—Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
My second wife had left me and taken everything, including my nine-year-old stepdaughter and our four-year-old daughter, leaving me down in the dumps and living alone in our empty house in Virginia Beach. No furniture. No TV. Not even a toaster. I bought a cheap futon and slept on that.
Weekdays I spent training the guys at ST-2. Weekends, even though I stayed busy running, cycling, paddling, and lifting, were tough.
One Saturday afternoon, a SEAL buddy of mine named Bruce called me and invited me to a barbecue. I didn’t feel like going out, so I said, “Thanks, Bruce. But I think I’ll stay home.”
When he mentioned food and beverages, my ear perked up.
Bruce said, “Come on, Don. It’s a great sunny day; ride your bike over. I’ll meet you halfway.”
I got on my Harley and rode from my home in Virginia Beach about five miles to the local 7-Eleven, where Bruce was waiting on his chopper. His Harley was more radical than mine, with ape hangers and very loud upswept fishtails.
I eased off the throttle and heard the loud bup-bup-bup of my motor—a sound that some people find annoying but that always fills me with excitement and expectation.
“Follow me,” Bruce said with a wild smirk on his face.
What’s going on? I wondered.
He led the way to a nice neighborhood just two miles outside of the SEAL Team Six compound. One of our SEAL buddies opened the wooden gates when he heard us approaching. Wafting through the air was the welcome smell of barbecue.
I saw about a dozen guys I knew from the teams, all of them holding beers and grinning like cats that had just eaten canaries. Beyond them were six young women lying on lounge chairs, either topless or entirely naked.
Immediately, I was like, Wow! This is cool.
One of the girls said, “We were just playing a joke. Bruce told us you needed some cheering up.”
“Thanks. Hey, before you get dressed, would you mind posing with the bikes?”
I borrowed Bruce’s wife’s camera and figured, Why waste a great opportunity?
They complied. It was my introduction to a group that we called Frogs on Hogs—which now includes over two hundred SEALs who own Harleys and who often get together to ride on weekends and to hang out.
Even though I was still feeling down because of my second failed marriage, riding with the guys helped me clear my head. On Memorial Day weekend 1994 we rode to the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, DC, to raise awareness of the plight of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action. Something like fifty thousand bikers from all over the country assembled in the Pentagon’s north parking lot then rode together up and over the Memorial Bridge, past the Capitol, and then down Constitution Avenue to the Vietnam veterans memorial wall, near the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool.
As waves of bikes carrying Vietnam vets and their supporters rumbled past the rear of the White House, we passed a relatively small group of gay marchers on their way to Capitol Hill. Talk about a contrast in lifestyles.
President Bill Clinton, who had recently been sworn into office, was scheduled to speak to the bikers. When he took the stage, over half of the people in attendance turned their backs on the commander in chief who had dodged the draft instead of fighting for his country in Vietnam.
Frogs on Hogs continued. Though the group was made up exclusively of men, we did decide to admit one woman, named Debbie, a former Navy LT who had recently retired.
She was full of life and rode a Sportster that her dad had willed to her. Debbie had been dating an ST-6 guy named Tom, and they got engaged. One rainy Saturday afternoon, Deb called Tom and asked him to meet her at Harpoon Larry’s bar on the beach.
Tom said no but told her to come home afterward and he’d make her dinner.
But as soon as he hung up the phone, he changed his mind about the bar. So while Deb was on her way, Tom got on his bike and rode past my house to meet her at Harpoon Larry’s.
Deb’s bike hit a slick patch on the wet road and flew over the sidewalk and up four steps that led to a hotel lobby. The front wheel of the bike climbed up the wall, then the bike flipped over and landed on top of Debbie.
As Tommy rode past the hotel, he saw an overturned bike with a rider trapped underneath. He ran up to help the biker and, seeing that it was his fiancée, fell to pieces. Tommy called me immediately. I was there in a flash.
But there was nothing I could do to help Debbie.
The accident had ruptured her aorta, and she quickly bled out. I watched as she took her last breath.
Thrills and danger ride together. That’s the way it works.
While I was still the training officer at ST-2, I accompanied a Delta platoon to winter-warfare training in Alaska. The forty-five-day course started with the basics of survival in a frigid landscape around the Buskin River—we set up snow caves and slept in them, worked with avalanche beacons, did cross-country and downhill skiing, pulled sleds, made fires, fished, procured food and water, and conducted small-boat drills in Seward Bay, which, because it’s salt water, doesn’t freeze in the winter.