If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today—as of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
—Thomas Watson, founder of IBM
Throughout the months I spent in Afghanistan following 9/11, I was focused on two things. First, making it back to the States without getting my nuts shot off or brains blown out so I could meet my son, who’d been born while I was gone. And second, if I did make it back, what the hell I was going to do next. The plan I came up with was simple: I would become a BUD/S instructor and finish my college education.
For an active-duty SEAL, going to BUD/S is like taking a break. You work maybe three days a week, yell at some students, get them to wash your car on the weekend, and have a chance to decompress. I could do BUD/S, spend my days off with my family, and finish up my degree in my downtime. All in all, a pretty cushy situation. I liked it.
Didn’t happen.
Instead, my BUD/S teammate Eric Davis and I were handed the challenge of a lifetime. “Hey you two,” we were told. “We want you to help design, build, and implement the most modernized, effective sniper training program on the planet.”
Being invited to take on this task reminded me of the day a few years earlier, in 2000, when a few slots opened up and our platoon chief, Dan Goulart, tapped my best friend, Glen Doherty, and me to enroll in NSW sniper school. We were terrified, because we were new guys—that is, SEALs who had not yet done a deployment and were very much still on probation. New guys were rarely given the chance to go to sniper school. They sent us off with these words of encouragement:
“Don’t fuck up.”
And now here I was, barely three years later, being tapped not to attend sniper school, not even to teach it, but to reinvent it.
I thought about my BUD/S plan—quality time with my family, completing my degree, moving on with the rest of my life. It was a great plan. But how could I possibly say no to what they were offering? It was an incredibly exciting honor.
Also a ridiculously daunting one. We were, in essence, being given responsibility for an entire generation of snipers. As I heard myself agreeing to take on the job, I silently reassured myself with these words of encouragement:
Don’t fuck up.
* * *
The strange thing about it was, the whole sniper thing had happened more or less by accident. It certainly wasn’t something I went looking for.
Plenty of top snipers already knew their way around guns long before they ever entered the military. Rob Furlong, Jason Delgado, and Nick Irving were handling rifles before they could shave. Marcus and Morgan Luttrell were born shooters who grew up in Texas hunting for food. Chris Kyle probably came down the birth canal with a rifle in his hands.
Not me. Before I entered the service, I’d hardly ever even fired a gun. I didn’t grow up wanting to shoot; I grew up wanting to fly. As a kid, Nick Irving went hunting for every book and video he could find on Carlos Hathcock and Navy SEALs. The movie that pushed my hot buttons was Top Gun. I was a Star Wars fanatic. Anything that had to do with flying had my attention. Stick me in a pilot’s seat, baby, put me twelve thousand feet above the earth, let me fly the Millennium Falcon! (Still true, by the way: there’s nothing I love more than taking a friend up and over the Manhattan skyline, or bopping up and down the West Coast at a few thousand feet—even better upside down.)
In my SEAL training I started out as a neophyte on the gun, and not a very good one. Somehow, as happened with Alex Morrison, my years of hunting fish had stuck to me, and that eventually translated into an ability to stalk, spot, and shoot. But you’d never have guessed that if you’d seen my crappy performance on the range during BUD/S.
And then there was Eric.
Like me, Eric is a Californian, grew up in the Bay Area. His father was a sheriff in San Mateo County; his father’s father was an FBI special agent, and his father was a lawman, too. Being the guy who keeps order with a gun in his hand was more or less in his blood, and his reason for joining the SEALs couldn’t have been simpler: to protect and defend those who couldn’t protect and defend themselves.
Despite that background, though, Eric was no more brought up with guns than I was, and before SEAL training he had zero experience shooting. (Not even spearguns.) In fact, he didn’t even like to shoot all that much. What he loved was the challenge of figuring out how it all worked—how to reverse-engineer and then teach that complex skill set. He’s been a student of human performance all his life, and he has a passion for it. But the actual shooting? Let’s just say, the dude is never going hunting in his spare time.
So, yeah: the task of helping to create the finest sniper program on the planet was entrusted to two guys who couldn’t shoot worth shit when they joined the navy.
That was ironic enough. Here’s what made it even more ironic: that this was happening within the navy in the first place. Because, the dirty little secret of the SEAL sniper program? For most of its brief existence, it frankly hadn’t been all that good. Yes, the standards were high, insanely high. But the quality of instruction wasn’t great, and the attrition rate was atrocious. (Both problems, as we would soon find, could be dramatically reversed.)
Think about this for a moment: SEALs are part of the navy. Not the army, not the marines. The SEALs trace their history back to the UDT (underwater demolition team) warriors of World War II, men whose specialty was swimming underwater and blowing things up. Even today we call ourselves frogmen. Just as the air force is all about being in the air, the navy is all about being out on, in, or under the water—not exactly the ideal environment for sharpshooting on an MK13 .30 cal sniper rifle. (Would you expect the air force to be charged with developing a top sniper program?) And while SEALs don’t exactly think of themselves as “sailors” or even really as part of the navy, it is Naval Special Warfare. We aren’t rangers; we aren’t Force Recon. We’re SEALs.
Basic training in the army gives you a good working familiarity with shooting. Marine boot camp gives you extensive rifle training. In navy boot camp, they teach you how to draw a pistol from a holster without shooting yourself.
You see the subtle difference there?
And those distinctions had historically carried over into the different branches’ sniper programs.
The Marine Corps stood up the first genuine military sniper training program in the U.S. during the World War II years, and the USMC sniper course has been a solid course of instruction ever since. It’s no accident that Carlos Hathcock was a marine. Marine snipers are legendary, and getting the SSBC qual is a badge of honor in the military. Even today, there’s something about marines that nobody else can touch: they get solid training in marksmanship and riflery from day one. The Marine Corps produces some of the finest riflemen in the world. (In fact, a friend of mine who runs the advanced sniper courses for the SEAL program today tells me he recently hired a former marine to teach.)
While the marine course was the gold standard, the army had some pretty damn fine training, too. The basic sniper course Nick Irving went through, while nowhere near as complete as the Corps’ program, still provided strong training in all the essentials, and the army’s advanced program was first-rate.
Then there was the SEAL course.
The SEALs had been in existence since the days of Vietnam, yet throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties there was no in-house NSW sniper training program. In those days, any SEALs who wanted to train as snipers were sent to the place where American military snipers were born: the marines. It wasn’t until the late eighties that NSW started putting together its own sniper course, and even once it was up and running, it remained the kid nobody wanted to pick for the ball team. SEAL Team Six author Howard Wasdin and his teammate Homer Nearpass, decorated snipers who both won Silver Stars for their part in the Battle of Mogadishu (in Wasdin’s case, also a Purple Heart), recall being offered the choice of training up with the SEAL school, the USMC program, or the army’s SOTIC course.
“When I talked to my SEAL buddies who had been to sniper school,” says Wasdin, “every single one of them had chosen to go to Marine Corps sniper school.”
He and Nearpass did the same.
When Alex Morrison went through the course in 1991 it was over-the-top difficult, and it was just as insanely difficult when I went through it a decade later. But just because it was hugely difficult didn’t mean it was hugely effective. Yes, some excellent snipers emerged from the course, but in some ways that was despite the training as much as because of the training.
The NSW course was, especially at first, not that well organized. It was taught by guys who had done a lot of match shooting and were superb marksmen, but few had real combat experience. The curriculum was modeled after the marine course program in its general outline—observation training, keep-in-memory games, sketching, brutally difficult stalks, and the rest—but when it came to the specifics of day-to-day instruction, a lot of these instructors more or less made it up themselves.
Throughout the nineties it gradually became more formalized and systematic, improving as it went. Even so, by the time I went through it in 2000 it was still essentially the same course Alex had gone through a decade earlier—and the same course Wasdin and Nearpass and dozens of other top candidates had skipped over in favor of other programs.
When Eric went through it in 1999, he says, the hardest thing about sniper school was getting clear on just what the hell it was they were supposed to be learning.
“The material wasn’t at all well organized in those days,” says Eric. “Whether it was ballistics, shooting, stalking, or any other piece of it, the instructors dumped a lot of information on us—but it wasn’t clear how it all fit together. There was a ton that we just had to figure out on our own.”
In its origins, the NSW course had been something of a Wild West show, formed in the days when the ink was barely dry on Dick “Rogue Warrior” Marcinko’s retirement papers. It had improved a good deal in the decade-plus since then—but it still bore that DNA.
Our task was to transform that into an extremely professional operation of the highest possible standards.
And don’t fuck up.
* * *
Fortunately, we had a few things going for us. First and foremost of these were the two guys who brought us in and would become our bosses: Senior Chief Bob Nielsen, who was then running the NSW program for the West Coast, and Master Chief Jay Manty, his counterpart on the East Coast.
To give credit where credit’s due, a significant amount of the core curriculum had already been significantly reworked by Chief Nielsen and Chief Manty by the time Eric and I arrived on the scene. These two were brilliant, decorated, top-tier snipers who had an incredibly far-sighted vision of where the course needed to go. They hadn’t simply hired the two of us to do all the work; they had also done a serious chunk of the work themselves.
The second hugely valuable thing we had going for us was Eric himself. I could not have asked for a better training partner. Eric is a brilliant instructor. No matter what he was teaching, I found I could sit there for any amount of time and listen, riveted—and learn. The man is a born teacher. More than that, he has a unique gift. Eric has a fascination with how things work and an uncanny ability to reverse-engineer any process, no matter how complex, breaking it down into its hundreds of component parts and putting it back together on a whole new level, like a Swiss watch disassembled and then rebuilt as a James Bond weapons system.
Plus, the two of us were already good friends. Eric was in my BUD/S class and we were both in Team Three; he went through the SEAL sniper course in ’99, two sessions before me. When my platoon went off to the Middle East in the fall of 2000 and ended up on the stricken USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, his deployed to the Middle East and worked out of Bahrain, were he participated in a few dozen noncompliant ship boardings. “The pirate stuff,” as he puts it. When 9/11 happened, Eric’s platoon had just returned and was on post-deployment leave. My platoon shipped out to Afghanistan immediately; his deployed the following January and ended up at the TOC (tactical operations center) in Kandahar while I was out in the field. For Eric and me, the chance to work together, let alone on something as insanely exciting as this, was a gift.
The third thing going for us was history and timing.
Historically, sniper programs in the U.S. have almost invariably been neglected, abandoned, and forgotten during protracted times of peace. In the years after World War II the United States let our military sniper programs more or less slide into dormancy. (The Soviets did not make the same mistake.) It was only once we were drawn into the Korean conflict, and even then only once a marine officer’s binoculars were smashed (and his head nearly blown off) by an enemy sniper’s bullet, that we figured maybe it was time to pull the program from the mothballs and get cracking again. After the armistice of 1953, military sniper training was nearly shelved, had it not been for the fierce advocacy of two marine officers, Second Lieutenant Jim Land (Carlos Hathcock’s mentor) and Warrant Officer Arthur Terry, who kept the flame burning. Before long Vietnam was in full force, and so was American military sniper training.
After Vietnam the Marine Corps’ excellent sniper program did not go away, nor did the army’s, but little urgency was attached to them. The same thing applied to the fledgling SEAL program throughout the nineties. “Little urgency” means scant attention, which means scant budgetary or logistic support from central command. It costs money to train snipers, and it costs a lot of money to train snipers to the highest possible levels of proficiency and effectiveness. The money just wasn’t there.
After 9/11 that all changed. By the time Eric and I were onboard, NSW was ready to give the program all the support it needed. We were now a nation at war.
* * *
When Eric and I started redesigning the course, it was a hairy time. Not only were we at war, but we were at war in a new and complex environment. This wasn’t Desert Storm, where we could rout the enemy by bombing the crap out of them. This was complicated street-level combat on multiple fronts, often with multiple factions having ambiguous loyalties, in shifting and confusing circumstances. Special Operations, classically employed only peripherally and for special situations (hence the term “special”), had suddenly become a central tactical element.
In this new wartime environment, Spec Ops snipers had become the tip of the spear. Our job was to sharpen that tip to the deadliest point possible.
We decided to toss out any idea of training to create competence. Screw competence. Good truly is the enemy of great. We were not interested in above average. We were interested in performance that wasn’t even in the same universe as average, performance that would blow “good” out of the water. What we were after was perfection—or as close to perfection as human beings were capable. For decades the USMC course had served as the gold standard of military sniper programs. Our objective was to build on that success and go further: to create a standard of perfection—a platinum standard.
* * *
One of our fundamental changes, we knew, had to come not in what we taught, but how. The quality of the teaching itself had to improve.
At that point, the course had about a 30 percent failure rate. Now, that doesn’t sound too bad. You think about the enormous washout rate in programs like BUD/S or Ranger School, and it makes sense. If you’re trying to produce an elite force of the best of the best, obviously you need to weed out those recruits who just don’t make the grade.
But put that in context. Sniper school isn’t like BUD/S, where you expect a major crop of inductees to wash out—where you actually want them to wash out. By the time a guy is admitted into the NSW sniper course he is already a serious performer. These were accomplished SEALs coming into the course, men who had already trained to the point where they could do virtually anything required of them, under virtually any circumstances—and we were still losing 30 percent of them. When I went through the course in 2000, we started out with twenty-six students. Every one of those twenty-six was a fine warrior with plenty of sniper potential. Yet we finished with just twelve. That’s a flunk rate of more than 50 percent.
Eric and I didn’t see the high attrition in our course as a badge of honor or symbol of excellence. We saw it as a failure. Not of the students: of the teaching. We wanted to take that attrition rate down—not by lowering the standards but by raising them, that is, by raising the bar on the quality of instruction so that our students would learn more and learn it better. The way to lower attrition, we believed, was to raise the level of excellence.
The year before, when I first got back from Afghanistan in the middle of 2002, I had myself put through the navy’s Instructor Training Course, a four-week program that all BUD/S instructors went through. It was a phenomenal experience. They videotaped us as we stood in front of the class teaching, then showed us the tapes. Until you actually see yourself on video replay, you would not believe what you look and sound like, all the Uhs and Ums and Y’knows that slip in, the amount of cursing you do without realizing it. I’ve seen guys sit there scratching their balls while they teach and refuse to believe it when they’re told what they’ve been doing—until they see it on videotape. It’s worse than sobering. It’s brutal. And invaluable. To this day I use the skills I learned in that course whenever I’m called on to do live television interviews or paid speaking engagements.
The Instructor Training Course taught us not only how to teach, but how to teach well—how to interact with students in such a way that encourages them to really learn, and not just throw information at them.
That experience had also crystallized some thoughts I’d been having about the importance of quality instruction. When I went through BUD/S and the rest of my SEAL training, BUD/S instructors were the only ones who went through that course. I thought that was part of the problem with our sniper program. The teachers might be fantastic shots, they might know their shit when it came to stalking and other skills—but that didn’t mean they were good teachers. As teachers, in fact, many of them were downright crappy. We decided that in the new course, we would send all our instructors through instructor school to become well-trained and highly professional educators.
Then there was the question of what we taught. One of the first determinations we made was that the course needed to get its shit together, by which I mean, we needed to make this thing more organized, coherent, and consistent.
The SEAL course was originally run by a chief, along with his cadre of two or three full-time guys, which he would supplement with snipers he pulled from the different teams. While the course was based loosely on the Marine Corps program’s curriculum, it ended up being kind of cobbled together, everyone more or less running the course according to his own style and experience.
What’s more, while this was happening on the West Coast, the same thing was going on, separately and completely independently, on the East Coast. Naval Special Warfare has always been organized in two main divisions, NSW Group 1, on the West Coast, and NSW Group 2, on the East, and each ran its own program. There was plenty of good stuff happening in these courses. But they weren’t reliably on the same page, which meant the students weren’t necessarily all learning the same things or being taught in the same ways. Which meant it was all kind of a mess.
And this was a problem.
This is exactly why military pilots have the NATOPS (Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization) manual and its standardized training. The way they talk to their crews is the same, no matter where they come from. You can take a pilot from the East Coast, throw him onto a West Coast helo flight crew, and he can fly that bird and talk to the crew in an instant in a way that they will all understand exactly what he is saying. Everyone is on the same page.
After 9/11, when we started rapidly deploying our platoons in real-world combat situations, we started realizing, “Holy shit, our snipers are talking different languages.” They’d be saying to each other, “Wait a minute—why are you giving me a minute hold? You mean you call your shots in minutes? We call them in mils.”
We had to take a good-old-boy course that had grown up without any clear planning, standardize it, and turn it into a professional course.
(Note: While this problem has since been addressed throughout the military, standardization is still a big problem today across the landscape of American law enforcement. With the emerging threats of terrorism and active-shooter situations, we need to standardize the best training and operational practices across all civilian units, too.)
On top of the four-week instructor training course, I also went through a three-month course to get my master training specialist (MTS) certification. The program teaches you how to develop a curriculum from scratch, identifying both learning objectives (what you want to make sure your course teaches) and performance objectives (what you want to make sure your students can actually go out and apply practically), and then writing a complete lesson plan that fleshes out and achieves those objectives. They packed an enormous amount of work into those three months, and there’s a reason they call it a master training specialist. It is, in essence, a concentrated graduate degree course.
I was determined that we were going to erase any hint of that sort of seat-of-your-pants style and raise the quality of the sniper course curriculum to a standard on a par with the best higher-education programs anywhere.
* * *
We started in August 2003 and worked like hell for three months, solidifying and putting on a pilot program. At the end of those three months, we were done. Or at least we thought so.
Almost immediately, we were pulled back in. Chief Nielsen wanted us to go further—to keep developing the course, keep pushing the envelope, keep raising the bar and seeing just how far we could take it. And he wanted us not just to redesign it, but to teach it. I didn’t foresee this at the time (having just been meritoriously promoted to petty officer first class), but within the next year I would end up being promoted to chief myself and made course manager for the entire program, with Eric being put in charge of the critically important Scout (mental performance skills, stalking, stealth and concealment) portion of the course.
Eric and I spent that next year innovating, experimenting, trying things out, and learning what worked and what didn’t. We surveyed the best sniper programs in the U.S., adopting or adapting best practices whenever and wherever we found them. We also looked to our counterparts overseas. When we were stationed with Task Force K-Bar in Afghanistan, we’d gotten to know Special Ops guys from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, and Turkey. Now we started leveraging those relationships. We took a hard look at what the British SAS, the German Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK), and the Polish GROM were doing, along with a few other Coalition partners and their sniper training programs.
We looked at outstanding achievers in professional sports, then went to explore the Olympic arena, where we focused on gold medal champions. We didn’t spend a moment looking at silver or bronze medalists’ experience. We didn’t care about that. We wanted to know one thing and one thing only: what were the gold medalists doing?
It was an incredibly creative time. Brainstorming, trying things out, adding new courses, totally renovating old ones. Moving things around, changing the order. Bringing in new technologies. We tested tons of ideas, many of which we were not sufficiently happy with and ended up not incorporating into the course. A select handful, we let stick.
During that year, we changed everything.
* * *
For starters, we added an entirely new program at the front of the course: a full two weeks spent giving our students a thorough training in the postmodern intelligence arts of digital photography and communications, called PIC (photographic intelligence course). We wanted to bring things into the twenty-first century in our use of science and technology—and that started on the first day.
Why place this portion first? Because, again, a sniper’s primary task has nothing to do with shooting a rifle. A sniper is first and foremost an intelligence asset. Snipers are a field element’s forward eyes and ears. Reconnaissance and surveillance is the bedrock of our skill set.
At the time, snipers were still being taught to look through their binos and sketch out on paper what they saw. A great skill set to have, for sure. (Delgado’s skills would serve him well in Husaybah.) But we wanted to give our guys a technological edge. We stepped out of the paper-and-pencil era and put top-of-the-line camera kits in our students’ hands. During that two-week course, we taught them how to camouflage a camera, shoot photos without being detected, use proprietary software to crop, adjust, and enhance the photos for maximum clarity, then compress them, encrypt them, and send them back to command over radio or satellite uplinks.
Which meant this also had to be a full-bore communications technology course. What do you do when you’re in the field, with a bunch of critically important photos you need to send back to TOC, and your radio antenna craps out? You improvise. You tap into your inner MacGyver and build a replacement from whatever you have on hand, and you do it fast. This course taught them how to do that.
We also had the most amazing setting for teaching this course, something that looked and felt like it came right out of a James Bond flick. Right on the coast of San Diego, there was an old underground armory that hardly anyone knew about. Bob Nielsen had managed to take it over and convert it into a training facility for our course. Our own secret underground bunker.
This place was seriously badass. You entered the place, went through a set of double doors, and there was our amazing teaching space: high exposed ceilings, high-quality tables for up to fifty students with the sort of standing-height chairs you see with drafting tables; a big podium with a computer server that let you control the digital projector and all the lighting; everything you could wish for in the perfect twenty-first-century classroom. We had our own armory. We had an indoor high-powered pellet gun range. I could open the door to the back, a secure locker area where we kept our ammo and equipment, and get a nice ocean breeze coming in. Students had big, individual walk-in steel cages where they could store their guns and ammo—and their top-of-the-line equipment for PIC. (These cameras were amazing, $25,000 pieces of precision equipment, the absolute best we could get our hands on. Eric would take one of these cameras to the zoo with his family, and people would assume he was there on assignment for National Geographic.)
And when I say “secret,” I’m not kidding. Nobody else really knew what was going on in there. Other SEALs would come in to Coronado to do some training and see us emerging with our satellite antennas and amazing photographic equipment and say, “What the fuck are you guys doing down there?” We didn’t tell them.
With its high-tech, precision science, and professional standards, PIC set the stage for the rest of the course.
* * *
In the old course, students would be handed their weapons and sent out onto the range fairly early on, and move on to the scout/stalk portion only after they’d gone through the marksmanship phase. But that didn’t make sense to us. Shooting doesn’t happen before stalking; it’s the other way around. Unless you can make your way undetected to a spot within shooting distance of your target, you’re never going to have the chance to take a shot. Marksmanship won’t do you much good if you can’t stalk.
So we reversed the sequence.
We figured, let’s have our students learn all the field skills they need and build up that essential foundation, then integrate those skills into actual field stalking, and then let the whole program culminate in the shooting phase, just as an actual stalk culminates in the shot. And it flowed much better. It duplicated field experience, and that was the goal. We weren’t trying to make great match shooters. We were grooming silent killers who could function flawlessly as the big-game hunters of the field of combat. This wasn’t the shooting school. It was the Killing School. And killing starts with stalking.
Thus, immediately after PIC came the scout portion of the course, which began with KIMS.
There are two different theories as to where the term KIM comes from. Some say it derived from Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel Kim, the story of an Irish orphan who grew up in India. As a youth, Kim was trained for government intelligence work; his training involved being shown a tray of stones and gems, or coins, or photographs, and then, once the tray was covered, required to describe as precisely as possible what he had seen. Thus, “Kim’s game.” Nice story. Maybe there’s even some truth to it. As far as I know, though, it’s simply an acronym for Keep In Memory: thus, keep in memory systems. (Who knows, maybe Kipling already knew the acronym, and that’s where the kid’s name came from.)
Wherever the name comes from, KIMS games have been around since the earliest days of sniper training. But we didn’t want to just replicate the usual program. We wanted to raise the bar—and Eric was uniquely qualified to do exactly that. As I said, Eric’s specialty is taking a complex process, identifying all the dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of individual components and steps to it, and then teaching that in a sequence that makes sense. Nowhere was that skill better put to use than in KIMS.
“Memory is like everything else you develop in sniper school,” said Eric. “It’s not about brute force or sheer effort, it’s about concentration, accuracy, and precision. You can try to force yourself to improve your memory by brute mental effort. But rote memory goes only so far.”
Eric had learned how to take it a lot further.
Years earlier, before 9/11, Eric was hanging around in Kuwait on his first deployment. Things were pretty slow, and one day he was browsing through books at the PX when one title caught his eye: The Memory Book, by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas.
What the hell, he thought. He bought the book and started reading. By the following day, he had memorized the names and dates of all the U.S. presidents, in sequence; a shuffled deck of cards, in order; and the periodic table of the elements. And he had pretty much nailed the technique of memorizing long lists of anything.
For Eric, that became not much more than a party trick, something he could impress people with but which didn’t really have any useful application.
Until we were tapped to revamp the NSW sniper course.
On the first day of KIMS, Eric stood up in front of a class of two to three dozen men, people he had never met or talked to before, pointed to one of them at random and asked the guy his name. When the student said who he was, Eric rattled off his phone number and address. And his Social Security number.
And then proceeded to do the same with everyone else in the class.
I was watching their faces when Eric did this, and I got the biggest kick out of it. It takes a lot to impress a SEAL. These guys were absolutely floored. So was I. It was pretty freaking scary.
The funny thing about it is, Eric’s memory is no better than anyone else’s. Eric is one of the most devoted dads I know, but he says he has trouble remembering his kids’ birthdays—and I’m not sure he’s joking. But he had taught himself specific techniques of association and visualization, where you take the raw data you need to remember and weave a context for it, so that the data goes from being random bits to being a meaningful array of points stuck in a multilayered mental spiderweb.
“People don’t forget things,” says Eric. “They just fail to remember them properly.”
Eric started by issuing Lorayne and Lucas’s classic text to every student, then taught classes that reinforced the techniques in the book—and expanded on them.
The students quickly mastered the techniques, and in no time at all the traditional sniper KIMS games were no longer any challenge. So we started looking for ways to make them harder.
First, we ramped up the volume on distractions. We started slamming trash can lids and banging shit around during the brief time window they had to glance at their items. We started shooting off flashbangs and live gunfire. We started showing X-rated movies with the volume turned up. Ooohh! Ahhh! Yeah, like that … more, more, deeper, deeper!
No dice: they still aced every test.
Then we got fiendish. We started showing them items and then waiting for days before testing them. Then weeks. They were still unstoppable.
This was a seminal experience for us: it showed Eric that you can not only master a seemingly impossible skill, but also transfer that seemingly impossible skill to a large group of others. This was critical for the overall development of the course, because it gave us the confidence to continue pushing the boundaries of training in every domain.
* * *
For field stalking, we took our students about an hour’s drive inland to the La Posta Mountain training facility (since renamed the Michael Monsoor Mountain Warfare Training Center), which covers about a thousand square miles of high mountain terrain. We’ve used this place a lot for SEAL training; appropriately enough, it was at this spot, during my own SEAL training, where I first got my shit together and went from being a crappy shot to an expert shooter.
Our stalking exercises were essentially the same as any sniper stalk class—but with a twist. We had our students start out by stalking not with rifles but with cameras. They would have to sneak up within two hundred yards of the instructors and take an identifiable picture of their faces, or take a clearly legible photo of an instructor holding up a piece of paper with a sequence of numbers written on it (similar to the hunt’s head in Rob Furlong’s course). Then the walker would point out their exact location—and they had to be so invisible that, even then, the instructors couldn’t see them.
This was even harder than stalking with a gun. You can poke your rifle barrel and scope out in front of you, through all the sticks and bushes you’re hiding behind. You need a clear bullet path, but a bullet is only so many millimeters wide. And while your scope needs to give you a clear view of the target, it doesn’t have to be a great view of the target.
None of that applies with a camera. You can’t poke a camera three feet out ahead of you. You need to get that thing right out with a wide-open, unobstructed photo path—and do all that without letting the sunlight catch a glint off the lens that might flash light in your target’s direction. And you can’t let any dust or dirt get on your lens, or it will ruin the shot. It’s insanely difficult.
Our typical shot distance, whether with camera or rifle, would be anywhere from 180 to 200 yards. And they were going up against two trained instructors, like Eric and me, with thousands of hours of experience, sitting comfortably in the shade, looking straight toward them with high-powered binoculars, in a field that we set up in the first place, so we not only knew what direction they were coming from, we also knew every piece of terrain on the way. And this wasn’t some lush jungle forest with tons of foliage for cover. The bulk of the stalks were in high desert terrain.
Then we replaced the camera with a rifle, and it became the traditional stalk course: hunting instructors with a rifle, taking shots with blanks, and by the end of the phase, with live rounds. Stalking is typically where the majority of fails occur. By the time our students were hunting us with rifles in their hands, though, they were already skilled stalkers, and we didn’t lose many.
* * *
After the scout phase we came back down to the bunker for some classroom time before going out to the range to shoot. First we taught them classes in the physics of ballistics—internal (what happens inside the barrel), external (what happens while the bullet is in flight), and terminal (what happens when the bullet reaches its target). We wanted to make them ballistics experts, and not just skillful gunslingers. We also trained them in the use of ballistic software, a technology that was just then coming into its own and becoming truly useful on the battlefield.
There was a very practical reason for all this scientific instruction. The existing training was great at turning its students into experts at the first shot. But the first shot doesn’t always find its target. We needed them to be experts at the second and third shot.
This was my baby. While Eric was primarily responsible for the scout portion of the course, the shooting phase was my area, and there was a fundamental change here that I was anxious to implement.
Classic sniper training taught that working with a good spotter is critical to a successful op. Your spotter watches where the bullet goes and then feeds you the necessary adjustments for your second shot. When you’re on the gun, you’re thinking about your fundamentals: breathing, posture, trigger pull, follow-through; you’re focused on making the shot. You need somebody else worrying about the mechanics of what’s happening out there—the distance and elevation, the wind, the behavior of the target. The two of you are like pilot and navigator: you’re the one flying the plane, but you need the navigator to tell you exactly where you’re going. If you want to be an effective sniper, you have to be completely loyal to your spotter: don’t argue, don’t question, just do what he says.
At least, that’s the traditional view. To Eric and me, it was the sacred cow of sniper training—and it was a cow that needed to go.
We had both worked in the Gulf as sniper overwatch from helicopters. I’d seen a lot of our guys serve as sniper overwatch for an assault element going into a village; I’d done it myself. In these situations, you can’t rely on your spotter for the simple reason that you don’t have a spotter. You have to self-spot. So why weren’t we training them in how to do that?
The reality of the battlefield is that you don’t always have the luxury—no, strike that: you rarely have the luxury—of having a guy on a spotting scope next to you saying, “Hey, man, you’re six minutes high” or “We’ve got crazy gusts out there, hold three right for wind.” I mean, it’s great when you do. But what if you don’t? Once you’ve made the shot and missed, now what are you going to do? You need to be able to know exactly why you missed, what factors are off and by how much, so you can make those corrections pretty damn fast and take a second shot. If your own life doesn’t depend on it, someone else’s probably does.
The traditional two-man team is great as far as it goes—but in real conditions of war the ability to function that way often goes right out the window once the first shot is fired. We needed our graduates to be able to serve as solo operators, fully capable of serving as shooter and spotter at the same time. (It was this solo training that would soon make Chris Kyle and a lot of other SEAL snipers so deadly on the muggy streets of urban Iraq.)
A lot of this shift had to do with the nature of the mission itself, since snipers were being used routinely as ad hoc overwatch for conventional units in dangerous locations. But it also had to do with advances in technology. Not only had the nature of war changed: so had the nature of the warrior’s tools.
For example, semiautomatic weapons had taken great leaps in efficiency and dependability, leading to greatly improved performance in the field. Back in the nineties, bolt-action guns were by far the superior sniper weapon. Semiautos just weren’t reliable enough, too prone to jamming or other malfunction. Not anymore. By the time my platoon landed in Afghanistan in late 2001 the technology of semiautomatics had become easily as reliable as that of any other gun. And using a semiauto meant you didn’t have to mess with the whole business of operating the bolt action—unlock, eject shell, slam home, relock—which eliminates a whole sequence of mechanical movement, accelerates shot output, and increases a sniper’s kill count.
Or, another example: laser range finders. Technology had made the process of ranging your target far simpler and quicker, something that in many circumstances a shooter could do himself without detracting significantly from his attention on the shot.
Increasingly, technology was enabling our guys to do it all themselves, rather than having to always pair with a partner—and having two snipers operating independently meant you could now cover a larger kill zone.
We also changed how we tested and graded them.
When I went through the course the first time, I saw guys who could shoot but didn’t understand the fundamentals of ballistics, and because of that were shitty spotters. The way the grading system worked when I went through the course was the same as in the marine and army courses: shooter and spotter were viewed as a single functional unit, and therefore they shared a grade. Which meant that a good shooter could be dragged down by having a bad spotter and flunk out because he was getting shitty input. I saw it happen.
In fact, it almost happened to Jason Delgado. As I mentioned earlier, he flunked the first two of a series of three qualifying sessions in his sniper course. And he didn’t fail by a slight margin; he wasn’t even close. On the third day, his instructors took him aside and pointed out that if he didn’t make it through this third and last round, he was going home.
They offered to let him change his spotter. At the time Jason’s spotter was Jesse Davenport, his friend and soon-to-be shooting partner in Iraq, where they were about to deploy. Jason figured, if he and Jesse were going to work together, they’d better get the kinks out now. The problem was, as I said earlier, while they were both excellent shots, neither was yet an experienced spotter. Jesse’s calls were taking Jason down.
Stubbornly, Jason said he didn’t want to change.
“You are about the dumbest motherfucker on this earth,” his instructor told him. “We suggest you change your spotter.”
A Navy SEAL who was also going through the course happened to be standing nearby. “Hey,” said the SEAL, “I’ll spot for you.”
Fuck it, thought Jason, why not? So he did. On his last qualifying round, Jason made every shot.
Now, just look at that for a second. Here’s Jason Delgado, an excellent marine who turned out to be a superstar sniper who saved a lot of lives in Iraq (as you’ll soon see)—and we almost lost him right then and there … because his spotter wasn’t giving him good calls.
Which made no sense to me. Being an effective sniper is so much more than simply being able to break a clean shot. You can repeat the mantra one shot one kill to yourself until you’re aquamarine in the face, but it often just doesn’t work out that way. If the first shot goes wrong, as it so often will, then you need to be able to figure it out, by yourself, on the spot, under maximum stress, and do it right. That’s one reason—only one, but a big one—that being a solid sniper is not the same thing as being a great match shooter.
I designed and implemented a spotting test so that nobody could slip by without having that skill set totally nailed down. It was fiendishly difficult, but fiendish with a purpose.
We’d test them on the spotting scope, then test them on the gun by themselves. Then we’d mess with their gun and have them shoot again. For example, we might have a student shoot a target at five hundred meters. Boom: center of the target. Fine. Then we’d say, “Okay, get off your weapon.” We would take his gun, reset the windage and elevation knobs, up or down, left or right, to within maybe 10 minutes of angle, without telling him exactly what we’d done, then hand his gun back and say, “Here’s three bullets. Solve the problem with two shots—and the third better be a kill shot.”
Now he’d have to adjust and get back on center target within three shots. The only way he could do that is if he truly understood ballistics. If he could do that, then we knew without a doubt that he could self-correct—and that was exactly the kind of shooter we wanted to put out the door.
* * *
Earlier I mentioned that the course Rob Furlong went through in Canada was what we call a gentleman’s course, one where the students were treated with respect, like adults, almost like colleagues. When Eric and I went through the NSW course in ’99 and 2000, it was pretty much the opposite of that. They berated us constantly, some instructors more than others.
We didn’t think that was effective or productive.
It’s not that we had thin skins or didn’t appreciate the value of tough love. Far from it. Hell, we’d both been through BUD/S and come out the other end, better men for it. But this wasn’t BUD/S, and these weren’t recruits. These were seasoned warriors. These were SEALs, for Chrissakes. We didn’t need to treat them like assholes in their first weeks of boot camp.
So we stopped yelling at them and beating them up. Instead, we tightened the screws on performance. We didn’t reduce the stress, we changed the nature of the stress. Instead of yelling at them, we tightened the tolerances and raised the level of expectation.
We also changed the fundamental nature of the relationship between instructor and student.
In the old class, that relationship varied somewhat depending on the particular character of each instructor, some being more assholes than others, and some being more decent guys. But the relationship itself was unsympathetic to the point of being adversarial. It was like they were trying to flunk us out. Again, I supposed this was modeled after the way it is in BUD/S—which works for BUD/S. But not for sniper school.
Instead, we divided the class into pairs and assigned one instructor to each pair, to serve as their personal mentor.
The mentoring idea was brilliant, and I can’t take credit for it. I’m pretty sure it was Master Chief Manty’s brainchild, but wherever it came from it was already there as a part of the new course’s structure when Eric and I arrived.
I immediately saw how smart, how effective, and how powerful this was. Throughout my training, both in the navy in general and especially as part of the SEAL teams, I’d seen plenty of examples of both great leadership and terrible leadership. I’d managed to make my way through and keep going regardless, which is what most guys do. But it was clear to me that where I’d really made tremendous progress was in those times and those situations where I’d had a great mentor. Nothing trains a skill like the apprenticeship model, and that’s exactly what a mentor provides, whether it’s explicitly structured that way or more informal, based purely on the character of the mentor.
In this case, though, it was structural, hardwired into the program, which meant it was not personality-dependent. Every single student who went through that program was going to have the benefit of a personal mentor, a skilled and highly trained professional instructor who was personally invested in seeing him succeed.
This was an incredibly valuable innovation. It provided a system of accountability that ensured nobody got left in the dark. Every day, we’d be watching out for our four guys. (Typically each instructor was assigned two pairs.) We kept student folders with detailed documentation of everything they did. We made performance notes and kept all their test scores in there. We would work with them one-on-one, coach them if they needed it, do whatever it took. Their success became our responsibility.
Every Friday we would meet with our personals to go over the week’s instruction, take a look at whatever they might be having issues with, whatever they felt they needed help with, or what we’d observed they needed help with. We’d review their records and make notes of what we talked about.
If necessary, we’d spend extra time with them over the weekend, which was typically reserved for practice and remedial work.
The following Monday we’d have a meeting where we’d check in with the course manager (which at this point was me), going around the room to each instructor. “Yeah, I checked in with my guys, here’s what’s going on, Student A was having trouble here, Student B needs help there.” Then the instructors on the line with those guys during the day would know which student needed extra work on spotting, or trigger pull, or whatever.
This also introduced a competitive element among the staff, and it was competition of the healthiest kind. We were each determined to make sure our guys were the best, which meant there was a constant effort to support them to the maximum of our ability. You did not want to show up Monday morning to go down the roster and have your guys at the bottom of the list. We would do anything we could to make sure our guys were keeping up and doing well.
When Glen and I went through the course in 2000, we had instructors who frankly didn’t give a shit whether we passed or not. At least one made an active effort to get us to fail. Now we’d turned that dynamic on its head, and built into the program an intrinsic motivation for every instructor to be working with students that he strongly wanted to succeed.
In my three years with the program, seeing more than three hundred students go through it, I only had one of my personals fail, and that was Marcus Luttrell (author of Lone Survivor), who went right back through the course again and passed with honors his second time through. All the others passed—because I’d be damned if my guys were going to fail!
* * *
By the end of that year, from late 2003 to late 2004, Eric and I had worked nonstop to achieve the platinum standard we were shooting for. Through a combination of:
we had radically transformed the SEAL sniper school.
Yet for all that, there was yet one more change we built into the course—and for me, that one additional change would have more impact on our outcomes in the field of battle than any of the others. This change had nothing to do directly with training our students in how to shoot or how to stalk.
It had to do with training them how to think.