Mark Owen: No Hero

They were after a senior Taliban leader. A firefight broke out almost as soon as the Rangers landed. Taliban fighters from up and down the valley came to defend the compound. The fight raged for at least two hours before a small group of Taliban started to flee. The Rangers called the QRF for help. They feared the group that had taken off included the commander and his bodyguards, and they didn’t want to lose him.

As the helicopter—call sign Extortion Seventeen—came in to help the Rangers, an RPG from one of the Taliban fighters struck the aft rotor assembly. Ray and the guys didn’t have a chance.

Two days later, commanders in Afghanistan claimed that the fighter who had fired the rocket-propelled grenade was killed by an F-16 bomb strike.

That didn’t make it any easier.

Later, rumors about an elaborate trap started to circulate. There was talk that the Taliban had lured the SEALs to the target and shot down the helicopter in retaliation for the Osama bin Laden raid. But whatever the truth, the reality is that the downing of Extortion Seventeen was a tragedy. When the QRF is called in, it’s almost always because something went wrong. Being the QRF is dangerous. There is no element of surprise, especially when you arrive in a CH-47 Chinook, which is essentially a flying school bus. Sometimes, there isn’t enough skill or luck in the world when it is your time.

As the details rolled in that night, I knew a bunch more teammates had lost their lives in Afghanistan. Thirty-eight service members were killed when an RPG hit Extortion Seventeen. More than a dozen were SEALs. The crash was the deadliest day of the decade-long war in Afghanistan. The sight of the flag-draped caskets on the way to the memorial services is forever etched into my mind.

Of course, Ray isn’t the only friend who was lost during my fourteen-year SEAL career. I have forty names in my cell phone contact list that I’ll never call again. There have been many more than just forty SEALs killed since September 11, but these were the forty whom I was lucky enough to have known and served with.

We’ll never relive the glory days of past deployments over a beer. No more cookouts or training trips. All forty guys are more than coworkers or friends. They are brothers. Every time I scroll through my contacts, I’ll run across a name and instantly relive a memory.

We all arrived in San Diego with the same dream. It was a bond that put a kid from the backcountry of Alaska on the same page as a surfer from California and a pig farmer from the Midwest who saw the ocean for the first time on the first day of training.

I chased that dream from high school in Alaska to BUD/S. Once I got my trident, the iconic badge SEALs wear on their uniforms, I tried to excel at every task. For me, and for many of my teammates, being a SEAL was just the start of our dream. Being a great teammate, pushing to constantly improve, and being there for the guys to your left and right became a kind of religion for us.

I never became numb to the loss. For me it stung more and more as my career progressed. My teammates sacrificed everything for their country. They spent months away from family and loved ones, long hours suffering in the cold mountains of Afghanistan, and some, like my buddy Ray, paid the ultimate price. Not one of them thought of himself as a hero.

I was faced with a decision.

I’d spent fourteen years trying to be the best SEAL I could be. But now I either had to reenlist and stay in the Navy long enough to earn my pension—another six years—or get out and find a new challenge.

The decision weighed on me like nothing else in my life. Being a SEAL on one of the nation’s premier teams was more than just my job. It was my identity and one of the chief ways I brought order and meaning to my life. It wasn’t like I could go overseas and run missions part-time. I knew once I left, the train was going to leave me far behind, and most of what I’d known my entire adult life would change forever.

As I wrestled with the decision, I spent nights examining my career and the events and lessons that came to define me. I ultimately decided to leave the Navy and forge a new path. In doing that, I had to reinvent myself.

The publication of the book thrust me into a world I had never been in before, one where millions of people I had never met suddenly wanted to talk to me and hear what I had to say. Most of the people I met were supportive, but there was criticism as well. It was a new challenge, one that I couldn’t be sure my SEAL training had prepared me for.

It took me thirteen deployments in thirteen years to become the operator I was when I left the Navy. Getting off the speeding train was difficult partly because I was heading into a world where I had no idea if my skills would apply.

When people hear about SEALs, they assume we’re superheroes who jump out of airplanes and shoot bad guys. We do both those things, but those skills don’t define us. When we make mistakes, we try again and again and again until we get it right. We’re not superheroes. We’re just committed.

There is no “secret sauce,” but there is a lot of hard work, dedication, and drive.

The reality is that SEALs don’t think of themselves as special. We simply strive to do the most basic tasks extraordinarily well. One of the best leaders I know used to challenge his junior guys to be engaged and part of the team.

“At what level are you willing to participate?” he’d ask.

“All in, all the time,” was the only acceptable answer.

We’ve learned, often the hard way, how to excel. Excelling means communicating with each other, testing, leading, listening, studying, and teaching, day after day, year after year. It means not just being able to trek miles through the mountains of Afghanistan carrying sixty pounds on your back, but also letting others call you out on your mistakes. And getting called out by your teammates is often harder than spending hours in the cold surf.

As I faced new challenges in my first year outside the Navy, I spent a lot of time going back to the lessons I learned during my SEAL career, and the moments and people whom I know I will carry with me the rest of my life. What I realized is that the important moments for me are not the moments that made headlines back home. They are the missions that have no name, in which my team was tested and learned something that made us better. They are the mistakes I made that I thankfully survived and learned from so I wouldn’t make the same mistake the next time. The most important moments are the ones that taught me what the SEAL brotherhood really means.

This book is about those moments, and the lessons from each one that define me.

Taken together, I hope these stories provide an intimate glimpse into the life and work of a SEAL and the lessons passed down to me by the teammates I served with and those who came before me.

Being a SEAL is not just a job. It is a lifelong commitment to challenge yourself, and your teammates, to exist in a constant state of evolution, examining your decisions and learning from your mistakes so that you and your team can be as effective as possible.

The lessons I learned over my career make up the legacy of the men, like Ray, we lost and all the other active and former SEALs who have dedicated their lives to this country. Many were learned the hard way, through the sacrifice of friends. This book is dedicated to my brothers.

SEALs are taught to mentor the younger generation and to pass the lessons we’ve learned on to the newer guys. I wrote No Hero because that is what I plan to do.