You Cannot Know...

How you will be tested, but you will

When I selected Naval Special Warfare as my first choice for assignment as a senior at the US Naval Academy, ahead of other common branches such as the surface navy, Naval Aviation, or the Marine Corps, I was privileged to get one of 16 spots. At the time, in late 2000, the US military was relatively at peace and so was NSW aside from a very few missions to surveil and capture Persons-Indicted-For-War-Crimes in Bosnia. I went to BUDS, the initial SEAL training pipeline in August of 2001, expecting a career of training trips and, with some luck, possibly a handful of “real world” missions. We all thought it would be an adventure, a test of our physical and mental toughness, and a chance to do “cool guy” stuff, like jumping out of planes, combat swimmer training, and shoot machine guns.

So I was in indoctrination at BUDS on September 11^th, 2001, not yet even “classed up.” Our days to that point had been spent learning basic BUDS stuff, how to carry a rubber boat on our heads, and lots of running, swimming, and working out as a prospective class on the beach. The days started pretty early, around 5 or 6 AM, but on PST, as BUDS is in southern California. On the 11^th of September, around 6 AM, someone who had been walking past a TV set told us “some plane hit the World Trade Center.” Like everyone else in America, to us it sounded like an accident, something to read about in the paper the next day, not something to stop training over.

But then a second plane hit the second tower. Training was canceled for the day. We gathered in the center of the BUDS compound at the “grinder,” the concrete courtyard around which BUDS is centered. No one knew what was going on. We were at a training command, we had no skills, and no job aside from learning. The news trickled in.

Someone must have put the base on some type of alert, because actual SEALS, not trainees like we were, began filtering out to the beach, dressed for war. They carried M-4’s, with loaded magazines. I remember as the sun set over the Pacific we gathered in our barracks and speculated. What did it mean? There were two general schools of thought amongst us 22 year old naval ensigns: the SEAL Teams were all going to war any second without us, or nothing would happen aside from some Tomahawk missile strikes once they found Bin Laden. It would be over soon enough.

I don’t remember if I advocated one position or another, but I remember feeling something had changed. I felt we had, through no foreseeable series of events, found ourselves in a place where we would almost certainly see combat. It was an odd sensation. Overwhelmingly exciting, a bit worrisome, and a suppressed panic that we wouldn’t measure up to the duty we had, after all, selected into. We’d been raised on the stories of Vietnam: the Rung Sat Special Zone, Bob Kerrey, Ed Thornton. We had heard from Vietnam SEALS, some of whom were still in uniform, about swimming your newly dead friends out into the South China Sea and heaving their lifeless bodies over the gunwhales of a waiting boat. We’d seen those instructors tell the stories, choking up, with the final rejoinder “I ain’t telling you any more of my stories, you’ll have your own fucking stories.” But would we?

As it turned out, we would. No one could have predicted that on the beach with me that morning were men who would participate in gunfights in Gardez, Fallujah, Nasiriyah, who would shoot pirates and rescue American hostages. No one could have known some of them would die overseas, in places like the Korengal Valley, Ramadi, or in the fireball of a CH-46 impacting a mountain. No one could have predicted some of them would rush up the stairwell into Osama Bin Laden’s bedroom.

We were tested in physical courage and skill in the years to come, and likely measured up to our predecessors. Some of us, in moments Hollywood producers would never greenlight a script for, at times, had to exercise a different, more difficult, and ultimately more important form of courage: the moral courage to do the right thing. These moments manifested themselves over the years in unsexy but ultimately more consequential forms. We said “no” to stupid missions that would have gotten men hurt despite fearing looking a coward. We said “no” to the element, present in every military unit, who felt “we could just win this war if we take the gloves off” and overlook a few itty-bitty violations of the Law of Armed Conflict. We said “no” to things we knew we couldn’t live with. Sometimes, the men under our command said “no” to us, for many of the same reasons. And now, 25 or so years later, in middle age, those amongst us most broken by moral injury and survivor’s guilt are the ones who, at times wearing the cloth of this nation, couldn’t bring themselves to do what it is that they knew, even then, was morally right.

I write this today not because I am vain enough to think the young men and women who will make the decisions of this generation under arms will hear me, but because my moral journey as a citizen must continue. And duty compels me to pass along what little wisdom I may have garnered through the years to the men and women in uniform now, facing both complex global challenges that could end in horrific violence at scale, but also a domestic political environment in which morality as it has been elucidated and taught for centuries to our warriors is now questioned, winked at, and even mocked. Your office is not for fame, or self-enrichment, or the settling of scores. You wear the uniform of your country, and that means ALL of the country.

You are living your duty now. Take care to guard both your morality and the morality of your men. They will follow you, they will obey you, they will come to trust you if you do your job well, and both shelter them from the moral injury of illegal orders and the guilt that can follow when you stray from what you know is right. Be apolitical. Be moral. Be faithful to your oath, no matter what humiliation or incentive is thrown at you to convince you to shirk it. You owe it to your men, your country, and most of all yourselves.

The Vietnam SEALs taught us as best they could how to fight a tenacious enemy. Our enemy came at us with roadside bombs and bullets. We were prepared for that. I wish we had prepared more for the dangers of cutting corners and moral compromise. Perhaps that is a part of all wars, especially those that go on for over 20 years. You do not know yet how you will be tested, as we were on September 10^th, 2001. But I promise that test will come, and it will help to have rehearsed in your mind how you will stand up to what you know to be wrong for what you know to be right.

After all, you do not have a choice, it is your duty.