Inside SEAL Team Six(86)

The sport tests you in every way possible. I’m proud to say that Team Odyssey finished in the top ten out of the seventy top adventure teams in the world that year.

The next year, in October of 1998, Team Odyssey competed in the Raid Gauloises in Ecuador. Among the physical challenges we faced this time was scaling a 19,600-foot live volcano named El Cotopaxi (Neck of the Moon). I suffered altitude sickness on the climb but recovered to complete the event.

When I wasn’t competing with Team Odyssey, I raced in ultra-distance marathons and bike races. And I was conducting SEAL training events for civilians. One of these events took place in Utah, right down the road from the home of NBA superstar Karl Malone. After the event, he invited our five-man SEAL training cadre to meet his wife and children.

I ran to his home from our hotel (twelve or so miles), which he got a huge kick out of. Towering over me, he asked, “In the SEALs, do they ever drop you in the middle of nowhere and you have to find your way back?”

I laughed and said, “Yeah. And sometimes you have to shoot your way out.”

“Do they make you swim a lot?”

“Yes,” I answered. “They do.”

He had his two pretty little girls with him. At one point, he turned to them and said, “Tell this man, what does Daddy do besides play basketball?”

Without missing a beat, they answered, “All Daddy ever does is watch SEAL movies.”

One of those movies was, unfortunately, Navy SEALs, a film starring Charlie Sheen. I say unfortunately because I was part of a group of SEALs who had been asked to serve as consultants on the movie. Chuck Pfarrer, who had been a SEAL at ST-6, based the script on real events. But, in typical Hollywood style, his original script was rewritten many times until it bore little resemblance to reality.

Over the course of the production, most of the SEALs who had been hired as consultants quit. Charlie Sheen constantly worried about getting hurt. He’d stop filming in the midst of an action scene to make sure the cameras picked up the pretty side of his face. He wouldn’t have lasted a week in BUD/S.



In between training, racing, and working at SEAL Team Six, I was trying to sort out my personal life. One of the girls I dated was a beautiful Australian athlete and diver named Paula.

Once when we were diving together in the Caribbean, we snuck into a shark feeding, where three guys with bang sticks and a bucket of fish were feeding the sharks.

I said to Paula, “Let’s swim down near the wall, so that nothing can get behind us.”

The wall was about three feet above our heads. We saw big fish starting to surround the guys who were doing the feeding. Then, before we knew it, the water around us was filled with hundreds of fish, including seven or eight very scary-looking eight-foot sharks—bull sharks, reef sharks, lemon sharks, sharp-nosed sharks, and hammerheads. As Paula and I watched helplessly, one of them approached, jaws wide open, and at the last moment swam over our heads. I’ve never felt so completely out of control.

Though Paula and I shared many interests, we didn’t have enough in common to forge a deeper relationship. For one thing, she didn’t believe in God, while I do. Things that upset me, like people not respecting their country and burning the flag, she thought were no big deal.

One of the best divers, shooters, and jumpers, and also a plank owner (■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ at ST-6 was a guy named Ray—he was a good friend and fellow corpsman. For a while, I dated his sister, Janna, and was very friendly with his whole family, including his wife and the mother of their two sons, Dawn.

One day while we were working together at ST-6, Ray told me that he and Dawn were getting divorced. I was sad to hear that because they were both terrific people and Christian and Dylan were great kids.

A couple of months later, Ray approached me again and said, “Don, I’ve found someone else and I’m moving on. But Dawn is lonely. Why don’t you take her out?”

“Me? Take out your ex-wife? I can’t do that.”

He said, “No, really, take her to a movie or something. Call her up.”

I’d always admired Dawn and found her very attractive but had never thought of her in a romantic way, and I didn’t want to insert myself in the middle of a difficult situation.

But Ray kept urging me to call her, so I did, and one night we ran into each other at a local Virginia Beach hangout called Phil’s Grill, where we talked and drank a couple of beers.

Then Ray called me and invited me to come over to his house for Christmas dinner. Dawn picked me up, Ray cooked dinner, and we all sat together at the same table—Ray, his new girlfriend, me, Dawn, and Christian and Dylan.