After a long, long sleep, I rose from my bed. My body felt heavy and numb, but when I held up my hands I saw that the Hell Week swelling had gone down a little. I joined the others, and we shuffled like zombies to medical. There they checked us again for cellulitis (flesh-eating bacteria), pneumonia, and broken bones.
With our medical check passed, we drove to a local restaurant and tore through a breakfast of stacked pancakes, sausages, crispy hash browns, cheesy eggs, sparkling fresh fruit, and biscuits covered in gravy. If last night’s pizza had been the best meal of my life, this breakfast came in a close second.
I was still swollen—head, hands, feet—and when I pulled up to my house and stepped out of the car, I moved slowly. My neighbor’s sprinkler was on, and just a few drops landed on the sidewalk, but I walked wide around it. I wanted, for a day, to be nothing but warm and dry.
After a blissful weekend off, we jumped right back into training. We did physical drills on the grinder and runs on the beach, and we continued our weekly two-mile ocean swims.
One early Tuesday morning, my swim buddy and I came out of the ocean, and as we ran up the beach, a man shouted something to us as he passed.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Something about a plane crash in New York.”
As the rest of the team finished the swim, we stripped off our wetsuits and donned boots and camouflage uniforms as word passed among us: a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. No, it was two planes. One of the buildings collapsed. Both buildings collapsed. Thousands of people died.
At the chow hall, the TV was on, and we hustled through the line and gathered at the tables near the corner of the hall so that we could watch the news. I could hardly take in what was happening. None of it seemed real. Thousands of people had died? Usually, we bantered while we ate, but that morning we wolfed down our food in silence, except for occasional words of profanity and prayer.
We had sat down for our meal thinking we were members of a peacetime military. When we stood, we knew our class was going to war.
“Mr. G,” someone later asked, “you think that they’ll speed up our training and send us to Afghanistan?”
In his question, I heard reflected my own desire—to do something, to be there for the country’s critical hour. Each member of the class in his own way said, “I wish I’d been on one of those planes.” It wasn’t bravado, and it wasn’t just talk. We had signed on to fight for our country, and now the fight was on.
SEALs fight from the sea, from the air, and from the land. We serve as the nation’s elite commando force, and suddenly it looked like our country had an immediate need for us. We trained hard, and over the next several months, we were shaped into warriors.
In dive phase, we learned to be combat swimmers. Up to that point, I had never taken a single breath underwater. In this phase of our training, while swimming underwater with scuba gear, we were repeatedly attacked. Instructors jerked our mouthpieces from our mouths, tore off our facemasks, ripped off our fins, flipped us in circles, turned off our air, tied our hoses in knots, and then swam away.
Starving for oxygen underwater, we had to wrestle our twisted tanks and hoses in front of us, turn on our air, untie our hoses, and try to reestablish a line to life-giving oxygen. As soon as we caught a breath of oxygen and straightened our tanks, they hit us again.
Later we swam to the bottom of the combat training tank with a swim buddy, just one scuba tank and one mouthpiece between us and our facemasks completely covered in tape. Both blind underwater, we shared oxygen back and forth as we transferred all of our dive gear from one man to the other. Later they had us tread water for five minutes with our hands in the air while wearing sixty pounds of gear. Anyone whose hands touched the water failed. Dozens of men failed different tests, and our training moved forward without them.
Nine weeks after I first entered dive phase, my swim buddy and I descended into the water at night wearing a Dräger combat diving system that emitted no bubbles. We kicked underwater for several hours, adjusting our course several times according to the dive plan we had built by studying the chart, tides, and currents. Using a series of hand gestures, we communicated underwater and executed our plan until we reached our target, placed our simulated mine, and swam away.
We then moved to land warfare and weapons training. At Camp Pendleton, we fired thousands of rounds from a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol and thousands more from our rifles. Before the military, I’d shot a gun once before. Now I became comfortable using a weapon that was designed to take a life. Eventually, my team and I would run and shoot, shouting and firing hundreds of bullets together, often just feet from each other, trusting the men around us with our lives.
I learned how to shoot a submachine gun, a shotgun, and an AK-47. I fired light anti-armor rockets and anti-tank weapons, and I planted claymore mines. We lined up on the range at night and learned to fire our rifles using night-vision goggles and lasers. We learned how to clear jammed weapons, how to rappel, how to gunfight as a team. We learned how to patrol quietly and how to black out every bit of metal and every piece of gear that might reflect light.
We learned how to navigate over mountains and how to use radios. We spent weeks in the woods, learning the basics of reconnaissance. As a class, they tear-gassed us to teach us that—even in pain and coughing, shrouded by a cloud of gas—we could still fight.
Toward the end of BUD/S, we went to San Clemente Island—“Where no one can hear you scream”—to do a night ocean swim.
The instructors stepped onto safety boats with loaded shotguns.
“Just thought you should know,” said one. “San Clemente is home to one of the largest breeding grounds for great white sharks in the world.”
We looked at one another and then at the water. I tried not to imagine the ocean frothing with blood.
“Now get in the water and swim.”
I got in. And I swam. Very, very fast.