Among Heroes

by Brandon Webb

  Especially Slattery. (And yes, it did piss him off.)

  Now, I am not a tall guy, and you might think being shorter was a major advantage in stalking. But it turned out size has nothing to do with it, and my proof for that assertion is Mike Bearden—who was the other guy in our class who clicked into the art of stalking right away.

  It was an amazing thing to watch: this monster of a guy, and he could just make himself invisible. I’d be a few hundred yards into a stalk and pause to look around, and there’d be Mike, slipping along nearby like a wraith. And then there were all the other guys back near the start line, inching along frantically on their stomachs.

  In our Navy training before BUD/S we all went through a school called SERE, an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Until I got to BUD/S, this school was the toughest damn training I’d ever had. At SERE they wanted to make sure you knew how to survive, whether on your own out in the wilderness or under conditions of hostile captivity, and they didn’t pull any punches in the process.

  I heard a story about Mike’s time in SERE school. When it came to the evasion exercise, where students role-play escaped prisoners and try to avoid recapture, they couldn’t find him. They’d rounded up all the other escapee-students, but even after scouring the entire area they couldn’t find Bearden.

  He had vanished.

  Even after the evasion exercise was over, they still couldn’t find him. The Bear, as the expression goes, was out in the woods. Finally they started combing the region in trucks, calling him in through loudspeakers. It turned out they couldn’t find him because he had stayed hidden underwater, breathing through a reed. The Commander wasn’t coming in till he was ready to come in.

  • • •

  On June 12, 2000, Mike, Glen, and I stood together with nine other classmates to receive our NSW Sniper School certificates. It was my twenty-sixth birthday; Mike was exactly twenty-seven years and three months old. His wife, Derenda, was there, along with their son, Holden, who was one day shy of nine months old. It was a proud time for all of us.

  For most of us, deployment would be coming soon. First, though, Glen and I had a thirty-day leave coming, and we both took full advantage of it immediately after graduation. For the Bear’s part, he was moving right on to another school, this one involving one of his favorite activities: jumping from tall places. Mike was using this time to go through military freefall training right there in California.

  Each of us had already been through rigger school, where you learn the basics of parachuting. There we had practiced a form of jumping called “static line,” a whole row of us jumping together with our chutes automatically pulled for us, what we call “dope on a rope,” and we’d also been through the exercise we call “hop-and-pops,” where you jump out over water at a few thousand feet and pull immediately, World War II–style, like the American airborne landings in Normandy. A funny story from Mike’s rigger-school days: While partying at someone’s second-floor apartment after hours, Mike was sitting out on the balcony when he looked out and glimpsed a guy snatching a purse from a woman on the street below. He leaped off the balcony, landing on his feet, and went after the guy. Seeing this giant appearing out of the air and plowing toward him, the terrified thief took off down the street as fast as he could run, but he didn’t have a chance. Just as he’d done on that high school choir trip in Scotland, Mike caught up with the perp and took him down with a flying tackle, then held him in a lock until the police showed up. That was Mike’s version of basic jump training.

  But this school Mike was going through now would take jumping to a whole different level. In military freefall he’d be jumping out of aircraft at ten to twelve thousand feet with full combat equipment. On an earlier visit to Coronado, his parents had seen some guys jumping out of a helicopter, and later that day Michael Senior had asked Mike, “How do you do that? I mean, you just throw yourself out of that thing. You don’t hesitate.”

  Mike shrugged. “Hey, somebody’s got to do it.”

  “But seriously,” his dad persisted, “have you thought about how dangerous this all is?”

  Mike said, “You know, Dad, I don’t think about that. You can’t think about that. This is our job. This is what we do. There are people out there who can’t help themselves. Somebody’s got to help them.”

  One day shortly after graduating from sniper school, Mike passed by the SEAL quarterdeck in Coronado on his way to get himself set up for jump school. A BUD/S instructor was finishing up with a group of fresh recruits, taking them through their punishing paces on the broiling-hot asphalt grinder. The instructor glanced up and spotted Mike walking by, recognizing him instantly. Reputation is everything in the SEAL teams, and everyone on the teams knew how well the new guys had done at sniper school, especially Mike.

  “Hey, Bearden,” the instructor called out. “Now that you’ve finished sniper school, what’s next?”

  Mike reached a fist up behind his neck and yanked, miming the action of opening a parachute. He grinned.

  “I’m gonna be a sky god,” he said.

  A few weeks later, nearing the end of jump school, Mike drove himself, Derenda, and their infant son, Holden, the fifteen hundred miles home to eastern Texas to attend a cousin’s wedding. The day after the wedding, he saddled the family up to head straight back out west so he could rejoin the class.

  “Man,” his dad said as Mike packed their bags, “I sure wish you could stay through the weekend. We could spend some time together.”

  “I can’t, Daddy,” said Mike. “We’ve got a jump coming up.”

  His dad nodded, said so long, and saw them off.

  A few days later, on Tuesday evening, Mike called home to check in with his folks, as he was in the habit of doing. He told his dad he’d made a jump that day, and said his back was really sore. When you watch SEALs go through their paces in documentaries, it’s easy to get the impression that we’re invulnerable and nothing fazes us. The truth is, all that training takes its toll. Mike’s knees had been dicey ever since high school, and while he never said a word about it to the other guys, they would hurt after jumping.

  “Well,” said his dad, “maybe you can skip tomorrow.”

  “Dad, you don’t skip,” Mike explained. “Besides, we’re just about finished up here.”

  There was a pause in the conversation; then his dad said, “So, what are you going to do next, Mike?”

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do next?” said Mike.

  “Your four years are fixing to be up. Have you thought about what comes after this?”

  Mike was silent for a moment before answering.

  “Dad,” he said, “I’ve found something worthwhile here. Yeah, I’ve had offers to go work for a few companies. And I’ve thought about working for the U.S. Marshals at some point. But for right now, I’m doing something I’m really good at.”

  Michael Senior digested that, then said, “So, what are you saying?”

  “I’m going to re-up, Dad,” Mike replied. “What we’re doing here makes a difference. People need us.”

  “Okay,” his dad said, and they said their good-byes.

  It was the last time the two men spoke.

  Michael Senior was at school teaching the next day, Wednesday, the twelfth of July, when someone came into the classroom and said he was needed at home right away. When he arrived home the news was waiting for him. That day the Bear had run smack into any military trainer’s worst nightmare: His main chute had a rare malfunction and got tangled up in his secondary or backup chute, preventing the secondary from deploying.

  He fought to the last second to get that canopy open—fought it all the way to the ground.

  • • •

  They held a funeral service for Mike Bearden on Wednesday, July 19, exactly one week after the freefall accident, at the First Baptist Church in Justin, Texas, the
town where his wife’s family lived. About twenty of Mike’s teammates were there, flown out from the coast so they could be present for the service.

  After the formal part of the service was over, little Holden looked over at my buddy Ed, who was a member of our sniper class, and pointed at his chest. Ed looked down. The boy’s finger was pointing at the gold SEAL Trident pinned to his lapel. Holden recognized it, because his dad had one just like it. He looked up at Ed and said, “Hey, mister. Do you know where my dad is?”

  Barely keeping his composure, Ed bent down and said, “He’s in a better place, son.” And then immediately felt like an ass. But what else could he say?

  There were a lot of tears shed by some very tough SEALs that day. Ed later told me it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, standing there in his dress blues as Mike’s little boy kept asking the SEALs in uniform where his daddy was. “It was a fucking tear factory,” is how he put it.

  I wasn’t there. In fact, I didn’t even know Mike had died. I was fifteen hundred miles away, surfing off the California coast, oblivious to all of this. Immediately after graduating sniper school, I had gone on my thirty days’ leave and had no idea what had happened. To tell the truth, though, even if I had known, I don’t think I would have gone. I couldn’t. It was too much.

  Over the years to come, a lot of my teammates would die, but I wouldn’t go to their funerals. It would be more than a decade before I would finally break down and attend a memorial service myself.

  • • •

  Mike’s death shook us all up, and I took it hard. It was the first time I’d come face-to-face with the fact that death is an unavoidable part of what we do.

  From the vantage point of today, so many years after 9/11, it’s hard to remember what the world was like in July of 2000. In many ways, we in the United States were living in our own bubble. The Cold War had been over for a decade, and in terms of combat, there wasn’t that much going on in the world. We’d lost four guys in Panama in ’89, and had seen more than a dozen of our Spec Ops brothers slain in Mogadishu in ’93, but those tragedies were brief and singular events that already seemed far removed in time. There was a sense of, if not exactly safety, at least relative calm, a sort of age of innocence. Yes, there were occasionally fatal accidents in training, but they were rare. We knew the life of a SEAL was dangerous—at least, we knew it with our heads. But we didn’t really expect to have to deal with the death of a comrade.

  I’d been wrong. I’d seen Mike as indestructible. But he wasn’t. None of us were.

  When my friends and I were going through BUD/S a few years earlier, one of our instructors sat us down and told us, “Look around, gentlemen. Look at the guys on your left. Now look at the guys on your right. These are your teammates, your friends. And some of them are going to die. You’re going to lose them. That’s the way it is.” Yeah, yeah, I remember thinking, save the lecture and just let us get our four hours of sleep! At the time his little speech had seemed melodramatic. Now it hit me that what he’d said was the simple truth. They’re your friends. And you’re going to lose them.

  What made Mike’s death all the more surreal was that it wasn’t as if he had been killed on the battlefield. It would be easy to decry his loss as senseless. But that wasn’t the truth. Tragic, yes. Wrenching, awful—absolutely. But not senseless.

  The training we go through to become the most effective warriors possible is serious. It’s not safe. Mistakes happen, because we’re constantly stretching our limits. If we made the conditions of our training so safe that nobody could get hurt, the training would fail in its purpose. We have an expression in the teams: “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” But it isn’t just sweat. We bleed in training, too. We get pneumonia, break bones, and sometimes worse. The mortal dangers our Spec Ops guys face don’t occur only in the cauldron of political hot spots around the world, but at every step along the way. Special Operations is a dangerous path, and those who tread it are putting everything on the line from day one. Mike died in the service of our country’s safety and security—in other words, he died keeping you and your family safe—every bit as much as our friends who would die a few years later in the streets of Ramadi or the mountains of Afghanistan.

  Mike died a hero’s death. And we all were left to fight the survivor’s battle: the one with shock, then anger and grief, and finally foreboding, knowing there were more losses to come. Because we all knew that death hadn’t simply paid us a visit. It had come into our midst, staked its tent, taken up permanent residence. From this point on it would be our constant companion.

  “You read war books, Clive Cussler and Richard Marcinko, things like that, and you get one kind of picture,” Mike’s dad told me years later. “But there’s a human side to these guys you don’t always read about. These are kids that mothers have brought into this world, and have raised and loved and held dear to their hearts, and you never dream that they’re going to just lay down their lives for somebody else. But it makes you proud, too. They just see it as their job and don’t think twice about it. Because if they didn’t do it, who else would?”

  • • •

  It wasn’t until several years after Mike’s death, long after I’d been through the caves of Afghanistan and back, that I finally had the chance to go through my own military freefall training. Because of a fluke in scheduling, this had been the one piece of standard SEAL schooling that I hadn’t managed to make. I’d been through the basic dope-on-a-rope stuff, but this was different. This was the jump Mike had been doing.

  As I sat in that little twin-engine plane, feeling it climb to twelve thousand feet (an altitude sufficient to cause hypoxia if you’re not wearing an oxygen mask) so we could throw ourselves out into the open sky, I felt a twinge of an emotion I wasn’t accustomed to feeling.

  Fear.

  Mike’s death had touched us all in a deep, dark place we don’t often show or talk about. SEALs don’t scare easily. Part of it is our training, and part of it is just who we are. To a degree every one of us on the teams shares that daredevil gene. But that doesn’t mean we don’t experience fear. We all have our own demons. Some guys have to conquer a fear of the water. In my case, Mike’s death triggered a fear of skydiving, and now that fear was rising up like a dragon.

  I told myself this was crazy. I loved flying. Since I was a kid I’d always aspired to become a pilot. I’d trained for this, and never for a moment thought I would have any hesitation when the time came to do it. But there it was.

  One classmate saw that plane’s rear ramp door open, sat himself right back down in his sideways-facing seat, and buckled himself in. “I’m done with this shit,” he said, and he refused to jump. I knew how he felt. An expression we have in jump school flitted through my mind: Why would you want to throw yourself out of a perfectly good airplane? Guys say it as a joke to take the edge off the tension of the moment. Right then I wasn’t seeing the humor in it. For a moment, I honestly didn’t know if I could go through with it.

  Then I thought about Mike. “What we’re doing here makes a difference,” he’d told his dad. “People need us.” The fall may have killed his body, but I’d never forget that indestructible spirit.

  I shook off the fear and jumped.

  2

  DAREDEVIL

  DAVE SCOTT

  On August 14, 2000, less than a month after Mike Bearden’s funeral, my platoon took off westward across the Pacific on our first deployment, bound for the Indian Ocean as part of an amphibious readiness group (ARG) attached to the transport ship USS Duluth. Our days as new guys were finally coming to an end—and not one moment too soon. After years of training and preparation, we were so glad to be getting the hell out of Coronado, on our way to becoming seasoned operatives at last.

  You’d think this would have been really exciting.

  It wasn’t.

  For one thing, being part
of an ARG was at the top of exactly nobody’s list. As part of an ARG, we had weeks of being shipbound to look forward to. This was smart in an operational sense, but it sucked for us. Yes, SEALs are technically part of the Navy, but in practical fact we have nothing to do with the Navy per se, and the last thing we want to do is spend our time on a boat. Not only is it tedious as hell, but it’s also practically impossible to stay in decent shape on a boat. Still, we gave it our all, putting in as much time as we could in the onboard gym lifting weights. On a ship, as they say, the acronym SEAL stands for Sleep, Eat, and Lift.

  Even when we did get off the boat, there just wasn’t all that much going on in the world. Trade sanctions against Saddam had been in place for a decade since Desert Storm, and as part of the multinational enforcement effort, SEAL teams were routinely involved in interdictions to curb the constant oil-smuggling traffic out of Iraq. That was an interesting gig, and we figured we would eventually have some fun doing ship boardings in the Gulf. But there wasn’t any serious action happening anywhere.

  We steamed southwest across the Pacific, with a few brief stops along the way at various exotic locations, until we reached the port town of Darwin, Australia, where we spent a week doing the things SEALs do to keep themselves occupied: joint training exercises with the Aussies, working out, and blowing off steam when we could. From there it was a quick hop north to war-torn East Timor, which had recently fought for its hard-won independence from Indonesia and was still in a shambles. A team of our guys went ashore for a few days to help in some humanitarian efforts there. And that was about as exciting as things got in those days. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity and stability, both in the States and in the world at large. To put it in SEAL terms, a pretty boring world.