There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
—Ernest Hemingway, “On the Blue Water”
“In words of three syllables or less, will you please tell me what on God’s green earth is going on out there? What kind of voodoo are you gentlemen up to?”
His voice was coming from Fort Benning, Georgia, more than two thousand miles away from where I sat in my subterranean office on the San Diego coast, but it nearly melted the phone in my hand. This army major was a man who knew exactly what he wanted and was accustomed to getting it.
I said nothing, just waited for him to go on. I had a feeling I knew what was coming next. Sure enough, after a pause, he said one more thing.
“Because whatever it is, Chief Webb, whatever craft beer your guys are drinking, I am calling to say, we want some.”
It was 2005, war was raging in Iraq, and our graduates were killing it in the field. Word had gotten out. Our guys were making a difference over there, and we were starting to hear from officers in other branches who wanted to know exactly what we were doing with our students that was making such a pronounced difference on the battlefield.
So, what was our secret sauce? It was everything you read in the last chapter … plus one more thing. For me, that one more thing, that X factor, was the most important change we introduced into the course, the one innovation, more than any other, that transformed the quality of snipers we were producing.
* * *
I have to admit, I was completely resistant to it at first, in part because of who it was that first pushed us in this new direction.
One day, soon after Eric and I had started working on the course, Bob Nielsen called us in to his office and told us he was retiring. This was devastating news; Bob was one of the best mentors I’d ever had and I hated the idea of losing him. As bad as that was, though, it got even worse with his next sentence: he told us who his replacement was going to be.
In my memoir The Red Circle, I wrote about Harvey Clayton and about what a nightmare it became to work under him for the next year. A master chief, Harvey was a solid match shooter but not a battle-tested sniper—exactly like the men who ran the course back when Alex Morrison went through it. (As a matter of fact, when Alex went through the course his second time in 1994, Harvey himself was the master chief in charge.)
Yet for all the grief I’ve given Harvey in print, it’s time to set the record straight in one regard. To his credit, he did introduce me to the man who would prove to be the single greatest influence on my contribution to the SEAL sniper course.
In early 2004, Harvey told us he’d arranged for us to go out to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days to meet with an Olympic shooter he knew who was an expert on mental management.
Oh great, I thought. Here we were, trying to get our guys ready for war, and Harvey was sending us off to waste precious days sitting through some kind of Tony Robbins bullshit? As the Brits say: Bloody hell. One look at Eric’s face, and I was pretty sure he was thinking the same thing. (He was.)
A few days later Harvey, Eric, and I were on a plane to Scottsdale, where we met up with Master Chief Manty and a few other guys from the East Coast course. Everyone there was an E-7 (chief) or higher, with the exception of Eric and myself. (My promotion was still a year away.) As the most junior members of the group, we didn’t think it was our place to voice our opinions too loudly. But we sure thought them loudly enough.
We checked into some crappy discount chain hotel, the kind with the same crappy paintings on every wall and same threadbare sheets on every crappy bed. I don’t mean to sound like a travel snob, but I hate these places; if we can’t go first class, I’d just as soon stay at a cheap B&B (or these days, an Airbnb).
Our meetings were taking place in a crappy little conference room. It felt like I was about to get a pitch for a third-rate timeshare.
This was not building my confidence.
SEALs are always looking for a competitive advantage, so we tend to be early adopters and aggressive innovators. At the same time, we’re also huge skeptics and ready to tear apart anything or anyone if we perceive them as not up to snuff. I’d recently been sent out to the East Coast to sit on a board reviewing proposed equipment upgrades for a new Special Operations “peculiar weapons modification kit”—SOPMOD—for SOCOM. One vendor came in and started giving his pitch, and I could see within seconds that it was full of holes. This guy had never been in the field, had probably never even shot a gun. He tried to field my objections, but he didn’t have a chance. He exposed his soft underbelly, and I eviscerated him. My point is, we’re a tough crowd.
We walked into the crappy little hotel’s crappy little conference room, sat down, and waited, prepared to eviscerate.
And then Lanny Bassham showed up.
* * *
The first thing that struck me about Lanny was what a humble, affable guy he was. No big ego, no swagger, no strutting—and he had plenty to strut about if he’d wanted to. This guy was the real deal. A shooting prodigy, Lanny had been assigned as a kid to the AMU (Army Marksmanship Unit), whose ranks include the best match shooters in the world. When he went to shoot in the 1972 Olympics in Munich at age twenty-five, he was already the youngest world champion in the sport and odds-on favorite to take the gold.
Those high expectations, however, proved to be his undoing.
One day in Munich he happened to overhear a few Russian competitors talking about him, musing about how much pressure he must be under. Their comments got into his head. He choked—and came away with a silver medal instead of the expected gold.
Lanny was devastated. Objectively, he knew that winning a silver medal in the Olympics was a fantastic achievement. (Hell, just competing in the Olympics is damn impressive!) Yet he couldn’t shake the bitterly disappointing sense of failure. He started dreading the moment when a new acquaintance would learn that he had been to the Olympics, because he knew how the conversation would go from there:
Acquaintance: “Oh wow, you were in the Olympics?”
Lanny: “Yup.”
Acquaintance: “That’s amazing. How did you do?”
Lanny: “I took silver.”
Acquaintance: “Wow. So who won the gold that year?”
Lanny says his definition of silver medal became “the very best you can possibly do and still lose.”
“Who remembers the silver medalist?” he says. “Or the first runner-up to Miss America, or the finalist in the World Series or Super Bowl? The only ones who remember are the runners-up themselves—and they can never forget.”
His words were especially meaningful to Eric and me, because we weren’t any more interested in second place than Lanny was. In the arena of Special Operations, being second-best doesn’t mean you go home with a silver medal. It means you go home in a wooden box.
Lanny suffered with his disappointment for a few years. Then, in 1974, he met a man who changed his life. He recounts the story in parable form in his book Freedom Flight, where he calls the man “Jack Sands.” (His real name was Jack Fellowes, but I’ll follow Lanny’s parable here and call him Sands.)
A captain in the navy (later promoted to commander), Sands was shot down over Vietnam and spent more than six years as a prisoner of war at the infamous POW camp known as the Hanoi Hilton. Six-plus years later he was finally released and flown back to San Diego, where they put him in an ambulance to get him over to Balboa Hospital to get checked out. The guy weighed barely a hundred pounds; after all, he had been in prison camp, under awful conditions, for over six years.
As they headed to the hospital, they drove past the golf course by the back gate of Naval Air Station North Island. Suddenly Sands called out, “Wait—stop the ambulance!”
What the hell? The ambulance driver pulled over, alarmed. Was the guy dying or something?
“Let me out for a bit,” said Sands. “I’ve got to play some golf.”
The driver looked at him like he was crazy. But Sands insisted. Hey, he was the returning hero. The driver reluctantly let him out of the ambulance and took him over to the golf course clubhouse, where the club members at first refused to let him play and tried to throw him out.
He explained who he was, that he’d been holed up in the worst imaginable prison in North Vietnam for more than six years, and that he really, really wanted to get out on the green and play a round of golf. Most of these guys were vets themselves. They took pity on him and brought him around to the pro shop to get outfitted, meanwhile shooting each other nervous looks behind the commander’s back. This guy was in absolutely terrible shape, not much more than skin and bones, could barely walk on his own. He was on his way to the hospital, for crying out loud. Would he even be able to swing the damn club without falling over?
The commander went out onto the green and shot par on the first hole. And the second. And the third. His drives went ripping down the fairway, every time. His putts were perfect. He shot par on all eighteen holes.
The club regulars all stared at him like he was from outer space. This guy hadn’t been on a golf course in years. Hell, he hadn’t even seen grass in years. He’d been wasting away in a tiny cell, with no exercise. What he’d just done simply wasn’t possible. Yet they’d just watched him do it.
“Pardon me for asking, Commander,” said one of the clubbers, “but how the hell did you do that?”
And he said, “Gents, I’ve played thousands of rounds of golf in my head over the past six years, and let me tell you, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve missed a putt.”
That was how the man had kept himself sane during his long stretch as a POW. He would sit in his tiny cell, build pictures in his head of all his favorite courses, and walk through them, playing round after round of golf. Every day, for six years. He hadn’t physically been on a golf course for ages—but he had mentally rehearsed his game to the point of perfection, and done it so thoroughly that his all muscles and articulations knew exactly what to do.
Commander Sands’s experience was not unique; quite a few POWs in Vietnam embarked on such massive feats of visualization in order to keep their sanity. One, Commander Howard Rutledge, filled his seven years in captivity by building five complete houses in his imagination, starting with locating the land and negotiating its purchase, then personally clearing the ground and digging the foundation, on through every detail of construction and concluding with landscaping and furnishing the place, putting it on sale and selling it for a profit before turning his attention to the next project and starting the whole process over again. Another, Commander William Lawrence, started combing back through his memory to see how many names he could remember from among his first-grade classmates, and ended up reliving his entire life to date in detail—three times over.
What these men all had in common, of course, was that they were prisoners of war and had virtually no physical freedom. But then, as Sands pointed out, Lanny was imprisoned, too, only in a prison of his own making: he was stuck in a box of frustration, regret, and self-limitation over his inability to take that gold medal.
Because it wasn’t really the bald fact that he had come in second that had so bothered Lanny. It was that he had the ability to come in first—but he had allowed his environment, in the form of the Russian competitors’ words, to control him and knock him off his game. Those overheard comments had put him in prison, and on some level he knew it.
What Sands told him that changed the course of his life boiled down to this: If your environment and circumstances control your attitude, you’re in prison. If you are in control of your thoughts and your attitude, then you’re free.
This was a revelation for me. This “mental management” we’d been flown to Scottsdale to hear about in a crappy hotel conference room wasn’t just some technique or tactic for mastering a particular skill set. It was a philosophy, one that resonated with me and with the core nature of everything we were up to.
The point of our course wasn’t to have our students become expert shooters.
The point of our course was to have our students become masters of their fate.
Which was exactly what Lanny went out and did. After meeting Jack Sands in 1974, he spent the next two years interviewing close to a hundred Olympic gold medalists and their coaches and, much like the way Eric reverse-engineers, he took note of everything they said and analyzed exactly how they trained. Those mental management core principles lay at the heart of it all. In 1976 he returned to the Olympics in Montreal—and this time, he took gold. He went on to dominate the field for years, winning twenty-two world individual and team titles and setting four world records. He also codified everything he’d learned into a system that he had now been teaching to coaches and athletes from all over the world.
Lanny talked with us throughout that day. The army major had it exactly right. We walked out of that little conference room completely drinking the Kool-Aid. I’ve been drinking it ever since.
* * *
We implemented our new mental management philosophy in three prime areas. The first was to establish a fundamentally positive approach to teaching, starting with a bedrock principle that Sands told Lanny he had absorbed while in captivity: “Focus only on the solution to the problem—never on the problem itself.”
This idea was familiar to me, and would have been to any SEAL. We are taught from day one never to bring up a problem without having a solution. Spec Ops warfighters are extremely solution-oriented, both by training and by nature. We are the entrepreneurs of the military, not the good employees who follow orders and act along preestablished paths. We go into impossible situations and accomplish the objective anyway.
Still, with all that action-oriented solution bias, I realized, we weren’t teaching that way. We were teaching the way most of us had learned by example, since we were kids, the way most people teach, which is to focus on the problem.
I used to coach Little League, and it always blew my mind how some of the other coaches would talk to the kids. I heard one coach tell a kid, just as he was about to go to bat, “Hey, Billy, whatever you do, don’t strike out!”
What the hell did he think that poor kid was thinking about as he stepped up to the plate? He was thinking about striking out. That’s all he could think about. And when he did in fact strike out (which of course he did), it wasn’t his fault, even though he thought it was. As far as I could see, it was the coach’s fault, 100 percent.
Here’s an example closer to home: remember that pithy little mantra of encouragement Glen and I received as we packed for sniper school, which I was still repeating to myself three years later as Eric and I prepared for our new assignment?
Don’t fuck up.
If someone tells you a hundred times, “Don’t fuck up” (or you tell yourself a hundred times), then what are you thinking about? Fucking up, of course. And because what you focus on is what you get, guess what happens? You fuck up. It works that way with seven-year-old kids trying to hit a baseball—and it works exactly the same way with grown men seeking to become the best military marksmen in the world.
When I heard Lanny, I instantly clicked with what he was saying, and knew we had to shift our core instructional methodology from “Don’t do it that way” to “Do it this way.”
Focus only on the solution to the problem—never on the problem itself.
If our new curriculum was the constitution of our new course, those thirteen words became its declaration of independence.
We started by writing down every single aspect of shooting that we saw as important—the classic Eric reverse-engineering tactic. When we were finished, we’d come up with about a hundred distinct points. Then we started a process of sorting and sifting, prioritizing them into hierarchies of importance, and eventually whittled our list down to seven core fundamentals of marksmanship. In the interests of not disclosing sensitive TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures), we’re not going to spell out that list of seven fundamentals here, but I’ll use the example of smooth trigger pull.
For a sniper, smooth trigger pull is exactly analogous to the golfer’s swing or the quarterback’s pass. For a public speaker, it’s that first sentence you speak after the introduction is over, the applause has stopped, and the hall has gone silent. It’s the keystone of the arch, the pivotal point where the rubber meets the road. The make-or-break moment.
There’s a difference, though. For a match shooter, pulling the trigger is like a pro golfer’s swing in this all-important way: you do it when you’re ready. The crowd is silent. You’ve done all your prep. You’ve lined up your shot. You’ve waited as long as you feel you needed to wait until the moment is just right. And then you go.
In war, a sniper doesn’t have that luxury. You’re not shooting on a range, you’re shooting in the confusing, noisy mess of battle. Which is why we all do our best to place our students in the midst of as much stress and distraction as possible, simulating as best we can the kinds of environmental sabotage they will have to fight through.
What the student does not need is the instructor sabotaging his thought process.
You see a lot of negative reinforcement in boot camp and other basic military training programs. (If I had a dollar for every time I heard an instructor say, “You are a worthless piece of shit, Webb!” my immediate peer group would include Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.) This was equally true in the NSW sniper course, which had modeled its teaching style on the negative-reinforcement approach of the marine course.
But I didn’t think that was working at sniper school. When they would screw up, we didn’t need to rub it in. They would do that all by themselves. Typically when a student missed a shot he would immediately get down on himself. He didn’t need us to tell him he’d fucked up. He had that territory covered.
The problem with negative reinforcement is that you are essentially programming your student to fail. I wanted to program them to be successful—no matter what.
So once we had identified those seven fundamentals as the focus of our marksmanship teaching on the range, I told all the staff, “Okay, guys, this is what we’re going to do. Here’s how were going to teach. If you see your student doing something wrong, you give him a positive correction. Not a negative correction. Instead of telling him not to do what he’s doing wrong, identify the fundamental he needs to be implementing, and remind him to do that.”
Imagine you’re on the gun for the first time, at five hundred yards, and I’m standing over you. I walk you through sighting in the target and you squeeze the trigger. Let’s say there’s a malfunction, and I notice that when the click comes from the firing pin hitting the bullet but the bullet doesn’t go off, you flinch.
I could say, “Hey, next time don’t flinch.”
Now what are you thinking about? Flinching, of course. It’s all you can think about. I just programmed you with a negative.
Or, I could take you back over the essentials of smooth trigger pull, and then say, “Look, this was a great learning experience for next time. You know what you need to do differently, right? Good.” Instead of pushing your face into what you’ve done wrong, I’ve just gotten you squarely focused on how much better you will do next time, and exactly why.
In either scenario, I’m telling you what to do, except in the first case I’m telling you to repeat the mistake, and in the second case I’m reinforcing the positive habit.
So simple. So powerful.
Focus on the solution to the problem—never on the problem itself.
I use that exact same approach today in business, when I talk to my team or I’m training up a new employee. I carefully watch how I’m talking to them, what words and phrases I’m using. I do the same thing with my children. It works.
* * *
The second area where we implemented mental management was to begin teaching our students how to hone and perfect their skills through mental rehearsal, exactly as in the story of Jack Sands’s perfect golf game.
This was something Lanny had observed in all the interviews he conducted with Olympic gold medalists between 1974 and 1976: they all tapped the power of visualization, taking the time and care to fully think through the entire process of whatever their particular sport and event was, visualizing it fully in great detail and mentally practicing it to perfection.
I wrote up a two-hour course on mental management and its application to marksmanship and incorporated that into our Fundamentals of Marksmanship curriculum. It came first thing, right at the start of the first class of the marksmanship portion of the course. And while that was just a two-hour class, we revisited and reinforced the material again and again, so they were relearning it throughout the course.
I started out by telling Lanny’s story: his background, his Olympic credentials and history, and how he developed his approach. I explained the core principles of our mental management philosophy. And then taught them how to practice to perfection through mental rehearsal.
In one course I had two personals, Brant and Liebermann, who I knew had great potential. Like everyone in the SEAL community, they knew the course’s reputation and its outrageous level of difficulty. At the start of the marksmanship phase, they came to me and said, “Realistically, Chief, what are you expecting out of us on this first shooting test?”
I told them, “I expect you to shoot perfect scores.”
Which of course was crazy; nobody shot perfect scores. But that’s what I told them. And you know why? Because it was what I expected from them.
I had also given them one of Lanny’s books, Freedom Flight, on CD (with Lanny himself doing the reading), and told them to listen to it, every word, start to finish. The only CD player they had access to was the one in their rental car. So every night, they would climb into the car and sit there, listening to the CD.
The other guys started making fun of them, saying they were going to their car at night to make out, shit like that. Usual SEAL stuff. They ignored the taunts. By the time I was telling them I expected their perfect scores, they had listened to the whole thing through, twice.
Just to give you an idea of the standards: in that first test we had them shooting a .308 semiauto back to one thousand meters, which was at the outer edge of the gun’s performance limitations. (Exceed your gun’s inherent factory-established capacity and even absolutely perfect shots can go bad.)
We gave them a snaps and movers test, hitting multiple targets that are suddenly snapped upright (snaps) and others that are moving left and right at irregular, unpredictable intervals (movers), shooting out to 200, 400, 600, 800, and 1,000 yards. Then they had to shoot an unknown distance (UKD) test, where they had to view a target, quickly assess the distance by ranging it with their scope—no laser range finders or other technology allowed—and then shoot it accurately. On top of all these variables, plus whatever the wind was doing, they had to contend with unpredictable human variables. The guy who happens to be out there today snapping your targets up may have had too much to drink the night before and start snapping them up a little crooked. (A not unlikely scenario, by the way.)
They would each go through the test twice, first as shooter and then as spotter, and we graded shooter and spotter separately in both cases, so no one could ride on someone else’s coattails. They all had to have both skill sets down cold. This meant they would rack up a total of four scores for the pair of them.
When it got around that I’d told those two I expected perfect scores, even the other instructors looked at me sideways.
The next day was the day of the test. Brant and Liebermann shot through and came out with the following scores:
100
100
95
100
That’s missing one shot out of eighty. About as damn close to perfection as a mortal can get.
The next day there was a line outside their barracks room: guys who wanted to get hold of those CDs and go sit in their rental cars.
We also taught them to use this practice for rehearsing contingencies.
If you think of ten things that could go wrong on the battlefield, you can design contingency plans for each one, then rehearse each of those circumstances along with the execution of your contingency and have the potential problem already addressed, so that when it does happen—if it happens—you’ve already rehearsed this ten times and you can deal with it almost without thinking.
At the time, I was just getting my pilot’s license, and I applied the same approach to my pilot training. What would happen, I asked myself, if I were airborne and suddenly faced with an engine fire? Or an engine went out on takeoff? I rehearsed those and other scenarios in my head, going through the entire emergency procedure over and over so that if it ever did happen for real, I knew I could handle the situation with total confidence. It was like working in a simulator, only instead of being physically strapped into an expensive facility, I simply built the simulator in my head.
* * *
Our third mental management area was the application of a positive teaching style to what we called self-coaching. This was a huge departure from the negative style of teaching we were accustomed to, and it focused not only on how we talked to our students, but especially on how they talked to themselves.
There is no one who has as strong an influence over you as you yourself. Others can talk to you for limited amounts of time, but you talk to yourself constantly, twenty-four hours a day. Not out loud (usually), and most of the time often not even consciously aware that you’re doing it. But you’re doing it, all right. We all are. And what you say to yourself—about what you’re doing, how you’re doing, and what you believe you can or can’t do—has an incalculably powerful impact on your behavior.
If I hadn’t learned this on some level myself, I’d never have made it to sniper school in the first place.
Despite how inexperienced I was with guns, I managed to survive the shooting portion of BUD/S back in 1997. It was when I got to our advanced SEAL training, where we started learning how to actually be SEALs and apply all the skills we’d learned, that I really struggled. We were out at La Posta doing our expert shooting qual on the range, and I was getting a lot of “What’s your problem?” looks from the other guys. Clearly, I was the worst shot in the class.
Here’s how the thoughts in my head sounded:
Oh my God, I suck at this! How am I going to make it through? I’m fucked!
At that point I had a breakthrough. I realized what I was thinking and how much those thoughts were crippling me, how much they were sabotaging any chance I might have of improving. I was burying myself with my own bullshit.
Dude, I told myself, let’s just stop and reset. You have all the skills to be a good shot. You’re totally capable. Now let’s just smoke this thing.
In that instant, I changed the way I was thinking about myself and the language I used in how I talked to myself. Progress was slow at first, but it picked up speed. Before long I went from being the worst shot in the class to one of the best in my platoon.
Now it was a few years later, and I was course master for the entire program.
In Lanny’s book With Winning in Mind he lays out a detailed self-coaching plan. When he explained the essence of it to us that day in Scottsdale, I immediately recognized the power of what he was talking about and knew we had to incorporate it into the course.
In our initial two-hour class I explained what self-coaching was and how it worked. I taught the students how to coach themselves, so if they caught themselves speaking to themselves a certain way, they could correct it on the spot and start changing their own habits of thought.
“Self-talk is not some airy-fairy seminar concept, gentlemen,” I told them. “It’s as real as blood and bullets. More than all the teaching and coaching we can provide, the most important thing is to make sure you know how to coach yourselves effectively. Because we are all our own best coaches or worst coaches—and typically it’s worst, not best.”
Even today, working in the worlds of business and media, I’m struck by how often I hear people say, “Oh, I’m not very good at this,” or, “Man, I’m having a hard time with that.” Yeah? Well keep on telling yourself that, and it will keep on being true. Because you’re actually practicing being bad at whatever it is you’re talking about.
It’s amazing how deeply ingrained most people are in their negative self-talk. You can teach people about positive self-coaching and explain it all thoroughly, but it really takes practice—a lot of practice—to uproot those deep habits of thought.
On the other hand, these were SEALs we were dealing with. Compared to the average citizen, our students were already tremendously disciplined, not only physically but also mentally. They caught on quickly and started correcting their own thought habits until it became second nature.
Of course, the real teaching happened not in that two-hour lecture, sitting in our little secret bunker, but out on the range in the weeks and weeks of sixteen-hour days that followed. Because it’s seductively easy to revert to old habits of thought and self-talk when you’re placed under the kinds of stresses we put our students through.
And we would actively look for scenarios to put them in to create maximum stress and adversity, in order to see how they’d deal with it. Better there than in Afghanistan or Iraq, right?
At one point I had two students taking a test, and they started complaining that the head snaps were coming up slightly crooked instead of perfectly straight up and down.
Really? I thought. What are you going to do on the battlefield? Ask the enemy to please stand up straight while you shoot them? Jesus.
“Look,” I told them, “it doesn’t matter if they’re straight or not. The target’s still there. It’s not like they’re exposing any less of the target. Just shoot the damned thing.”
But they kept complaining. They couldn’t let it go.
So I radioed down to the students who were operating the targets on that lane and told them to make it even worse. “Snap it up at a forty-five-degree angle,” I said. And then we all watched these two students implode. They completely lost it, screaming and stamping. They couldn’t recover their composure. They couldn’t deal with the stress.
This is not what you want when you are walking down a rubble-strewn street in Ramadi or storming a compound in Jalalabad. You want a guy watching your back who says, “Hey, I don’t give a shit where my target is or how it’s positioned, I’ll shoot and move on.”
I used it as a lesson. Those two failed miserably, and it was purely because of the quality of their own self-coaching. It wasn’t the target’s fault. The target wasn’t any harder to hit, just because it wasn’t straight. It was the fact that something went wrong, and they let it get to them.
It wasn’t the target. It was what they were telling themselves about the target.
It’s really interesting to me how different those two attitudes are, and I see it all the time, even in my civilian life today. In the real world, things don’t always go well. In fact, they most often don’t go well. There’s a reason “Shit happens” became such a hit as a bumper sticker. But here’s the difference: when something goes wrong, the ordinary person gets rattled, stressed, or pissed off. The champion embraces the adversity, even welcomes it as a gift, as an opportunity to say, “Look what I can do! Even given this shit situation I’m in, I’m still going to win!”
The exact same circumstances, yet one attitude produces failure while the other creates triumph. That, as Lanny told us, is the mind-set of the gold medalist.
* * *
As we implemented all these changes something interesting happened. Our standards went up. Yet our attrition rate went down. We had created something like a Wharton MBA equivalent for snipers, multiplying the amount of material to be absorbed and raising the level of difficulty—yet we were graduating more students, not fewer.
Before we redid the course, the NSW 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 one percent. The kinds of unbelievable scores Brant and Liebermann shot on that first test soon became the norm, rather than the exception.
Eric and I started working on the course in the middle of ’03 and began teaching it full-time the following January. I continued there until I left the military in July of ’06. In those three years I saw a dozen classes go through the course, comprised of more than three hundred students. What I witnessed in these guys was phenomenal almost beyond the point of description. When they emerged from the NSW course, they weren’t the same people they were when they started. There was an internal transformation so complete, so bone-deep that you could see it in the way they walked into the room. They didn’t just get good. They went beyond what they thought was possible and rose to a level of potential that surprised even them.
These few years also became a sort of who’s who of SEAL snipers, as some of our students went out onto the battlefield, distinguished themselves, and then went on to write about their experiences—or, in some cases, to be written about by others. That roster included, among others, Chris Kyle (who went through the course in the spring of ’04), Morgan Luttrell (summer ’04), Matt Axelson (summer ’04), Marcus Luttrell (fall ’04 and again that winter), Adam Brown (spring ’05), and JT Tumilson (summer ’05).
Writing about his sniper school experiences in Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell refers to me (though his editors spell my name Brendan Webb) as having standards “so high they would have made an Apache scout gasp.” Later on, recounting what went through his mind as he prepared for a mission to take out a Taliban HVT, he says: “Chances were I’d get only one shot at Sharmak [their HVT], just one time when I could trap him in the crosshairs and squeeze that trigger, probably from hundreds of yards away. I knew only one thing: I better not miss, because the apparitions of Webb and Davis, not to mention every other serving SEAL, would surely rise up and tear my ass off.”
Marcus went through the course in the fall of 2004 but failed to pass the stalk phase. He got the hang of it partway through, but by then it was too late; he couldn’t quite catch up. Like any good SEAL, though, he did not know the meaning of the term “quit.” He turned around and did the whole damn course again, start to finish, and sailed through his second time, in early 2005, with flying colors.
Years after we were both out of the navy, Marcus gave me a tearful embrace aboard the USS Midway in San Diego at a charity event and credited his training, especially the stalking portion, with saving his life in Afghanistan.
“Your training saved my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be standing here today without it. And I want to thank you for it.” It was a proud moment for me as an instructor, and it made the long hours of hard work put into the course and away from my own family all worthwhile.
Because of Lone Survivor, Marcus is the Luttrell the whole world knows about. But his twin brother, Morgan, is as outsize a character as his brother. Maybe more. Marcus says he’s been jailed four times for Morgan’s unpaid speeding tickets. I’m not entirely sure if that’s true or a Texas tall tale, but it definitely gives you a sense of their relationship. Even if I didn’t know which one was born first, I’d have bet any money it was Morgan. (It was, by seven minutes.) The two are also as devoted to each other as only identical twins can be. “Hey,” Morgan would say when he did the course in the summer of ’04, “make sure you take care of my brother when he comes through.” Morgan was a new guy and hadn’t done a platoon yet (unlike Marcus, who had). But he had no problems whatsoever and crushed the course.
For the Luttrell brothers, being SEALs has been a backbreaking experience—literally. Marcus broke his back during his escape in Operation Red Wings (which will come as no surprise to you if you’ve seen the 2013 Peter Berg film). Four years later, Morgan broke his during a training exercise, when the Black Hawk he was in clipped a cable and crashed into the boat they were about to board. Like Marcus, he defied doctor’s predictions, healed up faster than anyone would have expected, and went back out. Morgan eventually left the service after nine tours of combat to pursue a doctorate degree in applied cognition to help in his work with the victims of traumatic brain injuries.
Matt Axelson was Morgan’s best friend, and the two were paired up in their run through the course in the summer of ’04. Of the three-hundred-plus students I saw come through, Axelson was one of the best. In my book Among Heroes I wrote a whole chapter about him. He was also one of the four SEALs, along with Marcus, sent on Operation Red Wings in the summer of ’05; he and Marcus were the team’s two snipers. Unlike Marcus, Axe did not survive the mission. He is sorely missed by many.
As is JT Tumilson, who was also one of my personals. JT played a special role in the course when he came through in the summer of ’05. For each class we appointed one exceptional student as class leader. For that class, it was Tumilson—and he was the best damned class leader I had the whole time. JT was also a close friend of both Marcus’s and Morgan’s and part of their platoon at Team Five. JT perished in August 2011, along with thirty-seven others, when their Chinook was shot down by Taliban forces in the Tangi Valley, west of Kabul. I wrote about JT, too, in Among Heroes.
Like Alex Morrison and Marcus Luttrell, Adam Brown (subject of the bestselling book Fearless) failed the stalking phase his first time through the course in 2002. Like those other two exceptional men, he also turned around and did it again, nailing it on his second time through.
When Adam took his second shot at the course in the first few months of 2005, it was the last time we ran the East Coast and West Coast courses completely separately; that summer we merged the shooting phase into one national program (though we continued doing PIC and stalk on separate coasts). For that session I was on the West Coast with Marcus’s class and was not an instructor for Adam’s course, so I didn’t know him well, but I met him briefly out at the East Coast training facility, and by that time I had heard all about him. The guy was already legendary in NSW circles because he’d done something that was over the edge of crazy, even for a SEAL.
Nearly two years earlier, in the summer of 2003, Adam was participating in a CQB exercise when one of those fluke training accidents happened. He took a round in the eye from a sim round (real bullets with liquid, paint-filled tips). The eye was a total loss—and it was his right eye. A natural righty, Brown retrained himself to become left-eye-dominant and to shoot left-handed before going through the course a second time. Just getting through the SEAL sniper course was already one hell of an achievement. This crazy bastard put himself through it with one eye, shooting lefty.
Talk about a testament to the power of thought.
And then there was Chris Kyle, aka the Legend.
Chris’s story is so well known by now there’d be little point in my repeating it here. Suffice it to say that even back when he came through the course in the spring of 2004, when he wasn’t “the Legend” yet, had no record of 160-plus kills overseas yet, had not been labeled Shaitan al-Ramadi (“the devil of Ramadi”) by Iraqi insurgents yet, or had an $80,000 bounty slapped on his head—back when none of that had happened and he was just another sniper student from Texas, it was already clear that he was someone to keep our eyes on.
Unlike Marcus, Morgan, Axelson, and JT, Chris was not my personal (he was Eric’s), but apparently I made an impression on him. To put it more accurately, I said one word that made an impression on him.
As our outstanding graduates began rotating back stateside from the field—from Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and other hot spots—Eric and I started a regular practice of inviting them over to the schoolhouse to sit and talk, debrief about what they’d seen and experienced over there. Were there things we should change, things we should do better, new things we should be teaching? We would incorporate what we learned from them into our regular course reviews, and if it seemed important enough, we’d integrate the change into the course within weeks.
Chris came down to the bunker one day after returning from Iraq. Things were hopping in the office, and just as he started debriefing us on some details about the urban hide sites they were using over there, the phone rang.
I raised one finger to tell Chris I’d make this quick, and picked up.
It was a Special Boat Team guy, calling with a question about quals for sniper school. Really. Quals for sniper school? This guy wasn’t even a SEAL.
Back then, students who quit or failed out of BUD/S would sometimes get a shot at going to the special boat squadron, or SWCC (special warfare combatant-craft crewman). It created a strange, uneasy dynamic. You’d be out on a boat and suddenly realize that this guy who was driving you was the same guy who quit your BUD/S class a few years ago. It was weird. We just didn’t trust these guys. (Point of clarification: these were not the same as the SDV or SEAL delivery vehicle teams, like the one Marcus and Axelson were attached to. Not even in the same solar system.) Command soon realized this wasn’t working, and since that time they’ve done a stellar job of making it into an excellent program. But at the time, there was still a stigma about it.
I put the boat guy on speakerphone.
“Hey, this is Petty Officer So-and-So,” the voice said, all excited, “I’m from Special Boat Team XYZ, and I wanted to find out what the requirements are for sniper school!”
I looked at Chris.
“BUD/S,” I said, and disconnected the call.
Chris totally lost it. He cracked up, couldn’t stop laughing about it.
Years later, long after we were both out of the service, when we met up again in the context of being authors, he reminded me about this episode. I’d completely forgotten. He was still laughing.
* * *
That roll call—Kyle, Luttrell, Luttrell, Axelson, Brown, Tumilson—gives you a sense of the caliber of platinum-level snipers coming out of the program. And they are only the names you’ve heard of. For each of them there were dozens of others, and they were having a tangible impact, changing the way the enemy behaved. When the enemy has to worry, “Am I being watched by one of their snipers right now?” it denies them their freedom of movement. It shifts the equation on the battlefield.
Word started getting back to us about how thankful the marine and army forces were to have the SEAL snipers with them. You’ve probably seen the movie American Sniper (or read the book), and might remember the scenes where Chris Kyle is moving around Iraq with a unit of marines who are clearing building to building. Knowing that Kyle was up there somewhere—on a rooftop, at a window, wherever he happened to hide himself that day—made those troops feel safer, which in turn ratcheted up their effectiveness. Having him up there gave our conventional forces more room to move around without getting shot at or blown up. Chris was making it more dangerous for the other guys—and safer for our guys.
Now, multiply that effect by a hundred—because there were dozens and dozens of other guys just like Chris, with the same training and same level of skill and lethality, watching over our guys and laying down the enemy by the hundreds. Guys who never wrote books, were never interviewed on CNN, and whose names you’ll never hear, but who changed the face of combat for thousands of men and women in our conventional units.
Over the decade-plus that the putative War on Terror has been waged in the Middle East and Africa we’ve lost a lot of Americans, and a lot of Coalition brothers and sisters, too. But without the Kyles, Luttrells, and Tumilsons—and the Furlongs, Delgados, and Irvings—we would have lost an awful lot more.
* * *
At thirteen weeks, the new course was almost twice as long as the U.S. Army sniper school and longer by weeks than either the army’s advanced SOTIC course or the USMC scout sniper basic course. But even that wasn’t the whole of it. We also ran advanced classes beyond the basic course, a sort of continuing education for snipers that extended the reach of our curriculum even further.
For one of these, our rural program, we would take our students out into the wilds of the Northwest, up by the Canadian border, for a week-long hunting trip to stalk elk and whitetail deer. Some of these guys had hunted before; many had not. This was their chance to go out, stalk, shoot, and stop a beating heart.
It was literally a Killing School.
We would start out before sunrise, in the dark, and be on the hunt by the time the sun was warming the frost off the tips of branches. We would hunt for a few hours, then come back to the lodge for breakfast. Toward dusk we would go out a second time, hunting well past dark, then come back to dress out whatever we caught. This wasn’t some recreational junket where guys pulled triggers and then slapped each other on the back and went out for beers. We stalked, shot, skinned and gutted, cleaned, cooked, and ate every animal we killed.
In the full daylight hours in between, we ran advanced classes in long-distance shooting and real-world stalking.
These stalk sessions were like nothing else these guys had ever experienced before. In the classic course you stalk through an established sector and you know where your left and right boundaries are. Here we put our students into a very dynamic 360-degree environment with live fire. And while they were working for hours to get close enough to their targets to take a clean shot, we set countersnipers after them with radios to do their best to bust them. It was the same essential concept as the regular stalking course—just far more realistic.
As I said, I grew up spearfishing, but I’d never done any land hunting before. On one of our rural courses I shot my first deer. At the time, we were just starting to use ballistic software. Sitting in Southern California beforehand, I took a brand-new gun, zeroed it at one hundred yards, then took it with us up to the Canadian border. I did not zero the gun again; in fact, I didn’t shoot a single round out of it in this new environment, just applied the data the software gave me. Out in the wild, I lased a deer with my range finder, plugged in my elevation adjustments, aimed, and fired. The gun’s first shot in an entirely different environment, different elevation, different climate, shooting at 437 yards, on an upward 20 degree incline—and that first shot took the animal up off its feet. One shot, one kill.
There were some in the circle of command higher-ups who tried to snuff the program. Just a bunch of SEALs out on a nice boondoggle; that was their view of it. Fortunately more sensible heads prevailed. This was no boondoggle; it was a level of essential training that we couldn’t achieve in any other way. We were conditioning our students for the kill.
If you can track and hunt deer successfully then you are well trained for the battlefield, because humans are actually much easier prey than the animals we were hunting. Humans tend to be lazy, their situational awareness blunted by the comfort and security of domesticated living. Animals in the wild have razor-sharp instincts, and they know how to listen to them. Their senses are preternaturally keen. To sneak up on an elk in the Great North, you need to be part wild animal yourself.
There were students coming through the course who had grown up hunting, the Chris Kyles and Marcus and Morgan Luttrells. But there were also plenty who’d hardly ever touched a gun before SEAL training—people like Eric and me. For these people, this was the first time in their lives that they had ever stopped a beating heart with a lead slug. This gave them the chance to find out if they could do it.
More importantly, it gave us that chance.
Because not everyone could. And that’s something you need to know about someone you’re sending into the field of battle. He may be a tremendous guy, full of courage and loyalty and dedication and all kinds of great qualities. But if he cannot stare at a living being in his scope and pull the trigger without hesitation, he is not the guy you want on sniper overwatch as your unit enters a compound overflowing with lethal threats.
You want a guy who will not hesitate to kill, if killing is what’s called for.
* * *
Still, with all the improvements we made in the core NSW course, and even with advanced training like our rural course, we never lost sight of one unassailable fact: it still wasn’t reality. Not the reality of pointing a weapon at a human being, in the midst of the chaos of war, and shooting him. There really isn’t any way to train for that, no matter what sort of program you create.
The only way to truly train for the reality of war is to go to war.
Which is the third and final phase of the Killing School.