AUTHOR''S NOTE All the events in this book are true and are described herein to the best of my recollection. The names of the heroes in this book are ℜ however, some connected names have been changed to protect the identities of people incidental to these stories and of friends who are still in active duty. I have at all times sought to avoid disclosing particular methods and other sensitive mission-related information, and this book was submitted to the Department of Defense for a full review prior to publication. As much as possible, stories of my friends and their exploits have been compiled in full collaboration and partnership with family members. INTRODUCTION When I joined the Navy in 1993 I was a fresh-faced kid, barely out of high school. Like most nineteen-year-olds, I thought I knew something of the world. I had no inkling of the struggles that lay ahead. Nor did much of the country.

The America of 1993 was a world quite different from what it is today. The Cold War was over, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own obsolescence, and the deadly malaise now known as the Global War on Terror barely a blip on the horizon. Nestled in its valley between those two epochs of global conflict, the 1990s seemed a golden age of peace and prosperity. In many ways it was a time of fantasy and naïveté, and it would not last long. In the first light of the twenty-first century''s dawning we would awaken to stark geopolitical realities. The very nature of war would radically change, and my friends and I would be on the front lines of the new warfare. These were also the years of my passage from swaggering teen years to a more sober, reflective adulthood. On the way I would make a solid handful of the best friends in the world.

Many of them I would soon lose. It''s a strange place I find myself in these days. When I talk with people in their eighties or nineties, they describe what it''s like seeing so many of their friends vanish, one by one, and finding themselves progressively more alone in the world. That''s a normal part of the cycle of life, I know--but I''ve been having that experience for years, and I''m barely forty. The U.S. Special Operations community is one of the fiercest and most experienced fighting forces the world has ever seen. But we have been at war now for well over a decade, the longest continuous state of armed conflict in our history as a nation.

This has put an enormous stress on all men and women in uniform, along with their families and friends. Given the unique nature of today''s asymmetrical warfare, it has placed an especially heavy burden on our Special Operations community. Many of my closest friends in the SEAL teams are no longer here. They sacrificed everything, many leaving behind mothers, fathers, wives, and children. At the same time, they also left behind powerfully instructive examples of living--models of what it means to be a hero. This is the story of eight heroes whose lives intersected with mine during those years, men who gave their lives for their country and their team. Men who gave pieces of themselves to me, and without whom I would not be the man I am today. I trained with them and fought with them, looked up to them and learned from them.

I miss them all terribly, yet at the same time, they''re here with me still. "Leave no man behind" is the mantra of all Special Operations teams. The purpose of this book is to help ensure that these eight heroes are not left behind. Within these stories of friendship and character you''ll find the principles that guided these men in their lives, principles I have adopted in my own life and share with my children. Knowing these great men--who they were, how they lived, and what they stood for--has changed my life. We can''t let them be forgotten. So read about these amazing men, share their stories, and learn from them as I have. We''ve mourned their deaths.

Let''s celebrate their lives. --Brandon Webb 1 SUPERHERO MIKE BEARDEN It was still early, maybe one o''clock in the afternoon, and already creeping into the low nineties. It would get hotter still, we knew that for certain. Late spring in California''s Central Valley, dry and brown, a clear day, the barometer high and steady, but to us the atmospheric pressure felt like roughly ten thousand pounds per square inch. My best friend, Glen Doherty, and I were crouched down side by side at the front of a thousand-yard high-power shooting lane, on the last day of the marksmanship phase of the Naval Special Warfare Sniper School, arguably the toughest military training program on the planet. We were about to start our final test of this phase, the test that would determine whether we went on through the rest of the school or returned home in defeat. We''d been here for six weeks. A third of the class had already washed out, and we were terrified that we were next.

The idea of sniper school probably sounds romantic, exciting, adventurous. It''s none of those things. It''s fucking miserable. We would come back to our tents at the end of every interminable twelve-hour day dirty as hell, beaten down, exhausted, and already feeling the crushing weight of what loomed ahead of us the next day. That pressure is mostly mental. Of course you have to be in top physical condition, but we were all SEALs. Physically, we''d already had "normal" redefined for us and the bar set insanely high. But sniper school was not about sheer physical endurance.

It was about absorbing complex skill sets and executing them flawlessly, at a machine-gun pace, and under conditions of constantly increasing intensity. Seven days a week, twelve hours a day, we were always on--up at six a.m. to run out onto the range with rifle in hand and a single round, which we had to fire with sleep-stiffened fingers through still-cold rifle barrels at whatever moment they told us, at whatever target they told us, and hit it. Miss that early-morning shot and the rest of the day would feel like one long battle to regain any sense of confidence and morale. It was the most exacting, focused state of concentration any of us in the course had ever experienced. We were the proverbial frog in the pot of water being steadily brought to a boil, and the only way out of the pot was to fail. Which was exactly what many of our classmates had done.

In the weeks leading up to this test, some guys had come unglued under the strain and ended up fighting with their shooting partners. By "fighting" I don''t mean "exchanging heated words"; I mean punching, mashing, and kicking, the kind of brawl you have to wade into and physically pull apart if you don''t want too many broken bones. What made the pressure worse for Glen and me was that we were both still new guys. In the SEAL teams, "new guys" are SEALs who have made it through BUD/S but have not yet done a full year-plus specialized training workup and gone on an overseas deployment. A new guy''s job is pretty simple: Shut up and listen. Do what you''re told. Be invisible and act like you don''t know anything, because the truth is, you don''t. Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Sniper School has a global reputation; even within the teams it is the most respected school of them all.

The idea of a couple of new guys having the privilege of attending sniper school was more than some could take. Especially the instructor hovering over Glen and me right now as we inched through the ordeal of our final test. This guy, a genuinely nasty turd named Slattery, hated our guts. He wanted us to fail. And he happened to be the one grading us today. As Slattery bitched at us, the day continued creeping forward on its belly toward the hottest part of the afternoon, the rising temperature not only adding to our stress but also physically affecting our test conditions. As metal heats up it expands. That produces an increase in pressure on the bullet as it traverses the interior of the swelling rifle barrel, which in turn increases the round''s speed and alters the arc of its trajectory.

As the mercury rose out on the California range, the increasing temperature differentials threading through the bone-dry foothills around us also caused the sporadic gusts of wind to intensify. Which put every critical factor in our environment in flux, increasing the difficulty level of our task to an insane degree. In the field, your life often depends on making the shot. Out here on the range, it was just our careers on the line. At this point Glen and I had completed the "snaps and movers" portion of the test. Snaps and movers involves targets that suddenly pop up out of nowhere at unpredictable time intervals (snaps), and others that slide continuously right and left in random and unpredictable patterns and speeds (movers). Now we were in the second portion, called UKD, or unknown distances, which employed targets of variable range and elevation, none of this communicated to us. In snaps and movers we at least knew how far away our targets were.

Not in UKD. For this portion of the test the spotter had to employ complex observations and calculations, using the mil dot reticle in his scope (two tiny lines of illuminated dots arranged like crosshairs) to determine exactly how far away that damn thing was. And we weren''t using handheld computers, like we do these days in the field. We had to do all that math by hand, with the seconds ticking away. I was shooting first, Glen reading the conditions, calling wind and elevation, and keeping track of our time. We had to move through a course with multiple lanes and multiple shots within a precise given time frame. Which meant a hell of a lot of calculation, preparation, and execution had to happen every sixty seconds without fail. We''d cleared two lanes and we.