My father, dressed in the same snowsuit and hat, slowed to a stop. He turned back and I imagine he saw a small boy with his teeth chattering behind his scarf.
“I’m freezing,” I said.
“We only have a few more traps,” my father said. “Do you think you can make it?”
I just looked at him, not wanting to answer no. I didn’t want to let him down. I stared at him hoping he’d make the choice for me.
“I can’t feel my feet,” I said.
“Get off here and start walking behind the snowmobile. Follow my tracks. I am going to keep going. I won’t be far ahead of you. Stick to the tracks and keep moving because that will keep your feet warm.”
I slid off the back of the snow machine and adjusted the .22 rifle strapped to my back.
“You got it?” my father asked.
I nodded.
He started the engine and headed toward the next trap. I started walking and my feet warmed up.
Outdoorsmen pay thousands of dollars to experience the Alaska tundra, but for most of my childhood all I had to do was walk outside my door.
My family had a sense of adventure not found in most people. When I was five years old, we moved to a small Eskimo village in the interior of Alaska. My parents were missionaries who met in college in California and found that their faith not only allowed them to spread Christianity but also appealed to their sense of adventure.
Besides his missionary work, my father worked for the state. The job required a college degree, and my father was one of the few people in the village that had one.
My mother stayed home with us. She helped with homework and kept my sisters and me on track. I was the middle child between two sisters. We were a tight family because there wasn’t a lot to do in the village. Winters were brutal, so we’d huddle around the kitchen table and play board games.
But calling it a town by normal standards would be generous. We had two stores, together no bigger than a small truck stop, a small school, and a post office. No mall. No movie theater, but you could rent movies at one of the stores. The crown jewel of my town was the runway. It was just large enough to land a 737 jet as well as some of the bigger propeller-driven cargo planes. That made our village the hub of the region. Bush planes would come in and out of town bringing hunters and outdoorsmen from Anchorage to the more remote villages spread along the river.
We lived in a two-story house one hundred yards off the river. The house had a beautiful view of picturesque Alaska. Sometimes when I was lucky, I could see a moose or a bear from my front door. If I wasn’t in school, I was out hunting or fishing. From the time I was a little kid, I was comfortable using a gun and moving in the woods, and being responsible for myself.
During BUD/S training, I excelled at land warfare. It was really no different than my hunting trips as a kid. With varying backgrounds at BUD/S, guys were stronger in different areas. I did fine in the water too, but I felt most comfortable during the weapons and land warfare training.
So, when I got to DEVGRU, I typically acted as the point man for my assault team. On this cold night in Iraq, the four-mile patrol to the target village took about an hour. It was close to three A.M. when we arrived. As we got close, I could see the lights from the Iraqi village flickering across a highway.
It was a dusty shit hole.
Light blue plastic shopping bags blew down the street. The smell of raw sewage from a ditch that ran along the road hung on the wind. I could just make out the biscuit-colored houses, which had a faint green hue under my night vision goggles. The power lines that ran along the highway into Syria sagged. Everything looked ratty and run down.
As we got to the village, the teams started to peel off to their predetermined targets. I led my team to our target building. Creeping up to the gate, I tried the handle. The heavy black iron door creaked open. Pushing it just wide enough to see in, I scanned the courtyard. It was empty.
The front door of the two-story house had a large window covered by an ornate grate. I could see inside the foyer as my teammates’ lasers searched inside from the first-floor windows.
I slowly pushed open the front door of the house. It was unlocked. I paused at the threshold, my rifle at the ready, and waited. Looking over my shoulder, one of my teammates gave me a thumbs-up. I blinked the dust out of my eyes to make sure I could see before stepping inside. I was wearing my cumbersome op gear over a winter jacket as I tried to move like a cat.
“Think quiet,” I told myself.
The foyer was cramped. A small generator sat on the floor. There was a door straight ahead of me and another door to my right. Ignoring the door to the right because it was blocked by a generator, I crept through the door in front of me.
My senses were on fire. I strained to hear any movement up ahead as I scanned the empty room. The smell of kerosene from the family’s heating stove attacked my nostrils.
Every step that I took seemed like a huge crash. We were trained to anticipate an insurgent with a suicide vest or an AK-47 behind any door, ready to attack.
Curtains covered the doorway leading back to the bedrooms. I hated the curtains because at least with a door you felt a little protected. I had no idea if someone was looking under the curtain or was just waiting for my shadow to pass in front so that he could shoot.
This was the endgame. There was no way these rooms would be empty. We had no idea if the occupants had heard us. On my previous deployment with Delta, several of their guys were killed when they entered a house and got ambushed by a fighter hiding behind a sandbag wall. It was a deadly lesson we never forgot and it was always in the back of our minds as we entered a target.
I paused for a second or two, hoping to draw out any impatient ambushers. The light was on in the room behind the curtain. Flipping my night vision goggles up, I slowly pulled the curtain aside.
A long, slender refrigerator stood at the elbow of an L-shaped hallway. I spotted a door ajar and moved to quickly cover it while my teammates flooded the hallway, clearing the other rooms. One of my teammates followed me as we pushed open the door and cleared into a bedroom. There was no talking. Everyone knew his job.
Three mattresses were on the floor and I could barely make out two eyes staring at me from the corner of the dark room. It was a young man with wispy facial hair and dark eyes. He seemed nervous and his eyes kept shifting from side to side as we moved inside.
It struck me as odd that he just sat there staring at me.
There were two women, also awake, staring at the door. I immediately started moving toward the man. I knew something wasn’t right because men usually sleep in a different room. As I passed the women, I held my hand out, waving at them to be calm. The man started to try and talk.
“SHHHH!” I whispered. I didn’t want him to alert any men who might be in another room.
His gaze never left me. I grabbed him by his right arm and yanked him up, pushing the blankets away to make sure he didn’t have a weapon. Holding him against the wall, I pulled the blankets off the women. Sleeping between the women was a small girl, no more than five or six years old. When I moved the blanket off of her, the girl’s mother grabbed her and pulled her close.
I guided the man into the center of the room and secured his hands together with flex-cuffs—plastic handcuffs—and slid a hood over his head. My teammate watched the women while I quickly searched the man’s pockets. I then pushed the man to his knees and shoved his head into the corner. He tried to talk, but I pressed his face against the wall, muffling his voice.
Our troop chief, who was running the mission, popped his head in the door.
“What do you have?” he said.
“One MAM,” I said, which is shorthand for “military-aged male.” “Still need to search the room.”
I walked to the far corner of the room, next to the mattresses, and saw the brown stock of an AK-47. Resting on a pile of small plastic bags was a green chest rack, used to carry extra magazines, and a grenade.
“Got an AK over here,” I said. “Chest rack. Grenade. FUCK!” I was pissed we hadn’t seen the weapons earlier.
My teammate who covered the women hadn’t seen them either when we came into the room.
