made a mistake in front of Tom, it felt like you let him down. His disappointment with me was plastered across his face.
No screaming.
No yelling.
Just the look.
From above, I saw him shoot me the “
I wanted to speak or at least try and explain, but I knew they didn’t want to hear it. If they said you were wrong, you were wrong. Standing below them in the empty room, there was no arguing or explaining.
“OK, check,” I said, defenseless and furious with myself for making such a basic error.
“We need better than that,” Tom said. “Beat it. Do your ladder climb.”
Snatching up my rifle, I jogged out of the kill house and sprinted to a rope ladder hanging on a tree about three hundred yards away. Climbing up the ladder, rung by rung, I felt heavier. It wasn’t my sweat-soaked shirt or the sixty pounds of body armor and gear strapped to my chest.
It was my fear of failure. I’ve never failed anything in my SEAL career.
When I got to San Diego six years earlier for BUD/S, I never doubted I’d make it. A lot of my fellow BUD/S candidates who arrived with me either got cut or quit. Some of them couldn’t keep up with the brutal beach runs, or they panicked underwater during SCUBA training.
Like a lot of other BUD/S candidates, I knew I wanted to become a SEAL when I was thirteen. I read every book I could find about the SEALs, followed the news during Desert Storm for any mention of them, and daydreamed about ambushes and coming up over the beach on a combat mission. I wanted to do all of the things I’d read in the books while growing up.
After completing my degree at a small college in California, I went to BUD/S and earned my SEAL trident in 1998. After a six-month deployment throughout the Pacific Rim, and a combat deployment to Iraq in 2003–2004, I was ready for something new. I’d learned about DEVGRU during my first two deployments. DEVGRU was a collection of the best the SEAL community had to offer, and I knew I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try.
The Navy’s counter-terrorism unit was born in the aftermath of Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 mission ordered by President Jimmy Carter to rescue fifty-two Americans held captive at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran.
After the mission, the Navy identified a need for a force capable of successfully executing those kind of specialized missions and tapped Richard Marcinko to develop a maritime counter-terrorism unit called SEAL Team Six. The team practiced hostage rescue as well as infiltrating enemy countries, ships, naval bases, and oil rigs. Over time, missions branched out to counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
At the time Marcinko established the command, there were only two SEAL teams, so “six” was chosen to make the Soviets think the Navy had more teams. In 1987, SEAL Team Six became DEVGRU.
The unit started with seventy-five operators, handpicked by Marcinko. Now, all of the members of the unit are handpicked from other SEAL teams and Explosive Ordnance Disposal units. The unit has grown significantly and filled out with numerous teams of operators as well as support staff, but the concept remains the same.
The unit is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, called JSOC. DEVGRU works closely with other National Missions Force teams like the Army’s Delta Force.
One of DEVGRU’s first missions was in 1983 during Operation Urgent Fury. Members of the unit rescued Grenada’s governor-general, Paul Scoon, during the U.S.–led invasion of the small Caribbean nation after a Communist takeover. Scoon was facing execution.
Six years later in 1989, DEVGRU joined with Delta Force to capture Manuel Noriega during the invasion of Panama.
DEVGRU operators were part of the U.S.–led mission to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in October 1993, which turned into the Battle of Mogadishu. The fight was chronicled in Mark Bowden’s book
In 1998, DEVGRU operators tracked Bosnian war criminals, including Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian general who was later indicted for his role in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
Since September 11, 2001, DEVGRU operators had been on a steady cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, targeting al Qaeda and Taliban commanders. The command got the immediate call to insert into Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and operators in the command were responsible for some of the high-profile missions like the Jessica Lynch rescue in Iraq in 2003. It was missions like these and the fact that they are the first to get the call that motivated me.
Before you can screen for Green Team, you need to be a SEAL, and most candidates typically have two deployments. The deployments usually mean the candidate has the necessary skill level and experience, which was needed to complete the selection course.
As I climbed the rungs on the ladder in the Mississippi heat, I couldn’t help but think about how I’d almost failed the three-day screening process before even starting Green Team.
The dates for the screening fell during my unit’s land warfare training. I was at Camp Pendleton, California, hiding under a tree, watching Marines build a base camp. It was 2003 and we were a week into our reconnaissance training block when I got orders to report back to San Diego to start the three-day screening process. If I was lucky enough to get selected, I would begin the nine-month Green Team training course. If I was lucky enough to pass, I would join the ranks of DEVGRU.
I was the only one in my platoon going. A buddy in a sister platoon was also screening. As we drove down together, we both were washing the green paint off our faces. Still dressed in our camouflage uniforms, we smelled of body odor and bug spray after spending days in the field. My stomach hurt from eating nothing but Meals, Ready-To-Eat, and I tried to hydrate, sucking down water as we drove. I was not in the best physical shape, and I knew the first part of the screening was a fitness test.
The next morning, we were out at the beach. The sun was just peeking over the horizon as I finished the four-mile timed run. After a short break, I joined about two dozen other candidates in a line on a concrete pad. A breeze blew off the Pacific, and there was a little chill in the air from the night before. At any other time, it would have been a pretty morning on the beach. I was already tired from the run, and we still had push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups before the swim.
I easily passed the push-up test, despite the instructors’ nitpicking each rep. Every exercise had to be perfect, or it didn’t count. Rolling onto my back, I prepared for the sit-up test.
I was really tired as I knocked out the first sit-ups.
Being out in the field hadn’t helped my stamina. I got into a good rhythm at first, but it was broken when the instructor stopped next to me and started repeating some of the numbers of my reps.
“Ten, ten, ten,” he said. “Ten, eleven, twelve, twelve.”
My technique wasn’t textbook. He was repeating the numbers that weren’t perfect. Every time he repeated a number, I was more ashamed. I was getting tired but I wasn’t getting any closer to meeting the test standard.
“One minute.”
I was way behind as the call came and was quickly running out of time. If I failed the sit-ups, I was done. Doubt started to creep into my mind. I started to come up with bullshit excuses like I was ill-prepared because I had been training with my unit, rather than preparing for this test.
“Thirty seconds.”
With half a minute to go I was ten short of the minimum number. Next to me, another guy had already passed that number and he was knocking out even more as fast as he could go. My mind was spinning and I couldn’t believe I was failing. Forcing the poisonous thoughts from my mind, I focused on technique. Soon, I was making up ground.
“Ten seconds.”
I was close. My stomach ached. My breath came in gasps. My fatigue was replaced with fear. I was in shock. I couldn’t fail. There was no way I could go back to my platoon knowing I couldn’t even pass the physical fitness
