Stay Safe: A Memoir

On August 6, 2011 my closest friend and only sibling, my brother 14-months my junior, was killed in action fighting for his country as a Navy SEAL on SEAL Team 6 in Afghanistan. He was aboard a Chinook military helicopter—call sign Extortion 17—with  37 other men and one dog that was shot down by enemy fire and crashed, killing all 39 souls riding in it. Twenty-two of those men were Navy SEALs, making this event the greatest loss of both SEALs and U.S. military lives in a single incident since the war in Afghanistan began.I don't know how to write a memoir; I am not a writer. But I know my brother was special. And I know his life was, and still is, meaningful, touched many people and will never be forgotten. I will live with a hole forever and I hope one day to not have to fight tears at the mention of his name. And I continue to walk through my day-to-day life with a sense of numbness without the opportunity to talk to him.Robert James Reeves was born on August 2, 1979 in Shreveport, Louisiana. Rob and I grew up in Shreveport and each lived there until we started college; I went to the University of Arkansas in 1996 and he started at Louisiana State University in 1997. After Rob’s first year in college, Dad went to pick him up and drove him home to Shreveport for the summer of 1998. It was during that car ride that Rob outlined a plan for the rest of his life and that plan started by joining the Navy to become a SEAL. He said he was bored by college: bored sitting behind a desk all day and at night partying with the same friends from high school. Though extremely intelligent, he wasn’t doing well in school simply because he wasn’t applying himself. And he knew it. Rob said he recognized the need to do and experience something more exciting in life. He had heard about the SEALs from some friends and that sparked his own research and ultimate decision.Becoming a Navy SEAL certainly made Rob’s life exciting. And dangerous. The Navy SEALs (which stands for Sea Air Land) are special operations forces made up of highly trained men who complete clandestine operations on behalf of our country. They are performing a job that is commonly considered the most mentally and physically demanding among all armed forces. An excerpt from the job description sums it up nicely: “Direct action warfare. Special reconnaissance. Counterterrorism. Foreign internal defense. When there’s nowhere else to turn, Navy SEALs are in their element. Achieving the impossible by way of conditioned response, sheer willpower and absolute dedication to their training, their mission and their fellow spec ops [special operations] team members.”The summer of 1998, I stayed in Fayetteville, Arkansas, attending summer classes and working a retail job, which meant that I wasn’t a part of the family conversations about Rob joining the Navy. But we were a close family and I recall talking on the phone with my parents and my brother throughout the summer. At the time, I didn’t understand what a Navy SEAL really was or what they did. And being 20 years old, I was very self-involved and don’t remember thinking much of what Rob was getting into at the time; I supported his decision, because I would have supported any decision my brother wanted to make. But my parents understood and they would update me on the training that Rob was doing on his own over the summer before enlisting in the Navy that August. Neither Rob nor I were strong swimmers; we didn’t grow up spending a lot of time in the water. But Rob spent that entire summer immersed in a pool, working with family friends to train and become a better swimmer. He would run and come home to take a cold shower an effort at getting used to the sensation of cold water. He bought books about Navy SEAL training exercises and he started working to complete them. Rob also talked to guys he knew who had become SEALs: one of Rob’s closest friends growing up had a brother who was an active-duty SEAL, and a friend to us both from high school, Jonas Kelsall, had signed up the previous year. And at the end of that summer, Rob walked into a Navy recruiting office and said he wanted to be a Navy SEAL. He signed the papers and was shortly sent off to boot camp.I think it took me several years to fully understand and appreciate the job that Rob had signed up to do. However, I remember some of the conversation around his announcement and the shock that family and friends had that Rob wanted to join the Navy and become a SEAL. One of our close family friends responded to the news that he would be joining the Navy to become a SEAL with “What’s he going to do, make the enemy laugh to death?”He was funny. Rob always kept us in stitches with imitations, commentary, self-deprecation and small pranks. He had a great smile and after he “got you” he would just grin and most people would forget they had just been pranked. My mom and my grandmother were usually the butt of his jokes and the recipients of his pranks, but these only made them love him more. A story that my mom loved to tell occurred when we were high school: Mom was at a friend’s house with a group of women for lunch and Rob called the friend’s house to talk to Mom and told her that Dad had been arrested. He had a full story for how it happened, where it happened and what she needed to do to get him out of jail. She fell for the story completely. Rob loved it, but stopped her with the truth before she headed to the police station. Dad still can’t believe that Mom was so ready to believe that he had been arrested. There are countless stories like this one.He was smart and wildly creative. Though he disliked school, when a project or subject really peaked his interest, he would immerse himself in it and he would show how smart he really was. Rob was fantastic drawer and really shined in creative problem-solving.He seemingly didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body. He typically solved problems with humor and creativity. He didn’t have much experience with guns; just a couple of hunting trips in the Sportsman’s Paradise that is Louisiana. But certainly not an experienced hunter. He did love G.I. Joe growing up; in fact, we were the family that had the seven-foot long aircraft carrier toy set up in our living room for Rob and his friends to play. Actually, that was the only piece of “furniture” in our living room for a several years.He never responded well to rules. He liked to follow the beat of his own drum. I am the rule-follower; he was the rule-breaker. Someone asked if he would ever be able to adhere to the strict regime of a military lifestyle. As it turned out, he found a way to live on the edge of the rules in the Navy, too. We heard one story after he died that exemplified this: he was required to shave his head to a cut so tight that when the inspector came around to check they shouldn’t be able to grab any hair. Rob kept his “Shreveport swoop” haircut (an awful cut from the ‘90s that was close cut on the sides and the back, with long “bangs” on the front and combed to the side) on the front and when the inspector came around, he dipped his head low enough to be grabbed at the crown where the hair was shaved tight enough to pass inspection. His teammates describe the memory to us and still shook their heads in jealousy, admiration and shock at his gall, even years later.Rob was always very physically active, playing soccer and lacrosse in high school. And as a child he was in the emergency room frequently for treatment of gashes resulting in a skateboarding stunt gone wrong or just general rough-housing with his friends.In general though, he was good at almost everything he attempted, in that really annoying little brother kind of way that I hated while at the same time being proud. I relished the opportunity to find things that he wasn’t good at, it was so rare. He was not good at fishing, this I knew. I learned after he died, when we were all sharing stories about Rob, that he was also not good at frisbee or photography. And that is about it. I could name anything and if he tried it, he would be good at it. And if not, he would work at it until he was good at it. Just like me, everyone else in his life was in awe that he could be good at everything he wanted to be good at doing. It was annoying. And admirable.Looking back on it now, it is hard for me to imagine Rob becoming anything but a Navy SEAL, and I don’t remember what I thought he would do with his life—I probably never thought about it. But I am certain that a job description with “warfare” would have never entered my mind as a possibility.Rob had amazing foresight and knew that being a SEAL provided him with learning opportunities that could satisfy his insatiable curiosity. Our parents encouraged our learning new things constantly and that made us want to learn. He wanted to experience every opportunity this world had to offer to him. And the Navy gave him those opportunities. Rob took advantage of every single one of those opportunities the Navy presented to him: he learned languages, climbed mountains, jumped out of planes, traveled the world, learned how to fly, continued his college education, and met great people along the way.When he joined the Navy, I knew so little about the military. I’ve learned a lot over the years, and a lot more after he died. I attended his graduation from BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs, the initial SEALs training process) and saw the respect of the ceremony associated with the graduation process. Rob took us on a tour of the base and we got to see the obstacle course they had to complete as part of their training; everything was so structured. I even tried to do some of the obstacle course, which resulted in a lot of laughter from my entire family. When he would call to check in with my parents throughout his BUD/S training, his stories and his personal growth expressed through the tales were so impressive and interesting that my dad started recording the audio of the calls for posterity. I have since listened to all 18 hours of those recordings. Hearing my twenty-year old brother's voice was painful, and hearing my mom's voice—who died in 2007—even more so, but Rob was a great storyteller even then and I learned so much about what he went through and could hear the emotion in his voice, the highs and lows as he underwent the trials of becoming a SEAL.The month after Rob died was a surreal and bizarre experience. He would have laughed, cried and laughed some more with us through all the ups and downs of that first month. Rob balanced his reverence for his work with a keen sense of humor like none other I've ever experienced. He would have appreciated the escapades we endured as we worked with the Navy and attended many, many ceremonies over that month, keeping the appropriate balance of our experiences respectful and hilarious.Needing to talk to my brother, like I have for all other life struggles and wins, I wrote him daily letters during the weeks after learning of his death. Through memorials, funerals, laughter, constant travel, an earthquake and a hurricane, I used my letters to Rob to cope with the daily ordeals of the month of August. It is from the content of those letters, documenting the month of August 2011, that I was able to compile the memoir that I will be posting here, a chapter a day for the next month as we mark the fourth anniversary of Rob's death.Read other chapters of this book.

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