Sea Stories summary

The mental and physical vigor of the six-month-long Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training is notoriously the most difficult part of becoming a Navy SEAL. In fact, in 1977, when McRaven started his training, less than half of all trainees made it through. That’s in part because quitting is deceptively simple: all you have to do is ring a bell three times.

Arguably the most challenging time of BUD/S is the infamous Hell Week. Hell Week is six days of no sleep, constant harassment and vigorous physical exercises. Many commands were devised to be impossible to accomplish. One officer would grill McRaven with questions such as whether he thought his girlfriend was pretty. When he said yes, the instructor would call him a liar and assign more push-ups.

Over his first 15 years of naval service, McRaven witnessed both the bravery of soldiers and the tragedy of loss, from failed missions and trainings that had gone awry. However, he had yet to serve his country in a way he felt would give his life meaning. Simply put, he craved to fight in an honorable battle.

His chance came in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At the time, McRaven was on deployment  on board the USS Okinawa, an amphibious assault ship. In the ensuing weeks, President Bush ordered Operation Desert Shield for the build-up of troops in defense of Saudi Arabia.

In 2001, McRaven was serving as the commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group One – a section of the US Special Operations Command – while intermittently also commanding every SEAL on the West Coast.

His career was going so well that his boss, commander of Naval Special Warfare Command Admiral Eric Olson, was positioning him to become an admiral. Olson had seen to it that his next assignment was to serve on the Navy staff in the Pentagon.

In the weeks after September 11, the White House National Security Council established the Office of Combating Terrorism. McRaven assumed the role of Director of Strategy and Military Affairs for the new organization, as his superiors felt that he would be of more use fighting the War on Terror from the White House than serving on the Navy staff in the Pentagon.

You might already be familiar with McRaven’s work in the White House. Early during his tenure, a man by the name of Richard Reid attempted to detonate an explosive created out of his shoe on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami.

By the time he was deployed to Baghdad in October 2003, McRaven had fully recovered from his parachute accident. His mission in Iraq was to command the Army special operations unit assigned with the task of capturing or killing the United States’ Top 50 High Value Targets – including Saddam Hussein.

In December, McRaven was flying in a C-130 military aircraft when he had an inexplicable feeling that his team was going to find Saddam that night. As soon as he arrived back in Baghdad, he learned that the Special Operations Forces C-Squadron had captured Saddam’s close associate, Mohammad Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit, that morning. What’s more, al-Muslit had a lead that the former Iraqi president was hiding in his cook’s house in Tikrit.

By 2011, there had been many false leads in the hunt to find Osama bin Laden, the founder and then-leader of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. But this time, when McRaven was briefed on surveillance footage showing a man who fit bin Laden’s profile walking around a housing compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, something felt different.

The CIA had three proposals for approaching the compound. At the top of their list was a raid. And McRaven – who by this time was a three-star admiral and the commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command – was going to lead it.

In August 2014, McRaven was standing at the podium during his military retirement ceremony in Tampa, Florida. Looking down at the 700-person audience, he could see many of the people who had touched his life: fellow SEALs; teammates from the CIA, FBI and Green Berets; and even his high-school football coach.

Over his four decades of service, McRaven had learned that none of his successes would have been possible without the help of others. So it was appropriate that his final words that day began with a story about his most important teammate – his wife, Georgeann.