Free Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice by Brandon Webb Page A

and Kat, and for years afterward Mike felt shitty that he couldn’t be there for Kat. He would eventually get a sense of closure with Dave’s passing, but not for many years.
    The Navy offered Kat a desk to ride, but she knew that would be depressing and miserable. She opted instead to get back on her ship. When the Shock and Awe campaign began the following April, Kat was on her cruiser in the Gulf, launching guided missiles into Baghdad and watching them explode in real time on CNN.
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    Back in 1999, when Dave was at the Elliott School in D.C., he had a good friend, an ex–Navy corpsman who was now with the Marine Force Reconnaissance, named Greg Skelton. One day Greg challenged Dave to compete in the Marine Corps Marathon, a footrace of more than twenty-six miles. Dave took the challenge and, Dave being Dave, he also immediately upped the ante and insisted they run it “the Navy SEAL way,” in “boots and utes,” in other words, wearing a T-shirt and camouflage pants (utility uniform) and combat boots.
    Greg called his bluff. “Let’s do it,” he said.
    So they did. It wasn’t until eighteen miles into the race that Dave glanced over at Greg as they ran and said, “Hey . . .I don’t know if . . . you realize this, but . . . I was just kidding about . . . the boots and utes.” They huffed another twenty yards or so; then Dave added, “But what the hell, we’ve . . . come this far; let’s . . . finish this fucker.” And they did—the only runners among the thirty thousand participants who ran the competition, let alone finished it, in heavy boots.
    In October 2003, exactly one year after Dave’s death, Greg ran the Marine Corps Marathon again, once again with a Scott by his side—Dave’s dad, Jack, standing in for his absent son. When they reached the finish line Jack didn’t stop running. After another half mile he finally slowed and came to a standstill at Arlington National Cemetery, where he draped his finisher’s medal over Dave’s grave site.
    The following year Greg couldn’t make it, but Dave’s younger brother, Mike, kept the tradition going and ran the race himself. Like his father the year before, Mike continued on to Arlington to leave his Marine Corps Marathon finisher’s medal on his brother’s grave.
    The year after that, Greg was determined not to miss the event: He drove in uniform nonstop from Georgia to D.C. to run the race one more time—in boots and utes. Leaving the finish line behind, he followed in Jack’s and Mike’s footsteps until he had reached Dave’s final resting place, where he added a third medal to his friend’s growing collection.
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    Dave was the embodiment of the expression
larger than life
. Everything he did, he took to a level beyond what anyone else would think possible. He was more hilarious, more outrageous, more audacious. As his mom, Maggie, put it, “Dave lived more in his twenty-nine and a half years than others could live in a hundred.”
    Because he was so quick, he could pick up on anything that anyone was talking about and find a way to reference it to something he knew about or had experience with. That high-speed intelligence, combined with his basic good nature and sense of humor, gave him an amazing gift for conversation and for striking up new friendships. Kat describes him as a chameleon: He could throw wild parties filled with sophomoric stunts (like the time he convinced a group of starstruck freshmen to prove their mettle by sweating it out in a bathroom with an ignited teargas grenade Dave just happened to have hung on to from an earlier SEAL deployment), and the next day walk into any posh D.C. eating or drinking establishment and chat up the worldly professionals you’d find there as if he were one of them. Dave could talk to anybody and make anyone laugh.
    In many ways Dave was like a big kid. There was absolutely no situation where he would not let loose with his crazy