Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice (11 page)

Suddenly Marcus froze at the sound of approaching footsteps. A small knot of goatherds was headed their way.

There’s a sixth sense about the eyes. Scientists will tell you it’s superstition; people will scoff at it as voodoo—but I’ve experienced it, and it’s real. People can sense it when your eyes are on them. No matter how well concealed you are, if you train your eyes on someone nearby, you up the odds that he will glance in your direction. I don’t know how it works; I just know it happens.

As the sound of footfalls cut into the silence of their mountainside hideout, every natural instinct screamed,
Look in the direction of the sound!
—but instead Matt instantly averted his eyes. The scant concealment available in the scrubby mountain foliage didn’t give them much to work with. An impossible situation. Yet just as he had on that exercise going up against Dave Fernandez’s team, Matt somehow pulled it off. He melted away. In the next instant the others saw and followed Axelson’s example. All four men vanished.

“Those goat herders wouldn’t have seen us at all,” says Marcus, “if it weren’t for the fact that they happened to be walking straight toward us.”

But the little group was practically on top of them now, and confrontation was inevitable.

What happened next is the subject of Marcus’s book (and
the Peter Berg film adaptation)
Lone Survivor
. Faced with the decision of whether or not to quietly execute the three goat herders on the spot to keep their own location secure, the team made the excruciating choice to let the three go and hope for the best. Within minutes their mission was compromised and the four were fighting for their lives against impossible odds. Only one—Marcus—would make it out alive.

In a situation like this critical factors and complications start multiplying instantly, far too fast for linear thought to be of any use. Ninety-nine people in a hundred would panic or freeze. Matt never lost his cool, not for a fraction of a second. Marcus describes him leaning calmly up against a rock, in complete control and without a wasted movement or squandered round, acquiring target after target and getting off each shot with unerring accuracy.

A firefight is a messy, chaotic, nightmarish experience. Even five or six seconds of this rapidly exploding lethal chaos feels like an hour and has an impact on your psyche that stays with you the rest of your life. But this battle on the harsh Afghanistan mountainside didn’t last five or six seconds; it raged on and on and on. Estimates of the enemy’s number have ranged from several dozen to several hundred, but whatever it was, the four SEALs were badly outnumbered and outgunned.

Shot in the head and chest, Matt continued fighting to protect his buddies. Despite his mortal wounds he willed himself to hold out as long as his ammunition did, and longer, continuing on a good distance despite his wounds. Marcus recalls that Matt had three magazines left when an RPG blast blew them apart, yet when they found his body nearly
two weeks later, only one magazine remained and he was surrounded by piles of empty shells. I spoke with one of the medics who helped recover Matt’s body. He said Matt’s injuries were so extensive, it was amazing that he’d been able to cover any ground at all. He also had a bandage on one of his wounds, obviously self-applied. Right to the end he was stoically patching himself up so he could continue the fight and protect his brothers to his last breath.

•   •   •

Much has been written about Operation Red Wings. What goes mostly unsaid is that for many of us in the teams, it was a turning point. Between losing Matt, Danny Dietz, and Mike Murphy, and the sixteen others who perished in the effort to rescue them, it was the worst loss of life in a single day in the SEALs’ forty-year history. A lot of us started questioning exactly what we were doing over there.

When Mike Bearden died I was fresh out of sniper school and had not yet been on my first deployment. I was a new guy, untested by battle. With 9/11 still a year over the horizon, there was no battle yet to test us. By the time Dave Scott fell to his death two years later, the world was at war and I’d been through not only the carnage on the USS
Cole
but also six bloody months in Afghanistan.

Things were pretty simple when my platoon first landed in Kandahar in the fall of 2001. The smoke had barely cleared over the World Trade Center complex. In addition to our platoon patch, we wore NYFD patches on our outfits. We knew why we were there and what we were doing. We were going to find the guys who did this and make them pay. What’s more, we were going to track down and destroy the
clandestine network of men and resources that had trained and armed these guys and were continuing to do so, as they prepared to wreak further destruction on America.

Things were pretty clear back then. But now, in 2005? It was four years later, another four years of being sucked that much deeper into the commitment and sacrifice of war. I was now a family man, a father of two, and the preciousness of life had new meaning for me.

Supposedly we had rooted out the Taliban and quashed the al Qaeda influence there. But our guys were still over there, and things were not looking any better. For every ten hostiles we took out, a hundred more sprouted up. The restrictive ROEs that we were so glad we didn’t have to follow on the USS
Cole
(and that did not exist when we first landed in Afghanistan in 2001) were now back with a vengeance, smothering our guys in the field. The administrative machinery that ran Spec Ops was starting to bloat, and effective tactical and strategic decisions on the ground were starting to feel the suffocating force of political considerations in the comfortable corridors of Washington. We were graduating the best combat snipers and Spec Ops warriors in U.S. military history and had become excellent at winning battles. But to what end?

When Harvey was my boss I had risked my career to make sure we had a sniper course that deserved guys like Matt. Now I was starting to wonder whether we had a war that deserved guys like him.

•   •   •

In November 2012, I brought my nine-year-old daughter, Madison, with me to New York for a week. In between
meetings with publishers and media people, we would slip in all kinds of sightseeing, and it would be a fantastic chance for building some father-daughter memories. The first thing we did, though, even before leaving the West Coast, was to drive up to San Francisco to participate in a Veterans Day event hosted by Donna Axelson, Matt’s mother, in Cupertino.

After Matt and his teammates died, the city of Cupertino commissioned a lifelike bronze statue, by the renowned Florida sculptor W. Stanley Proctor, to be erected at Memorial Park, which up to that point, oddly enough, had no memorial. Designed to commemorate all veterans, the statue itself is of Matt and his close friend James Suh, who was one of the sixteen men who died in the helo crash trying to rescue Matt and his friends. (You can see it online at CupertinoVeterans Memorial.org.) Around the base of the pedestal are placed twenty twelve-by-twelve-inch pavers, one for each of the nineteen men who died in Operation Red Wings, with their birth dates and dates of death, plus one for Marcus, which reads simply, “Survivor.”

Donna holds an annual event there, where she talks about what the memorial means to her and to all of us. Each year she invites guest speakers to join her. That year she had invited me.

I talked about Matt and his buddies Danny Dietz and Mike Murphy, and the nature and meaning of their sacrifice. I retold a story by Marine Lieutenant General John Kelly, called “Six Seconds to Live,” about two young Marines who gave their lives standing down a suicide bomber in Iraq, and how much that story reminded me of Matt and his teammates. (If you haven’t heard the “Six Seconds” story, it’s
worth searching it out on the Internet.) Most of all, I spoke about what amazing men these three were, and how I was a better man for having known them.

Madison sat in the front row, right next to Donna, throughout my talk. Afterward people came up to her, thanking her and telling her how much my talk had meant to them. After the whole thing was over and we were alone together, she looked at me and said, “Dad, I’m really proud of you.” I’ve seen a lot of good and a lot of bad in my years on earth. Among the mix there have been some outstanding moments. That one ranks right up there at the top.

Months later Madison was still talking about that experience. I hadn’t realized it would have such an impact on her. But of course it did. If anyone tells you that children can’t handle the realities of life, that they can’t grasp the truth of life and death, you can tell them, “Sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.” My daughter’s life was changed forever by hearing about Matt and his teammates. Although she never met him, she’ll never forget him.

My hope is that the same will be true for her entire generation. Matt exemplified the simple truth that actions speak louder than words. Much like that Stanley Proctor bronze, Matt’s life stands as a mute but eloquent monument to the best and noblest impulses within us all.

VISIONARY

JOHN ZINN

I
n July 2006, eighteen months after making chief and wresting command of the NSW sniper course from Harvey Clayton’s hands, I left the U.S. armed services and faced the question every Spec Ops warrior must face sooner or later:
What now?
Once you’ve trained for years to become part of the world’s most elite fighting force, then spent long stretches in the thick of some of the most dangerous conflicts on the globe, what do you do for an encore?

Getting out of the service wasn’t an easy choice. I had put in nearly fourteen years of active service in the Navy. Sticking it out for another six would buy me a decent retirement package. I had colleagues who couldn’t believe I would even think about walking away with only a few years to go. Some were actually angry at me, which surprised me. (What did they think, I was somehow letting them down?) But I’d put the Navy and the teams ahead of my wife and kids for too many years.

Marriage and being part of the teams is not an easy mix. The day our first child was born I was in the Persian Gulf, headed for terrorist hideouts in the caves of Afghanistan. I
didn’t even meet my son until he was six months old. When our second came along I was constantly on the road, developing and teaching advanced courses to sniper students, and those long months away were tough on our relationship. The birth of our third was only weeks away, and I was worried that our marriage was being pulled to the breaking point.

It was time to put family first. I had to leave the teams.

The question was, and do what?

For a lot of us in the Spec Ops world, it can be a tough transition. After years of being either in combat or in training for combat, it feels strange to conform to the dictates and behaviors of the civilian workplace. It’s not necessarily hard to
get
work; there are plenty of private-sector firms who are anxious to hire people with the knowledge, experience, and skill sets of a Navy SEAL. It’s just hard to adapt to what others think of as a “normal” work situation.

We typically don’t make very good employees. Regular soldiers and sailors are trained to work well as functioning parts of the collective, good cogs in a larger watchworks. In the SEAL teams you’re not taught simply to obey orders; you’re taught to accomplish the mission, however that works and whatever it takes. We are groomed to think fast, think for ourselves, and think unconventionally. If soldiers and sailors are the military’s version of a solid corporate workforce, we are its entrepreneurs, innovators, and misfits.

If I was going to leave the employ of the government, the only employer I was interested in going to work for was myself. With a family of five to feed, that was a daunting prospect, but I couldn’t see doing it any other way.

Fortunately for me, I had some excellent role models. And one in particular.

•   •   •

I met John Zinn in the late nineties, when we had both just completed our respective BUD/S classes and joined Team Three. I was standing in the middle of a class on advanced diving techniques while our instructor gave a safety brief, something about how to avoid getting sucked into giant turbines and turned into fish food, when I heard a Clint Eastwood voice rasp quietly behind me: “Everyone has to die someday. . . .” I craned my neck just enough to look back, half expecting a scowling Man with No Name chewing on a cheroot. Instead I found myself eyeballing a cherub-faced towhead cracking a faint smile. (A piece of human nature trivia I learned in the teams: The more time a guy spends in the water, the drier his sense of humor.)

John and I were both southern California surfers, and we hit it off right away. If your picture of a Navy SEAL is a big, chiseled, pro-football type with rippling muscles and a fuck-you glare, then you never would have pegged John for a SEAL. A slender five-eleven, with sandy blond hair, an oval face, an affable smile, and quiet confidence, he looked like your average skinny surf bum.

John was a competitive swimmer almost before he could walk. His first swim meet, at age five, was abysmal. The other kids dived into the water and swam to the end of the pool and back before John had even touched the other side. That was it for John: He never lost a meet again, and that capacity to take fuel from failure would become his signature gift.

The water was John’s passion and driving force. An excellent athlete, he played competitive water polo throughout his school years. During his senior year of high school his dad took him to become scuba-certified, and John was so far
ahead of everyone else in the tests that the instructors started calling him Neptune. He could have gone on to university on a water polo scholarship. But he wanted more than anything to join the Navy and become a SEAL. Four days after his high school graduation, he was on his way to Great Lakes, Illinois, to attend Navy boot camp. He was barely seventeen. A year and a half later he was starting BUD/S.

John had no illusions about how tough the selection process would be, but he was determined to make it through no matter how hard it got. Of course, nobody goes into BUD/S
planning
to fail. Your first day on that asphalt grinder at Coronado you hear everyone around you saying, “Hey, man, no way
I’m
quitting!” And a few days later, as you drag yourself out of your bunk in the frigid predawn darkness, bruised and battered and beaten, and you hear the morning silence split by the bone-jarring
clanggg, clanggg
of that damn brass bell, you know another sorry-ass motherfucker has thrown in the towel. My class started with 220 candidates; by graduation seven months later there were twenty-three of us left. It’s easy to talk a big game, but when the reality of BUD/S starts to sink in, people crumble. Not John. He was so focused, so intent on plowing through and going straight into the SEALs, that it was impossible to imagine him
not
doing it.

And yet, just as with that first swim meet at age five, his first time out he
did
fail.

BUD/S Class 205 began in December 1995. It was near the tail end of a record-length El Niño surge, and major storms were pummeling California. By the time they reached Hell Week, it was one of the coldest on record. John ended up with pneumonia and was forced to call a halt.

Getting rolled from BUD/S just about killed him. Not the
pneumonia—the blow to his ego. He wasted no time on self-recrimination, though. That fuel-from-failure thing again. It wasn’t the first time he’d suffered a bitter defeat on the way to triumph, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.

There’s a common idea in the SEALs that says, if you don’t make it through BUD/S on your first try, you need to go out and get some experience before you come back for a second shot at it. John decided to take a turn as a naval police officer. He wangled an assignment to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio to go through a six-week training course, and upon graduating was assigned to police duty at the naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After eighteen months of breaking up bar fights and keeping the peace, he showed up back in Coronado, ready to do BUD/S again. This time he went the distance, and graduated Class 217 in mid-’98, just a few months after I finished Class 215.

•   •   •

As new guys at SEAL Team Three, John and I went surfing together as often as we could. We also shared an aspiration to become successful in business, and during our time together at Team Three we talked a lot about being entrepreneurs and all that we wanted to accomplish in our lives.

At the time I had begun investing in real estate and having some modest success, to the extent that I owned my own home and rented out a guesthouse on the property. I’d studied Robert (
Rich Dad, Poor Dad
) Kiyosaki’s approach to building a portfolio of income-generating assets, and I was convinced real estate was the way to go.

John wasn’t especially interested in real estate. He wanted to build something. He wanted to create and run his own business. Actually, that’s not saying it right: He didn’t just
want
to run his own business—it was more like a burning, all-consuming drive. He
had
to.

Right away I noticed that John had a distinctive quality of absolute confidence. When he talked about something happening in the future, it was so vivid, so real, you
knew
it would happen. A common experience for SEALs is that, once having been part of this incredibly elite team, it can seem impossible to imagine that any other experience could come close, as if the path of achievement were by definition downhill from there on. That wasn’t John’s view at all. “I have bigger fish to fry,” was how he saw it. And he was 100 percent positive that he would build something that would become hugely successful.

Figuring out exactly what that would be . . . that was another story.

In the spring of 2000 he asked his lawyer father, Michael, to help him form his own corporation as part of a plan for a restaurant that incorporated a gigantic man-made wave, so that people could come to the restaurant and surf while they were there. He became interested in buying the rights to a British-made amphibious vehicle and distributing it here in the States. He tried his hand at stockbroking. It became a running joke at Michael’s office: John calling and yet again changing his articles of incorporation to fit his latest new idea. Over the next few years that corporation’s name would change six times—and there were dozens of other business ideas that never even made it to the corporate-naming stage. Nothing quite came together. To a casual observer, John’s serial-entrepreneur efforts might have seemed no more than a string of harebrained ideas that would never amount to anything. It would be a few years before the evidence
proved it, but that casual observer would have been dead wrong.

Meanwhile John and I had continued in our SEAL careers on parallel tracks. When I went to Golf Platoon he joined Bravo, our sister platoon, and deployed to the Middle East at the same time we did. While we were part of the amphibious readiness group (the one that ended up rushing to the aid of the stricken USS
Cole
), Bravo was stationed in Bahrain, where they engaged in noncompliant ship boardings, enforcing UN sanctions against Iraq. On that deployment John proved himself one of their team’s most outstanding performers.

A hostile ship boarding, called a VBSS (visit, board, search, and seizure), is a high-speed, precision operation. After sneaking up alongside the hostile ship with your fast boats, you have to get your guys up and over the ship’s railings before the onboard crew of smugglers and pirates even realizes you’re there, because the moment they know they’re being boarded they’ll take aggressive countermeasures. In the case of a smuggling ship on the Gulf, they’ll haul ass for nearby Iranian waters, where you’re legally powerless to do anything.

During the critical split-second
board
phase of one of Bravo Platoon’s VBSS operations, one of the guys fired a grappling hook that failed to catch on the pirate ship’s railing.

“I was still processing the fact that the thing hadn’t taken,” John’s OIC explained afterward, “and in a fraction of a second John threw another hook up there by hand.” John’s hook caught, and within the next few seconds he had scuttled up the line and was up there on the railing laying down suppressing fire with a squad automatic weapon (SAW)
while the rest of the boarding team crawled up the line after him. “I’d never seen a reaction time like that before,” his OIC added. “And I’ve never seen one since.”

When our deployments ended, John and I were both coming up for reenlistment, which would mean a decent cash bonus if we opted to stay in. I was married by this time, John was engaged to his girlfriend, Jackie, and we were both thinking about the financial demands of starting a family. I took the bonus and stayed in, moving from Golf to Echo Platoon, which was scheduled to go overseas later that year (though we could hardly have guessed we would end up in the mountains of Afghanistan hunting for terrorist training camps). John took a different path. When Bravo Platoon got back from their deployment at the end of 2000, John surprised Jackie by saying he wasn’t going to reenlist. He loved being part of the teams—but he wanted out.

John was a valuable asset (he was hell on the M60 machine gun), and our command didn’t want to lose him. The commander of SEAL Team Three offered to raise his bonus, but John turned him down. The offer went up; he turned it down again. They finally got up to sixty thousand dollars (an unheard-of amount), but he turned that down, too.

As he said, he had bigger fish to fry.

John left the service in early March 2001, and he and Jackie were married a few weeks later. By this time Jackie had her master’s degree in food science and had gotten a good job offer from National Food Laboratories, up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since John had enlisted right out of high school, Jackie suggested he take this opportunity to go back to school and get a degree. “I grew up on the East Coast,” she says, “in a family where it was ingrained into us that the way
to success was to go to college and get a good job. I really couldn’t picture any other path.” John didn’t see it that way, and he didn’t give much of a damn about school, but he agreed to give it a shot. They moved to the Oakland area and he enrolled in a community college there while he looked for a job.