Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (47 page)

This policy was rigorously enforced and had led to the alienation of Team Six from the rest of the community. The new-friends rule was a relic of the Marcinko era, and like many other Marcinko policies we would come up against, it seemed pointless and counterproductive; but they were serious about it, so we did as we were told. There was at least a glimmer of a reason behind it: SEAL Team Six was then a black program. The existence of the Team was secret, the location of the base was secret, its budget, training, organization, and tactics were all classified. The building did not say “SEAL Team Six”—it said the name of an equipment-testing unit that did not exist. The cover was backstopped thoroughly. All of us had been processed out of the navy. At least as far as our records showed, we had all been separated from the service. Paperwork variously indicating resignation, retirement, and medical release from duty had been placed in each of our service records. We were to grow our hair long and forget that we owned uniforms. As far as the world was concerned, none of us were in the navy anymore. We were now civilians working for the phantom organization. This was what we were to tell our neighbors and new friends.

To our old teammates back at Little Creek, it would appear that we had dropped off the face of the planet. We had entered the black world. From now on the Teams would be referred to disparagingly as Vanilla SOF—plain white spec ops. As aspirant members of Team Jedi, we had crossed to the Dark Side.

There was an additional consequence of joining a black operation: compartmentalization. Green Team was firewalled totally from the operational elements of SEAL Six. We were told not to ask questions, to keep to our own cages and our own Team room, and not to fraternize with the operators, even if we had known them back in the real world. The training cell was completely segregated from the operational elements. Until we had passed out of Green Team, we were visitors. Period.

“When and
if
you graduate,” Court said, “you can play with your old friends.”

This culture pervaded the command. It wasn’t just the support guys who gave Green Team members the short stroke. In the hallways and around campus, the members of Green Team were practically invisible. Former teammates would pass by without a nod. The no-fraternization rule went both ways. This was another Marcinko innovation. You had to earn the right to be here; until then you were nothing.

The next briefing was from the command’s two counterintelligence agents, a pair of cards I’ll call “Lenny” and “Dougie.” It was their job to make sure the command kept a low—that is, invisible—profile. They were active-duty marines, as if you could tell. Dougie had curly hair to his shoulders and a drooping Fu Manchu. Lenny sported a goatee and an earring. They were affable enough, but their message was chilling. It was their job to discern how well our covers were working, and what the general public knew about us and the command.

“Here’s the deal,” Dougie said. “If I ask your next-door neighbors where you work and they tell me you’re a SEAL, you’re outta here.”

I made a mental note: Don’t chat up the neighbors.

Green Team was to be eight months long, two months longer than BUD/S. It would prove every bit as grueling. We worked six days a week, from six in the morning until five at night. We would have at least one night op a week, and we would work seven days a week when we were on the road, which would be most of the time. Individuals who attrited, were injured or deemed unsuitable would have their service records reactivated and would transfer back to the Teams. Before transfer, they would sign a security-termination agreement promising fines and imprisonment for leaking any information. Again, Lenny and Dougie would be checking.

We wore beepers and were on call to be in our cages and ready to deploy on short notice. I won’t mention the time requirement, but I will say this: It was stringent enough that some people sold their houses to move closer to work.

And there was a lot of work. Traylor Court would soon dispel any notions we had about being in shape. In the woods in front of the compound, Court had erected an aerial obstacle course. Rigged through the trees were caving ladders, rope bridges, monkey bars, bits of pipe, inclined boards, and horizontal beams. Negotiating the course required a variety of rock-climbing moves: chimneying, laybacks, mantles, and countless full-body lifts. We used to say Court was trying to separate the men from the baboons, but the course had a purpose. At Six, we climbed things: the sides of buildings, oil rigs, cliff faces, and anchor chains. As I gradually gained confidence and strength, I was to fall out of Court’s trees half a dozen times, but I would never fall on an operation.

We were required to swing through Court’s masterpiece after our daily six-mile run, which happened after our first hour and a half of PT, which started every morning at 0600. Morning calisthenics, like the run and the aerial O-course, were led by Court in person. Not all of our cardio conditioning was roadwork or swinging through trees. We swam thousands of laps and played water rugby in the Team’s indoor Olympic swimming pool. I was in shape when I got there, and I got harder. We lifted weights in a health-club-sized weight room. We did a twenty-mile cross-country run over hill and dale, forest and swamp. We swam around the island of Key West. By the end of training, I would weigh 220 pounds and be able to run ten miles in sixty-five minutes, knock out a hundred sit-ups in ninety seconds, and chin myself with one hand.

As fun as the exercise was, we were there to learn a trade, and the greater part of each day was spent absorbing the component skills required of a counterterrorist operator. We were put through an intense combat-swimmer curriculum, building on and expanding the underwater skills we’d learned in the Teams. The training required us to swim mile-long course legs underwater and affix magnetic mines to targets on time and without detection. We conducted underwater recons against port facilities and offshore oil platforms. We swam to piers, surfaced, and shot targets, disappearing back underwater and swimming a mile or two out to sea.

When I reported to Green Team, I might have been a bit jaded. I’d been in combat, I was a platoon commander, I had led numerous detachments and spent a good part of my career doing spooky stuff in Central America. I thought I’d been around the block, and I didn’t expect to have the shit scared out of me. But it happened in Green Team, often. It was taken for granted that we were all experienced operators and that we would learn quickly. Some of the things we learned were just plain dangerous. In the evolutions we practiced, everything either went perfectly or people died.

“Pay attention,” Bam-Bam used to say, “because if you fuck this up, it will kill you.” Every day Green Team battled the combined forces of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Darwin.

We attended survival schools for desert, woodland, and arctic environments. We learned how to take over ships at pierside and under way. We attended special driving schools, learning how to do bootlegs and J-turns, how to avoid roadblocks and vehicle ambushes. We also learned how to conduct the Pitt maneuver, an offensive driving technique used to knock other cars off the road. Much to the chagrin of our instructors, we kept these skills sharp on a series of rental cars. We were taught intelligence tradecraft, studying the arcana of dead drops, load signals, and countersurveillance. We took classes on the organization and tactics of the KGB, the East German
Stasi,
and the Cuban intelligence organization, the DGI (
Dirección General de Inteligencia
).

We learned to operate and field-strip each of the weapons we’d been issued, those and about a hundred others besides. We attended shooting schools, studying combat pistol craft and police shotgun technique from national champions like Rogers and Chapman. In an exercise called an El Presidente, we would stand, hands raised, pistols holstered, with our backs turned to three man-shaped silhouettes. On command, we would about-face, draw, fire two rounds into each target, reload, and fire two more rounds into the trio. I was considered fair at this. I could fire twelve shots and reload my weapon in just over five seconds. The best operator on the team could do it in four and a half.

Combat shooting differs qualitatively from traditional marksmanship. In normal rifle and pistol craft, shooters are taught to close one eye, relax, align the target, and squeeze the trigger slowly. To rush a shot is to cheat the process. Combat shooting is, by necessity, a hasty business. When people are shooting back at you, speed is life.

We were first taught to shoot from the ready position, squared toward the target, knees slightly bent, and weight forward on the toes, a position called “the modified isosceles.” Our MP-5s were secured over the shoulder and to the chest by a special assault sling. When the weapon is raised to engage the target, the sling becomes another point of stability, like a third steadying hand. On the command to fire, we would snap off safe, fire two rounds in quick succession (called a “double tap”), snap the safety back on, and return to the ready position. Initially we shot at reactive targets, armored silhouettes and dish-sized head plates. The pinging of the bullets off the metal targets and the fleeting puff of lead spatter were instant feedback, a process called “point of impact/point of aim.” Eye, hand, bullet, target, brain.

Combat shooting is dynamic, not static, and we did not spend much time shooting at stationary targets. We were taught to move and shoot, shoot and move and shoot, while the targets were moving. This required a different sort of aiming, completely unlike the target-focused techniques of long-distance marksmanship. We were taught to open both eyes, keeping the scan on and avoiding target lock. There is a bit of a trick to this, especially for marksmen used to shooting at bull’s-eyes printed on paper targets. Most right-handed people are right-eye dominant, and most lefties favor their left eye. The dominant eye is better exercised and slightly more acute. In traditional marksmanship, the nondominant eye is closed. We learned a technique to gray out our nondominant eye, keeping it open but using our dominant eye to process the target and align the sights. The nondominant eye maintained peripheral vision, the location of the next target and the position of obstacles. Basically, one eye scanned and the other killed.

In order to shoot accurately, we still had to acquire a correct sight picture, front and rear sights aligned, target centered over the front sight post; but in combat shooting, this process is compressed into a split second. There is no time to squeeze the trigger slowly; it is pulled rapidly and evenly. You must subtly anticipate the weapon going off, and learn by feel your own reaction to the muzzle blast and the cycling of the gun. All of this is exactly contrary to long-distance marksmanship, in which shooters are taught to relax, regulate their breathing, and squeeze the trigger so gently that they are surprised when the weapon goes off.

We often aimed on the run, or popping up from behind obstacles. Compensation for the jerk of the trigger had to be built in to the target scan, the aiming, and the firing of the weapon. Working day and night, we became masters of the fast-targeting, rapid-fire skills of combat shooting. Everything we did was timed and scored, and Green Team got smaller in the first four weeks. The class was ranked in a ratio of hits over time. Those scoring in the lowest 20 percent of our class cleaned out their cages and returned to Planet Vanilla.

Our next task was to learn the science and art of CQB, close-quarters battle. Combat shooting is an individual event; CQB is a team sport. Like everything taught in SEAL Team, we learned component skills and gradually built up to operational capability.

Sometimes called “room clearance” or “surgical shooting,” CQB was developed by the British SAS and put into practice in Northern Ireland. Counterterrorism is the science of
combating
terrorism, and CQB is the reason terrorists rarely seize buildings and hold hostages these days. It is the antidote to the hostage-barricade situation, whether the venue is a building, a cave, an airliner, an offshore oil platform, or a cruise ship. In the chaotic environment of a counterterrorism rescue, the mission is to secure the hostages and neutralize the terrorists. Discipline, teamwork, target discrimination, and exceptional marksmanship make this possible.

We would learn to shoot the bad guys from among the hostages in a place called the Kill House, an indoor 360-degree shooting facility. Movable walls allowed us to configure the range into multiple compartments, and we could make floor plans to match any target. We trained first in single rooms, shooting at man-sized printed silhouettes. Some targets were depicted holding weapons, some were hostages, some held weapons and police badges. After entering the room, we had to almost instantly scan, determine the threat, and either shoot or hold fire. We entered in teams of two, four, eight, and ten, and the targets were positioned differently each time. Sometimes the lights were on, sometimes they were off. We ran the target while instructors in the control booth pumped in disco fog and flashed strobe lights. Sometimes they blared music or jet-engine noise, and always, multiple video cameras taped us so the run could be played back in slow motion and analyzed.

Each of us fired tens of thousands of rounds, running scenarios as many as fifty times a day. When we were not in the Kill House, we shot next door in an elaborate cinematic target area. Our room targets become increasingly elaborate—furniture, couches, bookcases—and hidden bad guys were added. Stapled behind the critical areas of each target was a three-by-five index card marking kill areas on the human body. For every bullet we fired that missed a card, we had to buy a case of beer.

We were soon engaging targets in multiple-room scenarios. This required an extemporaneous flow of shooters through the operational area. Room clearance requires precision, an almost Zenlike awareness of the situation, and complete mastery of the weapon. Shooting pairs grouped and split up as the Team surged through hallways and rooms. It is at this, “flow through target” that SEAL Team Six is unmatched. The extreme level of training makes this possible. It is not enough to say that we practiced multiple-room clearance. In one year the operators of SEAL Six fire more bullets than the entire United States Marine Corps. We weren’t just
good
at multiple-room CQ; there is no one in the world who comes close.