Getting to know Matt affected me in two ways: First, it made me realize that over the course of my years in the teams, seeing the sacrifices so many guys and their families were making, and experiencing first-hand what was going on in the rest of the world, I’d come to have a deep love for my country, along with a dedication to serving that I hadn’t known was in me.
He also made me want to up my game.
I was already fiercely dedicated to excellence; I had always been. By natural inclination, I have a very low tolerance for bullshit, laziness, or mediocrity. (One reason among many that Dave Scott and I clicked.) But just being around Matt and watching the way he held himself to the highest standard possible was pushing me to hold myself to an even higher standard. As much as our students looked up to us and took us as role models, every now and then it worked the other way, too. As Matt worked his way through the course, I found myself looking up to him. To me, he represented the epitome of what it was we were working to develop in all our students.
My favorite example of this is a story my buddy Dave Fernandez told me about an encounter he and Matt had later that year, a few months after Matt had been through our course.
That fall Matt’s platoon was near the end of their pre-deployment workup and went through a set of final training exercises up in Bangor, Washington, which were led by Fernandez. Dave is a first-rate operator and he was hammering the piss out of these guys, getting them ready for their C1 certification. (C1 means you’re combat-ready; C2 means you’re not quite ready; C3 means you’re not even close.) The platoon was what we call a “stacked platoon,” meaning it was composed of all A-class operators. Despite that fact, unfortunately, the platoon was performing like shit. Or perhaps, as Dave points out, it was because they were all A-class operators and had trouble forming any kind of natural hierarchy that they were performing like shit.
Whatever the reason, they were doing a terrible job, and Dave had just pulled a training time-out. For a SEAL platoon on its final readiness exercises, this is unheard-of. Especially for Dave Fernandez.
“I am extreme about this,” says Dave. “In conventional troop training, admin time-outs occur frequently as a safety measure. But in my book, they have no place in SEAL training. If your platoon gets in a bind, tough. You’re going to have to dig your own way out of it. That was my philosophy.”
But these guys were such a train wreck, Dave was forced to call a halt and recall the entire platoon. They were running out of time, and he didn’t want to have to flunk them. He reamed them out, told them where things stood, and directed them to regroup, get their heads in the game, start over, and this time make it work.
Dave and his crew were playing the role of the enemy, fitted out in indigenous garb and playing their part to the hilt. The platoon’s task was to stay close enough to observe Dave’s group but not be seen, and eventually make their way to shore and into the 40-degree water where they would swim out to rendezvous with their recovery element.
Before long one of Dave’s guys came to him and whispered that he’d located one of the men on the platoon. It was close to dusk, and Dave had to peer carefully to see where his guy was directing him. Sure enough, there was a pair of steely blue eyes looking back at him. Shit. It was Axelson.
As Dave walked over to talk to Matt, he thought, “How the hell is this tall, curly-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, Scandinavian-looking motherfucker ever going to blend in the field?”
He knew Matt had a solid reputation, but he lit into him anyway. “As of right now you’re on E and E” — escape and evasion. This meant he”d been spotted but not yet captured and would now have to escape. “Your ass is busted, I’m coming after you, and you’d better not let me catch you. It starts right now.”
Without a word, Matt slipped back into the scenery as Dave went off to rally his team. Dave had been pulling for the platoon to pass, but now any reluctance to flunk them was gone. “I want this guy,” he told his team. “I want his ass. Do not fail.”
Now the platoon’s fate rested on Matt’s performance. Dave’s team had a pretty good idea of what Matt would do and where he would go. He was headed for a rendezvous point whose location they all knew already. No matter how you sliced it, the odds were wildly stacked against him.
“And son of a bitch,” says Dave. “I don’t know how he did it. But he did it. That blond motherfucker just melted into the night. None of us ever saw him — and we knew exactly where he was going! Even at the endpoint, we never got a bead on him. Where the hell was that guy? It was the damnedest thing.”
When Dave described the scene to me I laughed. I wished Eric and I could take the credit for that feat. After all, the guy had just gone through our stalking course. But it wasn’t just our course. It was Matt. He was one of the very best we had.
Which didn’t mean he had an easy time of it in sniper school. Nobody does. Suffering is designed into it; that’s the only way to create top-tier snipers. And those students soon learned that I wasn’t kidding back in that Coronado bunker when I said they’d probably end up hating the course.
Since Pendleton is less than an hour’s drive north of San Diego, Morgan would take off every evening and drive back down to Coronado where he was rooming with his twin brother, Marcus, rather than stay at our barracks. Marcus remembers Morgan coming in every night, feeling exhausted and defeated. One evening he rolled in, collapsed on the living room couch, and said, “I am praying every night that they kick me out of this course. It sucks so bad. It’s worse than BUD/S.”
Marcus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He stared at his brother and said, “What are you talking about? Nothing’s worse than BUD/S.”
Morgan stretched out his long limbs, groaned, and said, “Man, it’s a different kind of suck.”
Marcus could not wrap his head around this. “What do you mean, ‘a different kind of suck?’ I’m a SEAL; I know what the definition of suck is.” A few months later, when he went through the course himself, Marcus understood exactly what his brother was talking about. “Please, God,” he remembers muttering, “let them kick me out of this frigging course — I can’t stand it!”
Matt was having just as hard a time as Morgan. His mother remembers him calling home one day and saying, “Oh man, I only got a 60 percent today. I’ve got to get my average higher if I want to make it through this course!” He was consumed with worry that he was going to flunk out.
I understood why he felt so much anxiety about it. Every sniper student did. But he had no reason to worry. At no time was he ever at serious risk of failing. He and Morgan ended up finishing at the top of their class.
As I said, observing the way Matt held himself to the highest standard possible goaded me to hold myself to an even higher standard. I didn’t know it then, but within months this would push me into one of the riskiest decisions of my years on the teams. In fact, it would take me within a hair’s breadth of ruining my career.
When September came Matt and Morgan returned to their platoon, and Eric and I were on to our next class of new students. Except that it was not business as usual. Axelson’s presence in the course that summer had hammered home an ironic fact about our sniper course that was gnawing at me and making my life increasingly miserable. It had to do with my mentor.
This excerpt is from Brandon Webb & John Mann’s bestselling book, Among Heroes, available everywhere books are sold and on Amazon.
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