The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (30 page)

I was soon coming up for reenlistment again, which meant I had a cash bonus coming, something like $40,000. The problem was, reenlisting while stateside would mean I’d be heavily taxed, with a significant California tax on top of the federal bite. If I reenlisted in a tax-free combat zone, I would get the whole bonus. This would amount to a difference of something like fifteen grand. My wife was now pregnant with our first child, and fifteen grand can buy an awful lot of diapers.

It’s not uncommon for command to send a guy overseas for a short deployment to help him out in circumstances like this, so in July I went to talk with our ops officer, Keith Johnson, about the possibility of getting myself sent overseas. (The ops officer is typically a senior lieutenant, about to make lieutenant commander, who runs operations for the team, working directly for the commanding officer and executive officer.)

After hearing me outline my situation and what I was looking for, Keith thought for a moment, then said, “Look, Brandon, we’ve got a situation with ECHO platoon. Frankly, they’re a bunch of fuckups and we’ve just shaken the whole thing up. We fired the chief and OIC, cleared out the whole leadership team to wipe the canvas clean, but kept most of the guys.”

He hadn’t gotten to his point yet, but I knew where this was going, and I didn’t like it. He was talking about sending
me
to join this screwed-up ECHO platoon.

We had great chemistry in GOLF platoon, which is as crucial on a SEAL team as it is on a pro ball team. You can train all you want and have the most qualified guys in the world, but if the chemistry doesn’t click, the team won’t work. When that happened in a SEAL platoon, they would break the team up and reshuffle all the guys to other teams, much as you’ll see in pro sports. This is what had happened to ECHO platoon. Obviously, command was hoping to rescue this misbegotten team by bringing in some new blood, and Keith was on board with that plan. My coming to him with my tax-or-no-tax bonus problem happened to play right into the situation at hand.

“You should join ECHO,” he said. “They’re the next ones up to deploy, and you’ll get your tax-free bonus.”

I did
not
want to join this godforsaken platoon. They had a terrible reputation; everyone in Team Three knew they were a mess. Guys used to joke about them in the halls—and he was asking me to become part of this joke of a team? I had hoped there’d be some other avenue for getting me overseas, maybe joining DELTA platoon or some other excellent fighting force. Keith was selling it hard, though, and now that he’d proposed it to me it was going to be hard for me to wangle any other option. I realized it now came down to a choice: I could go join ECHO platoon or stay with my team at GOLF and give up the fifteen grand. GOLF platoon had a great reputation, and I pretty much had my pick of jobs there. Ultimately, though, I decided to put my family first and agreed to join ECHO platoon.

It was a move I would soon regret.

*   *   *

ECHO platoon was then at the tail end of their workup, doing some VBSS training operations, so I flew out to join them on the aircraft carrier where they were staged, about a hundred miles off the coast of San Diego. When I got there, I met up with Chris Dye, who had just taken over as the platoon’s new chief in the command’s efforts to rehabilitate the outfit.

Chief Dye was legendary in the SEAL community. A decade earlier, when he was at SEAL Team Two, he and his dive buddies had participated in a Special Op called Operation Nifty Package, part of Operation Just Cause, the United States invasion of Panama. As part of the op Chris and his dive buddy Randy Beausoleil planted the explosives that sank Noriega’s private boat. (You can read a riveting account of the whole mission in the excellent book
SEALs: The US Navy’s Elite Fighting Force,
written by my BUD/S classmate Chris Osman and Mir Bahmanyar.) A few weeks after this first meeting, I was helping Chief Dye move one day, and I noticed a plain stainless steel wheel among his stuff. It was about two feet in diameter, six spokes coming off an empty hub. Looked like maybe a steering wheel for a yacht or something.

“Hey, Chris,” I said, “what are you doing with this old wheel?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m just hanging on to it. That came off Noriega’s boat.” He had personally salvaged it off the wreck of the ship after planting the bombs that sank it. This dude had seen some interesting action in his time.

Finding out that Chief Dye would be running things at ECHO cheered me up quite a bit. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. The two of us were not really acquainted personally, but we knew each other by reputation, and I had been tagged with the role of general go-to guy to help him put things in order.

Chief Dye met me when I landed on the aircraft carrier where they were staging for their workup exercises. “Oh, man, am I glad to see you,” he said. “Welcome to ECHO. We have our work cut out for us.”

He told me they were planning to go out the next day to do some fast-roping off a couple of helicopters as part of a maritime ship-boarding op, and they were short one castmaster. The castmaster is in charge of rigging up the setup inside the helo, deploying the guys out on the rope, and making sure it all goes properly. He’s the last guy out. I wondered how the hell they’d been planning to go fast-roping with two helos and one castmaster, but I didn’t say anything. Chris would have figured out a way to do it. It might not have been exactly legal, but it would have worked. In any case, I was certified as a castmaster, so that was no longer an issue.

The next day we got out there up in the air and started the exercise. I was serving as castmaster in the second bird, watching the guys go out the door: one, two, three—and suddenly there was an MP-5 rifle flying through the air in free fall.

I nearly shit my pants. I could not believe what I was seeing. A SEAL team fast-roping out of a helo—and somebody
dropped his frigging weapon?

It was downright embarrassing. Everything is supposed to be slung in and tightly attached—that’s rule one. When we say, “That guy has his shit wired tight,” this is
exactly
what we’re talking about. Working around water and heights, you
always
lanyard your gear to your body. I’ve seen guys lose night-vision gear off their heads: Turn, whack the door of the helo cabin, the night vision pops off—and if it’s not tied in to your body, it’s going over and into the drink. Losing an expensive piece of night-vision equipment is bad enough—but losing a
weapon?
In career terms, that’s suicide.

The moment that MP-5 hit the deck, the guy who’d dropped it scooped it up and kept right on going. Chief Dye was in the other bird, so he didn’t see it and didn’t have to suffer this humiliation in person. Nobody else on our craft even noticed that it had happened, but I sure as hell did.

Nothing like this would ever have happened in GOLF platoon, and if it had, the guy perpetrating the misdeed would have been sent back to the fleet with his trident ripped from his chest. I’d seen it happen. When we reached Pearl Harbor on our way to the Persian Gulf the previous summer, for a day or two we had one weapon unaccounted for. For a SEAL, this particular brand of carelessness is one of the worst offenses you can commit. It turned out to be Chuck “Liberty Risk” Landry’s fault. After that episode a few years earlier when Landry had gotten drunk and wrangled with the base security guards, they’d given him a second chance. Losing track of that weapon in Hawaii was strike two, and there would be no strike three. The weapon did finally turn up, but Landry got sent back home. Brutal, but that’s how we did things—at least in GOLF platoon.

I held my tongue throughout the rest of that fast-roping exercise, but once we got back on the aircraft carrier at the end of the day to debrief, I let them have it.

“Look, guys, I know I’m brand-new here, but I have to tell you, that was inexcusable. Who the hell dropped that gun? That thing could have easily gone over the side, and if it had we would be in some serious shit right now!”

A big guy named Gilroy Jones raised his hand. “It was me.”

This was my introduction to the realities of ECHO platoon. Jones was a tough dude but a complete train wreck of a soldier. First time through BUD/S he got to Third Phase and then came up against a domestic violence charge for hitting the lady he was with. He made it all the way through his second time, went to Team Three, and screwed up there. It was amazing to me that he hadn’t been fired from the team—and now, he had screwed up our exercise. Turned out, he had made some sort of jury-rigged sling for his MP-5 out of surgical tubing, and in the course of the exercise it got hung up and broke.

It wasn’t just Gilroy Jones. These guys were a mess in general. It was so clear that they had never had any really good leadership. They’d had no one to look up to or learn from.

We had a 90/10 rule in the teams: 90 percent of the guys on any given team are going to be solid, and 10 percent will be guys you hope will get kicked out or transferred to another team. That’s just the way it is, and you can live with that. The problem with ECHO platoon was that we had far more than our fair share of 10-percenters. In a platoon of sixteen guys, 10 percent means one or two fuckups at most. Right away I identified half a dozen guys there as weak links, including our third officer and AOIC (assistant officer in charge)! Oh, great. Even our second and third in command were misfits. (Hadn’t Keith said they’d shit-canned the whole leadership? What did they do—replace them with guys who were worse?)

I felt like I had been yanked from playing on a World Series team and kicked downstairs to a farm league. I wanted to go back and beg for my old place on GOLF team again. Screw the fifteen grand—I wanted to be back with my guys.

During that same fast-roping exercise I’d noticed that our corpsman, Jackie, had his entire med gear with him. Jackie was a really quiet guy and would speak sort of under his breath so you couldn’t quite hear what he said.

When I saw that he was lugging along this huge pack, I said, “Hey, Jackie, why are you fast-roping with this big pack?” He said something back, although I have no idea what, so I elaborated. “All you should be bringing on a jump like this is basic trauma gear. You need to shit-can that whole bag.”

Christ on a crutch. I wasn’t even a medic, and here I was telling him how to pack his medical gear.

Jackie wasn’t bad, though; he was just wet behind the ears and hadn’t had strong leadership. In fact, he ended up becoming a solid citizen in the platoon and going on to join a tier-one unit and have a solid career in the community. A handful of the others were consistent screwups, though. A few of them would very nearly get me killed in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Not that ECHO platoon was all bad. Our breacher, Shawn, had been a BUD/S classmate of mine and was a very solid guy. After this disastrous day of fast-roping I took him aside and said, “Shawn, what the hell? How can you stand there and let these guys be such a mess?”

“I know,” he said, “but I didn’t think it was my place to tell them what to do.” I understood his point. Thank God Chris Dye was our chief; this was a guy I could work with. There were quite a few other solid guys there, too. Patrick had joined the platoon only recently and therefore had not suffered through the previous “leadership” at ECHO. It was clear right off the bat that Patrick was very sharp and an asset to the team. Heath Robinson, another guy who was fairly new to the platoon, also had his shit wired tight. A few years later, on an op where a group of SEALs took back a merchant vessel from some Somalian pirates, one of our men was jumped by a hiding pirate, the clinch too close for anyone to shoot. Heath pulled out his knife and cut the guy’s throat—one of the few SEALs since Vietnam to have a certified knife kill to his credit. Then there was Garrison, who joined at the same time I did. Garrison had been a marine before going through BUD/S and had been through some solid experiences with the Corps. Garrison was squared away, although with his marine background it took him a little doing to get accustomed to the SEALs and our, shall I say, lack of military bearing.

Over the weeks after I arrived, things gradually started looking better as a trickle of additional guys joined us after finishing whatever workup they were on, further helping shore up the platoon. Two of these, like Shawn, were BUD/S classmates: Ali, our senior corpsman, and Chris Osman.

Osman and I went way back, all the way to that moment on the beach in Third Phase when he became an accidental hero. Throughout BUD/S I couldn’t stand him, but during our time together in Team Three we gradually became friends. Soon we would also work together closely as the platoon’s two snipers, and our time in the Gulf and Afghanistan would cement the friendship.

A former marine, Osman was an excellent SEAL and a very squared-away dude. He can also be a frigging nightmare to be around. He is an intense guy and has a personality that can grate on you. Spend much time with him and chances are you’ll end up either loving him or hating him.

Osman was also something of a legend among the marine scout snipers. When he and Patrick went through the marine sniper course together, as part of their final training exercise they developed a mission plan that included monitoring the Camp Pendleton residence of the marine two-star general in charge as a surveillance target. Osman took the exercise a little further than planned: He broke into the guy’s house, snapped a bunch of pictures of its interior, and took the general’s starched camouflage uniform with its two stars from where it hung in the closet and sneaked it back out with him as plunder. The marine sniper instructors were terrified shitless when they found out what he’d done, and everyone tried to hush it up. Osman wore the purloined uniform for his class graduation photo. For years afterward I would run into Marine Corps snipers in the fleet who would ask me, after learning that I was in SEAL Team Three, “Hey, do you know that crazy SEAL, you know, the guy who broke into the general’s house and pinched his cammies?”

Osman never went through the SEAL sniper course himself; as a former marine, he’d done that marine course instead. Because of this, one could make the plausible argument that he wasn’t technically a true SEAL sniper, something I proceeded to have a lot of fun giving him shit about. “Hey, Osman, how hard is that Marine Corps course?”