The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen

by Brandon Webb

  After a few miles, I stopped at a water station to grab more water—and the moment I stopped moving, both my legs seized up. I started falling backward. There was nothing I could do about it. I grabbed my gun and just fell out, right on the ground. A guy I’d just met recently, Glen Doherty, was there as part of the support staff, manning the water station. Glen saw me drop to the ground and ran over to me. “Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I managed. “I’ll be fine,” hoping that maybe saying it would make it true. I spent the next few minutes massaging and hitting my legs, putting everything I had into it, trying to get the muscles to let go just enough so I could stand up. Finally I managed to get back onto my feet. Guys were starting to trickle into the station, telling us about who had dropped out. Glen and I were both flabbergasted. There were some real studs in the group who weren’t running anymore. That did it for me. I finished my water and got back on the road.

  I was not going fast, but I was near the top of the pack. As I got to the 10-mile mark, 2 miles short of the finish, a Humvee pulled up beside me with a medic and another guy. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw who it was. Dan Oldwell was not only a true stud, he was Honor Man in our BUD/S class. Honor Man is something like the class valedictorian, the guy who never quits, the most outstanding guy in the class, the one whose example inspires everyone else. Now here was our Honor Man—riding in a Humvee. He had quit.

  “Hey, Webb,” said Oldwell, “we’re just letting you know, the instructors sent us out to tell everyone. People are dropping from massive heat exhaustion. They’re calling it. Hop in.”

  It was twilight, and I could see the lights of our base camp on the horizon. I did not run 11 miles and put myself through all that misery to quit a mile from the gate. I looked up at Oldwell. “Thanks,” I said, “but no thanks. You’re not putting me in that car. No fucking way.”

  I turned back and kept going.

  A few minutes later I reached the camp gate. I stood there panting, feeling the pain coursing through my legs, feeling like a wreck, but it was a good feeling. “Good job, Webb,” I heard someone say.

  Just then an instructor walked up to me and said, “Hey, why is your weapon dirty?”

  I looked down at my weapon. The guy had a point. Some dirt had gotten on my gun when I fell over at the water station. It’s a code they had pounded into us: You take care of the team’s gear first, then you help your buddy, and once all that’s done, then you take care of yourself. You always make sure all your team’s shit is squared away before you go hop in the shower. It’s a code I believe in. I think it’s a great value to have.

  I looked up at the guy and didn’t say a word, just gave him a look that said, Fuck you. He nodded and walked away.

  It felt really good to finish that run. Out of a class of some eighty guys, some of them truly elite athletes, only Chris Osman and I and four others had done it. My stock was going up, and these things get back to the teams. It’s a little like an NFL draft: The teams are always looking for new guys, and they keep their ears to the ground. Every community is by definition a small community, and the SEALs are no exception. Tests, points, grades, certification—they all matter, but nothing counts like reputation.

  The brutal heat of Niland was followed by a few weeks at Camp Pendleton in a block of extensive land nav training, followed by four weeks of combat swimmer training off the San Diego pier at the Thirty-second Street Naval Station, doing four- and five-hour dives to plant explosives on gigantic destroyers.

  An Arleigh Burke–class destroyer is nearly a tenth of a mile long and has a displacement (total mass) of 9,200 tons. Imagine diving underneath one of these babies. Visibility is poor, and it’s easy to lose track of what’s up and what’s down. Normally you can orient yourself deep underwater by watching the upward trail of bubbles from your exhale, but with the Dräger rebreather system we were using, we weren’t emitting any bubbles, so there was nothing to follow. We learned to follow the seams of the welds on a ship’s hull to track our way to the surface. To make things worse, those ship’s generators are incredibly loud—and sound carries like crazy underwater. So there you are, deep down in the darkness, somewhere underneath a 9,200-ton vessel and surrounded by this intense RRRrrrRRRRRrrrrRRRRRrrrrRRRRR and no sense of up or down. It’s pretty easy to start thinking, Oh my God, am I even on the right boat?

  These ships have huge bilge pumps that suck in seawater with tremendous force. The specific ships we targeted were supposed to shut down their bilge pumps for our exercise—but if you’re stumbling around down there and get too close to the wrong ship, it’s not hard to get sucked right in. Guys have died that way.

  The first time I got down underneath one of those monsters, I couldn’t help thinking about Mikey Ritland trapped under that Zodiac off San Clemente Island. This sucker was a lot bigger than a Zodiac.

  Fortunately we made it through the dive work in one piece. I graduated from SEAL Tactical Training on August 14, 1998, and headed back to the team to get back to work—and start preparing for my Trident board.

  * * *

  The SEAL Trident is the only badge in the navy that has no rank. When you wear that Trident, anywhere you go in the military, people get out of your way, no matter what rank they are, because they know what it means to earn that thing. I’ve seen commanding officers approaching in ship passageways step aside and let us through when they see that Trident. In that moment they aren’t seeing rank or seniority—they are just seeing that big budweiser on your chest.

  In order to get my Trident, I first had to go collect signatures on my Personal Qualification Standard (PQS). I went to the dive locker and got signed off by the master diver there, to the air locker and did the same, then the first lieutenant of the boats rack, and on through all the individual people who had mentored us in each particular field. One by one, they signed off, and once I had the whole form completed I put in a formal request to go before my Trident board.

  The day finally came, a Wednesday in late 1998, six of us standing in the hallway in our starched, pressed desert cammies (the standard uniform, made of camouflage material). We waited together out in the hall on the top floor of the Team Three area. One by one, they called us in. Each guy was in there probably no more than thirty minutes, but it seemed like hours. When my turn came, I went in and sat down in the center of a horseshoe of instructors, who immediately started in on me, firing away with their questions, starting with weapons specs.

  “What’s the max effective range of the M-60 machine gun?”

  “What’s the max effective range of the M-4?”

  “What’s the muzzle velocity of the MP-5 submachine gun?”

  “How many movements does it take to clear-and-safe a SIG SAUER 226 pistol?”

  A comms guy asked questions about communications—shortwave and long-wave radio signals, different antenna setups, all the types of radios we use. Then a corpsman asked all kinds of first-aid questions. Then it went to the boats guy, the diving guy, the air guy. Everyone was firing crazy questions at me. I had to have the answers all down pat, and I had to answer fast. It was incredibly intimidating. I had studied my ass off for this, and I was pretty sure I was doing well. Still, they held my future in their hands.

  Then one of them asked, “Why do you want to be a SEAL?”

  I don’t know how anyone else answered that question, but it made me stop and think for a moment. Why did I want to be a SEAL?

  I had always wanted to be a part of something special, something that not many people can accomplish. Honestly, that was my real driving force, the chance to be part of an incredibly elite group.

  I had struggled some in high school, and while I’d managed to graduate, it was hardly with flying colors. There was no way I would have qualified for an ROTC scholarship or the Naval Academy. I had always wanted to be a pilot, but I hadn’t done well enough academically to get onto that track, either. In a way, I had something to prove to myself: that I could be part of somet
hing special, that I could set a high bar and make it.

  I didn’t go into all of this with these guys. I just said, “Look, I love the water, grew up in the water, and feel I’m well suited to it. I want to be a part of this special community, and I know that not many people can achieve this.”

  I walked out not knowing whether I’d made it. In fact, there were a few guys who didn’t, who screwed up some questions and would have to go back and retest later. I wasn’t one of them. When my turn came, the board of instructors brought me back into the room, messed with my head a little bit, then told me I’d passed.

  When that Friday came, I showed up in my cammies at SEAL command, down by the beach, for quarters. “Quarters” is the naval term for the daily assembly. All the platoons would muster up in their groups at 7:30 in the morning, the CO would come out and talk about what was happening that day or that week, and then we would change out to go do PT and get on with the rest of the day. On Fridays, anyone who was getting an award would be recognized during quarters.

  That Friday morning the CO came out and talked for a few minutes. Then I heard my name called and went up front. An instructor pinned a Trident to my uniform. I was no longer a search-and-rescue swimmer, a navy regular, a BUD/S student, a Team Three member on probation, an STT student.

  I was a Navy SEAL.

  The next instant, a throng of guys started running toward me—and I took off as fast as I could. There is a SEAL tradition: Once you have your Trident, you get thrown in the ocean, fully clothed. I did my best to outrun them and throw myself in, but no dice. They grabbed me and tossed me in the Pacific. Then they hauled me out again, soaking wet, took me back onshore, and started pounding my Trident.

  This is another navy tradition. A normal pin has a little metal or plastic backing that secures it on, like a tie tack, and keeps the pin from sticking into your skin, but there was no backing on my Trident. Used to be, when you’d earn your flight wings in the navy, they would call them your “blood wings,” because the guys would literally pound the pin into you, beat it into your chest. That’s old school, and the regular navy doesn’t do that anymore—but the SEAL teams do. SEAL teams are hardcore.

  So they pounded in my Trident, right over my heart. It felt good. Other than the three days that each of my kids was born, and one other moment that we’ll get to later, this was the proudest moment of my life.

  * * *

  A few days before receiving my Trident, I found out that I was being placed into GOLF platoon, one of the A-list platoons. I would spend the next two years with these guys.

  GOLF platoon was an odd assortment of characters, a strange but solid mix of personalities. Having the skills and the objective qualifications is one thing, but there’s something you can’t quite measure in tests that has to be there, too. For us, the chemistry was great. With SEALs in general, you’re dealing with a group of people who are pretty extreme, every single one an alpha male, like a wolf pack or group of Viking warriors. Each guy is constantly putting the others in check, but while they may beat each other up, when it comes down to it, it’s all for one.

  From the start, we were a very tight group:

  JAMES MCNARY, our OIC, was a classic navy officer: straight shooter, not a hair out of place. When Lieutenant McNary got out of the service in 2000, he went to Harvard Business School and went on to become principal security engineer at Raytheon.

  DAN, our chief, was a big guy and a California surfer like me. Chief Dan had gone through BUD/S at the age of seventeen and had pretty much been brought up in the teams. He ran that platoon; he was one of the smartest SEALs I’ve ever known, and McNary pretty much let him have free rein.

  TOM, our LPO (leading petty officer). Next in seniority after Chief Dan, Tom was a big monster of a guy, quiet and soft-spoken. For me he exemplified everything it means to be a good leader, constantly showing us the ropes and making sure we knew exactly what we were doing at every turn. Tom and Chief Dan shaped who we were as SEALs and taught us what it meant to be solid team guys and sharp operators. As I would later discover to my chagrin and detriment, not everyone in the teams had that caliber of training and leadership.

  ERIC FRANSSENS was a brute of a guy; Franny and I had gone through STT together, and he would shortly introduce me to my wife.

  GLEN DOHERTY, whom I’d first met at Niland when he was part of the support team when I went through STT. Glen went through STT himself right after I did and then joined us in Team Three. Glen would in time become one of the most important people in my life.

  MIKE RITLAND, my classmate from BUD/S, the Iowa farm boy who got trapped under the Zodiac and lived to tell the tale. We called him Mikey “Big Balls” Ritland.

  RANDY was a short, skinny guy we called “the Rat.” I’ve never seen a guy be so intelligent and so distracted at the same time. He could ace any academic advancement test you’d give him, and completely forget where he was supposed to be five minutes from now. The Rat was a Columbia graduate and Wall Street stockbroker before he became a SEAL.

  TOM KRUEGER. We all had nicknames, but Krueger came up with his own: Bad Ass. Chief Dan had to take him aside and tell him you don’t get to choose your own nickname—especially not one like that. We called him all sorts of names (including Jackass, though only behind his back), but none that ever stuck. We could tell Krueger had had a rough time when he was a new guy because he took obvious pleasure in any opportunity to haze new guys—as I would soon discover to my considerable dismay. Krueger ended up going into DEVGRU, the antiterrorist group that used to be called SEAL Team Six, and was shot and killed in Afghanistan in 2002.

  SHANE HYATT, whom we called “the Diplomat.” Shane marched to the beat of a different drum. With a shaved head and pierced tongue, the Diplomat had absolutely no inner monologue; he would just say whatever was on his mind, anytime, anywhere. You did not want Shane around anyone important, because he would offend people at will. Three months shy of graduating from an ROTC program at the University of Arizona and getting his officer’s commission, Shane told off his ROTC commander, got kicked out of the program, and had to pay back some $60,000 in tuition.

  CHUCK LANDRY was one of our youngest guys, just twenty when he joined the team, a big kid, 6'2" and sharp, but he had quite a mouth on him. We called him a liberty risk: When you went out on liberty with Landry, you never knew what would happen. One night he walked onto base drunk and started hassling the security guard. They handcuffed his hands behind him, but he managed to slip his hands under his feet and out in front again, whereupon they freaked out and drew their weapons to hold him in place. He ended up on double probation and couldn’t leave the team area for a month.

  BOB HARWARD served as team CO for my first month there before moving on to another command. Bob was a serious hard case; he had graduated BUD/S as Honor Man of Class 128 and had a reputation for being frighteningly smart and just as tenacious. He has pissed a lot of people off in his career just because he is fearless and uncompromising. The dude has a scar running from his chin right up to his forehead, and you take one look at him and say, Okay, I am not fucking with that guy. Bob was incredibly competitive, and I learned a dirty trick from him one day when we were doing a run-swim-run: First you do the run, then you throw your shoes in the team truck, jump into the water and swim 2 miles, then you get out of the water and rendezvous with the truck on shore, grab your shoes, and run the rest of the race. I was out of the water right behind Bob and saw him grab his shoes and yell at the driver, “You’re in the wrong spot! You need to drive another half mile down the beach!” Son of a bitch if he didn’t put a half mile between himself and the rest of the pack so he could win the race. That was Bob. Classic. Today Harward is a three-star admiral. When I later served in Afghanistan supporting Task Force K-Bar, Bob Harward was my commander.

  There were others, too: “Foxy,” “Cooter,” “Data,” Dave Scott, “Grogey,” “Mongo,” “Uncle Jesse.” Last but not least, there was me.

  I’m not sur
e exactly where my nickname came from, or why. I think at first it had to do with a few guys seeing me as someone who didn’t bathe often (which is strange, because I’m actually a pretty clean person), but soon it expanded to embrace a decidedly sexual connotation. We all had our stories of sexual conquest, but mine tended to be on the outrageous side, and for a while there I was pretty busily slaying the young women of San Diego. The other guys frequently shook their heads over my exploits, saying, “Webb, you dirty bastard,” and the name stuck.

  Dirty Webb.

  * * *

  There was one more person who came into my life around this time and would be a key figure in the years to come.

  It started with Franny; we were always trying to set him up with a date. Johnny Sotello, one of the guys, had a girlfriend from Norway named Monica, and one day he told us that Monica had a friend named Gabriele who would be perfect for Franny. Johnny set up a date so that Franny and Gabriele could meet at a local bar.

  I was at that bar the night of the blind date, and I couldn’t believe what I saw: Franny showed up with another girl. “Dude,” I said, “uh, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Franny said. “It’ll be fine.”

  Wait a second, I thought. He was bringing a girl to the bar where he was supposed to be meeting another girl for a date? How exactly was that supposed to be fine? But there wasn’t much I could do but sit back and watch.

  A few minutes later Monica showed up with an absolutely beautiful blonde. I could tell immediately that she was a foreigner—German, was my best guess. She was gorgeous.

  Franny went over to her with this other girl trailing along with him, got introduced to her, and proceeded to try to explain the situation. I wasn’t close enough to hear what either of them said, but it wasn’t hard to read their body language and see how the conversation was going. Franny was explaining to Gabriele and Monica how, yes, he was here with this other girl, but it was really nice to meet Gabriele, and he was wondering, could he still get her number?