OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- The big house. That's what the Helvenston family called their $322,000 Spanish-style home with the three-car garage in the hills above the Pacific.

Or rather, it was the house that used to be theirs: They put it on the market in 2001 after Scott Helvenston couldn't sell enough of his military-style workout videos to cover the advertising bills.

After that, the Helvenstons -- all four of them -- moved into a 26-foot travel trailer for a year. Scott, the former Navy SEAL instructor, actor, fitness guru and stuntman, was reduced to campground security guy. He tooled around in a golf cart, asking vacationers to turn down their radios.

Then Helvenston heard of the big money that his former SEAL buddies were making with private security companies overseas. First, he applied to DynCorp, one of the biggest, but turned down the job -- guarding Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Helvenston, who was raised without a father, didn't want to be away from his children for a year.

In the past few years, these kinds of jobs had been popping up constantly, particularly for men with training such as Helvenston's.

The soaring demand had lured so many SEALs, Green Berets and Delta Force operators that some U.S. generals openly worried about losing talent. The elite troops -- who can cost millions of dollars to train -- were taking their skills to private industries that then profited from taxpayers' investment.

Another such job was with Blackwater USA, which was offering contracts of just a couple of months in Iraq for $600 or more a day.

That was more like it.

Reservoirs of strength

People who knew Scott Helvenston -- "The Helv" to close friends -- struggle to explain how strong he was, physically and mentally. They point to his joining the SEALs when he was just 17. They bring up the time when he represented the Navy in a world military pentathlon championship. He won, perhaps the closest thing to being named the best military athlete on the planet.

Or they mention the time his parachute malfunctioned. He broke both wrists and both ankles, but stood and tried to walk away.

"It just seemed like he always had to prove himself," said his mother, Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel. "I don't know if he did that, or the world put it on him."

Just after Helvenston's eighth birthday, his father, a doctoral student, killed himself. The little boy was the last one in the family to see his dad alive.

Friends and family say that losing his father that way led to Helvenston's drive -- and to his later zeal to be a good father to his daughter, Kelsey, and son, Kyle.

Helvenston's drive catalyzed his innate athleticism. One day, 2-year-old Scott looked his mother in the eye and announced, "I'm Scotty Bod!" And he was, too, for the rest of his life. When he was about 4, his mother said, some college football players taunted him at the neighborhood pool, saying he was too little, the pool was for grownups. Scott dashed angrily to the diving board, tore off his flotation vest and, before she could stop him, dove in and swam the length of the pool.

Underwater.

An end to high school

The summer before 11th grade, Helvenston moved to Winter Haven, Fla., and there he met three other boys -- among them Ed "E.T." Twyford -- with whom he became close friends. The others were a year older, and when they graduated from high school, Scott told his mother that he saw no need to stay, either.

Instead, he got his GED and on June 28, 1982, drove to Orlando and joined the Navy. As was to become his habit, he had a lofty goal, though he had to explain to Twyford exactly what a Navy SEAL was.

Helvenston, who had discipline problems at home and school, thrived in the SEALs. "He gave a lot to the Navy, but the Navy gave a lot to him," Twyford said. "Once he got around that structure, that discipline, there was no stopping him."

He first was attached to SEAL Team 5 in Coronado, Calif., adjacent to San Diego. In 1983, he moved to SEAL Team 4 at Little Creek Naval Base and lived in nearby Virginia Beach.

Patricia Irby, also athletic and blond, lived next door.

"I'd be driving by, and I'd see him," she said. "He'd be washing his Jeep without his shirt, and I thought, 'Wow, he's hot!' "

Helvenston and Irby were married in 1988, just before he transferred back to California.

Helvenston eventually instructed younger sailors in such dangerous arts as high-altitude, low-opening parachuting; jumpers are dropped at altitudes of up to two miles or more and don't open chutes until they're just a few hundred feet above the ground.

He left the SEALs in 1992, his mother said, because an officer had taken a dislike to him and was using petty issues to torment him. That experience convinced him that it would be good to work for himself.

Helvenston's family was in Florida, his wife's in Virginia, but they stayed in California because they loved the outdoors.

Helvenston used his skills from the SEALs, along with the power of the commando group's name, to open doors in Hollywood.

Movie work

Helvenston got jobs as a consultant for movies including "Face/Off" with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage and "G.I. Jane," where he taught Demi Moore how to behave like a SEAL. He even was an actor in a reality show, "Combat Missions," run by the guy who dreamed up "Survivor." On the television show "Man vs. Beast," he became the only human to beat the beast, winning an obstacle-course race with a chimpanzee.

Helvenston also developed a line of SEAL fitness equipment and videotapes. He held SEAL-style fitness camps and led mountain-climbing expeditions.

According to his resume, Helvenston was qualified for high stunt falls, Western-style horse stunts, mountaineering and, needless to say, fights. The family photo albums depict a vigorous lifestyle. There are photos of Helvenston belaying Kelsey, then 6, as she climbs cliffs, of him setting up the climbing equipment for ESPN's "X Games," of Helvenston and Patricia Irby standing in front of temples in the Himalayas as they competed in the Raid Galoises, an international adventure race involving boats, mountain climbing and bikes.

For a time, Helvenston lived this unusually adventurous version of the California dream, family and all. But the SEAL fitness business began losing money. In the summer of 2001, the family moved into the travel trailer.

Eventually, the money problems killed their marriage, Irby said.

Money wasn't the way Helvenston measured success, and he didn't make much -- a bankruptcy filing in 2002 listed his income at less than $14,000 a year. When he decided to go to Iraq, he had child-support payments and rent. He also still had dreams, including opening a climbing gym.

The money problems made the decision to go to Iraq easier, though Irby is convinced there were other reasons.

"His big motivation, I felt like, was to get back with a group of his comrades. He was always out on 'a mission' of some kind, always looking for something to happen," she said.

Something did.

In March, Blackwater flew Helvenston to its Moyock, N.C., headquarters for a few days of training, then to Kuwait. For a little more than a week, he worked out of the company's new Kuwait City office with a team providing security for food convoys in relatively safe southern Iraq.

Then another Blackwater team that briefly had come south from its usual turf in the insurgent stronghold of the Sunni Triangle came up a man short; a member had problems with a flight.

They had to go back north, and Helvenston was assigned to join them.

He had never met Michael Teague, Wesley Batalona or Jerry Zovko, but soon he would ride with them into Fallujah.

SOURCE NOTES

Chapter 5 of "The Bridge" is based on information collected from these sources:

Helvenston's family life and former homes: reporter Jay Price's tour of the neighborhood; interview with Scott Helvenston's ex-wife, Patricia Irby, his mother, Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel, and his friend Ed Twyford.

Helvenston in the military: Navy personnel records; interviews with Irby and Helvenston-Wettengel.

Helvenston before and after the Navy: Interviews with Irby, Helvenston's brother, Jason Helvenston, Helvenston-Wettengel, Twyford and former SEAL Greg McPartlin.

Helvenston in Kuwait and Iraq: e-mail from Helvenston in Kuwait to Irby, Helvenston-Wettengel and Twyford.

(News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)

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