SEAL of Honor (3 page)

An hour later, the crackle of AK-47s and the roar of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) erupted on the mountainside. The men of SEAL Team Ten were under attack.

Half a world away, Michael’s mother, Maureen Murphy, was asleep in her Long Island home when the battle was joined. She awoke on the morning of June 28 feeling ill, placed a call to the local title company where she worked as an account clerk, and took a sick day. Although she did not usually watch much television, she found it a welcome distraction from the heavy traffic noise outside on a hot and humid June day. By the afternoon, the first reports that American servicemen had come under intense, heavy fire on a remote mountain in Afghanistan began to trickle out through the media. Few specifics were known, but it was widely reported that a helicopter had been shot down during an effort to rescue beleaguered soldiers on the ground. Although the story grabbed Maureen’s attention, she kept saying to herself, “Nah. Couldn’t be,” when she considered the possibility of her son being involved. It was understandable, since she did not know Michael was in Afghanistan. She was not alone. No one without an operational need to know knew where he was.

For Dan Murphy, Michael’s father, it was just another day. After a mentally stressful workday, the fifty-eight-year-old decorated and partially disabled Vietnam veteran, attorney, and former Suffolk County prosecutor was looking forward to an evening with his fiancée, Karen, her daughter, Kristen, and John Murphy, Michael’s eighteen-year-old brother. As they made their way to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway for the evening performance of
Beauty and the Beast
, he was not worried about the news that broke that day. Michael, he believed, was in Iraq.

After a day of rest, Maureen returned to work. Almost from the moment she arrived at the office around 8:00 AM, coworkers began to ask anxiously if she was aware of the news reports about American soldiers who had come under heavy fire in Afghanistan. Like them, however, she only knew what she had heard in the news the day before. Throughout the day, though, more and more details continued to emerge. News outlets confirmed that an unknown number of Navy SEALs had been killed and that a rescue helicopter attempting to reach them had been shot
down, killing all sixteen on board. Maureen later admitted that with each passing report her concern for Michael grew, and around the office everyone focused on the news with each updated broadcast. As well-meaning and concerned friends and coworkers continued to bring her attention to the unfolding events in Afghanistan, she tried to stay focused on her duties, but increased calls and reports on the local and national news channels made her efforts nearly impossible.

Early that same afternoon, Dan was reviewing cases in his office, where he was the chief legal assistant to State Supreme Court justice Peter Fox Cohalan. Immersed in work and away from a television, he was unaware of the new details of the fight that began to emerge. Still, his thoughts repeatedly drifted to his oldest son, Michael. He adamantly believed that he was in Iraq, based on a picture he had received from Michael on Father’s Day via e-mail. Michael and his team were wearing light-colored desert fatigues, each holding their weapons. Michael was wearing his characteristic Oakley sunglasses and his large digital chrome and black watch. “It must be Iraq,” he told himself.

John was also unaware of the new details in this unfolding story. He spent the afternoon with Karen and her daughter, Kristen, at the Holtsville town pool. As he sat in the sun and looked around, he recalled seeing the lifeguards at their stations while a feeling of dread came over him as he thought about his older brother Michael and his safety. The feeling was intense for several minutes, and though it gradually subsided, it never completely went away. Having never experienced such a feeling, he remained uneasy for the rest of the day.

Like Maureen, Heather Duggan, Michael’s fiancée, grew more and more concerned with each passing minute that afternoon and was glued to the news. When she heard the reports about an accident involving Navy SEALs in the mountains of Afghanistan, she called Naval Special Warfare Command (NAVSPECWARCOM) in Coronado, California. Michael had given her the number to call in case anything ever happened to him. After several calls and repeated requests, she was provided with no information because she was not listed as a next of kin or spouse. Frustrated and angry, Heather hung up. Had she been a member of the immediate family when she called, her worst fears may have been confirmed.

While Heather called seeking information regarding Michael, the Navy was already sorting through the outcome of the engagement and making preparation to contact family members of the fallen and missing SEALs. Around midafternoon and deep in thought while walking in downtown Manhattan, Lieutenant Jeff Widenhofer’s cell phone rang. It was the Navy’s Northeast Regional Casualty Assistance Calls Office at the Groton Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Connecticut, calling to inform him that he had been assigned a “casualty call.” Widenhofer was informed that Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy and the members of SEAL Team Ten were missing after they had been ambushed while conducting a reconnaissance
mission in the mountains of Afghanistan. On top of that, a rescue helicopter containing eight Army Night Stalkers and eight Navy SEALs had been shot down, and all aboard were presumed to have been killed.

Widenhofer, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and a veteran of three Middle East deployments, had been assigned to the Office of Naval Science at the United States Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA) in Kings Point on the North Shore of Long Island in June 2005. He was selected because he was only forty-five miles away from Patchogue. Already a difficult assignment, this casualty call was even more so because this one was his first. After making several phone calls, he learned he would not be acting alone while carrying out this responsibility. Commander Robert Coyle, command chaplain at the USMMA, and Lieutenant Commander Chad Muse, from Naval Special Warfare in California, would be accompanying him to the Murphy home.

While the Murphys each went about their day, the action outside of Asadabad made the routine at NSW in California anything but normal. At his office at 5:30 AM, Commander Todd DeGhetto received a telephone call on an unsecured line. A helicopter had gone down in Afghanistan, he was told. Three of his men may well have been on it. About an hour later he received a secured call from Captain Tom Carlson, commodore, NSW Group Three, confirming the helicopter crash, the identities of those killed, and that three of his men were missing on the ground. Meanwhile, word had reached Captain Larry Lasky, assistant chief of staff for operations and planning at NAVSPECWARCOM, that Operation Red Wings had gone into a rescue posture, “with troops in contact with a numerically superior force.” He knew from early reports that the four-man SEAL unit had come under heavy attack with limited support, lost communications, and was possibly trying to escape or evade the enemy by rapidly descending sheer cliffs. A quick-reaction force (QRF) consisting of several helicopters had been mobilized in an effort to extract the team, but the Chinook 47E helicopter carrying the QRF had been destroyed by what appeared to be a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) and the remaining helicopters were ordered to abort the mission. The reports were pieced together from videotape and digital photographs of the battle area and the helicopter crash site captured by an unmanned MQ-1 Predator.

It did not take a man with Lasky’s years of experience to know things were not going well. Based on these early reports, Captain Lasky recommended that the Crisis Action Center begin continuous operations, in order to keep Rear Admiral Joseph Maguire informed of the situation. At the time, Maguire reported
to General Bryan D. Brown, commander of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which controls and coordinates all special operations forces (SOF) components from each branch of the military and is headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida.

Word of the engagement spread quickly. At 8:00 AM Pacific standard time (PST) in the NAVSPECWARCOM Operations Center, Commander Ray Major, the operations officer, received word that all members of the SEAL unit and those on the rescue helicopter had been declared DUSTWUN (Duty Station Whereabouts Unknown). Also on duty was Lieutenant Commander Chad Muse, who was serving as the assistant operations officer after recently returning from a seven-month tour in Iraq. He immediately recognized the names of Lieutenant Murphy and Senior Chief Petty Officer Daniel R. Healy. Muse worked with Murphy when both were assigned to SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One (SDVT-1) in Pearl City, Hawaii, and again when Michael served as his operations officer for the Middle Eastern training exercise Early Victor in 2002. Commander Major instructed Muse to stand by to travel with the Casualty Assistance Calls Officer (CACO).

Naval Special Warfare is an extremely tight and close-knit community. It is common practice to dispatch with all CACOs an officer who either knows the sailor or the family. For Lieutenant Commander Muse, this was his unwritten sworn and solemn obligation, because both he and Murphy were Navy SEAL team leaders, each a member of a brotherhood, a community of elite warriors to whom the word “team” is not just a word or slogan, but the very essence of who they are. When he saw Michael’s name on the list, he knew he was going to New York and began to prepare for the most difficult assignment of his military career. With orders to connect with Lieutenant Widenhofer before going to the Murphy home, Muse was dispatched to provide the family with answers to nonclassified operational questions.

By 5:00 PM Maureen had already received telephone calls at home, including one from Heather, who was nearly hysterical. In a panic, she told Maureen about her attempts to obtain information through NAVSPECWARCOM in San Diego. She was upset because she was told that no information could be released to her because she and Michael were not married. “Heather, we don’t know anything. Let’s not jump to any conclusions. Just try and calm down. Michael has been deployed before and we’ve heard nothing from the Navy,” Maureen said in an effort to comfort her. However, neither Heather nor Maureen was comforted by their conversation. In fact, Maureen later remarked that Heather’s call only heightened her concern as she watched the news with John, who had returned home from the pool.

Following the workday, Dan prepared for a quiet evening at his home in the Long Island town of Medford. He and Maureen, who had been divorced since 1998, had not yet spoken to each other about the disturbing news reports. In the absence of anything specific to Michael, there was little to do but monitor the local and national news reports as information regarding the engagement in Afghanistan garnered increasing coverage. While certainly concerned, Dan was still clinging to his belief that Michael was in Iraq when Heather arrived at his door, still very upset by the news of the helicopter crash. Dan anxiously retrieved a photograph of Michael and his team and showed it to her. “See, they are wearing desert fatigues. Michael is in Iraq,” he told her, perhaps as much to assure himself as to comfort her. But Heather was unconvinced and asked, “What about those mountains in the background?” She was not the first to question Dan’s belief about the location of the photo—his friend Anthony Moncayo, an Army lieutenant colonel, had questioned Dan’s belief two weeks earlier. Trying not to add to her anxiety, Dan replied in a deliberately calm voice, telling her that “there are mountains in Iraq, especially in northern Iraq near Mosul,” but to no avail. Within moments Heather was off to Maureen’s. Dan began to share her concern, particularly after he learned through news reports that those who died were Navy SEALs.

At Maureen’s, Heather joined her and John as they anxiously watched the news. As his mother and Heather become more focused and distressed by the reports coming out of Afghanistan, John too became more concerned. When Heather left for home she gave Maureen the telephone number she had called earlier, hoping that she would have better luck obtaining information about Michael. Maureen called immediately. She was pleasantly greeted by a woman who answered the telephone. After Maureen identified herself, the lady stated, “Mrs. Murphy, I know your son and he is a really good man. I just wanted you to know that. I’ll put you through now.” But there was still no news from the Navy.

At 9:00 PM reports continued to be broadcast on several news channels, but Maureen had heard nothing back from Navy officials. By this time Lieutenant Commander Muse had arrived from San Diego. By 11:30 PM Maureen and John still had heard nothing. “We haven’t heard anything, so this is good, right? See, no news is good news,” Maureen said to John as they climbed the stairs to their bedrooms. John agreed and began working on his computer, but despite not hearing anything official from the Navy, he was concerned.

Approximately ten minutes later, Maureen, a devout Roman Catholic, had completed her evening prayers, changed her clothes, and was standing next to her bed when she heard a car enter the Astoria Federal Savings bank parking lot across the street. Through the open windows above the head of her bed she heard three doors open and close. In the dark silence of the heavy summer night the sound traveled quickly, echoing off of the surrounding houses, carried by the gentle
breeze that stirred the window curtains. Sheer terror struck her as she became frozen by fear. John, having heard the car doors too, went downstairs, where he stood in the foyer. His mother stood motionless in her room, overcome by a cold sweat as her heart pounded in her chest and she struggled to breathe.

As the mother of a member of the U.S. military, she was well aware of the notification procedure. Although able to stand, she could not move. Fear had immobilized her, and she was hoping that those getting out of the car were not coming to her door but perhaps only visiting neighboring households—or maybe they were the neighbors returning home. After what seemed like an eternity, the deafening sound of the doorbell pierced the silence; both John and Maureen were startled by the sound, shocked back to their senses. “John, don’t answer the door,” his mother said, but it was too late. He was already in the process of slowly opening it when he heard her plea. “Mom, there are three Navy officers here to see you,” he said in a somber, nervous tone.