by Brandon Webb
Because of this, if you have a submarine hiding down at, say, 50 feet, you’re not necessarily going to hear it if you (or your sonar buoy) are at 30 feet. In other words, submarines can literally hide within thermoclines. If the vessel makes enough noise, it may create sufficient energy to bleed through into the next layer—but a modern submarine is so stealthy that you have to be in that thermocline to hear it. I filed this information away; a few years later I would use it to my advantage in a most unexpected circumstance.
I made it through “C” school uneventfully—with one exception.
Since I would be spending at least the next few years of my life here in San Diego, I wanted to make sure I could keep up with two of my favorite pastimes, surfing and spearfishing. While in “C” school, we had ample time off for extracurricular activities, so I went up to my mom’s place in Ventura, got a surfboard and one of my spearguns out of storage, and brought them back down with me to Coronado.
One day, coming back from class to my barracks room, I found a note saying that my room had been inspected and I needed to come to the military police HQ to pick up my speargun. Thinking nothing of it, I grabbed a jacket and headed off.
When I arrived at HQ, I was promptly arrested. The charge: possession of a deadly weapon on base. They put me in a holding cell.
I could not believe what was happening. Possession of a deadly weapon? I was a diver, for heaven’s sake. Spearfishing was what I did. Besides, I obviously wasn’t trying to hide the speargun. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to: It was too big to fit in my locker. I’d had it lying out in the open. Were they serious?
They were. The MPs acted like jackasses, doing their best to intimidate me and impress upon me that I had screwed up big-time, that my navy career was over.
Yeah, yeah. Bite me.
They called one of the chiefs who happened to be on duty at my school and told him what was going on. To my great relief, as soon as he showed up they remanded me into his custody. My relief soon turned to surprise: The moment the chief and I were alone together, he started laying into me. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut and just take his shit, but it seemed strange and a little silly that they were making such a big deal out of it.
The rest of the instructor staff at “C” school thought the whole thing was pretty funny, and they gave me quite a lot of crap about it, as did all my classmates. When it came time to graduate, they all got together and created a special Jacques Cousteau Award for the poor slob who got arrested for possession of a speargun. I still have that award. I never got my speargun back.
The day after graduation one of the other chiefs called me into his office. He told me he didn’t agree with the way the first chief had handled the situation. “You’re a diver and a spearfisherman, Webb,” he said. “I respect that, and I’m sorry the navy confiscated your speargun.”
“Yes, Chief” was all I said, but it felt good to have someone in a leadership position say what he did. I could understand their need to enforce the rules, but I was still angry about it. They had destroyed a perfectly good speargun.
It wasn’t the last time I’d see what seemed to me examples of good leadership and poor leadership side by side. It also wasn’t the last time I’d find myself in trouble.
In April, fresh out of “C” school, I was finally assigned to HS-10, the helicopter training squadron where I would spend the next six months learning how to function as an aircrew member and operate the systems in the back of assorted types of H-60 helicopter.
The H-60 is a broad class of U.S. military helicopters that includes the Sea Hawk, the Ocean Hawk, the famous Black Hawk, and a handful of others. At HS-10 they put us into several different kinds of simulators representing the various helicopter platforms we would soon be flying. One had a heavy sonar package; another, which we called a truck, was completely gutted out and used mainly for combat and search-and-rescue exercises.
After learning all the technology on the simulators, it was time to go out on live trainings. They put one instructor in front with the pilot and another instructor in back with the aircrewmen. Here they taught us how to operate the hoist, how to use the proper terminology to talk from the front to the back, radio etiquette, and all the different systems on the aircraft.
In mid-October, after six months at the helo training squadron, I got orders to Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Six. HS-6, also known as the Indians, was my first deployment. Yes, I was still in training—but I was now part of an actual, operational helicopter command. I was in the navy fleet now.
And a helluva command it was. The squadron had an illustrious history stretching back nearly forty years. The Indians had rescued more than a dozen downed pilots in Vietnam and helped underwater demolition teams (the predecessors of SEALs) pluck moon-walking Apollo astronauts out of the ocean on splashdown, had earned a long succession of trophies and awards, and would years later go on to serve the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was excited about becoming part of HS-6. It was a damn good squadron—and I was out to make a name for myself.
Back in April, when I had first arrived at HS-10 for training, I had made another strong push to get orders to SEAL training. Once again, I’d been told I would have to wait until I got to my final duty station. Well, here I was at my final duty station, and I was determined to do a kick-ass job so I could apply for BUD/S and get the hell out of there as fast as I could.
Which turned out not to be very fast at all. In fact, I would continue serving as part of the Indians from October 1994 through the summer of 1997, encountering obstacle after obstacle in my quest, before finally getting my orders to SEAL training nearly three full years later.
* * *
In the spring of 1995, about six months after becoming part of the Indians, I went on a six-month deployment on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the western Pacific, called a WESTPAC. An aircraft carrier normally sports a full-time crew of several thousand. When it leaves port for a WESTPAC, though, all its associated helicopter squadrons populate it and disembark with it, which brings the total onboard population up to around five thousand, and it becomes like a small city unto itself.
We had gone out before for shorter trips of up to a month. The WESTPAC was different. Now we headed out west clear across the Pacific, stopping in Hawaii, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia, and then on to the Persian Gulf, where we spent the next four or five months as the U.S. aircraft carrier presence there. This was something like being a cop on the beat. We weren’t necessarily engaging anyone or seeing any action, but we were the show of force, ready to be tapped for whatever need might arise.
For those of us still in training, the WESTPAC gave us the opportunity to learn everything we could ever want to know about all the systems on the different helo platforms we were using at the time. For me, though, it meant one thing: earning as many qualifications as possible so I could get to BUD/S. As great as life was in the squadron, I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, the sooner the better.
At the center of BUD/S training is a monstrosity I’d heard about called the O-course, a brutally difficult setup aimed at developing superhuman endurance while inflicting maximum punishment. Later on, when I finally got the chance to face the actual O-course, it would nearly beat me. Meanwhile, I decided that if I kept facing obstacles in my path, I would treat them as my own private O-course and use them to make me stronger.
The problem with letting people know I wanted to go into SEAL training was that everyone knew about the absurd attrition rate at BUD/S, where typically some 80 percent wash out. To make matters worse, the aircrew community has a terrible reputation for sending in guys who wash out more than 90 percent of the time. This made my life pretty rough at HS-6. By this time, though, I’d figured out that when people tell you that you can’t do something, you can use it to your advantage, and every time someone else told me I was crazy and would never make it to BUD/S (let alone through BUD/S), I was determined to use it as more motivati
onal fuel. My operational philosophy was “I’m just going to do the best job I can and get all the quals, and then they’ll let me go.”
And right now, that meant getting my tactical sensor operator (TSO) qual.
Over the course of our deployment on the USS Lincoln, I completed all the requirements I needed in order to take my TSO test. The TSO ran the show and was the senior guy in the back of the aircraft. In essence, this would mean getting my qualification for crew chief. One September day, toward the end of that WESTPAC, the time finally came for my first check ride. Pass this, and I would have that crew chief qual I needed. I was ready to go and totally psyched.
“Check ride” means exactly that: From the moment we lifted off the flight deck and flew out over the Gulf, they checked every move I made, testing me on everything—language and terminology, correct procedures and sequences, how I operated every system I touched. If you’re tracking a submarine, for example, then you’re managing the sonar and making decisions in the back. If you’re on a rescue operation to pull a downed pilot out of the drink, then the level of control intensifies. As sonar operator, once you’re in search-and-rescue mode on the scene of a recovery operation, the pilot toggles hover control over to you and you are running the show. In a sense, I had to demonstrate that I could function as a pilot, too.
The entire check ride lasted about two hours. We touched down on the flight deck, and I turned to my instructors to get their feedback.
“You did pretty well,” they said, “but you need more experience.”
I stared at them, stunned. They were flunking me.
Technically speaking, I actually had passed the minimum requirements of the check ride, and I knew it as well as they did. The instructors are given some latitude in the scoring process, though, and there were a few senior guys in the squadron who were not exactly looking out for me. In the course of our deployment, I had knocked out all the requirements so fast that it kind of freaked a few of them out, and they wanted to see me cut down to size.
I didn’t argue, but I was annoyed as hell. Now I had a negative mark on my record. In retrospect I realize that I shoulder some of the blame here: I had probably pushed too hard to take the test before being fully ready for it. Then again, if they’d already decided I wasn’t ready, why did they let me take the test?
* * *
A few days later an event occurred that gave me one of the most vivid experiences in my life of great leadership and terrible leadership, side by side.
We were out on nighttime maneuvers over the Persian Gulf. Our pilot that night, Lieutenant Burkitt, was the sort of officer you can’t help disliking: a slimy guy who alienated officers and enlisted men alike. Lieutenant Burkitt’s copilot, Kennedy, was a good guy and quite smart, though a little on the geeky side. Rich Fries and I both served as crewmen; Rich was senior to me. In terms of rank and experience, I was the low man on this totem pole.
It had been a long night, and in order to make it all the way back to the Lincoln, we had to stop and refuel on a nearby destroyer. The night was pretty calm, but visibility was against us, as there was absolutely no moon out, and it was damn close to pitch black out there.
A destroyer’s deck is pretty tight to land on, especially as compared to an aircraft carrier like the USS Lincoln, and even more so at night with such low visibility. Because of this it was common operating procedure to slow the helo down to 90 knots (just over 100 mph), then open the cabin door and have one of the crewman spot the deck, that is, assist the pilot with verbal commands. On this occasion, the crewman doing the spotting was me.
As the helo slowed down to under 90 knots, I passed a message over the ICS (internal communications system) that the door was coming open. The door cracked open, and I looked out to get a visual on the destroyer’s lights. For some reason, I couldn’t make anything out. I kept straining to see something and finally caught a glimpse of light—but it was at eye level, which I thought was strange. I looked down and realized that we were not where we were supposed to be. We were not slowly descending and approaching the deck. Our pilot had put us down at water level.
We were about to crash into the ocean.
“Altitude! Altitude!” I yelled. All hell broke loose. Rich immediately realized what was happening and joined in with me. I will never, in all my life, forget what happened next. Suddenly we heard Lieutenant Burkitt’s voice shrilly piercing through our yells. “What’s happening?” he screamed. “I don’t know what’s happening! Oh God, oh God!”
He kept repeating that: Oh God, oh God.
For a split second Rich and I gaped at each other in disbelief. This was our pilot. This was our aircraft commander, screaming like a frightened schoolgirl.
We were done for. I held tight onto the cabin door. By now there was a foot of seawater in the main cabin, and any second we would be swamped and overrun with ocean: the point of no return. In my mind’s eye, I could see the rotor blades sabering into the water and splintering into a thousand pieces, the helo flipping upside down and sinking into the Gulf. Everything slowed way down and a stream of contrasting thoughts tore through my mind:
So this is why we go through the helo dunker training blindfolded.
Is this is really how it’s going to end?
No—I am not going to let this jackass Burkitt kill me!
Then something happened that turned it all around in an instant. Kennedy, our copilot, somehow torqued his shit together and hauled us and that damned helo up and out of the water. It was inches short of miraculous. Hell, maybe it was miraculous.
The crew on the destroyer thought we had crashed and were goners for sure, and they were shocked and thrilled to see us suddenly popping back up on radar.
Rich immediately replaced me on the door, exactly as he should have (he was senior to me and had thousands of hours in the H-60 under his belt), and he rapidly talked Kennedy down onto the deck after a few missed approaches. Burkitt was an utter disaster the entire time, mumbling to himself like a street person with a drug habit.
Despite our reports, nobody on the destroyer believed that we had actually put the bird into the drink. Not, that is, until the maintenance chief tore the tail section apart—and seawater started pouring out. A short investigation followed, but it went nowhere. The CO of HS-6 didn’t want his career to end over this incident, and he kept things tightly under wraps.
I don’t know how he did it, but Kennedy saved all our lives that night, and he deserved a medal for it. However, that wasn’t what happened. Instead, both Burkitt and Kennedy had their helicopter aircraft commander (HAC) papers suspended. Kennedy, the guy who had saved us all with his heroism and remarkable calm under pressure, got punished right along with Burkitt, the guy who cracked apart like an eggshell and nearly guaranteed our watery demise.
I came away with from that near-disaster with a resolve never to judge a person based on appearance. Kennedy had always seemed like a smart and very competent guy, but not one I would have figured for a hero. You never know what people are capable of until you get to work with them, side by side.
I hope I get the chance to shake his hand again one day.
* * *
In the long run, my fast-track-to-BUD/S strategy backfired on me. I had thought that if I gave everything my best, I would prove to my superiors that I was a hard worker and they would approve my assignment to BUD/S. In fact, the opposite happened. The better I did, the more valuable I was to my superiors—and the more reluctant they were to let me go.
And when I say “they,” who I’m really talking about is Chief Bruce Clarin.
Chief Clarin was an East Coast guy who hated being out on the West Coast and among what he described as “the fruit loops.” When he looked at me and some of my buddies, all he saw was guys who spent their whole lives surfing: We were all slackers. A few guys in the shop sucked up to him. Nobody else could stand him. To this day, I am amazed that this guy made chief and was put in charge of an aircrew shop. Clarin was a walking, talking
textbook illustration of how not to lead. He played favorites and rewarded people he liked, based not on any accomplishments but purely on the fact that he happened to like them. The guys he happened to like the most were also those who did the least amount of work and continually dragged down the rest of us.
In March 1996, about five months after returning from the USS Lincoln WESTPAC, I submitted my first BUD/S package, that is, my application along with all the necessary supporting documentation. It was quickly denied.
Instinctively, I knew that Clarin had screwed me. It was only months later that I would learn in full detail what had actually happened.
In order for me to get out of my AW job and get orders to BUD/S, permission needed to come from the appropriate rating detailer, the person who controls where people transfer to or work next in the navy. As it happened, our rating detailer was a man with the mind-blowingly unfortunate name of Petty Officer A. W. Dickover. (Someone, somewhere, must have seen the humor in this and assigned him the job based on his name alone.) Chief Clarin had put in a call to Petty Officer Dickover and asked him not to approve my request for orders to SEAL training.
You are probably wondering how I learned what had happened. I learned it because Clarin himself actually admitted to me what he’d done.
The truth was, I was the only third-class petty officer in the squadron who was NATOPS-qualified (Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization), which meant I could do things like give annual qualification tests or test someone who wanted to become a crew chief. After failing that first check ride, it hadn’t taken me long to test again—and pass. Now my rapid advancement came back to bite me.