by Brandon Webb
On the fifth and final target, Glen sighted the thousand-yard distance and got himself ready, slowly squeezed the trigger . . . and missed. A groan went up in the crowd.
The other guy got down in the dirt, went through his preparations, squeezed—and also missed. Another groan went up, laced with laughter, catcalls, and the usual volley of insults and obscenities. SEALs are not known to be overly tender with one another’s feelings.
Glen lay down in the lane again, took his second shot . . . and missed once more.
The other guy hit it square.
Predictably, a roar went up, and we all grabbed the guy and started pounding on him in congratulation. The SKS was his, but victory belonged to all of us, as we stampeded off the range in a raucous mass to go track down adult beverages in large quantities. It was a heady moment. The shooting portion of the class was over, and we’d survived it. Even though my best friend had lost the contest, I really didn’t care, and neither did Glen. For one thing, we were both so relieved just to have passed the damn course.
But there was another reason we didn’t care. If anyone else had beaten Glen, we probably would have been at least a little ticked off. SEALs are over-the-top competitive, and Glen even more so than most. But it happened that the shooter who had edged Glen out and taken possession of that SKS was such a likable guy, so universally loved and respected, it was impossible to feel anything but happy that he’d won.
His name was Mike Bearden. They called him the Bear.
• • •
I first met Bearden two years earlier, in the summer of 1998. We were all fresh from BUD/S, the legendary seven-month training program that all SEAL candidates undergo and only a fraction complete. Except that’s a misnomer: BUD/S isn’t really training; it’s more like a seven-month entrance exam. What we were doing now in the summer of ’98, this was training. SEAL tactical training, or STT, was what happened to those who made it through BUD/S and came out the other end still standing. Over the three months of STT (these days it’s called SEAL qualification training, or SQT), we had drilled into us weapons skills, close-quarters battle tactics and coordinated room-to-room takedown, advanced land navigation and survival, extended dives and underwater demolition, and desert warfare. For this last, they took us to the Niland desert, one of the strangest places I’ve ever seen.
Along the edge of the Salton Sea, a huge, strongly alkaline runoff lake that lurks well below sea level at roughly the same elevation as Death Valley, the Niland desert is a vast stretch of lunar landscape in the wishfully named Imperial Valley, where the central Californian desert bleeds out to the Mexican border. Niland makes an excellent surrogate Middle Eastern battleground. Most of Jarhead and the sand dune sequences in Independence Day and Star Wars were filmed there. Great place to prepare for war in Iraq or Afghanistan—although we were still a few years away from knowing that was what we were doing.
Toward the end of our time at Niland, one of our instructors decided that, because the 75th Ranger Regiment (the Army’s Spec Ops guys) were doing a twelve-mile forced march as part of their course, we needed to do that, too. “Hell, we’re frogmen,” went the thinking. “If they can do it, we sure as shit can do it better.” Instead of twelve miles, he figured, we’d make it fourteen.
Which was fine, except for two things. First, the Rangers didn’t just wake up one day and do a twelve-mile loaded march. They built up to it throughout their training. Also there was no room in our existing schedule to slip in an exercise like that. No worries: This guy figured he would just tack it onto the end of a full day of training. Like a P.S. on a letter. A really long, really heavy P.S.
So here we were on a fourteen-mile forced run, with full gear (including fifty-pound ruck), on an evening after we’d already done a five-hour land nav course that day from noon till five. In the middle of the desert. In July. And we had to do it in three hours. Out of seventy-two guys, only four made it under the three-hour gun. Barely another dozen of us made it back at all. The rest of the guys were strewn over the fourteen-mile course, and corpsmen (medics) had to haul them in. Some of them plain passed out. We used every IV in the camp that night.
And Bearden? He just crushed it. It hadn’t even taken him that much effort.
All seventy-two of us knew what perseverance and focus were all about. We were SEALs, after all, which meant we were all maniacs to some degree. But the Bear was in a class by himself. As I watched him sauntering into quarters that evening, while dozens of our teammates were still getting IVs or draped near-comatose over their beds, I had this thought:
This guy is indestructible.
Mike Bearden had been through BUD/S just a few months before me, in Class 213. I had gone on to SEAL Team Three, while Mike went to Team Five. At Team Five the other guys called him the Commander, in part because he loved James Bond flicks. But it was that other nickname that stuck.
The Bear.
It wasn’t just that those were the first four letters of his last name. The guy looked like a bear. The joke about Mike Bearden was that “everyone else looked up to him.” The guy was enormous. But his height wasn’t the only reason we all looked up to him. There was something distinctive about Mike, a commanding presence that made everyone around him feel safer because he was there. While he never grabbed the spotlight, he was the kind of guy all eyes turned to when he walked into the room. And it wasn’t simply because he was huge. Mike carried himself with a sort of quiet dignity. He seemed somehow exempt from all the pushing and shoving. In a community where bragging is like breathing, he never talked about himself, and he never trash-talked anyone else, either. I never heard him bitch or complain, not about anything, not once. He just went about his business and got the job done.
Mike apparently had some sort of alchemy going on there, because he could make friends with anyone. It wasn’t as if he went out of his way to do that. It just seemed effortless. Once when he was in high school (as I later learned), Mike tackled an all-star fullback for the opposing team and hit him so hard he tore up the guy’s ankle. So what happened? The two became best friends. Before long Mike was going out with a girl who also happened to be very close friends with this same fullback whose ankle Mike had messed up. All three of them became close friends, and they stayed that way. The girl’s name was Derenda Henderson. A few years later it changed to Derenda Bearden. Classic Mike: wreck a guy’s ankle, become his best bud and marry his close friend, and everyone’s happy.
Mike was the guy who would take time out to help someone who was having trouble figuring out how to use some weapons system, or fill out some confusing piece of paperwork. He was everyone’s big brother. And that quality intrigued me.
Growing up I’d been close to my little sister (my only sibling), but I’d never had a big brother, and my relationship with my dad was troubled. We moved fairly often as our family fortunes rose and fell, and each time I’d feel uprooted once again, forced to carve out new territory and new alliances, usually with a mix of wits and fists. I’d spent much of my teenage years on the docks of southern California, leaving home altogether by the age of sixteen. Throughout my childhood I’d been mostly concerned with looking out for myself. Mike Bearden seemed like he’d lived his whole life watching out for everyone else. To me this was both fascinating and inspiring. I wanted to be more like Mike.
I needed to understand what made him tick.
• • •
When Mike was just one year old his family moved to the Houston area so that Mike’s dad, Michael Senior, could pursue a doctorate in education there. To support the family, Mike’s parents, Michael and Peggy, needed to scare up some income as well as a place to stay. Michael Senior had worked as a teacher, and Peggy had child-care experience, so they took a position running a home for 144 abused and abandoned children, a career they continued for the next two decades. Which meant that Mike and his three siblings grew up in a home together with dozens of kids who h
ad been rescued out of situations ranging from bad to unthinkably bad, an experience that bred into the Bearden children a bone-deep sense of compassion for the downtrodden.
Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, during court-appointed visitation periods, some of the home residents would receive visits from parents or other relatives. Then there were those kids who, after looking forward to the visit all week, would simply sit and wait for a parent who never showed. Mike and his older sister, Wendy, would sit with them, wordlessly feeling their pain. It made an impression Mike never forgot.
No wonder the guy felt like everyone’s big brother when we were in the teams together. That was pretty much who he was.
And then there was that business of his indomitable spirit. As a kid, according to his parents, Mike was always determined to get into the game. Michael Senior had coached high school football while working his way through his undergrad degree, and now, to help give these disadvantaged kids as normal a life as possible, he started an athletic team for the boys, and Peggy started a team for the girls. Mike loved sports and would tag along with his dad to all their ball games.
When Mike was eight, the Bearden team was playing a visiting team from Austin. Bearden Senior had turned away from the field to take care of something on the sidelines that needed his attention, when suddenly a shout went up and a wave of laughter rippled through the crowd. He looked up and realized that everyone was yelling and pointing at something going on out on the field.
Oh, boy, he thought, what now? He strode out onto the field and sure enough, there was little Mike smack in the middle of the action. He had sneaked off into the locker room, wriggled into a full uniform, and run out onto the field to get into the game. The fact that the team jersey hung down around his knees like a dress didn’t seem to bother him a bit. He had his game face on. He was out there to play some ball.
When Mike was twelve he announced that he wanted to run a marathon. “You can’t run a marathon,” his dad told him. “You’re just starting seventh grade.”
“No, I’m gonna run,” he insisted. “Look right here.” He pointed to an announcement in the newspaper for the Houston marathon. His dad offered a compromise: They would take him to watch the race that year. “No,” repeated Mike, “I’m gonna run in it.”
Somehow he talked his dad into it, and when the day came, there was Mike out on the starting line, wearing his running shoes and his number on the back of his shirt. His parents figured he’d run a block or two and then quit when he realized just how outclassed he was. But “outclassed” was a foreign concept to Mike, then and always. When the gun went off he took off, too, and he didn’t stop. About half an hour later the Beardens heard an ambulance siren starting up. They looked at each other and shook their heads. Ten minutes later the ambulance returned with its twelve-year-old passenger. Mike had run that marathon until he collapsed in the street.
No matter what the sport, Mike wanted to get in there and carry the team on his shoulders. The problem was, he just wasn’t all that big—and by this time he was impatient to get growing. At his annual physical when he was eleven, the year before his marathon, he asked the family pediatrician, “Doc, you think I’ll ever grow? Am I always going to be this little?”
“Well, Mike,” the doctor said, “would you rather be tall, or would you rather be smart?”
That didn’t stop Mike for a second. “I want to be both!” he shot back.
Meanwhile, if he couldn’t be tall, he could make up for it by climbing up onto tall places. Which he did, constantly. Every chance he got to climb something and jump off, he took it—climbing trees, scaling walls, scurrying up statues, anything. One day when his parents were out, he invited all his friends to come over and swim in the pool they had on their property, which was situated right next to a good-size gymnasium they used for the children’s exercise and athletics. The Beardens later found out that while the other kids swam, Mike spent the afternoon climbing up on the roof of the gym and diving off into the pool.
As a boy Mike was a huge fan of comic-book superheroes. He had a Superman T-shirt with a big red S on it that he loved to wear around the property. Of course, that wasn’t unusual. A lot of kids his age had fantasies about being a superhero when they grew up. But Mike was serious about it. Firefighters captured his imagination. He could think of nothing more exciting than climbing up into a burning building, rescuing someone, and jumping out with them to safety. He was never one to pick a fight or go looking for trouble, and when arguments came up he would play the diplomat and try to persuade everyone to get along. But he didn’t like bullies, and he refused to stand by and let anyone pick on anyone else. Through his school years his teachers routinely pointed out that little Mike was someone who always stood up for the underdog.
One year, when he was in Scotland on tour with his church choir, Mike’s parents got a transatlantic call from the choir director. Uh-oh, they thought when they learned who was calling. What now? There was no problem, the choir director hastened to assure them; he just wanted to let them know what had happened. They’d all been walking around town that day as a group, and they happened to witness someone stealing something. Everyone else stood riveted to the spot and stared. As any true superhero would, Mike sprang into action, chased the guy down, and put a hammerlock on him.
In the middle of Mike’s fourteenth year, it finally happened: He starting growing . . . and kept on growing. His parents struggled to keep him in jeans that year, and the next, and the year after that. Before long he was six-foot-four, a lean, powerful 220 pounds, and the school’s star athlete.
From Little League on through high school, Mike had gotten into every sport he could, and he excelled in all of them. He was an all-star catcher, a valued linebacker, and a star swimmer. One year his high school football team was running an undefeated season, leading their district with one of the highest scores in the state. In a run-up to the state championship they lost a coin flip and had to play a preliminary game to qualify. Mike was the starting fullback in that game and scored all his team’s touchdowns. Two games earlier he had injured his knee and it had not fully recovered. Still, he played on. The two teams were neck-and-neck right down to the closing seconds, when the other team kicked a field goal and took the game by a point.
By the time he finished high school, Mike’s knee was pretty bad. For his last four games he had to stop in at the doctor’s office before each game to have the knee drained. The doc told him he shouldn’t be playing ball at all, but he was determined, and when Mike was determined, that was that. His knee might be suffering, but so what? He was Captain Indestructible.
After graduating from high school, Mike spent a few years working out what exactly he wanted to do with his life. After a year of college he took a job as an assistant coach at Derenda’s old high school, where he had the chance to accomplish as a coach the goal he had come so close to achieving as a quarterback: His undefeated team went right to the top and took the state championship that year. But as much as Mike loved coaching and loved football, he knew that wasn’t what he was here to do with his life. He was here to save people. He didn’t want to be a coach.
He wanted to be a superhero.
At the high school where he coached there was a picture in the school trophy case of a graduate who had gone on to become a SEAL. Mike was taken with it and started asking around, talking to anyone and everyone who had known that kid to find out whatever he could about him. One night not long after that his dad got a call.
“Dad,” said Mike as soon as his father picked up. “I know what I want to do.”
• • •
After STT I went on to my eighteen-month training workup with Team Three, and the Bear went on to train with Team Five, so we didn’t see each other much for the next two years, until we both showed up in Coronado for our initial sniper school briefing in April of 2000. It was in the crucible of sniper school that we became closer fri
ends, right up to the day he beat Glen in their shoot-off for that SKS rifle.
From our six weeks of marksmanship training up in Central Valley we caravanned back downstate to the scorching Martian landscape at Niland to see who would make it through the next portion of the course. Of the original twenty-six, there were now about eighteen of us left. By the end of the course only a dozen would graduate.
Shooting is one thing. Being able to get close enough to take the shot—and with such complete stealth that you can extract again without being captured, blown up, or shot yourself—is a whole other aspect of the sniper’s craft.
In fact, while most people equate sniper with marksmanship, the truth is that the art of stalking—the ability to move about undetected while observing every aspect and detail of an environment—comes into play far more than the ability to place a well-directed kill shot. Make no mistake: When it’s time to take that shot, it has to be perfect. (If you want to know just how crucial that is, just ask Captain Phillips of the Maersk Alabama.) But practically speaking, in the field we spend a lot more time in stalking and reconnaissance than we do shooting.
Picture a sniper stalking, and chances are good the images that come to mind have to do with a guy snaking along stealthily on his belly, or lying motionless for hours. Yes, those things happen. But that’s not really what it’s about. The lion’s share of the skill of stalking, like that of shooting, is mental. The key is the ability to scan an entire environment and identify dead space, the three-dimensional area defined by a visual obstruction that can effectively shield you from an observer’s view. In a way, the art of stalking comes down to the ability to make yourself invisible—not exactly a Jedi mind trick, but pretty close. And for some reason, getting the knack of this stalking mind-set was something that seemed to click for me and one other guy before it did for the rest of our classmates. By the last week of the course, I was far ahead enough in points that graduating was in the bag, and I stopped wearing my ghillie suit (a special stalking outfit we would customize with twigs and bits of vegetation) and began going out onto the course in my regular desert cammies just to confound and piss off the instructors.
