AS WE PULLED out of Sembawang Wharves on the northern tip of Singapore, I looked at the radar. Green dots indicated three large tankers in the shipping lanes. Otherwise, it was a quiet night.
"Let's turn the lights off," I said.
The boat captain spoke into the radio, "Lights off," and our two ships went dark. With our running lights extinguished and the internal lights dimmed, we became two black masses rolling over black waves on a black night, white wakes our only visible sign.
As we passed our second checkpoint, the navigator said to me, "Mr. G, that's checkpoint Betty."
"Roger."
The radioman called to headquarters, "Eastgate, Eastgate, this is Calisto. I pass Betty. How copy? Over."
"Calisto, this is Eastgate. I copy Betty. Over."
Our checkpoints were often named in categories and progressed alphabetically—we used the names of cities: Albany, Buffalo, Colorado Springs, Denver; or of cars: Alfa Romeo, Beemer, Cadillac, Dodge; or, most popularly, girls: Alexis, Betty, Cassandra, Danielle. Guys would sometimes slip the names of their wives and girlfriends into the operation.
We passed checkpoint Betty and the open sea beckoned. The boat captain said, "Bring it up?"
"Bring it up." The boat captain pushed the throttle forward, and the jet engines roared and soon we were rushing over the small chop of the sea at fifty knots. The moon was hidden by clouds, but occasionally threw its white shadow onto the waves, and as I turned my head left I saw the black outline of our sister ship flying just thirty meters to port.
I pulled a waterproof card from my pocket with the call signs, radio frequencies, and checkpoints for our journey. Using a red-lens flashlight, I checked our distance to the next checkpoint and tucked the card away. The cabin was blacked-out dark, but my guys picked up from the tone of my voice that I was wearing a huge grin.
"You havin' fun, Mr. G?"
"Loads."
I was the commander of a Mark V special operations craft detachment, in charge of two boats and twenty-one men, conducting operations in Southeast Asia. We had left Singapore for Zamboanga, Philippines, on a journey of over fourteen hundred nautical miles. If we were successful, this was going to be the longest transit in the history of Naval Special Warfare.
The Mark V (pronounced "Mark Five") is a special operations boat—usually called a "craft"—that was created in 1995 primarily for the clandestine insertion and extraction of Navy SEAL teams.1 At eighty-two feet long and seventeen and a half feet wide, the craft is large enough to carry a boat crew and sixteen SEALs, yet nimble enough to make hairpin turns at high speed.2 The boat's shock-absorbing seats offered some relief from the pounding we took as we flew over the waves at fifty knots.
Each boat had four gun mounts, and we often ran with twin .50-caliber machine guns at each mount. On the two boats, we had sixteen .50-caliber machine guns, an incredible amount of firepower. Other times we'd run with a mix of .50-cals and Mark-19s. The Mark-19s are automatic grenade launchers capable of sending a 40mm grenade over twenty-four hundred yards. In the hands of a trained operator, it's possible to launch forty to sixty accurate grenade shots in one minute. In addition to weapons, we carried onboard some of the nation's most advanced signals intelligence equipment.
The Mark V runs on jet propulsion, and its angular shape makes it harder to detect on radar.3 The back end of the craft is slanted toward the water, and on our back deck we carried Zodiacs—fifteen-and-a-half-foot combat raiding craft—that we could silently slip into the water with Naval Special Warfare commandos onboard.
Running side by side, we were two small fish in a big sea, but we were built to be fast and smart, and—in a pinch—we had big teeth.
The boats were impressive, but it took the right men to bring them to life, and those men in my crew were Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (SWCC—pronounced "Swick"). SEALs and SWCC are the two groups of operators that make up Naval Special Warfare, and SWCC—though less well known than their SEAL brothers—are the often-unsung heroes of the force. They make U.S. Naval Special Warfare the best maritime special operations force in the world.
SWCC go through training at Coronado at the same facilities where BUD/S training is conducted. Though different, SWCC training is also intense, and like BUD/S, has a very high dropout rate. During Crewman Qualification Training, aspiring operators undergo a rigorous physical training regimen and learn radio communications, boat handling, navigation, engineering, and maintenance. They learn how to shoot pistol, rifle, and the heavy weapons that are used onboard special warfare craft. In advanced training, some of the teams learn how to navigate winding, shallow inland rivers, while others learn to parachute from a plane with a ten-ton rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB—pronounced "rib") into the open ocean. The men learn to fire their .50-cal guns with accuracy while absorbing incredible g-forces as the hulls of their boats shoot over waves at full speed.
As the commander of the detachment, I was in charge of the mission, but the men ran the boats. Each boat had a captain, and the captain ran his crew. A navigator, chief engineer, radioman, and back-deck chief formed the core of each crew, while intel specialists and corpsmen complemented our team.
As we began to run across the open sea—a long night now ahead of us—our chief engineer, Crazy T, said, "Hey, LT"—short for "Lieutenant"—"I was thinking about making you one of those fish crackers, you want one?" Doug Traver—Crazy T—was a former police officer with a great sense of humor who came to Naval Special Warfare for his life's next challenge.
"That's all you, T."
Traver was referring to the "treats" that had been prepared for us when we crossed the equator. One of the great traditions in the United States Navy is the "crossing the line" ceremony that takes place when a sailor first crosses the equator and goes from being a lowly "wog" to an esteemed "shellback."
Usually, only large Navy ships made the journey across the middle of the earth, but when we came to Singapore we were only eighty-two nautical miles north of the equator. We looked back at the history of Naval Special Warfare and couldn't find an instance of any small Naval Special Warfare craft crossing the equator on its own hull. As a team we decided to make a run for it. At the time, I was a lowly wog, so our chief, Steve MacIntyre, and a few of the other shellbacks in our crew organized a special operations—style ceremony. It began while still ashore in Singapore.
As wogs we were split into pairs. I was teamed with Crazy T. Standing on a green field near our barracks, we saw a bright yellow Slip 'n Slide laid out on the grass. At the prompt of the shellbacks, we ran hard for the slide, dove, and as we flew down the field headfirst, we realized that the plastic sheet was covered not with water, but with fish oil.
We ran and dove down the slide several more times, until stinking fish oil dripped from our hair and covered our shirts and shorts. Then the shellbacks put two eggs in our oily hands.
"OK wogs, you have to protect those eggs all day. The shellbacks have set up stations around the base. You'll run from station to station, and at each station you'll have to complete tasks. The faster you complete the course, the more points you get. If your eggs break, you lose points, and you'll be punished by the mighty shellbacks. It pays to be a winner!"
Crazy T and I ran around the base stinking of fish oil. With slippery fingers, we programmed radios and assembled parts into weapons. We did pushups and frog hops in the sand and we crab-walked in the dirt.
We came huffing into the final station covered in fish oil and sand and dirt and sweat. Our eggs were unbroken, but when we tried to hand the eggs to the shellbacks, they told us, "Just set 'em down; we don't want to touch you guys."
Soon all of the stinking wogs gathered outside of our barracks, and then Chief MacIntyre said, "OK, wogs, here's the deal. You now have the opportunity to earn back time that you lost on the obstacle course by consuming delicacies from the Seven Seas."
The shellbacks laid out a plate of crackers that were covered in some kind of Marmite, fish, octopus, and mayonnaise concoction. With my fish-oil-and-sand-covered fingers, I pinched a cracker and brought it to my nose. I took one whiff and lost my motivation to "earn" back time.
Crazy T, however, was always very motivated. Each cracker was worth a few minutes, and T calculated that if he could down six or so crackers, we would win.
"T..."
"It's OK, LT, I got it."
T held his nose and swallowed one cracker fast, and then a second. He inhaled a third cracker. I think he even got the fourth cracker in, but the rule was that the crackers had to go down and stay down, and somewhere around the fourth cracker, T's stomach started to spasm.
The crew was yelling for him: "Hold it in, T! Hold it in!"
T managed to keep his mouth shut as he threw up. He bent over and held his legs. All twenty guys in the detachment—wogs and shellbacks alike—were yelling for him: "Hold it in, T, hold it in, you can do it!"
T then brought his hands together in front of his face and threw up into his hands. "You OK, T?" The whole crew stood waiting for T's next move. Spit hanging from his mouth, Crazy T said, "Guys, I can get it back in. I can get it back in."
The crew erupted: "Go for it, T. Go for it!" T stood looking at the mess in his hands awhile, and then I put my hand on his shoulder and said, "That's good enough, T. I think we did it," and T let go of the puke.
The next day we drove our boats down eighty-some nautical miles to the equator, with our sister ship flying a giant black Jolly Roger—the black pirate flag marked by a white skull and crossbones. As we approached the equator, the shellbacks hooked up speakers in the Mark V and—reflecting the varied tastes of our crew—blasted a mix of heavy metal, country, and rap as we shot over short blue waves on the ride south.
Traditionally, sailors are driven over the equator aboard ship, but our shellbacks decided that—being special operations—we had to swim across. We wogs jumped into the open ocean about a half mile from the equator. There was nothing but our boats and salt water in every direction. We started to swim but soon it was clear that the current was running north, and after a half hour we were farther away from the equator than when we started. The shellbacks, however, were not going to let us back onboard. They threw thick ropes off the back of the Mark Vs.
"Grab on! We'll drag you over."
The engines revved and we grabbed ahold. As the Mark Vs picked up speed, the ocean grabbed at us and tried to rip us from the ropes, but we all held on as the boats dragged us across the equator.
Once we crossed we swam to the back of the Mark Vs and were pulled dripping from the sea and welcomed aboard as new shellbacks. We replaced the Jolly Roger with the American flag and we then conducted an awards ceremony on our back deck. A few of my men had made extraordinary efforts and I had put them forward for recognition, so medals were pinned on their uniforms and orders were read on the open sea. Then we asked the chaplain—who had joined us for the journey that day—to say a few words.
As we floated on the ocean, an immense blue sea around us, we bowed our heads as the chaplain spoke. "This has been a wonderful day, and we have fulfilled a great Navy tradition in the best possible way. I also believe that crossing the equator like this demonstrates that sometimes you first have to believe in something to make it real."
I hadn't thought about the equator that way before. There was no magic line in the sea. Everywhere we looked there was nothing but open water.
At the beginning now of our longest journey, Crazy T said to me, "You sure, LT? Those were some good crackers."
We flew over the waves for hours that night. Borneo was far enough away that we had to refuel at sea, and so we had arranged to be met by a civilian refueling ship at a specific time and location in the middle of the night. This part of our operation was not secret. It was, in fact, well publicized because we wanted to demonstrate a growing relationship between America and Malaysia. But when our chief, Steve MacIntyre, met with the civilian refueling ship captain, he found that the civilian crew was very excited to be working with a group of American special operations forces. The captain and his men had shown up to the meeting in the belief that they were now being called upon to fight the war on terror.
Steve indulged them. He told the crew that we would link up at night using a "secret" code. When we came over the horizon and got within six nautical miles, Steve would come over the radio on a preassigned frequency and say, "Got milk?" The captain of the refueling craft would say, "No, just cookies." And we would then drive in to meet them.
When the time came for Steve to make contact, he came up on the radio: "Got milk?" There was a brief pause, and then we heard the captain, in South-Asian-accented English: "Oh no, no milk. No. No. Just cookies. No milk here, no milk, just cookies, just cookies." The captain was flustered in his excitement, and so Steve said, "What kind of cookies?" This was not part of the script that Steve had given the captain, and the captain said, "Oh my, oh my God, I don't remember, I have cookies, cookies."
Steve said, "Do you have Oreos?"
"Oh, yes, yes, we have Oreos, all of the Oreos you want."
"OK, then," Steve said. "I like Oreos."
"Me too," the captain said, and our secret refueling was under way.
After we'd taken on fuel, we made for Borneo, and as we shot through the dark night, the men at work, the waves rolling under us, I was possessed of a deep sense of happiness.
I had twenty-one good men racing two special operations boats across the sea at night destined for a port where no special operations craft had ever been before, and we were at the beginning of a groundbreaking transit the likes of which had never been attempted. My closest boss was nearly three thousand nautical miles away.
I leaned over to talk with my navigator and we checked our actual location against the course we had plotted. We were right on course, right on time. But as we flew I was thinking about more than just our speed, our location, our communications, and our plan. I was also thinking about my team, and most importantly, my guys' state of mind.
We had a great journey ahead of us, but we had also just overcome what was—certainly for me—the most difficult challenge of the deployment. Our first operation had been in Thailand, where we had participated in one of the largest military exercises in Southeast Asia with our Thai counterparts.
Thailand is a gorgeous country with white beaches and mountains overrun by green foliage. In Thailand, I visited humble stone temples paying homage to the Buddha, and intricate temples built by Thailand's royalty that housed giant golden statues. Sitting ringside in a packed Bangkok arena, I watched a Muay Thai fight, and on days off, I encouraged my crew to see as much of the country as they could.
One free Saturday, Kaj Larsen and I planned an elephant trek in the Thai jungle. Kaj and I had been through BUD/S; Jump School; Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school; and SEAL Qualification Training together. He was a fellow lieutenant (jg—junior grade), a fellow SEAL, and the commander of a RHIB detachment with eight guys and two eleven-meter boats. Their primary mission was to conduct boarding missions of other craft at sea. Kaj and I had sweated through more than three years of swims, jumps, dives, and all-night operations together, and we were good friends. We boarded a tourist van on our way to the elephant trek, and a few miles in, Kaj turned to me and said, "So, I've got a heavy one for you, brother."
"What is it?"
Kaj explained that two of his guys had woken him that morning and asked to speak with him. "They told me that last night, they're out in town, and they see Calvin."
"Calvin, the SEAL lieutenant?"
"Yeah, Stuart Calvin, and his eyes are wildly dilated, and they say something to him like, 'Dude, your eyes are blown' and Calvin flips out on 'em, tells 'em, 'What the fuck are you, some kind of master-at-arms?' And Calvin tells 'em to 'stay the fuck away.' Later, they're in the bathroom, and they see Calvin come in with two other guys in his SEAL platoon. Calvin has a baggie and Calvin and his guys walk together into one of the stalls. Then Calvin orders this new SEAL in his platoon to hold security on the door."
"What was in the baggie?"
"They don't know. They think it was ecstasy, or some drug, this stuff called Special K."
"What'd you tell your guys?"
"I told 'em that I'd talk with you, and then let 'em know what we're going to do about it."
Kaj's men knew me and trusted me, and as the elephant-trek van bounced over dirt roads, I called them on my cell phone and his men relayed their story to me exactly as Kaj had told it to me.
Kaj said, "What do you think?"
I said, "We should piss test everybody. Do urinalysis on the whole squadron. All of the SEAL platoons, all the boat detachments. Anybody who's doing drugs'll pop positive, and we'll get rid of 'em. Any other way, and this'll just become a bunch of accusations flying back and forth about what some guys saw in a club."
Kaj called his men. "Guys, we're going to ask for a urinalysis of the entire squadron. Mr. G and I'll be back soon and we'll talk more then. You guys are doing the right thing."
As Kaj and I made a plan, his cell phone rang again, and I could see the worry on Kaj's face as he listened. He hung up the phone and said, "I hate to tell you this, brother, but my guys said, 'We just want you to know, that if you do a squadron-wide urinalysis, the Mark V guys might not come out so well.'"
There wasn't just a drug problem somewhere in Naval Special Warfare; there was a drug problem in my detachment. I told Kaj, "Tell 'em that we're going to do a squadron-wide urinalysis, and tell them that I'm going to start an investigation into my detachment."
A few minutes later Kaj's men called back again and they told Kaj that one of his men "thinks that someone might have slipped something into one of his drinks."
"OK," Kaj said, "we'll talk about this when I get back." It just got uglier. Now Kaj knew that he had a drug problem in his detachment as well.
Kaj and I asked the van driver if he could drive us back to the hotel, but the driver had other stops to make. We discussed having our guys drive out to pick us up, but then we would have to explain to all of the men why we'd suddenly bailed on our outing. We wanted to put a plan together first. We climbed aboard the elephant.
As the elephant thudded through the jungle and we ducked overhanging branches, Kaj and I made calls to Bangkok, to Pattaya, to San Diego. Occasionally the elephant curled its trunk over its head and we fed it a banana, both of us on our cell phones.
It remains my most surreal moment in the United States military, this crisis aboard the banana-eating elephant. I thought briefly of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who marched war elephants through the Alps at the beginning of the Second Punic War. Did Hannibal feel this ridiculous?
It was a liberty day, and when we made it back to the task unit, we found that most of the men were gone. The next morning, we put our crews on lockdown. Kaj, Chief MacIntyre, two other chiefs, my maintenance officer, and I set up a row of chairs in the common room of one of the hotel buildings. We set out paper and pens to take notes.
I said to Kaj, "You ready for this?"
"I fucking hate that we have to do this. But let's go." We called our men in one by one.
One of the young men in my detachment stepped through the common room door with a big smile on his face—he thought he was about to be briefed about an upcoming operation—and when he saw the line of stern-looking chiefs and officers seated before him, he lost his smile. As we asked him questions, his cheeks went white and his hands started to shake such that he set down the pen he was holding and held onto his thighs. We called in men that we loved, one after another, and we questioned them.
Later, back in San Diego, people would ask me if it was hard to do this: was it hard to investigate my own men, hard to take statements about the conduct of fellow SEALs? I said then, and feel now, that whether or not it was hard was not relevant. It was necessary. No matter how many people we might upset, no matter how many supposed friends we might lose, our duty was to protect our men, the men who were doing the right thing. We couldn't have men using drugs and firing live ammunition, using drugs and executing complex operations, using drugs and representing the United States. We couldn't have officers selling drugs to young enlisted men. All of this was as obvious then as it is now. It wasn't hard. But when I had to call in front of me men whom I had worked with—some of them for over a year—and when I had to call in front of me men whom I had traded jokes with, whose families I knew, who had asked me to help them plan their careers and their educations—it was sad. I felt—and I know that others felt—deep disappointment that these men who had sweated with us through hours of lifesaving drills on the sun-beaten back decks of our Mark V on the open ocean, men who had shared food with us as we stayed up on all-night operations, men who fired live ammunition just feet from our bodies—it was with deep disappointment that we found that these men who had passed so many tests with us, had failed this one.
By the end of the investigation, three of my men were kicked out of the Navy, one of Kaj's men was kicked out of the Navy, several SEALs were kicked out of the Navy, and Calvin—the SEAL officer at the center of this fiasco who had been using ecstasy and cocaine and was selling drugs to young enlisted men—went to jail.
Kaj and I had to deal with a few idiots—like the SEAL lieutenant in the Philippines who told Kaj and me that we should have punished our guys who "ratted" about the drug use (that same lieutenant later asked us to lie to our commander about our missions and ended up receiving a letter of reprimand for his conduct). But in general, we received incredible support, and my chain of command had my back.
Every culture will encounter its problems. At the end of the day, the Naval Special Warfare values won out. The Navy SEAL Code says that we must "serve with honor and integrity on and off the battlefield."
Another line of the SEAL Code says, "Take responsibility for your actions and the actions of your teammates."4 Of the three men in my detachment who left the Navy, two were young men on their first deployment. I don't believe that they would have ever sought drugs in Thailand. They were trying to find their way, trying to be warriors, trying to be men, and when they saw Calvin—a SEAL lieutenant whom they admired—using and selling drugs in Thailand, they both made a bad decision and they followed Calvin's lead.
Before those two men left Thailand, I sat down with them. "You guys have made a serious mistake, and you're going to suffer serious consequences for your decision. That's the bad news. This is going to stay with you for the rest of your lives. The good news is that you can both decide how this is going to affect the rest of your lives. You have two options. One choice is to pretend that this isn't your fault, to act like you're a victim, to pretend that you were misunderstood, to pretend that you didn't make the choices that you did make. If you do that, this decision is going to haunt you for the rest of your life. The other choice, the better choice, is to be honest about what happened here. Be honest with yourself and be honest with everyone else. If you're honest about what happened here, this can be a mistake that you learn from, a mistake that you grow from. It doesn't feel like it right now, but you can make this a source of strength for yourself." At the time they said, "Thank you." They said, "We're sorry that we let everyone down." I shook their hands. As I walked back to my now-diminished crew, I wondered, Was there something more that I could have done, should have done to prevent this?
I'm still in touch with both men. They send me pictures of their just-born and smiling-in-the-backyard kids. We talk about their careers, their families, and as they've matured over the years, I've been pleased to recommend both of them for schools and for jobs. They put their bad decision behind them in a positive way and they found a way to move on. They both learned—and we all were reminded—that to be a warrior is as much a question of moral character as it is a question of physical courage.
My detachment and the Naval Special Warfare community also moved forward. My commander in San Diego sent men out from California to bring us back to full strength, and I intensified our physical training to build crew cohesion. I took a page from my Oxford boxing coach Henry Dean's book, and we woke each morning before the sun, ran to a nearby hill, and, still shaking off yawns, sprinted as a pack through the grass to the top of the hill and down again. We attacked the hill again and then again and again and then we ran back to the pool on base and broke into two teams for a game of Bull SEAL, a rough form of water polo that threw the whole pool into a churn.
Riding now for Borneo, I felt like the men had left Thailand behind them and were focused on the immediate mission ahead, which was to conduct reconnaissance and serve as American ambassadors of goodwill as we traveled throughout Southeast Asia.
En route to the Philippines, we were tasked to stop at a number of ports in Borneo, many of which had never before been host to an American naval vessel. We were part of a long American tradition of sending the Navy forward to act as one part war machine, one part diplomatic mission. Theodore Roosevelt had once said in a State of the Union address to Congress, "A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace."5
Malaysia and Indonesia both control parts of Borneo and both countries are important potential strategic partners of the United States. Combined, Malaysia and Indonesia are home to 263 million people.6 Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country on earth. And in 2001, 11.7 million barrels of oil per day and 40 percent of the world's trade passed through the Strait of Malacca,7 where there's a serious piracy problem.8 We went to establish and build relationships. If you think of the complex drama of America's strategic relationships in Southeast Asia as an intricate three-hour movie, our crew had only one line to say, but we wanted to say it well.
Our port stops included visits to crocodile farms and orangutan sanctuaries. We pulled into port to visit the Kingdom of Brunei, and after we met with the American ambassador, we floated down the Brunei River in a wildly painted wooden taxi and saw the Istana Nurul Iman palace, home of the sultan of Brunei. We ate terong belado (spicy eggplant) and mei goreng (fried noodles) at restaurants and we talked with locals. Growing up, we'd seen Navy commercials that promised us that sailors would get to see the world. As we walked through exotic cities and sampled the indigenous cuisine, I felt that the Navy was keeping its promise. Our ultimate destination, however, was a far less scenic spot.
When we pulled into Zamboanga, Philippines, we arrived at what was—in comparison to Iraq and Afghanistan—a little-known outpost in the Global War on Terror. On a Filipino base, the United States ran a small compound. The entire American footprint was probably no larger than half a football field, the compound hidden behind high walls piled with green sandbags and guarded by Marines. Inside, SEALs, SWCC, Marines, and Army Green Berets lived a spartan life. Four meals—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midrats—were served every day. Men slept in bunk beds lined next to each other. At the center of the compound, basic benches and bars were set out on a concrete slab to make a gym. The routine was simple: wake to a watch alarm and eat a big breakfast of pancakes, sausage, toast, cereal, fruit. Work out at the weight pile for an hour, then head to the boats and prepare for the upcoming operation. Eat a big lunch of soup, meat, fruit, salad, then work again. Plan an operation, and then eat a big dinner.
As the sun fell, we would either head to the boats to conduct a night operation or spend another hour working out. Filipino families lived on the base outside our compound, and they usually disposed of their trash by burning it, and so the air was often full of smoke. Bits of plastic refuse floated down on us from above. The air was unsuitable for running, and as a result of the lift, eat, sleep routine, guys' shirts started to stretch as we each put on "Zamboanga prison muscle."
Todd Leclair, an Army Special Forces major and accomplished athlete, ran the American compound. Leclair was a graduate of SAMS—the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies—where the Army sent some of it sharpest men and women to become expert war planners. Leclair was in charge of the wider mission in Zamboanga, which was to work with Filipino forces to disrupt and interdict terrorist organizations operating in the southern Philippines, especially those associated with the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.
In the 1980s the Mujahideen recruited Islamic men from around the world to join the fight against the Soviets. One of the young recruits was Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, a university-educated son of a Filipino ulema from the island of Basilan, located ten miles south of the Filipino mainland.9 After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Janjalani returned to the Philippines to continue his war. He gathered around him a group of young extremists and started the terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf.
Abu Sayyaf launched grenade attacks against nuns, priests, and innocent civilians, among them American missionaries. Terrorists bombed Christian missionary ships and cathedrals. In its first four years, from 1991 to 1995, Abu Sayyaf murdered 136 people and injured hundreds more. After Janjalani died in a firefight with police in 1998,10 the group focused its energy on thuggish kidnappings and attention-grabbing media stunts. In one highly publicized kidnapping in 2000, they held international travelers for ransom and extracted $20 million from the Libyan government.11 To spread terror, Abu Sayyaf also engaged in be-headings that were videotaped and later broadcast on Filipino TV.12
On May 27, 2001, a group of men from Abu Sayyaf raided Dos Palmas, an expensive resort in the Philippines. They kidnapped three Americans, including Gracia and Martin Burnham, a missionary couple from Rose Hill, Kansas. The leader of the raiding party—Aldam Tilao—had been involved in many of Abu Sayyaf's killings and raids. Tilao was a showy figure who enjoyed taunting the government on the evening news, dressed in his trademark black do-rag and sunglasses. Tilao threatened to kill his hostages unless he was paid a ransom.
On May 28, the Philippine president declared war on Abu Sayyaf and vowed to "finish what you [Abu Sayyaf] have started."13 Two weeks later, on June 11, Tilao made good on his threat and beheaded one of the hostages, Guillermo Sobero, a Peruvian American tourist. Despite the president's bold claim, there was little that the government or the army could do. The FBI had already tried to pay a ransom of $300,000 for the couple, but the money was lost before it got into the hands of Abu Sayyaf.14 In the dense jungles of Basilan, the Filipino Marines were having trouble tracking Tilao, and because the population of Basilan viewed Abu Sayyaf favorably and often provided Abu Sayyaf operatives with aid, it was difficult to gain any valuable human intelligence from anyone living on the island.
After September 11, 2001, the United States placed Abu Sayyaf on its list of terrorist organizations because of the group's early connections to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Destroying Abu Sayyaf and rescuing the Burnhams became priority missions for the U.S. Navy and the CIA. With the help of a tracking device provided by the CIA, the Philippine Army was able to identify the general vicinity of Tilao as the location of the hostages, and they launched a mission to rescue the Burnhams. Although Gracia Burnham survived the firefight, Martin Burnham died and Tilao escaped into the jungle.15
The Filipino Marines knew, however, that soon Tilao would be making a run back to his home island. With the help of Navy SEALs stationed at Zamboanga, the Marines tagged Tilao's boat with infrared sensors that could be tracked by plane. A raid was readied. The night before, four ships left from Zamboanga base. One was the "lure" boat, sent to pick Tilao up and draw him into the open water. Another boat was manned by Filipino Marines. The last two boats were manned by Navy SEALs and SWCC.16
Once Tilao's boat was far enough away that his crew could not swim back to shore, the Filipino Marines gunned their engine, rushed the fishing boat, and crashed right through it. In the ensuing firefight, Tilao was killed. It was a critical blow to Abu Sayyaf. But as terrorist groups often do, Abu Sayyaf recruited new members and kept operating.
Abu Sayyaf was still our main local enemy in the area. The Americans had a good force of advisors at Zamboanga, but the Sulu Archipelago where Abu Sayyaf worked is a string of islands 215 nautical miles long. Without fast, agile boats to move through the islands, the American force was stuck on the mainland. With a range of 550+ nautical miles, the Mark Vs gave us the ability to project force and conduct missions throughout the entire Abu Sayyaf area of operations.
For us to be successful in defeating Abu Sayyaf, however, we needed more than fast boats. We had to build capable Filipino partners who could fight on their home turf for years to come. Our Filipino counterparts were Special Warfare personnel who had been trained by Navy SEALs. We first met their men on a sandy beach, and as the members of their team walked over to meet us, I was struck that the Fils walked with the same carriage as our men. Our counterparts' complexions were different and their camouflage was a different pattern. The Fils were smaller than our guys, and their assault gear, canteens, compasses, and backpacks were all older and more deeply worn than the gear we carried. Yet they had the same "fierce friendly" look and the same "relaxed ready" posture that made my men stand out in a crowd, even when they were sitting in a restaurant in civilian clothes. Some of the Fils had grown up in slums outside of Manila and some of my men had grown up on small farms in the American South, but we sat down together with the universal shared understanding of those who have been toughened in the world's hardest schools.
On our first patrols, we took the Fil commandos with us to familiarize ourselves with the surrounding islands. Aboard the Mark Vs, the engines at a low rumble, we crept past a row of thatched bamboo huts, some patched up with corrugated boards and pastel-colored walls, seemingly tottering on their stilts. The fishermen retired here in the evening after a day of pulling in nets. Dogs ran over the bamboo planks of the pier, stopping occasionally to be petted by the local children. Throughout the Philippines, 43 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.17 Here in the southern islands, poverty was even more widespread. We took photographs of areas of interest—a squat home, for example, with a bundle of antennas emerging from it—a freshly built pier near a newly built mosque. We tuned our equipment to collect signals intelligence, and we asked our Filipino counterparts to tell us about the habits and life patterns of those who lived in these villages.
The draft of the Mark V was only five feet, but our jet engines pulled water from even deeper, and so as we crept past the villages and the shade of the water shifted to light blue, I kept a close eye on our depth. I was reminded of the coastline of Cambodia. There, too, boys gathered in the shallow sea to collect nets, small clusters of homes made a fishing village near the water's edge, and people still suffered, some of them visibly, from the effects of war.
After a few patrols, it was obvious that the Mark V, while well armed, fast, and with excellent range, was far too conspicuous—even at night—to do some of the close reconnaissance that was required here.
The Fils' boat also had its problems. The Fils had captured from smugglers a fifteen-foot flat-bottomed wooden boat rigged with two huge motors. The boat had a red mouth and sharp white teeth painted on both sides of the bow. The Fils called the boat the Shark, but the only menacing thing about it was its name. The boat had a short range, and if the sea was rough, it became hard to handle.
If we were going to conduct close, quality reconnaissance, we had to find another platform. Even our Zodiacs, black and small as they were, cut an unusual profile in the water. We needed to blend in.
I remembered from my time in Cambodia that local fishermen often used small boats in shallow water to fish off the coast at night. We asked our Fil counterparts about the fishing patterns here, and they confirmed that the Fil fishermen did the same. We purchased a few local bangka boats. They were simple wooden boats built like narrow canoes with an outrigger. They had small motors and were typically used by one Filipino man to fish close to home. The boats were often painted zany yellows and greens and purples and turquoise, and at night, dozens of the boats lingered off the coast as men fished, or—as we often saw through our night-vision goggles—napped.
One of the enduring qualities of Naval Special Warfare warriors is creativity. We are taught tactics, but more than tactics, we are taught how to adapt our tactics and take advantage of opportunities to complete our mission. When the instructors yelled "Drop!" we had to drop. But when they were holding a fire hose and the compound was filled with smoke and the night was dark and they yelled "Drop!" we kept running.
The men went to work. We outfitted a few wildly painted bangka boats with GPS units, radios, weapons, and strobe lights. The SWCC operators jumped in the boats and gunned the motors and they learned how the boats handled in the choppy waters just off the coast. We drove the Mark Vs out to sea and practiced launching and recovering the bangkas from the back deck of the Mark V.
I went on the back deck and talked to Kaj.
"We're all clear, bro. Let's launch your team."
Kaj's men stepped into the bangka boats and made a final radio check.
"Calisto, this is Dolphin, radio check, over."
"Dolphin, Calisto, I read you loud and clear, how about me, over?"
"Calisto, I have you same. Dolphin out."
A group of us bent and grabbed the wooden gunwales of the bangka boats.
"Ready, one, two," and at "three" we pushed all at once and the bangka boats slipped off the back deck and into the sea. They lit their infrared strobes and we watched on night vision as two Filipino fishermen made their way for the coast. On the deck, the Mark V guns were loaded and men sat ready to push the throttle forward if our guys got in trouble.
The night of our first mission, we launched the Mark Vs from the pier. Our bangka boats launched later from the beach, and we rendezvoused at sea and brought the bangkas onto our back deck and motored calmly through the night, our ships a black mass gliding quietly over a black sea. The back-deck chief scanned the waves using night vision, and our navigator studied the radar. Armed with cameras, our operators were able to conduct close reconnaissance of several areas of interest.
Slowly, like a family sitting down to snap together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, we gained a clearer picture of our area of operations. We shared our intelligence with our Filipino counterparts, and after several patient weeks, the Filipino forces decided to launch an assault on Jolo Island in the hopes of capturing the remaining Abu Sayyaf terrorists.
The morning of the operation, we pulled away from the pier before sunrise and drove south. The Fil Marines were going to assault a suspected terrorist compound of huts and houses on the island. Abu Sayyaf had a history of running from trouble via motorboat, and our role in the operation was to cut off any of the Abu Sayyaf gang that tried to flee while the Marines pressed their attack. We set up off the coast and listened to the progress of the operation over the radio as the Marines made movement to contact. We then had to engage in what is one of the most difficult of military disciplines: wait at the ready.
It was a peaceful day. The sun rose and reflected off the sea. We bobbed in our boats. We listened to the crackle of the radio. The day grew hot and we sweated through our brown T-shirts. We drank from our canteens. We ate MREs. A boat might make a run at any minute, but besides keeping an alert lookout, there was little to do. We checked our weapons again. Checked our radios again. We checked the position of our sister ship. Then we heard more calls come over the radio.
"Nothing here."
"They are gone."
The Marines had spent a day walking through the jungle of Basilan in a state of high tension. And then, when they hit the compound, they found nothing.
We turned our bows north and gunned our engines back for Zamboanga.
That night, the men in my detachment refueled our boats, and we cleaned our weapons. We stowed our charts and checked the batteries in our flashlights. We went to sleep ready to start again the next morning—or—if we were called—in the middle of that very night.
Abu Sayyaf had been on the run for two years, unable to threaten Americans or our allies, and we were going to keep it that way. The men in my detachment would have preferred a standup fight, but if Abu Sayyaf was going to hide, then we would seek—day after day—methodically, creatively. We'd become smarter every day. We'd guard and protect. We'd serve with strength and honor, and when it was time for us to go home, another group of Americans and our Filipino allies would take our place. We'd exercise bravery when called on and perseverance every day. The line would remain unbroken and we would win.