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

by Brandon Webb

As we pulled into the training center and parked, we saw a few dozen guys lining the roadway, yelling obscenities at us and telling us how fond of us they were. Our welcome committee. It felt like we were in a bad prison movie.

  It was ten o’clock at night, just in time to unload, find out where we were supposed to bunk, and hit the sack. A few of my busmates audibly cried themselves to sleep that first night. I didn’t mind. What I really didn’t appreciate was the four o’clock wake-up call the next morning with some assholes banging on aluminum trash cans and yelling, “Wake up! Get the hell out of your rack!” Senior recruits, in charge of moving the herd along.

  After a trip to the barber to get rid of our hair, we assembled in a room where they staged what they called the Moment of Truth: “Okay, who here lied to your recruiter?” Now was our last chance to tell the navy some dark secret about our sexual preference (these were the don’t-ask-don’t-tell days) or admit to our drug addiction. When it came to sex, drinking, and carousing in general, I was certainly no angel, but I happened to have the dual advantage of being heterosexual and drug free. If I hadn’t been, I would’ve had the sense to keep my mouth shut. Some admitted that, yes, they’d used on occasion. They were given a piss test. Some of them passed; the others were gone.

  Next I learned that I was being assigned to Company I-081 (a company being roughly a hundred people), which was integrated. At the time, the navy had three boot camp facilities: the one in San Diego, another in Great Lakes, Illinois, and the one I was standing in. Of the three, only Orlando had integrated companies.

  By “integrated,” they didn’t mean blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians all together in harmony. They meant men and women recruits training together in the same outfit. This was my first exposure to that aspect of military planning we fondly call FUBAR: fucked up beyond all repair. In its sociologically progressive wisdom, the navy had recently decided it would force-integrate men and women in boot camp while at the same time forbidding them to develop any sexual interest in one another. It does not take a PhD in behavioral psychology to figure out what’s going to happen when you put nineteen-year-old men and women together in close confinement. We had a steady parade of grab-assing going on throughout boot camp, from start to finish. I was guilty as charged, though never caught or convicted.

  Talk about a waste of resources. A men-only or women-only company would have one barracks room for sleeping and inspection. In our integrated company we needed three: one for group inspection, and then two more so the men and women could sleep in separate quarters. It was crazy. We assembled in one common area, with beds and lockers for inspection, where we stood at attention by our lockers while instructors screamed in our faces, just like you’ve seen in the movies. Then we all filed off to separate berthing places to sleep, guys to one and girls to another. Which meant I had two beds to make every day, and we had three separate locations for one purpose. Your tax dollars at work.

  Still, I could hardly complain. I have always been a big fan of the fairer sex.

  Now, I am the first to admit that with a shaved head, I am not a handsome man. People tell me I look mean. As my hair started growing in, though, my bonus points started going up with some of the women. “Wow,” said one. “You know, you’re kind of cute with hair.” I had a crush on her and got a few great back massages the first week in.

  Hey, maybe this boot camp stuff wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

  No—it was that bad. Back rubs and grab-assing notwithstanding, boot camp was long days of hard training. I’ve been a physically active person all my life, and I thought of myself as being in pretty good shape. Ha. Boot camp kicked my ass. Doing the physical training (PTs) was one thing: push-ups and more push-ups. But that wasn’t what really got to us. It was the endless hours of marching drills.

  Picture a mob of one hundred green recruits, from all over the country, from all walks of life and all levels of preparedness—and unpreparedness. They had to teach us how to step in step, pivot and turn, march right, march left, pivot and turn … and every time anyone screwed up, which was practically every second of every minute of every hour, they would yell at us to drop to the pavement, hot and sweating, and push out another ten, or another twenty—then back on our feet to get it right this time. Which, of course, we would not.

  The hours and weeks it took to whip this motley bunch into some kind of cohesive quasi-military force was grueling. Any chance we could grab to lie down flat on the concrete and rest, even for just half a minute, felt like heaven. When night came, I was dog-tired and hit that cot like a dying desert wanderer stumbling upon an oasis. Still, I was no stranger to hard work, and I was one of the better equipped people there. There were others who suffered a whole lot more than I did.

  * * *

  Petty Officer First Class Howard was my first experience with leadership in the navy, and he exemplified both the best and worst of what I would encounter in the years to come. He was smart, sharp, and very professional in both manner and appearance. There was never a ribbon out of place, not a stain or wrinkle in his working whites and crisp navy Dixie cup. He ran a damn good company.

  And he was profoundly unfair.

  Petty Officer First Class Howard was a black man who had grown up on the mean streets of a tough inner-city neighborhood, and apparently he was out to single-handedly set the race record straight during his tenure as a recruit company commander. Right away he handed out all the leadership positions in the company to all the black recruits. Of the hundred or so people in Company I-081, maybe ten were black, and they got all the cherry appointments. The two laundry spots, which came at the bottom of the totem pole, he assigned to a white guy and a white girl.

  Petty Officer First Class Howard was, in fact, a first-class racist. This was not hard to see. It also wasn’t hard to see that he was going to press his agenda at every opportunity. This was my first exposure to discrimination from the underdog’s perspective, and my goal was simple: stay out of the man’s way and off his radar. In this goal, I had an ally: my night-time-barracks bunkmate Rouche Coleman.

  Coleman was a street-smart African American kid from the meaner neighborhoods of Chicago who had joined the navy to escape the gang violence that permeated his home turf. He had been shot once and had the scar to prove it. He was soft-spoken, articulate, and blazingly intelligent.

  Coleman and I hit it off right away, and he made it his mission to watch out for me. True to Petty Officer First Class Howard’s program, Coleman was assigned to be the starboard watch section leader. As section leader he was responsible for managing a nightly watch bill and met every night with Howard and the pin staff (recruit leadership). He would come back to our bunk and tell me about the meetings.

  “He doesn’t like white people much,” said Coleman.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d kind of noticed.”

  “In fact,” he went on, “he is one racist sonofabitch.”

  I couldn’t disagree.

  “In fact, you’re lucky you got me looking out for your white ass.”

  He was dead right. I was lucky to have him looking out for my white ass. Later on we were broken into groups to work at various assignments on base. Sure enough, all us white folks were sent to the galley for kitchen duty. Coleman interjected on my behalf and requested that I be sent to help him in his duties back at our barracks. His request was granted, and we whiled away a lot of hours diligently playing cards and shooting the shit.

  Coleman was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. We became genuinely close friends and stayed close throughout boot camp. We kept in touch for a few years afterward until our assignments sent us off in different directions and life drew us further apart. Eventually we lost touch. I often wonder about him and how he’s doing.

  At boot camp I discovered that the military experience does a great job breaking down racial barriers and forcing you to learn about people from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. This proved to be one of the top fringe benefits
from my time in the navy, and over the years to come I would make quite a few of the best friends one could hope for in a lifetime.

  * * *

  Soon after we arrived in Orlando, they gathered us all in a big circle and went around asking each of us in turn, “What do you want to do in the navy?”

  Some of my campmates hesitated at the question, stumbled in their answers, or appeared not sure what to say. Not me. When my turn came, I didn’t have to think about it. “I want to be a SEAL.”

  I knew what reaction to expect, too, and was not surprised when it came. “Good luck with that,” one guy sneered, and a line of snickers and wisecracks rippled around the circle.

  It has always amazed me, when you tell people about something big you aspire to accomplish, how many try to shoot it down, throw out obstacles, tell you it’ll never happen. I think they don’t even realize they’re doing it. Often there’s no malicious intent there. It’s just the reaction people have when you state big goals. Maybe they’re threatened by you and your dreams; maybe by undercutting your goals, they get to justify their own insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe they’re just plain cynical, for no reason other than an ingrained habit of being negative. To tell the truth, I don’t know what their reasons are, and I don’t really want to know.

  This had been happening for three years now, ever since I’d set my sights on becoming a Navy SEAL. Every now and then someone would say, “Wow, that’s great, you’d be awesome at that.” But not very often. Usually, when I told anyone my goal, whether teachers, acquaintances, or even friends, what I got back was disbelief and ridicule. Now that I was in the navy, it only got worse. Everyone here knew about the SEALs, or at least knew that it was one of the hardest training programs in the world.

  For me this was just fuel for the fire, and the more I heard it the more it kept stoking that fire. I knew the only way I’d be able to prove I was serious about it was to ignore them and do it. That wasn’t a hard line to stick to, sitting here in a circle in Orlando. It would get a lot harder in the years to come, and brutally hard once I finally made it to the BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) legendary training course, but that wouldn’t happen for another four years.

  A few weeks into boot camp, the SEAL “motivator” (that is, recruiter) came around. Finally! I thought. It’s about time this guy showed up—what the hell was he waiting for? He showed us a brief video that described the life of a SEAL. We saw guys being tested underwater, shivering in the cold, going through the various trials of BUD/S. It told us about the origin of the SEALs in the 1960s, along with some great footage of guys patrolling the Vietnam jungles in Levi’s and black face paint, brandishing some very sizable guns.

  I didn’t even need to see the video, but I waited patiently till it was over, then went right up to the guy and asked him where I should sign. He shot me a withering look that said, It’s not gonna be that easy. Understatement of the decade.

  There were four other guys who were also interested. The recruiter explained to the five of us that we needed to muster at 4:45 the next morning to begin our physical and mental conditioning. Normally we all got up about 5:45 for a six o’clock reveille. Now we would be getting up an hour earlier. That was one more hour of lost sleep I wasn’t looking forward to—but hey, if that was the price of admission, I’d gladly pay it.

  The next morning, it was just me and two of the four guys. I guess the other two were excited by the video, but not so much about the reality. Those two were the first of hundreds I would see fall by the wayside on my journey to claim the SEAL Trident.

  Throughout the rest of basic training, the three of us would get up an hour earlier than everyone else and head off to a special physical training program to get us in shape for BUD/S. I was fired up about it. This was what I was here for. But man, those PTs kicked my butt.

  It was a hundred push-ups just to warm up. Then a thousand flutter kicks: You lie on your back, hands under your butt, and scissor-kick your legs in the air. Murder on the abdominals. Try it. Lie on the floor, on your back, your arms straight down and tucked under your butt, and kick your legs a foot or so in the air in a scissor motion. Then think: a thousand.

  After that, pull-ups—dozens, then dozens more, and then dozens more. This continued for an hour while all our boot camp buddies were still taking another precious hour of shut-eye. It was brutal, but it got me into shape.

  Before long, the three of us shrank to two. Rack up one more body falling by the wayside on the road to the SEALs.

  As the weeks went by and we drew closer to graduation, I kept inquiring about my orders to BUD/S. I finally got one of the SEALs’ attention, and he looked into the situation for me. I can’t say I was happy with the report. A decision I had made almost a year earlier had come back to bite me in the ass.

  * * *

  Back in the summer of 1992, fresh out of my high school senior year, I had gone with my dad to pay a visit to the navy recruiter in Ventura. A few days after we talked with him, the recruiter drove me the roughly 100 miles down to Bakersfield to the Military Enrollment Processing Station (MEPS).

  In Bakersfield they gave me a full physical, followed by a placement test, similar to an SAT, then sat me down at a desk with Petty Officer Rosales. His name wasn’t really Rosales; I don’t know his real name. In fact, if you had pulled me out of that room and asked me his name right then and there, I couldn’t have told you. Petty Officer Rosales was from the Philippines, with an accent so thick I could barely understand a word he said.

  I heard him say something that sounded like “Watchaw byuan?” He looked at me expectantly, waiting for my response. It took a minute for the penny to drop—then I got it. He had said, “What job you want?” Okay: This was a placement interview. I knew I had scored pretty high on their placement test, so I pretty much had my pick of tracks.

  “I want to be a Navy SEAL.”

  He looked me up and down, then began scrolling through his computer. It was so ancient I half expected to hear the sound of rusty pipes clunking as it went about its search. After a minute, he nodded and looked up at me.

  “I get you into Aircrew Search and Rescue program.” His eyes grew big as he spoke these words, like he was telling me I could be in line to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “You be search-and-rescue swimmer!”

  Okay—wait. What? I wanted to be a SEAL, not an aircrew rescue guy. My face must have registered both confusion and disappointment, because he nodded again and began speaking emphatically.

  “This is a great puckin program, men—you get a puckin turd class petty officer outta goddamn program, men.”

  I looked over at my recruiter. He smiled and nodded. “It’s a solid program, Webb, and there aren’t many who qualify.”

  As I would learn, he was speaking the truth. For an enlisted person in the navy, aircrew search-and-rescue (SAR) swimmer is a plum post, one of the four or five top jobs there is.

  For a regular navy guy, life on a ship can be hell: twelve hours on, twelve off, in some cases working some pretty nasty jobs. My recruiter was a “hull tech,” which is the navy’s fancy way of saying ship’s plumber. Imagine working on toilets and pulling shitty pipes for six months at a stretch. Whatever your rating (Navy for “job”), if it’s your first time on the boat, you’re spending three months in the galley: slave labor (the kind Coleman saved me from). Not if you’re a SAR, though. As a rescue swimmer, I would be getting up each day and checking out the flight schedule, and if I weren’t attached to a flight that day, I’d have ancillary duties, like keeping track of the aircrew logbooks—but I would basically have the day off. The next day, I might have a two-hour flight to drop off an admiral, and that’d be my day. A cherry posting.

  I didn’t know any of this at that point, and what he was describing sure didn’t sound like the track to SEAL training. I looked again at Petty Officer Rosales, still dubious.

  “Issa great puckin job to get you inna SEALs, men,” he insisted.

  Here wa
s the problem: Petty Officer Rosales didn’t really understand how the path to SEALs worked, and because of that, he didn’t have a clear grasp of how to steer me in the right direction. In the years since then they’ve improved the recruiting process. Today you can go right out of boot camp into the particular training school for your rating and then right into BUD/S. But that’s not how it was then. Back when I was joining the navy, they had what they called SEAL source ratings—certain jobs that they routinely sourced for new SEAL candidates—and if you didn’t have one of those jobs, you had to go to serve in the regular navy fleet and then enter the long way around. I eventually realized that I could have gone a far more direct route into BUD/S, so in that sense, SAR turned out to be a lengthy detour.

  Still, there could have been a hell of a lot worse detours. Petty Officer Rosales was right about one thing: SAR was a great puckin program. It meant I had guaranteed aircrew school and guaranteed Search and Rescue school, after which I could pick my aviation-related job on a plane or helicopter. Also, I would be accelerated from E-1, the entry-level rank for an enlisted sailor, to E-4, a noncommissioned officer (NCO) rank, which would mean a significant boost in both pay and stature. In time, I would be grateful for a number of reasons that I had gotten onto this track—but I had no idea how hard it would be to get out of this program and into BUD/S.

  I was put on delayed entry, which meant I wouldn’t be showing up for boot camp for a good ten months. I spent that summer, fall, and winter working at Mike Dahan’s retail dive shop in Ventura, working and waiting. It was a good time. Mike ran an excellent shop, and I got to be good friends with his shop manager, Keith Dinette, and Keith’s high school sweetheart, Nicole. (In fact, we are close friends to this day.) Still, I was impatient to get going and be on the path to becoming a Navy SEAL. Finally, in March, an airline ticket showed up in the mail. A friend drove me to LAX, where I was paired up to room with another guy who was headed for boot camp. The next morning, we were on the plane to Orlando.