More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 16 - May 25, 2018
Morale is the key to everything. There is nothing wrong with keeping people happy.
I began to understand that the instructors wanted to see how we behaved as a team. If guys started yelling at each other for not “carrying their weight,” the whole team would disintegrate. I watched finger-pointing destroy crews during Hell Week, and later saw the same tendency ruin careers. That’s why the course is designed the way it is. The SEAL brass doesn’t want guys who blame others on the teams. The goal is to find guys who, no matter what, work together as a team and, most important, never quit.
He could walk slowly because there were only about thirty-three of us left out of the original two hundred.
As we got closer, we could hear dogs barking. We didn’t worry about that because dogs bark on every target and never give us away. I’m convinced dogs don’t ever stop barking in the Middle East.
When we came back out, there was gunfire everywhere. I could hear the bullets cracking above our heads. I was thinking, “Man, these guys are lousy shots.” What I came to understand was that most of the enemy truly believed that Allah would guide their bullets. So why bother to aim? Their faith is probably a key reason I’m still in one piece.
His motto, which I’ve stolen from him, is, “Nobody ever worked for me. They worked with me.”
It really sucks that children are involved in this, and there are always kids in these houses. Always. The children told us that most of the folks nearby were family, but that there were strangers in town. This was their father’s house; that was the man I’d shot in the bedroom. They’d been sleeping in there when the helicopters woke them. Their father had sent his wife, their mother, to the door with an AK-47 to martyr herself and possibly take one of us with her. Now these kids were orphans.
When intel pinpoints a terrorist safe house, the leadership can just order up a guided bomb and blow the place apart. Since, as I’ve said, you can always multiply the number of fighters in a safe house by wives, kids, and cousins, the collateral damage in a strike like that can be something like twenty-plus to one. If you drop a payload on a house, you risk killing twenty innocent people for every one terrorist. By contrast, we were precise enough to hit our target without killing innocent people. That’s why we were given latitude—at least, back then. We’d proven we could do exactly what the
...more
“You don’t speak Arabic,” they’d say. “Yeah,” I’d respond, “but everybody speaks ‘gun.’ ”
Our plan was complacent, overconfident. When things go so right for so long, you stop thinking about ways things can go wrong. This is how success can kill.
We drove back to Baghdad Airport with a little bit of bitching going on. Most of the guys wanted to take the HVT down, bridge or no bridge, but they were fueled too much by emotion. The HVT could have been bait, intentionally luring us over a booby-trapped bridge. The commander had made the right decision. Eventually the guys would agree, just not right now. They all needed time to cool off.
One of the worst feelings in the world is having someone shoot effectively at you while your bullets have no chance of reaching them. I didn’t care for it.
