Free Inside SEAL Team Six by Don Mann and Ralph Pezzullo

said she was cold, and I let her borrow my black leather motorcycle jacket.
    While I was gone, three punks from a rival gang in nearby Milford, Connecticut, showed up at the party, roughed the girl up, stole my jacket, and left.
    When I returned home, around three in the morning, I was told what happened and I immediately tore off on my motorcycle to go after them. Two fellow Flat Rats known as the Monaco brothers followed me.
    The Monaco brothers and I drove all over but couldn’t find them. When we returned to my house hours later, the three punks from Milford pulled into my driveway.
    “Unbelievable!” I got off my bike and walked up to the driver’s side of the car. Two of the Milford punks got out of the passenger side holding baseball bats. The guy wearing my jacket was sitting in the passenger seat with the window down. Before he had the chance to get out, I punched him in the mouth.
    Then I grabbed the bat he was holding and charged after the other two, who ran off.
    It wasn’t a big deal. But I’d recovered my jacket and made a point—don’t mess with me, or the Flat Rats.
    I hoped it was over. But a couple days later, Mrs. Monaco was standing in a phone booth in a strip-mall parking lot when some guys from the Milford gang saw her and stabbed her to death.
    It was an ugly, horrible, senseless act of retaliation.
    I said to myself, The hell with this place. I’ve got to get out of here.
    When I invited my parents to come to my high school graduation, they’d asked if I was going to get a diploma. I barely squeezed through, graduating near the bottom of my class. But I was graduating, and moving on. Class of ’76.
    Wanting to improve my chances of finding a decent career, I decided to go to Mattatuck Community College, in Waterbury, Connecticut. I remember going with my dad to register for classes and buying a T-shirt that read TUCK U.
    I thought it was cool. My dad wished I had selected a different one.
    But for first time in my life, he seemed proud of me, his first son. My parents were even more pleased when I made the dean’s list the first semester.
    But the transition from hell-raiser to college kid wasn’t easy. I had a burning desire to do anything but sit in a classroom listening to a professor and taking notes.
    I thought maybe I’d be suited to being a policeman, because cops saw action and carried guns. I could be like my hero Evel Knievel, who had switched from black leather to white. So I signed up for a course in criminal justice.
    The first day of class, the instructor asked, “How many of you here think you want to become cops?”
    Practically everyone in the room raised his or her hand, including me.
    He said, “You want to be cops because of what you’ve seen on TV. The chases, the shootouts. Isn’t that right?”
    A bunch of us answered, “Yes.”
    “Well, those things will never happen,” he said. “You pull your weapon from your holster, and you’re in court the next day defending yourself. The hours are terrible. So is the pay. The divorce rate is the highest of all civilian jobs. You spend most of your time writing parking tickets.”
    Now I had to find something else. The question was, What?
    I was still racing motocross, and even though it was expensive and dangerous, it remained a good outlet for my relentless energy. My friend Dave Kelliher, who was a professional rider, told me that if I wanted to get serious, I needed to start training.
    “What do you mean? I’m at the motocross track all the time.”
    “I’m talking about physical training,” he answered. “I run ten miles three times a week.”
    At that point, I’d never run in my life.
    The next morning, I met him at this house in North Haven. Dave had measured this one-mile loop in his neighborhood that he ran ten times. I completed the first mile with him at a leisurely pace but didn’t feel good. The second mile I was breathing hard and felt like I was going to be sick.
    After the third, I sat on the