I called home and told my parents I’d just joined the SEALs. There was a long pause. This from the kid who turned down an appointment and said he’d had enough of the military. This from the hippie psych major who’d picked a school that was close to the surf. Again Dad passed up a great chance to razz me. He said, “Well, be careful.”
I cleaned out my apartment, sold my books, and drove back to my parents’ home, now back in Biloxi, Mississippi. My dad had since retired from the navy and was the southern manager for a company that manufactured bow thrusters for oil-field support ships. Dad got me a job installing and repairing bow thrusters, and I spent the summer waiting for my OCS class to start and pining over Lisa.
Three weeks before I was to report to Newport, I flew to New England. After graduation from Mount Holyoke, Lisa was working as the news director of a country-music station in Brunswick, Maine. I don’t know what I was thinking, that we would suddenly patch things up, or what. I wasn’t even really invited; I just called her up and said I was coming.
Our reunion was strained. Lisa’s job at the radio station required her to get up at four A.M., in time to have the morning news cobbled together from the Associated Press wire. Sitting in her apartment, I’d listen to her read the news between songs about broken hearts and wrecked pickup trucks. I hung around for a few days like a Christmas puppy no one wanted. One night at dinner I said quietly, “I think I should go.” She didn’t try to talk me out of it.
On our last night together, we made love in a bitter and selfish way. Then I lay awake in the dark and watched her sleep, and when her alarm clock rattled, I stared at the ceiling as she dressed, brushed her hair, and pushed through the front door. “Lock it when you go,” she said.
I remember that moment as the last of my boyhood. I had loved her in a desperate, complete, and frightening way. I think now that I loved her with a heart that had never been broken, and that is why I have loved badly since.
Carrying my seabag, I walked to the bus station and paid $33.50 for a one-way ticket to Newport. When the bus pulled up, rain was falling in a terrific sheet, and I was drenched in the few moments it took the driver to punch my ticket and toss the seabag into the luggage compartment. I found a seat in the back of the empty bus, placed my head against the glass, and wept silently.
I remember officer candidate school only as a jostle of shouting instructors and the sharp smell of floor wax. It was, I thought, considerably less difficult than Staunton. I commanded a company, studied very little, and nearly flunked celestial navigation. In sixteen weeks I spent every dime I earned on bourbon and hotel rooms in Newport, which was still something of a hometown to me, and when I was on liberty, I ripped a new hole in it. I dated nurses, dental technicians, and the daughter of a commodore. Counting time until graduation, I sat in my OCS room and listened to Vivaldi, Pure Prairie League, and pop music I’d taped from British radio stations. At night the wind would blow down Narragansett Bay and rattle the frost from my windows. Alone in the dark, I told myself I was over Lisa.
A week before I was to ship out, Lisa surprised me by driving down from Maine. She met me on the OCS quarterdeck, and we got a room in town. The night before my commissioning, she put on a blue nightgown and slept next to me. She kissed me, called me pet names, but would not make love to me. In the morning I got up early, put on my uniform, and she drove me back to the base.
When she dropped me off, she said, “Now, just walk away like Marlon Brando.”
The following morning my father administered the oath and swore me in as an ensign in the United States Navy.
It would be ten years before I saw or spoke to Lisa again. By then I would be a completely different person. A man who had passed through fire.
MARCH 1981. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA. It was a good hour and a half before sunrise, and a cold fog scudded across the moon and rolled over the ten-mile stretch of beach called the Silver Strand. It was 0435 hours Pacific standard time, that somniferous span of the twenty-four-hour clock referred to by the navy as “oh-dark-thirty.” One hundred and forty-five SEAL trainees were assembled before a podium on the asphalt “grinder” of the special warfare training compound on the Naval Amphibious Base, Coro-nado. Thin wisps of fog blew between the ranks. Standing silently, the men looked like a formation of ghosts.
I was one of ten officers—nine ensigns and a lieutenant—standing at parade rest before evenly spaced columns of sailors and petty officers. We all wore the uniform of SEAL trainees: starched green fatigues and jungle boots, with our names stenciled on white tape across our right pec and the right ass cheek of our trousers. The only thing distinguishing an officer from an enlisted man was a stripe painted fore and aft on the officer’s helmet.
These men were all who remained of the perhaps three hundred who had requested to attend SEAL training. Before this group had undergone a single day of instruction, the number of volunteers had been culled by two thirds. During pretraining, prospective students had been investigated, inspected, jabbed with needles, placed in hyperbaric chambers, and quizzed by shrinks. The tests washed out claustrophobics and those afraid of heights, the overly aggressive and the passive, people without perfect vision or hearing, those with trick knees, flat feet, color blindness, or heart murmurs, people with allergies, and those with criminal or juvenile records. One hundred and forty-five men had been judged by the navy to have the physical, academic, and psychological qualifications necessary to undergo SEAL training. They would start Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Class 114, the hundred and fourteenth class of naval commandos to be trained by the United States. The course we were about to undertake was declared by the Department of Defense to be “physically and mentally demanding.”
That’s a no-shitter.
Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, BUD/S to its initiates, is the most brutal training meted out by the U.S. military. Attrition rates of 60 to 90 percent are the norm. There have been classes, in fact, from which no one graduated. No one graduated because everybody quit.
Every man standing on the asphalt this morning knew the odds, and the navy did, too. These volunteers had been literally x-rayed to make sure any impediment was identified. Only those deemed most likely to succeed would be allowed into a class. The navy needed SEALs and did everything in their power to make sure the men assigned to BUD/S would make it through training. The navy would do everything, that is, except make training easier.
What lay ahead of Class 114 was a course much evolved since the navy first trained frogmen at Force Pierce, Florida. A punishing regime of twelve- to twenty-hour days would be devoted to physical conditioning, small-unit and guerrilla tactics, ambushes, demolition, and booby traps, as well as familiarization with a plethora of U.S., allied, and enemy weapons. In addition to discovering the more visceral aspects of being a commando, trainees would learn hyperbaric medicine, cartography, land and maritime navigation, open- and closed-circuit scuba diving, hand-to-hand combat, communications, and intelligence-gathering operations.
We’d learn all this stuff, that is, if we made it through the first day.
It is axiomatic in the military that training is tough because war is tougher. But what lay ahead of Class 114 was more than a training regimen; it was a rite of passage, an experience that would forever separate the men who had been there from the men who had not.
These were the sorts of lofty thoughts I had as I stood in the fog. You could almost hear “God Bless America” playing in my shaved little head. I had no goddamn idea what I was in for. The truth was, I was a tadpole, a wanna-be frogman, and I didn’t know shit about what it would take to become a Navy SEAL. And, it turns out, neither did the navy.
The Defense Department’s best physicians, physiologists, and psychiatrists had assembled profiles of SEAL graduates in an attempt to fill classes with men who would survive BUD/S. Despite their best efforts, farm boys, surfers, professional athletes, deep-sea divers, and Olympic hopefuls numbered among the dropouts, and regular 140-pound Joes
were among the people who would succeed. The truth was, nobody knew what kind of man would make it through SEAL training. There is no way to quantify motivation.
I don’t remember much about the group that started Class 114. I will never forget the handful of men who were to graduate with me. The dropouts left my memory. The men who were to graduate were a slice of America. There were kids from Nebraska who had never seen the ocean before. There were beach bums. Cubans from Miami. Tough guys and quiet types. The bony and the buff. Those who would make it through Class 114 were the most unlikely set of bastards you ever laid eyes on. Standing in the fog that morning, no one could know that only thirty-two men would still be around on graduation day six long months from now.
Our class’s student leader was Lieutenant Mike Heyward, a Citadel graduate and surface warfare officer. He was older than the ensigns by a couple of years and had volunteered for BUD/S after serving for four years in the fleet, mostly on destroyers. Mike was the oldest of the officers save one, Ensign Rick James, who, at the ripe old age of thirty, had gotten a waiver to attempt training. Like Mike, Rick had previous service, having been an artilleryman in the 82d Airborne before attending naval officer candidate school. The remainder of the officers in my class were also OCS graduates.
Prior to Class 114, it had been difficult for OCS types, ninety-day wonders, to receive orders to SEAL training. The slots were reserved for men the navy felt would be better motivated and more thoroughly prepared: that is, four-year ROTC graduates. Times change. As I write this, nearly every officer assigned to BUD/S now comes directly from the Naval Academy. When I went through, NROTC types got most of the slots, with an occasional OCS guy tossed in as food for the lions. Special preference seemed to be granted to the navy’s premier ROTC units: Duke, Notre Dame, and Boston College, some of the schools I’d blown off to surf in California.
In 114 all of the officers except Mike were liberal-arts majors from state schools. Why the switch? In the several classes previous, NROTC officers had attrited at an alarming rate. They succumbed to a variety of medical calamities. They fractured their skulls and had near-drownings, they gave in to hypothermia and stress fractures, but mostly, they just quit. Not enough officers were graduating. It was decided, as a test case, to put a load of OCS guys through. That’s why there was a sudden opening for me when I threatened to join the army: We were going to be guinea pigs.
When the navy switched from NROTC grads, they seemed to go in heavy for college jocks. The officers in my class included a member of the U.S. water-polo team, a four-time all-American decathlete, a college football player, a former paratrooper, one wild-ass redneck, a couple of California Beach Boy types, and me. I was taller than most and not as muscled as many. In college I had rowed NCAA crew and was a varsity fencer, two sports not noted for plebeian appeal.
A national-caliber athlete I was not, but I had been an ocean lifeguard and scuba diver since I was sixteen. I was a strong swimmer; I could handle sail- and powerboats and felt I knew my way around the surf zone. I knew that the odds were against me. I had no idea if I would make it to graduation; I knew only that I would not quit. I had turned my back on my previous life. I’d told myself and anyone who would listen that I would leave BUD/S on graduation day or in a bag. From a twenty-one-year-old ex-fencer, it was tough talk.
The door to the first-phase instructor’s office opened, and a long shadow fell on the formation. Master Chief Dick Roy, the naval special warfare training group’s command master chief, stepped onto the asphalt. A Vietnam veteran of both UDT and SEAL Teams, Dick Roy at forty years of age was athlete enough for any ten of us. The master chief sprang to the podium, six-five and 220 pounds of muscle. Want a visual? Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body and Clark Gable’s head, pencil-thin mustache, jug ears, and all.
Mike Heyward called the class to attention: “Class 114 all present and accounted for, Master Chief.”
The master chief spit a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco off the dais. His voice was clipped. “On behalf of the director, gentlemen, it is my privilege to welcome you to Basic Underwater Demolition, SEAL training. No one invited you here. No one requested that you attend this course. You volunteered. And you may volunteer to leave us anytime you wish. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.” The master chief pointed to a brass bell hanging in front of the first-phase office. “Just ring that bell over there three times, and you’re free to go. No questions asked. No prejudicial comments will be placed in your records. You will be free to go back to doing whatever fucked-up shit you were into before you came here. It’s that easy.”
The class stood at attention; the only sound was the booming of the surf behind the compound. The master chief continued, hands on his hips. “In the next twenty-six weeks, we’re not going to try to train you. We’re going to try to kill you. You will be asked to do things you’ll think are beyond the limits of your endurance. You will run faster, swim farther, and dig deeper than you thought humanly possible. When you are tired, you will be pushed. When you are hungry, you will go without food. When you are cold, the wind will be your blanket. You will suffer, you will sweat, and you will bleed.
“One hundred and forty-five men comprise this class. In the next six months, approximately seventy-five of you will ring that bell, ring out—simply quit. Fifteen to twenty of you will receive significant injuries during the course of training and will request to be medically dropped.”
The master chief worked the Red Man, shifting the lump in his cheek from right to left. I would never see Dick Roy without a plug of tobacco in his mouth, not during exercises, not on ocean swims, not on ten-mile runs. He was probably born with a chaw tucked into his cheek.
“If you came here to prove something to your daddy or your girlfriend, if you came here to find yourself, if you came here because you love America and you wanna be a coe-man-doe, do yourself a favor, do my instructors a favor: Ring out now.”
The master chief looked us over. “Maybe ten or fifteen of you clowns will make it. The rest of you will quit, flunk out academically, or be injured seriously. The men who remain at graduation will receive additional specialized training and go on to become members of the smallest and most elite spec-ops unit of the United States military: the operational SEAL Teams. This is the first and only pep talk you will receive at this command. Whether or not you graduate is entirely up to you.” He spit another glob of Red Man. This one landed within six inches of my left boot.
“Good luck,” he said.
By eight o’clock that morning we had done maybe seven hundred push-ups, run four miles in the sand, and performed an hour of calisthenics. Stragglers had been made to hit the surf, then roll in wet beach sand to make themselves into “sugar cookies.” Sugar cookies went on exercising in wet, sandy uniforms. But the day was still young.
BUD/S students do not march; they run, everywhere. After our predawn PT session, the formation double-timed across the amphibious base, where we reperformed the physical screening test, doing push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, a four-hundred-yard swim, and another run in long pants and combat boots. After lunch we were introduced to the obstacle course and got to carry telephone poles around for a while. Six guys had fallen out of formation by the time the class ran the mile to the chow hall for dinner. The three round trips to the mess hall for meals amounted to six additional miles a day, every day. Vomit spattered the pavement as the formation returned to the barracks long after dark.
If the instructors were trying to get my attention, they’d succeeded. Looking back, that first day of training would be the easiest day we’d ever have. On the wall of the BUD/S compound is painted one of the SEALs’ favorite mottoes: “The only easy day was yesterday.” As I collapsed into my bunk that night, even my ears hurt. That night I made up my own motto: All I had to fear was hope itself.
I’d survived my first day of BUD/S, but hundreds of thousands of push-ups, hundreds of miles of sand runs, and countless hours in the cruel sea remained between me and
graduation. The following morning eight helmets were lined up under the bell in front of the first-phase office. Overnight eight of our classmates had taken the master chief’s advice and quit. The helmets were how the instructors counted coup; each day the row would get longer as more students were injured, flunked out, or came to the realization that they wanted to be SEALs, but not this bad.
BUD/S training is broken into three phases, each of eight weeks’ duration. First phase is devoted almost exclusively to physical conditioning—and weeding out students. For twelve to twenty hours a day, trainees run, swim, paddle inflatable boats, navigate the obstacle course, then run some more. As often as the students are kept wet, they are just as often kept sandy. Chafing and blisters can quickly become ulcerous, infected sores. Other common first-phase injuries include joint inflammation and stress fractures of the lower legs. Twisted knees, ankles, and injuries from falls are also routine.
A major enemy is hypothermia. When most people think of San Diego, they think of sun-drenched beaches and palm trees. A BUD/S student will remember the cold. The water in San Diego is seldom above 60 degrees and is often much colder. A human being’s core temperature is about 98 degrees—well, you can do the math. BUD/S students are kept constantly wet, in the water and in the wind. Hours of exposure can result in mind-numbing, teeth-chattering hypothermia. There is not a BUD/S student who can’t tell you about muscle cramps and hallucinations. Instructor Ocean was one bad dude, and he was always available to provide negative reinforcement. In an event called a “surf torture,” instructors have the class link arms and sit down in the pounding shore break behind the compound. Plunging waves beat on the formation. Smashed and rolled by the breakers, the class struggles to keep hold of one another in the icy water. The megaphone would blare: “We’re going to stay here until someone quits.”
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 4
