Trigger Warning: This article includes graphic discussion of combat, violence, sexual assault, and death. Please engage with this interview with discretion, as the material may be highly distressing for some readers.
James “Jimmy” Hatch is a former special operations Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer and SEAL who fought in 150 missions, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Bosnia. He is also a master naval parachutist and expert military dog trainer and handler. Hatch served in the military for almost twenty-six years, and was awarded a Purple Heart and four Bronze Stars for his service. While on a mission in Afghanistan in 2009, a gun-shot wound shattered his femur and took him out of the field. After struggling with depression and substance abuse in his post-service life, Hatch published a memoir, ‘Touching the Dragon: And Other Techniques for Surviving Life’s Wars,’ in 2018. He also founded Spike’s K-9 fund, an organization that raises money to support and protect dogs that serve law enforcement and the military — the fund is named in honor of Spike, Hatch’s first working dog, who died in Iraq in 2009. Hatch began his studies at Yale as an Eli Whitney student in 2019. He is majoring in Humanities and will graduate next year.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your life leading up to your service as a Navy SEAL. Why did you want to be a SEAL?
I was adopted a couple of times, and I never met my birth family in Utah. At the time of my second adoption I was around 3 years old, and it was pretty brutal, violent — cops would come to the house and stuff. I was accustomed to violence and wasn’t very comfortable trusting people. So I’m naturally drawn to stories about war and that type of environment because, to me, relationships are transactional. I just figured that’s how the world was. [When I was younger] I got into a lot of trouble. I was a criminal. I broke into places, snuck around, vandalism, stuff like that. So, the military was actually kind of hard for me to get into because I was almost in enough trouble that I couldn’t be let in. I was lucky to be accepted, and then I did regular [military] stuff for a while until SEAL training.
The reason I wanted to be a SEAL, or in that type of work, was because I wanted to be the guy that punished people. I wanted that level of violence because of the things that had occurred when I was a child. I had a very strong desire to punish people that hurt innocent people. Initially, when I went to SEAL training, I quit. I was scared to death, and I didn’t have a lot of self confidence. The biggest guy in that class quit. He’d done the Iron Man, and I realized that it wasn’t really about fitness. It’s really about how well you can suffer. Anyway, I went back to BUD/s –the second SEAL training is called BUD/s. Later, I tried out for what’s called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, that’s a nice name for SEAL Team Six. I got to do some pretty heavy duty stuff and in lots of places. I was shocked. I think the first time that I saw what humans are capable of doing to each other on a big scale was when I saw the mass graves of predominantly Muslims in Bosnia. There were kids and women buried everywhere, it was tough.
I had my own prejudices and intellectual limitations insofar as I thought, if you lived in a city like this — with big buildings, universities, ballets, and opera — this couldn’t happen. Bosnia was highly cultured, they had hosted the Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984. In spite of all this, there was still violence.
What was your role on your tours?
We were mostly doing what’s called capture-kill missions. We would find the leaders of different groups and go to their house, and they made the choice between being captured or killed. We showed up and would try to give them an opportunity to give up. More often than not, they wouldn’t take it.
I remember this one guy who used his family as a human shield. [His kids] were down the hall, and [him and his men] were shooting at us from this back room. He didn’t kill his kids, thank God. But when we got to the back of the house, I asked him, “why did you have your kids there?” He said, in perfect English, “I will not let my family get in the way of jihad.” I thought to myself, how do you deal with that?
Having done all these missions, do you become desensitized to fear? You said earlier that SEALs have to be able to suffer, but also you have to be brave and put yourself in intense danger. Did you still feel the same adrenaline rush or nerves with every mission?
After the selection and training that you go through, it’s pretty much guaranteed that everybody that’s in your crew really wants to get out there and fight. The biggest fear you have isn’t that you’re going to get hurt or killed. It’s that you will make a mistake, and then let one of your friends down and then they will get hurt. So, the fear wasn’t really personal. It was more of a collective fear. I can speak only for myself here, but it was evident that my buddies were of similar minds.
The relationship between the people on these missions must be very unique. Are you a mentor to SEALs — whether former or current — now? What advice do you give to people who are entering or already serving in the military?
I think my book, ‘Touching the Dragon: And Other Techniques for Surviving Life’s Wars,’ opened up a lot of doors to help people. I’ve given speeches to veterans’ groups, people in active duty, law enforcement organizations, and more.
When people who have been through this type of training hear me admit that I struggled, they feel like they have permission to admit that they struggle too. In the military, one thing you don’t want is your colleagues to think you’re f––ed up. But the truth is, we’re all f––ed up. We just hide it better than others sometimes, and processing those things is important.
When you came back from a mission, was there a moment of reflection on what would happen with your team. In other words, would you talk about the difficult things you saw or endured afterwards?
After a mission, we would do something called an after-action debrief. We’d all get together and go through the whole mission in an official way, but we didn’t talk about the emotions. For example, one night we went on a mission, and there was a young boy who was around ten years old, two women, and then these five or six guys [who had been involved in shooting and were the target of the mission]. These guys had been raping this boy. A lot of us who had been involved in that type of thing as children ourselves, we wanted to just kill this guy. But that’s murder. So we called back to our base and said hey, we got this boy. But, there are no Child Protective Services in Iraq. The social structures are really messy there. We were directed to have our medics take care of the kid and talk to the women to make sure that they would take care of him.
So anyway, when we came back, we debriefed that mission, but we didn’t sit and talk about the feelings that we had about that kid. There were always those types of situations.
I had this illusion that war is an equal transaction with combatants, right? There’s the bad guy and the good guy. We fight. You try to kill me, and I try to kill you. But actually, that’s not the case. This boy is an example of that. That was 2006. What do you think [that boy] is doing now?
At Yale, you’re a Humanities major. What drew you to studying literature, art, and culture? Do the books you read help you overcome things you are struggling with? Do you see yourself reflected in them at all?
So you know, I dropped out of high school. I never took an SAT or an ACT. I didn’t read what I was supposed to read in school. I didn’t like it. I barely had enough credits to take the GED and get my diploma.
While I was in the military, I would look at people I respected, and then I would look at what they were reading. So, I kinda got turned on to some of the classics like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus – so stoics. It made sense for the military.
I understood that those things were important, but I didn’t really have the capacity to read them and grasp what was going on. I got frustrated with it, but I kept trying. Then I got here and talked to Professor Norma Thompson. She was the director of undergraduate studies for the Humanities, and she suggested I do Directed Studies. And I’m like, I don’t know shit about academia, and I didn’t know what DS was. I was told it was hard, but if no one is shooting at you, how can it be that hard? It was f––ing hard, and I had a really hard time keeping up.
DS also hit me because I’m reading this stuff and feeling it. First I’m pissed off, like dactylic hexameter, what’s that? Then we started reading about things [like epics] that were about war, and it hit me hard. I was in tears. I couldn’t sleep. Seriously, when we were reading Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and thinking about “what is the origin of man,” and I’ll tell you what the origin is, f***ing savages.
I’m thinking of the towns in Iraq. Once, we went into a storage building looking for the bad guys, and there was somebody chained to the f***ing floor. Or they’re out there naked. It’s cold. They have a bucket on the floor with water and under one of them – the bathroom is all over. It kind of disappoints me that we have running water and Siri, and we’re still just a few consecutively missed meals away from being complete savages. There’s just not a lot of people like me that have the level of exposure to that kind of stuff in academia. I don’t know exactly how to move forward with it, but I will.
You have been exposed to so many different tragedies. Are there examples within literature that come close to describing your experiences?
Picks up ‘Paradise Lost’ and points to the book. That’s how I felt after I got hurt. I’m reading these things, and I think wow these describe my feelings.
Sometimes when you go on a mission, you have to jump out of an airplane and you HAHO, a high altitude high opening jump, and it’s f––ing awesome. It’s a great way to sneak in on a target. It’s also beautiful. When you jump out of the back of the airplane in the middle of the night, you are immediately aware of your insignificance. You are just this little speck in the sky. You can get that same sensation when you are way out in the ocean. So, in ‘Paradise Lost’ it says: “Before their eyes in sudden view appear/ The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark/ Illimitable Ocean without bound,/ Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth/ And time and place are lost…” That’s what HAHO feels like to me.
In your book, you describe finding intensity and peace in gunfights. Could you please describe that? Where are other places you have found peace?
You talked about the intensity of the gunfights, and, you know, I have actually found that level of intensity in a few of my classes here. The problem with that intensity in gunfights is you’re destroying humans or you’re getting destroyed. And in this environment, at school, I feel like I’m building humans. Most importantly, I’m building my humanity, which is a very interesting and intense emotional feeling that I don’t know how to really express except to say that I am f––ing lucky because a lot of people with experiences I have had don’t ever get to see or feel that.
In western Iraq, we would take helicopters and land way way way, 6, 7, or 8 kilometers out there in the desert, walking, sneaking out as quickly as we could surround the house. So it’s a team effort, right? In the classroom, it’s the same way. Professor Bromwich, for example, guides the class with questions that leave you with more questions than you can actually even try to answer. That synthesis is not that different from a direct action mission. I mean, really, you’re on a mission to try to understand what the writer wants to communicate and then even further.
You also have to grapple with the fact that killing someone, and that must come with complex emotions. How did you deal with the ethics of your job?
When you go out and commit that type of act of inhumanity, that does something to your soul. The other people that are involved in the war, the people who sent you, they aren’t as invested. They don’t care as much as you do, even though they’re the ones that sent you. When I realized that the level of commitment that we had was not shared by senior leadership people, it got very difficult for me.
Having moved away from that environment, it became a lot easier to see things in a different light. I came to Yale and took this class on Afghanistan where we had all these generals and ambassadors come talk to us. I was so shocked. Ambassador [Anne] Patterson was the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan when I got shot. She came to speak to us — what an amazing human being. And she told me right away, you’re not going to get what you want. I said, what do you mean? She said, you want somebody to blame. Everybody is to blame.
So when I think about the risks that people took on both sides, and the people who have died on both sides. It’s just so sad. And the really difficult part for me is that none of those leaders who made those decisions are ever held accountable.
You went from a war environment to going home and being surrounded by people in their regular lives. I know that you have struggled with mental illness in your post-service life. How did you emerge from those feelings of isolation?
What we were doing was so intense. We would go out on a mission, capture-kill, and come back. I remember one time a mission reminded me of ‘Lone Survivor,’ which is about a SEAL mission that goes array. After that mission, we were picking up bodies. Only 16 hours later, one of my buddies went home. For me, it was a few weeks later, and I’m standing in a f––ing Best Buy, looking at the TVs they are selling. There were all these people around me in the store who didn’t have to worry about what’s going on in other parts of the world. No one really cares, and I still haven’t worked that out.
I think the hardest thing for me is not what happened to me — it’s what I did to other people who didn’t deserve it. In war, where there are combatants using their families as shields — that’s what gets you, when you see a child die.
Where do you feel like you find hope?
I find hope in my classmates — or when I open my email, and there’s somebody at a hospital doing something meaningful. There are days when I’m in tears as I walk past Cross Campus.
This little spot on the planet — so much good stuff comes out of here. I know we can joke about it because we’re part of it, but as a person who has lived a lot of life and comes from different angle, this place is f––ing amazing. It really is. The fact that I get to be a part of it with people like you guys, it’s a lot of hope.