I could feel my butt coming off the floor, and for a second I could feel a panic rising in my chest. I let go of the rope and started to lean back into the cabin, but my teammates were all crowded in the door. There was little room for me to scoot back. I could feel Walt’s grip tighten on my body armor as the helicopter started to drop. Walt’s other hand held the sniper’s gear. I leaned back as far as I could. Walt was practically lying on top of me to keep me inside.
“Holy fuck, we’re going in,” I thought.
The violent turn put my door in the front as the helicopter started to slide sideways. I could see the wall of the courtyard coming up at us. Overhead, the engines, which had been humming, now seemed to scream as they tried to beat the air into submission to stay aloft.
The tail rotor had barely missed hitting the guesthouse as the helicopter slid to the left. We had joked before the mission that our helicopter had the lowest chance of crashing because so many of us had already survived previous helicopter crashes. We’d been sure if a helicopter was going to crash it would be the one carrying Chalk Two.
Thousands of man-hours, maybe even millions, had been spent leading the United States to this moment, and the mission was about to go way off track before we even had a chance to get our feet on the ground.
I tried to kick my legs up and wiggle deeper into the cabin. If the helicopter hit on its side, it might roll, trapping my legs under the fuselage. Leaning back as far as I could, I pulled my legs into my chest. Next to me, the sniper tried to clear his legs from the door, but it was too crowded. There was nothing we could do but hope the helicopter didn’t roll and chop off his exposed leg.
Everything slowed down. I tried to push the thoughts of being crushed out of my mind. With every second, the ground got closer and closer. I felt my whole body tense up, ready for the inevitable impact.
CHAPTER 1
Green Team
I could feel the sweat dripping down my back, soaking my shirt, as I slowly moved down the corridor of the kill house at our training site in Mississippi.
It was 2004, seven years before I would ride a Black Hawk into Abbottabad, Pakistan, on one of the most historic special operations raids in history. I was in the selection and training course for SEAL Team Six, sometimes called by its full name: United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, abbreviated DEVGRU. The nine- month selection course was known as Green Team, and it was the one thing that stood between me and the other candidates moving up to the elite DEVGRU.
My heart was beating fast, and I had to blink the perspiration out of my eyes as I followed my teammate to the door. My breathing was labored and ragged as I tried to force any extraneous thoughts from my head. I was nervous and edgy, and that was how mistakes were made. I needed to focus, but no matter what was in the room we were about to enter, it paled compared to the cadre of instructors watching on the catwalk.
All of the instructors were senior combat veterans from DEVGRU. Handpicked to train new operators, they held my future in their hands.
“Just get to lunch,” I muttered to myself.
It was the only way I could control my anxiety. In 1998, I’d made it through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, or BUD/S, by focusing on just making it to the next meal. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t feel my arms as we hoisted logs over our heads or if the cold surf soaked me to the core. It wasn’t going to last forever. There is a saying: “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is simple: “One bite at a time.” Only my bites were separated by meals: Make it to breakfast, train hard until lunch, and focus until dinner. Repeat.
In 2004, I was already a SEAL, but making it to DEVGRU would be the pinnacle of my career. As the Navy’s counter-terrorism unit, DEVGRU did hostage rescue missions, tracked war criminals, and, since the attacks on September 11, hunted and killed al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But nothing about making it through Green Team was easy. It was no longer good enough for me to be a SEAL. During Green Team, just passing was failing and second place was the first loser. The point was not to meet the minimums, but crush them. Success in Green Team was about managing stress and performing at your peak level—all the time.
Before each training day, we completed a punishing physical training or PT workout of long runs, push-ups, pull-ups, and anything else the sadistic instructors could cook up. We pushed cars, and on multiple occasions we pushed buses. When we got to the kill house, a purpose-built ballistically safe building made up of hallways and rooms used to practice close-quarters battle, or CQB, our muscles were already tired and sore. The point of doing the PT was to make us physically tired to simulate the stress of a real mission before they tested us in a demanding tactical environment.
I didn’t have time to steal a glimpse at the instructors as we moved down the hall. This was the first day of training, and everybody’s nerves were running high. We had started CQB training after completing a full month’s worth of high-altitude parachute training in Arizona. The pressure to perform had been evident there too, but once we got to Mississippi it was ratcheted up.
I shook the nagging aches and pains from my mind and concentrated on the door in front of me. It was made of thin plywood with no doorknob. The door was battered and broken from teams that went before us, and my teammate easily pushed it open with his gloved hand. We paused for a second at the threshold, scanning for targets before we entered.
The room was square, with rough walls made of old railroad ties to absorb the live rounds. I could hear my teammate enter behind me as I swept my rifle in an arc searching for a target.
Nothing. The room was empty.
“Moving,” my teammate called as he stepped into the room to clear around a corner.
Instinctually, I slid into position to cover him.
As soon as I started to move, I could hear murmuring above me in the rafters. We couldn’t stop, but I knew one of us had just made a mistake. For a second, my stress level spiked, but I quickly pushed it out of my mind. There was no time to worry about mistakes. There were more rooms to clear. I couldn’t worry about the mistakes I made in the first room.
Back in the hall, we entered the next room. I spotted two targets as I entered. To the right, I saw the silhouette of a crook holding a small revolver. He was wearing a sweatshirt and looked like a 1970s thug from the movies. To the left, there was a silhouette of a woman holding a purse.
I snapped a shot off at the crook seconds after stepping into the room. The round hit center mass. I moved toward it, shooting a few more rounds.
“Clear,” I said, lowering my muzzle.
“Clear,” my teammate answered.
“Safe ’em and let ’em hang,” one of the instructors said from above.
No less than six instructors were looking down at us from a catwalk that spidered out over the kill house. They could walk safely along the walkways watching as we cleared the different rooms, judging our performance and watching for any tiny mistakes.
I put my rifle on safe and let it hang against me by its sling. I wiped beads of sweat out of my eyes with my sleeve. My heart was still pounding, even though we were finished. The training scenarios were pretty straightforward. We all knew how to clear rooms. It was the process of clearing a room perfectly under the simulated stress of combat that would set us apart.
There was no margin of error, and at that moment I wasn’t sure exactly what we had done wrong.
“Where was your move call?” Tom, one of the instructors, said to me from the catwalk.
I didn’t answer. I just nodded. I was embarrassed and disappointed. I’d forgotten to tell my teammate to move in the first room, which was a safety violation.
Tom was one of the best instructors in the course. I could always pick him out because he had a huge head. It was massive, like it housed a giant brain. It was his one distinct physical trait; otherwise you’d miss him because he was mellow and never seemed to get upset. We all respected him because he was both firm and fair. When you
