by Owen, Mark
With the house secure, I led the man to another room to question him. The room’s floor was covered in rugs, and sleeping mats were piled in a heap in the center of the room. A TV on the floor was on, but the screen was just static. Our interpreter stood next to the man as I pulled the hood off. His face was sweaty and his eyes were big as he tried to adjust to the light.
“Ask him why he had grenades and a chest rack,” I told the interpreter.
“I’m a guest here,” the man said.
“Why were you sleeping with the women and children? Guests don’t sleep next to the women.”
“One of them is my wife,” he said.
“But I thought you were a guest here,” I said.
The questioning went on like that for about a half hour. He never got his story straight and the next morning we turned him over to the Marines.
It was frustrating because missions were like this day after day. It was a catch and release system. We’d roll them up and in a few weeks the fighters would be back on the street. I was confident the fighter we found in the bedroom would be released soon. The only way to permanently take them off the street was if they were dead.
We found out later from some of the village elders that the men, including the fighter I encountered in the women’s bedroom, were part of an insurgent cell that rotated between the houses of the village. The guy we captured had gone home that night to stay with his family. Three other guys in his cell were killed that same night after a short firefight with my teammates. My teammates got lucky and got the jump on them before the insurgents reacted. Our troop uncovered guns, mines, and explosives for roadside bombs in the house.
After clearing our initial targets, our troop searched the majority of the houses in the village. In one of the bedrooms, I found a pile of bras in one of the drawers. I fished out a nice white one with lace and a bow at the center. Balling it up, I stuffed it into the cargo pocket in my pants for later.
Outside, the BOP, BOP, BOP of the Marines’ massive CH-53 helicopters echoed over the village. The sun was coming up as we held security positions in a nearby house. It was freezing. Mornings always seemed to be the coldest part of the day.
I looked up in time to see what looked like two big gray school buses fly over me, make a ninety-degree turn, and settle into the open desert just north of the power lines. The ramps in the back dropped down and out came the Marines just like you’ve seen in their commercials.
My troop chief walked past me to coordinate with the Marines so we could turn over the village and go home.
“You see their HQ?” he said.
“I think they are down the road,” I said, pointing toward a cluster of men and radio antennas.
As he passed by, I fished out the bra from earlier that night and discreetly draped it on a radio antenna attached to his back. When it was cold and miserable it is the little things that warm you up. As he passed some of the Marines, I saw them stare at him and laugh.
“Hey, where is your HQ?” the troop chief asked a nearby Marine.
He pointed down the road.
“Hey, sir, you’ve got a bra hanging off your back,” the Marine said.
“Yeah, I am sure there is,” the troop chief said without hesitation, glancing back in our direction. “Happens all the time.”
On the patrol back to the landing zone in the desert, I noticed something in my periphery vision blowing in the wind. Reaching back, I pulled on a bra strap.
Someone had hung a bra on the bolt cutters I had strapped to my back.
Pranks on the team were a way of life.
The pranking was so frequent that the squadron eventually built a wire diagram connecting all the suspected culprits. We used this same wire diagram to track terrorists. We had the names of all the guys in a pyramid with the worst prankster on top: Phil, my team leader at the time.
Phil had been in the Navy forever. He graduated Green Team the year I graduated BUD/S, left DEVGRU for a break, and joined the Leap Frogs, the Navy’s parachute demonstration team. He also served as a military free-fall instructor before returning to the command.
I met Phil during my first days at the squadron and instantly liked him. He did several tours as an assaulter, then headed up the squadron’s combat assault dog program before becoming my team leader.
Phil was a great prankster, maybe the best. At least once, I came back to my cage and found the shoelaces on all of my boots for my right foot cut. I couldn’t prove Phil did it. I knew he had large magnets, which he’d wave over your wallet to demagnetize the strip on your credit card. He was famous for bombing all of your gear with glitter. I don’t know how many pouches and uniforms I had to replace because purple glitter was caked on the Velcro or trapped in the folds of the fabric.
When things got slow, he’d create a feud.
“All right, who pranked me?” he would yell, walking into the team room.
But we all knew he pranked himself. He was trying to stir up a war because he was bored.
Sometimes, the guys did get him back. One Friday night after work, we all walked to the parking lot to find Phil’s car high in the air. One of his victims, and it was never clear who, picked up his car with a forklift and left it there.
One of the longest running pranks in the squadron started with Phil. When we weren’t deployed, we trained all over the United States. On this night, we were in Miami doing some urban training. It was just getting dark, and we were scheduled to practice CQB in an old abandoned hotel.
Before we started training, Phil and the local police, who kept onlookers away, went in to make sure it was empty. We didn’t want to start training and run up on some homeless squatter. At the time, Phil was still working as a dog handler.
As they walked the halls, Phil glanced into a room and saw something sticking out of the drywall. It was a giant twelve-inch black dildo. Sliding a rubber glove on, Phil pulled it out of the wall and carried it downstairs.
“Look what I found,” he said, waving it over his head.
“Get that thing away from me,” I said, backing away as it flopped back and forth in his hand.
With the hotel clear, we started to train. It was just before dawn when we finished. After I put my kit into the trunk of my rental car, I was exhausted and I collapsed behind the wheel. As I went to start the car, I noticed that I had something attached to my steering wheel.
“Phil!” I yelled, practically jumping out of the car to get away from it.
I looked around, but Phil was gone. He already fled the scene of the crime.
The dildo was strapped to my steering wheel. It stretched from the nine o’clock to three o’clock position. I cut it off the steering wheel and put it in a random helmet in one of the equipment bags.
The dildo, which came to be called the Staff of Power, disappeared. We forgot about it for a few months until back in Virginia Beach after we finished some gas-mask training.
Since DEVGRU is tasked with hunting down weapons of mass destruction, we often trained in the kill house in full chemical suits. The gas masks took a while to get used to, and we had to be comfortable operating in the suits and masks for long periods.
It was the end of the day, and we all came up to the team room after to get a beer. I walked in and headed over to the refrigerator. Popping the cap and taking a long pull, I turned back and saw some of the guys huddled around the foot of the conference table.
“Holy shit,” I heard one of them say.
“No way, that isn’t it, is it?” another one said.
I walked over to the crowd and saw a Polaroid picture taped to a blank sheet of paper. The Staff of Power was coiled in someone’s gas mask. As soon as I saw the picture, my stomach flipped. I had no idea where the Staff had been before Phil snagged it, and now it could have been in my gas mask. The same mask I spent hours in that day. I tried to see if the mask in question was mine, but the picture was shot so tightly it was impossible to tell. In that minute, the Staff of Power was in everybody�
�s mask, and no one was going to take a chance.
I followed the crowd down to supply and traded in my mask for a new one. Again, the Staff of Power was missing in action for a few months.
There was always food in the kitchen, and guys used to bring in massive jugs of pretzels and other snacks from Costco. One day a bin of animal crackers appeared in the team room. Handful by handful, the crackers started to disappear. You’d see guys eating the crackers as they walked from the kitchen to their cages or out to the ranges.
Soon enough, about halfway through the jug we found another Polaroid picture. This time, the Staff of Power was jammed into the middle of the bin with animal crackers piled up around the shaft.
To this day, I still can’t eat animal crackers.
I have no idea if Phil was the culprit. I know he was the one who found it, but to date the Staff of Power is unaccounted for.
CHAPTER 6
Maersk Alabama
The only thing Phil loved more than a good prank was parachuting. As my team leader, Phil had a passion that drove our team to air operations, in particular High Altitude, High Opening (HAHO) jumps. The technique offered the best and most stealthy way to infiltrate a target. During a HAHO jump, you exit the aircraft, open your parachute a few seconds later, and fly your canopy to the landing zone.
I got my free-fall qualification at Team Five, but it wasn’t until I got to DEVGRU that I truly mastered the art of jumping.
Let me be clear, at first jumping out of an airplane scared me.
There is something unnatural about walking to the edge of the ramp and jumping out. Not only did it scare me, I hated it at first. I was the guy sucking down oxygen on the ride up. After every jump, when I was back on the ground, I loved it. But the next morning, I’d sweat it all over again. By forcing myself to do it over and over, eventually it became easier. Just like in BUD/S, quitting wasn’t an option and jumping was a big part of our job, so it was something I learned to love.
While I was with Delta on my 2005 deployment to Iraq, Phil successfully led a HAHO jump in Afghanistan. We always trained for this type of mission but I never thought I’d do one for real. Since I’d joined the command, I rotated between Iraq and Afghanistan, deployment after deployment. Things had fallen into a pattern of deployments, training, and standby. There were so many missions they started to blur together. We were rapidly gaining combat experience with each deployment. The command as a whole continually refined its tactics and had become even more combat effective.
In 2009, we finally got something different.
I was on personal leave, waiting for a commercial flight back to Virginia Beach, when I saw the breaking news bulletin flash across the TV screen in the airport. The Maersk Alabama, a cargo ship with seventeen thousand metric tons of cargo, was headed for Mombasa, Kenya, when Somali pirates attacked it in transit near the Horn of Africa. It was Wednesday, April 8, 2009. The pirates captured the Maersk Alabama‘s captain, Richard Phillips, and fled with the captain in one of the ship’s eighteen-foot covered lifeboats. They had nine days of food rations. The USS Bainbridge, a destroyer, was shadowing the lifeboat, which was motoring about thirty miles off the Somali coast. Four pirates were on board armed with AK-47s.
Sitting in the airport, I wondered if we were going to get the call. Getting personal time off was a huge feat since my squadron was on standby and could be called to deploy anywhere in the world with an hour’s notice.
Watching the TV at the airport, I could see the orange lifeboat bobbing in the surf. Nearby was the gray-hulled USS Bainbridge. I tried to stand close so I could hear the report over the noise of the airport. Nothing was going on when I’d left Virginia Beach a few days earlier, but now I had a feeling we’d be getting a call. As footage of the lifeboat popped up on-screen again, my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was Phil.
“You watching the news?” he said.
“Yeah. Just saw it,” I said.
“Where you at?”
At this point, I was the most senior member of my team besides my team leader.
“I am at the airport,” I said. “I am literally waiting for my flight.”
“OK, good,” Phil said. “Get back as soon as you can.”
Instantly, I could feel my mind racing. The plane couldn’t fly fast enough. This mission was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I didn’t want to miss it.
Boarding a plane is frustrating enough when you’re not in a rush. I watched as folks meandered to their seats or fussed with the overhead bins. I pleaded with them in my head to hurry. The sooner we took off, the faster I could get back to work. Plus, I knew once I was airborne I’d be in a communications blackout. There was no way to contact me if they got the word to go. For all I knew, as the flight attendant sealed the doors to my plane, I was getting the recall notice telling me I had one hour to get to the command, and by the time we landed the team would be gone.
Putting my headphones in, I tried to zone out but I couldn’t. Five steps from the gate after we landed in Virginia I was on the phone.
“Hey, what’s up?” I said when Phil picked up.
It was well after eight at night, since I’d come from the West Coast.
“Still here,” he said. “Come into work tomorrow early and I will get you up to speed. Planning is underway. But we’re waiting for D.C. to make a decision.”
The next morning, I was at work early. Phil met me in the squadron room. We sat down at the conference room table.
“We’ve got one hostage,” Phil said. “Four pirates. They want two million dollars for him.”
“Nothing like knowing exactly what you’re worth,” I said.
“I’d ask for more,” Phil said. “A couple of million seems a bit light, unless you ask my ex-wife.”
“Where are they going?” I asked.
“They want to link up with their buddies and try and get Phillips to a camp or a mother ship,” Phil said. “So, we’ve got to be ready to do a ship takedown or go over the beach and take out one of the camps.”
We’d spent years preparing for either mission.
“We’ve already got a handful of guys on the Bainbridge,” Phil said. “They were working in Africa and jumped in last night. Negotiations broke down Thursday.”
“How long do we have before they make shore?” I asked.
“They don’t want to make landfall where they are now because of some tribal issues,” Phil said. “Their tribe is a little farther south so they can’t make landfall for another two days, so hopefully we have a timeline to work against.”
I asked about the recall.
“No recall, but it’s being discussed,” Phil said.
“Why haven’t we heard anything yet?” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense that it takes this long to make a decision.”
“Dude, it’s Washington,” he said. “Does anything make sense?”
A day later, we finally got a page recalling us. Most of us were already at the command. Our gear was packed and ready.
About twenty hours later, the ramp of the C-17 cracked open and sunlight spilled into the cabin.
I could feel the breeze on my face as I shielded my eyes from the bright East African sun. Minutes later, I saw the small parachute attached to a massive gray high-speed assault craft (HSAC) snap open and start to drag the boat out of the back of the plane. The boats were loaded with all the gear we needed. The plan was to drop them and the crews first, followed by the assault teams.
CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.
I could hear the boat on the metal rollers as it started toward the door, picking up speed before disappearing off the ramp. Moments later, a second parachute opened and the gray blur of the second boat flew past as it shot out, followed by the boat crews.
“Yeah,” I yelled as I watched the boats go. Others around me cheered as the boat crews disappeared off the ramp.
My heart was beating faster, more from excitement than anything else, as I waited for the thumbs-up from my teammates on the ramp. They
were watching to make sure the chutes on the boats opened.
We were jumping over the horizon from the USS Bainbridge so the pirates couldn’t see us. The USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship used to carry Marines into battle, was going to rendezvous with us and we’d stage off of her deck.
In the water below, the boat crews landed near the HSACs and started clearing off the parachutes. We had thirty minutes to wait before we jumped, which seemed like much longer.
I was sitting near the front of the plane on one of the bench seats. On top of me was one of my squadron’s communications specialists. He was wearing a tandem passenger harness strapped to the front of me. Hours before, he’d learned that not only was he going to Africa to help us with a hostage situation but he was also going to jump into the Indian Ocean to do it.
In order to get all needed personnel down to the USS Boxer, we had to jump three tandem passengers, including the communications specialists. These three non-SEALs were essential support personnel. During the flight over, I had a chance to sit down with the communications tech and brief him.
“You’re mine,” I said to him. “You ready for this?”
He was thin with a short haircut and a bookish demeanor. He looked a little nervous when I started to go over the jump and what to expect.
“You ever jumped before?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
When we got the six-minute call, everyone stood up to do our last-minute checks. I noticed the communications specialist looked pale. He hadn’t said a word since the door opened the first time. At least my first jump was over Arizona. His was a real-world jump into the Indian Ocean.
“We’re going to be fine,” I said.
He didn’t look convinced.
The ramp opened again. There were about forty jumpers on the plane, and we lined up on the ramp.
“Stand by,” the jumpmaster yelled, giving us the signal that we had less than thirty seconds before the jump.
I could feel the communications specialist’s leg start to shake. It was practically vibrating as we got closer to the ramp.
