We’ve all heard of the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, but there’s an elite team within the US military that’s so secretive, even its name is classified. It’s referred to simply as “the Unit” or “the Activity,” and the VA has no record of its members. Adam Gamal, a pseudonymous author, writes about his time as part of the highly classified group in his new book “The Unit: My Life Fighting Terrorists as One of America’s Most Secret Military Operatives” (St. Martin’s Press, Feb. 20). Gamal, a Muslim American who fled Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood as a young boy, enlisted in the US Army in 1994, compelled to serve the country that had given him freedom. He initially hesitated to join the special forces — though his language skills were needed, and his dark complexion and 5-foot-1 stature would make him an asset who could easily blend-in abroad. But, after 9/11, he wanted to do whatever he could to fight al-Qaeda.
“I felt that I had a moral obligation to make sure these guys didn’t do any more damage — either to my fellow Americans or to the religion that also feels like home to me,” he writes in the book, which is co-authored by Kelly Kennedy. But, joining the Unit first required undergoing a long, grueling selection process that was was excruciating both physically and mentally. Gamal, who has been awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star Medal and the Legion of Merit, shares his experience in this excerpt.
As soon as they handcuffed us and pulled bags over our heads, I started to hear explosions all around me, as if we’d suddenly found ourselves in a war zone.
From underneath my bag, I began to hear voices all around me: “I quit.”
I’d been walking for days, and I smelled sour. Things didn’t get better after they removed the bags from our heads. They asked me a bunch of questions, including about a message I’d received from a guy at a bar on the shady side of town.
“I don’t know,” I said. Whack!
They hit me so hard I was sure I was going to pass out. And then they hit me again. This was real. This was not a joke. They hit the women, too. One interrogator stood at least six feet, five inches tall and weighed a good 250 pounds. He had a monster beard, like some kind of militant religious terrorist — or a biker — and a bald head.
“Please don’t smack me,” I said, as I stood eyeball-to-belly button with the biggest guy I had ever seen in my life. “If you smack me again, you’re going to kill me. So don’t.”
He didn’t smile.
This was not a war zone.
For days, we had walked. Twenty miles. Thirty miles. Fifty miles. In the desert. In the city. In the woods. We never knew what our days would look like. One MRE to last a day. If we were in the city, eleven dollars to last a day. They dropped us in the worst places: Sand in every direction with no landmarks. The rough parts of town. At one point, I looked so bad, a woman thought I was homeless.
“Hey, I saw you walking around yesterday,” she said.
Isthispartofit? I thought. Isthisatest?
I had become paranoid about everything, sure that someone would try to trip me up.
I had been wearing the same clothes for days. I hadn’t shaved in a week. She tried to give me money.
“I can’t take it,” I told her. She insisted. “No, no,” I explained. “I’m not homeless.”
As it turned out, she had nothing to do with it. She was just kind.
They told us to pack a bag, and when we arrived, we gave it to our evaluators. They then decided what we would wear that first day. Our first day of walking? They gave one of the women a pair of high heels she had packed in her bag. She walked at least twenty miles that day. I am sure she was in pain, but my god, she was f—ing tough.
Most of us would not make it through selection. And many of us would not make it through training. By the end of it, I had injured myself enough that I needed cortisone shots. There was no skin on the bottom of my feet.
Was it physical? Yes.
But mostly, it was a mindf—.
‘Leave your ego at the door.’
“Leave your ego at the door,” they told us on the first day. Those who didn’t failed.
I went in feeling like I was special: Not only had I joined the Army as a non-English-speaking immigrant but I was usually the shortest guy in the group. Well, always. But despite that, I had excelled in training, physical fitness, rank, and education.
But it’s like when you go from high school, where you’re the best football player at your school, and move on to college, where all the best football players from all the high schools are and you’re no longer the best.
We had a guy who grew up between Brazil and Argentina, a guy whose dad had kidnapped him and taken him to Lebanon and then Libya, a guy who grew up fishing in Alaska, a guy whose family came from Ukraine. One woman was a world-class swimmer. There was a guy who ended up mayor for one day of his hometown in a foreign country after a coup and who then had to flee for his life.
Another guy, Jacob, had been shot in the face. While the bullet missed his brain, it took out his eye. His party trick? Popping out his glass eye.
The frightening unknown.
We didn’t know how long it would last.
The Special Forces guys — the Green Berets — also go through selection, but it wasn’t the same as ours. They knew, going in, exactly what they would encounter during their twenty-one days.
They knew that if they could just suck it up for three weeks, they were golden. They also knew, every day, exactly what they would be doing: Today, I’m going to do this task. I’ll need this much food and water. And tonight, I’m going to sleep in this particular spot after a twenty-mile road march. They knew that they would spend much of their time at Camp Mackall in North Carolina.
It may not seem like a big deal, but just that sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end gives you an edge: I only have to do this for another two hours/six miles/three days. Your first question-anybody’s first question-will always be, “For how long?” We didn’t have that. We didn’t even know how long selection would last. Six weeks? Eight weeks? They wanted to know if we were willing to take the risk, as well as if we could muscle through that daily unknown.
Fears revealed.
We found out during selection if we had any crazy phobias: we jumped from heights; we spent time in the water; we slept in the woods by ourselves.
“If you see a bear, don’t try to fight it,” they told us, and then they sent us out into the woods for days and days (and nights) for a land-nav course.
In the middle of f—ing nowhere in West By-God Virginia, we did a lot of land nav without GPS. They gave us maps and told us where to go, and then we found our spots and camped out. If you grew up in the country, this may seem like no big deal. But I didn’t grow up near anything that looked like a forest.
I definitely never saw a bear in Egypt.
Bears are faster than you think. They can run after you.
A brutal wakeup.
One night, we stayed, as a group, at a hotel. All of a sudden, a bunch of guys stormed our room and arrested us.
Okay.Whatthef—?
An old lady in the next room saw all of it, and it freaked her out pretty hard. We’re probably lucky we didn’t end up a meme for police brutality.
They weren’t pretending. They smacked the f– out of me. We had a guy, I’ll call him Mike, with us who was extraordinarily smart, to the point that he overengineered everything and was incapable of working with other people because he was smarter than everybody else. Hilarious, though, and I liked him. He and I were in the same room for one interrogation — picture a gym or an old-school barracks with an open shower area. I swear I could smell sweaty socks, bleach, and Speed Stick.
The interrogator asked me a question. “I don’t know,” I said.
Smack!
They told us not to talk too much.
The interrogator asked Mike a question. Mike told the interrogator this long-ass story.
“Mike,” the interrogator said, “you talk too much.”
But he couldn’t stop. And every time he talked more, the interrogator smacked him again. Smacked him hard. Extremely hard.
Whoa, I thought. This is real.
The unexpected ending.
All through it, they kept us walking. I had no skin left on the bottom of my feet. I had landed sideways fast-roping out of a Blackhawk and twisted my ankle the wrong way. My knee still ached from slipping on the black ice — the doctor had told me not to run on it for six months. And I was exhausted. I hadn’t been able to eat enough to keep any weight on my body, and I could feel it breaking down.
I was so f—ing thirsty.
ShouldIquit?
I couldn’t even move. Couldn’t move my feet.
A member of the cadre in a car rolled up next to me.
Sh-t.
I knew I was done. I knew he had come to tell me I had failed.
I got in the car.
But he didn’t say anything.
Sh-t. He’s taking me somewhere else to make me walk some more. Should I tell himI can’t walk anymore?
He handed me a bag.
“Eat this,” he said. “We’re going home.”
It was the best burger I’ve ever eaten.
From The Unit: My Life Fighting Terrorists as One of Americas Most Secret Military Operatives by Adam Gamal with Kelly Kennedy. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
