FIVE

GETTING DIRTY

Nineteen ninety-eight. It was a strange time to be part of an elite military corps. This was the waning phase of the Clinton years, and there was a sense in the military that we and the current administration did not have the best of relationships. Frankly, there also wasn’t much conflict happening in the world, or at least no major clashes in which our forces were directly involved. Some guys were wondering just exactly what we were doing here and would grumble that we weren’t really being employed. We all felt a kind of tense anxiousness, as if we were dogs on the leash just itching to be let loose. We wanted to do something.

Instead, we trained.

In a way, the BUD/S training is not really training at all, but one seven-month-long entrance exam, winnowing out all but those who refuse to quit. Now the training started—and we trained, and trained, and trained. This is something about the SEAL experience: The training never stops.

When it came time to be assigned to a specific SEAL team, they had us list our top three picks in order of priority. I figured if anything important was going to happen it would be in the Middle East. At the time, each team was responsible for a particular area of operations (AO), and the Middle East was Team Three’s AO. I wanted to be wherever the action was. What’s more, Team Three had a really good reputation. For my top three picks I listed Team Three, Team Five, and Team One (all West Coast teams), in that order. I was elated when the assignments came down: I had gotten my first choice.

When I arrived at Team Three I did exactly the same thing I’d done back as a new guy in HS-6: put my head down, kept my mouth shut, and made sure I did a good job at everything they threw at me. In the SEALs, a new guy is someone who has not yet gone on an overseas deployment with a SEAL team, and I learned very quickly that new guys are better seen and not fucking heard. We hadn’t yet earned our SEAL Tridents; we were still on a six-month probation, and they never let us forget it for a moment. Once we proved ourselves on a deployment, we would be treated with more respect. Until then, I was back on the bottom of the totem pole again.

The next big step after being assigned to a SEAL team as a new guy was to class up to SEAL Tactical Training (STT), a three-month intensive program of advanced training. (Today this is called SEAL Qualification Training, or SQT, and is part of advanced BUD/S, but it’s much the same thing.) STT was where we would really start getting into close-quarters battle tactics, room-to-room, where we would shoot thousands of rounds on the range, and go through more challenging land navigations and extended dives. It was where we would prove ourselves—where we would actually start becoming SEALs.

It was time to get down and dirty.

*   *   *

And this brought me face-to-face with my first major challenge as a SEAL new guy: I needed to demonstrate that I could perform up to par when it came to shooting a weapon.

Some of the guys I was training with had already served in the Marine Corps; many of them had shot guns since they were kids. Most knew their way around guns, for one reason or another. Not me. There’d been a little bit of shooting in boot camp, and we’d had a little time on the range as part of SAR training and again as part of BUD/S, but only a taste. When it came to firearms, I was green as the grass. Would I be able to measure up?

I would have a chance to find out soon enough in SST.

Right off the bat we spent a week at the Naval Training Center (NTC) range, where we shot a variety of firearms, including the M-4 semiautomatic assault rifle, SIG SAUER P-226 semiautomatic 9 mm pistol, the Heckler & Koch USP .45 semiautomatic pistol (USP stands for “universal self-loading pistol”), and the H&K MP-5 9 mm submachine gun. The designation “submachine” means it fires subsonic rounds. Bullets that travel faster than the speed of sound create an audible snap! like a miniature sonic boom. It sounds like someone clapping his hands together sharply. That’s how you know you’re being shot at: In addition to the crack! of the round’s actual discharge, you hear these tiny cracks around your head.

This was all new to me, and I found myself seriously behind the curve. Almost from day 1 I had instructors climbing all over my ass, saying, “Hey, Webb, what’s your problem?” It was like being back at the beginning of BUD/S all over again: Suddenly I was that guy. I had to get my shit together and do it fast, because we were about to take it up a notch.

After a week at the NTC we went out to the La Posta Mountain training facility, about an hour’s drive east of San Diego. An old satellite observatory, La Posta covers about 1,000 square miles perched 3,500 feet up on a mountaintop—not exactly Denver altitude, but higher up than what we were used to, and beautiful. It would become especially valuable as a training site within a few years because the terrain there so closely resembles parts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

At La Posta we conducted some patrol and land nav exercises, similar to what we’d done in BUD/S only tougher. Still, to me these didn’t seem that difficult. Then it came time to get into serious training on the shooting range. A few weeks in, they started running us through combat drills they call stress courses. Stress courses is right: For me, this was the moment of truth. I would either step up my game or show up as lame.

It wasn’t that I was worried about flunking out. This was about reputation. As I was coming to learn, reputation is like a house that, once you burn it down, is almost impossible to build again. This is true in business, in communities, in the world at large—but in the SEAL community it’s true times ten. There’s nothing more precious to a SEAL than his reputation. In the stress course drills, mine would be at stake.

The drills took place on a course that was set up with barricades every 10 to 20 feet. The idea was to spring through the course, taking cover at each barricade and shooting different kinds of targets, hitting as many as you could within a given time. I knew how it worked. It’s not rocket science. Run fast, stay hidden, shoot the bad guys. What I didn’t know was whether I could do it.

When my turn came, I checked my M-4 assault rifle, cleared my head, and felt my breath coming steady. I knew the next few minutes would stay with me in the team’s eyes, for better or for worse, for months to come.

The instructor yelled “Go!” I tore off on a 20-foot sprint to take cover behind the first barricade. I peered around the right edge, down low, and engaged the target. Crack! Ping! These were steel knockdown targets: You hit one and it flips down backward. Crack! Ping! Crack! Ping! Shooting steel was satisfying, because each shot gave off that instantaneous report, much better feedback than shooting paper targets. After firing off a few quick rounds, I was sprinting to the next barricade, where I repeated the process, and then to the next. At the third station there were half a dozen head poppers, targets that suddenly popped up with just their heads showing. The goal was to take out all six in rapid succession. I fired off six rounds, ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! ping! and then took off for the next station.

A few stations later, with plenty of targets still left to shoot, I ran out of ammo. They had designed it this way on purpose. They wanted to see how we did when our primary weapon went dry. I swept my rifle to the side, letting it swing on its sling by its own weight, immediately drew my pistol and fired off several more rounds at the remaining targets, then holstered the sidearm, grabbed my rifle, and brought it back up as I sprinted to take cover and reload. Cover, not concealment. We’d been drilled on the difference. Cover is when you hide behind something that can actually provide you with physical protection. Concealment means you’re hiding behind something that shields you visually, like a bush, but the other guy can shoot through the bush and hit you. I took cover, dropped my depleted M-4 mag, slammed in a fresh magazine, loaded a fresh mag in my pistol, too, in case I needed it, then sprinted off to engage the next series of targets.

The whole thing was a whirlwind—there was no sense of stopping and starting, taking this step and then that step, just one unbroken stream of actions and reactions. It was over before I even had time to think.

Our instructor did a double take that was almost comical. “Damn, Webb,” he said. “Where the fuck did that come from?”

I looked around and realized the other guys were all staring at me. I hadn’t missed a single shot. I had smoked the whole course.

In all my previous experiences shooting at paper targets, I’d always struggled, always felt stressed out, never felt like any of it came naturally, and I’d never been nearly as good a shot as the rest of the guys. But now, when I hit that first steel target and heard that ping! something just clicked into place.

I puzzled about this for some time, and later came to some conclusions about it. I’d had no firearms experience or training whatsoever before joining the navy—but I had done an awful lot of undersea hunting. There’s something instinctive about spearfishing. That speargun doesn’t feel like a tool—it’s more like an extension of your arm: You just point your arm and fire. Target shooting had never felt like that to me, at least not up to that point. Once we were out on this more realistic drill scenario, though, that instinctive sense kicked in. It wasn’t like I was shooting with a rifle. I was just pointing my arm and shooting.

Rob Byford, my OIC from BUD/S days, was there on the range that day. He’d seen the misery I went through in First Phase, seen me when I was that guy and must have looked for all the world like I’d never make it through BUD/S.

“Goddam,” he muttered loud enough for all to hear. “I’ll take Webb in my platoon any day. The fuckin’ guy never quits!”

Thank God, I thought. I’d redeemed myself.

*   *   *

From La Posta we headed out west into the desert to a godforsaken place called Niland, by the Salton Sea, where we spent the next six weeks in one of the strangest environments I’ve ever seen. This was our desert warfare phase, and I can’t imagine a more perfect location. The Salton Sea is essentially man-made, the result of an accident early in the twentieth century when some engineers were trying to redirect the Colorado River and lost control of the project. Now it’s one of the most brackish bodies of water on the planet, saltier than ocean water and filled with agricultural runoff.

On the northeast end of the lake is the funky town of Niland, occupied largely by meth labs and trailer parks. It reminded me of the postapocalyptic landscape in The Road Warrior. There are guys out there called scrappers who collect anything and everything. We’d be out on the range, doing contact drills, laying down thousands of rounds; we’d walk a hundred yards away to get a water break, drink, reload, and go back out—and all the brass shell casings we’d just left behind would be gone, the ground picked clean. Off to the side we’d see a guy with wild hair dragging along a sack and wearing his road-warrior goggles. It’s an odd bunch.

I’d been out to Niland about six weeks earlier, just before starting STT, with one of my buddies from Team Three, John Zinn. John and I were both surfers who’d grown up in California. He looked like your average skinny surf bum, but he was an excellent waterman and a great athlete. When I arrived at Team Three we hit it off right away.

As new guys, John and I were sent out there for a week to help support one of the SEAL platoons doing some training. One day we’d been sent out on some sort of resupply mission in a bare-frame, stripped-down Humvee. We’d completed the work and were done for the day. We were out in the desert, and no one else was around. We said, “Hey, let’s see what this bad boy can do.” We took off, taking turns driving, busting around the desert mountains and launching that Humvee over rises in the barren desert terrain like the Dukes of Hazzard.

As we were tearing ass down a long desert stretch, I saw a dip up ahead and started slowing a little to navigate it. John said, “C’mon, man, punch it!” and I stepped on it. Suddenly there was a gap in front of us. I accelerated, doing my best to jump it. All at once we were airborne. Everything slowed to a crawl. John and I turned and looked at each other, eyes wide, in slow motion: a Thelma and Louise moment. It couldn’t have been more than a second and a half that we were airborne, but it felt like a full minute. Then we landed. We had managed to clear the gap, but we came down so hard on the other side that it blew out the left front tire and bent the rim. We had no spare. How the hell were we going to explain this?

We radioed in. The guys at the base said they didn’t have anyone free to come out and get us, so we should hang tight for the night. We weren’t sure exactly where we were, but we knew we were somewhere in the vicinity of an area designated for ordnance exercises. In plain English: a live bombing range.

We slept out there that night in the Humvee and woke up early the next morning to the sound of F-18 jets screaming overhead and ordnance dropping in the distance. Were they getting closer? We weren’t sure.

We got on the radio and said, “Um, hey, guys, can you get us out of here?” We passed them rough coordinates and asked them to hurry. They came out and brought us a spare; we changed the tire and drove back to camp. Now we had to explain what had happened.

At the time the camp was run by a SEAL named Steve Heinz. This guy was like something out of a cartoon. Take whatever overdrawn, exaggerated picture you can form of a ridiculously tough Navy SEAL and exaggerate that by a factor of three. That’s Steve: an ogre of a man, chewing scrap metal and swallowing it. He ran that camp with an iron fist. Nobody screwed around there—nobody. So here we were, a couple of new guys who’d just busted one of his vehicles. We had been afraid of those F-18s. We were terrified of Steve.

First we went to see the mechanic and explained that there had been some rough terrain out there, and we blew a tire. He looked at the bent rim, then back at us. “How do you explain that?”

“The terrain was rough,” said John.

“Very rough,” I echoed.

He looked at us. “What the hell were you guys doing?”

John looked right back at him and said, “It was very, very rough terrain.”

The next few hours were not fun, waiting for the hammer to drop. Finally we were called into Heinz’s office. He lit into us. “What the hell were you doing out there? You want to tell me you guys weren’t out there hotdogging and fucking off in my vehicle?”

“No, sir,” John managed to get out. “We were just driving.”

“It was really rough terrain,” I added helpfully.

Heinz glared at us, then dismissed us with a growl. “Get the fuck out of my office.” That was the end of it.

John went on to BRAVO platoon and did four years there. He met a food chemist named Jackie, fell head over heels in love with her, got out of the service, and married her. When 9/11 happened, John was one of the first guys doing private security for companies like DynCorp and Blackwater as an independent contractor. The pay was outrageous, especially once we went into Iraq. He did that for a few years, then took a pile of earnings and formed an armored car company called Indigen Armor with an army buddy from their experience driving around being shot at over there. I like to think that our crazy outing at Niland helped plant a seed for his later success.

A few years later John and his buddy sold their majority interest, and he and Jackie had a child. Then in 2010 he was killed in Jordan in a freak accident. John was a good guy, one of the best. His dad, Michael, is a great lawyer, and he and I became good friends after John’s death. We are friends to this day. John was as solid as they come, and I miss him.

*   *   *

When John and I were first out there it had been spring, which is no picnic in Niland. Now it was summer and hotter than hell, hitting 115°F most days. It sometimes got so hot out there that we couldn’t put blasting caps in the ground in our demolition exercises, because the heat of the ground would set them off.

They put us through our paces in land nav and land warfare exercises, simulated drills where we’d come up against enemy contact and have to fight our way out of it. We also did some advanced demolition work there as part of an assault package: we’d go into a mock village, stage a prisoner snatch, shoot up the place, then set our C-4 charges everywhere and pull smoke on those charges—and we’d have fifteen minutes to get out of there before it all blew.

At Niland we were introduced to some of the heavier machine guns, the .50 caliber and .60 caliber, and we also got some practice on the Carl Gustav, an 84 mm recoilless rifle handheld rocket launcher, and got to fire some LAW (light antitank weapon) rockets. Although we mostly used live fire, for some exercises we used a laser setup called Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES), which fires blanks, a little like playing paintball. We used this system when we went up against each other in teams in OppFor (Oppositional Force) exercises. The focus, though, was not on that kind of force-on-force situation. Going in en masse and taking down a known force, like charging a machine-gun nest, is not a typical SEAL mission. We’re not the marines. Our preferred methodology is to insert ourselves in the middle of the night when no one’s looking, hit them, and get out. We’re not really there to fight; we’re there to tip the scales. At Niland, our focus was on demolition—and on getting a taste of what it takes to survive in the most god-awful, inhumanly hot conditions imaginable.

Near the end of our time at Niland, they took us out in the desert a little before noon for a six-hour land nav course. It was miserable out, August in the Niland desert. We spent the day roaming about that burned-Mars landscape like postapocalyptic scavengers, following the preset course and racking up points, finally arriving back at camp exhausted and dehydrated.

“Drink some water, guys,” the instructors told us, “and get some rest. In a few hours, we’re doing a little run.”

Turned out it wasn’t just a “little run.” It was a 12-mile timed run with weapons and full rucksack loaded with 50 pounds of gear. We started in after dinner, about eight in the evening, running along an aqueduct road. Running, not walking. The time we had to beat was no joke, and in Niland in August, eight o’clock is still damned hot.

Some of the guys were really good runners, and they were out in front right away. I’m a middling runner, not the best and not the worst; I was more or less in the middle of the pack. We got to mile 3, then mile 4, and I expected we would soon start seeing our fastest guys coming back the other way after hitting the 6-mile turnaround point. But we saw nobody. We hit mile 5. Still no one coming the other way.

Then finally we saw one, and then a few more—but only a few. Something’s wrong, I thought. There should be more guys coming back.

We soon found out what was wrong: Our guys were dropping in their tracks right on the road, and the medics were pulling them off to the side (where we wouldn’t see them) and getting IV bags into them. On torture runs like this, I had learned, you need to drink water nonstop. I was pounding the stuff down. I was not going to get dehydrated.

I reached the turnaround point, and there was Disco Stella, my BUD/S classmate and Team Three teammate. He looked bad, and I could tell he was hurting. Stella was a faster runner than me, but right now he was slowing down. We set off on the return leg, running together.

“I’m hurting, man,” he panted. I start to worry about whether he was going to make it. Normally he would be way out ahead of me, but he was clearly dehydrated and not doing well. Almost immediately, he started drifting back. He never caught up again.

After a few miles, I stopped at a water station to grab more water—and the moment I stopped moving, both my legs seized up. I started falling backward. There was nothing I could do about it. I grabbed my gun and just fell out, right on the ground. A guy I’d just met recently, Glen Doherty, was there as part of the support staff, manning the water station. Glen saw me drop to the ground and ran over to me. “Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” I managed. “I’ll be fine,” hoping that maybe saying it would make it true. I spent the next few minutes massaging and hitting my legs, putting everything I had into it, trying to get the muscles to let go just enough so I could stand up. Finally I managed to get back onto my feet. Guys were starting to trickle into the station, telling us about who had dropped out. Glen and I were both flabbergasted. There were some real studs in the group who weren’t running anymore. That did it for me. I finished my water and got back on the road.

I was not going fast, but I was near the top of the pack. As I got to the 10-mile mark, 2 miles short of the finish, a Humvee pulled up beside me with a medic and another guy. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw who it was. Dan Oldwell was not only a true stud, he was Honor Man in our BUD/S class. Honor Man is something like the class valedictorian, the guy who never quits, the most outstanding guy in the class, the one whose example inspires everyone else. Now here was our Honor Man—riding in a Humvee. He had quit.

“Hey, Webb,” said Oldwell, “we’re just letting you know, the instructors sent us out to tell everyone. People are dropping from massive heat exhaustion. They’re calling it. Hop in.”

It was twilight, and I could see the lights of our base camp on the horizon. I did not run 11 miles and put myself through all that misery to quit a mile from the gate. I looked up at Oldwell. “Thanks,” I said, “but no thanks. You’re not putting me in that car. No fucking way.”

I turned back and kept going.

A few minutes later I reached the camp gate. I stood there panting, feeling the pain coursing through my legs, feeling like a wreck, but it was a good feeling. “Good job, Webb,” I heard someone say.

Just then an instructor walked up to me and said, “Hey, why is your weapon dirty?”

I looked down at my weapon. The guy had a point. Some dirt had gotten on my gun when I fell over at the water station. It’s a code they had pounded into us: You take care of the team’s gear first, then you help your buddy, and once all that’s done, then you take care of yourself. You always make sure all your team’s shit is squared away before you go hop in the shower. It’s a code I believe in. I think it’s a great value to have.

I looked up at the guy and didn’t say a word, just gave him a look that said, Fuck you. He nodded and walked away.

It felt really good to finish that run. Out of a class of some eighty guys, some of them truly elite athletes, only Chris Osman and I and four others had done it. My stock was going up, and these things get back to the teams. It’s a little like an NFL draft: The teams are always looking for new guys, and they keep their ears to the ground. Every community is by definition a small community, and the SEALs are no exception. Tests, points, grades, certification—they all matter, but nothing counts like reputation.

The brutal heat of Niland was followed by a few weeks at Camp Pendleton in a block of extensive land nav training, followed by four weeks of combat swimmer training off the San Diego pier at the Thirty-second Street Naval Station, doing four- and five-hour dives to plant explosives on gigantic destroyers.

An Arleigh Burke–class destroyer is nearly a tenth of a mile long and has a displacement (total mass) of 9,200 tons. Imagine diving underneath one of these babies. Visibility is poor, and it’s easy to lose track of what’s up and what’s down. Normally you can orient yourself deep underwater by watching the upward trail of bubbles from your exhale, but with the Dräger rebreather system we were using, we weren’t emitting any bubbles, so there was nothing to follow. We learned to follow the seams of the welds on a ship’s hull to track our way to the surface. To make things worse, those ship’s generators are incredibly loud—and sound carries like crazy underwater. So there you are, deep down in the darkness, somewhere underneath a 9,200-ton vessel and surrounded by this intense RRRrrrRRRRRrrrrRRRRRrrrrRRRRR and no sense of up or down. It’s pretty easy to start thinking, Oh my God, am I even on the right boat?

These ships have huge bilge pumps that suck in seawater with tremendous force. The specific ships we targeted were supposed to shut down their bilge pumps for our exercise—but if you’re stumbling around down there and get too close to the wrong ship, it’s not hard to get sucked right in. Guys have died that way.

The first time I got down underneath one of those monsters, I couldn’t help thinking about Mikey Ritland trapped under that Zodiac off San Clemente Island. This sucker was a lot bigger than a Zodiac.

Fortunately we made it through the dive work in one piece. I graduated from SEAL Tactical Training on August 14, 1998, and headed back to the team to get back to work—and start preparing for my Trident board.

*   *   *

The SEAL Trident is the only badge in the navy that has no rank. When you wear that Trident, anywhere you go in the military, people get out of your way, no matter what rank they are, because they know what it means to earn that thing. I’ve seen commanding officers approaching in ship passageways step aside and let us through when they see that Trident. In that moment they aren’t seeing rank or seniority—they are just seeing that big budweiser on your chest.

In order to get my Trident, I first had to go collect signatures on my Personal Qualification Standard (PQS). I went to the dive locker and got signed off by the master diver there, to the air locker and did the same, then the first lieutenant of the boats rack, and on through all the individual people who had mentored us in each particular field. One by one, they signed off, and once I had the whole form completed I put in a formal request to go before my Trident board.

The day finally came, a Wednesday in late 1998, six of us standing in the hallway in our starched, pressed desert cammies (the standard uniform, made of camouflage material). We waited together out in the hall on the top floor of the Team Three area. One by one, they called us in. Each guy was in there probably no more than thirty minutes, but it seemed like hours. When my turn came, I went in and sat down in the center of a horseshoe of instructors, who immediately started in on me, firing away with their questions, starting with weapons specs.

“What’s the max effective range of the M-60 machine gun?”

“What’s the max effective range of the M-4?”

“What’s the muzzle velocity of the MP-5 submachine gun?”

“How many movements does it take to clear-and-safe a SIG SAUER 226 pistol?”

A comms guy asked questions about communications—shortwave and long-wave radio signals, different antenna setups, all the types of radios we use. Then a corpsman asked all kinds of first-aid questions. Then it went to the boats guy, the diving guy, the air guy. Everyone was firing crazy questions at me. I had to have the answers all down pat, and I had to answer fast. It was incredibly intimidating. I had studied my ass off for this, and I was pretty sure I was doing well. Still, they held my future in their hands.

Then one of them asked, “Why do you want to be a SEAL?”

I don’t know how anyone else answered that question, but it made me stop and think for a moment. Why did I want to be a SEAL?

I had always wanted to be a part of something special, something that not many people can accomplish. Honestly, that was my real driving force, the chance to be part of an incredibly elite group.

I had struggled some in high school, and while I’d managed to graduate, it was hardly with flying colors. There was no way I would have qualified for an ROTC scholarship or the Naval Academy. I had always wanted to be a pilot, but I hadn’t done well enough academically to get onto that track, either. In a way, I had something to prove to myself: that I could be part of something special, that I could set a high bar and make it.

I didn’t go into all of this with these guys. I just said, “Look, I love the water, grew up in the water, and feel I’m well suited to it. I want to be a part of this special community, and I know that not many people can achieve this.”

I walked out not knowing whether I’d made it. In fact, there were a few guys who didn’t, who screwed up some questions and would have to go back and retest later. I wasn’t one of them. When my turn came, the board of instructors brought me back into the room, messed with my head a little bit, then told me I’d passed.

When that Friday came, I showed up in my cammies at SEAL command, down by the beach, for quarters. “Quarters” is the naval term for the daily assembly. All the platoons would muster up in their groups at 7:30 in the morning, the CO would come out and talk about what was happening that day or that week, and then we would change out to go do PT and get on with the rest of the day. On Fridays, anyone who was getting an award would be recognized during quarters.

That Friday morning the CO came out and talked for a few minutes. Then I heard my name called and went up front. An instructor pinned a Trident to my uniform. I was no longer a search-and-rescue swimmer, a navy regular, a BUD/S student, a Team Three member on probation, an STT student.

I was a Navy SEAL.

The next instant, a throng of guys started running toward me—and I took off as fast as I could. There is a SEAL tradition: Once you have your Trident, you get thrown in the ocean, fully clothed. I did my best to outrun them and throw myself in, but no dice. They grabbed me and tossed me in the Pacific. Then they hauled me out again, soaking wet, took me back onshore, and started pounding my Trident.

This is another navy tradition. A normal pin has a little metal or plastic backing that secures it on, like a tie tack, and keeps the pin from sticking into your skin, but there was no backing on my Trident. Used to be, when you’d earn your flight wings in the navy, they would call them your “blood wings,” because the guys would literally pound the pin into you, beat it into your chest. That’s old school, and the regular navy doesn’t do that anymore—but the SEAL teams do. SEAL teams are hardcore.

So they pounded in my Trident, right over my heart. It felt good. Other than the three days that each of my kids was born, and one other moment that we’ll get to later, this was the proudest moment of my life.

*   *   *

A few days before receiving my Trident, I found out that I was being placed into GOLF platoon, one of the A-list platoons. I would spend the next two years with these guys.

GOLF platoon was an odd assortment of characters, a strange but solid mix of personalities. Having the skills and the objective qualifications is one thing, but there’s something you can’t quite measure in tests that has to be there, too. For us, the chemistry was great. With SEALs in general, you’re dealing with a group of people who are pretty extreme, every single one an alpha male, like a wolf pack or group of Viking warriors. Each guy is constantly putting the others in check, but while they may beat each other up, when it comes down to it, it’s all for one.

From the start, we were a very tight group:

JAMES MCNARY, our OIC, was a classic navy officer: straight shooter, not a hair out of place. When Lieutenant McNary got out of the service in 2000, he went to Harvard Business School and went on to become principal security engineer at Raytheon.

DAN, our chief, was a big guy and a California surfer like me. Chief Dan had gone through BUD/S at the age of seventeen and had pretty much been brought up in the teams. He ran that platoon; he was one of the smartest SEALs I’ve ever known, and McNary pretty much let him have free rein.

TOM, our LPO (leading petty officer). Next in seniority after Chief Dan, Tom was a big monster of a guy, quiet and soft-spoken. For me he exemplified everything it means to be a good leader, constantly showing us the ropes and making sure we knew exactly what we were doing at every turn. Tom and Chief Dan shaped who we were as SEALs and taught us what it meant to be solid team guys and sharp operators. As I would later discover to my chagrin and detriment, not everyone in the teams had that caliber of training and leadership.

ERIC FRANSSENS was a brute of a guy; Franny and I had gone through STT together, and he would shortly introduce me to my wife.

GLEN DOHERTY, whom I’d first met at Niland when he was part of the support team when I went through STT. Glen went through STT himself right after I did and then joined us in Team Three. Glen would in time become one of the most important people in my life.

MIKE RITLAND, my classmate from BUD/S, the Iowa farm boy who got trapped under the Zodiac and lived to tell the tale. We called him Mikey “Big Balls” Ritland.

RANDY was a short, skinny guy we called “the Rat.” I’ve never seen a guy be so intelligent and so distracted at the same time. He could ace any academic advancement test you’d give him, and completely forget where he was supposed to be five minutes from now. The Rat was a Columbia graduate and Wall Street stockbroker before he became a SEAL.

TOM KRUEGER. We all had nicknames, but Krueger came up with his own: Bad Ass. Chief Dan had to take him aside and tell him you don’t get to choose your own nickname—especially not one like that. We called him all sorts of names (including Jackass, though only behind his back), but none that ever stuck. We could tell Krueger had had a rough time when he was a new guy because he took obvious pleasure in any opportunity to haze new guys—as I would soon discover to my considerable dismay. Krueger ended up going into DEVGRU, the antiterrorist group that used to be called SEAL Team Six, and was shot and killed in Afghanistan in 2002.

SHANE HYATT, whom we called “the Diplomat.” Shane marched to the beat of a different drum. With a shaved head and pierced tongue, the Diplomat had absolutely no inner monologue; he would just say whatever was on his mind, anytime, anywhere. You did not want Shane around anyone important, because he would offend people at will. Three months shy of graduating from an ROTC program at the University of Arizona and getting his officer’s commission, Shane told off his ROTC commander, got kicked out of the program, and had to pay back some $60,000 in tuition.

CHUCK LANDRY was one of our youngest guys, just twenty when he joined the team, a big kid, 6'2" and sharp, but he had quite a mouth on him. We called him a liberty risk: When you went out on liberty with Landry, you never knew what would happen. One night he walked onto base drunk and started hassling the security guard. They handcuffed his hands behind him, but he managed to slip his hands under his feet and out in front again, whereupon they freaked out and drew their weapons to hold him in place. He ended up on double probation and couldn’t leave the team area for a month.

BOB HARWARD served as team CO for my first month there before moving on to another command. Bob was a serious hard case; he had graduated BUD/S as Honor Man of Class 128 and had a reputation for being frighteningly smart and just as tenacious. He has pissed a lot of people off in his career just because he is fearless and uncompromising. The dude has a scar running from his chin right up to his forehead, and you take one look at him and say, Okay, I am not fucking with that guy. Bob was incredibly competitive, and I learned a dirty trick from him one day when we were doing a run-swim-run: First you do the run, then you throw your shoes in the team truck, jump into the water and swim 2 miles, then you get out of the water and rendezvous with the truck on shore, grab your shoes, and run the rest of the race. I was out of the water right behind Bob and saw him grab his shoes and yell at the driver, “You’re in the wrong spot! You need to drive another half mile down the beach!” Son of a bitch if he didn’t put a half mile between himself and the rest of the pack so he could win the race. That was Bob. Classic. Today Harward is a three-star admiral. When I later served in Afghanistan supporting Task Force K-Bar, Bob Harward was my commander.

There were others, too: “Foxy,” “Cooter,” “Data,” Dave Scott, “Grogey,” “Mongo,” “Uncle Jesse.” Last but not least, there was me.

I’m not sure exactly where my nickname came from, or why. I think at first it had to do with a few guys seeing me as someone who didn’t bathe often (which is strange, because I’m actually a pretty clean person), but soon it expanded to embrace a decidedly sexual connotation. We all had our stories of sexual conquest, but mine tended to be on the outrageous side, and for a while there I was pretty busily slaying the young women of San Diego. The other guys frequently shook their heads over my exploits, saying, “Webb, you dirty bastard,” and the name stuck.

Dirty Webb.

*   *   *

There was one more person who came into my life around this time and would be a key figure in the years to come.

It started with Franny; we were always trying to set him up with a date. Johnny Sotello, one of the guys, had a girlfriend from Norway named Monica, and one day he told us that Monica had a friend named Gabriele who would be perfect for Franny. Johnny set up a date so that Franny and Gabriele could meet at a local bar.

I was at that bar the night of the blind date, and I couldn’t believe what I saw: Franny showed up with another girl. “Dude,” I said, “uh, what the hell are you doing?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Franny said. “It’ll be fine.”

Wait a second, I thought. He was bringing a girl to the bar where he was supposed to be meeting another girl for a date? How exactly was that supposed to be fine? But there wasn’t much I could do but sit back and watch.

A few minutes later Monica showed up with an absolutely beautiful blonde. I could tell immediately that she was a foreigner—German, was my best guess. She was gorgeous.

Franny went over to her with this other girl trailing along with him, got introduced to her, and proceeded to try to explain the situation. I wasn’t close enough to hear what either of them said, but it wasn’t hard to read their body language and see how the conversation was going. Franny was explaining to Gabriele and Monica how, yes, he was here with this other girl, but it was really nice to meet Gabriele, and he was wondering, could he still get her number?

Gabriele swiftly made it clear, with the aid of an emphatic hand gesture that involved her third digit, that she wanted nothing to do with this idiot. It was pretty funny watching the whole thing go down.

Eric walked back over to the other end of the bar where I was sitting.

“Hey, Franny,” I said. “Didn’t go so well, did it?”

“No,” he said glumly. “You were right.”

I took a pull on my beer, set it down, stepped away from the bar, and started walking back in the direction Franny had just come from. Here was this beautiful girl who’d come in expecting a date, and my troglodytic roommate had fucked it up. So I made my move. Walked up, leaned against the bar, nodded to her, very friendly.

“Do. You. Speak. English?” I asked, speaking very clearly and slowly. Very considerate, very thoughtful. Suave.

“Uh, yeah,” she replied. “I’m from Thousand Oaks. You know? California?”

Now I felt like an idiot. Why I had decided she was foreign, I have no idea. Maybe it was because I knew her name was Gabriele, or because Monica was from Norway. Maybe it was because she looked exotic to me.

We kept talking. I got her number, and we started dating. She had me hooked, right from the start. I immediately and completely gave up all the sexual escapades and wild living that was our normal navy way of life, and Gabriele and I took it relatively slow. I courted her for two solid months. What finally did it, I think, was an air show I took her to see.

I had volunteered to participate in this show up in Ventura, my hometown. My mom was there for it. It was cool. We did a thing called spy rigging: You clip into a helicopter through a harness on your back and they lower you on a rope so that you hang there, 100 or 150 feet down, while it goes through all sorts of maneuvers with you flying through the air at 3,000 feet. We put on a big demonstration with all kinds of complex maneuvers. I think it impressed her. That night our relationship went to a deeper level, and within months we were engaged. Just like that, two young kids in love.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see that we were too young and really hadn’t spent enough time together. And we never would. Gabriele was in school full-time, and I was always going off somewhere, whether it was to all the different training programs or, later on, to deployments in other parts of the world. Being a SEAL and being a family man are two very different realities that are extremely tough to reconcile.

Our marriage would last for years, long enough to have three incredible children. In the long run, though, the marriage itself never really had a fighting chance.

*   *   *

The training continued. We spent the next eighteen months in a lengthy workup, a seemingly endless procession of training blocks that took me all over the country and through some of the finest programs in the world. We would spend three or four weeks with the platoon, stationed in Coronado, then go off to a specialized school somewhere in the country for a training block, then rotate back home and repeat the cycle.

The truth is, SEALs never stop training. When we aren’t actually deployed we’re always learning new skills, continuing to hone our existing skills, and keeping ourselves in peak physical condition.

Rigger School

Four weeks of parachute training at an army school in Fort Lee, Virginia, learning to pack, repair, and jump with different kinds of chutes. We learned how to jump with a “stacked duck”: you take two Zodiacs, wrap them up with their engines and equipment, stick on two chutes, toss the whole thing out the back of a C-130, and jump with it. We were mixed in with army guys right out of boot camp, to their instructors’ great distress, because we were a totally corrupting influence. We drank hard and chased women every night, then showed up barely sober for class every morning. It was pretty rowdy.

Marine Operations (MAROPS)

We would take fully loaded Zodiacs 50 to 100 miles out onto the open ocean. Nothing like navigating on the choppy Pacific surface in a 15-foot rubber boat 100 miles from shore.

Over-the-Beach Training

About a month, part at Coronado Beach and part on San Clemente Island. We went through drills where we had to get our team extracted off a hot beach (that is, while being fired at), and others where we had to get our team onto a hot beach—all with live fire.

Land Nav

A few weeks at Team Three base in Coronado, followed by four weeks in the Laguna Mountains, much like what we’d done in Third Phase of BUD/S but a good deal more intense.

Desert Warfare

Niland again for four weeks. This was one of the most important training blocks, and I’ll say more about it in a moment.

Dive Phase

Four weeks off the San Diego docks—will say more about this one, too.

Close-Quarters Battle (CQB)

At John Shaw’s famous shooting range in Mississippi; more on this shortly also.

Gas and Oil Platforms Training (GOPLATS)

In the event that terrorists ever took over an oil platform out on the ocean, we needed to be ready on a moment’s notice to go out there and take it back. This involved nighttime dives 50 to 100 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. We would swim underwater for miles using a Dräger rebreather, then come up out of nowhere, hook a titanium caving ladder up onto the rig, snake up the ladder, and ambush whoever was up there. Sometimes there were bands of terrorists (simulated) we would have to capture and subdue. Because of my diving experience, they often made me point man on these ops, which meant the whole platoon relied on me to put them on the target. (It was quite an honor, especially being a new guy.)

Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS)

This is a critical part of training, essentially the Navy SEALs version of piracy on the high seas; it is similar to GOPLATS, only in this case we were going out on fast boats and taking over ships on the open ocean. Less than two years later, in my capacity as a sniper, I would be point man on an operation just like this with a genuine terrorist ship in the Persian Gulf—and in that one we definitely would be loaded with live fire.

Air Support

Working with an A-10 squadron outside Las Vegas, calling in live fire at night. The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) was the first U.S. Air Force plane designed specifically for close-quarters support and saw its first serious combat use during the Gulf War. It’s amazing how much ordnance those A-10s can deliver. Those air force guys are excellent pilots, and I loved working with them. It was my first experience getting on the radio and calling in ordnance—something that would save my life, and the lives of quite a few other guys, a few years later in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Inter-Operations (INTEROPS) Training

A week in northern Virginia with some intelligence people from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Defense’s version of the CIA. We did things like inserting a guy on the beach and then linking up with another agent and transporting him to a safe house. It was fascinating to be exposed to that world and see how intelligence agents work in hostile territory. It was also something I would learn a great deal more about many years later on the mean streets of Iraq.

*   *   *

One of our biggest and most important training blocks was the land warfare training, which took place, once again, out at Niland. A lot of the combat training we’d had up to that point, even in STT, consisted of basic contact drills, and a lot of the tactics taught there had been developed in the first years of the SEALs’ existence, which happened to be the Vietnam years of the sixties and early seventies. As a result, the entire approach to direct engagement was primarily oriented around the conditions of jungle warfare: You come into enemy contact, lay down a ton of fire, and quickly disappear into the jungle canopy. The whole point of guerrilla warfare is to avoid open, direct contact. When U.S. troops first encountered that style of warfare in the jungles of Southeast Asia it completely threw them, but that was the style of combat SEALs cut their teeth on.

In the desert, though, it’s a completely different scenario. You’re in the open, and there are not a whole lot of areas you can disappear into. How do you successfully survive an enemy contact out in the open desert? It’s a context that’s going to last much longer than the five or ten minutes of the typical enemy contact in a jungle-warfare scenario.

This was Team Three’s specialty: As a team we were responsible for Southwest Asia and the Middle East. Back then Team Three owned the training philosophy around open desert contact with the enemy. Just a year or two before, a SEAL named Forrest Walker had taken a few guys from his training cell all over the world to visit with various Special Ops units to learn from their experiences with desert warfare, especially the British and Australian SAS, and they had built a solid desert warfare program. Team Three was fortunate to be the beneficiaries of Forrest’s excellent work. (I would later serve in Afghanistan in the same platoon with Forrest.) We practiced in contact drills that would last up to an hour: sixteen guys moving constantly, using the desert terrain, conserving our ammunition, and at the same time putting down a continued rate of firepower. It takes some skill to conserve ammo so that nobody runs out, at the same time maintaining a steady rate of return fire, and all the while staying in constant motion and using the difficult desert terrain to your advantage.

It also takes a massive amount of coordination. We would suddenly have contact, which always brought with it an element of surprise; even though we were expecting it, we never knew exactly when it would come or from what direction. The lane graders (instructors) who had set this whole scenario up ahead of time would constantly shift the elements of the scenario, challenging us throughout the process. To simulate incoming fire, they would throw grenade simulators into our midst. Often these exercises took place at night, and they would have rigged chem lights on the targets that they could trigger, simulating muzzle flashes. They also had remote detonation devices so that, depending on how our response was unfolding, they could instantly change up the scenario by blowing up something off to our left, or our right, or behind us, big fireballs going on all around us through the course of the hour. We would instantly have to figure out which direction that initial contact was coming from, respond immediately with a blistering volley of overwhelming fire, and at the same time identify an out—exactly which direction do we go to extract ourselves from this contact unscathed? Whoever found the out first had to communicate it instantly and effectively to the rest of the squad.

In a firefight, you can’t afford the luxury of coming up with a great plan. You don’t have five minutes to think about it. A decent plan executed right now is a lot better than a great plan executed five minutes from now—when you’re dead.

Typically the squad would split up into two elements. One guy would peel off and say, “Hey, I’ve got an out over here!” and while half the squad was laying down fire, the other half would stop firing, get up, run back, get down, and start laying down fire—at which point the first half, having heard the lull and then the renewed fire, would start shifting in turn. It had to work like a perfectly choreographed routine, all unfolding on the fly, taking into account the terrain and conditions as well as the fact that the source of enemy contact might be on the move, too.

What’s more, all of this was happening with live rounds. This is something that sets SEAL training apart from most other military training: Everything we do, we do with high-speed live fire, real bullets—hundreds of thousands of rounds. You have to be incredibly careful. We were.

We also had four heavy M-60 machine guns in the platoon. An M-60 is gas operated, air cooled, and belt fed and weighs 23 pounds. It can deal out a sustained rate of about 100 rounds per minute, or in bursts of 200 rounds per minute (9 rounds per second), with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second. We’d typically fire it off in bursts of three, four, or five rounds; three is ideal because that gets the job done but also conserves ammo. I was one of the M-60 gunners and carried 1,000 of those 7.62 mm rounds on me. My roommate Franny had one of the other big guns, and we would sig off each other: I’d go dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, then I’d pause and move as I heard Franny pick it up, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat. We’d keep switching back and forth, conserving each other’s ammo, playing off each other as if we were musicians in a band, catching each other’s rhythm and riffing off one another, keeping that tuneful fire going. This would last for an hour or more.

We did one big final exercise where they combined everything we’d learned and ran us through a few hours of contact. They went out of their way to make it realistic and threw everything in there—bombs going off, live helicopters coming in to extract some of us, jets dropping ordnance, everything. Most people in the military never see training like this. The realism was remarkable.

*   *   *

During our workup’s four-week dive phase, I had a new and unique underwater combat experience: going up against dolphins.

In their arsenal of defensive strategies, the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) guys sometimes use sea lions and/or dolphins as a front line of harbor defense. They train these animals to track down enemy divers, outfitting them with a device strapped onto the head that contains a compressed gas needle. Once the dolphin has tracked you down, it butts you; the needle shoots out and pokes you, creating an embolism. Within moments, you’re dead.

Obviously they didn’t use the actual device on us, but they had training devices that looked and behaved just like the real thing. When a dolphin succeeded in nailing you, a little foam float would pop up to the surface, indicating that you’d been “killed.” The dolphin would then swim to the surface and be rewarded with a sardine. You, on the other hand, would be rewarded with a low score—or with having to do it all over again. Those suckers really packed a wallop. I heard that when you got nailed, you’d be sore for days.

Chief Dan was my partner on this exercise. We could tell when those little bastards were approaching because we could hear their sonar clicking—but that didn’t make it any easier to escape them, because they swim fast, way too fast for us or any other human being to outrun them.

As a rescue swimmer, though, I’d worked with sonar, and I was pretty sure I understood how the dolphins’ sonar sense worked.

“If we stay shallow enough,” I told Chief Dan, “and stay close enough to that big rock breakwall, it will mess with their sonar. They won’t be able to get a good return signal.”

That was our strategy close to shore. Farther out, where there was no way to screw up their sonar, we decided to try using thermoclines to our advantage, going deep and taking care to keep a solid temperature break in between us and the dolphins.

We didn’t get hit once.

*   *   *

Our next block was close-quarters battle training. CQB is the term for situations where you have to enter a hostile building and comb it, room to room, clearing rooms, taking out bad guys, rescuing hostages, or whatever the mission entails. This is a critically important block of training for a SEAL platoon, because a lot of what we do involves being able to move quickly and fluidly through a complicated environment—whether that means taking over an oil platform, clearing a multistory house, or clearing an entire village—and moving like lightning through close quarters without shooting any hostages or other friendlies, including each other.

This training would prove crucial both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and it was our training here in STT that made those later live operations work as effectively as they did.

This kind of operation requires an incredible degree of on-the-fly fluidity, flexibility, and adaptiveness. You have to be able to respond, react, adjust, and invent on split-second timing, all while avoiding being killed or killing someone else you didn’t mean to kill. Typically, the number one man in will go left automatically—but maybe in this case he can’t go left because there’s an immediate wall there, or the left-hand passageway is blocked off for some other reason. We always had a planned choreography, but plans and reality are usually two different things. These exercises simulated reality as much as possible, in all its unpredictable and messy glory—and it was all with live fire.

For CQB we went to John Shaw’s famous shooting-range ranch in Mississippi, the Mid-South Institute of Self-Defense Shooting. They gave us our choice of sidearm: We could use the SIG 226 9 mm pistol, or the H&K SOCOM, which is a big .45 built to SOCOM (Special Operations Command) specs especially for SEALs and other Special Operations forces. I took the Heckler & Koch.

In the past months, as I had gotten to know the various firearms, I had become a big fan of Heckler & Koch. This is the same company that makes the MP-5 9 mm submachine gun (which we also used in these exercises), and its weapons are just so damn reliable. I also like the .45 round. The SIG is a good weapon, but the magazines for the SIGs at the time were not the same quality. (I think it was some aftermarket product, not the factory magazine.) If you’re running or the weapon is getting jolted (which is surely going to happen in close-quarters combat), and the rounds stand a chance of rolling or tumbling inside the magazine, you can end up with a jam—and that is something you do not want to have happen. I had experienced that tumbling, and I didn’t trust that sidearm, so I used the H&K. It never let me down.

We lost one of our guys, Cooter, in this training block for safety violations; he kept shooting the hostage target—and even swept one of us as we were going room to room. (This was, again, with live fire!) Cooter was a hard worker with a solid attitude, and because of that he wasn’t tossed out. Instead, they rolled him and put him in a different platoon, where he had to start the whole workup again from the beginning. He did great and went on to make chief.

Outside the shoot house they had a gigantic tractor tire attached to a harness. If you threw a shot off a target or shot a hostage, then it was outside with you. You’d take off all your gear, strap into the harness, and drag that goddam monster for 500 yards, then run back to where you started, put your gear back on, and go inside and do it all over again—and get it right.

I did that tire-drag one time. Once was enough for me.

*   *   *

With all the focus on land warfare and diving, it’s easy to forget about the A in SEAL, but mastering the skills involved in going airborne is a crucial part of the training, too. During this time I also did a block of high-altitude parachute training, starting with a week of work in the wind tunnel at Fort Bragg learning how to use our bodies as gliders, and then out to the perfect weather of Yuma, Arizona, to take it up into the air. Most of the other guys in the platoon had already picked up this training (and these days, it’s automatically a part of the training pipeline right out of BUD/S), but I’d missed it, so they sent me out by myself now to make this one up.

For our first high-altitude jump they took us up in a little CASA C-212 twin-engine plane. When we reached 12,000 feet the ramp went down, and I caught my breath. What an absolutely stunning view. Beautiful and horrifying at the same time.

I’d done static-line jumping before, where a whole line of us jumped together and our chutes were automatically pulled for us. (We call it “dope on a rope.”) This time, we were on our own and going solo. There was an instructor on board, but we weren’t on tandem. Nobody would be connected to us when we jumped. We each had to throw ourselves out that door, and the rest would be up to us. Truthfully, I was nervous. The whole thing felt so counterintuitive, which is to say, insane. (As they say, you’re throwing yourself out a perfectly good airplane!) One army classmate saw that ramp open and sat himself right back down, refused to jump. “That’s it,” he said, “I’m done with this shit. No way I’m throwing myself out that door. I quit.” I understood how he felt, but then the whole SEAL thing kicked in. There was no way I was not jumping out that door. The next moment, I was flying.

Soon I was doing it again, only this time at night and on oxygen, at 20,000 feet. This was a whole new experience. Once we jumped we’d be airborne for a good thirty or forty minutes and land a good 40 miles upland from where we dropped. The idea is to have the aircraft drop while you’re in clear space, and then you can ride the winds and fly under canopy until you’re behind enemy lines, too small to be picked up on radar. We call them HAHO: high-altitude, high-opening ops.

I jumped. Up there it was even more beautiful than it had been at 12,000 feet—and cold as hell, well below freezing. Off to my left I saw an eerie series of lights in the distance: red, green, white, and one or two faintly strobing beacons. It was the navigation lights of a commercial aircraft. I was not alone up there, although the passengers on that craft (who doubtless had no idea a Navy SEAL was dropping by while they sat through their in-flight movie) were probably a lot warmer than I. A lot less crazy, too, I told myself and twisted my face into what I thought was a grin, but when your face is being pummeled by the full force of free fall, who knows.

It was one of the most flat-out exhilarating things I’d ever done. I absolutely loved it.

Not everyone felt the same way. We had two guys from Jordan in our class who never got over their terror of jumping. We’d heard they already had something like three hundred jumps behind them back in Jordan, but they’d been a total train wreck in the wind tunnel at Fort Bragg. Then we found out what their parachute training in Jordan had consisted of. They would be flown up and just tossed out of the plane with this helpful hint: “Make sure you pull your rip cord at 5,000 feet.” No wonder these guys couldn’t get stable in the wind tunnel; they’d been traumatized.

They didn’t get any better when we started jumping, either. They would hurl themselves out of that plane and start tumbling head over ass, with no control or poise whatsoever. It was the weirdest thing. They’d always pull at 5,000 feet, right on the money, every single time—but up to that moment they’d be like frigging rag dolls tumbling down a staircase the whole way down. Poor guys ended up getting rolled into the next class. After they left, the instructor showed us a video of one of these guys in free fall, and he was screaming his head off, Aaaahhhhhhh!!!! as he tumbled through the air like a piece of furniture. We felt bad for them, but I have to admit, it was pretty hilarious.

*   *   *

Probably the most memorable “training” I received during the entire eighteen months of our platoon’s workup was not an official training at all. I sure never got a certificate for it, but it made a lasting impression.

Not long after we met, Gabriele and I had a date set for our wedding. My family had spent good money on the preparations. For whatever crazy reasons kids do crazy things, though, around the second week of MAROPS, we decided we couldn’t wait any longer. We quietly eloped—snuck off to Vegas and hit a chapel.

When we got back I said, “Look, my mom will kill me if I tell her what we did. She’s planned this whole big thing. She’ll be devastated.” I swore Gabriele to secrecy. I couldn’t let my mother find out, and since my sister, Rhiannon, was living right in the area and going to San Diego State, we couldn’t let her find out either.

That same evening we went out to dinner at a nice place with the guys from the platoon, all there with their wives and girlfriends. Somehow the news leaked out. I suspect Gabriele just couldn’t keep it to herself and took one of her friends into the ladies room and whispered it to her. The next thing you know I was tying myself in knots trying to defend this little white lie. “Hey,” one of the guys said, “I heard you got married?”

“No,” I said quickly, “someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” I completely denied it. SEALs are resourceful, though. This was 1999, still the covered-wagon days of the Internet, but they went Web surfing and managed to find our Clark County marriage certificate online.

A few days later I was due to receive a conduct award at Friday quarters. This is something that typically happens every four years, if you have managed to stay out of trouble. Friday morning rolled around, we all mustered for quarters, and I heard my name called out. I went and stood in front of the whole team and our CO, Captain McRaven (Harward was gone by now), began reading out what I fully expected was going to be a conduct award. He started by reading my name, rank, and training history, and then he veered off into some pretty bizarre stuff, including a description of my sexual orientation, and then launched into a long list of “atrocities” I’d committed—concluding with how I had lied to my platoon. (I later learned that Chief Dan had written it. I wish I had a copy. It was a masterpiece.)

I was mortified and felt my face turn beet red. I had lied to my platoon, and now everyone knew it.

Reputation.

As summary punishment the whole team grabbed me and threw me in the ocean, which was pretty funny, except that I knew it wasn’t over. There was a hazing in my future.

Every new guy had already gotten a basic welcome-to-the-platoon hazing out at San Clemente Island. That was bad, but we all knew it was coming and handled it well. It’s a rite of passage that lets you know: Hey, you may think you know something, and you may think you’re pretty hot stuff—but you don’t, and you’re not. I know it sounds harsh, but the truth is, most of us did think we were pretty hot stuff by that point, and maybe we did need to be cut down to size.

I also knew what normally happened to guys in the platoon who got married: They would get hazed. I once saw a newly engaged guy walking around innocently in downtown Coronado when a navy van with no license plates pulled up and a few guys in balaclavas jumped out and snatched the guy right off the street, threw him in the van, and took off. That was normal, but I’d withheld my news and then lied about it when confronted. I knew I was going to get it even worse.

They got me that same night. We had just come back from a beach training, about two in the morning. I was peeling off my wet suit, had it around my ankles—and the guys grabbed me and wrapped me up in something. Next thing I knew I was duct-taped stark naked to a metal cart we used for hauling equipment. They wheeled me over to the ice machine, dumped ice on me, then wheeled me into a gear storage area and started taping me up.

The CO happened to walk through and saw something out of the corner of his eye—but Chief Dan whispered something to him and he scurried off as if he hadn’t seen a thing: plausible deniability.

They gave me a “lobster claw,” duct-taping my hands into claws so I had no use of my fingers. Then they gave me a “happy hat,” taping over the tops of my eyebrows, so I had a hard time seeing out from under the duct tape, then taping a handle onto my head so they could move it around like a marionette. They asked me, “Are you having a good time?” and then they nodded my head for me, Yes, thank you.

Chief Dan had a running commentary going, telling me that this was why I never wanted to lie to my platoon again. He interrupted himself to yell, “Go get the tequila!” A moment later, he put the bottle to my mouth and made me take a shot. It was the cheapest, worst tequila money could buy, just vile stuff, and I drank probably half the bottle by the time the night was over. Which was probably a good thing for me, because it did somewhat numb the experience.

Next they brought out a miniature handheld generator we use in demolition work, about the size of a small cell phone, called a miniblasting machine. You squeeze it four, five, six times in rapid succession, and you can hear it building up a charge, rrrr, rrrr, RRRR, RRRR!!—and then it lets loose with enough of a charge to set off a blasting cap. Only in this case, the wires weren’t tied into a blasting cap. They were wired into me. Chief Dan had the guys screw a set of claymore wires into the handheld generator and hook the other ends up with alligator clips to my nipples.

I don’t know how many volts go through that thing, but when that charge hits you, you lose all control, and that was exactly what I did.

Next, someone was ripping open an MRE, because every MRE contains a little bottle of Tabasco sauce. I strained to see who was doing this. Oh, shit. It was Krueger, the guy who took such pleasure in giving it to the new guys. Not good. Krueger opened the Tabasco sauce and poured it over my private parts. Now, I like hot food as much as the next guy, but having it on the outside is quite different than having it on the inside. When that Tabasco sauce hit my balls, I thought someone had dipped me in kerosene and lit a match.

The whole time, the senior guys were drinking beers, laughing and talking, tunes going on the radio in the background, while they gave the new guys orders. The new guys were getting pretty freaked out. Later they told me what was going through their minds at the time: It’s only a matter of time before one or more of us get thrown into the mix, too. Meanwhile, Chief Dan continued giving me lessons on platoon ethics and the importance of holding your platoon above all else.

Now Krueger put on a pair of surgical gloves, took a pair of clippers, and started clipping off all my pubic hair. Then he put one hand over my eyes, took a can of spray glue that we use to attach targets on the shooting range, spray-glued my face, and sprinkled the clippings all over me.

Ah, perfect. Now I had a beard made of my own pubic hair.

I was freezing to death, nuts on fire, waiting for another shock any minute. Finally Chief Dan said, “All right, somebody call Gabriele and ask her to come get him.” They called Gabriele from my cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. I was supposed to have been home hours ago, and she naturally assumed I was out drinking with my buddies and just now getting around to calling her to say I was sorry, that I’d be home soon. She was too pissed off to answer.

I suspected they were making the call because they’d run out of beer, so they figured they might as well quit. I was right, but when she never picked up, Chief Dan just shrugged—and sent off one of the new guys to go get another 18-pack.

The torture lasted another thirty minutes. Finally they quit, leaving Glen and the Rat to untape me and help me through the shower. It took four razor blades to get my face clean, or at least mostly clean. I was picking off bits of spray glue for weeks.

That was the last time I ever got hazed, and it left an impression—not only on me, but on all the guys. They talk about it to this day. I’ll tell you what, though: I never lied to the platoon again.

*   *   *

In the spring of 2000 our eighteen-month workup concluded with an Operational Readiness Exam (ORE), conducted off San Clemente Island, in which a small group of us simulated a covert tagging and tracking op on an enemy vessel. There were some tricky issues with water currents on the way back in, and things got sketchy. By the time we got back to rendezvous with our vessel, I had run out of air and had a headache, but we passed the exercise. GOLF platoon was certified and operationally ready to rotate overseas to serve in an alert status, which the platoon would do after a little downtime.

Before it did, though, something unexpected happened that changed the course of my career in the navy.

One day shortly after our ORE, Glen and I were called in to see our OIC, McNary. When we entered his office we found Tom, our platoon LPO, and Chief Dan there with him. Clearly something was up, something big, but we had no idea what.

Were we in some sort of trouble?

“Listen,” said McNary, “you guys have done a really great job here, and we’re short-handed on snipers right now. We want to offer you the opportunity to go to sniper school.”

I was not planning to become a sniper. In fact, the thought had never occurred to me. Of course, we all knew the SEALs had snipers, and we all knew how difficult a course it was. The whole thing seemed fascinating, but I’d never for an instant considered that I might become one of those guys. All my life, I’d loved being in the water, and all my life I’d wanted to be a pilot, but a sniper? Not a chance. Now here it was, being offered to us on a plate.

We were stunned. We were thrilled. We were terrified.

It was unheard of for a new guy to get a sniper billet. There were some seriously seasoned guys on the team who had waited years to get a slot; that’s how hard they were to get. We knew it was a fiendishly difficult school to pass, and the last thing anyone wanted was some wet-behind-the-ears new guy in there, because he’d just fuck it up and wash out. We also knew that everyone would be watching us, including our entire platoon, hell, our entire team, and that they would all be counting on us. If we washed out, we would be letting them down. If we said yes, we would spend the next three months under excruciating pressure.

We didn’t hesitate for a second.