Like I said before, he didn’t talk about it much. The only real story he ever told was about during his second stint as a SEAL in Afghanistan with Mike Osborne, a British guy. Mike was in the same unit. He and Dad both loved bugs—they would collect spiders and beetles and stuff when they were out in the mountains and fields. So they became friends.
Then Dad’s SEAL team got a call one day. A load of Taliban who had surrendered had been taken to an old nineteenth-century fort in the desert, to be interrogated. Dad said the place was beautiful—sandstone walls rising out of the plain, all scrub and goats and the occasional tree, like something from an adventure story.
But then it turned out that the whole thing was maybe a Trojan horse, because these Taliban prisoners—and there were hundreds of them—suddenly rose up and killed their guards and seized the fort.
So now there was a heavily armed group of Taliban in a fortress, basically, with rockets and guns and mortars, and Dad and the SEALs were sent in to take control. Dad was put in a small team with Mike Osborne. Their job was to get as close as they could to the part of the fort that was most strongly defended, and to use GPS tracking to call in air strikes.
So they snuck up to the walls, and managed to get into the main compound through some sort of side door—I think they killed some people to do this, but Dad glosses over that part. From their position, hidden by a low wall, they could see Taliban fighters up on the north side of the fort, embedded with their guns.
They got on the radio and called in a strike.
And someone on the support team got one of the coordinates wrong, just a decimal place, but it was enough.
So when the plane came over and dropped the JDAM smart bomb that was supposed to destroy most of the Taliban resistance, it actually fell closer to where Dad, Mike, and two other SEALs were hiding. The explosion ripped out a whole section of the fort’s exterior wall, deafened Dad for a week, and threw Mike Osborne fifteen feet through the air to an exposed part of the fort’s interior. Dad meanwhile was smashed into a rock or something, and lay there dazed. He said it was like the whole world had tuned to static.
Dust hung in the air, blurring everything. His ears registered only white noise. It was terribly hot too—he was baking in his helmet and uniform like he was in an oven. He could smell fireworks, and it weirdly made him feel like he was a kid back in Jersey.
Immediately Mike Osborne, who Dad could see through the hole in the wall, was surrounded by enemy fighters. In the middle of all the fuzz that had fallen over everything, the dirt in the air and the buzzing—
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—Dad watched Mike get on one knee, and shoulder his assault rifle. He was bleeding from his arm—it would turn out later that it was very badly broken. He emptied the assault rifle, holding off the guys trying to kill him, and when that was gone he took his sidearm and kept firing.
Dad says he didn’t think about what he did next. His legs and arms did it for him. But whatever he says, there’s still a medal upstairs in his nightstand that he doesn’t think I know about. A medal for conspicuous bravery that they don’t hand out very often.
Anyway, whether he thought about it or not, Dad managed to get up and he ran through a silent storm of bullets to where Mike was kneeling. He didn’t know where the other two guys in the unit were—they might have been dead, or just thrown out of sight by the blast. As he got close, he saw that Mike was out of ammo.
Mike saw him coming, and Dad drew his sidearm and threw it to him—Mike caught it out of the air, spun, and kept firing. Dad opened up with his assault rifle at the same time, suppressing the fire that was coming at them from the ramparts all around.
PLEASE NOTE: This story came to me in fits and starts over the years. I am stitching it together.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE: This next part I mostly heard from Mom, not Dad. Or at least, when Dad tells it, he leaves out key details. Key details like his own courage.
So Dad said, “I’m covering you. Go.”
Mike Osborne tried to say something, but Dad shrugged and pointed to his ear to show that he couldn’t hear, what with the fact that someone had carelessly dropped a bomb on them.
“Go,” he said again. And whether Mike could hear or not, GO is a pretty obvious word to lip-read.
So Mike Osborne nodded and ran for the exterior wall. Dad kept on firing every time he saw a head pop up or the flash of sunlight on a muzzle. Something smacked his head, and he saw only later that two bullets had hit his helmet.
AND TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: He managed to stop the enemy from killing Mike Osborne, and then another bomb landed in the right place this time, and that gave him the chance to run. He said it was the closest he ever came to dying, apart from when he was in a cave complex sweeping for ammunition and a teenager with an AK shot him through the shoulder and leg.