Brandon Webb doesn’t need much of an intro (especially to the SOFREP crowd), but in this episode of Brian Dickinson’s Calm in the Chaos, he gives us one heck of a reminder of what he has done in a thoroughly exciting life and career. From setting sniper overwatch in Yemen after the USS Cole bombing to nearly going down with a helicopter in the Persian Gulf, Webb walks us through his Navy years with the clarity of a man who’s danced with chaos and lived to write about it. It’s a raw, unfiltered tour of operations that defined an era—and the kind of trauma most Americans only glimpse through Netflix.

From Blood in the Bathtub to Overwatch in Yemen

If you think Navy SEALs are born tough, Webb proves they’re forged. Raised on a sailboat, slicing his fingers open in the tub as a kid, and eventually dropped into deep-sea dives at the age of 13, he was acclimating to stress before most kids figure out algebra. Fast-forward a few years, and he’s part of a SEAL team tasked with defending a billion-dollar warship against a dinghy full of explosives—and told to shoot anyone who comes within 500 meters. Welcome to the post-Cole world.

Betrayal, Brotherhood, and BS 

One of the more candid chunks of this conversation gets into darker inside the SEAL community—specifically, how Webb and others like Chris Kyle were torn apart by their own after going public. There’s a brutal honesty in his recounting of the internal politics and snake pits that plague elite units. And while he doesn’t throw punches just to score points, the gloves are definitely off. He contrasts that toxicity with the brotherhood found in the rescue swimmer community—a tribe of professionals who don’t tear down their own.

Reinvention at 10,000 Feet

Now flying his own plane across Portugal and scheming his next fiction novel, Webb is still the kind of guy who wakes up chasing something. He talks about high-performance behavioral skills, entrepreneurship, writing, fatherhood, and why most people who throw online punches are just ticked off at their own failures. If that hits too close to home, that’s not a bad thing, because if there’s one takeaway here, it’s this: consistency beats chaos, but you’ve got to be willing to get punched in the mouth by both.

Check out the full podcast below; it’s a good episode.