The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (36 page)

Now Harward had Cassidy on the radio. I could see from the set of LT’s face that he wasn’t thrilled at what he was hearing. I saw him nod, say a word or two, and sign off. The sound of the helicopters briefly hovered, then slowly started to diminish. With our extraction just minutes away, Harward had turned them around. Word came down: We weren’t being extracted after all.

We were out there, on our own, for at least another day or two.

Steve looked at me in horror as I smacked my lips, having just polished off the last water bottle. He was devastated. What could I say? Hey, that’s why you don’t pour out your water,
ever.
You just never know what’s going to happen.

So here we were, out in the middle of nowhere, deep in enemy territory, on our own for the night—and the temperature had already dropped to around freezing. You burn up a lot of calories humping around all day. These were not good conditions. We needed a plan.

Cassidy, Chief Dye, myself, and a few of the other senior guys huddled together to figure out what we were going to do for the night. Commander Smith, apparently still in the shit-getting-into frame of mind, said, “Well, I guess we’ll just go into the hills and lay up in the bushes.”

Chief Dye and I looked at each other in disbelief. We hadn’t brought much in the way of extra warm clothes because we hadn’t planned to be out overnight, and it was quite hot during the day. In fact, we’d been murderously hot while working the caves. But the clothing that felt suffocating during the afternoon now offered little protection against the frigid high-altitude desert nighttime. When you’re pushing up above the snow line, it gets cold as hell.

Even if we
had
thought to bring it, we didn’t have the cold-weather gear back at camp that we wanted to have anyway. Back when our platoon had first landed in Afghanistan we had put in a big cold-weather-gear request list. Evidently one shipment was sent, but it got lost somewhere on the way. Whether they’d sent a replacement, nobody knew. We kept hearing, “It’s coming … it’s coming next week,” but nothing showed up. For the moment, we were all going with what whatever we each had with us, along with the promise that we’d have better stuff as soon as possible.

On our own, most of us had bought ourselves some pretty decent gear. The SEAL teams are among the best-equipped fighting forces anywhere in the military. We had smart wool-blended socks, good boots from REI, good North Face jackets, that sort of thing. I had a $300 pair of Italian leather mountain boots, and I’d brought along a neoprene shell and wool cap. It wasn’t much, but at least it was something.

The marines, however, had it much worse. These poor bastards didn’t have shit for cold-weather gear, just standard-issue crappy desert boots and cheap white socks. True to their spartan culture, these guys were not going to complain at all, but they were in for a world of hurt with the subfreezing temperatures coming our way. And Commander Smith wanted us to
lay up in the bushes
?

I spoke up. “Hey, that’s a bad idea. These poor marines are already freezing, and it’s only going to get colder. We’re sure to have some cold casualties if we do that.”

Smith shook his head and said, “We gotta do what we gotta do. We’re just going to have to suck it up.”

Suck it up.
This was his brilliant tactical plan? The man was definitely getting in our shit now. It was one thing for us to suck it up, but we had twenty marines we were responsible for, too. They would absolutely suck it up if that’s what they were told to do—but that wasn’t going to prevent our having some cold casualties on our hands.

Chief Dye was having none of it. One of the villages we’d seen during the day lay up at the top of the valley at the end of a ridge, and I knew he had that place in mind as a strategic fallback position. It was on high ground, you could see the entire valley from there, and it was well protected as a fighting position.

Chief Dye turned to Smith and said, “All due respect, sir, your plan sucks. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to take Brandon and a couple other guys, do a recon, clear and occupy that village so we have a place to stay where we can start a goddam fire, get warm, and set up a perimeter for the night.”

“No,” said Smith, “we’re not doing that.”

“Yes,” said Chief Dye. “We are.”

Now Lieutenant Cassidy spoke up. “Got it,” he said. He nodded, and that was the end of that.

My respect for Cassidy was already high, but it had just gone up a notch. He was our officer in charge, but he also knew he wasn’t the most tactically experienced guy there. Like a good leader, he was the first to defer to the person with more experience, which in this case was Chief Dye.

You’ll find officers who think,
I’m the highest-ranking officer, I should have the best ideas,
but that’s not necessarily so. Being an effective leader doesn’t mean you have to be the smartest guy in the room or always have the best idea.

Years after returning from Afghanistan I was introduced by my friend John Tishler to Dr. J. Robert Beyster, the nuclear physicist who founded SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), a billion-dollar, Fortune 500 employee-owned defense contractor. In the course of a project I was working on in the private sector, Dr. Beyster took me out to lunch. Later we spent some time in his office, where I noticed a sign on his wall:

NONE OF US IS AS SMART AS ALL OF US.

J. Robert Beyster is one serious genius, and one reason he’s gotten to where he is is that he understands this core leadership truth: No matter how smart you are, you’d be stupid not to listen to the experts around you. Cassidy understood that, too. Smith, not so much.

Five of us took off and started moving quietly up the hillside: Chief Dye, Patrick, Heath, Osman, and I. It took us about an hour to get up there. When we got close to the village, it was pretty clear that the place had been completely deserted. Probably whoever had been there left as soon as those bombs started falling the night before. Still, caution dictated that we assume nothing. We snuck around behind and approached from the rear.

The place consisted of several buildings, all mud hut construction, and looked to be a multifamily living situation with a little stable for some goats, chickens, and a couple of donkeys. The doors were secured with some flimsy lock-and-chain assemblies, easy to kick in. Osman and I went through the place with the standard two-man room-clearing procedure while the others stood sentry. Once we’d cleared every room and made sure the place was secure, the others stayed while Osman and I went back down to pass the word and lead everyone back up there.

There was no question Chief Dye had made the right call. In terms of our tactical position, we had excellent visibility (or at least we would once daybreak came), it was very defensible, and we were up high so the radios would work well. Plus, the place had wool blankets, fireplaces and firewood, and plenty of adequate shelter to keep us out of the wind. To us it was like walking into the Ritz-Carlton. The marines were pretty stoic, as always, but you could see the looks on their faces:
Thank God.

Right away we set up our comms and called in our location to base camp via sat radio. The last thing we needed was for some gunship flying 20,000 feet over our heads to see our heat signatures and make us the featured guest stars on this night’s episode of Murder TV. Meanwhile the captain in charge of the marines set them up, half to go get warm and get some sleep and the other half to stand the perimeter.

We figured we would use this place as a kind of forward operating base the whole time we were out there, however long that would turn out to be. It was a smart decision—because we would be out there in the wild for a lot longer than one or two days.

M
ONDAY
, J
ANUARY
7

The next morning we split up. Part of the platoon went out with the forensics team to go dig up those gravesites and see if they could bring Harward some fresh, juicy DNA. Four of us—Cassidy, Osman, Brad, and I—went out before dawn to patrol a site where a C-130 gunship had engaged some forces the night before, to see if we could find any bodies.

We reached the coordinates we’d been given just moments before the indistinct grays of predawn resolved into the pastels of daybreak. Before we could do any serious searching, we heard voices coming from some nearby caves above us. The four of us instantly hit the ground and waited. As we watched, a spill of enemy fighters started pouring out of one of the caves—twenty, at least, and all armed.

If this were happening in the movies, we would all just leap to our feet and blow these guys away, but in real life it doesn’t work that way. We were outnumbered at least five to one, and we were not exactly armed with machine guns. This was not the OK Corral, and if we leapt to our feet we would all be mowed down in short order. There was no hiding until they were gone, either: These guys were headed our way. We would have to call in an air strike, and do it fast.

There was a B-52 nearby; Brad got it on the radio. It was my job to give him the coordinates—but there was a snag. The only way to ensure that the team in the B-52 dropped their fireworks on the other guys and not on us was to give them exact coordinates. Typically we would do this using a high-powered laser rangefinder hooked into a GPS so that when it ranged the target it would give us not only distance but also the target’s GPS coordinates, which we could then pass on up to whoever we were calling for air support. These bombers are extremely accurate with their ordnance, like vertical snipers in the sky.

We’d only planned for a simple twelve-hour mission and didn’t have all our usual equipment. Typically, for a full-on recon mission, I’d have at least a good sniper rifle. We didn’t have even a decent rangefinder.

Training, training. As a SEAL sniper I’d been taught to estimate distances on the fly even without all the usual tools, using only my five senses and my gut, but typically I’d be shooting a 10-gram bullet from the muzzle of a rifle. In this case, we were shooting a 1,000-pound “bullet” out of a 125-ton aircraft, flying 20,000 feet above us at near the speed of sound, at a target less than 500 yards away from where we sat—I had to get it right.

Range estimation. This was something else we covered in sniper school: You visualize a familiar distance, say, a football field.
That’s one football field, two football fields, three football fields
 … but this can be risky when you’re not on level ground. Here I had to sight up a rugged, rocky incline. And daybreak lighting can play tricks with distances.

Those twenty-plus al Qaeda, or Taliban, or who the hell knew who, were trickling down the slope heading straight for our position. They hadn’t seen us yet, but it would be only seconds before they did. If we were going to do this thing, it had to be
now.

“Brandon!” Cassidy hissed. “You need to Kentucky-windage this drop!” “Kentucky windage” is a term that means basically this:
Wing it. Give it your best shot
. I gave Cassidy a bearing I estimated as 100 meters
past
the group. If I was going to be off at all, better to guess long than short, and if I was balls-on accurate, a drop 100 meters behind them should at least buy us a few seconds to adjust and drop a second time.

Now the enemy cluster was so close we couldn’t wait any longer. We were concealed but not covered; that is, they couldn’t easily see us, but once they knew where we were, our concealment would give no protection against incoming fire. We quickly moved to cover—and that’s when they spotted us. There were a few alarmed shouts and then the sounds of small-arms fire.

There is nothing quite so galvanizing as the distinct
crack! snap!
of semiautomatic weaponry being fired over your head, the
crack!
being the sound of the initial shot itself and the
snap!
being the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it zings past you.

We returned fire. I sighted one guy wearing a black headdress, dropped him. Quickly resighted and dropped a second, this one wearing the traditional Afghan wool roll-up hat. Sighted a third—then glanced up and saw vapor trails in the sky. The B-52 was flying so high it was invisible to us, but I knew exactly what was happening up there: They were dropping the first bomb.

When you are this close to a big explosion it rocks your chest cavity. You want to make sure your mouth is open so the contained impact doesn’t burst your lungs. Brad got the call: We were seconds from impact. We opened our mouths, dropped and rolled.

The Joint Direct Attack Munition is a big bomb and extremely accurate. When the first set of JDAMs hit, it shook the mountain under our feet, throwing rubble everywhere.

I whipped around and glanced back up the incline to assess the strike. Perfect—about 100 yards behind the target. I rolled again, adjusting numbers in my head, and quickly shouted the new coordinates to Cassidy, who gave them to Brad to relay up to the bird. In moments like this your senses go into hyperacute mode and seconds seem to stretch into minutes, hours, a timeless series of discrete snapshots. I focused on my breathing, making it slow and deliberate, feeling the cool morning air mixed with the distinct smell of explosives teasing my lungs. I knew my numbers were accurate and that the men shooting to kill us would themselves be dead in seconds. For a brief moment, I was at peace. And then an unexpected sound sliced through the strange silence: the wail of a baby crying.

My stomach twisted. I had a five-week-old baby boy at home whom I’d not yet held in my arms; hopefully I would survive this war to meet him face-to-face. Someone up on that hillside had a baby they would never see or hold again.

I knew these people had made the decision to bring their families out here to this godforsaken fortress, knowingly putting them in harm’s way. Sometimes, I’d heard, they even did this intentionally, using their own children, their flesh and blood, as living shields to prevent us from attacking.
It was their choice,
I told myself,
not ours
. But I’ll never forget the sound of that baby’s cry.