14.
From the Ashes
The sun had disappeared when medical personnel whisked me away to the Swedish field hospital. The thought sank in that I might lose my leg. I was scared. At the hospital, a nurse gave me a shot of morphine. It didn’t take effect. Turned out I was in the 1 percent of people whose receptor for morphine doesn’t make the pain go away. The nurse gave me another shot. My leg still hurt like hell. They debrided my wounds—removing damaged, infected, and dead tissue to help me heal. Then they prepared me for transportation to Germany.
The medical personnel loaded us onto a plane. Inside the impressive aircraft, it looked like a hospital with wings: beds, IV units, machines. A nurse walked by me.
I reached out and grabbed her leg. “I’m hurting so bad. Can you please just give me something?”
She looked at my medical chart. “You’ve had two shots of morphine. You can’t be feeling pain.” Then she walked away to see another patient.
A little while later, a doctor came by and saw me.
This was bone pain—the worst kind of pain. With a cut, the body compensates by constricting arteries to decrease blood flow to the area in order to prevent bleeding to death. With a bone injury, the body can’t compensate. My pale body shook, and sweat poured out of me as I clenched my teeth, trying to will the pain not to consume me. Calm your pulse down. Slow your breathing. Block the pain; will it away. I could do it as a kid; why isn’t it working yet? I could do it as a kid; why can’t I do it now? It was the same principle I used when I was getting my ass beat as a child: remove myself from the pain and not become physically involved. Self-preservation mode. I couldn’t stop the physical symptoms of paleness, shaking, and sweat, so I tried to control how my mind coped with the pain.
“This man is in pain,” the doctor said.
“No kidding. I’ve been trying to tell you all.”
He gave me a shot of Demerol. “How’s that?”
I felt almost instant relief. “Thank you so much.”
The doctor spoke with the nurse. Then she came over and apologized. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” She was almost in tears.
* * *
Will I lose my leg? We landed at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Air force personnel loaded us onto a bus. The air force guys were cheerful and helpful. “We heard you guys kicked ass. We’re going to take good care of you.” They pumped up our spirits.
Upon my arrival at the army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest American hospital outside of the United States, the doctors took me straight to surgery.
In the operating room, they prepped me. A nurse tried to give me a general anesthetic.
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said.
“We need to put you to sleep for the surgery,” she reasoned with me.
“I don’t want to go to sleep. I know you’re going to take my leg off.”
She and a male nurse tried to hold me down, but I fought them off.
The situation was pretty intense when the surgeon came in. “What’s going on?”
“The patient is resisting,” the nurse explained. “He won’t let us administer the general anesthetic.”
The surgeon looked at me. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m just afraid you’re going to take my leg if you put me to sleep. I don’t want to go to sleep. Please.”
The surgeon told the nurse, “Give him an epidural.”
She gave me the shot in my lower back. Used for women giving childbirth, it deadened everything in me from the waist down.
The surgeon took my arm and looked into my eyes. “I may be the best orthopedic surgeon in the air force. I’ll save your leg.”
He may have been BS-ing me, but he seemed sincere, and I felt reassured.
The doctor performed surgery on me as I watched. When I realized they weren’t going to take my leg off, I fell asleep.
Later, I awoke to pain on my right thigh. The epidural had started to wear off. The surgeon had an instrument he used to scrape grafts of skin off my thigh. He put the grafts through a machine that looked like a cheese grater, which he used to punch holes in the skin to make it bigger. Then he stapled the skin onto the site where they’d performed the surgery. Gradually, I started to feel some pain. When they did the next skin graft, I flinched.
If it had been the Vietnam era, the doctors would’ve amputated. Due to advances in modern medicine and a great surgeon, I was able to keep my leg.
After the surgery, they carted me to my room. The nurse hooked up an electrical pump to my bed. “If you’re in pain, just hit this button, here. You can’t overdo it, but when you’re in pain, just give yourself a dose.”
“Cool.” I hit the button a couple of times and went to sleep.
* * *
Waking up, I had no concept of time. A voice cried out, “Damn, it hurts! Damn, it hurts!”
A nurse’s voice said, “Just hold on. We’re trying to find a pump.”
I looked over. He was the brave Ranger who’d been shot in the leg once, shoulder twice, and arm once—and still fed me ammo during the Battle of Mogadishu.
Some time had passed, and the nurse still hadn’t brought his pump. The hospital was not quite prepared for the mass casualties they now had on their hands.
The Ranger continued to cry out.
I called him by name.
He looked over at me. “Hooah, Ser’nt.” The Rangers abbreviated “Sergeant” to Ser’nt, and as a navy petty officer first class, my rank was equivalent to an army staff sergeant.
A mop leaned against the wall near my bed. I reached over, grabbed it, and extended the handle to him. “Grab this.”
He took hold of the mop handle.
“Let’s pull our beds together,” I said.
We pulled until the wheels under our beds rolled. With our beds together, I took the needle of my catheter out and stuck it in the Ranger’s catheter, then hit the button a couple of times. Having expended most of my strength, I couldn’t push the beds back apart. Both of us became sleepy.
When the nurse returned, she went ballistic. “What happened to your beds? What’s going on? Why are you giving him that medicine? If he was allergic to that, you could’ve killed him!” She took the needle out of his catheter and put it back in mine.
A full bird colonel must’ve heard all the commotion. He came in.
The nurse chattered about what happened.
The colonel looked at me. “Well, soldier, do you think you run the hospital?”
I explained, “We were just in an intense firefight. He was hurtin’. I made him quit hurtin’. Shoot me if you want to.”
The edges of the colonel’s lips rose in a slight smile. He took the nurse to the end of the room. “These guys are trained to take care of each other. Just let it go this time.”
The nurse had her back to me as the colonel turned and gave me a wink. Then he walked out of the room.
* * *
The next day I noticed my scalp itching terribly. I scratched it. Black stuff accumulated under my fingernails. During the battle, a Ranger I had carried back to the Humvee had bled on me. The black stuff on my scalp was his dried blood.
Uncle Earl, from my wife’s family, happened to be in Germany visiting one of his companies. He heard where I was and came to visit.
When he saw me, he just stared for a moment. Then he walked out and went high-order detonation on the staff. “Wasdin is lying in his own urine!” I hadn’t realized it at the time, but after my epidural, I lost bladder control. “His body is filthy!”
The hospital staff tried to calm him.
He wouldn’t calm down. “I want him cleaned up right now! I want some fresh clothes on him, and I want some fresh linen on that bed! Wash the blood out of his hair! Get in there and brush his teeth! You better take care of him immediately, or I’m calling somebody in Washington right now, and I’m going to rain down hell on this hospital!”
Maybe the hospital staff had been too busy due to the sudden flood of us coming in to perform the regular patient care. Whatever the reason, within minutes, an attendant washed my hair. I felt like I was in heaven. The assistant gave me a toothbrush, and I brushed my teeth. Also, the assistant took the linen off my bed and, even though the mattress had a plastic cover on it, flipped it over. They gave me a fresh gown. I felt so much better.
Uncle Earl brought in a wheelchair. “Anything I can do for you?”
“Yes, get me out of this hospital gown.”
He helped me into the wheelchair and rolled me to the gift shop, where he bought me a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a ball cap, and a teddy bear. Uncle Earl asked the cashier, “Could you cut these sweatpants off at the knee for us?”
She looked at him, puzzled, for a moment, then looked at me. “Sure,” she said sweetly. The cashier pulled out a pair of scissors and cut the sweatpants. She handed them to Earl.
“Thank you.” Earl wheeled me into the gift shop restroom and put the sweatpants on over my external fixator. The surgeon had drilled holes into the uninjured part of my bone near the fracture. Then he screwed pins into the bone. Outside my leg, a metal rod attached to the pins to hold them in place. The pins and rod made up the external fixator. Then Earl put the sweatshirt and cap on me.
He wheeled me out of the restroom and over to the cafeteria and picked up some Hefeweizen beers, traditional German unfiltered wheat beers that have less bitterness and more carbonation than the filtered variety. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Can you roll me out in the courtyard for some sunshine?”
He pushed me out there, and we had our drinks. Cleaned up with fresh clothes and drinking beer in the sunshine, I thought, This is pretty good. I drank half my beer and fell asleep. Later, I would give the teddy bear to my three-year-old sweetheart, Rachel.
* * *
The next day, a Delta guy from across the hall who had an injured shoulder came and visited me. We talked about the battle. He said, “I didn’t have a good appreciation for you guys since you weren’t actually part of our team, but you guys kicked ass. We had no idea SEALs could throw down like that! You especially. I saw you two or three times during that firefight. Wish I had more to do with you before the firefight.”
“It’s cool,” I said.
“Hey, Brad is down the hall. Want to go see him?”
“Sure.”
He wheeled me over to see Brad, one of the Delta snipers. I saw Brad’s amputated leg—sheared off when an RPG hit his helo. He shook my hand. “Want a dip?” he said as if everything were normal. He extended his hand and held out a fiberboard can of moist dipping tobacco—Copenhagen.
“Hell, yeah.” I pinched some and put it in my mouth.
The three of us sat talking and spitting.
“Hey, they were able to save your leg,” Brad said.
“I was told that if it had been a quarter of an inch more, they would’ve had to amputate.” Brad is taking this way better than I am, and his leg is cut off. Here I am feeling sorry for myself. Angry at the world and God. Here he is with no leg and a positive attitude.
Seeing Brad was good therapy for me. Brad was a sniper on Black Hawk Super Six Two. Along with him were Delta snipers Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart. They flew over the second downed helo and saw the pilot, Mike Durant, moving. Somali crowds closed in. With no friendlies on the ground to help, Mike was all alone. The three snipers and their door gunners fired at the mob.
Brad, Gordon, and Shughart looked at each other. They nodded.
Gordon told the pilot, “Insert the three of us to assist Super Six Four.”
The pilot radioed headquarters, “Three operators request permission to secure Super Six Four. Over.”
“Negative. There are too many unfriendlies down there. Can’t risk another bird.”
When one door gunner got shot, Brad took over the minigun. Everyone needed the big gun in the fight to keep the enemy from shooting them down.
The crowd on the ground grew, moving closer to Mike’s crashed helo.
“Two of us are going in,” Gordon said. “Put us down.”
The pilot radioed again, “Two operators request to secure crash site until rescue arrives.”
“Negative.”
Gordon insisted.
The pilot lowered the helo to the crash site. Brad stayed on the minigun in the Black Hawk and covered Gordon and Shughart as they fast-roped down.
On the ground the two snipers calmly moved Mike and other crew members to a more secure location with good fields of fire. Then Gordon and Shughart took up defensive positions on opposite sides of the helo, coolly shooting the enemy in the upper torso one by one—Gordon with his CAR-15 and Shughart with his M-14.
Suddenly, Gordon said matter-of-factly, like he’d bumped his knee into a table, “Damn, I’m hit.” Then he stopped shooting.
Shughart retrieved Gordon’s CAR-15 and gave it to Mike. Shughart resumed fighting. When Shughart’s rifle ran out of ammo, he returned to the downed helo and made a radio call. He walked around the front of the helicopter and charged at the crowd, firing point blank with his pistol, pushing them back until he ran out of ammo. The mob fought back, killing Shughart.
Enemy corpses lay scattered on the ground surrounding the fallen snipers. Shughart and Gordon were bad in the best sense of the word. The crowd got their revenge by dragging the dead soldiers’ bodies through the streets and cutting them up. They captured Mike and held him hostage, hoping to use him for a prisoner exchange. He was released later.
The military’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, would go to the two Delta snipers: Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart.
* * *
One day, General Henry Hugh Shelton, commander in chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, visited my hospital room. He presented me with my Purple Heart and gave me his commander’s coin. His sincerity, caring, and encouragement lifted my spirits.
“Is the hospital taking good care of you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
General Shelton asked how well the Rangers fought during the Battle of Mogadishu.
“They fought bravely, sir.” I thought for a moment. “We’re not going to leave this unfinished, are we?”
“No, we’re going to get the tanks and go in and do the job right.”
Although I’m sure he meant it, the White House never allowed that to happen.
* * *
I stayed in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center for a week before they flew me and others to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. As they wheeled me off the plane on a gurney, Laura and the kids met me. Eight-year-old Blake ran to my side and put his arms around my chest. Laura was pregnant. She held three-year-old Rachel, who was too young to understand much about what was going on.
After staying overnight in Maryland, I was taken to the Team compound in Dam Neck. I told them I wanted to rehab down at Fort Stewart Army Hospital in Georgia, the same place Blake was born, thirty minutes away from my home. The Team gave me a special lightweight wheelchair made of composite metal that I heard cost thousands of dollars. My two children, my wife, and I lived with her parents in Odum, Georgia, during my rehabilitation.
When I heard that Delta would be having a memorial service, I wanted to go. The military flew down a C-12, a small passenger plane, to pick me up at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. I flew up to the memorial ceremony at the Delta compound in Fort Bragg. Greeting me at the airport in SUVs were Tim Wilkinson and Scotty, the PJs, and Dan Schilling, the CCT. It felt good to see old friends from that hangar in Somalia. Even though they were air force, we had fought in Mogadishu together, which made me closer to them than to my SEAL Team Six Teammates who hadn’t been with me in combat. The air force would award Tim the military’s second-highest honor, the Air Force Cross (equal to the Navy Cross for Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard; Distinguished Service Cross for Army). Scotty would receive the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest honor. Dan received its next-highest honor, the Bronze Star.
They wheeled me past a wall where the names of the fallen Delta Force guys were written. I saw six pairs of desert combat boots, six M-16 rifles with bayonets stuck downward in the base of the display, six bayonets on the rifle butts, and a picture for each of the six men: Dan Busch, Earl Fillmore, Randy Shughart, Gary Gordon, Tim “Griz” Martin, and Matt Rierson.
I remembered Griz, who had a big birthmark on his face. A prankster who came up with new and exotic ways to blow stuff up.
During the memorial service in the auditorium, the chaplain led everyone in prayer for the fallen men. Wives wept. Dan Busch’s parents looked devastated. Dan was only twenty-five years old—incredibly young to be a Delta sniper—from Portage, Wisconsin. Squared away. A devout Christian. I never heard him say a cuss word—rare in the special operations community. I remember one day after lunch, we oiled up with suntan lotion and basked in the sun on top of a CONEX box outside of the hangar at Mogadishu. Of the little free time we had, I spent much of it with Dan Busch.
A sergeant read the Last Roll Call. Each man in the unit answered, “Here.” Except for the fallen men. The honor guard fired three volleys. A bugler played taps.
In our profession we knew it was a possibility when we took the job. Still, looking at their parents, wives, and kids really hit me hard. These guys are really gone. Dan is gone. How come I get to live and they don’t? Dan Busch was a much better person and Christian than I was. Why is he dead, and I’m still here? I felt guilty that I had survived.
After the memorial, when Scotty, Tim, and I were hanging out, a Delta guy asked who I was. They didn’t recognize me in my beard. I had been too weak to shave.
Scotty and Tim told him who I was.
“Aw, hell.” The Delta operator went to the other Delta guys and said, “Hey, Wasdin is here!”
They swarmed me, took me to Delta’s Charlie Squadron ready room, and gave me beers in both hands. We hung out, and they laughed when I told them about giving my medication to the Ranger at Landstuhl. Afterward Delta had a party, but I had a fever and didn’t have enough power in my engine to join them. I went back to my hotel room early.
Only Defense Secretary Les Aspin attended the memorial service. For the most part, the Clinton administration seemed to hope the Battle of Mogadishu would just conveniently disappear and America would forget.
* * *
After flying out the next morning to Georgia, I showed up at the hospital for my regular visit. I had diarrhea. My fever had worsened—my whole body ached like it was on fire. I felt disoriented. I was literally dying. A medical team descended on me and rushed me into the back, gave me a shot in each butt cheek, and put an IV in each arm. They removed the bandages from my leg and started working on it. The doctor, who had gone home, returned in his civilian clothes. “Where have you been?” he asked. “We’ve been trying to contact your house, but you weren’t there. The blood test results from your previous visit showed that you have a staph infection.” The deadly staph infection had crawled deep inside me via the pins in my leg. This partly explains why I didn’t feel up to attending the party with Delta after the memorial.
On the hospital bed, I floated up and looked down at myself lying there. I’m dying. This staph infection sucks a lot worse than combat.
The next day, the doctor was visibly upset with me. “If you’re going to stay under my care, you’ve got to give us a way to stay in contact with you. If not, you need to go back to Virginia and let those navy doctors take care of you.” He was scared. The doctor had done me a favor by letting me rehab in his army hospital—and I repaid him by almost dying on him.
“Yes, sir.”
They kept me in the hospital a couple of days until I recovered.
Sitting at home in my wheelchair, I committed one of the Team’s gravest sins—feeling sorry for myself. I slipped deep into depression. After waking in the morning, I had to perform my pin care, cleaning the skin around the four big pins sticking out of my leg. If I didn’t, the infection would crawl down the pins and into my bone—causing another staph infection like the one that almost killed me. Then I’d bandage everything back up. The whole process took fifteen to twenty minutes. Twice a day. Doing the pin care by myself was tough. I asked my wife and brother-in-law to help, but they didn’t have the stomach. It looked terrible—there’s nothing normal about four pins screwed into a bone. My skin graft looked nasty, the meat visible.
The walls were closing in on me. I wasn’t accustomed to being trapped indoors, and my depression was bearing down on me. I had to get out of the house, so I decided to do something simple and routine, but even something as mundane as grocery shopping turned out to be a bigger blow to my weakened self-esteem. One day, while slowly wheeling myself down the aisle in a Winn-Dixie supermarket in Jesup, Georgia, I started to realize how good it felt to be out of the house, contributing to the family by shopping. Some return to a normal life.
An overweight woman with a chicken hairdo—short in the back and spiky on top, the Kate Gosselin haircut that is common in Wayne County—stared at my leg. Her face twisted like she’d eaten a lemon. I had cut the right leg of my sweatpants off above the knee to accommodate my external fixator. Although the skin-grafted area was bandaged, the pins were visible. “Why don’t you stay at home?” she said. “Don’t you realize how gross that is?”
I got my leg shot off serving her country. Our country. Maybe this is how ordinary Americans see me. Are they fine with us going off to die for them but don’t want to see us wounded? I was feeling too sorry for myself to realize that she didn’t know who I was or how I was wounded. At the time, when my spirit lay in the dirt, her words kicked me in the teeth. I desperately needed to bounce back, but I couldn’t. Those words punted me deeper into depression.
At home, I wheeled around the house in my chair, eating and killing time watching TV. I couldn’t take a shower or a bath because I couldn’t get my screws wet. I had to wash my hair in the sink and take a washcloth bath.
Every other day I did rehabilitation at the hospital in Fort Stewart. They gave me hot whirlpool treatments for my left foot, to shake loose the dead flesh. It hurt like getting shot again. They gave me crutches. They put me on bars to help me walk. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t stop tears from coming out of my eyes—I’d been still for too long before the rehabilitation. Then I had to have another surgery. Later I would have three more.
My internal clock hadn’t adjusted from Africa to Germany, then back to the United States. With time on my hands, it became easy to take a two- or three-hour nap, which kept me awake at night.
Pain and depression didn’t help matters either. Bone pain. As long as those screws stayed in my leg, I’d have pain. It’s understandable how people can become addicted to pain pills, but I despised the pills—they just made me numb. To some small degree, I wanted to feel pain, guilty that I had survived while a lot of good guys, special ones like Dan Busch, lay dead. I thought maybe I was strange for feeling this way. Suck it up, take the pain.
Out of the SEAL Team Six loop and with no Team guys around, I suffered the withdrawal symptoms of being cut off from the camaraderie. I was in culture shock, too. People around town could talk to me about their lives, but I couldn’t talk to them about mine. I couldn’t joke with them about my Hell Week death leap to kill a rack of trays that I thought was a deer. Or laugh with them about the hospital in Germany where I gave the Ranger buddy my painkiller injections. People around town didn’t understand. I learned to shut up about those experiences. Now it occurred to me how different I had become from most people. Away from my Teammates, I felt forgotten, too. With no real-world missions, I had gone cold turkey from adrenaline. Now I couldn’t even walk. In the SEAL culture, where it pays to be a winner, I was the biggest loser. I was angry at the world in general and at God in particular. Why did this have to happen to me?
In retrospect, I see that God was letting me know I was only human, and that being a SEAL was just a job. Howard, you were too hardheaded to listen to Me after you were shot once. You didn’t listen to Me after the second shot. Here, big boy, let Me give you your third bullet hole. Now, do I have your attention? You are not Superman. You are God’s gift to special operations only for as long as I allow it to be. You are where you are because of Me. Not because of you. This is My way of getting your attention. Now that I’ve got it, let Me mold you further. You are not the finished product. He humbled me and brought me back down to earth. Made me become a father to my children. At the time, no one could’ve convinced me of all that, but looking back, getting shot in the leg was the best thing that ever happened to me.
* * *
One day, a buddy of mine called me. On his ranch, he had a special hybrid of deer that he bred with American whitetail deer.
“Come over and let’s hunt a little.”
“Yes. Yes! Let me get out of this house! Anything!”
He picked me up in his pickup truck, took me out to the field, and set me down in my wheelchair on the ground. He pushed me nearly 30 yards through light underbrush, then stopped. He pointed to a spot about 150 yards away. “Over there is where the deer usually come out.”
My personal hunting rifle was a 7 mm Magnum with a nice scope. I was so happy—waiting there for nearly an hour and a half.
A huge buck came out. Sitting in my wheelchair, I brought my rifle to my shoulder, pulled the trigger, and the deer went down. Perfect shot. After laying my rifle on the ground, I wheeled my chair over to the animal. Pushing my wheelchair along a dirt road took me a while.
I parked my chair next to the deer. The beautiful buck looked up at me. It snorted, then laid its head back down. It made a last gasp, as if all the air had been sucked out of its lungs. Hearing it die, I thought, I’d have been just as happy to come out and watch you, instead of taking your life. I’ve seen enough things die.
I took the buck and had the head mounted. In South Georgia, hunting is big. The boys head out before the crack of dawn and sit in their tree stands waiting for their prey during the season. I was still willing to kill someone to save myself or save another person—willing to kill in the line of duty—but I never hunted again.
* * *
The rehab people treated me like a celebrity. At that time, I was the only combat-wounded veteran in their hospital. Every time I went in, five or ten people would show up to talk to me.
After six or seven weeks, my niece brought me a device that slipped over the pins in my legs, creating a rubber seal, so I could shower. I stood on one leg in the shower and lathered up my hair. It felt like the best gift I’d ever received.
In early December, two months after the longest day in my life, my hometown of Screven, Georgia, threw me a hero’s welcome as part of the Christmas parade, with yellow ribbons everywhere. A big sign in the restaurant covered the front window: WELCOME BACK HOWARD, THE HOMETOWN HERO. Nearly all nine hundred of the townspeople must’ve signed it. People from Wayne County came out to line the streets, see me, and wish me well. They had no idea about the physical pain, the mental anguish, the loss, or the dark hole of depression that tormented me—before they honored me that way. They had no idea how much their welcome meant to me, appreciating me as part of the community. I didn’t feel like such a loser.
* * *
Mike Durant, the pilot of Super Six Four, the second Black Hawk to crash in Mogadishu, had broken his leg and back. Aidid’s propaganda minister, Abdullahi “Firimbi” Hassan, held him prisoner for eleven days until Mike and a captured Nigerian soldier were driven by their captors to a checkpoint at the UN compound. One of Durant’s captors pulled out UN credentials hanging on a chain around his neck and showed them to the guard. They waved him in. The checkpoint guard didn’t even realize Mike sat in the car. Nobody knew until he was already on the runway. His captors turned him over to the Red Cross. The United Nations showed enough unity with the enemy, but I didn’t feel like they showed enough unity with us. I never felt they could be trusted for operational security. You can only trust the people you train and fight with. I had trained with foreign counterterrorism units, and I trusted them. The UN checkpoint guard’s coziness with Durant’s captor, and the fact that his captor carried UN credentials, confirmed my distrust for the UN.
Mike Durant and I had just gotten to where we could walk unassisted. Our first meeting since Somalia was at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, to learn advanced Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. Although SERE schools like the one at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine, simulated being hunted, imprisoned, and tortured, this school took place in a classroom with ten to twelve students mainly learning the psychological aspects of captivity. With our experience in Mogadishu, Mike and I quickly became guest speakers for that particular class. The instructors called us to the front of the room, where we talked about our experiences and fielded questions from students and instructors.
* * *
The Navy flew Casanova, Little Big Man, Sourpuss, Captain Olson, and me to the Pentagon to award us the Silver Star. In Mogadishu, Captain Olson left headquarters to participate in rescuing men still pinned down. At our award ceremony, video cameras rolled and still cameras flashed. My citation read:
The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Silver Star medal to Hull Maintenance Technician First Class Howard E. Wasdin, United States Navy, for service set forth in the following citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against a hostile force during operation UNOSOM II in Mogadishu, Somalia on 3 & 4 October 1993. Petty Officer Wasdin was the member of a security team in support of an assault force that conducted an air assault raid into an enemy compound and successfully apprehended two key militia officials and twenty-two others. Upon receiving enemy small arms fire from numerous alleys, Petty Officer Wasdin took up a firing position and returned fire. As he assaulted down the alley with members of his unit, he was wounded in the calf. Upon receiving combat field condition medical attention, he resumed his duties and continued to suppress enemy fire. As his convoy exfiltrated the area with detainees, his element came under withering enemy fire. Petty Officer Wasdin, along with the security team, stopped to suppress enemy fire which had pinned down the Ranger blocking force. Although twice wounded, he continued to pull security and engage a superior enemy force from his vehicle. Later, while attempting to suppress enemy fire, during an attempted link-up for evacuation of the helicopter crash site, Petty Officer Wasdin was wounded a third time. His gallant efforts inspired his team members as well as the entire force. By his superb initiative, courageous action, and complete dedication to duty, Petty Officer Wasdin reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest tradition of the United States Naval Force.
It was signed for the president by John Dalton, the new secretary of the navy. Casanova and I walked into the secretary of defense’s office and shook his hand. Upon exiting, Casanova said, “That man’s got the softest hands I’ve ever felt.” Later, I also received a whack on the pee-pee for disobeying a direct order and helping the teenaged Somali boy who’d stepped on a land mine—my most successful op in Somalia.
* * *
Casanova and I sat chewing Copenhagen dip in Red Team’s ready room. It was a huge informal room, mostly neutral in color. Mission briefs, real-world intel, and other briefings were done in a special room. Pictures of Red Team exploits decorated one wall. An ornate totem pole and an authentic Indian headdress stood as Team symbols. In the largest part of the room were four big tables with eight to ten chairs that could sit a boat crew at each table. Carpeting covered the floor. The FNGs were responsible for cleanliness and keeping the two refrigerators stocked with various brands of beer. The Team chief and Team leader shared one office adjoining the Team room. Also adjoining the Team room was a computer room for general use. Just outside the Team room were the individual cages where we kept our gear.
Casanova and I sat at a table. Little Big Man arrived with an envelope from the Randall knife company. He had offered to send his knife, tell his story, and sponsor their company—SEAL Team Six sniper saved by Randall knife.
“How much they going to pay you?” Casanova asked.
Little Big Man opened the letter and read, “Thank you for sharing your story with us. We’ll give you ten percent off if you want to buy another knife.”
“Dumb-asses,” Little Big Man said.
Casanova laughed loudly and boisterously. I laughed so hard, I almost swallowed my chewing tobacco.
* * *
I recovered rapidly and returned to the Team. My first contact with Lieutenant Commander Buttwipe was when he took over command of Red Team as senior officer, Red Team leader. Buttwipe lived for appearances more than getting the job done, which ruffled a lot of operators’ feathers. A number of people left Red Team to go to Blue and Gold Teams because of him. He had a fake chuckle, especially in the presence of senior officers. When he laughed with us, it felt like he was really thinking about something else. Because he was part Japanese, we made jokes behind his back about losing World War II. Short in stature, he cut his hair short, too, in a flattop style.
He must’ve loved the smell of my gluteus maximus, because he rode it constantly. Maybe Buttwipe felt self-conscious that he lacked talent. Although he ran and swam well, he brought up the rear during CQB shooting drills, and he lacked good timely tactical decisions. Maybe he resented never seeing combat, or not earning a Silver Star. Regardless of his reason, somehow Buttwipe found out that Delta wanted me. The Delta operators at the hospital in Germany encouraged me to join them. A Delta colonel told me at the Andrews Air Force Base hospital how I could laterally transfer out of the SEALs and into Delta. In retrospect, Delta probably would’ve understood and respected me more—I know of no stronger bond than the bond with people I’d been in combat with. My relationship with Casanova, Little Big Man, the Delta operators, the CCTs, and the PJs was stronger than my relationship with other Teammates.
“I’ll support you if you stay here,” Buttwipe said, “but if you try to leave, I’ll be your worst nightmare.”
Buttwipe’s actions gave me more motivation to transfer to Delta. Yet his words said he didn’t want me to leave. He made no sense. I remained because I trained to be a SEAL, was still a SEAL, and wanted to continue being a SEAL. It’s what I did best.
In the sum of things, Buttwipe didn’t support me. He even gave me a hard time about showing up at the Delta memorial unshaven in civilian clothes. I really couldn’t understand his argument—I’d almost died of staph infection while making the trip to the ceremony. Surviving day to day took nearly all the energy I had. Shaving was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I despised his incompetence as much as I despised the incompetence of Clinton. Buttwipe should’ve been a politician instead of an operator. Just remembering him now makes me want to kick him in the face.
Laura and I divorced. The baby she was pregnant with wasn’t mine—wasn’t even the same race. It happened while I was gone. That’s all I’m going to say about that. I’d been unfaithful, too. Rachel and Blake went to live with their mom because I wouldn’t be able to take care of them when I had to be away for work. I hadn’t spent enough time with Rachel, and now I’d be spending even less time with her. Her mother let her do most of the things she wanted, but I didn’t. When Rachel became old enough to choose, she chose to live with her mom. Later, when Rachel was a senior in high school, her mother let her move in with her boyfriend—something I would never allow. My relationship with Rachel would deteriorate. Even though I was stricter with Blake than with Rachel, he chose to live with me when he turned thirteen. Although I should’ve known that family ties are stronger than job ties, I’d sacrificed my family for the Teams.
In spite of my sacrifices for the Teams, I could never return to being 100 percent of the sniper I used to be. My thinking became darker. One day, I held my SIG SAUER P-226 pistol in my hand. How bad would it be if I took this P-226 and ended everything with one 9 mm bullet? There are worse things than death. I convinced myself that everyone would be better off. They could collect on my life insurance.
Blake was visiting me. “Dad.”
That one word snapped me out of it. Ending my life would’ve been selfish. If I don’t have anything else to live for, at least I have my children. I never had those dark thoughts again.
Although it had looked initially like I’d lose my leg, I didn’t. I walked on crutches before I was supposed to, used a cane before I was supposed to, walked unassisted before I was supposed to, and started swimming before I was supposed to. Although people thought I would never walk without a limp, I did. Even though many thought I’d never run again, I did. After returning to the Team, I hit the gym every morning and did PT with them. I couldn’t always keep up, but I consistently worked hard at it.