by Don Mann
Hydrographic surveys and drawing beach charts were a snap in comparison. The instructor would give you a lead line and a slate board, and drop you into the water. The idea was to measure depths and check for obstacles.
The part I was the least proficient at was swimming. The BUD/S instructors had a fast way of testing our fight-or-flight response. They’d tie our hands behind our backs, bind our feet, then toss us in the pool.
Some trainees quickly figured out that the only way to avoid drowning was to relax, sink to the bottom of the pool, kick off powerfully toward the surface, get your mug above the waterline, gasp for a bit of air, then drop to the bottom again.
Many panicked, swallowed water, then coughed, choked, and eventually passed out. Divers retrieved them from the bottom of the pool, and the unconscious trainees were rolled on their sides and revived. Then instructors screamed in their faces, “Are you gonna quit? Did you get uncomfortable? What are you wasting our time for, quitter? You want to quit now?”
They were given thirty seconds to answer before they were tossed out of the program. Some guys left voluntarily—it was a challenge that got to the core of what it meant to be a SEAL, to face something profoundly uncomfortable and come out the other side.
Those who said they wanted to keep going were thrown back in the pool.
Who passed? The guys who refused to give up, who could suppress the need to breathe, who trusted that they’d be rescued if something went wrong and were prepared to lose consciousness—or even die.
The instructors called it drown-proofing.
I remember one particular trainee, a cocky EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) guy who went around bragging that he was going to finish at the top of the class. He tried to outsmart the instructors by resting the back of his head on a buoy in the pool. But an instructor saw him, grabbed the pool pole, and smacked him in the head. The EOD guy passed out and sank to the bottom.
The BUD/S instructor in charge motioned to the Navy safety divers to pull him out and resuscitate him. Like a number of the other big cocky men, the EOD guy ran home immediately with his tail between his legs.
I almost failed too.
It happened during an exercise in which we were instructed to stand on the side of the pool, do a forward flip above the water into the pool, then complete a fifty-meter swim underwater—twenty-five meters to one end, then a flip-turn and twenty-five meters back—without coming up for air.
I swam twenty-five meters, did my flip-turn, and, feeling that I needed air, came up for a breath. Almost immediately an instructor shouted, “Hey, you quitter! Get out of the pool and stand over there!”
Feeling about two inches tall, I joined the majority of my class along the side of the pool.
The instructor shouted to the eight or so guys who had passed, “These losers quit. You want to go to war with these quitters? They were feeling a little uncomfortable and had to come up to breathe. The hell with them. We can’t allow lower than whale shit quitters into the teams.” I was scolding myself, saying, What the hell’s wrong with you? You came this far and just because you were a little uncomfortable you had to come up for air? That’s pathetic!
Meanwhile, a couple of the instructors were huddled together talking. One of the them announced, “All right, let’s give these quitters one more chance.”
I thought, Whatever happens, I’m not coming up for air. I don’t care if it gets so bad that my head explodes. I’m not quitting this time. I swam underwater, did my flip-turn, and started back. My lungs started screaming. I desperately wanted to take a breath.
Please! Please! my brain was saying.
I forced myself on and blacked out just before I reached the wall. I don’t remember seeing it or feeling it. All I know is that the divers pulled me out, and I heard one of the instructors say, “Okay, you passed.”
Huge relief.
I learned later that the first time you think you need air, it’s really the CO2 receptors in your brain telling you that it’s time to exhale. If you exhale a little you can last a minute or so longer.
I met some real characters during BUD/S. One guy who stands out was Chris Klauser, who paddled up to BUD/S in a rubber boat on the first day. He beached his boat and removed his dry suit; he was wearing his white dress uniform underneath.
He marched up to the quarterdeck, stood at attention, and said, “Petty Officer Klauser reporting for duty.”
Klauser was a short, bald guy who weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds and had one long eyebrow. He looked kind of odd, but he could bench-press four hundred and fifty pounds—three times his weight! There were guys who could lift even more, but for muscle-to-body-weight ratio, Chris was at the top.
He gave the BUD/S instructors a hard time right from the start, which all of us thought was insane.
One of our instructors caught him clowning around one morning and shouted, “Hey, you, Klauser. Who do you think you are?”
Chris leaned against a palm tree and mimed smoking a cigar. “Burt Reynolds?”
The instructor, who didn’t find it funny, barked, “Drop down and give me fifty.”
Chris’s comeback was “Which arm?”
He passed BUD/S with ease and went on to become a distinguished SEAL pilot and cigarette-boat captain.
Cockiness and apparent fitness weren’t necessarily indicators of future success in the SEALs. It was impossible to tell which guys were going to pass. Big tough-looking football-player types were falling out. Bodybuilders broke legs and ankles. Cocky guys broke down and cried.
My third roommate (the first two washed out) was a soft-looking Mexican American who seemed to be failing everything. He was a weak swimmer, a slow runner, and did mediocre on all our tests. I kept wondering when he was going to quit or be sent packing. But he toughed it out, slowly improved and ended up having a very distinguished career in the SEALs.
A trainee who wanted out at any point during those two months had to ring a bell outside near the grinder and place his helmet beside it. Guys usually did this at night to avoid embarrassment. You’d be half asleep and hear the bell ring. And in the morning you’d look out and see more green helmets.
There was actually one BUD/S class a couple of years before mine where no one passed. From my perspective, BUD/S was 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical.
Halfway through phase one, the forty or so of us who remained began hell week—five days and five nights of continuous training on a maximum of four hours of sleep. Torture, some people might call it, from sundown Sunday to sundown Friday. We didn’t know when it was coming.
Hell week started with the instructors tossing smoke grenades in our tents while we were sleeping and firing blank rounds, yelling and screaming. That initial high-anxiety moment was followed by nonstop boat exercises, carrying inflatable Zodiacs over our heads, timed runs, crawling through mud, calisthenics. Seems like we never got a chance to catch our breath.
The instructors almost never gave us time to sleep either, and when they did, they made sleeping difficult. Once four of us were told we had an hour to nap, but we had to do it under a sprinkler. And one of us had to be on patrol the whole time, running around the other three.
During meals you’d see guys pass out and their faces fall into their plates. Guys actually closed their eyes and dozed off while they ran. A couple of times I managed to paddle in the ocean and sleep at the same time.
It was nonstop cold, wet, sore, and exhausting. I thought the Ironman race was tough. Hell week was like ten Ironman competitions in succession.
Day five I was hiking through the Tijuana mudflats at night, thinking I was following a guy with long black hair, a black leather jacket, and black pants. I followed him for about an hour and was trying to remember who he was when I realized there was no one in front of me. I’d been hallucinating the whole time.
Guys imagined they were seeing witches, pigs, and babies in trees. Beautiful mermaids smiled at them and waved. Rocks turned into talking turtles.
About half of the class managed to make it through phase one. Those of us who did got to exchange our green helmets for blue ones.
Phase two consisted of eight weeks of rigorous dive training. We were still required to do all the runs and PT (calisthenics, obstacle course, and so on).
Included were something called jock-up drills. We’d be down on the cement holding ourselves in push-up position for hours while wearing weight belts and twin scuba tanks on our backs as the instructors screamed at us, “Straighten up your back! Get all the way up! Hold it! Hold it longer!”
Your hands would be burning into the asphalt; your back would be sagging under the weight. The instructors didn’t stop until all of us gave up. Added to that were at least two dives a day. We learned both open-circuit diving (using tanks with compressed air) and closed-circuit diving with the Dräger LAR V (breathing 100 percent oxygen).
With the Dräger, exhaled breath passes through a chemical filter that removes the carbon dioxide and replenishes the oxygen. The advantage of the Dräger is that it produces no bubbles that can be detected by an enemy. The disadvantage is that breathing 100 percent oxygen for more than four hours or deeper than thirty feet leads to oxygen toxicity.
We also learned how to dive using another closed-circuit rebreather system—the MK 15, which is a closed-circuit mixed-gas underwater apparatus especially suited to deep-water dives.
We worked in two-man swim teams, starting with two-mile ocean swims and going all the way up to five-and-a-half-mile swims. Instructors taught us how to approach land undetected and how to attack ships.
At the end of phase two, all remaining trainees exchanged their blue helmets for red ones and began phase three—nine weeks of land-warfare training. The second half took place on San Clemente Island—an uninhabited island owned by the Navy since 1934, about fifty-five nautical miles south of Long Beach, California. A beautiful place.
Again the intensity of PT went up. We ran and swam longer distances (five and a half miles in the ocean) and still had to continually lower our time on the obstacle course run, and swim. But the twenty-six of us who had made it this far were now in terrific shape.
The training became more operational in a sense. Instructors taught us how to fire, take apart, and assemble different weapons—9 mm SIG Sauer P226 and MK23 Mod 0 .45-caliber handguns, MK43 and M2HB machine guns, HK MP5 9 mm automatic submachine guns, an M16. We fired mortars, shoulder-held rockets, and grenade launchers. And we learned how to blow up underwater obstacles with C4, dynamite, and TNT.
We spent many days and nights practicing land navigation, small-unit tactics, and patrolling techniques. Then we were taught how to both rappel and fast-rope from a helicopter.
Since rappelling is safer (and slower), we learned that first. From a helicopter hovering anywhere from twenty to seventy feet off the ground, the trainee was taught how to snap into a rappel line using a locking carabiner that was strapped to his shoulders. A beener or D ring was attached to each trainee via a rappel seat that went around his waist and upper thighs.
From a sitting position with the legs out the door of the helicopter, the trainee pivoted 180 degrees on the skid so he faced the inside of the helicopter—feet shoulder-width apart, knees locked, balls of the feet on the skid, body bent at the waist, the brake hand on the small of his back.
On the go signal, he had to flex his knees and push away from the skid gear, allowing the rope to pass through the brake and guide hands.
Optimal descent was roughly eight feet per second with no jerky stops. The trainee had to start braking about halfway down by releasing tension on the rope and moving his brake hand (the bottom one) out at a forty-five-degree angle.
One guy fell in front of me and broke his back in two places, both his feet, and his right femur.
Fast-roping is a whole lot quicker. Wearing a pair of leather gloves, the trainee grabbed the rope with both hands held at about chest level and then put the rope between his boots and stepped out. The idea was to slide down using hands and feet as brakes.
We practiced slowing our descent and stopping. And when we started carrying fifty-plus pounds of gear on our backs for a seventy-foot descent, we had to pull our gloves off fast when we hit the ground because the leather felt like it was on fire.
By the last days of November we felt like warriors. But even at the very end of BUD/S, guys were selected out if they didn’t keep improving steadily.
Over a hundred trainees had started BUD/S with me, and only twenty-three of us stood on the podium in our white dress uniforms on December 3, 1982, to receive our BUD/S graduation certificates.
It would be another six months at least, during which we were on probation and completing our advanced SEAL training, before we could earn our coveted Navy SEAL tridents and become SEALs.
Chapter Six
Goat Lab
Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.
—Confucius
Back in the early 1980s there were only two ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ SEAL teams in existence—ST-1, on the West Coast, which covered operations in all of Asia; and ST-2, stationed in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which was responsible for operations in Europe, Africa, and Central and South America. My goal at the time was to serve on both.
Each coast was also home to two UDTs (underwater demolition teams)—elite, special-purpose forces established by the U.S. Navy during World War II. Their primary function was to reconnoiter and destroy enemy defensive obstacles on beaches prior to amphibious landings. The Navy’s top combat swimmers, UDTs breached the cables and nets protecting enemy harbors, planted limpet mines on enemy ships (as we did in Somalia), and located and marked mines for clearing by minesweepers.
A precursor to the Navy SEALs, UDTs pioneered closed-circuit diving, underwater demolitions, midget submarine (dry and wet submersible) operations, and combat swimming—a more efficient variant of the side-stroke that reduced the swimmer’s profile in the water.
Even though I knew about SEAL Team One and Two and the UDTs, I was still in the dark about SEAL Team Six, ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Before I checked into SEAL Team One, I had to complete Special Dive Technician School (SDTS), with the only other corpsman in my BUD/S class, a guy named Bob. SDTS was basically a crash course in how to diagnose and treat dive injuries and dive illnesses, including decompression sickness, emphysema, and dive embolisms, and how to administer hyperbaric-chamber treatment.
Since I was responsible for the safety of the divers on my team, I was eager to learn.
I found out that decompression sickness (aka the bends) occurs when a diver who has spent a long period of time underwater or has been breathing gas at a higher pressure than the pressure on the surface ascends and then develops bubbles of inert gas within the tissues of the body.
Symptoms include severe joint pain in the shoulders, elbows, knees, and ankles. Some divers develop itching and mottled skin; others, headaches and blurred vision.
It’s initially treated with 100 percent oxygen until the diver can be placed in a hyperbaric chamber for recompression. I handled some cases of dive embolisms and decompression sickness levels one and two later in my career, but they were rare, since SEALs are expert divers.
Following the two-week course, Bob and I took Christmas leave. He flew home to Texas to go on a hunting trip with his dad, and I flew to Pennsylvania, where my parents were living.
Then I returned to ST-1 in Coronado, and before starting advanced training, I volunteered for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School.
Bob questioned my choice, and he wasn’t the
only new SEAL who did. “Why are you going to SERE School?” he asked. “You don’t have to, and I’ve heard it’s a pain in the neck.”
“Because a Vietnam vet SEAL told me that if we’re captured in combat there’s a good chance we’ll be beheaded or skinned alive,” I explained.
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Most of the twenty people in my SERE class were Navy pilots and aircrew personnel considered to be at high risk of capture. Since I was the only SEAL, I was known to both instructors and students as Baby Killer—a derogatory term left over from Vietnam that described a commando who raided small villages and killed indiscriminately.
The night after my arrival, I received a call from Bob, who told me that soon after he had gotten home, his dad had gone out to the store, and three guys had stopped him and tried to rob him. Bob’s dad had resisted and was shot dead.
“Jesus, Bob. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”
Bob said, “Don, I need your help. They caught the asshole who pulled the trigger. He’s in prison. I need you to show me how to get inside and kill him.”
Bob knew that I had worked briefly as a prison guard when I was waiting for orders to BUD/S.