Throughout his stay, we sensed his anxiety over his family. He still had family living in Sabray, as far as we could learn. He remained in contact with them, and what they told him didn’t always bring him peace. There were always firefights and explosions from IED attacks in the area.
On the last day of September, Morgan returned from his deployment and we all linked up with him in Washington. Mel and I thought it was pretty hilarious to see the expression on Gulab’s face when he saw how much my brother and I resembled each other. When Gulab and he embraced, I felt a circle becoming complete.
We visited the White House, got a tour of the Pentagon, and went to Arlington National Cemetery. At the Newseum, a news museum on Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s an exhibit devoted to 9/11. It features a huge wall displaying coverage of the attacks from the front pages of newspapers around the world. Seeing it brought home the reasons that I had been started down the path that brought me crashing into Gulab’s world.
He told us that he never wanted any gratitude—no money, nothing—for simply doing something Allah wanted him to do. He said he couldn’t believe anyone could have survived what I had gone through. If the overwhelming force of militia didn’t kill me, the terrain should have, he said. He added that when he first saw me in his village, he saw mercy in my eyes and felt called by Allah to protect me to the end.
In Washington, Melanie was finally able to spend some time with Morgan. Thus began her audition, if you will, to join the family as his sister-in-law (or outlaw, as we like to say in Texas). It didn’t go well. Maybe because he felt that our relationship had gone too far while he was out of the loop overseas, he put up the wall and didn’t let her in, remaining as cold as bare steel. Hell, he’d only been home from Iraq for a few days—his nerves were still tuned for fast-roping out of helos on midnight raids, not dealing with his brother’s new girlfriend.
It was only later, when Morgan and Mel got back to Texas, that my brother finally thawed out. They spent some time alone together and got to know each other. It went great. It was all just a formality as far as I was concerned, but with the visit complete, I could breathe deeply. I was in the clear to propose to her, and with Morgan in tow, we got it done. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember if I asked her or if Morgan did. I remember being on a knee with the ring and then it was over. Either way, mission complete.
After I posted news of Gulab’s visit on Facebook, several hundred of the folks who keep up with me there sent greeting cards to him. I was glad to see the outpouring of love and respect. When we hauled the cards home from the Lone Survivor Foundation office and showed them to Gulab, he, too, was touched.
To further break the ice, Mel picked up some Rosetta Stone language-teaching software so that she could learn Pashto. Gulab thought it was the funniest thing ever. As she played with it, trying to familiarize herself with his language, he teased us, revealing a sarcastic, even smart-ass side to his personality that I hadn’t seen before. But when Brad asked him what he and his friends could do to help him and his village, Gulab became earnest and serious. Educational and medical supplies were urgent needs, he said. We shipped a couple of boxes of bandages, wraps, and antiseptic cream, and put word out on Facebook, where people responded generously, as they always do.
As Gulab’s visit ended, Mel and I began preparing for our wedding, and Morgan returned to Virginia. He was in a place similar to where I was when I returned from Iraq in 2006. After eight deployments and a training accident that he was lucky to survive, he’d put a whole lot of mileage on his chassis. Having earned the rank of lieutenant, junior grade, he decided it was time to hang up his fins. He accepted a transfer from his team to a headquarters at “the Creek” in Virginia Beach. His plan to was endure a year of riding a desk, then make the transition out of the Navy.
We all had our transitions to make. The last week of November, Mel and I tied the knot at her dad’s ranch, where our late-night talks had begun. In front of three hundred friends and family seated on the long slope behind the main house, we said our vows as the sun set behind the lake. It was a perfect night, pure magic. I couldn’t be more proud to call her my wife. Though the late autumn air was damn cold, my heart was warm and full. Marrying Melanie was the greatest accomplishment of my life. It took me a long time to find her, and I wasn’t going to waste another second more without her as my wife.
Part III
How We Die
22
Heroes of the Day
Unless Morgan is overseas, I almost always keep my cell phone turned off after ten o’clock. For some reason that night in Washington, D.C., in the first week of August 2011, I left it on. After midnight, it began ringing on my hotel room desk, vibrating on a room-service menu. I didn’t answer. A few seconds later, it started a second time. I left it alone. When the phone rang again, I walked over to it and saw that the name on the display belonged to Boe, a former teammate of ours. Given the hour, I knew this was no social call.
I grabbed the phone, swiped my finger across the glass, and said, “Who did we lose?”
When he told me he didn’t know, but that things didn’t look good for some buddies of ours who had been in a helicopter that went down, my inability to sleep suddenly became convenient. I was going to be up for a while.
When I checked in with Boss, who was home in Virginia Beach, it turned out that he had sensed something had happened even before I gave him the news. Early every evening, when it was oh-dark-hundred in the Middle East, Boss thought of his teammates downrange, doing their thing. Knowing their work made the world a slightly safer place each night, he always swelled with quiet pride. All of us do this. We try to keep up with who’s home and who’s overseas, who they’re with and what they might be doing. But that Friday night, Boss was sitting on the couch, chilling with his wife, Amy, and their curly-dark-haired baby daughter, Lulu, when something unusual happened. Suddenly he felt ill, a sickening, dehydrated sensation. He went upstairs to lie down for a while, stopping in the bathroom along the way. His urine was clear—this told him that, physically, he should have been good to go. He drank a glass of water and tried to rest, but couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling. He said to Amy, “I think JT might be involved in something. Something’s happened.” He tooled around the house a little, still never feeling quite right, then turned in around eleven thirty. About an hour later I buzzed him from D.C.
When Boss picked up the phone, I figured he had already gotten the news, so I said, “Hey bro, you got any updates?”
“Updates? On what?”
“On JT.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. JT and Morgan were his best friends in the world.
“His bird went down. We’re waiting for more news.”
Details were hard to confirm, but with each call, the magnitude of the loss was revealed in grim increments.
At first, the death toll was put at five. Though it was known that a troop from JT’s squadron was involved, no one knew anything more. A subsequent call raised the number of dead to eleven. Then seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-seven, and then the final tally: thirty-eight souls. Everyone on board that bird was gone: thirty Americans, eight Afghans, and a dog.
Twenty-two of the U.S. KIA were SEALs. There was a pair of Air Force PJs and a combat controller, five soldiers from the Chinook’s aircrew, and a brilliant Belgian Malinois attached to the unit as a military working dog.
When someone texted Boss the list of fatalities, he said out loud to no one, “This can’t be true.” He knew every one of those guys. They were some of the finest talent in the SEAL community and, more than that, friends: Aaron “Trey” Vaughn, Matt Mills, JT…. “There’s no way we’ve lost every single man,” he said.
But it was no mistake. As the phone lines continued to burn, we eventually confirmed the death toll. Proportionally speaking, the losses on that helo were to that team what losing a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier would be to the Navy at large—almost 10 percent of its fighting st
rength. And Boss, for one, felt it happen from seven thousand miles away. The loss of those three men hit our circle hard. Morgan and Trey Vaughn were very close. They had shared space at our house in Virginia Beach. Matt was a great guy, a Texas boy from Dallas who I’d known my whole career. Our community is so small that any death will always make you feel the ripple. But JT’s loss stabbed us deepest of all.
After a sleepless night in my Washington hotel, I had little spirit left for the speech I was supposed to give later that day. It was a big event and I had to show. Before I went on stage, my hosts played a short video recounting Operation Redwing. It said that the losses we took—nineteen men—were the worst ever in the history of the SEALs. When I went on stage, the first thing I had to do was update the record.
“It’s been a crappy day,” I said. “And I’m sorry to say that video is now incorrect. The teams have had a mass casualty. We’ve lost a lot of our teammates. Twenty-two SEALs died in Afghanistan last night.”
The news shocked the audience. In May, after SEAL operators killed Osama bin Laden on a midnight air-assault raid into Pakistan, the teams—and especially the one JT served with—became a popular obsession all over again. The simultaneous loss of so many of our best operators became a big story. (Some reports suggested that some of the frogmen who helped take out bin Laden died in the August shootdown. It wasn’t true.)
A lady in the front row put her face into her hands. There was stirring, nervous murmuring, and some sobs. All that the news media had reported so far was that a NATO helicopter had gone down in Afghanistan. I didn’t relish my role as the messenger, but I had to tell the audience that I was simply in no condition to continue talking. I rambled a little and finally said, “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but my mind’s on something else.” As my voice choked up, I broke it off. I nodded apologetically to everybody and walked off the stage. The only thing I knew to do was make flank speed to Norfolk. I had to be with my brother and our teammates. The wreckage of the helo was still smoldering on the ground when I was en route to join them in their grief.
The last that was ever heard from JT’s helo was a simple announcement of its ETA. “Three minutes out,” the copilot said.
About sixty miles west of Kabul, they were inbound to a hot LZ in the Tangi Valley in Wardak Province, where a platoon of Rangers was shooting it out with Taliban forces. What started as a snatch-and-grab of a high-value target turned into a sustained firefight after the enemy detected the ground forces’ approach. As the tracers began to fly, the Rangers’ target, a warlord who controlled Taliban forces in the valley, tried to hightail it out of the area with several of his lieutenants. They took off like rabbits scrambling for the brush.
The Rangers, tied down under fire, couldn’t pursue. Seeing his prize slipping away, the U.S. commander called for help in cutting off the escape route of the squirters. Our boys were the handiest rifles available. That night they didn’t have their own op to run, so they were standing by as a quick reaction force, or what we call a spin-up team. When the Rangers called, they went. JT and his brothers piled into a fueled, loaded, and ready CH-47D Chinook flown by Army reservists from Bravo Company of Task Force Knighthawk, part of the Tenth Combat Aviation Brigade. That bird had thirty-three seats, and it took off full.
The Chinook, call sign Extortion 17, was inbound fast, tracing the floor of a valley at an altitude of about three hundred feet, when enemy fighters on the slopes took it under fire. From the tower of a two-story mud-brick building about two hundred meters to the helo’s south, Taliban fighters fired two or three RPGs in rapid succession. The first rocket missed, but the second hit the aft rotor assembly and exploded, slicing away ten feet of a fiberglass blade.
The helo jerked violently and lost altitude fast. Inside, anyone who wasn’t thrown out the open rear ramp was shaken so hard that he couldn’t have been conscious when the Chinook finally burst into flames. It was about three a.m. when Extortion 17 hit the deck.
The Rangers rushed to secure the crash site. No extended Air Force CSAR mission, no long march by a ground team, would be needed to bring these fallen warriors home. But the Taliban commander got away, and the men who shot down the Chinook were soon on the run, too, reportedly trying to escape into Pakistan.
JT. Everyone knew him by his initials. He was also called JT Money, inspired by the pep talk Vince Vaughn gave to his down-and-out friend in the movie Swingers. His unit worked in the shadows, but in death—as long as we live well—we all come into heaven’s light. So, too, with our fallen brother. Now we can honor him by the name his parents, George and Kathy, of Rockford, Iowa, gave him: Jon Thomas Tumilson. He was money.
It had been JT who had kept watch over Morgan when my brother was in the hospital and whose way with the nurses had given us the smoke screen necessary to evacuate Morgan from the premises. And now…
Boss and Morgan greeted me at the airport in Norfolk. Boss was in BUD/S with me and had gotten tight with JT during a Team 1 deployment to Baghdad. Both were hugely outgoing nonconformists with strong moral codes. In 2009, right before JT went to the East Coast, he and Morgan served as best men at Boss’s wedding. Boss’s bride, Amy, became like a sister to us in the teams. She understood us, was strong enough to stand up to us, and was therefore the ideal partner for a hard-driving guy like Boss. Along the way, she became as close to JT as his sisters, Joy and Kristie, were.
Family was important to JT. One Christmas, when his parents weren’t expecting him to be home, he surprised them by jumping out of a large wrapped box. (Stealth—that’s how our best guys roll.)
Soon Mel joined up with us, as did our friends Scott, Andy McGee, and some others, too. We circled up and leaned on each other for strength.
The Tumilson family asked the crew to bring JT’s personal belongings to Iowa. It was an honor to be asked, and as more of our friends and teammates rolled into town, we had enough strength in numbers to handle the pain of going to his house in Virginia Beach and breaking it down.
We loaded anything the family might want, including his Honda CBR1000RR sport bike and several mountain bikes, into the bed of our pickup trucks for the drive home to Iowa. As we rummaged through JT’s closets, attic, and storage containers, we tried to wrap our minds around what had been lost. Sorting through his familiar collection of crazy, offensive T-shirts, outdoor gear, weapons, plaques and awards, and a number of things we hadn’t seen before—shoeboxes full of photos of friends and family, and other personal things he held close—we saw a great patriot’s life scroll before us like a history lesson.
JT had a chocolate Lab named Hawkeye, who he loved like a son. Scott inherited Hawkeye, as per JT’s will. The neighbors were great, bringing food and standing by to help. No one seemed to know what to say. Really, there were no words: “I’m sorry”—that was all you could offer.
The final culmination of JT’s quest to become a Texan was his pickup truck, a Chevy Silverado 2500HD. As he pursued his quest, Morgan and I treated him as though he were a student in the Lone Star State version of BUD/S every step of the way. When he first visited us in Huntsville, driving some other brand, we gave him a hard time. When he got smart and bought that Chevy, then jacked up the suspension with a six-inch lift kit, we said he was driving a “low rider.” (If you’re going Texas-style, you’ve gotta have at least fourteen inches of lift.) JT spent hours poring over accessories catalogs, only to decide on Baja fenders. But in Texas, you need a full-on Ranch Hand replacement kit, strong enough to brush aside a cow. (Or at least that’s what we told him.) When he brought around his latest model, we asked him why anyone living in urban Virginia needed a Duramax diesel 4x4 with twenty-two-inch BMF Novakane Death Metal eight-lug rims (six hundred bucks apiece). It was almost a respectable vehicle for Walker County, but Norfolk? We also had to point out to him that no self-respecting rancher would drive a truck painted that awful metallic blue. “With that rig, you’re on a road to nowhere, bro.” The one-upmanship twisted him in knots, but it kept him h
ustling.
Now, looking at that metallic blue Silverado in the driveway, all we could do was smile and love him for the dedication and passion he brought to everything. True Love was one of a kind.
We soon learned that on the morning JT died, he had sent the people closest to him some very emotional e-mails. He had told more than a few of us he didn’t think he’d come home from this deployment. When he’d said that to Morgan and me when he was visiting Texas on leave, we didn’t think much of it—all of us say that kind of thing from time to time. But we don’t say it much. Yet now, every time anyone mentioned JT speaking this way, somebody else would pipe up with, “Yeah, he said that to me, too.” So JT knew. And Boss felt it happen. Considering this in light of my own experiences, I do believe these spooky feelings mean something.
After our work at JT’s place was done, we went to see the widow of another frogman who died on that helo, Chief Matt Mills. We knew him from way back in 2002, having met at SEAL Qualification Training. He was an Arlington, Texas, guy who we all liked and respected. We did what we could for his wife, Keri, and their children, taking care of the trash and cleaning house. We told Keri stories about Matt and held her close.
The following day, August 9, I parted company with the gang for a quick trip to Chicago. That night, Boss, Morgan, Scott, Justin, Sean, and Andy finished loading up and hit the road for Iowa. Boss was at the wheel of JT’s Silverado with Scott, Sean, and Hawkeye riding along. Morgan drove his own rig, hauling Justin and McGee. With a playlist of JT’s favorite music cycling through—“Fallen Angel” by Poison, “Back Down South” by Kings of Leon, “Hero of the Day” by Metallica, Toby Keith’s “American Soldier,” “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band, on and on—they cruised through the Shenandoah Valley into West Virginia and Ohio, keeping up a ninety-mile-an-hour pace. Soon, the cops were onto them—not with their radar guns, but to provide an escort. And when word got around about what was happening, people turned out in a big way, rendezvousing with my brothers in Indiana and taking them to the border of the next jurisdiction, each patrol handing off to their colleagues across the city limits or county line.
Service: A Navy SEAL at War Page 26
