Chapter 15: Dan's Miracle
This is the latest and FINAL chapter of The Ice Man, my book about the Navy SEAL platoon in Iraq that took the blame for a CIA homicide. The full book is available only to paid subscribers.
On April 22, 2023, I returned to Coronado for the first time in years. It was a warm spring day, which was welcome after an unusually wet winter. My route took me around the southern end of San Diego Bay through Imperial Beach, a gritty surfing community where many SEALs chose to live. The road then curved sharply north up the Silver Strand, the main north-south road through swanky Coronado with its beautiful seaside homes and oceanview high-rises. I passed Naval Special Warfare Command, the SEAL headquarters. I could see the dunes that generations of BUD/S trainees had trudged across while instructors shouted at them through bullhorns, urging them to quit. I could see the three-story obstacle course, every inch of which was familiar to Frogmen, who had run it too many times to count. A mile or so up the road, I turned off the road to attend a memorial to honor Dan Cerrillo.
A month earlier, Cerrillo had suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 50. The wounds of combat in Iraq never fully healed. In 2022, Cerrillo underwent surgery to clear away the damaged scar tissue in his heart. “They say the damage was the breaching charge I ate during my fight with Abu Said,” he said. “I’m much more alert so I think it worked.” He was running a shooting course, something he loved doing when he died.
I had never been to a SEAL memorial before, so I did not know what to expect. It turned out to be a deeply moving lesson on the value of recognizing and seizing life’s opportunities. Cerrillo’s family and friends all spoke about "Dan's miracle." A few years before his untimely passing, Cerrillo had changed not only his life but the lives of his wife and children and many ex-SEALs like him.
After leaving the Navy, Cerrillo worked for a time in personal protection. He had run security for some of the world’s wealthiest men, including. Paul Allen and another tech billionaire, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. To the outside world, he looked like a success. He was traveling the world and making a lot of money. He would give talks on how to be a great leader, husband, a father. But he was living a lie.
Cerrillo had entered a downward spiral of alcohol, PTSD, and depression that nearly killed him. “I was a complete fucking mess,” Cerrillo said. Anger, partially over the way he had been treated by the Navy, was eating him alive. His family was falling apart. His brain didn’t work. He couldn’t problem solve, couldn’t read or write. He was overwhelmed with sadness. He couldn’t sleep more than two hours a night. At his worst, he was drinking a bottle or two of tequila and smoking about four bowls of marijuana every day. When people weren’t looking, he would cry. “I couldn’t fathom living anymore in this condition,” he said.
He was not alone. There was a quiet episode of suicide ravaging the SEAL community. Commander Bobby Ramirez, who had just taken over command of SEAL Team One, took his own life shortly before Christmas. A few days after Cerrillo died, Mike Day, who had survived being shot 27 times while in Iraq, killed himself. Suicide rates among special operations forces were the highest in the military and higher than those of the general population.
A study by Special Operations Command found that from 2007 through 2015, there were 117 suicides among members of the special operations community. In 2012, 23 took their lives—a rate of 39.3 per 100,000. (The study did not break down the deaths by branch of service.) Researchers examined 29 cases in detail. Almost all had some form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or emotional trauma following deployment. In a dozen cases, the deceased had shared with loved ones the traumatic experiences they had experienced on deployment. These included being under enemy fire and watching fellow soldiers die in roadside bomb blasts, as well as killing enemy soldiers and animals, witnessing or participating in detainee torture and death, and missions that went against their ethical beliefs.
Researchers would find that military breachers like Cerrillo were prone to traumatic brain injuries. “Breacher’s brain” was the informal term for the fatigue, memory loss, headaches, and slowed thinking that resulted from repeated exposure to low-level blasts. Cerrillo told me he had participated in some of the studies.
Like many of his fellow SEALs, Cerrillo was haunted by the ghosts of men whose lives he had taken in combat. “My memories are ones that some overeducated shrink thinks but can never understand,” Cerrillo wrote in an unpublished memoir he shared with me. “If you have never taken a life, then you just can’t feel the emotions that go along with death. Taking a life (of a bad guy) is easy and the after-effects are easily drunk away. But when you take an innocent life, it never goes away. It just sits and haunts you night after night.” He would wake up and see the faces of the men he had sent to the afterlife.
“I think he was incredibly sad,” Leilani Cerrillo says. “I think he felt like he didn't fit into the family. He felt like nobody loved him. He was just taking himself down this really, really dark path.” He had lost many of his friends in 2011 when a Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing all 38 people on board, including 15 Navy SEALS from Team Six’s Gold Squadron. “Then slowly, one by one, more and more SEALs were dying, and he was already feeling like he didn't fit into society, and nobody understood him. It just got progressively worse.”
Cerrillo was trying everything he could to heal himself. "Yoga, meditation, you name it I was trying it,” he says. He tried Alpha-Stim, an electrotherapy device used to treat PTSD. “All of them helped me a little bit.” He tried everything except therapy. Like many former special operators, he was biased against therapy. In the SEAL community, it was seen as a sign of weakness. But he never gave up. Cerrillo was always pushing forward, one of his friends said about him, even when failure was inevitable.
One day, Cerrillo ran into Marcus Capone, an ex-SEAL breacher with Team Six. Capone ran Vet Solutions, a not-for-profit that funded psychedelic research to help veterans deal with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Sergey Brin of Google was curious about the program and was considering funding it. Capone talked about how taking psychedelics in Mexico had changed his life. Cerrillo blew him off, but something Capone’s wife said hit him hard. She talked about how mentally and physically abusive Marcus was before his therapy. The drunkenness, the loss of intimacy. Cerrillo heard his own wife’s story.
Cerrrillo’s marriage had broken apart. He had an affair and was living with another woman. His children were furious at him and felt betrayed. One day, Leilani confronted him. She told Cerrillo he had a choice. “I’m going to be honest with you. This is not about me. This is about you,” Leilani Cerrillo says she told her husband. “You can go live with her, which I don’t think is going to last. Or you can come home. I’m perfectly fine either way. If you love her and you’re happy with her, I’ll walk away. You and I will be friends. We will raise our children. That will be that.”
Cerrillo went to view the treatment first-hand in Mexico. “What I saw was nothing less than extraordinary,” he says. “I saw two of my friends go to bed as murderers, hardened, murdering men, and wake up as 12-year-old boys.” A month later, Cerrillo signed up for the treatment. On December 14, 2018, he traveled to the sleepy seaside clinic in Baja California. Cerrillo found himself unusually at ease despite the hippie-dippy surroundings. He talked about the Bloodbath Mission, recalling how he had killed a man in front of his son. He opened up about the mental anguish he still experienced.
The next day, he took a large dose of ibogaine, a compound derived from a West African shrub. Illegal in the United States, ibogaine offers promise for treating addiction but remains controversial. The drug gained prominence through the efforts of Howard Lotsof, a scientific researcher who claimed that it had helped him and five friends kick heroin in the 1960s. The US government has long classified it as a Schedule 1 narcotic, meaning it was officially seen as having no medical benefit. But nobody took ibogaine for fun. Those who did revisit some of their worst memories. Nevertheless, in homes, hotel rooms, and private clinics in North America and Europe, increasing numbers of desperate people were taking ibogaine in what has been called “a vast uncontrolled experiment.”
Cerrillo slipped an eyeshade over his eyes, put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and lay down. Cerrillo had never done psychedelics before. He went on a ride that lasted hours. He would be traveling through time and space, and then everything would stop. A computer file would open, and it would tell him a story from his life. He had gone down to Mexico to heal from war trauma, but what flashed before him were scenes from his childhood. He began to see how boyhood trauma had shaped his life choices and how it fed his anger and led him to combat.
The following day, Cerrillo smoked DMT. Known as the god molecule, DMT blasts some users into other dimensions or on an out-of-body experience. It sent Cerrillo to hell. He recalled something he had long forgotten. As a 5-year-old boy, he had watched his mother get attacked. He took a final hit of DMT, and this time, he went to heaven. He recalled his mother before the attack, a woman who was so loving and so caring. He realized that his mother was a damaged person, who had, in turn, damaged him. He understood why he hated, what had driven him to be a trained killer. He walked down to the beach and played in the waves and the sand like he was a child again. For the first time since he was a young boy, he felt at peace.
One of the most remarkable events in his life occurred at the airport on the flight home. While waiting to board his flight, he noticed two gay men sitting nearby. Cerrillo had grown up homophobic, which was reinforced by SEAL culture. For a Frogman like Cerrillo, gay was synonymous with weakness. But the mental eyeshades that had long colored his view of the world had been replaced with something else. As he looked at the two gay men leaning against each other, he had a revelation. “That’s love,” he thought to himself. “That makes sense to me. That’s what I fought for. I fought for Americans to be able to do whatever the fuck they want to do.” He turned his gaze and saw an older woman feeding French fries to her husband. That also made sense to him. He wanted his wife to be feeding him fries when he was older. He turned and looked again and saw a dad playing with his son. Cerrillo started crying. Being a father, he knew at the deepest core of his being, was the greatest gift in his life. Family and friends were what mattered in life. Everything else was a distant second.
On the way back from Mexico, Cerrillo decided that he was going to make his marriage work and be a better man and a better father. Leilani doubted him. The kids doubted him. But like everything else in Cerrillo’s life, he made his decision, and that was work. “He made it work and he completely changed our lives,” Leilani Cerrillo says. His oldest son, Dominic, finally got the father he had always dreamed of having. “It was an absolute miracle to see that savage of a friend that I grew up with, who ruined so many people who crossed him, turn into one of the most loving people I’ve ever met in my life,” said Frankie Choyeski, a friend of 33 years and a former SEAL teammate.
The Dan Cerrillo who returned from Mexico was a different man. He had allowed alcohol to rule his life. And then, suddenly, he was done. He stopped drinking overnight, and changed his diet, eating mostly fruits and vegetables. He never wanted to kill another human being again. He didn’t want to be a violent person. He began to heal.
Cerrillo began to reevaluate all his prior assumptions. I put down a gun,” he told me, “and I picked up a book.” He found he could let go of things that he had once believed in with every fiber of his being. He learned about plant-based medicines and how the Nixon administration had suppressed them out of fear of the counter-cultural, anti-war movements in the 1960s. Although he was no hippie, he shared some of their worldviews. He questioned American militarism. All the pain and suffering he had endured, all the blood he had spilled, what had it all been for? He told me he would never let his children join the U.S. military. He didn’t want them to get chewed up and spit out the way he had been. The Navy had failed him, yes, but it didn’t make him angry anymore. The Bronze Star he never received didn’t mean much to him anymore. “Just trinkets on a flag now,” he texted me.
The people who fought and bled for that flag, however, still meant a great deal to him. Cerrillo dedicated the remaining years of his life to helping former SEALs and others who were quietly suffering as he had been. He became chief of staff at the American Addiction Centers, a nationwide network of rehab facilities. Cerrillo was living proof that anyone could be saved. Since his death, Leilani Cerrillo said that she had heard from many of her husband’s former teammates who had stopped drinking because of him. She encouraged anyone who was listening at her husband’s memorial that if a chance comes along that might improve your life, take it. No matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel. There was hope in the darkest moments, but you had to keep moving.
Cerrillo’s daughter, Taylor, told a story of her father at his memorial. Taylor was having dinner with her dad a few years earlier in a steak house at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. At the time, Taylor was living in Vegas, struggling to become a trapeze artist. Doubt was beginning to creep into her atypical career choice, and she wondered whether she should quit. She knew her dad did not support quitting. He seemed unstoppable, like a man who feared nothing and no one. But Taylor figured that he was human. He must know pain, fear, and doubt. She asked her father how he made it through the days when he felt like he couldn’t continue. How did he deal with pain and fear? “Honey, in those times, I didn’t have an option,” he told her. “It was do or die. But in those moments when I felt like I wanted to die, I was met with an image of you and it never failed to force me to my feet.”
He then put his hands around the candle that lay on the table between them. He clasped his hands together, preventing the candlelight from shining through. “We are born with a fire in our hearts,” he told her. “Life will do its very best to squash all the crevices and the gaps that your light may try to shine through.” Then he began to turn his hands, and the candle glowed brightly again. “You see, light will always find a way to shine through. Life cannot extinguish your fire. Only you can.”
Many in attendance credited Cerrillo with helping save their lives from alcohol, addiction, and depression. Among the crowd were about 60 Frogmen. Jay Schmidt, his fellow breacher from Foxtrot Platoon, was there, along with at least one member of Cerrillo’s BUD/S class. Justin Legg was unable to attend as he recovered from his latest medical setback, a heart attack. Two members of the Polish GROM also showed up in their full-dress uniforms. There were a few members of the Frogmen Motorcycle Club, comprised exclusively of former SEALs. One former SEAL sat next to me, slowly spinning his Trident in his hand as he listened to the speakers.
I felt as I always have in the presence of Navy SEALs. I have such a profound respect for anyone who wears a Trident. What these men endured to wear that pin, the pain they endured, the dangers they faced, the sacrifices they made—it was nothing less than awe-inspiring. And maybe that was part of the problem. These men had surmounted every challenge, every obstacle placed in their path. They had chosen what one speaker at the memorial service referred to as “the pathway of pain,” a choice I could not begin to understand. Yet there was one enemy they could not defeat, one they fought in silent shame. It was the demons that lived inside of them and haunted their dreams.
SEALs learned how to shove their feelings down and keep going. Cerrillo called it bricks in a backpack. Each brick represented some painful memory or feeling. You would stack one brick on top of another. For a while, you could carry the load. But as the bricks piled up, at some point, the backpack became impossible to carry. You can’t function any longer because you have too many bricks in the backpack. You had to start unloading some of the bricks. For a lot of the SEALs, the answer was alcohol, drugs, or suicide. They couldn’t ask for help because it was a sign of weakness in their hyper-masculine culture. There were so many SEALs that had just walked away from their family because it was easier that way, rather than dealing with the darkness inside them.
Cerrillo was one of the few SEALs who could be honest about the mistakes that he had made in life. He was open about the issues in his family, the damage he had done, and the pain he had caused. He knew that his teammates didn’t want to share their demons because they felt it made them look weak. They had it backward. "You need to share this information because the weakness is when you kill yourself,” he would tell them. “Your family needs you.” True strength meant being able to share your vulnerability. Cerrillo was trying to teach guys in the teams that it was something that they needed to face. Many listened.
At the end of the memorial service, all of the SEALs present lined up. One by one, they bid farewell to their fallen comrade. They pounded their Tridents into a wooden US flag and saluted. Cerrillo’s former teammates brought their fists down hard to drive those brass pins into that wooden board.
This was how SEALs say goodbye to a former teammate. Like everything they did, it reminded them of the pathway of pain they had chosen. Two decades earlier, just up the road at Naval Special Warfare, SEALs had taken turns welcoming Cerrillo into the teams by blood-pinning a Trident into his chest. Now, one after another, they tore the skin of their fists and knuckles as they hammered the Trident pin into the wooden flag. It was painful entering the SEALs and it was painful when someone left.
No one spoke. All you heard was boom, boom, followed by a salute. Boom, boom, salute. It went on like that for 15 minutes or so. The booms carried out across the hotel pavilion where Dan’s memorial was held. They sounded out across the water of the small harbor nearby. They may have been just loud enough to be heard down the road at Naval Special Warfare, the crucible of pain that had forged these men into warriors.