Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091)

by Robinson, Patrick

  The course is designed to show students what it takes to become a combat warrior, with the accent on physical fitness, discipline, and devotion to country and the US Marine Corps. The young Jon loved it all, but the part he loved most was when his instructor pointed out in the distance a vast, low, flat grassy wilderness, strictly off-limits and apparently deserted.

  “No one goes there,” he said. “That’s the secret off-limit range BUD/S training, the two hundred-yard rifle qualification.”

  Jon stood on the edge of his personal heaven. “Can’t see anyone,” he muttered, staring into the horizon.

  “No one ever does,” replied the instructor. “But they’re out there.”

  But that was not simply the highlight of the trip for Jon—it was the highlight of his life. He had stood on the sacred ground where the Navy SEALs trained. On this great private enclave of the US military, he had seen the firing range of Special Warfare Command (SPECWARCOM), where they honed their skills. Not so many people had ever seen that, and for him, he now had a bond with the SEALs that would never be broken.

  When the “Devil Pup” from the Virginia Peninsula finally returned home, he was utterly determined that one day he would find his way west again, but this time to Coronado, home of the world’s most elite warriors.

  By now he was growing into a huge frame, headed for the six-foot, four-inch heavyweight he would one day become, with not one gram of fat—pure muscle and bone.

  At sixteen he began to understand fitness and what it would take to get a tight control on his physical development. Brought up so close to the sea, he swiftly developed into a top-class high school swimmer, making the teams and powering through the swim-league encounters with kids who were largely older and weaker. Jon won the 2002 Virginia State championship, fifty-yard freestyle, scything through the water in a record-busting 21.18 seconds—a time that stood supreme for three years.

  By now his given Christian name, “Jonathan,” had slipped away. Young Keefe, the human shark, was simply “Big Jon,” and he anchored the Tabb High relay swim team to victory after victory. They weren’t always in front when the third-lap man touched the wall, but every last time Big Jon hit the water like a Mark-8 torpedo, and the entire population of Tabb High almost went berserk with excitement as he hammered his way past the leaders. Altogether Jon won seven state championship events.

  Unsurprisingly he was awarded a partial scholarship for swimming to East Carolina University, about one hundred miles south, over the border in Greenville, North Carolina. But from there things went even further south for Jon. First he flunked out of college altogether and then he went home to the local community college to study—somewhat ironically, as things turned out—criminal justice.

  But, like the best buddy he had not yet met and who was, anyway, busy gunning that Mustang around Perrysburg, Ohio, Big Jon discovered the joys of rural Virginia’s dolce vita and devoted most of his time to majoring in having a real good time. Like Matt, he went for partying summa cum laude, somehow breaking loose from his old persona of great kid, big military ambitions, and dedicated athlete.

  “My parents tried everything to guide me and continued to give me all of their support,” he said. “But I guess I was too big, too sure of myself, and a lot too stupid to listen. But after two of the most ridiculous years of my life, finally I woke up and decided to get a grip.

  “I resolved to stop wasting everybody’s time, drove myself down to the local recruiting office, and joined the Navy. I told ’em straight out I did not have the slightest intention of being in the surface Navy. I was there to become a Navy SEAL. Sea, Air, and Land. Basic Underwater Demolition, right? Special Forces...just point me in the right direction, and get that Trident polished up.

  “I didn’t actually say any of that. But they were my thoughts. Nearly. You stand right there in front of that recruiting petty officer, I’m telling you, even sitting down he looked about twelve feet tall. He handed me the papers to sign and sent me, instanto, to Navy boot camp up on the Great Lakes.”

  The recruitment officer didn’t actually say it, but Jon could tell what he was thinking just by the way he looked at him: You think you’re so damned tough, kid ... then you go right ahead and prove it to us.

  “Matter of fact, I felt a lot less tough when I walked out than I did when I walked in. But I went home and packed, obeyed my orders, the way I always would, just as soon as I pulled on the dark blue uniform of the United States Navy.”

  Matthew McCabe joined the US Navy, and right after boot camp reported to the San Diego dockyards directly opposite Coronado, on the landward side of the bay. He was assigned to the USS Belleau Wood, the forty thousand–ton Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship that had been designed to land battalions of US Marines on distant shores.

  She was, in fact, a small aircraft carrier and traveled with forty helicopters and Harrier jump-jets embarked as well as landing craft. Matt, who was not yet nineteen, was never especially interested in the cleaning, polishing, and maintenance routines of the ordinary seaman, as his singular ambition was to join the SEALs, the guys on the other side of the bay.

  And as soon it was possible, he filed an application to be transferred to SPECWARCOM in Coronado, California. That application, in the time-honored tradition of huge organizations, became either lost, misplaced, mislaid, or thrown away. Either way, six months later Matt was still a member of Belleau Wood’s 930-man ship’s company, and still polishing.

  Almost every day he watched the SEALs in action, training, fast roping out of helicopters in their wet suits into the ocean, sometimes really close to his ship. Matt wanted so badly to join them that it actually pained him to think about it.

  But the Navy does not wait around. The Belleau Wood, it was announced, was scheduled for the Gulf at the center of a nine-ship battle group—a six-month deployment that would be conducted in searing heat.

  Finally, just before the ship left, a platoon from SEAL Team 2 came on board for two months, giving Matt the opportunity to watch them every day as they trained. No one watching SEALs work is anything less than mightily impressed—their fitness, their strength, their speed.

  As always they kept themselves to themselves, barely fraternizing with the crew of this small aircraft carrier. But their presence on board had an effect on Matt like a lightning rod, reaffirming that which he had known for so long: somehow he had to join these guys or die trying.

  Once on station, way off the coast of old Persia, there were endless days of temperatures hovering at well over a hundred degrees. The flight deck shimmered as, all day long and much of the night, aircraft thundered into clear blue skies east of Saddam Hussein’s old kingdom.

  When they returned to base the SEALs were still uppermost in Matt’s mind. And Matt once again in search of his application, only to be told that no one knew anything about it. So he filed another, and when that too produced only a kind of endless silence, he marched into the office and, as politely as possible, demanded an explanation.

  “What the hell is going on?” he wondered. “You’d have thought someone might have at least acknowledged my request. But I got a very definite impression they just did not especially want me to go to Coronado. I have no idea why. And I asked, ‘How did this happen?’ And no one knew anything about that either.

  “So I just filed again, and one year after my first application I was called in for interview and instructed to report to Coronado forthwith. It was March 2006, three months before my twenty-first birthday, and they sent me to BUD/S Class 259. There were more than 220 of us assigned, and I knew that out of that original intake they would take only a dozen. I have to say it never once occurred to me that I would not be one of them.”

  By this time Matt had never lost the drive for perfection in terms of fitness. He looked like a highly trained light-heavyweight boxer—a fraction under six feet, devoted to working in the gym, and, weighing in at 180 pounds, light enough to be an excellent runner.

  Compact, broad
shouldered, and athletically muscled, he was an outstanding skier, having burned up the high slopes all over the place, especially Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains, one hundred miles east of Los Angeles.

  Since early boyhood Matt had learned the art of downhill skiing in Michigan’s cold, hard-packed Boyne Mountains, at the north of the windswept Michigan Peninsula between the Michigan and Huron Lakes. When he finally hit the fast, powdery slopes at Vail, Colorado, it was a minor culture shock. But he soon got the hang of it. And when he did, pine trees swayed.

  Matt was as strong as a bull and capable of lifting a 250-pound man and carrying him the length of a football field.

  Pound for pound, he stood out, and even in the rarified arena of BUD/S, he could compete with the best of them. Matt did in fact have the perfect build for a SEAL—not too tall and very fast off the mark. Also, he discovered, he was academically as sharp as a tack and swift to memorize lists of facts. There are no dumb SEALs: 75 percent of them have college degrees, and as Matt moved through the early stages of his training, he was plainly up with the leaders in every conceivable discipline.

  “New territory for me,” he grins ruefully. “I’d never put my mind to academic stuff before. I couldn’t believe my lousy high school grades, not after I’d been in BUD/S for a few weeks.”

  No one “breezes” through this searching, brutal test of a young man’s strength, speed, brains, willpower, and ability to absorb pain. It’s all too demanding for that. Ask any SEAL about BUD/S and, in particular, about Hell Week, and you invariably receive a kind of stage groan, followed by “Hell Week? ... Don’t even remind me.”

  Matt accepts the grueling part but chuckles and remarks, “C’mon ... it wasn’t that bad.” And for him, you sense it really wasn’t. His hard-trained skier’s legs carried him along the Coronado beach for the four-mile run day after day. He was always a good runner, finishing in the first ten. Same for the push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. Matt had the right build, enormous strength, and all the determination in the world.

  But whatever he says about cruising through the course, more than one hundred guys quit in the first six weeks of the action. Twenty of them were gone before they completed indoctrination (INDOC), two weeks before BUD/S starts. Eight of them were outta there before lunch on the first day.

  “Tell you the truth, I was just jogging along, trying to get through my tests. I didn’t have time to notice ’em much.”

  Yeah, right, Matt. The whole of Coronado was talking about the DOR rate of BUD/S Class 259 (DOR: dropped on request, SEAL parlance for “I’ve had enough, and I retire forthwith from this madhouse”). The formal procedure is for the man who simply cannot take it anymore to walk to the office, place his helmet outside with the others, in a line on the ground, and then ring the brass bell.

  The chimes of that bell, ringing out confirmation that a teammate has decided this is not the correct career path for him, can be heard down on the beach, where other class members were pounding along the tide line, looking for the firmer sand.

  In Coronado there is a ban on ridicule. Anyone caught laughing or humiliating a man who has announced DOR is instantly dismissed, sent back to the fleet that day—wrong kind of person, lacking in team spirit, too self-possessed, too stupid.

  A man who has decided the life of a Navy SEAL is not for him may very well make a perfectly fine surface ship commander or a navigator or a submariner. The life of a SEAL is not for everyone, nor is it superior to all other forms of service in the US Navy. But you’d never get one of Coronado’s finest to admit that. Not in a thousand years.

  Meanwhile Matt was charging along the tide lineup with the leaders, trying to cope with everything the instructors threw at him. He knew how to row and was excellent in the Zodiac boats. He managed to get the hang of the feared obstacle course and eventually worked his way to finish near the top.

  His honed and practiced lifting strength saw him through all the work of carrying inflatable boats on his head—the SEAL Elephant Walk. Even the back-breaking effort of lifting logs the size of telephone poles was, in the end, achievable for him.

  And to think that once he had been scared half to death to hear the instructors’ practiced roar of “MCCABE, YOU’RE NOT TRYING!—YOU’RE NOT PUTTING OUT FOR ME! GET WET AND SANDY! AND YOU ... AND YOU ... AND YOU!”

  It took him a week to understand they often picked out men who really were putting out everything, trying with every ounce of strength they had. Because these were the guys the instructors could see were ready to lay down their lives to finish the four-mile races in the top ten. Matt, more by instinct than design, was one of those, and every instructor knew it.

  Understanding this, however, did not make it a whole lot better, as he ran into the freezing cold Pacific in full running kit and then came out and rolled in the freakin’ sand: “GET WET AND SANDY!” Screw that.

  By the time Phase II concluded, Matt had only one glitch, and that was underwater in the pool competence section. “Got right back in and nailed it next time,” he said. “Half the class blew out on that one.”

  For strength and athleticism as well as for confidence both in and under the water, Matt was a superbly confident baby SEAL. Always a quick thinker, he concentrated on every last lesson the BUD/S instructors issued. These included the heavy-duty laws of SPECWARCOM—the ones that include moral issues, the standards of behavior expected, the insistence on courtesy at all times to both your commanders and your teammates ... the iron-clad rule of honesty at all times.

  Above all there was the sense of being a part of a team, a brotherhood, that binding sense of camaraderie beloved of all fighting forces. But none more than the SEALs—and Matt recalls he sensed that long before the BUD/S course was even halfway over. Even though he was not yet qualified, somehow he knew the high honor of acceptance right here in Coronado, that it was somehow written in the stars for him.

  Young McCabe, who had never paid much attention in his school history classes, now found himself captivated by the long and glorious traditions of the Navy SEALs. He was especially touched by the instructors’ reminder that no SEAL has ever been left behind on the battlefield, no matter how grim the fight.

  Matt relished all of this. He had a copy of the new Creed of the SEALs, formalized the previous year, 2005, to clearly delineate the values, duties, and expectations of the world’s finest Special Forces.

  Matt kept it, and in both hope and determination—and a bit prematurely—he memorized the opening lines:

  In times of war or uncertainty there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our Nation’s call. A common man with uncommon desire to succeed.

  Forged by adversity, he stands alongside America’s finest special operations forces to serve his country, the American people, and protect their way of life.

  I am that man.

  My Trident is a symbol of honor and heritage. Bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before, it embodies the trust of those I have sworn to protect. By wearing the Trident I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day.

  The very words sent a chill down his spine, even though he had not yet passed BUD/S. And never for one split second did he doubt that in the not-too-distant future they would pin the legendary SEAL Trident on the high left-hand side of the jacket of his dress whites.

  For the very first time in his life Matthew McCabe had a true purpose to his life. And to this day he recognizes the debt he owes the US Navy. “They straightened me out,” he says. “They taught me discipline. They taught me honor, patriotism, and dedication. They even taught me how to study, sent me to a college where, to my amazement, I became a straight-As student. Despite everything, I owe them so much.”

  Big Jon Keefe joined the Navy in the high summer of 2006 and reported immediately to Recruitment Training Command (RTC), the Navy’s one and only boot camp, set in an enormous campus forty miles north of Chicago on the western shore of Lake Mic
higan, seven miles from the Wisconsin border.

  During the two months of basic training they turned him into some kind of sailor, with endless drilling on the great sprawl of the Ross Field Parade Ground, and he graduated on October 16. He took no time for vacation, driving through the gates of SPECWARCOM, Coronado, before the month of October was over.

  Somehow Big Jon had been a lot more successful with his paperwork than Matt had been. But that was before the ex-dough flipper from Perrysburg understood he was a potential scholar. Anyway, the swim champion from Virginia was into the BUD/S course before you could say, “Hoo-yah!”

  By mutual agreement, the names of still-serving Special Forces personnel will not be used in full in this narrative. And in the case of Jon’s first BUD/S instructor, this is just as well.

  “He was,” recalls Jon, with that touch of old world charm that comes so naturally to him, “the biggest asshole I ever met. Everyone was scared of him. He was an ex-Marine and a full brother to Attila the Hun. But was he ever good at his job!”

  That particular instructor was Jon’s proctor for INDOC, and he pulverized those guys—running, rowing, heavy lifting, climbing, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups—until they thought they’d collapse with exhaustion.

  But that instructor instantly made it clear that the SEALs are not remotely interested in men who collapse with exhaustion in the first week. They are interested only in those with the iron will to never quit, men who will drive on through the pain, drag themselves forward even though they have nothing left to give.

  Because those guys may become Navy SEALs. And they are always the only ones who count at Coronado. They are the young men who will fight their way to victory because, in their minds, nothing else matters. For them quitting is not even an option. They’d rather die than quit. And Jon Keefe was one of those.

  From the very beginning all of his instructors had him pegged to fail. Unlike his classmates—and certainly unlike Jon himself—they understood it was in many ways harder for a very big guy than it was for a medium-size athlete like Matt McCabe.