Inside SEAL Team Six(33)

“No, sir,” I answered.

“Where’s my PRC-seventy-seven radio?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Where are all the burlap bags?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Did you smash our lights?”

“No, sir.”

His face started to turn red, and he barked, “I need to know the truth!”

I repeated my name, rank, and service number the way I’d been taught.

Shaking his head in exasperation, he said, “You don’t understand, Petty Officer Mann. I’m being serious.”

So was I.

We kept going back and forth like this until the commandant finally broke role and shook my hand.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve been selected as the class honor graduate.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’d go to war with you anytime. But now I need to know the answers to my questions.”

I told him what he wanted to know, and he gave me the honor of raising the Stars and Stripes to signify that the course was over.

That’s when I learned that the commandant’s real name was Captain Ralph E. Gaither and he was a U.S. Navy hero who had spent 2,675 days in captivity in Vietnam.

SERE School had lasted ten days.



When I returned to the ST-1 base in Coronado I was told that my platoons hadn’t been formed yet.

Determined to become a better corpsman, I requested permission to attend the Special Forces medical lab in Fort Bragg, North Carolina—known in the military as Goat Lab.

The executive officer at ST-1 said, “It’s not required. Are you sure you want to go? The course is long and difficult.”

“Yes, sir.”

Goat Lab proved to be the most demanding and useful eight weeks of training I’ve ever had, because the Special Forces medics in attendance had spent the past ten months learning lab work and diagnostics at Fort Sam Houston, in Texas. Goat Lab for them was the combat-trauma phase of a larger course of study.

Although I had ER experience, I’d never learned how to do blood work and diagnose diseases. As the only SEAL in a class of twenty, I was very much behind the other guys and trying to catch up.

Day one, each one of us was given a patient in the form of a diseased goat. (Back in the Vietnam era, they’d used sick dogs.) Mine was a big fellow with a long red beard, so we named him Barbarosa, after the character Willie Nelson played in the movie of the same name.

I’ve always loved animals and don’t hunt. But now, after two other SF guys strapped Barbarosa down, I had to shoot him in the leg with a thirty-aught-six. Bam!

For the rest of Goat Lab it was my job to keep Barbarosa alive.

The bullet left a small entry wound and a large exit hole in his upper thigh. First thing I did was stop the bleeding. Then I cut away the damaged tissue, which is called a primary wound debridement.

The other SF medics and I took turns in surgery. I acted as the primary surgeon on Barbarosa and served as assistant surgeon and anesthesiologist for other guys in the class on their animals. And they did the same for me.

It was hard work. Every four hours, day and night, you had to check your patient’s vital signs—temperature, pulse, and respiration. And during the day, you did blood work. A classmate would hold the goat’s head back while you found a vein, inserted a catheter, and took blood. Then you’d put a sample of blood under the microscope and examine and measure red blood cells and white blood cells, and check for diseases.

I spent days and nights with Barbarosa and grew fond of him.

One cold morning in January, we were doing the morning report with the course veterinarian and he asked how all the patients were doing. I was seated in the back of the room. Once again, as the only SEAL, I was known as Baby Killer.

I’d been up late into the night studying medical manuals in my effort to catch up with the rest of the class.

The vet asked, “How did everything go last night?”

One of the SF medics answered, “Things went fine. But we had one patient that died.”

“What do you mean, he died?”

“He died,” the SF medic answered. “We went in the pen this morning to look and he was dead.”

“How do you know he was dead?” the vet asked.

“He was lying there and he wasn’t breathing.”

The vet raised his voice and said, “A patient is never dead until a doctor pronounces him dead. Now get out there and resuscitate him.”

Since I was the closest one to the door, I got to him first. The goat had rigor mortis with frozen saliva on the side of its mouth. It was obviously dead.

I got down on the ground and performed mouth-to-mouth for a good twenty minutes, up until the vet said, “Okay, the patient is now confirmed dead.”