JOHN ZINN
In July 2006, eighteen months after making chief and wresting command of the NSW sniper course from Harvey Clayton’s hands, I left the U.S. armed services and faced the question every Spec Ops warrior must face sooner or later: What now? Once you’ve trained for years to become part of the world’s most elite fighting force, then spent long stretches in the thick of some of the most dangerous conflicts on the globe, what do you do for an encore?
Getting out of the service wasn’t an easy choice. I had put in nearly fourteen years of active service in the Navy. Sticking it out for another six would buy me a decent retirement package. I had colleagues who couldn’t believe I would even think about walking away with only a few years to go. Some were actually angry at me, which surprised me. (What did they think, I was somehow letting them down?) But I’d put the Navy and the teams ahead of my wife and kids for too many years.
Marriage and being part of the teams is not an easy mix. The day our first child was born I was in the Persian Gulf, headed for terrorist hideouts in the caves of Afghanistan. I didn’t even meet my son until he was six months old. When our second came along I was constantly on the road, developing and teaching advanced courses to sniper students, and those long months away were tough on our relationship. The birth of our third was only weeks away, and I was worried that our marriage was being pulled to the breaking point.
It was time to put family first. I had to leave the teams.
The question was, and do what?
For a lot of us in the Spec Ops world, it can be a tough transition. After years of being either in combat or in training for combat, it feels strange to conform to the dictates and behaviors of the civilian workplace. It’s not necessarily hard to get work; there are plenty of private-sector firms who are anxious to hire people with the knowledge, experience, and skill sets of a Navy SEAL. It’s just hard to adapt to what others think of as a “normal” work situation.
We typically don’t make very good employees. Regular soldiers and sailors are trained to work well as functioning parts of the collective, good cogs in a larger watchworks. In the SEAL teams you’re not taught simply to obey orders; you’re taught to accomplish the mission, however that works and whatever it takes. We are groomed to think fast, think for ourselves, and think unconventionally. If soldiers and sailors are the military’s version of a solid corporate workforce, we are its entrepreneurs, innovators, and misfits.
If I was going to leave the employ of the government, the only employer I was interested in going to work for was myself. With a family of five to feed, that was a daunting prospect, but I couldn’t see doing it any other way.
Fortunately for me, I had some excellent role models. And one in particular.
• • •
I met John Zinn in the late nineties, when we had both just completed our respective BUD/S classes and joined Team Three. I was standing in the middle of a class on advanced diving techniques while our instructor gave a safety brief, something about how to avoid getting sucked into giant turbines and turned into fish food, when I heard a Clint Eastwood voice rasp quietly behind me: “Everyone has to die someday. . . .” I craned my neck just enough to look back, half expecting a scowling Man with No Name chewing on a cheroot. Instead I found myself eyeballing a cherub-faced towhead cracking a faint smile. (A piece of human nature trivia I learned in the teams: The more time a guy spends in the water, the drier his sense of humor.)
John and I were both southern California surfers, and we hit it off right away. If your picture of a Navy SEAL is a big, chiseled, pro-football type with rippling muscles and a fuck-you glare, then you never would have pegged John for a SEAL. A slender five-eleven, with sandy blond hair, an oval face, an affable smile, and quiet confidence, he looked like your average skinny surf bum.
John was a competitive swimmer almost before he could walk. His first swim meet, at age five, was abysmal. The other kids dived into the water and swam to the end of the pool and back before John had even touched the other side. That was it for John: He never lost a meet again, and that capacity to take fuel from failure would become his signature gift.
The water was John’s passion and driving force. An excellent athlete, he played competitive water polo throughout his school years. During his senior year of high school his dad took him to become scuba-certified, and John was so far ahead of everyone else in the tests that the instructors started calling him Neptune. He could have gone on to university on a water polo scholarship. But he wanted more than anything to join the Navy and become a SEAL. Four days after his high school graduation, he was on his way to Great Lakes, Illinois, to attend Navy boot camp. He was barely seventeen. A year and a half later he was starting BUD/S.
John had no illusions about how tough the selection process would be, but he was determined to make it through no matter how hard it got. Of course, nobody goes into BUD/S planning to fail. Your first day on that asphalt grinder at Coronado you hear everyone around you saying, “Hey, man, no way I’m quitting!” And a few days later, as you drag yourself out of your bunk in the frigid predawn darkness, bruised and battered and beaten, and you hear the morning silence split by the bone-jarring clanggg, clanggg of that damn brass bell, you know another sorry-ass motherfucker has thrown in the towel. My class started with 220 candidates; by graduation seven months later there were twenty-three of us left. It’s easy to talk a big game, but when the reality of BUD/S starts to sink in, people crumble. Not John. He was so focused, so intent on plowing through and going straight into the SEALs, that it was impossible to imagine him not doing it.
And yet, just as with that first swim meet at age five, his first time out he did fail.
BUD/S Class 205 began in December 1995. It was near the tail end of a record-length El Niño surge, and major storms were pummeling California. By the time they reached Hell Week, it was one of the coldest on record. John ended up with pneumonia and was forced to call a halt.
Getting rolled from BUD/S just about killed him. Not the pneumonia—the blow to his ego. He wasted no time on self-recrimination, though. That fuel-from-failure thing again. It wasn’t the first time he’d suffered a bitter defeat on the way to triumph, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last.
There’s a common idea in the SEALs that says, if you don’t make it through BUD/S on your first try, you need to go out and get some experience before you come back for a second shot at it. John decided to take a turn as a naval police officer. He wangled an assignment to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio to go through a six-week training course, and upon graduating was assigned to police duty at the naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After eighteen months of breaking up bar fights and keeping the peace, he showed up back in Coronado, ready to do BUD/S again. This time he went the distance, and graduated Class 217 in mid-’98, just a few months after I finished Class 215.
• • •
As new guys at SEAL Team Three, John and I went surfing together as often as we could. We also shared an aspiration to become successful in business, and during our time together at Team Three we talked a lot about being entrepreneurs and all that we wanted to accomplish in our lives.
At the time I had begun investing in real estate and having some modest success, to the extent that I owned my own home and rented out a guesthouse on the property. I’d studied Robert (Rich Dad, Poor Dad) Kiyosaki’s approach to building a portfolio of income-generating assets, and I was convinced real estate was the way to go.
John wasn’t especially interested in real estate. He wanted to build something. He wanted to create and run his own business. Actually, that’s not saying it right: He didn’t just want to run his own business—it was more like a burning, all-consuming drive. He had to.
Right away I noticed that John had a distinctive quality of absolute confidence. When he talked about something happening in the future, it was so vivid, so real, you knew it would happen. A common experience for SEALs is that, once having been part of this incredibly elite team, it can seem impossible to imagine that any other experience could come close, as if the path of achievement were by definition downhill from there on. That wasn’t John’s view at all. “I have bigger fish to fry,” was how he saw it. And he was 100 percent positive that he would build something that would become hugely successful.
Figuring out exactly what that would be . . . that was another story.
In the spring of 2000 he asked his lawyer father, Michael, to help him form his own corporation as part of a plan for a restaurant that incorporated a gigantic man-made wave, so that people could come to the restaurant and surf while they were there. He became interested in buying the rights to a British-made amphibious vehicle and distributing it here in the States. He tried his hand at stockbroking. It became a running joke at Michael’s office: John calling and yet again changing his articles of incorporation to fit his latest new idea. Over the next few years that corporation’s name would change six times—and there were dozens of other business ideas that never even made it to the corporate-naming stage. Nothing quite came together. To a casual observer, John’s serial-entrepreneur efforts might have seemed no more than a string of harebrained ideas that would never amount to anything. It would be a few years before the evidence proved it, but that casual observer would have been dead wrong.
Meanwhile John and I had continued in our SEAL careers on parallel tracks. When I went to Golf Platoon he joined Bravo, our sister platoon, and deployed to the Middle East at the same time we did. While we were part of the amphibious readiness group (the one that ended up rushing to the aid of the stricken USS Cole), Bravo was stationed in Bahrain, where they engaged in noncompliant ship boardings, enforcing UN sanctions against Iraq. On that deployment John proved himself one of their team’s most outstanding performers.
A hostile ship boarding, called a VBSS (visit, board, search, and seizure), is a high-speed, precision operation. After sneaking up alongside the hostile ship with your fast boats, you have to get your guys up and over the ship’s railings before the onboard crew of smugglers and pirates even realizes you’re there, because the moment they know they’re being boarded they’ll take aggressive countermeasures. In the case of a smuggling ship on the Gulf, they’ll haul ass for nearby Iranian waters, where you’re legally powerless to do anything.
During the critical split-second board phase of one of Bravo Platoon’s VBSS operations, one of the guys fired a grappling hook that failed to catch on the pirate ship’s railing.
“I was still processing the fact that the thing hadn’t taken,” John’s OIC explained afterward, “and in a fraction of a second John threw another hook up there by hand.” John’s hook caught, and within the next few seconds he had scuttled up the line and was up there on the railing laying down suppressing fire with a squad automatic weapon (SAW) while the rest of the boarding team crawled up the line after him. “I’d never seen a reaction time like that before,” his OIC added. “And I’ve never seen one since.”
When our deployments ended, John and I were both coming up for reenlistment, which would mean a decent cash bonus if we opted to stay in. I was married by this time, John was engaged to his girlfriend, Jackie, and we were both thinking about the financial demands of starting a family. I took the bonus and stayed in, moving from Golf to Echo Platoon, which was scheduled to go overseas later that year (though we could hardly have guessed we would end up in the mountains of Afghanistan hunting for terrorist training camps). John took a different path. When Bravo Platoon got back from their deployment at the end of 2000, John surprised Jackie by saying he wasn’t going to reenlist. He loved being part of the teams—but he wanted out.
John was a valuable asset (he was hell on the M60 machine gun), and our command didn’t want to lose him. The commander of SEAL Team Three offered to raise his bonus, but John turned him down. The offer went up; he turned it down again. They finally got up to sixty thousand dollars (an unheard-of amount), but he turned that down, too.
As he said, he had bigger fish to fry.
John left the service in early March 2001, and he and Jackie were married a few weeks later. By this time Jackie had her master’s degree in food science and had gotten a good job offer from National Food Laboratories, up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since John had enlisted right out of high school, Jackie suggested he take this opportunity to go back to school and get a degree. “I grew up on the East Coast,” she says, “in a family where it was ingrained into us that the way to success was to go to college and get a good job. I really couldn’t picture any other path.” John didn’t see it that way, and he didn’t give much of a damn about school, but he agreed to give it a shot. They moved to the Oakland area and he enrolled in a community college there while he looked for a job.
John found college life frustrating and at times infuriating. The other students were only a few years younger than he was, but to John they seemed like kids who had seen nothing of real life. It was hard to sit there listening to those professors spouting their academic worldviews, armchair-quarterbacking events halfway around the world—events John had seen up close in all their gritty reality. While I was tracking down Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the mountains of Afghanistan, John was sitting in a classroom being bored out of his mind.
Meanwhile, he continued coming up with idea after idea for new businesses. Every time he hatched a new concept he’d pitch it to Jackie, who listened and did her best to temper her own natural skepticism. Earlier that year, just before they were married, John had presented Jackie with the idea of putting ex–military personnel on domestic passenger flights. “Our biggest national threat is in the air,” he told her. He changed his corporation’s name to SkyGuard and worked with a martial arts master to develop a simplified version of Okinawan karate that flight attendants could employ in the narrow confines of a passenger airplane aisle, with a curriculum they could cover in about two hours.
Jackie had thought the idea was a bit far-fetched. Then 9/11 happened. “Oh, my God,” she told him. “You were right!”
Still, the SkyGuard idea did not come together. Jackie adored John and believed in him. But so far none of his brilliant ideas had panned out—and they had to eat. John needed to get a job.
Toward the end of 2001 John got a job offer with the sheriff’s department in Half Moon Bay, a sleepy San Francisco suburb. With eighteen months as a naval police officer in Guantánamo Bay, plus four years in the SEALs, he was the very definition of “overqualified.” Be that as it may, the job required that he enroll in a five-month program at the police academy there. He started in January 2002.
John was the best student his instructors had ever seen at the academy, both physically and academically. Which was interesting, considering that John had never before been more than a mediocre student (unless the subject involved athletics). But over his years in the service he had learned how to focus his energies on whatever task he saw as important, and he was killing their standards. The jock who didn’t care about school had become the ultimate student.
One week before graduation, the cadets were practicing one-on-one takedowns. John was disgusted at how laid-back his classmates were as they went through the motions. When his turn came and a classmate faux-attacked him, John took the guy down for real, and hard. He didn’t injure the man, but that dude was down before he had a clue what had hit him.
The instructor suspended John on the spot. After a hasty conference, the administration judged him “too aggressive” for the academy. With a week to go till graduation, he was booted out of the program.
John was devastated. He could joke about it to Jackie (“I would’ve been better off over in Oakland, where there’s a murder every day!”), but it was no joke. Being kicked out of the academy also meant the police job was gone. The young couple had just bought a home and were now carrying a substantial mortgage. Jackie’s job notwithstanding, they really needed John to generate an income.
This was the spring of 2002, and the so-called War on Terror was just hitting its stride. My platoon was on its way home from Afghanistan, to be replaced by others. Things were already heating up in Iraq, and those on the inside could sense the drumbeat to war. The government was stepping up its use of contract security agents overseas. As part of Team Three, John’s AO (area of operations) in the SEALs had been the Middle East, so he was highly qualified. If the Half Moon Bay police department couldn’t see a way to use him, private security companies like DynCorp and Blackwater sure could. And the money was good.
So John signed up, and for the next few years he was in and out of the Middle East, working as a private contractor.
In the summer of 2002, when Hamid Karzai became president of Afghanistan’s interim government, John was there as part of his security detail. A year later, as the dust settled in Iraq from the U.S.-led Shock and Awe campaign, John was there sweeping the country for WMDs. When L. Paul Bremer became in effect the interim chief executive of Iraq, John was on hand, guarding him as well.
Those years were a terrifying time for Jackie. It seemed to her that every night there was news about yet another roadside bomb in the Middle East—and all she could do was hope John was nowhere near it. She was right to be terrified, because there were in fact times when he was quite near the action indeed.
Especially one pivotal day in late January 2004.
• • •
By 2004 the situation in Iraq had seriously deteriorated and was getting more dangerous by the day. John and an ex–Green Beret buddy, Ron Griffin, would spend each day hazarding the streets of Iraq, then get together in the evenings to talk over what they’d seen during the day and discuss the tactical failures they’d witnessed.
One major source of problems lay in the vehicles they were driving, which were typically some sort of high-end SUV, retrofitted with armor plating. The problem was that everyone on the street knew who was in these vehicles, because nobody over there but Americans was driving those models. Our guys might as well have had neon signs saying, “We’re Americans! Shoot at us!” The bad guys would stand up on overpasses with binoculars, scope out one of these cars, and suddenly you’re getting an RPG up the tailpipe. (Ron called them “to whom it may concern shots.”)
And it wasn’t only a matter of how recognizable the cars were. These vehicles just weren’t designed for the punishment they were taking. John and Ron were constantly wrestling with fuel-incompatibility issues, suspension system failures, problems with doors, windows, and other secondary electromechanical systems, and all sorts of mechanical fuckups. Under normal circumstances failures like these would be minor annoyances. In conditions of urban combat they could be catastrophic.
“If someone doesn’t do something about these vehicles,” John said to Ron, “we’re going to lose a lot of our guys.”
On January 27, 2004, John was part of a convoy on a mission through the mean streets of the city where he and Ron were working. No matter how skillful the driving or how well the three drivers kept their distance, there was no way their vehicles could not stand out like three-piece suits in an inner-city street fight. Sure enough, the convoy was ambushed. The vehicles in front managed to escape the kill zone and get away, leaving John and his companions in the hot seat. A slew of hostiles came up from behind, and John and his buddies’ car started taking heavy fire. According to the after-action report, armor-piercing rounds were fired into the vehicle through their windows. Manning the machine gun in back, John returned fire out the shattered back windshield while the driver practiced every evasive tactic he knew.
Which was when one of the vehicle’s “safety” features nearly got them killed.
A grenade blew up under the chassis, severing one of the car’s brake cables and causing the vehicle to lock up and come to an instant and complete stop.
“Motherfucker!” the driver said. John’s only comment was another volley from the big gun.
Back at base, Ron was having lunch when he and a few other guys heard the calls coming over: “Contact! Contact! Contact! . . .” Ron and the others jumped into two cars to form an immediate reaction force, get out there as quickly as possible, and pull out any survivors.
Meanwhile, their vehicle immobilized, John and his two teammates had no choice but to hoof it. John continued shooting out the back of the car, laying down enough cover fire so the other two guys could start moving out before he quit and joined them. When you’re shooting an automatic weapon in an enclosed space, it isn’t kind to your hearing. And John did not go light on bullets. From that day on he was deaf as a post in his right ear.
The three went on foot now, winding their way through some back streets until they found a friendly cabbie who stopped and turned over his car keys to them. They thanked the man, hopped in, and quickly realized the cabbie hadn’t done them much of a favor: The damn thing was on its last legs. They made it another quarter of a mile before the cab quit on them.
Back on foot again. Eventually they found a junkyard area they could slip into and get some concealment. They holed up there until one of the two reaction vehicles caught up to them and got them out.
Once back at base they learned that, by some miracle, we had not lost a single one of our men in the attack.
John and Ron stayed in-country until March, but that was their last trip as private contractors. That night they took a yellow legal pad and sketched out the concept for a vehicle that would become the focus of John’s entrepreneurial energies from that point on.
• • •
“It’s crazy over there,” John told Jackie once he was back stateside. “Our guys are getting blown up left and right. What we need is a fully armored vehicle, built from the ground up to blend into the traffic of the country where we’re operating.”
Jackie heard the passion in his voice and saw the gleam in his eye. Uh-oh, she thought. Here we go again. But over the years she’d learned that John’s business ideas, even though none had yet come to fruition, were often ingenious and at times brilliant. As John described the custom-built vehicle he envisioned, Jackie could see he was onto something important.
Not everyone had the same level of faith in the concept. After all, John and Ron were security guys, hired guns—not engineers. “Knuckle-draggers don’t make vehicles,” as Ron puts it. Well, that was about to change.
John wanted the vehicle to look indigenous and be as fully armored as possible without looking that way. Indigenous. Armored. He called up his dad with the seventh and final name for his corporation: Indigen Armor.
During the rest of 2004, while I was busy developing and teaching the NSW sniper course with Eric Davis, John and his partners (Ron and another ex–Spec Ops security guy) were creating Indigen Armor. They put together a detailed proposal, with CAD drawings of the vehicle they had in mind, then shopped their idea to companies with the connections and financial clout it would take to put it into production.
Every company they approached said the same thing: “Great idea—but we get pitched great ideas all the time. We’re not interested until you actually build the thing and show it to us.” Developing the idea for their vehicle was not going to cut it. They were going to have to hire someone to build them a working model of the damn thing.
John had already done the research and knew the ideal manufacturing partner. They approached a racing car company in southern California with a strong track record and a good-size manufacturing facility. The firm agreed to build their demo vehicle and be their manufacturing partner. All John and Ron had to do was come up with about a hundred thousand dollars. They each put in twenty grand themselves, money saved from their contracting work, and then did what every capital-deficient entrepreneur does: started talking to friends and family.
By July their financing was in place and they were ready to go. It took a little over two months to build their demo model, and John and Ron were on-site all day, every day. It was nerve-racking, having all that friends-and-family money on the line, and the ’round-the-clock intensity of the production process was brutal, even for guys who were used to working in a war zone. “Hellacious” is how Ron describes it.
That September they invited all the contacts they could come up with to a debut showing at the racing car company’s facility in Huntington Beach. The showing was a runaway success. Soon they had a $10 million contract, starting with an order for four vehicles. John and his partners were able to pay back every investor—with interest—in far less than the promised one year.
Jackie’s long-standing belief in John was vindicated at last: His dream company had become a reality. Indigen Armor was off and running.
• • •
Except that nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever. It’s the first rule of combat, and the first rule of business.
One day John got a phone call from their client with some extremely upsetting news: The race-car company, their manufacturing partner, was going behind John’s back. They wanted to squeeze Indigen Armor out of the picture altogether and deal directly with the client. After all, they were the ones building the thing, right?
In Special Operations you’re trained to respond to any threat from any direction, no matter how unexpected, with immediate and decisive force. John and his partners didn’t waste any time. They terminated their contract, sued the car company, and won a $2.1 million arbitration award. Which was good news financially—but now they were without a manufacturing partner, and where did that leave them? John was undaunted. Spec Ops training again: The ability to respond to any situation with creative solutions is just as important as knowing how to shoot your weapon. Often more so.
The day the wire transfer from the award landed in their corporate account, John said to Jackie, “Well, the Band-Aid’s been ripped off.” She asked him what he meant. He grinned and said, “It looks like we’re gonna build these cars ourselves.”
Jackie was floored. Was he saying they were going to create their own production line? John had never intended to become an automaker. He had no experience in designing, outfitting, or running a manufacturing plant. Was he out of his ever-loving mind?
But that was exactly what they did.
John had an uncanny ability to make things happen, sometimes seemingly out of thin air. I’ll give you two of my favorite examples.
One day, when John was on a flight from D.C. to California, a child on his plane had a seizure. The boy had never had a seizure before and his mother had no idea what was happening. John, a trained EMT, immediately went into action, laid the boy out on his side and made sure his airway was clear, got a cool washcloth on his neck, and completely handled the situation—including keeping the boy’s mother calm—until the boy was okay again.
Once everything had settled down, a man across the aisle leaned over and started talking with John. Clearly he was quite impressed with how the young man had handled himself. He handed over his business card and said, “If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate to call me.” Looking at the card, John realized the man was majority owner of a southern California bank. He laughed. “Funny you should say that,” he replied. “There actually is something I need at the moment.” What he needed was about half a million dollars to capitalize some major expansion in his plant.
The following week John was sitting in the man’s bank, and a week after that he had secured a loan for half a million dollars. Michael said that in all his decades of practicing law, he’d never seen a business loan transacted from start to finish in so short a time, let alone one of that substantial an amount. John and the man from the plane ended up having a long and fruitful business relationship, with many millions more in financing along the way.
And the other example:
At one point John was touring potential clients through their production facility, showing their first-generation vehicle, which was a large sedan. He knew they needed to move into producing a next-generation run of smaller, Japanese-style vehicles, but they didn’t have the funding for it yet. In the middle of the place he had set up a black box, and as they toured the plant, everyone kept eyeing the thing and asking, “What’s in the black box?”
“We can’t really show you that,” John replied. “It’s our next-generation concept, and it’s amazing—but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it is just yet.”
In fact, there was absolutely nothing in the box. It was empty. But that didn’t matter. John completely sold them on the concept. Before long they had their financing, and their gen-two line was a complete success.
Today John’s vehicles are used throughout the world. Indigen Armor can’t release sales figures, but John’s company has built a lot of vehicles—and saved a lot of lives. Over the years they received a constant stream of e-mails and notes like this one:
I just wanted to write to thank you guys at Indigen Armor. I was on a mission today in the streets of the city where I’m stationed and our convoy was ambushed. The only reason I’m alive today is that I was driving one of your vehicles when it happened.
By 2008, John and his partners realized they had outrun their capacity to generate the kind of capital it would take to tool up to the full scope of operation John had in mind. It was time to sell. They shopped around and found a New York private-equity firm with a strong background in military and aerospace. They sold a majority interest in the business for a sizable sum, with John retained as president and CEO, in 2009—by which time I was already hip-deep in my own entrepreneurial deployment and being shot at from all sides.
• • •
When I left the service in mid-2006, Indigen Armor was already in full production and doing well, and I was inspired by John’s example. But I didn’t want to build vehicles; I wanted to train the guys who drove them.
John had wanted to build something. Me, I’d always been into real estate, even had my real estate license. My idea was to create a training facility somewhere in southern California that would serve both military and law enforcement personnel. I called it Wind Zero, named after a precision shooting term.
I had been thinking about this idea for years. I’d been out to Blackwater and other dedicated training facilities on the East Coast, and I knew from experience that there was nothing comparable on the West Coast. In fact, southern California was desperate for a solid, reliable training facility. At the sniper course we constantly had problems finding usable venues for our training. I would call units from other branches of the military and even local law enforcement units and ask, “Where are you guys going when you train?” Invariably the answer was, “We don’t really know. We’re doing our best to find whatever we can.” The problem was systemic, and we were constantly having to ship guys out to other locations to train, which was both expensive and time-consuming.
There was a human cost, too: Sending people out of state for weeks and even months at a time was tough on their families. I’d experienced this myself. The strain those long stretches of absence had put on my own marriage was one of the driving reasons I’d made the decision to leave the teams. If we could provide a place where these young men and women could train during the day and be back home with their families at night, we’d be doing them a huge service.
I started developing the idea along with a fellow former SEAL, a Team Five guy named Randy Kelley, who had gotten out a year before me and started his own business training people in advanced security and surveillance techniques and technologies—something like Q in the James Bond movies (only with a North Carolina accent). Randy gave me free use of his office space and helped me write a business plan.
And it was one hell of a plan. In addition to shooting ranges, tracks for driving instruction, and indoor classroom space, Wind Zero would feature lodging and dining facilities for up to two hundred people. We would be able to embed actual buildings and cities that we could dress up so we could run large-scale urban-environment exercises, such as riot situations and other high-threat scenarios. We could facade the area out as an Afghan village this week, an urban downtown next week. The plan also included two helo pads and an airstrip.
In many cases we figured people would show up with their own trainers, such as law enforcement groups. We knew there would also be customers who would want us to provide the training. No problem. In fact, even as we were continuing to work on the facility itself, we put a training staff in place and started taking on contracts even without having our own facility in place yet.
Then we had the idea of adding more racetrack. There are a lot of car clubs in southern California, and some of them were telling us there was a huge market for motor sports. Porsche and BMW clubs approached us and said, “Hey, if you build it, we’ll use it.” So we bolted on a separate business to the original concept: a track where we could hold privately sponsored race car events. There would even be facilities where you could store your car in between events. An expert from the UK helped us design a full Grand Prix–style double track.
Now all I had to do was find and buy the land, get the full financing, and build it. The thing would cost something like $100 million all told.
Like John Zinn when he was first out of the service, in my first year out I took work as a private-contract security agent to pay the bills, which meant being over in Iraq for months at a time. In between those stints overseas I started combing southern California, looking for land. By the end of 2006 I had found the property I wanted, a thousand acres of raw land in Imperial County, not far from Niland, my old stomping grounds.
I was able to put down some option money from my savings and private-contract earnings, but that wouldn’t hold the land for long. This was a $2 million–plus piece of real estate; the down payment alone would be north of three hundred thousand dollars. It was time to raise some serious investment.
At the same time, I set about the arduous process of securing entitlements.
In land-development terms, “entitlements” refer to the gamut of legal permissions and approvals you need in order to physically build the project. This can include zoning variances (or, in some cases, actual rezoning); land-use permits; approvals for roads, utilities, landscaping, and construction; and more. The process is slow, complicated, and frustrating. For a project the size and scope of what we were planning, we figured it would probably take at least a year or two.
• • •
I had barely begun the process of developing Wind Zero when I found I had a serious competitor, the one private paramilitary training organization that everyone had heard of and had an opinion about: Blackwater.
When I was still on active duty I had bumped into some guys from Blackwater in Las Vegas at the annual SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade) Show, a major military/hunting industry trade event, and asked them why they hadn’t done a West Coast facility yet. “The hell with California,” they said. “It’s too much of a pain in the ass.” They must have since rethought this position, because by the time I put a contract on my Imperial County land, Blackwater had just come on the scene and was aiming to do the same thing.
I was there when they first rolled into town in their stretch Hummers, meatheads piling out with their Under Armour shirts that were two sizes too small and showed off every muscle fiber. It was obnoxious. They brought out a guy from the East Coast with a pronounced Boston accent and put him in charge of their project. First thing he told me when we met was how much he hated California.
I was determined to take the opposite approach.
As soon as I had our land picked out, I began building as much local support as possible. I took a year and a half getting to know the people there, spent time talking with the guys in law enforcement, the fire departments, and the rest of the public safety community, building relationships with them, telling my story and explaining the project. Once I had established a foundation of solid support, then I started going to the town’s and county’s political leadership and moving the entitlement process forward. I put twenty letters of endorsement from local community leaders in front of them, from the police chief to the community college president, and they said, “Holy shit, we had no idea we needed this kind of facility . . . but you know, it makes sense.”
“Winning hearts and minds” isn’t just a military strategy for working in foreign territory; it’s common sense and common decency—and it works.
Two years after they started, the Blackwater effort crumbled under an onslaught of local opposition. There were anti-Blackwater bumper stickers everywhere. I knew it was over when I stepped outside one day and saw a lady walking her dog and wearing a T-shirt that said, “Stop Blackwater!”
Meanwhile our effort kept going. The entitlement process was even more complex, more difficult, more frustrating, and more drawn-out than our most conservative estimates. But we got through it. In December 2010, after four years of hard work, with millions of dollars on the line, we made it over the finish line and received official approval from Imperial County to build our facility.
It had taken four long years. We’d raised nearly $4 million and done it the hard way, piece by piece from more than forty different investors, with no angel investor forking over the lion’s share. So many people had told me we would never get the entitlements. But we did. Where Blackwater had failed, we had succeeded.
• • •
The victory tasted sweet indeed—but it lasted just thirty days. Because nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever.
First rule of combat, first rule of business.
While I had strong support and no real opposition from the local community, there were forces working against me from other directions the whole time.
First there was Jack, a former SEAL I’d known from my deployment in Afghanistan. Jack had called me right at the start, before I even had my property, and tried to get me to back off. According to him, he was already planning to do something very similar himself. I suggested we both keep doing what we were doing and work together in a cooperative relationship. The demand was practically unlimited, I told him, and there was more than enough room for two training facilities in the marketplace. But Jack was one of those people who insists on trying to be the smartest guy in the room. (Me, I’d rather be the dumbest guy in the room. I have no problem working with people who are smarter than me—the more talented, the better.) He kept doing what he could to intimidate and discourage me and, when that didn’t work, to sabotage me.
Then there was Casey, one of our investors, who had gradually taken on a more and more direct role in the project. Casey had more business experience than I did, and I looked up to him and tended at times to defer to him. My mistake. I gave him too much power in the company, and before long he was trying to edge me out altogether.
While I was battling these political and internal complications, the entitlement process had dragged on for what seemed like forever while the money we’d raised gradually dwindled to nothing. Eventually I had stopped taking a salary and started taking on consulting work here and there to keep the lights on.
At one point, just as I’d successfully fought off a mutinous takeover bid from Casey, we found ourselves battling a website that sprang up with the imposing name “Imperial Valley Against Wind Zero.” Evidently there was a bitter groundswell of opposition from the local community . . . at least, that was what it was designed to look like. The truth, as we soon learned, was that nobody in Imperial Valley had anything to do with the website or its mission. In fact, it was an elaborate scheme concocted by Jack, my jealous ex-SEAL rival.
On the heels of the Stop Wind Zero site, an anti–Brandon Webb video appeared online, pasting together sound bites from my various media appearances and taking them out of context to make them look like I was saying things I’d never even remotely said. It was like one of those tacky political smear commercials you see proliferating on TV during every election cycle. Jack’s handiwork again.
Still, we’d survived Casey, and survived Jack, and survived the exhaustion of our financial resources, and still managed to secure Imperial County’s approval for our project.
And thirty days later the county was sued by the Sierra Club, who claimed that the environmental-impact study had not been sufficient. In fact, it was rock-solid, but that didn’t seem to matter.
When I say “Sierra Club,” that makes it sound like a large national groundswell. Actually it was a lone individual, a woman at the local Sierra Club chapter who was known for instigating frivolous lawsuits. The head of the planning commission had warned me about her. “Watch out for Edie,” he said. “She’s a pain in the ass and fights everything we do. She has wasted an easy million in taxpayer dollars with her zero-development philosophy.” He was right. Edie perfectly fit that great Winston Churchill definition of an extremist: someone who will never change their mind and cannot change the subject.
Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about it. The county had to respond to the suit. And according to local statute, the developer—that is, us—had to pay the county’s legal costs for doing so.
What made the whole thing so painful was that I knew we would ultimately win the lawsuit. We’d done our homework, and the plans were all unassailably solid. The county really wanted the project. And since it had already been approved, the judge couldn’t have outright killed it. At the very worst, he could have made us go back and do our environmental-impact reports over again. But the Sierra Club (that is, this one woman) wasn’t backing down. If they (she) lost this suit, they (she) would just appeal it, which would have dragged it out for yet another long stretch of legal battles. It was a war of attrition, and since we were obligated to pay the county’s legal bills, it was stacked in the plaintiff’s favor.
There was no money left in our coffers. We had coasted over the finish line on fumes. It would take at least another half million to fight this thing. And with the economy in the shitter, nobody was about to step forward with the capital it would take to see it through.
By mid-2011 I had to acquiesce to the reality of the situation and call it quits.
I called the shareholders and let them know it was over. I had beaten Blackwater at their own game—and in return been beaten myself by a lady from the Sierra Club. It would have been funny if it weren’t so crushing. I had dedicated five years of my life to this idea, bolstered with the majority of my modest net worth along with a ton of money from friends and family members—and it was all gone in the blink of a court filing.
Shortly after which, my wife asked me for a divorce.
As I said, life in the teams can be brutal on relationships. Despite my having left the service five years beforehand specifically in order to be at home more and strengthen my family life, it had been too late. My marriage had become another casualty of war.
And I had to admit, it wasn’t just life as a SEAL. The fact was, I didn’t know how to make a long-term relationship work. My own parents’ marriage had become irretrievably fractured by the time I enlisted in the Navy. I thought I would be better at this than my dad, but now my own marriage hadn’t lasted even past my oldest son’s tenth birthday.
I had not succeeded in following in John’s footsteps or honoring his example, in more ways than one. As dedicated as he was to his work, John was never the classic workaholic, sacrificing his family on the altar of his entrepreneurial dreams. I’d seen others do that. Not John. His business was always his driving passion, yet what he was most proud of and most in love with was his family, and he never let business get in the way.
But me? Here I was: savings blown; business dream up in smoke; marriage irrevocably on the rocks. Compared to this, the reign of Harvey had been a picnic. Because here, now, there was no Harvey to blame. Yes, there were villains in the picture, and I could point and say my plans had been sabotaged, both from without and within. But denial and evasion of responsibility are not part of a SEAL’s makeup. I had to face the facts: I’d brought this all on myself.
It was the lowest point of my life.
• • •
After Wind Zero died, I had no idea how to pick up the pieces and go on. There were days when the idea of packing it all in, moving to Mexico, and living the simple life on my veteran’s benefits sounded more tempting than I wanted it to. But I had kids here. There was no way I could walk away. Besides, giving up is something I’m just not wired to do.
And then there was John Zinn’s example to honor.
Yes, I’d just experienced a massive failure. But John had tried dozens of ideas before Indigen Armor took off. If he could keep going, so could I.
Within a few months of tossing in the Wind Zero towel, I took a position as director at L-3 Communications, a large defense company in San Diego, just so I’d have something that paid the bills. It was a solid job and excellent money, but it drove me stir-crazy. I felt like a rat in a cage. I had to do something.
Ironically, it was that smear campaign against me and Wind Zero from a few years before that ultimately provided the answer. When that anti–Brandon Webb video appeared online, a friend told me that the only way to push it off the first page of search results was to get a lot more content about me onto the Internet. So I started doing whatever I could to produce material. In the process, I discovered that I liked to write.
A few years before Wind Zero closed I was invited to blog for a large website that served the military community. I’d been doing that now for two years, and I enjoyed it. At the same time, I saw quite a few ways the site itself could be improved. In fact, there was no single site that served the whole Special Operations community. So I decided to start my own. I invited a few friends from different branches of the service to write for the site as well. I scraped together about ten thousand dollars and launched SOFREP.com (for Special Operations Forces Situation Report) in January 2012.
By the end of the year we had more than a million people per month hitting our site.
All the success that had failed to materialize with Wind Zero happened with SOFREP. Within a year after launch I found myself running the largest Internet site in the world devoted to Special Operations. Our weekly SOFREP Radio podcast became the number one broadcast in its category (government) on iTunes, with more than half a million monthly visitors. The publishing division we launched had several New York Times bestsellers in its first year. Soon we had acquired or created more than half a dozen related websites, from NavySeals.com and the gear site Loadout Room to Fighter Sweep, a site dedicated to military and general aviation enthusiasts, and TransitionHQ, the only legitimate military-to-civilian advice and jobs portal on the Internet. We created an umbrella entity called Force12 Media to bring SOFREP and all the other properties together into one unified digital network. In just two years, Force12 Media went from a concept to a full-fledged digital-media empire.
I suppose I never did get out of the real estate business. I just shifted from developing one kind of site to another kind.
Through SOFREP and Force12 I’ve doubled the income I was earning at L-3 as a salaried employee, and done it working for myself, on my own terms. It’s a lot of work, and it keeps me extremely busy.
But not so busy that it runs my life or makes me miserable. Over the past few years, even with the craziness of Force12, I’ve also made it my business to take the time to build an excellent relationship with my ex-wife and her family, and to be there, consistently and in a big way, for our children.
That was another lesson I learned from John Zinn. Maybe the most important one of all.
• • •
After all the struggle and heartache of Wind Zero, the success of Force12 Media has been a gratifying experience, to say the least. There is a bittersweet note to it, though. Because I would have so loved to share the story of it all with John. I owed him that. But he was no longer there to share it with.
In 2010, less than a year after selling his company, John was in Amman, Jordan, at a huge military equipment expo. He was out with a few SEAL buddies but decided to turn in early, as he had an appointment early the next day to demo his latest vehicle to the king of Jordan. On the way home, he had his cabdriver stop the car so he could get out and walk the rest of the way. He never made it back to his hotel.
Exactly what happened is shrouded in uncertainty. According to the cabdriver’s testimony, John was agitated about something when he bolted from the cab and walked off on his own, headed for a rough section of town. It could just as well have been that the cabdriver was heading to the wrong hotel and that John, realizing this, got out of the cab and in typical John fashion decided to forge his own path. According to official reports, he stumbled on his walk home and fell off a steep drop in the path. According to the SEAL who saw him off in the cab that night, he was sober and clearheaded, and “stumbled on his walk home” just doesn’t sound like John. One report ruled out foul play; another cited “suspicious circumstances.”
The chances are good we’ll never know every fact and detail about exactly what happened that night. What we do know is this: The world is not a safe place. And John died making it a lot safer.
John was not on active duty or in the thick of combat when he perished. But Glen Doherty was right, in his toast to Dave Scott in that little Filipino bar in October 2002, when he said, “We all signed up for this. It’s all part of the deal.” As we say when we join the Spec Ops world, we’re writing a check, payable to the U.S. government, and in the “amount” section it says “up to and including our lives.” John left behind two daughters, ages two and four, and Jackie was pregnant with their first son, Matthew, whom John was so looking forward to meeting. He was a good friend, one of the best, and was busy serving his country and his fellow warriors right to his last breath.
John was a visionary. He had the capacity to paint a picture that others found so compelling, so real, that they would follow and do whatever it took to support him and help bring that picture into reality. It’s an ability, I’ve come to see, that every leader needs to master, whether you’re leading a platoon of warriors in combat or a team of colleagues or employees in a business venture.
And he was a visionary in a larger sense, too, in that he saw the direction the world was headed and led the way. The wave of the future in our military presence is not in large masses of forces invading territories, but with small, highly adaptable units, like Spec Ops individuals. The ability to be discreet, to have a small footprint as you go into a country and quietly look around without being obvious, is pivotal to the tactical and strategic successes of the future. John’s idea was ahead of its time. It still is.