Inside SEAL Team Six(34)

The dead goat’s mouth was disgusting, which probably explains why none of the SF medics offered to relieve me.

That episode taught me a lesson that helped me save some lives over the years: never assume someone is dead on the basis of how he looks.

Our final test, called trauma day, was intense. I waited with my medical bag as Barbarosa was led around a corner by two SF guys. Minutes later I heard a loud boom followed by the SF guys screaming, “Medic! Medic!”

I tore around the corner to see Barbarosa on the ground. He was a bloody, smoldering mess. His face had been set on fire. One of his eyes had been pulled out, his right leg had been amputated, and he had two sticks impaled in his chest. In addition, he had suffered several slash wounds that weren’t obvious at first.

I slammed into action: ABCDE.

First, I checked for an airway. Barbarosa didn’t have one, so I did a sweep with my fingers. You do this with a patient whose mouth has been damaged in order to clear away broken teeth, broken bones, blood, mucus, or vomit.

I discovered that Barbarosa’s tongue had been cut and stuffed down his throat; I pinned it to his lip, which is exactly what you would do with a human patient on the battlefield with a prolapsed tongue.

Once he was breathing again, I started to stop the leaks. The slash wounds were treated with direct pressure, but a lot of the bleeding was coming from the sticks that had been impaled in his chest. I chose to leave them in, because I knew that pulling them out would cause more damage.

I made a one-inch slice in his throat and inserted a tube so he had an airway. Then I managed to get two large-bore IVs in him. His vital signs started to stabilize.

I checked Barbarosa’s pupils and saw that they were unequal and not reactive to light, which indicated that he’d probably suffered a severe head injury too. So I had to be careful in terms of moving him. I made a backboard from a camo-colored poncho liner and two bamboo sticks and dragged him over to the vet, who was seated near the incinerator a few hundred meters away.

If I had failed to check something or Barbarosa had died, I would have flunked the course. A lot of guys did.

The vet said, “Okay, you passed. Now throw him in the incinerator.”

Goat Lab was gruesome, and it certainly was hard for someone who loves animals, but the skills it taught me enabled me to save human lives.

In January, I went to Army jump school in Fort Benning, Georgia. All the military services attended this training, which qualified you as a rope jumper, or a static-line jumper. After doing five static-line jumps, I earned my silver jump wings. But static-line jumping isn’t the same as free fall, which is typically what we did in the SEAL teams. The difference is that in static-line jumping, the line that deploys the main canopy is attached to the inside of the aircraft. In free-fall jumping, the parachutist falls to a designated altitude and then deploys the canopy himself.

My first free-fall jump occurred when I returned to ST-1 in Coronado. I remember the thrill of floating down through a beautiful clear blue sky near where Kim and I were living in a double-wide trailer in the community of San Ysidro. As I tried to locate the top of our trailer from the air, I noticed dozens of police cars gathered nearby with flashing lights.

Soon after I reached the ground, I learned that a brutal massacre had taken place at our neighborhood McDonald’s. A mentally disturbed unemployed welder named James Oliver Huberty told his wife he was going “hunting humans,” walked into the fast-food restaurant after lunch armed with an Uzi submachine gun, a 9 mm Browning pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun, and killed twenty-one unarmed people ranging in age from seven to seventy-four.

There were so many victims that the town’s funeral homes had to use the local civic center to accommodate all the wakes.

That horrible incident underlined something I’d learned in SEAL training and that I believe even more strongly today: You can’t anticipate all the challenges that are going to be thrown your way. All you can do is prepare yourself to the best of your abilities.





Chapter Seven





SEAL Team One




Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War





In June of 1983, fourteen of us from Foxtrot platoon assembled on the grinder and Commander McCurry, commander of SEAL Team One, pinned a coveted SEAL trident on my chest and congratulated me.

I was not only extremely proud but also fired up and ready for war. Not like some crazed psychopath, but as a professional commando prepared to fight for God and country.

But the reality was that in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. The Vietnam War had ended years earlier.