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

by Brandon Webb

  I felt the blood drain from my face. Everything Arty was saying was spot-on accurate, of course. Even if it hadn’t been, though, the last thing you want to do is start contradicting your instructor in front of the students. If one of your instructors does screw up, you pull him aside afterward and talk to him in private, but never in front of the students. Do that and everybody loses credibility.

  As soon as I could I pulled Harvey aside and said, “Harvey, you’re killing me here. You can’t do things like this to my instructors.” This wasn’t the first time he’d done this; he was becoming infamous for it. The students weren’t stupid, between Harvey and Arty, they could clearly see which one knew what he was talking about. Harvey’s behavior was undermining the whole concept of respect for leadership—not only privately, among the instructors, but also among the students.

  At the end of Arty’s course we had everyone in the class fill out critiques, as we did with every course. The students absolutely hammered Harvey. They had their certificates at this point, so they must have figured they had nothing to lose, and they just told the truth. “Unprofessional,” said some of the critiques. “Hurting credibility.” “A clear weak point.” “You need to know,” wrote one, “that Master Chief Clayton is an idiot.”

  When Harvey read the critiques he was furious and declared he would order the students to redo them.

  “I’m sorry, Master Chief,” I said, “but it doesn’t work that way. You can’t do that.”

  He started getting drunk after hours and picking on students. “Hey, you,” he’d say, “Mister So-and-So, get over here. I don’t like you. You can’t shoot for shit.” He would be truly mean to these guys. No matter what authority you have, you just don’t treat people that way. I can be hard on my own people, but I’m always careful to be fair. Harvey didn’t seem to give a damn about being fair.

  I had recently gotten my private pilot’s license. Senior Chief Nielson had let me take enough time off to do the fourteen-week course, which I started in April and finished by mid-July. The drive from San Diego up to Coalinga was about seven hours, but I could fly there in two, and I would sometimes round up a group of students, fly them up there, and take them out for steaks at a nearby ranch that had its own private runway.

  Harvey hated it. He hated the fact that I flew. I think he hated my having any kind of autonomy.

  Soon everyone was coming to me, complaining about the latest thing Harvey had done. It was a nightmare, and I didn’t know what any of us could do about it. I started worrying that the course’s reputation would suffer, and if that started happening, it could unravel everything we were working so hard to accomplish.

  One Friday toward the end of 2004, we had a staff meeting to go over a course we were starting the following Monday and weigh whether we were going to approach the subject using minutes of angle, mil dots, or exactly what. As so often happens with a discussion like this, the best idea came to the surface, and we all agreed to do it a certain way. That weekend I spent some hours prepping the course, redoing it and getting all the materials together so I’d be ready to go. On Monday morning, about an hour before the class was scheduled to start, Chris, one of our chiefs, came over to talk to me with a hangdog expression on his face. Uh-oh, I thought, what is it now?

  “Hey, Brandon,” said Chris, “Harvey wants you to teach it the other way.”

  What? I stared at Chief Chris in disbelief.

  “Yeah,” he said. “He told me to come tell you. He wants it taught the other way.”

  I lost it. “No fucking way,” I said. “You go back and tell him to get his ass in here right now.” As a chief, Chris outranked me (as did Arty, who was also a chief), but he knew I was course manager and this was my terrain. This was my course Harvey was dicking around with.

  A few minutes later Harvey showed up, and I reamed him out, right in front of the other instructors.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said. “I’ll tell you what, Harvey, if we were on a pirate ship at sea right now I would shoot you in the back, toss your sorry ass over the side, and declare mutiny.”

  I know, I know: This is not the recommended manner for addressing one’s superior officer. I value respect as much as any SEAL, and I don’t lose my cool very often. This was one of those rare moments, and master chief or no, I tore him a new one.

  He tucked his tail between his legs and left, and I taught the course the way we’d agreed to teach it the Friday before. I knew this was the beginning of the end, though. For close to a year I’d done my best to be loyal to the guy and work things out, and the situation had gone from bad to worse. Morale on the course was in the can, and the place was starting to feel like it was going to fall apart if something drastic didn’t happen, and happen soon.

  At the time, we had instructors who were newly minted chiefs with us while waiting to ship out to leadership posts: Arty (the instructor Harvey had so boorishly upstaged), Joe, and Chris. I went to all three of them and said, “Guys, something has to be done about Harvey. You guys are the chiefs. You’ve got to take some kind of action!”

  All three understood that while I was in charge of the course, my hands were tied. They all outranked me, and any initiative here would have to come from one or all of them. Understandably, though, all three were extremely reluctant to take any action. In the military, there is hardly anything you can do to screw up your reputation worse than going up the chain of command to complain about a superior. Whether you’re talking army, air force, marines, or navy, I don’t care what division or what force, ratting on your superior officer is tantamount to taking your life in your hands, reputationally and professionally speaking. In a situation like this, it’s far easier and safer to take the path of least resistance: Wait it out. Suck it up. Grin and bear it. But we’d been sucking, grinning, and bearing for close to a year.

  It was Chief Chris who finally decided to do something. He went to our command’s master chief and complained about Harvey.

  I don’t know exactly how he did it, and I don’t know exactly what he said, but whatever he did, it didn’t work. Nothing happened to Harvey—and Chief Chris got demoted. In the pecking order of chiefs in our command, he went from the number two spot to the last in line, and they pulled him from the course. You don’t recover from something like that. From this point on, Chris effectively had no hope of ever making master chief. It was a career-destroying move.

  Not surprisingly, Arty and Joe, the two remaining chiefs, were now completely intimidated, and they certainly weren’t going to make any moves against Harvey. Not ever.

  So it was up to me.

  I knew it could be the end of my career in the navy—the unfortunate fate of Chief Chris had made that abundantly clear—but we couldn’t keep operating like this. Harvey was screwing up the course. You go out into the jungle and mess with a lion cub, and you will hear about it from the lioness. The sniper course was my cub, and as long as there was breath in my body I was not going to let anyone compromise the integrity of what we had all worked so hard to build. Not even if it meant my career.

  I started carefully documenting all his bad behavior, every incident I could think of, from his contradicting Arty in front of the class to the students’ terrible critiques to his arbitrary changes in the course to the student complaints about his drinking and verbal abusiveness—everything. I didn’t editorialize, comment, or draw conclusions. Just put down the facts in black and white. I gathered up my sheaf of documents and proceeded over to the office of Harvey’s boss, a warrant officer named Len Marco, sat down with him, and spelled out the entire situation.

  “This is what’s happening with Harvey,” I said, “and it’s a problem. You can fire me from the course and send me anywhere you want me to go. I would rather stay. But someone needs to shed some light on the damage this guy is doing.”

  I took a deep breath and waited to see what would happen. Had I just committed career suicide?

  Len was silent for a few moments, looking at the paper
s I’d put in front of him as I spelled out the whole story. Then he looked up at me. “Come with me. We need to go talk to Master Chief Jordan.”

  Master Chief Jordan wasn’t just the next higher-up on the navy food chain; he was the master chief in charge of the entire Naval Special Warfare Center. As it happened, he was also the very same Master Chief Jordan who’d been running the sniper course when I enrolled in it two and a half years earlier, before Chief Carver took over. I took this as a good sign: At least he knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t some weenie jerk-off making trouble just because I had a bad attitude.

  On the other hand, he was also the very same master chief who had shit-canned Chief Chris when he told the same story I was about to tell. I took this as a bad sign.

  A very bad sign.

  But what could I do? There was no backing out now. Besides, I wouldn’t have backed out if I could. For the course, for the guys, and for myself, this was the right thing to do.

  Len started the meeting by explaining in the broadest terms why we were there and then turned it over to me. I went through what I had to say, detailing the worst of Harvey’s offenses, and Len, to his considerable credit, backed me up. Chief Jordan listened without comment, then nodded slightly and said, “We’ll look into this.”

  We were dismissed.

  The next day Harvey started packing. Orders had come down. Apparently there was something of an emergency situation developing in Bahrain where they needed a master chief. Harvey had been assigned to station there unaccompanied for a year.

  Instead, he put in for his retirement papers. Within a few weeks Harvey was gone—and suddenly I was not only running the course but also serving in the role of division officer, at least until another interim division officer could be assigned.

  In an evaluation Harvey had written up not long before he left, he had said of me, “Promote ahead of his peers!” Ironically, his advice was acted on—after he was gone. In February 2005, just weeks after Harvey left, I made chief petty officer my first time up.

  * * *

  With Harvey gone and our new curriculum in place, the sniper course started soaring, and we were graduating guys who were absolutely deadly. Suddenly our graduates were in big demand in the field, and I was getting phone calls from other branches of the service. “Major So-and-So wants to come out and observe your course.” Our guys were gaining such a reputation in combat overseas that these officers were saying, “What are these guys doing that we’re not doing—and how can we change our course so we start getting our guys to this level?” We were happy to give them all the help we could.

  Everything I’d experienced in the navy up to this point, from those early days as an aircrew search-and-rescue swimmer to BUD/S and STT through deployment on the USS Cole, in the Gulf, and in Afghanistan, all of it had gone into our work in revamping and refining this sniper course, and we were now turning out some of the most decorated snipers in the world.

  There is no better example of this than Chris Kyle.

  Like Matt Hussian, Chris is a Texan who had been shooting since he was a kid, and like a lot of guys who grew up hunting, he knew how to stalk. He was also a champion saddle-bronc rider; in fact, the first time he applied to the navy he was flat-out rejected because of pins in his arm, the result of a serious accident he’d had while in the rodeo ring. The navy later relented and actually sought him out for recruitment. Good thing for our side, as it turned out.

  Chris was not one of my personals—Eric had him as his student. He immediately made a big impression on all the staff and obviously had great potential, although it didn’t jump out and bite you at first. Chris is a classic example of a Spec Ops guy: a book you definitely do not want to judge by its cover. A quiet guy, he is unassuming, mild-mannered, and soft-spoken—as long as you don’t get him riled. Walk past Chris Kyle on the street and you would not have the faintest sense that you’d just strolled by the deadliest marksman in U.S. military history, with more than 150 confirmed kills.

  Like me, when it came time for assignment to the teams, Chris had chosen SEAL Team Three as his top pick, and gotten it, too. For his first deployment, he was one of the SEALs on the ground in Iraq with the first wave of American troops at the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. While he was there, Chris saw some serious action; it was a helluva place to have your first deployment.

  Upon rotating back home, one of the first things Chris did was to go through our sniper course. After graduating, he shipped right back out to Iraq, where he fought in the Second Battle for Fallujah, which turned out to be the biggest and bloodiest engagement in the entire Iraq war. Since the largely unsuccessful First Battle for Fallujah seven months earlier, the place had been heavily fortified, and we had big army units going in with small teams of our snipers attached to help give them the edge they needed. Our snipers would sneak in there, see enemy insurgents (sometimes snipers themselves) slipping out to try and ambush our guys, and just drop them in their tracks. It was no contest.

  Our guys were not only expert shots, they also knew how to think strategically and tactically, and they came up with all kinds of creative solutions on the battlefield. For example, they would stage an IED (improvised explosive device) to flush out the enemy. They would take some beat-up vehicle they’d captured in a previous op, rig it up with explosives, drive it into the city, and blow it, simulating that it had been hit by an IED. Meanwhile, they would take cover and wait. All these enemy forces would start coming out of the woodwork, shooting off guns and celebrating, “Aha, we got the Americans!” and the snipers would pick them all off like proverbial goldfish in a bowl. You didn’t hear about this on the news, but they did it over and over, throughout the city.

  Chris was in the middle of all this. In his first deployment he racked up close to 100 kills, 40 of them in the Second Battle for Fallujah alone. He was shot twice, in six separate IED explosions, and received multiple frag wounds from RPGs and other explosives.

  The insurgents had a sniper there from the Iraqi Olympic shooting team, who was packing an English-made Accuracy International, about $10,000 worth of weapon. This guy was not messing around. Neither were Chris and our other snipers. They shot the guy and took his rifle. Al Qaeda put a bounty on Chris’s head—but nobody ever collected. You can read about Chris’s exploits in his book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.

  As remarkable as he is, Chris Kyle is quick to point out that he was not unique on that battlefield. There was a whole lineup of SEAL snipers in Iraq at the time who were cutting a wide swathe through the hotbeds of insurgency, providing clear zones for our marines and army forces to operate without being picked off by enemy snipers themselves or being ambushed by IEDs.

  It’s easy to have an image of these guys as trained killers—mean, ruthless men who think nothing of ending other people’s lives. Maybe even violent and bloodthirsty. The reality is quite different.

  Think about the various ways we have gone about winning wars in the past. Think about American planes firebombing Tokyo and Dresden during World War II, which burned to death hundreds of thousands of civilians. And that’s an awfully painful way to go. Or consider what it’s like to take out a high-value target by leveling the city block where he’s located at the moment with a targeted JDAM strike. Imagine being someone he’s located in that building, slowly crushed to death under the rubble.

  Now think about a trained Navy SEAL sniper like Chris, waiting, sighting, and finally squeezing the trigger of his .300 Win Mag. The supersonic round reaches its destination in less than a second—the man is gone before the rifle’s report reaches his ears.

  The reality is that the death that comes with the sniper’s strike is typically clean, painless, and as humane as death can be. A cleaner death, if we’re really going to be honest with ourselves, than most of us will experience when we come to the end of our own lives. The sniper is like a highly skilled surgeon, practicing his craft on
the battlefield. Make no mistake: War is about killing other human beings, taking out the enemy before he takes us out, stopping the spread of further aggression by stopping those who would perpetuate that aggression. However, if the goal is to prosecute the war in order to achieve the peace, and to do so as fast and as effectively as possible, and with the least collateral damage, then warriors like Chris Kyle and our other brothers-in-arms are heroes in the best sense.

  * * *

  One of our better students was Marcus Luttrell, another Texan and author of Lone Survivor, his account of Operation Redwing in Afghanistan. I mentored both Marcus and his twin brother, Morgan, who came through the course about half a year before Marcus did.

  Marcus and Chris Kyle are actually good friends as well as fellow Texans—and they couldn’t be more different. Where Chris blends in and wears his strength inconspicuously, Marcus is the dictionary definition of “conspicuous”—a big strapping hunk of a guy, colorful, rambunctious, entertaining as hell, and larger than life in every way. If Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell had been alive in the Old West, Chris would have been the quiet one in the corner that you didn’t notice (at least, not until the gunplay started). Marcus would have been the gunslinger they ended up making the subject of Hollywood films.

  Unfortunately, for a sniper, conspicuous is not necessarily an asset. Like Morgan, Marcus was a first-rate SEAL, but he did not pass through our sniper course without incident. While he was a crack shot, he had a tough time meeting the course minimum requirements for stalking, where we were teaching the students how to use camouflage, the terrain, and stealth skills to sneak up to an enemy position.

  I vividly remember the first practice stalk we did with Marcus’s class. We were giving them a bunch of practice outings first so they could get the lay of the land and get their stalking feet under them. Once we’d gone through these we would start a series of ten graded stalks, on which the students had to score an 80 or above—meaning you could miss a maximum of two out of the ten, or you were out of the course.