by Couch, Dick
With each of the three operations, a common element was how routine they were for the SEALs, in large part because of their training. As one former SEAL observed, “In the SEAL teams, you train and train, you go over things over and over, you do a ton of dry runs. When the door gets blown and you go in, you don’t even think. It’s just second nature and you resort to muscle memory and your training. You know that the guy right next to you is doing the same thing, so there’s not much thinking involved, just acting and reacting.”
The first operation was the rescue of Richard Phillips, captain of the merchant ship MV Maersk Alabama, on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009. Phillips was tied up, with an AK-47 pointed at him from inches away by one of three Somali pirates who were holding him hostage inside a small enclosed fiberglass lifeboat being towed to calmer waters in the Indian Ocean by the American guided missile destroyer USS Bainbridge. Ransom negotiations had stalled. At the White House, newly elected President Barack Obama monitored the operation closely.
Three SEAL snipers positioned on the warship’s fantail peered through the night scopes of their sniper rifles. The SEALs waited until a moment appeared when all three pirates were simultaneously visible, and they squeezed their triggers. Three shots hit their targets less than one hundred feet away, and three pirates were killed. The hostage was freed. Many details of the flawless operation were made public, creating a global media sensation. Tom Hanks starred in a movie about the incident that grossed over $200 million in worldwide ticket sales.
THE SECOND MISSION, DUBBED Operation Neptune Spear, occurred two years after the rescue of Captain Phillips, on May 2, 2011, and was by far the most famous special operations raid in history. The climax of a ten-year manhunt led by the CIA, the operation resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The raid was run from a U.S. base at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and was personally monitored by video feeds by President Obama and his officials from the White House Situation Room and by CIA Director Leon Panetta from CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
The raid included twenty-three SEALs (or twenty-four, according to some accounts), a Pashto translator, and a dog—a Belgian Malinois combat dog named Cairo. “We think we found Osama bin Laden,” the SEALs were reportedly told a few weeks before the mission, “and your job is to kill him,” prompting cheers from the SEALs. The SEALs had the rare luxury of weeks of sustained planning and as many as one hundred assault rehearsals for the takedown on specially built mockups of bin Laden’s lair. In many ways it was a fairly straightforward compound raid, the kind that SEALs have a lot of experience with and train for routinely, stressing speed, surprise, planning, and flexibility.
The whole operation took less than forty minutes. When one of the helicopter pilots began losing control of his craft while descending toward bin Laden’s compound, he expertly conducted a soft crash-landing that safely deposited the SEALs to the site. The emergency landing required the SEALs to improvise and reshuffle their plan of attack, but managing this kind of last-minute crisis was also routine for the SEALs, who smoothly and methodically cleared the guesthouse and the first and second floors of the compound, advancing toward the third floor, where they found bin Laden. “What SEALs are good at is what I consider pickup basketball,” explained one SEAL. “We all know how to play the game. You hear the saying in the teams, can you shoot, move, and communicate? We all know how to shoot, we all know how to move efficiently and tactically, and we can communicate clearly. So when something goes sideways we’re able to play that pickup basketball and kind of read off each other.”
Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and several other adults were killed in the raid, including bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son and the courier who inadvertently led CIA analysts to pinpoint the location of bin Laden’s hideaway. A dozen children were unharmed. Bin Laden was reportedly killed just eighteen minutes after the helicopters landed, dispatched by a shot to his right forehead and one or two rounds to his chest.
Bin Laden may have had at least fifteen minutes to contemplate his fate in the darkness of his bedroom after the early noises of the SEALs’ arrival at the compound, which was soon punctuated by gunfire (the SEALs weapons were silenced but at least one man in the compound fired a burst from an AK-47), people wailing, and the noise of doors being blown off. Bin Laden might have initially thought a Pakistani force was entering the compound, but this impression probably shifted abruptly to total uncertainty. Because of the position of his window and the layout of the compound, if bin Laden looked outside, he wouldn’t have seen the SEALs or their aircraft on the ground. Bin Laden could have reached for his nearby AK-47, but he didn’t. The SEALs had the authority to capture bin Laden if he made conspicuous moves to surrender, but he didn’t. The world’s most notorious terrorist had neither the courage to fight nor the brains to surrender, or he may have simply figured his time had come. His fate was sealed. The SEALs collected as much evidence from the house as they could carry, put bin Laden in a body bag after taking photos and DNA samples, and safely withdrew toward the base in Afghanistan before local Pakistani security forces had a chance to respond to the site. Ever since the SEALs began their antiterrorism mission in 1980, they had rehearsed and conducted thousands of compound raids and night raids on high-value targets, and that experience paid off in the bin Laden raid. For the SEALs, it was pure muscle memory.
When President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, America rejoiced. Within days, after Vice President Joe Biden inadvertently revealed the involvement of the SEALs, they became the subject of intense worldwide fascination.
For the SEALs, it was a day at the office, a very successful one, but they then turned their focus on their next missions. Two of the SEALs involved in the raid later told their stories publicly, causing a whirlwind of controversy in the SEAL community and the media.
ON THE NIGHT OF January 25, 2012, Jessica Buchanan lay on a mat in an open field in Somalia, enduring her ninety-third day of captivity by a gang of local kidnappers. Nine armed gunmen slept just feet away from her.
The thirty-two-year-old American aid worker was suffering from an acute urinary tract infection that was triggering complications to her kidneys, and she had only sporadic access to medicine. She had spent three months outdoors, sometimes trying to sleep in torrents of cold rain and immobilized by pain. “They treated us like animals,” she recalled. She thought she would soon be dead. Negotiations for her release and the release of her fellow captive, Danish relief worker Poul Thisted, were stalled.
“Please tell God that I need some help,” Buchanan prayed as she gazed at a star she chose to represent her late mother. “We need to get out of here.” She heard rustling noises on the edge of the camp. Suddenly, her captors were jumping to their feet and cocking their weapons. “Then everything exploded,” she remembered. “Instant Armageddon. Gunfire broke out in every direction, and even the shock waves were terrible.” Her mind was overpowered with a single sensation: “Oh God, oh God, oh God . . . I cannot survive this.” Fearing that a rival gang was attacking the camp, Buchanan pulled a blanket over her head and thought, “Okay, well, this is it. This really is truly the end.” Then she felt a hand grabbing her blanket and calling her name. She was shocked to recognize that it was an American-accented voice.
The SEALs appeared from the darkness, penetrated the camp perimeter, and achieved total surprise. In moments all nine kidnappers were dead and both hostages were safe. Buchanan later explained, “It was unbelievably hard and fast. I gained instant insight into why the SEAL teams are said to train with such intensity. The depth of violence in the attack hits you all the way down to the bones.”
“Jessica!” a voice called. “This is the American military. We’ve come to take you home. You’re safe.” Those words, according to Buchanan, “were more beautiful than any piece of music I’d ever heard.” A SEAL picked her up in a fireman’s carry, trotted her away from the campsite, gave her medication, and placed her flat o
n the ground. The SEALs formed a protective bubble around her and lay on top of her as a human shield until the rescue helicopters landed. She felt as if “I was surrounded by magical heroes. They brought this terrible explosion of violence that popped the locks on our invisible prison. They reached in there and snatched us out alive—I couldn’t see how, but I was impossibly alive—and there we were, getting the hell out of there.”
Buchanan later explained what happened next: “I can’t believe I did this, but I had a small, little powder bag that they had let me keep. And inside, I had a ring that my mom had made, and I thought, I can’t leave it out here in the desert. And so, I asked him [a SEAL] to go back and get the bag for me. And, I mean, these men are just—they’re incredible. I mean, he goes back out into a war zone, basically, to go get my ring.” She added, “I don’t start breathing until we actually lift up off the ground. And they hand me an American flag that’s folded. I just started to cry. At that point in time I have never in my life been so proud and so very happy to be an American.”
Soon, her father got a call from the president of the United States. “I have great news for you,” he said. “Your daughter has been rescued by our military.”
The SEALs “were heartbreakingly polite,” Buchanan wrote. “They made special efforts to be kind, these athletic hunter-killers who had just taken out a camp full of armed men.” The hostages were evacuated to an American base in Djibouti, and soon, before Buchanan had a chance to fully express her feelings or thanks to the SEALs, they were gone.
“They just vanished,” Buchanan remembered. “They came out of darkness and disappeared back into it. I mean, it’s incredible.”
IN THE TURBULENT AGE since September 11, 2001, the U.S. Navy SEALs were used as never before. They succeeded in a wide spectrum of combat operations around the world and played a role in some of the most significant military operations of the era.
EPILOGUE
Today, on the day before they complete SEAL qualification training and become U.S. Navy SEALs, dozens of young SEAL trainees climb up a hill at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
They pause to assemble amid the graves of fallen SEALs. Each of the SEALs-to-be carries a Ka-Bar knife specially engraved with the name of a different Naval Special Warfare member who was killed in action, and the date and name of the battle in which they fell. It is the student’s responsibility to learn all they can about that person, to find their gravestone, and read aloud the teammate’s name.
A guest speaker, often a former SEAL, addresses the students in a private talk that focuses on the heritage of Naval Special Warfare, and the personalities and character of individual SEALs the speaker might have known. The ethos of valor and sacrifice that is instilled throughout SEAL training suddenly becomes real when the students put names and faces to those values.
A sailor named Paul Coover wrote of the ceremony, “On clear days, visitors to Rosecrans can often see the Navy’s boats, ships and aircraft operating near the horizon. On cloudy days, those missions—both training and live—are shrouded in a thick fog that envelops the peninsula. The carriers and rigid-hull inflatable boats, the planes and helicopters and people all working toward the same purpose then become invisible, but that doesn’t mean they cease to exist.”
The U.S. Navy SEALs have traveled far since their ancestor units were forged in the maelstrom of World War II. From the rich heritage and heroic sacrifice of the Naval Combat Demolition Unit sailors, UDT sailors, Scouts and Raiders, and OSS Maritime Swimmers who operated in the waters off Europe, the Pacific and Korea; to the SEALs who operated in the jungles of Vietnam, the battle zones of Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, the mission of Naval Special Warfare has evolved from a narrow portfolio of demolition work and beach reconnaissance into a broad spectrum of maritime and “over the beach,” land-based special operations, including the specialties of antiterrorism and hostage rescue.
The SEALs and other American special operation forces (SOF) have often faced an extremely dynamic landscape, both operationally and politically. As the Cold War peaked in 1961 and 1962, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force to develop capabilities in unconventional warfare. This hastened the birth of the Navy SEALs, but it was not until 1986, when Congress directed the formation of the U.S. Special Operations Command, that SOF had a legitimate chair at the Defense Department table.
The new organization would be headed by a four-star commander in chief, or CINC, and would have parity, at least on the organizational chart, with warfighting commands like Pacific Command, European Command, or Central Command. The creation of SOCOM was an unpopular decision among the service components who have traditionally resisted elite units, and especially those elite units who seriously compete for talent and treasury. There was even resistance within the SOF components that were made to leave their parent service for duty under the fledgling SOCOM. Some senior SEAL commanders said they would regret the day that the SEALs left the protective skirts of the Navy; they said they would be awash in Army green as the smallest service component of the new joint command. But in recent years, there has been grumbling among some in the Army and elsewhere that SOF has become too SEAL-centric, in the wake of some highly publicized successful missions and SEAL officers taking top leadership roles within the Special Operations Command structure.
The SEALs and their forefathers have experienced many hard-fought victories. They have also endured tragedies, failures, and long stretches of combat inaction and periods of major drawdowns, like the years after World War II and the Vietnam War. Recently, the SEALs have also endured a spate of publicity about current operations that many SEALs and former SEALs find extremely uncomfortable.
Modern warriors must grapple with the threats of combat, battlefield wounds, adjusting to life back home, and illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder, to name a few. The SEALs are no exception. Then there is the horror of witnessing comrades or civilians die in the course of battle, experiences that can enter the realm of the spiritual. One day in 2010, the year before he oversaw the raid that eliminated bin Laden, Admiral William McRaven, a career Navy SEAL, appeared at the door of an Afghan farmer whose sons were among five civilians accidentally killed during a raid by his men. “Sir, you and I are very different,” McRaven said to the farmer. “You are a family man with many children and many friends. I am a soldier. I have spent most of my career overseas away from my family. But I have children as well, and my heart grieves for you. But we have one thing in common. We have the same God. He is a God who shows great love and compassion . . . I pray today that He will show mercy on me and my men for this awful tragedy.”
Looking to the future of the SEALs, Vice Admiral Albert Calland III, former commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, argued in 2003 for an approach that stressed fundamentals in an age of complexity: “There are a lot of mission areas out there, and so what I’m doing is bringing us back to really focus on our core competencies: direct action and special reconnaissance. Those are the hallmarks of Naval Special Warfare and have always been our strengths from the time of the frogmen and Scouts and Raiders and the Underwater Demolition Teams. And with that, small unit tactics, flexibility and being able to operate in all environments, things that have really been the focus of what we’ve done well.” He added, “What’s in front of us now in my view is a very dispersed enemy that’s spread across the globe and continuing to disperse even more. You’ve got to go in with a small force. You’ve got to be able to maintain the element of surprise and that really aligns well with Naval Special Warfare and everything that we do.”
Why do men become SEALs? For some, the strongest impulses are the patriotic ones, to serve and protect their nation, and by extension their community and family. For others, these values apply, plus the ambition to perform at the most elite level of military special operations, and to prove themselves in the most challenging conditions. Some SEALs were inspire
d to join by a father or friend’s experience as a SEAL, or even by a SEAL book or movie. Others are attracted by the camaraderie, the thrill of danger and the unknown, and the adrenaline rush of new operations, traveling the world, shooting weapons, blowing things up, and jumping out of airplanes. And getting paid for it.
For a sailor named Norman Olson, the inspiration was a vision he had one day in 1955 on a California beach. “I was aboard a ship and we’d been off the Korean peninsula and came back,” he told us. “The ship was going out of commission and I was being transferred to another ship and I went over to Coronado because they had a class I had to take. And on the weekend, I was down on the beach, and I looked out and I saw a volleyball net. I saw a handful of studly guys in tan shorts. And, the other thing that perked me up, they all had very attractive women around, and they had a lot of beer. I didn’t know who they were and I started asking, ‘Who the hell are they?’ And they said they’re Frogmen. And I said, ‘Hmm, sounds pretty interesting.’ ” He jumped ship to become a UDT member, and later a SEAL, and spent thirty years on active duty.
The story of how Navy SEALs died in the mountains of Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings in 2005 has been widely told in books and movies and by Marcus Luttrell, survivor of the incident. In 2011, the father of one of the fallen SEALs, U.S. Army Vietnam Veteran Daniel Murphy, had this to say about his son and the brotherhood he belonged to:
“I am the father of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy. He was a Navy SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan on June 28th, 2005, and as a result of those actions was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor. Michael was like all of the other Navy SEALs that you’ve ever met. They’re extremely unassuming. They’re quiet, humble, incredibly brave men who do some of the most dangerous missions in the world. There’s only 2,000 of them. They are an extremely tight, extremely closed-mouthed, extremely small community that watches over each other. When I had heard about the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden by a special operations team, they had not reported yet who was involved. I knew myself that it was the Navy SEALs just by the operation that took place, how it went down. It was no doubt in my mind that those were Navy SEALs, those were Michael’s teammates.” Murphy has also said of the SEALs, “These are brave souls, brave people. It’s what’s happening every day. Forget politics, forget policy, forget what you’re doing, there are men and women out there that are willing to stand up and say, ‘I will protect your right to say what you think, to practice your religion.’ That’s a great thing. And that’s what makes this nation great.”
