LET ME BACK UP A BIT, BECAUSE IT’S IMPORTANT HERE TO talk a little about how SEAL training works. In martial arts—which was part of said training—they have a saying: “A black belt is a white belt who didn’t give up.” Put another way, I once heard a fellow SEAL describe it as having a million-dollar dream that you achieve with a minimum-wage work ethic. Both are very true. It’s a long, hard haul … and worth every challenging second.
SEAL candidates have to start off with the ability to swim five hundred yards using either combat side or breast stroke, perform at least forty-two push-ups and fifty sit-ups in less than two minutes for each set of exercises, complete at least six pull-ups from a dead hang (not with your hands curled toward you, the easy way), and run one and a half miles in boots in less than ten and a half minutes. Until you’ve had those boots turn from urethane and rubber to iron, drawing protests from every muscle between your ankles and your hips (rubbing your skin raw and bloody at some point of contact if the laces aren’t tied exactly right), until your lungs have had to wheeze and fight for every breath, until your brain is forced to act as the tough drill instructor against its own self-interest—until that happens, you cannot know the meaning of a true aerobic, cardiovascular workout. And until you add, “Your life and the life of your buddies depends on this,” you cannot know what it’s like to be a SEAL.
That’s why anyone who wants to join the SEALs is tested regarding whether they can meet these initial standards. We weren’t allowed to take breaks during the tests themselves; although, there are short standing breaks after each set of drills. I never knew that relief could be had on my feet, fully geared, until I received those respites. More than four in ten candidates drop out during this stage of training.
To make matters worse, each of these tests is performed one after the other. When I did them, officers stood over each one of us, making sure every rep was done precisely to navy standards. The navy wanted a high level of baseline fitness before it even considered whether or not to whip us into the shape needed to become a SEAL. When I would later become a SEAL instructor, I discovered that the screening test is designed to indicate whether you are qualified to even go to SEAL training and is not a measure of being a SEAL at all. It is simply a test to find out whether you will have a good chance of making it through the first day without getting hurt.
I’ve used the phrase “embrace the beast” to describe my approach to these physical ordeals. You learn not only to endure the burn but to like it, to look forward to it, to know that it is building you into something greater, making you a piece of something truly formidable—the best of the best. That’s a helluva motivation! You know, when people look at a mosaic, they see a carefully calculated organized design; they probably don’t consider—should not consider—all the forces that went into the painstaking creation of each tile.
I have to laugh. People have suggested, politely, that an individual has to have a touch of masochism to put themselves through extreme physical training. I respond, politely, that it isn’t true. Your body is but a conduit to boosting the mind and soul. That’s where the real boost, the real strength resides. You’ve seen those little desktop toys, “Newton’s Cradle,” the suspended metal balls that pass kinetic energy from one to the other? It’s like that. The body takes the “hit” to elevate every piece of you. And remember, it’s not just about you. It’s about you and your team. Your growth helps support and motivate the others, and their experiences boost you. You become attuned to that kind of exchange. Today, on the campaign stump or on the House floor, that’s one of the qualities that allows me to plug into people instantly, to relate to them, to hear them, to care about them.
Those of us who satisfied those foundational training requirements, as well as those who passed the written tests and the interviews, were accepted into the program. The one benefit—if you can call it that—to SEAL training over most other specialized combat unit training is that you eat. A lot. SEAL trainees get four meals a day, because it’s not possible to endure the level of physical strain the program requires without calories fueling your efforts. The colder the water, the more calories you burn.
Food plays a different role in SEAL training than, say, the Army Rangers. The Ranger training program is shorter—about two months in total—and it focuses on endurance with less food. The training reflects the missions Rangers undertake: short bursts under low-supply conditions. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’ll do: if you’re a sports fan, it’s the difference between scoring a touchdown off a kickoff in football and playing a quarter of full-court basketball. Each requires a specific set of skills. The Rangers score the TDs. The SEALs play hoop. Both play for keeps.
In the SEALs, there’s a focus on building strength—both mental and physical. Rangers tend to lose weight during training. SEALs tend to gain muscle mass in training becuase they get to eat as much as they want. The only way SEALs lose weight during training is if they start out heavy—and chances are if they’re that heavy, they’re going to have a lot of trouble passing the above-mentioned basic requirements.
While there was a big jump in physical intensity upon my joining the SEALs, I had at least a little experience with increased calorie intake. During summers when I was in high school, I had a job washing dishes. When I figured out that I could have a future playing college football, I focused on training hard and gaining weight. When I first went on dishwashing duty, I would grab a gallon of milk from the fridge and finish it along with leftover steak and crab. A gallon of milk alone is twenty-five hundred calories, and the steak and crab depended on how much the customers left on their plates. Even back then I was used to eating four meals a day, and sometimes I’d grab a sandwich in between. My goal was to consume ten thousand calories a day. That’s about eight thousand calories more than the average, sedentary male teen.
While we’re on the subject of other Special Forces units, in addition to the SEALs, the army’s Special Forces and elite counterpart is as good as they come. The selection courses are very different from that of the physical demands of SEAL training, but the outcome produces the right type of warrior for their missions. Those who don’t like the water and the waves best go army. A difference in selection is that the elite SEAL Team draws only from other SEAL teams, whereas any soldier in the army can request a chance at selection in the army’s most elite force; a Ranger, Special Forces, a cook—are all allowed to apply. The training is shorter, and there’s no high-intensity, high-stress week designed to weed people out at the start of it like in the SEALs. At the end of the army’s elite training, a group of senior operators reviews your performance and determines whether you’re in or not. It’s completely subjective but proven effective over time.
You could get bounced and never know why. The SEALs? If you don’t make the grade, you know why. You know as it’s happening. I can’t say which selection program is better or if better really matters. I have operated with both units and respect their capabilities and commitment to excellence. I do know the SEAL selection produces the results required to win.
Are there exceptions to the normal screening process? Rarely, but they can happen. SEAL selection to BUD/S is based on an interview, and there’s a little bit of good-old-boy network involved in getting orders to BUD/S during the summer months instead of during the winter when the water is colder. I will talk about Hell Week later, but suffice it to say that warm pain is better than cold pain. A son-of-a-SEAL will go to the front of the line, as will Naval Academy graduates. But if you’re a team player who passed all the tests and have competitive scores, chances are you will get orders to Coronado, California, for training. The folks running the show are patriots charged with defending this nation. In the end, the deciding factor is your own ability and your own toughness, not where you are from or who you know.
Officers and enlisted men go through the same SEAL training program, but don’t think for a moment that the officers have things easier due to their rank. If anything, officers face a lot more scrutiny as they go through training … and then some. Officers and enlisted start out having to know the same skills. As they move up through the ranks, officers begin to focus more on becoming experts in planning, coordinating, and resourcing. Enlisted become experts in the arts of combat, such as explosives, sniping, and door kicking. I’ve always thought an officer’s duty is to ensure that the men have the right equipment, the right training, the right leadership, and the right rules of engagement to win decisively on the field of battle. Period. If an officer has to fire his weapon or kick the doors in, either he is not doing his job or the team is in a world of hurt.
Officers tend to complete the course with only a 20-percent attrition rate, as opposed to the 80- to 90-percent washout rate for enlisted men. Some of the difference may be attributed to the increased competitiveness for the fewer number of available officer slots or their educational and life experience, but the fact is that expectations are higher for officers. They are expected to have leadership abilities and to demonstrate them by graduating from BUD/S training.
The navy’s taken some positive steps to attract quality officers to the SEALs. When I joined, a SEAL wasn’t going to rise to admiral rank. Commander was about as high as you could expect to climb. Since then, the emphasis on special operations has allowed SEALs to become admirals. In fact, two SEALs, William H. McRaven and Eric T. Olsen, not only rose to four-star rank but also were both commanders of the US Special Operations Command, which is in charge of all Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Special Operations Forces.
But all of this assumes the officers can make it through the training. And that’s a huge “if.” In BUD/S they’re treated like any other trainee, with only slight differences: when you tell an officer to drop down and do push-ups, you say, “Drop down, sir.” As you may imagine, other words are usually used to describe a BUD/S student before the “sir.”
From the moment a candidate raises his hand to take the oath to defend the US Constitution to the time a SEAL is sent to combat may take about three and a half years of training and more than 1.5 million dollars. After a student is sent to the Navy’s Basic Boot Camp or Officer Candidate School, the next step is a short pre-BUD/S course in Coronado, followed by the infamous six-month BUD/S training program. All SEALs go through the same program in numbered classes, with BUD/S Class 1 starting in World War II. In 1985, I was assigned to BUD/S Class 136. Those of us who finished pre-BUD/S successfully could do at least sixty push-ups, sixty sit-ups, and ten pull-ups in less than two minutes. We were able to run a four-mile course in boots and pants in just over half an hour. And each of us could complete a thousand-yard swim with fins in less than twenty minutes.
There is no room for error. Any recruit who fails to meet even one of these standards sees his opportunity to start SEAL training come to an end.
I passed; although, at times that was not a foregone conclusion. As a football player, I had trained for short bursts of power with a rest between plays. My workouts were structured to give me explosiveness for about five seconds. As part of a SEAL team, there were times when I had to have quick, explosive power, such as when I loaded gear into a helicopter, or put someone over my shoulder and carried him out of harm’s way, or assaulted a building using a grapnel and line, or climbed a ladder at night … with full gear.
SEALs also drill endlessly for long-haul activities that require not only strength but also endurance. One of the reasons even the most finely tuned athletes sometimes fail SEAL training is that they aren’t used to having a fully rounded, diverse workout routine. They get injured pushing themselves in ways they hadn’t before. As I said earlier, about the difference between football and basketball: unless you’re a Bo Jackson, you can’t simply switch from one discipline to another. The physical part of a SEAL is more a jack of all trades and a master of none.
A brief digression here: I intimated previously that, as a politician, I have the honor of getting a peek into others’ lives. I learn about their work, their challenges, and their needs. When I meet firefighters, I am impressed by the fact that their training includes a lot of what I went through as a SEAL. We don’t necessarily think of that when we walk past our local firehouses, but maybe we should. Firefighters (and police officers) have a challenge most SEALs never face: they have to interact with the public. Each man and woman represents the entire department. Again, as a politician, I have learned how challenging and rewarding that job can be. But to have to do that while on alert for an emergency, to give directions to tourists—listening to them while keeping an ear glued to your radio—and remember every departmental regulation and update is not an easy task. And to do it with good humor? I think of the missions I was on or oversaw. If, in their execution, the people I was trying to help or protect were calling me names or refusing direct orders, I’m not sure I would have been so pleasant while going about my duties.
In 2001, a friend who lives in New York was in an apartment fire on the ninth floor of 666 Greenwich Street. Yes, 666. Brown smoke filled the hall after someone’s DVD player shorted, melted a plastic stand, fell on a rug, and set the place on fire. My buddy made sure the front desk had called it in, then made the choice to head for the fireproof stairwell down the hall. As he descended, he encountered a lone firefighter coming up the stairs—a young guy in his slicker and helmet carrying oxygen, axe, the works. The firefighter had already climbed eight floors and, looking at my friend, said, “Good afternoon, sir,” then continued on his way.
A couple of weeks later, those responders—FDNY Squad 18—lost seven men in the North Tower of the World Trade Center attacks. That vital young man was one of them.
I salute all the individuals who wear a uniform in the service of their communities. Supporting them, making sure they are represented in Washington, is one of my most heartfelt agendas.
Class 136 began BUD/S training with 138 students and celebrated completion of pre-BUD/S with the tradition of shaving our heads in preparation for the first day of training. It isn’t really much of a celebration—just a chance to catch your breath, like reaching a camp on your way up Mount Everest. There’s still a whole lot of mountain to go.
In BUD/S, your objective is to survive the day. Each day was filled with classroom and physical training exercises called evolutions. Our job was to get familiar with the obstacle course, swim, run, learn small-boat operations, and come together as a team. Physical endurance tests were conducted as a team but graded as individuals. Academic tests were given on tactics and procedures and even on dive physics and demolition. You were allowed to have three deficiency “chits” before you were brought before a board of Trident-wearing instructors to determine your fate. The usual determination was to pack your bags. The instructors’ job was to make reliable teammates, not friends.
On one occasion, I found that out the hard way. Our class had just run the two miles to breakfast and back when our class leader discovered that he had left the class patrol leader’s notebook at the chow hall. Fearing unpleasant repercussions, I volunteered to run back quickly to retrieve it. We had a class in five minutes, and there was not enough time to run to the chow hall and back, so we devised a hasty plan of attack. I would run and get the notebook, the class would report all present, I would stay in the locker room until the break, and then I would slip back into the class with the notebook undetected. The plan was executed brilliantly until the instructors decided to count, and my absence was recorded. Unaware of being “busted,” I hid in a locker as the instructors did a quick search of the compound for me. When the class came into the locker room at break, I was informed that the instructors had recorded me as absent with leave.
On our class schedule the next evolution was Physical Training (PT) Calisthenics in the center of the BUD/S compound called the “The Grinder.” It was called the Grinder for a reason. It was an asphalt parking lot surrounded by pull-up and dip bars. The hot California sun would bake the Grinder to the point where the heat would blister the palms of your hands as you did push-ups. It was a place where students were ground into SEALs or quit. I felt like a Christian in the Colosseum about to be fed to the lions. The instructors had positioned a truck with the tailgate down so they could get next to my “spot” on the Grinder. They ingeniously fashioned a long cord extending from the bell across the Grinder to my position so it would be always within my reach. (A trainee can ring the bell three times to signal that he wants to quit the program.) The ninety minutes of PT began and ended with me doing eight-count body-builder exercises under the personal supervision of two instructors who had a bet on how many I could do before I quit. I am not sure who came closer to the number, but I did well over eight hundred before the time expired. They had me sign the deficiency chit and then promptly tossed it into the garbage. I was lucky they liked me.
We also went through cold water “conditioning” or, as we called it, “surf torture.” We were commanded to enter the Pacific Ocean. One might think the ocean in California is warm. Even though I was from Montana and thought I knew cold water, there is no colder environment than the water in Coronado. The instructors were masters at keeping us wet and cold, and when your teeth are shaking and your body is shivering, the last thing you want to do is go back into the water and get colder. Cold water is the great separation between being a SEAL and all others. The standard procedure was to don lifejackets, line up the class at the water’s edge, interlock arms, and walk into the ocean to your waist. The instructors, using a bullhorn, would direct the class to turn around and “take seats” on the sandy bottom as the waves crashed against their backs. Of the myriad of demanding physical-training evolutions at BUD/S, the simple command spoken by the instructors to “take seats” prompted the most trainees to ring the bell three times.
Because SEALs are a maritime force, basic conditioning also focuses on water-based operations, with a huge focus on swimming and being comfortable in the water. Again, this is not only about building physical strength, but mental strength as well. It’s one thing to be an excellent swimmer, and another entirely to not panic when your hands are tied behind your back, your feet are tied together, and you’re thrown into a pool to retrieve a mask at the bottom with your mouth. All the swim laps in the world aren’t going to teach you to do that while keeping your cool. Almost seven in ten candidates who enter BUD/S don’t make it through the first phase, or Basic Conditioning Phase, with the majority deciding to drop out during the fifth week—or, as it’s known, “Hell Week.”
Hell Week was a lot more entertaining for me as an instructor than as a student. I enjoyed the former and simply survived the latter. In one sense, Hell Week is a misleading term. It’s under a week—five and a half days, to be exact. But it is, without question, hell. We exercised for twenty-plus hours a day, and we slept maybe four hours total during the entire “week.” You’re driven to beyond what you believe are your limits.
When you’re in training, you know Hell Week is coming. You don’t know the exact time, but you know it’s going to start at some point. You might be in a tent on the beach, or you might be in the barracks. Like a storm on the horizon, you know it’s coming and that the consequences are inevitable. The one thing that’s certain is that you are not going to be able to stop it any more than you can stop the waves crashing over you in the Pacific Ocean.
Hell Week starts with “breakout”—a noise-and-smoke assault on the senses sprung on the recruits using fog machines, M60 blank ammunition, and M80 explosives. It starts with a firestorm of activity designed to create confusion and stress. When it happened to me, my classmates and I stumbled out of our tent cots and were immediately ordered into the surf. Just as we were starting to go into hypothermia, we were ordered out onto the beach to low crawl while M60 machine guns blazed above us. We ran as seven-man boat crews, carrying rubber boats called Inflatable Boat Small (IBS) on our heads and paddled through the surf and back to the beach. The officer would act as the coxswain, steeing and giving commands at the rear, and the enlisted would paddle and count rhythm. We were sandy and wet, and would remain so for the week. Our legs and bodies were rubbed raw from the wet sand. We had to keep moving to avoid stiffening up … and the more we moved, the more we chafed.
Then Hell Week got serious.
The first night we carried IBSs to the other side of the Naval Amphibious Base to the steel piers designed to bring supplies from ship to shore. The evolution was simple: Conduct drown proofing in the cold water by having your feet and hands tied behind your back. When exhausted, lie naked on the cold steel pier shivering until it was time to go back into the water. I remember the BUD/S physician draped in a wool blanket asking if anyone was too cold and wanted to quit. I hated him more than I wanted to quit. Hell Week isn’t about learning SEAL skills. Most of the time, we were too exhausted to learn anything complex. Hell Week is about mental toughness to keep going, pure and simple. Navy commanders needed to know whether our minds and bodies were strong enough to withstand what the toughest combat missions could throw at us … because dropping out in mid-mission is never an option.
Because of this, instructors provide every opportunity for those who do not have the will to stay to ring the bell three times and quit. Admiral Dick’s words were true, “It is a volunteer program; you can leave anytime you want.” Instructors using bullhorns promote changing vocations for the benefit of your fellow classmates to create doubt in your head. They’ll remind you of the discomfort, if not the flat-out pain, you’re in. They’ll tell you about the coffee and doughnuts waiting for you if you just give up and ring the bell. And trainees do drop out and ring that bell. They simply stop, even though their bodies are still more or less intact. Their spirits break. They ring the bell, and, for them, the ordeal is over.
Those remaining in mighty Class 136, after drown-proofing at the piers, spent the rest of the night running with boats on our heads and paddling in and out of the surf. Standing in the surf zone and watching the sunrise meant three things: breakfast was soon, you survived another day, and a new shift of fresh instructors was coming on duty.
As the Basic Conditioning Phase Officer, the challenges of training during Hell Week were much more than determining who had “the never quit” attitude. It was also about making sure the training was safe and that you neither killed nor injured a student. The most intense evolutions came early in Hell Week. There were two reasons for this. The first was that if someone was going to drop out, he would usually do it within the first few days. And the second was that after days of pushing students to their limits and not letting them sleep, the chances of them getting hurt jumped exponentially. The objective of the evolutions and Hell Week was to push men to their limits and give them confidence that they can go beyond what was ever before thought possible. BUD/S was designed to test the student, not to injure or maim those who failed. Hypothermia tables were followed strictly and the intensity of the evolutions were monitored carefully. As a student sitting in the surf zone freezing, it’s hard to feel warm just because some table says the cold is not going to be fatal. Guys drop out during Hell Week for a lot of reasons. Sure, some of them can’t take the exhaustion. But others simply can’t complete the training. This isn’t their fault, but they also can’t be allowed to proceed without the navy knowing whether they can withstand all that being a SEAL requires. SEAL duty could easily mean heading out to kill Osama bin Laden without sleeping for days.
Sometimes trainees are strong enough, emotionally and physically, and are completing all the activities demanded of them … and then they break a bone, or develop severe tendonitis, and can’t go on. There are no excuses, and no reasons: there is only being able to get through it, or not. There is also no chance of hiding from the scrutiny of the instructors or gaming the system. I once had a fellow student tell me that the way around surf-conditioning was to warm yourself by peeing in the water. I think he was kidding, but if he thought it helped, go for it. At any rate, for the amount of time they were in the water, even racehorses don’t have bladders that big. He quit early.
But his comment reminded me of a phrase I hate: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” I once caught a student who filled a hiking backpack with pillows to give it the appearance of bulk. I found that out only because I sent his squad team through a river and, damn, did those pillows get heavy, fast. And they dripped too. The SEALs don’t need people who are able to do great things alone. The SEALs need individuals who are willing to work as a team and who understand that bringing the team to bear will bring success to a mission, while being an individual will put the team at risk.
The physical training is not always about being the best or the fastest. In fact, many of the exercises are about developing mental and physical toughness—endurance, with the expectation that higher performance will come later. Of course, there are minimum standards, and we do bounce trainees who can’t meet those expectations. That’s the reason I didn’t cut the guy with the pillows in his backpack; that added water weight made the job tougher, and the drip down his pants made it uncomfortable too.
But we also try to determine which roles each trainee might best fill. Say you’ve got a big guy who’s maybe not the fastest in the bunch, but he’s strong with the never-quit attitude. Well, somebody is going to have to carry an assault team’s communication equipment. If you’ve got an ox, load him up. And don’t kid yourself; he may have finished in the bottom half of his group, but he can still cut it, and, at some point, his team is going to be very grateful they have all that communication gear. That is what leadership does: look at potential and set the conditions to succeed. This doesn’t mean that individuals shouldn’t perform brilliantly on their individual tasks. What it means is that they acknowledge their tasks support a greater team effort. If a team’s radio man is carrying a lot of weight in radios, it’s okay to relieve him of some of that weight. SEALs should chip in and lighten the load of the guy carrying the M60 and the hundreds of rounds of ammunition it takes, because if that 60 doesn’t rock when you need it to, the team is going to pay.
This may seem basic, but a cowboy on a SEAL team isn’t going to necessarily understand that while there’s no extra glory in carrying a couple of bandoliers with one hundred rounds of linked ammo on them, it’s absolutely essential … for the team.
It is possible for people who drop out of the program, or are forced out due to injury or illness, to go through the full training program again: Garry J. Bonelli broke his collarbone during an obstacle course accident during SEAL training. He got rolled back to the next BUD/S class, showed up in even better shape than he had the first time, and completed his training … including going through Hell Week a second time, which had to be even worse than the first go-round, because he knew exactly what was coming. I think the record is an enlisted SEAL who completed three Hell Weeks. That is the definition of “never quit”!
Bonelli ended up having a long and distinguished navy career that included a stint as commander of SEAL Team Five. When he retired in 2013, he was a rear admiral.
Tuesday night of our Hell Week was spent on a desolate part of Silver Strand Beach on the southern tip of Coronado. The site had mudflats where we crawled through the thick mud as a boat crew. We had been without sleep for fifty hours, and simple commands were harder to process. The misery of the mudflats transitioned into more surf torture and eating a box dinner in the water. It was cold, and our bodies were tired. The cold piece of chicken and a piece of bread was less than I had hoped for. As the sun went down, and its warmth went with it, the physiological effect of the cold night before us caused a run on the bell. Entire boat crews quit together, and a line formed just to ring out. A strange feeling came over me as I sat in the surf zone removing the lumps of sand from my wet bread and watching others quit. Perhaps it should have been a feeling of remorse for those classmates who tried and failed. Some of them had been my friends. Instead, I felt a sense of accomplishment that I was still in the class when others quit. I was happy for a moment, chewing on my sandwich and spitting out the small pieces of rock I had missed. Toward the end of the night, while paddling back to the BUD/S compound in the early morning fog, I saw the outline of a German U-boat appear in the distance. I knew I was seeing an illusion from not sleeping for a couple of days, but the U-boat seemed to keep pace just the same. I asked the rest of my boat crew if they were seeing the same thing I was. It wasn’t hard to convince most of them that the U-boat was out there. I guess at that point in Hell Week, we could have convinced ourselves of almost anything.
Toward the end of Hell Week, the intensity of the evolutions began to lessen and the confidence of myself and my fellow classmates who remained increased. The instructors and the students both knew that no one else was going to quit after all the hours of wet and cold spent getting here. We still did a lot of physical training, but the instructors started mixing in basic problem-solving exercises, treasure hunts, long paddle boat drills, and other evolutions designed to keep us moving. The idea was to have us do anything that stopped us from sleeping.
During the final night of Hell Week, my knee injury flared up. I remember running while carrying the IBS up above our heads and awkwardly tripping on a curb. While we all were tall, we weren’t fast, and we were shambling along, which didn’t help my knee any. Then my knee swelled up like a beach ball. I had injured it the first time during a football game against the Washington State Cougars. At halftime, I had it drained but lasted only a few minutes in the third quarter before being unable to even walk, and I spent the rest of the game on the bench. It was excruciatingly painful both then and now during Hell Week. After four days of suffering, no way I was going to either quit or repeat Hell Week, and my brain said to my body, “Too bad. Deal.” (That still isn’t masochism, by the way. My mind was simply asking, Are you or are you not a quitter?)
The evolution was called “Round the World,” which meant paddling and running the boat around Coronado Island. It was a race, and it always paid to be a winner during Hell Week. Whether the reward was being able to eat first or catch a few minutes of sleep away from the instructors’ attention, it was a prize worth winning. We got to our destination first, and we basically threw down the boat, turned it over, and crawled under the protection of the rubber shell to get a few minutes of shut-eye while waiting for the other boats to arrive. It was a cold, windy night, and I tried to doze, but I woke up shivering and embarrassed that I was so cold while everyone else was sound asleep. I started to wonder whether I was fit enough to get through the training and thought about quitting. I think everyone goes through these moments during BUD/S, and mine came toward the end of Hell Week.
I’ll confess something here. When another student quit, I felt better about myself because I was succeeding under the same conditions someone else wasn’t. As bad as that sounds, in the middle of the training, the thought that you could push through when other guys—guys you knew were tough, guys who had guts—were ringing the bell and quitting gave a sense of victory. You do not want to be one of those people. Teamwork is important; winning is everything. When someone drops out—well, it’s a little like politics. You don’t spend time on the poll numbers of the candidate below you. You look at the people who might be running stronger and figure out what you can learn from them. That’s the lingering benefit of SEAL training: life lessons. Barrels of them.
We used to do a “Hoo-yah!” when someone quit. Some leaders admonish their units for doing that, or try to do away with it, but I think there’s value to it. Surviving gives a certain level of confidence that, if nobody quit, would change the personality of resulting SEAL teams for the worse. Again, it’s like politics in the sense that as the field narrows, as the places at the debate podium go from ten to six to two, the dynamics change. Your personal game is enhanced. Your relationship with the survivors becomes much more seriously focused. I am still friends with some who quit our class and don’t hold it against them. The SEALs is not for everyone, just those who don’t ring out.
Besides physical trials, the navy also used Hell Week to put us through psychological exercises designed to confuse and strengthen resolve. One that sticks out in my mind is called “Creative Writing,” which happened during the final few hours of Hell Week.
I’ll be honest: I was pretty fried by that point. I was moving on autopilot, but I was moving. Moving was good. The instructors knew that, and that’s why, for Creative Writing, they brought us into a classroom and sat us down at individual desks.
I remember that the heat was set on high, and the lights in the classroom seemed dimmer than normal. It was really the first time I felt dry and warm all week. We were given pens and paper and told to write an essay about the Constitution—how as a SEAL you could fulfill your oath to support and defend it.
The instructors put on some soft music to “help us relax,” and, better yet, they stepped out so that we were left alone to write. My eyes shut, and I caught myself nodding off. I started writing just so I could focus on something other than how tired I was. After a few minutes, I heard heads hit the desks. I don’t remember how many or who they were, but I wanted to join them. After not sleeping for five days, I am not sure I was actually writing or just going through the motions.
After a while the instructors came back and began to tap individuals on the shoulder and point to the door. They repeated the process until they left one lucky student alone who was sleeping alone in the classroom. We heard what they did later. The student’s essay—what little of it he had written—was quietly replaced on his desk with a disenrollment form. Then they woke him up.
One of the instructors stood over him and drummed his fingers on the form in front of him. “Sign it again!” the instructor said. The trainee signed it automatically. In that condition, you’re not thinking. You’re just following whatever commands are given to you.
“Now read it!” the instructor barked, and the recruit read over “his” paper, only to realize that he’d just signed a request to drop out of the program. Of course, he had no memory of doing so. And he was alone, isolated, and stressed.
I don’t know how that trainee reacted—the instructors didn’t tell us that part—but after a minute or two he was told what had happened. The instructors tore up the quit sheet, and the trainee was still in the program. A life lesson learned.
Later, when I was the officer in charge of Hell Week, I carried on the fine tradition of this drill. On occasion the trainees would break down and cry, shrug, and accept that they’d signed it, and I even had a few recruits call foul play and admit nothing. They were exhausted and confused. All of them returned to training stronger from the experience. A teaching point of the exercise was to inoculate against this form of psychological stress. A SEAL might be captured and have a similar experience at the hands of an enemy. A captured SEAL might be presented with a confession that had a real signature—his signature. When you’re exhausted, your judgment may be off, and it is better to take an extra second to think before you act. The trick is to keep your conviction intact and not be fooled.
The training has to be objective, fair, and safe. The instructor’s objective is to train and mentor, not injure. I also had the latitude to create exercises based on what a SEAL might face in combat. In other cases, the exercise may be simply to observe how a student acts under stress or if he has the fortitude not to quit.
Let me give you an example. Extraction is a Hell Week exercise geared toward getting the men to focus on remembering basic commands and procedures. I’d have the BUD/S class line up with interlocking arms in the cold water while wearing life jackets and facing the shore. I’d bring the person on the left flank out and give him an extraction frequency. The first would be easy—it would be a VHF signal, which only has four digits. Something like 38.75.
The rules of Extraction were that the man with the extraction frequency had to go back into the water, and the class had to pass it quietly from man to man to the end. The class would be given two minutes to complete the task. And, of course, I’d be on the shore with a megaphone, giving instructions and trying to distract them by shouting out numbers of other frequencies.
At the end of two minutes, the two men remaining would be directed out of the water to face each other. If the man on the far end was able to correctly state the frequency given to the first man, they could be “extracted” out of the cold water. They rarely did. And once they screwed it up—which they almost always did, and the reason we call it “training”—I sent them “deeper into enemy territory,” which, in this case, meant waist-deep water. And the next frequency code was a UHF, which adds digits and complexity. At this point, some of them might have to get the code out past chattering teeth, which again wasn’t supposed to be heard by the instructors.
There was one other benefit to an exercise like this: it usually came early enough in training that it built class camaraderie—or destroyed it, albeit temporarily. It’s hard to feel solidarity with your brother when he’s just screwed up a code for the second time, and, as a result, your testicles are climbing up into your stomach to escape frigid water. Eventually, they would be up to their necks, and they would pass one digit at a time. The radio was loaded with the right frequency, the extraction call was made, and they moved to the relative warmth of the sandy beach.
So why did I have my men standing in cold water, focusing on quietly and correctly passing frequency down the line? Sure, that particular situation may not occur, but one in which a SEAL must check another team member’s gear and maintain enough attention to detail under high-stress situations to make sure he doesn’t miss a check inevitably will. And you want your brother focused.
That’s Hell Week. Once it’s complete, there are still twenty more weeks of BUD/S training to go. Yep. Twenty weeks left, to include Land Warfare Phase and Diving Phase. That’s a long time. I should note something about Hell Week: When trainees begin, they’re wearing white T-shirts. If they finish Hell Week successfully, they wear green T-shirts. That’s it. No medals, no ribbons. Just a different T-shirt. But those T-shirts mean they made it through the toughest part of SEAL training. When you see people wearing those T-shirts, they’ve got an aura of confidence about them other trainees don’t have. And they should—about 90 percent of the men who make it to the green T-shirt phase complete the rest of SEAL training.
Actually, training got a lot easier after that. In fact, our class, after Hell Week, was pretty cocky. We started with 138 and were down to fewer than a couple dozen original members. We were young and stupid. We would get hammered every day by the instructors and earned a reputation of being undisciplined but tough. They had it right. A BUD/S class did not have to be undisciplined; it just happened to be our fate.
That changed with the very next class. Pete Van Hooser, one of the toughest men to wear the Trident, came in as the next class officer, and he had that group marching in formation. His class, Class 137, has been held up as a prime example of what a disciplined SEAL class should look like. Pete was a former marine officer in his mid-thirties. Our class marveled at watching him line up his class and teach them basic marching drills. We were amazed at his organization but quickly dismissed the notion that we could do the same. Our die had been cast; we had made it through Hell Week, and, at that point, even marching like marines would not change our lot. Pete graduated and was assigned to SEAL Team Three before getting promoted and losing a leg in a parachute accident. Never one to quit, he later commanded SEAL Team Four and was the only former marine to command the navy’s most elite SEAL Team.
My class may have been rough around the edges, but we were learning. Once our basic conditioning was finished, we moved on to two months of land warfare training, which included basic weapons marksmanship, fire and movement drills, land navigation and patrol, and training in land and underwater demolitions. It also included a seven-mile night swim off the coast of San Clemente Island. San Clemente Island is the breeding grounds of the great white shark, and the instructors would make us watch Jaws before the swim. The difference between the animal seal and a SEAL trainee in the water is that a SEAL trainee is an easier lunch. Seven miles is a long way, especially when every shadow in the dark water could be an eighteen-foot shark. We were motivated to make record-breaking swim times.
The last phase of BUD/S was combat diving, which included basic aquatic combat and open- and closed-circuit diving. The difference is whether, when you exhale, your breath is released or circulated back into your tank so the carbon dioxide can be removed—it’s easier to be stealthy underwater if you’re not releasing a trail of bubbles. Even though it was January, and the water temperatures were in the low fifties, conducting dives and ship attacks allowed a greater degree of autonomy away from an instructor’s wrath.
Dive Phase also brought to light the story of Min and Tin, two foreign officers from Burma assigned by their country and the US Navy to conduct BUD/S training. It was not unusual to have foreign students in SEAL training, but it was the first time two officers from Burma were enrolled. Min and Tin arrived in Coronado, having gone through a short two-week course in English. Physically, they failed almost every evolution, but the standards for foreign students were different. A foreign student who was sent home in disgrace could face severe personal repercussions as well, as there were larger diplomatic considerations. Because the standard for foreign students was different, the instructors would look the other way when it came to performance. The water temperature was the same for everyone, and they still suffered, but the punishment for failure to keep up on a run or swim was lessened. And so Min and Tin suffered being cold, wet, and sandy through the first phase like the rest of us without the benefit of understanding much of the language. Almost every day they would ask about “diving,” and instructors and their classmates would respond, “Third phase.” At one point I even showed them on a calendar when Dive Phase would start. They seemed to be only partially satisfied with the answer. Not until we entered Dive Phase did their plea for “diving, diving, diving” change to “welding, welding, welding,” and they became quite insistent. Their English had improved and so had their physical conditioning. Min and Tin became obsessed with welding, and a visit by the Burmese consulate was scheduled. As it turns out, Min and Tin were actually two engineers who should have been enrolled in the navy’s Underwater Diving and Welding school rather than Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training. Someone in Washington made a mistake and enrolled them in the wrong course. No wonder during Hell Week they talked about diving!
After their meeting with the consulate, Min and Tin were less than enthusiastic. “Very bad,” I remember Min saying. Burma was going through a civil war, and when their government found out they had two officers about to become the first Burmese officers to ever complete SEAL training, they were immediately reassigned from the engineer corps to leading Special Operations troops at the front line. Their life had changed forever over a mistake in course titles.
BUD/S graduation was highlighted by our giving a hammer we had purchased from the local hardware store that morning for the traditional class gift to the Command. Like everything we did in Class 136, we were late in ordering the plaque and had to mount it later. I was ready to move on to the Army’s Airborne School (“Jump School”) at Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic static line parachute training. I qualified as a navy/marine corps parachutist and a free-fall parachutist within a month.
At this point, attrition rates among potential SEALs drop to nearly nil; once you’ve gone through Hell Week and graduated BUD/S, you’ve developed the core steel needed to be a SEAL. Now it was time to learn the trade, stay out of trouble, and prepare for battle.
For me, the next half year of training—SEAL Basic Indoctrination (now SEAL Qualification Training)—included advanced learning in counterguerrilla warfare, close-quarters combat, cold-weather training, demolitions, direct action missions, evasive and escape operations, intelligence collection, land navigation, maritime operations, medical training, small unit tactics, training and advising friendly military and paramilitary forces, and unarmed combat techniques. At the time, SEAL Basic Indoc (SBI) was conducted as a SEAL team; today, it is a separate course completed at the Naval Special Warfare Center before you are assigned to a team.
During my time in the SEALs, I was issued more than a dozen knives: the KA-BAR, Bowie knives, even a Buckmaster, which has a sawtooth edge, grappling hooks, and a hollow core used for small-item storage. I still keep them all at my office. It’s ironic that the first knife I was issued is nearly identical to the last knife twenty-three years later.
And there’s the lesson. It’s fine to strive for improving tools, whether actual physical tools or legislation. That said, not everything that is modified represents an improvement. Sometimes, modifications just represent someone getting his hands on something he shouldn’t and changing it for the sake of change—and that’s as true of regulations as it is of tool design. At times, returning to classic wisdom or tactics is the wisest choice.