When the Naval Academy admitted Brendan Looney in 1999, officials told him he would never become a Navy SEAL.
A vision test of red and green light found Brendan “color deficient” and he was labeled “restricted.” His brothers, Stephen and Billy, would be put on the same list.
The Naval Academy allows only 40 vision-restricted students at a time, across all grades. When the Looney boys were all at the academy, they took up 8 percent of those waivers.
Brendan was discouraged, but he stayed on course to become an intelligence officer, a star football and lacrosse player, and graduated in 2004 as his class’ “Honorman.”
“It means he was the best guy they had going,” says his father, Kevin. “Brendan could run forever, and I know he wasn’t the fastest guy, but he just gave it all he had, like he always did and always would.”
Brendan gave his father the Honorman award, a thought that makes Kevin cry on the spot.
Brendan was deployed for the first time in 2006 to Korea. He would call home and say he wished he were doing more; the Navy told him that if he took the low-action Korea mission, he could choose his next assignment, and Brendan hoped to do intelligence for a SEALs missions.
He started putting together an application and started training, working out three times a day. After all, the SEALs admit one restricted officer each year.
That year Brendan became the one officer off that list. Officers told the Looneys that Brendan was the first official color-blind SEAL in the Navy’s history.
“I think they knew what he could do, and that he would perform for them,” Kevin says.
“He just wanted to be where the action was. He wanted to make a difference. He wanted to feel like he was doing more. And he wanted to keep pushing it until he could.”
