How Real Navy SEALs Would Handle Famous Movie Missions

Navy SEALs are having the best year and a half ever. We’ve been inundated with tell-all books, documentaries, and big-budget action movies (the upcoming Zero Dark Thirty) about the special-ops frogmen… and then there’s that whole Team-Six-killing-Osama thing. We’re beginning to think there’s no task too big for these badasses. Just to make sure, we asked 17-year SEAL veteran Don Mann—author of the US Navy SEAL Survival Handbook and a Team Six trainer—how the SEALs would handle a few epic missions of our own devising. And by “our,” we mean Hollywood’s.

Click on to see how the SEALs would handle the harrowing moment of movies from Return of the Jedi toThe Dark Knight Rises.

Return of the Jedi (1983)

Scenario: A morbidly obese kingpin imprisons a carbonite-encased pilot in his palace, which is populated with armed minions.

Mann: “A team of 14 SEALs fast-rope down from a helicopter onto the roof, then go through either a skylight or window to clear the house from the top down. Anyone with a weapon is a threat, and SEALs shoot the threats. Anyone who isn’t they zip-tie and put on the floor with a hood on their head. Snipers are outside, making sure nobody’s escaping. We clear room to room, looking for that pilot.”

Willow (1988)

Scenario: An evil queen holes up at the top of a high-walled castle, protected by archers and swordsmen. The gates open only from the inside.

Mann: “A Special Purpose Insertion and Extraction rig lets seven or so guys hang on a helicopter line—they can come off the line or provide security from the line, shooting into the castle. The archers and swordsmen are easily taken out by these snipers. Throw in gas and the rest come out choking; rush in with gas masks on, put a gas mask on the queen, hook her to the SPIE rig, and pull her out from the top.”

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Scenario: An outbreak has forced a group of SEALs to hole up in a mall, surrounded by zombies (the fast kind).

Mann: “Being SEALs, they’d already have an escape plan figured out. But with the outbreak, they don’t want to leave a safe environment to go out into an area that’s been contaminated. They may be better off sitting in that shopping mall until help arrives. But the first thing to do is get a transmission to the outside. Then get into RadioShack and make a bomb. Use it to create a diversion on one side of the mall to get those zombies rushing over there.”

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Scenario: Terrorists have cut a large city off from the outside world and trapped the police. They have a nuclear bomb, which they’re driving around on a truck, with decoy trucks.

Mann: “Our people fast-rope out of helos and come up in boats and swim to shore armed. If we find the target truck, they can detonate the bomb, so we need to have CBR (chemical/biological/radiological) gear available. Whatever trucks our intel has told us they could be driving we follow by helo with armed guys, and then it’s actions on the objective—secure the truck drivers so they can’t detonate the device.”