A few weeks after our conversation in Lieutenant McNary’s office, Glen and I, along with two dozen others, mustered at the SEAL Team Five quarterdeck in Coronado for our initial sniper school in-briefing. Though this would later change, at the time the different SEAL teams would rotate as course hosts, and it happened to be Team Five’s turn.

They told us that there were two principal parts to the sniper training. First came the shooting phase, which would focus on learning our weapons, advanced ballistics, and, of course, the actual marksmanship training, during which we would work in pairs taking turns as shooter or spotter. The second was the stalking phase, where we would be trained in the arts of stealth and concealment.

We would be conducting the shooting phase at the Coalinga range, a private inland facility about a hundred miles northwest of Bakersfield, where we would camp out, receive all our instructions, and do all our shooting. In the event we survived the shooting phase, we would then go on to the stalking phase, concluding with our graded final training exercise (FTX) out in the California desert near Niland. 

Being from SEAL Team Three, which at the time had charge over the desert theater of operations, Glen and I were already quite familiar with the challenges of operating in that ungodly terrain and how fucking miserable it could be. We took comfort in the idea that this prior knowledge might give us some small advantage in the final phase. Assuming we made it that far.