The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (49 page)

Like me, when it came time for assignment to the teams, Chris had chosen SEAL Team Three as his top pick, and gotten it, too. For his first deployment, he was one of the SEALs on the ground in Iraq with the first wave of American troops at the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. While he was there, Chris saw some serious action; it was a helluva place to have your first deployment.

Upon rotating back home, one of the first things Chris did was to go through our sniper course. After graduating, he shipped right back out to Iraq, where he fought in the Second Battle for Fallujah, which turned out to be the biggest and bloodiest engagement in the entire Iraq war. Since the largely unsuccessful First Battle for Fallujah seven months earlier, the place had been heavily fortified, and we had big army units going in with small teams of our snipers attached to help give them the edge they needed. Our snipers would sneak in there, see enemy insurgents (sometimes snipers themselves) slipping out to try and ambush our guys, and just drop them in their tracks. It was no contest.

Our guys were not only expert shots, they also knew how to think strategically and tactically, and they came up with all kinds of creative solutions on the battlefield. For example, they would stage an IED (improvised explosive device) to flush out the enemy. They would take some beat-up vehicle they’d captured in a previous op, rig it up with explosives, drive it into the city, and blow it, simulating that it had been hit by an IED. Meanwhile, they would take cover and wait. All these enemy forces would start coming out of the woodwork, shooting off guns and celebrating, “Aha, we got the Americans!” and the snipers would pick them all off like proverbial goldfish in a bowl. You didn’t hear about this on the news, but they did it over and over, throughout the city.

Chris was in the middle of all this. In his first deployment he racked up close to 100 kills, 40 of them in the Second Battle for Fallujah alone. He was shot twice, in six separate IED explosions, and received multiple frag wounds from RPGs and other explosives.

The insurgents had a sniper there from the Iraqi Olympic shooting team, who was packing an English-made Accuracy International, about $10,000 worth of weapon. This guy was not messing around. Neither were Chris and our other snipers. They shot the guy and took his rifle. Al Qaeda put a bounty on Chris’s head—but nobody ever collected. You can read about Chris’s exploits in his book,
American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.

As remarkable as he is, Chris Kyle is quick to point out that he was not unique on that battlefield. There was a whole lineup of SEAL snipers in Iraq at the time who were cutting a wide swathe through the hotbeds of insurgency, providing clear zones for our marines and army forces to operate without being picked off by enemy snipers themselves or being ambushed by IEDs.

It’s easy to have an image of these guys as trained killers—mean, ruthless men who think nothing of ending other people’s lives. Maybe even violent and bloodthirsty. The reality is quite different.

Think about the various ways we have gone about winning wars in the past. Think about American planes firebombing Tokyo and Dresden during World War II, which burned to death hundreds of thousands of civilians. And that’s an awfully painful way to go. Or consider what it’s like to take out a high-value target by leveling the city block where he’s located at the moment with a targeted JDAM strike. Imagine being someone he’s located in that building, slowly crushed to death under the rubble.

Now think about a trained Navy SEAL sniper like Chris, waiting, sighting, and finally squeezing the trigger of his .300 Win Mag. The supersonic round reaches its destination in less than a second—the man is gone before the rifle’s report reaches his ears.

The reality is that the death that comes with the sniper’s strike is typically clean, painless, and as humane as death can be. A cleaner death, if we’re really going to be honest with ourselves, than most of us will experience when we come to the end of our own lives. The sniper is like a highly skilled surgeon, practicing his craft on the battlefield. Make no mistake: War is about killing other human beings, taking out the enemy before he takes us out, stopping the spread of further aggression by stopping those who would perpetuate that aggression. However, if the goal is to prosecute the war in order to achieve the peace, and to do so as fast and as effectively as possible, and with the least collateral damage, then warriors like Chris Kyle and our other brothers-in-arms are heroes in the best sense.

*   *   *

One of our better students was Marcus Luttrell, another Texan and author of
Lone Survivor,
his account of Operation Redwing in Afghanistan. I mentored both Marcus and his twin brother, Morgan, who came through the course about half a year before Marcus did.

Marcus and Chris Kyle are actually good friends as well as fellow Texans—and they couldn’t be more different. Where Chris blends in and wears his strength inconspicuously, Marcus is the dictionary definition of “conspicuous”—a big strapping hunk of a guy, colorful, rambunctious, entertaining as hell, and larger than life in every way. If Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell had been alive in the Old West, Chris would have been the quiet one in the corner that you didn’t notice (at least, not until the gunplay started). Marcus would have been the gunslinger they ended up making the subject of Hollywood films.

Unfortunately, for a sniper,
conspicuous
is not necessarily an asset. Like Morgan, Marcus was a first-rate SEAL, but he did not pass through our sniper course without incident. While he was a crack shot, he had a tough time meeting the course minimum requirements for stalking, where we were teaching the students how to use camouflage, the terrain, and stealth skills to sneak up to an enemy position.

I vividly remember the first practice stalk we did with Marcus’s class. We were giving them a bunch of practice outings first so they could get the lay of the land and get their stalking feet under them. Once we’d gone through these we would start a series of ten graded stalks, on which the students had to score an 80 or above—meaning you could miss a maximum of two out of the ten, or you were out of the course.

On these practice stalks we gave the students time to clip off bits and pieces of natural vegetation to put all over their ghillie suits and hats so they would be fully camouflaged, and then hide themselves, at which point we would scan the field to judge how well they were hidden, in other words, whether or not we could detect them. We got the sign that everyone was fully vegged up and hidden, I put my binos to my eyes and started scanning—and right away found myself staring at this odd-looking ice plant.

As I watched, that odd-looking ice-plant monster got to its feet and stood up.

Here was the problem: Ice plant doesn’t grow six feet tall, and it also doesn’t suddenly haul itself up to a standing position. Sure enough, it was Marcus, covered with wilting scraps of vegetation. He looked like an ice-plant Sasquatch.

“Oh, man,” I remember saying more than once during the course of those practice stalks, “it’s Marcus again.”

Marcus and his shooting partner were one of my two pairs in that course, and I often took them out on the course after hours, quizzing them and working with them, doing whatever I could to make sure they were getting this down. This was exactly why we’d set up this mentor system: so that the instructors would take ownership of their pairs and have a vested interest in their success.

As much as we all put into it, though, it wasn’t enough: Marcus didn’t make it. He was crushed, and so were we; he was an excellent shooter and as solid a SEAL as they come, and we all badly wanted to pass him—but we hadn’t succeeded in getting him through that concealment and stalking phase.

So what did he do? He turned right around and went through the course a second time, the whole damn three months of it. This is a guy who does not know the meaning of the word “quit.”

The second time through the course, Marcus was partnered with a BUD/S friend of his named Tej, who was even bigger (and even louder) than Marcus. Easily the biggest guys in the class, these two were so outrageous and boisterous I nearly had to separate them. At the same time, they kept that class in line. We had one student who was a career complainer, and more than one who tried to give us a hard time—but whenever someone started piping up or getting out of line, Tej and Marcus would shut them down. They were rowdy, hilarious, impossible, and two of the most standup guys we’d ever had.

Once again, Marcus and his partner were my personals, and once again, I was determined to see him succeed. Of course, we wanted every one of our students to succeed, but Marcus was so damn likable and such a good guy that we
really
wanted him to make it. He knew he’d have to get through on his own merits, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to do everything I could to make sure that happened.

When it came to the stalking portion he started having a rough time again—but at a certain point it just clicked for him, and from then on he did really well. This time around, he graduated with flying colors. I don’t know who was happier about it, Marcus or us. I’d say we were all pretty fired up.

Just as he was graduating, Marcus approached me to ask a favor. “Hey,” he said, “I’m about to deploy to Afghanistan, but we’ve got this big family event happening in Texas. Is there any way I could not do that FTX?”

Normally after graduating the course you could take up to thirty days’ leave to spend time with your family, but Marcus had already sacrificed his leave time to get himself placed immediately into the sniper course for his second go at it. Now the only way he could see his family before deploying would be if we let him out of the FTX, or final training exercise, which would normally add about one more week’s time on the course. The FTX was a graded mission, so theoretically it was mandatory, but hell, Marcus had clearly made it through at that point, so I worked it out for him to skip it and have that week with his family.

The week after that family event he was on a plane to Afghanistan.

What happened next is the subject of his book. Marcus and three teammates—Matt Axelson (Morgan Luttrell’s best friend), Danny Dietz, and Michael Murphy—went out on a reconnaissance mission in northern Afghanistan, not far from the area where we had run so many missions with ECHO platoon. The mission went bad, and soon the four were scrambling across the brutal Afghan terrain under heavy fire. Marcus watched as his teammate and brother’s best friend died in his arms. Murphy and Dietz were killed, too, as were all sixteen of the men (eight SEALs and eight Army Airborne “Night Stalkers”) dispatched as a QRF to rescue Marcus’s team. It was the worst U.S. loss of life in a single event in Afghanistan—a grisly record of tragedy that was broken only six years later when a Chinook helo was shot down in August 2011.

We were devastated when we heard the news. I’d lost other friends before, but this was the worst. I’d gotten close to all those guys during the course and had especially come to know Marcus and Axelson really well. As far as we knew, Marcus had died, too. That was what almost everyone believed (although Morgan insisted that he
knew
his twin brother was still alive). It wasn’t until five days later that we learned Marcus had miraculously pulled through.

Badly wounded and with all his buddies gone, this big Texan who had failed stalk after stalk when he first landed in our course had managed to walk and crawl undetected through some 7 miles of hostile terrain, somehow evading capture and killing 6 more Taliban fighters along the way, until he made it to an Afghan village that shielded him until he could be rescued.

Marcus was the only one out of the entire operation who made it home alive.

The next time I saw Marcus was more than a year later, in the late summer of 2006, on the deck of the USS
Midway
off San Diego where the navy was holding a big fund-raiser. He and his coauthor, Patrick Robinson, had just finished writing
Lone Survivor,
although it would not come out on the bookstands until the following summer. I spotted him at the event and went over to talk with him.

“Hey, Marcus,” I said.

“Hey, Brandon,” he replied.

We embraced each other, then quickly caught each other up on what was going on in our lives. There was quite a crowd around us, and we both knew we wouldn’t have more than a minute to talk. He grabbed me by both shoulders and said, “Brandon, listen. You need to know, that stalking course? That saved my life. If you hadn’t pounded that training into me, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”

His voice choked, and I saw tears in his eyes. I was getting pretty emotional myself.

“You saved my life, man,” he repeated, “and I want you to know that, and I want to thank you for it.”

I thought about all he had been through in Afghanistan, watching his friends die one by one, the long days and longer nights hidden away in that Afghan village while the Taliban hunted for him, not knowing whether he would make it out alive. I flashed on all the time we’d spent in the course, the hours we put in together long after the day’s studies were officially over, shaping him into a first-class stalker. I thought about the hours Eric and I and the rest of us had put in crafting and refining that course, the strain on our families while we were away, even the long months of enduring the reign of Harvey Clayton … and knew that this made it all way, way past worthwhile.

That
was my proudest moment as a SEAL.

CONCLUSION

S
EPTEMBER
2006
, WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN
. Even now, I couldn’t tell you the exact day. All I know is this: I had gone into this building with an assault team and now found myself standing alone in what looked like an abandoned warehouse, a dimly-lit clear-span space about the size of an average high school gymnasium. And I was
in
it, deep. Whoever the anonymous characters were who occupied this place, I knew their mission was to break me down to my constituent parts. I was pretty sure I would be more useful to them alive than dead. But you can never be completely sure about these things.