by Brandon Webb
We would hunt in the mornings, hold classes in the afternoons, long-distance shooting courses and things like that, then hunt again in the evening. (Our students blew the minds of some local hunters, too, because we were nailing deer at distances like 600 to 800 yards.) At the five-star lodge where we stayed, we’d come in from hunting at ten in the morning to a full country breakfast spread. At night we’d come back from hunting and dress out our deer or whatever we’d caught, wash up, and then sit down to an amazing dinner.
Everyone in the cell was a pretty damn good cook, with the exception of my buddy Eric and one other guy, Bill. I’m not sure who started it, but soon we were taking turns making lunch for each other. Here we were, a bunch of trained killers, trying our level best to outdo each other in the kitchen and arguing over who had the best recipe. It would have made a great reality television show. We had fantastic kitchen action and great food, only instead of the usual boring cooking-show banter, our lunch hour was filled with X-rated stories that would make a hooker blush. (This show would have to go on cable.) We were as competitive as Navy SEALs can be, too. It didn’t matter if we were trying to kick the shit out of each other on a swim, a training run, or in the effort to come up with the best recipes, we were always in it to come out on top. I never had a bad meal the whole time I was there.
Chief Gardner, our senior member and veteran of Somalia and the Gulf War, made one of the best tri-tip marinades on the West Coast.
Johnny, another instructor, was a great hunter and fisherman. He was the biggest, loudest, most boisterous character in Sniper Cell, but he was also one of the few guys in the cell not to have any combat experience, at least not at the time. Naturally we reminded him of this several times a day, and it drove him nuts. He had always been one step behind the action, in a few cases literally missing the boat when some serious action was about to go down. I think we would have left it alone, but it made him so crazy that we just had to give him massive hell for it. One day I put together a Rainbow Coalition Medal for him (completely spurious, of course), and we held a formal ceremony to award him this citation, which singled out “his innate cowardice and keen ability to avoid combat action at all costs.” We had quite the laugh at his expense. To Johnny’s credit, he proudly displayed the award up to the day he left the cell. He went on to become one of the most accomplished combat SEALs from the West Coast.
Johnny was famous for his hickory-bacon-wrapped venison with jalapeño peppers.
Bill was a very quiet guy and extremely professional in everything he did, a very solid sniper, instructor, and stand-up guy. However, Bill could not cook worth a damn, and we reminded him of this with great frequency. He tried to cobble together some sort of dish once, but whatever it was turned out to be such an abomination that he threw in the towel and never tried again.
Eric is as terrible as a cook as he is excellent as a friend. He has trouble microwaving popcorn without burning it. Even today, at his own backyard cookouts, I have to man the grill for him.
And me? I became famous (within the cell, at least) for my homemade mango salsa; I even grew my own peppers. My salsa, combined with white albacore tuna salad sandwich, was very tasty. When it was my turn to cook I’d whip up my mango salsa, maybe grill some yellowtail and serve it with steamed rice and some sort of homemade sauce. If they gave medals for cooking, I’m pretty sure a few of us would have been contenders.
Of course, they didn’t give medals for cooking—but there was a promotion coming, and one I wasn’t expecting. Every year, at the end of the year, they would traditionally give one person in the entire command a meritorious promotion. I knew very well that in this command, I was surrounded by superstars. Chief Gardner had put me in, though, and to my great surprise, at the end of 2002, after six months at Sniper Cell, I was selected for early advancement and meritoriously promoted to petty officer first class, E-6. It was one of the proudest moments of my navy career.
But not the proudest moment. That was still to come.
* * *
As much fun as we were having at Sniper Cell, there was one dark cloud over those months in late 2002. Shortly after I arrived, it became painfully clear that something was up with Senior Chief Seth Carver.
I knew Senior Chief Carver from sniper school in 2000 when he took over the course from his predecessor, Master Chief Jordan. Now, in addition to being master chief of the West Coast sniper school, he was also department head of the West Coast TRADET Sniper Cell. Chief Gardner was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the cell, but it was ultimately Seth’s command, and it was he who interacted with the rest of TRADET and the navy command structure—and this was becoming a problem.
TRADET would hold morning meetings that Chief Carver attended, representing our cell. I started seeing him roll in barely five minutes before that day’s meeting, his hair all messed up, and grab a scrap of paper out of the trash can to jot some hasty notes before dashing into the meeting. What the hell’s going on with Chief Carver? I thought. He’s a mess!
None of this behavior computed. I remembered Chief Carver as a 100 percent hardcore professional back at sniper school just a few years earlier. Now he seemed a complete train wreck. What was the deal?
A few of the guys pulled me aside and told me what was happening.
In the few years that had elapsed since I’d gone through Chief Carver’s sniper course, he’d had a rough time of it. Some thorny family problems had spiraled out of control, and Chief Carver ended up in an acrimonious divorce contest that was tearing him apart. Soon he was drinking heavily and God knows what else.
By that winter it got so bad that something was going to blow. Chief Gardner was doing his best to keep this all under wraps, but Chief Carver was teetering close to the edge of being thrown out of the navy. Finally Chief Gardner got us all together and we staged a full-blown intervention, after which the navy put him through rehab—and he managed to pull it out and get himself back on track.
Chief Carver had nineteen years in at that point, one year from retirement. If he’d been in the regular navy and this whole drama had gone down, he would almost certainly have been tossed out with a “Sorry, hate to see ya go” and maybe some kind of rehab at the VA if he was lucky, but no retirement: screwed, nineteen years down the tubes. But with the help of his SEAL buddies he was able to put in one more functional year and salvage his retirement.
That’s how it is with our community. SEALs take care of their own. If you had an attitude, if you were a persistent screwup who threatened to pull the standards down for the rest of us, they were merciless. However, if you were a good guy who had the misfortune to go through some adversity or other, they wouldn’t just toss you aside. If you had earned some respect and proven yourself as a good operator, they would do everything they could to take care of you and keep your career alive. And that’s exactly what we did with Chief Carver.
* * *
In the summer of 2003, after I’d been at TRADET for a little over a year, Chief Gardner came to Eric and me one day and told us that the guys who ran the basic SEAL sniper school had come to him for some help.
“They’re completely redoing the course,” he said, “and they need a few experienced guys to go through a pilot version with them, decide which parts of the curriculum to lock down. I thought we could loan you two out for a few months.”
Eric and I both felt honored to be asked and psyched at the prospect. Rewriting the basic sniper school course, from the ground up? Talk about having an impact on the future of the U.S. military!
The year before, soon after I arrived at Sniper Cell, I’d been selected by WARCOM, the parent command for all the SEAL teams, to represent the entire SEAL community at Spec Ops Command in a review-and-selection process for the new SOPMOD kit’s weapon upgrade. SOPMOD stands for Special Operations Peculiar Weapons Modification; the SOPMOD kit consists of everything that goes with the M-4, our basic assault rifle—flashlight, laser (visible and infrared), hand grips, scope, night sight, some ten items in all. I
flew out to the East Coast, to Virginia and North Carolina, sat on a board with my corresponding representatives from the army and the air force, reviewed vendors’ presentations (i.e., pitches), tested out all sorts of weapons and other equipment, and determined what equipment the next generation would be using. The SOPMOD kit we put together there was what all our Special Ops guys used in Iraq and are still using today in Afghanistan. It was a huge responsibility—and an incredible honor.
And now we would be having a similar input into the SEAL sniper course curriculum. This was the chance of a lifetime.
The only thing we were not entirely thrilled about was the location where this would be happening. At the time there were still two sniper schools, one for the West Coast and one for the East, and this pilot program was happening at the latter. The East coast ran their school at Camp Atterbury, a massive World War II–era training facility. The two of us would have to spend three months far from home smack in the middle of hot, humid, uninteresting Indiana.
Now, if you happen to be from Indiana (or Illinois or Ohio or anywhere around there), please don’t be offended. I’m sure your homeland has much to offer and many wonderful features but we weren’t from there, and it wasn’t where we wanted to be, especially in the middle of the summer. Still, that’s where the new course was being launched, so off to Indiana we went.
There’s always been a slightly weird dynamic between the East Coast and West Coast teams; not outright hostile, and not exactly competitive. Maybe “suspicious” is the best word. There’s a perception that on the West Coast it’s all surfing and suntans, while on the East Coast they really work. If I were to drop in on an East Coast SEAL team they might say something like “Oh hey, what’s up, Hollywood?” Coming into this situation as two guys from the West Coast, there as experts to weigh in on their East Coast course—this could have felt a little strained. But it didn’t, not even slightly, and the main reason for that was Master Chief Manty, the East Coast division officer. A born leader, Master Chief Manty was extremely intelligent and a very solid guy; he brought us in and made us feel right at home. We also met and worked with the West Coast division leader, Senior Chief Nielson. Both had done their last tours with DEVGRU, and both were phenomenal to work with.
It’s incredibly rewarding to be part of a team where you’re valued for your experience and where you’re able to genuinely influence change. That was the atmosphere we encountered out at Camp Atterbury. Eric and I showed up in Indiana in early August and worked our asses off for the next three months. Master Chief Manty had introduced some fascinating and powerful changes to the course (more about that shortly), and we both clicked with his ideas immediately. We worked like crazy to nail down that pilot course, redesigning things on the fly just as we had with the elements of the advanced courses at TRADET a year earlier. It was an all-out ninety-day sprint.
When the pilot course finished, we returned to our posts at TRADET, where we resumed teaching our training blocks, and life went back to normal—but not for long. Shortly after we got back from that stint in Indiana, Chief Gardner came to talk to Eric and me again.
“Okay, guys,” he said, “here’s what’s happening. Senior Chief Nielson wants you down at the sniper school full-time to continue reworking the course.”
Apparently Senior Chief Nielson had been selling this idea hard to our command. It had taken some finagling, because I was supposed to be halfway through a three-year commitment to TRADET, and it was pretty much the same for Eric. Yet he managed to swing it. Now that he’d sold it to TRADET, he had to sell it to us, too.
In fact, I’d been strongly thinking about trying to transfer over to the Naval Special Warfare Center (NSWC) to work as a BUD/S instructor. After a solid year and a half at Sniper Cell, I figured I’d probably had whatever impact I was going to have there, and BUD/S was an attractive job. I’d be working four days a week, with plenty of time off to be with my family. Our daughter, Madison, had been born that January, so I now had a wife and two kids, and they deserved a dad who was there at least a decent amount of time out of the week. On the other hand, I didn’t see how I could say no. In effect, Senior Chief Nielson was offering us an opportunity to write a bit of military history. How could we resist?
* * *
Thus began another intense period of redesign, much like our first few months at TRADET except that now, as we picked up where we’d left off just weeks earlier, we were shaping the basic core training of all future SEAL snipers—shooting, stalking, the whole thing.
It was an incredibly creative time. We would roundtable our ideas, make decisions, and implement them the next day. We started going through everything we’d experienced when we went through the course ourselves and addressing whatever weak spots we’d seen. Before long we were completely overhauling the course, updating all the existing classes and adding some new ones.
For example, we began aggressively integrating technology into the training. At the time, sniper students were still being taught to survey their target terrain with binos and then sketch it out by hand—just like we’d been doing since Vietnam. Hey, when the last U.S. helicopter airlifted out after the fall of Saigon, I was not quite one year old! Wasn’t it about time to get with the times? We stopped the hand sketches and started showing our guys how to shoot and crop digital photos with Nikon cameras. We taught them how to use DLT-3500 software (the military version of Photoshop) to adjust levels and enhance a photograph’s readability and clarity, and how to annotate their field intelligence on a laptop, compress and encrypt the data, and send it via satellite back to the base. This turned into a mandatory two-week program called PIC (photographic intelligence course) that new students now went through just prior to starting the regular scout/sniper school.
We introduced ballistic software programs and focused on making sure these guys had a thorough understanding of external ballistics (what happens from the moment the bullet leaves the barrel until it hits the target). In the old course we were basically taught to call the wind and shoot well, period. Now we started digging into the subject and turning these guys into ballistics experts.
We used technology to get more exacting with our weapons as well. When I entered the course back in 2000, I had been stuck with a faulty sight that could have gotten me washed out, if I hadn’t insisted on having the rifle tested. Too often, I had seen similar problems tripping up great shooters. Now we had the technology to solve these problems before they happened. We taught our students how to use a chronograph, a device that measures the muzzle velocity in fps (feet per second) of each specific rifle.
Let’s say you have two identical .300 Win Mag bolt action rifles, both from the same manufacturer and even from the same manufacture batch. One could still be as much as several hundred fps slower than the other. For that matter, there are even variances in individual lots of ammunition. Granted, these variances will typically affect accuracy only to a minute degree, but add them all together, especially when you’re shooting at very long ranges, and it can make a critical difference. Perhaps we will eventually reach a level of manufacturing precision where that margin decreases to the point of insignificance. Perhaps. Right now, though, these individual variances are a fact of life, and we decided it was time to deal with it.
A chronograph can also help gauge the condition of the barrel. As I mentioned before, these rifles have a certain barrel life: Put your .300 Win Mag through a few thousand rounds and the barrel will start to go, which means your bullets will become troublingly inaccurate. We shot each student’s rifle through a chronograph to find out quickly whether or not its barrel had gone beyond its useful life.
Eric transformed the KIM (keep in memory) class by pioneering a whole new way of teaching memorization skills. Rather than relying on pure rote memory, with its endless repetition, he employed some impressive techniques that involved linking the objects or numbers you wanted to memorize with a systematic sequence of objects or sounds in your mind.
Eric was a
master at this. Just before teaching his first class of a new KIM session, he would look at the student roster and in five or ten minutes code all their data and store it into his memory. Then he’d walk into class, look at the assembled students, point to one at random and say, “Okay, you over there, what’s your name?” The guy would tell him his name, and Eric would nod and say, “Right, your Social Security number is…” and rattle off the guy’s social and phone number. Then he’d do the same thing with everyone else in the room. I watched him do this over and over, and it never failed to blow the minds of everyone in the class. Mind you, Eric didn’t have any natural gift of photographic memory. This was trained memory, and he trained all our guys to have that ability, too.
For my part, I pushed hard on shifting the curriculum so that all our students would come out of the course knowing how to deploy independently, as solo operators. The way it was before, you’d have one student who happened to be a little better on the spotting scope, while his partner might be a little weak on ballistics but be a crack shot. To me, that was a recipe for breeding weakness into our graduates. It seemed to me we needed to make sure that every one of these guys we graduated had a complete command of every piece of the picture and could deploy by himself. Practically speaking, in most of the jobs they would be doing out in the field they would be called upon to act as lone gunmen. How could you graduate a competent sniper who didn’t have a complete grasp of spotting?
I developed tests to make sure these guys knew ballistics—that if the shot went high, they knew in a split second how many minutes of angle they’d have to correct to have a center-mass, on-target hit the very next shot. I wanted to put each student through a whole range of scenarios where he would have to make these calculations himself and not rely on a spotter. The idea was to develop the complete package in every single sniper, with the full gamut of skills and no deficiencies. My December ’04 eval, a year after Eric and I started working consistently with the course, referred to this:
