by Brandon Webb
Once we all got out there, our instructors said, “Hey, fellas, no one can hear you scream out here. You’re pretty far away from the flagpole,” meaning base command on the coast. There was not a lot of oversight here, no commanding officers strolling by at lunch to see how things were going. These instructors had us out here to themselves, and they made sure we knew it. This was our final four weeks before graduating—or not graduating, as the case might be. They would make sure we each earned it.
There was some sort of physical evolution before each meal, and how well we did determined what our meal experience was going to be. Every meal, we had to earn the right to eat dry.
For breakfast we all lined up outside the compound, separated out by squad. On their signal, they told us, one squad would sprint over to Frog Hill, a big hill nearby, and climb to the top as fast as possible. The first four to reach the top would come down and go eat breakfast. The three stragglers (there were seven men to a squad) would come down off the hill, go jump into the freezing cold ocean, and then take breakfast outside, covered with sand and soaking wet.
On the signal we lit out at a dead sprint—seven guys clawing their way up this hill. My lungs were burning. I am not a great runner, and I could still feel that pulled quad. Every morning I found myself smack in the middle of the pack, worried I would fall behind the cutoff point and end up with sand up my ass while I wolfed cold eggs. Somehow I managed to make it into the top four every day.
That was breakfast. For lunch, we had to bang out a minimum of a hundred push-ups with all our gear on: a canteen full of water, magazines full of ammo, and all the rest of our H-gear kit. If we didn’t get all our push-ups in on time, we ate lunch wet.
For dinner we had to do an 80-foot rope climb and then a minimum of twenty pull-ups with full kit. Do it, or we were getting wet.
Every morning I woke up with the same thought: I hope I don’t have to eat wet today.
By this point there were about 40 of us. Of those 40, 17 had been medically rolled in from a previous BUD/S class, which meant that of the 220 when we started six months earlier, there were now 23 of us left. One of those who had rolled in was a guy named Eric Davis.
Eric is a charismatic redhead who looks out for everyone and is impossible not to like. He fit in right away, and we clicked immediately. He’s one of the funniest people I know—and one of the most creative. In fact, the way he got himself into BUD/S in the first place involved considerable creativity on his part. When he first applied, he was crushed to learn that his color-blindness disqualified him from even trying out. That defeated him—for about five minutes, which was how long it took him to come up with an elaborate plan for faking his way through the color-blind test. No easy task, but somehow he did it and, sure enough, made his way through BUD/S. He guards his secret strategy to this day.
Call it karma or historic irony, but this came back to bite him many years later, when Eric decided he’d had enough and was ready to get out. I asked him how he planned to do that, since he had just signed up for a lengthy reenlistment. He assured me of his foolproof plan: At his next physical he was finally going to come out to the doctor about his color-blindness. He fully expected that this would give him an early out from his contract—but the doctor refused to believe him, would not even administer the test, and blew Eric off with a clean bill of health. I still give Eric a hard time about this whenever I see him.
Our schedule at the Rock was so intense it felt like we weren’t getting any sleep at all. By Third Phase standards, a good night’s sleep was three to four hours. Our first week there, Eric said, “Hey, they can’t keep this up forever. I mean, we’re handling explosives, right? Next week, they’ve got to let us sleep more.” As the days wore on he kept assuring us (and no doubt assuring himself at the same time) that it would get better, that they would have to let us get a little more sleep.
They didn’t: not the next week, or the week after that, or ever.
One night they just about broke us. We had screwed up some exercise or other, and our instructors had us in the water in the northwest harbor for fours hours or so, torturing us. We were just miserable. I heard guys muttering, “Jesus, when is this going to end?”
We had been through treatment like this many times in the past few months, but somehow, this was worse. Whether it was the accumulated weight of the past months’ experience or simply the bitter cold that February night, at some point everyone just stopped talking. An eerie silence fell over us as we continued hammering out our PTs, the sounds of legs and arms thrashing in the cold surf punctuated only by the instructors’ periodic barked commands.
It’s one thing when guys bitch and moan, but when everyone stops bitching and moaning, when it all goes silent, that’s when you know things are truly serious. We were pushing up against the absolute limits of our physical and mental capacities.
“Out!”
Mercifully, right at that point they called us out of the surf and onto the beach, where they ran us up and down the sand hills for a few minutes to get our circulation going. I have no doubt that as we ran, every one of us was thinking the same identical thought: Thank God that’s over.
“Hit the surf!”
Were they serious? They were. Just as we started feelings our limbs, they put us back down in that ice-cold surf again, flutter-kicking, arms linked in one long chain of human suffering.
The guy next to me, Chris Osman, started muttering under his breath. “Fuck this … fuck this…”
Osman was a former marine who had rolled into our class and was on my squad, and I did not like him. I had to admit, the guy was amazing: he could recall every bit of military minutiae, every detail—the effective range and fire rate of any rifle, which weapons were used in which conflicts, the blasting capacity and recommended application of every conceivable kind of explosive, all kinds of random crap. I thought he must have grown up reading military manuals instead of comic books like the rest of us. The dude was hardcore. I could not get along with him, though. I thought he was a loudmouth. We had almost come to blows a few times. Now it looked like maybe he was starting to crack.
I glanced over Osman’s head and caught Eric’s eye. Eric happened to be on Osman’s other side. Eric and Osman were good friends. Eric and I were good friends. Osman and I hated each other. It was a complicated sandwich.
Suddenly Osman stopped muttering and said out loud at full volume, “Okay, fuck this. I am out of here! I am not doing this anymore!”
“Chris!” Eric hissed. “C’mon, keep it together!”
Good riddance, I told myself, but I didn’t think he was serious. He was. He shook himself and broke free of both our grips, shucking off the inviolable circuit of locked arms, ready to walk out of the surf and head on up to the beach. Eric and I both gaped at him, stunned. He was on the verge of quitting the exercise, quitting BUD/S, quitting the SEALs. We were only days away from the end of our course, so close to the finish line—and he was quitting.
Except it was so dark out there that no one but the two of us had seen what Osman was doing. We heard a whistle go off, and a crisp voice. “Okay, move it! Out!”
The instructors were calling us out of the surf and back onto the beach. There was a dark clatter of splashes as we all scrambled to our feet to make the mad dash up the hill, but by the time we got there Osman was already surrounded by the instructors, not fully grasping what was happening. One instructor grabbed his arm, jerked it up into the air, and yelled at the rest of us.
“You see this? That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Osman here is the only one out of all you fuckers who’s really putting out!”
Suddenly Osman was a hero. The instructors handed him a mug of hot chocolate and told us again what losers we all were, that we hadn’t gotten there nearly as fast as Osman did. No one but Eric and I ever knew that the only reason he got there first was that he had had enough and was ready to get the fuck out of there when they blew the whistle.
And here’s the amazing
thing: Osman and I eventually became friends. In fact, we ended up serving together as SEAL snipers in Afghanistan. We’re good friends to this day.
I still give him shit about that night on the beach.
* * *
As part of our final training exercise, we went through a major nighttime op on a Zodiac, a large inflatable boat. The surf was big that night, and at one point we abruptly got a signal to come in. Our lane grader, the SEAL instructor who was evaluating our whole operation, was worried because the water was getting rough. I knew this particular section of beach: We were dangerously close to a seriously rocky shoreline. Beaching a rubber boat on a shoreline filled with sharp rocks is not something you want to take lightly. It can kill you.
Rich Honza, our boat crew leader, said, “Okay, they’re signaling us, we’ve got to go in right away.”
“Guys,” I said, “I think we have to wait and time it so we don’t get wrecked on the shore.”
No, said Rich, we had to go right in, right then and there.
“Look,” I said, “I surf, I know this area. The waves come in sets. The only way we’re not going to get pummeled on those rocks is if we wait for the big set to come, and then haul ass right after that.”
He insisted, though, and he was the crew leader, so there was nothing I could do about it. We were going right then, immediately. Oh, man, I thought, this is not going to be good. We started paddling like crazy, heading slowly for the shore. There was no way we would make it in time. I could feel the swell coming. Sure enough, we started rising, then lowering, and then the next rise was bigger—and then I knew we were about to get hit.
“Guys,” I yelled out over the roar of the surf, “get ready, the big one’s coming!”
A moment later a monster wave broke right on top of us. The next thing I knew I was the only one left in the boat, and I was hurtling toward shore. If I didn’t want to get sliced to ribbons on that treacherous shoreline, I was going to have to manage the entire damned Zodiac myself. This was bad. In fact, there was no way this situation could get any worse.
Then it got worse.
Darting a look backward, I caught a glimpse of something at the stern of the Zodiac. I looked closer—it was someone’s fingers. One of the guys had managed to hold on. Then a head bobbed into view, and I groaned. It was Mike Ritland.
Mike was an Iowa farmboy who had never seen the ocean live until the day he showed up for SEAL training. He swam in pools at school and was a decent swimmer, but the ocean was totally foreign to him, and his entire time out on the Rock had been a struggle. Now here I was, alone in our runaway Zodiac with everyone else back there somewhere in the ocean, with Mike hanging on to the stern for dear life—and the two of us were about to hit the rocks.
I had one thing going for me: I still had seconds’ worth of the lull that follows after a big set breaks—but only seconds. Somehow I got control of the Zodiac and managed to surf the damn thing safely up over the rocks and close enough in that I could touch bottom. I glanced back for a split second. No more fingers on the stern. I didn’t know what had happened to Mike and had no idea where anyone else was, but I couldn’t let myself think about it. I jumped out and scrabbled for a foothold in the rocks, then grabbed the Zodiac and started hauling it in, timing the moves so I was pulling it a little farther each time a wave came in. As I approached the shoreline I hopped back into the boat to make sure everything was strapped down—and felt something strange at my feet. What the hell? There was something underneath the boat, something pushing up.
No, not something. It was someone.
“Holy shit!” I yelled as I threw myself out again, grabbed the Zodiac with both hands, and heaved with all my might to free it from the pull of the water, pushing it up, up, and finally flipping it over to the side. A figure came gasping up out of the surf like a creature in a horror movie.
It was Mike. He’d been trapped under the Zodiac for more than two minutes, wedged in the pitch blackness.
“I was—I was—” He tried to talk at the same time he was wheezing and gasping for air. When he finally got enough breath in him, he finished the thought. “I was … gonna die. I was … sure I … was gonna die.”
No doubt he was absolutely right. Mike had the look of someone who had stared death in the face and known it had beaten him. “Fuck this,” he mumbled as I pulled him up onshore. “I shoulda been an Army Ranger … fuck this … this water stuff is not for me … you can have it.”
As Mike and I stood there on the shore, him leaning on me while he caught his breath, one of the instructors came running up to us. I figured he would be anxious to know if Mike was alive. I was about to shout out, “It’s okay! He’s okay!” but I was cut off by a string of obscenities followed by these words in a familiar voice:
“Webb! Get me a count of those fucking weapons!”
It was Instructor Shoulin.
It was like the guy had been put on this earth to find me and torture me. Just as with our land nav exercises up in the Laguna Mountains, here was my nemesis, helping out in Third Phase—and busting my balls.
Fortunately for all of us, we’d had our guns clipped in tight on the Zodiac. These were real weapons, and if any of us had lost one we would have been in seriously deep shit. Losing a gun is a career-ender for a full-fledged SEAL, let alone a BUD/S student. If we had lost any of those weapons while we were out there, we would all likely have been kicked out, and it would have been a problem for our instructors, too.
We didn’t lose any firearms, and we didn’t lose any people, either. Within another half minute everyone else was coming in to shore. Honza, our crew leader, came up to me and said, “Man, we should have waited for that set.” I didn’t reply.
Poor Mike had recovered his breath, but not his composure. He was beaten and he’d made his decision. He was going to go find that brass bell and ring it hard.
He didn’t, though, not that night and not the morning after, either. For the next few days he kept talking about it, and I kept talking him through it. “It was a freak thing, man,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. It could have happened to anyone. You’re fine.” I couldn’t tell if he was hearing any of it. It didn’t look like he was. Those two minutes had really rattled him. He’d been sure he was a dead man, and he was quitting.
Except he didn’t quit. Ritland stuck it out and saw the thing through. In fact, we ended up together later in our first platoon deployment as part of SEAL Team Three, and Mike went on to become a solid operator and have a strong career as a SEAL. The brass bell never got him.
* * *
By the time we all got off that island, we were a pack of uncaged animals. Stepping off the plane back in San Diego, we felt like we could conquer anything. Nothing I’ve ever experienced quite compares with how it felt to know that we had made it all the way through BUD/S.
Of our original two-hundred-plus, just over twenty of us had made it to the end.
The night before graduation, it’s tradition for all the graduating students to take the instructors out for a night of drinking. We went with them to a pub on Coronado Island called Danny’s that was strictly off-limits to students. The instructors started buying me shots, and then the night devolved into an endless series of beers. At some point I turned and looked at who it was that had shoved the latest beer in front of me.
It was Instructor Shoulin.
It was the weirdest thing. Here was this maniac who had done everything in his power to get me to quit, this guy that I hated, this guy who was my nemesis—and we were having a guys’ night out, drinking beers together.
“You know, Webb, I hated you,” he said. Hey, don’t hold back, I thought but didn’t say. Tell me what you really think. He took a slow sip of beer, then continued talking in that soft, icy killer’s voice. He was looking straight ahead, speaking almost as if I weren’t there.
“I did not want you to make it through. I did not want you to be a SEAL. We all thought you were going to quit. We thought we could ma
ke you quit.”
He stopped talking again. Maybe he expected me to say something. Maybe not. In any case, I kept my mouth shut and waited to see if he had anything else to say. He did.
“But you shoved it in our faces. You stepped up. I watched you turn a corner—and I was impressed.” He took another long pull on his beer, then quietly added, “You earned our respect.”
Those few minutes were worth all the shit I’d been through.
We drank until the sun came up. I overslept the next day and almost missed my own graduation. One by one, they called us up to receive our certificates. My parents were there, along with my grandparents, down from Canada. It was an unbelievably great feeling. I had made it through BUD/S. I was finally on the threshold of becoming a Navy SEAL.
I was still completely hungover from the night before.
FIVE
GETTING DIRTY
Nineteen ninety-eight. It was a strange time to be part of an elite military corps. This was the waning phase of the Clinton years, and there was a sense in the military that we and the current administration did not have the best of relationships. Frankly, there also wasn’t much conflict happening in the world, or at least no major clashes in which our forces were directly involved. Some guys were wondering just exactly what we were doing here and would grumble that we weren’t really being employed. We all felt a kind of tense anxiousness, as if we were dogs on the leash just itching to be let loose. We wanted to do something.
Instead, we trained.
In a way, the BUD/S training is not really training at all, but one seven-month-long entrance exam, winnowing out all but those who refuse to quit. Now the training started—and we trained, and trained, and trained. This is something about the SEAL experience: The training never stops.
When it came time to be assigned to a specific SEAL team, they had us list our top three picks in order of priority. I figured if anything important was going to happen it would be in the Middle East. At the time, each team was responsible for a particular area of operations (AO), and the Middle East was Team Three’s AO. I wanted to be wherever the action was. What’s more, Team Three had a really good reputation. For my top three picks I listed Team Three, Team Five, and Team One (all West Coast teams), in that order. I was elated when the assignments came down: I had gotten my first choice.
