No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL

CHAPTER 4 The Hooded Box Stress

I was in complete darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

Fear and stress are two different things.

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

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

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

Then, without warning, the hood was gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get the fuck down,” a teammate said.

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

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

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

“Clear left!”

“Clear right!”

“Moving!”

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

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

I quickly backed away from the stairs. I could feel the marble showering me as I ducked away from the burst. The roar of the AK-47 echoed through the first floor of the house, and thick smoke and the smell of gunpowder hung in the air, making it impossible to hear or think. Someone was spraying rounds down the stairs. The gunman wasn’t aiming as much as pointing the barrel in our direction and holding down the trigger. None of the fire was accurate, but that didn’t matter with the shooter only fifteen feet away from us.

I wheeled around and started to fire up the stairs with my M-4, hoping to force the shooter to find cover.

At least three of us were now returning fire when our platoon chief came up and started to organize us for an assault up the steps. The gunman had the advantage. We couldn’t see where he was hiding above us. We had no idea if it was just one or multiple shooters. Close air support from a fast mover or AC-130 was what we needed, but we were in downtown Baghdad. The threat of causing civilian casualties was too great. Our only choice was to assault up the stairs and clear the second floor.

The thick smoke was making it harder and harder to see.

The chief called for flash-crash grenades. The grenades are nonlethal and just make a ton of noise, stunning the target for a few seconds. The grenades would hopefully stun the gunman long enough for us to make our assault up the stairs.

We had about a half dozen grenades. They look like small silver pipes with holes in the body. We pulled the pins and tossed them up to the second floor. The booms and crashes sounded like the end of the world. My ears were ringing and I had to yell to communicate with the guy next to me.

My teammate and I took a quick glance at each other as the noise of the flash-crash started to taper off. We both knew it was time to head up the stairs. I took two deep breaths and tried to relax and stay focused on exactly what I needed to do.

The grenades smashed the second-floor windows, and shards of glass littered the marble steps and floor. A heavy, acidic, white smoke hung in the hall. We both fired into the thick smoke at the top of the stairs as we climbed. It was a feeble attempt at providing some covering fire.

I got about four shots off and was halfway up the stairs when my M-4 jammed. There was no time to fix it, so I let it drop. My rifle hung across my chest as I slid my pistol out of the holster on my leg.

Sweat ran down my face, into my eyes. I tried hard to focus on my front sight as I picked my way down the hall, trying to avoid stepping on the glass. I knew at any second the gunman might jump out and start firing again. There was no cover in the hallway. If he showed his face, he was getting shot.

There were three rooms on the second floor of the house. A balcony was at the far end of the hall. My teammates were right behind me. The SEAL beside me cleared into the first room on the right with some of the other guys. It was littered with sleeping mats. I continued slowly making my way down the hallway through the thick smoke.

As we approached the second door on the right side of the hallway, I stepped past it as my teammates behind me entered the room. As we got to the last door along the hallway on the left, my teammates smashed it open and flooded inside. I could hear yelling from the guys in the second room on the right side of the hallway. They found an AK-47, but there was no sign of the gunman.

Directly in front of me at the end of the hallway was the door to the balcony. I reached out and tried the handle. It was locked. My teammates had found an AK-47, but no one knew where the gunman had gone. I had an idea.

I thought through the risks. Did he have a suicide vest on? Was there more than one shooter? There was still no sign of him inside. I was starting to get nervous. How had the motherfucker gotten away already?

He couldn’t go down the steps. I took a knee and quickly unjammed my M-4. I unlocked the balcony door and slowly opened it up. Maybe he was hiding outside. It hadn’t dawned on me that there was no way he could have escaped outside and locked the door from the inside. It had all happened so quickly, and there was so much stuff going on around me it was hard to focus on the little things, like the balcony door being locked from the inside. I was obviously a bit overwhelmed. The whole fight was like being in a car accident.

When you’re in a car accident, you probably remember the last two to three seconds leading up to the crash. If you were in another car accident, and then another and another, you would begin to remember more and more details about what happened to cause each crash, as you got more familiar with the sights, smells, sounds, rhythms, and speed of a crash.

Gunfights are like car crashes to some degree. They are things you try to avoid, they always surprise you when they happen, and because of the rush of adrenaline, it can become hard to focus and make good decisions. This was one of my first firefights, and I was having trouble staying focused.

With my M-4 jam cleared and the rifle back in action, I opened the door and cleared out onto the balcony.

No one was there. Where the fuck had he gone? I walked down to the end of the balcony, searching the courtyard below and the roof above. I could see our idling trucks in front of the house. There was no way he could have jumped down and escaped. The gunman had vanished.

At the end of the balcony I peered into the window of the room where they’d found the AK-47. I could see my teammates standing in the room. It looked like they’d searched under the beds and in the wooden armoire at the far end of the room.

I was about to walk back into the house when I spotted an adult male through the window, inside the room with my teammates. He was tucked in the windowsill, hidden by a piece of furniture. The male was in his early twenties, wearing a wife-beater T-shirt and shorts. His hair was a mess and he had a few wisps of a beard on his cheeks. His knees were pressed into his chest and I could tell he was trying to be as still as possible. He had his eyes closed and he had no idea I could see him.

I leveled my M-4, but I couldn’t shoot. He was unarmed, and besides, my teammates were standing behind him and a stray bullet could hit them. Thick black metal bars covered the window. I slid the barrel of my rifle between the bars and smashed the glass. The breaking glass startled the gunman and he turned to face me.

I reared back and drove the muzzle of my rifle into his face. His head snapped back and his lip split open, sending blood cascading down his chin and onto his dirty wife-beater T-shirt. He groaned and fell out of the windowsill onto the bedroom floor. Some of my teammates grabbed him, flipped him over on his face, and cuffed him with a plastic zip tie. We found out afterward he was the Iraqi officer’s son. He’d ditched his AK-47 before hiding in the windowsill.

It was impossible for me to focus once we got back to base that night. I kept going over the mission in my head. The guys who found the AK-47 should have found the son, but none of us managed the stress of the situation very well.

It wasn’t until a couple years later, and the hooded box test, that I started to really think about how to manage stress. I learned there that the key was to first prioritize all the individual stressors and then act. I break it all down into the little things I can manage. The stressors that I can’t affect, I don’t worry about. The ones I can affect, I simply deal with one at a time. In a lot of ways, it goes back to BUD/S and the elephant.

You know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

The hooded box test is meant to overwhelm. It is meant to force you to make very difficult decisions, right or wrong, good or bad, life or death, all in seconds. We face the same challenge in combat. I always tried to keep things as simple as possible. We don’t want guys to freeze when faced with multiple threats. But we also don’t want guys to immediately start shooting without assessing the situation. Take what’s there, assess the situation, prioritize, and break it down into small tasks you know you can accomplish or eliminate or fix immediately. Through constant practice, repetition, and experience, most SEALs can prioritize stressors fast enough that it feels more like an instinct than a process.

Once that happens, everything starts slowing down.

Take the hooded box drill from S&T. I shot the hostage taker with two paint rounds seconds after the instructors pulled off the hood. He was the first box on my checklist. The second box was the men behind me. I swung around and yelled at the two men behind me.

“Show me your hands,” I barked, keeping my rifle up and at the ready. “Get the fuck back!”

The men were dressed like the gunman in cargo pants and team shirts. But the men were unarmed and held up their hands right away. Both men slowly backed up, taking very small, deliberate steps. Once they were a few feet away, I told them to get down on the ground.

“Put your face on the floor,” I said. “Spread your arms out.”

They did what I ordered, and I turned to face the blonde again, but she had a pistol out and stuck it in my face.

“What the fuck are you doing?” an instructor yelled from the catwalk above me.

The instructors all started yelling at me for not acting quickly enough. I was too deliberate. I didn’t move from threat to threat quickly enough and it cost me. Luckily, just about everyone failed the first time. Car crash number one complete, and it wasn’t pretty.

I cursed myself for being so slow. I spent too much time on the men and forgot about the woman. I didn’t see her as a threat, but overseas plenty of women, in Iraq specifically, would hide cell phones and weapons. On my first deployment with SEAL Team Five, we searched a woman after we arrested her husband, and found several phones and guns. During that same deployment, four women were arrested in Baghdad wearing suicide-bombing belts. A few months after the Baghdad arrests, a female suicide bomber—dressed like a man—detonated a suicide bomb outside of Tall Afar in northern Iraq. The insurgents knew we didn’t search women. After that, we made a point of searching everyone on target.

I’d failed my first hooded box test at S&T, but the lesson learned wasn’t one I’d forget. Assess, prioritize, and act. I’d get in that “car crash” of combat hundreds of more times throughout my career, facing new stresses faster than I could have imagined back during the hooded box training, firing real rounds instead of nonlethal paint, my life and the lives of others on the line. I learned something vital every single time.