The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (18 page)

It was Instructor Shoulin.

It was the weirdest thing. Here was this maniac who had done everything in his power to get me to quit, this guy that I hated, this guy who was my nemesis—and we were having a guys’ night out, drinking beers together.

“You know, Webb, I hated you,” he said.
Hey, don’t hold back,
I thought but didn’t say.
Tell me what you really think.
He took a slow sip of beer, then continued talking in that soft, icy killer’s voice. He was looking straight ahead, speaking almost as if I weren’t there.

“I did
not
want you to make it through. I did
not
want you to be a SEAL. We all thought you were going to quit. We thought we could
make
you quit.”

He stopped talking again. Maybe he expected me to say something. Maybe not. In any case, I kept my mouth shut and waited to see if he had anything else to say. He did.

“But you shoved it in our faces. You stepped up. I watched you turn a corner—and I was impressed.” He took another long pull on his beer, then quietly added, “You earned our respect.”

Those few minutes were worth all the shit I’d been through.

We drank until the sun came up. I overslept the next day and almost missed my own graduation. One by one, they called us up to receive our certificates. My parents were there, along with my grandparents, down from Canada. It was an unbelievably great feeling. I had made it through BUD/S. I was finally on the threshold of becoming a Navy SEAL.

I was still completely hungover from the night before.

FIVE

GETTING DIRTY

Nineteen ninety-eight. It was a strange time to be part of an elite military corps. This was the waning phase of the Clinton years, and there was a sense in the military that we and the current administration did not have the best of relationships. Frankly, there also wasn’t much conflict happening in the world, or at least no major clashes in which our forces were directly involved. Some guys were wondering just exactly what we were doing here and would grumble that we weren’t really being employed. We all felt a kind of tense anxiousness, as if we were dogs on the leash just itching to be let loose. We wanted to
do
something.

Instead, we
trained
.

In a way, the BUD/S training is not really training at all, but one seven-month-long entrance exam, winnowing out all but those who refuse to quit. Now the training started—and we trained, and trained, and trained. This is something about the SEAL experience: The training never stops.

When it came time to be assigned to a specific SEAL team, they had us list our top three picks in order of priority. I figured if anything important was going to happen it would be in the Middle East. At the time, each team was responsible for a particular area of operations (AO), and the Middle East was Team Three’s AO. I wanted to be wherever the action was. What’s more, Team Three had a really good reputation. For my top three picks I listed Team Three, Team Five, and Team One (all West Coast teams), in that order. I was elated when the assignments came down: I had gotten my first choice.

When I arrived at Team Three I did exactly the same thing I’d done back as a new guy in HS-6: put my head down, kept my mouth shut, and made sure I did a good job at everything they threw at me. In the SEALs, a new guy is someone who has not yet gone on an overseas deployment with a SEAL team, and I learned very quickly that new guys are better seen and not fucking heard. We hadn’t yet earned our SEAL Tridents; we were still on a six-month probation, and they never let us forget it for a moment. Once we proved ourselves on a deployment, we would be treated with more respect. Until then, I was back on the bottom of the totem pole again.

The next big step after being assigned to a SEAL team as a new guy was to class up to SEAL Tactical Training (STT), a three-month intensive program of advanced training. (Today this is called SEAL Qualification Training, or SQT, and is part of advanced BUD/S, but it’s much the same thing.) STT was where we would really start getting into close-quarters battle tactics, room-to-room, where we would shoot thousands of rounds on the range, and go through more challenging land navigations and extended dives. It was where we would prove ourselves—where we would actually start
becoming
SEALs.

It was time to get down and dirty.

*   *   *

And this brought me face-to-face with my first major challenge as a SEAL new guy: I needed to demonstrate that I could perform up to par when it came to shooting a weapon.

Some of the guys I was training with had already served in the Marine Corps; many of them had shot guns since they were kids. Most knew their way around guns, for one reason or another. Not me. There’d been a little bit of shooting in boot camp, and we’d had a little time on the range as part of SAR training and again as part of BUD/S, but only a taste. When it came to firearms, I was green as the grass. Would I be able to measure up?

I would have a chance to find out soon enough in SST.

Right off the bat we spent a week at the Naval Training Center (NTC) range, where we shot a variety of firearms, including the M-4 semiautomatic assault rifle, SIG SAUER P-226 semiautomatic 9 mm pistol, the Heckler & Koch USP .45 semiautomatic pistol (USP stands for “universal self-loading pistol”), and the H&K MP-5 9 mm submachine gun. The designation “submachine” means it fires subsonic rounds. Bullets that travel faster than the speed of sound create an audible
snap!
like a miniature sonic boom. It sounds like someone clapping his hands together sharply. That’s how you know you’re being shot at: In addition to the
crack!
of the round’s actual discharge, you hear these tiny
cracks
around your head.

This was all new to me, and I found myself seriously behind the curve. Almost from day 1 I had instructors climbing all over my ass, saying, “Hey, Webb, what’s your problem?” It was like being back at the beginning of BUD/S all over again: Suddenly I was
that guy.
I had to get my shit together and do it fast, because we were about to take it up a notch.

After a week at the NTC we went out to the La Posta Mountain training facility, about an hour’s drive east of San Diego. An old satellite observatory, La Posta covers about 1,000 square miles perched 3,500 feet up on a mountaintop—not exactly Denver altitude, but higher up than what we were used to, and beautiful. It would become especially valuable as a training site within a few years because the terrain there so closely resembles parts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

At La Posta we conducted some patrol and land nav exercises, similar to what we’d done in BUD/S only tougher. Still, to me these didn’t seem that difficult. Then it came time to get into serious training on the shooting range. A few weeks in, they started running us through combat drills they call stress courses. Stress courses is right: For me, this was the moment of truth. I would either step up my game or show up as lame.

It wasn’t that I was worried about flunking out. This was about
reputation
. As I was coming to learn, reputation is like a house that, once you burn it down, is almost impossible to build again. This is true in business, in communities, in the world at large—but in the SEAL community it’s true times ten. There’s nothing more precious to a SEAL than his reputation. In the stress course drills, mine would be at stake.

The drills took place on a course that was set up with barricades every 10 to 20 feet. The idea was to spring through the course, taking cover at each barricade and shooting different kinds of targets, hitting as many as you could within a given time. I knew how it worked. It’s not rocket science. Run fast, stay hidden, shoot the bad guys. What I didn’t know was whether I could do it.

When my turn came, I checked my M-4 assault rifle, cleared my head, and felt my breath coming steady. I knew the next few minutes would stay with me in the team’s eyes, for better or for worse, for months to come.

The instructor yelled “
Go!
” I tore off on a 20-foot sprint to take cover behind the first barricade. I peered around the right edge, down low, and engaged the target.
Crack! Ping!
These were steel knockdown targets: You hit one and it flips down backward.
Crack! Ping! Crack! Ping!
Shooting steel was satisfying, because each shot gave off that instantaneous report, much better feedback than shooting paper targets. After firing off a few quick rounds, I was sprinting to the next barricade, where I repeated the process, and then to the next. At the third station there were half a dozen head poppers, targets that suddenly popped up with just their heads showing. The goal was to take out all six in rapid succession. I fired off six rounds,
ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! ping!
and then took off for the next station.

A few stations later, with plenty of targets still left to shoot, I ran out of ammo. They had designed it this way on purpose. They wanted to see how we did when our primary weapon went dry. I swept my rifle to the side, letting it swing on its sling by its own weight, immediately drew my pistol and fired off several more rounds at the remaining targets, then holstered the sidearm, grabbed my rifle, and brought it back up as I sprinted to take cover and reload.
Cover, not concealment.
We’d been drilled on the difference.
Cover
is when you hide behind something that can actually provide you with physical protection.
Concealment
means you’re hiding behind something that shields you visually, like a bush, but the other guy can shoot through the bush and hit you. I took cover, dropped my depleted M-4 mag, slammed in a fresh magazine, loaded a fresh mag in my pistol, too, in case I needed it, then sprinted off to engage the next series of targets.

The whole thing was a whirlwind—there was no sense of stopping and starting, taking this step and then that step, just one unbroken stream of actions and reactions. It was over before I even had time to think.

Our instructor did a double take that was almost comical. “
Damn,
Webb,” he said. “Where the fuck did
that
come from?”

I looked around and realized the other guys were all staring at me. I hadn’t missed a single shot. I had smoked the whole course.

In all my previous experiences shooting at paper targets, I’d always struggled, always felt stressed out, never felt like any of it came naturally, and I’d never been nearly as good a shot as the rest of the guys. But now, when I hit that first steel target and heard that
ping!
something just clicked into place.

I puzzled about this for some time, and later came to some conclusions about it. I’d had no firearms experience or training whatsoever before joining the navy—but I had done an awful lot of undersea hunting. There’s something instinctive about spearfishing. That speargun doesn’t feel like a tool—it’s more like an extension of your arm: You just point your arm and fire. Target shooting had never felt like that to me, at least not up to that point. Once we were out on this more realistic drill scenario, though, that instinctive sense kicked in. It wasn’t like I was shooting
with
a rifle. I was just pointing my arm and shooting.

Rob Byford, my OIC from BUD/S days, was there on the range that day. He’d seen the misery I went through in First Phase, seen me when I was
that guy
and must have looked for all the world like I’d never make it through BUD/S.

“Goddam,” he muttered loud enough for all to hear. “I’ll take Webb in my platoon any day. The fuckin’ guy never quits!”

Thank God,
I thought. I’d redeemed myself.

*   *   *

From La Posta we headed out west into the desert to a godforsaken place called Niland, by the Salton Sea, where we spent the next six weeks in one of the strangest environments I’ve ever seen. This was our desert warfare phase, and I can’t imagine a more perfect location. The Salton Sea is essentially man-made, the result of an accident early in the twentieth century when some engineers were trying to redirect the Colorado River and lost control of the project. Now it’s one of the most brackish bodies of water on the planet, saltier than ocean water and filled with agricultural runoff.

On the northeast end of the lake is the funky town of Niland, occupied largely by meth labs and trailer parks. It reminded me of the postapocalyptic landscape in
The Road Warrior
. There are guys out there called scrappers who collect anything and everything. We’d be out on the range, doing contact drills, laying down thousands of rounds; we’d walk a hundred yards away to get a water break, drink, reload, and go back out—and all the brass shell casings we’d just left behind would be gone, the ground picked clean. Off to the side we’d see a guy with wild hair dragging along a sack and wearing his road-warrior goggles. It’s an odd bunch.

I’d been out to Niland about six weeks earlier, just before starting STT, with one of my buddies from Team Three, John Zinn. John and I were both surfers who’d grown up in California. He looked like your average skinny surf bum, but he was an excellent waterman and a great athlete. When I arrived at Team Three we hit it off right away.

As new guys, John and I were sent out there for a week to help support one of the SEAL platoons doing some training. One day we’d been sent out on some sort of resupply mission in a bare-frame, stripped-down Humvee. We’d completed the work and were done for the day. We were out in the desert, and no one else was around. We said, “Hey, let’s see what this bad boy can do.” We took off, taking turns driving, busting around the desert mountains and launching that Humvee over rises in the barren desert terrain like the Dukes of Hazzard.

As we were tearing ass down a long desert stretch, I saw a dip up ahead and started slowing a little to navigate it. John said, “C’mon, man, punch it!” and I stepped on it. Suddenly there was a gap in front of us. I accelerated, doing my best to jump it. All at once we were airborne. Everything slowed to a crawl. John and I turned and looked at each other, eyes wide, in slow motion: a Thelma and Louise moment. It couldn’t have been more than a second and a half that we were airborne, but it felt like a full minute. Then we landed. We had managed to clear the gap, but we came down so hard on the other side that it blew out the left front tire and bent the rim. We had no spare. How the hell were we going to explain this?