Much of our BUD/S training took place at the combat training tank, a specially designed Olympic-size pool with sections of varying depths: three feet, nine feet, and fifteen feet.
We ran to the training tank dressed in camouflage shirts, camouflage pants, black boots, and our green “first phase” helmets. Each of us wore a web belt—a thick belt made for carrying gear. Attached to the belt was a canteen, and tied around the top of the canteen was a piece of white rope.
In any free moment—waiting for chow, waiting for our turn to run the obstacle course—we’d practice tying knots. We learned how to tie knots because we needed to be able to attach explosives to obstacles underwater.
The instructors had strung a line in the water in the fifteen-foot section of the tank, just inches from the bottom of the pool. I wasn’t the best swimmer in the class, but I knew that if I waited for others to go first, the fear would just build. I needed to set an example, so I jumped into the water with a swim buddy.
We swam to an instructor treading water in front of us. Our task, he said, was to tie a knot around the rope submerged at the bottom of the pool.
Both of us took a deep breath, made a fist, and pointed our thumbs down to indicate we were about to dive. As we kicked to the bottom of the pool, pressure built on my eardrums. I pinched my nose and blew hard until my ears popped and the pressure equalized.
When we reached the bottom of the pool, I pulled out my rope and started to tie a knot around the line in the water. On dry land it was easy, but underwater I kept floating upward, which meant I had to release the knot to paddle myself down again.
When my swim buddy and I finished tying our knots, we gave the instructor the “Okay?” sign. He exhaled, and a few bubbles ran for the surface. He looked at the left side of our knots, then the right side. He tugged on both knots, and just as I felt I couldn’t stay down there much longer, he gave us both the okay. We untied our knots and streaked toward the surface.
Treading water, we took five big breaths. Our instructor said, “Let’s go,” and we swam down to tie the next knot. We had to do this five times, and each time, it got harder. My fingers grew clumsier. I found it harder to hold my breath.
One of the men in our class swam down and tied his knot. But then he began to float toward the surface, his body limp.
“Everyone out of the pool,” they ordered. We climbed out, and they made us sit down, facing away from the casualty. I still heard them drag his body from the water and listened as they worked to revive our classmate. He lived, but he suffered brain damage and left BUD/S.
Lieutenant John Skop, the officer in charge of the BUD/S class two classes before ours, had not been so lucky. He had been doing caterpillar races when it happened. In caterpillar races, teams of men wearing life jackets line up in the pool. Each man wraps his legs around the man in front of him. Connected like an ungainly caterpillar, the men paddle with their arms and race against other teams down the length of the pool.
The instructors warned us over and over again to tell them if we ever coughed up blood, which could be a sign of pulmonary edema. In a pulmonary edema, fluid builds up in the lungs, and it becomes harder and harder to breathe. The lieutenant had kept his pulmonary edema a secret, and when he started to struggle through the caterpillar race, his lungs finally filled with fluid. He died on the pool deck.
When I first heard Skop’s story, I thought, That was stupid. I’d have let the doctors know. But when I was actually in the middle of BUD/S training, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to be rolled out of my class for medical reasons and have to start over again with another class of men I didn’t know.
In fact, a few weeks later, a friend and fellow member of BUD/S Class 237 caught me spitting out what felt like a lungful of blood after I’d come up from tying a knot at fifty feet.
I said, “I’m fine.”
He looked at me and just said, “Come on. Better not let the instructors see you.”
For days after, I worried something was wrong, but I kept going.