The Heart and the Fist Part 10

We had no response.

The drill instructor continued. "Oh, Wong, your uniform looks great except for this fist-sized hole fist-sized hole that you burned straight through your shirt." that you burned straight through your shirt."

We were all standing at attention, and I bit the inside of my mouth harder than I'd ever bit it before in an attempt not to laugh.

He yelled at Wong: "How do you expect to stand in front of your sailors as an officer, a leader, when you do not have common sense enough to not burn holes in your uniform!"

When Staff Sergeant Lewis walked into the room, which now looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, and saw Wong in the pushup position sweating a puddle on the floor, he immediately looked at me. "Gritchens! What is going on here?"

Another drill instructor answered for me. "Wong here has got all creative, a one-hundred-percent individual, and I think that Gritchens enrolled him in a G.o.ddarn contemporary frickin' fashion cla.s.s!" He held up the burned uniform. "That is some avant-garde frickin' runway model trash right here!"

Staff Sergeant Lewis boomed, "Gritchens, I told you to watch out for Wong! What is going on?!"

"No excuse, sir!" I said. "It's my responsibility, sir!"

Staff Sergeant Lewis ordered the other two men in the room to leave and join the cla.s.s for chow, and told me to walk into the hallway with him.

The other drill instructors were still going crazy around Wong. "How do you expect me to trust you with a billion-dollar Navy ship if I can't trust you with a G.o.ddarn shirt?!" They had turned his bed completely over, and then they went around the room and turned over the three other beds and ripped the well-folded sheets off and threw the sheets in a pile in the middle of the room.

One of the drill instructors asked Wong, "Wong, have you ever played a G.o.ddarn sport in your life?!"

They weren't expecting an answer and were surprised when Wong yelled from the ground, "Yes, sir!"

"Really?" the drill instructor asked. "What sport did you play?"

"Football, sir!"

Looking through the door frame I saw two drill instructors look at each other in disbelief. "Really, Wong, you played football? What position did you play?"

Wong yelled, "It was John Madden Football, sir!"

I watched as one of the drill instructors walked out of the room trying to control a laugh. The other drill instructor bent down close to Wong's ear and yelled, "Computer games are not a sport! Do you understand me!"

"Yes, sir!"

I thought that Staff Sergeant Lewis was going to yell at me, but for the first time, he addressed me like a human being-albeit a gruff human being. "Gritchens, Wong is going to miss breakfast. I want you to run down to the McDonald's and buy him something to eat."

"Yes, sir!"

From where we stood in the pa.s.sageway, Staff Sergeant Lewis could not see Wong, though I could. He yelled, "Wong, Gritchens is going to McDonald's to get you breakfast, what do you want?" And then I saw the drill instructor who was bent down near Wong's ear whisper to him. The drill instructor whispered, "You better tell him, 'Lewis, go get me a G.o.ddarn frickin' Egg Mcm.u.f.fin.' Say exactly that or I will beat you for days."

Wong yelled, "Lewis, go get me a G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.kin' Egg Mcm.u.f.fin!"

Staff Sergeant Lewis exploded into the room and together with the other drill instructor they worked Wong through a series of pushups and squat thrusts until he'd laid a huge pool of sweat on the ground.

Staff Sergeant Lewis slowly whipped the cla.s.s into shape. We marched as a cla.s.s, trained as a cla.s.s, studied as a cla.s.s. We pa.s.sed inspections and we pa.s.sed exams and for a group that had never marched together before, soon the movements of our rifles were synchronized on the parade ground. We managed, eventually, to get in and out of the chow hall without trays being knocked out of our hands.

I also started to have a good time with my cla.s.smates. We earned the freedom of our Sat.u.r.days, and we'd all head out-dressed in our goofy candidate uniforms-and laugh for hours over plates of hot wings and burgers. We'd run for miles on the beach. I got to know my fellow candidates better, and I liked them even more. They'd all come to serve. We became one-same uniforms, same haircuts, same military language-but we all retained a rich diversity of thought and perspective and humor and philosophy. They were-almost to a person-kind and thoughtful, and it was through them that I began to rediscover America. One day while driving off base with my friends, I realized that if I counted the years from the time I became an adult at age eighteen to the time I'd joined the military at nearly twenty-seven, I'd spent more time outside the United States than I'd spent in it. My time away had afforded me an invaluable education about the world, but now, back at home, I was being reintroduced to my fellow Americans by some of our best people, people who had dedicated themselves to serving our country.

I often found myself playing the role of counselor. One man's mother became very sick and he broke down crying as he thought about leaving the Navy to return home. Another man who'd grown up hardscrabble fell apart seven weeks into OCS, thinking that he wanted to quit. He'd just never believed in himself before.

I still found the underwear folding and the keep-your-sneakers-clean-for-inspection stuff ridiculous, but I began to see some of the wisdom in what the drill instructors were doing. Some of the people in my cla.s.s had never been screamed at before. Now they had two trained drill instructors screaming at them and putting them through what were-for some of them-demanding physical exercises while they were forced to recall answers to essential military questions. This did not necessarily approximate the stress of what they would experience as ship commanders, but it did begin to teach the candidates that they could, that they had to, manage their fear and perform while under stress.

Uncontrolled fear rots the mind and impairs the body. Navy officers have to perform in situations-an incoming missile, a sinking ship-that could cause people to become paralyzed by fear. I'd learned in boxing and in my work overseas that human beings can inoculate themselves against uncontrolled fear. When I first stepped into a boxing ring to spar, my heart rate was high, my adrenaline pumped, my muscles were tense-and I got beat up. After years of Earl's training I could get in a ring with an appreciation of how dangerous my opponent was, and I could keep my heart rate steady, my muscles loose, and I could fight well. The same thing happened as I became more comfortable working in dangerous situations overseas. I didn't dismiss the dangers-in fact I became even more finely attuned to the dangers around me-but I was able to operate in those fear-inducing environments without my fear interfering with me. OCS was-for many-their first taste of chaos and confusion.

Likewise, while I found the unrelenting inspections of our uniforms to be mind numbing, it did teach attention to detail. If one man had lint on the back of his coat, we'd all pay. We learned to look out for each other, quite literally.

As we progressed, Staff Sergeant Lewis started to show a human side. We weren't allowed junk food on base, and when it was mailed to us in care packages, candidates sometimes were forced to eat it. During one mail call, one of the candidates was shoving Ding Dongs in his mouth and doing jumping jacks. As the Ding Dong scarfer tried to shout, "Yes, sir!" shards of Ding Dong flew down the hallway. Staff Sergeant Lewis had his head bent forward underneath his big Smokey Bear hat, but the slightest vibration of the hat gave away the fact that he was trying not to laugh out loud.

My friend Matt DiMarco and I organized an extravagantly named "Deathwish PT," and in the evening we would take a group from our cla.s.s outside for extra physical training. No one came close to death, but we did have a lot of fun. We'd knock out pull-ups and blow off steam by laughing about the day. We competed in an all-OCS tug of war, and our cla.s.s flag was held high on the victory stand.

Even Staff Sergeant Lewis started to take a bit of pride in our cla.s.s. He would call out, "One-Five" (we were cla.s.s 15-01), and we would shout back, "h.e.l.l yeah!"

Wong-like all of us-was required to complete forty-seven pushups in two minutes on the final physical fitness test. In the end, he knocked out more than ninety, stood up, and said, "Guess that's how it's done." By graduation day-our cla.s.s now dressed in choker whites, marching in formation, executing sword salutes-we had become Navy officers.

I walked off the parade field with orders to report to SEAL training in Coronado, California.

9. SEAL Training

THE SILVER STRAND stretches for seven straight, beautiful miles along the ocean, connecting Imperial Beach, California, and the peninsula of Coronado. Waves rolling in from the Pacific crash at Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, home of Naval Special Warfare Command and Navy SEAL training. stretches for seven straight, beautiful miles along the ocean, connecting Imperial Beach, California, and the peninsula of Coronado. Waves rolling in from the Pacific crash at Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado, home of Naval Special Warfare Command and Navy SEAL training.

As I turned onto the Silver Strand, I thought about the relatively brief but rich history of the Navy SEALs. The original frogmen were the Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II. Before the Allied landings at Normandy, the Germans placed obstacles underwater and on the beaches to deter landing craft and obstruct tanks and vehicles. The Underwater Demolition Teams were sent in to scout the landing zones, blow up the obstacles, and clear a path for the invasion. If the obstacles hadn't been cleared, landing craft would have been stopped in water too deep for the soldiers to wade ash.o.r.e, and German guns would have torn them apart. Without the frogmen, the Allied invasion on D-day would have literally been dead in the water.

The training I was about to undergo was built on the same principles-often we learned the very same tactics-as those of the men who led the invasion onto the beaches of Normandy. Rangers, Army Special Forces, Marine Force Recon, Air Force Pararescue Jumpers: all are incredible special operations forces that produce dedicated and capable warriors. Each unit has a different mission and different skill sets. All go through incredibly difficult training. Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training is, however, universally recognized as the hardest military training in the world. BUD/S lasts a grueling six months. Candidates are pushed to their physical and mental limits. As I drove through the gate in 2001, I knew that only about 10 percent of BUD/S students graduated with their original cla.s.s. Ninety percent failed or were rolled back to another cla.s.s. Around 250 men graduated from BUD/S every year, and even then, not all of those survived the additional six-plus months of advanced training it takes to become a Navy SEAL.

To put this in perspective, consider that the National Football League drafted 255 men in 2010. An NFL draft pick who is signed by a team is guaranteed a salary of $325,000, which does not include the bonus money that many of the top draft picks receive (which for some players equals tens of millions of dollars).1 In the same year, the starting salary for an enlisted Navy man undergoing SEAL training ranged from $19,464 per year for an E-2 (less than two years experience) to $24,744 per year for an E-5. In the same year, the starting salary for an enlisted Navy man undergoing SEAL training ranged from $19,464 per year for an E-2 (less than two years experience) to $24,744 per year for an E-5.2 In both cases, tremendous athletes of great courage are put through years of testing to become members of an elite group. I know and admire some of the great people who have played professional sports, but in the course of my training I would come to believe that the 250 men per year who become SEALs are far more richly rewarded. In both cases, tremendous athletes of great courage are put through years of testing to become members of an elite group. I know and admire some of the great people who have played professional sports, but in the course of my training I would come to believe that the 250 men per year who become SEALs are far more richly rewarded.

A young sailor dressed in camouflage fatigues stood up from behind the desk to greet me. "How are you, sir?" Dustin Connors was a physical training phenom in BUD/S-he could fly over the obstacle course and run through soft sand like he was running on asphalt. He later served with SEAL Team One in Iraq and is now a father and an engineer living in California. We would endure a lot together.

"I'm great. How are you?" I shook his hand.

"You gonna be in Cla.s.s 237?"

"I don't know," I said. Dustin explained that he was in a previous cla.s.s, broke his leg during training, and rolled back into Cla.s.s 237. He told me that 237 was "cla.s.sing up"-getting ready for the initial indoctrination phase of training. He said that we'd probably be in BUD/S together.

He stamped my orders and told me that I should come back in the morning. I'd be issued my gear and I'd receive a final medical exam before training started.

We had to stencil our names on everything that they gave us in BUD/S: every T-shirt, every knife, every fin. The next morning I was handed my fins, and on them I clearly saw the names of men who'd been issued this gear before me.

Walker Rodriguez Herman None of them had made it. I took out a stencil kit, crossed out "Herman," and wrote "Greitens." Would somebody be issued these fins in a few weeks and have to put a line through my name?

We began the first official day of BUD/S at 0500 on the beach. Under any other circ.u.mstances, it would have been a morning to enjoy. Small waves crashed on the sh.o.r.e and rolled up the sand. As we ran onto the beach, I looked up for a split second and thought, This is beautiful; This is beautiful; the sky was still a deep dark blue, and stars were shining over the ocean. the sky was still a deep dark blue, and stars were shining over the ocean.

But we didn't have time to enjoy the scenery. When the instructors came out, they'd want a muster report, a full accounting of our cla.s.s. The other officers and I bent our freshly shaved heads together and used a small red-lens flashlight to read the clipboard that held a full list of the names of the men in our cla.s.s who had survived the pre-BUD/S indoctrination course. We had started with 220 names. Now, due to quitting and injury, we were down to just over 160.

Our first task would be to run four miles in soft sand. We were all wearing boots, camouflage pants, and white T-shirts. We milled around the beach nervously before the instructors came out. One guy tried a joke-"Is this when the Charger Girls come out to cheer for us?"-but we were too nervous to laugh. Every man knew that most of the men on the beach that morning wouldn't make it.

"Drop!" The instructors walked onto the beach and we all fell and pressed our hands into the sand. As a cla.s.s we knocked out pushups in unison: "Down."

"One!" we boomed.

"Down."

"Two!"

"Down."

"Three!"

An instructor dragged his boot through the sand to make a starting line, and the instructions were relayed over a bullhorn: "There is a truck parked two miles down the beach. Run down the beach. Run around the truck. Then run back here. You have thirty-two minutes. And gentlemen," the voice paused, as we were about to hear for the first time a line that we would hear thousands of times in BUD/S, "it pays to be a winner."

Just then a truck cracked on its headlights, and the beams tore through the black morning. The truck looked impossibly far away.

"f.u.c.k, that's not two miles," someone grumbled.

"This is bulls.h.i.t."

"I heard they make it impossible to make it on the first run; sometimes it's more like five miles."

From the bullhorn came: "Ready." We all took in a breath. "Begin."

The pack of men started sprinting. The cla.s.s was in a panic. White T-shirts went flying past. Men kicked up sand as they sprinted through the morning. I yelled, "Be steady. Be steady," but fear ruled that morning, and the cla.s.s flew down the beach.

The cla.s.smate I was running beside was an accomplished triathlete, and we looked at each other in disbelief at the panic around us. As we reached the half-mile mark, the sprinters had slowed desperately, and some were already at a jog. They were jogging, then sprinting, then coughing and stopping, then running again. We still had three and a half miles to go, and already these guys were in trouble. These were athletes: high school and college football players, water polo players, state champion wrestlers. Many of them would later ace the runs, but as we'd learn over and over again in BUD/S, physical fitness mattered little without the mental fort.i.tude to deal with fear.

As we approached the turnaround truck, the beams of the headlights cut through the morning and lit up a small group of us running tight together near the front of the pack. We ran half-blinded into the headlights and could hear the instructors yelling, "Take off your shirts! Take off your shirts! Throw 'em in the back of the truck!" We peeled off our shirts as we ran, tossed them in the back of the truck, and ran for the finish line.

The instructors had all been through BUD/S before. They knew every trick. They knew that in the dark, in the confusion of 160 men, it would have been easy for any one man to make a quick turn on the beach short of the truck and start running back to the finish. Our shirts, however, had our names stenciled on them, and they would provide the proof that we'd made it to the halfway point.

We ran swiftly back down the beach, and those of us who ran across the line in the sand under the cutoff time were sent to stretch.

As the thirty-two-minute mark came closer, desperate trainees sprinted for the finish. Instructors prowled near the line in the sand, and as the watch ticked past the time limit and men raced in late, the instructors yelled, "Hit the surf! Straight to the water!" And the exhausted men went stumbling into the 50-some-degree water of the Pacific Ocean.

When the men came out of the waves soaking wet, the instructors yelled, "Get sandy!" and the men dropped and rolled until every inch of their bodies was covered in sand. "Pushups-knock 'em out!" the instructors yelled. And the men did pushups until they were exhausted, and then they were made to flip over and do flutter kicks, and then it was back to pushups, back to flutter kicks, back to pushups. "Stand up. Grab a partner. Fireman's-carry drills down the beach. Run to Instructor Wade. Now!" Men whose quads were already shot picked up other soaking two-hundred-pound men and ran down the beach.

One of the instructors walked over to those of us stretching and said, "Gentlemen, observe this closely. It pays to be a winner at BUD/S." The "losers" were now running back into the water, diving in, then running back out to the beach. Running in; running out. Running in; running out. "You fail. You pay. You fail. You pay," an instructor yelled from the sh.o.r.e.

The instructors circled around a man who'd failed the run and was now covered in salt water and sand. He was in the pushup position, his b.u.t.t in the air. His arms were shaking and they were failing him. One instructor yelled at him, "You know what the prize is for second place in a gunfight?"

"Negative, Instructor."

"It's death. There is no prize for second place. Now do your pushups properly."

The man's arms were shaking and drool was hanging from his lip as he tried to spit the sand out of his mouth. He must have said something like, "I'm trying," because the instructor exploded: "There is no try. try. We do not We do not try. try. Your teammates do not need you to Your teammates do not need you to try try to cover their backs. Your swim buddy does not need you to to cover their backs. Your swim buddy does not need you to try try to rescue him on a dive. Your platoon does not need you to to rescue him on a dive. Your platoon does not need you to try try to shoot straight. There is no to shoot straight. There is no try. try. There is only There is only do. Do, do. Do, or or do not. do not. There is no There is no try. try.." By the time we ran to breakfast, several men had quit.

The instructor staff made it easy to quit. They encouraged it. If at any moment in the training a candidate said, "I quit," or, "I D.O.R." (drop on request), he was removed from training immediately, and often we never saw him again.

The quitters would later have to "ring out" by ringing a bell three times. They then set their BUD/S helmets on the ground. As each day pa.s.sed, the line of helmets grew longer.

In an effort to provide "excellent customer service," the instructors would sometimes bring a bell out with us while we trained, and you could "express quit" by going straight to the bell.

I arrived every morning at the base before there was any hint of sun. As I pulled in, I often heard hard, angry rock music blaring from the barracks-Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

The screaming lyrics reflected the musical tastes of a few of our young hard-chargers. Men dressed in camouflage with shaved heads milled about the courtyard trading guesses about what the day might entail.

"Hey, Mr. G."

"What's goin' on, Lipsky?"

"Just another morning in paradise."

I smiled as I walked in to work. If I had stayed at Oxford to teach or gone to work for a consulting firm, it's hard to imagine that I would have been up this early and having this much fun. I realized also that if I'd stayed at Oxford or gone to work for a Fortune 500 company, I could have lived my entire life with the same kind of people who went to Duke or Oxford, or worked at fancy law firms. There was a "diversity" of people at each of those inst.i.tutions: they had men and women from Indonesia and Zambia and Turkmenistan, and they had people of every color there-but in truth, the backgrounds of the people at these "diverse" inst.i.tutions were often remarkably similar. Almost all of them understood what it meant to be a professor or a lawyer, but few people there understood what it meant to be a police officer or to have a job where you depended on the strength of your back. They easily thought of themselves as cosmopolitans, as "global" citizens, while these men at BUD/S thought of themselves simply as Americans.

The men in our cla.s.s didn't fit the Hollywood vision of what it meant to be a Navy SEAL. There were few Hollywood physiques. These guys weren't flashy. They were just tough. Andrejus Babachinas was a member of the Lithuanian Special Forces who came to train with us. I watched him pull his 250-pound body up a rope using only his arms. Drew Bolton was the son of a logger from northern California. Drew was unbreakable. He was also an avid reader and a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson. And then there was Jordan Maywell from Texas. Jordan's twin brother, Jason, went through BUD/S a few cla.s.ses before, and one day Jordan slipped into Jason's uniform and did a day of training while his brother took the day off. At the time, Jordan was a civilian. What he did was crazy, not to mention illegal, but it showed that he had guts, and that he'd do anything for his brother.

Much of our BUD/S training took place at the combat training tank, a specially designed 164' 82' Olympic-sized pool that had sections of varying depth levels: fifteen feet, nine feet, and three feet.

We ran to the training tank dressed in camouflage shirts, camouflage pants, black boots, and our green "first phase" helmets. We all wore a "web belt"-a thick belt made for carrying gear. Attached to the belt was a canteen, and tied around the top of the canteen was a piece of white rope.

In any free moment-waiting for chow, waiting our turn to run the obstacle course-we'd practice tying knots. We learned how to tie knots because we needed to be able to attach explosives to obstacles underwater. Knot tying is a skill as old as the frogmen themselves. The men creeping up the beaches at Normandy had to tie knots in the dead of night, their hands stiff with cold, to blow up the n.a.z.is' obstacles, and now we were going to be tested.

When we arrived we saw that the instructors had strung a line in the water in the fifteen-foot section of the tank, just inches from the bottom of the pool. I jumped in the water with a swim buddy and we swam to an instructor treading in front of us. We both took a deep breath, made a fist, and pointed our thumbs down to indicate that we were about to dive. As we kicked to the bottom of the pool, pressure built on my eardrums. Using the Valsalva technique we'd been taught, I grabbed my nose and blew hard until I felt my ears pop and the pressure equalize.

When we reached the bottom of the pool I pulled out my rope and started to tie a knot around the line in the water. The knots were easy to tie on dry land, but at fifteen feet underwater I was floating upward as I tied, and I had to keep releasing my hand from the knot to paddle myself down again.

When my swim buddy and I finished tying our knots, we gave the instructor the OK? sign. He twisted his face into a question behind his mask. He exhaled, and a few bubbles ran for the surface. He looked at the left side of our knots, then the right side. He tugged on both knots, and just as I felt that I couldn't stay down there much longer, he gave us both the OK sign. We untied our knots and made for the surface.

Treading on the surface, we took five big breaths, and then our instructor said, "Let's go," and we swam down to tie the next knot. We had to tie five knots, and it got harder with each trip to the bottom.

One of the men in our cla.s.s swam down and, after tying his knot, started floating up to the surface, his body limp. The instructors grabbed him and swam him to the surface. The rest of us were ordered out of the pool. We were made to sit down and face away from the casualty, but we could hear their efforts at CPR-the body being dragged out of the water, the chest being compressed, the breaths taken-as they worked to revive our cla.s.smate. The man was revived on the pool deck and lived. He also suffered brain damage and left BUD/S.

Lieutenant John Skop, the officer in charge of the BUD/S cla.s.s two cla.s.ses before ours, had not been so lucky. Pulmonary edema occurs when the extreme stress of training causes fluid to be pushed into the lungs. This reduces lung capacity. It's like drowning on dry land. Symptoms include chest pain, a feeling of drowning, and coughing up blood. Most BUD/S trainees were in such good physical condition that even with reduced lung capacity, they could perform at a high level. So it was possible for someone with pulmonary edema to keep training, keep pushing himself, keep anyone from knowing that he was in trouble.

The instructors warned us over and over again to tell them if we were coughing up blood. In that same combat training tank, Lieutenant Skop had been doing caterpillar races. In those races, teams of men wearing lifejackets line up in the pool. Each man-buoyed by his lifejacket-wraps his legs around the man in front of him. The men then begin to row with their arms-looking like an ungainly caterpillar-as they race against other teams the length of the pool. The lieutenant had kept his pulmonary edema a secret, and when he started to struggle through the caterpillar race, his lungs finally filled with fluid. He died on the pool deck.

When I first heard Skop's story I thought, That was stupid. I would have let the doctors know. I would have just rolled back into another cla.s.s and completed my training later. That was stupid. I would have let the doctors know. I would have just rolled back into another cla.s.s and completed my training later.