for every detail he could remember: their means of communication; where, when, and how often they had met; how money was exchanged; how much money was exchanged—all of it. Harvath filled half a legal pad with notes.
An hour later, he changed the subject and asked about Khuram Hanjour, the recruiter. He now wanted to know everything he could about him—where he lived, how to contact him, who he associated with, what mosque he went to, anything that could help them paint a better picture.
When he had exhausted the salient details about Hanjour the recruiter, he handed over the interrogation to a SEAL named Scobell, and stepped out into the gangway.
His mouth was dry and his head was pounding. He needed a handful of aspirin, a bottle of water, and a cup of coffee.
Harvath stuck his head inside the berth next door and asked if any of the SEALs had any Vitamin M, slang in the SEALs for Motrin. One of the men tossed him a bottle.
Harvath shook two pills into the palm of his hand and tossed the bottle back. Thanking the SEAL, he headed down to the submarine’s mess hall.
Entering the mess, he asked for a bottle of water. On the wall was a plaque commemorating the Florida for being the first Ohio-class sub to ever fire a Tomahawk cruise missile. At the other end of the room, a group of sailors were watching one of Harvath’s favorite westerns—The Magnificent Seven with Steve McQueen. He remembered someone telling him that it was the second-most-shown film in U.S. television history, second only to The Wizard of Oz.
In the Navy, you ended up watching any and every movie ever made. There wasn’t much else to do if you were under way and not on shift. While Harvath had seen The Magnificent Seven plenty of times in the Navy, the first time he ever saw it was with his father.
It was playing in a small movie theater in San Diego that occasionally revived popular Westerns. He and his father had driven across the bay from their home on Coronado one Saturday afternoon to see it. Harvath had been about nine years old at the time.
The film followed a team of gunslingers hired to protect a small Mexican village from marauders. The villagers were farmers and didn’t know how to fight. The gunslingers taught them.
Harvath’s father was a SEAL and the movie was a great metaphor for what they did. It helped Harvath better understand his father. It was full of great dialogue, with more than a few poignant lines.
Sitting there in the dark, Harvath watched his dad silently recite line after line by heart. It had a profound impact on him.
They returned together over the next three Saturdays. It was the happiest he could ever remember being, sitting alone in the dark with his dad. They weren’t sports guys and they couldn’t talk very much about what his dad did for a living, but they had movies, and especially, this movie.
By the time Harvath was seventeen, he had seen The Magnificent Seven more than two dozen times. He now knew all of the lines by heart as well. Some took on greater meaning for him as he grew older, but one in particular resonated with him after his father had died in a training accident and Harvath had become a SEAL himself.
Many of the villages he passed through around the world reminded him of the one in the movie. There were always children and they were always fearless. They gawked at the weapons he and his teammates carried and wanted to touch all of their equipment. What’s this do? What’s that do? The questions were always the same and the children sported smiles that seemed outsized for the squalid conditions they were living in.
While the SEALs were indeed a novelty in most of the places they were dispatched, the children in particular were drawn to them, often to the exclusion of their own families. While this was problematic for obvious operational reasons, there was also a balance that needed to be maintained. If not careful, the SEALs could have been seen as stealing the thunder of the village men, which wasn’t their intention and could have disastrous consequences. The SEALs needed their cooperation, not their resentment.
In one village, a young boy had told Harvath that he wanted to be a brave warrior like him someday, not a coward like his father who was just a farmer. Via his interpreter, Harvath admonished the