Each of us departed the courses with fifty pounds of books. Special warfare was not a vocation, we were told, it was a profession. The coursework was intended only as an introduction. We were expected to keep up our study of the literature, tactics, and science. It was fully expected of us to become scholars and specialists. I came away realizing that I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. We were in the big leagues now.
After the amphibious school came a less intellectual challenge—learning to jump out of airplanes. Although the navy then had its own parachute school in Lakehurst, New Jersey, BUD/S graduates are sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, to the army’s airborne school. There, the army trains its several varieties of paratroopers, and airborne school is the apogee of many a young soldier’s career; for BUD/S graduates, jump school is a cakewalk and a time to get a little froggy. Members of all branches train at Fort Benning, and among the student battalions are recon marines, air force pararescuemen, cadets and midshipmen from West Point and Annapolis, and even a few coastguardsmen. But no one raises hell at jump school like the navy, and the army knew this. Like prisoners of war, officer and enlisted BUD/S graduates were segregated in the hope that the tadpoles would not get together and act in a coordinated fashion.
When I arrived at Benning, my orders were stamped, and I was told to report to the naval forces liaison officer, a no-bullshit marine major. I entered his office and saluted. He didn’t take his feet off the desk. He said to me simply, “No fucking around while you’re here, Mr. Pfarrer. No dicking with the instructors, no pranks, no sabotaging vehicles, no defacement of government property. I will tolerate no behavior prejudicial to the conduct of good order.” This was a very marine term, and one we both knew came directly from Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: the General Article, the one they would charge you with if they needed to charge you with something.
The major went on to mention the shenanigans effected by the last several classes of BUD/S graduates. They’d hung BEAT ARMY banners from the 250-foot jump towers, plastered instructors’ cars with bumper stickers that said GAY AND PROUD, swiped street signs, and painted HIRE THE HANDICAPPED on the parking lot of an officers’ club. The major was due to transfer in four weeks, and he wanted a nice quiet tour. He told me that if he didn’t finish in peace, he was going to refer to a very short list of suspects. We both knew that if I failed to graduate from airborne training, or if I was rolled back for any reason, I would be stripped of my precious designator, 1180. If I lost those four numbers, I would be sent, horrors of frigging horrors, to the fleet. From the way the major wrinkled his low, receding forehead, I could tell he would like nothing better than to see me reassigned to a nice gray destroyer. I promised to be on my best behavior and saluted. He did not and told me to get a haircut as I left the office.
SEALs often describe jump school as two days of training intensely crammed into three weeks. There is a lot of bullshit, all of it mindless, and none of it could make a BUD/S graduate break a sweat. After six months on Coronado’s Silver Strand, whatever the airborne instructors could throw at us was of little consequence. They gave out push-ups only ten at a time, there was no surf torture, and besides, in three weeks we would wake up back in the nav, not the dog-face army. For three weeks we just thought of ways to screw with the airborne instructors, a posse of hard-ass paratrooper noncoms collectively referred to as Black Hats.
We jogged, did PT, jumped off platforms, towers, and aircraft mock-ups. We practiced parachute landing falls, called PLFs, endlessly. We did front, back, right, and left PLFs. We got hassled and yelled at. The curriculum can be summed up thus: Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door, jump right out, and count to four. Midway through the second week of training, it occurred to me that I was actually getting fat.
The Black Hats did their best to hammer us, and their humor was legendary. My favorite Black Hat expression was “Get on your face, Navy, and quit lookin’ at me like I owe you money.” Push-ups were the primary attention getter, unless we were wearing parachutes; then the preferred punishment was to “beat your boots.” Beating your boots meant to bend at the knees and slap the leather of your jump boots; this exercise was done in sets of ten. It was supposed to be unpleasant when a student was geared up in forty pounds of parachute. The punishments were laughable, and the Black Hats knew it.
Mike Heyward was the only officer from 114 to be assigned to my battalion; about a dozen other characters from our class were scattered around in different companies. The Black Hats knew we were beyond whatever pain they thought they could dish out. While our fellow students moped around the barracks after hours putting moleskin on their ouchies, the members of 114 grouped up and went on fourteen-mile runs.
In the second week, airborne students jump from increasingly higher platforms and towers, culminating in actual parachute drops from 250-foot mock towers. Why they are called “mock towers,” I never did figure out. They seemed pretty real to me. And goddamn high, too. During mock-tower drops, the apex of the student’s parachute is hooked to a cable and drawn twenty-five stories up into the air. The parachute is stopped at the top of the tower in a round metal cage. The cable is popped, releasing the canopy, allowing the parachute to inflate, and dropping the student. The fledgling parachutist floats to earth, attempting to steer for a landing in the field below. All of this is made more interesting by a graphic demonstration of parachute malfunctions courtesy of the Black Hats. Before student battalions start their tower drops, they watch as a dozen life-sized dummies are dropped from the towers, each with malfunctioning parachutes. The malfunctions have spiffy nicknames—Line Overs, Mae Wests, Cigarette Rolls, and Totals—and all of them are lethal. The malfunctioned canopies delivered the dummies into the ground at about a hundred miles an hour while loudspeakers in the tower blared “Another One Bites the Dust.” It was all very droll.
The last week of airborne school is jump week. Monday through Friday, five day jumps and a night jump are interspersed with six-mile runs to identify people with broken legs. Students jump by battalions. We donned our parachutes in cavernous warehouselike buildings. Black Hat jumpmasters checked our rigs, making sure we were buckled, tightened down, and fastened correctly, and then we were jogged out onto the airfield and shoved aboard a dozen C-141 jet transports.
The first jump is memorable. Students are hustled aboard the aircraft by shouting Black Hats and packed tightly into rows of nylon seats. Six minutes from the drop zone, students are commanded to stand and hook static lines to an overhead cable. Pressed close to the man (or woman) in front of you, the group of jumpers, called a “stick,” approaches the door. The lead student assumes a semicrouching position, chin up, hands on the door frame, awaiting the tap from the Black Hat serving as jumpmaster. “Putting your knees in the breeze,” this is called. When the plane arrives over the drop zone, the jumpmaster kicks out the lead jumper, and Black Hats at the back of the stick start shoving the line of jumpers toward the door. These initial jumps can hardly be called voluntary. Channeled down the aisles of the plane, pushed forward by the jumpers and Black Hats behind me, the first thing I knew, I was outside the aircraft and falling through hot jet wash. I counted to four, like I had been taught, and was jerked back to the real world by the tug of my parachute opening.
Outside the airplane was an astonishing sight, the sky filled as far as I could see with parachutes. The C-141s flew in echelons, dropping planeload after planeload of jumpers. Midair collisions were to be feared, and they were made more likely given that all of the several hundred parachutists in the sky that morning were on their first jump. I steered into the wind, executed a dynamite PLF, and made it to the ground without giving or receiving injury. The next day we did it again.
Friday of jump week is the graduation drop. Following a successful jump, we would form up by battalions on the drop zone and receive our silver wings. After the ceremony we’d be free to go, and I had leave coming. Sitting on the tarmac in my parachute, I was in a hurry to
get it over with. From across the runway I saw two figures coming at me, wearing parachutes but carrying their helmets. Only instructors were allowed on the flight line without their helmets strapped down, so I paid little attention until the two men walked over to the head of my stick. It was Keller and Pearlman, both classmates from 114.
“Hey Mr. Pfarrer, there you are.” Keller grinned.
“We thought we’d come over and jump with you,” Pearlman said. In a definite big-city move, they’d taken off their helmets and sauntered past maybe three hundred students to find me. Everyone thought they had to be instructors, including the Black Hats.
Keller stared at the student jumpers behind me. “Make a hole,” he growled. They did.
We jogged aboard our airplane and took off for the graduation jump, the Black Hats none the wiser. Six minutes out we stood up, hooked up, and Keller stepped in front of me as he snapped his static line to the cable. “Watch this,” he said.
When the light turned green, we began our mad rush for the door. The Black Hat standing by the hatch was tapping students as they jumped and dramatically yelling, “GO! GO! GO!” over the roar of the engines.
The stick of jumpers shuffled toward the door and dropped from sight. Pearlman was the first of our trio to reach the jumpmaster. Instead of pushing back his static line and assuming the correct airborne body position for exit, Pearlman thumbed his nose at the Black Hat. Before the disconcerted sergeant could react, Pearlman was out the door and gone. But Pearlman was the diversion. Keller was the hit. He came even with the door, reached out, and snatched the jumpmaster’s hat off his head. In the blink of an eye, Keller had leaped from the plane, clutching his trophy. I was next to the hatch, and to the everlasting credit of the jumpmaster, I heard him yelling, “NAVY! COME BACK WITH MY DAMN HAT!”
I fell out of the door laughing my ass off.
On the drop zone it was the usual chaos, but the aircraft had radioed the DZ crew and told them what happened. I did my best to blend with the crowd, but I was quickly located and submitted to the indignity of a stern questioning.
“Get over here, Navy!” one of the Black Hats snapped at me as I deposited my parachute in the back of a truck. I jogged over.
I smiled innocently. “Yes, Sergeant Airborne?” While at Fort Benning, we were supposed to yell “airborne” after we said anything. Not just “airborne” but “air-BORNE!” It was supposed to sound like “air-BONE.” Since it was meant to show our enthusiasm, we complied in the blandest manner possible.
“Get on your face, Navy, and give me about one hundred thousand push-ups.”
“Yes, Sergeant Airborne.” I dropped down and started pumping them out.
“What do you know about a stolen hat?” The sergeant’s eyes narrowed.
I continued to do push-ups. “What color hat, Sergeant Airborne?” I asked.
“Navy, my damn name is Sergeant. Airborne! Sergeant, period. Airborne! Not Sergeant Airborne.”
“Airborne, Sergeant Airborne.” I grinned.
I did push-ups for a while, and they eventually found Pearlman and Keller. By then Mike Heyward had the stolen ball cap stuffed into his pants. They questioned and searched us individually as we passed the hat off. The Black Hats always grabbed the wrong frog at the wrong time and were never any the wiser. Finally, we formed up by battalions on the drop zone and received the silver wings of an airborne paratrooper. The sergeant who’d questioned me about the hat pinned my wings on.
“This don’t mean nothin’, Navy,” he said as he punched the prongs of the wings through my uniform and into my chest. “Now you ain’t nothin’ but a five-jump chump.”
“If you ain’t airborne, you ain’t shit,” I said.
“You’re damn right,” the sergeant growled as he walked away. My meaning, I believe, was lost on my army colleague.
But the sergeant was right—we were rookies. The army called them “silver wings”; in the navy they were referred to as “lead wings.” We would have to make ten jumps into water to earn our gold navy jump wings. It dulled the luster of our graduation somewhat. But we were finally on our way to our respective teams, and if you should happen to be reading this, Sergeant Airborne, we still have your goddamn hat.
I ARRIVED AT SEAL TEAM FOUR in my dress blue uniform, orders and personnel file under my left arm, fifteen minutes prior to officers’ call, precisely as specified in my Book of Service Etiquette, Third Edition. I was ushered into the XO’s office. Lieutenant Commander Jon Wallace was a red-haired, ass-chewing, no-bullshit officer, a decorated Vietnam platoon commander, and the men of SEAL Four looked up to him. He was an operator, and even though his job kept him behind a desk most of the time, he took every chance he could to get out into the field. I entered the office, and he closed the door behind me.
“Sit,” he said. I found a chair, and he thumbed my file. “How do I pronounce your name?” he asked.
“Far-er,” I said.
The XO looked me over. “Did you go to jump school?”
“Yes sir,” I answered.
“Where are your jump wings?”
I was not wearing the detested lead wings. Adorning my uniform was all the fruit salad I rated—an expert pistol and an expert rifleman’s ribbons. “I was waiting to earn my gold wings, sir,” I said.
“Until then, wear your lead wings.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“What would you like to do at the command, Mr. Pfarrer?”
“I’d like to join a platoon, sir.”
“So would I,” the XO said. “So would I.”
I was assigned to the Operations Department, and I would also occasionally work directly for Jon Wallace in a capacity that my fellow junior officers referred to as “the XO’s out basket.” I would start my SEAL career as the lowliest of the low, a headquarters puke. My disappointment was compounded when the Team mustered at quarters that morning. The uniform was PT gear, cool guy–blue sweatsuits emblazoned with the individual’s operator number and “ST-4.” I was the only person in the formation wearing a uniform, and dress blues at that. After mustering the platoons, the XO introduced me as a freshly minted ensign, just checking aboard from BUD/S. He smirked and said that he hoped the Team would make me feel welcome. They did.
I was grabbed by about fifteen very athletic individuals and carried bodily to the dip tank, half of a jet-engine packing canister filled with water and used to check diving rigs for leaks. I struggled, but someone in the crowd reached out and calmly grabbed me by the scrotum. They twisted hard, and I calmed down pronto. I’d had my first lesson in SEAL Team hostage handling. They threw me in, and I broke through a quarter inch of ice as I splashed under. My hat had come off during the struggle, and as I surfaced, sputtering, the biggest dude I’d ever seen in my life tossed my cover in after me. Six-five, maybe 250 pounds of muscle, “Baby Zee” was the leading petty officer of the Training Department. He looked like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” he said.
I dripped through the supply building and was issued uniforms and kit. The chief petty officer behind the cage hardly gave me a look as I signed for my equipment, web gear, ammo pouches, backpacks, wet suits, masks, swim fins, and all the other goodies that would eventually make me a frogman. Although I was not yet assigned to a platoon, I was issued PT gear with my operator number, 156. I marked it proudly on my gear, the numbers 156 used instead of my name to demark my equipment and the front of my locker. I felt an odd, simple delight to finally own a number.
As I stuffed gear into my locker, I was reunited with Rick James, my classmate from 114. Rick had missed out on the paper chase I’d gone through after graduation, and reported directly to the team. Having previously served as a paratrooper, he was spared the ignominy of reattending jump school. Also among the wardroom was Frank “Giff” Giffland, who was class leader of 113, the BUD/S class graduating immediately before ours. Frank had been my neighbor in the BOQ back in Coron
ado, and we were friends. Rick and Frank looked at the puddle dripping from my best uniform. I was relieved to hear that their welcomes had been identical to mine.
In the regular navy, sailors do not generally grab officers and shove them into dip tanks. It happens even less often with the executive officer watching and grinning. The Team’s welcome was a message. We were officers, but we were FNGs, bananas, and we would be treated as nonentities until we proved that we deserved better. The community of naval special warfare was a meritocracy. We who were expected to lead would have to prove that we were worth following. We were all keenly aware that we were not yet SEALs; we were on probation, and if we failed to measure up, we would be gone.
I settled into my job, mostly paperwork, and I was soon able to carry out routine tasks with intense supervision. Working with me in the ops shop was Master Chief Mike Boynton, a gentle bear of a man, and he treated me with the patience of a saint. This particular saint had a stack of ribbons that stretched from Little Creek all the way to the Mekong River: Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts, and a Silver Star, all piled on top of a couple of drawers of campaign medals and unit citations. The crowning glory of his decorations was a gold Special Warfare Badge—the true object of my lust.
One day the master chief caught me gawking at his ribbons.
“Quit eye-fucking me, sir,” he said.
I did my best to ride along on every training evolution leaving the compound, and Master Chief Boynton graciously covered my ass by doing my paperwork, often putting in extra time to allow me to get out and operate. I tagged along with platoons as they conducted sneak attack and swimmer operations in Little Creek Cove. I took diving supervisor training, became a rappel and fast-rope master, demolition supervisor, swam beach recons, and learned the art and craft of cartography. I did everything I could to get out from behind the desk, and it was the master chief who made that possible.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 7
