Inside SEAL Team Six(82)

Day three we’d climbed to about twelve thousand feet when a bad storm started blowing in. We now had to cross a rocky peak that was covered with snow and ice.

Juli and Erik went up the side of the cliff without a problem.

I noticed some loose rock and warned the two cousins that they shouldn’t climb one behind the other; the person ahead might dislodge a rock that would tumble down onto the guy below.

I ascended and waited with Juli and Erik. The three of us were sitting on the side of the mountain taking in the incredible scenery around us and wondering when the next storm was going to hit when we heard some rocks come loose, then the sound of rocks falling, and then a bloodcurdling scream.

Mark and Mike hadn’t wanted to be separated. So Mark had ascended the cliff with Mike right below him, just like I had warned them not to do. Mark had knocked a rock loose; that had caused a rock avalanche, and…bam!

I climbed down to them and found Mike holding his right hand, which had been smashed by a boulder. He was in shock as he looked down at the bloody stump of flesh—all that I could see was a little piece of the palm.

I quickly wrapped his hand with the military OD green triangular bandage that I was wearing as a headband and yelled to Erik, “Set up a tent. Tell Juli to activate the emergency personal-locator beacon!”

Juli activated the beacon, and the race organizers in Argentina dispatched a medevac helicopter, which arrived forty minutes later. In the meantime, I bandaged and splinted Mike’s hand and stopped the bleeding.

We found a small ledge on the side of the mountain for the helo to land, and when it did we carried Mike aboard. Fortunately, the helicopter took off minutes before the storm hit, otherwise Mike would have had to wait until it blew over.

His cousin Mark was an emotional wreck, so I said to him, “Mark, you might as well leave the race. Take care of your cousin.”

But Mark was determined to finish.

Next, we had to descend twenty-five hundred feet down the side of a snowy mountain and climb over another range. The ride was a blast. You basically sat on your backpack, used your ice pick to steer, and glissaded all the way down.

Juli went first, then Erik.

Before I left, I asked Mark, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

He answered, “I’ll be fine; I just need a minute. You go ahead.”

I went down like a shot.

At the bottom Erik and Juli asked me, “How do you think he’s going to do?”

As we watched, Mark stumbled, fell, and tumbled all the way down the mountain. Before he even reached the bottom, we started to set up the tent and radio for medevac. He was badly broken up.

After Mark was medevaced, all that remained of Team Odyssey was me, Erik, and Juli. We flew through the rest of the course, passing twenty-seven teams in the next two days. Late in the race, I sank into a patch of quicksand.

Also, during two days of continuous paddling, I saw a beautiful Chinese girl in a traditional costume emerge from the water just in front of my canoe, and I stopped paddling. Erik, who was sitting behind me, asked, “What’s the matter, Don? Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to hit the girl.” Of course, there was no girl.

The three of us made it to the finish along with about half of the teams that had entered, but our finish was unofficial because we didn’t have a full team.



That was my first adventure race and I loved it. I was getting tired of the triathlons, with just the three sports. Adventure racing was much more exciting. By this time I had competed in over a thousand endurance competitions and I was looking for something more—and I had found it. So I immediately started planning and training for the next Raid, which was going to take place in South Africa in 1996.

That summer I was training with a group of athletes who were interested in participating too. Five of us paddled for twelve hours, then drove to the mountains in western Virginia and ran with packs and boots for fifty miles. Following that we mountain biked for another fifty miles with backpacks.

After we returned to Virginia Beach, we rode our bicycles another sixty miles at high speed (about twenty-three miles an hour, average).

As soon as the bike ride was over, I flew to Atlanta with a group of ST-6 operators to provide liaison and security to the Atlanta Summer Olympics, where 10,320 athletes from 197 countries were going to compete in 271 events. We landed, were briefed about the area we would be operating in and the mission, and were told we had ten hours before we had to report to FBI headquarters.

We were staying in a military barracks near a small park outside of Atlanta, which we were told was a known site of drug deals and homosexual hookups. Beyond the park stood several wooded mountains. Even though I was exhausted, I did a twelve-mile mountain-trail run.