Inside SEAL Team Six(72)

Seven of us stood at attention. The captain made the introductions.

When he got to Adam, who was standing to my right, Captain Fitzgerald said, “This is Lieutenant Curtis. He’s the one who was kidnapped with his wife driving back from the airport.”

Secretary Cheney nodded and said, “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s when we decided to invade.”



As the new year, 1990, began, our pace at SBU-26 didn’t slow down. In fact, many of my teammates from ST-6 requested orders to SBU-26 because they wanted a piece of the action. Chasing the rainbow.

Our patrols started to expand up and down the Pacific coast of Central and South America, and throughout the rivers and waterways from Panama all the way to Bolivia. We were now on the front lines of the war on drugs, which had been declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and grown in intensity during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

The “war” was actually a campaign of foreign military aid and military intervention, with the assistance of participating countries, the goal of which was to reduce or eliminate the sale of illegal drugs.

Over the next two years, I worked with SBU-26 conducting hundreds of VBSSs (visit, board, search, and seizures) throughout Central and South America. We seized hundreds of tons of marijuana and cocaine. But our enthusiasm was quickly dimmed by the rampant local government corruption.

Whenever we entered a foreign country that was cooperating with us—Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, and so on—we’d always meet first with local officials, and they’d brief us on where we could operate. Inevitably they directed us to little villages in the jungle. We’d raid family-run cocaine labs that had fifty-gallon drums and burn down some huts. Seize drugs and equipment.

But it didn’t take long for us all to realize we were attacking the tip of the iceberg. The big drug dealers and labs were being protected by corrupt government officials and were, therefore, untouchable.

Another component of the war on drugs was something we called mobile training ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​

Many of the guys we trained were conscripts with no gear, no training, and little funding. Also, they understood that they had to operate within the political restraints of their country and region. So they weren’t allowed to fully execute their jobs.

Still, we taught them how to shoot, patrol, and establish comms.

One of the MTTs we conducted took place in Riberalta, a little town of about 78,000 on the edge of the Amazon basin in northern Bolivia. The town was primitive and filthy, like something out of the Wild West, but with lots of mosquitoes, and everybody rode a motorcycle.

It wasn’t unusual to see a family of four riding on a Suzuki 125—the wife on the back of the seat, one kid on the gas tank, and another one on the handlebars. Cars and trucks were luxuries that few of the locals could afford.

For some reason, the people who lived there dumped their sewage upstream, so the water we cooked and bathed with was badly polluted. Even though we were careful about what we ate or touched, all of us got sick.

One day we were in our room and the LT said, “Hey, Doc. There’s some guy outside selling rolls.”

All of us were hungry, so I went to check these rolls out. They were covered with seeds and in a plastic bag, and they looked clean. They tasted great.

We must have eaten a hundred of them over the next couple of days. One night we were chewing on the rolls when the LT stopped and closely inspected the seeds.

“These aren’t seeds,” he shouted. “They’re moving!”