9. SEAL Training

THE SILVER STRAND stretches for seven straight, beautiful miles along the ocean, connecting Imperial Beach, California, and the peninsula of Coronado. Waves rolling in from the Pacific crash at Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, home of Naval Special Warfare Command and Navy SEAL training.

As I turned onto the Silver Strand, I thought about the relatively brief but rich history of the Navy SEALs. The original frogmen were the Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II. Before the Allied landings at Normandy, the Germans placed obstacles underwater and on the beaches to deter landing craft and obstruct tanks and vehicles. The Underwater Demolition Teams were sent in to scout the landing zones, blow up the obstacles, and clear a path for the invasion. If the obstacles hadn't been cleared, landing craft would have been stopped in water too deep for the soldiers to wade ashore, and German guns would have torn them apart. Without the frogmen, the Allied invasion on D-day would have literally been dead in the water.

The training I was about to undergo was built on the same principles—often we learned the very same tactics—as those of the men who led the invasion onto the beaches of Normandy. Rangers, Army Special Forces, Marine Force Recon, Air Force Pararescue Jumpers: all are incredible special operations forces that produce dedicated and capable warriors. Each unit has a different mission and different skill sets. All go through incredibly difficult training. Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training is, however, universally recognized as the hardest military training in the world. BUD/S lasts a grueling six months. Candidates are pushed to their physical and mental limits. As I drove through the gate in 2001, I knew that only about 10 percent of BUD/S students graduated with their original class. Ninety percent failed or were rolled back to another class. Around 250 men graduated from BUD/S every year, and even then, not all of those survived the additional six-plus months of advanced training it takes to become a Navy SEAL.

To put this in perspective, consider that the National Football League drafted 255 men in 2010. An NFL draft pick who is signed by a team is guaranteed a salary of $325,000, which does not include the bonus money that many of the top draft picks receive (which for some players equals tens of millions of dollars).¹ In the same year, the starting salary for an enlisted Navy man undergoing SEAL training ranged from $19,464 per year for an E-2 (less than two years experience) to $24,744 per year for an E-5.² In both cases, tremendous athletes of great courage are put through years of testing to become members of an elite group. I know and admire some of the great people who have played professional sports, but in the course of my training I would come to believe that the 250 men per year who become SEALs are far more richly rewarded.

A young sailor dressed in camouflage fatigues stood up from behind the desk to greet me. "How are you, sir?" Dustin Connors was a physical training phenom in BUD/S—he could fly over the obstacle course and run through soft sand like he was running on asphalt. He later served with SEAL Team One in Iraq and is now a father and an engineer living in California. We would endure a lot together.

"I'm great. How are you?" I shook his hand.

"You gonna be in Class 237?"

"I don't know," I said. Dustin explained that he was in a previous class, broke his leg during training, and rolled back into Class 237. He told me that 237 was "classing up"—getting ready for the initial indoctrination phase of training. He said that we'd probably be in BUD/S together.

He stamped my orders and told me that I should come back in the morning. I'd be issued my gear and I'd receive a final medical exam before training started.

We had to stencil our names on everything that they gave us in BUD/S: every T-shirt, every knife, every fin. The next morning I was handed my fins, and on them I clearly saw the names of men who'd been issued this gear before me.

Walker

Rodriguez

Herman

None of them had made it. I took out a stencil kit, crossed out "Herman," and wrote "Greitens." Would somebody be issued these fins in a few weeks and have to put a line through my name?

We began the first official day of BUD/S at 0500 on the beach. Under any other circumstances, it would have been a morning to enjoy. Small waves crashed on the shore and rolled up the sand. As we ran onto the beach, I looked up for a split second and thought, This is beautiful; the sky was still a deep dark blue, and stars were shining over the ocean.

But we didn't have time to enjoy the scenery. When the instructors came out, they'd want a muster report, a full accounting of our class. The other officers and I bent our freshly shaved heads together and used a small red-lens flashlight to read the clipboard that held a full list of the names of the men in our class who had survived the pre-BUD/S indoctrination course. We had started with 220 names. Now, due to quitting and injury, we were down to just over 160.

Our first task would be to run four miles in soft sand. We were all wearing boots, camouflage pants, and white T-shirts. We milled around the beach nervously before the instructors came out. One guy tried a joke—"Is this when the Charger Girls come out to cheer for us?"—but we were too nervous to laugh. Every man knew that most of the men on the beach that morning wouldn't make it.

"Drop!" The instructors walked onto the beach and we all fell and pressed our hands into the sand. As a class we knocked out pushups in unison:

"Down."

"One!" we boomed.

"Down."

"Two!"

"Down."

"Three!"

An instructor dragged his boot through the sand to make a starting line, and the instructions were relayed over a bullhorn: "There is a truck parked two miles down the beach. Run down the beach. Run around the truck. Then run back here. You have thirty-two minutes. And gentlemen," the voice paused, as we were about to hear for the first time a line that we would hear thousands of times in BUD/S, "it pays to be a winner."

Just then a truck cracked on its headlights, and the beams tore through the black morning. The truck looked impossibly far away.

"Fuck, that's not two miles," someone grumbled.

"This is bullshit."

"I heard they make it impossible to make it on the first run; sometimes it's more like five miles."

From the bullhorn came: "Ready." We all took in a breath. "Begin."

The pack of men started sprinting. The class was in a panic. White T-shirts went flying past. Men kicked up sand as they sprinted through the morning. I yelled, "Be steady. Be steady," but fear ruled that morning, and the class flew down the beach.

The classmate I was running beside was an accomplished triathlete, and we looked at each other in disbelief at the panic around us. As we reached the half-mile mark, the sprinters had slowed desperately, and some were already at a jog. They were jogging, then sprinting, then coughing and stopping, then running again. We still had three and a half miles to go, and already these guys were in trouble. These were athletes: high school and college football players, water polo players, state champion wrestlers. Many of them would later ace the runs, but as we'd learn over and over again in BUD/S, physical fitness mattered little without the mental fortitude to deal with fear.

As we approached the turnaround truck, the beams of the headlights cut through the morning and lit up a small group of us running tight together near the front of the pack. We ran half-blinded into the headlights and could hear the instructors yelling, "Take off your shirts! Take off your shirts! Throw 'em in the back of the truck!" We peeled off our shirts as we ran, tossed them in the back of the truck, and ran for the finish line.

The instructors had all been through BUD/S before. They knew every trick. They knew that in the dark, in the confusion of 160 men, it would have been easy for any one man to make a quick turn on the beach short of the truck and start running back to the finish. Our shirts, however, had our names stenciled on them, and they would provide the proof that we'd made it to the halfway point.

We ran swiftly back down the beach, and those of us who ran across the line in the sand under the cutoff time were sent to stretch.

As the thirty-two-minute mark came closer, desperate trainees sprinted for the finish. Instructors prowled near the line in the sand, and as the watch ticked past the time limit and men raced in late, the instructors yelled, "Hit the surf! Straight to the water!" And the exhausted men went stumbling into the 50-some-degree water of the Pacific Ocean.

When the men came out of the waves soaking wet, the instructors yelled, "Get sandy!" and the men dropped and rolled until every inch of their bodies was covered in sand. "Pushups—knock 'em out!" the instructors yelled. And the men did pushups until they were exhausted, and then they were made to flip over and do flutter kicks, and then it was back to pushups, back to flutter kicks, back to pushups. "Stand up. Grab a partner. Fireman's-carry drills down the beach. Run to Instructor Wade. Now!" Men whose quads were already shot picked up other soaking two-hundred-pound men and ran down the beach.

One of the instructors walked over to those of us stretching and said, "Gentlemen, observe this closely. It pays to be a winner at BUD/S." The "losers" were now running back into the water, diving in, then running back out to the beach. Running in; running out. Running in; running out. "You fail. You pay. You fail. You pay," an instructor yelled from the shore.

The instructors circled around a man who'd failed the run and was now covered in salt water and sand. He was in the pushup position, his butt in the air. His arms were shaking and they were failing him. One instructor yelled at him, "You know what the prize is for second place in a gunfight?"

"Negative, Instructor."

"It's death. There is no prize for second place. Now do your pushups properly."

The man's arms were shaking and drool was hanging from his lip as he tried to spit the sand out of his mouth. He must have said something like, "I'm trying," because the instructor exploded: "There is no try. We do not try. Your teammates do not need you to tryto cover their backs. Your swim buddy does not need you to try to rescue him on a dive. Your platoon does not need you to try to shoot straight. There is no try. There is only do. Do, or do not. There is no try.." By the time we ran to breakfast, several men had quit.

The instructor staff made it easy to quit. They encouraged it. If at any moment in the training a candidate said, "I quit," or, "I D.O.R." (drop on request), he was removed from training immediately, and often we never saw him again.

The quitters would later have to "ring out" by ringing a bell three times. They then set their BUD/S helmets on the ground. As each day passed, the line of helmets grew longer.

In an effort to provide "excellent customer service," the instructors would sometimes bring a bell out with us while we trained, and you could "express quit" by going straight to the bell.

I arrived every morning at the base before there was any hint of sun. As I pulled in, I often heard hard, angry rock music blaring from the barracks—Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

The screaming lyrics reflected the musical tastes of a few of our young hard-chargers. Men dressed in camouflage with shaved heads milled about the courtyard trading guesses about what the day might entail.

"Hey, Mr. G."

"What's goin' on, Lipsky?"

"Just another morning in paradise."

I smiled as I walked in to work. If I had stayed at Oxford to teach or gone to work for a consulting firm, it's hard to imagine that I would have been up this early and having this much fun. I realized also that if I'd stayed at Oxford or gone to work for a Fortune 500 company, I could have lived my entire life with the same kind of people who went to Duke or Oxford, or worked at fancy law firms. There was a "diversity" of people at each of those institutions: they had men and women from Indonesia and Zambia and Turkmenistan, and they had people of every color there—but in truth, the backgrounds of the people at these "diverse" institutions were often remarkably similar. Almost all of them understood what it meant to be a professor or a lawyer, but few people there understood what it meant to be a police officer or to have a job where you depended on the strength of your back. They easily thought of themselves as cosmopolitans, as "global" citizens, while these men at BUD/S thought of themselves simply as Americans.

The men in our class didn't fit the Hollywood vision of what it meant to be a Navy SEAL. There were few Hollywood physiques. These guys weren't flashy. They were just tough. Andrejus Babachinas was a member of the Lithuanian Special Forces who came to train with us. I watched him pull his 250-pound body up a rope using only his arms. Drew Bolton was the son of a logger from northern California. Drew was unbreakable. He was also an avid reader and a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And then there was Jordan Maywell from Texas. Jordan's twin brother, Jason, went through BUD/S a few classes before, and one day Jordan slipped into Jason's uniform and did a day of training while his brother took the day off. At the time, Jordan was a civilian. What he did was crazy, not to mention illegal, but it showed that he had guts, and that he'd do anything for his brother.

Much of our BUD/S training took place at the combat training tank, a specially designed 164' × 82' Olympic-sized pool that had sections of varying depth levels: fifteen feet, nine feet, and three feet.

We ran to the training tank dressed in camouflage shirts, camouflage pants, black boots, and our green "first phase" helmets. We all wore a "web belt"—a thick belt made for carrying gear. Attached to the belt was a canteen, and tied around the top of the canteen was a piece of white rope.

In any free moment—waiting for chow, waiting our turn to run the obstacle course—we'd practice tying knots. We learned how to tie knots because we needed to be able to attach explosives to obstacles underwater. Knot tying is a skill as old as the frogmen themselves. The men creeping up the beaches at Normandy had to tie knots in the dead of night, their hands stiff with cold, to blow up the Nazis' obstacles, and now we were going to be tested.

When we arrived we saw that the instructors had strung a line in the water in the fifteen-foot section of the tank, just inches from the bottom of the pool. I jumped in the water with a swim buddy and we swam to an instructor treading in front of us. We both took a deep breath, made a fist, and pointed our thumbs down to indicate that we were about to dive. As we kicked to the bottom of the pool, pressure built on my eardrums. Using the Valsalva technique we'd been taught, I grabbed my nose and blew hard until I felt my ears pop and the pressure equalize.

When we reached the bottom of the pool I pulled out my rope and started to tie a knot around the line in the water. The knots were easy to tie on dry land, but at fifteen feet underwater I was floating upward as I tied, and I had to keep releasing my hand from the knot to paddle myself down again.

When my swim buddy and I finished tying our knots, we gave the instructor the OK? sign. He twisted his face into a question behind his mask. He exhaled, and a few bubbles ran for the surface. He looked at the left side of our knots, then the right side. He tugged on both knots, and just as I felt that I couldn't stay down there much longer, he gave us both the OK sign. We untied our knots and made for the surface.

Treading on the surface, we took five big breaths, and then our instructor said, "Let's go," and we swam down to tie the next knot. We had to tie five knots, and it got harder with each trip to the bottom.

One of the men in our class swam down and, after tying his knot, started floating up to the surface, his body limp. The instructors grabbed him and swam him to the surface. The rest of us were ordered out of the pool. We were made to sit down and face away from the casualty, but we could hear their efforts at CPR—the body being dragged out of the water, the chest being compressed, the breaths taken—as they worked to revive our classmate. The man was revived on the pool deck and lived. He also suffered brain damage and left BUD/S.

Lieutenant John Skop, the officer in charge of the BUD/S class two classes before ours, had not been so lucky. Pulmonary edema occurs when the extreme stress of training causes fluid to be pushed into the lungs. This reduces lung capacity. It's like drowning on dry land. Symptoms include chest pain, a feeling of drowning, and coughing up blood. Most BUD/S trainees were in such good physical condition that even with reduced lung capacity, they could perform at a high level. So it was possible for someone with pulmonary edema to keep training, keep pushing himself, keep anyone from knowing that he was in trouble.

The instructors warned us over and over again to tell them if we were coughing up blood. In that same combat training tank, Lieutenant Skop had been doing caterpillar races. In those races, teams of men wearing lifejackets line up in the pool. Each man—buoyed by his lifejacket—wraps his legs around the man in front of him. The men then begin to row with their arms—looking like an ungainly caterpillar—as they race against other teams the length of the pool. The lieutenant had kept his pulmonary edema a secret, and when he started to struggle through the caterpillar race, his lungs finally filled with fluid. He died on the pool deck.

When I first heard Skop's story I thought, That was stupid. I would have let the doctors know. I would have just rolled back into another class and completed my training later.

My thinking changed when I was actually in the middle of BUD/S. When in BUD/S, the last thing in the world you want is to be rolled out of your class for medical reasons and have to start training all over again with another class of men you don't know.

A few weeks later, a friend and fellow member of BUD/S Class 237 would watch me spit out what felt like a lungful of blood after I'd come up from tying a knot at fifty feet. I turned to him and said, "I'm fine." All he said then was, "Come on. Better not let the instructors see you."

As the weeks progressed, our original mass of 220 men contracted to a smaller class of men we knew, liked, and trusted. Men quit as the runs continued and the swims got longer. Men quit in the pool and were hurt on the obstacle course. One man fell forty feet from the high-tower obstacle and broke his legs. We learned how to row our boats as a team and we learned how to make our backpacks float so we could pull them through the ocean at night. We learned how to sharpen our knives, and we learned how to patrol as a team. Many of the evolutions were painful.

One thing we all enjoyed, however, was working with the helicopters. We ran to them as their rotors flew, and the first time we climbed inside we all had on smiles a mile wide. As my helo lifted free of the ground, I leaned over and yelled to Greg Hall—one of the petty officers in my boat crew—"This is cool!"

He thought I was giving him some kind of last-minute instruction, and he tapped his ear to indicate that he couldn't hear me. "This is COOOOL!" I yelled. His face broke into a wide grin, and he gave me a thumbs-up as we flew over San Diego Bay.

The helo slowed to ten knots. We flew ten feet above the water of the bay, and the rotors whumped and churned the water into a wild froth. I was in charge of a boat crew of seven men and we all stood and formed a line. When the instructor pointed out the door, the first man jumped. The helo continued to fly, and we jumped at intervals one after another, inserting a long string of swimmers in the water. Hall was the second-to-last man to jump.

Hall was a former Marine and a former college football player. He was only about five nine, but he must have weighed 215 pounds. Greg Hall was a rock. He had a ready sense of humor, but he was also dead serious about getting done whatever job was set in front of him. I'd come to trust him completely. In a class full of young and inexperienced men who weren't used to being tested and weren't used to taking authority, Hall was a beacon of strength and maturity.

After Hall, I was the last man out of the helo. The instructor held his fist in the hold sign, then he pointed out the helo and I jumped. We were now a line of men afloat in the water. The helo flew a wide circle around the bay and dropped its ladder as it approached us again. Now the test began. The helo would fly over us—again at ten feet, again at ten knots—and each man in our boat crew had to grab the ladder as it was dragged through the water, and then climb up the ladder and into the helo.

We were practicing a method of inserting and extracting SEALs on an operation. A helo would fly in and drop off a team in the water. The team would conduct a mission, swim back out into the ocean, and the helo would lower a ladder, fly by, and pick up the team.

Hall spun around in the water to check our alignment. We were all in one straight line, and he held his arm high out of the water and gave me a thumbs-up. The first man in our crew grabbed the ladder and started to climb. He had stepped up three rungs—this was perfect—when the ladder hit the second man. Yap was a commando from Singapore who had come to BUD/S to train with American special operations, and the ladder twisted as he grabbed it. By the time the ladder hit the third man, Yap had climbed only one rung, and now the ladder was in a spiral all the way down and men were being dragged through the water. Still the helo kept flying and the men kept climbing.

I adjusted my mask over my eyes. The helicopter threw up a swirling mess of water as it approached. I knew that in this mechanical storm of wind and water it wasn't uncommon for men to miss the ladder altogether, an offense that would be severely punished by the instructors.

As the rotor wash of the helo approached Hall, I could make out only three bodies clad in black wetsuits hanging on to the same twisted ladder. Hall was swallowed by the rotor wash, and then the helo flew toward me. I had my eyes on the ladder as the whine of the engines grew louder still, and the mechanical storm approached.

Suddenly, I was floating in a very calm San Diego Bay. I punched the water in anger. I thought I had missed my grab.

I looked up and saw the helo climbing at thirty, forty, fifty feet, with two of our men still clinging to the ladder. Just then one of them let go—and I knew that it was Lucas, a former Marine and the only African American in my boat crew. I watched him fall through the air, his arms spinning, until he brought them to his side and crashed into the bay. The other man, who I later knew to be Greg Hall, was still holding on.

I later learned that after Hall grabbed the ladder, and as the helo approached me, a critical failure occurred in one of the engines. The helo had come a foot or two from crashing into the bay, and the pilots turned to make an emergency run back to Naval Air Station North Island. The instructors had yelled at Lucas to jump—he was safer in the water than in a disabled helo—and so Lucas let go of the ladder and plunged into the bay.

But as Lucas jumped, he freed the ladder of his weight, and as the twisted ladder righted itself, hanging on to the bottom was Greg Hall. Now the helo was at eighty feet, then one hundred. The instructors yelled to Hall over the whump of the rotor and the whine of the engine, with the symbol of a closed fist, "Hold! Hold! Hold!"

Hall later told me that as he watched the world below him fly by at sixty knots from over 150 feet in the air, and he looked up at the instructors yelling, "Hold! Hold!" he thought to himself, Well, no shit!

Hall held on to the ladder as the helo flew over the 200-foot-high Coronado Bridge, and I can only imagine what those morning commuters thought when they looked through their windshields, coffee in hand, and saw stuntman Hall flying overhead. Hall had a wild ride, but the helo landed safely back at North Island, and Hall was unhurt.

Throughout BUD/S, whenever we failed to do something that we should have done, we had to do pushups. If you should have sharpened your knife, but failed to, you did pushups. If you should have inspected your lifejacket for saltwater corrosion, but failed to, you did pushups. As Hall was walking away from the helo, the instructors yelled, "Hall, drop down!" Hall dropped into the pushup position. "Hall, you should have died. Do pushups for being alive."

Greg Hall knocked out twenty happy pushups and yelled, "Hooyah for being alive!"

Our confidence grew with each passing day. Not only were we still alive and still at BUD/S, but we learned we had a team we could count on. We learned that we could do things we might once have thought were impossible.

I stood with five other men next to the ledge of the combat training tank as our swim buddies tied our feet together so that we could not kick free. We then put our hands behind our backs, and our swim buddies tied our hands together.

"How's that?" My swim buddy asked.

"Feels good."

He tugged at the knot to check it a final time. A knot that came undone meant automatic failure. The five of us on the pool deck exchanged glances and then, with our feet tied together and our hands tied behind our backs, we jumped into the pool. It was time for drown-proofing.

The first test was to swim fifty meters. We dolphin-kicked toward the other end of the combat training tank, rolling to our sides every few kicks to catch a breath. After that, it was time to "float." Using a small dolphin kick, we floated about a foot below the surface, kicking up to the surface for air every twenty seconds or so. After five minutes of this, our instructor yelled, "Now bob!"

I blew the air out of my lungs and sank to the bottom of the pool along with the other men around me. As I felt my feet hit the bottom, I crouched into a squat, then pushed off hard. Shooting up through the water, I blew all the remaining air out of my lungs, and as soon as my head broke the surface, I inhaled for an instant and then began to sink again.

Calm was key. If your mind ran to thoughts of your bound feet, or you struggled to free your hands tied behind your back, problems compounded quickly. Timing was also key. A mistimed breath could mean swallowing water, which could lead to panic, which could lead to forgetting to blow all the air out of your lungs. When that happened, men ended up suspended—limbs bound—several feet from the life-giving air, and feet away from the bottom of the pool.

Drown-proofing required intense concentration. During training one day before the test, our hands were bound, but instead of our feet being tied, we were instructed to press them together to simulate them being bound. As we bobbed, my thoughts wandered for a moment. As I came to the surface I mistimed a breath, swallowed water, and went sputtering back to the bottom of the pool. I pushed hard for the surface, but I was out of air, and my mind was running in circles of fear. I pulled my feet apart and started treading water. "Whatsa matter, Greitens? Oh, no, looks like we got another officer panicking on us." I took in a breath to calm myself and let my body sink back down again to the bottom of the pool.

Unwavering mental focus was essential. I came to learn that in SEAL training and on deployments, the greatest distractions for men were not physical challenges, but family issues. The military can place a great strain on family life, and problems in family life can place a great strain on people serving in the military. Men in good relationships were not just happier men, they were also better trainees, and—I'd later come to believe—better SEALs and better public servants. Like drown-proofing, service overseas often demanded total concentration. Walking down an Iraqi road on patrol, men need to be thinking about what's happening in the alley on their right, not about an unhappy wife at home. On deployment, I've had men whose wives left them, a man whose child was diagnosed with autism, men whose homes were broken into, men whose parents died. Life doesn't stop when a service member heads overseas.

I learned how difficult it can be to stay focused when you're worried about someone that you love, and for that learning I'm grateful. I think that it made me a better officer on deployment. I'd check in with guys: "You call home recently? Everything good?" Usually guys would just brag about how great their kids were doing. But on a few occasions, I had guys wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me that they feared their marriage was falling apart, or to tell me that their kid was sick. Strong guys would break down crying. Of course, just like life doesn't stop at home, the mission overseas doesn't stop either, and those same men had to wake up the next day and get back to dangerous work. Emerson once wrote that concentration is the secret of strength. You can't chase two rabbits at once. And for men to perform overseas while their lives kept running at home, absolute concentration on the task at hand is essential.

During the actual drown-proofing, after the bobbing we moved on to flips. Again we blew all the air out of our lungs. As I touched the pool bottom I kicked my bound legs over my head and did a back flip. I pushed off the pool bottom and went to the surface for a snatch of air and then I sank again, blowing bubbles of air until I felt the bottom of the pool. This time I did a front flip underwater.

I pushed off the pool bottom. When I next broke the surface, I saw my swim buddy standing on the pool deck holding my facemask. As I sank back down, he threw it into the nine-foot-deep water. I watched the mask float to the bottom of the pool, and on my next push to the surface I grabbed a breath of air and rolled forward. I dolphin-kicked for the mask on the pool bottom, and when I'd made it to the bottom of the pool, I moved the strap of the mask into place with my nose, then bit the strap tight, swung my feet to the bottom of the pool, and pushed again for the surface. I bobbed five more times, breathing at the surface as I held the mask with clenched teeth.

The men at BUD/S wanted to be SEALs for a wide variety of reasons. Some were inspired by relatives, some were inspired by movies, some had played "special operations" video games. Some sought the respect of their parents and their friends. Some wanted to impress a girl. Some just wanted to test themselves. Many of the men had grown up in a culture where they'd inherited ideals about manhood from beer commercials and sitcoms. And whether the men they saw on TV were portrayed as overgrown and selfish boys, or as wimpy doofs forever outwitted and always ineffective at accomplishing anything worthwhile, the men who came to BUD/S knew—even if they might not have articulated it—that there had to be more. They knew that there had to be more to being a man and a responsible adult, and they knew that they wanted to become someone worthy.

We sometimes ran north of the BUD/S compound and onto the civilian beach in front of the Hotel del Coronado—an architecturally spectacular hotel and a popular vacation destination. One day during one of these runs—we still had about sixty men in the class and we were sick of looking at each other—the bikini-clad women lying out on the beach captured our attention.

Senior Chief Salazar led the run that morning. Senior Chief was a shorter man, powerfully built, who had a long history of honorable operations in the SEAL teams. He was also the epitome of an excellent trainer, unapologetically demanding and relentlessly positive. Every man in our class admired Senior Chief Salazar. I suspect that he knew this, and he used his power to teach important lessons, not just about combat, but also about how to live. "You know what, guys? I want to tell you something about women. And I want to tell you something about what it means to be a real frogman. You know how a real frogman treats women?" We kept running, none of us with any idea what Senior Chief would say. "If you're a real frogman, then every time a woman leaves your side, she'll feel better about herself."

In a culture where so many had been fed a steady diet of shallow macho posturing that involved degrading women, here was a simple message: "Every time a woman leaves your side, she'll feel better about herself." Many men had come to BUD/S not only to learn what it meant to be SEALs; many of them had come because they needed to learn what it meant to be men.

Waiting wasn't going to make the pool any shorter, so I stood with one of the first groups. There were five of us lined up on the pool deck, with five instructors treading in the water. We were standing at the deep end of the combat training tank. The water was fifteen feet deep, and the pool was twenty-five meters across. Our task was straightforward: jump in the pool and execute a front flip underwater, then swim underwater to the other side of the pool and back again, for a total swim of fifty meters underwater.

Standing on the pool deck, my mind started to race: should I try to jump in as far as possible, and save myself an extra foot of swimming, or will that use too much energy and oxygen? Should I do the front flip as soon as I hit the water, or wait until I sink a few feet?

I grabbed control of my thoughts and tried to concentrate on only three things: take a deep breath before I jumped, go deep, and stay relaxed while I swam.

I could feel the eyes of the men in my class on my back. I was being watched because I was one of the first students to swim, and because I was one of the class leaders. They were watching to see if I was worthy to lead them.

I took a very long, very slow, very deep breath, and I jumped. I did the front flip immediately, and I started swimming for the other side of the pool at a steep angle, hoping to get as deep as I could as quickly as possible.

Boyle's law states that at a fixed temperature and within a closed system, pressure and volume are inversely proportional. The deeper you go, the higher the partial pressure of oxygen in your system. The bottom line is that it's actually easier to swim fifty meters at fifteen feet deep than to swim the same distance at five feet deep. Mr. Boyle was very far from my mind just then, but I knew that I wanted to be deep. I pulled, kicked, and glided about three inches above the bottom of the pool.

As I came to the turnaround at twenty-five meters, I touched the wall, set my legs, and pushed. The water rushed past me, but the other side of the pool looked very far away, and I was out of air.

As I put my hands out in front to start the next stroke, I thought to myself, Stay... and as I pulled my arms back, I completed the mantra:... relaxed. I repeated this: Stay ... relaxed ... Stay ... relaxed. I was out of air, and my body was desperate for oxygen, but thousands of men had done this before me. Thousands more would follow.

I had to keep my heartbeat steady. Stay ... relaxed... The faster your heart beats, the more oxygen you use.

I pulled again, and then I was there. An instructor launched me onto the pool deck as I touched the finish wall, and I crashed onto the deck between two other students, each of us on our hands and knees, breathing hard. A corpsman bent down and looked in my eyes. I held up the OK sign with my right hand and said, "I'm OK."

"Good job, sir."

Was that it? Was that the swim I'd been worried about for months? I stood up and walked over to my boat crew. "Guys," I took another deep breath, "just go deep, and stay relaxed on the way back. We can all do this."

The guys looked up at me and nodded their heads, but I'm sure it wasn't the most inspirational speech they'd ever heard.

"Oh my, folks, looks like we've got a funky chicken," one of the instructors said.

One of the men that swam in my group was doing the funky chicken on the pool deck. When underwater and desperate for oxygen, your body will sometimes start involuntarily convulsing. It's awkward and painful as your body jerks and spasms. Sometimes when this process has started, the spasming and jerking will continue even when you've made it out of the water.

Men quit every day, and our boat crews—the groups of seven that we used to organize ourselves—changed every day. That morning a very quiet man named James Suh had joined my crew. He looked nervous watching the funky chicken on the pool deck. I said, "You too, Suh. You got this."

Suh looked at me. "I got it, Mr. G." And Suh did get it. He aced the fifty-meter swim that day, and while the class shifted and changed around us for months, for the most part, Suh remained part of my platoon or part of my boat crew for well over a year. I never once heard Suh raise his voice. He was utterly dependable. He had an undergraduate degree in mathematics, and he was one of the smartest men in our class. He would later help dozens of his fellow classmates with dive physics, and if it weren't for Suh's tutoring, many of our men wouldn't have passed the tests that required us to calculate the explosive power of demolitions. Suh was as good on the rifle range and underwater as he was in the air under a parachute. I remember Suh relating a few stories of fights that he'd had in college. He knew how to fight, and he could fight when he needed to, but he never provoked violence. We suffered a lot together, and we became good friends.

Suh would later die as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan. He was flying on a helo that was shot down by the Taliban in the middle of a firefight. He was flying in to rescue another man—Matt Axelson, "Axe"—who was sitting with us on the pool deck that day.

"I got it, Mr. G."

Yes, Suh. Yes, indeed.

Hell Week was coming. Training up to this point had been a challenge, but Hell Week is the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world, and in a class of Golden Gloves boxers, state-champion wrestlers, international-quality water polo players, and collegiate swimmers, we all knew that we'd never been tested in the way that Hell Week would test us. We were sitting in the first-phase classroom, and Instructor Harmon stood behind the podium. Instructor Harmon had a philosophical streak in him, and he said this:

"Each one of you is like an earthen vessel—a beautiful piece of pottery—prettied up by your fathers and mothers and teachers with tender loving care. In a few days, Hell Week is going to begin, and we're going to take every one of you out onto the grinder and we're going to smash you on the ground, break you open, and we're going to see what's inside each one of you. With many of you, we'll find nothing. There's just air. You are empty men without substance. For others, when you break we're going to have to turn away from the smell, because you live in a weak culture that has allowed you to get by on charm and pretty talk and backslapping and you have practiced dishing manure for so long that it almost seeps out of your every pore, and now, that is what you are. For others, when we smash you, we'll find inside a sword made of pure Damascus steel. And you are going to become Navy SEALs."