The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (20 page)

“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 something 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:

J
AMES
M
C
N
ARY,
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.

D
AN,
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.

T
OM,
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.

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

G
LEN
D
OHERTY,
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.

M
IKE
R
ITLAND,
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.

R
ANDY
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.

T
OM
K
RUEGER
. 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.

S
HANE
H
YATT,
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.

C
HUCK
L
ANDRY
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.

B
OB
H
ARWARD
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 sure 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?

Gabriele swiftly made it clear, with the aid of an emphatic hand gesture that involved her third digit, that she wanted nothing to do with this idiot. It was pretty funny watching the whole thing go down.

Eric walked back over to the other end of the bar where I was sitting.

“Hey, Franny,” I said. “Didn’t go so well, did it?”

“No,” he said glumly. “You were right.”

I took a pull on my beer, set it down, stepped away from the bar, and started walking back in the direction Franny had just come from. Here was this beautiful girl who’d come in expecting a date, and my troglodytic roommate had fucked it up. So I made my move. Walked up, leaned against the bar, nodded to her, very friendly.

“Do. You. Speak. English?” I asked, speaking very clearly and slowly. Very considerate, very thoughtful. Suave.

“Uh, yeah,” she replied. “I’m from Thousand Oaks. You know? California?”

Now
I
felt like an idiot. Why I had decided she was foreign, I have no idea. Maybe it was because I knew her name was Gabriele, or because Monica was from Norway. Maybe it was because she looked exotic to me.

We kept talking. I got her number, and we started dating. She had me hooked, right from the start. I immediately and completely gave up all the sexual escapades and wild living that was our normal navy way of life, and Gabriele and I took it relatively slow. I courted her for two solid months. What finally did it, I think, was an air show I took her to see.

I had volunteered to participate in this show up in Ventura, my hometown. My mom was there for it. It was cool. We did a thing called spy rigging: You clip into a helicopter through a harness on your back and they lower you on a rope so that you hang there, 100 or 150 feet down, while it goes through all sorts of maneuvers with you flying through the air at 3,000 feet. We put on a big demonstration with all kinds of complex maneuvers. I think it impressed her. That night our relationship went to a deeper level, and within months we were engaged. Just like that, two young kids in love.