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was compact and had been a strong high school swimmer, which helped him out in BUD/S. He once told me that his attitude toward BUD/S and most of the newguy shit we had thrown at us was just to keep his head down and complete the task, and never to worry about coming in first. It was actually a pretty effective mindset to have. In BUD/S, I saw a lot of “the best” athletes quit. Guys like Jonny who could just steadily grind it out survived.
    Biff was a newguy machine gunner from a couple of BUD/S classes behind me. Like Jonny, he grew up in Southern California and got his nickname from his doppelgänger Biff Tannen. Unlike the character from Back to the Future, our Biff was actually likable. He’d been a standout wide receiver at the College of the Canyons, and SEAL training had only built upon his sheer physicality. Biff had a quiet reserve to him but could unleash fury on the turn of a dime.
    Ryan Job was also a machine gunner and the funniest guy in our platoon. A doughy white kid from Washington State, Ryan had a baby face that seemed to be perpetually smiling. When he checked into our platoon in San Diego, he wasn’t exactly chiseled out of granite. By SEAL standards, he was big and jiggly, so I stuck him with the nickname Biggles. His early days in the platoon were rough. He was consistently last on all our platoon runs and just wasn’t in the kind of shape that was expected. Our OIC and platoon chief pulled him aside to deliver an ultimatum: “Tighten the fuck up, or beat feet out of this platoon.” Ryan took it as his come-to-Jesus moment. He turned around and worked out harder than anybody else in the platoon and got himself up to speed. He took a lot of crap from everybody during work-up, but the fact that he was always locked on with everything he did, coupled with his knack for self-deprecating humor, made it hard not to love him.
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    In March, Tony sent me to Military Freefall Course in Otay Lakes, outside San Diego, where I learned that higher altitudes didn’t make jumping out of airplanes any more pleasant for me. For three weeks, I learned how to jump with a team of other operators in order to insert into a combat zone. We learned to jump on oxygen, with gear, with a rifle, at night, and at various altitudes.
    By early April, SEAL Team THREE had returned from deployment. I showed up for work one morning in PT gear and walked into the platoon space, a common area that housed a couple of computers, a whiteboard, a couch, and anything any of the guys thought might add “character” to the walls. Chris Kyle and Jeremy were on the couch. We’d never met, but I knew who they were because I’d recently been given the newguy task of unloading all the older guys’ gear when they returned from deployment. Chris had just returned to the States after his second deployment to Iraq. Chris’s first combat tour during the initial invasion in 2003 was, arguably, a warm-up for the extraordinary kill counts that came during his two tours in the Sunni Triangle in 2004 and 2006. After the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, Chris’s reputation as one of the deadliest snipers in the world was just starting to spread through the Teams. “The Legend” wasn’t a household name back then, and in the Teams he was still known as Tex. Not exactly the most original nickname ever given to a Texas cowboy raised on rifles and rodeo, but Teamguy nicknames aren’t exactly a science. Chris’s freckled complexion and ginger hair told me he was a Scotsman, which told me fighting was in his blood. The alpha-male-sizing-up-the-competition look he gave me told me the hazing was not far off, but I played it cool and confident—sustained eye contact, standing tall, ready for anything. He slowly raised an empty soda can and spit dip juice into it apathetically.
    “Dauber,”he said lazily with his Texas drawl. “We’re gonna call you Dauber, newguy.”
    I had never heard of the affable blond oaf that Bill Fagerbakke played on