The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (44 page)

These were bad, bad dudes, surrounded by tons of weapons and mountains of ammo. Everyone in that compound was as armed and dangerous as armed and dangerous gets. We took well over a hundred guns, grenades, RPGs, you name it. If we’d had any hitches, if they’d had a chance to use any of their arsenal, it could’ve gone very badly for us. But there were no hitches. Our team coiled through those buildings striking with the speed of a 100-foot-long rattlesnake.

The Danish did an excellent job, too. As with the Germans, it was obvious from the start that these guys were first class, in both conditioning and tactical training. Going into the raid, we never worried for an instant about whether or not they would hold up their end. They did.

The DPV convoy arrived about halfway through the raid and belatedly set up their perimeter. They were embarrassed, but we didn’t give them too hard a time. Having to pull off the raid without our planned secure perimeter could have completely thrown us off. But it didn’t, not for a moment.

This is something unique about Special Ops forces: We’re trained to make decisions on the fly. In a sense, we are
all
trained to function as leaders in the field when necessity dictates. In a conventional unit, all too often when something screws up the whole mission grinds to a halt. In Special Ops we’re trained to adjust immediately, to say, “Okay, the thing screwed up, got it—so let’s get on with it,” and then make whatever executive decisions we have to without hesitation. That’s what happened in 2011 in the raid that took Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. The team that went in suddenly lost one of their choppers, which could have been a catastrophic mishap—but it wasn’t. They adjusted immediately, blew up the downed copter, completed the mission successfully, and got everyone out of there without losing a single member of the team.

We took more than twenty prisoners that night. They didn’t know what had hit them until it was over. We got our HVT, too. If you were following the news at the time, it was a name you’d have recognized. We commandeered a few of their vehicles, threw these guys in back, and headed back to process them into the EPW camp at Kandahar. General Mad Dog wouldn’t have been happy, but this was our job.

Not a shot was fired. It was our last op in Afghanistan, and with the exception of the temporary DPV defection it was flawless from start to finish.

*   *   *

A few days before we left Afghanistan, an event occurred that cast a pall over all our victories and triumphs. At the very end of March, some DEVGRU guys from Red Team, the group that would years later be credited with killing Osama bin Laden, went out to Tarnak Farms to do some training. This was exactly the same area we had trained in back when we were still newly arrived in Kandahar.

Back in December, after that episode when we had parked our Humvee on top of a series of live land mines and Brad and Steve had to defuse the entire mess while we stood and waited, we had gone back and given a full report. “Nobody should be going out there,” we said. “The area is definitely
not
clear. It was cleared previously by EOD, but it has obviously been visited since then. There’s a good chance someone is watching it right now and planting more mines.”

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 was 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.