Even if you get your shot off unseen and hit the target, if they find you afterward, you still fail. It’s a hard, tough, thinking man’s game, and the test is exhaustive. In training, an instructor stands behind both of you while you’re crossing the forbidden ground. They’re writing a constant critique, observing, for example, that my spotter has made a wrong call, either incorrect distance or direction. If I then miss with the shot, they know the mistake was not mine. As ever, you must operate as a team. The instructor knows full well you cannot position, aim, and fire the rifle without a spotter calling down the range, and Jesus, he better be right.
There was just one day during training where they walked on me, which I thought was pretty damned nervy. But it taught me something. Our enemy had a damn good idea where we might head before we even started, a kind of instinct based on long experience of rookie snipers looking for cover. They had me in their sights before I even got moving, because they knew where to look, the highest probability area.
That’s a lifetime lesson for the sniper: never, ever go where your enemy might expect you to be. My only solace on that rueful occasion was that the instructors walked on every single one of us that day.
In the final test, I faced that thousand-yard barren desert once again and began my journey, wriggling and scuffling through the dusty ground, my head well down, camouflage branches firm in my hat, groveling my way between the boulders. It took me hours to make the halfway point and even longer to ease my way over the last three hundred yards to my chosen spot for the shot. I was not seen, and I moved dead slowly through the rocks, from gully to gully, staying low, pressing into the ground. When I arrived at my final point, I scuffled together a little hide of dirt and sticks, and tucked down behind it, my rifle carefully aimed. I squeezed the trigger slowly and deliberately, and my shot pinged into the metal target, right in the middle. If that had been a man’s head, he’d have been history.
I saw the instructors swing around and start looking for the place my shot had come from. But they were obviously guessing. I pressed my face into the dirt and never moved an inch for a half hour. Then I made my slow and careful retreat, still lying flat, disturbing not a twig nor a rock. An unknown marksman, just the way we like it.
It had taken three months, and I passed Sniper School with excellent marks. SEALs don’t look for personal credit, and thus I cannot say who the class voted their Honor Man.
The last major school I attended was joint tactical air control. It lasted one month, out in the Fallon Naval Airbase, Nevada. They taught us the basics of airborne ordnance, five-hundred-pound bombs and missiles, what they can hit and what they can’t. We also learned to communicate directly with aircraft from the ground — getting them to see what we can see, relaying information through the satellites to the controllers.
I realize it has taken me some time to explain precisely what a Navy SEAL is and what it takes to be one. But as we are always told, you have to earn that Trident every day. We never stop learning, never stop training. To state that a man is a Navy SEAL communicates about a ten thousandth of what it really means. It would be as if General Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned he’d once served in the army.
But now you know: what it took, what it meant to all of us, and, perhaps, why we did it. Okay, okay, we do have our own little brand of arrogance. But we paid for every last drop of that sin in sweat, blood, and brutally hard work.
Because above all, we’re patriots. We will willingly carry the fight to whoever may be the enemies of the United States of America. We’re your front line, unafraid and ready to go in against al Qaeda, jihadists, terrorists, or whoever the hell else threatens this nation.
Every Navy SEAL is supremely confident, because we’re indoctrinated with a belief in victory at all costs; a conviction that no earthly force can withstand our thunderous assault on the battlefield. We’re invincible, right? Unstoppable. That’s what I believed to the depths of my spirit on the day they pinned the Trident on my chest. I still believe it. And I always will.
6
’Bye, Dudes, Give ’Em Hell
The final call came — “Redwing is a go!” The landing controller was calling the shots...“One minute...Thirty seconds!...Let’s go!” The ramp was down...the gunner was ready with the M60 machine gun...No moon...Danny went first, out into the dark.
As day broke over the mighty sprawl of the U.S. base at Bagram in Afghanistan on that morning in March 2005, we checked into our bee hut and slept for a few hours before attending a general briefing. Dan Healy, Shane, James, Axe, Mikey, and I, the new arrivals from SDV Team 1, were immediately seconded to SEAL Team 10 out of Virginia Beach, led right now by the teak-hard Lieutenant Commander Eric Kristensen, standing in for the absent CO, who was on duty elsewhere.
Eric was funny as hell, always one of the boys, so much so it might have impeded his progress through the higher ranks in later years. These days 75 percent of all SEALs have college degrees, and the line between officers and enlisted men is more blurred than it has ever been. But Eric was thirty-two and the son of an admiral from Virginia. Despite his sense of humor and his often wry look at higher authority, he was a very fine SEAL commander, and he presided over one of the best fighting platoons in the entire U.S. Navy. Team 10 was brilliantly trained for the kind of warfare we were now entering. Lieutenant Commander Kristensen had a couple of right-hand men, Luke Newbold and Master Chief Walters, very special guys. I can only say it was a pleasure to work with them.
Our briefing, like everything associated with Team 10, was top of the line, a kind of grim educational lecture on what was happening up on the northwest frontier, which divides Afghanistan and Pakistan. The steep, stony mountain crevasses and cliffs, dust-colored, sinister places, were now alive with the burgeoning armies of the Taliban. Angry, resentful men, regrouping all along the unmarked high border, preparing to take back the holy Muslim country they believed the infidel Americans had stolen from them and then presented to a new, elected government.
Up there, complex paths emerge and then disappear behind huge boulders and rocks. Every footstep that dislodges anything, a small rock, a pile of shale, seems like it might cause an earthshaking avalanche. Stealth, we were told, must be our watchword on the high, quiet slopes of the Hindu Kush.
These paths, trodden down for centuries by warring tribesmen, were the very routes taken by the defeated Taliban and al Qaeda after the withering U.S. bombardment had all but annihilated them in 2001. We would find out all about them soon enough.
Within literally hours, we began our first mission. No one regarded us as rookies; we were all fully trained SEALs, ready for action, ready to get up there into those mountain passes and help slow the tide of armed warrior tribesmen moving back across the border from Pakistan.
We flew by helicopter up into those passes, into the hills above a deep valley. We arrived, maybe twenty of us, including Dan, Shane, Axe, and Mikey, and fanned out around the mountain. Axe, Mikey, and James Suh (call sign Irish One) were positioned about one and a half miles from Chief Healy, Shane, and me (call sign Irish Three).
This was a border hot spot, where multiple Taliban troop movements were taking place on a weekly, or even daily, basis. We expected to observe the Taliban way below us on that narrow, treacherous path through the mountains, moving along with their swaying camels, many of them loaded up with explosives, grenades, and God knows what else.