Inside SEAL Team Six(52)

Once there, we had four hours to get dressed, pack our gear, have our intel briefing, and go to our cage to get our weapons and ammo. We always kept our wartime ammo separate from the training ammo.

If you were a demolitions guy, you packed all of the demolition. If it was a jump op, the riggers would pack all of the chutes and related gear; if it was a dive op, the men in the dive locker would pack all dive-related gear.

Typically, a recall involved the entire assault team with coxswain and sniper support. We were the only maritime counterterrorism team in the world that could be wheels-up in fewer than four hours!

Once we were recalled the day before a team member named Conrad was going to be married. It was a big wedding, and all of us were invited. But Conrad was the only one who got permission to attend. Later, when we saw the pictures, we noticed that he was just one guy in the company of all our wives and girlfriends. The joke around the base was that it had been a lesbian wedding.

All the operators on ST-6 were trained to be shooters, jumpers, divers, and so on. But each one of us had a specialty. For example, some were breachers, some were coxswains, some were snipers, some were communications reps. I was the medic, a dive supervisor, and a lead climber. So as a lead climber, I was the guy who went up the ladder first, whether we were climbing up the side of a ship, oil rig platform, or building.

During specialized training (SPECTRA, we called it), each of us would work on his specific skills. I climbed at Yosemite; Red Rock, Nevada; and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to train with some of the world’s top climbers. I also attended advanced para-rescue medical training courses with the USAF Pararescue (PJs) and advanced mini goat-lab courses with the Army Special Forces, and I worked at the Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg as an “intern”—which meant that I was allowed to assist in all types of procedures in the emergency and operating rooms.

Then, during the team’s deployment cycle, all of us would pack up and deploy somewhere in CONUS (the contiguous United States) or OCONUS (outside the contiguous United States). We might travel as a team to Puerto Rico for a three-week dive trip, or to Arizona for two to three weeks of HAHO jumping. Sometimes we ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​

The person or persons who had that specific specialty planned the trip. So I designed the climbing, medical, and dive deployments.

We trained for land, air, water, and mountain, arctic, jungle, desert, and urban terrain. No other maritime unit in the world was better trained, more versatile, or could deploy to as many locations in the world.

Given the level of expertise of the individual operators, we had spectacular advanced-training runs. Instead of static ship boarding, we practiced complex under-ways, which required the split-second timing of numerous components.

During under-ways, we’d parachute into the ocean and drop up to four cigarette boats on pallets approximately five miles away from the moving target ship.

We’d hit the water as close as possible to the cigarette boats, jettison our chutes, swim to the boats, and cut the assault boats free from the pallets. A steer-and-throttle man would board each boat and start the engine.

Then each boat crew would load its respective boat. Once all boats were loaded, we’d take off at a high rate of speed toward the target, generally a cruise liner.

These ops were always conducted at night. Sometimes we’d drop an extra boat, because if one hit the water at the wrong angle, it would sink to the bottom like a lawn dart.

Once the target ship passed, the assault boats moved into position. Two would attack from the starboard side, and two from the portside, in tandem.

With the assault boats bobbing up and down and the target moving at a good speed, a pole man would stand on the bow of the boat, with two men holding him, then extend a telescopic pole with the cave-in ladder attached and try to hook it to something solid on the deck of the target vessel.

At the same time the pole went up on the starboard side, one was also going up on the portside. If one boat dropped its pole or couldn’t attach its ladder, the cigarette boat behind it would move into position. If the worst-case scenario happened, we needed only one ladder to go up, because everyone could climb up the same ladder.