Few know the story of how the U.S. Navy SEALs (Sea, Air and Land) became the renowned warriors of today. Without them, much of world history would have been written differently, from the beaches of Normandy to the Pacific theater, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
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[ automatic gunfire ]
It was about a 24-hour battle,
stretching from one day
into the next.
[ indistinct shouting ]
We'd been training for years,
and this is our four minutes.
Every one of them,
they gave their life
in that rescue attempt.
And they did it because
one of their own was down.
Widely viewed as the world's
combat elite,
the clandestine U.S. Navy SEALs
have found themselves
in the media spotlight
as recent operations have
brought these quiet warriors
unaccustomed fame.
NEWS ANNOUNCER:
U.S. Navy SEALs rescued
American cargo ship captain
Richard Phillips.
They're the superheroes,
they're the titans,
they're impossible men
doing an impossible job.
Much of their history
is as secretive
as their missions.
But over the decades,
the roles of SEALs
and their frogmen forefathers
have transformed
along with evolving threats...
[ explosion ]
[ overlapping indistinct
dialogue ]
and a 24-hour news cycle.
From Hitler to bin Laden,
from countering massive
armies...
[ indistinct shouting ]
to countering terror,
from frogmen to
high-tech commandos,
how have the covert SEALs
become
the renowned warriors of today?
Who are the men behind
the face masks,
behind the green paint,
behind the history?
Move, move! Go! Go!
[ ** ]
[ shouting ]
[ ** ]
There are just 2,000 men today
who are active-duty
U.S. Navy SEALs.
They are all volunteers
who endure
what is perhaps the hardest
military training in the world.
MAN: I think my hell week
was just like
everybody else's hell week
in the 92 classes before me.
And that's why we do hell week.
First and foremost, so that you
have confidence in yourself.
You stay up for 120 hours
during the week,
and you get about three or four
hours of sleep.
And the reason why you get
three or four hours
is because we've done studies,
and if you don't get that
minimum amount of sleep,
you'll die after staying up
for 120 hours.
Until you go through it,
you don't understand
what it can do --
it grabs your inner soul.
If you don't think you're
the best SEAL,
you don't need to be
in the SEAL Team.
It's a real job, and it hurts,
and it breaks people:
mentally, physically,
it does all of that.
MAN: In the movies,
they make it look like
everything goes as planned,
but no mission ever goes exactly
the way you plan it,
so you have to be able to adapt.
That's the million-dollar
question:
why do you want to be a frogman?
Because they're going to pay me
and let me skydive
and blow [bleep] up?
Well, if you could be part
of a team,
wouldn't you want to be a part
of the very best
in the entire world?
While fewer than 10,000 men
have ever been Navy SEALs...
[ men shouting and gunfire ]
they greatly define
the modern battlespace.
Small groups of highly trained,
well-equipped commandos
facing off against
terrorist enemies:
the Taliban, Iraqi insurgents,
al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden.
OSMAN: The reputation
the community has
isn't because of anything
I've ever done.
It's because of what everybody
came before me,
everybody who's gone
after me,
and that collective talent
is now pooled
onto an emblem that's
on your chest.
The SEALs' forerunners have
always been state-of-the-art...
for their day.
The generic term for all
naval Special Warfare swimmers
is "frogmen," allegedly because
of how their British colleagues
looked
in their newly fashioned
green wetsuits.
Others recall it's how
the divers appeared
once they were issued some
exciting new high-tech gear:
swim fins.
KAISER: What do I think about
my frogman forefathers?
It's just unbelievable what
they did with what they had.
[ ** ]
When I think about guys
fighting the Japanese
with a KA-BAR and a bag
of explosives,
it's unbelievable when I think
about the things they did.
SPARKS: The older generation
of frogmen
did so much with so little.
They had to rely on their
ingenuity and kind of
their working-class-hero
kind of person.
That's who they were:
tough guys.
MAN: The guys who were
the forefathers,
they're going out to go ahead
and clear a beach.
And the guys who went out before
them didn't come back.
And so now these guys are
putting their hand up
and saying, "I'll still go."
That's the kind of people
that are still coming in
to the SEAL community.
[ explosion ]
SEAL is an acronym
meaning sea, air, and land.
It's how and where
they operate.
So how did Naval Special
Operations teams
also become land-based
commandos?
MAN:
It's a Cinderella story.
It doesn't make sense that
a Navy unit would be doing
the types of things
that we're doing.
It doesn't make sense that
a Navy unit would be
in Afghanistan or in the middle
of Iraq,
completely separated from
a body of water.
It just doesn't make sense.
The fact that we are there,
the fact that we're doing
those types of missions,
it's all related to how
we evolved.
The SEALs were born
in World War II,
of two oceans, for two kinds
of demolition work.
In the Pacific,
their predecessors swam in
in advance of U.S. Marines
and Army troops,
removing underwater obstacles
to make amphibious landings
possible.
And in the Atlantic, teams were
needed on the beaches of France
to blow open the gateway
to Europe for D-Day.
Everybody knows
that the invasion
is going to happen
in France.
They know that they're going
to have to put
millions of men onto the coast
to unseat Hitler,
to defeat the German armies
in France.
The Allies would have to land
somewhere
along the coast of France.
They knew that Hitler had built
a massive Atlantic wall
to prevent the invasion
and that they would have to
find a way to breach it.
But on the eve of its entry
into World War II,
the U.S. military had no one
with expertise
in this kind of complex
demolition work.
The U.S. Navy would recruit
a 31-year-old expatriate,
Draper Kauffman.
He would help create
one of the forefather teams
of today's Navy SEALs.
When the nearsighted Kauffman
graduated
from the Naval Academy,
he failed to get a commission
in the U.S. Navy.
But by the late 1930s,
France and England were
at war with Germany,
years before America entered
the fray.
So he went overseas to serve,
becoming an ambulance driver.
After a brief stint
as a German prisoner of war,
he went to London to join
the fight there.
The Blitz is going on
this entire time.
Hundreds of people are
getting killed in London,
you know, every other day.
Bombs are falling.
Some bombs are not exploding.
They asked for volunteers
for bomb disposal,
and true to form,
Draper volunteers.
Yeah, he's a character.
For whatever reason,
he wants to be
as close to the center of action
as he possibly can.
Kauffman's experience
with ordnance
got him a transfer
from the British navy
to the American one.
His orders to start the
U.S. Navy's bomb disposal unit
came just in the nick of time.
[ blades whirring ]
[ bombs whistling ]
Days after Draper Kauffman
returns to the U.S. Navy,
the Japanese attack
Pearl Harbor.
[ siren blares ]
Shortly after the Japanese
attack on Hawaii,
Kauffman was ordered
to dismantle
an unexploded 500-pound bomb
in Pearl Harbor.
For his valor, he was awarded
the Navy Cross.
He returned
to Washington, D.C.,
to run the Navy's
bomb disposal school.
Then, in 1943,
while on his honeymoon,
Lt. Commander Kauffman
received orders
to report back to D.C.
After four days of honeymoon,
we were at the Hotel New Yorker.
And I got a telegram telling me
to report immediately,
and I did what I guess
anybody else would've done.
I gave the young bellboy
five bucks and said,
"Son, you can't find me.
Come back tomorrow."
When he arrived in Washington,
Draper Kauffman was given
his new assignment:
clear Hitler's beaches.
"Have you ever seen
intelligence pictures
of the obstacles the Germans
are building
on their beaches in France?"
And I said, "No, sir."
He said, "Well, they're putting
obstacles
out in 6 feet of water
to stop the landing craft there,
and the soldiers would have
to get out in 6 feet of water.
Do you know how much
an infantryman's pack weighs?"
And I said, "No, sir."
He said, "Well, neither do I,
but they'll all drown."
He said, "Now, I want you
to put a stop to that."
Kauffman's new mission
took him
from running a school
on disposing unexploded bombs
to exploding ones.
He was ordered to create the
Naval Combat Demolition Units,
or NCDUs.
MAN:
By his own accounting,
he didn't have a clue
what he was doing.
But he took some of his officers
with him,
and those officers are actually
the ones
that set everything up
and made it work.
For their training camp,
the men went
to a swampy outpost
in Fort Pierce, Florida.
There was no air conditioning
out there,
there was no OFF! mosquito
repellent.
They said they would rather
face the Germans
than the mosquitoes
and the no-see-ums out there.
The training that still happens
at BUDS,
which is Basic Underwater
Demolition SEAL training,
started right here
in Fort Pierce.
So every time you see guys
lifting up a log,
that started right here
at Fort Pierce.
Boat teams going out
through the waves,
that started right here
in Fort Pierce.
The term "hell week" started
right here in Fort Pierce
because Draper Kauffman
wanted to condense the training
because he was getting ready
for war.
So he said, "Let's get this
all done in a week,"
and they called it
introduction week.
The guys called it hell week.
MILLIGAN: Kauffman's trying
to create
as close a representation
of actual war as possible.
[ ** ]
When the Second World War
starts,
Draper Kauffman is probably
the one American
that has seen the most of it.
He's seen how horrible
war is.
He's seen the emotional
and physical toll
that it takes on you.
So when he creates this
NCDU training,
he's trying to get as close
to that experience as possible.
He's trying to show
they can go without sleep
for a long period of time.
They can be cold and miserable
and hungry and everything else.
Kauffman used instructors
from his bomb disposal unit
to help transform
Navy construction battalions,
or Seabees, into Naval Combat
Demolition Units.
Men from the Scouts
and Raiders,
a joint Army/Navy maritime
reconnaissance unit,
were in charge of
the physical training
that created hell week.
According to one of
the original NCDU officers,
hell week separated the men
from the boys:
"The men took off
and left us with the boys.
But the boys who stayed
turned out to have
the intrepid spirit
for this kind of work."
Our first class started,
I think it was about 200,
and we graduated about 70.
NCDU training began
on June 6, 1943.
The trainees didn't know it
at the time,
but exactly one year later,
these men would be
on the beaches of Normandy
on D-Day.
HAWKINS: Naval Combat Demolition
men were put together
to get rid of the obstacles
on beach approaches in Europe,
specifically Normandy.
There's a very high tidal shift
at Normandy.
So sometimes the obstacles
are underwater,
sometimes they're not
underwater.
And if you're going to eliminate
the obstacles,
you really have to get in there
and get them at low tide.
[ explosions ]
Much has been told
of the D-Day invasion
and the sacrifices made
on these bloodstained beaches.
But the story of the
Naval Combat Demolition men,
forefathers of today's SEALs
who helped make the invasion
possible,
has lived mostly in the shadows
of history.
Eighteen-year-old Ken Reynolds
was one of the men
who volunteered for the NCDUs.
I thought, and other people
thought, it meant
non-combat demolition.
And my mother was elated,
because it was non-combat.
But I soon found out that
that's not what it meant.
The seaman second class
went to England
to join about 100 Naval Combat
Demolition volunteers
who were already training.
Allied engineers in England
had reproduced the German beach
obstacles
so the NCDU men could
practice exploding them.
[ explosion ]
One of the obstacles that
the NCDUs would have to defeat
was called a Belgian Gate.
An officer named Carl Hagensen
pre-packaged 2-pound charges
of C2 explosives
that could be quickly wrapped
around the beach obstacles.
Engineers determined that
these Hagensen Packs
had to be placed
in 16 strategic spots
in order to flatten
the metal tank trap
in a way that would allow
Allied vehicles...
to drive over the former
obstacles.
The NCDU men, along with
Army engineers,
were assigned to
Gap Assault Teams,
each one responsible for
blowing 50-yard breaks
in the beach defenses
at Normandy.
If they failed,
it would jeopardize
the largest invasion
in history.
Early on the morning
of June 6, 1944,
the NCDUs pulled their
explosive-laden rubber boats
as close to the obstacles
as possible.
REYNOLDS: You knew what was
in back of you.
There was thousands
and thousands of ships
coming across the channel,
and if we didn't open up
the beach,
there was nowhere to go.
Some of the Army soldiers
advancing towards Normandy
looked at the hell
in front of them --
their fellow troops
being massacred
by German defenses
on Omaha Beach --
and they clung
to the obstacles
that Ken and the other
demolitioneers
had already wired.
Ken tried, sometimes in vain,
to get the soldiers to loosen
their suicide grips
on the German defenses.
We got about half of all
the obstacles charged,
and the Army decided that
they were going to come in.
You'd take a fuse lighter
and you'd pull it
and so you've got two minutes
to get out of here.
But some of them didn't move.
They were so scared that they
didn't know what to do.
Despite suffering a 52%
casualty rate,
the NCDU men, alongside
the Army combat engineers,
were able to blast
completely open
five of the sixteen corridors
assigned to them
and three more partial gaps.
But that was enough to allow
the landings at Omaha Beach
and the Allied forces to pursue
Hitler's army.
We were an expendable unit.
If you survived, "Oh, well and
good. Boy, you survived."
If you died, "Well, that's,
that's -- we're sorry."
Nobody knew who we were.
The only identification
we carried was on our helmet,
which says USN on the helmet.
So consequently we were there
by ourselves.
But we were there.
Very much so, we were there.
One of the reasons
that the NCDU remained
invisible to history
is that they would only serve
in two significant operations
in Europe:
D-Day and the invasion
of Southern France.
And once U.S. troops were
on the ground in Europe,
demolition work shifted
completely
to the war in the Pacific.
Battles in the Pacific Ocean
posed very different challenges
than the land war
now raging in Europe.
The fight against Japan
was all about U.S. amphibious
island landings.
American military leaders
decided
the best way to advance
towards Tokyo
was to implement
an island-hopping campaign,
skipping the enemy's largest
strongholds
while capturing other islands
that would allow them to
hopscotch across the Pacific.
It began in the fall of 1943
at a place called Tarawa.
This would be the first
major test
of the combined Navy/Marine
Corps ability
to capture an island fortress
in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean.
It would also be the place
where the need for underwater
demolition men
became tragically apparent.
[ guns firing ]
HAWKINS: Tarawa was the first
major amphibious assault
in the Pacific,
and they were using
photographic interpretation
of what the coral reefs
looked like
or what beaches they were going
to land on.
What they discovered
was that the boats
hit these coral reefs
far from the beach,
and many of the Marines
had jumped out.
Hundreds of Marines drowned.
So they knew that
they had to have
some sort of pre-assault
reconnaissance.
That's when they established
the two provisional UDTs.
UDT stands for Underwater
Demolition Team.
[ ** ]
[ gunshots ]
After the Marines suffered
more than 3,000 casualties
in the 76-hour battle
to take Tarawa,
UDTs would subsequently
be used
in advance of every major
amphibious landing
in the Pacific.
[ explosion ]
Unlike their NCDU brothers
at D-Day,
these men worked underwater.
History has dubbed them
"The Naked Warriors."
The Naked Warrior was the UDT
operator in the Pacific
who went to the beach just in
swim trunks, a KA-BAR knife,
a slate around his neck,
and a stubby pencil
to take a string line
reconnaissance of the beach,
taking depth soundings and then
recording it on their slates.
They were the naked warrior.
These barely-armed men
made a critical difference
in the victories at places like
Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
Other maritime commandos
operated
for the Office of Strategic
Services,
precursor of the CIA.
Their missions included
infiltration behind enemy lines
and sabotage.
Of all the forefathers
of the SEAL Teams,
the covert OSS Maritime Unit
pushed the limits
of technology.
The Lambertsen Lung that was
used by OSS Maritime
was very innovative in its time.
It was a closed-circuit
pure oxygen breathing apparatus
that essentially took
exhaled air
and spread it over
a bed of chemicals
that re-circulated it
back to the diver,
and this in essence created
a bubble-free diving apparatus.
They adopted the first usable
submersible from the British,
which was called
Sleeping Beauty.
It was called
a submersible canoe.
It was a one-man vessel
that could be propelled
on the surface
and then submerged
for the attack.
They developed a floating
mattress that was propelled.
And they used an electric drill
with a 12-volt battery
to propel two guys through
the water with it.
As the Underwater Demolition
Teams
prepared for an invasion
of mainland Japan,
President Harry Truman changed
the course of history.
[ explosion ]
Two atomic weapons ended
the war in the Pacific.
[ brass band playing
and crowd cheering ]
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
Tens of thousands
of proud American flags
dotted the square.
And as the day wore on,
hilarity reached a high peak.
As happens after war,
the military immediately
began downsizing.
The OSS Maritime Unit
would not survive.
Nor would the Scouts
and Raiders.
Nor the Naval Combat
Demolition Units.
All but a handful of UDTs
were disbanded.
Still, young men were drawn
to becoming Navy frogmen.
[ ** ]
MAN: I saw the movie The Frogmen
with Richard Widmark.
I was a very good athlete
at the time,
and I was a good swimmer.
MAN:
The movie was Frogmen.
I had said at the end
of that movie,
"That's what I'm going to do
when I get a little bit older."
MAN: The movie came out,
The Frogmen movie with
Richard Widmark,
and I thought, "Well, I'll just
go down and become a frogman."
That's when I went down
and joined the Navy.
Despite young men's ambitions,
the Underwater Demolition Teams
shrank
from 3,100 men at the end
of the World War to 200.
The nature of warfare
in the late 1940s
chilled from hot battles
against the axis of Germany,
Japan, and Italy
to the Cold War between
the democratic West
and the communist East.
[ ** ]
What some have described as
"hysteria"
gripped much of
the United States
over fear of Communist
infiltrators.
Called the Red Scare
because of adherents' devotion
to the flag of the USSR,
it prompted President Truman
to issue a "Loyalty Order"
requiring government employees
to be investigated
for adequate allegiance to
the United States of America.
[ explosion ]
In 1949, the Soviets
successfully tested
a nuclear weapon
and Communist forces led
by Mao Zedong overtook China.
Then, in 1950, the Cold War
boiled over.
[ ** ]
On Sunday, June 25th,
Communist forces attacked
the Republic of Korea.
It was the first major combat
of the Cold War.
When 75,000 Soviet-backed
North Korean troops
poured south into the Republic
of Korea, an American ally,
President Truman responded
by sending U.S. forces
to stop the advance
of the Communists.
The American military started
arriving in Korea within weeks,
and the Underwater Demolition
Teams
were in the fight once again.
Korea marked a transformation
for the UDTs.
This would be the first time
they moved inland
beyond their traditional Navy
maritime habitat.
But their missions were still
mostly nautical,
often keeping passageways
for American ships open.
Wonsan Harbor in North Korea
had been heavily mined
before U.S. and United Nations
navies enforced a blockade.
But it required constant
vigilance
from the Underwater Demolition
Teams
to keep it from being further
mined by the North Koreans.
A former WWII Scout and Raider
turned UDT man,
Dick Lyon, was assigned
a dangerous new mission
in Wonsan Harbor.
His commanding officer called
the 28-year-old lieutenant
into his office.
He said, "I have to have
the strongest swimmer.
I've just received an indication
that a new shallow-water mine
has been dispensed
inside of Wonsan Harbor.
You're going to be heavily armed
with a pair of 24-inch
bolt cutters,
and your job is to dive down
under the mine
and cut the mooring cable."
It was before we had any issued
scuba gear,
which is why I was freebie
going down with bolt cutters
-- kuh! --
and a KA-BAR.
So... [ chuckles ]
that's it.
Dick Lyon entered
the 36-degree water
with no experience or training
in mine warfare.
And no American had ever
confronted
this kind of mine before.
I swam down under the mine
with my bolt cutters,
making sure that I don't do
something really cuckoo
like break one of those horns,
because that's the last thing
I would ever remember.
Inside one of the mines
that Dick Lyon recovered
was its packing slip --
in Russian.
It's not clear why a receipt
would be inside a mine,
but it was clear: the Soviets
were supplying these weapons
to the North Koreans.
The Cold War was in full swing.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
It came on July 27, 1953.
While the Communists signed
at Panmunjom...
After three years of fighting,
the Korean Conflict ended
in a stalemate in 1953.
But once an armistice
was signed,
the United States entered
another period
of military evolution.
President Dwight Eisenhower,
the former general,
was careful not to dismantle
the military
as had happened after
World War II.
But he now based his strategies
around nuclear capabilities.
As the Strategic Air Command
patrolled the skies
24 hours a day
while nuclear submarines
plied the oceans,
the tides of warfare
were shifting
to the concept of mutually
assured destruction, or MAD.
The theory was that
if two opposing sides
each had enough nuclear
firepower
to destroy the other,
then neither would fire
their weapons
because there could be
no victor in such a conflict,
only equal, shared destruction.
The massive nuclear build-up
was designed to contain both
the Soviet Union and China,
but those adversaries
were now using
a very different strategy:
spreading Communism
through smaller guerrilla wars
in countries like Laos.
U.S. military and political
leaders were concerned
about what was known as
the domino effect:
one country falling
to Communism
triggering the next one
to fall.
So they were determined
to draw a line in the sand
without launching nuclear
missiles.
In 1958, an admiral named
Arleigh Burke
came up with a plan
for special warfare teams
that would be the blueprint
for what the U.S. Navy SEALs
would one day become.
MAN: Arleigh Burke was
the Chief of Naval Operations.
He felt that the services
had to be alert to
the changing national threat
and be able to create operations
that were something less than
nuclear war.
And so he was the one,
if anyone would be considered
the Papa SEAL,
Arleigh Burke would be
Papa SEAL.
Although Admiral Burke
conceived the plans
for unconventional
naval warfare
under the Eisenhower
administration,
it would be a new president
who would champion them.
[ ** ]
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: John F.
Kennedy settles into office
as the 35th president
of the United States.
Fourteen days before Kennedy's
inauguration,
the Soviets had announced
they would be advancing
"wars of liberation"
to spread Communism.
It was in this tense climate
that John Kennedy was about
to take Arleigh Burke's vision
of SEAL Teams
and make it a reality.
In the same speech that Kennedy
announced the plan
to have an American on the moon
by the end of the decade,
he also declared the need
for enhanced special warfare
capabilities,
laying out his vision
for the decade to come.
To expand rapidly
and substantially,
in cooperation with our allies,
the orientation
of existing forces
for the conduct
of non-nuclear war,
paramilitary operations,
and sub-limited or
unconventional wars.
A little more than seven months
after this speech,
the U.S. Navy established
SEAL Teams One and Two.
As is still the case,
odd-number teams are
on the West Coast
and even-number teams
on the East Coast.
Although the Underwater
Demolition Teams
would continue on with their
strictly maritime mission
of clearing beaches
for amphibious landings,
every man on the first
SEAL Teams
was pulled from the UDTs.
MAN:
We had heard rumors,
because they'd been working on
putting something together,
but we had absolutely
no knowledge
that anything was imminent.
And we didn't really know
what SEAL Team was going to be.
I'm not sure anybody did
at that point.
MAN: First of all,
I've got to tell you
I was like halfway through
my training
before I found out
there were SEALs there.
I had heard of them before,
but I thought they was
talking about
a little furry creature
that swam around in the harbor.
So I didn't really pay that much
attention to the SEALs.
I just wanted to be a frogman.
McCORMACK: The first time
I heard the term SEAL used
was in late 1961.
And most of us thought
that the SEALs
stood for South East
Asia Liaison.
Seemed to fit,
but we soon found out
it stood for sea, air, land
and would take us beyond
the capabilities of UDT.
A 29-year-old lieutenant named
Dave Del Giudice was selected
as the first commanding
officer of SEAL Team One.
Considering the sophisticated
operations
the teams have today,
these were humble beginnings.
DEL GIUDICE:
We were only 10 officers
and 50 enlisted at that time.
We didn't even have a building
to work out of.
So we had to start from scratch
and get everything organized --
not only equipment,
but a place to call home.
I had almost no guidance at
the beginning of SEAL Team One.
It was a question of trying
to learn as we went along
how best to fulfill the mission.
[ camera focusing and beeping ]
The mission would be Vietnam.
[ ** ]
Just 10 days after
SEAL Team One was formed,
Dave Del Giudice and one of
his officers, John Stockholm,
were on their way
to Southeast Asia
where guerrilla warfare
was already widespread.
Saigon's military was no match
for the Communist Viet Cong,
and the Kennedy administration
was concerned
that the V.C. would soon
vanquish
America's ally in the south.
The first SEALs in Vietnam
did not fight, they advised.
Although the teams arrived
in 1962,
they would not operate
in combat missions
in Vietnam until 1966.
Instead, they trained their
South Vietnamese counterparts
for CIA-planned missions
into North Vietnam.
The early '60s found
the SEALs and CIA
as partners in formulating
covert operations
against the Communist North.
The CIA picked the targets,
and the SEALs worked out
the military tactics.
[ ** ]
In addition to working with
the CIA on intelligence,
the SEALs collaborated
with technological experts.
In 1964, American scientists
began working on a secret
weapon for the SEALS.
The extraordinary new device?
A miniature nuclear bomb.
Known as "backpack nukes,"
these weapons were built
as an alternative
to the massively destructive
nuclear weapons
in the U.S. arsenal.
These little nukes
were called
B-54 Special Atomic Demolition
Munitions, or SADMs.
A handful of SEALs trained
to parachute in
with the 58-pound device,
infiltrate behind enemy lines,
and have the capability
of annihilating an entire
battlefield.
A pair of swimmers could also
insert into an enemy-held area,
plant the bomb,
and swim back out.
Despite their size,
some of these nuclear weapons
were more powerful than the one
dropped on Hiroshima.
Other than in testing,
the SADM was never detonated
during the 25 years it was
in the military's arsenal.
Some Team members interviewed
to train with the device
were uncomfortable working with
its potential devastation,
saying they'd rather go back
to Vietnam.
[ ** ]
Vietnam, 1966.
It would be here and now
that the SEALs would establish
their reputation
as true combat warriors.
The North Vietnamese were
successfully building
an insurgency in the South.
At the same time, the CIA
realized there was little hope
of creating meaningful
resistance in the North.
A detachment of SEALs
were sent in
to take direct action against
Viet Cong guerrillas
who had infiltrated the South.
Operationally, the SEALs worked
almost autonomously.
They would gather
their own intel
and plan their own
counterinsurgency missions.
They also chose their
own equipment.
MAN: It changed from being this
guy in the water with fins on
and a face mask and
a life jacket and a KA-BAR
to a guy with an AR-15,
M-16 machine guns
going in and going directly
against the enemy.
HAWKINS: The first SEALs
in combat
wore Marine Corps green uniforms
and camouflage uniforms
when they could get them.
And a lot of the later SEALs
wore camouflage tops and Levi's.
More comfortable.
They also wore pantyhose,
by the way,
to keep the leeches off of you
when you're going through
the canals.
NEWS ANNOUNCER:
These men are members of
one of the most unique military
organizations in history.
Behind these green faces
are men who have accepted
the challenge
of some of the most daring
assignments
given to American fighting men.
These are the Navy SEALs.
BRUHMULLER: The "men with
the green faces" was a term
that came out at the start
of Vietnam
because we used to use
this camouflage makeup
on our faces and everything,
and a lot of it was green
and black.
And it used to scare the living
daylights out of the Vietnamese
to have you pop up and wake
some guy up in his hooch
and be looking at him.
It almost put him in shock.
THORNTON:
Of course back then,
everybody knew that stuff
didn't work worth a damn,
and it'd wash off after you'd
sweated so much in the jungles,
it would be gone, and you'd be
the guys with the white faces
or the dark brown tan faces,
you know?
MARTIN: We started out
with the simple missions
just to kind of get used
to the terrain and acclimate.
You know, the weather there
and the bugs
and the creepy-crawlies
and the caimans.
God, those caimans.
You know, saltwater alligators,
they come out of nowhere.
MAN: I was put in charge of
a 14-man SEAL platoon
on the edge of the Rung Sat
Special Zone,
which controlled the seaborne
approaches to Saigon
from the South China Sea.
We had rules of engagement,
but there was nothing --
I recall no restriction
whatsoever.
In fact, it was a playground.
My SEAL platoon, we had
the weapons we needed,
we had helicopters to insert us,
boats to insert us
and extract us,
helicopters to shoot for us
if we got in trouble,
intelligence assets.
And basically it was,
"Okay, Lt. Woolard,
here's the Rung Sat.
Stop these guys from mining it.
Just go out and do it."
The name "Rung Sat" translates
as "Killer Swamp."
And in 1966, it was a dangerous
V.C. stronghold
located deep in South Vietnam.
Yet the enemy's strength
was hidden
in the shadows of the jungle,
in their ability to ambush.
Lt. Maynard Weyers led
a SEAL platoon
that was supposed to keep
the Viet Cong
from using this area
as a supply route.
Saigon thought that there was
a lot of stuff coming from there
and there weren't any
U.S. troops down there,
or there weren't many,
and so it was up to us
to go in there and find them
and destroy them.
Twenty-eight-year-old
Billy Machen was one of the men
in Lt. Weyer's platoon.
They had been through
hand-to-hand combat school
together and were
close friends.
Billy Machen was with a platoon,
and we were spending a lot of
time in this particular area.
We found several caches of rice
in buildings,
and so we destroyed them.
The helicopters were flying
above us.
They indicated they saw
a V.C. camp
and some boats and stuff.
They said that it would probably
be good to check it out,
and so I talked to the platoon
that Machen was in.
I said, "Hey, we need to go in
and check this out."
And Billy said to me, he said,
"Well, do you think we should?
They know we're around,
and this may not be too smart."
And I said, "Yeah,
I understand that," I said,
"but we'll have the helicopters
above us for support,
so it'll be okay."
They got about halfway
to the site,
and the helicopters called us
on the radio and said that,
"We're running out of gas,
we gotta go home."
And so they took off, and we
were halfway to the target.
And they kept going and they got
ambushed on the way in there,
and Machen got killed.
It was tough to take
because, first off,
he got killed in there,
and then, you know, we always
bring our people back.
One of the guys picked him up
and carried him out,
and it was touch-and-go,
but they were able to get back
to the boat
with everybody intact
except for Billy.
It was a tough loss.
Despite the SEALs' growing
reputation
as invincible commandos,
Billy Machen proved they were
quite mortal.
He was the first Navy SEAL
combat death
of the Vietnam War.
But as the teams expanded their
direct action missions,
he would not be the last.
A CIA-backed ongoing operation
would cost five SEALs
their lives
as they led local forces
and mercenaries on missions
to capture or kill
Viet Cong leadership.
Provincial Reconnaissance
Units, known as PRUs,
were run under the CIA's
infamous Phoenix Program,
an initiative to destroy
the Viet Cong Infrastructure.
When the North and South
separated,
the North kept a parallel
government in South Vietnam.
And the idea was to go kill off
this parallel government,
the province chief, the
governors, the tax collectors.
It kind of got a bad name of
being an assassination outfit.
WEYERS: We were trying
to gather intel
is one of the main things
you want to do.
If you can capture them
without killing them,
you're ahead of the game.
For most cases we were trying
to capture them.
I think there were 60 SEALs
totally that were involved.
And no one knew we were SEALs.
We had special ID cards
and were kept quiet,
and some of the reason is,
I was telling Army majors
what to do,
and little do they know that
it was an E-6 enlisted SEAL
that was telling them
what to do.
We had a lot of power,
and it was very effective
and also very dangerous.
According to the CIA,
the Provincial Reconnaissance
Units became
probably the most controversial
element of Phoenix.
The CIA used their existing
network of over 100
South Vietnamese district
intelligence committees
to compile lists of known
Viet Cong Infrastructure,
or VCI, operatives.
These targets' identities
were sent
to special forces, police,
and the PRUs.
The stated preferred goal was
to "neutralize" the VCI
on the list by capturing
and interrogating them.
But if they resisted, which
apparently thousands did,
they were killed.
There's a degree of it
that's uncomfortable
because I was told to not talk
about it for a long time.
At one point, I was an assistant
principal in a high school
and I didn't really want the
kids to know what my past was.
They knew I had been
in SEAL Team,
but I never really talked about
what I did.
There are parts that
I'm uncomfortable with.
I think any time that a warrior
starts talking about combat,
there's a part of that person
will go back into that,
and I don't want to go there.
SEAL contact with the enemy
was close and personal,
often operating just inches
from their targets.
Their direct actions
were considered
the most effective
anti-guerrilla operations
in the war.
The last SEAL platoon left
Vietnam on December 7, 1971.
By then, two-thirds
of America's troops
had been pulled out.
By early 1972,
the ground war was now
mostly the responsibility
of the South Vietnamese.
But a handful of SEAL advisors
did remain,
and men like Lt. Tom Norris
were still operating
on critical, dangerous
missions.
[ jet engine squeals ]
On April 2nd, 1972, a U.S.
electronics jamming plane
was shot down in an area
that was occupied
by thousands of North
Vietnamese troops.
Only the navigator, 53-year-old
Lt. Colonel Iceal Hambleton,
survived the crash.
Also, a crewman from another
plane, Lieutenant Mark Clark,
was alive on the ground
after being shot down.
Clark had been trying to rescue
Hambleton,
who possessed U.S. nuclear
weapons information --
secrets that would be
of great value to the enemy
if he were captured.
The mission to save Hambleton,
whose call sign was "Bat-21,"
was memorialized in a book
and movie.
When Tom Norris undertook
the rescue mission,
12 airmen had already died
trying to save Hambleton.
Rescue helicopters kept being
shot down
in the North Vietnamese
controlled area.
But Norris was able
to walk in
and snatch Lieutenant Clark
from the riverbed
where he was hiding.
Then Tom Norris headed back
into the heavily patrolled
enemy area
to save Lt. Colonel Hambleton.
I was talking to the
forward air controllers,
and they were telling me
that Hambleton's not making
his scheduled calls to them.
And when he is, he's not
very coherent
and they think he's losing --
he's not going to make it.
So I went, "Okay, we're gonna go
after him."
Tom Norris and his South
Vietnamese partner, Kiet,
traveled by sampan to blend in
with the local river traffic.
And we came out of the fog
just below the Cam Lo Bridge,
which was supposed to have been
disabled.
It was not.
But it told me exactly
where I was.
Tom didn't know it at the time,
but there were 30,000
North Vietnamese troops
crossing the Cam Lo Bridge.
From that, I had a pretty
good idea
where to start looking
for Hambleton
because the forward air
controllers had seen him
and they had been able to get
a location on him from that.
We got to an area where
I thought looked pretty good,
beached the sampan, climbed up
on the bank and started looking,
and the guy was 25 yards
off the bank,
sitting there in a bunch
of shrubbery, you know?
He saw me, and of course,
he lit up
and he started smiling
and waving.
So we loaded him on the sampan,
put a couple life vests on him,
put him at the bottom
of the sampan,
put a bunch of vegetation
on him.
Kiet got in the front,
I got in the back,
and we headed off downstream.
Racing towards their base,
the men were spotted
by the North Vietnamese,
but Norris and Kiet kept
paddling furiously
along the far side
of the river,
trying to outdistance
the enemy,
when they came under withering
machine-gun fire.
Norris called in air support.
The men finally reached
the safety of their camp.
Doctors later reported
that Hambleton,
who had lost 45 pounds
over his 11.5-day ordeal,
could not have lasted
much longer.
And, as it had for
over 10 years,
the Vietnam War bled on.
In Paris, President
Richard Nixon's
National Security Advisor,
Henry Kissinger,
was in peace talks with
the North Vietnamese.
To give him more leverage,
all military options were
on the table,
including a massive
amphibious landing
near the North Vietnamese
border.
Two of the few SEALs left
in country
undertook a reconnaissance
mission:
Lieutenant Tom Norris,
who six months earlier
made the Bat-21 rescue,
and Petty Officer Mike Thornton
were joined by three South
Vietnamese special operators.
Norris, who was scheduled
to go home in about a week,
hand-picked Mike Thornton
for the operation.
NORRIS: Mike's the kind of guy
that you think a SEAL should be.
He's the big, muscular,
you know, "I'm a SEAL."
The rest of us, in actuality,
most of them are my size.
They're not big guys at all.
They're tough average-sized
folks.
Tom and Mike's mission
called for them to reconnoiter
an enemy-held naval base
on the Cua Viet River
and see how heavily defended
it was.
Was it vulnerable to being
captured
for a possible amphibious
landing site?
Planned to go up with
the Vietnamese.
They were gonna drop us off
into small little rubber rafts
called Inflatable Boat, Small
-- IBSs.
And we were gonna paddle
into an area
and then offload from the IBSs
and swim into the beach
and do our patrol and then
come back out again.
The SEALs did not know it
at the time,
but their Vietnamese boat
driver inserted them
far north of their intended
drop point.
We slipped in the water
and swam to the beach.
Tommy sent me up over --
I had a Starlight scope
and went up over the beach,
looked both ways
to make sure the areas
were clear.
Couldn't see the Cua Viet,
but we brought everybody up
over the beach one at a time.
The men did not find the river
where they were supposed to be,
but as dawn was about to break,
they spotted something ominous.
We're looking around and Mike
says -- he called me Nasty.
He says, "Hey, Nasty, is that
what I think it is
up there on the hill?"
And I said, "If you're talking
about that tank, absolutely."
He said, "Okay. Just thought
I'd check." You know?
[ laughs ]
"We're fine where we are,
but you know?
They're up there, we're down
here. It's okay."
And it didn't end up that way.
There was a patrol that came
down the beach.
The officer that was with us
decided that they thought
it would be a good idea
to see if we could do
a body snatch.
He stood up behind
the sand dunes and yelled,
[ speaks in Vietnamese ]
It means, "Come here."
- Tried to call the guy over.
- Tried to call the guy over.
The guy's got an AK-47.
He's got this little...
And this guy's 100, probably
100 yards away from him and...
Things went from bad to worse.
You know, we got in
a tremendous firefight.
The South Vietnamese officer's
decision
to attempt to capture an enemy
soldier by shouting at him
ended up alerting
the North Vietnamese
to the Americans' presence.
The two SEALs and the three
South Vietnamese operators
found themselves overwhelmed
by a force of roughly 300.
They had dunes all up here.
So I would move up here
and shoot.
And then I'd fall back
and shoot.
And I'd roll over here and throw
a grenade over there,
and then I'd shoot.
But by me moving around,
it gave them a false pretense
as to how many people we had.
Thought we had
a lot more people.
And we did that a lot, a lot
of shooting and maneuvering.
After a three-hour firefight,
the North Vietnamese troops
began to pull back.
But the SEALs realized that
their enemy was not retreating,
merely repositioning
to surround them.
Tom Norris used his radio to
call in an American destroyer
to bombard their position.
"We're gonna be overrun.
This is what I need, and I want
you to fire for effect."
And of course to them,
that means you're throwing
rounds right on top of us.
And the guy comes back
and he says,
"Understand fire for effect?"
And I said, "Absolutely.
Put it on us."
And he said, "Are you sure?"
And I said, "Get it in here!"
And they did.
I mean, they brought it in.
Thank goodness.
But, I mean, it was
a long time coming.
As soon as I said,
"Mike, we're extracting,"
we started leapfrogging
out of there,
and I'm the last guy up there.
So I'm covering those guys until
it's my turn to leapfrog out.
And that never happened,
because I got shot.
I mean, I knew I'd been hit.
But I didn't -- I didn't know
how bad.
So I'm scrounging around
to find my rifle
to try and, you know,
shoot back.
And I'm seeing tunnel vision
come in,
and I'm fighting, going,
"No, no, no, no, no, no!"
Because I need to shoot.
I mean, I need to cover my guys.
And, boom, I went out.
Later on, I see Dang coming back
by himself,
and I said, "Where's Tom?"
He said, "He's dead."
And I said, "Stay here."
They both grabbed me and I said,
"Stay here. I'll go get Tommy."
I thought he was dead,
but I wasn't going to leave him
behind.
That was the thing, that we
never leave anybody behind.
So I sure wasn't going to be
the first one.
When Mike got to Tom's
position,
it was being overrun
by the enemy.
I eliminated several other guys
coming over the top.
Then I picked him up
and started running,
and that's when
the first round hit.
And we got blown into the sky.
And I fell and I saw him flying
off my shoulders.
When I picked up Tommy, he said,
"Mike, buddy."
And that's when I knew he was
back alive.
I had blood all over my face.
I mean, my brain was hanging out
and I don't know what all.
Bad guys just shooting at us,
and I could see rounds
hitting the water going,
"Cha-cha-ching! Cha-cha-ching!
Cha-cha-ching!"
And pretty soon, I'm kind of
losing consciousness again,
and Mike's trying to pull me
out to sea.
Shot through his leg and hit
with shrapnel in his back,
Mike Thornton was now swimming
two injured comrades
out to sea:
Tom Norris,
who was barely alive,
and one of the South Vietnamese
operators
who'd also been shot
and couldn't swim.
Mike carried them both
for several hours
before they were finally
picked up.
The doctor gave him no chance
at all to live.
His first operation was almost
19 and a half hours long.
Nearly a year after saving
Tom Norris's life,
Mike Thornton would be awarded
the Medal of Honor,
America's highest
military honor.
But Norris was still
in the hospital.
When Mike was to receive
his medal, of course,
he wanted me to be there.
We went to the hospital
and said,
"You know, I'd like to be able
to be at this ceremony."
And they felt that was --
I mean, medically, I wasn't
supposed to be doing that.
So they said,
"No, you can't do that."
Of course, that's not
the thing to tell...
you just don't tell a SEAL
he can't.
You know, it's not a word
in our vocabulary.
And so we...
[ laughs ]
I just went up there
in the middle of the night.
[ laughs ]
Yeah. Well, he did.
Mike kind of kidnapped me
out of the hospital.
THORNTON:
The Navy got so angry at me
because I ended up keeping Tommy
for four days
instead of one day.
I told Admiral Zumwalt, I didn't
leave him in North Vietnam,
and I sure as hell wasn't going
to leave him in the hospital
on that great day.
I'll never forget
President Nixon said,
"Mike, what can I do for you?"
And I said, "Well, if you could
break this medal in half
and give the other half to the
young man standing behind me,
because he saved my life, too."
Four years later,
President Gerald Ford
awarded Tom Norris his own
Medal of Honor
for the rescue of
the two downed airmen.
Once he and Mike Thornton both
had received the medal,
it would be the only time
in modern history
that one recipient had saved
the life of another.
Neither one of us feel
that we deserve our medals.
He may think I deserve mine
because he's sitting
next to me now.
But did I ever think
about it twice
about going back to get Tommy?
No, because I knew
that he would've done
the same thing for me.
And that's what type of trust
that you have to have
within each other to do
missions like that.
The last SEAL advisor left
Vietnam in March of 1973.
With another war ending,
the special warfare units
were once again imperiled
by budgets and bureaucracy.
MAN: The worst time I can
remember is post-Vietnam.
We actually took United States
Navy SEALs out of the teams
and put them back in the fleet.
At that time
the brain power said,
"Well, we probably don't need
that much special operations."
That was a terrible mistake,
and a lot of guys suffered
for it.
So I think the darkest time
in the 45 years
I've been associated
with this community
was post-Vietnam just because
the SEALs weren't valued.
Funding for the military,
including the SEALs
and Underwater Demolition Teams,
dropped off quite a bit.
And there was a very low period
where it was difficult
to get the supplies you needed
to even train properly.
We got a lot of training done,
but we didn't get a lot
of shooting done
because we didn't have the money
for bullets at the time.
Skills atrophied or were not
developed with the times.
That went on for a number
of years after Vietnam.
But special operators would
still be needed.
[ crowd chanting
in foreign language ]
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter
approved an Army Special Forces
rescue of 53 Americans
being held hostage at
the U.S. Embassy in Iran.
The rescue mission, however,
met with disaster
when a helicopter collided
with a C-130 troop carrier
that was refueling.
Eight servicemen were killed
and several others injured.
In order to avoid another
catastrophe like Desert One,
the military created
two new organizations:
a Joint Special Operations
Command
to coordinate all special
warfare missions
and SEAL Team Six, the Navy's
dedicated counter-terror
and hostage rescue unit.
They chose the number six
to make the Soviets believe
there were five other teams
working against them.
[ shouts indistinctly ]
[ automatic gunfire ]
While now considered the elite
of the elite,
SEAL Team Six's first combat
mission met with tragedy.
[ explosion ]
Early this morning, forces from
six Caribbean democracies
and the United States
began a landing or landings
on the island of Grenada
in the Eastern Caribbean.
When President Ronald Reagan
gave the go-ahead
for Operation Urgent Fury,
he expressed concern
for the safety of 600 U.S.
medical students on Grenada.
But the underlying concerns
were, once again,
about the spread of Communism.
The country's Marxist prime
minister had been gunned down
by even more radical members
of his Cuban-influenced
administration.
Grenadian military forces
had been augmented
by Cubans and other
Soviet Bloc troops.
Reagan saw the prospect
of another Communist toehold
in the Americas as unacceptable
and ordered the American
military to capture the island
and restore constitutional
democracy.
While this was America's first
major combat operation
since leaving Vietnam, it was
planned in just three days.
SEAL Team Six was part of
the rushed operation.
Twelve teammates undertook an
ill-planned parachute insertion
in heavy winds.
Intelligence failed to consider
daylight savings time,
and a daytime mission faded
into night.
The men were dropped
in the wrong place.
Ten-foot swells
and a driving rain
dragged the men
and their parachutes.
Four SEALs perished that night.
Other SEALs were able to save
the Commonwealth governor,
who went on to stabilize
the country.
And the mission in Grenada
was hailed by President Reagan
as a triumph over Communism.
But the operation exposed
the need
for better Joint Special Ops
communications
and cross-service training.
The SEAL community did some
soul-searching.
If it was a training exercise,
we would've cancelled this.
But we can't. This is
real world; in you go.
And so you look at those things,
and you talk about it
in very gloves-off terms
not to assign blame,
but how do we train ourselves
or how do we prevent this
from happening again?
Because had we made
the better decision,
this would not have taken place.
We wouldn't have lost
those people.
[ automatic gunfire ]
The SEALs had been fighting
Communism
since their inception.
But the threats were shifting
in the 1980s.
There were Islamist militants
who held Americans hostage
in Iran.
Then the war on drugs flared
and President George H.W. Bush
sent the U.S. military,
including the Navy SEALs,
to capture Panamanian drug lord
Manuel Noriega
in December 1989.
Six weeks before that,
however...
[ jackhammer pounding ]
the Cold War took a turn.
The Berlin Wall
came shattering down.
[ cheering and applause ]
Much of the history
of the 20th century
is written in the struggle
for dominion
between communism
and democracy.
There is no more enduring
symbol of the Cold War
than of the Berlin Wall...
[ people shouting and singing ]
even in pieces.
Erected in 1961
as a permanent border
between East and West Berlin,
it was designed to keep
East German defectors
from leaving the Communist Bloc
and heading West.
[ trumpet blaring
and people cheering ]
Although the wall was down...
[ bomb squeals and explodes ]
the U.S. military continued
preparing
against its traditional enemy,
not knowing the extent
of an ongoing Soviet threat.
[ ** ]
So the men just kept training
-- Cold War training.
Foxtrot Bravo,
this is Alpha Charlie.
We worked with the Norwegians
and the Germans,
and we did crazy stuff like
the border of the Soviet Union
on skis.
And we would go out and patrol
for days and days,
living in the Arctic,
below zero,
thinking we were going to stop
the Soviet invasion?
I don't know.
But as the threat of war
between the Soviet Union
and the United States declined,
a new enemy was on the rise:
al-Qaeda.
In its first attack on America,
the terrorist organization
bombed New York's World Trade
Center in February, 1993,
killing 6 and wounding 1,000.
This was the same year that
Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa,
urging his followers
to kill American soldiers
stationed in Somalia
as part of a United Nations
humanitarian mission.
bin Laden provided military
training to Somali tribes
opposed to the UN's
intervention.
My first actual combat mission
was in Somalia in 1993.
I was a member of Task Force
Ranger,
which was a Joint Special
Operations task force
that went overseas to Somalia
to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid,
who happened to be
one of the warlords
in control of the area
at the time.
[ men chanting and clapping ]
They were taking control
of the food,
which was causing famine
for a lot of people.
Innocent civilians were dying.
[ ** ]
And before we had actually
deployed over there,
they had actually killed a group
of Pakistani soldiers
and massacred them.
So our job was to go in there
and try and capture him.
I was part of a small SEAL
sniper team of four guys,
very close-knit,
and our specialty
was sniping off of helicopters.
We thought that that's the skill
set they needed in Somalia.
When we got on the ground,
though,
it was a different story.
The Army was in charge,
rightfully so --
we were only four SEALs --
and they decided to use
their guys in those roles.
So we just took it upon
ourselves to find a job.
You know, that's what SEALs do.
We weren't just going to sit
on the cots at the airport.
Rick Kaiser and his teammates
from SEAL Team Six
successfully carried out
several "snatch and grab"
missions in Mogadishu,
intent on capturing Aidid's
top lieutenants
on their way to the warlord
himself.
The SEAL utility vehicle, right,
was our transportation,
even though it was not armored
at all.
It was very dangerous.
So anyway, we went in to reload
our magazines, get some water,
and get ready to go out,
and I went to the bathroom.
And when I came back, all the
guys were in the Humvee already,
ready to go, except for one
place: the driving seat.
And I looked at them and I go,
"You bastards," you know?
Because that is the worst place
to be
is in the driver's seat,
because you can't shoot.
You gotta just drive.
You're just like, wide open,
especially with no door
and no armor or nothing.
But they all looked at me,
and I could just see them,
a couple of guys were behind
the sandbags going like this...
laughing at me.
I was like, man, it didn't pay
to go to the bathroom.
So before the big battle
on October the 3rd,
we had already conducted,
I think, six other missions.
All of which gave us, I think,
overconfidence
that we could do whatever
we wanted in the city,
that the enemy was not
that fierce.
But unfortunately, you know, as
events unfolded on October 3rd,
when we were doing another
typical mission
to go into a city,
to a hotel in the heart
of the bad-guy territory,
one of our helicopters
got shot down.
Then Islamist militants shot
down a second U.S. helicopter.
But the men trying to rescue
the embattled Americans
also got trapped.
Ninety-nine U.S. servicemen
were now stranded in the middle
of the city,
surrounded by thousands
of armed fighters.
This operation was memorialized
in the book and movie
called Black Hawk Down.
It was not widely reported
that four Navy SEALs worked
with Army Rangers
to rescue their downed
soldiers.
So we were in a gun battle
from about noon that day
until noon the next.
[ gunfire and shouting ]
We took wounded guys in
and we went back out
and fought some more,
took some more back in, and then
we went out a third time
to rescue the guys
in the helicopter.
And we did.
We finally got them out.
Although 18 Americans died
in perhaps the fiercest
firefight since Vietnam,
every SEAL who was in Mogadishu
earned a Silver Star
for valor in combat.
But the brutality of the battle
was broadcast
and the U.S. withdrew.
Known as the Mogadishu Effect,
fear of public humiliation
underscored many future U.S.
foreign policy decisions.
But a loss for America was
taken as a victory by al-Qaeda.
What we found out later is that
that was really a test bed
for al-Qaeda
and other Islamic militants
for the future,
because what they saw us do
was when the going got tough and
Americans got killed, we left.
So it really gave them
the courage
to carry on and fight us, you
know, all the way up to 9/11.
[ explosion ]
September 11, 2001, was a new
generation's Pearl Harbor.
[ engines humming ]
[ explosion ]
But after that deadly attack
on America in 1941,
there was an obvious enemy and
a nation to hold responsible.
[ sirens blaring ]
Sixty years later,
9/11 was different.
Terror had no government.
[ siren blaring
and fire truck horn honking ]
I was in the Operations
Department at Dev Group
when 9/11 happened.
We were standing in our
operations center,
watching it happen
on the news.
MAN: I was in the Pentagon
when the airplanes flew into it.
I was where every good team guy
needs to be
when the caca hits the fan --
I was in the gym working out.
And I heard the fire alarm
go off.
But we'd had numerous
such drills,
and I thought it was a drill,
so I casually got dressed.
And I went out, and as I
stepped out I saw
25,000 of my closest friends
leaving the building,
going down to the river.
"What the hell happened?"
They said, "We think an airplane
hit the building."
[ sirens blaring ]
My response was I gotta find
my boss, he needs me now.
So I fought my way back
into the Pentagon,
and was inside the Pentagon
and actually sitting right there
with the Secretary of Defense
and my boss
while they were trying to figure
out what the heck was going on
and how many more airplanes
were going to come in
and were going to hit what.
OSMAN:
I didn't even believe it.
"What do you mean
they're hijacking planes?"
He goes, "There's terrorists
that have hijacked planes,
and they're crashing them
into buildings."
And I'm like, "What?!"
[ sirens blaring ]
Our intelligence agency,
we're tracking terrorist
organizations,
and it just felt like it was
just a matter of time.
You had already had some of
these attacks overseas:
the barracks in Saudi Arabia,
the bombings at the embassies
in northern Africa.
Then you had the USS Cole.
It was like, these things
are coming more quickly.
It changed the course.
OSMAN: So I was a sniper
at that time.
I was the ordnance rep,
so I was in charge of all
of the platoon's firearms,
all of its weapon systems.
So I said, "Sir, what do you
need from me?"
And he goes, "Obviously
you've heard.
You've seen what's going on
downstairs.
We're packing, so load up
everything."
And I just turned to him
and I said,
"What are we -- packing
for what?"
And he looked right back
and goes,
"We're going to war.
Take everything."
(chanting)
USA! USA!
I can hear you!
[ crowd cheers and whistles ]
The rest of the world hears you.
And the people --
[ loud cheers and whooping ]
And the people who knocked
these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.
[ loud exclaiming and cheers ]
What changed on 9/11
for us?
I don't think we realized it
until probably two years
into it,
that it changed us from
a reactive force
into a long-term, long-range
fighting force.
Whereas before, we would go for
quick missions, a week or two,
go rescue some hostages,
go take down a ship
that's been taken over,
that kind of thing,
and we'd be home and happy
and everybody'd be, you know...
But now, we were like,
this is the long haul.
[ ** ]
OSMAN: Fourth or fifth day
after 9/11,
got a brief from
the commanding officer
telling us that we had been
selected to go overseas.
He'd been given National Command
Authority
to send one SEAL platoon, and he
was going to send our platoon.
And, like, you are happy
that you're going,
but you feel bad for the guys
in the other platoon.
And I remember leaving,
and I was like,
"Oh, man, sorry you didn't get
picked."
And one guy looked at me,
he's like, "[bleep] you, dude."
We were allowed to go home
for one night.
We basically got about seven
or eight hours off to go home
and say bye to our families.
And we filled out last will
and testaments.
We filled out life insurance
paperwork.
We filled out power of attorneys
for all of our families.
So it was the real deal.
KAISER: It took about four weeks
after 9/11
before we knew what
the government wanted to do.
We just kept training like we
normally trained and got ready.
The general consensus
of the population
is that SEALs hide in a cave
somewhere.
When the bat signal goes up,
they show up -- doo-do-do! --
and they save the day!
And then when they get done,
they go back
and they attach their feet
to the ceiling
and they go back to hanging
upside down.
Not really the case.
What they're doing is they're
going back to training.
Training is as close
to realistic combat conditions
as is allowable.
[ gunfire ]
You always shoot live rounds
in the SEAL teams.
There's very little blank
training.
If there is, it's only just
to kind of get some of
the basic moves down
before everything turns
into live fire.
And so all the rockets are real,
all the rounds are real.
What it's fostering in you
is your ability to react
under extreme adversity
and to be able to clearly think
under a lot of stress.
So, you know, when bombs are
going off and rounds are flying
and, you know, you hear
"man down,"
and next thing you know,
you gotta do buddy drags,
and you're doing
all of these things,
what that is doing is allowing
you to remember
that you have to stay focused
and the last thing you're
supposed to do is panic.
[ gunfire ]
The Taliban must act,
and act immediately.
They will hand over
the terrorists...
or they will share
in their fate.
Shortly after 9/11,
SEAL Team 3's Echo Platoon
headed to an unknown
destination in the Middle East.
We were the first
SEAL platoon
to deploy from the United States
that I'm aware of.
Well, we didn't know
where we were even going.
It wasn't until we had
gotten to altitude
that our Officer In Charge asked
one of the air crew,
"Hey, where's this plane
even going?"
And he was like, "We were told
we're flying you guys
to Kuwait."
We're like, "All right,
Kuwait it is," you know?
What are you gonna do?
You're not gonna leave,
you know what I mean?
[ laughs ]
The men had hoped
they were going
to the heart of the fight
in Afghanistan,
but their disappointment
would soon diminish.
Chris and his teammates were
assigned a maritime mission
called VBSS -- Visit, Board,
Search, and Seizure --
of smuggling vessels.
A couple of weeks into
their deployment,
a drone in their area
identified a tier one target
related to Osama bin Laden's
earlier terrorist attacks.
It was the ship
that al-Qaeda used
to smuggle the explosives
into Africa
for the two U.S. embassy
bombings
that killed over 200 people.
And so they wanted that ship
taken down,
and our platoon was given
the green light to do it,
and we were just like, "Wow!"
No one says anything, right?
And all of a sudden, the joking,
the grab-assing goes away
and it's game time.
So, you know, unzip the bags,
put all the gear on,
press check the weapons.
Make sure there's a round
in the chamber.
And we raced up at 40 miles an
hour in the middle of the night,
hooked and climbed up the side
of the ship,
jumped over the railing.
We probably had about
four or five people
that had already made it
over the railing
and we were setting
a security perimeter
when the doors opened and people
started coming out.
At that moment, really,
we couldn't even wait
for the rest of the platoon,
so we started the assault on the
ship with four or five people.
There was a -- a seriousness
about what we were doing
that I hadn't experienced
before.
The professionalism rose
to the challenge,
and all of us just never really
said anything,
never talked, nothing;
we just operated.
So that ship takedown took
about three minutes.
[ ** ]
In October 2001,
SEALs were among
the first U.S. forces
to set foot in Afghanistan
as part of a true
Joint Special Forces Operation.
There were a lot of folks who
initially asked the question:
what are SEALs doing
in Afghanistan?
Well, SEAL is an acronym
for sea, air, land.
That's just how you get to work.
SPARKS: I can tell you
the first time
that I ever touched down
in Afghanistan,
it was a very surreal feeling
and experience.
You know, you feel like
you've trained
and worked so hard and so long
for something,
and now you're --
the time is here.
You know, everything you --
all your blood, sweat, and tears
that you gave in training,
you're gonna get ready
to test that overseas
somewhere for real.
But it was, you know, exciting
and a little bit scary
all at once.
You know, I landed at night
shortly after September 11th,
and it was... the time had come.
[ ** ]
Although Osama bin Laden
would not claim responsibility
for the 2001 attacks on America
until 2004,
U.S. intelligence quickly
assigned blame to al-Qaeda.
They had also known
that the Taliban,
fundamentalist Islamists
based in Afghanistan,
had been harboring al-Qaeda
agents for years.
[ gunfire and indistinct
shouting ]
Early in 2002, the U.S.
and coalition partners
launched Operation Anaconda,
the first major initiative
to capture or kill
al-Qaeda fighters
and their Taliban supporters
in Afghanistan.
Before the operation began,
U.S. intelligence agencies
concentrated satellites
and other spy technologies
on the valley
where the initial attacks
would be staged.
Despite focusing what one
officer at the time called
"every national asset"
on the Shah-i-Kot Valley,
the intelligence estimates
turned out to be
wildly off the mark.
Rather than 1- or 200
al-Qaeda fighters
concentrated mostly in the
villages on the valley floor,
there were probably
several times that,
and a lot of the positions
they occupied
were in the high ground
overlooking the valley
and therefore overlooking
the landing zones
that the helicopters carrying
the U.S. infantry
were going to land on.
A Delta Force Lt. Colonel,
Pete Blaber,
was in charge of Advanced
Force Operations.
Blaber's gut told him
that it was important to get
U.S. eyes on the ground before
the main assault force went in.
Blaber had two of his own
reconnaissance teams
and requested a third
from SEAL Team Six.
The five-man unit
was code-named Mako 31.
It was led by a SEAL
reconnaissance expert
named Goody.
Blaber pulled Goody aside
and told him,
"The success or failure
of your mission
will predicate the success or
failure of the entire operation.
You have to get to your
observation post by H-Hour,"
the time that the operation
officially starts.
Goody was determined not to let
Blaber down,
so he told them that if they
were falling behind schedule,
they would just keep dropping
gear if necessary
until there were five naked guys
with guns
standing on the O.P. at H-Hour.
Shortly after dawn
on March 1, 2002,
Goody sent the other two SEAL
snipers on his team
to scout their pre-determined
observation post.
When they finally poked
their heads over the rocks
to take a look, they got
the shock of their lives.
Right there was a tent occupied
by al-Qaeda fighters
on the very spot
that they had wanted to put
their observation post.
Everything changed when
Mako 31 moved into position.
In addition to discovering
enemy fighters,
the SEALs also identified
a DShK heavy machine gun
on the ridgeline,
an anti-aircraft weapon with
a range of about 1,000 meters.
That was the exact path that
the infantry assault helicopters
were going to fly
in just a day or so
to start Operation Anaconda.
Airborne surveillance
had completely missed
both the men and their
equipment.
FITZGERALD:
Until you're on the ground
and until you see it
from your own eyes
and choreograph everything
in your mind,
you have to have operators
on the ground
to pull the sensitive things off
that we need to do.
Goody's plan was to wait until
just before Operation Anaconda
was to begin before assaulting
the al-Qaeda tent.
This would diminish the risk
of other enemy fighters
in the area
being alerted to their
presence.
The SEALs took up a position
behind some rocks
only about 20 meters from
the al-Qaeda tent and watched.
NAYLOR:
As the SEALs waited,
an al-Qaeda fighter
emerged from the tent
and wandered over
towards their position.
The fighter let out a shout
to raise the alarm,
and at that point, Goody gave
the order to attack.
[ gunfire ]
The SEALs came over
the ridgeline firing.
Somebody inside the tent
fired off an entire clip.
They took the tent under fire.
The SEALs killed two
of the five al-Qaeda men
and wounded a third.
Goody's team called in
an AC-130
circling above the firefight
to take out the remaining
al-Qaeda fighters,
ending the threat
to U.S. helicopters
which would enter the valley
less than two hours later.
FITZGERALD: Our guys made
the right decisions.
And they took care
of the threat.
If they had not been there
at the right place
at the right time,
the beginning of this event
would have been a lot different
than it was.
Diverting a disaster?
Yeah, probably.
[ ** ]
In the first phases of
Operation Enduring Freedom,
SEALs carried out 75
of these special reconnaissance
and direct action missions.
While Team members would fight
in Afghanistan
for the duration...
early on,
their commander in chief
opened a new battlefront
against a familiar enemy.
[ rippling explosions ]
The SEALs would, once again, be
amongst the first to operate.
March 2003:
the United States was poised
to invade Iraq.
Congress had granted
President George W. Bush
the power to wage war
after the Bush administration
argued
that Saddam Hussein had failed
to disclose his arsenal
of Weapons of Mass Destruction,
or WMDs.
The administration
also accused Hussein
of forming alliances
with al-Qaeda.
Former U.S. Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld
later admitted that
they eventually discovered
the intelligence underlying
their WMD estimates was false.
No WMDs would be found in Iraq.
And confiscated Iraqi documents
would later reveal
that there were no direct ties
between al-Qaeda and Hussein's
government.
But in March of 2003,
all branches of the
United States military
were preparing
for the offensive.
[ ** ]
On the eve of the Iraq
invasion,
the SEALs undertook what was,
at the time,
the most complex operation
in their history.
Their mission: to capture
Iraq's enormous southern
oil supply
without allowing an economic
or environmental disaster
as had happened in 1991.
It was considered essential
that the oil supply be taken
over before the invasion began,
before the Iraqis
could destroy it.
MAN: The first Gulf War,
the first thing that
Saddam Hussein did
was blow up his southern
oil infrastructure.
And what that did was dump
millions of gallons of oil
into the northern Arabian Gulf,
which created massive
environmental impact.
Over a decade later,
it was the SEALs
who were tasked with keeping
Saddam Hussein
from destroying the country's
oil supply
as well as the entire region's
environment and economy.
The way that oil flows
off southern Iraq
is it gets pumped from this
large pumping/metering station
to two nodes, which you can
think of as almost faucets,
on the very end of
the Al-Faw Peninsula.
And it's through those faucets
that oil runs
to these two terminals,
KAAOT and MABOT.
And these are massive -- each
one is about a mile in length.
If the Iraqis had a chance
to destroy
any one of five critical
points,
it would coat the Northern
Arabian Gulf with oil.
We had to have boots
on the ground
in each one of those
five locations
at exactly the same time.
And so we started our planning
months in advance
of how we would put SEALs
onboard these two terminals
in the event that there may be
rigged explosive devices.
We were getting intelligence
from different places
that suggested that there were
arms and explosive devices
on at least one if not two
of the terminals.
What started out as a much
smaller isolated mission
expanded into what became
a very large mission,
all the night before the war
started.
The day before H-Hour,
it had just oil workers on it,
so at that point
it was just going to be
go and secure it and get
those people off of it.
Kind of no big deal, and then
we'd hold it and secure it
and turn it over to someone else
so no one could get on it.
And the day before, we noticed
all of a sudden
all those guys were getting
off-loaded
and they were bringing
Iraqi bad guys.
And they were bringing them on,
they had an anti-aircraft piece
that they brought on.
It changed quickly.
The Teams' nightly
reconnaissance had revealed
that tugboats would patrol the
perimeter of the oil platforms,
cruising a long circuit around
each of the terminals.
There were also large rings
of light
from searchlights on the MABOT
and KAAOT.
HELLER: The plan was we would
get all of our assets
outside the light ring
of the terminal
and we would wait for that tug
to go around.
And as soon as the tug
passed us,
we'd send three RHIBs
carrying SEALs
and a Polish Special Forces team
very quickly through the light
underneath the platform,
and from there, the guys would
scale up.
The operation began at
10:00 p.m. on March 20, 2003.
More SEALs were deployed
for this one mission
than ever operated together
during the entire Vietnam War.
We had helicopters
where I was overhead
looking at it with the FLIR,
which, you know,
I can see what was going on
at like 2,000 meters.
And then once we were up close,
circling the thing, providing
security as snipers.
And then I was up there also
working the radio,
pushing the timeline along and
the execution checklist along.
HELLER: Clockwork was
so important.
It was so important
to get guys there.
Every part of the mission
was so interlocked.
And if someone got there early,
there was the potential
to put folks in danger.
Until those guys were feet
on the deck on that thing,
anything that moved
or acted stupid on it
was gonna get shot by myself
or my partner in the other
helicopter.
The SEALs successfully got
aboard the platforms,
safely secured their prisoners
as well as the weapons
they discovered.
The entire operation took
about 45 minutes.
One thing we know is that
unlike in the first Gulf War,
we prevented the destruction
of millions and millions
of gallons of oil.
We prevented that
environmental disaster.
Within hours, the United States
invaded Iraq.
[ explosions ]
The invasion immediately
toppled the regime
of President Saddam Hussein,
who quickly went into hiding.
Although he was the number one
fugitive in the country,
there were over 50
top-tier targets
on the Most Wanted List.
So a group of soldiers
came up with the idea
of a deck of cards,
ranking the missing outlaws
by the face value of the cards.
The deck of cards, well, they
started at the ace of spades,
which was Saddam Hussein,
and then they went down,
you know, to the twos down
on the bottom somewhere
before they started the rest
of the blacklist.
And that's how we knew them,
you know?
It was easier than pronouncing
their name.
SEAL Teams and other
special forces
started taking cards
"out of play."
There was only one woman
featured in the deck.
Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash was
better known by her nickname:
Mrs. Anthrax.
The Five of Hearts was a female
who was part of Saddam's --
he was her main, like, chemical
biological weapons gal.
She was moving around
quite a bit
from safe house to safe house.
And the intel that we got on
her, we needed to move fast.
And we figured that
the best time to take her
would be while she was
in a vehicle
when her security detail was
smaller than it normally was.
[ ** ]
We had such a small
amount of time
for mission planning
on that one.
And that's the magic of
the SEAL Teams, that's --
that's just the way we do it,
you know?
If it needs to be done,
we'll do it.
In December of 2003,
U.S. troops and a Special
Operations Joint Task Force
captured the Ace of Spades.
But the arrest of President
Saddam Hussein
hardly ended the war in Iraq.
[ automatic gunfire ]
As it persisted, more SEALs
were engaged in Operation
Iraqi Freedom
than in any other war
in their history.
SEAL Teams adapted to being
unconventional warriors
in a conventional war.
For the first time, they truly
fought side by side
with their comrades in the Army
and Marine Corps.
It started in a place
called Ramadi,
center of the insurgency.
[ gunfire ]
Al-Qaeda in Iraq declared
this city to be its capital.
When we got into town,
we began to interface with
the conventional forces --
the Army and the Marines.
They're the ones who own
the battlespace, not us.
And so we very humbly said,
"Hey, look, you guys own
this battlespace.
You tell us how we can help
serve you.
What's going on here?
Where are your bases?
Where are your outposts?
What's this area over here?"
And there was an entire area --
I mean, I remember this
distinctly.
They said, "This whole area
right here
is al-Qaeda controlled
battlespace.
Don't go there.
You can't go there --
or go there, but nobody
will come get you."
We got him over here.
In the past, the SEALs often
did not work very well
with conventional forces.
SEALs had their mission, and it
was like, "This is our mission.
We can't tell you what it is and
we're gonna go do our thing."
And our task unit commander
had a much different philosophy
on things.
We said, "What are you doing?
What can we do to help?"
And guess what?
We integrated and interfaced
with them,
and it was -- it was a mutually
beneficial relationship, right?
Rather than us having
to coordinate
how to drive all our guys
into a mission,
well, the Army guys would
give us a ride... in tanks!
I mean, that's a heck of a lot
better than a dang Humvee.
Andrew Paul was a lieutenant
with a task force
of 32 SEAL snipers.
[ ** ]
[ indistinct shouting ]
[ explosions ]
As something would happen,
we would come in
and we would go grab these guys.
Or we'd go out and do
an overwatch operation,
and these guys with masks
and guns would come out
to attack an Army patrol,
and, you know, our snipers
would whack all four or five
of those guys all at once.
Over the course of six months,
we had over 360 confirmed kills.
That's just our task unit.
That area that was al-Qaeda
controlled battlespace,
we owned it by the time we left.
When you're interacting
with the local populace,
you are an ambassador
of America.
And, you know, not everybody
feels that way.
But I felt that was important,
so I would talk to them.
I'd ask them where
they were from.
I'd tell them about my family
and where I'm from
and why I was here.
They'd first probably see
these guys come in
with all this gear on and, I
mean, they would be very afraid.
And that's not what
we're there to do.
My idea wasn't that we were
there to go terrorize Iraqis.
My idea was that we're there to
go relieve the country of Iraq.
You can only shoot so many guys.
You can only, you know,
blow up so many things.
You can only do so many
missions.
You know, sooner or later,
our mission really
is to give this back
to the people of Iraq.
[ ** ]
When people think of SEALs,
they think of them kicking in
doors,
doing the very offensive things.
Yeah, that's true, but I think
where the nation gets the most
bang for the buck
is in that diplomatic
problem-solving type guy
who can work with partners
to expand their capabilities
and their capacity
and prevent wars.
There are a lot of guys
who we can train
to go shoot people in the face,
but what SEALs
and Green Berets
and Special Forces do
are working that full spectrum
of conflict
and being able to go
from drinking tea
to step outside the tent
and go do something
that a commando needs to do,
and then go back inside the tent
and drink tea some more.
And that is a unique skill set.
But what's going to make them
SEALs
is they've got to be able
to do both.
At that moment in time, it's --
to me anyway, it wasn't ever
about God and country, you know?
It was about being
with your brothers.
It's about operating.
It's about doing everything
you could
to make sure they could come
home to their family.
In September of 2006
in Ramadi,
a 25-year-old petty officer,
2nd class, Michael Monsoor,
was on his first combat
deployment as a Navy SEAL.
Mike had failed his initial
attempt at SEAL training
but persevered and ultimately
made it to the Teams.
Mike Monsoor was one of our
platoon mates
who lost his life in Iraq.
And he jumped on a grenade
and saved two guys,
one on either side of him.
And he subsequently got
the Medal of Honor.
Mike leaves behind a big hole
in my heart.
But I'm proud of what he did
and I'm proud of what
that stands for.
This idealistic warrior.
Mike had sent an email to his
sister the night before,
saying, "Gear's packed.
I'm on my way home."
Yeah, it's pretty rough.
Andrew Paul was already
back in California
when Mike Monsoor was killed.
He was one of the men to notify
the Monsoor family.
We got our blues together,
we got our plan together
and drove up to find
his parents' house.
And, man, that was
the hardest thing
I've ever done in my life.
I remember the commander who
came up with us said, you know,
"Sally Monsoor?"
She said, "Yes."
He goes, "Well, we have some
news about your son."
And, yeah, I mean, I just --
her head just slumped against
the door,
and, I mean, I just watched
the life drain out of her.
[ trumpet playing "Taps" ]
MAGUIRE: Look at Section 60
at Arlington National Cemetery.
MAN: Ready. Aim. Fire!
It's full of SEALs.
Men who've sacrificed
and given their lives.
The enemy gets a vote,
and nobody's immortal.
At SEAL funerals,
there is a tradition
of teammates removing their
insignia, called the Trident,
and embedding them into the
coffin of their fallen comrade.
You're not just burying
a warrior.
You're not just burying
a teammate.
You're burying somebody
that you love,
somebody that you know,
somebody that you
trained with.
You know his family.
You know his children.
For those of us who wear
the Trident,
everybody refers to each other
as brother.
And that is not just
an expression.
That's how everybody feels
about each other.
Because my teammate's
more important than I am.
Poseidon, the god of the seas,
wielded a trident
that gave him the power
to both create storms
and calm the waters.
Being a SEAL and the Trident,
you come from a long line
of people
who've sacrificed greatly
to get you to where you are.
Nobody who wears the Trident
today earned that reputation.
They inherited that reputation
from the men who came
before them.
And while you have the
opportunity to be a SEAL,
what you have to do is keep
that reputation intact
and make it just a little bit
better
than when they pinned a Trident
on your chest.
I think we're flesh
and blood,
but there is something extra
inside us.
And the enemies of this country
need to fear that,
because there is something
different they don't know about.
And the bonds to our brothers
is incredibly strong.
It'd be like a parent losing
their son.
It hurts a lot.
But it doesn't stop us.
In fact, if anything,
it just makes us stronger.
We'll obviously go to some
pretty extreme measures
if we need to.
Like flying in helicopters
that you've never seen
or heard of in your life
into a country that we swear
we'll never go to
in the middle of the night,
crash one of them
and still kill you.
I mean, you know, it's just...
[ chuckles ]
Yeah, that's the SEAL Teams.
What can I tell you?
On the night of May 1, 2011,
23 SEALs crammed aboard two
stealth prototype helicopters.
They lifted off
for a 90-minute flight
deep into the forbidden
airspace of Pakistan.
Despite the unusual location,
for the members of
SEAL Team Six,
this kind of raid
was a typical one...
except for the target:
Osama bin Laden.
As SEAL Team Six descended
on the compound,
one of the helicopters
got caught
in its own rotor wash
and crashed.
The SEALs scrambled
from the wreckage
and began moving
toward the house.
The second helicopter landed
safely outside the walls.
Quietly, the SEALs advanced.
On the third floor,
they found and killed
the world's most wanted
terrorist.
[ gunshots ]
Over the radio, the SEALs
reported bin Laden was dead.
The news of Bin Laden's death
brought celebrations to the
streets of the United States.
But it also haunted the world
with memories
of a clear September morning
a decade before
when the streets of America
were choked by terror.
This man's death was personal.
MAGUIRE: I grew up
in New York City.
I watched the Twin Towers go up.
But I also know the traffic
pattern of the Hudson River.
And I saw the second plane
flying south.
And I just said,
"Look at that guy.
He's not supposed to be flying
south there.
He's just taking a look at --
at that first tower."
And then I saw him go
into the second tower.
I saw it when it happened,
and immediately I said,
"We're under attack."
I finally got home from work
around midnight on 9/11
and my phone rang.
And I picked up the phone
and there was a voice
extremely emotional and crying,
and said,
"Joseph, I know what you do.
Get them. Get them
for what they did."
And it took me
a couple of seconds
to realize it's my brother.
And on the 2nd of May,
I placed a phone call
to my brother.
I said, "It took us a while,
but we got him."
All across America,
people gathered
in spontaneous celebrations --
outside the White House,
at Ground Zero, to Times Square.
SPARKS: I got numb.
I felt chills.
He was the face of terrorism
and the driving force behind
a lot of stuff,
but it felt like victory.
bin Laden was the embodiment
of the Western world's
newest enemy.
The leader of an international
network of splintered cells.
Nearly impossible to
infiltrate.
His was a shadow leadership
that took shadow warriors
to end.
No official state.
No traditional command
and control centers.
No uniforms identifying
an enemy combatant.
bin Laden's death symbolized
the fact
that America had adapted
to fighting this new kind
of adversary.
And the Navy SEALs became
the embodiment of that change.
[ ** ]
We are what they're scared of.
We're they're -- that bump
in the night.
That mystique and that legacy
goes way, way back
to even Vietnam and before.
You know, the enemy knew
the men in green faces,
if they were coming for you,
you weren't coming back.
[ ** ]
BRAMSTEDT: When you're out there
and you're in a conflict,
or a "tick" is what
they call it,
you're fighting for
the brotherhood.
It's the guys on your left
and your right.
The real reason and
the political reasons
why you're there and --
that's all gonna be argued
on the left and the right
of the aisle
somewhere in Congress somewhere,
the guys in the barber shop,
people driving down the road,
you know,
on their Bluetooth headsets.
But when you're in it and it's
happening, it's about this man.
I'm not firing my weapon to make
sure that I come home alive.
I'm firing my weapon to make
sure he comes home alive.
Back!
KAISER: I never thought about
killing people,
because I always thought
about it as a mission.
My job was never to go out
and kill somebody.
My job was to go capture
somebody,
go collect intelligence,
go do reconnaissance.
Because if you kill somebody,
you don't get any intelligence
out of them.
You capture them, you're gonna
get something out of them.
So -- eventually.
And then we can plan
our next mission,
because that's what every SEAL
wants is the next mission.
[ ** ]
WOOLARD: I think there's always
gonna be SEALs
in one form or another, but I
think they're still gonna be
the same basic sort of guy
who trained right down the road
from us here in Fort Pierce
during World War II,
the same guys who fought
in Vietnam,
in the mountains in Afghanistan,
and in Iraq.
The innate thread,
I think,
that goes through the teams
since their inception
way back to WWII is what I call
the Rudy Factor.
If you remember the Notre Dame
footballer:
they have hearts that they
just will not quit.
They will not quit
no matter what.
They're the type of guys who can
get knocked down, get back up,
get knocked down,
and get back up.
That's the common thread.
Since World War II, SEALs
and their forefathers
have faced whatever threat
the enemies of each generation
have posed...
[ explosions ]
from Hitler's beaches...
to bin Laden's terror.
While the perils have changed
and will continue to,
the invisible men
behind the face masks
still claim a common heritage
and future.
No matter how sophisticated
they or their foes become,
they are simply frogmen.
MAGUIRE: We live in an extremely
dangerous and difficult world.
And no matter where we
as a nation go next,
the first people in
will be the SEALs.
[ ** ]
