By 0600 I had counted out more than 450 push-ups. And there were more, I just couldn’t count anymore. I’d also done more than fifty sit-ups. We were ordered from one exercise to another. Guys who were judged to be slacking were ordered to throw in a set of flutter kicks.
The result of this was pure chaos. Some guys couldn’t keep up, others were doing push-ups when they’d been ordered to do sit-ups, men were falling, hitting the ground facedown. In the end, half of us didn’t know where the hell we were or what we were supposed to be doing. I just kept going, doing my absolute best, through the roars of abuse and the flying spray of the power hoses: push-ups, sit-ups, screwups. It was now all the same to me. Every muscle in my body ached to hell, especially those in my stomach and arms.
And finally Schulz offered us mercy and a quiet drink. “Hydrate!” he yelled with that Old World charm that came so naturally to him, and we all reached for our canteens and chugged away.
“Canteens down!” bellowed Schulz, a tone of pained outrage in his voice. “Now push ’em out!”
Oh, yes. Of course. I’d forgotten all about that. I’d just had a nine-second break. Down we all dropped again and went back to work with the last remnants of our strength, counting the push-ups. We only did twenty that time. Schulz must have been seized by an attack of conscience.
“Get in the surf!” he bawled. “Right now!”
We floundered to the beach and darn near fell into the surf. We were now so hot, the cold didn’t even matter. Much. And when we splashed back to the beach, Chief Schulz was there, ranting and yelling for us to form up and run the mile to the chow hall.
“Get moving,” he added. “We don’t have much time.”
When we arrived, I was just about dead on my feet. I didn’t think I had the energy to chew a soft-boiled egg. We walked into that chow hall like Napoleon’s army on the retreat from Moscow, wet, bedraggled, exhausted, out of breath, too hungry to eat, too battered to care.
It was, of course, all by design. This was not some kind of crazed Chinese fire drill arranged by the instructors. This was a deadly serious assessment of their charges, a method used to find out, in the hardest possible way, who really wanted to do this, who really cared enough to go through with it, who could face the next four weeks before Hell Week, when things got seriously tough.
It was designed to compel us to reassess our commitment. Could we really take this punishment? Ninety-eight of us had formed up on the grinder two hours earlier. Only sixty-six of us made it through breakfast.
And when that ended, we were still soaked, boots, long pants, and Tshirts. And once more we set off for the beach, accompanied by an instructor who showed up from nowhere, running alongside us, shouting for us to get moving. We had been told what awaited us. A four-mile run along the beach, going south, two down and two back. Thirty-two minutes on the stopwatch was allowed, and God help anyone who could not run eight-minute miles through the sand.
I was afraid of this, because I knew I was not a real fast runner, and I psyched myself up for a maximum effort. I seem to have spent my whole life doing that. And when we arrived at the beach, I knew I would need that effort. There could not have been a worse time to make the run. The tide was almost full, still running in, so there was no appreciable width of drying hard sand. This meant running in either shallow water or very soft sand, both of which were a complete nuisance to a runner.
Our instructor Chief Ken Taylor lined us up and warned us darkly of the horrors to come if thirty-two minutes proved to be beyond some of us. And sent us away, with the sun now climbing out of the Pacific to our right. I picked the line I would run, right along the high point of the tide, where the waters first receded and left a slim strip of hard sand. This meant I’d be splashing some of the time, but only in the shallowest surf foam, and that was a whole lot better than the deep sand that stretched to my left.
Trouble was, I had to stick to this line, because my boots would be permanently wet and if I strayed up the beach, I’d have half a pound of sand stuck to each one. I did not think I could lay up with the leaders, but I thought I could hang in there in the group right behind them. So I put my head down, watched the tide line stretching in front of me, and pounded my way forward, staying right on the hardest wet sand.
The first two miles were not that awful. I was up there in the first half of the class, and I was not feeling too bad. On the way back, though, I was flagging. I glanced around and I could see everyone else was also looking really tired. And right then I decided to hit it. I turned up the gas and thumped my way forward.
The tide had turned during the first twenty minutes and there was just a slight width of wet sand that was no longer being washed by the ocean. I hit this with every stride, running until I thought I’d drop. Every time I caught a guy, I treated it as a personal challenge and pulled past him, finally clocking a time well inside thirty minutes, which wasn’t half bad for a packhorse.
I forget who the winner was, probably some hickory-tough farm boy petty officer, but he was a couple of minutes better than I was. Anyway, the guys who made the time were sent up into the soft sand to rest and recover.
There were about eighteen guys outside thirty-two minutes, and one by one they were told, “Drop!” Then start pushing ’em out. Most of them were on their knees with exhaustion, and that kinda saved them a step in the next evolution, which was a bear crawl straight into the Pacific, directly into the incoming surf. Instructor Taylor had them go in deep, until the freezing cold water was up to their necks.
They were kept there for twenty minutes, very carefully timed, I now know, to make sure no one developed hypothermia. Taylor and his men even had a pinpoint-accurate chart that showed precisely how long a man could stand that degree of cold. And one by one they were called out and given the most stupendous hard time for failing to achieve the thirty-two-minute deadline.
I understand some of them may have just given up, and others just could not go any faster. But those instructors had a fair idea of what was going on, and on this, the first day of BUD/S training, they were ruthless.
As those poor guys came out of the surf, the rest of us were now doing regular push-ups, and since this was now second nature to me, I looked up to see the fate of the slow guys. Chief Taylor, the Genghis Khan of the beach gods, ordered these half-dead, half-drowned, half-frozen guys to lie on their backs, their heads and shoulders in and under the water with the rhythm of the waves. And he made them do flutter kicks. There were guys choking and spluttering and coughing and kicking and God knows what else.
And then, only then, did Chief Taylor release them, and I remember, vividly, him yelling out to them that we, dry and doing our push-ups up the beach, were winners, whereas they, the slowpokes, were losers! Then he told them they better start taking this seriously or they would be out of here. “Those guys up there, taking it easy, they paid the full price,” he yelled. “Right up front. You did not. You failed. And for guys like you there’s a bigger price to pay, understand me?”
He knew this was shockingly unfair, because some of them had been doing their genuine best. But he had to find out for certain. Who believed they could improve? Who was determined to stay? And who was halfway out the door already?
Next evolution: log PT, brand-new to all of us. We lined up wearing fatigues and soft hats, seven-man boat crews, standing right by our logs, each of which was eight feet long and a foot in diameter. I can’t remember the weight, but it equaled that of a small guy, say 150 to 160 pounds. Heavy, right? I was just moving into packhorse mode when the instructor called out, “Go get wet and sandy.” All in our nice dry clothes, we charged once more toward the surf, up and over a sand dune, and down into the water. We rushed out of the waves and back up the sand dune, rolled down the other side, then stood up like the lost company from the U.S. Navy’s Sandcastle Platoon.
Then he told us to get our logs wet and sandy. So we heaved them up, waist high, and hauled them up the sand dune. We ran down the other s
ide, dumped the goddamned log in the ocean, pulled it out, went back up the sand dune, and rolled it down the other side.
The crew next to us somehow managed to drop their log on the downward slope.
“You ever, ever drop one of my logs again,” the instructor bellowed, “I can’t even describe what will happen to you. All of you!” He used the enraged, vengeance-seeking tone of voice that might have been specially reserved for “You guys ever, ever gang-rape my mother again …” Rather than just dropping the stupid log.
We all stood there in a line, holding our logs straight-arm, above our heads. They try to make the teams a uniform height, but my six foot five inches means I’ll always be carrying at least my fair share of the burden.
More and more guys were accused of slacking, and more and more of them were on the ground doing push-ups while me and a couple of other big guys on the far end were bearing the weight. We must have looked like the three pillars of Coronado, sandstone towers holding up the temple, eyes peering grittily out at a sandscape full of weird, sandy, burrowing creatures fighting for breath.
Right after this they taught us all the physical training moves we would need: squats, tossing the log overhead, and a whole lot of others. Then, still in formation, we were told, “Fall in on your logs,” and we charged forward.
“Slow! Too slow! Get wet and sandy!”
Back down to the surf, into the waves, into the sand. By this time, guys really were on their last legs, and the instructors knew it. They didn’t really want anyone to collapse, and they spent a while teaching us the finer points of log teamwork. To our total amazement, they concluded the morning by telling us we’d done a damn nice job, made a great start, and to head off now for chow.
A lot of us thought this was encouraging. Seven of our number, however, were not to be consoled by these sudden, calming words uttered by guys who should have been riding with Satan’s cavalry in Lord of the Rings. They went straight back to the grinder, rang the hanging bell outside the first phase office, and handed in their helmets, placing them in a line outside the CO’s door. That’s the way it’s done in first phase: the exit ritual. There were now a dozen helmets signifying resignation, and we hadn’t even had lunch on day one.
Most of us thought they were a bit hasty, because we knew a certain part of the afternoon was taken up by the weekly room inspection. Most of us had spent all day Sunday getting into order, cleaning the floor with a mop and then high polishing it. Somehow I had found myself way down the waiting list to use one of the two electric buffers.
I had had to wait my turn and did not get finished before about 0200. But the time had not been wasted. I’d fixed my bed gear, pressed my starched fatigues, and spit-shined my boots. I looked better, not like some darned sand-encrusted beachcomber, the way I had most of the day.
The instructors arrived. I cannot remember which of them walked into my room. But he gazed upon it, this picture of military order and precision, and at me with an expression of undiluted disgust. Carefully he opened my chest of drawers and hurled everything all over the room. He heaved the mattress off the bed and cast it aside. He emptied the contents of my locker into a pile and informed me that he was unused to meeting trainees who were happy to live in a garbage dump. Actually, his words were a bit more colorful than that, more…well…earthy.
Beyond the confines of my room, there was absolute bedlam; stuff was hurled all over the place in room after room. I just stood there gaping as the entire barracks was ransacked by our own instructors. Outside in the corridor, I could hear someone bawling out Lieutenant David Ismay, the class leader. The soft, dulcet tones of Chief Schulz were unmistakable.
“What kind of rathole are you running here, Mr. Ismay? I’ve never seen rooms like these in my life. Your uniforms are a disgrace. Hit the surf…all of you!”
There were, by my count, thirty rooms. Only three of them had passed muster. And even those guys were not exempt from our first ocean plunge of the afternoon. In our shiny boots and pressed fatigues, we pounded back down to the beach, leaving a scene of total chaos behind us.
We raced into the water, deep, right into the waves. Then we turned and floundered back to the beach, formed up, and headed back to the BUD/S area. Chief Taylor was back in our lives with a major rush, obviously preparing for the last evolution of the day, on the beach or in the water. We did not know which.
All day long we had been wondering precisely who he was, but our inquiries had yielded little save that the chief was a true veteran of the teams who had seen combat in overseas deployment four times, including the Gulf War. He was a medium-sized man but immensely muscular; he looked like he could walk straight through a wall without breaking stride. But you could see he had a sense of humor, and he was not averse to telling us we were doing okay. Sweet of him, right? Half of us were hanging in there by willpower alone.
And we needed all the willpower we had, because in a few moments we were preparing to take the boats into the water again. I have never forgotten that surf drill on that first day because Chief Taylor made us paddle the boats out backward, facing aft. When we returned through the surf to the beach, we faced aft again, but now we were paddling forward.
When we first started, the journey out beyond the breakers seemed impossible to do while facing the beach and holding the oar so awkwardly, but we got better. And somehow we got it done. But not before all kinds of chaos had broken out. We capsized, flipped over, crashed backward trying to drive head-on into a big wave. And there was a lot of spluttering and coughing when we attempted Chief Taylor’s finale, which was to dump boat, right it again, stow the oars correctly, and then swim the boat back in through the surf and onto the beach.
Before we left, we were taken through an exercise called surf observation, in which two-man teams observe the condition of the sea and make a report. I paid strict attention to this, which was good, since from now on, every morning at 0430, two of our number would go down to the water’s edge and come back to make that report. Chief Taylor, smiling, as he was prone to do, dismissed us with the words “And don’t screw up that report. I want no discrepancies about sea conditions, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
We sharpened up our rooms that evening, and on day two were under way with the normal morning grind of push-ups, running, and getting wet and sandy. Our first classroom involved meeting our leading petty officer instructor, Chief Bob Nielsen, another Gulf War veteran of several overseas deployments. He was tall, slim for a SEAL, and, I thought, a bit sardonic. His words to us were packed with meaning, edged with menace, but nonetheless optimistic.
He introduced himself and told us what he expected. As if we didn’t know. Everything, right? Or die in the attempt. He gave us a slide presentation of every aspect of first phase. Before the first picture had been taken off the screen, he told us to forget all about trying to put one over on the instructors.
“Guys,” he said, “we’ve seen it all. You can try it on, if you like, but it won’t do anyone any good. We’ll catch you, and when we do, watch out!”
I think everyone in the room made a mental note not to “try it on.” We all listened carefully while Chief Nielsen ran quickly through the first four weeks and what we could expect — more running, log PT boats, and swimming, the full catastrophe. Purely to find out how tough we really were.
“Conditioning,” he said. “Conditioning and a whole lot of cold water. Get used to it. The next month represents a hard kick in the crotch. Because we’re going to hammer you.” I still have my notes of Bob Nielsen’s speech.
“You fail to meet those standards, you’re out. Of course most of you will end up being dropped. And most of you will not be back. You must make that four-mile thirty-two-minute run, and you must make the two-mile swims in an hour and a half. You’ll get a tough written test. There’s pool standards, there’s drownproofing. With and without the fins — kick, stroke, and glide.
“You may be thinking, What does it take? What must I do to make it throu
gh? The cold truth is, two-thirds of you sitting right here will quit.”
I remember him standing next to my row and saying, “There’s seven rows of you sitting here. Only two rows will succeed.” He seemed to look straight at me when he said, “The rest of you will be gonzo, history, back to the fleet. That’s the way it is. The way it’s always been. So try your best to prove me wrong.”
He issued one further warning. “This training does not suit everyone. We get a lot of very good guys through here who just decide this is not for them. And that’s their right. But they will walk away from here with dignity, understand? We catch one of you laughing or making fun of a man who has requested DOR, we’ll hammer you without mercy. Big time. You will regret those moments of ridicule for a long time. I advise you not even to consider it.”
He closed by telling us the real battle is won in the mind. It’s won by guys who understand their areas of weakness, who sit and think about it, plotting and planning to improve. Attending to the detail. Work on their weaknesses and overcome them. Because they can.
“Your reputation is built right here in first phase. And you don’t want people to think you’re a guy who does just enough to scrape through. You want people to understand you always try to excel, to be better, to be completely reliable, always giving it your best shot. That’s the way we do business here.
“And remember this one last thing. There’s only one guy here in this room who knows whether you’re going to make it, or fail. And that’s you. Go to it, gentlemen. And always give it everything.”
Chief Nielsen left, and five minutes later we stood by for the commanding officer’s report. Six instructors filed into the room, surrounding a navy captain. And we all knew who he was. This was Captain Joe Maguire, the near-legendary Brooklyn-born Honor Man of Class 93 and onetime commanding officer of SEAL Team 2. He was also the future Rear Admiral Maguire, Commander, SPECWARCOM, a supreme SEAL warrior. He had served all over the world and was beloved throughout Coronado, a big guy who never forgot a fellow SEAL’s name, no matter how junior.
Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 Page 11