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 B

on about it. Just does ’em. He could win the light-heavyweight championship of the world and forget to tell you. It’s what I first liked about him. He was never Mr. Too Cool, like a lot of guys are. He’s a real easy character to like, I’ll tell you that.”
    For the record it should be recorded here that Jon forgot to mention for this book that he was one of the fastest high school swimmers onthe East Coast of the United States. He even forgot to mention his state championship and longstanding Virginia 50-yard-freestyle record. Someone else told the author.
    Reminded, he said, pretty laconically, “Yeah, I guess I could chug along okay some days.”
    â€œIt’s what I first liked about Jon,” says Matt. “He never tried to be the coolest guy around. Not even one time when he won a 5.5-mile SEAL swim race in the Pacific out near San Clemente Island. Sonofagun won. I never saw it, but everyone was talking about it. When I asked him, he said it was probably a fluke—he wasn’t real sure the others were trying!”
    When Matt and Jon reached their Teams, Special Training took a diverse turn. As Jon concentrated on becoming expert at demolishing anything that stood in his Team’s way, Matt headed for probably the most cerebral part of SEAL Team missions: the complex business of communications.
    For those who would specialize in this slightly secretive section of the dark arts, there was a demanding course in the on-base Comms School. This starts a candidate off right at the basics, which all SEALs must master (just in case), and runs all the way through to advanced satellite communications and space-age battlefield techniques, the ones that ensure no one is out of the loop.
    The sheer complexity and myriad chances of the system going down appealed to Matt. Confident now that his goof-off schooldays were way behind him, he had already decided that a career in the SEALs was his natural spot in this world and that, in the long term, an officer’s commission was not beyond him.
    He swiftly grasped that communications on any mission was the heart and soul of the operation, the mission’s critical path. Without top-class comms, there can be only chaos. Every SEAL is obliged to read Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor , and every SEAL shudders at those terrible moments when the Red Wings’ chief comms man, Danny Dietz, could not raise home base to provide help.
    And Danny was an expert. A real expert. And he simply could not make the connection. Up there in the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, towering rock faces and steep escarpments that rose above and below them blocked the quivering electronic signal lancing out from Danny’s transmitter.
    By the time the Red Wings had fallen down two mountains and been shot God-knows-how-many times, Danny’s radio gear was history. In the end it was Lieutenant Michael Murphy’s final sacrificial action—moving into a bullet-raked clearing and punching in the numbers on his satellite phone—that finally raised a five-alarm uproar on the Bagram Base.
    By now Danny had died, and the other three were all badly wounded. Murphy’s final act contravened the general practice of not using these special phones unless the situation was dire. And Mike Murphy knew that his situation was as dire as it gets. In the final few minutes of his life, mortally wounded, he made the connection, the very best he could do, which was only to be expected from a SEAL officer of his supreme quality.
    Everyone knew the legend of the Red Wings and understood that that disaster, at least partly, involved faulty communications, when they were unable to summon help.
    And so Matt went to yet another school as a part of his Special Training course. And right there he became acquainted with the regular SEAL radio that everyone takes on every mission. It’s about nine inches long and fits into a special slot in the harness. With its antennae