Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL

by Pfarrer, Chuck

  Many of the training cadre, like Master Chief Boynton, were high-time Vietnam operators, men who had fought in the Rug Sat Special Zone and the Mekong Delta, and from these men we learned skills and tricks small and large. There were new equations to master, not just the mathematics of demolition problems or the mixture of breathing gases in closed-circuit diving rigs. The cadre taught us that SEALs operate in a different polarity, in a different ethos, and in a different world. SEALs embrace what other people fear. Operators seek out bad terrain, shitty weather, and big-sea states. SEALs occupy the margins, ecological niches abandoned by humans: hard jungle, glacier, swamp, desert, blue water, and the surf zone.

  In the course of my first months at the Team, night would become day and day would become night. Complex evolutions would first be practiced in daylight, but we operated almost exclusively at night. In darkness things were done by touch, by feel, and by instinct honed in hundreds of missions, operations, insertions, and extractions. The cadre taught how to “see” at night, looking around objects and not directly at them, maximizing our eyes’ natural concentrations of rods, the structures in our eyes best able to process contrast. Moonlight became, for us, broad daylight. The darkness was not just a shield and cloak, the night became our sovereign territory.

  “Fear the darkness,” Baby Zee used to say, “for I am in it.”

  Word up, motherfucker.

  Patrols were inserted into the middle of the Great Dismal Swamp, a very aptly named piece of real estate, and made to traverse kilometers of cypress bog, saw grass, and canal. Sometimes we patrolled into the belly of the beast, one platoon against another in a big boys’ game of hide-and-seek. The first team to locate the other would be extracted by helicopter. The losers had to walk out. In the Teams, like at BUD/S, it paid to be a winner. In other exercises, patrols laid up by the side of the intercoastal waterway and counted barge and push-boat traffic, photographing each tow and lighter that passed, noting boat names, registration numbers, type of cargo, visible crew, etc. This data was expected to be presentable immediately on extract, a nontrivial task when you have spent two days immersed in water up to your neck.

  Bad weather became good weather; rain, sleet, and cold were our accomplices. Bad weather made the enemy pissy and miserable, and the enemy’s vulnerability was always our strength. We learned to live, hide, and operate in places no one wanted to be. Sometimes when we were extracted by helicopter, I would look down as we flew off over miles of trackless swamp and couldn’t believe that we had been in there . . . not just in there, Mom, but in there at night.

  The cadre habituated us to the chaos of combat. In an event called a Monster Mash, operators would run five miles, swim two, emerge from the surf zone, and pair up with a shooting partner. After a brief sprint across beach sand, shooting pairs would run the gauntlet. Alternating hauling each other in a fireman’s carry, the pair would traverse a section of dune laid with det cord (plastic explosive cast into “ropes”), smoke grenades, and half-pound blocks of TNT. As the pair struggled past, the explosives were cranked off within feet of the trail. The close detonations were mind-numbing. The gauntlet was followed by a quarter-mile dash to the rifle range, where individual operators would have to assemble an AK-47 rifle, then lock and load and shoot for score at a series of silhouette targets two hundred meters away. Pumped out from the run and swim, jacked up by the explosions and smoke, hitting the targets was at first almost impossible. In all of the training, there was method and purpose. We were being conditioned to overcome fatigue and the not always salutary effects of adrenaline. In my first months at the Team, the days passed like weeks and the weeks passed like days.

  One Friday afternoon I pattered back to my desk, dripping in my wet suit, fresh from a water jump off Cape Henry. It was almost quitting time, and I’d left a pile of work on my desk. I got back to find that the master chief had done it all: drafted messages, written memos, forwarded reports. It was work that I had expected would take me all weekend.

  “Jesus Christ. Soaking wet. Where have you been, sir?” he asked.

  Obviously, I hadn’t been out dancing. “Water drop,” I said. “What happened to the stuff I left on my desk?”

  “Fairies got it,” he said. “Officer fairies, ’cause there ain’t no such thing as chief petty officer fairies.” I smiled. The master chief looked at me. “How many jumps is that?” he asked.

  “Ten,” I said.

  Master Chief Boynton ambled toward me, unsnapping the gold navy wings he wore below his ribbons. “Here,” he said, “you’re gonna be needing some of these.” He handed me his wings. “Before you go gettin’ all misty-eyed, I probably own a hundred pairs of these. They don’t cost very much, so don’t go writing me a thank-you note. I was just gettin’ tired of looking at your nasty-ass army lead wings.” He walked out.

  Navy jump wings cost five dollars at the uniform shop. But the gift meant a hell of a lot to me. Mike Boynton was a frogman’s frogman, the corporate knowledge of the team, an operator.

  Mike is gone now, but I still have those wings.

  * * *

  MOBILE, FLEXILE, AND HOSTILE

  SENIOR CHIEF JOHN JAEGER did not have much use for new guys, and he did not care too much for officers, either. The one thing that annoyed him more than anything else was new-guy officers, and it was into his tender care that we were delivered when we formally started AOT in the spring. It seemed a very SEAL thing to do to assign a man who would not suffer fools as the leading chief of the Training Department. It cannot be said that the senior chief was a patient man. There was an incredible amount to teach us, and he was in a hurry to do so. Training with the senior chief, one always got the impression that this would all be going a lot faster if we weren’t so fucking stupid.

  Senior Chief was a red-faced, thickset man in his early forties. He’d done several tours in Vietnam as an M-60 gunner for SEAL Team One, and he was unapologetic about the fact that he loved war. The senior chief seemed to have a trace of a German accent, although this was not the most peculiar thing about his speech. He had a sort of verbal tic: He constantly used “or so” as an appositive. Any noun or verb was followed by “or so.” He’d say things like “Get your ass over here before I shoot you, or so.” Or “Youse guys are dumber than a bag of hammers, or so.”

  It was rumored that he was born in Germany during World War II, at a Lebensborn camp where SS men impregnated specially selected Aryan Uber-fräuleins. I heard the story that he was adopted after the war and later orphaned by U.S. Army parents. I knew for sure only that he grew up in a series of foster homes in the Midwest. Even after I came to know him well, I never asked about his German birth. I mean, really, what do you say to someone? “I heard you were born in a Nazi genetic experiment”?

  Physically, the senior chief did not make much of an impression, but in the field he was tireless. He operated on about ten hours of sleep a week, and he made a point of winning the command’s weekly two-mile swim. To the chagrin of many of our triathletes, John Jaeger usually crossed the finish line first, rolling onto his back, kicking his flippers, and smoking a cigarette he’d pull out of a plastic bag in his wet suit. If anyone dared to criticize his smoking, John would hold forth on nuclear war: “When the apocalypse comes, there’s gonna be nothing but smoke and dust. All you granola-eating, nonsmoking motherfuckers are gonna be coughing, wheezing, and whining while I take over what’s left, or so.”

  I never doubted him for a second.

  I first met the senior chief after a parachute drop into Fort A. P. Hill, a sprawling army preserve in central Virginia. The place was vast, hundreds of square miles of artillery ranges, woodland, marshland, lakes, streams, and hills. We’d parachuted in with full field gear, weapons, and ammo. On the drop zone we were met by Baby Zee and a few of the other training petty officers. We were not told where the SEAL camp was located; this being our first training deployment, we had no way of even guessing. We were each handed an eight-digit grid coordinate. The cadre told
us that at our coordinates we would each find an ammunition can. In the can would be a second eight-digit grid coordinate. These coordinates would lead us to the SEAL camp. Some people were sent to road junctions, some to hilltops. Some were sent north and some south. I looked at my map and plotted my first coordinate. It was in the middle of a swamp. That swamp was six kilometers from where I now stood. Humping my pack and rifle, I took out over the hills.

  Our navigation was to be conducted by handheld compass only, no GPS. The ammunition cans for which we searched were each about the size of a fat lady’s pocketbook. They were painted green. The woods were green. Everything was green, and my can was hidden in a bog. When I got there, the swamp was green, too. Still, I had always prided myself on my navigational skills, and I was confident I’d find my cans. I counted my paces, followed contour lines, and walked a magnetic bearing straight through a waist-deep morass. I located can number one directly on my route of march, hanging from a cypress tree. I opened the lid and found the slip of paper with my next set of coordinates. They were at a road junction to the east—four clicks back the way I had just come.

  It was obvious that we were getting screwed with. I had no idea how many cans I’d have to find before I found the camp. It was now almost noon, so I started to jog. I found my remaining eight cans and covered another twenty clicks, twelve miles, before I arrived at the SEAL camp, well after dark. Though I’d run most of the way across country, I was the third man in. I had been given the longest course.

  As the other students tromped in, we settled into camp. It was not much to look at: a series of mobile-home bodies covered with camouflage netting. The trailers had electricity, but inside were plywood shells filled with bunk beds. There were windows but no screens or glass. I selected a bunk, hung my pack, and spread my sleeping bag out on the stained mattress. Baby Zee told me not to get too comfortable—we wouldn’t be spending much time in the trailers.

  I met Senior Chief Jaeger standing around the camp’s fire. I thought I was pretty cool because I’d jumped in carrying an insulated cup and an empty coffee can in my pack to use for heating water and preparing MREs (meals, ready to eat). I noticed that the senior chief had a coffee can, too. He was sipping a beer and watching the can by the edge of the flames. Every now and then he used the cutting end of a pair of demolition cap crimpers to rotate the can in the flames.

  “I see you got a coffee can, or so, Mr. Pfarrer,” he said.

  “Yes, Senior Chief.”

  “Whatcha gonna use it for?” he asked.

  “Boiling water,” I answered.

  “Oh.”

  It was then that I noticed the top of the senior chief’s coffee can was covered with aluminum foil. As I waited for my water to boil, I caught a whiff of something delicious. My can was boiling water, but the senior chief’s rig was a Dutch oven. In John’s coffee can was a pair of quail stuffed with wild onions and freshly picked morels. In a plastic bowl beside him was a salad made from wild watercress and cattail root. Senior Chief knew how to live off the land. He was a scrounge par excellence, and I would later watch him gather delicacies, munchies, and just plain weird stuff in every ocean and environment around the world. Seaweed, conch, tiny wild strawberries, sassafras roots, yucca plants, fish, birds, snakes, hickory nuts, and wild pineapples. All of it would end up in his pot and would emerge a marvel of camp cuisine. Before me was Euell Gibbons with a machine gun.

  I poked at my beans and franks while the senior chief ate quail and drank beer. The fire crackled and snapped.

  “How’d you like your walk, or so?” he asked.

  “It was okay,” I said.

  “If you liked today, sir, you’re gonna freakin’ love tomorrow.”

  I watched him lick his fingers. He was right. I loved tomorrow, and the next day.

  Senior Chief still didn’t like FNGs, and it took him a while to tolerate me. In my AOT section was another officer, a guy we called Dwight Light. Dwight was an enthusiastic and personable ensign who graduated four classes behind me in 118. Dwight’s blond hair was the color of snow, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. While a bandana was sufficient to cover my reddish locks on operations, Dwight’s hair made him stand out in darkness like a flashlight. Through night-vision goggles, Dwight glowed like a luminous object. And that’s how he got his name.

  Dwight Light and I slowly came to realize that only one thing pissed the senior chief off more than new-guy officers, and that was preppy college boys. If you were trying to find a preppy from central casting, it would probably be Dwight Light. He’d grown up in Darien, Connecticut, spoke with a patrician lockjaw, and had been a varsity squash player at Penn. Dwight soon took any of the heat not directed at me, and eventually, he’d take all of it. We were very often the recipients of the longest compass courses, the hardest demolition problems, and the longest swims. Neither of us complained, pissed, or moaned. We just did it all. Dwight Light proved his mettle in AOT, and later, after he got out of the navy, he would set the human-powered crossing record for the Atlantic Ocean, cranking a pedal-powered boat nearly three thousand miles from Newfoundland to Plymouth, England.

  The senior chief never did quite warm up to Dwight, but eventually I broke through. John Jaeger became my sea daddy. A sea daddy is a mentor, someone who shows you the ropes and teaches what the Team expects of you. He was an unlikely Yoda, and I was no Luke Skywalker. The lessons were hard, and the senior chief was a big fan of learning by doing. He’d let me make the mistake once, unless that mistake was going to kill him or someone on the cadre.

  “If it freakin’ kills you, sir, that’s what we call Darwinism, or so.”

  He was not above calling me a “donkey-dick motherfucker, sir,” when I screwed up, which was often. We soon came to realize that Fort A. P. Hill was the senior chief’s world, and we were just living in it.

  It was called advanced operator training for a reason. We had been exposed to the basics at BUD/S, only the basics, and now it was time to mold us into frogmen. We focused on the three tasks a commando must master to prevail in combat: how to shoot, how to move, and how to communicate.

  We had been introduced to Russian weapons at BUD/S, but now we became virtuosos. The RPG-7 antitank rocket launcher was a good piece of kit, and we learned to use it against bunkers, vehicles, and aircraft. We crawled low while AK-47s and RPD machine guns were fired over our heads. We came to know the distinct sounds of Russian-made AKs and American M-16s, a vital skill in the furious whirl of combat. We worked with demolitions a lot. We learned how to rig charges that would drop trees across roads, and how to set up deadly claymore mines to sweep and decimate the scenes of ambushes. We learned how to put a hurtin’ on bridges, how to crater runways and derail trains. We were shown how to use linear-shaped charges to do elegant little jobs, like blow the wheels off vehicles or cut through hardened steel such as a bank vault. We were taught where to strike a target with greatest economy, how to disable key pieces of equipment, and how to booby-trap almost everything. All of this we practiced with live ammunition and live explosives.

  The training was structured to teach us component skills and subtasks; we would gradually assemble these skills into full mission profiles. We ran de-molition raids against elaborate target mock-ups, underground command centers, bunker complexes, and communication facilities. We learned how to take down surface-to-air missile sites, and learned Russian tactics for guarding, securing, and reacting when these sites were attacked. We worked with the navy’s Red Wolf helicopter squadrons to insert and extract from operations. We were taught how to attack and how to run away. We became masters of dirty tricks, like leaving booby-trapped backpacks along our line of retreat—claymore mines fused with time pencils to splatter anyone who attempted to follow. We learned how to fight guard dogs. We learned how to throw bloodhounds off our trails. We climbed fences, we climbed walls, we blew open safes and hangar doors. We made pizza-shaped platter charges and destroyed electrical substations. We had a blast, literally.


  As our skills coalesced, we were instructed less and made to operate more. We planned, briefed, and executed under the watchful eyes of the cadre. We were accompanied in the field by Lane Graders, cadre members who geared up and patrolled with us. They gave no advice and offered no sympathy. They were there to keep eyes on, and to make sure we didn’t lie our asses off in the debriefs. In the SEALs there is an expression, “Cheat if you must, but don’t get caught.” The Lane Graders made cheating impossible. If the operation involved a six-mile hump, they went along to make sure you didn’t steal a truck. (Bear in mind, we were encouraged to do things like steal trucks.) The Lane Graders made sure our out-of-the-box thinking remained on the planet.

  The most important thing I learned from the senior chief was how to be a leader. He taught me that though my men carried machine guns, the platoon was my weapon. John Jaeger trained me how to take care of the men in my charge and to make sure the concept of Team remained foremost. The platoon required ammunition, radios, batteries, and antiarmor weapons; they also required food, sleep, praise, discipline, information, and responsibility. “Take care of the lads,” John used to say, “and the lads will take care of you.” Small, simple things were important: Eat last, and only after everyone has been served. Buy beer. Praise publicly, punish privately. Take the heat when things go wrong. Ask questions and solicit the opinions of the enlisted operators, and, most important, delegate subtasks within the mission. Fully 50 percent of the officers in SEAL Team are Mustangs, men who served first as enlisted troops and gained their commissions through merit and dedication. This percentage is higher than in any other part of the military. The reason is simple: The lads are motivated. Officers come and go, but enlisted men are the backbone and experience base of the Teams. They don’t require micromanagement, they require guidance; it was often necessary only to wind ’em up and point them in the right direction. John taught me that if I trusted the men, the men would trust me.