Among Heroes

by Brandon Webb

  At one point, just as I’d successfully fought off a mutinous takeover bid from Casey, we found ourselves battling a website that sprang up with the imposing name “Imperial Valley Against Wind Zero.” Evidently there was a bitter groundswell of opposition from the local community . . . at least, that was what it was designed to look like. The truth, as we soon learned, was that nobody in Imperial Valley had anything to do with the website or its mission. In fact, it was an elaborate scheme concocted by Jack, my jealous ex-SEAL rival.

  On the heels of the Stop Wind Zero site, an anti–Brandon Webb video appeared online, pasting together sound bites from my various media appearances and taking them out of context to make them look like I was saying things I’d never even remotely said. It was like one of those tacky political smear commercials you see proliferating on TV during every election cycle. Jack’s handiwork again.

  Still, we’d survived Casey, and survived Jack, and survived the exhaustion of our financial resources, and still managed to secure Imperial County’s approval for our project.

  And thirty days later the county was sued by the Sierra Club, who claimed that the environmental-impact study had not been sufficient. In fact, it was rock-solid, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  When I say “Sierra Club,” that makes it sound like a large national groundswell. Actually it was a lone individual, a woman at the local Sierra Club chapter who was known for instigating frivolous lawsuits. The head of the planning commission had warned me about her. “Watch out for Edie,” he said. “She’s a pain in the ass and fights everything we do. She has wasted an easy million in taxpayer dollars with her zero-development philosophy.” He was right. Edie perfectly fit that great Winston Churchill definition of an extremist: someone who will never change their mind and cannot change the subject.

  Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about it. The county had to respond to the suit. And according to local statute, the developer—that is, us—had to pay the county’s legal costs for doing so.

  What made the whole thing so painful was that I knew we would ultimately win the lawsuit. We’d done our homework, and the plans were all unassailably solid. The county really wanted the project. And since it had already been approved, the judge couldn’t have outright killed it. At the very worst, he could have made us go back and do our environmental-impact reports over again. But the Sierra Club (that is, this one woman) wasn’t backing down. If they (she) lost this suit, they (she) would just appeal it, which would have dragged it out for yet another long stretch of legal battles. It was a war of attrition, and since we were obligated to pay the county’s legal bills, it was stacked in the plaintiff’s favor.

  There was no money left in our coffers. We had coasted over the finish line on fumes. It would take at least another half million to fight this thing. And with the economy in the shitter, nobody was about to step forward with the capital it would take to see it through.

  By mid-2011 I had to acquiesce to the reality of the situation and call it quits.

  I called the shareholders and let them know it was over. I had beaten Blackwater at their own game—and in return been beaten myself by a lady from the Sierra Club. It would have been funny if it weren’t so crushing. I had dedicated five years of my life to this idea, bolstered with the majority of my modest net worth along with a ton of money from friends and family members—and it was all gone in the blink of a court filing.

  Shortly after which, my wife asked me for a divorce.

  As I said, life in the teams can be brutal on relationships. Despite my having left the service five years beforehand specifically in order to be at home more and strengthen my family life, it had been too late. My marriage had become another casualty of war.

  And I had to admit, it wasn’t just life as a SEAL. The fact was, I didn’t know how to make a long-term relationship work. My own parents’ marriage had become irretrievably fractured by the time I enlisted in the Navy. I thought I would be better at this than my dad, but now my own marriage hadn’t lasted even past my oldest son’s tenth birthday.

  I had not succeeded in following in John’s footsteps or honoring his example, in more ways than one. As dedicated as he was to his work, John was never the classic workaholic, sacrificing his family on the altar of his entrepreneurial dreams. I’d seen others do that. Not John. His business was always his driving passion, yet what he was most proud of and most in love with was his family, and he never let business get in the way.

  But me? Here I was: savings blown; business dream up in smoke; marriage irrevocably on the rocks. Compared to this, the reign of Harvey had been a picnic. Because here, now, there was no Harvey to blame. Yes, there were villains in the picture, and I could point and say my plans had been sabotaged, both from without and within. But denial and evasion of responsibility are not part of a SEAL’s makeup. I had to face the facts: I’d brought this all on myself.

  It was the lowest point of my life.

  • • •

  After Wind Zero died, I had no idea how to pick up the pieces and go on. There were days when the idea of packing it all in, moving to Mexico, and living the simple life on my veteran’s benefits sounded more tempting than I wanted it to. But I had kids here. There was no way I could walk away. Besides, giving up is something I’m just not wired to do.

  And then there was John Zinn’s example to honor.

  Yes, I’d just experienced a massive failure. But John had tried dozens of ideas before Indigen Armor took off. If he could keep going, so could I.

  Within a few months of tossing in the Wind Zero towel, I took a position as director at L-3 Communications, a large defense company in San Diego, just so I’d have something that paid the bills. It was a solid job and excellent money, but it drove me stir-crazy. I felt like a rat in a cage. I had to do something.

  Ironically, it was that smear campaign against me and Wind Zero from a few years before that ultimately provided the answer. When that anti–Brandon Webb video appeared online, a friend told me that the only way to push it off the first page of search results was to get a lot more content about me onto the Internet. So I started doing whatever I could to produce material. In the process, I discovered that I liked to write.

  A few years before Wind Zero closed I was invited to blog for a large website that served the military community. I’d been doing that now for two years, and I enjoyed it. At the same time, I saw quite a few ways the site itself could be improved. In fact, there was no single site that served the whole Special Operations community. So I decided to start my own. I invited a few friends from different branches of the service to write for the site as well. I scraped together about ten thousand dollars and launched SOFREP.com (for Special Operations Forces Situation Report) in January 2012.

  By the end of the year we had more than a million people per month hitting our site.

  All the success that had failed to materialize with Wind Zero happened with SOFREP. Within a year after launch I found myself running the largest Internet site in the world devoted to Special Operations. Our weekly SOFREP Radio podcast became the number one broadcast in its category (government) on iTunes, with more than half a million monthly visitors. The publishing division we launched had several New York Times bestsellers in its first year. Soon we had acquired or created more than half a dozen related websites, from NavySeals.com and the gear site Loadout Room to Fighter Sweep, a site dedicated to military and general aviation enthusiasts, and TransitionHQ, the only legitimate military-to-civilian advice and jobs portal on the Internet. We created an umbrella entity called Force12 Media to bring SOFREP and all the other properties together into one unified digital network. In just two years, Force12 Media went from a concept to a full-fledged digital-media empire.

  I suppose I never did get out of the real estate business. I just shifted from developing one kind of site to another kind.

  Through SOFREP and Force12 I’ve
doubled the income I was earning at L-3 as a salaried employee, and done it working for myself, on my own terms. It’s a lot of work, and it keeps me extremely busy.

  But not so busy that it runs my life or makes me miserable. Over the past few years, even with the craziness of Force12, I’ve also made it my business to take the time to build an excellent relationship with my ex-wife and her family, and to be there, consistently and in a big way, for our children.

  That was another lesson I learned from John Zinn. Maybe the most important one of all.

  • • •

  After all the struggle and heartache of Wind Zero, the success of Force12 Media has been a gratifying experience, to say the least. There is a bittersweet note to it, though. Because I would have so loved to share the story of it all with John. I owed him that. But he was no longer there to share it with.

  In 2010, less than a year after selling his company, John was in Amman, Jordan, at a huge military equipment expo. He was out with a few SEAL buddies but decided to turn in early, as he had an appointment early the next day to demo his latest vehicle to the king of Jordan. On the way home, he had his cabdriver stop the car so he could get out and walk the rest of the way. He never made it back to his hotel.

  Exactly what happened is shrouded in uncertainty. According to the cabdriver’s testimony, John was agitated about something when he bolted from the cab and walked off on his own, headed for a rough section of town. It could just as well have been that the cabdriver was heading to the wrong hotel and that John, realizing this, got out of the cab and in typical John fashion decided to forge his own path. According to official reports, he stumbled on his walk home and fell off a steep drop in the path. According to the SEAL who saw him off in the cab that night, he was sober and clearheaded, and “stumbled on his walk home” just doesn’t sound like John. One report ruled out foul play; another cited “suspicious circumstances.”

  The chances are good we’ll never know every fact and detail about exactly what happened that night. What we do know is this: The world is not a safe place. And John died making it a lot safer.

  John was not on active duty or in the thick of combat when he perished. But Glen Doherty was right, in his toast to Dave Scott in that little Filipino bar in October 2002, when he said, “We all signed up for this. It’s all part of the deal.” As we say when we join the Spec Ops world, we’re writing a check, payable to the U.S. government, and in the “amount” section it says “up to and including our lives.” John left behind two daughters, ages two and four, and Jackie was pregnant with their first son, Matthew, whom John was so looking forward to meeting. He was a good friend, one of the best, and was busy serving his country and his fellow warriors right to his last breath.

  John was a visionary. He had the capacity to paint a picture that others found so compelling, so real, that they would follow and do whatever it took to support him and help bring that picture into reality. It’s an ability, I’ve come to see, that every leader needs to master, whether you’re leading a platoon of warriors in combat or a team of colleagues or employees in a business venture.

  And he was a visionary in a larger sense, too, in that he saw the direction the world was headed and led the way. The wave of the future in our military presence is not in large masses of forces invading territories, but with small, highly adaptable units, like Spec Ops individuals. The ability to be discreet, to have a small footprint as you go into a country and quietly look around without being obvious, is pivotal to the tactical and strategic successes of the future. John’s idea was ahead of its time. It still is.

  5

  ROUGH MEN STANDING BY

  CHRIS CAMPBELL, HEATH ROBINSON, AND JT TUMILSON

  On April 14, 2009, I drove into the heart of downtown San Diego to hunt down an address I’d been given via e-mail, a little hole-in-the-wall off Market Street. Inside, the guy running the place ushered me into a tiny room, where he sat me in a chair in front of a green-screen backdrop, facing a television camera. “This thing is piped directly into the studio in New York,” he told me. And right into a hundred million households, I thought. Hi, everyone, Brandon here.

  Earlier that day an e-mail had landed in my in-box asking whether I would be willing to be interviewed on live national television for CNN. It was just two days since an American sea captain had been rescued from pirates off the coast of Somalia by three simultaneous shots fired by three Navy SEAL snipers. Someone from Anderson Cooper’s office had learned about me and my role in the NSW sniper course and tracked me down. Would I be willing to go on Anderson Cooper 360° that night to talk about these men and their training? Like, in a few hours?

  Sure, I replied. So there I was.

  This would be my first time appearing before the media in any major way, and I was a little nervous. People who do this all the time—celebrities, politicians, big business executives—typically go through media training and get extensive coaching to prepare for live TV. The only coaching I was going to get was this guy nodding in the direction of the lens.

  He wired me with a nearly invisible earpiece and pointed out the monitor parked next to the camera. Christiane Amanpour’s lips were moving, but there was no sound coming out. “Don’t try to look at the person on the other end,” he said. “It’ll mess you up because of the time delay. Look right into the camera, or it’ll look like you’re being evasive.” I nodded. Some good coaching after all. Then he left the room.

  The place felt airless. I could reach out and touch the walls on both sides at the same time. Suddenly Christiane Amanpour’s voice was in my head.

  “. . . It was marksmanship at its best—the way Brandon Webb teaches it”—it sounded like she was sitting directly next to me, her mouth to my ear—“and he joins us now from San Diego. Brandon, I think everybody wants to know how three coordinated shots, different people shooting at a moving target from a moving platform, just how did they do it? And how difficult was it?”

  I talked for the next two or three minutes, doing my best to answer Amanpour’s questions. But I knew the question all her viewers were really asking:

  Who are these guys—and how the hell do they do what they do?

  I’ll tell you who they are: some of the best, kindest, noblest men I’ve ever known.

  • • •

  The Captain Phillips rescue generated an enormous swell of interest among the public. And with good reason. By the spring of 2009, America was tired of failing. Wall Street had just self-destructed, the housing market had crashed, and the economy was going down in flames. War in the Middle East was dragging on with no end in sight. The rest of the world community was looking at us like we were the kid who stank up the whole room by shitting our pants and were too clueless to realize it. We couldn’t seem to do anything right. The nation was hungry for heroes.

  Three months earlier, on a crisp January day, a US Airways pilot named Chesley Sullenberger had saved a passenger plane from crashing into the Hudson by flying it like a glider. Sullenberger’s performance had a seismic impact on the national morale. It was like a sign from above that maybe our country was still capable of producing someone who could pull off a classic American can-do miracle.

  And now these three anonymous SEAL snipers had pulled off a stunt so perfect you’d think it was lifted out of a James Bond film.

  The Captain Phillips rescue faded eventually from the news cycle, but the current of public interest in the SEAL community continued surging along. Two years later it burst onto the front pages again, this time in an even bigger wave than before. On the evening of May 1, 2011, President Obama interrupted Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice to stride up to a White House podium and make the announcement that we’d just completed a successful raid on a suburban complex in Pakistan and killed America’s public enemy number one.

  It’s impossible to overstate the impact and sense of historical vindication the UBL (bin Laden) raid’
s success ignited in our nation. It wasn’t just the ghost of September 11 being avenged at last. The feeling of payback and resolution reached decades farther back, all the way to the original formation of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

  I was only five years old when President Jimmy Carter sent a contingent of Spec Ops troops into Iran in a failed attempt to rescue the American hostages, but the reverberations of that disaster were still echoing well into the new century. Operation Eagle Claw, as it was called, ended catastrophically, leaving one helo crashed and five abandoned, eight servicemen dead, our fifty-two hostages still captive, and America thoroughly humiliated. It was a classic right-hand-doesn’t-know-what-the-left-hand’s-doing fuckup. And it was in direct response to that colossal failure that SOCOM was created—a unified structure bringing together the Spec Ops forces of the different branches under one centralized command. The bin Laden raid not only nailed the architect of the 9/11 attacks; it also presented the ultimate demonstration that we’d learned from that thirty-year-old debacle and gotten our shit wired tight.

  To Eagle Claw’s lingering question mark, Neptune Spear was one hell of an exclamation point.

  The moment news of the UBL raid hit the media, the world went crazy over the highly secretive—and up till this point highly secret—Spec Ops unit involved, and that same question was once again on everyone’s lips: Who the hell are these guys?

  First, let me tell you who they’re not.

  They’re not Disney action figures. And they’re not the macho muscle guys you typically see acted out on the big screen. When the film Zero Dark Thirty came out, most of us in Spec Ops could barely watch it. Yes, it was that bad. That final scene, when the SEALs are taking the bin Laden compound and the whole team runs around the building, sweeping one another with their lasers, and then they barge in doing that ridiculous movie-assault-team shout, “Go, go, go, go, go!”—it was fucking painful. No excuse, Hollywood, no excuse.