by Brandon Webb
Kat’s heart leaped into her throat. Dave was incredibly charming, and she had no illusions that the long periods apart were easy on either of them. Had he met someone else? Was their relationship in trouble?
There was a silence on the phone. Then Dave said, “I took a BASE jumping course.”
Even in the midst of her relief, Kat knew damn well she had just been played.
• • •
That summer I transferred to a different platoon within SEAL Team Three, one that was scheduled for deployment to the Middle East later that year. I loved Golf Platoon, the group I’d been with, and absolutely hated the idea of leaving Glen Doherty, Mike Ritland, Shane Hiatt, Dave Scott, and all my other close buddies behind. But ops at command had asked if I would join Echo, a weaker platoon, to help it get on its feet. I was by now newly married and we were expecting our first child. They were offering me a substantial bonus to make the lateral move to boost this fucked-up platoon—an offer I couldn’t refuse. I said a reluctant good-bye to Glen and Dave and the rest of my teammates at Golf Platoon and joined Echo.
It turned out to be a more fateful decision than I could have imagined: The events of September 11 were only weeks away.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, my new platoon was one of the first to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Our task: to rout out and destroy every Taliban or al Qaeda element we could find. That December, while Dave and Kat were being married in a ceremony at the chapel at Walter Reed (they had actually eloped in June, but held the December ceremony for friends and family), I was threading my way in the pitch-black through a warren of mountain caves in northern Afghanistan, jammed up against the Pakistan border. On that mission, along with huge caches of weapons and matériel, we discovered al Qaeda recruiting posters with Photoshopped pictures of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center towers—posters that had been made up and circulated within this network in the months before the attacks. It was beyond creepy. We found nearly a million pounds of ammunition, equipment, and intelligence resources—and we dropped close to half a million pounds of ordnance, taking out one of the largest terrorist training facilities in the country.
Meanwhile Dave was back stateside with the other guys, frustrated beyond description that the biggest conflict in years was happening on the other side of the world, and he wasn’t there in the middle of it. It only added further fuel to the fire of Dave’s constant hunger for physical adventure.
The following spring, while she was shipboard on an exercise, Kat got an e-mail from Dave. Something was wrong, but he wouldn’t say what it was in the e-mail. He just left her a phone number. When she called the number she found she was talking to a hospital in Memphis. Dave had been in an accident. “We were skydiving,” he told her. “I had a bad landing and got a little banged up, but no big deal. I’m flying home tomorrow.”
When she returned to port in San Diego the following day and picked Dave up from the airport, she was shocked to see the condition he was in. Clearly he was not just “a little banged up.” His face was a mess and he was using a walker. He looked bad.
Kat didn’t learn this till a few years later, but in fact Dave had not been skydiving. He’d been BASE jumping.
While training at the famous Shaw Shooting range in Mississippi, Dave and another Team Three guy took off to do a BASE jump off a balcony near the top of a very tall Memphis hotel. Somehow Dave opened facing toward the building, swung back and slammed into it, then scraped his way all the way down the side of the building until he collided with a massive concrete planter. In addition to messing up his face and chipping some teeth, Dave had a hairline fracture in his pelvis—and a lacerated liver. A lacerated liver is no laughing matter. If he hadn’t gotten immediate medical attention he could easily have bled out and died.
Although his injuries were severe, Dave recuperated at home and went back to work much sooner than anyone wanted him to. He said he was bored sitting around the apartment. Kat was about to go on deployment herself and knew she wouldn’t be able to get much time off to help him hobble around.
Dave didn’t mind being bashed up. He just shrugged and took it in stride. To him, getting injured was part of the risk. But he had absolutely no patience with the recuperation process and couldn’t stand being laid up and stationary. Like a shark, Dave had to be in motion or he felt like he was dying.
Dave also craved intellectual simulation every bit as much as physical adventure. While he recouped from his Mississippi BASE jump, if he couldn’t use his body, at least he could engage his mind. He took up Tagalog (pronounced ti-GAH-lug), the native language of the Philippines. He knew the platoon would be returning to that part of the world soon, and he figured the ability to speak the native language would be an advantage there.
In fact, any leg up he could gain in the area of intelligence was a big plus at this point. Dave was already planning to leave the service and get into contract security work after his next deployment. He’d interviewed with the CIA, and he knew damn well that with his intelligence background and uncanny grasp of the shadowy world of al Qaeda–style international networks, he was any intelligence analyst’s wet dream. When his parents asked him what he planned to do next, he told them the CIA had declined to hire him, and he would be doing some other kind of work instead. But that was just classic Dave smoke-screen bullshit. He would do anything and say anything to protect his parents and keep them from worrying. He was CIA-bound for sure. Dave knew that cyberterrorism and advanced intelligence were where the action of the future lay, and wherever the frontier of war was, that was where he wanted to be.
• • •
In July 2002, Kat set off on a guided missile cruiser, USS Mobile Bay, for a deployment in the Persian Gulf, where as deck division officer she would be standing bridge watch and leading boarding parties on missions very similar to some I’d participated in on my way to Afghanistan, right after 9/11.
Dave was there that July to see her off. On the bridge of the huge vessel there hung a large hand-drawn banner that read, WE SHALL NEVER FORGET.
By this time I was back from Afghanistan. Iraq was heating up, with war clearly on the horizon. It looked like my old platoon would be rotating into the action, if Iraq did indeed blow up. Meanwhile, they were about to head westward again. Two months later Golf Platoon—which still included Glen, Mike Ritland, Shane, and all my other close friends from our USS Cole days—deployed once again across the South Pacific, headed toward the Philippines. Dave had been moved over to Delta Platoon with a billet as assistant officer in charge (AOIC), or second O, but Delta was Golf’s sister platoon, and the two groups deployed together.
On the way west they stopped over for a while in the U.S. territory of Guam. While it is a strategically important stepping-stone to Asia, it’s hard to describe adequately just how remote Guam is. With a total area about the size of Columbus, Ohio (that’s about one-twentieth the area of the island of Hawaii), Guam is a minuscule dot in the middle of the vast Pacific. When you’re stationed on Guam, you might as well be on the moon. Dave was antsy.
One day while doing a little sightseeing, Mike Ritland, Shane, and Dave were standing at a famous cliffside spot on Guam’s northwestern coast, just above Tumon Bay. Called Two Lovers Point, the place features a traditional statue depicting the two lovers from an ancient native Romeo-and-Juliet-type legend. Forbidden to marry, the two leaped from this cliff together to be wedded forever in death. It’s a dramatic spot. You stand on a cantilevered balcony and look straight down through a four-hundred-foot drop to the waves and rocks below.
As Mike and Shane gazed out at the ocean’s westward expanse, they heard a pock, pock, pock down below. Dave was chucking pebbles off the edge and timing how long it took them to hit water with his Casio G-Shock wristwatch. “That crazy bastard,” says Mike. “He was checking the place out for a goddamn BASE jump!”
After a few weeks in Guam, Golf Platoon moved o
n westward to the Philippines to put in some time helping the Filipino SEALs in their fight against the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), a long-standing militant Islamist organization. The ASG were high on our list of bad guys in the still-young War on Terror, and going up against them was a top priority. Our role was to train. While our guys trained one group of Filipino SEALs to help them improve their tactics, a second group would head south to Zamboanga to go head-to-head with ASG forces, then come back up north and rotate out with the first group.
Meanwhile Delta, Dave’s platoon, stayed behind in Guam, where Dave was stuck doing boring tasks for his CO—while barely fifteen hundred miles away his buddies were engaged (albeit indirectly) in fighting terrorists. So much for mastering Tagalog. It must have driven Dave stir-crazy.
One quiet Saturday in October, Mike Ritland, Shane, Glen, and the others were all called into their OIC’s hotel room in the Philippines. “Hey,” the OIC said, his face a blank. “I’ve got something I need to tell you guys.”
Back in Guam, Dave had gone BASE jumping—not off Two Lovers Point, but at Orote Point, a remote location out on the westernmost tip of the island, not far from the naval base there. Just like the balcony at Two Lovers, it was a four-hundred-foot drop from a lush green cliff straight down to the ocean’s surface.
Based on the evidence, and knowing how Dave operated, it was not hard to reconstruct what had happened. He would have made a thorough study of the elevation, the tide and currents, the wind, and every factor affecting the jump. Once fully prepared, he hurled himself off the cliff and into the open air. The jump was perfect. Pulling himself out of the surf, he gathered his chute and started back up the path leading up the face of the cliff. And then something ridiculous happened. Something so out of character that if Dave had been standing nearby watching himself, he would have had a field day busting his own balls: He slipped and fell from the path. The fall fractured his skull; by the time they found him, he was gone.
It was October 12, two years to the day since the bombing of the USS Cole.
Back in the Philippines, Mike, Shane, and Glen filed out of their OIC’s room in shock, no one saying a word. They were all thinking the same thing. No fucking way. Not Dave. Not possible. This did not happen. One by one they all made their way back to their rooms. A few minutes later they rejoined and went outside for a run. Mike still remembers that run: nothing but the sounds of hard breathing and feet slapping the ground to underscore the deepening silence, each man alone in his own thoughts.
Later the three went out to a place they knew and had a few drinks together. Sitting around the table in that little Filipino bar, no one said a word, the silence stretching out beneath the dull hum of a slow ceiling fan. Then Glen gripped his shot glass of tequila and hoisted it into the air.
“To Dave,” he said. Nobody else moved. Glen looked at Shane, then at Mike.
“Look,” he said, “I know we’re all hurting. But we all signed up for this. Dave wasn’t on the job, technically speaking—but it’s all the same thing. It’s part of the fucking deal. So let’s not sit here feeling sorry for him. He wouldn’t want that. And none of us would want that, either, if we were in his shoes. Dave was a hell of a guy. Let’s drink up and celebrate his life.”
Glen’s impromptu speech began pulling the other two out of their funk. They all drank to Dave and started recounting his exploits, which were legion.
Although I wasn’t there with them at the time, I heard about the scene later from Mike Ritland, and Glen’s words struck deep. They would come back to me, and strike even deeper, exactly ten years later.
• • •
Kat flew home to be present when they buried Dave at Arlington with military honors, two weeks after his death. Bob Harward, our CO, gave a tribute to Dave, and spoke the traditional words that all veterans know: “Mrs. Scott, on behalf of the president of the United States, a grateful nation, and a proud Navy, this flag is presented as a token of our appreciation for the honorable and faithful service rendered by your loved one to his country and the Navy.”
Mike, Shane, and Glen wanted badly to fly back to the States to be there for the funeral, and Kat lobbied for permission for them to come, but it didn’t happen. Mike and his wife were close friends with Dave and Kat, and for years afterward Mike felt shitty that he couldn’t be there for Kat. He would eventually get a sense of closure with Dave’s passing, but not for many years.
The Navy offered Kat a desk to ride, but she knew that would be depressing and miserable. She opted instead to get back on her ship. When the Shock and Awe campaign began the following April, Kat was on her cruiser in the Gulf, launching guided missiles into Baghdad and watching them explode in real time on CNN.
• • •
Back in 1999, when Dave was at the Elliott School in D.C., he had a good friend, an ex–Navy corpsman who was now with the Marine Force Reconnaissance, named Greg Skelton. One day Greg challenged Dave to compete in the Marine Corps Marathon, a footrace of more than twenty-six miles. Dave took the challenge and, Dave being Dave, he also immediately upped the ante and insisted they run it “the Navy SEAL way,” in “boots and utes,” in other words, wearing a T-shirt and camouflage pants (utility uniform) and combat boots.
Greg called his bluff. “Let’s do it,” he said.
So they did. It wasn’t until eighteen miles into the race that Dave glanced over at Greg as they ran and said, “Hey . . . I don’t know if . . . you realize this, but . . . I was just kidding about . . . the boots and utes.” They huffed another twenty yards or so; then Dave added, “But what the hell, we’ve . . . come this far; let’s . . . finish this fucker.” And they did—the only runners among the thirty thousand participants who ran the competition, let alone finished it, in heavy boots.
In October 2003, exactly one year after Dave’s death, Greg ran the Marine Corps Marathon again, once again with a Scott by his side—Dave’s dad, Jack, standing in for his absent son. When they reached the finish line Jack didn’t stop running. After another half mile he finally slowed and came to a standstill at Arlington National Cemetery, where he draped his finisher’s medal over Dave’s grave site.
The following year Greg couldn’t make it, but Dave’s younger brother, Mike, kept the tradition going and ran the race himself. Like his father the year before, Mike continued on to Arlington to leave his Marine Corps Marathon finisher’s medal on his brother’s grave.
The year after that, Greg was determined not to miss the event: He drove in uniform nonstop from Georgia to D.C. to run the race one more time—in boots and utes. Leaving the finish line behind, he followed in Jack’s and Mike’s footsteps until he had reached Dave’s final resting place, where he added a third medal to his friend’s growing collection.
• • •
Dave was the embodiment of the expression larger than life. Everything he did, he took to a level beyond what anyone else would think possible. He was more hilarious, more outrageous, more audacious. As his mom, Maggie, put it, “Dave lived more in his twenty-nine and a half years than others could live in a hundred.”
Because he was so quick, he could pick up on anything that anyone was talking about and find a way to reference it to something he knew about or had experience with. That high-speed intelligence, combined with his basic good nature and sense of humor, gave him an amazing gift for conversation and for striking up new friendships. Kat describes him as a chameleon: He could throw wild parties filled with sophomoric stunts (like the time he convinced a group of starstruck freshmen to prove their mettle by sweating it out in a bathroom with an ignited teargas grenade Dave just happened to have hung on to from an earlier SEAL deployment), and the next day walk into any posh D.C. eating or drinking establishment and chat up the worldly professionals you’d find there as if he were one of them. Dave could talk to anybody and make anyone laugh.
In many ways Dave was like a big kid. There was absolutely no situation wh
ere he would not let loose with his crazy grin, booming laugh, and insane antics, if he was so moved. His Elliott School roommate DeVere Crooks remembers being in the shower at the end of a long day of study, when suddenly a giant gorilla arm shot in from around the shower curtain and turned off the hot water. DeVere almost had a Janet Leigh–style heart attack. Classic Dave.
“He had the most tender of hearts, a boyish imagination, and a bold vision of where he wanted to be,” says Kat. “I often wonder if I mistakenly caught a bolt of lightning. After so many years, it still saddens me to think of that light as not being there anymore.”
For me Dave’s life stands both as an inspiration and as a cautionary tale. I’ve always been drawn to extreme sports. There’s nothing I love quite so much (my early qualms notwithstanding) as throwing myself out of a perfectly good airplane. All my life I’ve taken things to the edge. All SEALs do; it’s our job description. But Dave took things right to the edge and then well past it. In a way, it was amazing that he lived as long as he did. That insatiable appetite for what lay beyond the edge is no doubt what killed him. Yet it was also what made him so brilliant. Dave understood the twenty-first century when most of us still thought we were living in the twentieth. And his intelligence was infectious. Just being around him made me more curious about how things worked—and even more important, how they could work.
About a year after Dave died, my friend and BUD/S classmate Eric Davis and I were recruited to take on the complete revamping and redesign of the Naval Special Warfare sniper course. It was an enormous task and an even greater responsibility (and one we’ll look at more in the next chapter). The world had changed dramatically since the bombing of the Cole, and so had the nature of warfare—and even more, the role that SEAL snipers played. We needed a new course, one that left behind the past and addressed the future. We needed a course that incorporated the latest in technological wizardry, that fully developed its trainees intellectually as well as physically, a course that would be designed for continuous improvement so that it would always be ten steps ahead. A course that pushed the envelope to the edge of the possible, and then pushed it even further.
