The boys from Task Unit Ramadi came home and continued taking on the world. Johnny Brands, who Morgan and Dozer carried out of a house in the Papa sector with both his feet nearly severed, is back in the game, a chief in a West Coast team, and still one of the fastest runners in the Naval Special Warfare community. Studdard came out of a long stay in the hospital to serve—as he had before joining the teams—as a firefighter in Colorado. He’s laying his life on the line, helping other people, while also raising a family.
Our brotherhood closes up around its wounded. After the docs amputated Elliott Miller’s left leg at the knee, he faced a hard climb in rehab. Dozer and some others who were in San Diego virtually moved in with him. For four months, in addition to their platoon duties, they tended to him, mending him in their team guy way, tending to his every need. Being frogs, they did a whole lot more than that, too: they hammered on him when he needed it, and he responded. Though the powers that be in the Navy sometimes thought the boys were going a little too hard on him, he gained strength fast under their care. Though they mean no harm, doctors are often professionally inclined to tell you what you can’t do and outline in detail why. But where we come from, you do everything you can to prove them wrong. We take away our reasons not to try. So Dozer and the guys started helping him learn to speak again. Lesson by lesson, day by day, it was like going back to grade school. I don’t think a brother can ask for more than that. But the point is that he never had to ask.
Elliott will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but his courage changed his course in more ways than one. He impressed his physical therapist so much that she married him. Though he has great difficulty speaking, he still has plenty of game: as I write this, she’s pregnant with their first child. With such courage, he lives out the saying Never Quit.
Many of my teammates from Task Unit Ramadi are still out there, bringing hell to our enemies: Commander Leonard, Senior Chief Steffen, Slab, Wink, Marty Robbins, and Jerry have moved on into deeper waters, doing things that would make all of us proud.
My friend Chris Kyle, the Team 3 sniper, is out of the Navy now. At Sadr City, he was in a hairy firefight during which, in the space of about two minutes, he took a bullet in the head and another in the back. Though his helmet and rear plate protected him from serious wounds, those bullets delivered a message he hadn’t seemed to hear before: I can die. His wife, Taya, didn’t mind having him follow that newly recognized logic to a family-friendly conclusion: That was two too many close calls, and it’s time for me to hang up my guns. No one should ever think he’s bulletproof, not even a tough redneck from Texas.
On a bitterly cold morning in early January of 2009, the war, in a sense, found Chris again. What happened to him not far from his home outside Dallas never made the news, since the town involved didn’t want the publicity, but the incident would certainly have made national headlines had a reporter ever gotten a tip about it.
Chris was minding his own business, fueling his pickup truck at a gas station, when he found himself at gunpoint. Two men holding pistols demanded his truck. Law enforcement will usually advise you to give in to the criminal in a situation like this. And that’s good advice. But Chris took another route. Very calmly and coolly, he sized up which of the two was handling his pistol more comfortably. He put his hands up and told them he was going to reach into the truck to get his keys. Then his hand went under his coat. From a waistband holster, he pulled his Colt 1911. Swinging the pistol under his left armpit, he gave each robber two .45-caliber Hydra-Shok hollow-points to the chest. By the time the cops responded to the 911 call from the terrified lady who had locked herself in a car behind Chris’s truck, the matter was settled. Elapsed time: about ten seconds. The service station’s security cameras caught the whole thing.
I pray for anyone whose life gets so desperate that he or she chooses to resort to a life of crime, but it’s hard to resist a little cold laughter all the same: I mean, how unlucky a dumbass do you have to be to target a random guy for felony armed assault and find out he’s killed more people than smallpox?
Incidents like Chris’s can interrupt a veteran’s best-laid plans to readjust to civilian life. I know, because war came for me a few months later.
It was April 1, 2009. The night started out like any other. Recovering from surgery, I wasn’t sleeping very much. Of course, I never do, but so much of life is the attitude you bring to it, and so much of your attitude depends on how you think and talk about what you do. The next sunrise always holds the promise of new possibilities—keep that front and center and it becomes a little easier to deal with the bags under your eyes.
That was my frame of mind as I was tooling around the family ranch near Huntsville one night—and was suddenly startled to hear the ring of a gunshot outside the house.
My first instinct was to check on my mother. Grabbing a pistol, I hurried to her room and got eyes on her. Satisfied that she was okay, I swept through the rest of the house, then ran outdoors.
I found her near the road. DASY, my four-year-old yellow Lab, was lying in a puddle of blood. She had been shot, and then beaten. A trail of blood ran back toward the street, marking her path to the place where she died.
Beyond the fence dividing our land from the dirt road, I noticed a suspicious car stopped, and four men inside. From where DASY was lying, I crawled across the grass and under the fence, crabbed through the culvert, and snuck up on the guys in the car. They had no idea I was there, less then thirty feet away from them. I had them dead to rights, but couldn’t get a clear shot. As the driver put the car into gear and started onto the road, I ran to my truck, jumped in, cranked the engine, and peeled out after them. When they saw me in the rearview mirror, the chase was on.
As the pursuit began across the back roads of East Texas, I called 911 and told the operator what was happening, adding, “You need to get somebody out here, because if I catch them I’m going to kill them”—all four of them.
I believe in forgiveness, but these guys had gone too far. It was time to apply the old code: an eye for an eye, blood for blood.
The chase covered forty miles across three counties, sometimes at speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour. It felt like business as usual.
The pursuit ended when we reached a roadblock set up by the Onalaska police department. With law enforcement on hand, I was able to hold back my rage and stop short of the inevitable. As the cops cuffed the men, I approached them and asked, “Which one of you killed my dog?” One of the guys started running his mouth about what he was going to do to me. He had no idea. I was silently running my mouth at myself, too, trying to talk myself out of putting another notch in my gun.
I’d seen human depravity at work in places much worse off than Walker County, Texas, but this came close to the worst of it for gratuitous cruelty. When I learned the details of what they had done—one of the guys beat DASY with a baseball bat before another guy shot her—I found myself craving ten minutes in a locked room with them. I’d spot them the baseball bat and the gun, and it wouldn’t have mattered. What kind of trash beats a helpless dog with a baseball bat then shoots her? Believe me, it took everything I had not to engage. But I knew I wouldn’t be much of a warrior if I failed to uphold the law I was sworn to protect, no matter how much the criminals deserved a penalty beyond the one spelled out in the statutes.
And their time will come. God sees everything. He saw me with tears in my eyes as I took DASY and buried her under a tree by a lake.
On September 24, 2009, the entire spec ops community took another blow that no one saw coming. Two days after undergoing successful reconstructive surgery, Ryan Job, the Team 3 gunner who had been hit in the face in Ramadi in the summer of ’06, died of complications from his procedure in Arizona.
It was not considered a combat-related death. It was referred to in his medical records as a “hospital-acquired injury.” Ryan had recovered well enough to climb Mount Rainier after coming home. He trained for a triathlon, an
d married his girlfriend, Kelly. We lost a brave soul and fine warrior who survived horrendous wounds and deserved to live a long, fulfilling life. Kelly was three months pregnant with their daughter when Ryan passed. He never met his child. Being a new father myself, I can’t imagine the pain Kelly has gone through. She will always have a family in the teams. God bless her.
We all have our crosses to bear. We carry them heavily, out of love for our brothers in arms. But sometimes you have to let go of the idea that anyone down here is in control.
21
Family Ties
In October 2009, after Morgan was injured in that helicopter crash during the training exercise off Virginia Beach, he tackled rehab as I always did: pissed off that his body had broken down and willing to push himself like a madman to get back to his team.
After he joined me in Pensacola for rehab, he needed just five months to get back to his fighting weight. When he finally checked out of Athletes’ Performance, the docs couldn’t believe it. He finished the program a lot faster than anyone expected.
In April 2010, he linked up with his team again as they deployed to the Middle East. While he was over there, wouldn’t you know it, he flew several missions with the same aircrew who had crashed on that ship with him that night.
Back home, as I traveled around the country as a keynote speaker, I never would have thought that my story would have the power to motivate others. When I met the people who had come to hear me, I saw that my career was just the tip of an iceberg that reached deep into the ocean beneath me, far out of my sight. It was natural to feel kinship with my SEAL teammates. But there were so many other military men and women, including those from different service branches and periods of history, without whose service nothing we do would be possible today.
My experience getting healed up ultimately helped give me the vision to launch a foundation dedicated to caring for those who sacrificed part of themselves in service to America. I established the Lone Survivor Foundation as a nonprofit entity in February 2010, and set to work raising money to develop programs to restore, empower, and renew hope for wounded service members and their families using therapeutic support, health, and wellness tools, with an emphasis on the kind of outdoor experiences that have helped get me right after coming home.
We worked to bring on an excellent medical staff—volunteers who specialize in the types of injuries that combat vets often have—to work directly with the soldiers and schedule retreats. And as we got our nonprofit designation, we put together a board that has a high level of motivation and understands the community of wounded warriors they serve. They see that a warrior’s wounds affect not only the veteran but his or her family, too.
Shortly after the Lone Survivor Foundation was put together, I met Sherri Reuland, an orthodontist from Tyler, Texas, who was so moved by Lone Survivor that she came up with a creative idea to give back to the men and women who protect this country. Sherri and four of her friends started the Boot Campaign, an awareness campaign based on selling official “Give Back” combat boots. The group tries to honor those in uniform while using the net proceeds to support veterans’ charities such as the LSF and others.
My destiny took another turn in June 2010, as the Lone Survivor Foundation was preparing to host its inaugural fund-raising gala in Houston. A gracious man from Houston, Brad Juneau, became involved in supporting the foundation, thanks to his friendship with an old college fraternity brother of mine, Danny Cortez. Danny knew Brad had a passion for helping military men and women, so he and Andy McGee, another lifelong friend of mine, talked me into going to visit Brad’s ranch one weekend. It wasn’t far from where I lived. Around that time, I got introduced via e-mail to his daughter, Melanie. Long story short, Mel was on a long vacation in Belize, so we e-mailed and texted each other while I was having a guy’s weekend at her father’s ranch. Then we started talking on the phone—often for five to eight hours—every night. (I never did have the heart to tell Brad that I was talking to his daughter while I was hanging out with him during the day.)
After about five thousand dollars’ worth of international cell phone charges, I knew I had to meet her as soon as she got home. We had a date planned for Friday, three days after she got back. But I decided not to wait that long. While she was still in flight to Houston, I texted her and said, “There is no way we’re going to be in the same state together and we’re not going to meet.” We met that night at a restaurant in the Woodlands. The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the one. We sat at the bar and talked until the place closed down. Then I walked her to her car, gave her a kiss good-night, got in my truck, and sent her a text saying, “This is the last time you will ever leave without me.” And it was. The day after that, we officially started our life together.
I would have married her in a heartbeat if it weren’t for one small complication: I had to wait for Morgan’s blessing. And Morgan was in Iraq. I understood quickly that my personal life couldn’t go far before Morgan got loose of the war.
Team guys look after each other, but some need the help more than others do. Take JT, for example. He would get so quickly smitten with one woman after another that we were constantly having to save him from himself. His next girl was always the One. He was so easily swept away that the guys in his platoon nicknamed him True Love. His heart was always out there, looking for Mrs. Right. In a case like that, it was a team guy’s duty to protect his brother, to keep him whole, healthy, and focused. If he was going to get serious, his girl had to go through us. JT knew how to love and he knew how to serve. But it was always a team effort to keep love and service in practical harmony. With JT it was a full-time job.
A few months after Mel and I started dating, we entertained a visitor who had had a profound impact on me, to say the least. The last I’d seen of Gulab was the night he was taken, terrified, off Spanky’s helicopter at Asadabad. He was debriefed by our intel guys, then returned to Sabray. The military eventually repaid his friendship by having some engineers build roads and establish an electrical infrastructure in his village. Because of the danger posed by the Taliban, Gulab and his family were moved, for their protection, to an undisclosed location. But after he saved my life, I never had the chance to thank him personally. I was able to get in touch with him through some special friends in Afghanistan, a Green Beret named Joe, and an Army civil affairs officer, Major Clint Hanna. With these capable guys working their channels, I had been hoping to get him Stateside in time for the Lone Survivor Foundation gala, but a delay in paperwork kept that from happening.
By the time his flight finally reached Houston in late September, the only agenda I had was the one that really mattered: personal gratitude. When we met Gulab at the Houston airport, he was carrying a single backpack for luggage and was in the company of two men: an interpreter and a military friend who had greased the wheels for his visit. Gulab was exactly as I remembered him: dark, sure on his feet, with chiseled facial features that even his heavy black beard could not conceal. I felt his serenity and his courage, too—the same qualities that had enabled him to refuse that Taliban commander who demanded that Gulab allow him to take me from the village.
Being reunited with Gulab brought me a feeling of comfort and ease similar to what I had felt with Morgan, JT, Josh, and JJ and my family after coming home from Afghanistan. Gulab was my teammate, just as they were, and I drew strength from his presence. He took care of me at his home; now it was my turn to take care of him.
He stayed with us for more than two weeks. Mel and I took him to places he wouldn’t be likely to see in his part of Afghanistan. At the Museum of Natural Science, he didn’t know what to make of the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The look on his face was priceless as he asked the interpreter whether something like that could really have walked the earth.
We found an Afghan restaurant that he seemed to like. (The only American food he really enjoyed was glazed doughnuts. He also knocked down bottle after bottle of antacid tablets.) Later, Mel and
I took him to dinner at the Petroleum Club of Houston. I’ll never forget Gulab standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows in the forty-third-floor dining room, gazing out at the city’s sea of lights. He couldn’t believe the freedom we enjoyed in America, where you could get into a car and drive as far as the eye could see. Such liberty was as alien to him as the T. rex.
A few months before his arrival, he and one of his cousins were driving home when they were ambushed by some militia. During the fight, Gulab was hit in the hip and his cousin was killed. Just a normal day—that’s how he described it to me. Since our time together his house has been burned down, his car blown up, and he’s been shot. After I picked him up at the airport, I asked him what he wanted to do first. He replied, “Blow up your car, burn down your house, and then shoot you in the hip.” Of course he was joking, but it really hit home just how much he had sacrificed to save my life. He is a true hero.
Service: A Navy SEAL at War Page 25
