by Brandon Webb
It took a few weeks to make the Cole ready for transport back to the States. Finally they loaded it onto a gigantic transport ship, the Norwegian MV Blue Marlin, and as the vessel pulled away and out toward open sea, the crew started playing some macho Kid Rock song on a set of loudspeakers.
“Bullshit,” Dave’s voice cut through. “I can’t believe you guys—that’s the wrong song to be playing right now!”
As far as Dave was concerned, we’d just lost. The other guys got the better of us and there was nothing to be proud of here. We fucked up, and they won; it was that simple. I’m sure the crew saw it differently. Theirs was a huge and difficult task: They had to keep the damn thing afloat, put out all the fires, ready it for transport and salvage, and do all that and more under the creepily hostile gaze of foreign nationals who seemed all too ready to shoot at them. So, hey, credit where credit was due. But to Dave there was nothing there to celebrate.
“We are in deep shit,” he mused as the Blue Marlin and its crippled freight pulled away. We sure were. Dave just saw it before the rest of us did.
• • •
Dave’s radiant intelligence was just one facet of his outsize personality. The other was an unbridled wildness. These two sides of Dave contrasted so starkly that it was as if he were two different people, each one pulling his life in opposite directions—a brainy technology nerd who required extreme physical risk the way the rest of us need oxygen. Apollo and Dionysus, god of rational thinking and god of chaos and the outrageous, wrapped into a single person.
To a degree, I related to that crazy risk-taker side of Dave. From the moment I could crawl I was a daredevil, constantly getting myself into trouble, courting danger, and pushing things to extremes. I made my poor mother’s life hell; she says it was a wonder I survived childhood, let alone adolescence. But Dave? He took recklessness to a whole new level. I could never be as extreme or outrageous as Dave, and wasn’t even sure I’d want to be. But I admired the hell out of his raw courage and sheer mental appetite.
While still in grade school, Dave asked his parents if he could take computer lessons—and this was in the early eighties, when personal computers were not yet popular. (Dave was born in 1973, a month after Mike Bearden and a year before me.) He would sit for hours messing around with his Franklin, an early competitor of the Apple II. And it wasn’t about playing games; he would sit there and program the damn thing. He personified “computer geek” before anyone had invented the term.
At the same time, he lived for physical thrills. Even from his earliest days, Dave was an adrenaline junkie. He loved being outside on his bike and using it to do the riskiest tricks possible. His dad helped him build a half-pipe in the backyard, where he practiced his bike moves for hours. They attached a zip line to Dave’s tree fort so he could go shooting down it with a banshee cry, practicing his feats of aerial derring-do.
The Scotts had a vacation home on the nearby Jersey coast, and by age three Dave was addicted to plunging into the ocean, no matter the water temperature. He would thrash around in the freezing-cold surf, lips turning blue, teeth chattering, and if anyone suggested it was time to get out, he’d say, “I’m n-n-not c-c-c-cold!” The cold just didn’t seem to bother him. One day his dad, Jack, found him playing around in a mudflat by the beach, rolling around down in the mud, doing push-ups. “He was so completely covered in mud,” says Jack, “all you could see were his eyes.”
The dude hadn’t even started kindergarten yet and he was already putting himself through BUD/S.
A decade and a half later, on a simmering Friday evening in July of 1990, when Dave was about to enter his senior year of high school, a summer blockbuster came out. Navy SEALs, starring Charlie Sheen, did a few million at the box office that first weekend, no more than a modest splash for a summer action film. But it ignited a lot of young men’s souls, including Dave’s. He walked out of that suburban theater with the siren song of life as a SEAL pounding in his blood.
At the same time, the world of numbers and electrons held as powerful an attraction as ever. A National Merit scholar, Dave graduated high school with excellent SAT scores, then enrolled in Penn State to study computer engineering. It looked for a while like the academic brain might hold sway over the thrill-seeker gene. But Dave quickly grew bored with college and couldn’t bring himself to sit through his classes. Soon he wasn’t even showing up for them. He gave it a year before dropping out.
When he called his parents to break the news that he was joining the Navy, they were aghast. Maggie Scott, Dave’s mother, burst into tears on the phone and did everything she could to persuade him to change his mind. As her husband, Jack, says, “I heard some words from her mouth I heard only then and during childbirth.” Maggie sums it up this way: “We were not happy.” But they both knew that nothing they could do would budge him.
In 1993, two years after finishing high school, Dave went through BUD/S Class 195. He then spent the next few years in deployments with his SEAL team in various parts of the world.
One Sunday morning during these years, the phone rang in the Scott home in the Philadelphia suburbs. When Maggie picked up she was surprised and delighted to hear Dave’s voice on the other end. “Dave!” she exclaimed, beckoning to Jack to pick up an extension. “How are you?”
“Better than I was,” said Dave. He was calling from a hospital bed in Quito, Ecuador. “I was in a little accident,” he explained.
As his parents listened, horrified, he related the sketchiest details of his “little” accident. It had happened about a week earlier, in the middle of the night, and it involved a car crash somewhere along the Ecuador-Colombia border. That was all they ever knew. The story we heard on the teams was that he and some buddies had gotten into it with some locals and were speeding away from the banditos when their car rolled. One Golf Platoon teammate says he heard Dave was on a motorcycle at the time. Whatever actually happened, Dave had been badly hurt, his colon perforated and his insides pretty much torn out.
Dave was taken to a clinic in the area, but when they saw a sonogram the clinicians on staff knew they were way out of their depth. Dave was medevaced out to emergency surgery in Quito, where he lay wide-open on an operating table for an extended series of procedures, including the removal of a few inches of intestine that were not salvageable. (We could see the evidence whenever Dave took off his shirt: a huge, ugly scar ran some ten inches vertically from his lower gut up to his rib cage. “Hey, check it out,” he’d say. “You wanna see some cut abs?”)
After being shuttled through several different hospitals, Dave eventually arrived back at Walter Reed in Bethesda. Jack and Maggie fetched him out of the hospital and brought him back home for some brief recuperation time before he could go in and have his colon reattached. Meanwhile, Dave had to wear a colostomy bag—which he lost no time using to good advantage when he was back at NSW headquarters in Virginia Beach for a short stretch before his reattachment surgery.
Every SEAL team has a floor in the Naval Special Warfare building where all the paperwork, travel claims, and other administration happens. This is where the CO’s office is located, and it’s also where nobody in the platoon wants to be. (We’d all rather be hanging out in our platoon’s team room.)
Dave would let his colostomy bag fill up with gas, then sneak upstairs into the main hallway in his PT gear, open the valve, and squeeze its contents out into the open air. He delighted in describing the results to us in graphic detail. “Man, that stench was so nasty and teargas powerful, people would run for the exit with their eyes watering. It would clear the building.” And he took such unadulterated pleasure in it that he’d do it all over again the next day. I’ll never forget Dave’s evil grin as he painted the scene for us. He called it “Saddam gassing the Kurds.” Totally tasteless, I know. We all laughed so hard we thought we might end up with internal injuries and colostomy bags, too.
Following Dave’s explo
its in South America, the pendulum swung the other way for a while, as the incandescently brilliant side of his personality decided it was hungry. Leaving the teams, he enrolled at the Elliott School in D.C. to pursue his bachelor’s in international affairs with a concentration in counterterrorism and national security—the same program where he would soon take that course with Dr. Post and write his paper on bin Laden. For the next few years he funneled his explosive kinetic energy into academics, completing the four-year program within two years. “You know,” he told his parents, “it’s really not that hard if you actually study and go to class.”
But he desperately wanted to get back into the field. Without telling Jack or Maggie, he enrolled in ROTC at the same time so he would walk out of George Washington with his officer’s commission as well as a bachelor’s degree. (Dave was what we call a “mustang”—that is, an officer who started out as an enlisted man. The term comes from the idea that a mustang horse can be tamed and saddle-broken but always maintains its wild streak—a definition tailor-made for Dave.) It wasn’t until he was halfway through his program that he confessed to his parents about the ROTC track and his intention to return to the teams. When they grilled him as to why on earth he would give up a brilliant and promising academic career to return to the SEALs, he said, “I still can’t believe I actually get paid to jump out of airplanes, shoot guns, and blow things up!”
SEAL officer billets are highly competitive. The U.S. Naval Academy gives out the majority of them and allows only sixteen spots per year. Half that number go to ROTC programs and are competed for across all the top colleges in the nation. The odds of getting a SEAL officer billet were extremely low—but as a formerly deployed SEAL, Dave was already in the club, and his work at the Elliott School had also made him well connected. On top of all that he was extremely well liked by his peers. If it took bending a rule in Dave’s favor to allow him back into the teams as an officer, the chances were good that would happen. Sure enough, immediately after graduating he was in Coronado reporting to Team Three, the ink barely dry on his re-up papers, and wangling his way onto our platoon, where we instantly accepted him into our tight-knit group. Two weeks later he was with the rest of us on the USS Duluth, bound for the Middle East and our rendezvous with the crippled USS Cole.
• • •
Once the Cole was loaded onto a freighter and hauled away and we were released from the Port of Aden, we returned to Bahrain, where we finally did get in some ship-boarding exercises. But we weren’t there long.
After the Cole was hit, nobody had any idea what attacks might be coming next, so the Navy immediately halted all resupply operations that were under way throughout the region and rerouted everything through a single port, where they could focus all their surveillance and intelligence resources in one place to make sure it was all safe. The guys in charge of making sure it was safe were us.
While nobody came out and said so, it was clear that command was worried about another Cole-style attack on an American vessel. If two idiots in a crappy little powerboat could take out a ten-thousand-ton destroyer, then who knew what else was possible? The security of the entire overseas fleet depended on our ability to get these resupply ships in and out safely.
Since there was a substantial population of expat British and American workers in this particular port, it was relatively easy for us to blend in. We took twelve-hour shifts, setting up surveillance in the port either early in the morning or at night, depending on our rotation. Just like on the bridge of the Cole, we spent long hours doing nothing but watching through our optics and binos, watching anything and everything. Why was that truck over there? Trucks weren’t supposed to be there. Who were these guys over here who weren’t here yesterday, and what were they doing here today? Anything remotely suspicious we wrote down in our activity logs, which would later be turned into reports that would go up some unseen chain of intelligence command.
We were not authorized to have weapons outside a certain zone in the port—but authorized or not, we carried concealed sidearms anyway, not just when in our hotel but everywhere around town, which added another layer of tension to the situation.
In this exotic locale we had a firsthand experience of the incredibly byzantine puzzle that is Middle Eastern culture and politics. There was the constant sense that we were missing huge chunks of the full picture. American forces have gotten somewhat better at this in the years since 9/11, but back then we were relatively unprepared. We knew we were supposed to be functioning in essence as a crew of intelligence operatives, but it was hard not to feel like a bunch of ridiculously conspicuous Caucasian Americans dropped in the middle of what might as well have been a distant planet. There were so many cultures, dialects, religious sects, dynastic families . . . it was an immense tangle of nuance and history, shifting alliances and ancient grudges. We felt enveloped by a sense of helplessness: How the hell could we possibly understand what was going on here?
And, of course, Dave absolutely loved it. For him it was like Christmas morning. Complexity? Cultural ambiguity? Undercurrents of espionage and international intrigue? Risk of discovery and grave danger to one’s person? Yes! The dude was in his element. The only thing missing was high-altitude, high-octane physical danger—and, of course, the opportunity to actually kill bad guys.
With his hair worn long and an earring in one ear, Dave gave the perfect impression of being an eccentric computer geek. (Which, of course, he was.) He would work at the computers for hours, then go to work up on the roof with sniper scopes for hours more.
We spent a month gathering whatever information we could and passing it on up the channels. We also learned more about the Russian Mafia, the Middle Eastern sex-slave trade, and a whole raft of other immoral and illegal activities going on under our noses than we would have thought possible.
After completing the mission, we began our homeward trek across the Pacific. In February, on our way to Hawaii, we weighed anchor near the tiny island of Iwo Jima to participate in the fifty-sixth anniversary of the American Marine landing there during World War II.
This was, remember, a Marine landing we were commemorating, and the Duluth was full of Marines. The idea was that they would be the ones who would go ashore first. But Dave wasn’t having any of that. Rather than wait around while the Marines boarded their boats and headed in, he jumped ship and swam ashore himself so he could reconnoiter ahead of everyone else. Once on land, he crafted a sign and posted it right at the beach’s edge, facing outward so it would greet the Marines when they arrived:
U.S. MARINES
WELCOME TO IWO JIMA!
COURTESY OF SEAL TEAM 3
Dave had brought a container with him, which he proceeded to fill with forty pounds of pure black sand. After smuggling the sand back with him onto the Duluth, he measured it out into dozens of little bottles, then gave one to each Marine on board as a memento of his visit. A little bit of Iwo Jima to take home with them—courtesy of SEAL Team Three, of course.
This wasn’t the last time our platoon would visit this part of the world. Dave and the other guys would be out this way again about a year and a half later, though I would not be with them that time—and that second trip would not end well.
• • •
Soon after we got back to the States, Dave became intensely interested in BASE jumping, which was just starting to gain popularity.
Coined in the 1970s, the term “BASE jumping” refers to the act of jumping off a stationary object—BASE is an acronym for buildings, antennae, spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs)—and using a parachute to land safely. Or attempting to. With a fatality rate more than forty times that of parachuting out of a plane, BASE jumping is the most dangerous recreational activity in the world.
Naturally Dave thought this was a fantastic idea. Kat, now his fiancée, was not so wild about it.
“The motorcycle thing I can live with,” she told him. “The skydiving I�
��m not totally crazy about, but it’s something you have to do for work anyway, and you seem to know what you’re doing. But BASE jumping? Sorry—that’s where I draw the line.”
Dave and Kat had met at George Washington, just as she was about to begin her sophomore year. (Like Dave, she was there on an ROTC program and bound for active duty in the Navy.) Everyone on campus knew that this guy had just come off two tours as a Navy SEAL, and he was the talk of the campus. “All the girls’ tongues were wagging,” says Kat, “and all the guys wanted to be his best friend. My eyes rolled as far back in my head as they could and I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I wanted nothing to do with him. I just knew he was trouble.”
Much to Kat’s dismay, when the fall semester began she found she’d been assigned as part of an ROTC sophomore-to-freshman buddy system to tour the new SEAL guy around the campus and show him the ropes. Dave soon discovered that Kat was not only gorgeous, she was also brilliant—and she had no trouble keeping up with his laser wit. The two quickly became fast friends. By the following year they were dating.
“Kat is the first girlfriend I’ve ever had who’s smarter than I am,” Dave told us when he joined our platoon a year later. Still, being in a relationship with Dave was anything but easy, even for someone as resourceful as Kat. When it came to BASE jumping she had put her foot down, but she knew better than anyone that Dave was impossible to contain.
In mid-2001, while Kat was in Newport, Rhode Island, going through her six months of surface warfare training before reporting to her fleet, Dave told her he had to go out of town for a couple of days and might not be able to call while he was gone. A few days later he called and said, “I have something to tell you, and I think you’re going to be mad at me.”
