McRaven has more to talk about than killing bin Laden
The White House, spring 2011.
Months of planning have nurtured a CIA tip about the location of Osama bin Laden’s hidden base into a carefully coordinated operation to capture or kill the world’s most wanted terrorist. Now Adm. William H. McRaven, commanding officer of all U.S. special-operations forces in Europe and Africa, is preparing to brief President Barack Obama and other members of the nation’s senior military leadership.
Three helicopters, one carrying a bladderlike device to aid in refueling, are to spirit a team of Navy SEALs to bin Laden’s compound in the midsize Pakistani city of Abbottabad. If all goes according to plan, McRaven explains, one of America’s key allies in the war on terror would be none the wiser.
But what if they’re found out, asked the president. What if
there’s a firefight?
“We call that,” said McRaven, pausing to take a breath, “when the (expletive) hits the fan.”
Any great story needs a proper punchline. That one, labeled “Neptune’s Spear” after a figurine of the Greco-Roman sea god McRaven once kept on his desk, makes an effective punchline not only for McRaven’s second memoir, “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations”
(Grand Central Publishing), but for a nearly fourdecade career that ended with his 2014 retirement. McRaven appears at Blue Willow Bookshop at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Finding and killing bin Laden may have been the most high-profile and politically risky operation carried out under his watch, McRaven notes, but it was hardly the most difficult.
“Just about every night in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were some missions that will never make the history books but were just as heroic and just as difficult as the bin Laden raid,” he says. “I will caveat all that by saying that the men that went on that raid were incredibly heroic.”
A life of adventure
McRaven’s first book, 2017’s best-selling “Make Your Bed,” grew out of the commencement address he gave to his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, shortly after retiring. “If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right,” he concluded. The speech went viral, and the next year McRaven began a three-year tenure as chancellor of the UT System.
“I will tell you that my (opinion) of a good story differs from my wife,” he says. “I tend to enjoy more of the thrillers and science fiction, so I like my characters to develop very quickly, and I like the action to develop quickly.”
No such problems here. Besides the bin Laden raid, “Sea Stories” revisits 17 other pivotal moments from McRaven’s life, most of them just as action packed: a fateful high school track meet; “Hell Week” of his SEAL basic training, once “just another class at the Naval Amphibious School”; and a grotesque 2001 skydiving mishap that separated his pelvic muscles from the bone.
Assigned to the National Security Council in the wake of 9/11, McRaven found getting to his desk from the White House parking lot helped him regain the full use of his legs.
He also includes the 2003 mission that successfully captured the deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; the rescue of U.S. merchant captain Richard Phillips, now familiar as the plot of the 2009 Tom Hanks film “Captain Phillips”; and a couple that exhibit a more reflective, personal side. One, a hospital visit to several young wounded servicemen and -women, inspires McRaven to call them “The Next Greatest Generation.”
Gift for storytelling
Adventures aside, the true purpose of “Sea Stories” is to honor the “great people that took great care of me,” McRaven says. “It was my wife, who picked me up when I stumbled; it was a lot of great fortune; a lot of great soldiers-sailors-airmen-and-Marines that moved me in this direction; and then these kind of fateful events that turned my path in a direction.”
McRaven speaks in the sort of booming baritone that, were he not a naval officer, might have made for an excellent basketball coach or opera singer. He has a curious tic of combining troops from the various armed services into one hyphenated word: “soldiers-sailors-airmen-and-Marines” — evidence that decades of facilitating cooperation between these men and women in uniform has infiltrated his conversation on a molecular level.
As for his knack for storytelling, he credits that to his father, a former Air Force fighter pilot who, McRaven says, also played some pro football for a while. The opening chapter of “Sea Stories” finds McRaven, age 5, eavesdropping as his father swaps tales with his officer buddies while stationed in France; the sense of fellowship between his mother and the officers’ wives was just as strong, he adds.
“I think that is kind of what pushed me in the direction of the military,” McRaven says. “It was a culture that I enjoyed, and doing something noble and honorable I thought was important.”
However, McRaven says, he decided on the Navy because he’s always loved the water; he was scubadiving in Canyon Lake near New Braunfels by age 13. Asked for an elementary-school report on someone he found heroic, he chose the enigmatic French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. His teachers were expecting someone more like Davy Crockett or Sam Houston, he recalls.
“Jacques Cousteau was not a familiar name to a lot of people in America, but I loved the idea (that) he had a ship called the Calypso and he sailed around the world,” McRaven says. “I always thought it would be great to do that, and of course I thought about being a Navy frogman because that’s where you could be underwater.”
More to SEALs than six-packs
Among other things, the bin Laden raid helped make SEAL stories a hot commodity in Hollywood — a trend still going strong thanks to films such as “American Renegades” and TV series like CBS’ “SEAL Team.” With the exception of 2014’s “American Sniper,” which he found realistic, McRaven says many productions — though technically accurate — lack emotional depth.
“What they miss sometimes is the humanity,” he says. “They want to make all Navy SEALs out to be, you know, these 6-foot-4 men of rippling muscles (who are) steely-eyed killers; and the fact of the matter is most SEALs are kind of medium-build, wiry guys.
“We are fathers and brothers and sons and uncles,” he adds. “The nature of any human action is (that) people make mistakes, people get emotional, but people also, certainly in wartime, you have these great highs and these great lows.”
McRaven’s conversation with the Houston Chronicle came as he was wrapping up a week of heavy promotion for “Sea Stories,” leading him to declare, “I’m not sure if I’ve missed a morning or evening show yet.”
For someone who is allegedly retired, he has no trouble staying busy.
“It’s relative,” he says. “I’m still quite involved with the university; I’m in the national-security program there, so I stay really connected with the school. I’m teaching, I’m writing, I’m on boards, I’m frankly busier than I’ve ever been.
“I laughingly tell people I’ve failed at retirement again,” he adds, “but I’m OK with it.”