I had been issued an astonishing amount of stuff. Foul-weather gear, Gore-Tex parkas, assault vests, cammies, boots, fins. Bags and sea chests full to bursting. Climbing harnesses, carabiners, chocks, jumars, and lock picks. Nomex coveralls. Custom wet suits. Flight suits. Survival kits. Sunglasses and ski goggles. Scuba rigs, a pair of twin steel 90s for open circuit and a brand-new Draeger LAR-V rebreather. An MT-1-X parachute and an impressive number of weapons. In my personal rack in the arsenal were a CAR-15 with M-203 grenade launcher, MP5-A5 and MP-5K machine pistols, and a wicked little silenced MP5-SD. I had a personal AK-47, an H&K G3 assault rifle, an M-60 machine gun, a SAW-squad automatic weapon, a stainless-steel Smith & Wesson model 686 .357 Magnum pistol, a Beretta 92 SBF, and a blue-steel Walther PPK, just like James Bond. The armory tech was blasé as he had me sign.
“This is your basic draw,” he mumbled. “If you need any other sort of weapon, or if you want modifications made, just let us know.”
I reported the following morning at 0600 and met my new teammates. The twenty of us were to be the fourth Green Team processed by SEAL Team Six. Some faces I recognized and some I did not. In any case, we were surprises to one another. When we were notified of our selection, we were told to tell only those people with a need to know. Several of my new teammates were old friends. Wild Bill had been in Class 114 and was a member of my boat crew during Hell Week. Bill was an NFL-sized guy with an incredible sense of humor. He was impressively strong and born into the career of spec ops—his father was a serving colonel in the Green Berets. There were three others from 114 in my Green Team: Greg Pearlman and Chris Keller, the two hot dogs who’d swiped the jumpmaster’s hat back at Fort Benning, and Vinny, a tall man built like a cross-country runner, who was quiet, intense, and dedicated. He, too, had been in my boat crew for Hell Week, and I was glad to see him. They were solid guys, good shipmates, great operators, and all would be destined to have long careers at SEAL Six.
The balance of my Green Team came from SEAL Teams One, Two, and Three, as well as the SDV Teams. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, I was the only one from SEAL Four. Everyone selected was considered top-of-the-line, the officers all former platoon commanders, and most of the enlisted former leading petty officers or boat-crew leaders. The class’s sole chief petty officer was Bud Denning, a taciturn guy with a subtle and cutting sense of humor. As chiefs go, Bud Denning was one of the best.
There were three other officers in my Green Team, all of us lieutenants, and all of us would become friends for life. Sean Pikeman was our class leader, senior by a couple of years; he was fresh from SEAL Team One and a jungle deployment to the Philippines. He had been raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma; he had an Okie’s level head and had played all-American lacrosse at the University of Rochester. Next was Rick Cullen, unflappable, a meticulous planner and a former platoon commander from SEAL Two. Finally, there was Moose. If the Moose didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. Built like a linebacker, he was a high-time SDV pilot from the West Coast. Driving minisubs into Korean harbors on recons wasn’t exciting enough for him, so here he was. Moose was a fascinating guy with a rigorous and accomplished upbringing. Captain and quarterback of his high school football team, he also found time to play first violin in the Seattle Youth Symphony. At Claremont College in California, he ran the 880 and majored in philosophy and religion, writing his senior thesis on the death of Eric Bonhoffer, a Lutheran theologian executed by Adolf Hitler. Moose was as impressive intellectually as he was physically. He could talk about Epictetus while he benched 350, and it was only a fool who’d try to outdrink him.
Our instructors walked in, dressed in the uniform of the day, blue jeans and polo shirts. The entire time I was at SEAL Six, I would wear a navy uniform only once. This was a civilian-clothes operation.
The training cell was led by a man with the remarkable name of Traylor Court. Court was prior enlisted, had attended OCS and gotten drafted into the command by Dick Marcinko personally. Court had a gymnast’s build and was one of the operators, along with Kim Erskine, who had taken down the radio station on Grenada. Court wasn’t the type to raise his voice. He commanded attention and respect.
With Court were three other instructors: Toni, a six-foot, 250-pound Hawaiian surfer; Mike Daniels, your basic triathlete sniper-cum-demolition expert; and a guy we called Bam-Bam. Bam-Bam was from Gary, Indiana, and was fond of remarking that he was the only one of his three brothers not currently in prison. Bam-Bam had been the Indiana State springboard-diving champion, and in a command where everyone was an expert marksman, he was considered one of the fastest and deadliest shots. He was also quick with his fists.
There was no welcome-aboard speech. Court made a few remarks, most notably that this was a selection course. Not only was it possible to fail; for most of us, it was likely. He predicted that half of the men assigned to this Green Team would attrite. It was a variation of my welcome to BUD/S, and I am sure everyone who heard him thought they’d be among the graduates.
Court was to prove precise in his estimate. Of the twenty of us standing in the Team room, only twelve would make it through Green Team and be assigned to assault elements on the operational team. Court went on to enumerate half a dozen transgressions for which we would be immediately canned: Accidental discharge of a weapon. Any safety violation involving diving or explosives. Use or suspected use of controlled substances. Loss or mishandling of classified material. Revealing any facts about SEAL Team Six to anyone, in or out of naval special warfare. We were specifically instructed to no longer associate with anyone back in the regular Teams. We were told bluntly: “Make new friends.”
This policy was rigorously enforced and had led to the alienation of Team Six from the rest of the community. The new-friends rule was a relic of the Marcinko era, and like many other Marcinko policies we would come up against, it seemed pointless and counterproductive; but they were serious about it, so we did as we were told. There was at least a glimmer of a reason behind it: SEAL Team Six was then a black program. The existence of the Team was secret, the location of the base was secret, its budget, training, organization, and tactics were all classified. The building did not say “SEAL Team Six”—it said the name of an equipment-testing unit that did not exist. The cover was backstopped thoroughly. All of us had been processed out of the navy. At least as far as our records showed, we had all been separated from the service. Paperwork variously indicating resignation, retirement, and medical release from duty had been placed in each of our service records. We were to grow our hair long and forget that we owned uniforms. As far as the world was concerned, none of us were in the navy anymore. We were now civilians working for the phantom organization. This was what we were to tell our neighbors and new friends.
To our old teammates back at Little Creek, it would appear that we had dropped off the face of the planet. We had entered the black world. From now on the Teams would be referred to disparagingly as Vanilla SOF—plain white spec ops. As aspirant members of Team Jedi, we had crossed to the Dark Side.
There was an additional consequence of joining a black operation: compartmentalization. Green Team was firewalled totally from the operational elements of SEAL Six. We were told not to ask questions, to keep to our own cages and our own Team room, and not to fraternize with the operators, even if we had known them back in the real world. The training cell was completely segregated from the operational elements. Until we had passed out of Green Team, we were visitors. Period.
“When and if you graduate,” Court said, “you can play with your old friends.”
This culture pervaded the command. It wasn’t just the support guys who gave Green Team members the short stroke. In the hallways and around campus, the members of Green Team were practically invisible. Former teammates would pass by without a nod. The no-fraternization rule went both ways. This was another Marcinko innovation. You had to earn the right to be here; until then you were nothing.
The next briefing was from the command�
��s two counterintelligence agents, a pair of cards I’ll call “Lenny” and “Dougie.” It was their job to make sure the command kept a low—that is, invisible—profile. They were active-duty marines, as if you could tell. Dougie had curly hair to his shoulders and a drooping Fu Manchu. Lenny sported a goatee and an earring. They were affable enough, but their message was chilling. It was their job to discern how well our covers were working, and what the general public knew about us and the command.
“Here’s the deal,” Dougie said. “If I ask your next-door neighbors where you work and they tell me you’re a SEAL, you’re outta here.”
I made a mental note: Don’t chat up the neighbors.
Green Team was to be eight months long, two months longer than BUD/S. It would prove every bit as grueling. We worked six days a week, from six in the morning until five at night. We would have at least one night op a week, and we would work seven days a week when we were on the road, which would be most of the time. Individuals who attrited, were injured or deemed unsuitable would have their service records reactivated and would transfer back to the Teams. Before transfer, they would sign a security-termination agreement promising fines and imprisonment for leaking any information. Again, Lenny and Dougie would be checking.
We wore beepers and were on call to be in our cages and ready to deploy on short notice. I won’t mention the time requirement, but I will say this: It was stringent enough that some people sold their houses to move closer to work.
And there was a lot of work. Traylor Court would soon dispel any notions we had about being in shape. In the woods in front of the compound, Court had erected an aerial obstacle course. Rigged through the trees were caving ladders, rope bridges, monkey bars, bits of pipe, inclined boards, and horizontal beams. Negotiating the course required a variety of rock-climbing moves: chimneying, laybacks, mantles, and countless full-body lifts. We used to say Court was trying to separate the men from the baboons, but the course had a purpose. At Six, we climbed things: the sides of buildings, oil rigs, cliff faces, and anchor chains. As I gradually gained confidence and strength, I was to fall out of Court’s trees half a dozen times, but I would never fall on an operation.
We were required to swing through Court’s masterpiece after our daily six-mile run, which happened after our first hour and a half of PT, which started every morning at 0600. Morning calisthenics, like the run and the aerial O-course, were led by Court in person. Not all of our cardio conditioning was roadwork or swinging through trees. We swam thousands of laps and played water rugby in the Team’s indoor Olympic swimming pool. I was in shape when I got there, and I got harder. We lifted weights in a health-club-sized weight room. We did a twenty-mile cross-country run over hill and dale, forest and swamp. We swam around the island of Key West. By the end of training, I would weigh 220 pounds and be able to run ten miles in sixty-five minutes, knock out a hundred sit-ups in ninety seconds, and chin myself with one hand.
As fun as the exercise was, we were there to learn a trade, and the greater part of each day was spent absorbing the component skills required of a counterterrorist operator. We were put through an intense combat-swimmer curriculum, building on and expanding the underwater skills we’d learned in the Teams. The training required us to swim mile-long course legs underwater and affix magnetic mines to targets on time and without detection. We conducted underwater recons against port facilities and offshore oil platforms. We swam to piers, surfaced, and shot targets, disappearing back underwater and swimming a mile or two out to sea.
When I reported to Green Team, I might have been a bit jaded. I’d been in combat, I was a platoon commander, I had led numerous detachments and spent a good part of my career doing spooky stuff in Central America. I thought I’d been around the block, and I didn’t expect to have the shit scared out of me. But it happened in Green Team, often. It was taken for granted that we were all experienced operators and that we would learn quickly. Some of the things we learned were just plain dangerous. In the evolutions we practiced, everything either went perfectly or people died.
“Pay attention,” Bam-Bam used to say, “because if you fuck this up, it will kill you.” Every day Green Team battled the combined forces of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Darwin.
We attended survival schools for desert, woodland, and arctic environments. We learned how to take over ships at pierside and under way. We attended special driving schools, learning how to do bootlegs and J-turns, how to avoid roadblocks and vehicle ambushes. We also learned how to conduct the Pitt maneuver, an offensive driving technique used to knock other cars off the road. Much to the chagrin of our instructors, we kept these skills sharp on a series of rental cars. We were taught intelligence tradecraft, studying the arcana of dead drops, load signals, and countersurveillance. We took classes on the organization and tactics of the KGB, the East German Stasi, and the Cuban intelligence organization, the DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia).
We learned to operate and field-strip each of the weapons we’d been issued, those and about a hundred others besides. We attended shooting schools, studying combat pistol craft and police shotgun technique from national champions like Rogers and Chapman. In an exercise called an El Presidente, we would stand, hands raised, pistols holstered, with our backs turned to three man-shaped silhouettes. On command, we would about-face, draw, fire two rounds into each target, reload, and fire two more rounds into the trio. I was considered fair at this. I could fire twelve shots and reload my weapon in just over five seconds. The best operator on the team could do it in four and a half.
Combat shooting differs qualitatively from traditional marksmanship. In normal rifle and pistol craft, shooters are taught to close one eye, relax, align the target, and squeeze the trigger slowly. To rush a shot is to cheat the process. Combat shooting is, by necessity, a hasty business. When people are shooting back at you, speed is life.
We were first taught to shoot from the ready position, squared toward the target, knees slightly bent, and weight forward on the toes, a position called “the modified isosceles.” Our MP-5s were secured over the shoulder and to the chest by a special assault sling. When the weapon is raised to engage the target, the sling becomes another point of stability, like a third steadying hand. On the command to fire, we would snap off safe, fire two rounds in quick succession (called a “double tap”), snap the safety back on, and return to the ready position. Initially we shot at reactive targets, armored silhouettes and dish-sized head plates. The pinging of the bullets off the metal targets and the fleeting puff of lead spatter were instant feedback, a process called “point of impact/point of aim.” Eye, hand, bullet, target, brain.
Combat shooting is dynamic, not static, and we did not spend much time shooting at stationary targets. We were taught to move and shoot, shoot and move and shoot, while the targets were moving. This required a different sort of aiming, completely unlike the target-focused techniques of long-distance marksmanship. We were taught to open both eyes, keeping the scan on and avoiding target lock. There is a bit of a trick to this, especially for marksmen used to shooting at bull’s-eyes printed on paper targets. Most right-handed people are right-eye dominant, and most lefties favor their left eye. The dominant eye is better exercised and slightly more acute. In traditional marksmanship, the nondominant eye is closed. We learned a technique to gray out our nondominant eye, keeping it open but using our dominant eye to process the target and align the sights. The nondominant eye maintained peripheral vision, the location of the next target and the position of obstacles. Basically, one eye scanned and the other killed.
In order to shoot accurately, we still had to acquire a correct sight picture, front and rear sights aligned, target centered over the front sight post; but in combat shooting, this process is compressed into a split second. There is no time to squeeze the trigger slowly; it is pulled rapidly and evenly. You must subtly anticipate the weapon going off, and learn by feel your own reaction to the muzzle blast and the cycling of the gun. All of this i
s exactly contrary to long-distance marksmanship, in which shooters are taught to relax, regulate their breathing, and squeeze the trigger so gently that they are surprised when the weapon goes off.
We often aimed on the run, or popping up from behind obstacles. Compensation for the jerk of the trigger had to be built in to the target scan, the aiming, and the firing of the weapon. Working day and night, we became masters of the fast-targeting, rapid-fire skills of combat shooting. Everything we did was timed and scored, and Green Team got smaller in the first four weeks. The class was ranked in a ratio of hits over time. Those scoring in the lowest 20 percent of our class cleaned out their cages and returned to Planet Vanilla.
Our next task was to learn the science and art of CQB, close-quarters battle. Combat shooting is an individual event; CQB is a team sport. Like everything taught in SEAL Team, we learned component skills and gradually built up to operational capability.
Sometimes called “room clearance” or “surgical shooting,” CQB was developed by the British SAS and put into practice in Northern Ireland. Counterterrorism is the science of combating terrorism, and CQB is the reason terrorists rarely seize buildings and hold hostages these days. It is the antidote to the hostage-barricade situation, whether the venue is a building, a cave, an airliner, an offshore oil platform, or a cruise ship. In the chaotic environment of a counterterrorism rescue, the mission is to secure the hostages and neutralize the terrorists. Discipline, teamwork, target discrimination, and exceptional marksmanship make this possible.
We would learn to shoot the bad guys from among the hostages in a place called the Kill House, an indoor 360-degree shooting facility. Movable walls allowed us to configure the range into multiple compartments, and we could make floor plans to match any target. We trained first in single rooms, shooting at man-sized printed silhouettes. Some targets were depicted holding weapons, some were hostages, some held weapons and police badges. After entering the room, we had to almost instantly scan, determine the threat, and either shoot or hold fire. We entered in teams of two, four, eight, and ten, and the targets were positioned differently each time. Sometimes the lights were on, sometimes they were off. We ran the target while instructors in the control booth pumped in disco fog and flashed strobe lights. Sometimes they blared music or jet-engine noise, and always, multiple video cameras taped us so the run could be played back in slow motion and analyzed.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 34