No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL

CHAPTER 7 After Action Review Communication

I stifled a long yawn as I walked back to our ready room and took off my kit, which was soaked with dust and sweat. I was tired, having come down from the adrenaline of combat, and feeling the sting of missing the target.

We gathered in the briefing room near our operations center in eastern Afghanistan. It was summer 2010. The heat was oppressive, requiring us to haul extra water on every mission. The good thing was I drank most of it, so by the time the mission ended my load was lighter.

I could just make out the sun peeking over the mountains. It had been a long night and I knew tonight’s After Action Review, which we call the AAR for short, was going to be tough.

We’d been tracking a Taliban commander just north of Khost. The valley was one of several sanctuaries where they cached weapons and explosives. We started tracking them via ISR, which is shorthand for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, which is what we call drones. When they finally stopped moving from village to village and settled into a network of compounds at the end of the valley, we launched.

But after landing just out of RPG range of the compounds, we got several reports of squirters running from the target. We chased them for several hours, but the target got away. Back at the base, I knew there were going to be a lot of very direct questions about what the fuck happened and why the enemy had gotten away. We want to do our job as clean and as perfect as we can, but the rules of engagement kept us boxed in and we lost our target. It was one thing to hit a dry hole, but this time we knew the guy was there and failed to kill or capture him. We don’t put our lives on the line to fail.

Frankly, at the end of a long mission, when you’re fried, frustrated, and angry about failing, sitting down and talking it out is often the last thing you want to do. But I had seen the AAR work throughout my career and I knew it was a vital part of our culture.

The AAR is one of the ways we fix mistakes. It was a time to ask questions and make sure we were doing the job right. AARs can get emotional, frustrating, long-winded, and even boring, but no matter what people think of them, they are absolutely critical.

I thought we had made the right call given the situation on the ground and the rules of engagement. We’d all agreed that landing on the “Y” for this operation was the right choice, but we had obviously been wrong. No matter how bad egos might get bruised, it was important to explore every reason why our operation had failed. We needed to fix our failure, and the most important AARs are the hard ones. Imagine if the military hadn’t held an AAR after Operation Eagle Claw, the botched raid in 1980 to free the American hostages in Iran.

The investigation that followed that failed operation pointed out gaps in the military mission planning, from a lack of cohesion between services to a need for better equipment. It was specifically because of that failure that

An AAR is a place where lessons are learned and policies are modified or scrapped, all with an eye toward making the team better. This type of dialogue ensures buy-in from both the top and bottom of the chain of command. The key is that we get as many players in the room as possible. The only way an AAR works is if everyone leaves their ego outside and comes in willing to take honest criticism.

On the way into the meeting, I ran into my buddy Walt. No taller than my armpit, Walt was short, but his attitude, cocky with a swagger, compensated for it. He had a healthy dose of little-man syndrome and an inordinate amount of body hair. He was one of my best friends and always a straight shooter when it came to voicing his opinion.

Walt was covered in mud from head to foot. The mud was so thick it was impossible to run a comb through his beard. I smiled when I saw him. He just shook his head, letting a small smirk crease his lips. I could make out his white teeth peeking out of the mound of matted hair tangled beneath his chin.

“Not a fucking word,” he said. “That was bullshit. We need to figure this shit out. We can’t keep flying in and giving away our position. Especially if they aren’t going to let us drop bombs.”

The Taliban commanders must have heard the rotor wash echoing off the valley walls a few minutes before we landed. It was like an early-warning system. When they heard helicopters, they ran.

Walt and his teammates had tried to catch the fighters after they ran from the compounds but lost them in the mountains. As we walked into the briefing, everyone looked dejected, angry, and frustrated. No two SEALs in the room looked the same. We each wore different, usually mismatched uniforms; some operators wore beards; some had long hair. We all had a drink of some sort—coffee, water, Rip It energy drinks. This was going to be a long talk.

Walt and I sat down in two of the chairs in the room. We were joined by one of Walt’s teammates, who wore a black Van Halen T-shirt instead of his camouflage shirt. The white Van Halen logo was bright and clean because it had been covered by his body armor. Like Walt, he was covered everywhere else with mud.

“That’s a good look for you,” I said with a smile.

He didn’t return the smile.

None of us wanted to risk death only to fail. If we were going to do our jobs, we had to find a way to work within the rules of engagement because the Taliban knew the rules, too, and used them against us. The Taliban knew that if they dropped their guns and ran that we couldn’t just shoot them. They knew if they blended in with the civilian population they could slip away. If it were just a matter of dropping bombs or shooting the guys we knew were bad, the war would have been much easier. That being said, that’s not what we’re about, and none of us were about to shoot unarmed people. Besides, if we even remotely got out of line, what seemed like thirty different lawyers all working for the officers up the food chain would tell us all about it.

Shit, by my last deployment we were barely even allowed to enter a structure or building in Afghanistan without prior approval from higher up. It made fighting the war almost impossible.

Walt and I were some of the last ones into the AAR. Before it started, I took a minute to focus and calm down. I let the frustration of watching the fighters escape bleed away. Emotion had no place in an AAR. It got in the way of good communication. I took two deep breaths and pushed the thoughts of failure out of my mind. I’d become adept at compartmentalizing things, and I knew I needed a clear head for this conversation.

Taped to the side of the tent wall was a poster-size piece of paper with the checklist for the AAR.

Each of us took turns talking about our role in the mission. As a team leader, I would start by speaking for my team, and my guys would jump in if they had something to add. Everyone was not only free to talk, but encouraged to speak up.

The troop chief started things off by going over the mission planning. From there, we started talking through each part of the operation, starting with the infil. We came in on two CH-47 helicopters, using the infil strategy called “flying to the Y.”

Flying to the Y had been no different than previous missions. The radio exploded with chatter about squirters as soon as we started to land. I was right behind my point man as we dashed off the ramp, peeling to the far-right flank of our formation to get a good angle on the compounds.

Over the radio, I heard Steve, Walt’s team leader, roger up to pursue the fighters. They followed the drone’s laser marker past the buildings and into the hills. I waited for the word to start the assault toward the compounds. Individual teams immediately started peeling off to take flanking positions and provide a base of fire.

“OK,” said the troop chief over the radio. “Let’s take it.”

We started toward the target. I saw other teams and Afghan commandos disappear into a maze of compounds. My team surrounded one building and stopped. We set up at the door and tried the latch. It was unlocked. The point man pushed the door open.

The house was pitch-black, but we could see pretty well with our night vision goggles. The house had one main room with a kitchen in one corner. The place was deserted. There were no fighters. No weapons. No explosives. Nothing.

Outside, I saw a few Afghan commandos standing guard over some women and children. Over the radio, Steve was still racing after the fleeing fighters. I could see the drone’s laser tracking the Taliban fighters far up the hill. Well behind them were Steve and his team. I could see the IR strobes on their helmets blinking. They were cutting a zigzag up the hill trying to catch up.

“That sucks,” I said to a teammate watching them with me. “That looks miserable. Hope they catch ’em.”

Over the radio, Steve was asking for close air support. He wanted the AC-130 gunship to open fire, but he couldn’t get approval. Finally, after more than an hour chasing the fighters up the side of the mountain and deeper into unknown territory, the troop commander and troop chief called the mission. There was no use in continuing to pursue the fighters, especially since our team wasn’t gaining any ground on them and they weren’t getting approval to drop bombs.

The troop commander called for exfil and the first helicopter landed near the network of compounds. We walked up the ramp and slumped into the orange jump seats. Seconds later, I could feel the helicopter lift off and head back to the base.

The other helicopter headed for Steve’s team, including Walt. They were too far away to walk back and we didn’t have the time to sit and wait as they scaled back down the mountain. These were not rolling hills either. We were talking mountains, ones with snowcaps in the winter. A helicopter exfil at Steve’s location wasn’t going to be easy.

Steve and his team needed one hand on the mountain at all times as they waited for the helicopter to arrive. The twin-rotor CH-47 helicopter couldn’t land, so the pilot from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flew past the cliff, stopped in a hover, and slowly backed the open ramp to the edge of the rocks. The rotors were within a few feet of the rock face. The 160th pilots were the best in the world. Only these pilots could have pulled this type of exfil off. Steve’s team watched the pilots back the bus-size helicopter to the cliff face. The downdraft from the spinning rotor blades kicked up dirt and debris that showered the SEALs with rocks and coated their uniforms in mud.

The pilots maneuvered the helicopter’s ramp to within a few feet of the cliff. One by one, Steve and his team jumped from the rocks to the ramp.

“Man, you guys would still be making your way down that mountain if the pilots hadn’t pulled off that exfil,” I said to Walt as he described leaping for the ramp.

“We were getting blasted by rocks for at least five minutes,” Walt said. “I’m not sure what would have been worse, the walk back down the mountain or the welts I have all over my body.”

“Maybe the Van Halen shirt jinxed you,” one of the other SEALs said.

“Yeah, Walt, maybe the weight of your mud-covered beard slowed you down,” I said.

It was funny to us because we weren’t the ones who had to climb the mountain. We were having a good laugh about Steve and his team, but they weren’t enjoying the joke. They’d tried their best to get the fighters and felt let down when the air strikes weren’t approved.

“Why did we do this?” Walt finally asked. “These tactics aren’t working. I can’t believe I humped around the side of a mountain and we didn’t even get the guy.”

Finally, Steve chimed in about not getting approval to use the AC-130.

“What is the point of having Spectre on target if they can’t shoot?” Steve said. “Was there any question these assholes were bad?”

Steve already knew the answer.

There was no question the squirters were bad. But, under the rules of engagement, we had to see the guns. And while the drones tracked the fighters, it wasn’t clear if they were armed. I didn’t have any doubt. Neither did my teammates. But we weren’t the ones giving approval.

“These guys got away because of the way we planned the target,” Steve finally said. “Our guys were smoked and these two knuckleheads should have been captured or smoke checked.”

The Taliban learned from the mujahedeen’s fight against the Soviets. They picked areas to hide that were difficult to reach, except by helicopter. We often had no choice but to fly to the Y.

“Guys, we made the decision to land on the Y because of the terrain surrounding the target,” the troop chief said. “We knew the risks going in that there was a chance the enemy could spook and haul ass.”

It was becoming hard for us to justify ever landing on the Y because as soon as the fighters heard you coming, which was a few minutes before you actually landed, they started squirting or hauling ass away from the target. The only way it worked was when we could get containment on the target and block all the escape routes. If you aren’t on the ground ahead of the helicopters, all bets are off. You’re going to spend the night chasing squirters.

We preferred to patrol into targets. It allowed us to keep the element of surprise and set up around the target to keep fighters from fleeing when the shooting started. I looked over at the recce team leader. His team planned the routes and set up snipers on target.

“The routes into that specific valley are very limited, and the patrol would have been hard as hell, if we could even keep our timeline at that,” the recce team leader said.

It would have taken us six hours to walk up the valley and over the mountain peaks. The recce guys weren’t sure we could make the timeline. Especially with the number of assaulters we needed to bring on the target. We had to take the Afghan commandos, our partner force, and two members from the conventional Army unit responsible for the valley.

There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that neither the Afghan commandos nor the Army guys could have made the patrol. Let alone on the faster timeline that we would need in order to reach the target in time.

Each year, since the beginning of the war, the rules of engagement had changed to match the political winds. At the time of this mission, partnering with the Afghans was the order of the day. A mission once reserved for the Special Forces was now getting farmed out to every unit from paratroopers to regular SEAL teams. We were being required to bring along Afghan commandos who couldn’t speak English and wouldn’t last two minutes in BUD/S. The Afghan commandos, on paper, were Afghanistan’s answer to our counterterror units. But in reality, the troops were only a slight upgrade from the regular Afghan soldiers running around the country.

We also had to bring along a herd of other stragglers or enablers, like “battle space owners,” or BSOs, so they could witness the operation. These were American military soldiers stationed near the target. If the elders from the village came down to the nearest base to complain and accuse us of killing innocent farmers, the Army guys would be able to say they witnessed everything and defuse the situation.

It made doing our simple things even harder. On several occasions because of weight restrictions on the helicopters, we bumped SEALs off the helicopter and the mission just to make room for an Afghan commando or a conventional Army BSO.

“These BSOs and Afghan commandos just aren’t useful at all,” I said. “Is there any way we can talk to the higher-ups and explain to them how limiting they are to our mission?”

The troop chief almost laughed.

“You’ve been here long enough to know that this is what we’re stuck with,” he said. “This is the hand we’ve been dealt and we have to play it.”

I shook my head and took a drink of my coffee. I did know the answer, but it felt good to say it. At least if we threw it on the table, the team could debate it or at least know dumping everyone who wasn’t a SEAL from the mission was considered.

The AAR was spinning. If we tried to patrol in with our entire gaggle of people, we knew we wouldn’t make it. If we used helicopters and landed on the Y, we knew we’d spook the fighters and they’d leave. The troop chief finally jumped in and got us back on track. Nobody was specifically to blame in this AAR other than ourselves. No one person ordered us to land on the Y. We were all more pissed at the limitations of the rules of engagement, or ROE, as well as the fact that our target got away. As we went round and round, people began getting louder and louder and more and more intense. Pretty soon the whole AAR was breaking down and there were more emotions than cold hard facts or new ideas.

“Look, guys, we have rules,” the troop chief said. “We didn’t write them, but we have to follow them. The key here is that we’ve discussed everything that happened right and everything that happened wrong. We take on board every single lesson we’ve learned and we don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

I looked around the room, and some of the guys were nodding. I agreed with the troop chief. We couldn’t go back in time and fix anything.

“The fact of the matter is we have to find a better way to hit these compounds,” the troop chief said. “These guys knew what they were doing. They ran when they heard the helicopters. Everybody needs to reflect on that fact for a minute. Stop pointing fingers at your teammates or at the rules of engagement and start focusing on the big picture. We took a swing and it didn’t work. Let’s figure out a better way next time.”

The AAR got the issues out in the open and forced us to think outside of the box and communicate. We still needed to find a way to do an offset infil with all the extra people we were required to take on a mission.

In the end, the AAR eliminated any infighting. Everyone had a chance to say their piece and air any concerns. It allowed us all to openly communicate. Frustrations were aired in that room and hopefully in that room only. Nobody carried on later because we all knew that this was the place and setting to let our voices be heard. Just the chance to communicate, with no sugarcoating, with no rank, and with complete openness and honestly, was what we needed to correct both big and small problems.

I remember a particularly uncomfortable and very personal AAR after I became a team leader. It was in Afghanistan and it was shortly after Phil, my old team leader, was shot in the leg. We were in the middle of the deployment, so I wasn’t expecting to take over the team leader responsibilities until the following deployment. I was still getting used to having the added responsibility. Since I was a new team leader, I didn’t want to screw anything up. I knew my troop chief would be watching me closely. Luckily my entire eight-man team was more talented than I was and made being a first-time team leader much easier.

The target, as usual, was a Taliban commander or facilitator. We’d tracked him to a bed-down location in a village near the Pakistan border. After we raided the compound and captured him, our troop chief put out the word to prepare for exfil.

We all have our standard kit—weapons, night vision, body armor—plus we had additional gear like ladders and sledgehammers to breach doors. Every member of the team is assigned extra gear. I carried a set of bolt cutters on my back. I don’t know how many times someone would use them and set them down instead of returning the bolt cutters to me. This happened routinely with all the extra equipment that we would carry on a mission. When it came time to leave the target, I wouldn’t have all of the equipment that I was responsible for.

Everybody was getting ready to leave. It was night and pitch-black and I wanted to make sure that everybody had their stuff. We were lining up to patrol back to the landing zone, and I got on the radio net monitored by my whole team and called Jake, call sign Alpha Eight.

Jake had the ladder for our team, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t forget it. But I used a frequency that everyone could hear.

“Alpha Eight, this is Alpha One,” I said.

“Alpha One, this is Eight, go ahead,” he said.

“Hey, you got your ladder?” I said.

“Roger that,” he replied almost immediately.

From there, I double-checked that I had a good head count for my team, then called the troop chief.

“Echo Twelve, Alpha One. Alpha is ready to exfil.”

Each team leader quickly checked in with the same, but none of them went to the extent of asking their individual guys if they had their extra gear.

“Roger, recce take us out,” the troop chief said.

Back at the base we immediately dropped our gear and sat down for the AAR. As we ended the exfil portion of our AAR, Jake raised his hand.

“Hey, just curious why you had to get on the radio and remind me about my ladder?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, it’s my gear, it’s my responsibility,” Jake said. “I’ve never forgotten it before.”

At first I was a bit taken back. I really didn’t know what to say. I was the team leader and I had the right to ask him anything I wanted. I could have gotten on the radio and asked him his shoe size or if he brushed his teeth that morning. But then it clicked. Instantly, I felt like an ass.

“Good point,” I said.

I sat there in front of the whole team, feeling like an asshole. I was so concerned about my team doing things correctly that I wasn’t paying attention to my own behavior. I’d become the team leader that I’d always hated, the micromanager. Sure, in the back of my mind I’d rationalized asking him about the ladder because it was a big piece of equipment that I wanted to make sure we didn’t forget on target. But what I didn’t do was trust my guy to be responsible for his own gear. Phil was always really good at letting us do our own thing. He trusted us to do our jobs and spoke up only when he had to correct you. I knew I had fucked up if Phil had to come talk to me. Otherwise, we were expected to know what we had to do. I’d wasted my breath and energy asking Jake about the ladder. Now I had to answer for my mistake during the AAR.

“Did I remind you to bring your bolt cutters or even your gun tonight?” Jake asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Well, the ladder is my gear, it’s my responsibility, so I’ve got it.”

Of course he knew what gear to carry. The way I’d asked sounded like I didn’t trust my teammates, and we all understood the importance of trust.

“My mistake,” I said. “Good copy, roger that. I’m an ass and I get what you’re saying. It won’t happen again.”

I was never mad at Jake. I was embarrassed and mad at myself.

All the credit goes to Jake. He knew that the AAR was the perfect time to bring up my error. Had Jake not been honest enough to communicate with me directly, I probably would have done the same thing the very next mission and it would have become habit.

Both the ladder AAR and the one after the mission when we lost the Taliban commander served the purpose.

The day after the failed mission to capture the Taliban commander, we were out on a new target. There wasn’t time to dwell on the past. We all blocked out the last mission because we had to go back into harm’s way, as a team, without second-guessing the men to our left and right.

But a month later, the troop chief came back to us with the same target.

“You guys want to take another swing at these guys?” the troop chief asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

I was in the operation center with Steve. The troop chief was there with the recce team leader. On the flat screen were satellite photos of the target compounds and the valley.

“He’s back at home,” the troop chief said, pointing to one of the compounds in the cluster. “Intel has him corralled to the exact same compound we hit before. He is there with a couple of buddies.”

I looked at the compound and then looked at the valley as a whole. I wanted another shot. I’d let the first mission go and tried not to focus on the shithead getting away, but I wasn’t about to let him pass through our fingers again.

“Your team has primary,” the troop chief said to me.

My team could pick what we wanted to do on target.

“I want to walk in,” I said.

I loved the harder stuff. If there was more of a challenge, I ate it up. The harder the mission, the more I liked it. But I also knew the obstacles we faced on this target. The AAR had shown us the problems with our first plan. We had to find a way to keep the element of surprise or it wasn’t worth taking another swing at capturing or killing this guy.

I looked at the recce team leader. He had a smile on his face.

“I found a route,” the recce team leader said. “But we can’t do it with a big patrol.”

“I agree. The last thing we need is that huge gaggle snaking its way through the mountains,” I said. “There is no way we’d make it.”

We’d learned a valuable lesson the last time. I thought back to the AAR and why we took the helicopters the first time.

“What about the commandos and battle space owners?” I asked. “Any way to get them in a different way?”

We talked for an hour and finally came up with a plan that fit with the rules of engagement. My team of SEALs, combined with our recce guys, an Air Force Pararescue Jumper (PJ) and our troop chief would take a helicopter to a nearby valley and patrol to the target. Once we had containment set around the network of compounds, we would radio back. The other teams plus the battle space owner and Afghan commandos would come in by helicopter and land on the Y. We’d already be in place to handle any squirters and to commence the assault as soon as the helos touched down. We finally had a work-around. It had been developed during the AAR.

We briefed the plan to the entire troop and grabbed our gear, and my team headed for the helicopters. We left hours before the main body and started to patrol. It was hot and we weren’t a kilometer into the patrol before my shirt was soaked with sweat. There was little moon, and if I hadn’t had my night vision it would have been impossible to see. For hours we walked up and down the hills.

The patrol was long but uneventful. I kept my focus, hoping all this hard work was going to pay off. The last thing I wanted was to let these fuckers get away again. We’d come up with a great plan and were now putting in the work to make it happen.

We finally crested the last hill and I could see the maze of compounds below. I checked my watch. We were on time. We quickly moved down and set up on the different alleys leading out of the small group of compounds. From the satellite images, we’d figured there were a couple of avenues out of the compound network. We split into teams of two and set up on each one.

We moved silently down the hill. I kept my rifle at the ready as we got close to the walls. I was with another SEAL, my swim buddy, and we took a knee and waited. Overhead, ISR was keeping track of the compounds. There were no reports of movers. When all the teams were in place, I heard the troop chief come over the radio.

“Birds are inbound,” the troop chief said. “Two minutes.”

I looked at my watch. I could already hear the faint thud of the rotors as the helicopters flew up the valley toward the compounds. I wiped the sweat off my face with my sleeve. If the fighters were indeed in the compound, I expected them to start running for it any minute.

Seconds later I heard the drone pilot over the radio.

“We’ve got two movers leaving the target compound and heading east,” the drone pilot said.

That was all that I wanted to hear. We were set up to the east and ready and waiting for them.

I knew from the satellite images they were headed down a long alley that split the cluster of six compounds in half. It was the same route they used the first time we hit the compounds. At the end of the alley, Bert, who was one of my newer guys, and an Air Force PJ were set up.

“Coming your way, Alpha Four,” I said over the radio.

“Roger,” Bert said.

The rotors were loud now as the helicopter was landing on the western side of the compounds. I could just make them out in the cloud of dust. The radio crackled with reports as my teammates and the Afghan commandos fanned out and started moving toward the compounds.

Seconds later, I heard the crack of suppressed rifle fire as Bert and the pararescueman opened up. The fighters—carrying AK-47s—got only a few steps out of the alley before running into Bert. The fighters were in a dead sprint. They looked up just as they cleared the alley and saw Bert and the PJ. The fighters tried to skid to a stop and raise their rifles in a weak-ass attempt to get some shots off. Before they even had a chance to level their AK-47s, Bert and the PJ fired multiple rounds into each fighter. They went down in a heap at the mouth of the alley.

“Two EKIA,” Bert radioed.

Both fighters were killed in action. I felt instant gratification. We’d gotten them. We’d missed on the first try but didn’t get discouraged. We’d talked through the failed mission—focused on what went right and what went wrong—and then found a new way to attack the target.

You don’t often get a second chance in combat. We never counted on taking another swing at these guys, but we knew that the lessons learned from the first mission would help future missions.

The AAR served its purpose, and because of it, the two Taliban commanders would never be a threat again. We had figured out how to work around the requirements placed on us while still operating within the rules of engagement. This mission and the lessons learned had been pretty straightforward. However, many AARs and the lessons learned in them aren’t so simple. Sometimes people die because we haven’t clearly communicated and learned from our mistakes.

As hard as it can be to criticize the actions of a teammate, or to take criticism from a brother, it is one of the most important tools a SEAL has to improve. The hardest thing to do is honestly communicate with people, especially when you might be at fault. Mistakes are made in combat and that’s understandable. The thing to remember is that communication and the lessons learned from the AAR are only put in place to make the team better. Understanding that it’s not all about you is tough and was one of the hardest things for me to learn throughout my career. Slowly over the years I began to understand more and more about how important it was to stay humble and understand that everyone can make mistakes. You don’t turn your back on them because they made a mistake, but learn from them so the next night you do things better.

Lessons learned in combat, and sometimes in blood, must be passed on.