Hell Week was followed by Heaven Week.
Well, not really, but that’s the way it felt. Technically, it was known as Walk Week. We survivors of Class 246 were given the next nine days, including weekends, to let our bodies heal and to regain the physical strength and mental sharpness to continue with BUD/S. It wasn’t like we just sat on the beach and worked on our tans, but the stress was minimal and there were no tests or timed evolutions.
Then came the last two weeks of First Phase, which consisted primarily of more physical training and evenings spent in classrooms, studying hydro reconnaissance. In plain English, this meant that we were learning effective ways to approach or attack a target using underwater tools and tactics. Old-school frogman stuff.
All of this helped set the stage for Second Phase, eight weeks of diving instruction and practice, conducted in pools, training tanks, and San Diego Bay. There were few, if any, serious beatdowns during the last two weeks of First Phase. While still embracing the time-honored persona of hard-ass that the job demands, our instructors were noticeably less negative in their rhetoric. They did not address us as losers; they did not preface every interaction with some comment designed to reinforce the fact that we faced overwhelming odds in our desire to become SEALs.
That’s because the odds were now in our favor. Including rollbacks, Class 246 ended First Phase with slightly more than fifty students. We’d lose a dozen more in Second Phase, but obviously this represented a dramatic slowing of attrition. In comparison to First Phase, it felt like the sound of the DOR bell was as rare as a smile from one of the instructors.
Not that it was easy. BUD/S is never easy. But once you get past First Phase, the focus of the program shifts rather dramatically from thinning the herd to teaching and encouraging those who remain. It is presumed that if you get through First Phase, you will become a SEAL, and the remaining four months of instruction are staged accordingly.
Safety is a big concern during Second Phase. While exhaustion can lead to injury and illness in First Phase, it is in Second Phase that training can be legitimately dangerous. For this reason, we spent the first week studying physics and physiology and the basics of diving. We got to hear in great deal about all the terrible things that could happen to the human body and brain if you screwed up underwater. For example, a panic-induced uncontrolled ascent can trigger an embolism. We read and studied and took written tests, which we were required to pass before actually getting in the water.
And then we moved on to Pool Week, where we got our first taste of actual scuba diving. But, this being BUD/S, it was far from the sort of gentle indoctrination you might receive during a vacation in the Bahamas. For one thing, we either rode to the pool in a bus, while wearing scuba gear and breathing through hoses, or we humped it on foot, a distance of roughly a mile, with air tanks on our backs. Sometimes we did push-ups in the sand, while wearing our gear—including our breathing apparatus. By this point, we’d all gotten pretty good at cranking out forty or fifty push-ups while barely breaking a sweat, but 125 pounds of scuba gear and a breathing hose adds a degree of difficulty to the equation that is hard to imagine until you do it.
Worse were the relentless training exercises designed to induce panic, usually by making you think you couldn’t breathe. Similar in philosophy to drownproofing, this was the navy’s way of teaching students how to become comfortable in and under the water, even when facing the possibility of losing consciousness.
While the majority of students who reach Second Phase eventually graduate from BUD/S, it’s also true that some of the strongest and seemingly most competent candidates are brought to their knees by the diving portion of training. There is no way to know who will placidly accept the horror of oxygen deprivation and water rushing into his lungs, while calmly finding a way out of the situation … and who will unabashedly freak out. Make no mistake: the second option is by far the more natural response. I don’t care how tough you are or how adept you are at swimming. When outside forces cut off your air supply or promote the leaking of water into your equipment, the first inclination is to seek relief. The second is to panic.
Second Phase was packed with evolutions and training designed to test a student’s ability to deal with situations that seemed not just beyond his control but life-threatening. You might have to go back to childhood to dredge up the memory, but just about everyone has experienced the sensation of drowning. Maybe you stumbled into the deep end of a pool before you were ready; maybe you got rolled by a big wave while surfing; maybe you went a little too deep while snorkeling and nearly passed out while scrambling frantically to the surface. Whatever the scenario, you remember it. And it sucks.
Much of Second Phase was devoted to replicating that sensation and to instilling in students the discipline and experience necessary for coping calmly with what feels like a near-death experience. Although no one liked it, most of us did all right with even the worst aspects of the training. A few students, however, simply couldn’t deal with it and ended up dropping out.
The scary stuff started with the very first time we were allowed to try out our scuba equipment in the pool. Although most of us were decent swimmers and comfortable in the water, I’m not sure anyone in our class had any formal scuba training whatsoever. So when we turned on our air valves and sat down in the shallow end of the pool, and let our heads dip below the surface, imagine the surprise we felt as water seeped into our mouthpieces. We choked and gasped. We spit and looked for relief. A couple of guys panicked and tried to get out of the pool. All of this was intentional and designed to induce fear and dread. I had never used a hose or regulator before, but I knew right away that something was wrong. I also figured it was part of the program, and so I did my best to go to my happy place again.
Stay calm … stay calm.
Zen-like focus, while helpful in First Phase, was critical to surviving dive training. In addition to continued beatdowns on the obstacle course, four-mile runs on the beach, and endless calisthenics on the grinder, we were tossed into various bodies of water and forced to flirt with the sensation of drowning. As with much of BUD/S, the idea was not merely to educate and train but to see how you would respond under intense pressure. Can you stay calm when your life is at stake? It was all hard and occasionally frightening, but after a while, you got used to it. And if you didn’t, you were gone.
A lot of the drills and tests were designed to foster teamwork and trust. For example, we’d sit at the bottom of the pool in pairs, sharing one mouthpiece. This was known as buddy breathing, the idea being that in the midst of a mission, your swim buddy might experience a problem with his equipment, necessitating the sharing of oxygen. It encouraged both camaraderie and courage. Other tests were more physical in nature, like treading water without using your hands while wearing a weighted belt and all your scuba gear. Sometimes an instructor would swim by in the middle of an exercise and rip off your mask or regulator hose, just to see how you’d respond. The proper response was to calmly replace the gear as quickly and efficiently as possible. In the real world, during amphibious assaults, any number of outside forces—from rough surf to a capsized boat—can cause you to lose your equipment. It’s crucial to remain calm under even the most difficult conditions. But some guys would just immediately streak to the surface. In another test, instructors would tie our hoses into knots, and we would have to try to untangle the knots while submerged—preferably before passing out. And indeed, some guys did pass out. You’d see them flailing away at the knots, working feverishly. Then they’d begin to slow down, and finally their arms would barely move. They were virtually unconscious, but still trying to complete the exercise! Instructors were always nearby during the evolutions and would immediately rush in and rescue the struggling candidate. Still, it was a scary situation whenever someone passed out.
Roughly halfway through Second Phase, we were subjected to a test known as pool comp, in which our fitness, knowledge of basic diving techniques, and our ability to remain unshaken under pressure were severely challenged. Pool comp came at the end of Pool Week, and it had a well-earned reputation for weeding out BUD/S candidates with almost as much efficiency as Hell Week. It was a lot shorter, but in some ways equally challenging. The pool comp test involved jumping into the water with full scuba gear, and then sitting on the bottom while awaiting “orders.”
The orders involved two or three instructors diving in after you and conducting an all-out assault known as a surf hit. It was pretty simple, really. The instructors were on me in a heartbeat, tearing off my mask, pulling out my air hose, and generally doing their best to instill a sense of complete panic. That’s all there was to it: a series of roughly a half dozen situations, each designed to cut off breathing. The natural inclination is to rocket to the surface and take a big gulp of air. But in pool comp, that response gets you a failing grade. We were expected to work through each of the challenges—untying knots in hoses, fixing problems with our tanks, and so on—without coming to the surface. As with most tests in BUD/S, we were given two chances to pass pool comp. I passed on the first attempt, which was a huge relief, since it was a widely held opinion that if you made it through pool comp, you’d make it through Second Phase.
Not that it was easy. After the completion of pool comp, we did a lot of night dives in San Diego Bay. Most of us had never experienced night diving, and coping with the blackness was as challenging as it was it was disorienting. There was also a lot of tedious but important work in pools and tanks. Eventually, near the end of Second Phase, we did get to make one really cool dive, a two-hundred-foot descent to a sunken ship that felt like the sort of scuba diving I’d always heard about, instead of the tortuous and tactical stuff we had been doing for the better part of two months. It was all part of the process—the navy didn’t want us out in the ocean, a couple of hundred feet below the surface, until we had demonstrated proficiency in a controlled environment.
By the time Second Phase ended, there were roughly forty members of Class 246 remaining. We were nine weeks away from becoming SEALs. Finally, it began to seem real. Not just because the distance to the BUD/S finish line was now shorter than the distance we had traveled from the starting line but because Third Phase, as we all knew, would be devoted to training that would most closely resemble life while on deployment as a SEAL. While the handbook description is a mouthful of words about basic weaponry, small-unit tactical training, and demolition, Third Phase is known most commonly as land warfare. Like everything else about BUD/S, it was a knee to the nuts.
It was also, at least part of the time, a lot of fun. If you were to ask a civilian to describe their idea of SEAL training, they would probably come up with something like Third Phase. With evolutions that focus on marksmanship and rappelling, as well as explosives and navigation, Third Phase does in fact provide trainees with an opportunity to apply their skills and training to tests that loosely approximate the kind of work they might expect to encounter on deployment.
Loosely. There’s nothing quite like going out on a mission, but Third Phase does a pretty good job of introducing the concept. We still did daily training runs, with the expectation that our times would decrease. We still beat ourselves up on the obstacle course. But the pain and stress of physical training was generally incorporated into field exercises that, while challenging, were often interesting and even fun in a weird sort of way. I mean, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was cool to blow things up or to become proficient on a variety of weapons—from a 9 mm pistol to an M4 rifle to an M60 machine gun. You don’t become a SEAL if you don’t like guns and explosives. It’s part of the job.
For the last five weeks of Third Phase, we moved offshore to the same training facility, where I’d helped out before starting Indoctrination some six months earlier. It was strange to think of how far I had come in such a short period of time. Back then, I had been utilized in a variety of ways, including playing the role of an enemy combatant to be dispatched by trainees during an ambush or other simulated mission. Now I was one of the trainees, back on that same jagged, rocky island, with only a few weeks standing between me and graduation.
There were still no guarantees. For one thing, the training facility had its own obstacle course, which, while not as nasty as the course at Coronado, was still no picnic, especially since we covered it while carrying a rifle and other gear, and even learned to negotiate it through a cloud of tear gas. I only ran the entire O Course once on the island, but that was enough, especially since we constantly incorporated long and difficult hill runs into our physical training.
The offshore facility was also the site of one of the most notorious and hated evolutions of BUD/S: a 5.5-nautical-mile swim.
This one had worried me since the start of BUD/S. Even as I survived Hell Week and the lung-popping fear of dive training—experiences that should have, and did, make me more confident—I still kept in the back of my mind an image of the open-water swim that had caused a great many men to DOR or get rolled back just as the end of BUD/S was finally in sight.
It’s hard to convey just how hard it is to swim five and a half nautical miles. Or just how much the entire experience sucks. Five and a half miles. In the ocean. In sixty-degree water that is often turbulent, with strong currents. And did I mention the sharks? Okay, I’ll say it now. There are sharks all around this island. Big, nasty, man-eating sharks, including the granddaddy of all ocean carnivores: the great white shark.
Now, the truth is, in all the years that the navy has conducted BUD/S training, there has never been a single case of a shark attack on a trainee. But when you step into the water for the five-and-a-half-mile swim, knowing you’re going to be out there for more than four hours, wearing a slick black wetsuit and fins that might confuse any hungry shark into thinking he’s looking at a seal, rather than a SEAL, it does give you pause. As most people know, the seal is at the top of the great white’s preferred menu, and the training facility is home to a large seal colony. Where there are seals, there are sharks, and there were lots of seals nearby.
The possibility that one of us might get eaten was a source of great humor among the instructors in Third Phase, who were, in some ways, even more sadistic than their counterparts back in Coronado. It might have been the distance and the remoteness of the location that brought out the best—or worst—in these guys. Regardless, they took great delight in letting us know that we’d probably have company during the ocean swim. Rumor was they even chummed the water before the evolution. I have no proof that this happened; nevertheless, it would not surprise me. We were told very explicitly that shark encounters were not just possible but likely, and that if we came in contact with one of the toothy monsters, we were to hold our ground and fight back.
Sure.
In all honesty, while the shark talk might have upped the fear factor prior to the ocean swim, once in the water and dealing with the reality of the situation, I never gave much thought to being attacked. Oh, sure, I might have joked about it a little with my swim buddy, Connor (we did the ocean swim in pairs), but it wasn’t a practical concern; there were too many other things to worry about and too many other ways in which this evolution sucked. Like many days in BUD/S, there were moments during the ocean swim when I was so exhausted, and in such discomfort, that anything that could put an end to the suffering seemed almost acceptable.
Including being eaten by a great white shark.
That’s the sort of thing that slips into your mind when you spend a few hours slogging through frigid ocean water, getting tossed about by the waves—some guys vomit from seasickness—and experiencing cramps in muscles you didn’t even know you had. The current can be quite strong, so we were given swim fins (flippers) to wear during the exercise. Sounds generous, right? Well, the truth is that the fins, while helpful in battling the current, put an enormous strain on your calves and feet, which had the unfortunate effect of causing you to tire more easily and increasing the likelihood of cramps. And yet, it wasn’t very practical to attempt the swim without them.
For the first couple of miles, Connor and I would stop occasionally to rest and talk. We screwed around a little to take our minds off the pain and exhaustion. I’d been worried about this evolution for months, but I tried to take the same approach that I did to everything during BUD/S: stay calm and keep moving forward. Go to the happy place rather than dwell on the pain. Kick and glide, kick and glide.
At one point, a seal began swimming alongside us, which was one of the coolest things I had ever experienced. And not just for a couple of strokes, either. He was with us for quite a while, maybe a half mile or more. You don’t realize how big seals are until one is swimming next to you; nor do you realize how beautiful and graceful they are. They really do look a bit like dogs, and if you get close to one in the water, they have similar personalities. We even played around with him as if he were a puppy. Maybe he was just curious, but this particular guy seemed to be enjoying our company. It occurred to me only later that we might as well have been swimming with shark bait!
At the halfway point, some two and a half hours into the swim, one of the instructors’ boats pulled up alongside us and offered canteens of water and protein bars. BUD/S is brutal in its intensity and capacity for inflicting discomfort, but pushing the envelope is not the same as being reckless. You can’t complete a five- or six-hour ocean swim without hydrating and eating at some point along the way. It just isn’t possible. So we refueled and went back to work.
I have nothing catastrophic to report about the ocean swim. It was long and boring and painful, but at some point, it became apparent that we were going to reach the finish line, and I was filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. This, I believed, was the last serious obstacle standing between me and graduation from BUD/S, and now it was nearly over.
But as my swim buddy and I broke the surf line and slogged up the beach, we were hit with a surprise. Instead of congratulating us, one of the instructors told us that even though we had finished, we had failed to complete the swim before the mandatory cutoff time.
“Get some rest, gentlemen,” he said. “You’ll be doing this again tomorrow.”
This was perhaps the worst thing I had ever heard in my life. Not since Hell Week had I felt so completely exhausted, and instead of being allowed to celebrate this accomplishment, we were told that we would have to repeat the torture, in less than twenty-four hours. I was angry and confused—I didn’t even know there was a cutoff time for the ocean swim (guess I should have paid closer attention); we thought it was one of those evolutions in which mere completion was considered success. It sure as hell seemed like that was a high-enough bar to clear. But I was too tired to question the instructor’s mandate, and I figured it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. This was BUD/S: as bad as something was, it could always get worse.
I ate a big meal that evening and passed out as soon as I hit the bed. It was the second-best night of sleep I had ever experienced, surpassed only by the night that Hell Week ended; however, this time I woke not to the sweet relief that comes with knowing the worst is over but to the stark realization that today would be even worse than yesterday. I was so sore I could barely walk. Despite a solid eight hours of sleep, I was foggy and exhausted. The idea that we were going to get back in the water and swim five and a half miles all over again seemed not just crazy but completely unrealistic. They might as well have asked us to swim to Hawaii. For one of the few times during my entire BUD/S experience, I felt a sense of creeping dread. And even a sliver of doubt.
This can’t be happening …
But it was. While the rest of the class slept in, Connor and I, along with a half dozen other “shitbags” (that’s what the instructors labeled us for failing to meet the cutoff time), dragged our sorry asses out of bed and began to dress. Included in this group were two guys who had somehow managed to get lost during their first attempt at the swim. I don’t know how this was possible, since you basically were supposed to simply follow the shoreline. But apparently, at some point, they had veered out into the ocean and become disoriented, a screwup so incomprehensible that the class paid tribute to it by writing a song in honor of the two wayward students; I don’t remember the words, but it was sung to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the fresh light of the morning, we were instructed to prepare all our gear for the ocean swim. We went through the entire pre-swim inspection, just as we had the day before. We were yelled at and told we were useless and threatened with expulsion if we didn’t perform better on this day. We had one more chance, they said, to meet the cutoff. Fail, and we’d be rolled back.
We went to the beach, limped into the water, and prepared for a second consecutive day of anguish. Only a few times during BUD/S did I feel defeated before an evolution even began. This was one of those times, and the feeling of impending doom was heightened by the fact that while I was standing in the water, a wave crashed over me, causing me to lose one of my swim fins. Without the fins, the five-and-a-half-mile swim would have been almost impossible. With only one fin … well, I can’t even imagine the result.
I looked at Connor. He shook his head.
“We’ve got this,” I said, trying to sound encouraging. I don’t think it worked.
And then, just as were about to begin swimming, a miracle happened.
“Okay, everybody out!” an instructor yelled. “Today’s your lucky day. We’re going to give you credit for yesterday’s swim.”
Wait … what?
I looked at Connor. We both smiled. And then we laughed. As did the others in our little group of shitbags. Along with the instructors. Turns out, they were just messing with us. In six months of mind fucks, this was the biggest of them all. It was evil. And if I were not so tired, I might have been tempted to say something about it. But I was just happy it was over. In a matter of seconds, the worst day of BUD/S had become the best of days. I even caught a lucky break—one of the other guys found my missing swim fin and handed it to me as we walked out of the water, so I didn’t get chewed out for losing my equipment.
A few minutes later, we joined the rest of our classmates for the ceremonial raising of the flag, which we did every morning, usually accompanied by a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. With the sun on my face, and the ocean swim behind me, I spoke the words aloud. They had rarely sounded quite so sweet.
Graduation was held on November 21, 2003, on a clear November morning in Coronado, right on the grinder, appropriately enough. This place where we all had worked and suffered for the previous six months was now the site of our greatest celebration. We all wore crisply pressed dress blue uniforms, with white caps and spit-shined shoes.
I’d always been a fairly easygoing guy, not really all that emotional—traits that helped me get through the roller-coaster ride of BUD/S—but I’d be lying if I said that graduation wasn’t a powerful day. Although rollbacks from previous classes left Class 246 with roughly 40 graduates, only 22 of the original 168 remained. You could see the pride on everyone’s faces, and the joy of being reunited with friends and family, with girlfriends and wives. My parents both made the trip out from Texas to attend graduation, which was nice. They didn’t get out of Texas very often, so this was a treat for them. And it gave me a real sense of satisfaction and pride to walk up and receive my certificate, and to then turn around and see their smiling faces.
The hated DOR bell in this setting was transformed from a symbol of individual failure into one of teamwork and triumph. At the end of the graduation ceremony, three different students—the officer in charge, class honor man (the outstanding class member, as determined by a vote of his fellow students), and lead petty officer—all were asked to ring the bell exactly once. As the final bell sounded, we threw our hats into the air and shouted.
“Hoo-yah!”
In reality, BUD/S was just the first step in the long journey to becoming a SEAL. There would be many more months of training—more than a year of Airborne School, SEAL Qualification Training, and Cold Weather Training. Along the way, I’d receive the Special Warfare insignia, also known as the Seal Trident, that signifies official membership in the SEAL brotherhood. While we might all have felt like SEALs that day in Coronado, and rightly proud of having survived BUD/S, there was so much more to learn.
A Navy SEAL, after all, is years—not months—in the making.