Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior Read online

  Praise for

  DAMN FEW

  “If you’ve ever wished you could read the testament of a Jedi Knight, here it is. Damn Few takes us inside the mind of a born warrior. Lieutenant Commander Denver has trained SEALs and led them in combat. He tells us what it takes to reach the superelite level, why he does it, what it means to him, what he thinks the future holds. This is timeless stuff, worthy of being read in the era of Caesar, Alexander, Leonidas—or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

  —Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art

  “Here is the rare book that changes the lives of young men and the views of older ones. Intense, riveting, inspiring, and humbling. Damn few make it. Damn few can do what the SEALs do.”

  —Hugh Hewitt

  DEDICATION

  For My Wife, My Heartbeat.

  For My Mom, My Champion.

  For My Dad, My Compass.

  For My Brother, My Archetype.

  For My Girls, My Fuel.

  And for my warrior brothers, my deepest respect.

  EPIGRAPH

  Here’s tae us.

  Wha’s like us?

  Damn few,

  And they’re a’ deid.

  —Early Scottish Toast

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Cover

  Title Page

  Praise

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: SEAL Time

  PART ONE: LEARNING IT

  1 Train Tough

  2 BUD/S Secrets

  3 Hell, Yes

  4 Cool Stuff

  5 Young Warrior

  6 Raw Material

  Photo Section

  PART TWO: DOING IT

  7 Team Player

  8 Peacetime Warrior

  9 Terror Age

  10 Mission Iraq

  11 Momentum Shift

  12 Seven Months

  13 Killing School

  14 Family Time

  15 Two Ops

  PART THREE: PASSING IT ON

  16 Make More SEALs

  17 Out of the Shadows

  18 Global Pursuit

  The Warrior’s Bookshelf

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION: SEAL TIME

  The Sunni fighters had learned to mount three-prong mortar tubes on the beds of Toyota Hilux pickups. These little trucks were scooting around western Iraq like homicidal go-karts. They would pull up to a spot, and—thoomp, thoomp, thoomp—the mortar operator would launch three fast rounds, powerful enough to flip a Humvee or dispatch half a dozen U.S. Marines to the hospital or the morgue. Then the driver would slam on the gas and, pedal to the metal, they’d screech right out of there. Once they got proficient, no amount of reconnaissance or technology could pinpoint where these roving thugs would turn up next. By the time my SEAL teammates and I arrived in Anbar Province in the spring of 2006, the mortar boys were certified pros. My first night at Combat Outpost COWBOY outside Habbaniyah, a mortar round came flying over the concertina wire and landed thirty feet from me while I was in the head.

  Message received.

  “How can we help impact the battle space?” I asked the Marine lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the outpost. “How can we protect the base and help the Marines get after the enemy?”

  He didn’t have an immediate answer, but I could tell he hated how things stood. “We could definitely use some help here,” he said.

  These were the dark days before the Sunni Awakening, when the major tribal leaders finally got sick of the senseless violence of Al Qaeda in Iraq and turned noticeably more sympathetic to the U.S. cause. Back then, the area around Habbaniyah was one of the bloodiest in Iraq, truly one of the most lawless places on earth. Improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, random sniper fire from hidden alleys and rooftops—the dangers seemed to lurk everywhere. The way the insurgents saw it, the Americans had invaded their country and so deserved to die. These people we were fighting wore no uniforms, answered to no central command, and displayed a maddening ingenuity at threatening the lives of U.S. troops. Conceiving an effective counterstrategy wasn’t proving any easier than tracking down Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.

  The SEAL platoon we were replacing had been training Iraqi Scouts, the Iraqi version of our special forces, though the comparison was almost laughable. The Iraqis were mostly willing soldiers. Mostly willing. But I’m pretty sure Iraq had Boy Scouts with more field experience. Thanks to the efforts of SEAL Team One, the Iraqis had made some progress on the combat basics—how to plan a mission, how to communicate, how to shoot more effectively, and, if at all possible, how not to get themselves or their American trainers killed. Still, these budding special operators hadn’t seen much action at all. They’d been going out on night patrols with our guys, which was standard procedure and would have kept them busy in some other war zone. But western Iraq’s tribal region was almost entirely dead at night.

  The camel spiders and the feral dogs never seemed to sleep. Everyone else was in bed by 8:30, including the pickup-truck mortar boys and their many violent cohorts. Then, as soon as the sun came up, the truck tires were squealing again and the mortar shells were raining down.

  I knew we had to find a way to get the SEALs into the middle of the fight and somehow shift the balance in this lopsided battle zone.

  First thing the next morning, I sat down with my senior guys from SEAL Team Three. “We gotta get outside in the daytime,” I told them. “We have to make ourselves visible to the enemy. We’ll beg them to fire on us. We’ll be like human bait. But our snipers will be waiting in the palm groves. Our heavy gunners will be out there, too. We’ll have to show some nerve here. We might have to dodge some sniper fire and some mortar shells. We’ll just have to outshoot ’em, I guess. Anyone up for that?”

  It wasn’t really a question. I had been with these guys for more than two years already. I’d gone through SEAL training with some of them. It didn’t matter that they’d barely had time to unpack the gear yet. These were real-deal, ready-for-action American warriors, as impatient as I was to find some action, just itching to test their training and preparation in a hot battle zone. I knew what those evil grins meant.

  “This will get us fighting?” one of our heavy gunners asked.

  “No doubt,” I told him.

  “Then, yeah,” he said, as the others nodded and smiled. “We’re good to go.”

  Three hours later, all sixteen of us—snipers Rolex and Ro, heavy gunners Big D and Bakes, communicators Lope and Cams, assistant officers Nick and John, and the rest of the platoon—backed by sixteen Iraqi Scouts, were on our feet, taking a late-morning stroll beyond the perimeter wire of Combat Outpost COWBOY and into the pockmarked outskirts of Habbaniyah. This was a banged-up neighborhood of high-walled houses, open sewers, and potholed streets. Cars and trucks zoomed past us. When bullets are flying, no one likes to drive slowly. Garbage burned in piles on the corners. One whiff of that could sap your appetite for the rest of the day. Most of the local people tried to stay inside. The blocks were eerily quiet until they were ferociously loud. Every block or two had another mosque, some modest, some grand, all of them sending out calls for prayer five times a day. In full kit and body armor in the 110-degree heat—long pants, long shirts, boots, gloves, battle helmet, weapons, ammo and water, probably sixty pounds of gear per man—we did not exactly blend in.

  We might as well have carried a giant banner as we walked along: “Go ahead. Take your shot. The SEALs are here.”

  With the de
sert sun directly overhead, I took an overwatch position on a rooftop with our snipers. My assistant officers were positioned in a nearby palm grove with our heavy-weapon gunners, a perfect L-shaped ambush layout, when the first Toyota rolled up.

  I don’t think the Iraqi mortar team had a clue what was coming next. Given the free-fire zone Habbaniyah had become, they had no reason to expect anything at all. Standing on the truck bed, the mortar operator wasn’t even looking our way. He was staring at what must have seemed like another easy target for an over-the-wire mortar attack. Maybe he’d hit the next American taking a bathroom break.

  But he never got a chance to launch.

  On the rooftop, Rolex and Ro put their scopes to their eyes. They tucked their chins tight and squeezed off round after round after round. Their weapons erupted like tightly held jackhammers—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—the shots were flying that fast.

  At almost exactly the same moment, Big D fired his ferocious Mk 48 from the grove. That let off more of a low bass rumble. The instant D fired, Nick and John directed the rest of the line to fire, too. All of them erupted immediately. Fast rounds and big rounds, loud and hard, caught the mortar gunner from several different angles, milliseconds apart. His body spun around like a jacket in a clothes drier—one, two, almost three full spins, before he tumbled from the bed of the pickup and onto the ragged concrete below.

  Plunk.

  From where I stood, I had a straight-on view of the driver. He looked frozen in terror, almost white. His eyes made bull’s-eye circles and his hands jumped three inches off the steering wheel. Without glancing one way or another or once touching the brake, he dove out the side window with the truck still rolling forward. As the driver’s body was still in the air, one of my snipers swung around and nailed him squarely in the side of his head. The driver’s body splattered to the concrete just as the truck careened into a ditch on the left and finally came to a stop.

  Our platoon had been on the ground less than a day by then. The guys were bleary from travel and smacked by the heat. But already we were doing what we had come for. We had begun our historic campaign to redefine the battle space and shift the momentum of a frustrating and long-running war.

  “I like working the day shift,” I told Ro and Rolex as they put their sniper rifles down and we climbed off the roof.

  “Any shift,” Ro said.

  It didn’t take long for word to spread across Anbar. A new group of predators were in town now, and they were working around the clock.

  Here in the second decade of America’s War on Terror, conventional military methods just aren’t getting it done anymore. Massive invasions, long occupations, extended nation-building campaigns—they still have their place in the U.S. military arsenal. But some of their legendary effectiveness has definitely begun to fade. Those old approaches are hugely expensive, in blood and in money. The commitments just go on and on. And far too often—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq—the long-term results don’t quite match the hopes going in.

  None of this should come as a big surprise. Those old ways of fighting were designed in a very different era for a very different set of threats. We’ll never defeat our twenty-first-century enemies with World War II battle plans.

  Today’s brewing conflicts are mobile and unpredictable. They pop up quickly and almost anywhere. Iran. Syria. North Korea. Somalia. Venezuela. Take your pick of pugnacious countries and nagging trouble spots. The Pak-Afghan border. The Palestinian territories. The Hindu Kush. The fighters are armed and itchy and impervious to calm diplomacy. How much longer until drones and tactical nukes are up for sale on eBay? Just log on to PayPal and type in the dollar amount.

  War isn’t just nation against nation anymore. It’s tribal warlords crazed with ancient hatreds. It’s thugs in the Horn of Africa grabbing Westerners for profit and fun. It’s a fugitive al Qaeda mastermind holed up in a compound in Pakistan with two or three wives and a secret cache of porn. It’s a quiet village in western Iraq that may or may not be housing a makeshift bomb factory, depending on whose intel you believe.

  Over the past decade, America’s top leaders kept asking what works, what doesn’t, and why. More and more often, their answer is the same.

  “Send in the SEALs.”

  And we keep performing spectacularly.

  Small, nimble units of highly trained warriors, we are experts at missions that traditional armies were never built for. Lightning-quick commando raids. Highly orchestrated assaults. Discreet operations in challenging environments. Extractions, recoveries, and other bold maneuvers that don’t even have names yet. It’s an amazing run we’ve been on since 9/11, and I don’t see it slowing down soon. Osama bin Laden. The Maersk Alabama. That aid-worker rescue in Somalia. Momentum-shifting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  The Army, Big Navy, the Marines—they’re great at what they do. They are huge and potent and necessary. But those guys are linear, and we aren’t. We’re designed for speed and creativity. There’s a reason to take the 3/2 Marines and say, “You start here. Get to there and destroy everything in between.” They get it done. But if you’re saying, “Start here, get to there, kill two guys, capture three, then come out without anybody knowing you were there”—our phone should be ringing off the hook. And it is.

  There are barely 2,500 SEALs. We didn’t even exist as an organization before Vietnam, when President Kennedy reconstituted the Navy’s leftover World War II–era dive teams into a naval counterterror force capable of operating on sea, air, and land. We are a tiny organization compared to the big boys. But we keep achieving things no one else seems able to. Pound for pound, man for man, our success is hard to argue with. We keep proving ourselves over and over again. We are the most resourceful problem solvers on the modern battlefield, ideal warriors for the kinds of wars America is fighting now.

  So where do we find the men for these high-risk missions? What combination of talent, training, and instinct do they bring to the fight? Are warriors like these born or made? How can we get more of them?

  For the past four years, it has been my job to answer those questions and help create the next generation of SEALs. After completing the SEALs’ brutal training program and leading more than two hundred combat missions overseas, I have been the officer in charge of every phase of training, basic and advanced, for these extraordinary assault teams. It is a profound and awesome duty at an urgent and dangerous time.

  With all the SEALs’ recent successes, we have been getting a level of attention and acclaim we are not used to. It’s been very flattering and certainly well deserved. It’s produced some stresses as well. But something important has been missing from the discussion. People keep describing what we do, but no one has even scratched the surface of how and why. The unique psychology behind it. What really makes it work. The extraordinary character of those involved. The carefully crafted motivation and training techniques. The many lessons for the future of America’s relationship with the world.

  This is my account of how we create these special warriors and how they are changing the modern battlefield. The story features a cast of lethal and aggressive warriors, who turn out to be amazingly dedicated and patriotic men. It’s not just a tale of heart-pounding gunfights, though we have plenty of those. It’s not just a recap of our withering training regime, though that’s how we got here. It’s the up-close-and-personal revelation of who we are and how we got here. Much of this story has never been fully told before. Secrecy remains an important part of what we do, and there are some details that must remain secret. You will not find them here. But as I have learned as a SEAL leader, openness and honesty can be powerful weapons as well. In that spirit, we have been explaining ourselves and our vital mission as we never have before. With the Navy’s full support, a group of us helped to make a uniquely realistic movie called Act of Valor, sharing key SEALs lessons with the world. Ours is a story that really needs to be told—loyally, truthfully, and well.

  I tell it the only way I know
how, through my own experiences and insights as a proud SEAL officer, informed by the experiences and insights of my closest brothers and friends. To them and to my family, I owe nearly everything.

  My own SEAL dream was launched by a book I found inspiring. My hope is that this one teaches lessons that go far beyond my life and my journey, past the battlefields I have fought on, inspiring a whole new generation of warriors to carry on this special dream that all of us share.

  1

  TRAIN TOUGH

  We should remember that one man is much the same as another and that he is best who is trained in the severest school.

  —THUCYDIDES

  * * *

  The M4 is a loud rifle. The Mk 48 machine gun is even louder. And the boom from a .50-cal comes on so strong, it can rattle nearby buildings and shake large hills.

  On a gun range, we all wear ear protection. We have to, these weapons are deafening. But when the battle was raging and I was squeezing off rounds, I swear I never heard the sound of my own weapon, barely an inch from my right ear. I felt the recoil. I smelled the smoke. I saw the brass fly out of the ejection port. I knew I was getting rounds in on my target. But it was like someone had reached a giant hand onto the battlefield and turned down the volume on the shooting soundtrack.

  There’s actual science behind this. When a lion roars, the sound is so loud—114 decibels or so, the rough equivalent of a jackhammer on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk—the lion should suffer serious hearing damage. But that doesn’t happen. When the lion is in full battle cry, something in his genetic coding knows to protect him from the earsplitting volume of his own ferocious roar.

  Human predators have that mechanism, too, as I discovered immediately on the battlefield.

  War is just a more extreme version of the hunt. The reality of a living target changes everything. The experience of warfare—not just psychological but physical as well—sent me all the way back to a basic predatory-survival mode. It eliminated everything that wasn’t needed in the struggle between life and death. And it heightened all those things that were. My concentration. My intensity. My single-mindedness. It made me better just when I needed it most. Then, when the fight was over or I’d gotten behind a wall or a vehicle and that moment of absolute urgency had passed, the volume exploded back on again.