by Brandon Webb
When I arrived at Team Three I did exactly the same thing I’d done back as a new guy in HS-6: put my head down, kept my mouth shut, and made sure I did a good job at everything they threw at me. In the SEALs, a new guy is someone who has not yet gone on an overseas deployment with a SEAL team, and I learned very quickly that new guys are better seen and not fucking heard. We hadn’t yet earned our SEAL Tridents; we were still on a six-month probation, and they never let us forget it for a moment. Once we proved ourselves on a deployment, we would be treated with more respect. Until then, I was back on the bottom of the totem pole again.
The next big step after being assigned to a SEAL team as a new guy was to class up to SEAL Tactical Training (STT), a three-month intensive program of advanced training. (Today this is called SEAL Qualification Training, or SQT, and is part of advanced BUD/S, but it’s much the same thing.) STT was where we would really start getting into close-quarters battle tactics, room-to-room, where we would shoot thousands of rounds on the range, and go through more challenging land navigations and extended dives. It was where we would prove ourselves—where we would actually start becoming SEALs.
It was time to get down and dirty.
* * *
And this brought me face-to-face with my first major challenge as a SEAL new guy: I needed to demonstrate that I could perform up to par when it came to shooting a weapon.
Some of the guys I was training with had already served in the Marine Corps; many of them had shot guns since they were kids. Most knew their way around guns, for one reason or another. Not me. There’d been a little bit of shooting in boot camp, and we’d had a little time on the range as part of SAR training and again as part of BUD/S, but only a taste. When it came to firearms, I was green as the grass. Would I be able to measure up?
I would have a chance to find out soon enough in SST.
Right off the bat we spent a week at the Naval Training Center (NTC) range, where we shot a variety of firearms, including the M-4 semiautomatic assault rifle, SIG SAUER P-226 semiautomatic 9 mm pistol, the Heckler & Koch USP .45 semiautomatic pistol (USP stands for “universal self-loading pistol”), and the H&K MP-5 9 mm submachine gun. The designation “submachine” means it fires subsonic rounds. Bullets that travel faster than the speed of sound create an audible snap! like a miniature sonic boom. It sounds like someone clapping his hands together sharply. That’s how you know you’re being shot at: In addition to the crack! of the round’s actual discharge, you hear these tiny cracks around your head.
This was all new to me, and I found myself seriously behind the curve. Almost from day 1 I had instructors climbing all over my ass, saying, “Hey, Webb, what’s your problem?” It was like being back at the beginning of BUD/S all over again: Suddenly I was that guy. I had to get my shit together and do it fast, because we were about to take it up a notch.
After a week at the NTC we went out to the La Posta Mountain training facility, about an hour’s drive east of San Diego. An old satellite observatory, La Posta covers about 1,000 square miles perched 3,500 feet up on a mountaintop—not exactly Denver altitude, but higher up than what we were used to, and beautiful. It would become especially valuable as a training site within a few years because the terrain there so closely resembles parts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
At La Posta we conducted some patrol and land nav exercises, similar to what we’d done in BUD/S only tougher. Still, to me these didn’t seem that difficult. Then it came time to get into serious training on the shooting range. A few weeks in, they started running us through combat drills they call stress courses. Stress courses is right: For me, this was the moment of truth. I would either step up my game or show up as lame.
It wasn’t that I was worried about flunking out. This was about reputation. As I was coming to learn, reputation is like a house that, once you burn it down, is almost impossible to build again. This is true in business, in communities, in the world at large—but in the SEAL community it’s true times ten. There’s nothing more precious to a SEAL than his reputation. In the stress course drills, mine would be at stake.
The drills took place on a course that was set up with barricades every 10 to 20 feet. The idea was to spring through the course, taking cover at each barricade and shooting different kinds of targets, hitting as many as you could within a given time. I knew how it worked. It’s not rocket science. Run fast, stay hidden, shoot the bad guys. What I didn’t know was whether I could do it.
When my turn came, I checked my M-4 assault rifle, cleared my head, and felt my breath coming steady. I knew the next few minutes would stay with me in the team’s eyes, for better or for worse, for months to come.
The instructor yelled “Go!” I tore off on a 20-foot sprint to take cover behind the first barricade. I peered around the right edge, down low, and engaged the target. Crack! Ping! These were steel knockdown targets: You hit one and it flips down backward. Crack! Ping! Crack! Ping! Shooting steel was satisfying, because each shot gave off that instantaneous report, much better feedback than shooting paper targets. After firing off a few quick rounds, I was sprinting to the next barricade, where I repeated the process, and then to the next. At the third station there were half a dozen head poppers, targets that suddenly popped up with just their heads showing. The goal was to take out all six in rapid succession. I fired off six rounds, ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! and then took off for the next station.
A few stations later, with plenty of targets still left to shoot, I ran out of ammo. They had designed it this way on purpose. They wanted to see how we did when our primary weapon went dry. I swept my rifle to the side, letting it swing on its sling by its own weight, immediately drew my pistol and fired off several more rounds at the remaining targets, then holstered the sidearm, grabbed my rifle, and brought it back up as I sprinted to take cover and reload. Cover, not concealment. We’d been drilled on the difference. Cover is when you hide behind something that can actually provide you with physical protection. Concealment means you’re hiding behind something that shields you visually, like a bush, but the other guy can shoot through the bush and hit you. I took cover, dropped my depleted M-4 mag, slammed in a fresh magazine, loaded a fresh mag in my pistol, too, in case I needed it, then sprinted off to engage the next series of targets.
The whole thing was a whirlwind—there was no sense of stopping and starting, taking this step and then that step, just one unbroken stream of actions and reactions. It was over before I even had time to think.
Our instructor did a double take that was almost comical. “Damn, Webb,” he said. “Where the fuck did that come from?”
I looked around and realized the other guys were all staring at me. I hadn’t missed a single shot. I had smoked the whole course.
In all my previous experiences shooting at paper targets, I’d always struggled, always felt stressed out, never felt like any of it came naturally, and I’d never been nearly as good a shot as the rest of the guys. But now, when I hit that first steel target and heard that ping! something just clicked into place.
I puzzled about this for some time, and later came to some conclusions about it. I’d had no firearms experience or training whatsoever before joining the navy—but I had done an awful lot of undersea hunting. There’s something instinctive about spearfishing. That speargun doesn’t feel like a tool—it’s more like an extension of your arm: You just point your arm and fire. Target shooting had never felt like that to me, at least not up to that point. Once we were out on this more realistic drill scenario, though, that instinctive sense kicked in. It wasn’t like I was shooting with a rifle. I was just pointing my arm and shooting.
Rob Byford, my OIC from BUD/S days, was there on the range that day. He’d seen the misery I went through in First Phase, seen me when I was that guy and must have looked for all the world like I’d never make it through BUD/S.
“Goddam,” he muttered loud enough for all to hear. “I’ll take Webb in my platoon any day. The fuckin’ guy never quits!
”
Thank God, I thought. I’d redeemed myself.
* * *
From La Posta we headed out west into the desert to a godforsaken place called Niland, by the Salton Sea, where we spent the next six weeks in one of the strangest environments I’ve ever seen. This was our desert warfare phase, and I can’t imagine a more perfect location. The Salton Sea is essentially man-made, the result of an accident early in the twentieth century when some engineers were trying to redirect the Colorado River and lost control of the project. Now it’s one of the most brackish bodies of water on the planet, saltier than ocean water and filled with agricultural runoff.
On the northeast end of the lake is the funky town of Niland, occupied largely by meth labs and trailer parks. It reminded me of the postapocalyptic landscape in The Road Warrior. There are guys out there called scrappers who collect anything and everything. We’d be out on the range, doing contact drills, laying down thousands of rounds; we’d walk a hundred yards away to get a water break, drink, reload, and go back out—and all the brass shell casings we’d just left behind would be gone, the ground picked clean. Off to the side we’d see a guy with wild hair dragging along a sack and wearing his road-warrior goggles. It’s an odd bunch.
I’d been out to Niland about six weeks earlier, just before starting STT, with one of my buddies from Team Three, John Zinn. John and I were both surfers who’d grown up in California. He looked like your average skinny surf bum, but he was an excellent waterman and a great athlete. When I arrived at Team Three we hit it off right away.
As new guys, John and I were sent out there for a week to help support one of the SEAL platoons doing some training. One day we’d been sent out on some sort of resupply mission in a bare-frame, stripped-down Humvee. We’d completed the work and were done for the day. We were out in the desert, and no one else was around. We said, “Hey, let’s see what this bad boy can do.” We took off, taking turns driving, busting around the desert mountains and launching that Humvee over rises in the barren desert terrain like the Dukes of Hazzard.
As we were tearing ass down a long desert stretch, I saw a dip up ahead and started slowing a little to navigate it. John said, “C’mon, man, punch it!” and I stepped on it. Suddenly there was a gap in front of us. I accelerated, doing my best to jump it. All at once we were airborne. Everything slowed to a crawl. John and I turned and looked at each other, eyes wide, in slow motion: a Thelma and Louise moment. It couldn’t have been more than a second and a half that we were airborne, but it felt like a full minute. Then we landed. We had managed to clear the gap, but we came down so hard on the other side that it blew out the left front tire and bent the rim. We had no spare. How the hell were we going to explain this?
We radioed in. The guys at the base said they didn’t have anyone free to come out and get us, so we should hang tight for the night. We weren’t sure exactly where we were, but we knew we were somewhere in the vicinity of an area designated for ordnance exercises. In plain English: a live bombing range.
We slept out there that night in the Humvee and woke up early the next morning to the sound of F-18 jets screaming overhead and ordnance dropping in the distance. Were they getting closer? We weren’t sure.
We got on the radio and said, “Um, hey, guys, can you get us out of here?” We passed them rough coordinates and asked them to hurry. They came out and brought us a spare; we changed the tire and drove back to camp. Now we had to explain what had happened.
At the time the camp was run by a SEAL named Steve Heinz. This guy was like something out of a cartoon. Take whatever overdrawn, exaggerated picture you can form of a ridiculously tough Navy SEAL and exaggerate that by a factor of three. That’s Steve: an ogre of a man, chewing scrap metal and swallowing it. He ran that camp with an iron fist. Nobody screwed around there—nobody. So here we were, a couple of new guys who’d just busted one of his vehicles. We had been afraid of those F-18s. We were terrified of Steve.
First we went to see the mechanic and explained that there had been some rough terrain out there, and we blew a tire. He looked at the bent rim, then back at us. “How do you explain that?”
“The terrain was rough,” said John.
“Very rough,” I echoed.
He looked at us. “What the hell were you guys doing?”
John looked right back at him and said, “It was very, very rough terrain.”
The next few hours were not fun, waiting for the hammer to drop. Finally we were called into Heinz’s office. He lit into us. “What the hell were you doing out there? You want to tell me you guys weren’t out there hotdogging and fucking off in my vehicle?”
“No, sir,” John managed to get out. “We were just driving.”
“It was really rough terrain,” I added helpfully.
Heinz glared at us, then dismissed us with a growl. “Get the fuck out of my office.” That was the end of it.
John went on to BRAVO platoon and did four years there. He met a food chemist named Jackie, fell head over heels in love with her, got out of the service, and married her. When 9/11 happened, John was one of the first guys doing private security for companies like DynCorp and Blackwater as an independent contractor. The pay was outrageous, especially once we went into Iraq. He did that for a few years, then took a pile of earnings and formed an armored car company called Indigen Armor with an army buddy from their experience driving around being shot at over there. I like to think that our crazy outing at Niland helped plant a seed for his later success.
A few years later John and his buddy sold their majority interest, and he and Jackie had a child. Then in 2010 he was killed in Jordan in a freak accident. John was a good guy, one of the best. His dad, Michael, is a great lawyer, and he and I became good friends after John’s death. We are friends to this day. John was as solid as they come, and I miss him.
* * *
When John and I were first out there it had been spring, which is no picnic in Niland. Now it was summer and hotter than hell, hitting 115°F most days. It sometimes got so hot out there that we couldn’t put blasting caps in the ground in our demolition exercises, because the heat of the ground would set them off.
They put us through our paces in land nav and land warfare exercises, simulated drills where we’d come up against enemy contact and have to fight our way out of it. We also did some advanced demolition work there as part of an assault package: we’d go into a mock village, stage a prisoner snatch, shoot up the place, then set our C-4 charges everywhere and pull smoke on those charges—and we’d have fifteen minutes to get out of there before it all blew.
At Niland we were introduced to some of the heavier machine guns, the .50 caliber and .60 caliber, and we also got some practice on the Carl Gustav, an 84 mm recoilless rifle handheld rocket launcher, and got to fire some LAW (light antitank weapon) rockets. Although we mostly used live fire, for some exercises we used a laser setup called Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES), which fires blanks, a little like playing paintball. We used this system when we went up against each other in teams in OppFor (Oppositional Force) exercises. The focus, though, was not on that kind of force-on-force situation. Going in en masse and taking down a known force, like charging a machine-gun nest, is not a typical SEAL mission. We’re not the marines. Our preferred methodology is to insert ourselves in the middle of the night when no one’s looking, hit them, and get out. We’re not really there to fight; we’re there to tip the scales. At Niland, our focus was on demolition—and on getting a taste of what it takes to survive in the most god-awful, inhumanly hot conditions imaginable.
Near the end of our time at Niland, they took us out in the desert a little before noon for a six-hour land nav course. It was miserable out, August in the Niland desert. We spent the day roaming about that burned-Mars landscape like postapocalyptic scavengers, following the preset course and racking up points, finally arriving back at camp exhausted and dehydrated.
“Drink some water, guys,” the instructor
s told us, “and get some rest. In a few hours, we’re doing a little run.”
Turned out it wasn’t just a “little run.” It was a 12-mile timed run with weapons and full rucksack loaded with 50 pounds of gear. We started in after dinner, about eight in the evening, running along an aqueduct road. Running, not walking. The time we had to beat was no joke, and in Niland in August, eight o’clock is still damned hot.
Some of the guys were really good runners, and they were out in front right away. I’m a middling runner, not the best and not the worst; I was more or less in the middle of the pack. We got to mile 3, then mile 4, and I expected we would soon start seeing our fastest guys coming back the other way after hitting the 6-mile turnaround point. But we saw nobody. We hit mile 5. Still no one coming the other way.
Then finally we saw one, and then a few more—but only a few. Something’s wrong, I thought. There should be more guys coming back.
We soon found out what was wrong: Our guys were dropping in their tracks right on the road, and the medics were pulling them off to the side (where we wouldn’t see them) and getting IV bags into them. On torture runs like this, I had learned, you need to drink water nonstop. I was pounding the stuff down. I was not going to get dehydrated.
I reached the turnaround point, and there was Disco Stella, my BUD/S classmate and Team Three teammate. He looked bad, and I could tell he was hurting. Stella was a faster runner than me, but right now he was slowing down. We set off on the return leg, running together.
“I’m hurting, man,” he panted. I start to worry about whether he was going to make it. Normally he would be way out ahead of me, but he was clearly dehydrated and not doing well. Almost immediately, he started drifting back. He never caught up again.
