by Brandon Webb
We thought our report would handle the problem, that nobody would go out there again. We were wrong. In a classic wartime lack of communications—FUBAR—evidently no one passed the word to Red Team. On March 28, a SEAL named Matthew Bourgeois stepped out of a vehicle at Tarnak Farms and directly onto a land mine. Probably it was very much like the mine I had found there—except that this one wasn’t defective. It exploded, instantly killing Bourgeois and injuring a second SEAL.
Later that day I talked to a few of the guys from Red Team. As they were describing the scene to me one of them said, “We were standing right next to a bombed-out blue minivan.”
A bombed-out blue minivan. These guys had been standing in precisely the same spot where my buddies and I had been back in December—the spot in that snapshot I still have.
There was no way the mine that killed Bourgeois could have been there a few days after Christmas when we were out there. We were all over that area, walking everywhere. Just as we had said in our report, the place had to have been mined after we left.
The people we were up against were devious and fiendishly smart. They kept their swords sharp. No wonder they had fought off the British and Soviets successfully for so many years. How long would we end up being here?
ELEVEN
MY PROUDEST MOMENT
I left Afghanistan with my platoon on Tuesday, April 2, flew a third of the way around the world, grabbed a ride to our little two-bedroom home in Point Loma, California, went inside, and met my five-month-old son for the first time.
Coming face-to-face with Jackson that evening was incredible, even surreal. I don’t know what was more amazing to me: the fact that Gabriele and I had produced this little redheaded creature with ten fingers and ten toes, or the fact that I’d made it back from Afghanistan to see him with all my ten fingers and ten toes intact, after more close calls than I cared to remember.
The first thing that happened on arriving home was the solid sixty days’ leave they gave us to decompress from our six-month deployment, and I spent pretty much all of it with Gabriele and Jackson. It was such a blast hanging out with this little dude, playing with him, watching him learn and grow before my eyes. Later on, when each of our other two kids was born, it would be a replay of the same amazement all over again, but this was the first time, and it knocked my socks off. I was ecstatic. Whatever my expectations of fatherhood had been, this exceeded them. I couldn’t get enough of it. Two solid months with this little guy went by as if it were a single day.
Meeting Jackson was the proudest moment of my life—at least in a personal sense. The proudest moment in my professional life, my life as a SEAL, was still ahead of me. Before that could happen, though, things would take a few twists and turns I hadn’t counted on.
* * *
The first thing that happened was that I was suddenly out of the teams.
In truth, I’d been pondering a possible career change for a while. Before 9/11 happened, even as I was trying to get myself assigned to a stint overseas, I was seriously considering what the ideal next move for my career might be, and I wasn’t entirely sure it meant staying in the SEALs. A lot of this thinking had to do with the fact that I now had a growing family. As I said, it’s not impossible to reconcile family life with life as a SEAL, but it certainly isn’t easy. Not too many marriages can survive the kind of fanatical dedication involved in being an active member of the teams. I felt it might soon be time to make a change to a more stable environment, for the family’s sake. But if not SEALs, then what?
For some reason flying has been in my blood from as early as I can remember, and I’ve always been passionate about the idea of going into aviation. Maybe it’s just the wanderlust that seems to be a family trait. My dad’s sister, Gayle, has always been a world traveler; when we were kids she would pop in periodically with photos and souvenirs she’d picked up from all kinds of exotic places. My parents had their longtime dream of sailing around the world, and they acted on it. My sister, Rhiannon, ended up becoming a flight attendant and has traveled the world just like Aunt Gayle. And Lord knows my career in the SEALs took me to quite a few exotic locales.
In any case, before going to Afghanistan I had been considering finishing my degree and going on to become a commercial airline pilot. The typical way to pursue this path would be to enroll at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (a.k.a. “the Harvard of the sky”), a four-year university heavy in aviation that has a program geared toward helping place ex-military with the airlines. With my aviation background and field experience, they were willing to give me credits that would have started me out with more than an associate’s degree, putting me well ahead of the game.
But the world had changed while I was in Afghanistan. The airline industry was in rough shape, and pilots were being laid off. Becoming a commercial pilot as a way to create more stability for my family suddenly didn’t seem like such a hot idea, so I decided at least to finish out my enlistment, which would run through early 2005.
As it turned out, I didn’t have a choice. After the attacks of 9/11 the navy put a community-wide stop-loss in place, which allowed them to retain people who were on active duty beyond their official date of separation. In other words, it was an indefinite suspension of our ability to leave the service. I couldn’t have gotten out even if I wanted to.
Okay, so I was definitely staying with the SEALs for now. Why not become a BUD/S instructor? That way I could have more consistent time with my family and at the same time contribute to training the next generation of SEALs.
No such luck. That decision was made for me, too, before I’d even left Afghan soil. I wasn’t going to be a pilot, and I wasn’t going to be a BUD/S instructor, either. The navy had something else in mind. While en route back to the States I learned I’d been given orders to a newly formed Naval Special Warfare Group One Training Detachment, TRADET for short.
Change was afoot. With the growing importance of Special Operations in the warfare of the twenty-first century, the SEAL community was undergoing a comprehensive reorganization. Prior to this, each individual SEAL team was responsible for its own training. Now they were consolidating all the advanced training under two divisions, one for each coast. TRADET was in charge of developing programs of advanced training, a sort of “continuing education” for SEALs beyond BUD/S and the other basic training courses. It was split up into different training components, including MAROPS (maritime operations), Land Warfare, CQB, Assault, and a handful of others. Since TRADET was brand-new, they badly needed warm bodies to fill their posts, and bodies with experience even more so. Sometimes there was a bit of arm-wrestling in terms of which group got which talent coming in fresh from the field, a little like the competition that happens when top players are drafted onto pro football teams.
When I checked out of SEAL Team Three and into TRADET one sunny day in early June, I was first placed in the Land Warfare office, but that posting didn’t stick. Within a few days a request came from another division that set the course of my career for the next several years. The guys running the sniper division said they wanted me, and after a brief political tug-of-war I was out of Land Warfare and had become part of a tiny unit called Sniper Cell, run by a veteran SEAL chief named Jason Gardner.
* * *
I felt incredibly fortunate to be recruited into Sniper Cell. For one thing, the group was so small it felt like I could actually make a difference here. It varied as people rotated in and out, but five members was typical. Most of the TRADET training groups were two to three times that size. Also, the East Coast didn’t have a dedicated entity focused on advanced sniper training, so our Sniper Cell was unique.
Another reason I felt so fortunate was Chief Gardner himself. Chief Gardner has an amazing résumé of service as a SEAL. He fought in the first Gulf War; he shot a half a dozen guys in Somalia. In Afghanistan he put in more than 340 hours of “troops in contact,” meaning under fire, and led his troops in 196 KIA and the capture of six HVT. In 2009 he w
as awarded the Silver Star. He is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, but you do not want to go up against him in combat. The man is a killing machine. He was also a fantastic boss to work for.
Since TRADET was new, we had to come up with new standardized training methodologies and curricula for the cell. Because of my SAR background and real-world experience as a helo sniper in those ship assaults in the Gulf, Chief Gardner put me in charge of developing a curriculum for the Helo Support block. A separate training for helo support was a brand new concept, and for the most part the curriculum had to be created from scratch. And it had to be done fast. We had new teams with new snipers coming up who needed to be trained for the realities of combat conditions. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t over—and it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that hostilities in Iraq might be just over the horizon. (In fact, the U.S. Joint Resolution authorizing use of force in Iraq was then only a few months away, and the invasion itself followed just five months later.) There wasn’t a moment to waste.
Fortunately, I had an excellent ally in this project: my old friend Eric Davis, the same guy who’d been with Osman and me that freezing cold night on the beach of San Clemente Island. Eric had arrived at Sniper Cell just before I did, and our reunion was a harbinger of great things to come.
Eric is a superstar instructor, one of the best guys on the podium I’ve ever seen. I would sit in on one of Eric’s classes and at the end find myself saying, Damn, I don’t want that guy to stop! I’d get so engaged listening to him teach that I’d blink and an hour had gone by. And he wasn’t just a good lecturer; he also genuinely cared about the students. I couldn’t have wished for a better partner in the work we were about to undertake—work that, as it turned out, would stretch into several years.
Chief Gardner gave us free rein to put together whatever we thought made the most sense for the new Helo Support block, and we threw ourselves into the task. I talked to every sniper I could find with significant helicopter experience to get their input and make sure I had the latest crew communication language, and I wrote, wrote, and wrote some more. I was responsible for coordinating airspace, air assets (always challenging), live-fire ranges, boats, air flow out to San Clemente Island (where the bulk of our training was conducted), and the actual training of the platoon snipers. It was an insane flurry of activity, and it felt a little like jumping out of a plane at 20,000 feet—exhilarating and terrifying.
Everyone had always complained that helicopter assets were next to impossible to come by for training purposes. I was determined that this was not going to be a problem for our course. I had strong relationships in the helicopter community; I figured I should be able to get us live resources, and from my perspective, this was essential. Simulators are fine, as far as they go, but anytime you can get your guys into a real helicopter, show them how to rig up their weapons in the door, give them live-fire training at some real target on the ocean’s surface, both daytime and nighttime with night-vision gear and lasers, you’re going to have really superior results. When Air Operations scheduling reported that there were no assets available for us, I made it happen anyway. I refused to compromise. Sometimes we’d have helo assets come pick us up and fly us out to San Clemente Island, and sometimes we’d take our guys on a quick plane ride and meet the assets out there. Whatever it took, I would not take no for an answer, and we always had the genuine article for our training exercises—always. The guys taking the course were stoked.
Something else that had always bugged me about operations that involved helo support was the lack of a clearly integrated, efficient communications protocol. With a handful of different procedural standards being thrown together into the mix of an op, sometimes it was almost like trying to work in metric and inches at the same time. That had to change. I developed a new system of standardized operations and communications procedures between pilots and snipers. In terms of long-term impact, this was my biggest accomplishment while running the Helo Support block. In an eval I received later, the chief warrant officer reviewing my work wrote:
These streamlined procedures have greatly reduced communication clutter between pilots, HELO-borne pilots and ground assault forces, and have significantly contributed to safer and more dynamic target assaults.
It was a crazy task; we were inventing everything on the fly (literally!), but I loved the challenge. In about a month I had a complete curriculum developed and ready to teach. Now all I had to do was start teaching it.
Damn! I thought, I’ve never taught before.
I remembered my own sniper training and how there were teachers who could teach and others who couldn’t. I was determined to be one of those who could, so I got myself put through Instructor Training School, a four-week program offered at Thirty-second Street by the San Diego Bay. I can’t say enough good things about this school. All the public speaking and teaching I’ve done ever since has been tremendously influenced by the experience of those few weeks. They put us up in front of a classroom and videotaped us while we taught, then played the tapes back to us. There is nothing like watching yourself teach on videotape. We would sit there staring at ourselves on screen and hearing ourselves say “Uh” and “Um” and “Y’know” ten, twelve, fifteen times a minute. It was brutal. If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend it—and if you have any intention of teaching or being in any kind of leadership position, it is something you have to do.
Guys would watch in horror as they saw themselves cursing in the middle of their sentences, saying things they would have sworn they never said until they saw the hard evidence. Talk about shock and awe. It was embarrassing—or it would have been if the instructors had stopped and rubbed our noses in it. But they had a job to do, and they got on with it. They would count up all the uhs, ums, and whatevers, all the shits and fucks and damns, then run us through it again. They drummed all the verbal tics out of us.
They taught us how to work off a curriculum, how to structure a class, how to gauge how the different students were doing and support slower ones in picking up the pace without browbeating them. They taught us it was okay to pause and gather our thoughts without filling in the empty space with an “Um”; how to ask questions without shotgunning or drilling students to the point where we’d embarrass them or make them uncomfortable; how to encourage students to ask their own questions and get them thinking so they absorbed material instead of just parroting it back.
They taught us how to teach. In terms of practical life skills, it was one of the best schools I’ve ever experienced. Back when I was in sniper school, the only SEALs who were put through Instructor Training School were the BUD/S instructors. This was about to change. Today they put all their instructors through that program.
Once Eric and I had the Helo Support block up and running, Chief Gardner asked me to assist him with the redesign of Urban Sniper Training, which he had been putting together based in part on his experiences in Somalia. We did this right in San Diego in some old buildings that were owned by the Naval Training Center. Urban is all about trying to cover as many angles as you can and using cover effectively as you move through a village or city. We took our guys through our urban scenarios as two-man units, showing them how to set up urban hides—instead of going up on the rooftops where everyone expects you to be, find a basement where you can get eyes on your target—and how to disguise their hideout sites so that no one could see into them, but they could shoot out of them with a clear line of sight.
While I was at Sniper Cell, Chief Gardner led the charge on updating the basic optics we used community-wide and eventually SOCOM-wide, replacing our Leupold scopes with a new Nightforce scope. The U.S.-made Nightforce pieces were much better optics, and they had a feature I especially loved: Pull out a little knob and suddenly the reticles become illuminated, so that in low-light conditions or an urban nighttime environment we now had crosshairs lit with a faintly glowing red light.
I had to smile the first time I sighted through that tiny, precision-manufacture
d glowing reticle. There it was again: my red circle.
As we got these curricula up and running, we started pulling snipers aside while their platoons were going through their workups and running them through the Helo and Urban courses. Soon word started to spread and we heard that SEALs in the teams were saying to each other, “Man, you have to go through that Helo Support block and Urban block.” Back in Afghanistan, when snipers from the other countries’ Special Operations teams were asking Osman and me over to debrief them after Zhawar Kili, I’d befriended a very sharp Danish sniper named Henning, from the Danish Frogman Corps. Now Henning was running the sniper training in Denmark, and he flew over to the States, went through our advanced courses, then took what he’d learned and implemented it in Denmark.
We ran another block called Rural Training, where we brought guys who’d been through all the other training up to Bull Hill Ranch in Washington state, right up against the Canadian border, and took them out hunting whitetail deer and elk. Tracking Taliban hideouts out in Zhawar Kili with Osman had reminded me of deer hunting, and I now found the comparison worked both ways: Taking students out for some actual deer hunting was a great way to train them in the realities of combat.
Hunting deer is typically much harder than hunting people. People get lazy. Not so with wild animals; their instincts are honed to a razor’s edge. Taking our snipers out into the wild, having them stalk a live animal, get it on target, and stop a beating heart for real—it was phenomenal training, and one of my favorite parts of everything we did. There were some bear up there, too. One of our instructors, Matt Hussian (who later took over my courses when I left Sniper Cell), grew up in Texas hunting deer with a .22 to put food on the table for his mom and little brother. Hussian would go out and disappear for a few days, and next thing you knew he’d come walking out of the woods dragging some big bear he’d taken down.