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

by Brandon Webb

  On these practice stalks we gave the students time to clip off bits and pieces of natural vegetation to put all over their ghillie suits and hats so they would be fully camouflaged, and then hide themselves, at which point we would scan the field to judge how well they were hidden, in other words, whether or not we could detect them. We got the sign that everyone was fully vegged up and hidden, I put my binos to my eyes and started scanning—and right away found myself staring at this odd-looking ice plant.

  As I watched, that odd-looking ice-plant monster got to its feet and stood up.

  Here was the problem: Ice plant doesn’t grow six feet tall, and it also doesn’t suddenly haul itself up to a standing position. Sure enough, it was Marcus, covered with wilting scraps of vegetation. He looked like an ice-plant Sasquatch.

  “Oh, man,” I remember saying more than once during the course of those practice stalks, “it’s Marcus again.”

  Marcus and his shooting partner were one of my two pairs in that course, and I often took them out on the course after hours, quizzing them and working with them, doing whatever I could to make sure they were getting this down. This was exactly why we’d set up this mentor system: so that the instructors would take ownership of their pairs and have a vested interest in their success.

  As much as we all put into it, though, it wasn’t enough: Marcus didn’t make it. He was crushed, and so were we; he was an excellent shooter and as solid a SEAL as they come, and we all badly wanted to pass him—but we hadn’t succeeded in getting him through that concealment and stalking phase.

  So what did he do? He turned right around and went through the course a second time, the whole damn three months of it. This is a guy who does not know the meaning of the word “quit.”

  The second time through the course, Marcus was partnered with a BUD/S friend of his named Tej, who was even bigger (and even louder) than Marcus. Easily the biggest guys in the class, these two were so outrageous and boisterous I nearly had to separate them. At the same time, they kept that class in line. We had one student who was a career complainer, and more than one who tried to give us a hard time—but whenever someone started piping up or getting out of line, Tej and Marcus would shut them down. They were rowdy, hilarious, impossible, and two of the most standup guys we’d ever had.

  Once again, Marcus and his partner were my personals, and once again, I was determined to see him succeed. Of course, we wanted every one of our students to succeed, but Marcus was so damn likable and such a good guy that we really wanted him to make it. He knew he’d have to get through on his own merits, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to do everything I could to make sure that happened.

  When it came to the stalking portion he started having a rough time again—but at a certain point it just clicked for him, and from then on he did really well. This time around, he graduated with flying colors. I don’t know who was happier about it, Marcus or us. I’d say we were all pretty fired up.

  Just as he was graduating, Marcus approached me to ask a favor. “Hey,” he said, “I’m about to deploy to Afghanistan, but we’ve got this big family event happening in Texas. Is there any way I could not do that FTX?”

  Normally after graduating the course you could take up to thirty days’ leave to spend time with your family, but Marcus had already sacrificed his leave time to get himself placed immediately into the sniper course for his second go at it. Now the only way he could see his family before deploying would be if we let him out of the FTX, or final training exercise, which would normally add about one more week’s time on the course. The FTX was a graded mission, so theoretically it was mandatory, but hell, Marcus had clearly made it through at that point, so I worked it out for him to skip it and have that week with his family.

  The week after that family event he was on a plane to Afghanistan.

  What happened next is the subject of his book. Marcus and three teammates—Matt Axelson (Morgan Luttrell’s best friend), Danny Dietz, and Michael Murphy—went out on a reconnaissance mission in northern Afghanistan, not far from the area where we had run so many missions with ECHO platoon. The mission went bad, and soon the four were scrambling across the brutal Afghan terrain under heavy fire. Marcus watched as his teammate and brother’s best friend died in his arms. Murphy and Dietz were killed, too, as were all sixteen of the men (eight SEALs and eight Army Airborne “Night Stalkers”) dispatched as a QRF to rescue Marcus’s team. It was the worst U.S. loss of life in a single event in Afghanistan—a grisly record of tragedy that was broken only six years later when a Chinook helo was shot down in August 2011.

  We were devastated when we heard the news. I’d lost other friends before, but this was the worst. I’d gotten close to all those guys during the course and had especially come to know Marcus and Axelson really well. As far as we knew, Marcus had died, too. That was what almost everyone believed (although Morgan insisted that he knew his twin brother was still alive). It wasn’t until five days later that we learned Marcus had miraculously pulled through.

  Badly wounded and with all his buddies gone, this big Texan who had failed stalk after stalk when he first landed in our course had managed to walk and crawl undetected through some 7 miles of hostile terrain, somehow evading capture and killing 6 more Taliban fighters along the way, until he made it to an Afghan village that shielded him until he could be rescued.

  Marcus was the only one out of the entire operation who made it home alive.

  The next time I saw Marcus was more than a year later, in the late summer of 2006, on the deck of the USS Midway off San Diego where the navy was holding a big fund-raiser. He and his coauthor, Patrick Robinson, had just finished writing Lone Survivor, although it would not come out on the bookstands until the following summer. I spotted him at the event and went over to talk with him.

  “Hey, Marcus,” I said.

  “Hey, Brandon,” he replied.

  We embraced each other, then quickly caught each other up on what was going on in our lives. There was quite a crowd around us, and we both knew we wouldn’t have more than a minute to talk. He grabbed me by both shoulders and said, “Brandon, listen. You need to know, that stalking course? That saved my life. If you hadn’t pounded that training into me, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”

  His voice choked, and I saw tears in his eyes. I was getting pretty emotional myself.

  “You saved my life, man,” he repeated, “and I want you to know that, and I want to thank you for it.”

  I thought about all he had been through in Afghanistan, watching his friends die one by one, the long days and longer nights hidden away in that Afghan village while the Taliban hunted for him, not knowing whether he would make it out alive. I flashed on all the time we’d spent in the course, the hours we put in together long after the day’s studies were officially over, shaping him into a first-class stalker. I thought about the hours Eric and I and the rest of us had put in crafting and refining that course, the strain on our families while we were away, even the long months of enduring the reign of Harvey Clayton … and knew that this made it all way, way past worthwhile.

  That was my proudest moment as a SEAL.

  CONCLUSION

  SEPTEMBER 2006, WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN. Even now, I couldn’t tell you the exact day. All I know is this: I had gone into this building with an assault team and now found myself standing alone in what looked like an abandoned warehouse, a dimly-lit clear-span space about the size of an average high school gymnasium. And I was in it, deep. Whoever the anonymous characters were who occupied this place, I knew their mission was to break me down to my constituent parts. I was pretty sure I would be more useful to them alive than dead. But you can never be completely sure about these things.

  In the faint light I began surveying my surroundings.

  The walls were painted black, lending an even darker aspect to the intimidating pall of my new digs. Loud rock music blared from oversized speakers, adding to the sense of confusion and disorientation. At my
feet I could make out a large red circle painted crudely onto the floor, as if I were standing in the middle of a target where I was the bull’s-eye. I smiled briefly. My old friend, the red circle. Maybe this wasn’t a simile or metaphor. Maybe this was a target. Maybe I was the bull’s-eye. All I knew was that a world of hurt was coming my way, and I’d be damned if I was going to give ground. They could attack me, hurt me, even try their level best to kill me, but I wasn’t about to cave in or back down.

  I was going to hold this damned red circle no matter what came at me.

  As I stood there thinking these thoughts, there was motion behind me and a hood suddenly came down over my head and I was pitched into blackness. Didn’t hear him coming. Whoever this sonofabitch was, he had already impressed me. Of course, with those speakers filling the room with their godawful din it wasn’t all that hard to stay under the sound radar. Still, my hearing is pretty damn good—and I hadn’t heard a thing.

  Whatever came next, it was going to be serious. The people who brought me here were doing everything they could to throw me off balance. I knew they expected me to panic, but I would not be giving them that satisfaction—or that advantage. My SEAL training taught me to prepare for situations and moves like this. I had already rehearsed a range of worst-case scenarios in my head and was ready for whatever they might throw at me.

  Let the punishment begin.

  Nothing happened.

  I continued standing there, blinded inside my hood, reflexes ready, senses as acute as I could muster. My ears strained to hear past the distorted cacophony of hyperamplified rock; my nostrils flared to pick up any scent I could through the thick cloth. Who was out there beyond the confines of this dark hood? Hostiles, clearly. How many? Empty seconds ticked by. Despite myself, I started to relax ever so slightly—and the instant I did so my unsensed enemy yanked the hood off my head and punched me square in the face, hard.

  My head snapped back, and I was temporarily blinded by the brilliant light that invariably follows a strong blow to the head. My training kicked in faster than any conscious thought process. My body had been trained to stand in a way that protects posture and ensures a balanced stance, and—to their surprise, I hoped—I did not lose my balance. Instead my head jerked back upright and my vision returned, and I instantly took in my situation: There was one immediate threat in front of me (the guy who had just clocked me in the face) and two more at a slight distance, coming at me from the far end of the room, both armed.

  I saw that my quick recovery from his frontal blow had caught Target Number One by surprise, slowing his reaction time by the barest fraction of a second, and I used that fractional gap to my immediate advantage. Instantly I slammed the guy, delivering a quick muzzle strike with my M-4 that put him down on the floor, prying open my advantage another two seconds—two seconds I was fully prepared to use with lethal finality. I snapped my rifle into position and unloaded two rounds to his head. Target One down and out.

  Now Target Two and Target Three were running at me full tilt, 10 feet and closing fast. No time to think. I shot the closest one first, two rounds to the head—but as I squeezed the trigger to put a third round into him, something screwed up. It was the kind of glitch you hope never happens, but you know that if it does, it will be at the worst possible moment: My M-4 malfunctioned.

  No time to curse, not even time to think.

  In situations like this you can’t afford to stop and deal with the malfunction. The M-4 was already gone from my mind as my fingers let go of it, my focus shifting single-mindedly to Target Three. The M-4 was slung in a way that caused it to swing down and to the left, out of the way of my secondary weapon, a Glock 17 holstered at my right side. As the rifle dropped and swung, my right hand had already drawn the pistol. I pumped four rounds into the last guy coming at me, and he, too, went down. As he fell he got off one shot, and it clipped my right forearm. It barely registered. My total focus was on Targets Two and Three, making sure they were down—all the way down. They were.

  Then there was nothing but stillness around me and the sound of hard, slow panting, a sound I realized was coming from me. I was hit but still standing. Breathing hard with sweat dripping down my face, I felt the salt sting in my eyes. I wiped my forehead, looked down—and smiled.

  I’d held my red circle.

  After another few moments the three men I’d taken down began to stir. Gradually they got back to their feet. They were, obviously, not dead. We’d been using simulated ammunition. Still, while not lethal, these were high-velocity rounds. When one of these things hits you, you’re hit, and you know it. These guys would be sore for a while.

  It was good to have completed my first scenario, especially good that I’d acquitted myself well. The scenarios to follow would get increasingly more difficult, designed to induce the maximum amount of stress.

  I was no longer in the U.S. Navy SEALs. I was on my own, in a facility somewhere in or around D.C. participating in a one-week refresher course in close-quarters battle. Soon I would be driving the streets of Iraq, providing mission support for an intelligence unit, part of an outfit that we referred to only as the Client. Whatever I might be called upon to do there, whoever I’d be working with and whatever situations, operations, or emergencies I might face, I knew one thing: I would stand my ground and hold whatever red circle I was given to hold.

  * * *

  I should back up a little.

  After running the SEAL sniper course for two and a half years, I finally decided in mid-2006 to leave the service and go into the private sector. The entrepreneurial impulse was as much in my blood as aviation, maybe more so, and I decided to follow a dream that had been bubbling up throughout my SEAL years: To create a private facility that would help us train the finest fighting forces anywhere on earth, whether military combat units, Special Ops teams, or civilian law enforcement personnel. I knew from experience that all of the above suffered from a perennial shortage of excellent training grounds, and I wanted to do something about it.

  I needed two things. The first was a certain kind of experience. In my thirteen years of service I’d seen the military from almost every angle—but I had no experience of the world of private contractors. The name Blackwater had made this kind of shadow forces infamous, yet they were a far more crucial element in the big picture than most civilians realized. There are a handful of intelligence agencies in the United States who help to keep us safe while we sleep, and most of them require the skills of highly trained Special Operations personnel for their work. Since they don’t have the capacity to produce their own operators, these personnel are almost without exception privately contracted. I needed to know what that world was like.

  The second thing was, frankly, finances. As I contemplated my options, I happened to run into a good friend who was doing some work for an OGA (other governmental agency) and told me what he was earning for relatively short-term deployments overseas. I calculated that in a fairly short time, I could go a long way toward bankrolling at least the early phases of my entrepreneurial venture.

  A buddy of mine happened to work in that same intelligence network coordinating job applications. My application got fast-tracked, and by the time I officially left the service I already had a package approved and a deployment date set with the Client.

  I wasn’t about to jump without a backup chute.

  Gabriele was nearing the end of her third pregnancy when I officially left the navy on July 6, 2006. Our second son, Tyler, was born the last day of August. By September I was standing in an abandoned warehouse somewhere in the D.C. area, holding on to my red circle and putting three guys onto the floor.

  That fall I deployed to Iraq, where I provided mission support services for the Client. While I was there I rewrote the entire security plan for one of their remote sites in Iraq (it was a joke when I got there, two pages long and useless) and developed a complete training program for our Kurdish Peshmerga security force (who’d had basically no training up to that poi
nt). I also ran missions that ranged from the mundane to the bizarre, including delivering attaché cases full of American cash to intel assets (in case you’ve ever wondered how much $1.5 million in cash weighs, I can tell you: a lot), grabbing double-agent informers in the middle of the night and hauling them in for questioning, arranging and coordinating clandestine meeting points with locals-turned-intel-assets, driving like hell through the city losing Iranian tails, and anything you might imagine from everything you’ve seen in the movies. I was never ambushed at any of our checkpoints or meeting spots, but it was known to happen. One group got into a firefight on the road to Kirkuk and had to blast their way through. At another checkpoint, a few of our guys realized too late that the officials on hand were not acting as friendly as they should have been; they got lit up by machine-gun fire and never made it out of there.

  There was an incident late in 2006 where several key Iranian diplomats were caught spying in Baghdad and several high-level assets suddenly had to be smuggled into Iraq. I was in the middle of that mess, driving a vehicle through the city with stolen Iraqi plates and trying to calm a case officer who was bawling her eyes out because our assets had suddenly changed our rendezvous point and her commander was screaming at her on a cell phone. (FUBAR.) I had to pull the car over in the middle of the op, turn around in my seat, and yell into her face to break through and keep the op moving. Training, training. We got the assets and made it out alive. (You don’t want to know who they were or what intelligence we got from them.)

  By the end of 2007 I was out of Iraq and back in the States, and with the help of my investors I had purchased the raw land for the site of my new facility: about a thousand acres of California desert out in Imperial County—and where? Right across the Salton Sea from my old friend Niland, of course. Where else? I called the facility Wind Zero, a precision shooting term that refers to the practice of precisely tuning your weapon to a point of perfect balance and neutrality.