I tried to protest, but the judge—none other than the chief himself—quickly ruled me out of order. I turned to my defense attorney.
“What do you expect?” he said. “He’s only got a third-grade edu-Kay-shun.”
“Guilty!” declared the judge. “Next charge!”
“Your Honor, the defendant is disrespectful,” said the prosecutor. “He told the CO to fuck off.”
“Objection!” said my lawyer. “He told the
The CO is the commanding officer of the Team; the OIC is the officer in charge of the platoon. A pretty big difference, except in this case.
“Guilty! Next charge!”
For every offense I was found guilty of—which meant anything and everything they could make up—I had to take a drink of Jack Daniels and Coke, followed by a shooter of Jack.
They got me pretty wasted before we even got to the felonies. At some point, they stripped me down and put ice down my drawers. Finally I passed out.
Then they spray-painted me, and for good measure, drew Playboy bunnies on my chest and back with a marker. Just the sort of body art you want for your honeymoon.
At some point, my friends apparently became concerned about my health. So they taped me to a spine board completely naked, took me outside, and stood me up in the snow. They left me for a while until I regained some amount of consciousness. By then I was jackhammering hard enough to put a hole through a bunker roof. They gave me an IV—the saline helps cut down the alcohol in your system—and finally took me back to the hotel, still taped to the spine board.
All I remember from the rest of the night is being lifted up a bunch of stairs, apparently to my motel room. There must have been a few spectators, because the boys were yelling, “Nothing to see here, nothing to see!” as they carried me in.
Taya washed off most of the paint and the bunnies when I met up with her the next day. But a few were still visible under my shirt. I kept my jacket tightly buttoned for the ceremony.
By then, the swelling in my face was almost completely gone. The stitches in my eyebrow (from a friendly fight among teammates a few weeks early) were healing nicely. The cut on my lip (from a training exercise) was also healing pretty well. It’s probably not every bride’s dream to have a spray-painted, beat-up groom, but Taya seemed happy enough.
The amount of time we had for our honeymoon, though, was a sore point. The Team was gracious enough to give me three days to get hitched and honeymoon. As a new guy, I was appreciative of the brief leave. My new wife wasn’t quite as understanding, and made that clear. Nonetheless, we married and honeymooned quickly. Then I got back to work.
3. TAKEDOWNS
Gun Ready
I roused myself from the side of the boat where I’d been catching some rest despite the cold wind and choppy waters. I was soaked from the spray. Despite the fact that I was a new guy on my first deployment, I’d already mastered the art of sleeping in all sorts of conditions—an unheralded but critical SEAL skill.
An oil tanker loomed ahead. A helicopter had spotted it trying to sneak down the Gulf after loading up illegally in Iraq. Our job was to get aboard her, inspect her papers, and if, as suspected, she was violating the U.N. sanctions, turn her over to the Marines or other authorities for processing.
I scrambled to get ready. Our RHIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat, used for a variety of SEAL tasks) looked like a cross between a rubber life raft and an open speedboat with two monster motors in the back. Thirty-six feet long, it held eight SEALs and hit upward of forty-five knots on a calm sea.
The exhaust from the twin motors wafted over the boat, mixing with the spray as we gathered speed. We were hauling at a good pace, riding the wake of the tanker where radar couldn’t pick us up. I went to work, taking a long pole from the deck of the boat. Our speed dropped as our RHIB cut alongside the tanker, until we were just about matching its pace. The Iranian ship’s engines pulsed in the water, so loud our own motors were drowned out.
As we pushed alongside the tanker, I extended the pole upward, trying to angle the grappling hook at the top onto the ship’s rail. Once the hook caught, I jerked the pole down.
Gotcha.
A bungee cord connected the hook to the pole. A steel cable ladder was connected to the hook. Someone grabbed hold of the bottom and held it while the lead man began climbing up the side of the ship.
A loaded oil tanker can sit fairly low in the water, so low, in fact, that you sometimes can just grab the rail and hop over. That wasn’t the case here—the railing was quite a bit higher than our little boat. I’m not a fan of heights, but as long as I didn’t think too much about what I was doing, I was fine.
The ladder rocked with the ship and the wind; I pulled myself upward as quickly as I could go, my muscles remembering all those pull-ups in BUD/S. By the time I reached the deck, the lead guys were already headed toward the wheelhouse and bridge of the ship. I ran to catch up.
Suddenly the tanker began gaining speed. The captain, belatedly realizing he was being boarded, was trying to head for Iranian waters. If he reached them, we’d have to jump off—our orders strictly forbade taking any ship outside of international waters.
I caught up to the head of the team just as they reached the door to the bridge. One of the crew got there at roughly the same time, and tried to lock it. He wasn’t fast enough, or strong enough—one of the boarding party threw himself against the door and bashed it open.
I ran through, gun ready.
We’d done dozens of these operations over the past few days, and rarely had anyone even hinted of resistance. But the captain of this ship had some fight in him, and even though he was unarmed, he wasn’t ready to surrender.
He made a run at me.
Pretty stupid. First of all, I’m not only bigger than him, but I was wearing full body armor. Not to mention the fact that I had a submachine gun in my hand.
I took the muzzle of my gun and struck the idiot in his chest. He went right down.
Somehow, I managed to slip as well. My elbow flew out and landed straight on his face.
A couple of times.
That pretty much took the fight out of him. I rolled him over and cuffed him.
Boarding and searching ships—officially known as VBSS, for Visit, Board, Search, Seize— is a standard SEAL mission. While the “regular” Navy has specially trained sailors to handle the job in peacetime, we’re trained to handle the searches in places where resistance is likely. And in the lead-up to war during the winter of 2002–03, that meant the Persian Gulf off Iraq. The U.N. later estimated that, in violation of international sanctions, billions of dollars of oil and other items were smuggled out of Iraq and into the pockets of Saddam’s regime.
Smuggling took all sorts of forms. You’d find oil being carried in wheat carriers, hidden in barrels. More commonly, tankers took on thousands and thousands of gallons in excess of what they were permitted in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program.
It wasn’t just oil. One of the biggest contraband shipments we came across that winter were dates. Apparently they could fetch a decent price on the world market.
