The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (14 page)

•   
Low wall
. An 8-foot plywood wall you jump up and swing over.

•   
High wall
. This one is about double the height of the low wall; you use a thick rope to climb up and over.

•   
Low barbed-wire crawl
. Exactly what it sounds like: Stay low or hook skin.

•   
100-foot-high cargo net
. Climb up and over.

•   
Balance logs
. You run along a series of rolling logs while keeping your balance (or trying to).

•   
Hooyah logs
. “
Hooyah
” is the ultimate SEAL catchall word, meaning everything from “Yes, Instructor!” to “Oh, fuck!” to “Fuck you!” This is a pile of 3-foot logs that you step up and over while holding your hands up over your head.

•   
Rope transfer
. Climb up one rope, transfer to another, then slide down.

•   
Dirty Name
. Aptly named (yes, we actually called it Dirty Name), a double set of log beams: You jump up, grab the first log beam, and pull yourself up, then get to your feet and jump up and onto the higher log beam, swing around and over, and drop down to the sand. This station is a rib-breaker, which is how it got its name.

•   
Weaver
. Metal bars spaced about 3 feet apart and shaped like a shallow triangle. Weave over and under, all the way up, then down, and you’re out.

•   
Burma bridge
. Climb a 15-foot rope, then transition to an unstable rope bridge, cross the bridge, and slide down a second 15-foot rope on the other side.

•   
Hooyah logs
again.

•   
Slide for Life
. A four-story set of platforms with an angled rope that slopes down about 100 feet to the bottom. Climb up all platforms to the top, then mount the rope from the bottom with your legs wrapped around, hang with your arms, and worm your way down. Next, transition to an assault style on top position (much quicker). Disrespect this one and you have broken bones, which happened constantly. Fall off and you have a good chance of getting medically disqualified from BUD/S.

•   
Rope swing
. Grab the rope on the run and swing up, then let go at just the right moment to hop up and onto a high balance log beam.

•   
Tires
again.

•   
Incline wall
. Scoot up, slide over and down.

•   
Spider wall
. A high plywood-and-log wall you climb up and shimmy along sideways. Similar to rock climbing, it’s all about finger and toe strength.

•   
Vaults
. A series of logs set at intervals. Jump up and over each one on your way to a sprint finish.

For the first few obstacles, I had no problem. Parallel bars, tires, low wall, high wall, barbed-wire crawl—I was doing great, or at least keeping up. The first obstacle that gave me trouble was the Weaver. It slowed me down, and by the time I got to the top of the Slide for Life I was whipped. Soon I found myself hanging on for dear life by my legs, four stories up and upside down. All my grip strength was gone, and my hands were burning from the torn calluses. We’ve had guys drop off that rope and break arms and legs. In a last-ditch effort not to fall, I hooked both elbows over the top of the rope and attempted to recover some grip strength.

Within a few seconds Instructor Kowalski was screaming at me. “Webb, you big piece of shit!” (This was Instructor Kowalski’s habitual form of address for me.) “You have two seconds to let the fuck go of that rope with your fucking elbows, and you already used them up!” He ordered me to let go
now
and shimmy the hell down.

I unhooked my elbows and continued to hang upside down by my legs, delaying the inevitable four-story fall.
Oh, shit,
I thought,
this is going to hurt
. A memory flashed through my mind of a hapkido class I’d taken when I was a kid, when we’d been taught the importance of knowing how to survive a fall. That memory, together with some dumb luck, saved me from getting too badly hurt. I let go, and a terrifying moment later I hit the ground like a sack of ready-mix concrete.

I lay there in pain for a few seconds.

Instructor Kowalski walked over, kicked me in the stomach, and said, “Hey, you alright?”

“Hooyah, Instructor Kowalski,” I managed to get out.

“Well then
get your ass up
and get going!” he yelled.

I got my ass up and got going.

When I had finished, one of the guys in the class said, “God, man, we all saw you fall from that thing, and we thought you were finished!” I wasn’t, at least not yet.

*   *   *

Our water skills training in First Phase were modeled on the experiences of the underwater demolition team (UDT) guys in World War II, who were the SEALs’ direct predecessors. These guys would swim ashore secretly, ahead of a troop landing, with nothing beyond their mask, fins, and snorkel but a demo knife and explosives, to scout out and blow up any obstacles that the enemy might have planted to prevent our flat-bottomed landing craft from coming ashore. In Second Phase we would get into more intensive water training, but for now they walked us through the basic skills of underwater demolition: breath hold (no tanks), long underwater swims, underwater knot tying, and the like. The point was to get used to the water, push our limits, and realize that we could go a lot further than we thought we could go.

I’d done drown-proofing in Search and Rescue school; now I got it again, but ratcheted up a notch. Hands tied behind my back, feet tied together, tossed into a 20-foot dive tank, I had to survive for an hour doing various exercises like diving down and picking up objects on the bottom of the pool with my mouth.

They had us do hydrographic surveys, another old-school remnant from World War II days when the UDT guys would swim in close to shore, gather as much data as they could, and put it into a hand-drawn map for the landing crews (or use it to blow things up). They lined up ten of us on the beach, spaced about 2 yards apart, and sent us walking out into the surf with small boards to write on. We jotted down data until we couldn’t touch bottom, and at that point we swam out with a lead line that we dropped down to take soundings as we kept heading farther offshore, 12 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet, and on. Eventually we started diving down for obstacles in our lane, mapping out everything we could find, before returning to shore and putting all the data we’d collected into a hydrographic chart.

If it sounds exacting and tedious, it was—only it came at the end of an incredibly long, brutally hard day when we were exhausted, ready to hit barracks and collapse. We had to get each detailed chart exactly right,
perfectly
right, or the instructor would rip it up and send us back out into the night surf to do it over again.

The water tests in First Phase were tough. We did an underwater breath-hold 50-meter swim, which went like this: We jumped into the pool feet first (we weren’t allowed to push off the wall), did a somersault, then went 50 meters down and back, holding our breath the whole way. Guys were popping up to the surface like goldfish corpses. Not that they had quit intentionally—they had just passed out.

Another water test was the underwater knot-tying trial. You submerge, tie your first knot, then wait for your instructor to inspect and approve it. Once your work is okayed, you go up to surface for a moment, catch a breath, then go down to tie the next knot, and on through a series of five knots in all.

Typically the instructor takes his time inspecting your knot, looking it over very slowly and methodically. Not because he needs to, but just to bust your balls. What he’s really doing is trying his best to force you to run out of air. This is exactly what happened to me—only with a twist.

Instructor Shoulin really had it in for me, so it should have come as no surprise when he came over to “support” the underwater knot-tie exercise and singled me out. “You’re in my lane, Webb,” he said. What he really meant was
You’re mine now, I own you, you piece of shit
.

There was something about me that Instructor Shoulin didn’t know: I practically grew up underwater. I may have been a wreck physically and at the bottom of the heap in basic PT, but when it came to water skills, I felt I could do anything they threw at me. That attitude would get me in trouble later, but for the moment it served me pretty well.

We dove down under, Instructor Shoulin on my tail like a shark tracking a baby seal. I tied my first knot. He started looking it over, real slow. He couldn’t find anything wrong with it, and I knew it, and he knew that I knew it—but that didn’t make any difference. He took forever, knowing there was nothing I could do but sit there and take it.

Finally he looked over and gave me the thumbs-up:
This one’s okay, you can surface now.
Only I didn’t head up to the surface. Instead, I methodically moved on and started tying my second knot. I didn’t dare look in his direction, but I sure wish I had. I’d love to know what the expression on his face looked like.

After I finished the second knot and he had inspected it (more quickly this time) and approved it, I ignored his
Okay, you can surface now
gestures once again and went on, starting in on my third knot.

That was it. Instructor Shoulin couldn’t hold out any longer—he went up to the surface to gasp for air. He was so pissed off. I had embarrassed him. I was pretty sure I’d pay for it, too.

By the fifth week of First Phase, I was a wreck: exhausted, humiliated, just about beaten into a corner. Then one afternoon, just a few days before Hell Week was to begin, it all came to a head.

Every afternoon we formed up in seven-man boat crews, grabbed our heavy rubber boats, threw them up on top of our heads, and ran with them to the beach to get tortured for a while. On this particular afternoon we were on our way out to the beach when Instructor Shoulin called over to my team. “Webb, get over here.”

Michaelson, my boat crew leader, said, “Hey, what’s up, Instructor Shoulin? Where is he going?”

“Don’t worry about Webb,” he replied. “Just go get your fucking boat ready.” I looked over and realized that O’Reilly, Buchanan, and Kowalski were all with him.
Uh-oh
. I peeled away from my boat crew and headed with them out to a section of beach where it was just us, alone: me and the four alpha instructors.

“Drop, Webb,” said one of them. “Eight-counts, begin.” This was one of their favorite forms of punishment. The eight-count bodybuilder goes like this:

1.   Start from a standing position.

2.   Drop to a squat, hands on ground.

3.   Push legs back to basic push-up position.

4.   Execute a push-up.

5.   Scissor-kick your legs apart.

6.   Legs back together in push-up position.

7.   Pull your legs up to your chest.

8.   Jump back up to standing position.

They had me do a hundred of these babies, then took me through push-ups, flutter kicks, the whole works, and all the while they were shoveling sand in my face and yelling at me, all four of them, at the top of their lungs.

“You are a worthless piece of shit, Webb! Do you even know what a piece of shit you are? You are the biggest piece of shit we’ve ever seen! You’re weighing your whole class down. You are a one-man walking disaster. You are fucking it up for everyone else. You don’t belong here, you fleet piece of shit. Do you even know how badly you’re fucking this up, how much everyone wants you gone? You’re a disgrace, Webb. You’re garbage. You need to quit. Nobody wants you in Hell Week.”

On and on for the next hour. It was beyond brutal. I could feel how intensely they all wanted me to get up, limp away, and go ring that goddam brass bell.

The worst of it was, I knew they were right. There was a reason they were singling me out. I
was
physically out of shape, and that
had
been affecting the entire class, and that bothered me. In fact, this is something I’ve continued to be conscious of and careful about to this day: If you show up late, if you don’t have your gear together, or your facts together, or whatever shit it is you need to have together, then you are affecting the whole team. They were right, and it was a lesson I would never forget.

If I was not physically as tough as I needed to be, I had one thing going for me. I was very tough mentally.

There is a common misperception that to make it through SEAL training you have to be a superathlete. Not so. In its purely physical requirements, the course is designed for the average athletic male to be able to make it through. What SEAL training really tests is your mental mettle. It is designed to push you mentally to the brink, over and over again, until you are hardened and able to take on any task with confidence, regardless of the odds—or until you break.

I was not about to break.

My body at this point was nowhere near as conditioned as it would become in the months and years ahead, but mentally, I was ready for anything. That was the only reason I survived that hour on the beach. That was the only reason I made it through BUD/S.

People have asked if I ever thought about quitting during the SEAL training, if I ever had one of those dark-night-of-the-soul moments you hear about, those moments of piercing doubt and anguished uncertainty. The answer is
Never—not once
. Lying there facedown in the sand with these four hardcase psychopaths doing their level best to break me, something else happened instead: I got what we call a fire in the gut.

Of the four, it was Instructor Buchanan who was the most in my face. So I looked up at him, nailed him with the coldest stare I could muster, and said, “Fuck you, Instructor Buchanan—
fuck
you. The only way you’re getting me out of here is in a body bag.”

He glared back at me, gauging me, weighing my intent. I meant every word, and he knew it. He took one step back and jerked his head, gesturing up the beach toward where my boat crew was prepped and waiting. “Get back to your crew” was what he said, but the way he said it made it sound like “The hell with you.”