They took us over to the swimming pool and started us on a series of physical tests, one after the other. The first part of the test called for you to swim three hundred meters using only an underwater recovery stroke, like the breaststroke or sidestroke. Then you paired off after the swimming and did as many push-ups as you could in two minutes, as many sit-ups as you could in two minutes, and as many four-count “burpees” (squat thrusts) as you could in two minutes, and then you had to run a mile. If you quit at any time, that was it. It was all over. But they didn’t tell you how many of each you had to do or how fast you had to run to pass.
Of course, I was fine with the swimming, because I was an ex–competitive swimmer. But like an idiot, I wanted to impress the SEAL instructors, so I went at it hard. I swam like hell. It didn’t take long for me to learn that I should have paced myself; I should have taken my time and saved my strength. Steve did OK; he wasn’t as strong a swimmer as I was, but I was ahead of everyone by a pool length.
Great finish in the pool. I was pumped. But then we did our push-ups, sit-ups, and burpees, one after the other, and by that time I was blowing up. “My God,” I thought, “I still have to run a mile.” I thought I’d die before I got to the end; I was never a good runner anyway. But to my own amazement I finished third out of the group.
We started with about forty guys. Only twelve remained after the swimming. When we got all the way to the end, only four of us had passed: myself, Steve, and two others. Score two for the South Side Boys.
Of course, this was only in the fifth week of boot camp, and we still had six or seven weeks to go. So after passing the SEAL test, we had to return to our regular company and finish out boot camp before we could start our real training. Our company commander was Engineman First Class Pat Bondi. But as soon as he found out that we had passed the screen test and were volunteering for SEAL training, he pulled us aside, away from the rest of the guys in our company, and said, “You two guys really want to become pole-carrying assassins?”
That was the navy’s slang term for the SEALs—the “pole” part came from the fact that as part of our boat-crew training at the mudflats we had to carry telephone poles; the “assassin” was because the SEALs were sometimes called upon to do assassinations. If the military needed somebody killed, we were a unit that would do it. In fact, the SEALs were surrounded by such a mystique that regular navy guys were afraid of us. There was also a lot of bullshit floating around about the SEALs, which only added to the mystique.
So when Mr. Bondi asked us if we really wanted to be pole-carrying assassins, I was still pumped from getting through the test, and I looked him in the eye and said, “Mr. Bondi, that’s the only reason I joined the navy.”
He just shook his head.
“Look, don’t cause me any problems, just go along with everything I tell you, fold your clothes, do what you’re supposed to do. I won’t bother you anymore in boot camp. Because what you’re gonna face . . . There’s nothing I can do short of killing you that could be worse than what you’re going to go through. You have no idea what the fuck you’re getting into.”
And he was a man of his word. From that point on in boot camp, we were never harassed or bothered or yelled at. We didn’t get any of the shit they were giving to the regular boot campers. We were already elite, already separated out from the “black shoe” navy.
I met up with Mr. Bondi a few years after that. I went to a San Diego Chargers football game one afternoon, and he was there. I walked over to him and said, “Hey, Mr. Bondi, remember me? I’m Janos! I was in your boot-camp company. I wanted to tell you I made it—I’m a Navy SEAL!” He looked at me, and his eyes grew big with fear. This was my company commander, my bootcamp instructor, and he was scared to death of me! Of course, I had been in the SEALs for about two years at that point, and I had buffed out to 220 pounds of ripped, raw navy killer. But all I wanted to do was say hello, and he was terrified! That’s the mystique that the SEALs carry.
So Steve and I graduated from boot camp, and we were sent to different schools. Steve went to electronics-technician school; I went to storekeeper school. Those terms don’t really mean anything if you’re a SEAL; the SEALs don’t have rates the way the rest of the navy does. If you’re a SEAL, you’re a SEAL. But in order to rise in rate, you have to have a specialty: radioman, storekeeper, electronics technician, bo’sun’s mate, and so forth. So they sent us to these specialty schools before our SEAL training began. They gave us bonus points so that we could rise in rate faster. That was fair, given the extra training we were voluntarily taking on. Steve’s class went longer than mine, so I ended up going into BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training before he did. I was class 58; he was class 59.
Was the training as tough as they’d led me to believe? It was worse. Worse than I could ever have imagined. You don’t get through it if you don’t want it. You have to want it. You have to want it bad. Real bad.
I left storekeeper school on a Friday and crossed the bay to Coronado to go to BUD/S. Normally, you get a couple of weeks of “pretraining,” to work out and get in the swing of things before you start. But because of a quirk of timing, I got in on a Friday and started BUD/S that Monday. I had forty-eight hours to get ready.
Down by the bay there were old, dilapidated, crappy-looking World War II barracks huts. When it was time to check in, I went down to the back door of one and pounded on it. From inside, these huge, booming voices yelled out, “Who the fuck is there?”
“Storekeeper Seaman Apprentice Janos reporting for duty!”
“Get the fuck in here!”
I had just met Gunner’s Mate First Class Olson, my class proctor. I handed him my stuff, and he looked it over, looked at me, and said, “Janos . . . didn’t you have a brother or an uncle or something, who came through this training and quit?” My brother Jan had come through there a few years ago and had made it through. By this time he had already done one tour in Vietnam and was an old-timer. I was proud of him. So I told him, “My brother’s Jan Janos, class 49, underwater demolition team 12. He graduated.”
Sitting in the corner at a desk was a guy I soon came to know as “Mother” Moy. He looked up and said, “What the fuck did you say your name was?”
Olson replied, “It’s another one of those stupid Janoses.”
Moy looked at me and said, “Oh, yeah? You mean that puke brother of his made it? Well, I’m gonna tell you something, boy. You’d better be twice as good as that fucked-up brother of yours, and I’m gonna find out Monday.”
I’m thinking, “Oh, fuck. I don’t need this.” The intimidation factor was huge. Of course, I realized much later they were just having fun and that they actually had a lot of respect for my brother. But I was eighteen, and I was petrified.
On Monday, the first phase of BUD/S started. SEAL training comes in three different phases. You get different drills and a different set of instructors for each phase, and you’re expected to do continuously better on your run times and all your other physical exercises, even while you’re being trained in new skills.
My first-phase instructor was Boatswain Mate First Class Terry “Mother” Moy. I don’t have to tell you what “Mother” was short for. Nothing can compare to the fear he could strike in you. Twenty-some years later, I met him again at a SEAL reunion. By this time I had become 275-pound pro wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura, but when I saw him at that reunion, the hair on the back of my neck still stood up. That’s how scary these guys were.
That was only the beginning of what was still to come. The first five weeks are nothing but physical training. You have to run everywhere you go. If you’re moving, you’re running. It’s brutal. An ambulance follows you everywhere you go, and as guys go down they get whisked into it, and you probably never see them again. You can quit at any time, and most of the trainees do. The law of averages says that two out of every three will go down. An average class starts with anywhere from one hundred to one hundred and twenty guys and gener
ally graduates between twenty and thirty-five. They had one class that graduated only four, not even a whole boat crew, which is seven guys. Mine was a summer class, and we did pretty well; we graduated with thirty-eight.
Believe it or not, the instructors aren’t there to try to make you quit. Their job is to push you right to the edge. If you take yourself over the edge and quit, it’s up to you. But they’re not rooting for you to fail. They’re rooting for you to toughen up and make it.
The first phase builds toward the fifth week, which the instructors call Motivation Week and the trainees call Hell Week. During Hell Week, the instructors divide into two groups and go on rotations: twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off. The trainees go with no sleep from Sunday night to Saturday morning. That’s what separates the men from the boys. You’re wet, you’re cold, you’re exhausted, you’re in desperate need of sleep, and quitting starts to look awful good.
Hell Week eliminates the bananas. A banana is someone who is soft on the inside and soft on the outside, and he’s out of there pretty fast. But you can never tell who will make it and who won’t. Sometimes you see a guy who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, like he was born to do this kind of thing. Three weeks later, he’s gone. You’ll see another guy who looks so wimpy, it makes you wonder why he’s even there. Weeks later, he’s still standing. There are a lot who look soft on the outside but are hard on the inside. They survive. But you learn not to think too much about what could happen to you. You just keep working and keep getting better, faster, and stronger. There’s a beach near the famous Del Coronado Hotel that has these big, sharp rock jetties. You and your class have to land rubber rafts on the rocks, coming in against huge, crashing waves. During this exercise, every class loses at least one guy to a broken leg or a dislocated shoulder, not to mention those who quit first. To make it, you have to put your fears aside and think only of the objective. One moment’s hesitation is all it takes to fail.
The second phase was nine weeks of demolition and landwarfare training. We got new instructors. If you’d made it this far, the odds were good that you’d make it through the rest. At this point we learned how to patrol with weapons and how to do demolition work. The navy owns San Clemente Island, out near Catalina, home to an airstrip and some Quonset huts. On one side of the island, the regular navy shoots at targets. On the other side, SEALs learn how to blow things up. I spent two weeks out there, mostly learning how to make and detonate plastic explosives. We’re not the EOD—Explosive Ordnance Division—that learns how to take apart bombs. So don’t call me to dismantle a bomb, only to build one.
Those tough high-school math courses were finally coming in handy. We used the slide rule to apply mathematical equations that would tell us how much ordnance we would need to blow something up. It was critical that we get it right, because we had to carry it all. The rule of thumb was, when in doubt, overload. So after we made our calculations, we always took an extra haversack of C4 to make sure we got the job done.
The third phase of training was underwater diving, again with a whole new set of instructors. They taught us how to swim with attack boards, and how to navigate underwater at night with a compass. We learned how to dive scuba, then with mixed gas, which allowed us to dive much deeper. Then finally we learned to use an Emerson rig: pure oxygen with a rebreather that filters out the carbon dioxide and lets you reuse it so that you can dive without bubbles. The rig limits your dives to less than thirty-three feet, but it lets you dive completely undetected. No bubbles rise to the surface to give you away. You’re silent and deadly.
Finally, we graduated. They give you a nice ceremony with everyone in dress uniforms and a band playing. An admiral comes by and gives you a speech. Then you have a guest speaker, usually a former SEAL, to give you an address about how you’re “following a gallant force before you.” I’ve actually spoken at one. I told the new trainees about the brotherhood they were entering into. Then you go up and get your diploma, shake the admiral’s hand, and you’re officially in.
That weekend after the ceremony, they gave us a lecture: “Look, you report for duty on Monday, and you’ve got to start out on the right foot. So don’t go crazy this weekend. Don’t get in trouble. And whatever you do, don’t go to Tijuana!”
Back in those days, Tijuana was pretty wild and woolly. The basic rule was that if you were a gringo, you didn’t walk the streets alone in Tijuana. There was a criminal element in the city that knew how to prey upon guys like us. And that’s not even to mention the police force.
Well, most of the other guys listened. But Janos the Dirty didn’t. It was me and Ray Holly and Greg Platt, plus Platt’s two nice-looking cousins that we latched on to just to hang out with. This was back in the times when signs on lawns in San Diego said “Dogs and Navy keep out.” So it was nice to have some legitimate female companionship.
We went into the Blue Note, where Carlos Santana used to play. Platt was drunk, so he decided to take a walk to clear his head. We said, “OK, Greg, don’t forget to come back!” So an hour went by, and then two. No Greg. We went back to the car. He wasn’t there. We went all over the streets of Tijuana. We went back and forth across the border; we even drove all the way back to the base. Still no Greg.
In those days, Tijuana police would arrest you for nothing if you were a gringo, because it was an easy source of revenue. They knew that if you put up the money for bail, you weren’t likely to bother to come back for your court date, so they got to keep it. That was their scam. Around noon each day, they’d even send around a list to all the military personnel, showing who had been arrested that night.
So along came the list, and sure enough, there was Greg’s name on it. His bail was something like $150. None of us had that kind of money, so we ran back to the barracks and said, “Look, we went to Tijuana last night, and Platt’s in jail.” We passed the hat around and collected enough for his bail. Then we sprung him out that afternoon.
He had broken that commonsense rule: Never wander around Tijuana alone, because that’s when they prey upon you. In those days, all the horror stories were true. All the guys were put in a single cell. The guards came in from time to time and sprayed them down with fire hoses, just to make life miserable for them. They were fed on cabbages that had been boiled in a garbage can. Greg said there were Americans in there, hippies, who had been in jail for months because no one had come to post their bail.
We got Greg back to the barracks in the nick of time.
On Monday we were sent to our teams. I was part of underwater demolition team 12. When you go to your team, you become known as an FNG: a Fuckin’ New Guy. You’re an FNG until you go on your first deployment overseas. Then when you come back, you’re an old-timer. With a four-year enlistment, you do two tours of duty overseas. Normally, a tour is six months; my first was nine months, and my second was eight months.
But it seems like you’re never done with training. After I graduated from BUD/S, I went to army jump school. But of course, since we were the navy elite, we went with an attitude. They expected it from us. In fact, before we left, the old-timers pulled us into a room and said, “We’d better get some bad reports on you guys, or else you’ll have to answer to us.” So we were on a mission: Go down there and cause as much trouble for the army as we could.
There were about twenty-five of us. When we arrived, the army tried to separate us right away. They told us, “OK, four of you are going upstairs in these barracks, two of you are going over in that barracks. . . .”
But we weren’t going to accept that: “No. We’re the Navy SEALs. We’re going to take the top floor of these barracks. We’re all going to stay together. We trust each other. We don’t trust anyone else.” So we walked into the top floor of the barracks and told the guys that were up there to get out. They did, without offering any resistance. That SEAL mystique comes in handy sometimes.
We were up there late that night with all the lights on, playing the radio loud, playing cards, when an army s
ergeant came bursting in. He was what in those days was called a shake ’n’ bake: just like the chicken, fifteen minutes in the oven and they’re done. He’d been to a three-week noncommissioned officer (NCO) school and had come out a sergeant. He hadn’t earned it. The shake ’n’ bake started yelling at us, “This is the Army Airborne School, and lights are supposed to be out at twenty-two-hundred hours! You people turn these lights out!”
We just kind of looked at him, “Who the fuck are you?”
Jim Haskell strode up to him and said, “Well, Sergeant, you got two minutes to get your ass outta here. Don’t bother us. We’ll shut the lights off when we feel like it.” But the guy kept hollering at us, so Haskell grabbed him by the seat of the pants and tossed him out the door and into the dirt.
Needless to say, about a half hour later, we got a visit from one of the black hats. This guy was a high-ranking sergeant, an E7 or E8; he was actually one of the Airborne instructors. He cleared out all the other army guys who came into the room with him so that it was just him and us. Then he said, “Look, I know how good you guys are. I know how well-trained you are; I know the camaraderie that you have. But we have army guys here that we have to train. And we ask you for your respect.”
And we did respect him. This guy was no shake ’n’ bake; he was a ’Nam vet, the real deal. So we said, “No problem, Sergeant. Just a misunderstanding.” Then we turned the lights off.
The actual black-hat sergeants liked us. They wanted their guys to be like us. You see, in jump school, just like in other phases of military training, they’ll make you drop for push-ups. But whenever they drop one SEAL, we all drop. Where the army guys were used to getting dropped for ten push-ups, we were used to getting dropped for fifty. We could do them with one hand. That was the kind of shape we were in. When they ran in formation, we circled them. We had faced “Mother” Moy; what could jump school do to us?
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