With Ralph Pezzullo

2011, Little, Brown and Company, NY, 2011, 295 pages

Inside Seal Team Six was marketed as a primer on how our elite warriors developed the ability to execute the son of a Saudi construction magnate, despite the presence of his suicidal unarmed wives. Believe me, this book is better than all that. It starts on an irritating note with much of the text blocked out in accordance with U.S. Government redactions. In case you are expecting some ego orgy like Richard Marchinko’s Rogue Warrior, be prepared for something at once grittier and more humane.

After the obligatory nod to our current best man-hunters, Don tracks back to his youth in a crappy New England town. Don was a member of the generation a few years older than I who reaped the bitter harvest of the sixties love affair with drugs. As a boy his willingness to take extreme risks along with his huge work ethic essentially drove him into the SEALS. Actually, the best violence scenes in the book come from Don’s teen years, brawling with bikers, drug dealers, jocks, punks and perverts. He reminds me so much of my friend David Lumsden [a doctor and extreme athlete] that I was astonished that God let two of these guys loose on the planet at the same time.

Much of Don’s military experience could not be discussed, so he went in depth where his extreme sports experience was concerned. He once ran 36 marathons in a year while in various naval training programs. He was the guy that pushed the physical training envelope to the max. Inside Seal Team Six is ¼ personal memoir, ¼ operations retrospective, ¼ extreme training and competition journal, and ¼ medical memoir. Ralph Pezzulla does do a first class ghost writing job, seamlessly providing news and historical perspective with a voice consistent with Don’s.

There are some harrowing operations, including a real crap shoot in Somalia in 1985. But, despite the common mythology about our military, the casualties come on the back end. I remember during the 1991 Gulf War that the U.S. lost fewer troops at war than it did in peace over the same length of time. As a medical specialist Don dealt with far more dead and dying U.S. servicemen in training settings than in combat. This was primarily due to heavy meat-grinding equipment malfunctions, not overtraining. When something that weighs hundreds of tons—or zooms around at great speed—shits the operational bed…men die, in multiples.

There are a number of drug war accounts from Latin America that shed some unintended light on our national policy, and make for gritty insight into the incidental life of a covert soldier, rather than the ‘hop and pop’ flash of commando heroics. The best operational stories have to do with the action in Panama to get George Bush the Elder’s coke dealer into custody. Don was on special boat patrol, saw some action, and had more medical gruesomeness to relate. There is also a comical wild goose chase after a Panamanian general that you have to read to believe.

Inside Seal Team Six keeps coming back to Don’s driven state-of-being as an extreme endurance athlete, and his medical responsibility. Honestly, I would recommend this book more strongly to athletes and medical people than to war fighters, or prospective soldiers.

The absolute craziest part of the book begins on page 96, when Don attended the Army Special Forces medical lab in Fort Bragg, North Carolina—infamously known as Goat Lab. Don is issued a diseased goat, who he named Barbarossa. He is then made to shoot Barbarossa in the leg and care for him for the duration of the lab. At one point Don ends up giving mouth-to-mouth to a dead goat for a half hour! Barbarossa was cool. Don liked him and nursed him back to health. Then, one day, two Special Forces goons take Barbarossa around the corner, smash him, slash him, stab him, burn him, and rip his tongue out. Then they yell for Don to come save Barbarossa, which he does. Then…I’ll let Don tell that.

Don Mann is an extreme example of a driven person with an irrepressible spirit; the kind of guy without whom our ancestors would not have survived what nature has thrown at humanity over the ages; the kind of man who too often dies unheralded, unknown, and unremembered in some lonely place. Ironically, in this repressed, denatured, drug-addicted nation of ours, the only way Don Mann could find freedom was on the lethal edge of the military machine that makes possible, expands, and secures this manhood-sapping paradise. Inside Seal Team Six is the kind of story that makes you proud to be a human, despite the ugliness that it exposes.

I closed Don Mann’s memoir certain of one thing, that he is flame in a dispirited world; a flame that does not flicker, but burns.