by Brandon Webb
Devised a practical test that evaluates student wind calling and spotting abilities; simple and extremely effective.
Now we were graduating guys who were going out into the field and being absolutely deadly, whether in pairs or operating on their own.
We also introduced a new structural element that had the effect of raising the student-instructor relationship to a whole new level: We divided the class into pairs and assigned each pair to a specific instructor as their personal mentor. In effect, this created a kind of competition among the instructors. You didn’t want one of your pairs to be the pair who failed the course, because that would reflect poorly on you as an instructor. Suddenly each of us had ownership of these specific students, which created an incentive for all of us to really get in there, spend some extra time with these guys, and make sure they knew what the hell they were doing. When I went through the course in 2000 we had some instructors who didn’t give a shit if we passed or not, and at least one who was almost trying to get us to fail. Now we had built into the system an intrinsic motivation for every instructor to be working with students that they strongly wanted to succeed. In all my time there, I only had one student fail. All the others passed—because I’d be damned if my guys were going to wash out!
Our instructors were teaching better, and our students were learning better. The course standards got harder, if anything—but something fascinating happened: Instead of flunking higher numbers of students, we started graduating more. Before we redid the course, SEAL sniper school had an average attrition rate of about 30 percent. By the time we had gone through the bulk of our overhaul, it had plummeted to less than 5 percent.
In that same December eval, my commanding officer wrote:
Primary instructor for Sniper COI [course of instruction]. Graduated highest percentage of qualified snipers in Naval Special Warfare Center (NSWC) history.
For the first few pilot courses, we had constantly changed things around and experimented, designing and implementing improvements and refinements on the fly. By the end of 2004, after we’d been doing this for about a year straight, we settled on a finalized curriculum that we then continued to teach without much change—but we also built into it the idea of continuous improvement from that point on. Today the course goes through an annual review to make sure it continues adapting to changes on the battlefield and to new developments in technology.
* * *
Earlier I said that intellectual capacity was the first trait we look for in a sniper, that physical ability, as important as it is, is only 10 percent of the game. Of all the changes we made in the course, the one that felt most significant to me and that I was proudest of was our system for mental management.
When we first encountered the concept of mental management it was being taught exclusively to instructors as a way to help us coach and teach more effectively. In essence, it was all about where we as instructors focused a student’s attention.
Say you’re doing batting practice with a kid and you notice he’s standing with his knees buckled in, shoulders misaligned, hands spread wide apart on the bat. Your impulse might be to start telling the kid everything he’s doing wrong. If you focus his attention on all these wrong things, though, what you’re really doing is imprinting them into the poor kid’s mind, with the result that they start becoming ingrained habits. If you say, “Hey, you’re flinching. Every time the ball comes at you, you’re flinching! Stop flinching,” then what the hell’s that little kid thinking about? He’s thinking about flinching!
If instead you say, “Hey, put your hands closer together, like this, and look: feet apart.” Then you’re showing him what to do rather than focusing his attention on what not to do.
A beginner typically starts out very focused on everything that’s going on. He’ll tend to absorb whatever is thrown at him. He is, in other words, highly programmable. The question is, as an instructor, what are you going to feed that rapt attention: bad habits or good habits?
This translated directly to instruction on the sniper course. In the old days instructors would bark at us for everything we did wrong. “Stop! You’re putting your finger on the trigger wrong! When you pull the trigger, you’re flinching! You’re jerking the barrel! You’re fucking up!” Suddenly we’d be thinking, Holy shit, there’re twenty things I’m doing wrong! Instead, we learned we could give a student three positive commands, three things he could do to correct those errors, and now he’d be developing good habits from day 1.
I have to admit, I was not completely on board with the whole concept of mental management when I first bumped into it, and I had to overcome my own skepticism. Shortly after Eric and I checked into NSWC to start working with the basic sniper course, we and a handful of other instructors were brought out to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a one-week course taught by a champion marksman named Lanny Bassham, one of the pioneers of mental management. I was pretty dubious. Mental management? What, like some positive-thinking guru? Oh boy. “Great,” I said to Eric, “when is Tony Robbins gonna come in and blow smoke up our asses?”
My attitude didn’t last long. Bassham is such an amazing, down-to-earth guy—and what he taught us was nothing short of incredible.
“I wasn’t good at sports,” Lanny told us. “I was kind of this weak, goofy kid. My dad said, ‘Hang in there, we’re going to find something for you. Everyone has a talent.’”
Lanny found his talent when he got into competitive shooting. After college he joined the army and was assigned to their marksmanship unit, which is comprised of the best match shooters in the world. By the time he went to shoot in the 1972 Olympics in Munich at the age of twenty-five, Lanny was famous, the youngest world champion in the sport, and everyone expected him to shoot gold.
“I was on the bus with a bunch of competitors from different countries,” he said. “I heard some Russians in the seat behind me talking about how much pressure I must be under, with the entire reputation of the United States on my shoulders, and how they were glad they weren’t me—and they started getting in my head.”
By the time he stepped off the bus, Lanny was completely rattled. “I shot the worst match of my life,” he said. This being Lanny, the worst match of his life meant he came in second—but he was devastated. He came back to the States and visited with a handful of sports psychologists to see if he could understand what had happened to him, and they all said the same thing: “Hey, it’s okay to be number two. Olympic silver is a great achievement, Lanny. You should be satisfied with that.”
Lanny said, “Screw that. I don’t think so!”
He spent the next few years interviewing dozens of gold-medal champions and recording all the specific traits he could identify in his interviews. They gave him an earful; you don’t get to be a gold medalist without doing an awful lot of self-examination and studying best practices and key practice/performance tactics and strategies. Out of everything he heard, he found there were two specific traits they all shared in common.
First was complete and total confidence. Not arrogance or cockiness, but an absolute, unshakable confidence in their ability to perform regardless of adversity. Here’s how Lanny described this trait:
If I’m a champion tennis player, playing a championship game, it doesn’t matter if the strings start popping off, or my favorite racket breaks in the middle of the game. I’ll pick up a piece of plywood, tape it to a stick, and I’ll still beat you on the tennis court.
It’s an attitude that says, I will win no matter what. These people didn’t just want to win, they expected to win. When they went out to compete, they had already won in their minds.
We’ve all seen people who have the talent and skill to win, but at the last minute something goes wrong: their favorite bat breaks, or a golf swing misses, or something in their environment distracts them—the way Lanny was psyched out by the Russians’ taunts—and their game just unravels. It didn’t unravel because the bat broke, Lanny was saying, or because the pitch went wild, or be
cause of the other teams’ taunts. It unraveled because it was vulnerable.
For champions that doesn’t happen. Their game is invulnerable. That’s the kind of confidence Lanny was talking about—and that was the kind of confidence we wanted to instill in our sniper course graduates.
The other common trait was that they all did some kind of mental rehearsal—closing their eyes and practicing their winning game in their heads, over and over again.
Lanny told us about a navy pilot he met in the seventies named Captain Jack Sands. Captain Sands was shot down while serving in Vietnam and spent seven years in a prison camp in Hanoi, confined in isolation with no physical activity. In order to preserve his sanity, he decided to practice his golf game. Of course, he couldn’t physically play golf—but the 5' × 5' cage he was in couldn’t prevent him from creating a course in his mind. In his imagination he evoked an image of a beautiful country club course, placed himself there, and let himself experience it all in great detail. He saw himself dressed in golfing clothes, smelled the trees and grass, and felt himself making each stroke as he played. Every day, for seven years, Captain Sands played a full eighteen holes in his mind while his body sat in his cage. He played it perfectly, never hooking, slicing, or missing a single shot or putt. Hey, he was making it all up, right? Why not make it perfect?
Here was the amazing part. Before joining the navy, Captain Sands was an average weekend golfer, barely breaking 100. After he was finally released from his captivity and made his way home, he eventually got out onto a real grass-and-air golf course, and his first day out on the green he shot a stunning score of 74. He had taken more than twenty strokes off his game—without once laying a hand on a club. (By the way, some have claimed this story is an urban legend and there was no such person. It’s no urban legend: Lanny sat next to the guy on a seven-hour flight to a world championship match they attended together.)
The point, said Lanny, was that your reality is defined by your mind, not your external environment. Jack Sands’s golf game changed so dramatically because that was how he had programmed his brain to see it.
Lanny went on to tell us about a national shooting championship he participated in. As part of his preparation, he had spent time mentally rehearsing the moment when he would be kneeling there and suddenly realize, Holy shit, I’m about to shoot a perfect score. What so often happens in a high-stakes situation like this? The realization that you are on a roll knocks you off balance. It’s that Uh-oh, I’m so close, what if I screw up now? moment that can come with asking someone out on a first date, taking your first driver’s test, asking for a raise, or doing anything risky and important in life. We’re not ready for this place of victory and don’t know how to react now that we are here–so we choke. Not Lanny. He’d rehearsed that moment so many times that it was now as familiar to him as coming home.
“When I hit that moment in that championship,” he said, “I recognized it like an old friend. Just like I’d done every time I’d rehearsed it, I took two deep breaths, said to myself, I’m shooting the next three shots perfectly, then took my time. Boom. Boom. Boom.”
He shot a perfect score.
Lanny returned to the Olympics in 1976, and this time, using his mental management system, he took the Olympic gold. Over the following years he dominated the field, winning twenty-two world individual and team titles and setting four world records on top of the gold medal he took in Montreal. Lanny incorporated what he’d learned into a whole mental management program, which he wrote about in his book, With Winning in Mind. His system became so popular that other coaches and athletes started having him come train them.
We hired Lanny to help us apply his methods to our sniper course—not just for the instructors but for the students. We also went and studied what the British and the army and Marine Corps were doing and consulted with coaches on a wide range of championship athletes, collating and discussing everything we learned. We ran a few pilot courses, experimenting in our live laboratory, trying out different techniques and seeing how each one affected the students. Eventually we developed an entire system of mental management and integrated it into our marksmanship class.
The first time I started teaching the mental management material as part of our course, some of the students were just as skeptical as I had been at first. I had a pair of Team One guys, Brant and Lieberman, as my personals. We issued Lanny’s book to the whole class, but these two guys were my guys, so I also made them listen to Lanny’s CDs. Every night, Brant and Lieberman would be out in the car listening to these CDs, and the other guys would ride them unmercifully. “Hey, you guys, you gonna go make out in the car again tonight?”
The two guys ignored them and kept listening. The others kept taunting, too—but not for long. When that class’s first shooting test came up, a snaps and movers test, Brant and Lieberman both shot perfect 100s. We had never had a pair shoot perfects 100s. In the second part of the test, Brant shot another 100 and Lieberman shot a 95.
It was the highest score in U.S. Navy SEAL sniper course history.
Talk about people swallowing their pride: Suddenly all the other guys were begging to borrow Brant and Lieberman’s CDs and burning copies for themselves. Before we knew it, the whole parking lot must have turned into a make-out session—because every night the parking lot was full of pairs of guys in their rental cars listening to those CDs.
* * *
Despite all the progress we were making, throughout the year a darkening cloud hung over our work at the sniper course. It was a problem that made the issue with Chief Carver the year before seem like a summer vacation, and it kept getting worse.
Barely a month after Eric and I had checked into NSWC, Senior Chief Nielson pulled me into his office one day and said, “Brandon, I’m retiring.”
I didn’t know whether to be shocked or pissed. In truth, I was both. “What do you mean, retiring? Who’s replacing you?”
He paused, then looked me square in the eye and said, “Master Chief Harvey Clayton.”
Clayton had a reputation, and it wasn’t good. I barely knew him, just enough to say hi as we passed in the halls, but it’s a small community. I knew he had run the course many years earlier. I also knew he’d spent most of his time in the fleet navy and had really absorbed that culture—not usually a good mix with SEALs. What’s more, while he was a very good match shooter, Harvey had never done any kind of operational tour.
He also had the reputation of being a real prick to work for.
“Harvey? Are you serious? I just signed up for a couple of years here, and now you’re sticking me with Harvey Clayton?”
Senior Chief Nielson shook his head. He knew exactly what I was talking about. “Look, I’m sorry—but listen, you’re the most experienced guy here, and I’m setting you up to be course manager.”
That latter point was no small thing. To put it in perspective: The sniper school was taught by course instructors, typically E-5 and E-6 petty officers, who reported to the course manager, usually a chief, who managed the curriculum and ran the whole course. The course manager in turn reported to the division officer (Senior Chief Nielson, soon to be Master Chief Harvey Clayton), who ran interference between the course itself and the parent command. I was still an E-6, and teaching this course was my first LPO (leading petty officer) billet. By making me course manager, Senior Chief Nielson was saying he would be giving me an E-7 billet—in essence, setting me up to make chief petty officer the moment I became eligible.
Advancement to chief petty officer (E-7 and above) is a big deal in the navy. It’s more than just a pay raise. Chief petty officers are considered a breed apart, a community within the community. And making chief after being in just over ten years? That would be a seriously big deal. A lot of guys go through their whole careers without making chief.
I understood what Senior Chief Nielson was saying and what it meant—but, man oh man, I did not want to work for this guy.
As it turned out, working for Harvey
Clayton was not as bad as I’d expected. It was worse. Of all the leaders good and bad, all the bosses I’ve had throughout my entire career, from Petty Officer First Class Howard in boot camp to Chief Clarin in HS-6 to Commander Smith in Afghanistan, Master Chief Harvey Clayton was the worst.
Harvey was not much enamored with technology, or progress, or change. He was not interested in whatever improvements and new developments we wanted to bring to the course. He was too insecure to hear new ideas from anyone. If he had supported us the way Senior Chief Nielson had done, or even just stayed out of the way and let us do what we were there to do, he could have taken credit for all of it, and we would have been happy to let him do it. He couldn’t get his own ego out of the way long enough to see that. Instead, he just wanted to rewind everything and have it all go back to the way it used to be. He also was quite clear that he was in charge; it was his show, and if he said no, that meant no.
One afternoon we were out at Coalinga teaching a course and one of our instructors, Arty, had pulled a group of students aside to give them some coaching on elevation. Arty was a very smart guy and especially sharp with technology; he could write code and had a reputation (deserved) as an Internet technology guru. Whenever Arty talked about anything technological, I made sure to listen.
“So, you adjusted your elevation when you shot this morning,” he was explaining, “but now that you’re shooting in the afternoon, you’ll find that when you shoot at 200 yards your existing 200-yard adjustment is an inch too high. That’s because it’s a good 20 degrees warmer now than it was this morning, and as the temperature increases your chamber pressure also increases, which translates into higher muzzle velocity. So now you have to bring your elevation down an inch to compensate—”
“Stop!” Suddenly there was Harvey, striding out onto the range and interrupting Arty right in the middle of his class. “Stop, stop, stop! You guys, listen, you just trust your dope.” (Dope meaning “data on personal equipment,” the elevation data from a data book.) “Trust your dope. Don’t start changing your settings and messing everything around. Trust your dope!”
