The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (19 page)

We radioed in. The guys at the base said they didn’t have anyone free to come out and get us, so we should hang tight for the night. We weren’t sure exactly where we were, but we knew we were somewhere in the vicinity of an area designated for ordnance exercises. In plain English: a live bombing range.

We slept out there that night in the Humvee and woke up early the next morning to the sound of F-18 jets screaming overhead and ordnance dropping in the distance. Were they getting closer? We weren’t sure.

We got on the radio and said, “Um, hey, guys, can you get us out of here?” We passed them rough coordinates and asked them to hurry. They came out and brought us a spare; we changed the tire and drove back to camp. Now we had to explain what had happened.

At the time the camp was run by a SEAL named Steve Heinz. This guy was like something out of a cartoon. Take whatever overdrawn, exaggerated picture you can form of a ridiculously tough Navy SEAL and exaggerate that by a factor of three. That’s Steve: an ogre of a man, chewing scrap metal and swallowing it. He ran that camp with an iron fist. Nobody screwed around there—nobody. So here we were, a couple of new guys who’d just busted one of his vehicles. We had been afraid of those F-18s. We were
terrified
of Steve.

First we went to see the mechanic and explained that there had been some rough terrain out there, and we blew a tire. He looked at the bent rim, then back at us. “How do you explain
that
?”

“The terrain was rough,” said John.

“Very rough,” I echoed.

He looked at us. “What the hell were you guys doing?”

John looked right back at him and said, “It was very, very rough terrain.”

The next few hours were not fun, waiting for the hammer to drop. Finally we were called into Heinz’s office. He lit into us.
“What the hell were you doing out there? You want to tell me you guys weren’t out there hotdogging and fucking off in my vehicle?”

“No, sir,” John managed to get out. “We were just driving.”

“It was really rough terrain,” I added helpfully.

Heinz glared at us, then dismissed us with a growl. “Get the fuck out of my office.” That was the end of it.

John went on to BRAVO platoon and did four years there. He met a food chemist named Jackie, fell head over heels in love with her, got out of the service, and married her. When 9/11 happened, John was one of the first guys doing private security for companies like DynCorp and Blackwater as an independent contractor. The pay was outrageous, especially once we went into Iraq. He did that for a few years, then took a pile of earnings and formed an armored car company called Indigen Armor with an army buddy from their experience driving around being shot at over there. I like to think that our crazy outing at Niland helped plant a seed for his later success.

A few years later John and his buddy sold their majority interest, and he and Jackie had a child. Then in 2010 he was killed in Jordan in a freak accident. John was a good guy, one of the best. His dad, Michael, is a great lawyer, and he and I became good friends after John’s death. We are friends to this day. John was as solid as they come, and I miss him.

*   *   *

When John and I were first out there it had been spring, which is no picnic in Niland. Now it was summer and hotter than hell, hitting 115°F most days. It sometimes got so hot out there that we couldn’t put blasting caps in the ground in our demolition exercises, because the heat of the ground would set them off.

They put us through our paces in land nav and land warfare exercises, simulated drills where we’d come up against enemy contact and have to fight our way out of it. We also did some advanced demolition work there as part of an assault package: we’d go into a mock village, stage a prisoner snatch, shoot up the place, then set our C-4 charges everywhere and pull smoke on those charges—and we’d have fifteen minutes to get out of there before it all blew.

At Niland we were introduced to some of the heavier machine guns, the .50 caliber and .60 caliber, and we also got some practice on the Carl Gustav, an 84 mm recoilless rifle handheld rocket launcher, and got to fire some LAW (light antitank weapon) rockets. Although we mostly used live fire, for some exercises we used a laser setup called Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES), which fires blanks, a little like playing paintball. We used this system when we went up against each other in teams in OppFor (Oppositional Force) exercises. The focus, though, was not on that kind of force-on-force situation. Going in en masse and taking down a known force, like charging a machine-gun nest, is not a typical SEAL mission. We’re not the marines. Our preferred methodology is to insert ourselves in the middle of the night when no one’s looking, hit them, and get out. We’re not really there to fight; we’re there to tip the scales. At Niland, our focus was on demolition—and on getting a taste of what it takes to survive in the most god-awful, inhumanly hot conditions imaginable.

Near the end of our time at Niland, they took us out in the desert a little before noon for a six-hour land nav course. It was miserable out, August in the Niland desert. We spent the day roaming about that burned-Mars landscape like postapocalyptic scavengers, following the preset course and racking up points, finally arriving back at camp exhausted and dehydrated.

“Drink some water, guys,” the instructors told us, “and get some rest. In a few hours, we’re doing a little run.”

Turned out it wasn’t just a “little run.” It was a 12-mile timed run with weapons and full rucksack loaded with 50 pounds of gear. We started in after dinner, about eight in the evening, running along an aqueduct road. Running, not walking. The time we had to beat was no joke, and in Niland in August, eight o’clock is still damned hot.

Some of the guys were really good runners, and they were out in front right away. I’m a middling runner, not the best and not the worst; I was more or less in the middle of the pack. We got to mile 3, then mile 4, and I expected we would soon start seeing our fastest guys coming back the other way after hitting the 6-mile turnaround point. But we saw nobody. We hit mile 5. Still no one coming the other way.

Then finally we saw one, and then a few more—but only a few.
Something’s wrong,
I thought.
There should be more guys coming back.

We soon found out what was wrong: Our guys were dropping in their tracks right on the road, and the medics were pulling them off to the side (where we wouldn’t see them) and getting IV bags into them. On torture runs like this, I had learned, you need to drink water nonstop. I was pounding the stuff down. I was
not
going to get dehydrated.

I reached the turnaround point, and there was Disco Stella, my BUD/S classmate and Team Three teammate. He looked bad, and I could tell he was hurting. Stella was a faster runner than me, but right now he was slowing down. We set off on the return leg, running together.

“I’m hurting, man,” he panted. I start to worry about whether he was going to make it. Normally he would be way out ahead of me, but he was clearly dehydrated and not doing well. Almost immediately, he started drifting back. He never caught up again.

After a few miles, I stopped at a water station to grab more water—and the moment I stopped moving, both my legs seized up. I started falling backward. There was nothing I could do about it. I grabbed my gun and just fell out, right on the ground. A guy I’d just met recently, Glen Doherty, was there as part of the support staff, manning the water station. Glen saw me drop to the ground and ran over to me. “Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” I managed. “I’ll be fine,” hoping that maybe saying it would make it true. I spent the next few minutes massaging and hitting my legs, putting everything I had into it, trying to get the muscles to let go just enough so I could stand up. Finally I managed to get back onto my feet. Guys were starting to trickle into the station, telling us about who had dropped out. Glen and I were both flabbergasted. There were some real studs in the group who weren’t running anymore. That did it for me. I finished my water and got back on the road.

I was not going fast, but I was near the top of the pack. As I got to the 10-mile mark, 2 miles short of the finish, a Humvee pulled up beside me with a medic and another guy. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw who it was. Dan Oldwell was not only a true stud, he was Honor Man in our BUD/S class. Honor Man is something like the class valedictorian, the guy who never quits, the most outstanding guy in the class, the one whose example inspires everyone else. Now here was our Honor Man—riding in a Humvee. He had quit.

“Hey, Webb,” said Oldwell, “we’re just letting you know, the instructors sent us out to tell everyone. People are dropping from massive heat exhaustion. They’re calling it. Hop in.”

It was twilight, and I could see the lights of our base camp on the horizon. I did
not
run 11 miles and put myself through all that misery to quit a mile from the gate. I looked up at Oldwell. “Thanks,” I said, “but no thanks. You’re not putting me in that car. No fucking way.”

I turned back and kept going.

A few minutes later I reached the camp gate. I stood there panting, feeling the pain coursing through my legs, feeling like a wreck, but it was a good feeling. “Good job, Webb,” I heard someone say.

Just then an instructor walked up to me and said, “Hey, why is your weapon dirty?”

I looked down at my weapon. The guy had a point. Some dirt had gotten on my gun when I fell over at the water station. It’s a code they had pounded into us: You take care of the team’s gear first,
then
you help your buddy, and once all that’s done,
then
you take care of yourself. You
always
make sure all your team’s shit is squared away before you go hop in the shower. It’s a code I believe in. I think it’s a great value to have.

I looked up at the guy and didn’t say a word, just gave him a look that said,
Fuck you
. He nodded and walked away.

It felt really good to finish that run. Out of a class of some eighty guys, some of them truly elite athletes, only Chris Osman and I and four others had done it. My stock was going up, and these things get back to the teams. It’s a little like an NFL draft: The teams are always looking for new guys, and they keep their ears to the ground. Every community is by definition a small community, and the SEALs are no exception. Tests, points, grades, certification—they all matter, but nothing counts like reputation.

The brutal heat of Niland was followed by a few weeks at Camp Pendleton in a block of extensive land nav training, followed by four weeks of combat swimmer training off the San Diego pier at the Thirty-second Street Naval Station, doing four- and five-hour dives to plant explosives on gigantic destroyers.

An Arleigh Burke–class destroyer is nearly a tenth of a mile long and has a displacement (total mass) of 9,200 tons. Imagine diving underneath one of these babies. Visibility is poor, and it’s easy to lose track of what’s up and what’s down. Normally you can orient yourself deep underwater by watching the upward trail of bubbles from your exhale, but with the Dräger rebreather system we were using, we weren’t emitting any bubbles, so there was nothing to follow. We learned to follow the seams of the welds on a ship’s hull to track our way to the surface. To make things worse, those ship’s generators are incredibly loud—and sound carries like crazy underwater. So there you are, deep down in the darkness, somewhere underneath a 9,200-ton vessel and surrounded by this intense
RRRrrrRRRRRrrrrRRRRRrrrrRRRRR
and no sense of up or down. It’s pretty easy to start thinking,
Oh my God, am I even on the right boat?

These ships have huge bilge pumps that suck in seawater with tremendous force. The specific ships we targeted were supposed to shut down their bilge pumps for our exercise—but if you’re stumbling around down there and get too close to the wrong ship, it’s not hard to get sucked right in. Guys have died that way.

The first time I got down underneath one of those monsters, I couldn’t help thinking about Mikey Ritland trapped under that Zodiac off San Clemente Island. This sucker was a lot bigger than a Zodiac.

Fortunately we made it through the dive work in one piece. I graduated from SEAL Tactical Training on August 14, 1998, and headed back to the team to get back to work—and start preparing for my Trident board.

*   *   *

The SEAL Trident is the only badge in the navy that has no rank. When you wear that Trident, anywhere you go in the military, people get out of your way, no matter what rank they are, because they know what it means to earn that thing. I’ve seen commanding officers approaching in ship passageways step aside and let us through when they see that Trident. In that moment they aren’t seeing rank or seniority—they are just seeing that big budweiser on your chest.

In order to get my Trident, I first had to go collect signatures on my Personal Qualification Standard (PQS). I went to the dive locker and got signed off by the master diver there, to the air locker and did the same, then the first lieutenant of the boats rack, and on through all the individual people who had mentored us in each particular field. One by one, they signed off, and once I had the whole form completed I put in a formal request to go before my Trident board.

The day finally came, a Wednesday in late 1998, six of us standing in the hallway in our starched, pressed desert cammies (the standard uniform, made of camouflage material). We waited together out in the hall on the top floor of the Team Three area. One by one, they called us in. Each guy was in there probably no more than thirty minutes, but it seemed like hours. When my turn came, I went in and sat down in the center of a horseshoe of instructors, who immediately started in on me, firing away with their questions, starting with weapons specs.

“What’s the max effective range of the M-60 machine gun?”

“What’s the max effective range of the M-4?”

“What’s the muzzle velocity of the MP-5 submachine gun?”