Inside SEAL Team Six(93)

Paul said, “That’s exactly what happened to me in Mogadishu.”

“What do you mean?”

“My light accidentally went on and I was shot at. But the skinnies missed, and then I put them all down.”

I was in Israel when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical who opposed Rabin’s signing the Oslo Peace Accords. I watched as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to light memorial candles and sing peace songs while angry mourners rioted.

A few years later, I was training a group of Palestinians in protective operations. One night after work I went out to dinner with a group of Palestinian officers, who started to open up after a couple of drinks.

One of them turned to me and said, “All we want to do is to be able to pray. Has anyone ever told you that you can’t worship in your church?”

“No.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you can’t go home for three or four days?”

Another one of the officers said, “All we want is the land that used to be ours, and to be able to drive to church, drive home, and drive to work.”

I was interested in hearing their perspective. Of course, they didn’t mention the fact that Palestinians were hitting Israel with bombs and rockets all the time.

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When my mother became ill, I stopped deploying as often. Memorial Day weekend 2001 I spent visiting her and my father in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where they had retired to a nice home near a golf course. My poor mom was suffering from emphysema and lung cancer and had to breathe through a respirator.

As I kissed her good-bye to return to Virginia Beach to pick up my daughter, my mom whispered, “Don, don’t leave.”

I said, “Don’t worry, Mom. The nurse is here to take care of you. And I’ll be back.”

Again, she said, “Don’t go.” I saw fear in her eyes.

While my dad was down the road at the VFW, where he served as state commander, a thunderstorm moved into the area, and my parents’ house was struck by lightning. The window between the porch and the bedroom exploded, and the porch caught fire.

As my mother lay in bed too weak to move or call for help, flames from the porch started to spread down the hallway. A neighbor saw the flames and ran into the house to try to rescue her.

The nurse who was with her disconnected my mother’s frail eighty-five-pound body from the respirator and was running out of the room with my mother in her arms when the flames reached the oxygen tanks and the house exploded. The nurse survived, but my mother and the Good Samaritan neighbor died in the fire.

My father called me in tears with the awful news. I got into my car and drove as fast as I could back to my parents’ home. All that remained was charred wood and ashes.

The first thing I did was visit the neighbor’s wife to express my thanks and condolences.

She said, “I always knew that my husband was going to die helping someone. I’m just sorry he couldn’t do more.”

I couldn’t believe the depths of her compassion and kindness. Her husband had died eight hours earlier trying to save my mother, and she was apologizing to me!

I drove to the morgue to view my mother’s body. Her face was charred black. Even with all my combat medical experience and training, I couldn’t take it. I broke down and ran into the woods in tears.

My mother had been afraid of fire her whole life. She’d always been so good to me, and she had asked me not to leave her.

I felt as if I’d let her down one last time.



I had to keep busy, and by the summer of 2001, I was spending about half my time doing weapons and tactics training and the other half training, racing, climbing, and producing extreme sporting events.

That changed when al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. My focus immediately switched to the war on global terrorism. Sports took a backseat.