The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (50 page)

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 point). 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.

It took a good four years to raise the full financing and secure the zoning and other legal go-aheads to get Wind Zero under way. There was a shocking amount of resistance to the plan from some local environmentalists and other forces resistant to change (which I had a hard time not thinking of as incarnations of the spirit of Harvey Clayton). By that time, though, we had the support of the local law enforcement community, the fire department, public safety personnel, and everyone else in the community who had a grip on common sense. Besides, it wouldn’t matter if it took twice that many years. Whatever red circle I’m given to hold, I’ll stand my ground.

*   *   *

My dad did well for himself eventually. Not long after I joined the navy he started another company doing spec homes and custom housing, bought some land on the outskirts of Jackson Hole along the Idaho-Wyoming border and developed it, then sank his profits into properties that provided him his retirement. He built a house down in Cabo San Lucas, where he lives in the winter, fishing off the beach and playing drums in a local band. He’s sixty-two now and still plays music every day—and he has a 42-foot boat. Our relationship still has that bit of edginess to it. But he’s my dad.

My mom and I are still very close, and I see her often. A good number of the memories from the first chapter of this book come from her. To this day my parents still talk regularly, and if you asked either of them, I think they would describe themselves as good friends.

I can say much the same for Gabriele and me. Despite our best efforts, our marriage did not survive the intensity and long separations of the SEAL years; in 2009 we separated, and she and our three kids took up residence in a nice property within a half-day’s drive. We managed it all in as friendly and collaborative a way as anyone could hope for, and we remain committed to having a good relationship, both for the kids’ sake and out of respect for ourselves and for each other. I wish it would have worked out better for us, but I’ve seen friends do far worse. I make the five-hour drive out there several times a month to spend time with Tyler, Madison, and Jackson, and it’s always amazing to see them, every time. The marriage may not have made it, but the family is forever. That, too, is part of my red circle.

I see quite a few of my old SEAL buddies, too, from my Sniper Cell friend Eric to Chief Dan from the GOLF platoon days. I may not be an active member of the teams now, but the community is more like a family than a job, and once you’re an intrinsic part of it, that never goes away. Glen, my shooting partner and best friend from sniper school, is a partner with me today in Wind Zero; not long ago we wrote a book together,
The 21st-Century Sniper.

Our quiet community was thrust into the public spotlight in April 2009 when a coordinated team of three SEAL snipers took out three Somalian pirates in a perfectly coordinated trio of shots, rescuing Captain Richard Phillips of the
Maersk Alabama.
Soon my phone was ringing off the hook, and before I knew it I was standing before the CNN cameras explaining to Anderson Cooper the practically impossible logistics involved in pulling off such a mission and the lengths to which those three covert warriors had gone in training for it.

Two years later that spotlight grew more intense when a team of SEALs staged a covert raid on a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden, America’s Public Enemy No. 1 for the past decade and the man credited with orchestrating the 9/11 attacks. Once again I found myself on CNN and other media outlets providing viewers some insights into what had just happened. That sense I’d had back in 2000, standing on the deck of the crippled USS
Cole
off the coast of Yemen, that the nature of our modern military was tipping upside down and covert ops forces would soon become the vanguard of twenty-first-century warfare, has proven out. Yet I’m not sure the American public fully grasps what that looks like from the inside.