Inside SEAL Team Six(79)

When I got home, my wife at the time, Kim, was alarmed by my appearance. I looked in the mirror and saw that my skin had turned green.

I asked Kim to run me a hot bath. After that, I figured, I’d rest.

But I was in so much pain that I couldn’t walk from the bedroom to the bathroom. So I crawled on my hands and knees and passed out in the hallway.

I woke up in the Balboa hospital in San Diego. The doctors informed me that I had a torn rotator cuff, a compressed spine, plantar fasciitis in both feet, and a torn quadriceps muscle in my left leg. My skin had turned green because my liver and kidneys were shutting down. And my weight, which was normally around 185, had dipped below 140.

The doctors called it the worst case of overtraining that they’d ever seen.

I had to stop doing PT, forgo the ultra-distance triathlon, and spend time in the hospital. I hated backing down. And it wasn’t the only time injury forced me to do so.

During a sniper-training mission with ST-2 at Fort Pickett, Virginia, I went out to check the hides the snipers were constructing. Sometimes the snipers’ hides were so good, I’d walk to within three feet of them and still not see them.

So instead of walking through the woods like I usually did, I decided to ride my new Trek Y22 mountain bike, figuring that afterward I’d pedal through the nearby hills and forest, despite not having a helmet.

After checking the hides, I went for a ride and crossed a long wooden bridge. The roadway was made of long six-inch-wide planks of wood that had inch-and-a-half gaps between them. When I saw the gaps, I braked to slow down, but then I immediately started scolding myself, saying, What kind of pussy am I? I’ve ridden and raced all kinds of bicycles and motorcycles and I’m worried that I can’t keep the wheel of my bike on a six-inch-wide board?

I swore to myself I wouldn’t slow down when I crossed it on the way back. An hour or so later, I looked at the bridge and hit it at about twenty-five miles an hour without even thinking of braking.

Lights out!

I woke up on the side of the bridge feeling sunshine on my face and wondering why I was sleeping outside. Then I noticed a sharp pain in my right leg. Stuck in it was a ten-inch-long splinter, and another six-inch splinter was sticking in my forearm.

All the water had trickled out of my water bottle, and I’d suffered a head injury and been unconscious for some time.

I pushed myself hard and often paid the price.

In fact, I can’t count how many times I’ve pushed myself to unconsciousness. We have a saying in the teams that I never liked: Too much can-do can do you in.

I like to think that the only thing that should ever be done in moderation is moderation itself.



In Fort Pickett, as I mentioned, I ran the military operations in urban terrain course. We had a setup that looked just like a village, with cars we could set on fire and all kinds of buildings. I often worked with a British SAS (Special Air Service) soldier who had conducted numerous ops in Northern Ireland.

One afternoon, we took a break so the guys from ST-2 could do their helo-rappel requalifications. The SAS sergeant and I sat on the ground watching them rappel about seventy feet from a helicopter and onto the ground behind a building. A big 230-pound SEAL named Steve was the one first out. He went to brake by putting his hand behind his back, and his Ka-Bar knife came out of its scabbard enough to cut the rope, causing him to fall fifty feet.

The ground shook when he hit it.

Steve broke both his hands, both ankles, his back in two places, and had an open femur fracture in his leg.

I treated Steve with the help of a SEAL corpsman. Although Steve was in tremendous pain, he never lost consciousness. After he was splinted and bandaged, Steve was medevaced out by the same helo he’d fallen from.

Meanwhile, Mike, whom I’d worked with in Panama and who was the LT in the platoon, happened to be videotaping the whole thing. The Navy later used the tape to show new corpsmen how to treat traumatic injuries.

Shannon, Chonie, and our baby daughter, Dawnie, finally arrived in Virginia Beach from Panama. I found a home that Shannon liked, and I thought it was a perfect place to raise a family. But work required me to spend a lot of time away.

Sometime in 1994 I returned to Virginia Beach after a month in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I was running a weapons and CQB course, to find the grass on the lawn high, the light bulbs and toilet paper gone, and our house completely empty. Shannon had packed up and moved across country. She hadn’t even left a letter.

Even though I had sensed that the breakup was coming, I was devastated. Physical pain I could take, but emotional distress was harder to handle.





Chapter Fourteen





Back to ST-6




Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond’s natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.