Inside SEAL Team Six(83)
On the way to the barracks, I stopped at the base gym to finish my three-day nonstop workout. I crushed myself on the leg-extension machine. Usually I could lift 340 pounds, but this time I could only lift around 30—I was beat!
Wanting to push myself until I didn’t have anything at all left, I started to run back to the barracks, passing through the park that we had been told to avoid. When I stopped behind a tree to urinate, I pissed pure blood.
I’d done this other times during ultra-distance runs and wasn’t particularly concerned. But now I felt light-headed and collapsed to the ground.
I woke up minutes later by the tree, with my shorts down, wondering where the heck I was. I couldn’t even remember the name of the city, or the state.
I pulled up my shorts and started to walk. And as I did, my head started to clear.
Later, when I explained to the guys on the ST-6 security detail what had happened to me, they joked to the FBI guys that I’d been assaulted in the park.
On the night of July 27, 1996, thousands of spectators gathered in the town square area of Centennial Olympic Park for a late-night concert by Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, whose big hit was “Cardiac Party.” Sometime around midnight, someone planted a green U.S. military field pack containing three pipe bombs surrounded by nails underneath a bench near the base of a concert sound tower. The bombs weighed more than forty pounds and used a steel plate as a directional device.
Security guard Richard Jewell discovered the suspicious field pack and alerted Georgia Federal Bureau of Investigation officers. Nine minutes later, the bomber called 911 and alerted authorities.
I was on duty at the operations center with an FBI agent when we got the call. It went something like “My brother-in-law is a nut. He told us that he built a pipe bomb and that he would be famous at these Olympics.”
We’d received dozens of similar calls.
But we decided to take this call seriously and alert authorities, who started to clear concertgoers from the park. At 1:20 a.m., while Richard Jewell and other security officials were in the process of ushering people out, the bomb exploded, killing one woman and injuring over a hundred others. Another man, a Turkish photographer, died from a heart attack while running away from the blast.
President Bill Clinton condemned the bombing as “an evil act of terror” and vowed, “We will spare no effort to find out who was responsible for this murderous act. We will track them down. We will bring them to justice.”
Thirty-four-year-old Richard Jewell was initially lauded as a hero. But three days it came out in the news that the FBI was treating him as a suspect. They conducted several searches of the house where he lived with his mother. Several months later, the investigating U.S. attorney cleared Jewell of all charges.
The investigation stalled until early 1997, when the Atlanta bombing was linked to two other bombings in the Atlanta area. After a massive manhunt, fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph was arrested in Murphy, North Carolina, and sentenced to life in prison.
As the advanced-training officer at ST-6, I organized and conducted elaborate training exercises—capability exercises (CAPEX), we called them. Sometimes we’d rent commercial cruise liners for a week at a cost in excess of a million dollars and practice taking them down.
Often we deployed all three SEAL assault teams, along with the snipers, breachers, and coxswains, and worked with helicopters and ships. We would spend an entire week climbing up the sides of the ship from the cigarette boats, rappelling down from the helos, taking down the ship’s ballroom, disabling the engines, and defusing elaborate IEDs. It was an exercise in coordination with the air assets, boat assets, assault teams, and ship crews.
We also practiced jumping from passenger jets. We’d be sitting in a Boeing 727 with the passengers in the front of the plane and our parachutes stashed in the luggage compartment. Once we got close to our target, we’d move to the back of the aircraft, which would be partitioned off by a curtain.
We’d open the door to the luggage compartment and retrieve our parachutes, then crank open the back door of the jet. The first four guys would position themselves on the stairs. When the green light went on, they jumped. Then the rest of the team would run down the steps and jump. We needed to exit quickly so that the separation between all the jumpers in the air wasn’t too great. We usually achieved a tight stack and flew, bumping canopies.
We even had passenger jets specially designed so the seats would turn around to make room for us to don our chutes. We practiced this often.
In addition to being the ST-6 advanced-training officer, I served as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) officer, which became the most important program that ST-6 was involved with at the time. We went from a counterterrorism team to a counter-WMD team. Part of my responsibility was to help track and recover approximately two hundred nuclear weapons that had gone missing when the Soviet union disintegrated in 1990.