by Brandon Webb
No, in real life these men are not steroidal supermen or one-dimensional fighting freaks. They are ordinary flesh-and-blood human beings who shape-shift themselves into something extraordinary through sheer will and devotion.
Like three of my friends, Chris, Heath, and JT.
• • •
I met Chris Campbell when he rolled into my BUD/S class in 1997. Chris was living proof that you cannot judge a book by its cover. He stood about five-seven, one of the smallest guys in our class, and weighed maybe 140 sopping wet. The instructors called him “Campbell’s Soup,” because he always had a smile on his face, like the happy cartoon kid on the soup can. No matter how much shit they threw at him, it wouldn’t stick. Chris was afraid of nothing, never lost his temper, and nothing could faze him. You just could not get this guy down.
One night during second phase (this was after making it through Hell Week in first phase), we were winding down for the night when one of our instructors screeched into the parking lot, braked his car on a crazy angle, and got out, leaving his headlights on. We heard him outside telling the other instructors, “Go home, you guys. I’ve got this.” Instructor Weber, as we could clearly hear from his slurred speech, was piss-drunk. He was going through a divorce at the time, and he was not a happy man. What was more, he was prepared to share that state generously with the rest of us.
Instructor Weber walked into the building and started laying into the class, yelling at us, hosing us down, and subjecting us to various forms of punishment. As he stood regarding the group, his head swiveling slowly left to right like a tank gun, his eyes lit on me. I didn’t know what was going on behind those reddened eyes, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
“Hey, Webb,” he growled. “So you got time to go grab a dry shirt? Fuck you.” That was when I knew I was in for some trouble.
Somehow Instructor Weber knew I’d had a dry T-shirt on earlier that night. In fact, when we suited up in our wet suits to go out into the surf, I never wore a T-shirt underneath like everyone else did. (I never understood this. I mean, why bother? It just gets wet!) I’d do my dive, take my wet suit off, put my dry T-shirt on, and then everyone would be standing around in wet T-shirts except me. This little luxury I allowed myself had just come back to bite me in the ass.
Nearby stood a large tank of clean, freezing-cold water that we’d use to wash the sand and salt water off our gear and regulators after being in the ocean—the dip tank. Weber glared at me emptily, then swiveled his tank-gun gaze over and looked at Chris. Then over at the dip tank. Then back at us. I could see the words forming in his brain before he hacked them up and coughed them at us.
“Webb! Campbell! In the dip tank!”
Whatever infraction Chris had committed that earned his being in there with me, I don’t remember or never knew in the first place. But there we were, up to our necks in freezing-cold water, watching the rest of the class doing push-ups and eight-count bodybuilders while Weber talked. And talked. The guy went on and on: what shits we were, how miserable this class was, how we’d never make it to third phase, what an embarrassment we presented. Soon he was getting circular. Oh, God, I thought, when is this going to be over? I was positive that death from hypothermia was only minutes away. I couldn’t imagine being more miserable. I felt so sorry for myself.
And then I glanced over at Campbell.
His teeth were chattering so hard they sounded like they were going to rattle right out of his head—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat, like a chipmunk machine gun. And he had this big shit-eating grin on his face. I did a literal double take and wondered whether I was hallucinating. What the hell would he have to be so happy about? Yet there it was, that classic Campbell grin plastered on his mug—and so help me, I was grinning back.
It occurred to me then how ridiculous we both looked. And how inane Instructor Weber’s endless rant sounded. And how absurd the whole situation was. And then Chris and I were both laughing—at our own misery and everything about it.
That moment was perfect Campbell. And he had that effect on everyone. No matter what was going on, no matter how bad the situation got, things always seemed easier when Chris was around. Everyone liked him. How could you not?
I heard a story about Chris from Randy Kelley (the same Randy Kelley who later helped me out when I was launching the Wind Zero effort). Randy and Chris were teammates in the BUD/S class before mine, before Chris got rolled. During Hell Week there’s an exercise we call Around the World, where you go out onto the ocean in the middle of the night and paddle around Coronado Island. This is essentially an endurance contest, an all-night affair that runs from the early evening through dawn the next day. On this occasion it was deep in the middle of the night, they’d been out there paddling in the frigid Pacific for hours, and everyone was starting to pass out from the cold and lack of sleep. Randy had grown up going to a Baptist church, and at that moment the tune of an old Baptist hymn popped into his mind. Desperate to keep himself awake, he started humming it.
Suddenly Randy heard another voice harmonizing with his. Chris had joined in, and not only that, he was singing the words. Randy looked over at Chris. They both laughed, then started in again, singing this old hymn together. The other guys on the boat groaned and said, “Jesus, you guys.” Which only made them laugh harder—and keep on singing.
It turned out Chris and Randy had both grown up in North Carolina. They hit it off and stuck together from that point on, even after Chris rolled out of that BUD/S class and into the next. After BUD/S they both went on to Team Five and ended up in the same platoon, where they became inseparable.
Chris had joined the SEALs in large part because he wanted to get out of North Carolina and see the world. He and Randy both loved the outdoors, and whenever the platoon arrived at a new location, if it was possible to camp out, they would take that option over a hotel room. While the other guys would go out partying, Chris and Randy would go exploring—on safari, diving, hiking, whatever. For the next four years, through two platoons, they did this all around the world.
A devoted photographer, Chris always had a camera with him, taking pictures of anything and everything. The others would ride him for what seemed like stupid things to snap pictures of at the time. But when they’d get back home and look at the photos he’d taken, they would turn out to be amazing shots. The dude had an eye; that was for sure. In fact, the thing Randy noticed most about Campbell was his capacity to appreciate the beauty of whatever was going on, to be at home wherever he was. No matter where here was at the moment, he never seemed to want to be anywhere else.
“What’s special about Chris,” said Randy, “is not that he’s larger-than-life. It’s kind of like he is life.”
• • •
Chris’s progress through SEAL training was not an easy time for him. In fact, in those early years it almost seemed like he had to work extra hard just to keep up.
Near the end of third phase in BUD/S, we were doing a final land-navigation exercise up at Camp Pendleton. Land nav was tough. We were out in the mountains through the freezing nights, snow on the ground. We didn’t get much sleep. Most of land nav we went through in groups, but this final exercise dissolved the squads. Now it was every man for himself. The air crackled with tension. We all knew that if we didn’t pass, we didn’t graduate.
The exercise was a combination of survival skills and navigation/reconnaissance skills. The instructors had planted a series of navigation points distributed across the countryside, spanning a number of mountains. We had to hit each point in the right sequence, almost like a survivalist scavenger hunt. At each point there was an ammo box with a unique code inside that we had to radio in along with our coordinates before moving on to the next.
In the middle of the night, I ran into Chris. He looked disheveled and frazzled.
“Hey, man,” I said, “what’s going on?”
He jerked his head in my
direction and stared at me. “I just realized, this isn’t my point! I’m not supposed to be on this hill!” He pointed to a mountain about two miles away. “I’m supposed to be on that hill!” And he went staggering off in the other direction.
Oh, man, I thought. Campbell is fucked. And he almost was. He nearly flunked out of BUD/S on that land nav. The next morning I checked in with him to see how he’d done. He’d made all his points, all right, but in the process he’d gotten a severe case of poison oak. The poor guy was covered with it. Anyone else would have been in utter misery. Not Campbell. There he was, lying on a rolled-out mat on the ground, covered head to toe with that ugly red, burning rash, grinning and laughing at some joke.
If you’d been a betting man and you were around when Chris was going through those early years of training, your money probably would not have been on his being the guy who would go on to become an outstanding operator. His spirit was Teflon, but this SEAL stuff did not come easy for him.
Not long after 9/11, Chris and Randy’s platoon went into a given location in the Middle East to assess possible access points, in case it proved impossible to airdrop forces directly into landlocked Afghanistan. Randy was the platoon’s leading petty officer, so it was his responsibility to make sure everyone had all the right gear. After they finished their surveys and were preparing to pull out, Chris approached him on the beach. “Hey, Randy,” he said. “I, well . . . I lost my gun.”
“No way,” Randy said. That wasn’t possible. For a SEAL, there are few infractions as catastrophic as losing your gun. We would always, always have our sidearms strapped in, and we would always, always lanyard our guns, especially when we were going in the ocean.
Chris showed Randy his holster. No gun.
“Tell me you lost it somewhere here, right?” said Randy, gesturing up and down the stretch of beach.
Chris hung his head. “No, man. It’s nowhere on the beach. It’s gotta be in the ocean somewhere.”
Even aside from being a SEAL, Chris was an avid outdoorsman who had always loved the ocean. He would spend hours surfing the waves. The ocean was like his home. This was the last guy in the world you’d think would be unprepared for an op in the water. But the gun was gone.
There was nothing Randy could do to help Chris out here. As LPO he had to tell the platoon commander. He did. The commander went ballistic.
They spent the next six hours diving in the surf, trying to find that gun, until the sun went down and the boats came in to take them back to their ship.
Chris was on kitchen duty on the ship for the next two weeks. That may sound like light punishment, but let me explain something: SEALs are never on kitchen duty. It just doesn’t happen. There may be several hundred crew members, sailors, Marines, and others on a ship—and a few dozen SEALs, who are regarded as being in a class by themselves. I’ve seen high-ranking officers step aside and let a teams guy through when they see that trident. Kitchen duty? You must be kidding. It was unspeakably humiliating for Chris.
It also became a defining moment for his career. He felt he’d let everyone down—and it drove him to double his effort to become an outstanding performer. Which was exactly what he did. Not long after the lost-gun episode, Chris went on to Green Team, which is to top-tier operations what BUD/S is to the SEALs. It is one ballbusting tryout, and more than half who start don’t make it through.
Including Chris. He failed out of Green Team.
And then something amazing happened: They kept him around.
It’s hard to convey just how rare this is. When you fail out of Green Team, you fail out—emphasis on the word out. In that way Green Team is not like BUD/S: You don’t get a second try. And you don’t stick around, either; you are sent back to your regular SEAL team, where you resume your career. You do not pass Go or move around the board again. Incredibly, though, they let Chris stay. His instructors gave him a temporary billet somewhere at their command, doing boring administrative and support tasks. Basically, being a whipping boy. But still: They let him stay.
Why? Because of that Chris Campbell attitude. They could see he was dead serious and very conscientious and at the same time completely humble, both about himself and his job. They couldn’t help it; they just liked him.
And he worked his ass off. After about a year of this he went back through Green Team a second time. This time he made it. As an outstanding operator, he became part of incredibly exacting and dangerous missions that you and I have never read about in the papers or heard about on CNN, and never will.
• • •
And then there was Heath Robinson.
In the summer of 2001, long after Chris Campbell had joined Team Five and I’d gone to Team Three, after going through sniper school and deployment and the USS Cole and home again, I left my friends at Golf Platoon to help resurrect a struggling Echo Platoon that was going through a major restructuring. It had a new chief, Chris Dye, who was excellent, and a small handful of solid, squared-away guys who made my job a hell of a lot easier than it might have been. Heath Robinson was one of them.
The first day I met Heath, I had just hopped a C-2 Greyhound COD (carrier on-board delivery) monoplane to meet up with Echo a few hundred miles off the San Diego coast, where they were stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific preparing for some GOPLATs (gas and oil platform) boarding work. The next morning I started jocking up with them for a ship-boarding exercise where we’d be fast-roping down from two helos. Right away I saw we were in trouble. These guys had their shit dangling all over the place.
Even with the intense level of training we get in the SEALs, there’s still a substantial chasm between the learning you do in the classroom and the learning you get from real-world experience. These guys didn’t know how to tighten up their straps, cut off the excess, and tape things down where necessary. They had no idea how to position or sling their guns properly. They were so not ready for serious action it wasn’t funny. It made me realize how much I’d taken our leadership at Golf Platoon for granted. Later that day, while we were on the exercise, one dude (a train wreck of a guy whom we eventually had to shit-can during our Afghanistan deployment) actually dropped his rifle in the middle of a maneuver on one of the helos—an unpardonable sin. Their chief didn’t see it. I did.
After the exercise the chief took us through a debriefing, then asked if I had any comments. I let loose, giving them chapter and verse on just how fucked-up and unprepared they were.
Later on that day one of the team, a guy with intense eyes set in a Hollywood-handsome face, came over to talk to me. “Petty Officer Webb?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I just want to thank you for joining our platoon.”
“No problem,” I told him. “Glad to help.”
“Also,” he added, “can you take a few minutes to show me what the hell I’m doing?”
Right then and there I got all I ever needed to know about Heath Robinson: He was fanatical about learning and doing whatever it took to become the best operator possible; he was both outgoing and disarmingly self-deprecating; and he was fucking hilarious. His smile lit up every room he entered.
While he was going through BUD/S, one night Heath and his fellow inmates were lying wet and sandy in the surf, arms linked in a chain of suffering. Where Campbell and Kelley had sung a Baptist hymn to keep their spirits up, Heath went a different way. Suddenly his voice blurted out, “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones . . .” and everyone in the class burst out laughing.
That was Heath to a T: entertaining, colorful, funny as hell. His sense of humor and perfectly timed one-liners got a lot of guys through those long, dark nights of the soul.
Heath was a born ham and loved to perform. In grade school he played Scrooge in a school production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and had a blast doing it. Get a few beers in him and he could do a pitch-perfect rendition of Michael Jackso
n’s “Thriller.” The other guys called him Hollywood, in part because he was such a good-looking guy and a classy dresser, and in part because he loved the movies and was constantly cracking people up with well-placed film lines. In the fall of 2001, as we were about to put down on a blood-soaked tarmac in war-torn Kandahar in the wake of a Marine invasion: “Six bucks and my right nut say we’re not landing in Chicago” (Planes, Trains and Automobiles). As we were listening to a teammate grunt in pain while being stitched up in the field by an impatient corpsman: “I’ll have what she’s having” (When Harry Met Sally). As we were about to embark on a mission tracking down Taliban forces on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border just before dawn: “Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved” (The Blues Brothers). It sure made everyday life easier over there. Heath’s saxophone traveled with him through Afghanistan, too. In later deployments his priorities shifted, and the sax was replaced by what came to be known as Heath’s Famous Cappuccino Machine.
Heath grew up in Petoskey, on the northern tip of Michigan. Like Matt Axelson, Heath had the Navy in his blood. His grandfather on his mother’s side served in World War II in the Navy, and he and Heath were very close throughout Heath’s childhood and beyond.
Heath told me that when he was sixteen, he watched on CNN as the bodies of American servicemen were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu while the American flag burned. “That was the moment I knew I wanted to become a Navy SEAL,” he said. “I wanted to stop things like that from happening.”
I took him under my wing and we quickly became friends. Up to that point the guys in Echo had had no real leadership. With the platoon’s reorganization, Chief Dye, my BUD/S teammate Chris Osman, a few other more experienced guys coming on board, and I managed to quickly bring the platoon up to snuff, but only through serious browbeating and ’round-the-clock abuse. Heath ate it up. Despite being a new guy he soon proved a more valuable asset to the team than some of the more experienced SEALs in the platoon. He was not even two years out of BUD/S, but he was so determined to become a first-rate SEAL, and so hungry to do things right, that by the time we were in Afghanistan, being with him felt like being with a seasoned operator.
