I was raised a Catholic. I went to catechism, collected holy cards, and had my first communion in full regalia. Though my family was not overly religious, we ate fish sticks with ketchup on Fridays. I was a typical Catholic kid, felt vaguely guilty about something (though at age twelve, I didn’t know what yet), but I accepted my faith, the sacraments, the saints, and the whole enchilada without question. That wasn’t to last.
About a month after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, in August 1969, a single towering thunderstorm drifted off the coast of West Africa. Borne offshore on the trade winds, the clutch of thunderstorms meandered west across the Atlantic. Soon this evolving low-pressure system had a name: Camille.
Hurricane Camille would turn into the most devastating weather system ever to strike North America. Swirling, gathering power from the warm waters of the tropical Atlantic, Camille stalked the Florida straits, made a brief feint at Tampa, and roared into the Gulf of Mexico. The 85-degree waters of the Gulf turned Camille into a monster.
And my hometown was directly in her sights.
On the seventeenth of August, 1969, Biloxi, Mississippi, was laid waste by Hurricane Camille. At the time, my father was assigned to MACV, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Unlike Dad’s previous tours as a destroyer captain, this tour was on the ground. The war in Vietnam was at its bloody height, and he’d deposited us in Biloxi to await his return.
At twelve years old I was the man of the house. As the eldest son and a navy brat, I’d grown used to the job. We’d lived in every navy town from Newport to Pearl Harbor, and by the sixth grade, I’d attended five different elementary schools. Beyond having a very real stake in the war, my siblings and I were children without a care in the world. It was high summer, a time of bicycles and snow cones with a new set of friends.
Storm-track prediction in 1969 was not what it is now, and no one, forecasters included, could conceive of Camille’s power. My family had no clue. As the hurricane turned north, we didn’t have the sense to evacuate. Only hours before the storm hit, we moved from our waterfront home to a multistory hotel on the beach. In hindsight our move was idiotic, but it saved our lives. My brother and sisters, our mother, and I rode out the storm in one of the few buildings in the city to survive intact, a 1920s-era hotel on Biloxi’s main beach.
In the morning we rose to find the city wiped from the face of the map.
Around the hotel, oceangoing freighters had been tossed up hundreds of yards from the sea. Bodies hung in trees. Debris, dead animals, shrimp boats, wrecked cars, and the mud-soaked possessions of the dead were scattered for miles. Biloxi was no more.
I found our station wagon half a mile from the hotel, upside down in what was left of a Dairy Queen. Of our home we had only hopes. We were ferried back across the bay by the National Guard to find our house and the neighborhood around it reduced to kindling. Mud covered everything. It looked like a war zone. No. It looked worse.
There was no food or water to be found. Bewildered survivors wandered the rubble, sobbing. There were no police, no emergency services, and no government. Camille had been a great equalizer; every survivor was a destitute, mud-spattered refugee. Class and possession no longer mattered. The veneer of civilization had been ripped away. Martial law was declared, and gunfire crackled in the night as survivors battled looters.
We had no way to communicate with my father, no way to tell him or anyone else where we were, or even that we were alive. My mother was nearly catatonic, overcome by shock and grief. There was nothing to do but sit in the wreckage and wait.
We lived in the ruins of our house for three days, scrounging intact cans of food and soft drinks from the mud. Finally, my father was able to receive emergency leave. Dad traveled ten thousand miles from Saigon by plane, train, and truck to find us huddled in what was left of the house. We had lost everything but one another. Now Dad was home, and we slowly started to rebuild our lives.
It was in the mud of Biloxi where my separation from God occurred. I was not even thirteen years old, and I had seen a city destroyed—plowed flat as though it had been carpet-bombed. Had this been the work of men, an act of war, I could have comprehended it. I could have excused it. But this was not an act of man. This was an act of God.
In the wreckage of my home, I cursed God. I cursed him for what he had done, and dared him to do worse. These people, my family, and this sleepy Mississippi town had done nothing to deserve annihilation.
I did not rage long, but I put God, or any concept of a benign, enlightened deity, completely out of mind. The good little Catholic boy was no more. I didn’t need flag-burning war protesters to tell me God was dead. I knew it. For a long time God and I would get along without each other just fine.
In 1973 we were again stationed in Newport, Rhode Island, and I was totally into surfing. I’d picked up the sport a couple of tours before, when we were stationed in Hawaii, and catching waves became the driving passion of my young life. Not much mattered to me except getting in the water. Some kids skipped English. I ditched classes a week at a time and stayed away as long as the swell lasted.
I had hooky down to a fine art. I’d stash my surfboard and wet suit in the bushes behind our quarters and bum a ride to the beach. After I’d surfed my brains out, I’d change back into my school clothes, return the board and wet suit to their hiding places, and arrive home at the same time my classmates were stepping off the school bus. My parents had no idea. If they ever asked why my hair was wet, I’d tell them I took a shower after gym class. I was loving life.
It didn’t last. My parents were called into a conference with the dean of boys, who informed them I was an incorrigible class skipper pulling straight D-minuses. My father acted swiftly. One afternoon I came home to find the catalogs of five military schools lined up on the dining room table. My dad told me to read through them and pick one out. I was fifteen years old, a pooka-shell-wearing surf dude, and I was damned if I was gonna read about a bunch of idiots in Nazi uniforms. I jabbed my finger at the closest catalog and said, “How about this one?”
My finger was pressed against a gray catalog embossed with the letters “SMA.” I didn’t know it, but I’d randomly selected the prospectus of the oldest and toughest military prep school in the nation: Staunton Military Academy.
My dad just smiled.
Two weeks later, I was standing atop a pair of footprints painted on an asphalt parade deck tucked deep in the bosom of the Shenandoah Valley. I was one of a hundred new cadets, called “rats,” being welcomed to my new high school. An upper-class cadet was screaming in my face. I could see his tonsils as he shrieked at me. His breath was bad, and he seemed incapable of speaking without ejecting a vast quantity of saliva. I was dressed in a baggy aloha shirt, and my hair was to my shoulders. I’d left the pooka shells at home, luckily. I remember being called a communist, morphodite, hippie-surfer bitch as I was marched with my fellow “new boys” to the academy’s barbershop.
I was to spend two long years at SMA. Like every cadet who ever went there, I remember it as the kind of place you could hate every day and miss for the rest of your life. The academics were tough and the military rules unbending. Rats had little free time. We were formed into a battalion three times a day and marched to the mess hall. Companies were served on the basis of their performance at parade, with the honor company eating first and the slackers last. Eating last sometimes meant going hungry. When the mess hall ran out of food, they served powdered eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
At meals and every other time, we were harried by upperclassmen—the usual Lords of Discipline stuff. Our rooms were subject to surprise inspections three times a week. To discourage desertion, we were forbidden to possess luggage or civilian clothing. Our persons, uniforms, and weapons were inspected regularly. We drilled every afternoon and had a dress parade every Sunday, rain or shine. Breaches of discipline garnered demerits and assignment to the Beat Squad, which generally meant running around the school’s track with r
ifle and rucksack, or shoveling snow or raking leaves.
SMA was an old school, steeped in tradition. The Academy was founded in 1860 by William Hartman Kable. Not long after the school admitted its first students, hostilities opened in the American Civil War. Like many a good Virginian, Billy Kable joined up. He served with distinction as a captain in the 10th Virginia Calvary, in the Confederate States Army. Like Captain Kable, Staunton cadets wore gray.
Staunton alumni have served in almost every conflict fought by the United States since the Civil War—in America’s army, chiefly, but also in the navy, air force and marine corps. One of Staunton’s professors, Major Thomas Dry Howie, led the Allied breakout from Saint Lo after the landings at Normandy. In so doing, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor—the hard way. Among the academy’s alumni are senators, admirals, generals, fighter aces, congressmen, and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, people like John Dean and Barry Goldwater. It was the kind of school that did not bend its ways to suit the student body. You adapted or you perished.
It is interesting that at my high school, everyone carried a gun, and we didn’t have a problem with school violence. There was, however, the occasional suicide. Although no one did himself in while I was a cadet, a couple of kids had nervous breakdowns. The phenomenon was called, in cadet argot, “snapping out,” and it happened a few times a year. Someone would be taken, blubbering, from his room and led by the officer of the day to the infirmary and the school nurse. The next day the unfortunate cadet’s room would be cleaned out. No one talked much about it. Like I said, SMA was a tough place.
The school rewarded compliance. If a cadet was on the dean’s list, pulling A’s and B’s, he didn’t have to attend daily study halls. An hour or two of free time a day was precious. Idle hours could be spent in the cadet canteen, smoking and hanging out. Cadets were supposed to have a permit signed by their parents in order to buy cigarettes, but I never heard of anyone asking to see one. Consequently, everybody smoked. Another way out of the military hassles was to go out for a varsity sport. Athletes were allowed the afternoons to practice, and there was no military bullshit on the playing fields. Away games off the academy grounds were a welcome break from marching and polishing brass.
At SMA I learned a lot more than how to clean a rifle, drill a company, and shine my shoes. As you might imagine, young men are not sent to military schools because they have comported themselves like model citizens. My brother cadets were a multitalented lot. Some might question the wisdom of grouping together twelve hundred world-class juvenile delinquents. In our battalions were the scions of the first families of Virginia, the sons of Watergate conspirators, the offspring of Latin American dictators, and the bastard kids of movie stars. We also had our share of vandals, felons, and drug dealers.
It was at SMA that I acquired many of the skills that would serve me later in the SEAL Teams. At SMA I learned to pick a lock, hot-wire a car, and perfectly forge the laminated New Jersey driver’s license that would permit me to buy beer until I turned twenty-one.
In many ways, SMA was like Stalag 17, the escape-proof camp where the Nazis locked up Allied officers prone to breaking out. By concentrating the experts, our jailers had created Escape Central. Like intrepid POWs, we cut holes in the fence, ditched our uniforms, and sneaked into town wearing civvies stashed in secret hiding places. To go AWOL for beer was to risk expulsion. Unlike the prisoners in the German camps, we made our escapes round trips, and we’d always be back in our bunks by reveille.
Staunton taught me another vital skill: how to put up a front. I learned to shine my shoes, keep my uniform pressed, and say “Yes sir.” At SMA cadets learned to toe the line during the day and howl at night.
I can’t say I enjoyed Staunton, but I needed it. My grades went from D-minuses to A’s and B’s. I earned letters in track and soccer. On the day I graduated, I had been offered an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy and three full-ride ROTC scholarships. The hippie surfer had been made into a patriot.
What did I do? I picked a college in California that would be close to the surf. I turned down the Annapolis appointment and the ROTC rides. I’d had enough of the military. Or so I thought. My father, naturally, was disappointed, but I was never hassled about turning down Annapolis. He never brought it up, and I thank him for his indulgence.
After military school, college was a breeze. Staunton had taught me how to budget my time and how to study. At California State University at Northridge, I was a varsity athlete, an officer in my fraternity, and held a full-time job while I pulled down mostly A’s. I majored in clinical psychology and looked forward to graduate school and a practice in the suburbs.
It wasn’t to happen.
I was in love. Heart-attack-serious, all-consuming, major hound-dog love with a woman I’d met back in Newport. Lisa Wheaton was the daughter of another Naval War College professor. About the time I was shipped off to Staunton, Lisa’s dad, a colonel in the engineers, was transferred to Germany. She and I wrote to each other incessantly, and when she came back to the U.S. to attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, I became a frequent flier. We spent our junior year in Great Britain together—well, almost together. Lisa attended the University of London, and I went to the University of Bath. We saw each other every weekend and spent our “vacays” traveling together through England, Scotland, and Ireland.
When we returned to the U.S. in our senior year, things started to cool off for her. By the time I’d started grad school, it was over. Our breakup had unfolded in excruciating slow motion and was marked by extreme civility on both sides. I can tell you in all honesty that I was let down in the kindest manner possible.
In the tragic fashion of the self-absorbed, I was devastated. Nothing mattered to me anymore. Not getting a Ph.D., not becoming a psychologist, nothing. I’d lost the most important thing in my life, and I was adrift and alone.
Then one day I was walking across campus, and it hit me. I was going to spend my twenties wearing out a path to the library. Three more years of school, a dissertation, an internship . . . then I would spend the rest of my life trying to convince rich white ladies not to be afraid of spiders.
There has to be more to living, I thought. My father has seven stars on his Vietnam service ribbon . . . that’s right, I said seven. When I was a boy, I would stand on the pier waiting for his destroyer to come in. It was like a carnival. Bands played, and hundreds of wives and kids crowded the pier, waving signs, holding balloons. All waiting for fathers and loved ones to return from halfway around the world.
When the gangplank was put over, we’d all rush aboard, all four kids and our mom grabbing Dad in a massive hug. He’d always return with exotic presents: silk scarves from Thailand for the girls, opals for our mother, teak-handled pocketknives for the boys. Although he never talked much of Vietnam, Dad would pile the kids on his knees and show us on the globe the places he had been. He told us of seeing polar bears swimming in arctic seas. Of sunsets off the coast of Africa. Of sea snakes covering the surface of the ocean as far as he could see in the Gulf of Siam. The names of the places he’d been were magical to me: Zamboanga. Cam Rahn Bay. The Ionian Sea. The Straits of Magellan.
I said it was almost inevitable that I joined the navy. It’s probably more serious than that. My father’s side of the family had been in the United States for three generations. With the exception of my great-grandfather, who emigrated from Switzerland in 1900, every man in my family has served as an officer in the navy or the Marine Corps. My grandfather was a navy intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II. My father was career navy, my uncle Don was a navy gunfire officer in Vietnam, and my uncle Steve waded through rice paddies as a marine platoon leader. My mother’s older brother Bob was a navy fighter ace in the Pacific; her brother Mickey was at Normandy and Remagen.
I wanted to see the world, too. Now I wanted my life to be an adventure.
I walked into the psychology offices and said, “I quit.” I got into m
y 1969 Kingswood Estate station wagon and drove to the navy recruiter’s office on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. I told them, “I want to be a Navy SEAL.”
This was a long time before SEALs became a staple in movies, TV, and popular culture. For many years the navy denied the very existence of the SEAL Teams. The lieutenant commander behind the desk looked me over. “What do you know about the SEALs?” he asked.
What I knew, I had been told by my father, who worked with the SEALs during his ground tour in Vietnam. I told the recruiter I was a navy brat and an SMA graduate. I told him I wanted a challenge. I seemed sincere, because I was.
The recruiter told me the SEAL program was full, but they needed helicopter pilots. I was born into a navy family, and I knew that where there was a will, there was a waiver. I agreed to take the flight aptitude test, along with the test for SEAL training. I passed both. The recruiter said they still needed helicopter pilots, so I played a trump card. I said that if I couldn’t become a SEAL, maybe I’d wander down the hall to his army colleague’s office and become a Green Beret.
Two days later there was an opening in the SEAL program. I wound up with a “contract”: I would attend navy officer candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island. After that, the navy guaranteed that I would receive orders to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in Coronado, California. But they didn’t guarantee that I would pass, or that I would get a second chance if I was injured and forced to drop out. If I failed, I’d be sent to the fleet: haze gray and under way, just like the regular navy. I had no intention of joining the regular navy; I wanted to be a SEAL, I said. The recruiter reminded me patiently that I was joining the regular navy—and if I flunked out of OCS, I’d be sent directly to the fleet, as an enlisted man.
I signed on the dotted line.
In the span of three days, I’d gone from budding psychologist to wanna-be naval commando. I’d turned my back on everything I thought I would be. Gone were five years of study and my plan for a life. I’d jumped off the end of the world. I have been told that breaking up with my girlfriend was a very B-movie reason to join the SEALs. Maybe it was. It all seems very beau geste now, but it didn’t then. I wanted to change the direction of my life.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 3
