Among Heroes

by Brandon Webb

  Chris didn’t say a word. “I wanted to crush his skull with my fist,” he told me recently. But he held his tongue, and his fist. I don’t know if I could have managed that level of restraint.

  I had no appetite for dinner that night. Chris was gone, Harvey reigned supreme, and I had nothing to show for our attempted coup but a large knot in my stomach. I didn’t see how things could get any worse. I went back to my office in our subterranean bunker and sat in my desk chair, brooding. There was nothing I could do. With Chris thrown under the bus, there was no way either of the other two chiefs were going to risk making a move. Not being a chief myself, I was clearly powerless in this situation.

  And then, out of the blue, I thought about Matt Axelson.

  By this time Matt was long gone from sniper school, off somewhere with his platoon in their final training and preparation before deploying to Afghanistan. But the impact of watching him go through our course had stayed with me, and now, as I sat feeling sorry for myself at how royally Harvey had pissed on my life, I remembered something I’d witnessed the summer before, when Matt and Morgan were going through the course.

  One day I was observing one of our instructors giving a group of students some training on how to take environmental factors into account when calling a shot. As I mentioned earlier, the fact that a metal rifle barrel expands as it heats up translates into increased pressure on the round as it passes through, which in turn means higher muzzle velocity and an altered arc of trajectory. Because of this, the instructor was explaining, you can’t necessarily follow the specs from a DOPE sheet (“data on personal equipment,” a table of shooting specs for your rifle). “The adjustment you made for elevation this morning may have worked perfectly this morning,” he was telling the class, “but now it’s a good twenty degrees warmer, and your round is going to have a proportionately flatter arc, so to compensate you need to adjust your elevation down—”

  “No, no, no, no, no!” said Harvey, cutting the instructor off as he waded in. “Don’t start changing your setting and messing everything up. Trust your DOPE, you guys, trust your DOPE!”

  It was an appalling scene. Harvey had no interest in the kind of sophisticated ballistic know-how we were teaching; he was strictly old-school, and any newfangled ideas or significant improvements over what he’d learned when he was a student made him feel threatened. Which was bad enough. But to butt in and contradict an instructor right in front of the students was so fundamentally inappropriate—and it was obvious that the students all knew that as well as I did. I could see it on their faces, their reactions to his hissy fit ranging from amused to incredulous to disgusted. Two or three guys standing behind Harvey who knew he couldn’t see them actually rolled their eyes.

  But not Axelson. Matt behaved with complete decorum. In fact, he was the only guy on the range that day giving Harvey his full attention. I knew damn well that he knew damn well what an ass Harvey was being. Matt was no fool, and he wasn’t missing a beat. He was simply responding by being a total professional. Matt was being the grown-up here, and Harvey was being a child.

  I vividly remembered standing there watching that scene unfold and thinking, This is totally fucked-up. That snapshot vignette had burned itself into my brain, and I couldn’t erase it, forget it, or ignore it.

  “Goddammit, Axelson,” I muttered as I sat brooding in my bunker.

  It was that higher-standard thing. No way around it. I would have to do this thing myself. Even if it meant throwing my career in the toilet, as Sajnog had done, the situation demanded it. If I didn’t step up now, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

  “Goddammit, Axelson,” I repeated, then got up from my chair, decision made. As long as someone like Harvey was in charge, we didn’t deserve students like Matt.

  I pulled together details of Harvey’s bad behavior, took my collected papers to Harvey’s superiors, and reported him.

  Then held my breath all that night.

  I don’t know if it was the fact that I’d so carefully documented my claims, or that the warrant officer in charge decided to back me to the master chief he reported to, or that this was the second Harvey-related complaint in as many weeks. I’ll likely never know. Whatever it was, by some miracle my point got through. The next day Harvey packed his bags and quietly left.

  By the time the next session began, Harvey had left the Navy—and I’d made chief.

  Over the next few months I got calls and e-mails from former students, thanking me for sticking my neck out (or to put it more accurately, for placing it directly on the executioner’s block) and expressing their relief and gratitude that Harvey was finally gone.

  I didn’t say this to any of them then, but I’ll say it now: They had Matt to thank.

  • • •

  June 28, 2005. It was a year, almost to the day, since I first saw Matt and Morgan standing in that bunker at Coronado at the induction of their sniper school class. During that year Morgan’s brother, Marcus, had gone through the course, too, and just days after graduating he joined Matt and his platoon on the other side of the world. Now Marcus and Matt and two other teammates, Danny Dietz and Michael Murphy, were on a capture-or-kill mission in the Hindu Kush, going after a very bad dude variously referred to as Ben Sharmak or Ahmad Shah. Marcus and Matt would be the team’s snipers, Danny and Mike serving as spotters.

  The four men were positioned high up on a rocky mountainside, gazing down on the village where their target was reputed to be in hiding. After seven or eight miserable hours of trek-and-climb, they were dug in and prepared to be up on those hills above the village for days, maintaining invisibility and surveillance as they lay in wait, scratching what cloak of cover they could from the barren slope.

  Suddenly Marcus froze at the sound of approaching footsteps. A small knot of goatherds was headed their way.

  There’s a sixth sense about the eyes. Scientists will tell you it’s superstition; people will scoff at it as voodoo—but I’ve experienced it, and it’s real. People can sense it when your eyes are on them. No matter how well concealed you are, if you train your eyes on someone nearby, you up the odds that he will glance in your direction. I don’t know how it works; I just know it happens.

  As the sound of footfalls cut into the silence of their mountainside hideout, every natural instinct screamed, Look in the direction of the sound!—but instead Matt instantly averted his eyes. The scant concealment available in the scrubby mountain foliage didn’t give them much to work with. An impossible situation. Yet just as he had on that exercise going up against Dave Fernandez’s team, Matt somehow pulled it off. He melted away. In the next instant the others saw and followed Axelson’s example. All four men vanished.

  “Those goat herders wouldn’t have seen us at all,” says Marcus, “if it weren’t for the fact that they happened to be walking straight toward us.”

  But the little group was practically on top of them now, and confrontation was inevitable.

  What happened next is the subject of Marcus’s book (and the Peter Berg film adaptation) Lone Survivor. Faced with the decision of whether or not to quietly execute the three goat herders on the spot to keep their own location secure, the team made the excruciating choice to let the three go and hope for the best. Within minutes their mission was compromised and the four were fighting for their lives against impossible odds. Only one—Marcus—would make it out alive.

  In a situation like this critical factors and complications start multiplying instantly, far too fast for linear thought to be of any use. Ninety-nine people in a hundred would panic or freeze. Matt never lost his cool, not for a fraction of a second. Marcus describes him leaning calmly up against a rock, in complete control and without a wasted movement or squandered round, acquiring target after target and getting off each shot with unerring accuracy.

  A firefight is a messy, chaotic, nightmarish experience. Even five or six seconds of
this rapidly exploding lethal chaos feels like an hour and has an impact on your psyche that stays with you the rest of your life. But this battle on the harsh Afghanistan mountainside didn’t last five or six seconds; it raged on and on and on. Estimates of the enemy’s number have ranged from several dozen to several hundred, but whatever it was, the four SEALs were badly outnumbered and outgunned.

  Shot in the head and chest, Matt continued fighting to protect his buddies. Despite his mortal wounds he willed himself to hold out as long as his ammunition did, and longer, continuing on a good distance despite his wounds. Marcus recalls that Matt had three magazines left when an RPG blast blew them apart, yet when they found his body nearly two weeks later, only one magazine remained and he was surrounded by piles of empty shells. I spoke with one of the medics who helped recover Matt’s body. He said Matt’s injuries were so extensive, it was amazing that he’d been able to cover any ground at all. He also had a bandage on one of his wounds, obviously self-applied. Right to the end he was stoically patching himself up so he could continue the fight and protect his brothers to his last breath.

  • • •

  Much has been written about Operation Red Wings. What goes mostly unsaid is that for many of us in the teams, it was a turning point. Between losing Matt, Danny Dietz, and Mike Murphy, and the sixteen others who perished in the effort to rescue them, it was the worst loss of life in a single day in the SEALs’ forty-year history. A lot of us started questioning exactly what we were doing over there.

  When Mike Bearden died I was fresh out of sniper school and had not yet been on my first deployment. I was a new guy, untested by battle. With 9/11 still a year over the horizon, there was no battle yet to test us. By the time Dave Scott fell to his death two years later, the world was at war and I’d been through not only the carnage on the USS Cole but also six bloody months in Afghanistan.

  Things were pretty simple when my platoon first landed in Kandahar in the fall of 2001. The smoke had barely cleared over the World Trade Center complex. In addition to our platoon patch, we wore NYFD patches on our outfits. We knew why we were there and what we were doing. We were going to find the guys who did this and make them pay. What’s more, we were going to track down and destroy the clandestine network of men and resources that had trained and armed these guys and were continuing to do so, as they prepared to wreak further destruction on America.

  Things were pretty clear back then. But now, in 2005? It was four years later, another four years of being sucked that much deeper into the commitment and sacrifice of war. I was now a family man, a father of two, and the preciousness of life had new meaning for me.

  Supposedly we had rooted out the Taliban and quashed the al Qaeda influence there. But our guys were still over there, and things were not looking any better. For every ten hostiles we took out, a hundred more sprouted up. The restrictive ROEs that we were so glad we didn’t have to follow on the USS Cole (and that did not exist when we first landed in Afghanistan in 2001) were now back with a vengeance, smothering our guys in the field. The administrative machinery that ran Spec Ops was starting to bloat, and effective tactical and strategic decisions on the ground were starting to feel the suffocating force of political considerations in the comfortable corridors of Washington. We were graduating the best combat snipers and Spec Ops warriors in U.S. military history and had become excellent at winning battles. But to what end?

  When Harvey was my boss I had risked my career to make sure we had a sniper course that deserved guys like Matt. Now I was starting to wonder whether we had a war that deserved guys like him.

  • • •

  In November 2012, I brought my nine-year-old daughter, Madison, with me to New York for a week. In between meetings with publishers and media people, we would slip in all kinds of sightseeing, and it would be a fantastic chance for building some father-daughter memories. The first thing we did, though, even before leaving the West Coast, was to drive up to San Francisco to participate in a Veterans Day event hosted by Donna Axelson, Matt’s mother, in Cupertino.

  After Matt and his teammates died, the city of Cupertino commissioned a lifelike bronze statue, by the renowned Florida sculptor W. Stanley Proctor, to be erected at Memorial Park, which up to that point, oddly enough, had no memorial. Designed to commemorate all veterans, the statue itself is of Matt and his close friend James Suh, who was one of the sixteen men who died in the helo crash trying to rescue Matt and his friends. (You can see it online at CupertinoVeterans Memorial.org.) Around the base of the pedestal are placed twenty twelve-by-twelve-inch pavers, one for each of the nineteen men who died in Operation Red Wings, with their birth dates and dates of death, plus one for Marcus, which reads simply, “Survivor.”

  Donna holds an annual event there, where she talks about what the memorial means to her and to all of us. Each year she invites guest speakers to join her. That year she had invited me.

  I talked about Matt and his buddies Danny Dietz and Mike Murphy, and the nature and meaning of their sacrifice. I retold a story by Marine Lieutenant General John Kelly, called “Six Seconds to Live,” about two young Marines who gave their lives standing down a suicide bomber in Iraq, and how much that story reminded me of Matt and his teammates. (If you haven’t heard the “Six Seconds” story, it’s worth searching it out on the Internet.) Most of all, I spoke about what amazing men these three were, and how I was a better man for having known them.

  Madison sat in the front row, right next to Donna, throughout my talk. Afterward people came up to her, thanking her and telling her how much my talk had meant to them. After the whole thing was over and we were alone together, she looked at me and said, “Dad, I’m really proud of you.” I’ve seen a lot of good and a lot of bad in my years on earth. Among the mix there have been some outstanding moments. That one ranks right up there at the top.

  Months later Madison was still talking about that experience. I hadn’t realized it would have such an impact on her. But of course it did. If anyone tells you that children can’t handle the realities of life, that they can’t grasp the truth of life and death, you can tell them, “Sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.” My daughter’s life was changed forever by hearing about Matt and his teammates. Although she never met him, she’ll never forget him.

  My hope is that the same will be true for her entire generation. Matt exemplified the simple truth that actions speak louder than words. Much like that Stanley Proctor bronze, Matt’s life stands as a mute but eloquent monument to the best and noblest impulses within us all.

  4

  VISIONARY

  JOHN ZINN

  In July 2006, eighteen months after making chief and wresting command of the NSW sniper course from Harvey Clayton’s hands, I left the U.S. armed services and faced the question every Spec Ops warrior must face sooner or later: What now? Once you’ve trained for years to become part of the world’s most elite fighting force, then spent long stretches in the thick of some of the most dangerous conflicts on the globe, what do you do for an encore?

  Getting out of the service wasn’t an easy choice. I had put in nearly fourteen years of active service in the Navy. Sticking it out for another six would buy me a decent retirement package. I had colleagues who couldn’t believe I would even think about walking away with only a few years to go. Some were actually angry at me, which surprised me. (What did they think, I was somehow letting them down?) But I’d put the Navy and the teams ahead of my wife and kids for too many years.

  Marriage and being part of the teams is not an easy mix. The day our first child was born I was in the Persian Gulf, headed for terrorist hideouts in the caves of Afghanistan. I didn’t even meet my son until he was six months old. When our second came along I was constantly on the road, developing and teaching advanced courses to sniper students, and those long months away were tough on our relationship. The birth of our third was only weeks away, and I was worried
that our marriage was being pulled to the breaking point.

  It was time to put family first. I had to leave the teams.

  The question was, and do what?

  For a lot of us in the Spec Ops world, it can be a tough transition. After years of being either in combat or in training for combat, it feels strange to conform to the dictates and behaviors of the civilian workplace. It’s not necessarily hard to get work; there are plenty of private-sector firms who are anxious to hire people with the knowledge, experience, and skill sets of a Navy SEAL. It’s just hard to adapt to what others think of as a “normal” work situation.

  We typically don’t make very good employees. Regular soldiers and sailors are trained to work well as functioning parts of the collective, good cogs in a larger watchworks. In the SEAL teams you’re not taught simply to obey orders; you’re taught to accomplish the mission, however that works and whatever it takes. We are groomed to think fast, think for ourselves, and think unconventionally. If soldiers and sailors are the military’s version of a solid corporate workforce, we are its entrepreneurs, innovators, and misfits.

  If I was going to leave the employ of the government, the only employer I was interested in going to work for was myself. With a family of five to feed, that was a daunting prospect, but I couldn’t see doing it any other way.

  Fortunately for me, I had some excellent role models. And one in particular.

  • • •

  I met John Zinn in the late nineties, when we had both just completed our respective BUD/S classes and joined Team Three. I was standing in the middle of a class on advanced diving techniques while our instructor gave a safety brief, something about how to avoid getting sucked into giant turbines and turned into fish food, when I heard a Clint Eastwood voice rasp quietly behind me: “Everyone has to die someday. . . .” I craned my neck just enough to look back, half expecting a scowling Man with No Name chewing on a cheroot. Instead I found myself eyeballing a cherub-faced towhead cracking a faint smile. (A piece of human nature trivia I learned in the teams: The more time a guy spends in the water, the drier his sense of humor.)