Part 8 (1/2)

There's a lot of confusion in the civilian world about SEALs and our mission. Most people think we're strictly sea-based commandos, meaning that we always operate off s.h.i.+ps, and hit targets on the water or the immediate coastline.

Admittedly, a fair amount of our work involves things at seawe are in the Navy, after all. And from a historical perspective, as briefly mentioned earlier, SEALs trace their origins to the Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs. Established during World War II, UDT frogmen were responsible for reconning beaches before they were hit, and they trained for a variety of other waterborne tasks, such as infiltrating harbors and planting limpet mines on enemy s.h.i.+ps. They were the mean, bad-a.s.s combat divers of World War II and the postwar era, and SEALs are proud to carry on in their wake.

But as the UDT mission expanded, the Navy recognized that the need for special operations didn't end at the beach line. As new units called SEALs were formed and trained for this expanded mission, they came to replace the older UDT units.

While ”land” may be the final word in the SEAL acronym, it's hardly the last thing we do. Every special operations unit in the U.S. military has its own specialty. There's a lot of overlap in our training, and the range of our missions is similar in many respects. But each branch has its own expertise. Army Special Forces-also known as SF-does an excellent job training foreign forces, both in conventional and unconventional warfare. Army Rangers are a big a.s.sault force-if you want a large target, say an airfield, taken down, that's their thing. Air Force special operators-parajumpers-excel at pulling people out of the s.h.i.+t.

Among our specialties are DAs.

DA stands for ”direct action.” A direct-action mission is a very short, quick strike against a small but high-value target. You might think of it as a surgical strike against the enemy. In a practical sense, it could range from anything like an attack on a key bridge behind enemy lines to a raid on a terrorist hideout to arrest a bomb maker-a ”s.n.a.t.c.h and grab,” as some call it. While those are very different missions, the idea is the same: strike hard and fast before the enemy knows what's going on.

After 9/11, SEALs began training to deal with the places Islamic terrorists were most likely to be located-Afghanistan number one, and then the Middle East and Africa. We still did all the things a SEAL is supposed to do-diving, jumping out of planes, taking down s.h.i.+ps, etc. But there was more emphasis on land warfare during our workup than there traditionally had been in the past.

There was debate about this s.h.i.+ft far above my pay grade. Some people wanted to limit SEALs to ten miles inland. n.o.body asked my opinion, but as far as I'm concerned, there shouldn't be any limits. Personally, I'm just as happy to stay out of the water, but that's beside the point. Let me do what I'm trained to do wherever it needs to be done.

The training, most of it anyway, was fun, even when it was a kick in the b.a.l.l.s. We dove, we went into the desert, we worked in the mountains. We even got water-boarded and ga.s.sed.

Everybody gets water-boarded during training. The idea is to prepare you in case you're captured. The instructors tortured us as hard as they could, tying us up and pounding on us, just short of permanently damaging us. They say each of us has a breaking point, and that prisoners eventually give in. But I would have done my best to make them kill me before I gave up secrets.

Gas training was another kick. Basically, you get hit with CS gas and have to fight through it. CS gas is ”captor spray” or tear gas-the active ingredient is 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, for all of you chemistry majors. We thought of it as ”cough and spit,” because that's the best way to deal with it. You learn during training to let your eyes run; the worst thing to do is rub them. You're going to get snotty and you're going to be coughing and crying, but you can still shoot your weapon and fight through it. That's the point of the exercise.

We went up to Kodiak, Alaska, where we did a land navigation course. It wasn't the height of winter, but there was still so much snow on the ground that we had to put on snowshoes. We started with basic instruction on keeping warm-layering up, etc.-and learned about things like snow shelters. One of the important points of this training, which applied everywhere, was learning how to conserve weight in the field. You have to figure out whether it's more important to be lighter and more mobile, or to have more ammunition and body armor.

I prefer lightness and speed. I count ounces when we go out, not pounds. The lighter you are, the more mobile you become. The little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out there are faster than h.e.l.l; you need every advantage you can get on them.

The training was pretty compet.i.tive. We found out at one point that the best platoon in the Team would be s.h.i.+pped out to Afghanistan. Training picked up from that point on. It was a fierce compet.i.tion, and not just out on the training range. The officers were backstabbing each other. They'd go to the CO and dime each other out:

Did you see what those guys did on the range? They're no good...

The compet.i.tion came down to us and one other platoon. We came in second. They went to war; we stayed home.

That's about the worst fate a SEAL can imagine.

With the conflict in Iraq looming on the horizon, our emphasis s.h.i.+fted. We practiced fighting in the desert; we practiced fighting in cities. We worked hard, but there were always lighter moments.

I remember one time when we were on a RUT (real urban training). Our command would find a munic.i.p.ality that was willing to have us come in and take down an actual building-an empty warehouse, say, or a house-something a little more authentic than you would find on a base. On this one exercise, we were working at a house. Everything had been carefully arranged with the local police department. A few ”actors” had been recruited to play parts during the exercise.

My role was to pull security outside. I blocked out traffic, waving vehicles away as some of the local cops watched from the sidelines.

While I was standing there, gun out, not looking particularly friendly, this guy walked down the block toward me.

I started going through the drill. First I waved him off; he kept coming. Then I s.h.i.+ned my light on him; he kept coming. I put my laser dot on him; he kept coming.

Of course, the closer he got, the more convinced I was that he was a role-player, sent to test me. I mentally reviewed my ROEs (”rules of engagement”), which covered how I was supposed to act.

”What are you, the popo?” he asked, sticking his face out toward mine.

”Popo” (a thug's term for police) wasn't in the ROEs, but I figured he was ad-libbing. The next thing on my list was to throw him down. So I did. He started to resist, and reached under his jacket for what I a.s.sumed was a weapon, which is exactly what a SEAL playing a bad guy would do. So I reacted in kind, giving a good SEAL response as I wrestled him into the dirt and busted him up a bit.