Free Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) by Patrick Robinson Page A

where the SEALs come under first fire. The role of the breacher requires high courage, and a lot of it. And that was Big Jon’s stock in trade. Was he scared? Hell no. They’d taught him to be a US Navy SEAL. And everyone knows they’re invincible. Jon loved every last and precious moment of it.
    Any time you are privileged enough to see a SEAL Team on television, laying siege to some terrorist stronghold in Iraq or Afghanistan, remember you are watching the maestros of assault at work, banging and blasting their way forward to achieve their mission. You are seeing the results of hours and hours of practice, months and months of training, men whose unquestioning dedication to the American flag is, very simply, without end.
    Sometimes they pay the highest possible price. And when these men make their final journey home, the Stars and Stripes always drapes the coffin. A rigid SEAL guard of honor stands motionless at the head for the duration of the journey, no matter the distance, which is often half a world away. No SEAL ever dies in vain. For each fallen man a new piece is added to the great mosaic of the Teams—a place where courage and daring are always paramount, but where valor is the unending constant.
    And in the cold January of 2008, Jon stepped into the sharp end of this brotherhood. By year’s end he would be a highly qualified Team 10 breacher, and after that would come the unit-level training (ULT), the last few months of fine tuning that everyone receives before deployment, probably to Iraq, possibly to Afghanistan.
    Meanwhile Matt McCabe had arrived back from Germany and quickly discovered that the relentless search for perfection had not abated, even in the established Teams. His best friend, Jeff (no proper names for serving Special Forces), had been “rolled back” (sent to retake a course), so the first thing Matt did was to meet and befriend a big powerful new guy from Coronado, Jon Keefe.
    Within a few weeks Jeff and Jon showed up in Team 10, in which Matt was in hard training, and the three of them became buddies,traveling out to Reno, Nevada, for a part of a Special Forces driving course. This may sound like a huge amount of fun, but the SEALs treat it with the same grim, hard-eyed proficiency as pool comp.
    SEALs need to be able to drive Humvees like stock-car drivers. The day may come when they need either a fast getaway or even (much more likely) a surprise arrival in a combat zone, and they do not want to be looking around for a decent driver.
    In those platoons, as ever, everyone needs to be able to do everything. When three regular SEAL drivers arrive in Reno, they are just that—regular drivers. When they return to Virginia Beach they will be world-class experts in rallying—racing over rough terrain, up mountains, down escarpments, and through streams.
    SEAL drivers may need to operate at high speed in any war zone. As men may be wounded, it may be necessary to engage in a running firefight from the vehicle, and the nearest man to the wheel needs to get in and move it. He’ll need all the steering, braking, and timing skills they taught him in Reno.
    All three of them loved it up there on the high slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as they slid, skidded, and tore up the mountain shale, hard cornering and making high-speed U-turns. And they all passed the examinations. It ended in late March, and they took a long weekend to drive down the Nevada border, crossing the enormous Yosemite State Park and heading for the ski slopes of Squaw Valley, California.
    There Matt was the expert, once making an unbelievable Black run down from the rampart of Squaw Peak, nearly eighty-nine hundred feet above sea level, and disappearing at about 100mph down the steep Siberia Slope. “I never thought I’d see him again!” says Jon.
    â€œYou know, that’s the thing about Matt. He can just do so many things so well, better than most people. But he never goes