Free Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL by Chuck Pfarrer

some,” like a redneck at a Molly Hatchet concert.
    I looked around as I shoved a fresh mag into my rifle. The attack had been flawless, and the ruin of the vehicles was complete. The jeep was now upside down, the truck was burning off the side of the road, and almost every square foot of both was shot through by bullets or perforated by the deadly shrapnel of claymores.
    I said, “Set security. Search team in.” Two pairs of men came forward to count and search the dead, while the rest of the squads arrayed themselves up and down the road, reloading weapons, taking cover, ready to meet any of the gallant enemy attracted by the sounds of our ambush.
    Then headlights snapped on up and down the road. I could see men standing in their glow, one lighting a cigarette. Not enemy but friendlies. They were members of the training department of SEAL Team Four. Our ambush had been a final evolution in advanced operator training, or AOT—the highly realistic scenarios that SEAL platoons go through before deployment. The members of the cadre (and that’s what they were called, “cadres”) watched the ambushed vehicles as we searched them. They had watched everything, our setup, our attack, and now they were clocking what was called “time on target.” I bent down on hands and knees and looked into the upside-down jeep. There was a mannequin behind the steering wheel, the dummy head of a woman shot through the face by a 5.56-millimeter bullet. On the ground under the passenger seat was a cheap plastic briefcase stuffed with papers and maps. I dragged this free as my radio operator pulled the mannequin out of the jeep and laid it on the road.
    The truck and the jeep had both been “driven” by dummies: Rather, the jeep had been towed behind the truck by a twenty-foot shot of chain. The road on this specially designed ambush range was tracked a foot deep; the wheels of both the truck and jeep rolled in wood-sided tracks cut into the road. The truck had been placed in first gear and allowed to creep forward on idle. Both vehicles contained only mannequins and paper silhouettes. Until the grenades smashed into them, the vehicles could only roll down the middle of the road, stuck like slot cars.
    I handed the briefcase off to a shooter as one of the cadre shined a light into the back of the truck, then under and into the upside-down seats of the jeep. He was making sure each mannequin or silhouette had at least one bullet hole in it. Clean targets and untouched dummies were expected to be shot again, point-blank. These were called “security rounds.”
    Within two minutes both vehicles had been searched, all items of intelligence value had been gathered up, unwounded targets had been shot, and several of the mannequins were planted with pressure-sensitive booby traps, rude surprises for anyone sent to recover the bodies. This trick, placing booby traps under the dead, had been learned from the Viet Cong.
    The squads collapsed onto the ambush site, formed a column, and we departed as the rain fell and the burning truck gushed smoke into the black night. Forty minutes later, we were extracted by helicopter and landed in the SEAL compound at a U.S. Army reservation somewhere deep in the hills of central Virginia. There we were debriefed, cleaned our weapons, and drank beer as the sun came up on the last day of sixteen solid weeks of training. I remember on this cold spring morning, I was beginning to feel like a real SEAL.
    I WOULD NOT ARRIVE at SEAL Team Four until early December 1981. After graduation from BUD/S, I was one of several officers from 114 held at the Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado—the navy term is “stashed”—and we were once again to be guinea pigs. This time we were to be put through a new academic program intended to make us better special warfare officers. I was in a hurry to get to my new command, but in plain truth, as BUD/S graduates, we were of little use to anyone. We weren’t even SEALs yet; we were