Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all Hell.
—General William Tecumseh Sherman, addressing the graduating class of Michigan Military Academy, June 1879
If the goal of military training is to prepare you for the hell of war, then there’s really only one way that’s going to work. The training is going to have to be hell, too.
Military training is like Dante’s Divine Comedy: it’s built on a progressive series of different levels of hell. These vary from branch to branch, but they follow the same broad pattern. There’s basic hell, where whatever sloppiness you bring to the table is squeezed out of you, where you learn how to follow orders and fall into formation. Basic hell is where you start becoming military material. Boot camp, basic, infantry school, battle school—the names and curricula vary, but it all boils down to the same essential task: put you on the hot seat, burn away your civilian trappings, and harden you into a disciplined fighter.
And then there’s advanced hell, where they turn up the heat and start tempering the steel inside you—if there is any steel there to temper.
There’s nothing quite like going through a Special Operations school or advanced-level military course. It isn’t just that you find out firsthand what hell really is, what it’s like to go through an experience where seven or eight out of ten don’t even make it through to the end of the course. It’s that here in advanced hell, you are pushed to your absolute limits and then beyond, to the point where you discover that those limits aren’t absolute at all. Where you experience pain so great it makes you pass out, and then you wake up and find out you’re still here. And then you go through it all over again. And again. You find out what it is to die and then come back to life again … and that’s just in order to graduate.
Which, if you do, means you get to go on to more training, which means more hell.
We have an expression: You train harder than you fight. And another: The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat. Only that one isn’t the whole truth. Sometimes you bleed in training, too.
* * *
For Rob Furlong, the first few circles of hell weren’t so bad; it was more an experience of culture shock than one of real suffering.
Basic training in the Canadian infantry was much like basic military training everywhere: the new recruits were drilled in the fundamentals, including rank structure, conduct, basic formations, and weapons training. But all of that was secondary to the real training: being pounded, physically and verbally and emotionally, for days on end without letup. To Rob it was one two-month stretch of being yelled at, an experience he didn’t find unpleasant so much as bewildering.
When confronted with a task, Rob is the kind of guy who simply does it, no overanalysis or complaint or pushback. He had always been an extremely pragmatic, goal-oriented person. Now he suddenly had these authority figures in his face, screaming at him, throwing his shit around, breaking things, and freaking out at him no matter what he did. It seemed like irrespective of how well he followed orders or how much effort he put out, the result was always the same.
One day, toward the start of month two, he put this conclusion to the test. That morning the master corporal came in and, as usual, ripped through all Rob’s clothes, threw them around the room, and yelled at him to iron and fold it all over again. But Rob didn’t do that. Instead, he just picked it all up off the floor, brushed it off, and stuck it all back on his shelf the way it was.
The next morning the master corporal came in, gave Rob’s stuff a cursory glance, nodded, and said, “Good job, good work. Coming along,” and left.
The screaming and punishment notwithstanding, Rob knew right away that he loved the army life. He finished out basic at the top of his class. When it came to shooting, his strongest competition was an experienced reservist who’d had a lot of time behind the C7, the Canadians’ basic service rifle at the time, a carbine (shorter-barreled version) of an M16. That soldier already knew this rifle inside and out. Rob had never seen one before. The reservist took the top spot—but Rob took second.
After basic came six months of battle school, which drilled the ABCs of infantry life: tactics, survival, navigation, section maneuvers, more firearms and basic marksman training, explosives training … and physical training. PT: endless PT, endless pounding—like basic all over again only ratcheted up a notch.
“At battle school, you’re garbage,” recalls Rob. “You’re just a piece of shit.”
For the first month the instructors did everything they could to break the new guys. More than 50 percent of the class washed out. They brought in another class to fill the ranks, and lost half of those guys, too. Some broke mentally, others couldn’t hack the sheer brutality of the endless rucksack marches. The attrition rate was vicious.
Rob was unaffected by any of it. When he got to battle school he was coasting on a flow of adrenaline. He could not wait to sink his teeth into the training. Getting up early in the morning didn’t bother him. Being worked late into the night didn’t bother him. He embraced it all. He was all business. What little precious free time the new recruits were allowed, Rob poured into more practice—practice loading his magazines, assembling and disassembling his rifle, all his gun drills, anything and everything. He didn’t want to simply get through the course; he wanted to conquer it, master it, do it to the very limits of his ability. He was hungry for excellence.
This time no reservist was going to best him. In his battle school class, Rob took top shot. The trophy, a six-foot musket with his name inscribed on it, remains one of his most prized possessions.
From battle school Rob was posted to Third Battalion and immediately put onto the Canadian shooting team, where his shooting earned him first place for Western Canada and second place overall for “top tyro” (highest-scoring newcomer). From there he went on deployment, a tour in Bosnia for peacekeeping duty, which wasn’t terribly exciting. This was 1999 and the world was mostly at peace, which for an aspiring military sniper meant it was pretty boring.
While he was in Bosnia, command pulled him off-tour for a month to compete for Team Canada again, this time in a competition in Australia.
Rob loved competition shooting. He loved the purity of it, the stretching of perfection. He also enjoyed rubbing shoulders with such accomplished, high-level shooters, comparing notes and sharing tricks of the trade. He noticed, for example, some competitors laying their ammunition out in the sun for a while before shooting, in order to warm it up. Made sense: when using ammunition with a heat-sensitive propellant, heating up the round will accelerate the burn, causing greater chamber pressure and muzzle velocity.
Rob made a mental note to himself. Perhaps this would come in handy later on.
By the end of his first week he was in first place for his division. Things were going phenomenally well. There was nothing Rob wanted to do more than shoot, and this was shooting at an awfully rarefied level. And then he bumped into the downside of rubbing shoulders with competitors. Literally.
One day the contestants were working their way through an event that incorporated an obstacle course. As Rob crawled underneath an obstacle, rifle in hand, another shooter directly behind him accidentally slammed into the back of his shoulder. A bolt of pain tore through Rob’s shoulder, the kind of neural impulse that goes screaming up to the brain with the message, Red alert—we’re screwed! It was a hard hit, and it popped Rob’s shoulder out, dislocating his arm.
For him, the competition was over.
Rob was devastated. He spent the next three weeks sitting around in Australia, disconsolate, watching everyone else shoot. Those three weeks were nearly unendurable—far worse than any hell even the most devious instructor could have possibly dished out.
For the rest of ’99 and into 2000 Rob’s sole mission in life was to recoup his shoulder and get back in shape so he could move on with his grand plan—a plan he’d had from the start. When he entered the military, Rob had formulated a concrete list of goals, which he’d mapped out carefully and written down. The list went something like this:
get through basic
get through battle school
join battalion
get through jump course
qualify for airborne unit
get through recce course
qualify for recce platoon
take the prize
Nobody knew about this list but Rob. He had not shared his plan with another living soul. Each level of the plan raised the bar higher and would be tougher to achieve. Right now his total focus (aside from shooting, always shooting) was on the next item, getting through a jump course. Making that would qualify him for Alpha Company, Third Battalion’s airborne unit. Which, if all went well at Alpha, might lead to his getting accepted into PPCLI’s recce course.
Recce (pronounced reck-ee), the British version of what Americans would call recon, was the quintessential Spec Ops training program, a hellacious mix of land navigation, reconnaissance, assault ops, and sheer survival skills. Few ever made it to the recce course. A lot fewer made it all the way through. If Rob got to be one of those rare individuals, the resulting recce qual could be—could be—Rob’s ticket to shoot for a coveted spot on the Third Battalion’s recce platoon. Passing recce in and of itself was far from a guarantee that he’d then make it onto the platoon, which accepted only the elite of the elite. But narrow as it was, that was the doorway he needed to pass through to get where he meant to go.
The truth was, none of these goals was really important to him, in and of itself. They were all simply stepping-stones toward the goal, that final step. The prize. He hadn’t forgotten the images on that television screen in the recruitment office in Newfoundland.
He was going to be one of Canada’s top snipers.
* * *
While Furlong was nursing his shooting arm back into shape in Australia, Jason Delgado was riding a bus from Manhattan to Parris Island, South Carolina. The bus ride took about twelve hours, plenty of time for Delgado to think about what he was getting himself into. Although he was pretty sure he already knew. Marine basic training is the longest and toughest of any of the armed services, and by most accounts the most brutal.
“You know what makes marines so good at what they do?” says Jason. “I’ll tell you; one word: misery.” He laughs. “Pure hell and misery.”
As he got off the bus he saw a long phalanx of yellow footprints painted onto the asphalt in rows of four pairs. “Stand … to!” The recruits all placed their feet on the yellow footprints, which had the effect of forcing them all to stand in the correct posture.
That’s the marines, right there. The Marine Corps is legendary for its exactitude. In the marines, everything is done by the numbers, micromanaged to the nth degree. And it pays off. They are the epitome of consistent, dependable excellence. When our SEAL platoon went deep into the enemy stronghold in the caves of Zhawar Kili, a unit of about twenty marines came in with us to act as security, and I was damn glad of it. If I were back in hostile territory tomorrow, there’s no force on earth I’d rather have guarding my ass than a unit of marines.
Just as you’ve probably seen in the movies, the first event on arrival at marine boot camp was the ritual shaving of heads, only it was not so antiseptic an experience as it looks in the movies. Quite a few emerged with good-sized nicks in their heads. “It was pretty savage,” says Jason. “Blood was drawn.”
Next they were given their standard issue: boots, PT gear, and the rest. Except that they weren’t allowed to actually wear their boots. Not yet. They had to earn them. In marine boot camp, they had to earn everything—their name tapes, their eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia, their boots, everything. What they got to drink was water—if they wanted juice, they had to earn it. Want to place a phone call home? Fine: earn it. They were being taught from day one to appreciate every last thing they had.
How did they earn these privileges? Mainly through being aggressive. Jason quickly learned that the more aggressive you were, the more you were seen as a leader; the more you stood out, the more privileges you got. He soon scored a number of phone calls home, courtesy of a few (tacitly encouraged) fistfights.
One morning Jason arrived at the chow hall, sat down with his food, took one bite, and the sergeant made him spit it out before he could swallow. Everyone had to get up and leave, right then. No breakfast that day. That happened frequently. If you wanted to get to the chow hall in time to eat, you quickly learned the fundamentals of time management.
It seemed like random cruelty—but it was more about breaking down the young men’s sloppy habits and preparing them for a life of efficiency. A lot didn’t make sense at first, but after a few years in the Corps, and especially once on deployment, the young marines would start understanding why things were done the way they were in boot camp. With his “Third Recon” cadet corps experience, Jason already had a pretty good idea.
“From day one, they were stripping us of our pride and individualism,” he says, “and showing us that it’s not about you, it’s about the mission. Priority one is the mission, priority two is troop welfare. Mission first. Even if you die, you have to accomplish the mission.”
The drill instructors had free rein with their recruits. At any moment, if they decided they didn’t like what they were seeing, everyone stopped what they were doing and hit the ground for push-ups.
One night Jason’s drill instructor (called a “heavy”), Sergeant Jones, burst into their barracks, flipped over all the bunks, smashed bottles of Aqua Velva on the walls, threw their clothes all over the place, then ordered the men to have it all clean and flawless by the following morning. It was exactly like Rob Furlong’s experience, only Sergeant Jones added a unique twist.
Before leaving, he made the men all line up, then ordered them each to drink two canteens full of water before going to bed. After drinking each canteen they had to hold their canteens upside-down over their heads, to prove they’d drunk it all. Those few who tried to slip by were betrayed by water pouring down on their heads. Sergeant Jones made sure everyone drank their full quota of two canteens’ worth, and then gave a standing order: “Anyone gets up out of his rack to go use the bathroom is on firewatch for the rest of the night.” (Firewatch is so painfully boring that it’s typically manned in one-hour shifts; being forced to stay awake and look at nothing for hours, especially when you’re already exhausted, is excruciating.) He then opened every window in the squad bay, so the boys would have a nice cold breeze all night, making the urge to pee even worse.
All night long, Jason heard his teammates moaning. Some peed into their canteens. Jason knew that was a bad idea: Sergeant Jones would have thought of that. He needed a different tactic. He quietly got out of bed, slipped into his full cammies, strapped on his pistol belt and flashlight, went out into the halls, and pretended he was on firewatch. He walked up and down the squad bay a few times, ducked into the bathroom to piss, walked up and down the squad bay a few more times, then slipped back into bed. All those months of sneaking around in Van Cortlandt Park with his paintball rifle and scope now paid off. Nobody saw him. A sniper in the making.
The next morning, some of the guys had pissed their beds, others pissed their pants. But the worst off, as Jason had figured correctly, were the guys who pissed in their canteens. Sergeant Jones stomped in and gave them their first order of the day: drink another canteen of water. Those who’d used their canteens as urinals tried to fake their way through, putting their piss-filled canteens to their lips and pretending to drink. But they weren’t thinking about what came next.
“Okay, now hold your canteens up over your heads!”
A few marines got golden showers that morning. Delgado kept a straight face, but inside he was laughing so hard he almost peed in his pants himself.
In fact, he found everything about boot camp hilariously funny—at first. As far as he was concerned, he’d already done a lot of this stuff, or things much like it, in his cadet corps in the Bronx. And he was just so jazzed to be there, becoming an honest-to-God, real-live member of the U.S. armed forces, a marine, for shit’s sake. Every time he got yelled at, far from beating him into a corner, it would have the opposite effect. He’d soak it up, enjoy every screaming word of it.
It took an adjustment for him to start taking it all seriously. That adjustment happened pretty fast. It didn’t take long to realize that this was not a game. These guys were there to whip him and all the others into shape by any means necessary. Boot camp in the Corps is longer than in the other branches of the U.S. armed services. Longer, and tougher. The PT baseline requirements included running a mile and a half in under fifteen minutes, forty-five crunches or more in two minutes, and fifteen pull-ups (for males). The punishment went up from there.
The three months of training was punctuated throughout by a steadily escalating series of humps (hikes with fully loaded rucksack): a two-mile hump, four-mile hump, seven-miler, and so on. The last one came during the final portion of basic, dubbed the Crucible: a fifty-four-hour-long series of tests including obstacle course, war-gaming, problem-solving, and teamwork-testing, interspersed among the endless drills and dozens of miles of marching. At one point Jason found himself trying to figure out how to drag a heavy ammo can under a net of low-lying barbed wire for several hundred yards. At another, he had to get his entire team across an obstacle course, consisting of huge pegs sticking out of the ground, using just a single plank of wood, like a huge game of human Tetris. One impossible task after another, with no sleep and little food, all blurred together into one endless mass of misery. And Jason totally loved it.
That is, he hated it—but in a good way. He could feel it carving him into the man he wanted to be.
* * *
There’s one more key element that distinguishes USMC boot camp from basic in the other branches: these guys get extensive marksmanship training. Every new marine coming out of basic is at least a decent shot. The Marine Corps is proud of its slogan, “Every Marine is a rifleman.” It’s absolutely true, and it starts in boot camp.
When Jason and his classmates got out on the range they started at three hundred yards, standing rapid fire, then kneeling rapid fire at three hundred yards, then went out to four hundred yards, both sitting and prone, and then all the way out to five hundred yards, prone. Five football fields: that’s a very respectable distance, something no other basic training would attempt. And back in 2000, when Jason was going through the course, this was all iron sights, that is, no advanced optics, just sighting down the barrel through the little metal notched sighting device that comes with the gun, which is pretty damn primitive.
But all that range time was still ahead of them, coming in week two. During his first week on the M16, Jason didn’t fire a single shot. In classic anal marine fashion, the first week of marksmanship phase was all classroom work, fundamentals of weapon handling, and dry-firing, dry run after dry run. They practiced snapping on barrels, trigger pull, seeing whether their sights were getting jiggled or stationary. It was a week of endless tedium, sitting on the grass for hours at a time, staring at spray-painted echo silhouettes (from the waist up) on a series of 55-gallon drums. Jason and dozens of other “boots” lying on the ground in a huge circle, aiming and “firing” their weapons at the targets.
The M16 is a semiautomatic, its mechanism operated by a gas piston. When you fire a round, the exploding gases from that round work the machinery to rack the next round into place. Which means that if you don’t actually fire a round, there’s no explosion, and you have to manually rack the thing every time you squeeze the trigger and drop the firing pin. Doing that once? Twice, ten times? No big deal. A hundred times? A few thousand times? It’s not only tedious, it’s draining. Just lying there, squeezing the trigger, racking, aiming, snapping, racking, aiming, snapping, and racking, for hours on end, day after day, all week long.
And it was hot; South Carolina springtime hot.
The first day, Delgado lay down on the ground, got positioned, and started in: aim, snap, rack. Aim, snap, rack. After a few minutes he felt something tickling his ear. Then the tickle turned to an itch. He told himself to ignore it. Aim, snap, rack. The itch got worse. Sand fleas, biting him in the ears. Leave it alone, Delgado. Doan do it, dawg. Aim, snap, rack—now it was awful. He longed to rip his hand off the rifle and start scrabbling at his right ear. But he knew it wasn’t allowed, that he had to lie there and take it.
“Yeahhhhh,” came a voice above him, mocking, sneering. The sergeant had seen it in Delgado’s face: that look of cringing discomfort. “Yeahhh,” he continued, “let ’em eat. They need to eat, too … my little marines.” The shooting instructors knew all about the sand fleas. They called them “our little drill instructors.”
Delgado kept on dry-firing, and the little drill instructors kept on chewing on his ears.
Between the little drill instructors and the big ones, that first week was when Jason began acquiring the kind of discipline and self-control that would serve him well in the future. That would, in fact, save his life, and other lives, too.
* * *
When Nick Irving entered the army under his Option 40 Ranger contract, he was still a fairly skinny dude, topping out at barely 105 pounds. He wasn’t used to eating three square meals a day. As a teenager he would typically eat one solid meal, then snack on candy or other fast calories. He just never ate that much—until he hit the army chow hall. Over the ten weeks of basic Nick packed on close to forty additional pounds, most of it muscle.
Which, as it turned out, only exacerbated the suffering of his personal brand of hell.
Nick had planned to be a SEAL, so he had focused his effort the past few years building himself up as a swimmer. He hadn’t trained up for the kind of weight-bearing exertion it takes to be an army grunt. Now he found himself running up and down concrete tracks with eighty to a hundred twenty pounds of ruck on his back. He soon developed a massive case of shin splints that developed further into an extensive series of tiny fractures in the bones of his legs.
The additional forty pounds turned Nick from Stick Figure into a formidable dude—but it also added even more stress onto his injured legs. Every morning, he woke up to a pair of legs that were badly swollen and in severe pain. Finally the pain got to be too much. Nick placed a phone call to his parents and told them what was happening.
“Hey,” he said, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Listen, Nick,” his father told him. “This has been your dream since you were in elementary school. Suck it up, drive on—and if it gets too bad and your legs fall off, then you can quit.”
Nick listened. He decided the only way he was going to quit would be if his legs did fall off. Or if he ended up dying. Man, he recalls thinking at times during those dark days, I really do hope I die.
Once out of basic Nick was supposed to go right on to airborne school, but his condition forced him to postpone. The doctors told him he needed to allow six months to a year for the stress fractures to heal. “Screw that,” said Nick. “I don’t have six months to a year. I’ll take a month, and however much they heal at that point, that’s how healed they’ll be. If my legs snap off, they snap off.”
True to his word, he took just one month off and then went into rigger (parachute) school, where he found himself running up to six or eight miles a day in addition to the actual jumping. The shin splints returned, along with the fractures, swelling, and pain—plus one additional element in his arsenal of suffering: fear.
He could push through the pain in his legs. After a while they just got numb. But the jumping itself? That was something else.
The truth was, Nick was absolutely terrified of heights. Just crawling out onto the roof to repair a shingle would make him feel like he was about to pass out. Anything above ten feet freaked him out. And he was about to go a lot farther up than ten feet.
Before doing any actual jumping, the students climbed up into a mock-up of an AC-130 transport plane to simulate free fall. This was only forty feet off the ground, and they were buckled into a harness the whole time. Still, Nick shook so hard he could barely make it through the exercise.
Before long he was up in a real AC-130 at 1,500 feet, traveling about 200 mph, feeling seriously weak in the knees. Knowing how terrified of heights he was, one of the instructors pulled him out of the line. “Hey, recruit, guess what?” she said. “You’re gonna be the first guy out.”
Nick sat on the plane’s bench with the other students, at the head of the line. Then came the dreaded words: “Jumpers, stand by. Stand up. Hook up.” They were hooking to a static line, which meant their chutes would be opened for them automatically; they wouldn’t need to worry about pulling rip cords and counting or any of the other mechanics of the process. All they had to do was keep a decent form: knees together, tuck in, chin to chest, so when the risers popped out they wouldn’t get riser burn.
They stood up and hooked on to the line. The instructor opened the 130’s big side doors and propped Nick up there, the tips of his boots hanging out over the edge.
“Don’t look down,” a voice told him. “Look at the horizon. Do not look down.”
Nick looked down.
Everything looked so small down there. Nick just had time to think, This is insane! when the green light went on, the instructor behind him gave him a smack in the ass, and he jumped. Everything he’d learned, everything he’d been told to do, went clean out of his mind. He dropped like deadweight, had terrible form and a lousy landing. Still, he made it to the ground, conscious and in one piece. It was far from his worst jump.
That was still ahead of him.
* * *
So many levels of hell, so little time.
After airborne came a monthlong selection course called Ranger Indoctrination Program (or RIP, later renamed Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, or RASP), designed to weed out weaker candidates. They didn’t learn all that much—basic map-reading, some weapons-handling, all pretty basic. Essentially it was thirty-days-plus of brutal PTs. The first day they had a half-mile run carrying a hundred pounds of gear. The class started out with some eighty-five guys; sixty didn’t make it to day two.
Indoc is to ranger candidates what BUD/S is to aspiring SEALs. About midway through Indoc comes the part everyone dreads, a phase called Cole Range, which is the rangers’ version of what the SEALs call Hell Week.
Cole Range itself is a remote training area off of Fort Benning. They don’t drive you out there. You ruck out.
Nick and his compadres packed up everything they’d need to last a week out there, and got going. They had to be at the compound within three hours or be automatically kicked out. It was a little over twelve miles.
It was hot that day, close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A little past halfway to the range, one guy started muttering; no one had any idea what he was saying. A minute later, he was screaming. Then he fainted, hit the dirt, came to, and started begging, “Please, someone, stick a thermometer in my ass.”
They took his boots off and discovered that his feet were soaked in sweat. He hadn’t wanted his feet to get wet, so he’d wrapped them in plastic wraps.
Seriously? thought Nick. Bad idea, dude.
They put a thermometer in his ass, all right; his core temp was over 105. They hauled him off to a hospital and kicked him out of the military.
When the group reached the range they were all so dehydrated that Nick’s muscles started locking up worse than he had ever experienced, before or since. He got them unlocked fast. As soon as they arrived they had PT: push-ups, sit-ups, running, and more running—buddy runs, pick up and carry the biggest guy you can find, carry him for two miles, run back, more push-ups, more sit-ups, more running. Every time they thought they were finished, it kept going. It went on for eight hours.
Finally it was time to sleep. Only they were not permitted to lie down, or even to sit down. The only option was to sleep standing up. And they had just fifteen minutes to do that, after which it was—guess what?—time for more PTs.
It was a never-ending cycle, and it lasted for nearly a week.
At one point the training cadre brought out some hot pizza, along with coffee and hot chocolate, and damn, it smelled so good. All they’d had to eat at this point was a small portion of MREs: Meals Ready to Eat, the standard military ration. (I’ve lived on MREs for months at a time while being on a compound with servicemen of multiple branches and nationalities, and here’s what I learned: you can’t trade that crap. You can’t even give it away.)
“Hey, guys,” one of the instructors said. “You want some pizza? It’s right here. Just have one guy come out here, and he can grab some for the rest of you.”
Nick knew damn well that if you fell for that one and got out of formation, BOOM, you were out, gone, kicked out of the class. You never break formation. That pizza was not there for them to eat. It was there to torture them.
One day, they finally gathered up those students who hadn’t yet dropped out and said, “All right, guys, it’s over. You made it through Cole Range. We’re going back to the base so you can clean your weapons, get some real chow, and then go on with the rest of your training.”
They all clambered into the back of a big deuce-and-a-half and it took off. The exhausted candidates were all high-fiving each other even as they collapsed in the bed of the truck. “Yeah! We made it!”
Half an hour later, the truck jerked to a stop. The tarp covering the back lifted, and light poured into the bed of the truck. The men spilled out and looked around.
They were at Cole Range.
It wasn’t over at all. They were right back where they’d started; they’d been driven in a big circle. Their instructors were just messing with them.
“I can’t do this,” Nick heard one of his classmates moan. “I’m fuckin’ outta here.” His spirit was broken.
They lost quite a few guys that day.
A few days later they were taken outside in the rain and set up to practice doing field emergency trauma work. There they were: exhausted, hadn’t slept in days, trying to put IVs into each other and sticking nasalpharyngeal airway tubes (NPAs) down each other’s noses. Getting it all wrong. It was ugly.
A lot of guys quit that day, too.
Nick’s ranger indoc class started out with just over eighty rangers. When he graduated, there were only himself and six others left.
* * *
Advanced military training doesn’t just beat on you, it examines you, explores your every weakness, hunts for your greatest vulnerability, and then attacks you right there in that soft spot.
For some, guys who are already in tremendous physical shape when they start, things like Hell Week and Cole Range are no big deal—they just kind of go on autopilot and tough it through—but they freak out when it comes to the pool competence testing. You’re sitting there at the pool’s edge with your back turned, listening to your classmates basically being drowned. It washes a lot of guys out. For me, pool comp was no big deal; I grew up in the water. But I didn’t have a lot of firearms experience growing up and was clearly one of the shittier shots in my class, a defect that nearly crushed me, until I made the conscious decision to be the one who crushed it.
Everyone has his soft spot.
For Nick Irving it was heights.
Making it through Indoc meant Nick had earned his ranger scroll and was now put on active duty as a ranger and into rotation for a six-month training workup. Within days after being assigned to Charlie Company at Fort Benning, Nick participated in an airfield seizure exercise. This is one of the rangers’ specialties. When war breaks out, the rangers jump in and capture an airfield, paving the way for other troops to enter, supply lines to flow, and all the rest of what it takes to mount a full-fledged military operation.
They were scheduled for a night jump. Nick was serving as a 240 gunner. The M240 is a serious weapon (the same machine gun the front door gunner on Rob Furlong’s Chinook manned back in 2002), almost as tall as Nick himself, and weighs about twenty-five pounds, not including ammo. With the gun, all the equipment he would need on the op, assault packs attached to his shins with a thousand rounds packed into them, his usual kit stuffed inside his gun case, helmet, night vision, and parachute on his back, Nick was carrying a good hundred pounds or more of extra weight.
As the C-17 climbed Nick told himself, Hey, toughen up, it’s your first big jump with battalion. They got the green light to jump. He turned to the open doorway to jump out and saw nothing but a wall of blackness. He tried his best not to think about the fact that they were traveling at over five hundred miles an hour and that he was high above the earth. This was a lot higher than the roof on his house, that was for damn sure.
He jumped.
Feeling the wind smash against his face, he began his count:
One thousand … two thousand … three thousand …
By four thousand his chute was supposed to open. Right on cue, he felt the jolt of something release and shoot up behind him.
Everything’s cool, he told himself. He should be able to steer now. But that wasn’t happening.
Five thousand …
Man, he was still hearing an awful lot of wind.
He realized he was also hearing his teammates shouting at him over his comm: “Pull your reserve! Reserve, reserve!” He looked up and saw not a big wide-open canopy but something that looked like a cigarette roll. A cloth cigar. His parachute hadn’t opened. There was nothing up there but a long roll of fabric fluttering uselessly in the wind.
Oh, shit.
He reached down and pulled his reserve parachute—and everything went into super-slow-motion as
he saw a spring pop out—
and the parachute slip down to the level of his legs—
and then unbutton itself—
and then rise and unfurl above his head—
Except that the risers, those strings that attach to the actual fabric of the parachute, had somehow gotten wrapped under his left leg and his weapons case, so as they shot upward they also yanked Nick’s left leg upward. Now he was barreling toward the ground while doing a full split, his right leg dangling straight down and his left leg pulled up so far that he could kiss his left knee. He couldn’t even begin to steer, let alone prepare for a proper landing. And damn, did that leg hurt, felt like it was being pulled right off.
Nick looked down (“Don’t look down!”) and saw an expanse of concrete runway leaping up to meet him. He saw a few F-16s parked nearby, shrouded in the semidark. And a lot of concrete.
He thought: This is going to be really bad.
He thought: I’m gonna break my leg, I know this for a fact.
Reserve parachutes are not designed to steer like the primary, but Nick kept struggling anyway, desperate to shift his trajectory off that concrete target, trying his damnedest to pull on that reserve and get some horizontal movement.
No dice.
He tried to bend his right leg a little, to help absorb the impending impact. It didn’t move. Now he was at hundred feet … then seventy-five feet … Nick flashed on his mom, who had always said she thought his job was too dangerous. You’re too young for this, Nick, she’d said, you’re going to get hurt.
At fifty feet he said out loud, “Oh, man, my mom’s gonna kill me—”
And then he heard a loud POP!
That was my knee, he thought. So much for that leg.
The reserve chute, still aggressively doing its job of grabbing at the wind, now began to drag Nick down the runway, shredding his clothes and rubbing the soles of his boots against the tarmac so hard that they heated to the melting point. Nick struggled to disconnect the chute, but the way it was wrapped around him made it impossible to pop the straps, and it continued scraping him down the airfield. He tried to reach for a knife he had, but it was connected to his boot, which was still stuck inside one of the risers.
He was terrified. There was nothing he could do but go along for the ride. He visualized the headline: ON FIRST DAY AS ARMY RANGER, NICK IRVING PRONOUNCED DEAD.
Finally he ground to a halt.
Men from his unit came running over to him, utterly freaked out. “Ohmigod, dude, are you okay?”
Nick lay prone, a sharp pain knifing through his back. His team circled him and one started examining his knee. Miraculously, it wasn’t broken. That POP! he’d heard was not his knee going after all, it was the sound of his boots smacking into the concrete. From his waistline down, his clothes were split open and in tatters. He was covered in black skid marks from being dragged down the runway. The soles of his boots had melted and were peeling off. He was a mess—but nothing was broken.
They said, “Are you good?”
He figured he had a choice.
He could say, “Fuck this, that’s it, I’m never doing another jump! Sorry, guys—I’m outta here!” Or he could suck it up.
Which, when you put it that way, was no choice at all.
“Yeah,” he said as casually as he could. “I’m good.” He pulled himself up onto his feet, collected his scattered kit and scattered wits, and limped over to rejoin the rest of the group. Alive, and changed forever.
* * *
Returning from Australia with his useless shoulder, Rob Furlong finished up his tour in Bosnia, then went back to Canada, where he kept up a rigorous schedule of physical therapy. As soon as his arm healed enough to shoot, he was back on the range. He sailed through his three-week jump course and went on to Alpha Company, Third Battalion’s airborne unit, where everyone immediately hated him because he was a new guy. He kept his mouth shut, swept floors, maintained equipment, and did his best to remain invisible. When the timing seemed right, he expressed an interest in going into the reconnaissance training program. Command said yes.
Recce is a two-month course, heavily steeped in ambush and raids. It embraced land navigation (much like BUD/S) and survival, airborne ops, water insertions, and more. The washout rate was high.
This is the point where the training goes beyond difficult and starts reaching into your bone marrow. For SEALs, it’s BUD/S and the advanced SEAL training that follows. For rangers, it’s Ranger School (still ahead for Nick). For Rob it was recce school. While it lasted for only two months, the pace was nonstop—no easing up on weekends, no resting up at night, no classroom academics to vary the pace. It was one constant, unbroken test of performance. No food or sleep for five days at a time (water only), loaded backpacks, and complex, exacting missions that brooked no margin of error. Recce was the first time Rob ever fell asleep while walking. He describes those two months as the most physically demanding thing he has ever experienced.
Rob’s recce school took place in Fort Lewis, Washington, supported by a cadre of Green Berets. It was October 2000, and in Fort Lewis in October all it does is rain. The men were drenched the entire time. At one point the Green Berets gathered them all into a bivouac deep in the woods. The guys were all soaking wet, freezing cold, and miserable. Right in the midst of the bivouac they had a big fire going, all the instructors standing around taking it easy.
Hang on, thought Rob, something’s wrong with this picture. Not only were their torturers not in their usual pissed-off mood, they seem to be kind of joking around and enjoying themselves. And why were they giving the students a chance to take the chill out of their bones?
“Hey,” said one of the instructors, “we brought some lunch in for you guys.”
Nobody said a word. True? A ray of sunshine in the gloom? Or a trick?
The instructor turned to one of Rob’s teammates and said, “Hey, Hagland, there’s a blue glow stick there, just down the path. That’s where your lunch is. Run down and grab it.”
Hagland disappeared down the path. A moment later the others heard him exclaim, “What the fuck?” Then they heard some thrashing around, followed by a sound nobody expected: panicked clucking. Which then stopped as abruptly as it had started.
A minute later Hagland came tromping back up the path, looking pissed off as a thundercloud. In one hand he held what looked like a rock but turned out to be a potato. In the other, the warm, limp chicken whose neck he’d just broken. That was their dinner. Each man got a raw potato and a live chicken. That was it for the next four days.
It was very realistic training, and it taught them serious escape-and-evasion tactics. How are you to survive? When you’re out in the wild, on your own in hostile territory, a chicken and a potato would be a damn good meal. In fact, in those circumstances you’d be lucky to have such luxuries—as Rob would later learn firsthand.
Of all his experiences in military training, Rob says that recce course was the worst.
“You’re sitting there hating life,” he says. “It’s exciting to be learning all these crazy survival tactics, but at the same time you’re saying, ‘Why the fuck am I doing this to myself?’”
The misery notwithstanding, Rob did quite well on this course, and when he got back to Alpha Company in Canada he found the other men now had a whole new level of respect for him. Still a fairly junior guy, he’d done well in his shooting career, gone to an airborne company and done well there, got sent on to the recce course and excelled there, too.
Still, for Rob passing recce was just another stepping-stone.
Next stop: recce platoon.
The PPCLI’s recce platoon operates on its own, supporting the battalion in whatever capacity they need. If one of the battalion’s companies, for example, is planning an airborne or water insertion and needs reconnaissance done beforehand, they call on recce.
The recce platoon breaks down into three teams.
There’s a long-range patrol team, which specializes in patrol for extended durations. These are the guys who do the quintessential reconnaissance missions, slipping in behind enemy lines and staying there lengthy periods of time. They specialize in stealth, observation, and survival skills.
Then there are the pathfinders, extremely highly trained forces schooled in doing beachheads and water insertions, airborne and helo ops, sub insertions, everything—similar to our SEALs.
And then there are the snipers.
Even within the recce platoon, the snipers are a breed unto themselves. You don’t just come out of the recce course and head right into the sniper cell. Typically you have to go through additional sniper training before you are even considered as having a shot at it. For that matter, most recce course graduates don’t even go into the recce platoon at all. Making it through the recce course simply makes you recce-qualified. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll go anywhere after that. And Rob wasn’t about to make his ambitions public. He knew what the deal was: stay quiet, be professional, do your job, and wait for your chance, because there are other guys ahead of you. He knew if he was seen as acting like he was trying to jump ahead over other people in his unit, all that would get him would be a bad name. He had to quietly prove himself and wait for his opportunity.
What Rob didn’t know, however, was that people high up in the system had been watching him for some time. Word had gotten around that this kid could shoot, and that he was made of pretty solid stuff.
In 1999, when he did his Bosnia tour, he’d been invited to participate in a two-week concentration course with a wide range of snipers, including Canadians, Brits, and Czechs. He went with another Canadian, neither of them sniper-qualified at that point, and while they did not exactly kick the shit out of the more experienced Brits and Czechs, they held their own. Evidently that had been a sort of litmus test to see if they might be sniper material down the road. Rob didn’t learn this until he’d already made it through the recce course, but these higher-ups had already decided that if he made it through recce, they were going to pull him into the sniper cell and start his on-the-job training right away.
When he heard the news, Rob was elated, ecstatic, on top of the world. Yet at the same time, he knew that making it through recce and being inducted into the sniper cell was only the beginning. It was like finishing BUD/S: sure, it’s hard, and yes, it’s amazing when you make it through, but it’s really only an entrance exam. One seriously sadistic entrance exam, but still, just the beginning.
Once you’re through it, that’s when the real training starts.
* * *
Like Rob Furlong, Jason Delgado already knew exactly where he was aiming the day he walked into boot camp. After basic came School of Infantry (SOI), seven weeks of living the marine life, more battle tactics and weapons training and all the rest, and of course, more brutal PTs. All of this, Delgado ate up with a spoon and couldn’t wait to get through. He had an endgame in mind.
The Corps is renowned for its scout sniper program; the marines have been at the forefront of the U.S. military sniper experience since Vietnam. Jason may have landed in the marines more or less by accident, after the doors to both the army and the SEALs were closed to him, but it was turning out to be the perfect path.
When you first start your marine sniper training you’re considered a PIG—a Professionally Instructed Gunman. It’s only when you graduate sniper school that you become a HOG—a Hunter of Gunmen. When Jason was going through his training pipeline, young PIGs went through an indoc for the sniper program that was organic to their particular battalion. Some indocs lasted one day, some two or three; it depended on the individual unit. While the indocs were short, they were hellacious. Of the eighteen or twenty aspiring PIGs who might try out, typically three or four would make it through, with all the rest being DOR (drop on request).
Jason had no problem with the physical demands, but he tripped over his own personality. A HOG named Rose was counting off Jason’s pull-ups. At one point, Rose called out the same number twice in a row, and then again, and then again—pull-up after pull-up, he was counting out the same damn number. Delgado thought the guy was trying to disqualify him because he was Hispanic. He lost his cool and started trash-talking the instructor.
Of course, it had nothing to do with his ethnicity. That was just Delgado’s own bullshit that the instructor was triggering—and not by accident, either. Instructor Rose was probing, pushing, looking for a chink in the PIG’s armor. He found it.
They have a saying in the Corps: Nothing is sacred. Nothing and no one. That was part of the training—anything could be taken from you, including your pride, your self-esteem, your composure, and still you had to perform. They would make jokes about anything and everything: mothers, wives, girlfriends, kids—and it would get raunchy. You couldn’t get upset or react at all. The young marines did this to each other over and over, to the point where they couldn’t tell if they were making you mad or not, because you would just laugh and play along. It taught them equanimity under pressure, tolerance, and the invaluable life skill of not taking oneself too seriously. More importantly, it taught them to be able to perform in any situation, no matter what.
“It forced me to lose that chip on my shoulder,” says Delgado. “I learned that it gets you nowhere. Do we get that racist shit thrown at us? Of course. We get it a lot. But the ones who succeed in the military are the ones who are able to let it roll off their shoulder.”
It was a valuable lesson. It also got Jason flushed from indoc.
Getting a “no” vote from the indoc board was one of the most painful things that ever happened to Jason. It was also one of the best things that ever happened to him.
He went back to his platoon and spent the next year proving himself. He took over as fire team leader and went on to be selected to become a MOUT (military operations in urban terrain) instructor. MOUT was a fairly new thing, a Corps-wide program incorporating close quarters battle (CQB) and all kinds of urban-focused raid techniques, from isolating targets to using grappling ladders, as well as teaching infrastructure management skills in areas like sewage, plumbing, and water purification. It was a hell of a leadership role, especially for someone so young, and Jason earned a lot of people’s respect.
He also never lost sight of his goal. He wanted to be a sniper.
One of his buddies had made it through indoc and gotten into the sniper platoon, and through him Jason ended up befriending a few of the senior snipers. As MOUT instructor, he had by this time taught a number of snipers. He’d built a résumé and a reputation. Most importantly, he’d worked on getting that chip off his shoulder.
Finally the day came: he went back in for a second indoc, this one lasting two days. At the end, when it came time for the indoc board to vote on who got through, Jason got voted down once again. Only this time the platoon’s chief sniper, Jack Coughlin, overrode their vote. “Look,” said Jack, “this is the kid’s second time through. He’s worked his ass off to get here, and humbled himself enough to come back and try again. He’s got heart.”
By the skin of his teeth and on the strength of his effort, Jason had made it through on his second try—but it wasn’t over.
That second indoc didn’t produce enough PIGs to fill out their sniper platoon, so command decided they would hold one more indoc. And they weren’t going to have Jason and the other PIGs sitting around doing nothing while these new guys were going through the mill, so even though he’d already passed, Jason would now be going through yet one more indoc. Only this one was different. The platoon, as it happened, was going on deployment to Okinawa, Jason’s first tour of active duty. This next indoc would take place over there. And it wouldn’t last one day, or two days, or even three days.
This one lasted six months.
They would go out into the jungle for five days, six days at a time, come back to the marine base for a day, clean up, go out into town and mess around for a while, then go back out and do it all over again. They practically lived in the jungle.
Each morning began with a ruck run for three, four, five miles or whatever the instructor felt like that morning. In each man’s rucksack went a PIG egg: a sandbag filled to capacity and wrapped in duct tape. Purpose? None; just extra deadweight. Everywhere you went, a PIG egg went with you. If you happened to be the one carrying radio equipment, if you were the one bringing extra water, didn’t matter: you also had to carry this frigging forty-pound PIG egg. And the humidity level in Okinawa was insane. They would come back looking like they’d run through the ocean.
The classes showed the other side of marine training: brutality mixed with an obsessive insistence on perfection. They had classes back to back, every day, sometimes the same class they’d already had before. Sniper school itself was only twelve weeks long, but this indoc was six full months, so they learned everything three or four times over, to the point where they could recite the class material verbatim. In fact, that was one of their requirements. They couldn’t mess up an “is,” or an “as,” or a “the.” Everything had to be in place, even when reciting multiple paragraphs at a time.
And they were tested, constantly and mercilessly. They’d be out driving somewhere in the city and one of the senior HOGs would suddenly say, “We just passed seven cars—give me the make and model of each one, and who was driving.” Their brains were in constant training as much as their bodies. It was like full-fledged sniper school, only without being sniper school.
When it came time to go to the actual sniper school, Delgado would be way more than ready. At least, that’s what he thought.
* * *
By the time Nick Irving joined his battalion in late 2005, the Iraq War was in full engagement. After that six-month training workup (with that terrible jump), Nick deployed to Iraq for three months as a gunner and Stryker driver, then returned to the States for six more months of training, then back to Iraq for a second deployment, and then back stateside again. That cycle—six months training rotating with three or four months deployment—repeated itself until 2008, when he got the news that on returning home from this deployment (his fourth), he was going to Ranger School.
Shit, was his first and only thought.
Irving had his scroll, but not yet that coveted RANGER tab on his uniform, the one that says you’ve been through Ranger School and are now a full-fledged ranger. Still, nobody exactly looks forward to Ranger School.
If ranger indoc was hell, the sixty-two-day Ranger School was that experience all over again only at a deeper level. Averaging fifteen to thirty minutes of sleep a night (and some nights none at all), Nick soon lost all the weight he’d picked up back in basic.
The low point came while they were in mountain phase, probably the toughest phase of the three (land phase, mountain phase, desert phase). He was carrying around 120 pounds’ worth of gear, up and down the mountains. It was bitter cold. By this time he was mostly in a semiconscious state, something like sleepwalking. They were walking up a mountain slope and finally reached a resting spot. Then it was Nick’s turn to pull security. He stood up, sleepwalked over to their perimeter, and stood guard. He was dimly aware of a thought going through his mind: I’m so … fucking … tired.
Nick looked down, and blinked. At least he thought he’d blinked. In reality, the moment he shut his eyes he was fast asleep, and was able to grab several fractions of a second of deep, satisfying repose until he abruptly woke up when his face was six inches from hitting the ground. And then, BLAM, it did hit the ground.
Damn, he thought. I just fell asleep.
He started getting up, but by the time he had one foot under him he already knew he was going to fall asleep again. To shorten the distance, he stayed right there, pulling security on one knee, rather than going all the way up to a standing position.
And sure enough, fell asleep again.
This time, after waking up as he hit the ground, he thought, Screw it, I’m just going to lie down. He figured, if the instructors saw him, maybe it would look like he was lying prone and aiming his weapon at something.
He got down on the ground, doing his best to assume an aiming-my-weapon-at-something pose, and looked up at a nearby bush—and right before his eyes, the bush started to move! In the semidarkness, the vague shape was resolving into a figure … and then all at once he realized, it wasn’t a bush. It was George Foreman, crouched down on one knee!
Holy shit, thought Nick. It’s George Foreman!
He looked around. Was anyone else seeing this? And what the hell was George Foreman doing out there?
Then he realized, George Foreman was a well-known motivational speaker. Maybe they’d sent him out here onto the mountain to give them a motivational talk. Help them keep going.
Maybe they’d sent him out here to give them some food.
And then the figure began to speak.
“Hey, man,” it said. “Listen here—you want to get yourself one of these George Foreman grills.”
“Fuck, yeah,” croaked Nick. He looked at where George was pointing and saw that he was holding a big, juicy steak in his hand. Then Foreman opened up that George Foreman grill and tossed the steak on there, where it immediately began to sizzle. It looked just amazing, and smelled even more so. Nick licked his lips. He was practically drooling.
No, not practically drooling. He was drooling. No doubt about it. He just could not wait to bite into that steak.
And then the figure started fading away. A moment later, it was just a bush.
Nick felt so sad he practically cried.
On his first day home after graduating from Ranger School and earning his ranger tab, the first thing Nick did was go to Walmart, buy himself a $29.99 George Foreman grill, and make himself a big juicy steak on that motherfucker. He still has that grill.
Nick wasn’t the only one who hallucinated his way through Ranger School. Another day during that mountain phase he was walking along a ridgeline when the guy he was with suddenly took off, sprinting full out along the cliff. For a moment Nick thought he was going to jump off, that he meant to kill himself. Then he was sure of it, because as the guy approached the cliff’s edge he actually accelerated.
But he wasn’t suicidal, he was a football player, and he’d just seen his quarterback throw him a long pass (as he later told Nick). He was going to win the game.
The pass flew off the side of the mountain, and the wide receiver lunged after it. Hurling his body off the side of the mountain and spreading out his arms, he caught the ball. And took a hell of a fall. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt too badly. He fell asleep halfway through the fall, so his body stayed loose, and when he eventually hit the slope he just rolled.
During mountain phase Nick began picking up a bad stench of something, an ammonia smell. He realized what he was smelling was himself: his body eating away at its own muscle. At one point, desperate for some water, he drank from a mountain stream without first purifying the wilderness water with the mandatory iodine tablets. Oops. Back in camp he discovered he’d contracted a bad infection and parasites. Having by now lost some forty pounds, he found to his horror that he couldn’t absorb anything from his food. Everything ran right through him, even water. One of the guys managed to sneak some pizza into their camp one day and they each had about a half a slice. As soon as Nick ate his share it came right back out the other end virtually intact.
Uh-oh, he thought. This is not good.
Medics gave him three or four IVs back to back and shot him full of penicillin, and he was back out in the field within a few hours, but he still couldn’t eat a thing, and he was still hurting. The average adult male needs a minimum intake of about 1,800 calories per day. They were getting about half that, along with an insane level of physical stress, and no sleep, sometimes for two days straight. If you needed sleep, you had to figure out how to sleep—you guessed it—standing up. Nick heard quite a few bodies hit the ground.
One classmate lost so much muscle in his neck that he could no longer support the weight of his head. He had to walk around holding his head up with his hand, and if he wanted to look at something, he had to literally take his head with his hands and move it in that direction. He ended up washing out and being sent home.
After graduating from Ranger School, Nick didn’t have any feeling in his toes. He didn’t get that feeling back until five or six years later, long after he’d been out of the military altogether.
After getting out of the service he went in to the VA for an exam. When the doctor looked at his X-rays and tests he said, “My God, you look like an eighty-year-old man!” He told Nick that in his experience, Ranger School takes an average of about seven years off a person’s expected life span.
A lot of people don’t grasp this. They think you go through BUD/S or Ranger School or Delta training, and you just tough it through and come out the other end stronger than ever. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t simply survive it; it beats you up.
It is, in a word, hell. And you do it, because that’s what it takes to prepare you for what you’ll face in the field, when you go into battle to fight for your country. It’s a trade-off we all make willingly: you become a highly skilled warrior, but at the same time it also damages you. And that damage is permanent.
* * *
Naval Special Warfare has its own legendary brand of hell. Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S, is a seven-month marathon of physical and mental punishment, carried out under maximum stress and in every conceivable environment, designed to weed out every single soul not driven enough, fanatical enough, and downright crazy enough to push himself all the way through it and out the other end. Its attrition rate is legendary. Actual death is rare—but it has happened. It nearly happened to Alex Morrison in ’88.
During the land navigation portion of the training, Alex’s class was taken out to San Clemente Island, aka “the Rock,” a godforsaken place some eighty miles off the coast of San Diego where SEAL students are taken to be trained. (And by “trained” I mean stretched to human limits and beyond.) I remember our first day out at the Rock with my own BUD/S class in 1998, exactly one decade later. One of our instructors lined us up and said, “Hey, guys, I want you to remember this: out here, no one can hear you scream.” He wasn’t kidding. It was brutal enough when I was out there. I can’t even imagine how tough it was ten years earlier, in an era of significantly less oversight.
One morning they did an eight- or ten-mile run before breakfast (standard operating procedure). Alex didn’t eat much when they got back. From there they went out to the demolition range to practice the fine art of blowing things up. (Don’t forget, the D in BUD/S stands for demolition.) While on the demo range, Alex committed the unpardonable sin of briefly kneeling.
Punishment time. His instructor took him out to Frog Hill, a small mountain in the middle of the Rock, and directed him to perform a “flight.” This consisted of carrying an aircraft pallet up Frog Hill and back down in X amount of time. Only this instructor also had Alex strap onto his back a 180-pound dummy they fondly referred to as the Chaplain.
Already fairly well spent from the run and lack of food, Alex carried the Chaplain up the hill, but as he reached the top the dummy slipped and he dropped it.
“Do it again,” called out the instructor.
He dragged the Chaplain down to the bottom of the hill, strapped him on tight again, then headed back up the hill. By this time he was thoroughly exhausted, and so, naturally, he dropped the Chaplain once more. The instructor didn’t have to call out the command; Alex heard it in his head. Do it again.
“You need to quit, Morrison,” the instructor yelled up the hill, as Alex began dragging his burdens back down for another try. “You need to quit. Why don’t you just quit?”
“Fuck you,” Alex managed to croak. “I’m going to die here.”
At this point he was crawling with the dummy on his back, and probably starting to slip into some degree of insulin shock.
Finally, the instructor realized he wasn’t going to get Alex to quit, so he stopped him. “You’re done,” he said, and left him to crawl his way back to base.
When Alex reached his barracks, he crawled up onto his cot and lay there in the fetal position. After a while their class corpsman came over and said, “Hey, man, what’s up with you?” Alex didn’t answer; he didn’t need to. His pupils were dilated, his temperature was dropping, and he was close to unresponsive. The corpsman didn’t need a map to see where this was going. They ended up medevacking Alex out of there for emergency medical care. If they hadn’t, he would have been gone within hours.
As they bundled him onto a stretcher for transport, one of his teammates got down close to one ear and said, “Hey, Alex. Alex! Are you quitting?”
“No!” Alex gasped. “No, no, no, no, no…”
Over the next few hours, Alex was given several IVs and then, when he had recovered enough to manage it, some food. A brief rest.
And then he was back in the air, headed back to the Rock.
At the start of his training, Alex found the runs excruciatingly difficult. He was in every goon squad, the guy at the back of the class who was always being punished with extra flutter kicks in the cold surf while everyone else was sent off to eat lunch. By the end of BUD/S he was near the top of his class.
He says his most satisfying moment was completing a timed run up at the front of the class, having not only finished at the top, but having finished at the top and still not feeling completely crushed by it.
“That sense of absolute confidence, that I can do anything, bring it on! feeling,” he says. “That was one the most exhilarating feelings I’ve ever had.”
That is the purpose of all the hell: discovering that you have what it takes to come out the other side.
* * *
You’ve probably read training stories like this before, or perhaps you’ve seen boot camp sequences in movies, and it probably seems insane, as if the instructors are being sadistic sons of bitches, pushing their victims beyond the point of exhaustion out of pure meanness, actually trying to flunk them out. It sure as hell felt like that to each of us, as we were going through it.
It all feels different later on, once you are actually in combat.
Looking back, after coming out on the other side and going on to active duty, you realize that those instructors aren’t being sadistic at all. They’re not trying to kill you. They’re not even trying to hurt you.
They’re doing two things.
First, they’re there to find out what you’re made of. Because if you’ll buckle under the pressure of brutal PTs back in some safe training camp in America, you are without question going to buckle in combat in some other part of the world where people are shooting at you, setting off explosives at you, and doing their level best to kill you. The hell of training is nothing compared to the actual hell of combat.
And second, they’re there to help you find out what you’re made of.
We all learned a great deal in our various training programs, both basic and advanced. A massive amount of subject matter, ten thousand detailed and exacting behavior patterns, a ton of mechanical knowledge and technical skills. But the most important thing we learned was something about ourselves: no matter what they did to us, we were still here.
Yes, the physical punishment is brutal, but that isn’t where the hell resides. Your physical body can go way further than you’ve come to believe. The boundaries that Spec Ops training pushes up against are not limits of the body, but limits of the mind.
The decision to become part of the most elite fighting force on the earth is not a decision that happens once. It’s a decision you make over and over again, every day, sometimes dozens of times a day. In the process, you become more than simply a highly trained warfighter. You become a force of nature.