Inside SEAL Team Six

by Don Mann

  The terrain wasn’t as brutal as the dictator had been, but it was pretty demanding. I was teaching a weapons and small-unit tactics course in the snow-and-ice-covered mountains not far from the Iranian border with a former ■​■​■​■​■​ man and another security contractor. There was a two-thousand-meter mountain I wanted to climb, so I asked my colleagues if they wanted to do it with me.

  The ■​■​■​■​■​ guy said, “The mountain road is too dangerous. We might run across an IED.”

  “We can avoid the road and run up the side of the mountain and post-hole through the snow,” I replied. “No one’s going to place an IED on the side of the mountain where there’s not even a trail.”

  We started out together, but I arrived at the top first. At the summit stood a little wooden hut.

  After my two buddies arrived, I looked over a snowbank through the door opening and saw somebody’s hand on an AK-47. Seconds later, four soldiers emerged and they held us at gunpoint.

  With my hands held over my head, I tried to explain why we were there. Unarmed and wearing cold-weather workout gear, we hardly looked threatening. Nor did the Iraqi soldiers, who seemed to be in their late forties and fifties.

  The one soldier who understood a little English translated for the others. They lowered their rifles and invited us into their little shack. As we sat on a rug, they shared tea and bread with us and explained that they were on guard against foreign fighters sneaking across the border from Iran.

  Sometime in 2005, I traveled two hundred fifty miles northwest of Baghdad to Mosul, Iraq, with three other Americans ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ At the time, the ancient city of two million was the scene of constant and severe violence as its diverse ethnic, religious, and political groups vied for supremacy.

  On December 21, 2004, fourteen U.S. soldiers, four American employees of Halliburton, and four Iraqi soldiers had been killed by a suicide bomber who entered a dining hall at Forward Operating Base Marez near the main U.S. military airfield at Mosul wearing an explosive vest under an Iraqi security service uniform. Another seventy-two Americans were injured.

  After arriving and completing our mission, the four of us stopped at a safe house where American soldiers were defusing a rocket that had been placed near the front door. The chief who ran the building said, “You guys came at the right time. We need more shooters. We’re being attacked all the time.”

  The four of us were armed and ready. But nothing much happened during the daylight hours other than our hearing rocket attacks and small-arms fire off in the distance. At night, as we prepared to leave, the chief said, “Great. Now that you guys are leaving, we will be attacked again.”

  The four of us climbed into an armored vehicle with our gear and weapons and headed to a deserted field on the outskirts of the city where we were scheduled to meet our aircraft.

  As we drove, we heard the chief shouting over the radio, asking for the QRF (quick reaction force) to respond: “We’re being attacked!”

  We couldn’t turn around. Instead, we waited in a darkened field for about forty-five minutes until a blackened six-seat prop plane landed. As we scurried aboard, the pilot shouted, “Hurry up! Hurry up!”

  Recognizing his voice, I said, “Al?”

  “Don?”

  He turned out to be a pilot and a good buddy from ST-6 who is still flying high-risk missions all over the Middle East.

  As I sat with him in the cockpit, he said, “When I first starting flying here, soon after the war started, I noticed all these little lights coming at me, like fireworks, and quickly realized that they were tracers and I was being shot at from the ground. But I love it! I love the action!”

  Al approached the Baghdad airport, then started to corkscrew in so suddenly that I felt like my stomach was coming out of my throat.

  As Al did this, he gave me a little smirk. It was the same little smirk he’d given me years earlier when the two of us were testing an ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​

  Al and I were going to jump out on an experimental tandem rig. It was actually two jumps combined into one, because soon after Al deployed his main chute, I had to release four points of contact with him before I could free-fall away from Al and pull my chute. Before I jumped, I said, “Al, I want to be released at eight thousand feet so I have plenty of time to do a cutaway.” And knowing Al the way I did, I added, “I’m serious, don’t mess around up there.”

  Al had a reputation of being one of those sky gods at ST-6, a man who would jump on the back of a new jumper as he was falling at 120 miles an hour to scare him shitless. Or he’d grab the jumper’s feet and spin him in circles.

  Al and I exited the bird at twelve thousand, five hundred feet, the two of us secured, my back to his front.

  When we got to eight thousand feet, I yelled, “Okay, Al, I’m going to cut away now.”

  He said, “Wait, let’s go over there.”

  He steered in an easterly direction for about a thousand meters as we fell to seven thousand feet.

  I shouted, “Okay, Al, now!”

  He said, “No, you were right. Let’s go back over to where we were before.”

  Now we were less than six thousand feet and I was getting worried because I still had four release points to pull—two at my chest, two at my hips—before I could free-fall away from him and pull my chute.

  “Al, now!”

  We were down to five thousand feet and falling. Had it not been an experimental chute, I wouldn’t have been so anxious.

  “Al! Damn it!”

  He smirked, then gave me the signal to release. I cut away from Al and had a good opening and a safe landing.

  As I continue to work the dirt circuit—which is what we former operators call the Middle East—I keep running into retired SEALs like Al. Guys I’ve known for thirty years now. It’s always great to see them. We’ve all turned gray and look a little weary but are still riding the operational train.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ST-6 Today

  Although I sacrificed personal freedom and many other things, I got just as much as I gave.…For all the times I was wet, cold, tired, sore, scared, hungry, and angry, I had a blast.

  —ST-6 Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts in his “open in the event of my death” letter to his wife

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  Today’s ST-6 operators are very intelligent and have more combat experience than any unit in the history of the United States. They score far higher than average on standard military intelligence tests and are usually college graduates. Some even hold advanced degrees. In this era of unconventional warfare, they’re called upon not only to possess battlefield skills but also to think on their feet, overcome fear, operate sophisticated high-tech equipment, and plan for every possible contingency.

  Like one team member told me, “Given the pace of operations and all the things we’re asked to deal with, mental toughness is more important than ever.”

  Today’s SEAL training focuses on ways to rewrite primal and remembered fear. Researchers have discovered that once an animal learns to be afraid of something, that memory never vanishes from the amygdala, a part of the brain. But according to Dr. Gregory Quirk of the University of Puerto Rico’s school of medicine, a person can supersede those bad memories stored in the amygdala by forming new ones in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

  How? By repeating an action, any action, over and over, with the understanding that you are rewriting the bad memory.

  Lieutenant Commander Eric Potterat, a Naval Special Warfare psychologist, compares the process to the making of world-class athletes. “Physically, there’s very little difference between athletes who win Olympic gold and the rest of the field. It’s like the SEAL candidates we see here. Terrific hardware. Sit-ups, push-ups, running, swimming, off the charts, superhuman. But over at the Olympic center, sports psychologists found that the difference between a medal and no medal is determined by an athlete’s mental ability.”

  The elite athletes—the Wayne Gretzkys, the Laird Hamiltons, the Michael Jordans—know how to use the information they learn about how their body responds during a contest or a race. According to Lieutenant Commander Potterat, this is what separates them from the competition.

  Just like some SEAL snipers I know, who, before lining up their targets, steady their hands by taking four very deep breaths to oxygenate their bodies as much as possible.

  Of course, nothing prepares a warrior better than combat. And today’s ST-6 operators are conducting live-fire missions all the time.

  Most of the recent ops that they’ve been engaged in are rarely talked about and don’t reach the press. But the pace is incredible, and the missions are highly dangerous.

  Some of my ST-6 buddies played an important role in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led coalition effort to rid that country of al-Qaeda terrorists ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​

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  The first helo landed on a high slope near the east peak of Takur Ghar at 0245 hours on March 4 and was immediately struck by machine gun fire that ripped into the fuselage and cut the hydraulic line. With the severed line spraying hydraulic fluid everywhere and the chopper jerking this way and that, my friend Petty Officer First Class ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​
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