The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (46 page)

“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:

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.