Chapter 2
I rode bulls for about a year, without a ton of success. Wising up, I went to horses and ended up trying saddle bronc bustin'. This is the cla.s.sic event where you not only have to stay on the horse for eight seconds, but also do so with style and finesse. For some reason, I did a lot better in this event than the others, and so I kept with it for quite a while, winning my share of belt buckles and more than one fancy saddle. Not that I was a champion, mind you, but I did well enough to spread some prize money around the bar.
I also got some attention from the buckle bunnies, rodeo's version of female groupies. It was all good. I enjoyed going from city to city, traveling, partying, and riding.
Call it the cowboy lifestyle.
I continued riding after I graduated high school in 1992 and started going to college at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. For those of you who don't know it, Tarleton was founded in 1899 and joined the Texas A&M University system in 1917. They're the third largest non-land-grant agriculture university in the country. The school has a reputation for turning out excellent ranch and farm managers as well as agricultural education teachers.
At the time, I was interested in becoming a ranch manager. Before enrolling, though, I had given some thought to the military. My mom's dad had been an Army Air Force pilot, and for a while I thought of becoming an aviator. Then I considered becoming a Marine-I wanted to see real action. I liked the idea of fighting. I also heard a bit about special operations, and thought about joining Marine Recon, which is the Corps' elite special warfare unit. But my family, Mom especially, wanted me to go to college. Eventually, I saw it their way: I decided I would go to school first, then join the military. Heck, the way I looked at it, doing that meant I could party for a while before getting down to business.
I was still doing rodeo, and getting fairly good at it. But my career ended abruptly around the end of my freshman year, when a bronco flipped over on me in a chute at a compet.i.tion in Rendon, Texas. The guys watching me couldn't open up the chute because of the way the horse came down, so they had to pull him back over on top of me. I still had one foot in the stirrup, and was dragged and kicked so hard I lost consciousness. I woke up in a life-flight helicopter flying to the hospital. I ended up with pins in my wrists, a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, and a bruised lung and kidney.
Probably the worst part of the recovery was the dang pins. They were actually big screws about a quarter-inch thick. They stuck out a few inches on either side of my wrists, just like on Frankenstein's monster. They itched and looked strange, but they held my hands together.
A few weeks after I was hurt, I decided it was time to call up a girl I'd been wanting to take out. I wasn't about to let the pins get in the way of a good time. We were driving along and one of the long metal screws kept hitting the signal indicator as I was driving. It p.i.s.sed me off so bad I ended up breaking it off at the base close to my skin. I don't guess she was too impressed with that. The date ended early.
My rodeo career was over, but I continued partying like I was on tour. I ran through my money pretty quick, and so I started looking for work after school. I found a job in a lumberyard as a delivery guy, dropping off wood and other materials.
I was a decent worker, and I guess it showed. One day a fellow came in and started talking to me.
"I know a guy who owns a ranch and he's looking for a hired hand," he said. "I wonder if you'd be interested."
"Holy h.e.l.l," I told him. "I'll go out there right now."
And so I became a ranch hand-a real cowboy-even though I was still going to school full-time.
LIFE AS A COWBOY
I went to work for David Landrum, in Hood County, Texas, and quickly found out
Working on a ranch is heaven.
It's a hard life, featuring plenty of hard work, and yet at the same time it's an easy life. You're outside all the time. Most days it's just you and the animals. You don't have to deal with people or offices or any petty bulls.h.i.+t. You just do your job.
David's spread ran ten thousand acres. It was a real ranch, very old-school-we even had a chuck wagon during the spring round-up season.
I want to tell you, this was a beautiful place, with gentle hills, a couple of creeks, and open land that made you feel alive every time you looked at it. The heart of the ranch was an old house that had probably been a way station-an "inn" in Yankee-speak-back in the nineteenth century. It was a majestic building, with screened porches front and back, nice-sized rooms inside, and a big fireplace that warmed the soul as well as the skin.
Of course, because I was a ranch hand, my quarters were a little more primitive. I had what we called a bunkhouse, which was barely big enough for an actual bunk. It might have measured six by twelve feet, and my bed took up most of that. There wasn't s.p.a.ce for drawers-I had to hang all my clothes, including my underwear, on a pole.
The walls weren't insulated. Central Texas can be pretty cold in the winter, and even with the gas stove on high and an electric heater right next to the bed, I slept with my clothes on. But the worst thing about it was the fact that there wasn't a proper foundation under the floorboards. I was continually doing battle with racc.o.o.ns and armadillos, who'd burrow in right under my bed. Those racc.o.o.ns were ornery and audacious; I must've shot twenty of them before they finally got the message that they weren't welcome under my house.
I started out riding the tractors, planting wheat for the cattle in the wintertime. I moved on to sluffing feed to the cattle. Eventually, David determined I was likely to stick around and started giving me more responsibilities. He b.u.mped my salary to $400 a month.
After my last cla.s.s ended around one or two in the afternoon, I'd head over to the ranch. There I'd work until the sun went down, study a bit, then go to bed. First thing in the morning, I'd feed all the horses, then head to cla.s.s. Summer was the best. I'd be on horseback at five o'clock in the morning until nine at night.
Eventually, I became the two-year man, training "cut horses" and getting them ready for auction. (Cutting horses-also called carving horses, sorting horses, whittlers-are trained to help cowboys "cut" cows from the herd. These working horses are important on a ranch, and a good one can be worth a good amount of money.)
This is really where I learned about dealing with horses, and became much more patient than I had been before. If you lose your temper with a horse, you can ruin it for life. I taught myself to take my time and be gentle with them.
Horses are extremely smart. They learn quickly-if you do it right. You show them something real small, then stop, and do it again. A horse will lick its lips when it's learning. That's what I looked for. You stop the lesson on a good note, and pick up the next day.
Of course, it took a while to learn all this. Anytime I messed up, my boss would let me know. Right away he'd cuss me out, tell me I was a worthless piece of s.h.i.+t. But I never got p.i.s.sed at David. In my mind, I thought, I'm better than that and I'll show you.
As it happens, that's exactly the kind of att.i.tude you need to become a SEAL.
"NO" FROM THE NAVY
Out there on the range, I had a lot of time and s.p.a.ce to think about where I was headed. Studying and cla.s.ses were not my thing. With my rodeo career ended, I decided that I would quit college, stop ranching, and go back to my original plan: join the military and become a soldier. Since that was what I really wanted to do, there was no sense waiting.
And so, one day in 1996, I made my way to the recruiters, determined to sign up.
This recruiting station was its own mini-mall. The Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force offices were all lined up in a little row. Each one watched as you came in. They were in compet.i.tion with each other, and not necessarily a friendly compet.i.tion, either.
I went to the Marine door first, but they were out to lunch. As I turned around to leave, the Army guy down the hall called over.
"Hey," he said. "Why don't you come on in here?"
No reason not to, I thought. So I did.
"What are you interested in doing in the military?" he asked.
I told him that I liked the idea of special operations, and that from what I'd heard of Army SF, I thought I'd like to serve in that branch-if I were to join the Army, that is. (Special Forces, or SF, is an elite unit in the Army charged with a number of special operations missions. The term "special forces" is sometimes used incorrectly to describe special operation troops in general, but when I use it, I mean the Army unit.)
At the time, you had to be an E5-a sergeant-before you could be considered for SF. I didn't like the idea of waiting all that time before getting to the good stuff. "You could be a Ranger," suggested the recruiter.
I didn't know too much about Rangers, but what he told me sounded pretty enticing-jumping out of airplanes, a.s.saulting targets, becoming a small-arms expert. He opened my eyes to the possibilities, though he didn't quite close the sale.
"I'll think about it," I said, getting up to leave.
As I was on my way out, the Navy guy called to me from down the hall.
"Hey, you," he said. "Come on over here."
I walked over.
"What were you talking about in there?" he asked.
"I was thinking about going into SF," I said. "But you have to be an E5. So we were talking about the Rangers."
"Oh, yeah? Heard about the SEALs?"
At the time, the SEALs were still relatively unknown. I had heard a little about them, but I didn't know all that much. I think I shrugged.
"Why don't you come on in here," said the sailor. "I'll tell you all about 'em."
He started by telling me about BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/Scuba training, which is the preliminary school all SEALs must pa.s.s through. Nowadays, there are hundreds of books and movies on SEALs and BUD/S; there's even a pretty long entry on our training in Wikipedia. But back then, BUD/S was still a bit of a mystery, at least to me. When I heard how hard it was, how the instructors ran you and how less than 10 percent of the cla.s.s would qualify to move on, I was impressed. Just to make it through the training, you had to be one tough motherf.u.c.ker.