Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice (10 page)

But Bob wasn’t the problem that was gnawing at me now. The problem was that Bob wasn’t there anymore. When I said, “In the short time we worked together,” I meant it. Barely a month after Eric and I arrived at the course, Bob called me into his office and let me know he was moving on to another billet. Then he told me who his replacement would be: a master chief named Harvey Clayton.

“
Harvey?
Shit, Senior Chief Nielsen! You have to be kidding me.” I knew Master Chief Clayton by reputation, and it wasn’t a good one. He was a dyed-in-the-wool fleet Navy guy who’d come to the teams as a senior enlisted man with no real experience downrange. He’d made chief right away and been shuffled around the teams in a variety of admin roles. I’d been fleet Navy myself for four years before joining the SEALs and, as I knew firsthand, they are two completely
different cultures. And while he was a hell of a shot and an excellent match shooter, match shooting is not sniping, and Harvey had no real-world experience as a sniper. Putting someone like that in charge of a group of SEALs would be like trying to work inch-based nuts and bolts with a metric toolkit.

On top of which, I’d heard he was a major dick to work for.

Bob gave me a bland, unreadable look. “I know this course will be in good hands with you guys,” he said. “No doubt in my mind.” He clearly knew that Harvey was a poor choice for the position, but he just as clearly trusted Eric and me, and figured that however difficult Harvey might be, he would at least stay out of our way. “Sorry, gents,” Bob said.

I don’t think he ever dreamed just how bad it would get.

Harvey’s deficiency as a sniper should not have been a problem, in and of itself. All he really had to do was lean on us. Between Eric and me and our other instructors, we had it completely covered. Things might have worked out fairly well if he had just let us do our jobs. The problem was, he was incredibly insecure toward junior, more experienced instructors, and that insecurity just would not let him get out of the way and allow us to do what we were there to do. Once he took command, it quickly became obvious that our working relationship was the opposite of what we’d had with Bob Nielsen. Whereas Bob would defer to us, with Harvey everything had to be his idea. It had to be his course, his curriculum. And he was strongly resistant to most of the very innovations that Eric and I were trying to implement.

If Bob Nielsen exemplified the best in leadership, Harvey was leadership at its most abysmal. He micromanaged the
teaching and curricula, was patronizing and antagonistic to students, and exercised poor judgment in countless decisions both large and small. The quality of the course began to suffer as a result. We’d made Bob look good. Harvey was making
us
look terrible.

Harvey’s behavior had been a problem during that summer session with Matt and Morgan. After they graduated and we moved into the fall, things grew even worse.

That fall was the last time we held the course at Camp Pendleton. Nailing down a consistent, established location for the shooting portion of the course had been a constant headache, and as much as we wanted it to, Pendleton wasn’t working out. This was a Marine facility, which meant we didn’t have priority. We’d reserve the range, but the Marines could kick us out whenever they wanted.

The rifle club several hours to the north where Glen and I had gone through the course in 2000 was another possibility. In fact, this was an ideal location in many ways. But there was one big problem with that place. The dry, dusty environment harbored
coccidioidomycosis
(“valley fever”) spores. This didn’t seem to bother the locals; maybe they’d adapted to it. When out-of-towners came for an event that might last just a few days, they didn’t seem troubled by it. But living out there in tents for weeks on end, our guys kept getting sick, and valley fever can be brutal. As much as I loved that location, I’d had to face the fact that we just couldn’t use it.

Except Harvey disagreed.

“We’re going to make it work,” he said. “We’ll do dust mitigation—get a water truck up there and spray it down every day.”
Right
, I thought.
Like that’ll work.

In every class, the senior (i.e., highest-ranking) student
serves as class leader. That session our class leader was Rob, a guy I knew from Team Three. Rob came to me and said, “Hey, Instructor Webb, we got our teams to pay for trailers. We’re going to rent RVs so we don’t have to sleep in the tents and inhale all that toxic dust.”

I thought Rob’s solution was brilliant. Harvey didn’t.

“Absolutely not!” he said when he heard what the students were planning. “That’s a waste of the Navy’s money! I’ve got the water truck lined up, and it won’t be a problem.” He put the kibosh on the whole thing—called their command and had them cancel the RVs. I was furious. There was no reason to pull the plug on this plan. It would have been no skin off Harvey’s back; the money was coming out of Team Three’s budget. Whether it was Harvey’s need to show he was in control or just plain meanness, it was unconscionable.

But wait. It got worse.

There we were: up in that spore-infested environment again, no trailers, the guys putting up their tents to get ready for the course. First day of the session, guess who shows up in a fucking RV? If you guessed Harvey, you’d be right. During the six long weeks of that shooting phase he was the only one there who was not sleeping in a tent. And of course his spraying-down-the-dust plan was worthless. To no one’s surprise (but Harvey’s) our guys started getting sick again. It was an abomination.

Harvey’s behavior went from bad to worse. Now he started getting drunk, stalking the facility and yelling at the students he didn’t like. It was beyond embarrassing.

When the students were given course critiques to fill out, they hammered him, calling him “unprofessional,” “hurting credibility,” and “a clear weak point” in the course. One of
them wrote, “Master Chief Clayton is an idiot.” I watched Harvey turn crimson as he read through them. He grabbed a handful of the papers and said, “I’m going back in there, and they’re going to fill these out all over again!”

“Master Chief Clayton,” I explained, “you can’t do that. These are their fucking critiques! The whole point is to get their honest feedback.”

He glared at me, stalked out of the office, went back into the classroom, and ordered the students to fill out new critiques. (Which they did—and they filled them out exactly the same way again.)

Three of our instructors were newly minted chiefs themselves. I went to them and said, “Guys, we have to do something about Harvey. It can’t go on like this. He’s killing the course.”

They knew I was right. They also knew my hands were tied. I was in charge of the course—but I wasn’t a chief.

In the Navy, the title of chief refers to the upper ranks of enlisted men. Becoming a chief is a serious accomplishment. Chiefs are the Navy’s version of senior management. They have their own eating area on the ship (called the chiefs’ mess) and walk their own walk. Even officers (if they’re smart, which they often are) will defer to a chief’s judgment. In essence, chiefs run the Navy.

Harvey was a master chief, rank E-9. I was a petty officer first class, rank E-6. This problem was literally above my pay grade. If anyone was going to do something about the situation, it was going to have to be one of the three other chiefs; I knew it, and they knew it. Yet this was the last thing any of them wanted to do. In the military, going around your boss to complain about him to his superiors is one of the worst
sins you can commit. But they also knew that Harvey was destroying the fabric and credibility of the course.

Finally one of our chiefs, Chris Sajnog, took it on.

And took it on the chin.

When Chris went to our command’s master chief and complained about Harvey, the only impact it had was to get Chris knocked on his ass. He was instantly relieved of his post at the sniper course and went from the number one E-7 (chief) at the command to last. Any chance he had of ever making senior chief (E-8) evaporated on the spot. Chris had joined the Navy in the late eighties, graduated from BUD/S Class 199, and went on to a stellar career in the teams. He was at the top of his dive class and an excellent corpsman. Now his career was effectively gutted.

As Chris was cleaning out his desk, Harvey said to him, “Hey, Sajnog—no hard feelings.”

Chris didn’t say a word. “I wanted to crush his skull with my fist,” he told me recently. But he held his tongue, and his fist. I don’t know if I could have managed that level of restraint.

I had no appetite for dinner that night. Chris was gone, Harvey reigned supreme, and I had nothing to show for our attempted coup but a large knot in my stomach. I didn’t see how things could get any worse. I went back to my office in our subterranean bunker and sat in my desk chair, brooding. There was nothing I could do. With Chris thrown under the bus, there was no way either of the other two chiefs were going to risk making a move. Not being a chief myself, I was clearly powerless in this situation.

And then, out of the blue, I thought about Matt Axelson.

By this time Matt was long gone from sniper school, off
somewhere with his platoon in their final training and preparation before deploying to Afghanistan. But the impact of watching him go through our course had stayed with me, and now, as I sat feeling sorry for myself at how royally Harvey had pissed on my life, I remembered something I’d witnessed the summer before, when Matt and Morgan were going through the course.

One day I was observing one of our instructors giving a group of students some training on how to take environmental factors into account when calling a shot. As I mentioned earlier, the fact that a metal rifle barrel expands as it heats up translates into increased pressure on the round as it passes through, which in turn means higher muzzle velocity and an altered arc of trajectory. Because of this, the instructor was explaining, you can’t necessarily follow the specs from a DOPE sheet (“
d
ata
o
n
p
ersonal
e
quipment,” a table of shooting specs for your rifle). “The adjustment you made for elevation this morning may have worked perfectly this morning,” he was telling the class, “but now it’s a good twenty degrees warmer, and your round is going to have a proportionately flatter arc, so to compensate you need to adjust your elevation down—”

“No, no, no, no,
no
!” said Harvey, cutting the instructor off as he waded in. “Don’t start changing your setting and messing everything up. Trust your DOPE, you guys, trust your DOPE!”

It was an appalling scene. Harvey had no interest in the kind of sophisticated ballistic know-how we were teaching; he was strictly old-school, and any newfangled ideas or significant improvements over what he’d learned when he was a student made him feel threatened. Which was bad enough.
But to butt in and contradict an instructor right in front of the students was so fundamentally inappropriate—and it was obvious that the students all knew that as well as I did. I could see it on their faces, their reactions to his hissy fit ranging from amused to incredulous to disgusted. Two or three guys standing behind Harvey who knew he couldn’t see them actually rolled their eyes.

But not Axelson. Matt behaved with complete decorum. In fact, he was the only guy on the range that day giving Harvey his full attention. I knew damn well that
he
knew damn well what an ass Harvey was being. Matt was no fool, and he wasn’t missing a beat. He was simply responding by being a total professional. Matt was being the grown-up here, and Harvey was being a child.

I vividly remembered standing there watching that scene unfold and thinking,
This is totally fucked-up
. That snapshot vignette had burned itself into my brain, and I couldn’t erase it, forget it, or ignore it.

“Goddammit, Axelson,” I muttered as I sat brooding in my bunker.

It was that higher-standard thing. No way around it. I would have to do this thing myself. Even if it meant throwing my career in the toilet, as Sajnog had done, the situation demanded it. If I didn’t step up now, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

“Goddammit, Axelson,” I repeated, then got up from my chair, decision made. As long as someone like Harvey was in charge, we didn’t deserve students like Matt.

I pulled together details of Harvey’s bad behavior, took my collected papers to Harvey’s superiors, and reported him.

Then held my breath all that night.

I don’t know if it was the fact that I’d so carefully documented my claims, or that the warrant officer in charge decided to back me to the master chief he reported to, or that this was the second Harvey-related complaint in as many weeks. I’ll likely never know. Whatever it was, by some miracle my point got through. The next day Harvey packed his bags and quietly left.

By the time the next session began, Harvey had left the Navy—and I’d made chief.

Over the next few months I got calls and e-mails from former students, thanking me for sticking my neck out (or to put it more accurately, for placing it directly on the executioner’s block) and expressing their relief and gratitude that Harvey was finally gone.

I didn’t say this to any of them then, but I’ll say it now: They had Matt to thank.

•   •   •

June 28, 2005. It was a year, almost to the day, since I first saw Matt and Morgan standing in that bunker at Coronado at the induction of their sniper school class. During that year Morgan’s brother, Marcus, had gone through the course, too, and just days after graduating he joined Matt and his platoon on the other side of the world. Now Marcus and Matt and two other teammates, Danny Dietz and Michael Murphy, were on a capture-or-kill mission in the Hindu Kush, going after a very bad dude variously referred to as Ben Sharmak or Ahmad Shah. Marcus and Matt would be the team’s snipers, Danny and Mike serving as spotters.

The four men were positioned high up on a rocky mountainside, gazing down on the village where their target was
reputed to be in hiding. After seven or eight miserable hours of trek-and-climb, they were dug in and prepared to be up on those hills above the village for days, maintaining invisibility and surveillance as they lay in wait, scratching what cloak of cover they could from the barren slope.