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My father got a second divorce, and we just had to do something, so we started hunting. I think the first time we went hunting, it was in a two-door Datsun, my uncle Jack's. We didn’t know what we were doing or how to sight in a weapon. We just got a doe tag for an antelope, and all we knew was how to stock the cooler. Sodas, Twinkies, sandwiches—yeah, we used to call it the buffet. That was it. There was basketball season, hunting season, and fishing season.

As for the SEAL teams and the Navy, well, joining the SEAL teams was an accident. It wasn’t necessarily about getting dumped, but it was a situation where I just needed to get out. I had a bad relationship, and basketball wasn’t fun anymore. I needed an adventure. I had two friends who always wanted to be Marines—Jim McBride and Ben Walsheski. They had high and tight haircuts, Marine Corps stickers on their trucks—they were Marines. When they came back to Butte, Montana, it was like watching someone from Full Metal Jacket walk in. Ben walked into the Vu Villa, and I thought, “Holy shit, that’s a Marine.” I still wasn’t going to join, though. I was playing basketball, but I was like, “That’s a Marine. I’m going to watch this guy kick someone's ass.”

When it was time to leave, as a young man, you realize you can see the world for free by joining the military.

My wife calls me the luckiest unlucky man in the world.

I said I wanted to be a sniper. I grew up hunting, and Marines have the best snipers in the world. I read Carlos Hathcock's book and thought, "I want to do that." The recruiter said, "Look no further, we have snipers in the Navy. All you have to do is become a Navy SEAL first—no big deal. We’ll send you right to sniper school." I didn’t know what a SEAL was. I’m from Montana and didn’t know how to swim, but I thought, "Why would this guy lie to me?"

You want to be great? Do it a thousand times. You want to be really great? Do it 10,000 times. Do everything like you do anything.

Everything was fine until I entered the water. That’s when the problem started. I made it to the deep end, almost didn’t make it back, and thought, "I'm fucked. I just signed a contract with the government to be a Navy SEAL, and I don’t know how to swim."

I remember looking around and thinking, "There's no fucking way I'm passing this course." But then I started talking to other guys—some from Brooklyn, some from Compton, others from South Florida. I realized everyone was scared. We’re all the same. Later in life, I understood it doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or the guy in Bin Laden’s bedroom—we’ve all had our first day, and we’ve all been scared.

Wherever you are, be there.

When I talk to young men who want to be SEALs, they ask, "What should I be doing to get ready for BUD/S?" I respond with, "What are you doing to get ready?" They say, "Taking cold showers to get used to it." I tell them to stop that. If I told you in 30 days, I was going to kick you in the nuts as hard as I can, and you had your best friend kick you in the nuts every day to prepare, guess what? It’s still going to suck when I do it. Don't prepare for it—just take it like a man.

I started to realize they were training us to be successful in life. A BUD/S instructor, not known for being nice, said, "I’m not here to intimidate, I’m here to motivate." He was our class proctor, the one who helps you through. He said, "I know you've seen the movies and read the books, but regardless of what you've been told, this course is not impossible. People graduate—look at me, I’m living proof. I will never ask you to do anything impossible, but I will make you do something very hard, followed by something very hard, day after day, for eight straight months.”

That sounds like a lot, but don’t think about eight months from now. That’s not how you achieve a long-term goal. You do it like this: Wake up in the morning on time, make your bed the right way, brush your teeth—three victories already. Make it to the 5 a.m. PT on time, and as I’m beating you, don’t think about the pain. Focus on your next goal—breakfast. After breakfast, make it to lunch. After lunch, your next goal is dinner. After dinner, do everything you need to do to get back into that perfectly made bed. Because you took the time to make your bed the right way, regardless of how bad today was, tomorrow is a clean slate. Tomorrow is a fresh start."

"When you feel like quitting—and you will—don’t quit right now. That’s emotion. Quit tomorrow. If you can keep quitting tomorrow, you can do anything in life."

The first time I jumped, the first time under canopy, I landed, and one of the black hats, one instructor, said something. I thought, "That is the coolest thing I've ever done."

Looking back through that whole pipeline, was there ever a time you wanted to quit? Every day in BUD/S. What got you through? Everyone who said I couldn't do it.

I'm at the SEAL reunion in Virginia Beach, and I see those old-school badass dudes with the big trident hats. I saw this old dude—he was a little too old—me being cocky, I go, "Hey, what BUD/S class were you in?" He said, "Well, I went through Hell Week in 1944." I said, "There was no Hell Week in the 1940s." He said, "There was on Omaha Beach. Know your heritage." I thought, "Holy shit."

So we're back at Unit Two up in Germany, just finished Kosovo, and then I was in the operations room. We did have email at the time because it was September 2001. We saw the TV come on, and there was a picture of the Twin Towers—the North Tower was on fire. They said, "This is breaking news: a small plane has hit the World Trade Center." We were looking at it, thinking, "It's a nice day, man. It's clear, and that's not a small hole—that's a huge building." That's a big fucking hole, man. Then the second one hit. Someone said, "That's Osama bin Laden. That's al-Qaeda, man. Everything we know just changed."

The funniest part of that was, you know, we always get briefed on dangerous marine life. Whatever, I don't give a fuck. They're not going to hurt you, but this one we paid attention to. They said, "You're going to be swimming off the coast of Africa, and every man-eating shark you can imagine is there." They said there shouldn't be any, but if you see saltwater crocodiles, they're 20 feet long, and they'll eat you. And, there aren't any hippos, but those are the deadliest animals in Africa—they kill more people than anything. "Oh, and here's your landing point. It's called Black Mamba Point because it's full of black mambas. They're very aggressive, they'll chase you, and they'll kill you." After that, it's like, "All right..."

If you want to be fast, slow down. If you want to deal with chaos, breathe. I tell people that now at boardrooms—if you're having a shitty meeting, stand up and breathe. Learning the "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" philosophy, and you'll get through it.

What impressed me the most was how fast they could do CQB. If you're not in the front, they're gone—they're going to dust this place. But the second thing was how funny they were—the humor and the camaraderie.

I was lucky because every single day, I got to work with people who were better than me.

What I think makes a great team is morale. They always made sure morale was high.

I'd never been to war. I'd only seen it on TV, so I assumed it was as bad as it looked. I assumed there was a suicide bomber around every corner, everyone was going to be shooting at you, and it was going to blow up all the time. It took a while to realize that in a war zone, most people just want to get on with their lives and raise their families. Most people are not combatants.

I was watching him, and I remember looking over—he's got body armor, short sleeves, big old beard, and one of those cop radios. I remember thinking, "I want to be cool like that. I want to look cool like that." When we got back, I told him, "I'm not kissing your ass, but how weren't you afraid?" He goes, "Well, how do you know I wasn't afraid?" I said, "Because you didn't look like it." He goes, "That's right. You don't know if I'm afraid, but if I show you that I'm calm, you'll be calm. Calm is contagious."

The Heineken story is funny because when I first got there, they had a place where we could send the interpreter to get booze for us. Obviously, no one drinks overseas, but we sent him, and the price was, I want to say, 20 bucks for a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and 30 bucks for a case of Heineken. So we sent the interpreter—my interpreter was Larry because we couldn't pronounce his name, so he was just Larry. We sent him to get some stuff, and I'm the new guy there, but I'm over there now. He came back with nothing. He said, "Yeah, the guy running the shop said, 'I know who you're selling this to. These are for the Americans,' and the prices went from 20 and 30 to 50 and 60." I'm like, "Fuck this, are you kidding me? Get your shit on." So we roll over there, and I say to the guy, "Look, I can appreciate inflation. 20 to 30, you go 25 to 35, that's fine. You raise it that high, you can't sell booze in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. I'm going to take it all for free and put you in jail." He goes, "25 and 35 is fine, my friend." I'm like, "Shit, couldn't we have just done this in the first place?"

There's a crash site we have to get to, and they're not going to fly us because they're shooting down helicopters now. So, figure it out. We're running around this makeshift airfield, and there's a hut full of rangers. We're like, "Hey, here's the situation," and we told them. "I need five guys," and all 20 of them jumped up and said, "We should take 10 minutes to get ready; we'll be out in three." Then they came out. We decided, "Go get whatever vehicle you can steal." We're driving as far as we can, and then we're humping up into the valley. We didn't know if there were survivors, we didn't know what had happened, but we knew the Taliban was up there.

These are two neighboring valleys, and people don't understand that in Afghanistan there have been families living in these valleys for 10,000 years who have never met each other. You're not allowed in, and they hate each other. They'll cut your head off and, like old-school Dracula, put it on a stake type of thing. So we're driving in there, and this is the part where I've seen Afghanistan is a different world. People don't understand that. When I first got to Red Team, I asked the guys, "What's Afghanistan like?" They said, "You just have to see it because you're not going to believe me." We went up there, and they don't have water. And I'm a father, and I saw these kids. I handed a bottle of water to a little girl. She opened it, dumped it out, so she could play with the plastic.

Marines are bad motherfuckers. They will take shitty gear and make it suck even more.

Afghanistan might as well be the 13th century. We showed this guy an aerial photo of his village on an iPad. I might as well have shown him an actual picture of Allah. This dude was looking at the iPad like, "One minute you're fucking your animal, now you're looking at an iPad."

A very important lesson I learned on this deployment is: never die because you got bored. Do everything like you do anything, and always follow your rules. People die because they take shortcuts or they get bored.

I don't believe in micromanaging. You teach your people how to do it and let them do it. But at that moment, I figured it was a proper time to micromanage. I said, "Change the fucking batteries." He said, "I can't, I'm not carrying the spares." Remember—you are.

I will never make another joke about the Air Force.

I got on the starboard side—the right side—of this Blackhawk, and we're leaving. It's maybe a 10-minute flight back to April; that's how close we were to this, right on the border. That's the first time I saw the battlefield we had just created. It was scorched earth. I'm thinking, "Oh man, we just bombed Pakistan. That is an international incident." Then I thought, "I'm in charge, I'm probably going to hear about this."

I've been lying to my mom my entire career because it's easier to go to war than to send someone you love to war. Their worrying is not going to affect how you do, so don't make them worry—just lie to them.

Thanks to jiu-jitsu: don't fight anyone in a bar—you don't know who's a black belt. Very true. Don't go looking for it. If you get in a bar fight and someone starts with a leg kick, apologize and buy him a drink.

One of the worst things you can say when you're running a team is, "Well, this is the way we've always done it." It's like, wait a minute.

We invented combat clearance. Why are we sprinting at night through houses with white lights when we can put our nods down and own it? Why are we yelling? Stop yelling. When you turn a corner and point your gun up, I don't need to hear you yell, "Stairwell." I'll assume there's a stairwell. Shut the fuck up. So we started training on silent runs. We learned that when we were silent, not only were we faster and more efficient, we were communicating at the highest levels simply by reading off each other. We said, "We're going to go slow. We're going to go in quiet. We're not going to blow the door, we're going to pick the lock." We figured out ways to break the glass quietly and open it, and just go inside, wake them up—you know, catch them when they're sleeping. We started having competitions—how many al-Qaeda guys can you check for a suicide bomb and then wake them up by saying something? Watching a grown man shit his pants—that was one of the greatest things ever.

Nobody ever worked for me; they were with me.

What I love about special operators is they really know how to solve problems.

We went in with 17 SEALs and two dogs—two Malinois. They're important to the story because we got in there—immediate gunfight—but we cleared 10 houses. We killed all 19 guys and didn't hurt one woman or child. Then we left, swam out. The next day, the locals woke up, and you know, there was the usual terror reigned by these al-Qaeda shits. But now, there's no one—they're dead, they're gone, and they had a block party. We had assets above, and they're watching this because you want to see what happens afterward. There's this block party going on. The block party got so big, a reporter from Baghdad—a newspaper reporter—went up there and interviewed the people in the houses that we had taken down. He asked, "Who came last night?" The headline on the newspaper said, "They were ninjas, and they came with lions."

The further you get away from war, the more it starts to sink in that a lot of guys are killing each other because a lot of narcissists in charge have you do it.

I don't know what percentage of people actually stand up for what they believe in, but I thought it was a lot higher until 2020 came around. Then I realized the majority of these people are just sheep, doing whatever they're told.

Iraq. What the fuck was that all about?

They put us all into a room, and the commanding officer of SEAL Team Six—so each squadron had a commanding officer, but Six was like a group—came in. I'll never forget the way he said, "The reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to Osama bin Laden." I mean, it sinks in, but we're professionals. We're like, "Okay, are we going right now? We're ready." They explained to us, and they brought in the agency team, which was mostly women. They explained to us in such depth how they found him in these long briefs, and we're all almost like, "Look, we believe you. I don't need to know this shit. Just tell me where he is. I'll carry the gun and the sledgehammer."

They told us that the president had about five options to get him. They said, "Obviously, we could carpet bomb the shit out of it." I think the Air Force wanted like 22 JDAMs to make sure, and it's like, "Holy shit, you're going to kill everyone around." So that's a no-go. We would never know if we got him. They had something they called "the pacer." They could see him walking outside. "We could hit him with one bomb, but we know how that works. If you fuck that up, you'll never find him again." We actually laughed at this one—they said, "We could do a joint op with the Pakistanis," and we were like, "Oh yeah, tell them about it, and he's fucking out of there." Or, "You're an option, and you guys can figure out a way."

Admiral Bill McRaven gave us the last speech. He said, "Guys, last night I watched my favorite movie, Hoosiers. The best part of that movie is when the team from Hickory, Indiana, makes it to the state championship. They walk into this gym, it's an arena, and they're starstruck, just looking around. The coach had one of the guys grab a tape measure and said, 'What's the distance from the back of the rim to the free throw line?' He said, 'It's 15 feet, coach.' 'All right, what's the distance from the hoop to the floor?' He said, '10 feet, coach.' And the coach goes, 'I'm sure you'll find these are the exact measurements in your gym in Hickory. This is just a bigger arena.'" McRaven said, "You guys do this every night. This is just a bigger arena." I remember as we were leaving, someone said, "Hey Admiral, you're so busy, I doubt you watched Hoosiers last night, but you were born to give us that speech right now."

"Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended." That's what George Bush said on 9/11, and I was like, "Shit, I'm going to keep saying that." Then it hit me—I'm on this mission, we're on this mission, and we're going to fucking kill him.

I watched dudes run from different rooms to grab kids that had been separated from their families and bring them back so the kids wouldn't be as afraid. I remember being proud of the guys but also thinking, "This is what the good guys do." Al-Qaeda isn't doing that when they come to our house. They're going to shoot it out and cut people's heads off. We do that because we're the good guys, and I'm sure you've seen that in combat.

We're leaving now on a mission where we're supposed to die, but if we can live for another 90 minutes, if we can cross the border into Afghanistan, we get to see our kids again. We get to live another 50 years. But they know we’re here, and they can shoot us down. We got 85 minutes into the flight, and the pilot came over the radio, as cool as ever, and said, "All right gentlemen, for the first time in your life, you're going to be happy to hear this—welcome to Afghanistan." And yeah, it was like, "Holy shit, we did it."

An L-ambush—that was my last mission. I got out after that and transitioned into civilian life. You have to learn that there’s a lot of life after the military. The military is unique because you can get in at 18 and retire at 38. At 38, you’ve got a lot of life left in you, and that’s when the real work starts.

You’ve got to realize that what someone thinks about you is none of your business. Stop wasting negative energy on what they're thinking of you. If they’re pissed, there’s nothing you can do about it. If they ever want to work with me, I’ll work with them, that’s fine. If you want help, ask—I’ll help. But if you’re just hating, take it somewhere else. There’s a point where you just have to stop caring. I don’t care.

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