Brian Pan

Howard Wasdin, SEAL Team Six:

Of course, SEALs train to match the appropriate level of violence required by the situation, turning it up and down like the dimmer on a light switch. You don’t always want the chandeliers on bright. Sometimes you do. That switch is inside me still. I don’t want to, but I can turn it on if needed. However, the training didn’t prepare me for seeing the humanity in those fourteen men. It’s something you have to be in real combat to see. Not simulated combat. Maybe I could’ve put a bullet in every one of their skulls and bragged about how many confirmed kills I got. Some people have this concept of SEALs just being mindless, wind-me-up killing machines. “Oh, you’re an assassin.” I don’t like that. I don’t adhere to it. Most SEALs know that if you can do an op without any loss of life, it’s a great op.

Seeing those fourteen men, I realized they were not bad guys. They were just poor sonsofbitches who were half starved to death, under-equipped, outgunned, having no clue, and following some madman who’d decided he wanted to invade another country. If they didn’t follow the madman, the Republican Guard would execute them. I suspect they lost the will to fight. Maybe they never had the will to fight in the first place.

They were human beings just like me. I discovered my humanity and the humanity in others. It was a turning point for me—it was when I matured. My standards of right and wrong in combat became clearer, defined by what I did and didn’t do. I did give the fourteen Iraqi soldiers food and take them to a safer place. I didn’t kill them. Whether you’re winning or losing, war is hell.