Among Heroes

by Brandon Webb

  When I heard this I was impressed—and moved.

  For a lot of us, joining the SEALs was something like joining the French Foreign Legion: the expression of a thirst for adventure. As Dave Scott said, “I get to shoot guns and jump out of planes . . . and get paid for it?” For me it was more the allure of being part of such an elite group. My teen years hadn’t been easy, and I needed to prove to myself that I could do something of real worth. My decision to become a SEAL had not been driven by an especially strong sense of patriotism or, to be brutally truthful, even by the impulse to serve. For me the SEALs offered the chance to be part of something great, something special, to reach a level of achievement that put me among the best of the best. And as aspirational as that was, I also had to admit it was all about me, about what I wanted to experience and achieve.

  Matt wasn’t like that. Here was a kid determined to live his life as a gift, as an act of service to others. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d observed that quality. Mike Bearden was an outstanding example of a teammate I looked up to for his selflessness, and there were others. But with Matt that sense of devotion was so stark, it cut a deep groove in my consciousness.

  Getting to know Matt affected me in two ways: First, it made me realize that over the course of my years in the teams, seeing the sacrifices so many guys and their families were making, and experiencing firsthand what was going on in the rest of the world, I’d come to have a deep love for my country, along with a dedication to serving that I hadn’t known was in me.

  He also made me want to up my game.

  I was already fiercely dedicated to excellence, always had been. By natural inclination I have a very low tolerance for bullshit, laziness, or mediocrity. (One reason among many that Dave Scott and I clicked.) But just being around Matt and watching the way he held himself to the highest standard possible was pushing me to hold myself to an even higher standard. As much as our students looked up to us and took us as role models, every now and then it worked the other way, too. As Matt worked his way through the course, I found myself looking up to him. To me, he represented the epitome of what it was we were working to develop in all our students.

  My favorite example of this is a story my buddy Dave Fernandez told me about an encounter he and Matt had later that year, a few months after Matt had been through our course.

  That fall Matt’s platoon was near the end of their predeployment workup and went through a set of final training exercises up in Bangor, Washington, which were led by Fernandez. Dave is a first-rate operator and he was hammering the piss out of these guys, getting them ready for their C1 certification. (C1 means you’re combat-ready; C2 means you’re not quite ready; C3 means you’re not even close.) The platoon was what we call a “stacked platoon,” meaning it was composed of all A-class operators. Despite that fact, unfortunately, the platoon was performing like shit. Or perhaps, as Dave points out, it was because they were all A-class operators and had trouble forming any kind of natural hierarchy that they were performing like shit.

  Whatever the reason, they were doing a terrible job, and Dave had just pulled a training time-out. For a SEAL platoon on its final readiness exercises, this is unheard-of. Especially for Dave Fernandez.

  “I am extreme about this,” says Dave. “In conventional troop training, admin time-outs occur frequently as a safety measure. But in my book they have no place in SEAL training. If your platoon gets in a bind, tough. You’re going to have to dig your own way out of it. That was my philosophy.”

  But these guys were such a train wreck, Dave was forced to call a halt and recall the entire platoon. They were running out of time, and he didn’t want to have to flunk them. He reamed them out, told them where things stood, and directed them to regroup, get their heads in the game, start over, and this time make it work.

  Dave and his crew were playing the role of the enemy, fitted out in indigenous garb and playing their part to the hilt. The platoon’s task was to stay close enough to observe Dave’s group but not be seen, and eventually make their way to shore and into the forty-degree water, where they would swim out to rendezvous with their recovery element.

  Before long one of Dave’s guys came to him and whispered that he’d located one of the men on the platoon. It was just going to dusk, and Dave had to peer carefully to see where his guy was directing him. Sure enough, there was a pair of steely blue eyes looking back at him. Shit. It was Axelson.

  As Dave walked over to talk to Matt, he thought, How the hell is this tall, curly-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, Scandinavian-looking motherfucker ever going to blend in in the field?

  He knew Matt had a solid reputation, but he lit into him anyway. “As of right now you’re on E and E”—escape and evasion, meaning he’d been spotted but not yet captured and would now have to escape. “Your ass is busted, I’m coming after you, and you’d better not let me catch you. It starts right now.”

  Without a word, Matt slipped back into the scenery as Dave went off to rally his team. Dave had been pulling for the platoon to pass, but now any reluctance to flunk them was gone. “I want this guy,” he told his team. “I want his ass. Do not fail.”

  Now the platoon’s fate rested on Matt’s performance. Dave’s team had a pretty good idea of what Matt would do and where he would go. He was headed for a rendezvous point whose location they all knew already. No matter how you sliced it, the odds were wildly stacked against him.

  “And son of a bitch,” says Dave. “I don’t know how he did it. But he did it. That blond motherfucker just melted into the night. None of us ever saw him—and we knew exactly where he was going! Even at the end point, we never got a bead on him. Where the hell was that guy? It was the damnedest thing.”

  When Dave described the scene to me I laughed. I wished Eric and I could take the credit for that feat. After all, the guy had just gone through our stalking course. But it wasn’t just our course. It was Matt. He was one of the very best we had.

  • • •

  Which didn’t mean he had an easy time of it in sniper school. Nobody does. Suffering is designed into it; that’s the only way to create top-tier snipers. And those students soon learned that I wasn’t kidding back in that Coronado bunker when I said they’d probably end up hating the course.

  Since Pendleton is less than an hour’s drive north of San Diego, Morgan would take off every evening and drive back down to Coronado, where he was rooming with his twin brother, Marcus, rather than stay at our barracks. Marcus remembers Morgan coming in every night, feeling exhausted and defeated. One evening he rolled in, collapsed on the living room couch, and said, “I am praying every night that they kick me out of this course. It sucks so bad. It’s worse than BUD/S.”

  Marcus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He stared at his brother and said, “What are you talking about? Nothing’s worse than BUD/S.”

  Morgan stretched out his long limbs, groaned, and said, “Man, it’s a different kind of suck.”

  Marcus could not wrap his head around this. “What do you mean, ‘a different kind of suck’? I’m a SEAL; I know what the definition of ‘suck’ is.” A few months later, when he went through the course himself, Marcus understood exactly what his brother was talking about. “Please, God,” he remembers muttering, “let them kick me out of this frigging course—I can’t stand it!”

  Matt was having just as hard a time as Morgan. His mother remembers him calling home one day and saying, “Oh, man, I only got a sixty percent today. I’ve got to get my average higher if I want to make it through this course!” He was consumed with worry that he was going to flunk out.

  I understood why he felt so much anxiety about it. Every sniper student did. But he had no reason to worry. At no time was he ever at serious risk of failing. He and Morgan ended up finishing at the top of their class.

  As I said, observing the way Matt held himself to the highest standard possible go
aded me to hold myself to an even higher standard. I didn’t know it then, but within months this would push me into one of the riskiest decisions of my years on the teams. In fact, it would take me within a hairbreadth of ruining my career.

  • • •

  When September came, Matt and Morgan returned to their platoon, and Eric and I were on to our next class of new students. Except that it was not business as usual. Axelson’s presence in the course that summer had hammered home an ironic fact about our sniper course that was gnawing at me and making my life increasingly miserable. It had to do with my mentor.

  Throughout my time in the Navy I saw striking examples of good leadership, mediocre leadership, and terrible leadership. When it was good, it was life-changing. Nobody exemplified that more than Bob Nielsen, our division officer.

  In the short time we worked together, Bob was a tremendous role model and mentor for me. We talked every day, not only about the changes in the course and how that was going, but also about my life and my career. Bob knew that sooner or later I had a decision coming: whether to continue working as an instructor; or try out for a top-tier unit, as he had done; or get out of the service altogether. This fork in the road wouldn’t come for a few years yet, but I was thinking about it. Bob knew that, and he served as a wise and solid sounding board.

  The greatest thing about working for Bob was that he completely empowered us to run his course. “You guys are it,” he told us. “You’re the experts; I trust you.” When someone you look up to and respect so highly puts his trust in you and gives you the mandate to act, that’s the greatest feeling in the world. Our hard work made Bob look good—and in fact, that was a big part of our motivation. We wanted to make him look good.

  But Bob wasn’t the problem that was gnawing at me now. The problem was that Bob wasn’t there anymore. When I said, “In the short time we worked together,” I meant it. Barely a month after Eric and I arrived at the course, Bob called me into his office and let me know he was moving on to another billet. Then he told me who his replacement would be: a master chief named Harvey Clayton.

  “Harvey? Shit, Senior Chief Nielsen! You have to be kidding me.” I knew Master Chief Clayton by reputation, and it wasn’t a good one. He was a dyed-in-the-wool fleet Navy guy who’d come to the teams as a senior enlisted man with no real experience downrange. He’d made chief right away and been shuffled around the teams in a variety of admin roles. I’d been fleet Navy myself for four years before joining the SEALs and, as I knew firsthand, they are two completely different cultures. And while he was a hell of a shot and an excellent match shooter, match shooting is not sniping, and Harvey had no real-world experience as a sniper. Putting someone like that in charge of a group of SEALs would be like trying to work inch-based nuts and bolts with a metric toolkit.

  On top of which, I’d heard he was a major dick to work for.

  Bob gave me a bland, unreadable look. “I know this course will be in good hands with you guys,” he said. “No doubt in my mind.” He clearly knew that Harvey was a poor choice for the position, but he just as clearly trusted Eric and me, and figured that however difficult Harvey might be, he would at least stay out of our way. “Sorry, gents,” Bob said.

  I don’t think he ever dreamed just how bad it would get.

  Harvey’s deficiency as a sniper should not have been a problem, in and of itself. All he really had to do was lean on us. Between Eric and me and our other instructors, we had it completely covered. Things might have worked out fairly well if he had just let us do our jobs. The problem was, he was incredibly insecure toward junior, more experienced instructors, and that insecurity just would not let him get out of the way and allow us to do what we were there to do. Once he took command, it quickly became obvious that our working relationship was the opposite of what we’d had with Bob Nielsen. Whereas Bob would defer to us, with Harvey everything had to be his idea. It had to be his course, his curriculum. And he was strongly resistant to most of the very innovations that Eric and I were trying to implement.

  If Bob Nielsen exemplified the best in leadership, Harvey was leadership at its most abysmal. He micromanaged the teaching and curricula, was patronizing and antagonistic to students, and exercised poor judgment in countless decisions both large and small. The quality of the course began to suffer as a result. We’d made Bob look good. Harvey was making us look terrible.

  Harvey’s behavior had been a problem during that summer session with Matt and Morgan. After they graduated and we moved into the fall, things grew even worse.

  That fall was the last time we held the course at Camp Pendleton. Nailing down a consistent, established location for the shooting portion of the course had been a constant headache, and as much as we wanted it to, Pendleton wasn’t working out. This was a Marine facility, which meant we didn’t have priority. We’d reserve the range, but the Marines could kick us out whenever they wanted.

  The rifle club several hours to the north where Glen and I had gone through the course in 2000 was another possibility. In fact, this was an ideal location in many ways. But there was one big problem with that place. The dry, dusty environment harbored coccidioidomycosis (“valley fever”) spores. This didn’t seem to bother the locals; maybe they’d adapted to it. When out-of-towners came for an event that might last just a few days, they didn’t seem troubled by it. But living out there in tents for weeks on end, our guys kept getting sick, and valley fever can be brutal. As much as I loved that location, I’d had to face the fact that we just couldn’t use it.

  Except Harvey disagreed.

  “We’re going to make it work,” he said. “We’ll do dust mitigation—get a water truck up there and spray it down every day.” Right, I thought. Like that’ll work.

  In every class, the senior (i.e., highest-ranking) student serves as class leader. That session our class leader was Rob, a guy I knew from Team Three. Rob came to me and said, “Hey, Instructor Webb, we got our teams to pay for trailers. We’re going to rent RVs so we don’t have to sleep in the tents and inhale all that toxic dust.”

  I thought Rob’s solution was brilliant. Harvey didn’t.

  “Absolutely not!” he said when he heard what the students were planning. “That’s a waste of the Navy’s money! I’ve got the water truck lined up, and it won’t be a problem.” He put the kibosh on the whole thing—called their command and had them cancel the RVs. I was furious. There was no reason to pull the plug on this plan. It would have been no skin off Harvey’s back; the money was coming out of Team Three’s budget. Whether it was Harvey’s need to show he was in control or just plain meanness, it was unconscionable.

  But wait. It got worse.

  There we were: up in that spore-infested environment again, no trailers, the guys putting up their tents to get ready for the course. First day of the session, guess who shows up in a fucking RV? If you guessed Harvey, you’d be right. During the six long weeks of that shooting phase he was the only one there who was not sleeping in a tent. And of course his spraying-down-the-dust plan was worthless. To no one’s surprise (but Harvey’s) our guys started getting sick again. It was an abomination.

  Harvey’s behavior went from bad to worse. Now he started getting drunk, stalking the facility and yelling at the students he didn’t like. It was beyond embarrassing.

  When the students were given course critiques to fill out, they hammered him, calling him “unprofessional,” “hurting credibility,” and “a clear weak point” in the course. One of them wrote, “Master Chief Clayton is an idiot.” I watched Harvey turn crimson as he read through them. He grabbed a handful of the papers and said, “I’m going back in there, and they’re going to fill these out all over again!”

  “Master Chief Clayton,” I explained, “you can’t do that. These are their fucking critiques! The whole point is to get their honest feedback.”

  He glared at me, stalked out of the office, went back int
o the classroom, and ordered the students to fill out new critiques. (Which they did—and they filled them out exactly the same way again.)

  Three of our instructors were newly minted chiefs themselves. I went to them and said, “Guys, we have to do something about Harvey. It can’t go on like this. He’s killing the course.”

  They knew I was right. They also knew my hands were tied. I was in charge of the course—but I wasn’t a chief.

  In the Navy, the title of chief refers to the upper ranks of enlisted men. Becoming a chief is a serious accomplishment. Chiefs are the Navy’s version of senior management. They have their own eating area on the ship (called the chiefs’ mess) and walk their own walk. Even officers (if they’re smart, which they often are) will defer to a chief’s judgment. In essence, chiefs run the Navy.

  Harvey was a master chief, rank E-9. I was a petty officer first class, rank E-6. This problem was literally above my pay grade. If anyone was going to do something about the situation, it was going to have to be one of the three other chiefs; I knew it, and they knew it. Yet this was the last thing any of them wanted to do. In the military, going around your boss to complain about him to his superiors is one of the worst sins you can commit. But they also knew that Harvey was destroying the fabric and credibility of the course.

  Finally one of our chiefs, Chris Sajnog, took it on.

  And took it on the chin.

  When Chris went to our command’s master chief and complained about Harvey, the only impact it had was to get Chris knocked on his ass. He was instantly relieved of his post at the sniper course and went from the number one E-7 (chief) at the command to last. Any chance he had of ever making senior chief (E-8) evaporated on the spot. Chris had joined the Navy in the late eighties, graduated from BUD/S Class 199, and went on to a stellar career in the teams. He was at the top of his dive class and an excellent corpsman. Now his career was effectively gutted.

  As Chris was cleaning out his desk, Harvey said to him, “Hey, Sajnog—no hard feelings.”