Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Read Free Page A

operational every day since putting in my papers. That was fine with me; there was nothing else I wanted to do in the navy. I just wanted out—eventually. Three days before, I’d gotten an answer to my request. My commission was to expire in three hours, at midnight.
    So what was I doing standing in the back of a 727, waiting to jump into a soccer field in the middle of a Virginia suburb? As the plane shook and banked, I began to ask myself the same thing. As weird as it might sound, I was making the jump because I didn’t want to.
    I hated to jump. Unfortunately for me, my aversion to gravity was well known. I was teased for it, but I still made every jump, more than three hundred of them, three of them combat insertions, and I had to be a competent operator in the air. When you are trying to group twelve parachutes together in a stack at thirty-three thousand feet on night-vision goggles, there is no room for substandard performance. Besides, as they say in SEAL basic training, I didn’t have to like it, I just had to do it. I was the boat-crew leader, and my boat crew drew this operation. If the Rastas were going to jump, then I would, too.
    I turned to the combat controller and said, “Go for depressurization.”
    The riggers and observers scrambled for their seats and buckled in. The combat controllers each pulled on a jet pilot’s helmet, their oxygen masks connected to carry bottles strapped to their belts. They could continue to communicate with the drop zone through radio microphones in their oxygen masks. There was a loud rushing sound as the cabin filled with fog. The aircraft depressurized, and I looked at the altimeter on my wrist. It read twelve thousand feet, the same as the altitude outside the aircraft.
    Alex pulled back the latch on the aft hatch and secured it to the galley with a piece of bungee cord. The cabin was filled with the earsplitting roar of the engines. The sound was deafening, agonizingly loud. It actually made your chest hurt. The combat controller touched me on the shoulder. Talking was now out of the question; from now on we would communicate with hand signals. He held up five fingers and a thumb. We were six minutes from showtime.
    The jumpers shuffled into the aft galley of the plane. José “Hoser” Lopez stepped onto the folded stairs and clambered to the end of the aft ramp. As D. B. Cooper discovered, much to his peril, the tail ramp of a 727 will not completely deploy when the aircraft is in flight. The force of the air streaming under the fuselage prevents the hydraulics from pushing the stairs into a full down-and-locked position. As the stick of jumpers packed into the galley and watched, Hoser climbed to the end of the folded stairs and did the bounce: Hanging on to the handrails, he jumped up and down, forcing the stairs down until the tail ramp clicked into a full down-and-locked position.
    This was not as easy as it sounds. While you are playing jumpy-jumpy, the aircraft is doing over 140 miles an hour. Until the hydraulics overcome the wind resistance, the thousand-pound tail ramp bucks like a depraved mule. People have been killed and crippled attempting the bounce, but tonight, Hoser got it down and locked after just a few wild gyrations.
    Once the ramp was down, a cable was affixed to the metal steps. This line would winch the ramp closed after we bailed out. Hoser took a position on the lowest step and turned to face the other jumpers, hands gripping the rails. He would be the first man off, exiting backwards, and he needed to see my signal to go. We all packed onto the stairs tightly, nuts to butts. I was the last man in the stick, standing on the top stair in the galley next to the combat controller, who looked like a giant insect in his helmet. He turned to me and held up three fingers. I passed the signal to Hoser, who lifted one hand off the rail and gave a three-fingered “hang loose” to the Rastas.
    I checked my altimeter. It read five thousand feet and