Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Pictured: Navy Seals and Marines look out from an observation post towards insurgents in Ramadi.

It is a lengthy article and so I only put down a small part of it, click the link at the bottom to read the rest of “Bravery And How To Master It” by Bob Drury:

At precisely 9:21 p.m., the marine sitting beside me at the Baghdad LZ, the helipad inside the Green Zone, stands and strides toward the bomb shelter. His gait is brisk but not panicked. I follow, fumbling with my helmet.

A nanosecond earlier, we’d heard the muffled ka-whompf that announced the launch of a Russian-made Katyusha rocket.

Overhead, the keening hiss of the projectile intensifies before terminating with a deafening and, to me, terrifying explosion just as we reach the tunnel-like concrete shelter.

“Jesus,” somebody says as the scrum of bodies — marines, soldiers, airmen — crushes inside.

Whether from the piled humanity or the rocket’s concussion (doubtful, since I learned later that the shell landed hundreds of yards away), the lenses of my glasses pop from their frames. I grope around the dark dirt floor with the flat of my hand. Someone not far down the row shines a penlight. “Grab that light, will ya?” I say to the marine next to me.

He is a broad, blond sergeant named Bill Cullen from the First Battalion of the Fourth Marines. He is 26, from Walton, Kentucky, and wears a tan, fire-resistant, U.S. Marine-issue flight suit. He grabs the flashlight.

“Shine it in my face,” I say. He hesitates. I take off my wire frames. “It’s an experiment. Just do it, please.”

In the dark of the shelter my face illuminates; a score of eyes turn toward me.

“What do you see?” I ask. “What’s it look like? The color.”

“Pale,” someone says.

There’s a snicker. “Yeah, real white.” More laughter.

Sergeant Cullen agrees. “Pretty ashen, I would say.”

I take the flashlight and shine it in Cullen’s face. It’s nearly crimson, a much darker shade than the desert tan he’s acquired during his unit’s nearly completed 6-month tour. “What’s this supposed to mean?” he asks.

Over the sound of the air-raid siren, I explain: I’m a reporter for Men’s Health, traveling from Baghdad to Fallujah to embed with the Navy SEALs camped outside that central Iraqi city. One of the purposes of my assignment, I say, is to acquire some knowledge of the physiology of fear and stress — in this extreme case, the behavior of men struggling to overcome their innate instinct for self-preservation when other men are trying to kill them. Science stuff in a war zone.

Blank stares.

“Fight over flight. Running toward the sound of gunfire.”

Recognition.

I point to my face and explain: This is an example of what’s called vasoconstriction, and I have no control over it. The blood pumps from my heart through my arteries, but as my fear-induced heart rate rises, nonessential blood vessels automatically constrict. The capillaries drain. My brain is signaling my body, “Alert!” and stopping the superfluous blood vessels in my face from dilating. My brain needs to ration the oxygen in my blood to send elsewhere — to protect vital organs or into the muscles of my legs so I can run away.

“Then how come I’m not white?” Cullen shines the penlight on the face of a fellow marine.

“Or him?”

Training, I say. Habituation, the military calls it. It’s the difference between my heart rate rising after a workout — something I’m used to, when my vessels dilate and my face reddens — and being terrified during a rocket attack. The more you train, the more tricks you employ, the more you can program your body to adjust.

Essentially, you’re bending the body’s software to control its hardware. It works standing over a putt on the 18th green. It works shooting a final-second free throw. It works banging down a door with a bad guy on the other side.

There are a few seconds of silence. Someone says, “And you’re headed down to embed with the SEALs?”

I nod.

Cullen laughs. “You’re going to have plenty of opportunities to compare your white face with their red ones.”

I have just interrupted the disquisition of the square-jawed and, yes, ruddy-faced executive officer of SEAL Team 10, the lean and muscular Lieutenant Commander Mike H.

“What are you guys doing here anyway,” I ask, noting that there’s not a hell of a lot of water in and around Fallujah to justify the presence of the U.S. military’s waterborne special operators.

We’re inside the makeshift (and air-conditioned — it’s 117°F outside in the Anbar desert) Special Operations Task Force command post. Before I blurted out my question, the 36-year-old Mike H. had been delineating which details I could and could not write about in regard to the previous night’s “kinetic” — or lethal — mission, a gunfight with al-Qaeda zealots clad in suicide vests. All six insurgents, eager to die, did so. Mike H. stops, exasperated.

“Because the L stands for land,” he says. “SEAL: sea, air, land.” At 6′5” and 230-odd pounds, Mike H. has the build of a classic college tight end. “You’re right, though,” he quickly adds. “With Afghanistan and Iraq, we have been very land-centric over the past couple of years.” He sweeps his left arm, a gesture encompassing the gated and gritty tent-and-trailer SEAL compound tucked away in a hidden corner of Camp Fallujah. “But there’s plenty of water in the showers.”

Here, I suppose, is a good a place to explain the restrictions that were placed on me and our photographer, Max Becherer, for this story. SEALs are notoriously elusive with the media. It took a year of lobbying to secure access to the SEAL base in Fallujah, and no other media outlet has been here. During our stay last September, we weren’t so much welcomed as tolerated. Chilly graciousness.

The SEALs are a semicovert organization, deployed in countries from Colombia to the Philippines, and all special operators in Iraq and Afghanistan are high-priority targets of insurgents. Because a SEAL scalp is a major enemy coup, you’ll notice that this article contains almost no last names or photographs of faces or other identifying features.

The real SEALs are nothing like the Hollywood ones — the “knuckle-dragging Charlie Sheens,” as one officer put it. Established in 1962 by John F. Kennedy, the U.S. Navy SEALs are a separate, elite force charged with clandestine reconnaissance and unconventional warfare. To a man, they are tough and smart.

(…)

On one of my last nights in Fallujah, I have a round-table discussion with five SEAL officers — three Incredible Hulks and two Batmen. They’re all older than 35, and they agree to speak freely on condition of anonymity. Our session takes place a few hours before these SEALs gear up for a midnight raid.

There is the usual talk about courage emanating from strategy and tactics, from comradeship and shared responsibility, from training and muscle memory and diaphragmatic breathing. Then we reach the meat of the discussion. Which one of these officers would trade places with the lieutenant working with the sheikhs? Big hoots all around.

“You have the wrong guys,” says one. “We’re the door breachers, and proud of it.”

Another: “We don’t do so well with the hugging and kissing.”

A third: “You’ll never meet a team guy who says that’s what he wants to do. It might be what he has to do, but all team guys want to do is hunt down and kill bad guys. That’s it.”

When I describe this exchange to Guild, he laughs. “They were putting you on a little bit. Part of the tough-guy ethos is getting the right guys to hunt the right enemy by the right means, at the right time and place. But courage is not being reckless and cavalier. One of the biggest parts of being a special operator is showing restraint.”

Later that evening, I stand in a shadowed corner of the ready room as these same men don their war paint for that night’s intended “snatch.” Whitesnake screams over the loudspeakers. Cans of Rockstar and Red Bull are emptied. Blue extra-sticky tape is attached to explosive charges. K-bars are sharpened. A bomb-sniffing German shepherd, his fur neatly shaved into a mohawk, growls. A Pussycat Dolls video plays on a large-screen TV. A 50-caliber machine gun is oiled, and chem lights and headlamps are tested. Slides are racked onto sidearms. There is much burping and farting.

The SEALs, several dozen of them, fly at midnight. They return 31/2 hours later with 16 handcuffed prisoners. As they file past me, the SEAL officer who’d been most vociferous about wanting to kill people winks. “No dead,” he says, nodding toward the captives. “Now that’s courage.”

(http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&channel=guy.wisdom&category=life.lessons&conitem=a45ff170b76a8110VgnVCM20000012281eac____&page=1)