4
Battlefield whistle drills were conducted in the midst of high-pressure water jets, total chaos, deafening explosions, and shouting instructors...“Crawl to the whistle, men! Crawl to the whistle! And keep your goddamned heads down!”
We assembled in the classroom soon after 1300 that last afternoon of Indoc. Instructor Reno made his entry like a Roman caesar, head held high, and immediately ordered us to push ’em out. As ever, chairs scraped back and we hit the floor, counting out the push-ups.
At twenty, Reno left us in the rest position and then said crisply, “Recover.”
“Hooyah, Instructor Ree-no!”
“Give me a muster, Mr. Ismay.”
“One hundred and thirteen men assigned, Instructor Reno. All present except two men at medical.”
“Close, Mr. Ismay. Two men quit a few minutes ago.”
All of us wondered who they were. My boat’s crew members? Heads whipped around. I had no idea who had crashed at the final hurdle.
“Not your fault, Mr. Ismay. You were in the classroom when they quit. Two-two-six will class up in BUD/S first phase with a hundred and eleven men.”
Hooyah!
I realized we had been losing guys fairly steadily. But according to these numbers, Class 226 had had 164 men assigned on the first day, and we’d lost more than fifty of them. I know a few never showed up at all, mostly through sheer intimidation. But the rest had somehow vanished into the void. I never saw any of them leave, not even my roommate.
And I still cannot work out quite how it happened. I guess they just reached some type of breaking point, or maybe they anguished for days over their own inability to cut the mustard. But gone is gone in this man’s navy. I did not entirely comprehend it at the time, but me and my 110 cohorts were witnessing the ruthless elimination process of a U.S. fighting force that cannot tolerate a suspect component.
Instructor Reno now spoke formally. “You’re on your way to first phase BUD/S. And I want each and every one of you to make me proud. Those of you who survive Hell Week will still have to face the pool competency test — that’s in second phase — and then the weapons practicals in third phase. But I want to be at your graduation. And right there I want to shake your hand. I want to think of you as one of Reno’s warriors.”
The Hooyah, Instructor Ree-no! with our clenched fists in the air could have lifted the roof off the classroom. We loved him, all of us, because we all sensed he truly wanted the best for us. There was not a shred of malice in the guy. Neither was there a shred of weakness.
He repeated the orders he had been giving us for two weeks. “Stay alert. Be on time. And be accountable for your actions at all times, in and out of uniform. Remember, your reputation is everything. And you all have a chance to build on that reputation, beginning right here on Monday morning, zero five hundred. First phase.
“For those of you who make the teams, remember you’re joining a brotherhood. You’ll be closer to those guys than you ever were to friends in school or college. You’ll live with them...and, in combat, some of you may die with them. Your family must always come first, but the brotherhood is a privileged place. And I don’t want you ever to forget it.”
And with that, he left us, walked away and slipped out of a back entrance, leaving behind a very long shadow: a bunch of guys who were revved up, gung ho, and ready to give everything to pass the challenging tests ahead. Just the way Reno wanted it.
Enter Instructor Sean Mruk (pronounced MUR-rock), ex-SEAL from Team 2, veteran of three overseas deployments, native of Ohio, a cheerful-looking character we had not encountered during Indoc. He was assistant to our new proctor. We heard him before we saw him, his quiet command, “Drop and push ’em out,” before he had even made his way to the front of the classroom.
In the following few minutes he ran through the myriad of tasks we must complete after hours in first phase. Stuff like preparing the boats and vehicles, making sure we had the right supplies. He told us he expected 100 percent at all times, because if we did not put out, we’d surely pay for it.
He made sure we had all moved from our Indoc barracks, behind the grinder, over to the naval special warfare barracks a couple of hundred yards north of the center. Prime real estate on the sandy beach, and it’s all yours — just as long as you can stay on the BUD/S bandwagon and remain in Class 226, the numbers of which will shortly be blocked in stark white on either side of your new green phase one helmet. Those numbers stay with you as long as you serve in the Navy SEALs. My class’s three white-painted numbers would one day become the sweetest sounds I ever heard.
Instructor Mruk nodded agreeably and told us he would be over to the new barracks at 1000 Sunday to make sure we knew how to get our rooms ready for inspection. He gave us one last warning: “You’re an official class now. First phase owns you.”
And so to the cloudless Monday morning of June 18, all of us assembled outside the barracks two hours before sunrise. It was 0500 and the temperature not much above fifty degrees. Our new instructor, a stranger, stood there silently. Lieutenant Ismay reported, formally, “Class Two-two-six is formed, Chief. Ninety-eight men present.”
David Ismay saluted. Chief Stephen Schulz returned the salute without so much as a “Good morning” or “How y’doing?” Instead, he just snapped, “Hit the surf, sir. All of you. Then get into the classroom.”
Here we went again. Class 226 charged out of the compound and across the beach to the ocean. We floundered into the ice-cold water, got wet, and then squelched our way back to the classroom, freezing, dripping, already full of apprehension.
“Drop!” ordered the instructor. Then again. Then again. Finally, Ensign Joe Burns, a grim-looking SEAL commander, took his place in front of us and informed us he was the first phase officer. A few of us flinched. Burns’s reputation as a hard man had preceded him. He later proved to be one of the toughest men I ever met.
“I understand you all want to be frogmen?”
Hooyah!
“I guess we’ll see about that,” said Ensign Burns. “Find out how bad you really want it. This is my phase, and these are my staff instructors.”
Each of the fourteen introduced himself to us by name. And then Chief Schulz, presumably terrified we’d all go soft on him after an entire two minutes of talk, commanded, “Drop and push ’em out.” And again. And again.
Then he ordered us out to the grinder for physical training. “Move! Move! Move!”
And finally we formed up, for the first time, on the most notorious square of black tarmac in the entire United States Armed Forces. It was 0515, and our places were marked by little frog flippers painted on the ground. It was hardly worth the visit.
“Hit the surf. Get wet and sandy!” yelled Schulz. “Fast!”
Our adrenaline pumped, our legs pumped, our arms pumped, our hearts pumped. Every goddamn thing there was pumped as we thundered off the blacktop, still dressed in our squelching boots and fatigue pants, went back down to the beach, and hurled ourselves into the surf.
Jesus, it was cold. The waves broke over me as I struggled back into the shallows, flung myself onto the sand, rolled over a couple of times, and came up looking like Mr. Sandman, except I wasn’t bringing anyone a dream. I could hear the others all around me, but I’d heard Schulz’s last word. Fast. And I remembered what Billy Shelton had taught: pay attention to even the merest suggestion...and I ran for my goddamned life straight back to the grinder, right up with the leaders.
“Too slow!” bellowed Schulz. “Much too slow...drop!”
Schulz’s instructors roamed among us, berating us, yelling, harassing us as we sweated and strained to make the push-ups...“Like a goddamned fairy.” “Get a grip on yourself.” “For Christ’s sake, look as if you mean it.” “C’mon, let’s go! Go! Go!” “You sure you wanna be here? You wanna quit right now?”
I learned in the next few minutes there was a sharp difference between “get wet and sandy” and just plain “get wet.” Parked at the side of the grinder were two of the inflatable boats, laden to the gunwales with ice and water. “Get wet” meant plunge over the bow, under the water, under the rubber seat struts, and out to the other side. Five seconds, in the dark, in the ice, under the water. A killer whale would have begged for mercy.
Now, I’d been cold before, in the freakin’ Pacific, right? But the water in that little boat would have frozen the balls off a brass monkey. I came out of there almost blue with the cold, ice in my hair, and blundered my way to my little frogman’s marker. At least I’d gotten rid of the sand, and so had everyone else. Two instructors were going down the lines with freezing cold power hoses, spraying everyone from the head down.
By 0600 I had counted out more than 450 push-ups. And there were more, I just couldn’t count anymore. I’d also done more than fifty sit-ups. We were ordered from one exercise to another. Guys who were judged to be slacking were ordered to throw in a set of flutter kicks.
The result of this was pure chaos. Some guys couldn’t keep up, others were doing push-ups when they’d been ordered to do sit-ups, men were falling, hitting the ground facedown. In the end, half of us didn’t know where the hell we were or what we were supposed to be doing. I just kept going, doing my absolute best, through the roars of abuse and the flying spray of the power hoses: push-ups, sit-ups, screwups. It was now all the same to me. Every muscle in my body ached to hell, especially those in my stomach and arms.
And finally Schulz offered us mercy and a quiet drink. “Hydrate!” he yelled with that Old World charm that came so naturally to him, and we all reached for our canteens and chugged away.
“Canteens down!” bellowed Schulz, a tone of pained outrage in his voice. “Now push ’em out!”
Oh, yes. Of course. I’d forgotten all about that. I’d just had a nine-second break. Down we all dropped again and went back to work with the last remnants of our strength, counting the push-ups. We only did twenty that time. Schulz must have been seized by an attack of conscience.
“Get in the surf!” he bawled. “Right now!”
We floundered to the beach and darn near fell into the surf. We were now so hot, the cold didn’t even matter. Much. And when we splashed back to the beach, Chief Schulz was there, ranting and yelling for us to form up and run the mile to the chow hall.
“Get moving,” he added. “We don’t have much time.”
When we arrived, I was just about dead on my feet. I didn’t think I had the energy to chew a soft-boiled egg. We walked into that chow hall like Napoleon’s army on the retreat from Moscow, wet, bedraggled, exhausted, out of breath, too hungry to eat, too battered to care.
It was, of course, all by design. This was not some kind of crazed Chinese fire drill arranged by the instructors. This was a deadly serious assessment of their charges, a method used to find out, in the hardest possible way, who really wanted to do this, who really cared enough to go through with it, who could face the next four weeks before Hell Week, when things got seriously tough.
It was designed to compel us to reassess our commitment. Could we really take this punishment? Ninety-eight of us had formed up on the grinder two hours earlier. Only sixty-six of us made it through breakfast.
And when that ended, we were still soaked, boots, long pants, and T-shirts. And once more we set off for the beach, accompanied by an instructor who showed up from nowhere, running alongside us, shouting for us to get moving. We had been told what awaited us. A four-mile run along the beach, going south, two down and two back. Thirty-two minutes on the stopwatch was allowed, and God help anyone who could not run eight-minute miles through the sand.
I was afraid of this, because I knew I was not a real fast runner, and I psyched myself up for a maximum effort. I seem to have spent my whole life doing that. And when we arrived at the beach, I knew I would need that effort. There could not have been a worse time to make the run. The tide was almost full, still running in, so there was no appreciable width of drying hard sand. This meant running in either shallow water or very soft sand, both of which were a complete nuisance to a runner.
Our instructor Chief Ken Taylor lined us up and warned us darkly of the horrors to come if thirty-two minutes proved to be beyond some of us. And sent us away, with the sun now climbing out of the Pacific to our right. I picked the line I would run, right along the high point of the tide, where the waters first receded and left a slim strip of hard sand. This meant I’d be splashing some of the time, but only in the shallowest surf foam, and that was a whole lot better than the deep sand that stretched to my left.
Trouble was, I had to stick to this line, because my boots would be permanently wet and if I strayed up the beach, I’d have half a pound of sand stuck to each one. I did not think I could lay up with the leaders, but I thought I could hang in there in the group right behind them. So I put my head down, watched the tide line stretching in front of me, and pounded my way forward, staying right on the hardest wet sand.
The first two miles were not that awful. I was up there in the first half of the class, and I was not feeling too bad. On the way back, though, I was flagging. I glanced around and I could see everyone else was also looking really tired. And right then I decided to hit it. I turned up the gas and thumped my way forward.
The tide had turned during the first twenty minutes and there was just a slight width of wet sand that was no longer being washed by the ocean. I hit this with every stride, running until I thought I’d drop. Every time I caught a guy, I treated it as a personal challenge and pulled past him, finally clocking a time well inside thirty minutes, which wasn’t half bad for a packhorse.
I forget who the winner was, probably some hickory-tough farm boy petty officer, but he was a couple of minutes better than I was. Anyway, the guys who made the time were sent up into the soft sand to rest and recover.
There were about eighteen guys outside thirty-two minutes, and one by one they were told, “Drop!” Then start pushing ’em out. Most of them were on their knees with exhaustion, and that kinda saved them a step in the next evolution, which was a bear crawl straight into the Pacific, directly into the incoming surf. Instructor Taylor had them go in deep, until the freezing cold water was up to their necks.
They were kept there for twenty minutes, very carefully timed, I now know, to make sure no one developed hypothermia. Taylor and his men even had a pinpoint-accurate chart that showed precisely how long a man could stand that degree of cold. And one by one they were called out and given the most stupendous hard time for failing to achieve the thirty-two-minute deadline.
I understand some of them may have just given up, and others just could not go any faster. But those instructors had a fair idea of what was going on, and on this, the first day of BUD/S training, they were ruthless.
As those poor guys came out of the surf, the rest of us were now doing regular push-ups, and since this was now second nature to me, I looked up to see the fate of the slow guys. Chief Taylor, the Genghis Khan of the beach gods, ordered these half-dead, half-drowned, half-frozen guys to lie on their backs, their heads and shoulders in and under the water with the rhythm of the waves. And he made them do flutter kicks. There were guys choking and spluttering and coughing and kicking and God knows what else.
And then, only then, did Chief Taylor release them, and I remember, vividly, him yelling out to them that we, dry and doing our push-ups up the beach, were winners, whereas they, the slowpokes, were losers! Then he told them they better start taking this seriously or they would be out of here. “Those guys up there, taking it easy, they paid the full price,” he yelled. “Right up front. You did not. You failed. And for guys like you there’s a bigger price to pay, understand me?”
He knew this was shockingly unfair, because some of them had been doing their genuine best. But he had to find out for certain. Who believed they could improve? Who was determined to stay? And who was halfway out the door already?
Next evolution: log PT, brand-new to all of us. We lined up wearing fatigues and soft hats, seven-man boat crews, standing right by our logs, each of which was eight feet long and a foot in diameter. I can’t remember the weight, but it equaled that of a small guy, say 150 to 160 pounds. Heavy, right? I was just moving into packhorse mode when the instructor called out, “Go get wet and sandy.” All in our nice dry clothes, we charged once more toward the surf, up and over a sand dune, and down into the water. We rushed out of the waves and back up the sand dune, rolled down the other side, then stood up like the lost company from the U.S. Navy’s Sandcastle Platoon.
Then he told us to get our logs wet and sandy. So we heaved them up, waist high, and hauled them up the sand dune. We ran down the other side, dumped the goddamned log in the ocean, pulled it out, went back up the sand dune, and rolled it down the other side.
The crew next to us somehow managed to drop their log on the downward slope.
“You ever, ever drop one of my logs again,” the instructor bellowed, “I can’t even describe what will happen to you. All of you!” He used the enraged, vengeance-seeking tone of voice that might have been specially reserved for “You guys ever, ever gang-rape my mother again . . .” Rather than just dropping the stupid log.
We all stood there in a line, holding our logs straight-arm, above our heads. They try to make the teams a uniform height, but my six foot five inches means I’ll always be carrying at least my fair share of the burden.
More and more guys were accused of slacking, and more and more of them were on the ground doing push-ups while me and a couple of other big guys on the far end were bearing the weight. We must have looked like the three pillars of Coronado, sandstone towers holding up the temple, eyes peering grittily out at a sandscape full of weird, sandy, burrowing creatures fighting for breath.
Right after this they taught us all the physical training moves we would need: squats, tossing the log overhead, and a whole lot of others. Then, still in formation, we were told, “Fall in on your logs,” and we charged forward.
“Slow! Too slow! Get wet and sandy!”
Back down to the surf, into the waves, into the sand. By this time, guys really were on their last legs, and the instructors knew it. They didn’t really want anyone to collapse, and they spent a while teaching us the finer points of log teamwork. To our total amazement, they concluded the morning by telling us we’d done a damn nice job, made a great start, and to head off now for chow.
A lot of us thought this was encouraging. Seven of our number, however, were not to be consoled by these sudden, calming words uttered by guys who should have been riding with Satan’s cavalry in Lord of the Rings. They went straight back to the grinder, rang the hanging bell outside the first phase office, and handed in their helmets, placing them in a line outside the CO’s door. That’s the way it’s done in first phase: the exit ritual. There were now a dozen helmets signifying resignation, and we hadn’t even had lunch on day one.
Most of us thought they were a bit hasty, because we knew a certain part of the afternoon was taken up by the weekly room inspection. Most of us had spent all day Sunday getting into order, cleaning the floor with a mop and then high polishing it. Somehow I had found myself way down the waiting list to use one of the two electric buffers.
I had had to wait my turn and did not get finished before about 0200. But the time had not been wasted. I’d fixed my bed gear, pressed my starched fatigues, and spit-shined my boots. I looked better, not like some darned sand-encrusted beachcomber, the way I had most of the day.
The instructors arrived. I cannot remember which of them walked into my room. But he gazed upon it, this picture of military order and precision, and at me with an expression of undiluted disgust. Carefully he opened my chest of drawers and hurled everything all over the room. He heaved the mattress off the bed and cast it aside. He emptied the contents of my locker into a pile and informed me that he was unused to meeting trainees who were happy to live in a garbage dump. Actually, his words were a bit more colorful than that, more...well...earthy.
Beyond the confines of my room, there was absolute bedlam; stuff was hurled all over the place in room after room. I just stood there gaping as the entire barracks was ransacked by our own instructors. Outside in the corridor, I could hear someone bawling out Lieutenant David Ismay, the class leader. The soft, dulcet tones of Chief Schulz were unmistakable.
“What kind of rathole are you running here, Mr. Ismay? I’ve never seen rooms like these in my life. Your uniforms are a disgrace. Hit the surf...all of you!”
There were, by my count, thirty rooms. Only three of them had passed muster. And even those guys were not exempt from our first ocean plunge of the afternoon. In our shiny boots and pressed fatigues, we pounded back down to the beach, leaving a scene of total chaos behind us.
We raced into the water, deep, right into the waves. Then we turned and floundered back to the beach, formed up, and headed back to the BUD/S area. Chief Taylor was back in our lives with a major rush, obviously preparing for the last evolution of the day, on the beach or in the water. We did not know which.
All day long we had been wondering precisely who he was, but our inquiries had yielded little save that the chief was a true veteran of the teams who had seen combat in overseas deployment four times, including the Gulf War. He was a medium-sized man but immensely muscular; he looked like he could walk straight through a wall without breaking stride. But you could see he had a sense of humor, and he was not averse to telling us we were doing okay. Sweet of him, right? Half of us were hanging in there by willpower alone.
And we needed all the willpower we had, because in a few moments we were preparing to take the boats into the water again. I have never forgotten that surf drill on that first day because Chief Taylor made us paddle the boats out backward, facing aft. When we returned through the surf to the beach, we faced aft again, but now we were paddling forward.
When we first started, the journey out beyond the breakers seemed impossible to do while facing the beach and holding the oar so awkwardly, but we got better. And somehow we got it done. But not before all kinds of chaos had broken out. We capsized, flipped over, crashed backward trying to drive head-on into a big wave. And there was a lot of spluttering and coughing when we attempted Chief Taylor’s finale, which was to dump boat, right it again, stow the oars correctly, and then swim the boat back in through the surf and onto the beach.
Before we left, we were taken through an exercise called surf observation, in which two-man teams observe the condition of the sea and make a report. I paid strict attention to this, which was good, since from now on, every morning at 0430, two of our number would go down to the water’s edge and come back to make that report. Chief Taylor, smiling, as he was prone to do, dismissed us with the words “And don’t screw up that report. I want no discrepancies about sea conditions, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
We sharpened up our rooms that evening, and on day two were under way with the normal morning grind of push-ups, running, and getting wet and sandy. Our first classroom involved meeting our leading petty officer instructor, Chief Bob Nielsen, another Gulf War veteran of several overseas deployments. He was tall, slim for a SEAL, and, I thought, a bit sardonic. His words to us were packed with meaning, edged with menace, but nonetheless optimistic.
He introduced himself and told us what he expected. As if we didn’t know. Everything, right? Or die in the attempt. He gave us a slide presentation of every aspect of first phase. Before the first picture had been taken off the screen, he told us to forget all about trying to put one over on the instructors.
“Guys,” he said, “we’ve seen it all. You can try it on, if you like, but it won’t do anyone any good. We’ll catch you, and when we do, watch out!”
I think everyone in the room made a mental note not to “try it on.” We all listened carefully while Chief Nielsen ran quickly through the first four weeks and what we could expect — more running, log PT boats, and swimming, the full catastrophe. Purely to find out how tough we really were.
“Conditioning,” he said. “Conditioning and a whole lot of cold water. Get used to it. The next month represents a hard kick in the crotch. Because we’re going to hammer you.” I still have my notes of Bob Nielsen’s speech.
“You fail to meet those standards, you’re out. Of course most of you will end up being dropped. And most of you will not be back. You must make that four-mile thirty-two-minute run, and you must make the two-mile swims in an hour and a half. You’ll get a tough written test. There’s pool standards, there’s drownproofing. With and without the fins — kick, stroke, and glide.
“You may be thinking, What does it take? What must I do to make it through? The cold truth is, two-thirds of you sitting right here will quit.”
I remember him standing next to my row and saying, “There’s seven rows of you sitting here. Only two rows will succeed.” He seemed to look straight at me when he said, “The rest of you will be gonzo, history, back to the fleet. That’s the way it is. The way it’s always been. So try your best to prove me wrong.”
He issued one further warning. “This training does not suit everyone. We get a lot of very good guys through here who just decide this is not for them. And that’s their right. But they will walk away from here with dignity, understand? We catch one of you laughing or making fun of a man who has requested DOR, we’ll hammer you without mercy. Big time. You will regret those moments of ridicule for a long time. I advise you not even to consider it.”
He closed by telling us the real battle is won in the mind. It’s won by guys who understand their areas of weakness, who sit and think about it, plotting and planning to improve. Attending to the detail. Work on their weaknesses and overcome them. Because they can.
“Your reputation is built right here in first phase. And you don’t want people to think you’re a guy who does just enough to scrape through. You want people to understand you always try to excel, to be better, to be completely reliable, always giving it your best shot. That’s the way we do business here.
“And remember this one last thing. There’s only one guy here in this room who knows whether you’re going to make it, or fail. And that’s you. Go to it, gentlemen. And always give it everything.”
Chief Nielsen left, and five minutes later we stood by for the commanding officer’s report. Six instructors filed into the room, surrounding a navy captain. And we all knew who he was. This was Captain Joe Maguire, the near-legendary Brooklyn-born Honor Man of Class 93 and onetime commanding officer of SEAL Team 2. He was also the future Rear Admiral Ma-guire, Commander, SPECWARCOM, a supreme SEAL warrior. He had served all over the world and was beloved throughout Coronado, a big guy who never forgot a fellow SEAL’s name, no matter how junior.
He talked to us calmly. And he gave us two pieces of priceless advice. He said he was addressing those who really wanted this kind of life, those who could put up with every kind of harassment those instructors at the back of the room could possibly dish out.
“First of all, I do not want you to give in to the pressure of the moment. Whenever you’re hurting bad, just hang in there. Finish the day. Then, if you’re still feeling bad, think about it long and hard before you decide to quit. Second, take it one day at a time. One evolution at a time.
“Don’t let your thoughts run away with you, don’t start planning to bail out because you’re worried about the future and how much you can take. Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day, and there’s a wonderful career ahead of you.”
This was Captain Maguire, a man who would one day serve as deputy commander of the U.S. Special Operations in Pacific Command (COMPAC). With his twin-eagles insignia glinting on his collar, Captain Maguire instilled in us the knowledge of what really counted.
I stood there reflecting for a few moments, and then the roof fell in. One of the instructors was up and yelling. “Drop!” he shouted and proceeded to lay into us for the sins of one man.
“I saw one of you nodding off, right here in the middle of the captain’s briefing. How dare you! How dare you fall asleep in the presence of a man of that caliber? You guys are going to pay for this. Now push ’em out!”
He drilled us, gave us probably a hundred push-ups and sit-ups, and he drove us up and down the big sand dune in front of the compound. He raved at us because our times over the O-course were down, which was mostly due to the fact that we were paralyzed with tiredness before we got there.
And so it went on, all week. There was a swim across the bay, one mile with a guy of comparable swimming ability. There were evolutions in the pool, in masks, wearing flippers and without. There was one where we had to lie on our backs, masks full of water, flippers on, trying to do flutter kicks with our heads out over the water. This was murder. So was the log PT and our four-mile runs. The surf work in the boats was also a strength-sapping experience, running the boats out through the waves, dumping boat, righting boat, paddling in, backward, forward, boat being dragged, boat on our heads.
It never ended, and by the close of that first week we had lost more than twenty men, one of them in tears because he could not go on. His hopes, his dreams, even his intentions had been dashed to bits on that Coronado beach.
That was more than sixty rings on the big bell right outside the office door. And every time we heard it, without exception, we knew we’d lost an essentially good guy. There weren’t any bad guys who made it through Indoc. And as the days wore on and we heard that bell over and over, it became a very melancholy sound.
Could I be standing there outside the office door, a broken man, a few days from now? It was not impossible, because many of these men had had no intention of quitting a few hours or even minutes before they did. Something just gave way deep inside them. They could no longer go on, and they had no idea why.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Marcus. Because the son-ofabitch might toll for thee. Or for any one of the sixty-odd others still standing after the brutal reality of week one, first phase. Every time we crossed the grinder, we could see the evidence right there before our eyes, a total of twenty helmets on the ground, lined up next to the bell. Each one of those helmets had been owned by a friend, or an acquaintance, or even a rival, but a guy whom we had suffered alongside.
That line of lonely hard hats was a stark reminder not only of what this place could do to a man but also of the special private glory it could bestow on those who would not give in. It drove me onward. Every time I looked at that line, I gritted my teeth and put some extra purpose into my stride. I still felt the same as I had on my very first day. I’d rather die than surrender.
The third week of first phase brought us into a new aspect of BUD/S training, called rock portage. This was dangerous and difficult, but basically we had to paddle the IBS along to an outcrop of rocks opposite the world-famous Hotel del Coronado and land it there. I don’t mean moor it, I mean land it, get it up there on dry land with the surf crashing all around you, the ocean swell trying to suck that boat right back out again.
I had to figure pretty big in this because of my size and ability to heave. But none of my crew was quite ready for this desperate test. It was something we just had to learn how to do. And so we went at it, paddling hard in from the sea, driving into those huge rocks, straight into waves which were breaking every which way.
The bow of our boat slammed into the rocks, and the bowline man, not me, jumped forward and hung on, making the painter firm around his waist. His job was to get secure and then act like a human capstan and stop the boat being swept backward. Our man was pretty sharp; he jammed himself between a couple of big boulders and yelled back to us, “Bowline man secure!”
We repeated his call just so everyone knew where they were. But the boat was now jammed bow-on against the rocks. It had no rhythm with the waves and was vulnerable to every swell that broke over the stern. In this static position, it cannot ride with the waves.
Our crew leader’s cries of “Water!” were little help. The surf was crashing straight at us and then through the boat and up and over the rocks. We had on our life jackets, but the smallest man among us had to hop over the bow, carry out all of the paddles, and get them safely onto dry ground.
Then we all had to disembark, one by one, clambering onto the rocks, with the poor old bowline man hanging on for his life, jammed between the rocks with the boat still lashed to his torso. By now we were all on the rope, trying to grab the handles, but the bowline man had to move first, heading upward into a new position, with us now taking the weight.
He set off. Bowline man moving! I hauled ass down in the engine room, pulling with all my strength. A wave slammed into the boat and nearly took us all into the water, but we hung tough.
Bowline man secure! And then we gave it everything, knowing our crewmate could not come catapulting backward right into us. Somehow we heaved that baby onward and upward, dragged it clean out of the Pacific, cheated the Grim Reaper, and manhandled it right up there onto the rocks, high and dry.
“Too slow,” said our instructor. And then he went into a litany of details as to what we’d done wrong. Too long in the opening stages, bowline man not quick enough up the rocks, too long on the initial pulls, too long being battered by the waves.
He ordered us onto the sand with the boat, gave us a set of twenty push-ups, then ordered us straight back the way we’d come — up and over the rocks, boat into the water, bowline man making us secure while we damn near drowned...get in, get going, shut up and paddle. Simple really.
That first month ended much like it had begun, with a soaking wet, cold, tired, and depleted class. At the conclusion of the four weeks, the instructors made some harsh decisions, assessing the weakest among us, guys who had failed the tests, perhaps one test, maybe two. They looked hard at very determined young men who would rather die than quit but simply could not swim well enough, run fast enough, lift heavy enough, guys who lacked endurance, underwater confidence, skills in a boat.
These were the hardest to dismiss from the program, because these were guys who had given their all and would go on doing so. They just lacked some form of God-given talent to carry out the work of a U.S. Navy SEAL. Years later I knew several instructors quite well, and they all said the same about that fourth week first phase assessment, the week before Hell Week — “We all agonized over it. No one wants to be in the business of breaking a kid’s heart.”
But neither could they allow the weak and the hopeless to go forward into the most demanding six days of training in any fighting force in the world. That’s not the free world, by the way, that’s the whole world. Only Great Britain’s legendary SAS has anything even comparable.
The results of the four-week assessment meant there were just fifty-four of us left; fifty-four of the ninety-eight who had started first phase. And Class 226 would start early, as all Hell Week classes do, Sunday at noon.
Late that last Friday, we assembled in the classroom to be formally addressed once more by Captain Maguire, who was accompanied by several instructors and class officers.
“Everyone ready for Hell Week?” he asked us cheerfully.
Hooyah!
“Excellent,” he replied. “Because you are about to experience a very searching and painful test. Each one of you is going to find out what you are really made of. And every step of the way, you will be faced with a choice. Do I give in to the pain and the cold, or do I go on? It will always be up to you. There’s no quotas, no numbers. We don’t decide who passes. You do. But I’ll be there on Friday when Hell Week ends, and I hope to shake the hand of each and every one of you.”
We all stood in some awe for the exit of Captain Maguire, the quintessential Coronado man, who understood the pride of achievement at having scaled the heights and who knew what really counted, in the SEALs and beyond. He was the everlasting chief.
They briefed us about what to bring to class on Sunday — our gear, equipment, change of clothes, dry clothes, and some off-duty clothes, which would be placed in a paper bag so the successful guys would have something to wear when it was all over. Guys who went DOR (dropped on request) would also have dry clothes available anytime during the week when they prepared to leave.
Our instructor told us to eat plenty, right through the weekend, but not to worry about sleep gear on Sunday afternoon, during which time we would be incarcerated in the classroom. “You’ll be too keyed up to sleep,” he added brightly. “So just get in here and relax, watch movies, and get ready.”
On the notice board was the official doctrine of the U.S. Navy SEALs, week five, first phase: “Students will demonstrate the qualities and personal characteristics of determination, courage, self-sacrifice, teamwork, leadership, and a never-quit attitude, under adverse environmental conditions, fatigue, and stress through-out Hell Week.”
That’s laying it on the line, right? Almost. Hell Week turned out to be a lot worse than that.
We spent the weekend organizing ourselves, and we assembled in the classroom at noon on Sunday, July 18. Two dozen in-structors from all over the compound, guys we’d never even met before, were in attendance. It takes that many to get a class through Hell Week, plus attending medics and support and logistics guys. I guess you need a full staff to march men into the ultimate physical tests of the navy’s warrior elite.
This is known as the Hell Week Lockdown. No one leaves; we sit and wait all afternoon; we have our seabags; and the paper bags with our dry clothes are lined up, our names written on the outside in black marker. They served us pizza, a whole stack of it, in the late afternoon.
And outside you could sense it was quiet. No one passed by, no patrols, no wandering students. Everyone on the base knew that Hell Week for 226 was about to begin. It was not exactly respect for the dead, but I guess you understand by now more or less what I mean.
I remember how hot it was, must have been ninety degrees in the room. We’d all been goofing off, wearing Sunday casuals most of the day, and we all knew something was going to happen as the evening wore on. Some movie was running, and the hours ticked by. There was an atmosphere of heightened tension as we waited for the starter’s pistol. Hell Week begins with a frenzy of activity known as Breakout. And when it came for us, there were a lot more guns than the starter’s.
I can’t remember the precise time, but it was after 2030 and before 2100. Suddenly there was a loud shout, and someone literally kicked open the side door. Bam! And a guy carrying a machine gun, followed by two others, came charging in, firing from the hip. The lights went off, and then all three gunmen opened fire, spraying the room with bullets (blanks, I hoped).
There were piercing blasts from whistles, and the other door was kicked open and three more men came crashing into the room. The only thing we knew for sure right now was when the whistles blew, we hit the floor and took up a defensive position, prostrate, legs crossed, ears covered with the palms of the hands.
Hit the deck! Heads down! Incoming!
Then a new voice, loud and stentorian. It was pitch dark save for the nonstop flashes of the machine guns, but the voice sounded a lot like Instructor Mruk’s to me — “Welcome to hell, gentlemen.”
For the next couple of minutes there was nothing but gunfire, deafening gunfire. They were certainly blanks, otherwise half of us would have been dead, but believe me, they sounded just like the real thing, SEAL instructors firing our M43s. The shouting was drowned by the whistles, and everything was drowned by the gunfire.
By now the air in the room was awful, hanging with the smell of cordite, lit only by the muzzle flashes. I kept my head well down on the floor as the gunmen moved among us, taking care not to let hot spent cartridges land on our skin.
I sensed a lull. And then a roar, plainly meant for everyone. “All of you, out! Move, you guys! Move! Move! Move! Let’s go!”
I struggled to my feet and joined the stampede to the door. We rushed out to the grinder, where it was absolute bedlam. More gunfire, endless yelling, and then, again, the whistles, and once more we all hit the deck in the correct position. In barrels around the grinder’s edge, artillery simulators blasted away. I didn’t know where Captain Maguire was, but if he’d been here he’d have thought he was back in some foreign battle zone. At least, if he’d shut his eyes, he would have.
Then the instructors opened fire for real, this time with high-pressure hoses aimed straight at us, knocking us down if we tried to get up. The place was awash with water, and we couldn’t see a thing and we couldn’t hear anything above the small-arms and artillery fire.
Battlefield whistle drills were conducted in the midst of high-pressure water jets, total chaos, deafening explosions, and shouting instructors...“Crawl to the whistle, men! Crawl to the whistle! And keep your goddamned heads down!”
Some of the guys were suffering from mass confusion. One of ’em ran for his life, straight over the beach and into the ocean. He was a guy I knew really well, and he’d lost it completely. This was a simulated scene from the Normandy beaches, and it did induce a degree of panic, because no one knew what was happening or what we were supposed to be doing besides hitting the deck.
The instructors knew this. They understood many of us would be at a low ebb. Not me. I’m always up for this kind of stuff, and anyway I knew they weren’t really trying to kill us. But the instructors understood this would not be true of everyone, and they moved among us, imploring us to quit now while there was still time.
“All you gotta do is ring that little bell up there.”
Lying there in the dark and confusion, freezing cold, soaked to the skin, scared to stand up, I told one of them he could stick that little bell straight up his ass, and I heard a loud roar of laughter. But I never said it again, and I never let on it was me. Until now, that is. See that? Even in the chaos, I could still manage the smart-ass remark.
By now we were in a state of maximum disorientation, just trying to stay on the grinder with the others. The teamwork mantra had set in. I didn’t want to be by myself. I wanted to be with my soaking wet teammates, whatever the hell it was we were supposed to be doing.
Then I heard a voice announcing we were a man short. Then I heard another voice, sharp and demanding. I don’t know who it was, but it was close to me and it sounded like the Biggest Bossman, Joe Maguire, with a lot of authority. “What do you mean? A man short? Get a count right now.”
They ordered us to our feet instantly, and we counted off one by one, stopping at fifty-three. We were a man short. Holy shit! That’s bad, and very serious. Even I understood that. A party was dispatched immediately to the beach, and that’s where they found the missing trainee, splashing around out in the surf.
Someone reported back to the grinder. And I heard our instructor snap, “Send ’em all into the surf. We’ll sort ’em out later.” And off we went again, running hard to the beach, away from the gunfire, away from this madhouse, into the freezing Pacific in what felt like the middle of the night. As so often, we were too wet to worry, too cold to care.
But when we were finally summoned out of the surf, something new happened. The whistles began blasting again, and this meant we had to crawl toward the whistles all over again, but this time not on the smooth blacktop. This time on the soft sand.
In moments we looked like sand beetles groping around the dunes. The whistles kept blowing, one blast, then two, and we kept right on crawling, and by now my elbows were really getting hot and sore, and my knees were not doing that great either. All four joints felt red-raw. But I kept moving. Then the instructors ordered us back into the surf, deep, so we could stay there for fifteen minutes, maximum immersion time in water hovering just under sixty degrees. We linked arms until we were ordered out to more whistles and more crawling.
Then they sent us down to the surf for flutter kicks, heads in the waves. Then more whistles, more crawling, and back into the water for another fifteen minutes. Right next to me, one of the top guys in the class, an officer and a boat-crew leader, great runner, good swimmer, quit unconditionally.
This was a real shaker. Another officer in his crew went running up the beach after him, imploring him not to go, telling the attending instructor, on his behalf, the guy did not mean it. No, sir. The instructor gave him another chance, told him it wasn’t too late and if he wished he could go right back into the water.
But the man’s mind was made up, closed to all entreaties. He kept walking, and the instructor told him to get in the truck right next to the ambulance. Then he asked the guy doing the pleading if he wanted to quit too, and we all heard the sharp “Negative,” and we saw the guy running like a scalded cat down the beach to join us in the water.
The temperature seemed to grow colder as we jogged around in the freezing surf. And finally they called us out and the whistles blew again. We all dived back onto the sand. Crawl-ing, itching, and burning. Five guys quit instantly and were sent up to the truck. I didn’t understand any of that, because we had done this before. It was bad, but not that bad, for chris’sakes. I guess those guys were just thinking ahead, dreading the forthcoming five days of Hell Week, the precise way Captain Ma-guire had told us not to.
Anyway, right now we were ordered to grab the boats and get them in the surf, which we did without much trouble. But they made us paddle hundreds of yards, dig and row, lift and carry, dump boat and right boat, swim the boat, walk the boat, run the boat, crawl, live, die. We were so exhausted it didn’t matter. We hardly knew where we were. We just floundered on with bloody knees and elbows until they ordered us out of the water.
I think it was just before midnight, but it could have been Christmas morning. We switched to log PT in the surf. No piece of wood in all of history, except possibly the massive wooden Cross carried to Calvary by Jesus Christ, was ever heavier than our eight-foot hunk of wood that we manhandled in the Pacific surf. After all of our exertions, it was a pure backbreaker. Three more men quit.
Then the instructors came up with something new and improved. They made us carry the boats over the O-course and manhandle them over the goddamned obstacles. Another man quit. We were down to forty-six.
Right then we switched to rock portage and charged back down the beach to get the IBS into the water. We crashed through the light incoming waves like professionals and paddled like hell, using the remnants of our strength, to the rocks opposite the Hotel del Coronado. My swim buddy, Matt McGraw, was calling the shots in our boat by now, and we drove forward, crashed straight into the rocks, and the bowline man leaped for his life and grabbed on to the painter. We steadied the boat with the oars, and I thought we were doing real good.
Suddenly the instructor, standing up on the top of the rocks right there at damned near two o’clock in the morning, bellowed at our crew officer, “You! You, sir. You just killed your entire squad! Stop getting between the boat and the rocks!”
We hauled the boat out of the water, over the rocks, and onto the sand. The instructor gave us two sets of push-ups and sent us back the way we came. Twice more we assaulted the rocks, slowly and clumsily, I suppose, and the instructor never stopped yelling his freakin’ head off at us. In the end we had to run the boat back along the beach, drop it, and get right back into the surf for flutter kicks with heads and shoulders in the water, then push-ups in the surf. Then sit-ups. Two more men quit.
These DORs happened right next to me. And I distinctly heard the instructor give them another chance, asking them if they wanted to reconsider. If so, they were welcome to press on and get back in the water.
One of them wavered. Said he might, if the other guy would join him. But the other guy wasn’t having it. “I’m done with this shit,” he said, “and I’m outta here.”
They both quit together. And the instructor looked like he could not give a flying fuck. I later learned that when a man quits and is given another chance and takes it, he never makes it through. All the instructors know that. If the thought of DOR enters a man’s head, he is not a Navy SEAL.
I guess that element of doubt forever pollutes his mind. And puffing, sweating, and steaming down there on that beach on the first night of Hell Week, I understood it.
I understood it, because that thought could never have occurred to me. Not while the sun still rises in the east. All the pain in Coronado could not have inserted that poison into my mind. I might have passed out, had a heart attack, or been shot before a firing squad. But I never would have quit.
Soon as the quitters had gone, we were put right back to work. Lifting the boats into a head carry for the run over to the chow hall, only another mile. When I got there I was as close to collapse as I’d ever been. But they still made us push ’em out, lift the boat, to work up an appetite, I suppose.
Eventually they freed us to get breakfast. We had lost ten men during the nine hours that had passed since Hell Week began; nine hours since those yelling, shooting gunmen had driven Class 226 out of their classroom, nine hours since we had been dry and felt more or less human.
They were nine hours that had changed the lives and perceptions of those who could stand it no more. I doubt the rest of us would ever be quite the same again.
Inside the chow hall some of the guys were shell-shocked. They just sat staring at their plates, unable to function normally. I was not one of them. I felt like I was on the edge of starvation, and I steamed into those eggs, toast, and sausages, relishing the food, relishing the freedom from the shouts and commands of the instructors.
Just as well I made the most of it. Seven minutes on the clock after I finished my breakfast, the new shift of instructors was up and yelling.
“That’s it, children — up and out of here. Let’s get going. Outside! Right now! Move! Move! Move! Let’s start the day right.”
Start the day! Was this guy out of his mind? We were still soaked, covered in sand, and we’d been up half killing ourselves all night.
Right then I knew for certain: there was indeed no mercy in Hell Week. Everything we’d heard was true. You think you’re tough, kid? Then you go right ahead and prove it to us.