by Brandon Webb
I did that tire-drag one time. Once was enough for me.
* * *
With all the focus on land warfare and diving, it’s easy to forget about the A in SEAL, but mastering the skills involved in going airborne is a crucial part of the training, too. During this time I also did a block of high-altitude parachute training, starting with a week of work in the wind tunnel at Fort Bragg learning how to use our bodies as gliders, and then out to the perfect weather of Yuma, Arizona, to take it up into the air. Most of the other guys in the platoon had already picked up this training (and these days, it’s automatically a part of the training pipeline right out of BUD/S), but I’d missed it, so they sent me out by myself now to make this one up.
For our first high-altitude jump they took us up in a little CASA C-212 twin-engine plane. When we reached 12,000 feet the ramp went down, and I caught my breath. What an absolutely stunning view. Beautiful and horrifying at the same time.
I’d done static-line jumping before, where a whole line of us jumped together and our chutes were automatically pulled for us. (We call it “dope on a rope.”) This time, we were on our own and going solo. There was an instructor on board, but we weren’t on tandem. Nobody would be connected to us when we jumped. We each had to throw ourselves out that door, and the rest would be up to us. Truthfully, I was nervous. The whole thing felt so counterintuitive, which is to say, insane. (As they say, you’re throwing yourself out a perfectly good airplane!) One army classmate saw that ramp open and sat himself right back down, refused to jump. “That’s it,” he said, “I’m done with this shit. No way I’m throwing myself out that door. I quit.” I understood how he felt, but then the whole SEAL thing kicked in. There was no way I was not jumping out that door. The next moment, I was flying.
Soon I was doing it again, only this time at night and on oxygen, at 20,000 feet. This was a whole new experience. Once we jumped we’d be airborne for a good thirty or forty minutes and land a good 40 miles upland from where we dropped. The idea is to have the aircraft drop while you’re in clear space, and then you can ride the winds and fly under canopy until you’re behind enemy lines, too small to be picked up on radar. We call them HAHO: high-altitude, high-opening ops.
I jumped. Up there it was even more beautiful than it had been at 12,000 feet—and cold as hell, well below freezing. Off to my left I saw an eerie series of lights in the distance: red, green, white, and one or two faintly strobing beacons. It was the navigation lights of a commercial aircraft. I was not alone up there, although the passengers on that craft (who doubtless had no idea a Navy SEAL was dropping by while they sat through their in-flight movie) were probably a lot warmer than I. A lot less crazy, too, I told myself and twisted my face into what I thought was a grin, but when your face is being pummeled by the full force of free fall, who knows.
It was one of the most flat-out exhilarating things I’d ever done. I absolutely loved it.
Not everyone felt the same way. We had two guys from Jordan in our class who never got over their terror of jumping. We’d heard they already had something like three hundred jumps behind them back in Jordan, but they’d been a total train wreck in the wind tunnel at Fort Bragg. Then we found out what their parachute training in Jordan had consisted of. They would be flown up and just tossed out of the plane with this helpful hint: “Make sure you pull your rip cord at 5,000 feet.” No wonder these guys couldn’t get stable in the wind tunnel; they’d been traumatized.
They didn’t get any better when we started jumping, either. They would hurl themselves out of that plane and start tumbling head over ass, with no control or poise whatsoever. It was the weirdest thing. They’d always pull at 5,000 feet, right on the money, every single time—but up to that moment they’d be like frigging rag dolls tumbling down a staircase the whole way down. Poor guys ended up getting rolled into the next class. After they left, the instructor showed us a video of one of these guys in free fall, and he was screaming his head off, Aaaahhhhhhh!!!! as he tumbled through the air like a piece of furniture. We felt bad for them, but I have to admit, it was pretty hilarious.
* * *
Probably the most memorable “training” I received during the entire eighteen months of our platoon’s workup was not an official training at all. I sure never got a certificate for it, but it made a lasting impression.
Not long after we met, Gabriele and I had a date set for our wedding. My family had spent good money on the preparations. For whatever crazy reasons kids do crazy things, though, around the second week of MAROPS, we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. We quietly eloped—snuck off to Vegas and hit a chapel.
When we got back I said, “Look, my mom will kill me if I tell her what we did. She’s planned this whole big thing. She’ll be devastated.” I swore Gabriele to secrecy. I couldn’t let my mother find out, and since my sister, Rhiannon, was living right in the area and going to San Diego State, we couldn’t let her find out either.
That same evening we went out to dinner at a nice place with the guys from the platoon, all there with their wives and girlfriends. Somehow the news leaked out. I suspect Gabriele just couldn’t keep it to herself and took one of her friends into the ladies room and whispered it to her. The next thing you know I was tying myself in knots trying to defend this little white lie. “Hey,” one of the guys said, “I heard you got married?”
“No,” I said quickly, “someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” I completely denied it. SEALs are resourceful, though. This was 1999, still the covered-wagon days of the Internet, but they went Web surfing and managed to find our Clark County marriage certificate online.
A few days later I was due to receive a conduct award at Friday quarters. This is something that typically happens every four years, if you have managed to stay out of trouble. Friday morning rolled around, we all mustered for quarters, and I heard my name called out. I went and stood in front of the whole team and our CO, Captain McRaven (Harward was gone by now), began reading out what I fully expected was going to be a conduct award. He started by reading my name, rank, and training history, and then he veered off into some pretty bizarre stuff, including a description of my sexual orientation, and then launched into a long list of “atrocities” I’d committed—concluding with how I had lied to my platoon. (I later learned that Chief Dan had written it. I wish I had a copy. It was a masterpiece.)
I was mortified and felt my face turn beet red. I had lied to my platoon, and now everyone knew it.
Reputation.
As summary punishment the whole team grabbed me and threw me in the ocean, which was pretty funny, except that I knew it wasn’t over. There was a hazing in my future.
Every new guy had already gotten a basic welcome-to-the-platoon hazing out at San Clemente Island. That was bad, but we all knew it was coming and handled it well. It’s a rite of passage that lets you know: Hey, you may think you know something, and you may think you’re pretty hot stuff—but you don’t, and you’re not. I know it sounds harsh, but the truth is, most of us did think we were pretty hot stuff by that point, and maybe we did need to be cut down to size.
I also knew what normally happened to guys in the platoon who got married: They would get hazed. I once saw a newly engaged guy walking around innocently in downtown Coronado when a navy van with no license plates pulled up and a few guys in balaclavas jumped out and snatched the guy right off the street, threw him in the van, and took off. That was normal, but I’d withheld my news and then lied about it when confronted. I knew I was going to get it even worse.
They got me that same night. We had just come back from a beach training, about two in the morning. I was peeling off my wet suit, had it around my ankles—and the guys grabbed me and wrapped me up in something. Next thing I knew I was duct-taped stark naked to a metal cart we used for hauling equipment. They wheeled me over to the ice machine, dumped ice on me, then wheeled me into a gear storage area and started taping me up.
The CO happened to wal
k through and saw something out of the corner of his eye—but Chief Dan whispered something to him and he scurried off as if he hadn’t seen a thing: plausible deniability.
They gave me a “lobster claw,” duct-taping my hands into claws so I had no use of my fingers. Then they gave me a “happy hat,” taping over the tops of my eyebrows, so I had a hard time seeing out from under the duct tape, then taping a handle onto my head so they could move it around like a marionette. They asked me, “Are you having a good time?” and then they nodded my head for me, Yes, thank you.
Chief Dan had a running commentary going, telling me that this was why I never wanted to lie to my platoon again. He interrupted himself to yell, “Go get the tequila!” A moment later, he put the bottle to my mouth and made me take a shot. It was the cheapest, worst tequila money could buy, just vile stuff, and I drank probably half the bottle by the time the night was over. Which was probably a good thing for me, because it did somewhat numb the experience.
Next they brought out a miniature handheld generator we use in demolition work, about the size of a small cell phone, called a miniblasting machine. You squeeze it four, five, six times in rapid succession, and you can hear it building up a charge, rrrr, rrrr, RRRR, RRRR!!—and then it lets loose with enough of a charge to set off a blasting cap. Only in this case, the wires weren’t tied into a blasting cap. They were wired into me. Chief Dan had the guys screw a set of claymore wires into the handheld generator and hook the other ends up with alligator clips to my nipples.
I don’t know how many volts go through that thing, but when that charge hits you, you lose all control, and that was exactly what I did.
Next, someone was ripping open an MRE, because every MRE contains a little bottle of Tabasco sauce. I strained to see who was doing this. Oh, shit. It was Krueger, the guy who took such pleasure in giving it to the new guys. Not good. Krueger opened the Tabasco sauce and poured it over my private parts. Now, I like hot food as much as the next guy, but having it on the outside is quite different than having it on the inside. When that Tabasco sauce hit my balls, I thought someone had dipped me in kerosene and lit a match.
The whole time, the senior guys were drinking beers, laughing and talking, tunes going on the radio in the background, while they gave the new guys orders. The new guys were getting pretty freaked out. Later they told me what was going through their minds at the time: It’s only a matter of time before one or more of us get thrown into the mix, too. Meanwhile, Chief Dan continued giving me lessons on platoon ethics and the importance of holding your platoon above all else.
Now Krueger put on a pair of surgical gloves, took a pair of clippers, and started clipping off all my pubic hair. Then he put one hand over my eyes, took a can of spray glue that we use to attach targets on the shooting range, spray-glued my face, and sprinkled the clippings all over me.
Ah, perfect. Now I had a beard made of my own pubic hair.
I was freezing to death, nuts on fire, waiting for another shock any minute. Finally Chief Dan said, “All right, somebody call Gabriele and ask her to come get him.” They called Gabriele from my cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. I was supposed to have been home hours ago, and she naturally assumed I was out drinking with my buddies and just now getting around to calling her to say I was sorry, that I’d be home soon. She was too pissed off to answer.
I suspected they were making the call because they’d run out of beer, so they figured they might as well quit. I was right, but when she never picked up, Chief Dan just shrugged—and sent off one of the new guys to go get another 18-pack.
The torture lasted another thirty minutes. Finally they quit, leaving Glen and the Rat to untape me and help me through the shower. It took four razor blades to get my face clean, or at least mostly clean. I was picking off bits of spray glue for weeks.
That was the last time I ever got hazed, and it left an impression—not only on me, but on all the guys. They talk about it to this day. I’ll tell you what, though: I never lied to the platoon again.
* * *
In the spring of 2000 our eighteen-month workup concluded with an Operational Readiness Exam (ORE), conducted off San Clemente Island, in which a small group of us simulated a covert tagging and tracking op on an enemy vessel. There were some tricky issues with water currents on the way back in, and things got sketchy. By the time we got back to rendezvous with our vessel, I had run out of air and had a headache, but we passed the exercise. GOLF platoon was certified and operationally ready to rotate overseas to serve in an alert status, which the platoon would do after a little downtime.
Before it did, though, something unexpected happened that changed the course of my career in the navy.
One day shortly after our ORE, Glen and I were called in to see our OIC, McNary. When we entered his office we found Tom, our platoon LPO, and Chief Dan there with him. Clearly something was up, something big, but we had no idea what.
Were we in some sort of trouble?
“Listen,” said McNary, “you guys have done a really great job here, and we’re short-handed on snipers right now. We want to offer you the opportunity to go to sniper school.”
I was not planning to become a sniper. In fact, the thought had never occurred to me. Of course, we all knew the SEALs had snipers, and we all knew how difficult a course it was. The whole thing seemed fascinating, but I’d never for an instant considered that I might become one of those guys. All my life, I’d loved being in the water, and all my life I’d wanted to be a pilot, but a sniper? Not a chance. Now here it was, being offered to us on a plate.
We were stunned. We were thrilled. We were terrified.
It was unheard of for a new guy to get a sniper billet. There were some seriously seasoned guys on the team who had waited years to get a slot; that’s how hard they were to get. We knew it was a fiendishly difficult school to pass, and the last thing anyone wanted was some wet-behind-the-ears new guy in there, because he’d just fuck it up and wash out. We also knew that everyone would be watching us, including our entire platoon, hell, our entire team, and that they would all be counting on us. If we washed out, we would be letting them down. If we said yes, we would spend the next three months under excruciating pressure.
We didn’t hesitate for a second.
SIX
COLD BORE
There are some pretty difficult schools and training courses in the United States military, but none has quite the reputation of SEAL sniper training. It is one of the toughest programs anywhere on the planet. Even when compared to my combat tours in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, I count my time in sniper school as one of the most intense, grueling experiences of my life.
The SEAL sniper course is three months of twelve-plus hour days, seven days a week. Ironically, it is not all that demanding physically. After going through the brutality of BUD/S and some of the programs in SEAL Tactical Training, there was nothing in the sniper course that posed any real physical challenge. Nevertheless, it is extremely challenging mentally.
“First and foremost? Intellectual capacity.” When people ask what it takes to become a Navy SEAL sniper, that’s my first answer. Don’t get me wrong: You have to be physically tough. Our training demands that every graduate be one of a unique breed, willing to snake his way through treacherous urban war-zone terrain or crawl the hot desert floor for hours, slow as a snail and often through his own bodily waste, sometimes withstanding days on end of unendurable physical hardship, to set up on his target. Still, the physical ability is maybe 10 percent of it. Most of it is mental.
Sniper school is one of the very few courses a SEAL will not be looked down upon for failing to complete. It’s an unwritten rule that you don’t give guys a hard time for washing out of sniper school. Because the course is known for its insane difficulty, just being selected or volunteering to go automatically elicits respect in the teams.
The students who entered the course were already the cream of the crop, but the attrition rate was still vicious. When
I took the sniper course in the spring of 2000, we classed up with twenty-six guys at the start. Three months of continuous training later, only twelve of us would graduate.
* * *
A few weeks after our conversation in Lieutenant McNary’s office, Glen and I, along with two dozen others, mustered at the SEAL Team Five quarterdeck in Coronado for our initial sniper school in-briefing. Though this would later change, at the time the different SEAL teams would rotate as course host, and it happened to be Team Five’s turn.
They told us that there were two principal parts to the sniper training. First came the shooting phase, which would focus on learning our weapons, advanced ballistics, and, of course, the actual marksmanship training, during which we would work in pairs taking turns as shooter or spotter. Second was the stalking phase, where we would be trained in the arts of stealth and concealment.
We would be conducting the shooting phase at the Coalinga range, a private inland facility about a hundred miles northwest of Bakersfield, where we would camp out, receive all our instruction, and do all our shooting. In the event we survived the shooting phase, we would then go on to the stalking phase, concluding with our graded final training exercise (FTX) out in the California desert near Niland.
Being from Team Three, which at the time had charge over the desert theater of operations, Glen and I were already quite familiar with the challenges of operating in that ungodly terrain and how fucking miserable it could be there. We took comfort in the idea that this prior knowledge might give us some small advantage in the final phase. Assuming we made it that far.
We were led to the team armory, where we each checked out the suite of weapons we would be working with over the next few months. We each got a sniper M-14, a Remington .308 bolt gun, a Remington .300 Win Mag, and a .50 cal, along with scopes and ammo.
Once we had our weapons, we mustered back in the Team Five area to meet our instructor cadre.