Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice (19 page)

For me, being part of the post-9/11 operation in Afghanistan had been a hell of an education, and it packed an awful lot of experience into six short months. The invasion of Iraq was that same experience for Glen, and he saw his share of the realities of war. When he returned to the States he came over to my place again, and we did the same kind of debriefing we’d done on my return from Afghanistan, only this time it was him sharing the stories with me.

•   •   •

Throughout our years in the service, Glen and I hung out every chance we got. We drank together, went surfing together, and stayed up late into the night talking together. More than anything else, we pursued our lifelong passion for flying together.

With all the ocean training and “frogman” thing, it’s easy
to forget that the “A” in SEAL stands for
air
. All my life I’d wanted to be a pilot, and so had Glen. Fresh out of high school he enrolled in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and earned a bachelor’s in aeronautics.

In early 2005 I bought a little 1981 Cessna 172 over the Internet. The guy I was buying it from lived out in Illinois, so I asked Glen to fly there with me and help me bring it home. This was February and a bad snowstorm was moving in, so we had limited time to get this sucker out of there.

By this time Glen was out of the service (though I was still in), and he had just finished his instrument qual; I was about to finish mine. We were flying a lot, so we were both pretty current. We were also cocky and overconfident, as SEALs tend to be.

Arriving at the airport in the evening, we decided we’d collect the plane right away and get the hell out of there. It was dark and cloudy out, with the storm system on its way in, but we figured we were charged up and ready to go. Just as we were about to leave the pilot’s lounge and head to the plane, this old-timer walks over to our table and says, “Hey, you two fellas the ones just bought old Bob’s Cessna?”

Yeah, we said, that was us.

“You fellas really think it’s a good idea to take that plane out tonight? Having never flown it before? In this kinda weather?”

We looked at each other. The old guy had a point. After he left I turned to Glen and said, “What the fuck were we thinking?” He grinned and didn’t say anything. There’s a saying in aviation: “There are bold pilots and old pilots, but no old bold pilots.” We stayed in Illinois that night.

The next morning we got up at dawn, filed our flight plan
for our first leg to Oklahoma, grabbed some coffee, hopped into the plane, and took off. From eight hundred feet up it was IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), pilotspeak for “too overcast to see,” but we knew once we got high enough we would break out of the cloud layer.

As we started climbing, we discovered that our radio didn’t work. We were hearing the tower okay, but they weren’t hearing us; we’d somehow lost the ability to transmit.

Okay: no visibility and no communications.

At about five thousand feet I glanced out my window and said, “Hey, Glen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but look.” He looked over past me, out my window. Rime icing—the frosty white ice that forms when water vapor freezes to the surfaces of cold objects—was starting to form on the wing struts. Flying in ice, in a plane that isn’t certified to fly in ice: not good. If we descended back through the cloud layer we would just keep picking up more ice. If we kept climbing and broke out, the ice would probably burn off. We had to keep climbing.

No visibility, no communications, and a plane that was icing up.

“Shit,” I said.

We looked at each other and laughed. Glen said, “Hey, at least we’ve got each other. If we’re gonna go, we go together.”

At about seven thousand feet, the cloud cover broke. IFR (instrument flight rules) are when you fly east you fly at odd altitudes, and when you fly west you fly at even altitudes, for clean traffic separation. At VFR (visual flight rules) it’s even plus five hundred, but this was an IFR plane. We flew at eight thousand feet all the way to Oklahoma, the whole way trying
to figure out what the hell was wrong with our radio. We happened to have a little Garmin aviation GPS with us. That damn thing probably saved our lives.

As we flew into Tulsa we settled into our precision-instrument approach, when we made another fun discovery: Our glide scope didn’t work. Oh, cool. Now we were executing a precision-instrument landing without precision instruments, and no radio. And it was still cloudy. I pulled out a little handheld radio I’d happened to bring along. That would have to serve.

Nothing to do but just fly the damn thing in.

We broke out of the clouds in the center of the runway, midfield, right smack over the tower. A voice came over the radio: “Hey, you’ve only got about two hundred feet of runway left; you want to circle around and then land?”

I looked at Glen with a question on my face. He looked back and said, “Dude, I am so stressed, I’m puttin’ this fucking thing down right now.”

And we did: just planted it on the deck like an aircraft-carrier landing, which is to say, like a dog taking a dump. Thump! there it is. Stopped short with less than fifty feet of runway in front of us—and taxied in with just enough reserve gas to make it.

Once we were on the ground the radio worked perfectly. It wasn’t till we eventually got back to San Diego that we figured out what had happened: The antennae weren’t grounded properly, so as long as we were on the ground everything worked fine, but once we were in the air, no dice. Good to know. Would have been even better to have known
before
flying halfway across the country.

We refueled and took off again. After a total of sixteen and a half hours in the air we stayed overnight in New Mexico, then made the final leg home.

Glen and I did a lot of flying over the years, but what we really wanted to do was fly a single-engine plane clear around the world. The speed record for that particular feat was still quite breakable, and we knew we could crush it. But we never got the chance. I’d still love to do it. I just don’t know whether there’s anyone I’d trust enough as a flying partner—anyone other than Glen.

•   •   •

In 2006, a year after our cross-country adventure in the little Cessna, I left the service, and the first thing I did was follow Glen’s footsteps (and John Zinn’s) into the world of private security contracting. Glen, as usual, knew the right people, and he helped me get my application fast-tracked so that by the time I left the service, I already had a deployment date set in the shadowy world of private-contract security work, or Global Response Staff (GRS).

This is a realm most people don’t know much about, but private-contract security work is a noble calling that gave people like John Zinn, Glen, and me the opportunity to keep serving our country and making the world a safer place even after taking off the uniform.

In the Special Operations community, we have a belief that there are three types of people in the world. The
wolves
are what most would call “evil people.” They are the rapists and murderers, the psychopaths and extremists who prey on the weak and use violence and others’ fear to achieve their goals. In the twentieth century they stood on stages and
commanded armies, if they were lucky. In the twenty-first, they hide in the shadows, guide planes into skyscrapers, and delude their recruits into blowing themselves up in public places.

Then there are the sheep—good people, everyday people who go about their lives, able to do so in safety only because they are protected from the wolves. For the most part, they are not aware of the wolves, or that they are being protected from them. They may not even really believe that there
are
wolves out there, ready to cause them harm. But there are.

And sheepdogs are acutely aware of it.

Sheepdogs can look like wolves, and may at times even be mistaken for them, but they serve the opposite cause. They exist not to prey on sheep but to preserve them, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, as Mike Bearden explained it to his dad. They are here for one purpose: to look after the safety of the flock.

Here’s an easy way to understand the difference between sheepdogs and everyone else. Most people, when they hear about a terrorist event or violent attack, think, “Thank God I wasn’t in that movie theater or on that plane.” A sheepdog hears about the same event and says, “Damn—I wish I’d
been
there!” Why? Because maybe he could have done something to stop it from happening.

As Heath Robinson’s sig line said, most of us are able to go about our lives in relative safety only because there are “rough men standing ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Sheepdogs are those rough men. That was who Glen was, whether or not he happened to be an active-duty Navy SEAL at the time.

For my part, I did some of this work in Iraq, where I ran
all sorts of missions, from the insanely dangerous to the dangerously insane—missions I can’t talk about but which, if I could, would make for some pretty colorful, edge-of-your-seat action flicks.

I did that routine twice, for a stretch of a few months each. Glen had by then been doing it for a few years, and he kept doing it long after I stopped, traveling to work in the world’s hottest hot spots and most explosive situations. The most dangerous scene he ever encountered, he told me, was not in the Middle East or Africa but in Mexico City, where he worked with a man who didn’t seem to fully grasp the over-the-top risks he was taking.

Glen was furious with the guy’s carelessness. Because of his arrogant refusal to listen to the advice of experience, he was endangering a lot of other lives.

“Look, dude,” Glen told the man, “if you keep going like this you’re going to get whacked. It’s not a matter of
if
. It’s only a question of
when
.”

•   •   •

In the summer of 2010, Glen turned forty, and his siblings and friends pulled a “surprise” birthday party for him, the word in quotes because of course he knew about it ahead of time. I don’t think there was a party anywhere on planet Earth since 1970 that Glen didn’t know about ahead of time. Still, he did a great job of acting surprised.

He did a less than perfect job of acting happy. His marriage had fallen apart not long before this, and it was eating at him. On the one hand, he relished the freedom (which was more or less why it didn’t work out in the first place). He and Sonja had a little sign on their Encinitas house that said, T
HE
D
OHERTYS
. The first time I visited there after the divorce
went through, I saw that Glen had crossed out the
S
so that it now read simply, T
HE
D
OHERTY
. He got the biggest kick out of that.

At the same time, he was completely torn up about it. I think it was less the fact that that they weren’t together anymore and more that he’d failed. Glen hated failure. As tolerant as he was—and he was one of the most tolerant people I’ve ever known—he had no tolerance for failure. Especially
this
failure. This was what his dad had done.

By this time he had been doing this private-contract security work for years, and everyone who knew him and loved him could see that it was wearing on him. It was wearing on the whole country. We’d been at war for nearly a decade, the longest stretch of continuous warfare in our nation’s young history. And it was sapping us—financially, emotionally, some would argue (and I would not disagree) even morally. Glen was showing the signs of that wear.

I cannot honestly say he was looking seriously at alternatives, at least not yet. But his friends were certainly looking for him, me included. I was working hard on the Wind Zero project and brought Glen in as a minority partner. He became intensely involved for a while, not only helping with the fund-raising effort but also managing training and consulting contracts. When a large contract came in I could hand it over to Glen and sleep like a baby at night, knowing he’d take impeccable care of the customers. When I started work on my first book,
21st Century Sniper
(later rereleased as
Navy SEAL Sniper
), Glen was my coauthor. When I took a cherry executive position for a major defense firm after Wind Zero collapsed to make ends meet, I tried my best to get Glen to look at taking one as well.

And these were not his only career options. On a surfing trip to Mexico in 2009, a buddy of ours got smashed into some rocks and had his spine pierced. He needed emergency surgery. There was no one around to do that but us. As it happened, one of our party was Sohaib Kureshi, a brilliant Pakistani brain surgeon. (Note to self: When surfing off-country, always bring along a brilliant surfer brain surgeon.) We tossed our friend onto a picnic table at the place where we were staying, after stopping off at the only nearby store for beer and painkillers, and turned to Glen—who had his medic kit on hand, as always. Glen loaded our buddy with morphine, irrigated the puncture site, and proceeded to help Sohaib do the delicate surgery. “If he’s interested in doing it,” Sohaib told us after it was all over, “Glen’s got a brilliant medical career ahead of him.” (For two weeks every year Glen ran a medical clinic on Tavarua Island, a destination surf resort off the coast of Fiji.)

Glen had looked at all these options, and there was something attractive in every one of them. He was always up for new experiences and challenges. “Glen is the master of moving goalposts,” a friend observed. “His problem isn’t that he doesn’t have goals. His problem is that he has a hundred goals.”

Still, he hadn’t made any serious moves or given any real indication that a career change was in the offing.

At that surprise party, I got to meet Glen’s siblings, Greg and Kate, for the first time. Glen had always talked about them so fondly that it felt as if I already knew them. Greg had written a speech for the event, which he and Kate delivered. They described a line in that magnificent Robert Redford film
A River Runs Through It
, where the older brother is
recalling his father’s struggle to find more memories of his younger son, Paul, the Brad Pitt character: