Next, he picked up the skull section and put it back, saying, “Look, it’s just like a bowling ball.”
As I watched in a combination of wonder and horror, he mixed some liquid with the bone fragments and then used that as a superglue to hold the skull section in place.
He carefully peeled the face back up over the skull and lined up the nostrils and eye sockets.
“That’s it!” he announced.
Miraculously, the boy recovered. Months later, he was back on his motorcycle riding around town.
While I was attending to the injured boy, the LT was trying to get Hutch out of jail.
During the three days it took him to negotiate Hutch’s temporary release, Lieutenant Mike R.—who had a really sick sense of humor—continued to mess with him. He told Hutch, “I have bad news. The Bolivians won’t let you out of here, and they’re planning to give you the death penalty.”
He also walked in one day and said, “Sorry, Hutch, but the boy died. You killed an eleven-year-old boy.”
When Hutch started to scream, the LT said, “I’m only kidding.”
Once the LT knew Hutch was being temporarily released, he called us together and said, “I want you guys to load the plane quickly. I’m going to pick up Hutch, then we’re going to fly out of here illegally, as fast as we can.”
I thought, That’s a pretty ballsy move.
Later that night, as we were loading the C-130, the LT drove up in a taxi with Hutch. As soon as they boarded, he ordered the pilot to fire up the engines.
We were pulling the rest of our gear up the back ramp when two platoons of Bolivian soldiers arrived and surrounded the plane, their weapons drawn.
They yelled in Spanish, “If you try to leave, we’ll shoot you.”
The LT refused to back down. Instead, he said, “Okay, guys. Open the cruise boxes and break out your weapons.”
It was going to be like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
We closed the ramp and taxied down the runway as all of us held our breath. Thankfully, the Bolivians (many of whom we had just trained) let us leave without firing a shot.
But when we returned to Panama, we caught hell. The commanding officer who had told us not to cause any trouble was pissed. And rightfully so.
Chapter Thirteen
El Salvador
What does not kill me, makes me stronger.
—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols
My former German teacher Shannon and I were married in 1990, and she eventually moved to Panama with me. But even though we loved each other, our marriage got off to a somewhat rocky start.
When Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm to thwart Iraqi aggression. In Panama, where I was still stationed, I heard over the radio that the U.N.-authorized coalition force of thirty-four nations led by the United States was in dire need of special operators who were also medics, and I wrote to the SEAL commodore in Coronado, California, requesting orders to be assigned to the invasion. When Shannon found out, she protested strongly.
With good reason. She was pregnant with our daughter, Dawnie, who was born on March 22, 1991—which was one of the happiest days of my life.
Months before Dawnie was born, I had been sent with a group of ST-6 SEALs to help provide security to a regional drugs summit being held in the beautiful colonial city of Cartagena, Colombia. Tension was extremely high. Officials feared that Colombian drug barons would take revenge for the recent arrest of their friend and ally Manuel Noriega.
■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ who, in the style of machismo, wore black armbands with DAS printed boldly on them and roared through the streets on trail bikes.
We were staying at the same local hotel as the presidents of Bolivia and Peru. As ST-6 SEALs, we tried to remain low-key, but the seriousness of the summit didn’t stop the presidents and their friends from partying all night with loud music; people laughing, dancing, and screaming; and naked women being thrown in the hotel pool.
President George H. W. Bush was more discreet, arriving in the morning on Air Force One. After the Boeing 747 taxied to a stop near the terminal, the president emerged and waved from the top step of the stairway. At least, I thought it was the president. But when I looked closer, I saw that the man was not the president but an almost perfect double. When he wasn’t shot at or attacked, the real president emerged from the plane and was whisked quickly to an armored limo.
Since BUD/S, the pace of my workouts hadn’t let up. In addition to doing the required daily SEAL PT, I was on a thirty-year mission to work out every day. I hadn’t missed a workout since February of 1978, and that included fifty-mile trail runs, two-hundred-mile bike rides, twenty-four-hour mountain-bike rides, and fifty-mile kayak paddles.