The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen by Marcus Luttrell, Brandon Webb, John David Mann Read Free Book Online Page A

was alone. Those first few nights on that 40-foot cat, I cried myself to sleep.
    As I said, I was scared, too, but I told myself I had to get past being scared, and when I did I found there was also a part of me that was excited about whatever lay ahead. I knew my life had hit a major turning point. I’d had experiences most other sixteen-year-olds had not. Still, I was far from an adult. I didn’t even have my driver’s license yet.
    Often, during those lonely nights, I thought about what had happened with my dad and me back in the harbor off Papeete. On the one hand, it was a hard lesson in the demands of authority. My dad was right: There’s only one captain on a ship, just like there’s only one person in charge of a mission, or a department, or any venture. At the same time, he was making the wrong decision. I had learned how to take orders during my time on the Peace, and that sense of respect for the chain of command would become a crucial trait later on during my service in the military. Still, as we shall see, there would be quite a few other occasions when I would feel it was my duty to challenge authority, despite my training, when my gut told me the guy in charge was leading us down the wrong path.
    That catamaran was fast —way faster than any single-hull boat I’d ever sailed. It took us less than two weeks to make Hilo.
    A day before we reached our destination, I came up on deck from my stateroom on the port side of the boat. It was a gorgeous morning. As I stood on deck, something in the hull caught my eye. I bent down to look. Just above the waterline, a swordfish had rammed our boat during the night, spearing himself straight through the hull and breaking off the tip of his snout. That damn fish must have leapt clear out of the water to spear us. I grabbed my camera to take a picture of it. I still have that snapshot. The next day we breezed into the harbor at Hilo with a short length of swordfish beak jammed through our hull.
    The image of that swordfish stuck in my mind as firmly as its beak stuck in the Shilo ’s flank. What the hell was going on for that fish? What made it leap up out of the water to attack this strange, unknown vessel? Did it know it was going up against something more than ten times larger and heavier than itself?
    What future was I leaping out of the water to go up against?
    Years later I would learn this odd factoid of biology: Although like all fish it is cold-blooded, the swordfish has special organs in its head that heat the eyes and brain as much as 60°F above ambient temperature, greatly enhancing the animal’s vision and therefore its ability to nail its prey. The falcon or eagle would probably be most people’s choice, but if you were looking for a totem to represent the idea of a sniper—especially a sniper who works in water—the swordfish would not be a bad pick.
    Perhaps this had been a vision quest, after all.
    *   *   *
    Once we reached Hilo I made my way back to the mainland by plane and met up with my old boss, Bill Magee. As my mom had known would be the case, Bill was happy to see me and said I could go back to work for him and live on board. “Hey,” he said, “you’ve already got your schoolwork out of the way for the rest of the year. Why don’t you just settle into boat life?”
    I can’t even imagine how my life might have turned out if he hadn’t made this kind offer.
    Soon after I rejoined Captain Bill and the Peace, the Animals showed up for a few days of diving. This time one of them, a younger guy, brought a few friends with him. These guys were rugged. I didn’t know what they did, but you could see that whatever it was, they knew it inside and out. They weren’t muscle-bound showoffs or tough guys with attitude; it was more subtle than that. Being around them, you could just sense that there was something special about the way these guys carried themselves. It felt like they could take on a shark on a bad day and come out