TWO

BOOT CAMP

Stepping off a cross-country flight from LAX, I walked up the jetway, through the airport, and out into Orlando, land of Disney, Epcot, and the U.S. Naval Training Center. The evening air was still warm from the blistering Florida sun. It was March 1993: I was nineteen years old and about to enter navy boot camp.

I couldn’t help wondering why the navy had sent me clear across the country when there was a perfectly good boot camp in San Diego, a few hours from where I live, but what the hell did I know? The ink was still wet on my enlistment contract, and I knew better than to ask the question. Besides, I was excited to finally get out of Ventura and on to bigger and better things.

There were a few other boot camp candidates on my plane. We were met by the local navy representative, who put us on a bus that started crawling north on Route 436. It took about forty minutes to reach our destination. Most of those minutes passed in a silence freighted with thrill, foreboding, and dread.

As we pulled into the training center and parked, we saw a few dozen guys lining the roadway, yelling obscenities at us and telling us how fond of us they were. Our welcome committee. It felt like we were in a bad prison movie.

It was ten o’clock at night, just in time to unload, find out where we were supposed to bunk, and hit the sack. A few of my busmates audibly cried themselves to sleep that first night. I didn’t mind. What I really didn’t appreciate was the four o’clock wake-up call the next morning with some assholes banging on aluminum trash cans and yelling, “Wake up! Get the hell out of your rack!” Senior recruits, in charge of moving the herd along.

After a trip to the barber to get rid of our hair, we assembled in a room where they staged what they called the Moment of Truth: “Okay, who here lied to your recruiter?” Now was our last chance to tell the navy some dark secret about our sexual preference (these were the don’t-ask-don’t-tell days) or admit to our drug addiction. When it came to sex, drinking, and carousing in general, I was certainly no angel, but I happened to have the dual advantage of being heterosexual and drug free. If I hadn’t been, I would’ve had the sense to keep my mouth shut. Some admitted that, yes, they’d used on occasion. They were given a piss test. Some of them passed; the others were gone.

Next I learned that I was being assigned to Company I-081 (a company being roughly a hundred people), which was integrated. At the time, the navy had three boot camp facilities: the one in San Diego, another in Great Lakes, Illinois, and the one I was standing in. Of the three, only Orlando had integrated companies.

By “integrated,” they didn’t mean blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians all together in harmony. They meant men and women recruits training together in the same outfit. This was my first exposure to that aspect of military planning we fondly call FUBAR: fucked up beyond all repair. In its sociologically progressive wisdom, the navy had recently decided it would force-integrate men and women in boot camp while at the same time forbidding them to develop any sexual interest in one another. It does not take a PhD in behavioral psychology to figure out what’s going to happen when you put nineteen-year-old men and women together in close confinement. We had a steady parade of grab-assing going on throughout boot camp, from start to finish. I was guilty as charged, though never caught or convicted.

Talk about a waste of resources. A men-only or women-only company would have one barracks room for sleeping and inspection. In our integrated company we needed three: one for group inspection, and then two more so the men and women could sleep in separate quarters. It was crazy. We assembled in one common area, with beds and lockers for inspection, where we stood at attention by our lockers while instructors screamed in our faces, just like you’ve seen in the movies. Then we all filed off to separate berthing places to sleep, guys to one and girls to another. Which meant I had two beds to make every day, and we had three separate locations for one purpose. Your tax dollars at work.

Still, I could hardly complain. I have always been a big fan of the fairer sex.

Now, I am the first to admit that with a shaved head, I am not a handsome man. People tell me I look mean. As my hair started growing in, though, my bonus points started going up with some of the women. “Wow,” said one. “You know, you’re kind of cute with hair.” I had a crush on her and got a few great back massages the first week in.

Hey, maybe this boot camp stuff wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

No—it was that bad. Back rubs and grab-assing notwithstanding, boot camp was long days of hard training. I’ve been a physically active person all my life, and I thought of myself as being in pretty good shape. Ha. Boot camp kicked my ass. Doing the physical training (PTs) was one thing: push-ups and more push-ups. But that wasn’t what really got to us. It was the endless hours of marching drills.

Picture a mob of one hundred green recruits, from all over the country, from all walks of life and all levels of preparedness—and unpreparedness. They had to teach us how to step in step, pivot and turn, march right, march left, pivot and turn … and every time anyone screwed up, which was practically every second of every minute of every hour, they would yell at us to drop to the pavement, hot and sweating, and push out another ten, or another twenty—then back on our feet to get it right this time. Which, of course, we would not.

The hours and weeks it took to whip this motley bunch into some kind of cohesive quasi-military force was grueling. Any chance we could grab to lie down flat on the concrete and rest, even for just half a minute, felt like heaven. When night came, I was dog-tired and hit that cot like a dying desert wanderer stumbling upon an oasis. Still, I was no stranger to hard work, and I was one of the better equipped people there. There were others who suffered a whole lot more than I did.

*   *   *

Petty Officer First Class Howard was my first experience with leadership in the navy, and he exemplified both the best and worst of what I would encounter in the years to come. He was smart, sharp, and very professional in both manner and appearance. There was never a ribbon out of place, not a stain or wrinkle in his working whites and crisp navy Dixie cup. He ran a damn good company.

And he was profoundly unfair.

Petty Officer First Class Howard was a black man who had grown up on the mean streets of a tough inner-city neighborhood, and apparently he was out to single-handedly set the race record straight during his tenure as a recruit company commander. Right away he handed out all the leadership positions in the company to all the black recruits. Of the hundred or so people in Company I-081, maybe ten were black, and they got all the cherry appointments. The two laundry spots, which came at the bottom of the totem pole, he assigned to a white guy and a white girl.

Petty Officer First Class Howard was, in fact, a first-class racist. This was not hard to see. It also wasn’t hard to see that he was going to press his agenda at every opportunity. This was my first exposure to discrimination from the underdog’s perspective, and my goal was simple: stay out of the man’s way and off his radar. In this goal, I had an ally: my night-time-barracks bunkmate Rouche Coleman.

Coleman was a street-smart African American kid from the meaner neighborhoods of Chicago who had joined the navy to escape the gang violence that permeated his home turf. He had been shot once and had the scar to prove it. He was soft-spoken, articulate, and blazingly intelligent.

Coleman and I hit it off right away, and he made it his mission to watch out for me. True to Petty Officer First Class Howard’s program, Coleman was assigned to be the starboard watch section leader. As section leader he was responsible for managing a nightly watch bill and met every night with Howard and the pin staff (recruit leadership). He would come back to our bunk and tell me about the meetings.

“He doesn’t like white people much,” said Coleman.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d kind of noticed.”

“In fact,” he went on, “he is one racist sonofabitch.”

I couldn’t disagree.

“In fact, you’re lucky you got me looking out for your white ass.”

He was dead right. I was lucky to have him looking out for my white ass. Later on we were broken into groups to work at various assignments on base. Sure enough, all us white folks were sent to the galley for kitchen duty. Coleman interjected on my behalf and requested that I be sent to help him in his duties back at our barracks. His request was granted, and we whiled away a lot of hours diligently playing cards and shooting the shit.

Coleman was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. We became genuinely close friends and stayed close throughout boot camp. We kept in touch for a few years afterward until our assignments sent us off in different directions and life drew us further apart. Eventually we lost touch. I often wonder about him and how he’s doing.

At boot camp I discovered that the military experience does a great job breaking down racial barriers and forcing you to learn about people from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. This proved to be one of the top fringe benefits from my time in the navy, and over the years to come I would make quite a few of the best friends one could hope for in a lifetime.

*   *   *

Soon after we arrived in Orlando, they gathered us all in a big circle and went around asking each of us in turn, “What do you want to do in the navy?”

Some of my campmates hesitated at the question, stumbled in their answers, or appeared not sure what to say. Not me. When my turn came, I didn’t have to think about it. “I want to be a SEAL.”

I knew what reaction to expect, too, and was not surprised when it came. “Good luck with that,” one guy sneered, and a line of snickers and wisecracks rippled around the circle.

It has always amazed me, when you tell people about something big you aspire to accomplish, how many try to shoot it down, throw out obstacles, tell you it’ll never happen. I think they don’t even realize they’re doing it. Often there’s no malicious intent there. It’s just the reaction people have when you state big goals. Maybe they’re threatened by you and your dreams; maybe by undercutting your goals, they get to justify their own insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe they’re just plain cynical, for no reason other than an ingrained habit of being negative. To tell the truth, I don’t know what their reasons are, and I don’t really want to know.

This had been happening for three years now, ever since I’d set my sights on becoming a Navy SEAL. Every now and then someone would say, “Wow, that’s great, you’d be awesome at that.” But not very often. Usually, when I told anyone my goal, whether teachers, acquaintances, or even friends, what I got back was disbelief and ridicule. Now that I was in the navy, it only got worse. Everyone here knew about the SEALs, or at least knew that it was one of the hardest training programs in the world.

For me this was just fuel for the fire, and the more I heard it the more it kept stoking that fire. I knew the only way I’d be able to prove I was serious about it was to ignore them and do it. That wasn’t a hard line to stick to, sitting here in a circle in Orlando. It would get a lot harder in the years to come, and brutally hard once I finally made it to the BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) legendary training course, but that wouldn’t happen for another four years.

A few weeks into boot camp, the SEAL “motivator” (that is, recruiter) came around. Finally! I thought. It’s about time this guy showed up—what the hell was he waiting for? He showed us a brief video that described the life of a SEAL. We saw guys being tested underwater, shivering in the cold, going through the various trials of BUD/S. It told us about the origin of the SEALs in the 1960s, along with some great footage of guys patrolling the Vietnam jungles in Levi’s and black face paint, brandishing some very sizable guns.

I didn’t even need to see the video, but I waited patiently till it was over, then went right up to the guy and asked him where I should sign. He shot me a withering look that said, It’s not gonna be that easy. Understatement of the decade.

There were four other guys who were also interested. The recruiter explained to the five of us that we needed to muster at 4:45 the next morning to begin our physical and mental conditioning. Normally we all got up about 5:45 for a six o’clock reveille. Now we would be getting up an hour earlier. That was one more hour of lost sleep I wasn’t looking forward to—but hey, if that was the price of admission, I’d gladly pay it.

The next morning, it was just me and two of the four guys. I guess the other two were excited by the video, but not so much about the reality. Those two were the first of hundreds I would see fall by the wayside on my journey to claim the SEAL Trident.

Throughout the rest of basic training, the three of us would get up an hour earlier than everyone else and head off to a special physical training program to get us in shape for BUD/S. I was fired up about it. This was what I was here for. But man, those PTs kicked my butt.

It was a hundred push-ups just to warm up. Then a thousand flutter kicks: You lie on your back, hands under your butt, and scissor-kick your legs in the air. Murder on the abdominals. Try it. Lie on the floor, on your back, your arms straight down and tucked under your butt, and kick your legs a foot or so in the air in a scissor motion. Then think: a thousand.

After that, pull-ups—dozens, then dozens more, and then dozens more. This continued for an hour while all our boot camp buddies were still taking another precious hour of shut-eye. It was brutal, but it got me into shape.

Before long, the three of us shrank to two. Rack up one more body falling by the wayside on the road to the SEALs.

As the weeks went by and we drew closer to graduation, I kept inquiring about my orders to BUD/S. I finally got one of the SEALs’ attention, and he looked into the situation for me. I can’t say I was happy with the report. A decision I had made almost a year earlier had come back to bite me in the ass.

*   *   *

Back in the summer of 1992, fresh out of my high school senior year, I had gone with my dad to pay a visit to the navy recruiter in Ventura. A few days after we talked with him, the recruiter drove me the roughly 100 miles down to Bakersfield to the Military Enrollment Processing Station (MEPS).

In Bakersfield they gave me a full physical, followed by a placement test, similar to an SAT, then sat me down at a desk with Petty Officer Rosales. His name wasn’t really Rosales; I don’t know his real name. In fact, if you had pulled me out of that room and asked me his name right then and there, I couldn’t have told you. Petty Officer Rosales was from the Philippines, with an accent so thick I could barely understand a word he said.

I heard him say something that sounded like “Watchaw byuan?” He looked at me expectantly, waiting for my response. It took a minute for the penny to drop—then I got it. He had said, “What job you want?” Okay: This was a placement interview. I knew I had scored pretty high on their placement test, so I pretty much had my pick of tracks.

“I want to be a Navy SEAL.”

He looked me up and down, then began scrolling through his computer. It was so ancient I half expected to hear the sound of rusty pipes clunking as it went about its search. After a minute, he nodded and looked up at me.

“I get you into Aircrew Search and Rescue program.” His eyes grew big as he spoke these words, like he was telling me I could be in line to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “You be search-and-rescue swimmer!”

Okay—wait. What? I wanted to be a SEAL, not an aircrew rescue guy. My face must have registered both confusion and disappointment, because he nodded again and began speaking emphatically.

“This is a great puckin program, men—you get a puckin turd class petty officer outta goddamn program, men.”

I looked over at my recruiter. He smiled and nodded. “It’s a solid program, Webb, and there aren’t many who qualify.”

As I would learn, he was speaking the truth. For an enlisted person in the navy, aircrew search-and-rescue (SAR) swimmer is a plum post, one of the four or five top jobs there is.

For a regular navy guy, life on a ship can be hell: twelve hours on, twelve off, in some cases working some pretty nasty jobs. My recruiter was a “hull tech,” which is the navy’s fancy way of saying ship’s plumber. Imagine working on toilets and pulling shitty pipes for six months at a stretch. Whatever your rating (Navy for “job”), if it’s your first time on the boat, you’re spending three months in the galley: slave labor (the kind Coleman saved me from). Not if you’re a SAR, though. As a rescue swimmer, I would be getting up each day and checking out the flight schedule, and if I weren’t attached to a flight that day, I’d have ancillary duties, like keeping track of the aircrew logbooks—but I would basically have the day off. The next day, I might have a two-hour flight to drop off an admiral, and that’d be my day. A cherry posting.

I didn’t know any of this at that point, and what he was describing sure didn’t sound like the track to SEAL training. I looked again at Petty Officer Rosales, still dubious.

“Issa great puckin job to get you inna SEALs, men,” he insisted.

Here was the problem: Petty Officer Rosales didn’t really understand how the path to SEALs worked, and because of that, he didn’t have a clear grasp of how to steer me in the right direction. In the years since then they’ve improved the recruiting process. Today you can go right out of boot camp into the particular training school for your rating and then right into BUD/S. But that’s not how it was then. Back when I was joining the navy, they had what they called SEAL source ratings—certain jobs that they routinely sourced for new SEAL candidates—and if you didn’t have one of those jobs, you had to go to serve in the regular navy fleet and then enter the long way around. I eventually realized that I could have gone a far more direct route into BUD/S, so in that sense, SAR turned out to be a lengthy detour.

Still, there could have been a hell of a lot worse detours. Petty Officer Rosales was right about one thing: SAR was a great puckin program. It meant I had guaranteed aircrew school and guaranteed Search and Rescue school, after which I could pick my aviation-related job on a plane or helicopter. Also, I would be accelerated from E-1, the entry-level rank for an enlisted sailor, to E-4, a noncommissioned officer (NCO) rank, which would mean a significant boost in both pay and stature. In time, I would be grateful for a number of reasons that I had gotten onto this track—but I had no idea how hard it would be to get out of this program and into BUD/S.

I was put on delayed entry, which meant I wouldn’t be showing up for boot camp for a good ten months. I spent that summer, fall, and winter working at Mike Dahan’s retail dive shop in Ventura, working and waiting. It was a good time. Mike ran an excellent shop, and I got to be good friends with his shop manager, Keith Dinette, and Keith’s high school sweetheart, Nicole. (In fact, we are close friends to this day.) Still, I was impatient to get going and be on the path to becoming a Navy SEAL. Finally, in March, an airline ticket showed up in the mail. A friend drove me to LAX, where I was paired up to room with another guy who was headed for boot camp. The next morning, we were on the plane to Orlando.

And now here I was, just days away from graduating boot camp, trying to figure out how the hell to get myself on the track to BUD/S.

“Sorry, Webb,” the SEAL told me. “You have orders to Search and Rescue—and they’re undermanned in that program. We can’t just yank you out. You’ll have to wait until your final duty station and then apply for a transfer.”

Talk about taking the wind out of my sails. I pleaded with him to let me switch programs, but he said there was little he could do for me.

“Be patient,” he said. “You’re showing promise; you’ve got good traits. Keep at it. Just apply at your next command.”

I was not happy about this, but what the hell, I told myself. At least I wasn’t headed to a ship to chip paint. Search and Rescue would be a great program, SAR would be a great position—and besides, as soon as I got to my command, I could apply and get fast-tracked to BUD/S.

Hey, how long could it take?

*   *   *

My dad showed up in Orlando for my graduation from boot camp. It was a good feeling, walking out of there knowing I’d accomplished something significant. I could tell he was proud of me.

A year earlier, when he first heard I was serious about going into the navy, my dad had been there for me and cheered me along, even giving me a Ford Ranger to drive, as a combined high-school-graduation/congratulations-for-enlisting-in-the-navy gift. While so many other people were pooh-poohing my aspirations to be a SEAL, my dad had been totally supportive. Given our rocky history together, this had felt especially good to me.

Things had not gone well for my parents’ marriage. After returning from that ill-fated boat trip to New Zealand (minus one teenaged son), they had found themselves faced with irreconcilable differences and unable to work things out. Maybe the stress of coming back to reality in the States after their big boat trip exacerbated things. I’m sure finances were no help. Whatever the particulars and reasons of the moment, my dad decided to move out.

My mom was crushed, but in time managed to get past it (if not entirely over it), and eventually she met another guy. Within a few years my dad must have realized what he’d lost, because suddenly he was trying to win her back. It was a one-way bridge he’d driven her over, though, and she wasn’t going back.

Every now and then he would come visit me on the Peace, Captain Bill’s dive boat, and do a little scuba diving. Our relationship continued to be pretty much just as strained as it had been on the deck of the Agio. On one of these visits, soon after my seventeenth birthday, we went diving off Gull Island, a little pinnacle rock off the back side of Santa Cruz Island. We anchored up, and he was one of the first guys into the water. A half hour later he headed up toward the surface to see where the boat was—and surfaced right smack into a big patch of kelp. It was a very bad spot, with the surf breaking over an especially rocky coast. He got tangled up in the kelp, panicked, and spit his regulator out.

At the time, I was serving in the role of rescue diver, so I dove in to help him out. I can remember the scene as if it were happening right now: I’m staring out at Jack Webb, this tough-guy hero of mine who is panicking and yelling for help, and I’m the one there to rescue him. It was hard to wrap my head around, but my training kicked in. I dove into the water, swam the 300 or 400 yards in a flash, and pulled his ass out of there. It put us in a weird situation, and we’d never talked about it, but it hovered there, making our already complicated relationship even more awkward.

Right after graduation from boot camp I got my first military paycheck. I couldn’t wait to look at it. I ripped open the envelope and stared at the numbers. It was for about $700. Considering I’d been there for two months, that came to a little more than ten dollars a day. I’d been making better money than that working on the dive boat when I was fourteen! I didn’t care. It was something—and I was in the navy, on the road to becoming a SEAL.

I had a week before I would be checking into Aircrew Candidate School in Pensacola, so I bought a plane ticket to go see my dad, who was now living in Jackson Hole, right on the Idaho-Wyoming border. I flew into Salt Lake, where he met me, and we drove up to his place, where we had a great time together. We went skiing, drank beer, goofed off. We drove around in my Ford Ranger, which he was keeping for me in Jackson Hole while I was going through my navy training. I had the sense that he was trying to reach out to me, and I appreciated it, even though things still felt a little strained between us.

The week came to an end and it was time for me to get back. I had a few uniforms I wanted to get dry-cleaned. I’d pretty much blown my whole paycheck on the ticket out and my return ticket to Florida, and I had no cash left.

“So Dad,” I said, “could you hook me up with a little cash so I can get these uniforms cleaned, pressed, and looking sharp when I go back?”

He looked at me for a moment without a word—and then started giving me a hard time, berating me for hitting him up for money.

What the hell? I stared at him, not believing what I was hearing. After all this time, after all we’d been through, he was going to make me feel guilty about helping me out with a little dry-cleaning? I’d saved his goddam life, for crying out loud, and he couldn’t help me make sure I had a clean uniform?

I lost it and started yelling at him—and before either of us knew what was happening I was sitting there behind the wheel of that Ranger, bawling my eyes out in anger and frustration.

Instantly he knew he had screwed up in a big way, and he felt truly terrible about the whole thing—at least so I would learn many years later. At the time, it sure didn’t show. A blanket of quiet hostility settled over us. He gave me the money. I vowed to myself that I would never ask him for anything again, ever. I left the Ranger with him and told him it was his now. I didn’t want it.

We did not part on good terms. Soon, though hardly soon enough, I was out of there and on a plane back to Florida for the next leg of the journey.

*   *   *

My next stop was Pensacola, way out on the Florida panhandle, where I would check in for two months of training at the Naval Aircrew Candidate School.

Aircrew school was a much more relaxed environment than boot camp had been. While boot camp was all about physical conditioning, aircrew school was mostly about giving us an orientation, as well as screening to make sure none of us had any physiological problems with flying.

We’d get up early, put on our shorts and T-shirts, go do a little PT, eat breakfast, and then hit the classroom. They strapped me into a flight simulator, a big cylindrical chamber outfitted with a seat and handles. Once they shut me in, the thing started moving, spinning at different speeds, now faster, now slower, changing both speed and direction at unpredictable intervals; the whole time a voice was talking to me from some unseen speaker, walking me through the various maneuvers. Clearly the thing was designed to put our inner ears to the test, to push the limits of our capacity to withstand acceleration and extremes of motion without getting vertigo. We called them spin-’n’-pukes.

Some guys washed out right then and there. A few others didn’t survive drug testing (I wondered how they’d gotten this far), and one or two had mental health issues that knocked them out of the running.

The PT standards in aircrew school were a bit more severe than we’d had in boot camp. Still, there wasn’t much of it. To me, the PT seemed pretty easy, and I could feel myself starting to get out of shape. For some of the guys, though, it wasn’t easy at all, and a few more washed out because they couldn’t meet the physical standards.

Pensacola was a great place to be young and in the navy. We were right on the border of Florida and Alabama, and things were fairly loose. Girls were everywhere, and most places in town didn’t check your ID at the bars if you were military. I was in heaven.

Most of our class were headed to work in aircrew jobs or other navy jobs. Only a handful of us were going on to Search and Rescue, and when it came time to graduate we said, “Oh, shit.” We were excited but also somewhat terrified. We knew our next step was going to be a good deal harder.

After Aircrew Candidate School I headed down the block for four weeks of Search and Rescue school, and sure enough, here things kicked up a notch. Although it was just down the street, it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Search and Rescue school was a completely different world.

At SAR school they ran a tight ship, and the atmosphere was serious and professional. We showed up early every morning for inspection, and our uniforms had to be perfect. From there we went to PT, followed by a 3-mile conditioning run, followed by some swims, then the classroom, and then we hit the pool for training.

The training environment revolved around a huge indoor pool that simulated sea state, the irregular swell of waves on the open ocean, in a space the size of a large gymnasium. They had huge spray machines to simulated helicopter rotor wash, and parachute-like devices hanging down from cranes, which they used to drag us through the pool. We learned the basics of lifesaving, then moved on to more advanced techniques for rescuing downed airmen.

Imagine you are a pilot and you’ve had to eject from your craft. It’s the middle of the night, and you’ve parachuted into rough water. You can’t see a thing, you’re weighed down and badly entangled in a web of parachute shroud lines, and the water is freezing cold. We’re the guys who jump out of helicopters into this environment to save your ass.

When people are plunged unexpectedly into the water, they tend to panic, and even though you’re the guy swimming out there to save their life, they tend to grab on to you and push you down. It’s not conscious, it’s out of pure panic. Still, conscious or not, they are doing their level best to drown you. So we did a lot of what they described as drown-proofing.

The objective was to make sure we were ready for whatever conditions might be thrown at us. They taught us how to get the pilot out of his chute and then either clip him into a litter or fit him fast with a rescue strap device that slips under the arms. Then we would have to clip ourselves in and get us both hoisted up and into the waiting helo, all while the victim was panicking and trying to fight us off. There are dozens of different types of harnesses, straps, chutes, and other systems, and we had to know the procedures for every one of them—and we had to know them blind, backward and forward, because we might be dealing with them in the worst of circumstances, with a panicked or incapacitated human being on our hands. We also had to master a range of first-aid techniques, because you never know what kinds of injuries a downed pilot might have sustained.

Near the end of the four weeks, it was final exam time. We all filed into the locker room and sat down on benches to wait while they called us out, one by one, to go to the pool for our turn. When my name was called, I stood up and walked out into the open pool area.

The place was noisy and dimly lit, simulating a nighttime scene. The rotor chop simulator spray was on, the hoist equipment was up and running, and there below me was a downed pilot flailing around in the water, on the edge of drowning.

I leapt off the platform, eyes looking to the horizon as instructed, and felt myself splash down into the tank. I swam directly toward the panicked victim, trying in vain to sense when I was getting close. It was impossible to hear anything over the roar of the machinery and chop of the waves. Suddenly two huge arms wrapped around me like a steel bear trap, and we were both thrashing in the water. I could feel his panic. I knew it was simulated and that he was in reality a skilled instructor posing as a terrified pilot—but he was a good actor, and he was taking me down.

The shroud lines were everywhere. I knew I couldn’t let myself get tangled in those goddam ropes, but it was very difficult not to. For an instant I flashed on that picture of my dad, struggling to fight clear of that cloying bed of kelp and spitting out his regulator in panic. I wanted to say, “For Chrissake, calm down—I’ll get you out of here!” But I knew that when someone is in a panic, there’s no talking to him. Finally I managed to free myself from the guy’s grip, wrestle him into the harness system, and get him hoisted up onto the helo.

Once he was laid out on the floor, I saw that he was badly injured. His injuries were simulated, of course, but the special effects were very good—and I had to administer the correct first aid if I wanted to pass the test.

That exam was tough. Fortunately for me, my years of experience on Captain Bill’s dive boat had sharpened my water skills to a fine point, and I made it through okay. Not so for some of the others. The drown-proofing was where the most people washed out. In that frantic, darkened, noisy environment, feeling themselves being dragged down by a crazy person, they would lose their grip and panic themselves. A few of our victims “drowned.”

Search and Rescue was an excellent training experience. Graduates of this program are an elite bunch. Howard Wasdin, the SEAL who fought in the “Black Hawk Down” battle of Mogadishu and went on to write the book SEAL Team Six, started out training as a search-and-rescue swimmer. I was proud when I finished the course, and I’m proud to this day to have belonged to the SAR community.

But I still wanted badly to get to SEAL training.

*   *   *

After SAR school it was time to pick an “A” school where I would receive basic training for whichever specific naval job I elected to do. In the navy, your occupational specialization is referred to as your rating; your rating is earned through “A” school. If you want to be a cook, you go to mess specialist “A” school. If you’re a submarine sonar guy, you go to “A” school for sonar.

Search-and-rescue swimmers were deployed on helicopters, and as far as I could see, the only job on an aircraft that didn’t involve turning wrenches was antisubmarine warfare operator, or AW. This was the early nineties, when we hadn’t yet shifted from Cold War thinking and were still largely oriented toward a big Soviet submarine threat that no longer existed. Today the same rating is called aviation warfare systems operator. By whatever name, it boils down to being the guy who works the sonar in the back of the helicopter—and that sounded damn exciting to me. I put AW at the top of my wish list.

The navy is usually pretty fair in awarding top finishers their choice of orders. Since I had been at the top of my class at both Aircrew Candidate School and SAR school, I got my pick, and soon I was headed for Millington, Tennessee, for four months of antisubmarine warfare/sonar operator training.

They taught us some fascinating skills in Millington, including how to read a sonar gram (not the same thing as sonogram). We would drop sonar buoys out the back of a helicopter, then read the signals they emitted on a screen or, more typically, burned onto a printout. We learned how to see harmonic frequencies in the readout, and from these pick out the blade rate and discern how many blades were on that particular prop. There would be a whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—that last being a top rotation where it would cavitate (create an air pocket that then implodes), and by counting the number of whooshes between cavitations we could tell it was, for example, a four-bladed prop. Other clues from the sonar frequencies would tell us how many cylinders the engine had. It was amazing: From this little screen or printout we could say, “Okay, we’ve got a one-cylinder engine, four-blade prop—so that’s a type 209 class Soviet sub.” We memorized a ton of different submarine traits and characteristics so that, in a clinch, we could classify any one of them immediately without even thinking about it.

Toward the end of my time at “A” school I again inquired about orders to BUD/S. It turned out, the rules had just changed. In the past, it had been possible to go right from “A” school to BUD/S. In fact, one guy had just done that a few months earlier, but he was the last to go through that door before it slammed shut. They had since restricted anyone from leaving “A” school with orders to BUD/S. Once again, I was told I’d need to wait and take up my request after arriving at my final duty station. This would be when I deployed as part of an active helo squadron—which would not be for close to a year.

Graduation day came, and we all sat huddled in the classroom waiting for our orders. We’d heard that half of us would go to the West Coast and half to the East Coast. Wherever we each ended up was where we would spend the next three or four years of our lives.

We knew they used class rankings to pick our assignments for our next duty station, so everyone with mediocre grades was horse-trading—a thousand dollars cash, sex with their sister, anything not to be sent east, or sent west, depending on the person’s particular aversion. There were guys from the Midwest who were terrified they would have to go hang out with those fruitcakes in California. In my case, the destination was helicopter training, then duty station with a helo squadron, which meant orders either to San Diego or Jacksonville, Virginia. I did not want to end up in Virginia. BUD/S was based in San Diego, and I knew I’d have a better chance of making it into SEAL training if I was already stationed right down the street.

I’ve never been a great student, but I’ve always been able to pull out A’s and B’s when I absolutely had to, and I was graduating near the top of the class. Still, I feared I would end up being sent to an East Coast squadron.

It turned out I was worried for nothing: The orders were all for the West Coast.

I was going home.

*   *   *

After nearly a year out east, I returned to California in January of 1994 with orders to report to HS-10, the helicopter training squadron in San Diego where I would learn the ropes before finally deploying as part of an operational squadron. However there were a few more hurdles to clear first before joining HS-10, and the toughest of these was what came next. Before you can become a pilot or rescue swimmer, or take any other job where there is significant risk of capture, you need two things. You have to have secret clearance, and you have to go to survival school.

The term “boot camp” was first used by the marines back in World War II, “boot” being slang for “recruit.” Those of us who showed up for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training that January might have already been through many months of training, but we were clearly still green, still boots—and survival school was boot camp on steroids.

Based on the experiences of U.S. and allied soldiers as prisoners of war, the program’s aim is to equip its trainees with both the skills and the grit to survive with dignity in the most hostile conditions of captivity. It was far and away the most intense training I’d encountered so far.

We mustered at the SERE school building at Naval Air Station North Island, on the northern end of the Coronado peninsula, where we were scheduled for a week of classroom training, followed by a week of fieldwork. We spent that first week covering history and background, including lessons learned from World War II and Vietnam. We learned such things as how to tell a captor just enough to stay alive—but not enough to give away secrets. The week went by fast, which suited us fine. We were looking forward to getting into the field.

That day came soon enough. We were all lined up and checked head to toe for smuggled food items before heading out. We had been warned not to try to sneak any food into our clothes or boots, but as I would learn again and again during my time in the navy, there’s always one in every bunch. Sure enough, a few guys got caught with a variety of ridiculous food items stashed on their person. I had to give it to them for trying.

After inspection, we drove about ninety minutes to the northeast, heading into the mountains of Warner Springs, California, where we were broken into groups of six and then into two-man evasion teams. I was paired up with a big Recon marine. These are Special Ops guys, similar in many ways to SEALs, including some who specialize in deep reconnaissance and others, called black ops, who focus more on direct action missions. I didn’t know if this guy was black ops or not, but regardless, as survival and evasion partners go I figured I could do a lot worse.

Then we were set loose in the wild with nothing but the clothes on our backs, simulating the experience of being on the move behind enemy lines. We spent the next three days learning basic survival and evasion skills, including trapping, tracking, and land navigation. We ate everything we could get our hands on, which wasn’t much. Survival school classes had been going out to this same spot for years, and practically everything that qualified as edible plant or animal had long ago been snatched up and eaten. Soon we were wolfing anything that wasn’t tied down, including bugs, some scruffy plants, and one lucky rabbit. By day 2, we were starving.

The nights were rough. Our first day out my partner and I built a shelter in preparation for the cold mountain night, but we way overbuilt. Being manly men, we wanted a nice roomy setup so we would each have our space and wouldn’t have to sleep so close that we would touch each other. Having since experienced that kind of cold a number of times, both in training in the States and thousands of feet above sea level in the wilds of northern Afghanistan, let me tell you: All that manly bullshit goes right out the window and you are more than happy to be nut to butt with anyone who has a pulse and warm blood coursing through his veins. After waking up the fourth time, chilled to the core and teeth chattering, my marine buddy and I grunted a few words of manliness and then nestled up to each other like a scene right out of Brokeback Mountain.

After three days of this, we were ready to get on with the evasion-and-captivity portion of training, which included an evasion exercise lasting about twenty-four hours, leading directly into the simulated POW camp portion of the training, which would be three days long. During the evasion exercise, which simulated the circumstances of a downed aviator, we would be out in the woods attempting to evade capture by the enemy, who would actively hunt us down. The rules of this exercise were pretty simple: Don’t get caught. If we did, we would win a prize: extra POW time.

When the time was up, they would sound a loud siren, at which point those of us who had made it to the time threshold without being caught would walk to the nearest road and turn ourselves in. The “turn yourself in” part sounded crazy to me, but what the hell. It was their rules.

My marine buddy and I did very well at the evasion exercise—so well, in fact, that by the time they sounded the siren the next afternoon, we had cleared way to the south and were completely out of earshot. We eventually realized we had gone way out of bounds and the time limit must have expired by now, so we found a road and started walking north toward the exercise boundary. Soon we were picked up by a truck full of foreign-looking men who looked quite pissed off. Hoods were yanked over our heads, and we were smacked around for a while. Good times. Later we learned that these guys had been out looking for us for almost four hours and were none too happy about it.

Once we reached camp, our hoods were removed and we were marched into a processing area, where we were each given our own war criminal number. I remember my number to this day: I was no longer Brandon Webb, I was now War Criminal 53.

There were two rules here, and we learned them pretty fast. “Grab your rags!” was the first. The second was “Eyes to ground, whore dog!” Grab your rags: That was intended to remind us to grab the sides of our pants (which did indeed resemble rags at this point) so the guards could see our hands at all times. Eyes to ground: That one was to ensure that none of us war criminals would look around and gain any increased awareness of our surroundings—awareness that we might be able to use later to our advantage.

I decided to test out this second rule. Quietly, carefully, without moving my head or neck, I rolled my eyes just a few degrees to steal a glance around. Whack! My head rocked back from a swift backhand to my face. I could feel my jaw crack. I was a fast learner, or at least not the slowest: I tried it once more, and after the second numbing smack across the face figured they were enforcing the rules pretty well. From that point on I grabbed my rags and kept my eyes to ground. I did not look around. (Okay, I did—but I was a lot more careful about not getting caught doing it.)

Once we were given our new rags and number, we were all asked very nicely what we preferred for dinner.

“War Criminal 53! You want the chicken or the fish?”

Both sounded damn good to me—but I suspected it was a trick question and that what they really wanted was our signatures. We had to sign for our choice of dinner in the ledger, and they had instructed us to use our real names. I’d heard enough stories to realize that they could use this against us in any sort of future propaganda campaign. I might have been a prisoner in their camp, but I wasn’t about to roll over. I wrote my choice in the ledger (I chose fish) and signed it without using my name, writing simply, “Fuck you—sincerely.”

After signing up for dinner we were gathered in a room where we could talk to each other. There were some pretty nervous guys in there. Strange though it sounds, I felt pretty relaxed. I’m not sure if this comes from early experiences being on my own or if it’s just my temperament, but I’ve never been one to lose my cool in a high-stress situation. This would prove to work to my advantage more than once, both now and especially later on, once I was finally in training as a SEAL.

After a few minutes, the camp guard came in and asked for a show of hands from anyone who was U.S. Spec Ops. I couldn’t believe it. Did he really think we were going to fall for that?

“Come and answer us, you American whore dogs! Who is U.S. Spec Ops and pilots? We know your U.S. spy planes and Spec Op soldiers are on the ground in our country! Turn yourselves in now and save yourself pain and suffering. We will give you hot meal!”

The accent was Russian and sounded quite authentic, but the request was so funny and so obviously full of shit that it took an effort to suppress laughter. In the next instant my amusement turned to shock and dismay when I saw several of my comrades’ hands fly up. What the hell were they thinking? Those unfortunates were asked to sign a confession and then immediately separated from the rest of us. I don’t know where they were taken or exactly what their special treatment was, but I can promise you two things: first, it hurt, and second, it was not a “hot meal.”

Next I was assigned to a small concrete box, about three feet tall, though somewhat larger in width and depth (thank heavens), which I was expected to enter. Not much alternative here. I crawled in and did my best to find a comfortable position. Hunching down a bit, I could just manage to sit cross-legged, sort of. I am not a tall man, and in that moment I was grateful for this fact.

In the box I noticed a Folgers coffee can. I was told its purpose. “It is for you to piss and crap in.” Ahh, all the amenities. There was a little canvas flap one could pull down for a little privacy when it came time to use the can, that phrase having now taken on its literal meaning.

This would be my home for the next few days.

I wondered what would happen next. It wasn’t that terrible being crammed into this ridiculous box, but I wanted them to haul me out and start interrogating me. Let’s get this damn thing over with, I thought.

Nobody came.

As the hours crawled by, a sort of routine began to establish itself.

People were randomly selected (at least it seemed that way to me) to be pulled out of their boxes and taken away into the night. A short while later, we would hear screams. Then the music would start: bad songs, the worst, over and over. Other times it would be a recording of a little girl pleading for her daddy to come home. Whatever it was they played on the loudspeakers, it would go on for hours. When daybreak came this routine continued. Screaming, complaining, whining, beatings, and bad music.

My most vivid memory of time in the camp was being crammed into another tiny box, this one of wood and no more than 3 feet in all dimensions. This wonderful location would be my accommodations for the next few hours while they subjected me to the interrogation portion. (Be careful what you wish for.) I’ve never had a problem with small spaces, but when I was stuffed into that box (yes, stuffed), my left leg started to cramp. This was the kind of cramp you can quickly relieve simply by straightening out your leg, but in that damned box, there was no straightening anything out. That leg cramp—and even more, my complete and utter inability to do anything about it—drove me near to insanity. It took everything I had to keep it together in the box.

On day 2 they gathered us all together and gave us a speech.

“Nobody cares about you worthless turds. Nobody on the outside is thinking about you. You’re ours, and no one gives a shit. So we’ve made a decision. We were supposed to keep you here for three days and then let you go, but that was the old plan. That was before we had a chance to find out just how weak and pitiful you are. We decided we’re gonna keep you pieces of shit here and keep punishing you for a lot longer. Maybe five days. Maybe ten. We haven’t decided yet.”

Now, this sounded pretty far-fetched. We all knew that the POW portion would last only three days. At this point, though, it was weirdly believable. When you haven’t had a decent meal in four days, you haven’t slept much, and you’ve gone through a full twenty-four hours of that POW environment, I don’t care who you are or how tough you are, it starts to mess with your head.

After this bizarre announcement we were returned to our concrete homes. Shortly thereafter, my neighbor in the next hole over, War Criminal 51, asked to see the camp commandant about his swollen feet. He was ignored and soon asked again, this time louder—and again, and then again. He kept repeating his request, over and over, and was ignored every time. After more than a dozen repetitions, his demands moved from pleading to urgency to hysteria, and still he kept at it.

Finally he started screaming.

He was done putting up with this bullshit, and everyone could stop playing games now, right now. “My orders end tomorrow, man! I’m not playing this fucking game anymore! Get me the fuck out of here, man!” He sounded like Private Hudson, the Bill Paxton character in Aliens. (“That’s it, man, game over, man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now?… We’re all gonna die, man!”) He had completely lost it.

After about an hour of this, I had to pull down my little canvas flap so the camp guards wouldn’t see me laughing. I know that sounds sick, but I couldn’t help it. There were only two ways to see it: Either it was terrifying or it was funny as hell. I went with funny as hell.

Suddenly I heard the scuttling of running feet. I jerked open my canvas flap just in time to see War Criminal 51 making a run for it! I could hardly believe my eyes. Did he really think he could get out? Who knows. My neighbor (I never did learn his name) had cracked.

I don’t think anyone had ever tried to run right out the main gate before, and he actually took the guards by surprise for a moment—but only for a moment. They grabbed him up pretty quick. I never saw him again.

Not that he was the only one who thought about escaping. But it is an established rule in the U.S. military that even in a prisoner-of-war situation you still use a strict chain of command. For example, if you want to make an attempt to escape the camp, you have to run your request chit (fill out the form) and ask permission from the senior person. This was difficult for me to accomplish because of the location of my concrete box and my lack of proximity to our senior person. I made two attempts to run escape chits, but none of the people I passed them to were successful in getting a chit all the way up the chain of command.

In the middle of the second night there, we were told to strip naked. We stayed that way while they hosed us down with freezing cold water. Time for your bath. What else could you ask for?

During the course of these few days we learned a lesson that had been learned the hard way by real POWs before us, mostly from people imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam: In any prisoner-of-war situation, the goal is to survive with honor. If you act like a jackass, if you are arrogant and refuse (or appear to refuse) to cooperate, you will be quickly executed. Don’t be a smart-ass. That is not the way you play the game. As much as is humanly possible, you stick to name, rank, and service number.

A few guys took the opposite tack and acted out, being as obnoxious and uncooperative as they could. Their reward: They got waterboarded. After the course was over, these guys started bragging about being waterboarded for bad behavior, as if it were a badge of honor. They were quickly disabused of this notion. In our debrief after SERE, it was made crystal clear that if you got waterboarded, this showed that you were not putting into practice what you’d been taught about surviving in a prisoner-of-war situation. In short, you were a fuckup.

A few guys pushed it even further, and their punishment went beyond waterboarding: They were executed. (Simulated, of course, but still not fun.) More than a few people failed out for getting “executed” or completely losing their cool. Three days doesn’t sound like a very long time, and under normal, everyday circumstances, it’s not—but under POW camp conditions, it doesn’t take long to wear down a man’s sanity.

After day 3 we were liberated from the camp and soon found ourselves back at North Island getting debriefed on our POW experience. Our guards had seemed callous and brutal, like they neither knew nor cared who we were and didn’t even notice us except to punish us. It was a ruse. In fact, they had watched us all quite carefully and taken thorough notes on each individual prisoner the entire time. I was happy to find out that I did pretty well.

I asked about War Criminal 51, the guy in the hole next to mine who’d made a run for it.

“He lost it, completely and totally,” I was told.

Would he be able to go on with his training, I asked, or was he out of the navy?

“Don’t know,” they said. “We’re still evaluating him. Either way, though, he will not be continuing on in his current high-risk assignment.”

They gave us advice on how to make a solid transition from our exhausting training back to normal, real-world living. “Remember,” they told us, “you guys have not eaten in almost a week. Take it easy, and definitely refrain from having any alcohol for a while, because it can induce hallucinations.”

I think they told us this last piece at least three times, but they could have said it thirty times and it probably still would not have mattered. Try telling a nineteen-year-old who has just been liberated from a simulated POW camp that he should “take it easy” and “refrain from alcohol,” and see what happens. I went out that night with all my friends and classmates to the Surf Club on base, and we got absolutely trashed. I don’t remember much about that night, but I vividly remember waking up Sunday morning with a massive headache, peeing bright yellow from dehydration. I didn’t care. Boot camp—all of it—was over.

Now all I had to do was figure out how to get to BUD/S.