Service: A Navy SEAL at War (39 page)

Three times during those brutal months, K Company took casualties bad enough to knock it off the line. Each time, it came back from combat-ineffective status. In Operation Adair, a five-day operation fought in June, it suffered nine KIA from just two
platoons, which have about forty men apiece. The officer who replaced Lieutenant Tilley, Captain Joseph Tenney, was hit in back of the head and evacuated. Declared combat-ineffective once again, the K/3/5 returned in September to take part in another major operation. Back in command, Captain Tenney earned a Silver Star.

By the end of those six months, the Marines in the valley, though outnumbered in every fight, had destroyed most of the NVA division facing them. Six members of the K/3/5 received Silver Stars. But the triumph came at a high price: from April to December of 1967, the North Vietnamese boasted of killing more Americans in the Que Son Valley than anywhere else. The Marines soon began calling Road 534 the Road of Ten Thousand Pains, a phrase taken from Homer’s
Iliad
.

At the Rio Rio Cantina in San Antonio the night I met up with him and his unit, R. V. Burgin, the anchor of the Old Breed, held court and served as emcee. He had been the group’s treasurer for twenty-one years, taking care of the funds that paid for Marine Corps monuments that stand today on Peleliu and Okinawa. Just as Mr. Burgin looked up to his senior enlisted leadership—hard veterans of Guadalcanal, such as his first sergeant, Mo Darsey, or his sergeant, Johnny Marmet—the Vietnam generation looked up to him. The Marines who enlisted to fight in Vietnam didn’t need a history book to tell them what they’re all about. They had the World War II generation to look back to—and they did. “We never qualified to carry these guys’ mess gear,” said Harvey Newton, who served in the K/3/5 as a nineteen-year-old lance corporal in Vietnam.

I don’t endorse Mr. Newton’s modesty, because the legacy of K Company’s valor got a new chapter in Vietnam, and it’s gotten
one in our time as well. A Marine of my generation who served with the K/3/5, my friend Jeremiah Workman—a mortarman just like Mr. Burgin—received a Navy Cross for his actions during the Battle of Fallujah in December 2004. In April 2011, when Third Battalion returned from Helmand Province, Afghanistan, Jeremiah’s company had taken record casualties for a Marine Corps unit its size on a single deployment in the modern era: twenty-five KIA and another 140 wounded, including more than a dozen amputees. In spite of that bloody record, its instances of post-traumatic stress have been almost nil, largely thanks to the way the families of the veterans have circled up and looked after each other back at Camp Pendleton.

It takes that kind of close brotherhood to get by. I’ll never forget how the brotherhood circled around the Tumilson family in Rockford, Iowa. The SEAL family held close to them, ensuring JT isn’t forgotten. At the funeral, the presiding pastor recited from Psalm 18:

This might be the Bible’s most powerful call to military service. Those of us who are forged in that vision can relate to the
way R. V. Burgin sums up his service: “What sticks with me now is not so much the pain and terror and sorrow of the war, though I remember that well enough. What really sticks with me is the honor I had of defending my country, and of serving in the company of these men.”

I see it all as a single piece of fabric. Americans should never forget that the founders of this country, like all who have served her in uniform, were willing to die defending everything its flag represents. It’s so easy to get lost in the controversies that divide us. But I believe, no matter what our race, religion, or beliefs may be, that Americans should be able to come together to keep our country rooted in what made it great: a land of opportunity, a place where people can make something of themselves, limited only by their imaginations and willingness to work hard; a country where we all can come together, whatever our differences, for the greater good; a country of hands up, not handouts, where we try to live by the meaning of the words “Love thy neighbor,” and put as much effort into helping others as we do helping ourselves. By doing those things, we can continue to live up to the idea of
One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

T
oday, Boss is still working in a classified capacity on a team that will be bringing hell to terrorists worldwide. He recently got hold of the original drawings that JT had used as a model for the elaborate Oriental carp design he had on his right arm. As I write this, Boss is finishing the last installment of the painful, eighteen-hour process to inscribe this work of everlasting art into his left arm. “Art, life, and remembrance of living through pain and loss,” Boss calls it. The ultimate tribute to a brother, fallen but not forgotten.

Prior to August 6, 2011, I was looking forward to nothing more than seeing Morgan return to Texas. His bags were just about packed in Virginia Beach as he finished his med boards. He was playing out time, waiting for his exit letter from the Navy. He was planning to shift gears, maybe go to graduate school, or even run for political office. He was also going to get busy working with me on the Lone Survivor Foundation.

But when JT, Matt Mills, Trey Vaughn and all the others went down, Morgan had a change of heart. It was an immediate decision on his part, though he didn’t tell me about it for a few weeks. He didn’t want to give me any distractions as we prepared to celebrate JT’s life in Iowa. Morgan knew right away what he
needed to do: he was staying in the teams and going back for another deployment, in honor of his fallen brothers.

Morgan went to his command, pulled his retirement papers, and told them he wanted to become operational again. He’s in the training cycle now and will be serving back in the Sandbox by the time this book is published. It will be his tenth combat tour. And he wasn’t the only frog to walk that path after this latest tragedy hit our community.

The war in Afghanistan may end someday, as the war in Iraq officially has. We’ll see headlines about the drawdown of conventional forces, leaving all the problems to the locals to deal with. For our special operations forces, however, employment opportunities downrange will continue to be plentiful—and more dangerous, after the Army and Marine Corps aren’t around to secure the areas we operate in.

It’s hard for me to express what all this means to me. Maybe words just can’t say the things that come so deeply from the heart. It’s a feeling that comes from experience, from blood, sweat, and mourning. There are many reasons why my military service has meant so much to me—and to those who have come before me and those who are yet to deploy. It isn’t the danger by itself. It’s the brotherhood, the bonds you form with people who, like you, are willing to give everything away for a greater good. The brotherhood carries on, and in this way, and in ways you’ll never read about, the flaming Ferris wheel really does continue to spin.

The urge to serve something larger than myself drew me into the military, and serving for nine years has taught me a few things. But service in the military isn’t the only way to go. Now that I’m out of uniform, I see that my deployments were only the beginning, a workup for whatever the rest of my years call me to do.
You can serve your family, and put their needs in front of yours. You can do the same thing in your community, your town, and your city. I think all of us who serve—in any type of uniform—can arrive at this broader view of service faster than most other people, because of what we go through.

Service is selflessness—the opposite of the lifestyle that we see so much of in America today. The things that entertain us don’t often lift us up, or show us as the people we can rise up to become. The people who appear in this book—and others who did things I can’t talk about—are my role models. They quietly live out the idea expressed in the Bible (John 15:13): “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

But you don’t have to be a Christian, or even particularly religious, to serve. You just have to be willing to understand your place and put yourself at the end of the line. Still, my faith has helped me toward a deeper understanding of what service really means. You do what’s expected of you, and more. You look after others, and put their welfare ahead of your own. You don’t worry about the big purpose of it all—it’s beyond your pay grade. But if you do the small things right long enough, you might find yourself coming out the other side having done something important.

It’s an evolution you follow, a tour on the great Ferris wheel, which doesn’t have to burn. It never stops turning until the day you take your last breath. And you hope that by the time you leave this earth, it will be a better place than it was when you got here. The causes you’ve served in your life will have meant something. Someone will have picked up on your work, run with a legacy you left behind, and used it to put his or her own stamp on the world.

All I can really tell you after walking this particular path is that I’m proud to have served my country. I know that part of me will always bleed with the teams, and that my time in uniform, which at the moment seems so long, has been just a short chapter in a far longer book, and brief preparation for what the future holds.

Thank you, God, for all these days.