The anticipation—that sense of impending doom—might have been the worst part.
It was another example of how BUD/S was a test of mental strength as much as anything else. The reality is this: by the time we got to Hell Week, we had experienced just about every soul-sucking evolution that BUD/S had to offer. We knew what it was like to be exhausted and cold and wet; to be screamed at and told we were worthless pieces of shit from sunup until sundown. There were few surprises left. The first month of First Phase had been all about acclimating to the physical and mental strain, and to understanding what was expected of us. Hell Week would just be more of the same.
Only worse.
If you looked at it that way, the beast didn’t seem so fearsome. Everything about First Phase had sucked. Hell Week would just suck a little bit more. I’d be a little bit colder, a little bit tireder, a little more disoriented. I could handle that. Or so I told myself, anyway.
Other people weren’t so sure. They talked themselves into expecting the very worst and in the process laid the groundwork for failure. The minute doubt seeps into your mind, the moment you start thinking about how great it would be to walk out of the water and get into some warm, dry clothes, you are done. If you believe Hell Week will be the shittiest experience of your life, then that’s exactly what it will be. I mean, it is absolutely horrible, but the whole point is to instill a sense of invincibility: If I can get through this, I can get through anything.
I can honestly say I never thought about quitting. Not for one second. I knew there was a chance I could fail to meet the standards required on certain tests and evolutions. I might get sick or injured. But quit? No way. You’d have to kill me first. I don’t mean for that to sound arrogant or cocky. I didn’t think I was in any way superior to the other members of my class, and I have never felt like I was anything special when compared to the men with whom I served throughout my career. This was just something I felt in my heart.
It’s a gift, I guess, just like any other attribute that determines success or failure in BUD/S. Some guys are blessed with speed or strength or size. I was mediocre in all of those categories, but I was not a quitter. I was resilient. And the awareness of that fact—an understanding of my own personality—allowed me to enter Hell Week with a sense of calm. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was looking forward to the madness, but neither was I filled with dread. Indeed, on Sunday evening, as we moved from our bunks to a bunch of tents that had been set up on the beach, I felt almost giddy with anticipation. I was anxious, nervous, curious. But not scared. Whatever Hell Week dished out, I figured, perhaps naïvely, that I could handle it. I wasn’t going to die, and I wasn’t going to quit. Whatever else happened was entirely out of my hands. And I was okay with that.
Most people aren’t built that way. A lot of guys who enter BUD/S are type A personalities: focused, driven, hypercompetitive. They are also control freaks. During Hell Week, you learn very quickly that you are in control of almost nothing except your own emotions. You can succumb to the fear and pain, or you can find a way to endure it.
The folks at Naval Special Warfare Command understand all of this. There is a reason SEAL training hasn’t evolved much over the years: it’s highly effective exactly as it is. The SEALs want not just warriors but men who can follow orders while also thinking on their feet; men who will not panic in the heat of battle, and who will not quit under stress; men who will die for their brothers. The making of a SEAL occurs during BUD/S and further training, but some of it is simply ingrained. There is a subtle difference between toughness and strength. The first is often superficial and fleeting. The second is bone-deep and permanent.
You need strength to get through Hell Week.
It was shortly before midnight Sunday when the insanity began—instructors bursting into our tents and screaming at the top of their lungs, firing blanks from machine guns and tossing smoke grenades. Outside, more instructors unleashed a hellstorm of machine-gun fire and flash grenades, lighting up the night sky with fireworks. The noise was deafening; and yet, through the explosions and the screaming, I could hear music. Yeah, music, for Christ’s sake. The unmistakable sound of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” crackling through the sound system. The volume had been turned up so loud that distortion and scratching accompanied every note, which I suppose was part of the desired effect: to create a sense of utter anarchy and confusion. Lights flashed like strobes; explosions echoed above the beach, while Axl Rose screeched in the background, providing a weirdly appropriate soundtrack to the proceedings.
“Welcome to the Jungle!”
No shit.
The first few hours of Hell Week is known as Breakout. It marks the line of demarcation from the awful but orderly first month of First Phase and the seemingly random wretchedness of Hell Week. Of course, the reality is that there is nothing random or unpredictable about it. The seeds of self-doubt are planted in the hours leading up to Breakout and take root firmly as you scramble about in the darkness, searching for your teammates (we were all divided into groups for the upcoming evolutions), trying not to get lost.
Breakout is intended to simulate the confusion and chaos of battle. Since none of us had ever been in combat, we had nothing to compare it to, but it sure felt like the real thing at the time. Throughout Indoctrination and First Phase, we had been taught the importance of relying on your teammates, of working together and fighting the urge to fend only for yourself when things get hard. This is of the utmost importance in battle, and Breakout was designed to test our resolve and aptitude in this regard.
For the most part, we failed. Which was exactly the expected outcome. The instructors made it impossible to stay with your teammates during Breakout. The sky was filled with smoke and fire. Fire trucks were lined up near the grinder, hoses spraying water into the air. The sound of artillery rounds rattled the ground like thunder. And in the midst of the craziness, instructors ran around and shouted orders, all the while imploring us to stay with our teammates.
“Where are your guys?” one of the instructors yelled at me, his face so close to mine that I could almost feel him spitting into my ear.
“I don’t know,” I replied, my voice not quite as confident as I would have liked.
“Well, fucking find them!”
But I couldn’t find them. Not right away. The goal of Breakout, from the instructors’ point of view, was to instill a sense of complete and utter panic in the mind of an already frazzled and frightened trainee.
“Find your guys! Find your guys!” they repeatedly screamed, but they had made it virtually impossible to stay together. It’s well known that the stress and confusion of Breakout, combined with the anxiety that precedes it, sometimes causes trainees to quit on the spot. Not that you’d be able to tell, since no one could hear the ringing of the DOR bell in that environment. I know we lost some guys during the first night. I found that somewhat surprising. They had already withstood four weeks of First Phase; the real pain of Hell Week hadn’t yet begun. So why quit? The answer, I guess, is that they were overwhelmed by dread and fear. That’s another mind trick that BUD/S so brilliantly applies: the idea that weakness can be exploited through simple anticipation. It wasn’t Breakout that made people quit—it was the idea of Breakout and what it represented: impending doom and anguish so horrific that it could make almost anyone say, “Fuck this shit. I’m done.”
The first thing we did when we came out of our tents was make our way to the grinder, where we were doused with water from the fire hoses and ordered to do push-ups and sit-ups and jumping jacks, all against a backdrop of gunfire and whistles and sirens and explosions. Moments later, we were sent into the ocean in full camouflage uniforms and boots for the first of many sessions of surf torture. We were ordered back into the ditch, where we all had just pissed, and instructed to roll around in the dirt. A nice little urine-soaked sugar cookie to start things off on the right foot.
We were all completely shell-shocked and disoriented. Fewer than fifteen minutes had passed, and already I was shivering and sore. I wasn’t scared, but I did find myself thinking, How the hell I am going to do this for the next five days?
There was no answer. For me, the ideal strategy for surviving Hell Week was to think of it as a series of small challenges, rather than one gigantic test. Just try to make it from one meal to the next. I’m not a real mystical guy or anything, but I learned very quickly the value of taking a meditative approach to some of the harsher aspects of Hell Week. Silly as it might sound, if we were instructed to lie down in the surf and let the cool water roll up over our faces, I would just close my eyes and go to my happy place. I’d imagine I was somewhere warm and calming, and pretty soon the worst of it was over and it was time to move on to the next awful exercise. I have no explanation as to why this worked for me. Everyone had their own way of coping with the pain. Look at photos of trainees during Hell Week, and you’ll see a row of guys on their backs in the surf, arms locked, bodies rigid. Some of them will be bug-eyed with fear. Others have their faces contorted in pain. And some will appear to be almost asleep, as if they are oddly at peace with their surroundings.
That was me. I was one of the lucky ones.
Not that it wasn’t terrible. It was. Every second of Hell Week sucked. For some reason, though, I found a way through the relentless agony by taking the smallest of bites and reminding myself that eventually I’d be able to swallow it and move on. I guess you could say I was temperamentally suited to BUD/S, in general, and to Hell Week, in particular.
I remember one day sitting in the elephant cages (where the inflatable boats were stored), savoring an MRE (meals ready to eat). One of the few good things about Hell Week is that we ate almost constantly. Massive meals three times a day, along with MREs and power bars to ensure we had enough calories to fuel the endless evolutions. For me, sitting quietly and savoring an MRE was a calming and restorative experience. Yes, I was cold and wet. Yes, I was so exhausted I thought I might fall asleep on the spot. But at least I wasn’t in the water. At least I wasn’t holding a log over my head or cranking out hundreds of push-ups or sit-ups. No one was in my face, calling me a motherfucker or a pussy.
It was, for a few moments, peaceful.
Therefore, I simply could not fathom the sound I heard off in the distance.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
And then, a few minutes later, it happened again.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
I looked at one of my buddies. He shrugged wearily. By now, the sound of our classmates ringing the DOR bell had become so routine that it was usually met with utter indifference. Another one bites the dust. What are you going to do? For some reason, though, this one baffled me. I simply could not understand why anyone would quit during one of the few times in the day when pain was replaced by pleasure.
Another time, I walked through the chow hall, carrying a big plate of food. I was feeling pretty good about having a few minutes of free time and plenty to eat, while all around me guys were nodding off in mid-bite. This actually happened: you’d see someone shovel a spoonful of food into his mouth, and as he was chewing, his eyelids would drop, and he’d sort of list to the side. You’d have to give him a little shove to prevent him from choking. Once I saw an instructor walk by a sleeping student in the middle of the chow hall. The instructor stopped, picked up a lemon from a table, and squirted juice into the student’s eyes. He woke up rather quickly. But none of this was unusual; in fact, guys fell asleep everywhere during Hell Week: in the chow hall, the latrine and porta-potties, the barracks, even on the beach.
Anyway, as I walked past the instructors’ table, I heard someone yell, “What the hell are you smiling about?”
Smiling? I was smiling? I hadn’t even realized it, but yeah, I guess I might have been.
“I asked you a question!” the instructor barked.
I kind of shrugged and nodded. “Just happy to be here, sir.”
The instructor shook his head and went back to his meal. He must have thought I was either too stupid to realize what was happening or suffering from some sort of dementia. The truth was, in that moment, Hell Week didn’t seem all that bad.
But that, I would later discover, is part of the genius of Hell Week. You can almost grow accustomed to the ceaseless hurt. It becomes normal to the point that you forget how it feels to be warm and dry and comfortable. Then, suddenly, you get a taste of it—when you switch into fresh clothes, or at the chow hall, or even just nibbling an MRE—and the brief encounter with normalcy sparks a moment of weakness.
I have had enough of this shit.
And you quit.
In fact, this was quite common—guys were just as likely, if not more likely, to quit during a lull in the torture as they were to quit after twenty minutes of lying in the frigid surf, waiting for hypothermia to set in.
Oh, and here’s another awesome thing about the DOR process—another example of the devious mind games they played on all of us. When someone quit, he was not treated like a pariah by the instructors. There was no tongue-lashing or walk of shame—beyond ringing the bell, of course. In fact, typically, when someone quit, he would be met by the instructors with a smile and a warm blanket.
“It’s okay, son. No shame in this at all.”
The disgraced student would nod. The instructor might even hand him a cup of coffee and something to eat. They’d commiserate together, right there in front of the entire class, which had the effect of minimizing the whole experience, allowing doubt to seep into the minds of anyone who might be on the fence.
Shit … that looks like a pretty good deal. Maybe I should quit, too.
In fact, quitting, especially during Hell Week, was rarely an isolated incident. Rather, it came in waves. One guy would stand up and walk out of the water. His surrender paved the way for others, until soon there were three or four guys huddled together in front of the class, all wrapped in blankets, warm and comfortable.
But their dream was over. For the rest of us, it lived on.
The first twenty-four hours of Hell Week were the worst. Between the dread and anxiety that filled the hours before Breakout, and the shock and chaos of the actual experience, I think it took at least a full day to adjust to the madness. I wouldn’t say there was any sort of rhythm or routine to it—it was just ceaseless, random evolutions. But at least I’d expected this and figured that if I could get through the first twenty-four hours, I’d be okay.
A little luck is involved. I had gotten sick early in First Phase, which made things even more challenging for a while, but by the time Hell Week rolled around, I had kicked the bug out of my system and felt reasonably strong. Unfortunately, I had passed the virus on to my roommate, who first started feeling shitty just a couple of days before Hell Week commenced. I felt terrible for him, as I knew the odds were now stacked against him. When he dropped out midweek, I felt somewhat responsible. He was a good guy, and if not for being compromised by illness, I think he probably would have made it. But it could just as easily have been me or anyone else. They did give my roommate the option of taking some time to recover and then rolling back with Class 247. He declined the offer.
One of the first things we did after Breakout was an elephant run from Coronado to Imperial Beach—a nearly ten-kilometer test of strength and endurance in which teams of six men awkwardly transported inflatable boats on their heads and shoulders. I remember hearing the bell ring just a few minutes into the elephant run and picturing that unfortunate team trying to shoulder the added weight when down a man for most of the entire six miles. Trust me—when you’re in that position, you don’t feel empathy for the guy who dropped out; you’re just pissed that he’s made your job harder.
We had done elephant runs previously, but during Hell Week, they were longer and more frequent, and often complicated by the sudden disappearance of a teammate or two. Carrying an IBS was challenging not just because of the weight but because of the boat’s flexibility and ungainly shape. It was like trying to carry a giant, 185-pound water balloon. Inevitably, as your arms grew weary, the IBS slowly dropped, until eventually there was no space between the top of your head and the surface of the boat.
To ease the burning in your arms, you’d let the boat rest almost entirely on the top of your head. It was, for a little while, anyway, the lesser of two evils. While your aching biceps and triceps recovered, your upper body bore the brunt of the workload. Unfortunately, this could lead to an assortment of problems, ranging from the merely annoying or humorous (like the bald spot I developed on the top of my head, where the hair was burned off from miles of chafing), to the potentially catastrophic (migraines, back and neck injuries that could necessitate medical withdrawal from the program). But in the middle of a six-mile elephant run, you do whatever it takes to get to the finish line. You don’t worry about the consequences.
The beatdown of Hell Week was relentless, but medical personnel were always nearby to ensure the safety of participants—in a sense, to protect us from ourselves. There was a formula that was used to minimize the risk of hypothermia: the colder the water, the briefer the episodes of surf torture. But the envelope was routinely pushed. It always felt like surf torture ended just as you thought you couldn’t last another second. Once in a while, there would be a brief period of recovery—a few minutes of resting on the berm, letting the sun warm your face and body. This was especially true if you were fortunate enough to win one of the many team competitions.
“Pays to be a winner!” was a refrain often echoed by the instructors.
Damn straight. I remember one race in which we had to carry inflatable boats in one direction and then return with logs. It was almost indescribably painful. But our team won, and our reward was a solid twenty minutes of rest—or even sleep!—on the berm, under a warm and sunny sky.
But every interlude was followed by another beatdown. A whistle would sound, and we’d be ordered to walk back into the water for another round of surf torture.
Sometimes we did “surf laundry.” This was another of those exercises that was exponentially worse than it sounds. March into the water. Take a seat. Remove your clothes—right down to your underwear. Rinse the sand from your clothes. Fold your clothes neatly and place them in a pile on the beach. Do all of this while sitting in waist-deep, sixty-degree water, your fingers so numb they barely function. Finally, when everyone in the entire class finishes their “laundry,” everyone is allowed out of the water. The prize for completing the task: getting dressed in the same cold, soaking wet clothes we had just removed.
Then more elephant runs, often followed by dangerous and exhausting portage exercises, in which teams carried their boats over wet and craggy and sometimes steep boulders on the shoreline. This was followed by more log PT … more sit-ups, push-ups, and surf torture—in full clothes or half-naked. Time in the water was almost always followed by a sugar cookie or a crawl through the mudflats, to ensure maximum chafing. By the end of the second day, some guys discovered that their scrotums had swollen to nearly twice the normal size. By the end of the week, they had doubled in size again and resembled raw hamburger.
But at least I wasn’t alone. We all suffered the same maladies and indignity, and we did it with as much humor as we could muster. I was lucky. Class 246 had its share of not only outstanding SEAL candidates but some world-class ballbusters, as well. We made fun of each other, and we supported each other. As Hell Week wore on and our numbers dwindled, the jokes became darker, funnier, and more frequent. It was a way to fight off not just the pain but the ever-present threat of humiliation and failure. During Hell Week, the DOR bell was rarely out of view. It would follow us in the back of a pickup truck, from evolution to evolution, from the beach to the grinder to the streets where we suffered through elephant runs. If you started to weaken, you could count on a sympathetic instructor getting in your ear and whispering, “Just ring the bell. It’s right there. Give it a pull and this will all be over.”
But, like I said, DORs were most common not in the midst of the agony but during the rare instances of rest and recuperation—immediately after meals, for example, or following a warm decontamination shower and a subsequent medical evaluation. For some guys, the slightest respite was an invitation to quit. And the longest break was, for nearly everyone, the greatest temptation of all.
It came after more than two days of nonstop insanity. We were all giddy with exhaustion and sleep deprivation. It isn’t possible to go five days without sleep and still meet the brutal physical demands of Hell Week; a bare minimum of rest is required, and the bare minimum is what we got: a grand total of four hours, divided into two-hour increments. We were allowed to shower, eat, and change into dry clothes. Then we slogged into our tents and passed out on the ground. Some of us slid into sleeping bags. I don’t remember falling asleep. I think I was out before I hit the ground.
Then, in what felt like a matter of seconds, we were roused rather gently from our nap. Unlike Breakout, when we woke to the heart-stopping thunder of machine-gun fire and explosions, the midweek nap ended with instructors walking through the tents and softly urging us to “rise and shine.” It seemed out of character; almost like they felt bad for us and wanted us to enjoy every possible second of sleep.
In fact, that is exactly what they were doing.
We were coaxed from the tent in the early evening hours. No one said much of anything as we walked to the top of the berm and stood in a long, woozy line, watching the sun slowly set beyond the Pacific. I remember thinking, as I looked out at the glorious red sunset and the shimmering sea, that it was absolutely gorgeous. It would have been ever better with a beer in my hand and a cookout on the sand, and a pretty girl as company.
But such thoughts are dangerous when your world is about to be rocked. See, that’s exactly the kind of warm daydream they expected us to conjure. It was evil, it was sadistic, and it was absolutely brilliant. I would have to say that waking from that first nap was one of the hardest parts of Hell Week for a lot of people. Personally, I didn’t consider quitting, but when the bell rang a few minutes later, just as we were ordered to hit the surf, signaling the withdrawal of yet another classmate, and the dashing of another dream, I understood exactly why it had happened.
We all walked toward the water, arms interlocked, and stood in the crashing surf. As one of the instructors shouted, “Take seats!” we all just stood there. This was the only time during Hell Week when we hesitated to follow an order. The idea of sitting in the cold water, just moments after a nap, was almost too much to bear.
“Take seats!” the instructor shouted again, this time louder and more emphatically. Slowly, we sank to the beach and leaned back into the sand, letting the Pacific roll up over our bodies. The chill was stark and immediate, rendering the nap a distant memory.
By the halfway mark, I felt confident that I would not succumb to the doubt and fatigue that causes so many candidates to DOR. I was much less certain of whether I would be able to meet all the physical demands.
Throughout First Phase, including Hell Week, the obstacle course was my biggest concern, as it had been since the day I arrived in Coronado. The O Course was the biggest ballbuster of BUD/S. Imagine the worst CrossFit workout you’ve ever seen, and you get some idea of the intensity of the BUD/S obstacle course.
It starts off with an arm walk through a set of parallel bars, followed immediately by a sprint through a set of tires (with hands clasped behind your head), and a climb over a seven-and-a-half-foot “low wall” that is preceded by jumping off two short tree stumps, which aids in momentum but can of course compromise balance. Then a short sprint across the sand to a higher wall (eleven feet six inches) that is scaled with the aid of ropes, followed by a nasty low crawl under a set of logs encircled with barbed wire (with only three inches of clearance at the lowest point), another sprint across the sand to a daunting fifty-foot-high rope wall (or cargo net, as it is commonly known), another exhausted sprint across sand and a series of balance logs, and a stationary rope climb.
This is not even the halfway mark of the O Course, but by this point, your lungs are on fire and your legs are aching. And it is here that you encounter the single-most problematic barrier on the course: the Dirty Name. It’s basically two consecutive hurdles, one five feet tall, the other ten feet tall, separated by a distance of maybe four or five feet. The idea is to jump to the first barrier, landing on your arms, and pull yourself up quickly. Then climb to your feet and leap immediately to the second. It looks simple enough when done well by an experienced SEAL, and preferably one who is either very tall or blessed with great leaping ability. But for many people, the first few attempts at the Dirty Name result in mistimed collisions with the hurdles, bruised or busted ribs, and nasty falls to the sand. Even a reasonably well-executed attempt at the Dirty Name could result in getting the wind knocked out of you.
While still reeling from the Dirty Name, the obstacle course runner quickly encounters something known as the Weaver, which looks sort of like a V-shaped ladder and must be traversed by going first over one rung and then under the next. By the time you get through the Weaver, with nearly half the course ahead of you, the possibility of passing out is not only real but welcome; at least the pain would end.
The second half of the course is comprised of more tires, more ropes, more walls, more climbing and running, and, near the end, something known as the Slide for Life, which is more like the Slide for Death. It is not the most tiring event in the obstacle course; it is the most dangerous. Basically, to complete the Slide for Life, you climb a forty-foot platform and affix yourself to a stationary rope that angles toward the ground, over a distance of one hundred feet. With hands and feet wrapped around the rope, you “slide for life.” Make a mistake on this one, and you could be seriously injured; you’ll almost certainly find yourself medically disqualified or rolled back.
The first time I saw the obstacle course, I thought to myself, This is going to be a problem.
It was.
Like I said, I am not a gifted athlete, so I expected certain parts of it to be challenging—specifically, the Dirty Name. There are time standards that must be met in BUD/S, and the standards become more difficult with each phase. I had spent a lot of time practicing during Indoc, so eventually I gained enough technical proficiency to meet the requirements. But every time I ran the obstacle course—and we did it repeatedly—it took a little piece of my soul.
In case you couldn’t tell, I hated the O Course, and I really hated it during Hell Week, when we would do it in teams while carrying inflatable boats. This is hard to envision and even harder to execute. The first time I heard we were going to carry boats through the obstacle course, I almost thought it was a joke. It wasn’t, of course. I mean, we didn’t do the entire course, obviously—there is no way to haul a 180-pound boat over a fifty-foot rope wall, or carry it while on the Slide for Life. But just about everything else? Yeah. It was almost comically awful, and it beat us to shreds.
Much of Hell Week was spent either on our backs or stomachs. We constantly were told to hit the ground and crawl toward the sound of a whistle. Sometimes this would take us through water or over sand. Sometimes we crawled over concrete and asphalt, or through mudflats or culverts. Whatever we were instructed to do, we did it. Without hesitation.
“March to the surf!”
We marched to the surf.
“Sit down in the water!”
We sat in the water.
“Roll in the sand!”
We rolled in the sand.
If you screwed up, an instructor would instantly get in your face and pepper you with insults and expletives. The SEALs want men who can not only handle adversity but who will not let their emotions get in the way of completing a job. When you’re wet and cold and practically falling asleep on your feet, and someone starts screaming in your ear and telling you what a worthless pile of garbage you are, it’s very tempting to go off on the guy. Indeed, that is exactly the response is intended to provoke. So while you might think that the ideal Navy SEAL candidate is someone who is basically a live wire—intense, focused, ready to spark at any moment—the opposite is actually true. The best candidates are ambitious and indefatigable, sure. But they also are surprisingly low-key and unflappable.
I learned to respond with either silence or an enthusiastic “Hoo-yah, instructor!” (basically, the SEALs’ response to virtually everything).
Again, I think this is a gift, something you are either born with or not. Shit always ran off my back when I was a kid. I didn’t let much get to me. My parents divorced, we lived in a trailer park, and I worked hard for everything I had, but I never felt angry or resentful about any of it. It was just the way things were. I learned early on that there are things you can’t control in life—a lot of things—so you find a way to deal with them. Eventually, even the worst shit passes. This attitude, more than anything else, helped me get through BUD/S, and Hell Week in particular.
In the last couple of days of Hell Week, there was a perceptible shift in attitude among both the instructors and students. The physical toll was no less demanding; if anything, it was compounded by mounting sleep deprivation. But the majority of people who quit during Hell Week did so in the first two or three days, urged on by instructors whose primary job was to separate the weak from the strong. If you made it to Wednesday, it was presumed you had the ability to get through Hell Week. And if you could get through Hell Week, the odds of getting through BUD/S tilted in your favor. So in the final forty-eight hours, the instructors were a bit less vicious and sadistic, more likely to encourage than discourage.
As for the students of Class 246, we could finally see the finish line drawing near.
The final evolution of Hell Week, on Friday morning, was known as So Sorry Day, a combat-simulation exercise featuring an obstacle course through mudflats and culverts and barbed wire, among other things. The mudflats of Hell Week are legendary, as they are not merely muddy but sometimes tainted with sewage and other untreated waste that spills from the Tijuana River into the Pacific Ocean. And in this putrid swamp, we were instructed to “play” for several hours. A highlight of the evolution—if you can call it a highlight—involved shinnying out over the swamp on a tightrope, then telling a joke for the entire class to hear. The real punch line came when the class would vigorously shake the rope and deposit the student into the shit and mud below.
Eventually, as morning gave way to afternoon, we made our way back to the compound on Coronado Beach. Of course, we didn’t just walk back; instead, we conducted one last elephant run. We all knew that the end was near, but sleep deprivation has a way of screwing with your head; it seemed possible under these conditions that Hell Week could go on for several more hours, or even days. But as we assembled on the beach, soaking wet and caked with mud and shit, completely exhausted, and the instructors gathered as a group in front of us, it was apparent that something was different. The instructors planted a flag, and then one of them took a bullhorn in hand and shouted, “Class 246, Hell Week is secured!”
At first, there was stunned silence. A few guys looked like they might cry. There were weary hugs, and then shouts of “Hoo-yah!” rang across the beach. We stood up as the instructors walked through our group, shaking our hands and smiling, and offering heartfelt congratulations. These men, who had spent the previous five days treating us like dirt, now embraced us as brothers. I had never felt so proud in my life.
Afterward, I took a shower and put on some dry clothes. The instructors ordered pizza for everyone—and by pizza, I mean an entire large pizza for each surviving candidate. I sat outside on the grinder, shoveling pizza into my face, and called my father to give him the news.
“Hey, Dad,” I said … and then for some reason, a mischievous thought crossed my mind. And I paused.
“What’s up, Will? How’s it going?”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I wanted to let you know that I didn’t make it. I just quit.”
There was a short pause before my father finally broke the silence.
“Bullshit,” he said.
And that was it. I laughed into the phone.
“Yeah, you got me, Dad. You’re right. I’m okay. Hell Week just ended. I made it.”
There was another pause. I could almost see my father smiling.
“Good job, boy.”
After pizza, we were escorted back to our rooms (not the tents on the beach, but our real rooms) by some students who were going through Indoctrination. Under medical advice, they helped us put drawers and cabinets under the base of our beds, so that our aching and swollen legs would be elevated when we passed out. Early that evening, I fell into bed and lost consciousness almost immediately. For the next twelve hours, I slept like the dead.
It was, and remains, the best night of sleep of my entire life.