The man I found in the room was definitely a fighter and a smart one too. He hid his gun, chest rack, and hand grenades just out of reach and well enough for us not to see them on our initial entry into the room.
Everything inside me wanted to shoot this guy right there on the spot. He knew the rules we had to follow and he was using them against us. We couldn’t shoot him unless he posed a threat. If he had any balls, he would have lit us up coming through the door. He knew we were in the house. The man must have heard us come in and thought he could hide with the women.
With the house secure, I led the man to another room to question him. The room’s floor was covered in rugs, and sleeping mats were piled in a heap in the center of the room. A TV on the floor was on, but the screen was just static. Our interpreter stood next to the man as I pulled the hood off. His face was sweaty and his eyes were big as he tried to adjust to the light.
“Ask him why he had grenades and a chest rack,” I told the interpreter.
“I’m a guest here,” the man said.
“Why were you sleeping with the women and children? Guests don’t sleep next to the women.”
“One of them is my wife,” he said.
“But I thought you were a guest here,” I said.
The questioning went on like that for about a half hour. He never got his story straight and the next morning we turned him over to the Marines.
It was frustrating because missions were like this day after day. It was a catch and release system. We’d roll them up and in a few weeks the fighters would be back on the street. I was confident the fighter we found in the bedroom would be released soon. The only way to permanently take them off the street was if they were dead.
We found out later from some of the village elders that the men, including the fighter I encountered in the women’s bedroom, were part of an insurgent cell that rotated between the houses of the village. The guy we captured had gone home that night to stay with his family. Three other guys in his cell were killed that same night after a short firefight with my teammates. My teammates got lucky and got the jump on them before the insurgents reacted. Our troop uncovered guns, mines, and explosives for roadside bombs in the house.
After clearing our initial targets, our troop searched the majority of the houses in the village. In one of the bedrooms, I found a pile of bras in one of the drawers. I fished out a nice white one with lace and a bow at the center. Balling it up, I stuffed it into the cargo pocket in my pants for later.
Outside, the BOP, BOP, BOP of the Marines’ massive CH-53 helicopters echoed over the village. The sun was coming up as we held security positions in a nearby house. It was freezing. Mornings always seemed to be the coldest part of the day.
I looked up in time to see what looked like two big gray school buses fly over me, make a ninety-degree turn, and settle into the open desert just north of the power lines. The ramps in the back dropped down and out came the Marines just like you’ve seen in their commercials.
My troop chief walked past me to coordinate with the Marines so we could turn over the village and go home.
“You see their HQ?” he said.
“I think they are down the road,” I said, pointing toward a cluster of men and radio antennas.
As he passed by, I fished out the bra from earlier that night and discreetly draped it on a radio antenna attached to his back. When it was cold and miserable it is the little things that warm you up. As he passed some of the Marines, I saw them stare at him and laugh.
“Hey, where is your HQ?” the troop chief asked a nearby Marine.
He pointed down the road.
“Hey, sir, you’ve got a bra hanging off your back,” the Marine said.
“Yeah, I am sure there is,” the troop chief said without hesitation, glancing back in our direction. “Happens all the time.”
On the patrol back to the landing zone in the desert, I noticed something in my periphery vision blowing in the wind. Reaching back, I pulled on a bra strap.
Someone had hung a bra on the bolt cutters I had strapped to my back.
Pranks on the team were a way of life.
The pranking was so frequent that the squadron eventually built a wire diagram connecting all the suspected culprits. We used this same wire diagram to track terrorists. We had the names of all the guys in a pyramid with the worst prankster on top: Phil, my team leader at the time.
Phil had been in the Navy forever. He graduated Green Team the year I graduated BUD/S, left DEVGRU for a break, and joined the Leap Frogs, the Navy’s parachute demonstration team. He also served as a military free-fall instructor before returning to the command.
I met Phil during my first days at the squadron and instantly liked him. He did several tours as an assaulter, then headed up the squadron’s combat assault dog program before becoming my team leader.
Phil was a great prankster, maybe the best. At least once, I came back to my cage and found the shoelaces on all of my boots for my right foot cut. I couldn’t prove Phil did it. I knew he had large magnets, which he’d wave over your wallet to demagnetize the strip on your credit card. He was famous for bombing all of your gear with glitter. I don’t know how many pouches and uniforms I had to replace because purple glitter was caked on the Velcro or trapped in the folds of the fabric.
When things got slow, he’d create a feud.
“All right, who pranked me?” he would yell, walking into the team room.
But we all knew he pranked himself. He was trying to stir up a war because he was bored.
Sometimes, the guys did get him back. One Friday night after work, we all walked to the parking lot to find Phil’s car high in the air. One of his victims, and it was never clear who, picked up his car with a forklift and left it there.
One of the longest running pranks in the squadron started with Phil. When we weren’t deployed, we trained all over the United States. On this night, we were in Miami doing some urban training. It was just getting dark, and we were scheduled to practice CQB in an old abandoned hotel.
Before we started training, Phil and the local police, who kept onlookers away, went in to make sure it was empty. We didn’t want to start training and run up on some homeless squatter. At the time, Phil was still working as a dog handler.
As they walked the halls, Phil glanced into a room and saw something sticking out of the drywall. It was a giant twelve-inch black dildo. Sliding a rubber glove on, Phil pulled it out of the wall and carried it downstairs.
“Look what I found,” he said, waving it over his head.
“Get that thing away from me,” I said, backing away as it flopped back and forth in his hand.
With the hotel clear, we started to train. It was just before dawn when we finished. After I put my kit into the trunk of my rental car, I was exhausted and I collapsed behind the wheel. As I went to start the car, I noticed that I had something attached to my steering wheel.
“Phil!” I yelled, practically jumping out of the car to get away from it.
I looked around, but Phil was gone. He already fled the scene of the crime.
The dildo was strapped to my steering wheel. It stretched from the nine o’clock to three o’clock position. I cut it off the steering wheel and put it in a random helmet in one of the equipment bags.
The dildo, which came to be called the Staff of Power, disappeared. We forgot about it for a few months until back in Virginia Beach after we finished some gas-mask training.
Since DEVGRU is tasked with hunting down weapons of mass destruction, we often trained in the kill house in full chemical suits. The gas masks took a while to get used to, and we had to be comfortable operating in the suits and masks for long periods.
It was the end of the day, and we all came up to the team room after to get a beer. I walked in and headed over to the refrigerator. Popping the cap and taking a long pull, I turned back and saw some of the guys huddled around the foot of the conference table.
“Holy shit,” I heard one of them say.
“No way, that isn’t it, is it?” another one said.
I walked over to the crowd and saw a Polaroid picture taped to a blank sheet of paper. The Staff of Power
