Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

Florida. I was there on 9/11, and little did I realize the massive impact those
terrible events in New York City would have on my own life.
I remember the pure indignation we all felt. Someone had just attacked the
United States of America, the beloved country we were sworn to defend. We
watched the television with mounting fury, the fury of young, inexperienced, but
supremely fit and highly trained combat troops who could not wait to get at the
enemy. We wished we could get at Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda mob in Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan, or wherever the hell these lunatics lived. But be careful what
you wish for. You might get it.
A lot of guys passed SEAL qualification training and received their Tridents
on Wednesday afternoon, November 7, 2001. They pinned it right on in a short
ceremony out there on the grinder. You could see it meant all the world to the
graduates. There were in fact only around thirty left from the original 180 who
had signed up on that long-ago first day of Indoc. For myself, because of various
educational commitments, I had to wait until January 31, 2002, for my Trident.
But the training never stopped. Right after I formally joined what our
commanders call the brotherhood, I went to communication school to study and
learn satellite comms, high-frequency radio links, antenna wavelength
probability, in-depth computers, global positioning systems, and the rest.
Then I went to Sniper School back at Camp Pendleton, where,
unsurprisingly, they made sure you could shoot straight before you did anything
else. This entailed two very tough exams involving the M4 rifle; the SR-25
semiautomatic sniper rifle, accurate to nine hundred yards; and the heavy,
powerful 300 Win Mag bolt-action .308-caliber rifle. You needed to be expert
with all of them if you were planning to be a Navy SEAL sniper.
Then the real test started, the ultimate examination of a man’s ability to move
stealthily, unseen and undetected, across rough, enemy-held ground where the
slightest mistake might mean instant death or, worse, letting your team down.
Our instructor was a veteran of the first wave of U.S. troops who had gone in
after Osama. He was Brendan Webb, a terrific man. Stalking was his game, and
his standards were so high they would have made an Apache scout gasp.
Working right alongside him was Eric Davis, another brilliant SEAL sniper, who
was completely ruthless in his examination of our abilities to stay concealed.
The final “battleground” was a vast area out near the border of Pendleton.
There was not much vegetation, mostly low, flat bushes, but the rough rocksboulders-and-shale
terrain was full of undulations, valleys, and gullies. Trees, the
sniper’s nearest and dearest friends, were damn sparse, obviously by design.