless and forty pounds lighter than when he arrived. He shook his last bout of malaria in 1947, after he came home, and was happy never to talk about it again. The media in his day had little interest in Peleliu. Everyone expected it to be a sideshow, so it took a while for history to give it its due. That suited Mr. Burgin. He
was strong and silent about it, kind of like his hero, John Wayne, who has a photographic shrine of his own farther down the hallway.

Mr. Burgin didn’t talk about his service until 1980, when his First Marine Division buddies found him and made sure he went to Indianapolis that year. Twenty men from the K/3/5 were there. He knew them all, and had done foxhole duty with a few of them. “Hey, Burgin, do you remember…” they would ask. At first, he usually didn’t. “Well, hell, you ought to. You were
there,
” they would say. And gradually, and then faster, the memories returned. Soon he was talking freely, and reconnecting with everything he went through in the Pacific.

In 1991, at a reunion in Minneapolis, he decided to take part in a documentary project on the battle for Peleliu. The experience convinced him that the story should be remembered more widely. He feels to this day that history isn’t taught anymore; how else to explain why a fight that took eighteen hundred American lives remains so obscure?

Mr. Burgin’s effort to reverse that state of affairs led to his involvement in the HBO miniseries
The Pacific,
in which his story is told over the course of several episodes. The filmmakers changed some of the characters (and some history), but he says they got the big things right. The only mistake that bothers him is seeing the actor playing him wearing the wrong rank insignia on his shoulder. He’s shown as a private first class. There’s only one man in the world, of course, who can appreciate what he had to go through to get his corporal’s second stripe.

He went through it the night he killed his first enemy soldier. On Cape Gloucester, he faced a banzai charge without a rifle. Since he was a mortarman, his main job was hauling around a
heavy baseplate for the mortar. As a Japanese soldier rushed him, he pulled his .45 and caught him in the chest from ten strides away. Only one or two of the enemy escaped. “That attack broke me in right away,” he said.

He went through it on another night, on Peleliu, when he heard scuffling a short distance away, a few men down the line. An enemy soldier had jumped on top of one of his teammates while he was sleeping. There was grunting, and then a drawn-out scream. The awakened Marine had reached up, gouged the eyes of the Japanese soldier, and as that soldier fell back, the Marine rose, grabbed him by the neck and seat of the pants, and flung him off a cliff. “I heard that Jap screaming all the way down, from the second his eyes were gouged till he hit bottom,” Mr. Burgin said. “I’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling sound in my life,” he said.

He went through it again a few days later, while assaulting a cluster of craggy hillocks known as the Five Sisters. Mr. Burgin was sickened to find the bodies of a four-man Marine recon team wedged in among some rocks.

These were the things—among many—that pushed him up the ranks. And these were the things that closed up the years between us. When he told the Five Sisters story, I couldn’t help but think of my teammates from Operation Redwing. He and I share much in common, including the experience of fighting in confined spaces and harsh terrain. Later on, the death of his skipper, Captain Andrew A. “Ack-Ack” Haldane, and his platoon leader, a popular, soft-spoken mustang first lieutenant named Edward A. “Hillbilly” Jones, hit home with me as well. In life-or-death situations, Mr. Burgin faced moments of moral compromise that I could relate to. Things you can’t imagine
happen to you under fire in the dark. I read about a few of them in his book,
Islands of the Damned,
and I didn’t need him to explain the details. His war ran on amphibious tractors and DUKWs; mine ran on Black Hawks and Humvees. But the sensations, the shocks to the system, and the screams don’t change. The big things never do. “It’s impossible to imagine the look and smell of a battlefield if you’ve never been on one, and impossible to forget if you have,” he said. Any soldier of any war knows this.

In San Antonio, in 2010, I joined R. V. Burgin in the proud company of his unit. I saw the continuous thread of gallantry that runs from his day to the present. The Fifth Marines have a glittering battle history, and K Company’s contribution to it was significant. In 1967, the K/3/5 was deployed to the Que Son Valley in Vietnam, thirty miles south of Da Nang. From April through September, they and other outfits from the Fifth Marines took on North Vietnamese Army forces holding fortified positions along a highway known as Route 534. In May, during the first Operation Union, they assaulted a well-defended hill and became pinned down by heavy fire. The gunnery sergeant was killed, and K Company’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Robert O. Tilley, was badly wounded. A lance corporal attached as a forward air controller, Christopher K. Mosher, ran toward the front and put himself in an exposed position for five hours, directing air strikes. Finally wounded in the back by mortar shrapnel, he was evacuated, never to walk again. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his valor.