This was desert, West Coast, 115 degrees. And, uh, I'm walking back, man, 10 minutes into a four-hour stalk. You load a live round and shoot the target for your final score. Then what they do is take the two live guys off-target, put silhouettes there. They had never had somebody finish a stalk that fast before. They thought somebody had accidentally discharged the rifle because it was so quick. Once I went up to a tree about 200 meters away, in the zone we had to be in, and then in 10 minutes took the shot. Okay, I've got to get that shrub in line and now I can low-crawl all the way up and they're not going to be able to see me. Now I can put this tree or this bush or this terrain feature in between me and them and get up real quick and then once you get in real tight, you can kind of use that, even a shrub if I'm on my stomach and inching over. It's like, okay, I know where they're at. The whole key to the stalk is finding those two fuckers on the target. RELATED: Inside the Making of Lone Survivor Read article And I thought, who is that? Is that Luttrell again? Through the binos you see a dude - like a Sasquatch, a badly dressed Sasquatch out there. I mean he would clip ground cover, put it on his hat, and then stand up and go on the stalk. That actually happened to Marcus Luttrell. You're off the field. And you can only fail a few. And if they see anything they're going to bust you. Go." Then you've got to get up to the position, identify the target, right? With two instructors sitting on this table or truck with high-powered binoculars, laser rangefinders, and a radio. You've got four hours, your target is that direction, here's your left boundary, your right boundary. You go out to this field in an open terrain and you have instructors they call walkers with orange hunting hats, all with radios, and they go, "Alright, gents. It's three months straight, and it's the most stressful thing I've ever done. But it was because I had all that practice stalking and hunting as a kid. All these Texas guys are saying, "That's fucked up, this California boy." They were pissed. You know the way you approach, you dive down, and you've got to be very quiet, approaching the schools with a reef feature between you. I didn't grow up hunting whitetail, but I would stalk tuna and white sea bass and yellowtail. I didn't really understand it at the time, but I grew up spearfishing in the kelp beds on the coast of California. And on the stalk field, I was top in my class. I never shot much when I was a kid, but on the spotting scope, understanding the ballistics and the calculations, I'm a ten. Why were you the best shot? What was your experience? RELATED: The Controversial True Story Behind American Sniper Read article Either you just got it, and you got lucky that you had a good set of weapons and your scopes were working - because back then if you didn't have good equipment, they didn't give a shit - or it was like, "Hey, sorry, man. The teaching style was not done very well back then. You two idiots are our best shots at getting through the course." Because back then it was a 30-percent washout rate. The platoon was short two snipers and they called Glen and me into the office one day and said, "Hey, you're the two best shots in the platoon, and we need two snipers. I was in my first platoon at Seal Team 3 in 1999 with Glen Doherty, who was later killed in Libya. We recently spoke with Webb about working with Chris Kyle and Marcus Luttrell, and what it takes to become one of the world's elite snipers. He is the author of the memoirs The Red Circle and Among Heroes, forthcoming in May.
#Men getting the snip free#
These days Webb writes regularly for the vital military news site SOFREP, which he co-founded in 2012, and flies retired Russian war birds in his free time. Later he'll say, offhandedly, that he can always tell a man who's been there by his eyes, and indeed there is something undisclosed in his: a kind of discretionary distance between a personal history likely unfathomable to civilians and his amiable demeanor. The tempting question is, of course, the one that can't easily be asked: How many? On the subject of his time stalking insurgents in Afghanistan, sniper and former member of SEAL Team 3 Brandon Webb says, rather succinctly: "We dropped hate on them." From the mouth of another man, such a declaration might suggest pride, but you can't hear any in Webb's voice.
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