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A F
OURTH
D
EPLOYMENT
I
f things had worked according to “normal” procedures, I would
have been given a long break and a long stretch of shore duty after
my second deployment. But for various reasons, that didn’t happen.
The Team promised that I’d have a break after this deployment.
But that didn’t work either. I wasn’t real happy about it. I lost my
temper talking about it, as a matter of fact. I’d guess more than
once.
Now, I like war, and I love doing my job, but it rankled me that
the Navy wasn’t keeping its word. With all the stress at home, an
assignment that would have kept me near my family at that point
would have been welcome. But I was told that the needs of the
Navy came first. And fair or not, that’s the way it was.
M
y blood pressure was still elevated.
The doctors blamed it on coffee and dip. According to them, my
blood pressure was as high as if I were drinking ten cups of coffee
right before the test. I was drinking coffee, but not nearly that much.
They strongly urged me to cut back, and to stop using dip.
Of course I didn’t argue with them. I didn’t want to get kicked
out of the SEALs, or go down a road that might lead to a medical
discharge. I suppose, in retrospect, some might wonder why I
didn’t do that, but it would have seemed like a cowardly thing to
do. It would never have felt right.
I
n the end, I was all right with being scheduled for another
deployment. I still loved war.
D
ELTA
P
LATOON
U
sually, when you come home, a few guys will rotate out of the
platoon. Officers will usually change out. A lot of times the chief
leaves, the LPO—lead petty officer—becomes the chief, and then
someone else becomes LPO. But other than that, you stay pretty
tight-knit. In our case, most of the platoon had been together for
many years.
Until now.
Trying to spread out the experience in the Team, command
decided to break up Charlie/Cadillac Platoon and spread us out. I
was assigned to Delta, and put in as LPO of the platoon. I worked
directly with the new chief, who happened to be one of my BUD/S
instructors.
We worked out our personnel selections, making assignments
and sending different people off to school. Now that I was LPO, I
not only had more admin crap to deal with, but couldn’t be point
man anymore.
That hurt.
I drew the line when they talked about taking my sniper rifle
away. I was still a sniper, no matter what else I did in the platoon.
Besides finding good point men, one of the toughest personnel
decisions I had to make involved choosing a breacher. The
breacher is the person who, among other things, is in charge of the
explosives, who sets them and blows them (if necessary) on the
DA. Once the platoon is inside, the breacher is really running things.
So the group is entirely in his hands.
T
here are a number of other important tasks and schools I haven’t
mentioned along the way, but which do deserve attention. Among
them is the JTAC—that’s the guy who gets to call in air support.
It’s a popular position in the Teams. First of all, the job is kind of
fun: you get to watch things blow up. And secondly, you’re often
called away for special missions, so you get a lot of action.
Comms and navigation are a lot further down the list for most
SEALs. But they’re necessary jobs. The worst school you can send
someone to has to do with intel. People hate that. They joined the
SEALs to kick down doors, not to gather intelligence. But everyone
has a role.
Of course, some people like to fall out of planes, and swim with
the sharks.
Sickos.
T
he dispersal of talent may have helped the Team in general, but as
platoon LPO I was concerned about getting the best guys over to
Delta with me.
The master chief in charge of the personnel arrangements was
working everything out on an organizational chart that had been set
up on a big magnetic board. One afternoon, while he was out, I
snuck into his office and rearranged things. Suddenly, everyone who
was anyone in Charlie was now assigned to Delta.
My changes had been a little too drastic, and as soon as the
master chief got back, my ears started ringing even more than
normal.
“Don’t
ever
go into my office when I am not here,” he told me
as soon as I reported to him. “Don’t touch my board.
Ever
.”
Well, truth is, I did go back.
I knew he’d catch anything drastic, so I made one little switch
and got Dauber into my platoon. I needed a good sniper and
corpsman. The master chief apparently never noticed it, or at least
didn’t change it.
I had my answer ready in case I was caught: “I did it for the
good of the Navy.”
Or at least Delta Platoon.
S
till recovering from knee surgery, I couldn’t actually take part in a
lot of the training for the first few months the platoon was together.
But I kept tabs on my guys, watching them when I could. I hobbled
around the land warfare sessions, observing the new guys
especially. I wanted to know who I was going to war with.
I was just about back into shape when I got into a pair of fights,
first the one in Tennessee I mentioned earlier, where I was arrested,
and then another near Fort Campbell where, as my son put it,
“some guy decided to break his face on my daddy’s hand.”
“Some guy” also broke my hand in the process.
My platoon chief was livid.
“You’ve been out with knee surgery, we get you back, you get
arrested, now you break your hand. What the
....
?”
There may have been a few other choice words thrown in there
as well. They may also have continued for quite a while.
T
hinking back, I did seem to get into a number of fights during this
training period. In my mind, at least, they weren’t my fault—in that
last case, I was on my way out when the idiot’s girlfriend tried
picking a fight with my friend, a SEAL. Which was absolutely as
ridiculous in real life as it must look on the printed page.
But taken together, it was a bad pattern. It might even have been
a disturbing trend. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize it at the time.
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