Mark Owen - No Hero

I’ve never been a fan of heights, and I sure wasn’t thinking about falling or my fear of heights when I signed up for the trip. I was only thinking of downtime in Vegas and blowing off steam before heading to Iraq.

The night we arrived, we hit the Strip and enjoyed all Vegas had to offer. After a few hours of sleep—more like a quick nap—we drove out to the climbing site. We hired civilian instructors and they watched in awe as we pulled new, top-shelf gear out of our rental cars. I had the best gear that money could buy, and the command had hired the best instructors in the world, but I had none of the skills. I was definitely out of my league, especially compared to the professional instructors.

The five instructors were gathered in a group near the parking lot when we arrived. They wore ratty shorts, shirts, and sandals. Climbers are inherently poor, especially the good ones, because climbing is all they do. These guys don’t have any other hobbies. I’d seen the same thing with skydivers. All of their money went right back into buying gear and doing the sport that they loved. Our instructors came over to help with the gear, shaking our hands and welcoming us to the canyon. Their hands were callused from hours on the rock face.

The first two days were no big deal. It was more of a refresher, with nothing too high or hard to climb. We had to make sure that everyone remembered the safety precautions and basics we had learned previously before getting into the newer, more demanding climbing the last day.

We split up into two-man teams. Each team had its own instructor. I was paired with Jeff, one of the newer SEALs in the platoon. He wasn’t a fan of heights either. There was no way I was going to show my fear, and Jeff was trying hard to hide his nerves from me as well. If your teammates ever see a weakness, you’ll never hear the end of it.

Our “billy-goat” instructor led us over to one of the climbing routes. He was short and stocky, with leathery skin and a long goatee. He had the strongest handshake I’d ever felt. A North Face beanie covered his scraggly brown hair. He was an ex-con who’d been to jail for assault. He’d beat up the guy who was banging his wife, or at least that’s what he told us during one of the breaks.

It was decided that I’d go first while Jeff would belay as I climbed. I kept up a steady soundtrack of what I was doing as I inched up the cliff face. None of my talking made sense. It was sort of gibberish, but it was comforting for me. I am sure it annoyed Jeff.

“Oh yeah, lucky cam number four,” I said, holding the cam in my open hand. “Lucky blue number four.”

Each camming device was a different color, based on the size. I set my own “pro,” or my own protection, as I climbed. That meant it was up to me to do it right, because if I fell—something I was trying not to think about at the time—the rope would be pulled taut in the camming devices. We were taught to place the cams roughly every ten feet into cracks in the rock face and ledges. If I fell with my closest cam being ten feet below me, I’d fall a total of twenty feet before the rope caught me. If I’d placed that cam wrong, I didn’t want to think about falling to the next one below that.

I decided to put them in at five-foot intervals as I climbed, in an attempt to make myself feel more comfortable.

“Yep, every five feet works great,” I said to myself as I set another cam into the rock face.

I made it up the first pitch without issue and belayed Jeff as he climbed up. Jeff led the next route, and I stayed below him to belay his climb. Once we both had several chances to practice our lead climbing techniques, the instructor took us up to a bigger wall. The shadow of the wall seemed to stretch out for miles. I tried not to look up to the top of the cliff, which blocked out the sun.

“You’re first,” the instructor said to me.

I didn’t have much to say this time. I was too nervous to talk. This rock face was much bigger and flatter than the others we had climbed. There were half the hand- and footholds available, and we would have to stay very focused on choosing a clean route up the face.

I climbed quickly at first, easily finding hand- and footholds. As I climbed, I set pro into cracks or pockets in the rocks. I had been in such a good rhythm between climbing and setting my pro that I hadn’t noticed I was using entirely too many camming devices and was about to run out. Placing my last cam into a big crack in the rock, I was officially stuck. I couldn’t go any higher. To be honest, I didn’t want to.

For the first time since I started to climb, I took my eyes off the rock face in front of me and started to look around. I was pretty fucking high up. I could see the Las Vegas Strip and the desert stretching all the way to the horizon. I glanced down and saw Jeff, now a lot smaller. He looked like a garden gnome.

Any chance I had of keeping my fear in control was slipping away, a lot like my hold on the rock.

I wished I was anywhere else as I looked up into the crystal-clear blue sky. I was nervous and could feel myself losing focus on where my hand- and footholds should be. I lost “front sight focus.” When a SEAL shoots, we talk about focusing on the front sight of our pistol just before we pull the trigger because if it is lined up on the target and in focus, the bullet will hit. If you lose that front sight focus, you’ll miss, simple as that.

But all I could think about was the cold rock face, how high I was off the ground, and the instructor climbing up to me without a rope. I could also hear Jeff on the ground yelling up to me.

“You need me to climb up there and save you?” Jeff said in a smartass tone.

I struggled to find a new handhold, but my fingers were tired.

“I’m about to slip and fall,” I thought.

To my left, I heard something scrape against the rocks. I’d been so focused on my situation that I’d forgotten all about our instructor. I’d catch him climbing around like Spider-Man as he waited for me to set the next cam. It made me nervous watching him because he didn’t use a rope.

The guide finally scampered up to me. Dangling from a harness across his chest were about a half dozen cams. His crazy billy-goat ass had climbed down and collected up all the unneeded cams I had set below so he could pass them off to me and I could keep climbing. And he’d done it all without any rope or pro of his own, free-climbing around me without giving it a second thought. Somehow that fact wasn’t comforting.

A cigarette dangled from his lips as he hung there next to me. With one hand on the rock face, the instructor took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. It was obvious I was struggling.

“Hey, man,” he said in a lazy, raspy voice. “Just stay in your three-foot world.”

I was a couple of hundred feet up the rock face and I could barely think, let alone decipher his cryptic advice.

“What the hell are you talking about, bro?”

“Only focus on your three-foot world,” he said. “Focus on what you can affect. You keep looking around, and none of that shit can help you right now, can it?”

I shook my head no.

“You’re calculating how far you’re going to fall,” the instructor said. “You’re looking down at Jeff, but he’s not going to come up and help. You’re looking out at the Strip. What are you going to do, gamble your way to the top? Don’t look at me. I’m not going to help you either. This is up to you. You’re climbing this rock. Stay in your three-foot world.”

I’ll never forget those words: “Stay in your three-foot world.”

It was the only way I got off the rock face. Now reloaded with cams, I focused on wedging one into the nearest crevice. I slid the rope through the carabiner and started to climb again. My focus never went farther than my next hand- or foothold. All the beauty of the desert or Las Vegas sparkling in the distance was lost on me. But I could tell you every crack in the rock. I was so focused it shocked me when my hand reached over the lip of the cliff at the top of the climb.