Inside SEAL Team Six(62)

My swim partner and I used to beat the hell out of each other, just for fun. When on the road or out in the field, every night we came back to our room (we were also roommates) and attacked each other like Inspector Clouseau and Cato from the Pink Panther movies.

Once our administrative senior chief joined us while we were messing around, and I put him in a headlock and stuck his head in the toilet. He reported me, but the charge was dismissed.

One night I was lying in bed with Kim in our house in Virginia Beach when, just after midnight, I heard someone jiggling the doorknob on our front door. I whispered, “Hey, Kim. I think someone’s trying to break in.”

I grabbed the loaded .45 I kept under my bed and crawled down the hallway. The front door was to my right. I crawled past the living room, went out the back door, slithered out, and ran around to the front. I was excited. My plan was to surprise the guy from behind and bang his head against the front porch while I held him at gunpoint.

But as I was coming around, a car took off from the front of my house and sped by at seventy miles an hour. It was going so fast, I couldn’t read the license plate number. Disappointed, I returned to bed.

The next day I was back at work at ST-6 when my teammate Dave came up to me and said, “I hope I didn’t bother you guys last night. I got so shit-faced that I went to your house instead of mine and was trying to get in the front door. My house key wasn’t working.”

I shook my head and said, “Dave, you’re not going to believe what almost happened.”

We dressed like civilians, and tried to look like civilians. But it didn’t work all the time. Once, a group of us walked into a bar in Puerto Rico. I knew that we needed a cover, so I said, “Guys, let’s say that we’re in a band.”

One of the guys on my boat crew said, “Yeah, we’ll say we’re called Head East and we just reunited.”

We started talking to a group of girls, and before we knew it, someone on the stage announced that there was a band in the house called Head East. Our cover worked until one of the girls asked us to sing one of our songs.

Another time we were on a dive trip to Key West. We were thirty fit guys with long hair and beards sitting around a hotel pool and trying not to look like we were in the military. But the girls wouldn’t come near us. They assumed we were gay.

Each of us was given a stipend for clothes. We were supposed to buy two suits and a couple of casual outfits. But some guys, including me, didn’t know anything about buying or wearing fancy clothes.

One guy on the team, whom we called Dirty Dan (he truly earned his name), used to shop at the Salvation Army. He’d show up in used striped pants, a worn checkered jacket, a plaid shirt, and shoes that were a size too big for him. We thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t.

Turned out he was spending all his extra stipend money on guns. Other guys blew their money on motorcycles or cars.

Guys had different ways of blowing off steam. I worked out and raced in world-class multisport endurance competitions. Others entered shooting competitions or sniper matches. Some raced motorcycles or cars. Many competed in hand-to-hand defense meets. Some of the guys on the team were incredible musicians. A precious few were family men.

Hazing was a popular activity, especially on birthdays and when guys were getting married. As the medic, I kept the medical records, so I knew the guys’ birthdays and instigated most of the hazing.

If a guy was getting married, we’d shave off his pubic hair and eyebrows. On a teammate’s birthday, we’d make him play a game called a shot or a shot.

We’d put paintball .38 rounds in the freezer, then lay out ten to twenty shots of tequila. We’d ask the guy which one he wanted, a shot or a shot.

If he chose the paintball shot, we’d fire it at his bare stomach, which stung bad and left a big red welt. Guys would alternate back and forth.

This went on for an hour until the guy was throwing up from all the tequila and his stomach was covered with welts.

Sometimes we’d wrap the birthday boy in duct tape and throw him in the ocean.

As my thirtieth birthday approached, I knew I was next, and I tried to come up with a plan to keep the thirty guys on my team off me. On the day itself we happened to be working in the kill house at the ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ Thirty of us had driven there, two men per car.

I remembered that when I was a prison guard one of the inmates had smeared feces all over himself and came out with his arms held wide. And all of us had backed off. Sounded like a plan.

So I stole all the car keys and locked them in one of the cars. I kept the keys to one car, but not mine. I figured that when they came for me and I ran, they would think I was planning to escape in my car. This way I would misdirect them. Besides, since I’d be covered with shit, I didn’t want to get it all over the upholstery of my own rental car.