The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (28 page)

The walker closest to me got on his radio. “It wasn’t an AD, sir. It was Webb. He’s in position.”

In other words, I had taken my blank shot, and now I was coming for them.

When the instructors heard that, I could tell they wanted my ass. By that point in the course I had taken down some pretty good scores, and that alpha-male, head-butting energy was in the air: They really wanted to nail me. I started hearing all this chatter over the walker’s radio. Neither of the instructors could see me, but they didn’t want to give up. They started scouring my vicinity, searching for me like crazy.

“Hey, man,” I said to the walker, “what the hell? Can I take the shot, or what?”

Finally he told the instructors he was giving me my bullet. He handed it over, and I took the shot. As bad as they wanted me, they didn’t get me. I scored a 10.

I started walking back, and as I neared the start point there was Glen, crawling on his stomach. “I’m an idiot,” I heard him mumble.

After that I helped a few other classmates who were having a hard time getting the hang of it. We were coming down to the very last stalk, and there were three guys who had racked enough poor scores that they now needed to get a perfect score, or else they wouldn’t pass. All this time and effort, and it was coming down to this one last stalk that would decide whether or not they would become SEAL snipers. The level of tension was inhuman.

These were really good guys, and I badly wanted all three of them to make it. On our last stalk before the final test, I went with them, doing everything I could to help them get themselves a clean, fast pathway into the zone for a solid FFP. In the process, I didn’t pay enough attention to what I was doing myself and hung myself out a little too far. I got busted—and failed the stalk. I didn’t mind, though. I had enough margin in my accumulated scores to make it through even with a 0 on that one. When the final stalk came, two of them made it. The third went home.

Here was the funny thing: When they read out those final scores, another guy and I had tied for first place—and after that came Glen, right behind us in second place.

I looked over at him and said, “You bastard! What do you mean, you were in jeopardy of failing? You were doing
fine
. You almost passed me up in points, you bastard!”

But that’s Glen: He’s an absolute perfectionist. He always wants to do better. It’s one of the traits that makes him great.

We left Niland and headed back to Coronado to take some brief instruction in how to waterproof our weapons and how to take care of them when going in and out of the water. After graduation we would go on to spend another week doing some two-man contact drills and over-the-beach training, but for all practical purposes, we were done. We’d made it.

The graduation ceremony took place in the Team Five compound on June 12, 2000, my twenty-sixth birthday. The COs from all the different teams showed up. It was a proud moment for everyone in GOLF platoon. Our personal triumph also translated into bragging rights for them and enhanced the reputation of the whole team. Glen and I were on Cloud Nine.

My SEAL sniper certificate carries the signature of Capt. William McRaven, who at the time was serving as commander of Naval Special Warfare Group One. More than a decade later, now a four-star admiral, McRaven would be credited with organizing and executing Operation Neptune’s Spear, the Special Ops mission that took out Osama bin Laden in May of 2011. The following month he was confirmed as the ninth commander of SOCOM, the entire U.S. Special Operations Command, taking the reins from Admiral Eric T. Olson, another Navy SEAL.

It was ten years almost to the day since my dad threw me off our family’s boat in the South Pacific. Then, I’d been a scared sixteen-year-old kid. Today, I was a Navy SEAL sniper.

*   *   *

Our platoon would deploy soon, but first I had some leave coming, which I took with pleasure. It was good to decompress a little, to surf for hours and spend time with Gabriele.

A little more than a month after graduation, I decide to go look up the Bear.

Right after graduation, Mike and I had made a horse trade. While I was part of Team Three, he had been assigned to a cold-weather platoon in Team Five, and we each had extra pieces of equipment that the other coveted. He had an extra cold-weather sleeping bag I thought might come in handy, and he agreed to trade it for a desert tan assault vest of mine. I had already given Mike the vest, but he still owed me the bag, and I wanted to collect before heading out to wherever I was going next.

I showed up at Team Three, expecting the bag to be sitting there waiting for me, as Mike had promised it would be. It wasn’t there, and frankly, I was a little pissed off about it, but I figured I ought to give Mike the benefit of the doubt. I knew he must have a good reason.

I called up his platoon hut at Team Five to give him shit. One of his platoon mates answered the phone.

“Hey,” I said, “is the Bear around? And can you tell him to come to the phone so Brandon can kick his ass over the wire, just for now, until I have a chance to come over there and kick it in person?”

There was silence on the other end. It lasted only a second or two, but in that short gap I felt my stomach drop out from under me. Something was wrong.

“Yeah…” the voice said. “Actually, no. Mike was in an accident.”

That didn’t sound good. I instantly felt like a complete ass. “What the hell? What happened? Is he okay?”

He was not okay. On July 12, just a few days earlier, the Bear had been in a freak accident while in parachute training. During a free-fall exercise, his main chute got tangled with a secondary chute and failed to open. He didn’t make it.

The Bear left behind a gorgeous wife, Derinda, and a beautiful little two-year-old boy, Holden.

I couldn’t attend his funeral because by that time I was already deployed and on my way toward the Persian Gulf. A few of my friends did, though. They told me later about that day, and about Holden walking up to them because he recognized the gold SEAL Tridents on their uniforms, just like his dad’s, and asking them if they knew where his daddy was. One friend said there were at least a few guys who could barely keep it together at that point. Most had to go off for a solid cry.

Mike’s death shook everyone who knew him, and it hit me pretty hard. He was the first of many friends I would lose over the years.

SEVEN

WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

In the late summer of 2000 our platoon embarked on a trans-Pacific run, headed for the Persian Gulf by way of Hawaii, Australia, and points west. Our first deployment. Thank God, we were finally getting out of here! We were attached to the USS
Duluth,
a troop transport ship, or amphibious transport dock. The
Duluth
was a fine old vessel, the last ship to be launched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the summer of 1965 before the yard’s closure.

The
Duluth
departed from California on August 14, 2000, with most of our gear aboard—but not us. We skipped the boat and boarded a plane for Hawaii. Rather than having us waste a lot of time on board, our command would fly us ahead to the ship’s next destination, where we could put in additional days of training while waiting for the vessel to catch up. This was a pattern we followed for most of the trip west. During those times we did spend on board we got a lot of kidding from the rest of the navy personnel, because in their eyes all we did was train. (They said the acronym SEAL stood for Sleep, Eat, And Lift, as in lift weights.)

In Hawaii we did some combat diving, paired off for a little hydrographic survey work, and occupied ourselves with the various ways SEALs continually train and retrain. In the daytime, that is. Once evening hit we’d go have fun. The single guys all chased girls, and we married guys had good times out with the boys. Chief Dan and I had both brought our surf boards along, and we’d meet up early in the mornings and surf for a few hours before joining the rest of the guys for our workouts. Later on, at other ports of call on our westward trek, we found a few days to peel away and go on surfing outings together. We got some pretty odd looks at various customs stations. (SEALs with surfboards? What were we going to do, take out bad guys by outsurfing them?)

The Hawaiian port where we put in was one with a unique place in American history. It was at Pearl Harbor that we had been attacked on our own soil nearly sixty years earlier. Being there on that historic site almost made you wonder:
That could never happen again … could it?

Leaving Hawaii, we hopped on a C-130 transport plane and headed for Darwin, Australia. I have to tell you, flying in a C-130 is an absolutely fantastic way to travel. We could stretch out, go do push-ups in the corner, or do pretty much whatever we wanted. We brought our own food, had hammocks strung up all over the back of the plane, went up to the cockpit to shoot the shit with the pilots for a while, or rocked out to our headphones. I’ll take that over commercial flying any day of the year.

We made a few brief stops on our way to Australia, including one night in the Marshall Islands on the beautiful little atoll of Kwajalein, where a small contingent of defense personnel was stationed. This place was like paradise, and it made me think of Hiva Oa, the little island in the Marquesas where I had fallen briefly in love with a girl whose name I never knew. Ten years earlier I had been not far from this very spot, being booted off the family boat at Papeete. And now here I was, a U.S. Navy SEAL sniper, being deployed on a troop transport ship to the Persian Gulf to help keep the global peace. I still have a hand carving I picked up on our stopover in Kwajalein. Call it a keepsake, a reminder of a more innocent time—a time before everything changed.

We continued south and west through a week’s stay in Australia, three days of a humanitarian assistance operation off East Timor, brief stops at Singapore and Phuket, Thailand, and eventually north through the Indian Ocean into the Persian Gulf, where we put in at the little island country of Bahrain, which had a fairly liberal culture as Muslim countries went. By now we were into October.

We were there in Bahrain to conduct some training exercises with the neighboring Saudis. As an unofficial rule, we don’t train these guys in the Middle East too thoroughly. I mean, we’re there to help—but at the same time, when the sun comes up tomorrow in that part of the world, you never know for sure who’s going to be arrayed against you. After a few days we got back out onto the
Duluth
and into the Gulf, where we planned to spend a few days engaged in ship-boarding training exercises.

That’s when we got the call about the attack on the USS
Cole.

*   *   *

To much of the world, September 11, 2001, was and still is “the day everything changed,” and it’s easy to understand why. In the summer of 2001 the public’s attention in the United States was focused largely on the debate over stem cell research and the latest political scandal about whichever congressman had been most recently caught with his zipper down. (In case you’re wondering, it was California Democrat Gary Condit.) The reality of war was mostly a fading memory, the topic of nostalgia. Stephen Spielberg’s made-for-TV World War II epic
Band of Brothers
had just premiered on HBO, on Sunday, September 9.

It had been a decade since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over, a new century had begun, and it was easy to be lulled into a sense that the kinds of global conflicts that had convulsed the twentieth century were already archaic relics of a distant past. We had left behind a world defined by the opposition of two vast global forces, Western capitalism and Eastern communism. But we hadn’t yet come to grips with what came next. For most of the world, what came next was suddenly, starkly defined that sunny, clear-sky New York morning in the fall of 2001.

Not for me. For me, it came eleven months earlier, on October 12, 2000.

Going into that fall, there was no significant conflict for our military forces to focus on. Still, the whole Mideast region was a political and military tinderbox that always loomed in the background. At the time, SEAL Team Three was involved in reinforcing United Nations sanctions against Iraq, and Saddam was smuggling out an awful lot of oil. We were expecting to participate in policing the area, which would mean doing a significant number of ship boardings on noncompliant vessels. The Iraqis would send these tankers out onto the Gulf to make a run for Iranian waters, where American and other NATO personnel could not legally pursue. Our job would be to catch up with them and intercept them while they ran that brief gauntlet through the narrow international shipping lanes.

This was a mission we were hoping to rotate in on. We had just gotten back on the
Duluth
and were mobilizing to get our equipment and go participate in that ship-boarding detail when we suddenly got word that an American destroyer, the USS
Cole,
had been hit in the nearby Gulf of Aden just off the coast of Yemen, and hit bad.

That morning, the
Cole
had put in at about 9:30 local time for a routine refueling stop. By 10:30 refueling had commenced. At 11:18 a small craft loaded with about a quarter ton of homemade explosives and manned by two individuals approached the ship’s port side and made contact. The explosion killed seventeen sailors and injured thirty-nine others, putting a 40' × 40' hole in the hull in the process.

Wait—
what
? Two guys in a speedboat? How the hell had
that
happened?

We took off and were on-site within shooting distance of the Yemeni coast within eight hours, putting our fast boats over the side. The marines had an outfit in Bahrain they called the Fast Company, and they earned their nickname: they were on the scene a few hours ahead of us and had already established a security command post on the injured
Cole
by the time we arrived. We immediately set up a 500-meter perimeter incorporating both the pier and the surrounding water. We were also directed to set up a sniper team on the bridge of the ship itself to monitor the situation, glassing the entire perimeter constantly to ensure that no other bad actors got into the mix.