No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL

by Mark Owen

  I immediately looked up to check if I had a good reserve canopy. I hoped like hell that I did, because we don’t have another reserve. The main and reserve chute were it. Above me, the reserve parachute was full and fat with air. It flapped gently in the breeze. I pulled on the steering lines to make sure everything was working. Before I keyed the radio to report to the lead jumper, I took a split second to enjoy the silence. It’s a crazy silence you can experience only when you’re floating through the night sky under a parachute.

  I could hear the lead jumper checking in, and I looked at my GPS and altimeter and got my bearings. They were already headed for the landing zone.

  “This is jumper twelve,” I said over the radio. “I had a cutaway. I’m at eighteen thousand feet and my distance to target is ten kilometers. I don’t have you in sight.”

  “Roger, jumper twelve,” the lead jumper said. “We’re at twenty thousand feet. Our distance to target is eight kilometers. My heading is one, four, five degrees.”

  I pulled on the steering lines, turning in a sweeping arc to get online with the target and the rest of the jumpers. I slowed my descent and stayed on track. Soon, in the distance, I could see my teammates’ parachutes. I worked my way back into the stack as we closed in on the landing area. By the time we landed I was right in the middle with the other jumpers.

  I grounded my parachute and gathered up my gear. All of the guys around me were jovial, happy with the jump. But I was pissed at myself for making such a rookie mistake. I let fear control me. I wasn’t focused and it could have cost me my life.

  When it was time to patrol, I got into line and marched to the rendezvous with the buses. I stowed my gear and took a seat near the back, still going over the jump in my head. I was the new guy and couldn’t afford to make stupid mistakes. Making it worse, I’d made more than one mistake. I realized my jump was less than perfect from the start. The moment I stepped on the C-130 I was focused on how uncomfortable I was and not on what I was about to do. What if I’d pulled that shit in a firefight? I knew damn well a gunshot wound was going to be a lot more uncomfortable than an ill-fitting pack. I was too worried about all the shit that couldn’t directly affect me that night, rather than focusing on all the stuff I could control, and that could kill me.

  I needed to know my gear better. From that day, I focused on making sure everything I wore always fit the same and I was always comfortable, or at least as comfortable as two hundred pounds of gear strapped to your body can feel. The obsession went beyond jumping. All of my uniforms and kit fit and were comfortable. I became really good at making sure that if something wasn’t fitting right, I was going to take the time to make sure it was near perfect. And it wasn’t just the gear I was issued that I obsessed over, but gear I helped design.

  But being uncomfortable on the plane was only the first problem. Once my exit went to shit, I started to panic. That is a mistake that more often than not is fatal. Once I stayed in my three-foot world, I got back on track. Instead of looking outward to solve the problem, I focused on the things I could control.

  The buses dropped us off at the airport, where we unpacked and met to do an AAR. Everyone on the jump sat down at tables in the briefing room. The lead jumper started going over the mission. Each jumper chimed in with any issues. It finally got to me.

  “I had a bad exit,” I said. “My main chute malfunctioned. I had to go to my reserve.”

  After the debrief, one of the team leaders pulled me aside.

  “Hey,” my team leader said. “So what caused the malfunction?”

  “I had a bad exit,” I said.

  “I know,” my team leader said. “Why? What caused the bad exit?”

  “I didn’t have good body position,” I said. “When I started spinning, I got nervous and pulled my main. It’s because I was so unstable when I pulled my main that I think I caused the malfunction.”

  We sat together for the next few minutes going over the jump. I know now that he wanted to make sure I learned from my mistakes.

  “Walk through putting your gear on,” he said. “Walk through the procedures inside the aircraft, your body position on exit, your emergency procedures. Then last but not least, walk through in your mind what you’re going to do while flying your canopy.”

  The team leader stressed the need to walk through the whole jump in my mind, prior to doing it. It is something I do before every jump now.

  People think SEALs are fearless. Think again. No one lives without fear; heights were my Achilles’ heel. I probably should have thought of that before leaping at the chance to go to Las Vegas on the Navy’s dime. I should have used that fear to master the skydiving procedures from the beginning. I guess I needed a close call to learn a lesson I’ll never forget.

  Instead of focusing on the fear and being afraid, I have learned to focus on what I can control. I control my gear. I control my rehearsals, and I control my mind and my decision making.

  Now, when I hear the drone of the C-130 propellers, I’m excited. I’m the one cracking jokes and looking forward to the views as I silently glide under canopy to the drop zone.

  It took me a long time to get that comfortable. To get there, I faced my fear head-on. I volunteered for every jump trip I could at the beginning of my career. I didn’t like it, but I knew that if I was going to get any better at it, I was going to have to make myself jump every opportunity I got. The Navy SEALs motto is “The only easy day was yesterday,” and throughout my career that was a fact. I always pushed myself and never sat back and rested. I pushed myself every chance I got and tried to make myself better. Each day was always harder than my last.

  Slowly I learned to overcome the fear of jumping. I am still not a huge fan of heights, but skydiving doesn’t faze me now.

  On the ride back to the hotel after the uncontrolled spin, I started to feel better and knew I would handle the same situation better the next time. I couldn’t help thinking back to being on the rock face all those years earlier and the simple advice I’d gotten from the human billy goat, back before I’d seen any combat and before I really knew what fear was.

  “Hey, man, stay in your three-foot world.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Hooded Box

  Stress

  I was in complete darkness.

  I could feel the weight of multiple sets of eyes all focused on me. Sweat rolled off my forehead, making the fabric of the hood stick to my face. People were moving around and talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All of my senses—except my eyes—were hypersensitive as I strained to pick up anything that could help me when the hood came off.

  I had been on two deployments—including one rotation to Iraq—before I was picked for the S&T course. When it was my turn to enter the box, I slid a magazine full of Simunitions, a paint cartridge created by General Dynamics that can be fired through our rifles, into my weapon and walked to the center of the room. Lights hung from the unfinished ceiling and a catwalk crisscrossed the room, allowing instructors to watch the action from above. The concrete floor was clean. A square box was taped onto the floor at one side of the room. I stood in the middle of the box and the instructors lowered the hood over my head. We couldn’t move outside of the taped lines or the exercise would end.

  The hood and a rope that was tied to it were attached to a pulley system. When the instructors yanked the rope, the hood came off and I’d have to react to the scenario in front of me. Under the hood, I didn’t know if I would have to react to a hostage situation, deal with unarmed but violent bystanders, or handle compliant individuals who could become hostile in a split second. The scenario might be something I’d never encountered before.

  Unlike BUD/S, which tested a candidate’s will more than anything else, S&T was all about skill, mental control, and the ability to make the right decision under enormous stress and pressure. I had to be able to quickly assess t
he situation, prioritize the threats, and act accordingly, all with the instructors watching from the catwalk and cataloging every action. Everything was graded to the finest point: One mistake could mean an early exit from the course and a ride back to SEAL Team Five.

  I took two deep breaths and closed my eyes as the hood came down to rest on my shoulders. I wiggled my fingers and grabbed the pistol grip of my rifle, my finger lying across the trigger housing. I tried to relax. I knew if I was tense and not thinking clearly I would make a mistake. I didn’t think about any what-ifs. I trusted that I would know what to do. The question was whether I would be able to make the right life-or-death decisions quick enough and in the correct order. The S&T course forces you to stretch beyond your three-foot world.

  Fear and stress are two different things.

  Staying in your three-foot world is one of the keys to managing fear. But stress is harder to manage because it is usually coming from outside your control. The instructors did their best to throw more stress at us than we could handle.

  As the seconds ticked off under the hood, it became harder and harder to stay focused. It felt like the instructors were just fucking with me by making me wait. Maybe they just wanted to see how long I’d stand at the ready. Maybe they were all just standing there laughing at me under the hood. I wiggled my hands again and shifted my weight from foot to foot, trying not to let my mind wander.

  I knew it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds, a minute at most, but every second under the hood felt like a year.

  Then, without warning, the hood was gone.

  The light hit me like a flashbulb. I immediately started to scan the room with my rifle up and at the ready. Not ten feet in front of me stood a cute blond woman. I could see her soft brown eyes looking at me. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She smiled at me like she knew something I didn’t.

  Not seeing a weapon in her hands, I scanned past her. I caught a glimpse of a gunman, dressed in a team ball cap, T-shirt, and cargo pants, over the girl’s shoulder. He was in the back right corner of the room holding a black semiautomatic pistol to a man’s head. The hostage had his head down, and I couldn’t see his face.

  Not even thinking about it, I’d already shouldered my gun and my eyes were already looking through my sights. He didn’t say anything as I set the red dot of my EOTech sight on his head.

  “Hey, buddy,” I heard over my shoulder. “Hey, asshole!”

  “Holy shit,” I thought. I hadn’t even looked behind me. “Fuck, I’m already spiraling out of control.” I hadn’t even taken a look at the entire room. I was too focused on the two threats in front of me.

  I flipped my safety off and fired off two quick shots. The paint rounds exploded on the gunman’s chest. I knew I needed to take care of the immediate threat with the hostage first. Even if there were armed people behind me, in my mind at that moment, the hostage situation was the first priority. I watched the gunman drop his pistol and drop to the ground next to the hostage in a piss-poor attempt to play dead.

  Even though the gunman was now dead, I felt as if I’d already screwed up. I hadn’t even assessed the entire room. I was in too much of a rush. Early on in my career, I had a hard time slowing things down because we were trained to do everything at full speed.

  During my first deployment to Iraq with SEAL Team Five, we ran to the door and up the stairs with lots of yelling and screaming during every raid. Hell, when we arrived in Iraq, nobody in my platoon had any combat experience. It was the first deployment for most of the platoon. We were basically making it up as we went along.

  We set up our camp behind a palace that sat on a massive man-made hill on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport. From the roof of the palace, I could see the airport spread out in front of me. Military aircraft—big gray C-130s and C-17s—lumbered down the runways. There seemed to be a constant hum of engines and the thump of helicopter rotors. Baghdad International Airport was a massive hub for Coalition forces. HUMVEES and LMTV trucks kicked up dust on the dirt roads that led from the airfield to the tent cities where the troops lived. Contractors raced around in four-by-four trucks, and every day a new field of modular trailers sprang up to be used for sleeping or to serve as offices for the various companies.

  A Special Forces team occupied the main palace. A massive wooden door opened into a foyer with marble floors. Stairs led up to the second-floor rooms. There was a chow hall built on the back, and the operations center took over one of the downstairs rooms. As I walked around the palace, I could see the design work on the marble and the fine craftsmanship on the banister. But looters had stolen most of the valuables before we arrived. Massive holes in the walls were everywhere. The rumor during the invasion was Saddam’s palaces had gold pipes, so looters all over Iraq punched holes in the walls looking to make a little cash.

  Outside sat big olive-green antennas and a satellite dish. Generators hummed near the pool, which separated the main palace and our living quarters. We took the servants’ houses near the motor pool. Like the palace, the quarters had marble floors. But the floors lacked the ornate patterns, and there were fewer signs of wealth. That didn’t stop the looters from punching holes in the walls out there too.

  The pool area became the camp’s center. Both SEALs and Special Forces lounged by the water between missions. It was early spring, and the oppressive heat hadn’t arrived. But during the afternoons, the temperature hit the high eighties. We mostly worked nights, so there was little to do but eat, sleep, work out, and sit by the pool until we got a mission.

  Within weeks of arriving, we had morphed into a Baghdad SWAT team, raiding compounds of suspected insurgents with the help of the CIA. The agency was trying to round up insurgent leaders, who were mostly former Baath party members. The CIA would get a tip, and that night we’d hit the house.

  About midway through the deployment, we got called in to detain a former Iraqi Air Force intelligence officer. We all met in the operations center. Our CIA contact, dressed in a dark polo shirt, khaki pants, and desert boots, walked us through the intelligence. The target was organizing attacks against American soldiers in the city. A CIA informant tipped off the Coalition and the information worked its way through the system to us. The Iraqi officer was tall and skinny, with no facial hair, rare in Iraq.

  The informant would drive ahead of our convoy and mark the house. We’d follow behind him, crash through the gate, and storm the house. There wasn’t a lot of finesse in the way we did it, just a lot of yelling and explosions.

  We met around eleven at night to do a final mission brief and left the wire just after midnight. The CIA officer and his informant were well ahead of us in a beat-up old sedan with mismatched panels. We rode in three HUMVEES with mounted machine guns. I’d worked with a teammate to weld running boards and some handholds on the roof so guys could hang off the sides and launch more quickly once we got to the target, similar to what you’d see a SWAT team using in downtown LA.

  I rode in the lead vehicle. The streets were deserted. The streets were narrow with a tangle of wires crisscrossing above. The truck’s antennas whipped back as they hit the wires above, and the throaty rumble of the engine made it hard to hear anything. Bursts of radio traffic cut through the engine noise.

  “OK, that’s it,” I heard the officer in charge of the mission say. “Chemlights on the left.”

  The engine of the HUMVEE revved and the truck surged forward, coming to a halt in front of the compound. I was practically out of the truck before it stopped. The main gate was ajar and I ran through the short courtyard to the front door. I didn’t try the doorknob to see if it was locked. My teammate stuck a breaching charge across the lock, and we both rolled to the side of the door.

  “Fire in the hole,” my teammate yelled. A few seconds later, he set off the charge, blowing the door off its hinges and sending it flying inside the house. I didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. I was
inside seconds after the door, my gun up and ready to fire.

  I could hear my teammates clamoring behind me. We were like sharks in a feeding frenzy. I could feel the adrenaline, making it hard for me to focus. The spring heat, even at midnight, was still muggy, and I could feel the sweat pooling in my gloves as I scanned for a target.

  The house was nice, with smooth marble floors and stairs. Oriental rugs covered the floors of the downstairs rooms, and the smell of cooking oil hung in the air. The foyer opened up into two rooms on either side of the hall. The kitchen was toward the back of the house, to the right of a staircase that led to the second floor.

  Behind me, I heard my teammates clearing into the first-floor rooms. I kept moving forward toward the staircase.

  “Get the fuck down,” a teammate said.

  “We got ’im,” said another teammate. “Get his hands.”

  The Iraqi Air Force officer was in the downstairs living room. He gave up immediately, and my teammates quickly bound his hands. I watched them shove him out the door to the waiting trucks. I could hear a woman and at least one child sobbing in the living room, as the rest of the team spread out.

  Our platoon chief stood in the center of the hallway as the “hall boss” and yelled out directions to different rooms as we cleared.

  “Clear left!”

  “Clear right!”

  “Moving!”

  I moved to the bottom of the stairs with a teammate and held security on the stairs.

  As I approached the bottom of the stairs, the foyer exploded in a barrage of AK-47 rounds. The bullets crashed into the marble floor, sending shards into the air. I could hear my teammates yelling and diving for cover as the rounds smashed into the walls just feet in front of me.