The Way Forward

Master Life's Toughest Battles and Create Your Lasting Legacy

Robert O'Neill, Dakota Meyer

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780062994073
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062994097
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Biographies

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“The Way Forward will help every reader master their own challenges—this is a must-read book!” —Admiral Bill McRaven, U.S. Navy (Retired) and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Make Your Bed

American Sniper meets Make Your Bed in these life lessons from decorated United States service members and New York Times bestselling authors Robert O’Neill and Dakota Meyer—an in-depth, fearless, and ultimately redemptive account of what it takes to survive and thrive on battlefields from Afghanistan and Iraq to our daily lives, and how the perils of war help us hold onto our humanity.

Rob O’Neill and Dakota Meyer are two of the most decorated and recognized US service members: O’Neill killed the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, and Meyer was the first living Marine to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. But beyond their actions and courage in combat, O’Neill and Meyer also have much in common in civilian life: they are both sought-after public speakers, advocates for veterans, and share a non-PC sense of humor. Combining the best of military memoirs and straight-talking self-help, The Way Forward alternates between O’Neill’s and Meyer’s perspectives, looking back with humor at even the darkest war stories, and sharing lessons they learned along the way.

The Way Forward presents O’Neill and Meyer’s philosophy in combat and life. This isn’t a book about the glory of war and combat, but one about facing your enemies, some who are flesh and blood and some that are not: Your thoughts. Your doubts. Your boredom and your regrets. From Rob’s dogged repetition at the free throw line of his childhood basketball court to Dakota’s pursuit of EMT and firefighter credentials to aid accident victims, these two American heroes turn their experiences into valuable lessons for every reader.

Gritty and down-to-earth, O’Neill and Meyer tell their stories with candor and vulnerability to help readers handle stress, tackle their biggest obstacles, and exceed their expectations of themselves, while keeping life’s battles in perspective with a sense of humor.

Drawing from hundreds of missions and the hardest lessons of their lives, O’Neill and Meyer share their unfiltered framework for winning your own battles:

• Front Toward Enemy Philosophy: Learn the simple, powerful mindset—inspired by the instructions on a Claymore mine—that America’s top operators use to confront any obstacle, from combatants to self-doubt.
• Lessons from Special Operations: Go inside the missions that shaped O’Neill and Meyer, from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to the firefight that earned the Medal of Honor, and discover the principles forged in the crucible of combat.
• Overcoming Adversity: A raw, no-BS guide to turning trauma into strength, handling extreme stress, and finding purpose after the fight is over.
• Dual-Perspective Storytelling: Experience the unfiltered humor and hard-won wisdom of two legendary warriors as a Navy SEAL and a Marine share their alternating, candid accounts of life on and off the battlefield.

Part One

Preparation

1

American Boys

ROB

Don’t Forget Where You Come From

You can barely hear yourself inside a Chinook helicopter when the cargo door is open. A CH-47 is a beast; it’s a flying school bus. It’s about as comfortable, too. With the cargo door closed and the ramp up, it’s quieter inside, the roar of the rotors muted to where it becomes possible to focus, to think, to have a quiet conversation, or maybe just sleep.

We used CH-47s for nighttime missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we flew toward the sites where we would land and hike to our targets, I would sit and go over the mission in my head. Think about who I was going to kill that night. Shut out the background noise.

On a flight in 2010 where I was jumpmaster, the door was open and I couldn’t hear myself think over the thunder of the rotors. The wind howled in my ears as I knelt on the ramp, holding on to one of the hydraulic jacks and looking forward for our drop zone ten thousand feet below. Below me, it wasn’t razor-sharp peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains or the noisy sprawl of Jalalabad’s streets and bazaars. Instead, I saw the richest hill on earth: Butte, Montana, my hometown.

As the Chinook thundered north, I could see hills dotted with sagebrush, and stands of ponderosa pines reaching up into Highland Mountains. I spotted my high school and then the campus of Montana Tech and the boxy HPER Complex, where I once shot 105 free throws in a row and learned to swim to become a Navy SEAL.

I looked closely at the familiar grid of streets and saw my father’s ranch house on Bittersweet Drive and my mother’s bungalow near East Middle School to the north. The wide mouth of the Berkeley Pit and the turquoise tailing pond came into view before we banked right across the East Ridge and over Saddle Rock, where the towering white statue of the Lady of the Rockies looked down over the city.

Then the Chinook slowed as we completed the wide circuit around the city and approached the airport. A dozen guys waited behind me, ready for the signal to hurdle themselves off the ramp into the sky over Butte. Somewhere two miles below, my mother and father waited, looking for our chutes. The pilot had turned on the green go light. I held up my finger in the air to show one minute to jump, then my thumb and index finger for thirty seconds. When it was time, I punched the outside of my thigh like you would in a game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” then extended a “thumbs up.” Stand by. Then I held my hand straight out from my chest, pointing out the door: the go signal. One by one, my guys launched off the ramp, tumbling toward the ground before stabilizing at terminal velocity.

And then it was my turn.

* * *

EVERYONE’S FROM SOMEWHERE, and my somewhere is Butte. It calls itself a city, but to me, it’s a town. A tough-guy, mining town, I guess. The miners who helped build Butte in the late 1800s were born hard, had hard lives, and when they weren’t underground digging for coal, they drank and fought, which made life hard for everyone around them, too.

Mine shafts go everywhere around and under Butte. Marriott built a hotel there recently. I’m betting they did underground site surveys so that it didn’t collapse into a hole. There was a brothel in town called the Dumas Brothel, which had a tunnel that went right down in a mine shaft, so that the miners could conveniently come up and visit the ladies on their lunch breaks. Crazy stuff.

Butte used to be a boomtown of a hundred thousand people, the biggest city between St. Louis in the east and San Francisco in the west. Now it has fewer than forty thousand. Gold and silver mines made Butte “the richest hill on earth.” Later, it was copper. And it was copper, not gold, that gave Butte one of its lasting landmarks: the old Anaconda mine in the northwest corner of town, which also happens to be one of the biggest toxic waste sites in the country. It closed in 1982, but the hole that it left behind is colossal. That son of a bitch is two thousand feet deep and a mile and a half wide.

After Anaconda shut it down, the mine filled up with toxic water. Now it’s the country’s biggest Superfund site. Canadian geese land there and die in the water after they splash down. It’s sort of a tourist attraction, and I don’t know if that says more about the site or the tourists who come to see it. When I brought my wife, Jessica, up to Big Sky Ski Resort to the east, near Bozeman, she looked at the mountains. “My God, Montana is beautiful,” she said, before adding, “Nothing like Butte.”

You could say the mines gave Butte another landmark, though. A more personal touchstone. Get this: Butte is the most Irish town in America, as a percentage of population. No shit. Most of the miners came over from Ireland and brought St. Patrick his holiness with them.

In 1979, an electrician named Bob O’Bill came up with the idea of building a shrine to the Virgin Mary because his wife was dying of cancer. She recovered, but he pledged to build it anyway. Instead of being a five-foot-high statuette in his backyard, it became a ninety-foot monument that now presides over the entire city. He acquired some land on the East Ridge, right on top of the Continental Divide. I’m talking 8,500 feet above sea level. I was about three when construction began, and it wasn’t finished until 1985. It’s a big-ass statue. She’s called the Lady of the Rockies, and she stands over the ridge with arms outstretched, palms up. She glows at night, lit up with white and green spotlights. When you’re in downtown Butte, “the flats,” all the east-west city streets seem to end at her feet. When I looked up and saw her, she seemed to be looking down over the city and blessing the hard-luck Irish miners with her upturned hands, always visible from the sky and the ground. As far as I was concerned, the whole world was Irish Catholic, and she was watching over all of us. Sometimes my mom would drop us off at the trailhead at the bottom of the mountain, and we’d hike up to her. She’d grow taller and bigger the closer we got, until we stood at the foot of her flowing robes and looked up at her, as majestic to us as the Statue of Liberty.

For me, Butte felt like the center of the universe. The biggest ball game was right before Christmas when Butte Central played Butte High School in basketball. If you were lucky, you got to go over the mountain to Bozeman or maybe northwest to Missoula and watch the Montana Grizzlies play the Montana State Bob Cats. That was the big time. Butte didn’t have a lot to hang its hat on. It did have Evel Knievel, who was from there. No shit.

Both my mom and dad grew up in Butte. There were four kids total in my family: two sisters and me and my brother. I went to the same high school as my parents had, Butte Central, which was the private Catholic high school. It was split up into Boy’s Central and Girl’s Central. My dad went to the University of Montana right out of high school on a basketball scholarship, and my mom went to Montana Tech for her first two years, which is where I ended up going to college. Then she transferred to UM to be with my dad. She became a math teacher, because she enjoyed solving problems. That’s where I get that from. A lot of combat is solving problems. It’s slowing down, calming down, and finding solutions.

Now, some people assume I must have been a badass growing up. I was never a badass. I didn’t beat people up when I was kid; in fact, I was probably beat up more than I did the beating. My childhood wasn’t packed with martial arts classes and hard-hitting football. It was filled with jokes and laughter. This originated with my dad, who let us watch Trading Places, John Candy’s Delirious, and other movies like that. Totally inappropriate for kids. I held on to his sense of humor, too. I always want to make people laugh and keep morale high. That’s good for families. It’s also good for soldiers, and it was an essential element for my teams. You’ll hear some of the funniest things in the most dire situations in the middle of combat. Like when I first arrived in Afghanistan, I assumed everything horrible that I heard on the news was true: suicide bombers everywhere, gunfights in the mountains, and land mines all over the place. As we were walking in the mountains to try to rescue Marcus Luttrell, I asked my boss, “What if we walk through a minefield?” Without missing a beat, he said with a completely straight face: “It’ll be fine. Just plug your ears.”

Growing up, Butte felt like the hometown of every kid in America who wants to be somewhere bigger or more exciting. You think that just because someone’s from Phoenix, Arizona, they’re better than you. Or because someone’s from Chicago, they’re better. It gives you a little bit of an inferiority complex.

I always knew there was something else out there. I had to get to Great Lakes, Illinois, to go to U.S. Navy boot camp to see other scared kids just like me and realize that everyone’s pretty much the same. I recall two dudes who left Los Angeles, one from Watts and one from South Central, in order to get away from gangs. Another person from Westchester County, New York, told me he couldn’t stand it. Everyone has to get out of somewhere.

I try to get home about every two months. My mom and dad are still there, although amicably divorced, and I have to go back and check to see that my dad is behaving himself. My brother, Tommy, is still there, too. He has a morning drive-time radio show. Everyone in Butte knows him because he reads the school hot lunch menu every day. It’s completely ridiculous. He gets to tell the kids if they’re having beef ole’ for lunch that day, which is essentially chili and Fritos. I think he’s probably better known in Butte than I am.

* * *

BACK WHEN I BROUGHT MY SQUADRON to my hometown for a training mission in 2010, my team was at the highest point for morale. Especially in xxxxxxxxxxxx—my squadron—because we hadn’t lost anybody in combat since I had gotten there. We’ve been doing really well and we just finished a deployment.

When I was putting together training trips for my team, I thought, Man, I’d love to go home on the government’s dime and bring a bunch of buddies up to show them the town. So I sold it as a high-altitude skydiving trip for about a dozen of us. Butte’s already a mile above sea level, so by the time you’re in the CH-47, we’re about three miles up and that air is thin. When you’re landing a jump at five thousand feet, your parachute is going really fast and you need to know how to do it.

I knew a former Air Force Pararescue guy who owns a company in Butte called The Peak. And I knew we could probably get an airplane up for free from the Air Force Base in Great Falls. And then I get the government to pay for our room and board, and I know the guy who owns a hotel, so I can put up with some good business. The trip was about two weeks long.

So, no shit, there we were, two miles above my hometown. High-altitude jumps can be hard if you don’t take it seriously or get complacent. There is a lot going on and it’s easy to get cocky or overzealous or just plain forgetful. You have to calculate exactly how to get upwind of the drop zone, get the correct altitude to start your downwind portion, and then correct your “crosswind” portion so that you can turn and go into the wind just before you slow down to land. If you screw something up and come in too hot, you burn in, and that usually means that you die. If you “auger in,” you hit hard and hurt yourself badly, but you’ll survive. On one of the jumps, one of my guys augered in right in front of my family. He slammed into the ground in a big cloud of dust, then jumped up and pretended he was fine because he was in front of everybody. We have a saying: “If you’re going to be stupid, you better be hard.” Once we got back into the CH-47, and after we got into the air far enough from the crowd, he looked at me in pain. “Oh, that fucking sucked,” he groaned.

As jumpmaster, I went last. I could hear the guys all around me laughing and talking, and when it was my turn to go, I got out there on the ramp. We were hovering almost directly above the house where I grew up. I watched the guys below me, shooting nose-first toward the ground. The sky was wide and huge over me, and below Montana spread to the east and west on both sides of the Continental Divide. I got up from my knees and ducked under the aft fuselage and launched outward and down, and as the wind rushed against my face at 120 miles an hour, I looked toward the streets and buildings below, getting closer and closer as my hometown rushed up to meet me.

We’d jump during the day and at night go out to drink at Maloney’s, a bar on North Main Street. It’s got a big shamrock on the awning over the door, and Irish flags hanging over the bar. It boasts Jell-O shots for a dollar and nude centerfolds plaster the walls and ceiling inside the men’s bathroom. Not exactly PC, but hardly a surprise, either.

When my guys and I went to Maloney’s, something would happen almost every night. The regular patrons would see a bunch of new guys in their bar, and after a few drinks would talk some shit. Pretty soon everyone was on their feet, ready to go. But there’s a big difference between being a tough guy and a technical fighter trained in close-quarters combat. When one of the regulars would start to get in the face of one of my guys, I would try to tell them as gently as I could, “Don’t do this. You don’t want to do this.”

We really didn’t get in fights. It went more like this: tough guys would try something, and then my guys would knock them out. Boom.

“I told you not to do that,” I’d say afterward.

One of our SEALs sent a tough guy to the hospital, and he showed up at the bar the next night again with his jaw wired shut. What’s great about Butte is you can knock someone out and then help them up and have a drink with them. We didn’t have a drink with the guy with the broken jaw, though, after one of his buddies grumbled, “Maybe someone should pay his medical bill,” and one of my guys cracked up and said, “Maybe someone should learn to fight.” Don’t get me wrong, guys in Butte are tough and everyone has a “puncher’s chance” of landing a good one, so if you visit, don’t get too cocky.

We didn’t spend all our nights at bars. We were there to train, and not just for high-altitude skydiving. Montana was a great place to train for disappearing into the mountains. Often, during missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we would drop several klicks (kilometers) away, hump it to the target, do the job, and then cut out. But other times, we’d camp in the mountains for days at a hide site so that we could reach a hard-to-get-to target off in the middle of fuck knows where. And one of the ways you can get around in the mountains in Afghanistan is on horseback or on mules. That’s how the mujahideen drove out the Russians; they could fade into the mountains and move around on horseback. The United States even provided them with mules to do it; some of the mules that went to the muj came from farms in central Tennessee, not far from where I now live. So, in Montana we figured we’d find some cowboys to teach us how to pack a horse into the backcountry. They’d show us how to water the horses and take care of them, how to get everything strapped in tight, and spend a night or two in the mountains.

For this, we needed the right gear. I worked a line item into the budget for footwear for the training. After we arrived, we went up to Miller’s Boots and Shoes, a Butte mainstay on South Arizona Avenue, around the corner from the Dumas Brothel, and outfitted everyone with cowboy boots. Before the trip, I argued with my bosses that we needed boots because of rattlesnakes, and the bosses rolled their eyes and said, “Yeah, okay, I know what you’re doing, but go ahead and get the boots.” The o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part One: Preparation
• Part Two: Duty
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher