No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL

by Mark Owen

  I’ve never been a fan of heights, and I sure wasn’t thinking about falling or my fear of heights when I signed up for the trip. I was only thinking of downtime in Vegas and blowing off steam before heading to Iraq.

  The night we arrived, we hit the Strip and enjoyed all Vegas had to offer. After a few hours of sleep—more like a quick nap—we drove out to the climbing site. We hired civilian instructors and they watched in awe as we pulled new, top-shelf gear out of our rental cars. I had the best gear that money could buy, and the command had hired the best instructors in the world, but I had none of the skills. I was definitely out of my league, especially compared to the professional instructors.

  The five instructors were gathered in a group near the parking lot when we arrived. They wore ratty shorts, shirts, and sandals. Climbers are inherently poor, especially the good ones, because climbing is all they do. These guys don’t have any other hobbies. I’d seen the same thing with skydivers. All of their money went right back into buying gear and doing the sport that they loved. Our instructors came over to help with the gear, shaking our hands and welcoming us to the canyon. Their hands were callused from hours on the rock face.

  The first two days were no big deal. It was more of a refresher, with nothing too high or hard to climb. We had to make sure that everyone remembered the safety precautions and basics we had learned previously before getting into the newer, more demanding climbing the last day.

  We split up into two-man teams. Each team had its own instructor. I was paired with Jeff, one of the newer SEALs in the platoon. He wasn’t a fan of heights either. There was no way I was going to show my fear, and Jeff was trying hard to hide his nerves from me as well. If your teammates ever see a weakness, you’ll never hear the end of it.

  Our “billy-goat” instructor led us over to one of the climbing routes. He was short and stocky, with leathery skin and a long goatee. He had the strongest handshake I’d ever felt. A North Face beanie covered his scraggly brown hair. He was an ex-con who’d been to jail for assault. He’d beat up the guy who was banging his wife, or at least that’s what he told us during one of the breaks.

  It was decided that I’d go first while Jeff would belay as I climbed. I kept up a steady soundtrack of what I was doing as I inched up the cliff face. None of my talking made sense. It was sort of gibberish, but it was comforting for me. I am sure it annoyed Jeff.

  “Oh yeah, lucky cam number four,” I said, holding the cam in my open hand. “Lucky blue number four.”

  Each camming device was a different color, based on the size. I set my own “pro,” or my own protection, as I climbed. That meant it was up to me to do it right, because if I fell—something I was trying not to think about at the time—the rope would be pulled taut in the camming devices. We were taught to place the cams roughly every ten feet into cracks in the rock face and ledges. If I fell with my closest cam being ten feet below me, I’d fall a total of twenty feet before the rope caught me. If I’d placed that cam wrong, I didn’t want to think about falling to the next one below that.

  I decided to put them in at five-foot intervals as I climbed, in an attempt to make myself feel more comfortable.

  “Yep, every five feet works great,” I said to myself as I set another cam into the rock face.

  I made it up the first pitch without issue and belayed Jeff as he climbed up. Jeff led the next route, and I stayed below him to belay his climb. Once we both had several chances to practice our lead climbing techniques, the instructor took us up to a bigger wall. The shadow of the wall seemed to stretch out for miles. I tried not to look up to the top of the cliff, which blocked out the sun.

  “You’re first,” the instructor said to me.

  I didn’t have much to say this time. I was too nervous to talk. This rock face was much bigger and flatter than the others we had climbed. There were half the hand- and footholds available, and we would have to stay very focused on choosing a clean route up the face.

  I climbed quickly at first, easily finding hand- and footholds. As I climbed, I set pro into cracks or pockets in the rocks. I had been in such a good rhythm between climbing and setting my pro that I hadn’t noticed I was using entirely too many camming devices and was about to run out. Placing my last cam into a big crack in the rock, I was officially stuck. I couldn’t go any higher. To be honest, I didn’t want to.

  For the first time since I started to climb, I took my eyes off the rock face in front of me and started to look around. I was pretty fucking high up. I could see the Las Vegas Strip and the desert stretching all the way to the horizon. I glanced down and saw Jeff, now a lot smaller. He looked like a garden gnome.

  Any chance I had of keeping my fear in control was slipping away, a lot like my hold on the rock.

  I wished I was anywhere else as I looked up into the crystal-clear blue sky. I was nervous and could feel myself losing focus on where my hand- and footholds should be. I lost “front sight focus.” When a SEAL shoots, we talk about focusing on the front sight of our pistol just before we pull the trigger because if it is lined up on the target and in focus, the bullet will hit. If you lose that front sight focus, you’ll miss, simple as that.

  But all I could think about was the cold rock face, how high I was off the ground, and the instructor climbing up to me without a rope. I could also hear Jeff on the ground yelling up to me.

  “You need me to climb up there and save you?” Jeff said in a smartass tone.

  I struggled to find a new handhold, but my fingers were tired.

  “I’m about to slip and fall,” I thought.

  To my left, I heard something scrape against the rocks. I’d been so focused on my situation that I’d forgotten all about our instructor. I’d catch him climbing around like Spider-Man as he waited for me to set the next cam. It made me nervous watching him because he didn’t use a rope.

  The guide finally scampered up to me. Dangling from a harness across his chest were about a half dozen cams. His crazy billy-goat ass had climbed down and collected up all the unneeded cams I had set below so he could pass them off to me and I could keep climbing. And he’d done it all without any rope or pro of his own, free-climbing around me without giving it a second thought. Somehow that fact wasn’t comforting.

  A cigarette dangled from his lips as he hung there next to me. With one hand on the rock face, the instructor took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. It was obvious I was struggling.

  “Hey, man,” he said in a lazy, raspy voice. “Just stay in your three-foot world.”

  I was a couple of hundred feet up the rock face and I could barely think, let alone decipher his cryptic advice.

  “What the hell are you talking about, bro?”

  “Only focus on your three-foot world,” he said. “Focus on what you can affect. You keep looking around, and none of that shit can help you right now, can it?”

  I shook my head no.

  “You’re calculating how far you’re going to fall,” the instructor said. “You’re looking down at Jeff, but he’s not going to come up and help. You’re looking out at the Strip. What are you going to do, gamble your way to the top? Don’t look at me. I’m not going to help you either. This is up to you. You’re climbing this rock. Stay in your three-foot world.”

  I’ll never forget those words: “Stay in your three-foot world.”

  It was the only way I got off the rock face. Now reloaded with cams, I focused on wedging one into the nearest crevice. I slid the rope through the carabiner and started to climb again. My focus never went farther than my next hand- or foothold. All the beauty of the desert or Las Vegas sparkling in the distance was lost on me. But I could tell you every crack in the rock. I was so focused it shocked me when my hand reached over the lip of the cliff at the top of the climb.

  I finished the climbing trip that week with a new perspective. Staying in my three-foot
world became a mantra for me. It is liberating once you let go of the things that you can’t control. It seems to work for just about any situation. The three-foot world helped me get through everything from climbing to skydiving to night dives where the only way you can keep your bearings is to focus on the glowing compass on your wrist.

  Of course, the other part of being a SEAL that makes a fear of heights a little bit of a problem is skydiving. I had been to jump school even before joining the Navy, but I was uneasy with every jump and it took years before I started to love it.

  I remember one jump, just after I graduated S&T. My troop was on a military free-fall training trip in Arizona. I was “new meat,” which meant I was the new guy. I had to jump all the gear the more senior guys didn’t want to jump, like the collapsible ladder, sledgehammers, and extra ammunition.

  The inside of the C-130 was lit by red lights. I couldn’t stand up straight as I shuffled onto the plane. It was hot in the cabin as we took off and climbed to twenty thousand feet above the Arizona desert. My mouth was dry and my breathing was ragged. The backpack I was jumping was new, and much bigger than the pack I usually used. It sat at my feet, full of ammunition and extra gear. The straps from the rest of my sixty pounds of gear cut into my skin.

  I tried to adjust the weight of the pack, hoping to balance it better, but I didn’t have any luck. My body ached from dragging the pack, oxygen tank, and parachutes onto the plane. I rolled my neck, working out the kinks from the heavy helmet and night vision goggles strapped to my head. I just didn’t feel comfortable at all. Instead of focusing on what I had to do, I complained to myself about how much everything sucked. All I wanted to do was jump because at least I’d be closer to getting all of the gear off.

  Most of the time we wear so much gear that it literally takes all the fun out of something. Jumping at a civilian drop zone wearing a small “sport parachute” can be fun. For our work jumps, I had a minimum of sixty pounds of personal combat gear strapped to me. Add another one hundred pounds from the parachute, an oxygen bottle, and a mask, and then strap an additional sixty-pound backpack of extra “new meat” gear in front of me, and I was weighted down with well over two hundred pounds of gear, doubling my weight.

  All my attention was focused on my discomfort when it should have been on the task at hand, a proper exit from the aircraft and the rest of the jump. We were conducting a night jump into an unknown drop zone, meaning we hadn’t been there before. I’d studied it on the map—an intersection of two dirt roads near the base of a mountain—but I wouldn’t get eyes on it until I was under canopy and looking through my night vision goggles. All I had to do was exit the plane; after a several-second delay, open my chute; and fall into line behind the lead jumper; and, if all went well, we would all land together. We all had the landing zone programmed into the GPS on our wrists in case we weren’t able to link up with the lead jumper, but that was usually an unused contingency plan.

  It was the lead jumper’s job to guide the entire stack to the ground safely. When you are flying collapsible canopies in the middle of the night sky with more than twenty other SEALs, this is easier said than done. Since parachutes aren’t rigid like the wing of a hang glider or an airplane, if two parachutes collide with each other, the chutes collapse or wrap around each other, causing you to fall to your death.

  I scanned the cabin, looking at my teammates, who were just shadows in the red glow of the lights by the ramp. Most of the guys just sat there silently, occasionally shifting the weight on their laps. It was impossible to see faces or expressions, but no one looked like I felt, which was nervous.

  I fiddled with my oxygen tank and repositioned my rifle for the third time. I was so wrapped up in my own suckfest, the whoosh of air as the ramp slowly opened startled me. The jumpmaster gave the signal for “Ramp” and then “Stand up.” My teammates, like old men under all the gear, slowly got to their feet and shuffled toward the ramp.

  The wind was deafening. We huddled near the edge and waited for the green light to jump. For a second, it dawned on me that I was inside one of the movies that I’d watched growing up. It was surreal, as I looked over my brothers lined up in front of me. I’d worked my ass off to be here.

  Had I really made it?

  The stars bobbed up and down as the plane settled into its cruising altitude. At this altitude, the black sky was littered so densely with stars it was hard to tell them apart. Beneath us, the clouds slipped by, occasionally breaking open, revealing the black desert below. It was so dark that it was hard to tell the difference between the lights from buildings on the ground and the stars shining in the night sky. I looked at the green numbers on my altimeter.

  We got the “One minute” call from the jumpmaster and my mind began to wander. I could feel myself starting to question if I could really handle what was about to come my way. The what-ifs started to circle in my mind.

  “What if I screw up my exit?”

  “What if I didn’t pack my parachute correctly and it doesn’t open like it should?”

  “What if I can’t find the lead jumper and I am lost in the night sky?”

  Then the green “go” light lit up.

  “Green light. Jumper, go!”

  My teammates waddled forward and disappeared off the ramp. Just like in the fifty-meter underwater swim, I needed to force all the what-ifs out of my mind and focus. As my boots reached the lip of the ramp, my mind was still racing. I wasn’t focused.

  I squared my feet on the ramp with my toes hanging slightly over the edge and pushed off. Nothing about my exit was relaxed or graceful. I was stiff off the ramp and my body position was bad from the start. My head should have been up, and my arms and legs out, controlling my body angle. But as soon as I hit the jet stream flowing off the plane, I started to spin. A spin is the last thing you want exiting an aircraft, especially when you’re carrying a lot of weight from extra gear.

  The stars were just a smear of light as I rotated like a top. I struggled to get my bearings. A feeling of panic welled up from my chest. I was gulping down air as I flailed in a desperate attempt to stop the spinning. I was in trouble, but I couldn’t clear my mind and think, which only compounded my problems.

  Instead of worrying about my body position, instead of worrying about getting under control and getting into a stable position, belly to the earth, all I could think was how I had to save myself.

  “This is not good; this is not what should be happening right now,” went around in my head in a loop.

  Out of pure instinct driven by fear, I reached in and pulled the handle to release my main chute. It was too early to pull my chute and I was in an uncontrolled spin; it was the last thing I should have done, but there was no reversing it now. I could feel the chute jump off my back as it came out of the container. In the split second I waited for the jerk of the parachute filling with air, I scolded myself for being so unfocused. I knew everything I did wrong. I fucked up my exit from the aircraft. My body position was stiff and I’d caused the spin to occur. I didn’t stop the spin before pulling my chute. I panicked and simply stopped thinking and acting and instead made another mistake by not getting into the proper position before I pulled. I knew better than to make any of those mistakes.

  I felt the parachute jerk and the spinning begin to slow, but when I looked up to check my canopy, I couldn’t lift my head. The risers that led from my harness up to the parachute blocked it. I could feel the risers pressing against my neck. I thrashed my head back and forth, hoping to wiggle free, but it only put more pressure on the back of my head.

  Something was very wrong.

  All I could hear was my breathing through my oxygen mask and the flapping of the parachute above me. I took a quick look at my altimeter. I was finally remembering all the basic skydiving rules that I had been taught.

  “Always be altitude aware.”

  I was at eighteen thousand fee
t, so I had plenty of altitude and time to fix the problem with my chute. But not much time, if I wanted to stay with the others. By now, my teammates were above me, I figured, and with good parachutes they were probably already flying toward the target.

  I could hear the snapping of the parachute above me as I started to bank into a lazy turn. At first it was a slow circle, but by the second rotation I was picking up speed. I’d seen the videos of guys with parachutes rolled tight like cigarettes burning into the ground. My parachute had some lift, because I wasn’t falling like a meteor. But I had no ability to control my chute, and the spinning was getting faster and faster. I feared if the spinning became too violent I’d lose consciousness.

  I had to act.

  All of a sudden my mind started focusing on my emergency procedures, snapping me into my three-foot world. Up until this point I was worried about my comfort and how the older guys were going to make fun of me for fucking up my exit. But none of those things were in my three-foot world. Worrying about that wasn’t going to help me with my parachute malfunction.

  An eerie calm came over me, washing away the panic and discomfort. First I had to find a way to see my malfunctioning parachute.

  As I turned, I craned my neck, and I could just make out the parachute. One side was fat and full of air. The other fluttered limply like a bird’s broken wing. I’d caused the malfunction when I pulled my parachute handle in the middle of an uncontrolled spin. I was so out of control that the pilot chute, which drags the main chute out of the pack, got tangled on some of the steering lines at the edge of my canopy. The pilot chute was preventing the main chute from opening fully.

  There was no way I was going to save this parachute. My only chance was to cut away from the main parachute and pull the reserve. I was picking up more and more speed. The constant revolutions were making me dizzy. It was impossible to focus on the horizon.

  We’re taught how to deploy our reserve parachutes over and over again until it becomes muscle memory. I took a deep breath, looked down at my cutaway handle, and pulled it. I could feel the main chute break away, and for a split second I started to free-fall again. Once the main chute cleared, a static line pulled the reserve chute. It sprung open and jerked me to a halt.