by Rorke Denver
But mostly what we did was have hard, rollicking fun. I woke up every morning, climbed into PT gear, dragged a razor across my face, and worked out at the team compound for two hours with a great bunch of guys. On any given day, we might walk out the back door of the command and take a fast boat out in Chesapeake Bay or chase a ship on an attack exercise. We had a helicopter to take us fast-roping onto a boat deck. We went rappelling and running on the beach. We were always training, always traveling. We practiced shooting in Mississippi and North Carolina. We had diving adventures in Newport, Rhode Island. We went on demolition trips. It was like going to summer camp in your twenties with only the cool guys. We’d hit the bars at night, and every weekend have massive barbecues on the beach.
Really, it was like being a member of an excellent fraternity, the greatest man club in the world. Maybe the last one. Virginia Beach wasn’t quite the year-round vacation paradise that San Diego was, and it was nowhere near as large. You couldn’t go into a single coffee shop, bar, or restaurant in the Virginia Tidewater region without bumping into five other SEALs, from your team or another. But even that made the experience more intense. What we were doing was totally enjoyable. You couldn’t escape the teams if you wanted—and really, why would you? We were young guys, mostly single, having the time of our life.
Whenever I could steal a little quiet time, I would get back to reading the classics of war. Every warrior should. I dove into The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. I challenged myself with the just-war theories of two brilliant Catholic saints, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. They wrestled thoughtfully with serious questions about when war is morally appropriate.
“War is justified only by the injustice of an aggressor,” Augustine wrote, “and that injustice ought to be a source of grief to any good man, because it is human injustice.”
“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary,” countered Aquinas. “First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention.”
I devoured the ancient Greeks, Socrates, Plato, and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. I read Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, which was already on its way to being a modern warrior classic. Every time I reread Churchill, he sounded more prescient to me.
I had one unexpected side trip that turned out to serve me extremely well in my career. While I waited for another cycle of advanced SEAL training to begin, I was dispatched to Fort Benning, Georgia, for Army Ranger School. I was totally blown away by the Rangers. Their two-month infantry leadership course was vastly different from BUD/S. Instead of jumping in and out of the ocean and racing boats, prospective Rangers march for endless miles with heavy rucksacks and subsist on starvation rations for days at a time. But these guys are amazing experts when it comes to infantry warfare skills: That training gave me a huge leg up when I got back to my SEAL team at Little Creek, and I have proudly worn the Ranger tab on the left shoulder of my cammie top ever since.
Each Friday afternoon back in Virginia, the SEAL team would end the week with a hard-core ten-mile run through First Landing State Park and back out to the beach. If you were new to the team, you had to earn your reputation on those runs. When we first started, the command master chief, a legendarily hard SEAL named Tommy, said to us: “You young bucks better win every one of these races.” I figured he meant it. On the very next group run, three of us young guys broke away from the pack. I don’t think I have ever held a pace like that for ten straight miles. It was like we’d packed the BUD/S conditioning runs into a one-hour sprint. When we got to the finish line, I could barely talk I was breathing so hard.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked my friend Ice. “Why did we run this fast? We were way ahead of everybody else.”
“I don’t know,” Ice said.
“Me neither,” said our teammate Fish. “I thought you were picking up the pace so I picked up the pace.”
SEALs never miss a chance to compete. If we don’t have something real to compete over—don’t worry, we’ll dream something up. If three SEALs are going on a run, it’s not a run anymore. It’s a race. SEALs get bloody noses during pickup games of Horse. For me, this hypercompetitiveness didn’t seem strange at all. It went back to those birthday party footraces in my childhood cul-de-sac. Some boys never grow up. Any SEAL who doesn’t want a physically crushing challenge had better play alone—and stay out of the SEAL team van. You never know when a van brawl might break out.
Everyone knew the rules for a van brawl. There was only one: No striking, hurting, or otherwise coming into contact with the driver, who at that moment was trying to deliver his high-spirited male cargo on a dive trip, a jump exercise, or some other training opportunity.
What was the point of brawling inside a moving van? Put it like this: When bored, aggressive, overgrown male children are forced to sit so close to one another for hours at a time, their already excessive testosterone will pump into overdrive, and sometimes they just can’t resist beating each other up.
I do not believe regular people do this with their colleagues. Clearly, we were exceptional in many ways.
SEAL van brawls were no joke. The carnage routinely included busted teeth, cracked ribs, and grotesque bruises. Senior officers sometimes tried to calm everyone. But good luck with that when eight or ten frenzied young beasts were punching, choking, kicking, and fishhooking each other in the mouth. Hair-pulling and eye-gouging were considered less than manly, but I’ve seen both employed.
Van brawls broke out for pretty much any reason or no reason at all. Someone spilled a drink. Or the trip was long and boring. Or some stupid debate—what was the best comedy movie ever or the worst defensive line in football?—grew just a little heated. Every once in a while, some twisted chief would turn in his seat and shout, “Van brawl!” just to see what his guys were made of.
By the time you made lieutenant or platoon commander, you were expected to abstain from van brawling. But when I was a young ensign at SEAL Team Four, I was every bit a party to those fights and a functional fighting member.
It was all just part of SEAL culture. As the new guys got acclimated to life at Team Four, the seasoned SEALs were constantly offering advice. It was like learning life lessons from your big brother or your crazy uncle. How to handle yourself in a bar fight: “Hit first. Hit hard. And be ready to move.” How to behave around women: “Date strippers. Don’t marry strippers.” Some of the advice was sage. Some of it could just as easily get you killed.
The underlying message in all of it was the potency and importance of the SEAL brotherhood. There seemed to be a special SEAL answer for everything, and you’d better know what that answer was. One day I was in the training room with three of my SEAL mentors who had been in the teams a long time. I’d grabbed a copy of the Yellow Pages.
“What are you doing?” asked Jos.
“I just bought a Dodge 2500 diesel pickup,” I told him. “I want to put a cap on it so I can keep all my gear back there. I don’t want it to be an open-bed pickup.”
“I hear you,” he said. “But what the hell are you doing with that book?”
This was pre-Google. Where else was I supposed to find a truck cap? “I’m looking for a place that sells caps,” I said.
“Let me tell you,” Jos said. “The best Yellow Pages on the face of this earth are the SEAL teams. Close that book.”
I closed the book.
“Stand by, Young Viking,” he said. “Let me prove this to you.”
He got on the phone with me sitting there. He dialed the quarterdeck for SEAL Team Eight. I heard him say, “This is Warrant Officer Jos. I need you to put something out over the 1MC,” the command microphone system. “Anybody who has a connection for getting caps for the back of pickups, here’s my number. Tell him to call me back.”
He hung up the phone. He didn’t stop. He called the quarterdecks of the other Little Creek teams, Two and Four, and delivered the same message
. “Get back to me,” he said.
He had just hung up from the last call when the telephone rang.
“Yeah, this is Jos,” he said. “Okay, give me his number. Where’s he at? Corner of Virginia Beach Boulevard and Independence? Great. I appreciate it.”
He hung up the phone and looked at me like he was looking at a child. “Okay, prepare to copy,” he said as I broke out a piece of paper and he repeated a phone number to me. “Jim is my friend Billy’s uncle,” Jos said. “He sells caps on the corner and for team guys will do a fifty percent discount and installation for free. He’s waiting for you right now. Go.”
Ever since that happened, I don’t think I’ve ever actually had something I needed that I didn’t get through the teams.
But I wasn’t at Little Creek solely to learn SEAL culture and hone SEAL competitiveness. You’re not a SEAL if you don’t have your Trident, the shiny gold insignia that tells the world, “U.S. Navy SEAL.” And we didn’t have ours yet.
The Special Warfare Insignia, as the SEAL Trident is officially known, is one of the most widely recognizable warfare specialty pins in the U.S. military. A golden eagle clutching an old Navy anchor, a trident, and a flintlock pistol—you’ll sometimes hear SEALs refer to the Trident as “the Budweiser,” and it does vaguely resemble the famous logo of another powerful American institution.
By any name, that tiny Trident is packed with symbolism. The old anchor reminds SEALs that their roots go back to the valiant Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II. The trident, the scepter of Neptune or Poseidon, king of the oceans, emphasizes the SEALs’ connection to the sea. The eagle, the classic emblem of America’s freedom, refers to the SEALs’ ability to swiftly insert from the air. The eagle’s head is lowered, suggesting the SEALs’ humility. The pistol, which is cocked and ready to fire, points to the SEALs’ capacity and readiness for fighting on land. Heritage, sea, air, and land—the SEALs.
When the Trident was first issued in 1970, there was a silver version for enlisted men and a gold one for officers. But that distinction was quickly abandoned. Now everyone gets gold, one of the very few Navy badges issued in a single grade. And even that has meaning. It highlights how SEAL officers and enlisted men are trained and deployed side by side.
Before receiving my Trident, I had to get through one last hurdle, my Trident Boards, a written exam followed by an intensive oral and practical test. I’m not saying the grilling I got was the sit-down equivalent of Hell Week. But it was tough and precise and insistent, and it went on for a really long time. Then came one of the best days of my life.
My dad and my brother flew out to Little Creek. Lots of the other soon-to-be SEALs had family there as well. It was the day I’d been dreaming about for more than three years. That Friday morning, the whole team was together for an extra-strenuous PT. We did a loop through the Little Creek O-course. And then while our families waited near the water and had refreshments, we did another ten-mile run through the state park that eventually brought us back to the beach. You knew we’d all be diving in. The guys who already had their Tridents hit the water in shorts and fins. We newbies kept our full cammies on. We had a final swim down the beach. For three of us, the swim was extra-vigorous. We had to carry a breaching sledgehammer on our backs. That was a fun treat.
Even knowing the day would be special didn’t quite prepare us for the greeting we got when we pulled ourselves out of the water. The commanding officer of SEAL Team Four, whom everyone on the team knew as Father War, was waiting for us on the beach. Lined up with him were officers and enlisted men, the entire team. The families were standing behind them.
Father War is one of the super-legends of our community. A former Marine officer, he went through SEAL training at age thirty-six. He lost a leg in a free-fall jump and didn’t let it slow him down one bit. He attached a fin to his prosthetic leg for swimming and used a different leg with a shoe for running. He went on to command virtually every tactical unit in the SEAL teams and retired a captain. His lessons on how to lead men inspired me and set an extremely high bar.
We waited in knee-deep water as the commander stood in the water with us. He delivered a truly moving speech about becoming part of the brotherhood.
“It’s a struggle, a tough struggle, to earn your place in this warrior community,” he said. “You have worked incredibly hard. You have shown incredible commitment. Now you are part of this brotherhood, and now the real work begins. You have earned your Tridents. You are real team guys now.
“There is only one reason this Trident is polished to such a high gold shine,” he continued. “That is so each person does nothing to tarnish it. Everybody carries his weight. Everyone lives up to that expectation. Everyone takes care of one another. The nation is counting on you to do that job. That is not a slogan. It is not something you just read on a poster. That is real.”
Standing there, having completed some of the most difficult training there is to join this exclusive group of American warriors, I know all of us felt that. I’m sure Father War believed it. It was a simple but perfectly stated and sincere welcome to the brotherhood.
He passed down the full line of us in the water and pinned the Trident on each man’s cammie top. Then, as the families looked on proudly, every single member of the team came up and shook hands with us. It was as genuine a handshake as I’ve ever received from anyone. It felt very, very special, celebratory and serious all at once. At that point, you’re a made man in this elite brotherhood. I felt the pride of that—and the weight of it.
To this day, I feel incredibly fortunate to have started my SEAL career with Father War. He took a special interest in all of us, dealing with issues large and small. It even fell to him at one point to rein us in after one memorably rowdy van brawl. Seat cushions had been ripped open. Windows had been smashed. Doors were knocked off their hinges. After this particular trip to Land Warfare Training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, Father War demanded to see BRAVO’s three officers.
“You guys are in the running to be the best platoon at SEAL Team Four,” he said. “But you have destroyed more vehicles in a shorter period of time than any idiots I have ever seen. The next vehicle you mangle in any way—I don’t care if someone slams into it while you’re parked—you three will pay for the fixes out of your own paychecks.
“Now get out of my office.”
In large part, Father War made me the officer I am. His guidance, his experience, his insight, his constant openness to creative thinking, and his hands-on style of command—the time I spent with him changed the trajectory of my life and career.
Other things fell into place as well. I was tremendously fortunate to be picked up by BRAVO Platoon. B, the platoon commander, really was one of the last clean-cut superheroes. He and Chief Petty Officer Hall, who day to day ran the platoon, were creative, driven, and committed to doing things right.
It’s a special relationship between a chief and a young ensign. In theory, on the day he’s sworn in, a brand-new ensign outranks the most senior master chief, who is a noncommissioned officer. But no master chief in the U.S. Navy would ever take any crap from the likes of me.
Least of all Chief Hall. He had been around so long and knew so much about the day-to-day practical operation of the SEAL teams, he could get almost anything done. Everyone the chief served with, officers and enlisted alike, were loyal to him, and he earned it the old-fashioned way. He was phenomenally good at taking care of the boys, making sure we all got the newest gear and the good-deal trips, knowing every angle in the system to get everything we needed, always making sure he got the best new guys for his platoon.
BRAVO Platoon had just come off a very active rotation, and they were down a few members, including that teammate who’d stepped out of a helicopter in a training exercise 180 feet above the water and was killed. They had to pull some new blood in. The chief assembled an amazing group. Frog was one of the most effective snipers and field-craft experts you’ll ever meet. You did not want him trackin
g you in the woods or the jungle. When we would go on a two-mile swim in the ocean, he’d be the only one on the team swimming without fins—and he’d finish in the top two or three.
Eddie was a good-looking Cuban-American, BRAVO’s all-time class clown. Always telling jokes, making crank calls to commanding officers of other military units—harmless stuff but hilarious. Half the platoon met their wives through Eddie. He was the best wingman you could ever have.
Irish and Toro were the two youngbloods in the platoon, barely a year or two out of high school. They weren’t short enough to be Smurf SEALs, but they certainly weren’t large. Yet size didn’t hold them back. It was these young bucks who carried the heavy M60 machine guns, running through woods, across rivers, and over hills. They had great personalities. Everybody loved them. They were what the twins from BUD/S would have been if the twins had made it through.
Sonny and Josh were muscle-bound Proto-SEALs, the recruiting poster picture of a strongly built physical specimen. Sonny, an explosives expert, had so little body fat, he would actually sink in cold water. I never heard him complain once about anything. To this day, the very definition of cool—that was Sonny. Josh was gregarious, fun, intense, competitive, just an uncontrolled ball of testosterone. He was like a hound dog, totally loyal to his buddies, always chasing tail. You did not want to be on the opposing team when you saw those two guys running at you with big machine guns.