by Rorke Denver
“Good shot,” I could hear my teammate say.
* * *
We looked like a couple of novice bus drivers who’d gotten separated from their routes. Two baby ensigns, my buddy Jason and I, walking across the parking lot in our pressed dress blues without any medals at all. We hadn’t earned any yet. But as we made our way to the Grinder that morning, both of us could just feel it. Something momentous was about to occur.
“Man, this is it,” Jason said to me.
“We’re here,” I agreed.
We’d completed the thirteen-week course at Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida, and earned the Navy’s entry-level officer rank. We’d driven out to California in my creaky Jeep, stopping in Colorado to spend a few days with my mom. Orders in hand, Jason and I made our way across the magnificent Coronado Bridge, high enough for any Navy ship to go under, except for an aircraft carrier, arriving at the SEALs’ beachfront compound across the bay from downtown San Diego. We knew we were following in the footsteps of the SEALs who’d come before us. This is where it began for all of them. Now, finally, it was our turn.
I felt like a young Spartan just starting the agoge, fully aware of the warrior tradition I was entering, still in awe at the rigorous training I was about to receive. There was no doubt in my mind that morning. I had come to one of the most exhilarating and intimidating moments of my life.
Anyone expecting some high-tech, James Bond facility would be taken aback by how basic the Naval Special Warfare Center is. No retina scans, no laser guns—just a complex of low-slung cinder-block buildings behind a high razor-ribbon fence, some classrooms, barracks, a mess hall, a very large obstacle course, and a gym, all of it jammed so close to the Pacific Ocean you can hear the surf from almost anywhere. Functional would be a good word for the architecture, though the views are out of this world.
At the center of it all is the Grinder. For SEALs, the Grinder is sacred ground. It’s our crossroads and our town square, a big, open, asphalt rectangle with administrative and training offices along all four sides. SEALs are always coming and going from the Grinder. A lot of SEAL physical training happens on the Grinder. In summer months, the concrete gets so blisteringly hot, instructors have to hose it down so the recruits won’t singe their hands doing push-ups. The Grinder is where SEAL graduations are held and where, like a constant taunt, the SEAL exit bell hangs. A famous sign is also there: THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY.
There wasn’t much of a welcome when Jason and I arrived. A woman in the Student Control Office gave us our room assignments in the barracks. A Navy petty officer I figured must be an instructor looked up from a file just long enough to say matter-of-factly: “After you drop off your bags, you two get into PT gear. Go out to the beach. The class is working out right now. Join them.” We did what we were told. We threw on shorts and white T-shirts and ran out to the beach, where about sixty young men in identical shorts and shirts were on their backs in the sun. They looked like human scissors, frantically kicking their feet up and down.
“Oh, a couple of new ensigns,” one of the instructors called out as Jason and I trotted up. “You just gonna stand there, sirs?”
It was the first of many sarcastic “sirs” I would hear from an enlisted instructor, who had to understand that even the freshest officer candidate could someday become his platoon commander or future team commanding officer. But a “sir” from him couldn’t remotely be taken as a sign of deference or respect. The enlisted instructors made perfectly clear who they thought was in charge, and it wasn’t some rosy-cheeked officer. That was a lesson that would stick with me for years: Rank is nice, but it isn’t the only gauge of power or importance. In training or at war, the bigger question is who has the influence, the knowledge, and the personal authority—who has the balls—to make things happen. On the beach that day, I was in that instructor’s world.
“You guys will PT right in front of everybody,” he said. Jason and I went to the front of the group and got busy.
After all my years playing sports, I thought I was in pretty good condition. But I had never worked out like this before. Set after set of push-ups and sit-ups were challenging enough—fast and hard. But this particular instructor was some kind of fiend for these up-and-down flutter kicks. He made us do hundreds of them. I noticed he was kicking right along.
As the fresh recruits struggled and groaned, five or six other instructors were swimming like sharks through the class, looking for people to destroy. It didn’t take long for one of these instructor-enforcers to stand menacingly over Jason, who looked like he was hurting even worse than I was.
“Ensign!” he said sternly. “You don’t think you can do this?”
As Jason tried to answer, for some reason my mind wandered off to an old hunting joke I’d heard from my dad. Two hunters are being chased by a bear in the woods when one of them stops to put on a pair of running shoes.
“What are you doing?” the first hunter asks. “You’ll never outrun that bear.”
“I know,” his friend answers. “But all I have to do is outrun you.” That must have been my brain’s way of telling me: As long as the instructor is yelling at Jason, he isn’t worrying about me.
Jason kept it going through the pain. So did I. As the hard-nosed instructor moved along to someone else, all I could think was, Wow! This is day one, huh?
Not even.
It was pretraining. The instructors were still waiting for a full class to assemble. Some kind of storm was clearly gathering. No one could guess what devastation it might deliver. But I was getting my first real taste of BUD/S.
BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, is the toughest military entry program anywhere. I’ve been through Army Ranger School. I’ve studied all the other elite basic training programs including Army Special Forces, Air Force Pararescue Jumpers, British SAS, and Dutch KCT, four tough ones—and had friends in all of them. None of those schools is as difficult to survive as BUD/S. It’s a three-phase, six-month onslaught of physical and mental challenges that push prospective SEALs to the absolute limit of their endurance—and then beyond. No one is supposed to die during BUD/S. Steps are taken to avoid that. For their safety, the recruits are constantly hydrated and the instructors carefully time how long anyone stays in ice-cold water. But the demands really are superhuman, meaning they go far past what any sane person would expect to endure anywhere, ever.
Every SEAL must graduate from BUD/S. You’re not a SEAL unless you do. BUD/S is what distinguishes our community from all those other fine special-operations forces. When a SEAL encounters another SEAL he has never met before, the first question will almost always be: “What BUD/S class were you in?” And then they’ll start to argue about whose BUD/S class was tougher, each totally certain that his class was the toughest ever in the whole history of BUD/S.
Toughness really is the standard at BUD/S.
Or as one of the instructors told Class 223 when we had finally all arrived: “BUD/S is tough because tough makes better SEALs.” Then the instructors got busy proving it.
Our days were packed with boat races, heavy-log drills, and open-ocean swims. We did calisthenics with medieval ferocity—bursts of 3,000 sit-ups, 7,000 lunges, God-only-knows-how-many flutter kicks. And then there was SEALs’ famous twenty-station obstacle course. Laid out on the sand in a giant square, the O-course tested stamina, balance, coordination, and upper-body strength with rope climbs, balance logs, tire jumps, monkey bars, and a barbed-wire sand crawl. The stations had appropriately twisted names: the Weaver, the Spider Wall, the Slide for Life, and the Dirty Name, so called because of all the expletives shouted in exhaustion there. The cargo net climb was frighteningly high. All I’ll say about that is good luck if you have a problem with heights.
We ran almost everywhere we went. The running started at 5 a.m. with a bleary-eyed four-mile sprint in boots and camouflage pants. We didn’t stop running until we hit the barracks mattresses at night.
“Drop!” the i
nstructors ordered, seemingly at random. Immediately everyone had to hit the dirt or the concrete or the sand or the classroom floor. Our heads had to face the nearest body of water—the ocean, the bay, or a swimming pool—acknowledging the SEALs’ historic connection to water. Then we had to bang out 20, 30, or 50 fast push-ups. When the instructors weren’t yelling “Drop,” they were often calling “Hit the surf!” Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, and whatever we had on, we went running for the ocean and dove in.
A word about water temperature: There is no way to fully explain how painfully cold San Diego Bay and the open Pacific Ocean can be, even in the fall. The temperature goes from colder to coldest. It never feels just cold. The very first time I heard “Hit the surf,” I still had a smile on my face, thinking, We’re gonna run over the hill and hit the surf. This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Coming from northern California, I figured the Pacific off San Diego, not ten miles from the Mexican border, had to be balmy and inviting. Wrong! We all went charging over the berm, then fifty yards down to the water, and dove in. The water was freezing, freezing cold. I couldn’t believe how cold it was. As I came running out, all I could think was, Wow, swimming is fun. Leaping into the glacial chill is definitely not.
To get a sense of how cold that water feels, try a little experiment. On a cold winter day, stand outside with a hose and drench yourself from head to toe. Then stand in front of a fan for ten or fifteen minutes. If it’s hot outside, fill a bathtub with cold water and ice. Twenty minutes of that will give you a good idea. Wet cold just feels colder than dry cold. I have seen BUD/S students jackhammer-shivering so violently they pulled a muscle. Their fingers got so numb, they needed a buddy to button their uniform tops.
Not everyone suffers the same level of debilitation. Some people adjust pretty well to being in cold water. I’m one of the more fortunate ones. With my thick build—six foot one, about 205 pounds in the fall of 1998—I held my body warmth better than many of the skinnier guys held theirs. But that was just by comparison. It was unnerving for everyone, feeling that frigid water pushing the body temperature swiftly downward. San Diego Bay is usually a few degrees warmer than the ocean, somewhere in the mid-50s Fahrenheit. But even the bay water could make your teeth chatter and your fingers go numb. And for most people, the open Pacific felt like a countdown to hypothermia, even during a hard, competitive swim.
While BUD/S students were often wet and cold, one thing we weren’t was hungry. The recruits were practically force-fed. Bacon, eggs, cereal, waffles, juice, and coffee for breakfast; big platters of meat, potatoes, and vegetables for lunch and dinner. We are not the Army Rangers, where starvation is used as a training tool. SEAL recruits burn so many calories, they constantly need to be replenished. Otherwise we would die. I’m not kidding. With all the physical exertion, a student could literally eat an extra-large, triple-cheese, meat-lover’s pizza with a stick of butter on top, call it lunch, and still not have the calories to carry through to dinner.
My classmates and I were constantly measuring ourselves as individuals. But right from the start, we couldn’t help noticing something striking about the BUD/S approach: No matter how onerous the demands became, we almost never faced them alone. Our first week of training, everyone was assigned a swim buddy, another student to exercise with, keep an eye on, help along as necessary, and, in a very real sense, share the BUD/S experience with. The class was also divided into boat crews, usually one officer and six enlisted men. These relationships became the foundation for SEAL relationships to come.
My swim buddy was my roommate Matt, a fellow officer candidate from Colorado who remains my closest SEAL friend today. Matt has a razor-sharp mind, amazing leadership qualities, and an infectious we-can-do-this self-confidence. To this day, I would trust Matt with my life. We pushed each other, motivated each other, joked with each other, and always watched each other’s backs. Each week, we and all the other swim-buddy pairs took to the open ocean for a grueling two-mile, a test we’d either pass or fail together.
One duo in our class failed to stay within the required six feet of each other on that swim. When they got back to the beach looking totally exhausted, the instructors handed them a heavy, cumbersome, six-foot rope with a loop on either end.
“This will make sure you stay together,” one of the instructors told the pair. “Now go swim it again.”
You might not stay with the same swim buddy forever. People leave, get injured, or fall back to later classes or swap to help a struggling classmate. I had four swim buddies by the time I finished BUD/S, including one who was in danger of being dropped from the class because he kept failing his swimming tests. I became his swim buddy and helped to get him through. We understood that once we became fully deployed, combat-ready SEALs, we would all be expected to perform with high efficiency in tightly knit teams. But these relationships, the swim buddies and the boat crews, become over time the very foundation of the SEAL community, direct precursors to future eight-man squads, sixteen-man platoons, thirty-two-man task units, and then teams of several hundred men, all of it intricately layered into a rock-solid SEAL brotherhood.
You’ll see the results of this personal tightness up and down the SEAL ranks. Two snipers working in perfect coordination, a shooter and a spotter. An errant BUD/S student being told to “hit the surf,” supported by four or five of his buddies who just decide to dive in, too. A senior admiral and his force-master chief, not formal swim buddies, but still working in total synch. From the battlefield shoot-out to the barroom brawl, from the family crisis to furniture-moving day, SEALs come to expect it: They can count on other SEALs.
Two retired SEALs can meet for the first time on a street corner. If a crisis breaks out, they’ll be working together to solve it, instantly and seamlessly, swim buddies again. That interconnectedness was woven through everything at BUD/S. Working as a unit, seven strong young men could lift a 180- to 200-pound log about the size of a telephone pole and run down the beach—but only if every man was giving his all. If someone wasn’t, the whole crew was at a big disadvantage.
The same group dynamic applied, even more so, every time we climbed into our IBSs, or Inflatable Boat Small. Those rugged rubber boats, black with bright yellow trim, looked like they might have come from a white-water rafting company. They were strong enough to handle almost any kind of abuse. They and the students in them were the heart and soul of BUD/S teamwork.
For hours at a time, we’d be out on the ocean or the bay in our IBSs in pounding, maximum-effort races—winning crew gets to sit out the next one. “It pays to be a winner in BUD/S,” the instructors kept reminding us. And they made sure it did.
“When you guys get to the battlefield,” one instructor told us, “your squad will perform well together or it won’t. You’ll get the job done, you’ll save each other’s lives—or you won’t. Out there, it’ll be a lot more important than a boat race.”
When we weren’t paddling our boats, we were dragging them, lifting them, filling them with sand, dumping the sand out, and running down the beach with those damn, 110-pound inflatable boats balanced on our heads. Some guys complained they were getting bald spots from the constant rubbing of sandy boat bottoms on their heads.
My boat crew—Matt, Trey, Coop, Mike, and Carlo, plus some rotating others—were absolute animals, studs all. Since Matt and Trey were officers like me, we had three boat crew members who were always ready to lead. That was a solid advantage, and it gave me two real peers to bounce things off of. Depending on each other as we did, our crew got very tight. Even today, some of my closest friends are my fellow Boat Crew III members from BUD/S.
From the start of BUD/S, we all knew the numbers, the brutal wash-out rate for the one thousand or so young men who are accepted into five or six BUD/S classes every year. We knew that at some point before graduation, 70 to 80 percent of our class would likely be gone. In most cases, people wouldn’t get kicked out. Demoralized and exhausted, they’d choose to leave. S
omewhere between the grueling log races, the frigid ocean swims, the small-boat marathons, the endless sit-ups and push-ups, the underwater knot-tying panics, the constant verbal beat-downs from a cadre of barking instructors who never seem satisfied with anything—most of our classmates would soon be asking themselves, What exactly am I doing here? And without an adequate answer they’d conclude that, despite whatever SEAL dreams they’d had, this just wasn’t for them. They’d DOR, Drop on Request. They would walk away from whatever crazy abuse they happened to be suffering at the moment and signal their decision by giving the famous SEAL bell the required three rings, hoping never to be so cold, wet, sandy, sleep-deprived, emotionally finished, or physically spent ever, ever, ever again.
In my BUD/S class, we lost a couple on opening day. One of my classmates got up and left during the very first classroom session, even before he’d been asked to do a single exercise. He rang the bell and was gone.
The clang of that bell, along with the barking instructors and the rolling surf, really was the audio track of BUD/S. It rang at all hours of the day and night, letting everybody know: “There goes another one.”
The bell was never hard to find. It hung right outside the First Phase instructors’ office on the Grinder. Following long-standing SEAL tradition, those who were ready to leave laid their green trainee helmets on the ground in a line beside the bell. Depending on how many classmates have quit already, that line of helmets could be short or very, very long. And then came the rings, each one with its own sad story and its own special sound.