The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (45 page)

Something else that had always bugged me about operations that involved helo support was the lack of a clearly integrated, efficient communications protocol. With a handful of different procedural standards being thrown together into the mix of an op, sometimes it was almost like trying to work in metric and inches at the same time. That had to change. I developed a new system of standardized operations and communications procedures between pilots and snipers. In terms of long-term impact, this was my biggest accomplishment while running the Helo Support block. In an eval I received later, the chief warrant officer reviewing my work wrote:

These streamlined procedures have greatly reduced communication clutter between pilots, HELO-borne pilots and ground assault forces, and have significantly contributed to safer and more dynamic target assaults.

It was a crazy task; we were inventing everything on the fly (literally!), but I loved the challenge. In about a month I had a complete curriculum developed and ready to teach. Now all I had to do was start teaching it.

Damn!
I thought,
I’ve never
taught
before.

I remembered my own sniper training and how there were teachers who could teach and others who couldn’t. I was determined to be one of those who could, so I got myself put through Instructor Training School, a four-week program offered at Thirty-second Street by the San Diego Bay. I can’t say enough good things about this school. All the public speaking and teaching I’ve done ever since has been tremendously influenced by the experience of those few weeks. They put us up in front of a classroom and videotaped us while we taught, then played the tapes back to us. There is nothing like watching yourself teach on videotape. We would sit there staring at ourselves on screen and hearing ourselves say “Uh” and “Um” and “Y’know” ten, twelve, fifteen times a minute. It was brutal. If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend it—and if you have any intention of teaching or being in any kind of leadership position, it is something you
have
to do.

Guys would watch in horror as they saw themselves cursing in the middle of their sentences, saying things they would have sworn they never said until they saw the hard evidence. Talk about shock and awe. It was embarrassing—or it would have been if the instructors had stopped and rubbed our noses in it. But they had a job to do, and they got on with it. They would count up all the
uhs, ums,
and
whatevers,
all the
shits
and
fucks
and
damns,
then run us through it again. They drummed all the verbal tics out of us.

They taught us how to work off a curriculum, how to structure a class, how to gauge how the different students were doing and support slower ones in picking up the pace without browbeating them. They taught us it was okay to pause and gather our thoughts without filling in the empty space with an “Um”; how to ask questions without shotgunning or drilling students to the point where we’d embarrass them or make them uncomfortable; how to encourage students to ask their own questions and get them thinking so they absorbed material instead of just parroting it back.

They taught us how to
teach.
In terms of practical life skills, it was one of the best schools I’ve ever experienced. Back when I was in sniper school, the only SEALs who were put through Instructor Training School were the BUD/S instructors. This was about to change. Today they put
all
their instructors through that program.

Once Eric and I had the Helo Support block up and running, Chief Gardner asked me to assist him with the redesign of Urban Sniper Training, which he had been putting together based in part on his experiences in Somalia. We did this right in San Diego in some old buildings that were owned by the Naval Training Center. Urban is all about trying to cover as many angles as you can and using cover effectively as you move through a village or city. We took our guys through our urban scenarios as two-man units, showing them how to set up urban hides—instead of going up on the rooftops where everyone expects you to be, find a basement where you can get eyes on your target—and how to disguise their hideout sites so that no one could see into them, but they could shoot out of them with a clear line of sight.

While I was at Sniper Cell, Chief Gardner led the charge on updating the basic optics we used community-wide and eventually SOCOM-wide, replacing our Leupold scopes with a new Nightforce scope. The U.S.-made Nightforce pieces were much better optics, and they had a feature I especially loved: Pull out a little knob and suddenly the reticles become illuminated, so that in low-light conditions or an urban nighttime environment we now had crosshairs lit with a faintly glowing red light.

I had to smile the first time I sighted through that tiny, precision-manufactured glowing reticle. There it was again: my red circle.

As we got these curricula up and running, we started pulling snipers aside while their platoons were going through their workups and running them through the Helo and Urban courses. Soon word started to spread and we heard that SEALs in the teams were saying to each other, “Man, you
have
to go through that Helo Support block and Urban block.” Back in Afghanistan, when snipers from the other countries’ Special Operations teams were asking Osman and me over to debrief them after Zhawar Kili, I’d befriended a very sharp Danish sniper named Henning, from the Danish Frogman Corps. Now Henning was running the sniper training in Denmark, and he flew over to the States, went through our advanced courses, then took what he’d learned and implemented it in Denmark.

We ran another block called Rural Training, where we brought guys who’d been through all the other training up to Bull Hill Ranch in Washington state, right up against the Canadian border, and took them out hunting whitetail deer and elk. Tracking Taliban hideouts out in Zhawar Kili with Osman had reminded me of deer hunting, and I now found the comparison worked both ways: Taking students out for some actual deer hunting was a great way to train them in the realities of combat.

Hunting deer is typically much harder than hunting people. People get lazy. Not so with wild animals; their instincts are honed to a razor’s edge. Taking our snipers out into the wild, having them stalk a live animal, get it on target, and stop a beating heart for real—it was phenomenal training, and one of my favorite parts of everything we did. There were some bear up there, too. One of our instructors, Matt Hussian (who later took over my courses when I left Sniper Cell), grew up in Texas hunting deer with a .22 to put food on the table for his mom and little brother. Hussian would go out and disappear for a few days, and next thing you knew he’d come walking out of the woods dragging some big bear he’d taken down.

We would hunt in the mornings, hold classes in the afternoons, long-distance shooting courses and things like that, then hunt again in the evening. (Our students blew the minds of some local hunters, too, because we were nailing deer at distances like 600 to 800 yards.) At the five-star lodge where we stayed, we’d come in from hunting at ten in the morning to a full country breakfast spread. At night we’d come back from hunting and dress out our deer or whatever we’d caught, wash up, and then sit down to an amazing dinner.

Everyone in the cell was a pretty damn good cook, with the exception of my buddy Eric and one other guy, Bill. I’m not sure who started it, but soon we were taking turns making lunch for each other. Here we were, a bunch of trained killers, trying our level best to outdo each other in the kitchen and arguing over who had the best recipe. It would have made a great reality television show. We had fantastic kitchen action and great food, only instead of the usual boring cooking-show banter, our lunch hour was filled with X-rated stories that would make a hooker blush. (This show would have to go on cable.) We were as competitive as Navy SEALs can be, too. It didn’t matter if we were trying to kick the shit out of each other on a swim, a training run, or in the effort to come up with the best recipes, we were always in it to come out on top. I never had a bad meal the whole time I was there.

Chief Gardner, our senior member and veteran of Somalia and the Gulf War, made one of the best tri-tip marinades on the West Coast.

Johnny, another instructor, was a great hunter and fisherman. He was the biggest, loudest, most boisterous character in Sniper Cell, but he was also one of the few guys in the cell not to have any combat experience, at least not at the time. Naturally we reminded him of this several times a day, and it drove him nuts. He had always been one step behind the action, in a few cases literally missing the boat when some serious action was about to go down. I think we would have left it alone, but it made him so crazy that we just had to give him massive hell for it. One day I put together a Rainbow Coalition Medal for him (completely spurious, of course), and we held a formal ceremony to award him this citation, which singled out “his innate cowardice and keen ability to avoid combat action at all costs.” We had quite the laugh at his expense. To Johnny’s credit, he proudly displayed the award up to the day he left the cell. He went on to become one of the most accomplished combat SEALs from the West Coast.

Johnny was famous for his hickory-bacon-wrapped venison with jalapeño peppers.

Bill was a very quiet guy and extremely professional in everything he did, a very solid sniper, instructor, and stand-up guy. However, Bill could not cook worth a damn, and we reminded him of this with great frequency. He tried to cobble together some sort of dish once, but whatever it was turned out to be such an abomination that he threw in the towel and never tried again.

Eric is as terrible as a cook as he is excellent as a friend. He has trouble microwaving popcorn without burning it. Even today, at his own backyard cookouts, I have to man the grill for him.

And me? I became famous (within the cell, at least) for my homemade mango salsa; I even grew my own peppers. My salsa, combined with white albacore tuna salad sandwich, was very tasty. When it was my turn to cook I’d whip up my mango salsa, maybe grill some yellowtail and serve it with steamed rice and some sort of homemade sauce. If they gave medals for cooking, I’m pretty sure a few of us would have been contenders.

Of course, they didn’t give medals for cooking—but there was a promotion coming, and one I wasn’t expecting. Every year, at the end of the year, they would traditionally give one person in the entire command a meritorious promotion. I knew very well that in this command, I was surrounded by superstars. Chief Gardner had put me in, though, and to my great surprise, at the end of 2002, after six months at Sniper Cell, I was selected for early advancement and meritoriously promoted to petty officer first class, E-6. It was one of the proudest moments of my navy career.

But not
the
proudest moment. That was still to come.

*   *   *

As much fun as we were having at Sniper Cell, there was one dark cloud over those months in late 2002. Shortly after I arrived, it became painfully clear that something was up with Senior Chief Seth Carver.

I knew Senior Chief Carver from sniper school in 2000 when he took over the course from his predecessor, Master Chief Jordan. Now, in addition to being master chief of the West Coast sniper school, he was also department head of the West Coast TRADET Sniper Cell. Chief Gardner was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the cell, but it was ultimately Seth’s command, and it was he who interacted with the rest of TRADET and the navy command structure—and this was becoming a problem.

TRADET would hold morning meetings that Chief Carver attended, representing our cell. I started seeing him roll in barely five minutes before that day’s meeting, his hair all messed up, and grab a scrap of paper out of the trash can to jot some hasty notes before dashing into the meeting.
What the hell’s going on with Chief Carver?
I thought.
He’s a mess!

None of this behavior computed. I remembered Chief Carver as a 100 percent hardcore professional back at sniper school just a few years earlier. Now he seemed a complete train wreck. What was the deal?

A few of the guys pulled me aside and told me what was happening.

In the few years that had elapsed since I’d gone through Chief Carver’s sniper course, he’d had a rough time of it. Some thorny family problems had spiraled out of control, and Chief Carver ended up in an acrimonious divorce contest that was tearing him apart. Soon he was drinking heavily and God knows what else.

By that winter it got so bad that something was going to blow. Chief Gardner was doing his best to keep this all under wraps, but Chief Carver was teetering close to the edge of being thrown out of the navy. Finally Chief Gardner got us all together and we staged a full-blown intervention, after which the navy put him through rehab—and he managed to pull it out and get himself back on track.

Chief Carver had nineteen years in at that point, one year from retirement. If he’d been in the regular navy and this whole drama had gone down, he would almost certainly have been tossed out with a “Sorry, hate to see ya go” and maybe some kind of rehab at the VA if he was lucky, but no retirement: screwed, nineteen years down the tubes. But with the help of his SEAL buddies he was able to put in one more functional year and salvage his retirement.

That’s how it is with our community. SEALs take care of their own. If you had an attitude, if you were a persistent screwup who threatened to pull the standards down for the rest of us, they were merciless. However, if you were a good guy who had the misfortune to go through some adversity or other, they wouldn’t just toss you aside. If you had earned some respect and proven yourself as a good operator, they would do everything they could to take care of you and keep your career alive. And that’s exactly what we did with Chief Carver.

*   *   *

In the summer of 2003, after I’d been at TRADET for a little over a year, Chief Gardner came to Eric and me one day and told us that the guys who ran the basic SEAL sniper school had come to him for some help.