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

by Brandon Webb

“We’re in for it, you know,” I added.

  He asked me what I meant by that.

  “Sooner or later,” I mused, “there’s going to be a major hit, right here on U.S. soil. We’re not ready for it.”

  * * *

  After I got back from that deployment on the Duluth, two big changes were in store for me on a personal level. I was about to become a father, and although I didn’t know it yet, I would also soon be leaving GOLF platoon. Both changes would have a major impact on my life for years to come. They were also related, in a way. The reason I made the move to leave GOLF platoon, frankly, came down to a matter of family finances.

  I was soon coming up for reenlistment again, which meant I had a cash bonus coming, something like $40,000. The problem was, reenlisting while stateside would mean I’d be heavily taxed, with a significant California tax on top of the federal bite. If I reenlisted in a tax-free combat zone, I would get the whole bonus. This would amount to a difference of something like fifteen grand. My wife was now pregnant with our first child, and fifteen grand can buy an awful lot of diapers.

  It’s not uncommon for command to send a guy overseas for a short deployment to help him out in circumstances like this, so in July I went to talk with our ops officer, Keith Johnson, about the possibility of getting myself sent overseas. (The ops officer is typically a senior lieutenant, about to make lieutenant commander, who runs operations for the team, working directly for the commanding officer and executive officer.)

  After hearing me outline my situation and what I was looking for, Keith thought for a moment, then said, “Look, Brandon, we’ve got a situation with ECHO platoon. Frankly, they’re a bunch of fuckups and we’ve just shaken the whole thing up. We fired the chief and OIC, cleared out the whole leadership team to wipe the canvas clean, but kept most of the guys.”

  He hadn’t gotten to his point yet, but I knew where this was going, and I didn’t like it. He was talking about sending me to join this screwed-up ECHO platoon.

  We had great chemistry in GOLF platoon, which is as crucial on a SEAL team as it is on a pro ball team. You can train all you want and have the most qualified guys in the world, but if the chemistry doesn’t click, the team won’t work. When that happened in a SEAL platoon, they would break the team up and reshuffle all the guys to other teams, much as you’ll see in pro sports. This is what had happened to ECHO platoon. Obviously, command was hoping to rescue this misbegotten team by bringing in some new blood, and Keith was on board with that plan. My coming to him with my tax-or-no-tax bonus problem happened to play right into the situation at hand.

  “You should join ECHO,” he said. “They’re the next ones up to deploy, and you’ll get your tax-free bonus.”

  I did not want to join this godforsaken platoon. They had a terrible reputation; everyone in Team Three knew they were a mess. Guys used to joke about them in the halls—and he was asking me to become part of this joke of a team? I had hoped there’d be some other avenue for getting me overseas, maybe joining DELTA platoon or some other excellent fighting force. Keith was selling it hard, though, and now that he’d proposed it to me it was going to be hard for me to wangle any other option. I realized it now came down to a choice: I could go join ECHO platoon or stay with my team at GOLF and give up the fifteen grand. GOLF platoon had a great reputation, and I pretty much had my pick of jobs there. Ultimately, though, I decided to put my family first and agreed to join ECHO platoon.

  It was a move I would soon regret.

  * * *

  ECHO platoon was then at the tail end of their workup, doing some VBSS training operations, so I flew out to join them on the aircraft carrier where they were staged, about a hundred miles off the coast of San Diego. When I got there, I met up with Chris Dye, who had just taken over as the platoon’s new chief in the command’s efforts to rehabilitate the outfit.

  Chief Dye was legendary in the SEAL community. A decade earlier, when he was at SEAL Team Two, he and his dive buddies had participated in a Special Op called Operation Nifty Package, part of Operation Just Cause, the United States invasion of Panama. As part of the op Chris and his dive buddy Randy Beausoleil planted the explosives that sank Noriega’s private boat. (You can read a riveting account of the whole mission in the excellent book SEALs: The US Navy’s Elite Fighting Force, written by my BUD/S classmate Chris Osman and Mir Bahmanyar.) A few weeks after this first meeting, I was helping Chief Dye move one day, and I noticed a plain stainless steel wheel among his stuff. It was about two feet in diameter, six spokes coming off an empty hub. Looked like maybe a steering wheel for a yacht or something.

  “Hey, Chris,” I said, “what are you doing with this old wheel?”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “I’m just hanging on to it. That came off Noriega’s boat.” He had personally salvaged it off the wreck of the ship after planting the bombs that sank it. This dude had seen some interesting action in his time.

  Finding out that Chief Dye would be running things at ECHO cheered me up quite a bit. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. The two of us were not really acquainted personally, but we knew each other by reputation, and I had been tagged with the role of general go-to guy to help him put things in order.

  Chief Dye met me when I landed on the aircraft carrier where they were staging for their workup exercises. “Oh, man, am I glad to see you,” he said. “Welcome to ECHO. We have our work cut out for us.”

  He told me they were planning to go out the next day to do some fast-roping off a couple of helicopters as part of a maritime ship-boarding op, and they were short one castmaster. The castmaster is in charge of rigging up the setup inside the helo, deploying the guys out on the rope, and making sure it all goes properly. He’s the last guy out. I wondered how the hell they’d been planning to go fast-roping with two helos and one castmaster, but I didn’t say anything. Chris would have figured out a way to do it. It might not have been exactly legal, but it would have worked. In any case, I was certified as a castmaster, so that was no longer an issue.

  The next day we got out there up in the air and started the exercise. I was serving as castmaster in the second bird, watching the guys go out the door: one, two, three—and suddenly there was an MP-5 rifle flying through the air in free fall.

  I nearly shit my pants. I could not believe what I was seeing. A SEAL team fast-roping out of a helo—and somebody dropped his frigging weapon?

  It was downright embarrassing. Everything is supposed to be slung in and tightly attached—that’s rule one. When we say, “That guy has his shit wired tight,” this is exactly what we’re talking about. Working around water and heights, you always lanyard your gear to your body. I’ve seen guys lose night-vision gear off their heads: Turn, whack the door of the helo cabin, the night vision pops off—and if it’s not tied in to your body, it’s going over and into the drink. Losing an expensive piece of night-vision equipment is bad enough—but losing a weapon? In career terms, that’s suicide.

  The moment that MP-5 hit the deck, the guy who’d dropped it scooped it up and kept right on going. Chief Dye was in the other bird, so he didn’t see it and didn’t have to suffer this humiliation in person. Nobody else on our craft even noticed that it had happened, but I sure as hell did.

  Nothing like this would ever have happened in GOLF platoon, and if it had, the guy perpetrating the misdeed would have been sent back to the fleet with his trident ripped from his chest. I’d seen it happen. When we reached Pearl Harbor on our way to the Persian Gulf the previous summer, for a day or two we had one weapon unaccounted for. For a SEAL, this particular brand of carelessness is one of the worst offenses you can commit. It turned out to be Chuck “Liberty Risk” Landry’s fault. After that episode a few years earlier when Landry had gotten drunk and wrangled with the base security guards, they’d given him a second chance. Losing track of that weapon in Hawaii was strike two, and there would be no strike three. The weapon did finally turn up, but Landry got sent back home. Brutal, but that’s how we did things�
�at least in GOLF platoon.

  I held my tongue throughout the rest of that fast-roping exercise, but once we got back on the aircraft carrier at the end of the day to debrief, I let them have it.

  “Look, guys, I know I’m brand-new here, but I have to tell you, that was inexcusable. Who the hell dropped that gun? That thing could have easily gone over the side, and if it had we would be in some serious shit right now!”

  A big guy named Gilroy Jones raised his hand. “It was me.”

  This was my introduction to the realities of ECHO platoon. Jones was a tough dude but a complete train wreck of a soldier. First time through BUD/S he got to Third Phase and then came up against a domestic violence charge for hitting the lady he was with. He made it all the way through his second time, went to Team Three, and screwed up there. It was amazing to me that he hadn’t been fired from the team—and now, he had screwed up our exercise. Turned out, he had made some sort of jury-rigged sling for his MP-5 out of surgical tubing, and in the course of the exercise it got hung up and broke.

  It wasn’t just Gilroy Jones. These guys were a mess in general. It was so clear that they had never had any really good leadership. They’d had no one to look up to or learn from.

  We had a 90/10 rule in the teams: 90 percent of the guys on any given team are going to be solid, and 10 percent will be guys you hope will get kicked out or transferred to another team. That’s just the way it is, and you can live with that. The problem with ECHO platoon was that we had far more than our fair share of 10-percenters. In a platoon of sixteen guys, 10 percent means one or two fuckups at most. Right away I identified half a dozen guys there as weak links, including our third officer and AOIC (assistant officer in charge)! Oh, great. Even our second and third in command were misfits. (Hadn’t Keith said they’d shit-canned the whole leadership? What did they do—replace them with guys who were worse?)

  I felt like I had been yanked from playing on a World Series team and kicked downstairs to a farm league. I wanted to go back and beg for my old place on GOLF team again. Screw the fifteen grand—I wanted to be back with my guys.

  During that same fast-roping exercise I’d noticed that our corpsman, Jackie, had his entire med gear with him. Jackie was a really quiet guy and would speak sort of under his breath so you couldn’t quite hear what he said.

  When I saw that he was lugging along this huge pack, I said, “Hey, Jackie, why are you fast-roping with this big pack?” He said something back, although I have no idea what, so I elaborated. “All you should be bringing on a jump like this is basic trauma gear. You need to shit-can that whole bag.”

  Christ on a crutch. I wasn’t even a medic, and here I was telling him how to pack his medical gear.

  Jackie wasn’t bad, though; he was just wet behind the ears and hadn’t had strong leadership. In fact, he ended up becoming a solid citizen in the platoon and going on to join a tier-one unit and have a solid career in the community. A handful of the others were consistent screwups, though. A few of them would very nearly get me killed in the mountains of Afghanistan.

  Not that ECHO platoon was all bad. Our breacher, Shawn, had been a BUD/S classmate of mine and was a very solid guy. After this disastrous day of fast-roping I took him aside and said, “Shawn, what the hell? How can you stand there and let these guys be such a mess?”

  “I know,” he said, “but I didn’t think it was my place to tell them what to do.” I understood his point. Thank God Chris Dye was our chief; this was a guy I could work with. There were quite a few other solid guys there, too. Patrick had joined the platoon only recently and therefore had not suffered through the previous “leadership” at ECHO. It was clear right off the bat that Patrick was very sharp and an asset to the team. Heath Robinson, another guy who was fairly new to the platoon, also had his shit wired tight. A few years later, on an op where a group of SEALs took back a merchant vessel from some Somalian pirates, one of our men was jumped by a hiding pirate, the clinch too close for anyone to shoot. Heath pulled out his knife and cut the guy’s throat—one of the few SEALs since Vietnam to have a certified knife kill to his credit. Then there was Garrison, who joined at the same time I did. Garrison had been a marine before going through BUD/S and had been through some solid experiences with the Corps. Garrison was squared away, although with his marine background it took him a little doing to get accustomed to the SEALs and our, shall I say, lack of military bearing.

  Over the weeks after I arrived, things gradually started looking better as a trickle of additional guys joined us after finishing whatever workup they were on, further helping shore up the platoon. Two of these, like Shawn, were BUD/S classmates: Ali, our senior corpsman, and Chris Osman.

  Osman and I went way back, all the way to that moment on the beach in Third Phase when he became an accidental hero. Throughout BUD/S I couldn’t stand him, but during our time together in Team Three we gradually became friends. Soon we would also work together closely as the platoon’s two snipers, and our time in the Gulf and Afghanistan would cement the friendship.

  A former marine, Osman was an excellent SEAL and a very squared-away dude. He can also be a frigging nightmare to be around. He is an intense guy and has a personality that can grate on you. Spend much time with him and chances are you’ll end up either loving him or hating him.

  Osman was also something of a legend among the marine scout snipers. When he and Patrick went through the marine sniper course together, as part of their final training exercise they developed a mission plan that included monitoring the Camp Pendleton residence of the marine two-star general in charge as a surveillance target. Osman took the exercise a little further than planned: He broke into the guy’s house, snapped a bunch of pictures of its interior, and took the general’s starched camouflage uniform with its two stars from where it hung in the closet and sneaked it back out with him as plunder. The marine sniper instructors were terrified shitless when they found out what he’d done, and everyone tried to hush it up. Osman wore the purloined uniform for his class graduation photo. For years afterward I would run into Marine Corps snipers in the fleet who would ask me, after learning that I was in SEAL Team Three, “Hey, do you know that crazy SEAL, you know, the guy who broke into the general’s house and pinched his cammies?”

  Osman never went through the SEAL sniper course himself; as a former marine, he’d done that marine course instead. Because of this, one could make the plausible argument that he wasn’t technically a true SEAL sniper, something I proceeded to have a lot of fun giving him shit about. “Hey, Osman, how hard is that Marine Corps course?”

  Don’t get me wrong. The Marine Corps has great shooters, and they’re some of the best marksmen in the military. Osman also could shoot.

  With Osman and Ali joining the platoon, it was starting to feel like a minireunion. Those guys were happy to see me, and I was sure as hell glad to see them. I started feeling a bit better about my situation. Maybe life in ECHO platoon would be tolerable. I sure hoped so.

  EIGHT

  INTO THE WAR ON TERROR

  One fine fall day not long after wrapping up that workup with ECHO platoon, I got up at the crack of dawn to go surfing. Our platoon was about to rotate overseas (the whole reason I’d joined them in the first place), so I would soon be back out on the Persian Gulf, where we were scheduled to participate in the interdiction of oil-smuggling boats coming out of Iraq—the same mission I’d been hoping to participate in when the attack on the USS Cole tossed our plans out the window. That was still some weeks off, though. Gabriele was now eight months pregnant, and my command had granted me permission to stay stateside long enough to be there for the birth of our first child. After that I would go rejoin my platoon. For now, I was enjoying the R & R.

  I knew this would be my last day of surfing for a few days, so I made the most of it. The next day I was booked on a flight to Texas for a Stinger missile school at Fort Bliss that would last a few days. Always training.

  After an hour or two of surf
ing I returned home exhilarated and ready to start my day. Even after all the years and all the crazy things I’d done, from Dräger-diving underneath gigantic tankers to jumping out of planes at 20,000 feet, there was still no experience that beat being out in the surf in the chill of the early California morning, nothing but a sleek plank of lightweight foam like a membrane between my bare feet and the surging elements. It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world. I love it to this day.

  When I got in, I found Gabriele sitting not five feet from the television, enormously pregnant, staring at the screen. It was early still, barely six o’clock, but she was already up. She turned to look at me, her face pulled into an expression of speechless horror. I sat down next to her and started watching the live broadcast from New York City, just in time to see the second plane hit the South Tower. The attack on U.S. soil that I’d worried about after standing watch over the crippled USS Cole was no longer an abstraction.

  Within days I had joined my platoon on a nonstop flight to the Middle East. By the time our son Jackson came into the world on the last day of November, I was in the Persian Gulf and headed for Afghanistan.

  * * *

  We left North Island Naval Air Station in a big C-5 cargo plane, stopped off in Washington state to pick up some Army Rangers, made a short refueling stop in Iceland and then a brief overnight somewhere in Spain. Barely twenty-four hours after leaving San Diego we were receiving a briefing at Camp Doha, the principal U.S. base in Kuwait, where we were told we would be participating in, yes, the interdiction of noncompliant vessels in the Gulf.

  Ironically, this was now a bit of a letdown. A year ago I’d been looking forward to exactly this mission. Hell, just a month ago we would have been thrilled to be on this assignment. Finally, some action! we’d have thought. Now everything had changed. Our country had been attacked in a brutal and unprovoked strike that slaughtered thousands of civilians. It was payback time, and we were champing at the bit to get our asses where we could do some serious damage in the name of our people back home. Interdiction of Saddam’s oil smugglers, until recently a cherry assignment, now seemed like a time-consuming detour.