We strapped on our parachutes, then connected the heavy backpacks to D rings on the front of each harness. All of our gear was secured with quick-release fittings. Within seconds of landing, we would be fully equipped and ready to rock.
As the riggers laid their cables, the air force combat controllers established radio communications with Landing Zone Green, a soccer field in Virginia Beach that would be our jump target. On LZ Green were parked three unmarked Chevy Suburbans from the Team. The drop zone crew was our reception committee, playing the role of friendly agents who would meet us as we touched down. In a real-world op, they would drive us to the target area or a safe house. Tonight all they had to do was hang out, make radio communications with the airplane, and wait for us to float to earth. Our exercise would end when my twelve-man assault element got to the ground.
As we completed equipment checks, one of the air force combat controllers came up to me. He didn’t look happy. “The DZ reports winds northeast, twenty knots and gusting to thirty. Visibility is less than half a mile in heavy rain. Do you want to abort?”
“No,” I said, “we can handle it.”
As I said those words, lightning lit the sky around us, and the plane buffeted sharply. The air force guy grabbed a seat back to steady himself. He smirked. “Very studly.”
The conditions were marginal, actually outside of parameters, but the parameters were guidelines. We had all jumped in worse. Besides, if we got this over with, we could make it to the Raven and grab a few beers before closing time. This would be my last op, and I was buying when we got to the bar. Although I wasn’t looking forward to the tab, I was anxious to get on the ground before the weather got worse.
Nearly twenty months before, I had submitted a letter to the secretary of the navy, asking to resign my commission and leave the Teams. It had taken the navy almost two years to answer my request. When you hold a commission in the armed forces, you serve at the pleasure of the president. It had apparently not pleased the White House to let me go any sooner. The navy took its time in processing my letter, and I had been operational every day since putting in my papers. That was fine with me; there was nothing else I wanted to do in the navy. I just wanted out—eventually. Three days before, I’d gotten an answer to my request. My commission was to expire in three hours, at midnight.
So what was I doing standing in the back of a 727, waiting to jump into a soccer field in the middle of a Virginia suburb? As the plane shook and banked, I began to ask myself the same thing. As weird as it might sound, I was making the jump because I didn’t want to.
I hated to jump. Unfortunately for me, my aversion to gravity was well known. I was teased for it, but I still made every jump, more than three hundred of them, three of them combat insertions, and I had to be a competent operator in the air. When you are trying to group twelve parachutes together in a stack at thirty-three thousand feet on night-vision goggles, there is no room for substandard performance. Besides, as they say in SEAL basic training, I didn’t have to like it, I just had to do it. I was the boat-crew leader, and my boat crew drew this operation. If the Rastas were going to jump, then I would, too.
I turned to the combat controller and said, “Go for depressurization.”
The riggers and observers scrambled for their seats and buckled in. The combat controllers each pulled on a jet pilot’s helmet, their oxygen masks connected to carry bottles strapped to their belts. They could continue to communicate with the drop zone through radio microphones in their oxygen masks. There was a loud rushing sound as the cabin filled with fog. The aircraft depressurized, and I looked at the altimeter on my wrist. It read twelve thousand feet, the same as the altitude outside the aircraft.
Alex pulled back the latch on the aft hatch and secured it to the galley with a piece of bungee cord. The cabin was filled with the earsplitting roar of the engines. The sound was deafening, agonizingly loud. It actually made your chest hurt. The combat controller touched me on the shoulder. Talking was now out of the question; from now on we would communicate with hand signals. He held up five fingers and a thumb. We were six minutes from showtime.
The jumpers shuffled into the aft galley of the plane. José “Hoser” Lopez stepped onto the folded stairs and clambered to the end of the aft ramp. As D. B. Cooper discovered, much to his peril, the tail ramp of a 727 will not completely deploy when the aircraft is in flight. The force of the air streaming under the fuselage prevents the hydraulics from pushing the stairs into a full down-and-locked position. As the stick of jumpers packed into the galley and watched, Hoser climbed to the end of the folded stairs and did the bounce: Hanging on to the handrails, he jumped up and down, forcing the stairs down until the tail ramp clicked into a full down-and-locked position.
This was not as easy as it sounds. While you are playing jumpy-jumpy, the aircraft is doing over 140 miles an hour. Until the hydraulics overcome the wind resistance, the thousand-pound tail ramp bucks like a depraved mule. People have been killed and crippled attempting the bounce, but tonight, Hoser got it down and locked after just a few wild gyrations.
Once the ramp was down, a cable was affixed to the metal steps. This line would winch the ramp closed after we bailed out. Hoser took a position on the lowest step and turned to face the other jumpers, hands gripping the rails. He would be the first man off, exiting backwards, and he needed to see my signal to go. We all packed onto the stairs tightly, nuts to butts. I was the last man in the stick, standing on the top stair in the galley next to the combat controller, who looked like a giant insect in his helmet. He turned to me and held up three fingers. I passed the signal to Hoser, who lifted one hand off the rail and gave a three-fingered “hang loose” to the Rastas.
I checked my altimeter. It read five thousand feet and was descending rapidly. Past the open tail ramp, through sheets of driving rain, I could see car headlights on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel a mile below. It was raining hard, and lightning zigzagged through the cloud deck. The bay was rough, the clouds were descending, and the storm was on us fully. I could see raindrops frozen in the strobing of the airliner’s anticollision lights. The 727 pulled a broad, lazy turn over the Chesapeake and entered the landing pattern for Norfolk International.
The purpose of tonight’s exercise was to see if a stick of jumpers would show up on airport approach radar. After orbiting over SEAL DZ, Assailant 26 had requested a touch-and-go at Norfolk International. The plan was for Assailant to put flaps and landing gear down and enter the pattern. Our landing zone was maybe two and half miles from the airport’s tower, between the Chesapeake shore and the runways. As the airliner swooped for a landing, my element would jump when the soccer field came into sight.
We would be leaving the airplane at seven hundred feet, pretty low for a free-fall drop. After we exited the aircraft, the tail ramp would be winched shut. Assailant 26 would then execute a touch-and-go, divert, and land at the nearby naval air station at Oceana, Virginia. That was the plan, anyway. Moments from now, for me, that plan would completely go to hell.
The combat controller held up his right hand, index finger and thumb half an inch apart. I passed the signal to Hoser: thirty seconds to drop. I checked my altimeter: We were passing through a thousand feet. The combat controller slapped me on the leg. I yelled, “GO! GO! GO!” into my radio headset. At the bottom of the ramp, Hoser let go of the railing and was instantly sucked off the stairs. I watched as he disappeared into the wall of blinking raindrops. The rest of the jumpers clattered down the stairs and dived into black. I was the last man to leave the airplane. Plunging off, I could feel the hot blast of the engines and smell the acrid scent of burning jet fuel.
As my body slammed into the slipstream, I arched my back. The exit from an airliner is not unlike bodysurfing a gigantic wave. The drop feels the same, and you have to arch your back hard so you don’t somersault. I waited three seconds, my fingers hooked the rip cord, and I pulled. I felt the cable whip through its channels and open the parachute containe
r on my back. The spring-loaded pilot chute fired, and my main parachute and deployment bag shot skyward. I braced for opening shock, preparing my body for deceleration from 120 miles an hour to almost zero. I took a deep breath and held it.
But my parachute did not open. Virginia was still coming at me fast. I had maybe ten seconds to live.
I’ve heard it said that in times of peril, victims flash back on their entire lives. I have been in bad places many times, in mortal, violent moments when I did not really know if I would live or die, but a flashback has never happened to me. Maybe I’m not sufficiently contemplative. Maybe I’ve never considered myself a victim. All I knew was that I was hurtling toward earth, and I was going to die if I didn’t solve a mystery. The mystery involving my main canopy. Why hadn’t it opened?
Actually, “why” didn’t matter. What mattered now was getting a reserve chute deployed. I did not flash back over my life, but I did go to adrenaline world. This has happened to me almost every time I have faced imminent destruction. The planet seems to stop. Everything slows and is silent. I no longer heard the roar of the jet. I did not hear the rush of the wind past my helmet. I no longer felt the raindrops slamming like BBs into my face. The world was in slow mo. The only problem was, in about five seconds I would auger into the planet at 176 feet per second.
On the stairs of the airplane, my altimeter had read 750 feet. That was almost four seconds ago. I estimated I was falling through 500 feet now, without a working parachute.
You will read these words in about the same relative time that my accident seemed to unfold. My mind was racing with clear, fluid thought: relative velocities; probabilities; actions and outcomes. I seemed to be falling in perfect silence, but my mind was rapidly processing. Everything I am about to describe unfolded in fewer than fifteen seconds. That amount of time would decide if I lived or died.
I knew whatever I tried might well be futile, but I was going to stay with this problem and fight it until I opened a parachute or I bounced. I had been trained to deal with a variety of nonoptimal parachute functions, and my mind did a pull-down menu of malfunctions and their remedies. Live or die, I would carry out my malfunction drill. The problem was, I didn’t know what sort of malfunction I had.
I lifted my knees to my chest, which pulled me into a sitting position. I was now falling as though strapped to a chair. I looked up; my pilot chute had fired, but the parachute, which is held in the nylon deployment container, was stuck. Instead of having hundreds of square feet of canopy, I had a lump of nylon the size of a large loaf of bread. And it wasn’t slowing me down. My eyes racked focus; hundreds of feet above me, in an even line, I could see the square canopies of the other jumpers. Disappearing into the low cloud deck, the Rastas’ parachutes were getting smaller. I was dropping like an anvil.
Stay with the procedure, I told myself, stay with the drill. I threw away my rip cord and moved my hand to the “twinkie” on my harness. This was a padded nylon strap on my right shoulder, connected to the cutaway cables of my main parachute. Before I tried to put up my reserve, I would have to detach my main parachute, or my second chute would tangle uselessly in the mess that was already up there.
Releasing the twinkie was a two-step process. First, it had to be ripped away from the double-sewn Velcro that held it in place. Then, the twinkie and approximately two feet of cable had to be pulled clear so my main parachute would cut away from the riser straps connecting it to my harness. My eyes fell on the glowing dial of my altimeter. I was now at four hundred feet, the lowest recommended altitude at which a reserve parachute can be deployed. Stay with the emergency procedure, I told myself. Improvisation is for desperate people.
I had the twinkie in my hand. I’d pulled it free of the Velcro, and I was about to cut away. In that instant, my main parachute opened. Sort of. Three of the eight cells of my main canopy worked free of the deployment bag. My head jerked skyward as my body decelerated. This was definitely luck of the Irish: I had half a parachute.
I looked again at the altimeter: three hundred feet. One hundred feet below the minimum altitude to deploy my reserve. I was desperate. It was time to improvise.
I made a command decision. I was too low to cut away my main, fall clear, and deploy my reserve. My one chance was to stay with what little parachute I had and try to ride it in. My altimeter was basically useless below 500 feet. The device worked by measuring atmospheric pressure, and I was falling through a thunderstorm. I might be at 300 feet, I might be lower. My altimeter might still be reading 300 feet when I smashed through somebody’s skylight.
My eyes flicked down for the first time since I left the airplane. I was over water, an L-shaped inlet I knew to be Desert Cove in the Little Creek neighborhood of Virginia Beach. The cove was maybe half a mile from the soccer field where I was supposed to land.
My mind raced. I was doing the math faster than a science nerd’s solar-powered calculator. I was still falling ninety miles an hour, at least; I had a marginal opportunity to get my rig fully deployed. If I hit the water, it was possible the impact would not kill me. Theoretically possible but unlikely. If I was not killed outright by the sudden stop, I would almost certainly be knocked unconscious. With sixty-five pounds of gear strapped to my body, I would sink and drown. I had to get my rig open.
The MT-1-X parachute is not a round chute, it is shaped like a wing. And like a wing, it can be steered precisely and flown in any direction the jumper wishes to go. It’s an excellent rig; with this equipment I’d made pinpoint landings from six miles up. But I had only half a wing. Worse, I was no longer falling vertically: The three inflated cells of my canopy were spinning me in a wild spiral. I was in a flat spin, making two full 360-degree revolutions a second. Below me, Desert Cove was spinning like a Frisbee. Like a fighter pilot pulling too many G’s, the centrifugal force was pushing the blood away from my brain and into my legs. I was getting tunnel vision and was close to blacking out. I had to get the rest of the canopy open before I lost consciousness.
I reached up and grabbed the parachute’s risers with both hands and pulled at them with all my might. It was a last, desperate move—and it worked. With a loud pop, the remaining five cells on my canopy opened. One cell was tattered and deflated, but I had an almost full parachute. I was now at approximately 250 feet.
I was still over water, and although I was prepared to ditch, I thought it better to try flying toward land instead of attempting a swim with sixty-five pounds of assorted metal objects. Lightning flashed; through the rain, I could see a boat ramp and an empty parking lot a hundred yards to my right. I turned in to the wind and headed for a perfect landing.
I was congratulating myself on my brilliant airmanship when something salty splashed my face. Blood dripped down my wrists and spattered my goggles. I had ripped two fingernails off my right hand, clawing at the twinkie. I didn’t feel any pain, but I knew the nails had been ripped clear of their beds. I pulled the blood-spattered goggles from my face.
Looming out of the rain, a trio of high-tension wires draped over the parking lot. I hadn’t just cheated death in order to be hung up and electrocuted. I made a hard right 180. As I pulled the turn, my parachute fluttered violently. The damaged center of my rig sucked in the remaining cells, the canopy collapsed and dropped me a heart-stopping fifty feet before it again caught the wind. No more turns were possible. I was now headed straight downwind. And that was not a good thing. My parachute was in full flight, and I was riding a twenty-knot gust. I was doing maybe forty miles an hour over ground. Landing was inevitable. Landing at this speed, with no steering, would not be pleasant.
A hundred and fifty yards away was a strip of sand, Demonstration Beach, a place where we sometimes launched practice diving missions. I had just enough altitude to make it, but I was still going too fast. Even if I completely braked my canopy, I’d still be traveling at the speed of the wind, maybe thirty miles an hour. I dared not try to put the canopy into a stall; the rig would fold up and drop me. Full
speed was my only speed. I reached up and nursed my steering paddles, gingerly making a series of corrections right and left. I glided for the beach, puckered my ass, and braced for impact.
A galaxy of stars exploded in my head. My knees slammed into my backpack, my MP-5 machine pistol jammed into my ribs, and I heard a sickening snap. Half conscious, I bounced and was dragged by my still-inflated canopy across the beach. Digging a trench with my heels, I was pulled across the sand through a strip of grass and out onto the road that circled the cove. Caught by a gust, the parachute that had saved my life was going to drag me until I was hamburger. I clutched the twinkie with my bloody fingers and jerked it clear. The main canopy cut away and drifted off. I came to a stop in a ditch on the other side of the road.
Finally, the ride was over.
Sand and blood covered my face and hands. My ribs crackled as I sucked in air. I lay in the weeds, and the rain beat into my face. I started to laugh; it was 2356 hours in the eastern time zone, 11:56 P.M. In three minutes and twenty seconds, I would be a civilian.
* * *
CHARM SCHOOL
IT WAS PROBABLY INEVITABLE that I joined the navy, though I resisted it. I am the son of a career navy officer and a navy nurse. My father, Pat, was an Annapolis graduate, a destroyer captain, and ended his navy career as a professor of tactics at the Naval War College. He’d met my mom, Joni, when she was a navy nurse stationed at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital outside San Francisco. I am the oldest of four kids, two boys and two girls. In my family, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. My brother, Sean, is a chief engineer in the merchant marine, and my sisters, Colleen and Katie, are registered nurses.
We moved around quite a bit as a navy family, and we were close. We weren’t rich, but we lacked nothing, and I count my childhood, essentially, as a happy one.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 2
