SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (2 page)

Chaos erupted inside and outside of the garage. People ran everywhere. Little Birds and Black Hawks filled the skies with deafening rotor blasts. I was in my own little world, though. Nothing existed outside my scope and my mission. Let the Unit guys handle their business in the garage. My business was reaching out and touching the enemy.

This wasn’t the first time I’d killed for my country. It wouldn’t be the last.

A few minutes passed as I continued scanning. More than 800 yards away, a guy popped up with an RPG launcher on his shoulder, preparing to fire at the helicopters. If I took him out, it would be the longest killing shot of my career. If I failed …

2.

One Shot, One Sill?

A year earlier I’d been stationed at SEAL Team Six in Virginia Beach, Virginia. While on standby, I wore my hair longer than standard navy regulations, so I could travel anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice without being marked as military. Usually I stayed clean-shaven. When I deployed with SEAL Team Two to Norway, I wore a beard, but normally I didn’t like wearing facial hair.

Waiting for a callout, I practiced my skills in a building called the “kill house,” used for urban counterterrorist training, and on the shooting range.

After standby would come three months in individual training phase, when we could go off to school: Bill Rogers’s shooting academy, driving school, free climbing, or whatever we put in for. The great thing about being at SEAL Team Six was that I got to go to almost any of the best schools anywhere I wanted. Training phase was also a good opportunity to take leave, maybe a vacation with the family, especially for those returning from an overseas deployment. Then came three months of getting together for Team training: diving, parachuting, and shooting school—each part of training followed by a simulated operation using the skill recently trained in.

*   *   *

One night I was sitting in a pizza place called the Ready Room (the same place Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn stood outside of arguing in the movie
Navy SEALs
) talking about golf with my seven-year-old son, Blake, and a playful grizzly bear of a guy nicknamed Smudge. In the background, a Def Leppard tune was playing on the jukebox. We inhaled a pepperoni, sausage, and onion pizza—my favorite. When on standby, I wasn’t allowed to drink more than two beers. In SEAL Team Six, we took the limit seriously.

Our drink was Coors Light. Whenever traveling in groups, my Teammates and I used the cover story that we were members of the Coors Light skydiving team—our explanation for why thirty buff guys, most of us good-looking, would walk into a bar wearing Teva flip-flops, shorts, tank tops, and a Spyderco CLIPIT knife in our front pocket. Every time we walked into a bar, the men started changing their drinks to Coors Light. Then the women would begin drinking Coors Light. Coors should’ve sponsored us. The cover worked well because if people asked us about skydiving, we could answer any question. Besides, our story was too preposterous not to be real.

At around 1930 hours, before I finished my pizza and Coors Light, my pager went off:
T-R-I-D-E-N-T-0-1-0-1.
A code could mean “Go to the SEAL Team Six compound.” Or a code might tell me which base gate to use. This time, I had to go straight to the plane.

My bags would meet me on the bird. Each bag was taped up and color-coded for its specific mission. If I didn’t have everything packed up correctly, I just wouldn’t have it. On one op, a guy forgot the ground liner to put on the outside of his sleeping bag to keep the water from getting in. His good night’s sleep wasn’t very good.

During standby, we were on a one-hour leash. No matter where the heck I was, I had one hour to get my tail on the plane and sit down ready for the brief. Now, time was already ticking. Blake and I hopped into the car, a silver Pontiac Grand Am, and I drove home, just down the road from the Ready Room. Inside the house, my wife, Laura, asked, “Where you going?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t know.”

“Is this the real thing?”

“Don’t know—and if I did, I couldn’t tell you. See ya later.”

That was another nail in the coffin for our marriage: leaving at any time and not knowing when I’d be back. Who can blame her? I was married to the Team way more than I was married to her.

Smudge picked me up at home and dropped me off at Oceana Naval Air Station’s airfield. My eyes scanned the special blacked-out C-130. Some have jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) bottles on them for taking off on short runways and getting in the air a lot quicker, a good thing to have when people are shooting at you. If I’d seen JATO bottles, I would’ve known our destination wasn’t going to be good, but there were no JATO bottles this time.

I boarded the plane well before my 2030 drop-dead time. The inside was darked out. Under a red light, I made sure my bags were there, made sure they were the right ones, and made a mental note of where they were so I knew where to return when I needed to start gearing up.

Three SEAL snipers joined me: Casanova, Little Big Man, and Sourpuss. In the Teams, many of the guys went by nicknames. Some guys called me Waz-man. Others had tried to call me Howie, but that didn’t stick because I wouldn’t answer to it. Sometimes a guy gets his nickname for doing something really stupid—there’s a reason a guy gets named “Drippy.” Other times a difficult name like Bryzinski becomes “Alphabet.” A Team Two friend of mine was called “Tripod.”

Casanova was my shooting buddy. We’d been together since sniper school in Quantico, Virginia. He was the ladies’ man. More panties were thrown at him than onto a bedroom carpet. Little Big Man had a bad case of the small man complex, which is probably why he always carried that big-ass Randall knife on his hip. Everybody teased him, “Little man, big knife.” Sourpuss, the senior man, had zero personality—the one guy in the group who wasn’t a cutup, fun-loving type of guy. He was too interested in getting back home to “Honey,” his wife, and didn’t seem to care about the op or what any of us had going on. He whined a lot, too. None of us really liked him.

We sat down in front of a flip chart near the cockpit.
Just the four of us. Probably a real-world op.
The guy giving the brief was someone I’d never seen before—someone from Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He was all business. Sometimes in the Teams there’s a little chuckling during a brief. The SEAL briefer might crack a joke about the guy with the weak bladder: “OK, we’re going to patrol in here about two clicks. This is where Jimbo will pee the first time. Then, over here, this is where Jimbo will pee the second time.” Now, there were no jokes. We kept our mouths shut.

After the 1980 failed attempt to rescue fifty-three American hostages at the American Embassy in Iran, it became clear that the army, navy, air force, and marines couldn’t work together effectively on special operations missions. In 1987, the Department of Defense grafted all the military branches’ special operations onto one tree—including tier-one units like SEAL Team Six and Delta. SEALs and Green Berets are truly special, but only the best of those operators make it to the top tier: Team Six and Delta. JSOC was our boss.

Mr. JSOC flipped the chart to an aerial photo. “OK, gentlemen, this is a TCS op.” Major General William F. Garrison, JSOC commander, had called us out on a Task Conditions and Standards (TCS) operation. General Garrison had thrown the BS flag.
Could we do what we advertised—anything, anytime, under any conditions—including an 800-yard killing shot on a human?

Mr. JSOC continued, “You’re going to do a night HALO onto a known target.” HALO meant High Altitude Low Opening: We would jump from the airplane and free-fall until we neared the ground and opened our parachutes. It also meant that anyone on land might have a chance of seeing or hearing the plane flying so close to the area. On a High Altitude
High
Opening (HAHO), we might jump at 28,000 feet, fall five seconds, open our chutes, and glide maybe 40 miles to the landing zone—which allowed us to avoid detection more easily. On a training jump over Arizona, both Phoenix and Tucson, over a hundred miles apart, we looked barely separated. The bad thing about a HAHO is how bitterly cold it is at 28,000 feet—and it stays cold. After landing, I would have to stick my hands under my armpits to thaw them out. Because this jump was a HALO, the cold would be less of a factor.

Mr. JSOC showed us the plane route, the drop point, and, more importantly, the landing point—where we needed to park our parachutes. He told us where to stow our chutes after we touched ground. In hostile territory, we would dig holes and bury them. This was a training mission, though, and we weren’t going to bury parachutes worth a couple of thousand dollars each.

“This is the route you’re going to patrol in.” He gave us the time for a ten-minute window of opportunity to take out our target. If we were late and missed our window of opportunity or missed the shot, there would be no second chances. One shot, one kill.

We stripped off our civilian clothes. Like every other SEAL I know, I went commando in my civvies—no underwear. For sniper work, I put on North Face blue polypropylene (polypro) undershorts, also used in winter warfare, to wick moisture away from the body. We put on woodland cammies, camouflage tops and bottoms. I wore wool socks. After going through winter warfare training with SEAL Team Two, I learned the value of good socks and spent money on the best civilian pair I could find. Over the socks I wore jungle boots. In one pocket I carried a camouflage boonie hat for the patrol in and patrol out. The boonie hat has a wide brim and loops sewn around the crown for holding vegetation as camouflage. In a knife case on my belt, I carried a Swiss Army knife, my only knife on sniper ops. I used a cammy kit, like a pocket-sized makeup kit, to paint my face dark and light green. I painted my hands, too, just in case I took off the Nomex aviator gloves that kept my hands warm. I had already cut out the thumb and index finger at the first knuckle on the right glove. This helped when I had to use fine finger movement for things like adjusting my scope, loading ammo, and getting a better feel for the trigger.

My sidearm was the SIG SAUER P-226 Navy 9 mm. It has a phosphate corrosion-resistant finish on the internal parts, contrast sights, an anchor engraved on the slide, and a magazine that holds fifteen rounds. Designed especially for the SEALs, it was the best handgun I’d ever fired, and I had tried nearly every top handgun there was. I kept one magazine in the pistol and two on my belt. My gear included a map, a compass, and a small red-lens flashlight. In a real op, we could use GPS, but this time General Garrison wouldn’t let our map and compass skills go untested. We also carried a medical pouch, called a blowout kit.

We didn’t wear body armor when doing a field sniper op like this over land, relying instead on being invisible. If we were doing an urban op, we’d wear body armor and helmets.

Each of us carried water in a CamelBak, a bladder worn on the back with a tube that runs over a shoulder and can be sucked on (hands free) to hydrate.

Our long guns were the .300 Winchester Magnum rifle. Wind has less effect on its rounds, the trajectory is lower, the range is greater, and it has a hell of a lot more knockdown power than other rifles. For hitting a hard target, such as the engine block in a vehicle, I’d choose a .50 caliber rifle, but for a human target, the .300 Win Mag is the best. I already had four rounds loaded in my rifle. I would put a fifth round in the chamber when I got on target. On my body I carried twenty more rounds.

My sniper scope was a Leupold 10-power. Power is the number of times the target appears closer. So with a 10-power, the target appears ten times closer. The marks called mil dots on the scope would help me judge distance. We had laser range finders that were incredibly accurate, but we wouldn’t be allowed to use them on this op. Over the Leupold scope I slid a KN-250 night-vision scope.

Although SEAL Team Six snipers sometimes use armor-piercing and armor-piercing incendiary ammunition, for this op we used match rounds—projectiles specially ground to be symmetrical all the way around. They cost nearly four times more than regular bullets and came in a brown generic box that read
MATCH
on the outside. These rounds shot nearly the same as the Win Mag rounds made by Winchester.

For other missions, we’d carry an encrypted satellite communication radio, the LST-5, but tonight was a one-night op, and we didn’t have to report back.
Go in, do the hit, and exfiltrate.
We carried the MX-300 radio. The
X
didn’t stand for “excellent”; it stood for “experimental.” Our radios could get wet and cold and they still worked. From our sniper positions, we could quietly speak into the mike and pick each other up crystal clear. SEAL Team Six was always trying the latest and greatest stuff.

As the jumpmaster, I had to check everyone’s parachute—the MT-1X. Again, the
X
didn’t stand for excellent.

“Thirty minutes!” the loadmaster called.

If I had to urinate, now was the time to do it, in the piss tube mounted on the wall. I didn’t have to, so I went back to sleep.

“Ten minutes!”

Awake.

“Five minutes!” The ramp on the back of the C-130 lowered. I gave a final look over each sniper’s parachute. We walked to the ramp but not on it.

With the ramp down, it was too noisy to hear anymore. Everything was hand signals now. At three minutes, I got on my belly on the ramp. Remembering the aerial photo from the brief, I looked down to make sure the plane was over the area where it was supposed to be.