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

by Brandon Webb

  Gabriele swiftly made it clear, with the aid of an emphatic hand gesture that involved her third digit, that she wanted nothing to do with this idiot. It was pretty funny watching the whole thing go down.

  Eric walked back over to the other end of the bar where I was sitting.

  “Hey, Franny,” I said. “Didn’t go so well, did it?”

  “No,” he said glumly. “You were right.”

  I took a pull on my beer, set it down, stepped away from the bar, and started walking back in the direction Franny had just come from. Here was this beautiful girl who’d come in expecting a date, and my troglodytic roommate had fucked it up. So I made my move. Walked up, leaned against the bar, nodded to her, very friendly.

  “Do. You. Speak. English?” I asked, speaking very clearly and slowly. Very considerate, very thoughtful. Suave.

  “Uh, yeah,” she replied. “I’m from Thousand Oaks. You know? California?”

  Now I felt like an idiot. Why I had decided she was foreign, I have no idea. Maybe it was because I knew her name was Gabriele, or because Monica was from Norway. Maybe it was because she looked exotic to me.

  We kept talking. I got her number, and we started dating. She had me hooked, right from the start. I immediately and completely gave up all the sexual escapades and wild living that was our normal navy way of life, and Gabriele and I took it relatively slow. I courted her for two solid months. What finally did it, I think, was an air show I took her to see.

  I had volunteered to participate in this show up in Ventura, my hometown. My mom was there for it. It was cool. We did a thing called spy rigging: You clip into a helicopter through a harness on your back and they lower you on a rope so that you hang there, 100 or 150 feet down, while it goes through all sorts of maneuvers with you flying through the air at 3,000 feet. We put on a big demonstration with all kinds of complex maneuvers. I think it impressed her. That night our relationship went to a deeper level, and within months we were engaged. Just like that, two young kids in love.

  Looking back, it’s not hard to see that we were too young and really hadn’t spent enough time together. And we never would. Gabriele was in school full-time, and I was always going off somewhere, whether it was to all the different training programs or, later on, to deployments in other parts of the world. Being a SEAL and being a family man are two very different realities that are extremely tough to reconcile.

  Our marriage would last for years, long enough to have three incredible children. In the long run, though, the marriage itself never really had a fighting chance.

  * * *

  The training continued. We spent the next eighteen months in a lengthy workup, a seemingly endless procession of training blocks that took me all over the country and through some of the finest programs in the world. We would spend three or four weeks with the platoon, stationed in Coronado, then go off to a specialized school somewhere in the country for a training block, then rotate back home and repeat the cycle.

  The truth is, SEALs never stop training. When we aren’t actually deployed we’re always learning new skills, continuing to hone our existing skills, and keeping ourselves in peak physical condition.

  Rigger School

  Four weeks of parachute training at an army school in Fort Lee, Virginia, learning to pack, repair, and jump with different kinds of chutes. We learned how to jump with a “stacked duck”: you take two Zodiacs, wrap them up with their engines and equipment, stick on two chutes, toss the whole thing out the back of a C-130, and jump with it. We were mixed in with army guys right out of boot camp, to their instructors’ great distress, because we were a totally corrupting influence. We drank hard and chased women every night, then showed up barely sober for class every morning. It was pretty rowdy.

  Marine Operations (MAROPS)

  We would take fully loaded Zodiacs 50 to 100 miles out onto the open ocean. Nothing like navigating on the choppy Pacific surface in a 15-foot rubber boat 100 miles from shore.

  Over-the-Beach Training

  About a month, part at Coronado Beach and part on San Clemente Island. We went through drills where we had to get our team extracted off a hot beach (that is, while being fired at), and others where we had to get our team onto a hot beach—all with live fire.

  Land Nav

  A few weeks at Team Three base in Coronado, followed by four weeks in the Laguna Mountains, much like what we’d done in Third Phase of BUD/S but a good deal more intense.

  Desert Warfare

  Niland again for four weeks. This was one of the most important training blocks, and I’ll say more about it in a moment.

  Dive Phase

  Four weeks off the San Diego docks—will say more about this one, too.

  Close-Quarters Battle (CQB)

  At John Shaw’s famous shooting range in Mississippi; more on this shortly also.

  Gas and Oil Platforms Training (GOPLATS)

  In the event that terrorists ever took over an oil platform out on the ocean, we needed to be ready on a moment’s notice to go out there and take it back. This involved nighttime dives 50 to 100 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. We would swim underwater for miles using a Dräger rebreather, then come up out of nowhere, hook a titanium caving ladder up onto the rig, snake up the ladder, and ambush whoever was up there. Sometimes there were bands of terrorists (simulated) we would have to capture and subdue. Because of my diving experience, they often made me point man on these ops, which meant the whole platoon relied on me to put them on the target. (It was quite an honor, especially being a new guy.)

  Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS)

  This is a critical part of training, essentially the Navy SEALs version of piracy on the high seas; it is similar to GOPLATS, only in this case we were going out on fast boats and taking over ships on the open ocean. Less than two years later, in my capacity as a sniper, I would be point man on an operation just like this with a genuine terrorist ship in the Persian Gulf—and in that one we definitely would be loaded with live fire.

  Air Support

  Working with an A-10 squadron outside Las Vegas, calling in live fire at night. The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) was the first U.S. Air Force plane designed specifically for close-quarters support and saw its first serious combat use during the Gulf War. It’s amazing how much ordnance those A-10s can deliver. Those air force guys are excellent pilots, and I loved working with them. It was my first experience getting on the radio and calling in ordnance—something that would save my life, and the lives of quite a few other guys, a few years later in the mountains of Afghanistan.

  Inter-Operations (INTEROPS) Training

  A week in northern Virginia with some intelligence people from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Defense’s version of the CIA. We did things like inserting a guy on the beach and then linking up with another agent and transporting him to a safe house. It was fascinating to be exposed to that world and see how intelligence agents work in hostile territory. It was also something I would learn a great deal more about many years later on the mean streets of Iraq.

  * * *

  One of our biggest and most important training blocks was the land warfare training, which took place, once again, out at Niland. A lot of the combat training we’d had up to that point, even in STT, consisted of basic contact drills, and a lot of the tactics taught there had been developed in the first years of the SEALs’ existence, which happened to be the Vietnam years of the sixties and early seventies. As a result, the entire approach to direct engagement was primarily oriented around the conditions of jungle warfare: You come into enemy contact, lay down a ton of fire, and quickly disappear into the jungle canopy. The whole point of guerrilla warfare is to avoid open, direct contact. When U.S. troops first encountered that style of warfare in the jungles of Southeast Asia it completely threw them, but that was the style of combat SEALs cut their teeth on.

  In the desert, though, it’s a completely different scenario. You’re in the open, and
there are not a whole lot of areas you can disappear into. How do you successfully survive an enemy contact out in the open desert? It’s a context that’s going to last much longer than the five or ten minutes of the typical enemy contact in a jungle-warfare scenario.

  This was Team Three’s specialty: As a team we were responsible for Southwest Asia and the Middle East. Back then Team Three owned the training philosophy around open desert contact with the enemy. Just a year or two before, a SEAL named Forrest Walker had taken a few guys from his training cell all over the world to visit with various Special Ops units to learn from their experiences with desert warfare, especially the British and Australian SAS, and they had built a solid desert warfare program. Team Three was fortunate to be the beneficiaries of Forrest’s excellent work. (I would later serve in Afghanistan in the same platoon with Forrest.) We practiced in contact drills that would last up to an hour: sixteen guys moving constantly, using the desert terrain, conserving our ammunition, and at the same time putting down a continued rate of firepower. It takes some skill to conserve ammo so that nobody runs out, at the same time maintaining a steady rate of return fire, and all the while staying in constant motion and using the difficult desert terrain to your advantage.

  It also takes a massive amount of coordination. We would suddenly have contact, which always brought with it an element of surprise; even though we were expecting it, we never knew exactly when it would come or from what direction. The lane graders (instructors) who had set this whole scenario up ahead of time would constantly shift the elements of the scenario, challenging us throughout the process. To simulate incoming fire, they would throw grenade simulators into our midst. Often these exercises took place at night, and they would have rigged chem lights on the targets that they could trigger, simulating muzzle flashes. They also had remote detonation devices so that, depending on how our response was unfolding, they could instantly change up the scenario by blowing up something off to our left, or our right, or behind us, big fireballs going on all around us through the course of the hour. We would instantly have to figure out which direction that initial contact was coming from, respond immediately with a blistering volley of overwhelming fire, and at the same time identify an out—exactly which direction do we go to extract ourselves from this contact unscathed? Whoever found the out first had to communicate it instantly and effectively to the rest of the squad.

  In a firefight, you can’t afford the luxury of coming up with a great plan. You don’t have five minutes to think about it. A decent plan executed right now is a lot better than a great plan executed five minutes from now—when you’re dead.

  Typically the squad would split up into two elements. One guy would peel off and say, “Hey, I’ve got an out over here!” and while half the squad was laying down fire, the other half would stop firing, get up, run back, get down, and start laying down fire—at which point the first half, having heard the lull and then the renewed fire, would start shifting in turn. It had to work like a perfectly choreographed routine, all unfolding on the fly, taking into account the terrain and conditions as well as the fact that the source of enemy contact might be on the move, too.

  What’s more, all of this was happening with live rounds. This is something that sets SEAL training apart from most other military training: Everything we do, we do with high-speed live fire, real bullets—hundreds of thousands of rounds. You have to be incredibly careful. We were.

  We also had four heavy M-60 machine guns in the platoon. An M-60 is gas operated, air cooled, and belt fed and weighs 23 pounds. It can deal out a sustained rate of about 100 rounds per minute, or in bursts of 200 rounds per minute (9 rounds per second), with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second. We’d typically fire it off in bursts of three, four, or five rounds; three is ideal because that gets the job done but also conserves ammo. I was one of the M-60 gunners and carried 1,000 of those 7.62 mm rounds on me. My roommate Franny had one of the other big guns, and we would sig off each other: I’d go dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, then I’d pause and move as I heard Franny pick it up, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat. We’d keep switching back and forth, conserving each other’s ammo, playing off each other as if we were musicians in a band, catching each other’s rhythm and riffing off one another, keeping that tuneful fire going. This would last for an hour or more.

  We did one big final exercise where they combined everything we’d learned and ran us through a few hours of contact. They went out of their way to make it realistic and threw everything in there—bombs going off, live helicopters coming in to extract some of us, jets dropping ordnance, everything. Most people in the military never see training like this. The realism was remarkable.

  * * *

  During our workup’s four-week dive phase, I had a new and unique underwater combat experience: going up against dolphins.

  In their arsenal of defensive strategies, the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) guys sometimes use sea lions and/or dolphins as a front line of harbor defense. They train these animals to track down enemy divers, outfitting them with a device strapped onto the head that contains a compressed gas needle. Once the dolphin has tracked you down, it butts you; the needle shoots out and pokes you, creating an embolism. Within moments, you’re dead.

  Obviously they didn’t use the actual device on us, but they had training devices that looked and behaved just like the real thing. When a dolphin succeeded in nailing you, a little foam float would pop up to the surface, indicating that you’d been “killed.” The dolphin would then swim to the surface and be rewarded with a sardine. You, on the other hand, would be rewarded with a low score—or with having to do it all over again. Those suckers really packed a wallop. I heard that when you got nailed, you’d be sore for days.

  Chief Dan was my partner on this exercise. We could tell when those little bastards were approaching because we could hear their sonar clicking—but that didn’t make it any easier to escape them, because they swim fast, way too fast for us or any other human being to outrun them.

  As a rescue swimmer, though, I’d worked with sonar, and I was pretty sure I understood how the dolphins’ sonar sense worked.

  “If we stay shallow enough,” I told Chief Dan, “and stay close enough to that big rock breakwall, it will mess with their sonar. They won’t be able to get a good return signal.”

  That was our strategy close to shore. Farther out, where there was no way to screw up their sonar, we decided to try using thermoclines to our advantage, going deep and taking care to keep a solid temperature break in between us and the dolphins.

  We didn’t get hit once.

  * * *

  Our next block was close-quarters battle training. CQB is the term for situations where you have to enter a hostile building and comb it, room to room, clearing rooms, taking out bad guys, rescuing hostages, or whatever the mission entails. This is a critically important block of training for a SEAL platoon, because a lot of what we do involves being able to move quickly and fluidly through a complicated environment—whether that means taking over an oil platform, clearing a multistory house, or clearing an entire village—and moving like lightning through close quarters without shooting any hostages or other friendlies, including each other.

  This training would prove crucial both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and it was our training here in STT that made those later live operations work as effectively as they did.

  This kind of operation requires an incredible degree of on-the-fly fluidity, flexibility, and adaptiveness. You have to be able to respond, react, adjust, and invent on split-second timing, all while avoiding being killed or killing someone else you didn’t mean to kill. Typically, the number one man in will go left automatically—but maybe in this case he can’t go left because there’s an immediate wall there, or the left-hand passageway is blocked off for some other reason. We always had a planned choreography, but plans and reality are usually two different things. These exercises simulated reality as much as possi
ble, in all its unpredictable and messy glory—and it was all with live fire.

  For CQB we went to John Shaw’s famous shooting-range ranch in Mississippi, the Mid-South Institute of Self-Defense Shooting. They gave us our choice of sidearm: We could use the SIG 226 9 mm pistol, or the H&K SOCOM, which is a big .45 built to SOCOM (Special Operations Command) specs especially for SEALs and other Special Operations forces. I took the Heckler & Koch.

  In the past months, as I had gotten to know the various firearms, I had become a big fan of Heckler & Koch. This is the same company that makes the MP-5 9 mm submachine gun (which we also used in these exercises), and its weapons are just so damn reliable. I also like the .45 round. The SIG is a good weapon, but the magazines for the SIGs at the time were not the same quality. (I think it was some aftermarket product, not the factory magazine.) If you’re running or the weapon is getting jolted (which is surely going to happen in close-quarters combat), and the rounds stand a chance of rolling or tumbling inside the magazine, you can end up with a jam—and that is something you do not want to have happen. I had experienced that tumbling, and I didn’t trust that sidearm, so I used the H&K. It never let me down.

  We lost one of our guys, Cooter, in this training block for safety violations; he kept shooting the hostage target—and even swept one of us as we were going room to room. (This was, again, with live fire!) Cooter was a hard worker with a solid attitude, and because of that he wasn’t tossed out. Instead, they rolled him and put him in a different platoon, where he had to start the whole workup again from the beginning. He did great and went on to make chief.

  Outside the shoot house they had a gigantic tractor tire attached to a harness. If you threw a shot off a target or shot a hostage, then it was outside with you. You’d take off all your gear, strap into the harness, and drag that goddam monster for 500 yards, then run back to where you started, put your gear back on, and go inside and do it all over again—and get it right.