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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.
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