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 B

smiling.
    On our first dive, when these guys saw me, a sixteen-year-old kid diving with no buoyancy compensator and my twin steel 72s, they noticed. “Holy shit,” said one of them, “who is this kid?”
    The two of us got to talking. He wanted to know how I’d come to be a deckhand, and I told him a little bit about my background.
    “You know,” he said, “you should check out the seals.”
    At least that’s what I thought he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. Seals? Was this guy seriously into seals, like whale watching and shit? Was he making a joke?
    “No,” he said, “not seals— SEALs .”
    I still didn’t get it.
    “Navy maritime Special Operations Forces,” he explained. “SEALs. It stands for Sea, Air, and Land. SEALs.”
    I’d never heard of them before.
    “To become a SEAL,” he added, “you go through the toughest military training in the world.”
    Now, that got my attention. I didn’t know much about the military, but I had always been fascinated with aviation and wanted to be a pilot when I grew up, maybe even an astronaut. What he was describing intrigued me. I love the water, I thought, and I’m a pretty good diver. That sounds like a hell of a challenge.
    The truth was, I knew I needed a plan, somewhere to go and something to aim at. At the time, when I wasn’t on the dive boat, I would surf and hang out with some guys around the harbor. They were starting to get into crystal meth. I had no interest in it—I would drink beer and that was the extent of it—but seeing them and where they were heading scared me. I knew that I had to get the hell out of there sooner or later, if I wanted to make anything better out of my life.
    From that point on, my goal was fixed: I was going to become a Navy SEAL.
    I had no idea how hard it would be.

 
    TWO
    BOOT CAMP
    Stepping off a cross-country flight from LAX, I walked up the jetway, through the airport, and out into Orlando, land of Disney, Epcot, and the U.S. Naval Training Center. The evening air was still warm from the blistering Florida sun. It was March 1993: I was nineteen years old and about to enter navy boot camp.
    I couldn’t help wondering why the navy had sent me clear across the country when there was a perfectly good boot camp in San Diego, a few hours from where I live, but what the hell did I know? The ink was still wet on my enlistment contract, and I knew better than to ask the question. Besides, I was excited to finally get out of Ventura and on to bigger and better things.
    There were a few other boot camp candidates on my plane. We were met by the local navy representative, who put us on a bus that started crawling north on Route 436. It took about forty minutes to reach our destination. Most of those minutes passed in a silence freighted with thrill, foreboding, and dread.
    As we pulled into the training center and parked, we saw a few dozen guys lining the roadway, yelling obscenities at us and telling us how fond of us they were. Our welcome committee. It felt like we were in a bad prison movie.
    It was ten o’clock at night, just in time to unload, find out where we were supposed to bunk, and hit the sack. A few of my busmates audibly cried themselves to sleep that first night. I didn’t mind. What I really didn’t appreciate was the four o’clock wake-up call the next morning with some assholes banging on aluminum trash cans and yelling, “Wake up! Get the hell out of your rack!” Senior recruits, in charge of moving the herd along.
    After a trip to the barber to get rid of our hair, we assembled in a room where they staged what they called the Moment of Truth: “Okay, who here lied to your recruiter?” Now was our last chance to tell the navy some dark secret about our sexual preference (these were the don’t-ask-don’t-tell days) or admit to our drug addiction. When it came to sex, drinking, and carousing in general, I was certainly no angel, but I happened to have the dual advantage of being