by Rorke Denver
“Stand by for some of the guys coming to the teams,” the instructors said. “They have gotten way too many tries getting through this place.”
I had an argument one day with a capable officer who went on to command one of the teams. At the time, he was a training director. I was saying that these multiple opportunities to pass were undermining the quality of SEAL training. This guy is fantastic with numbers and metrics and percentages and statistics. He pulled out a spreadsheet.
“Look at how much risk we’re really taking,” he said. “This is only going to generate somewhere between seventeen to thirty additional graduates a year. If those guys graduate, that will cover our quota in a couple of years. Honestly, it’s seventeen to thirty guys. That is basically one platoon or one task unit. Don’t you think we can absorb that? One platoon. It’s not that many guys.”
My response was instinctive, not political.
“Not a platoon I want to be in charge of,” I said. “A group of guys who need five tries to get through the course of instruction—who’d want to be in charge of that platoon?”
To me, the calculation is simple. Growing the force is a nice goal. Some growth is probably a good thing. I take seriously the complexities of the world today and the valuable role the SEALs can play. With more SEALs, we could conduct more missions and do more good.
I just don’t want to see what makes us great get watered down. Quality has to come first. That’s what makes the SEALs the SEALs. America already has the best conventional forces on the planet. When large numbers are needed, they’re the ones with the troop strength.
We almost never go on our missions alone. Someone has flown us there or shipped us there. Someone has collected the intelligence we’re acting on. Someone is providing medical backup, technical support, or combat support. We love and need these guys. And generally speaking, we don’t hang around for years or decades. We execute high-paced, short-duration targeted missions. We are small, nimble, and quick.
Elite organizations can’t be mass-produced. Something gets lost in the multiplication.
Harvard is a great university. They have something special there. But I don’t see the Harvard deans suggesting new Harvard branches in malls across America. In elite organizations, quality trumps quantity every time.
That said, the instructors can sometimes go overboard. As they kept being nudged to ease up, I’d sum up their reaction like this: Let’s see about that. They proceeded to make BUD/S even harder, and it was already damn hard.
Constant improvement is one of the hallmarks of being a SEAL. That is what we do. For a sniper in a SEAL platoon, that means finding a way to alter his stance, to adjust his weapon, to apply some new change no one ever tried before. In ways small and large, that’s how a SEAL sniper becomes a better sniper.
Something similar happens with SEAL instructors. They are always pushing the students harder, increasing the demands, making BUD/S better, which inevitably means making it a tougher experience. Pushing the curriculum, that’s the absolute nature of a SEAL instructor’s personality.
Over the years, SEAL training has gotten tougher as a result.
BUD/S instructors are always convinced they know exactly how to use the curriculum to push the students to precisely the right breaking point, which will soon enough reveal who are the right guys to get through. I believe it should still be hard. But I also believe there comes a point where BUD/S is hard enough to achieve what it is supposed to—to help us identify the right new guys for our brotherhood.
Anything beyond that is at least counterproductive and at worst dangerous.
I do believe that, without our even realizing it, the toughness was escalating. We used to do log PT for a couple of hours. It’s a brutally punishing event. We would lunge with logs at a chest carry, standing in one spot. One of the first times I came to an event, my instructors were lunging the students with these logs all the way around the obstacle course—they wouldn’t admit it but basically they were going to keep it going until someone or something broke. They wouldn’t stop, not until someone was injured. They had pushed that class as hard as you could possibly push them. No one was quitting voluntarily. Everyone who was left had utterly proven himself. And the instructors kept pushing them.
I or my master chief, a highly responsible and disciplined and intense guy, had to pull the instructors aside and say, “Stop. We have to move to another evolution.”
I felt very torn on that battleground. I really believed in the instructors, and I believed our job was to be the guardians of the brotherhood and see that the right candidates were getting through. But I could see there were a few instructors who had drifted off the reservation on how hard to be pushing students. And despite our legendary independence, we are a military organization. We do ultimately have to answer to people above.
Finally, I knew I had to address the entire instructor cadre. This whole issue of balance had turned into a war.
“You guys live this job passionately,” I said. “That is the right thing to do. But I think you are about to lose the fight. I think you will be replaced if you don’t find a way to balance the playing field a little. Then the floodgates will open. You won’t be able to protect the brotherhood. All that we worked for will be in other people’s hands. I don’t even want to think what that might mean.”
In terms of SEAL training, this was our Cuban Missile Crisis. Very few people know how close we came to disaster in October 1962. The same thing was happening here. There was an alarming chance that SEAL training would be put in the hands of civilians or retired SEALs or conventional Navy instructors. Someone would follow orders and they’d get more people through some lighter version of SEAL training, regardless of the quality that produced.
“I’m not saying cancel BUD/S or make it Diet BUD/S or BUD/S Light,” I told the cadre. “But this is as bad as it’s ever been. I think we’ve begun to lose sight of what we’re doing here. We’re not here to destroy people. We are here to select the right guys.
“We’re gonna lose a lot of guys in the first three days of Hell Week,” I said. “By about day four, no one’s gonna quit. Someone might get hurt. But by Wednesday night, most of the guys who are here are staying here. You need to recognize that and you need to throttle back a bit. We’re not gonna change water temperature. We’re not gonna keep them dry. We’re not gonna give them warm towels and tell them to put their feet up. But by then, we have the core of the guys who are going to get through Hell Week and get through training and join this brotherhood.”
“They are the future,” I wanted them to understand. “We should be proud that our program has identified them.”
“If it’s four or if it’s eighty, I don’t care,” I said. “There is always going to be a worst guy in a class of any size. And if you get the class down to one, he’ll be the worst and the best guy.”
How was all this resolved? It hasn’t been.
Through trial and error and much grinding debate, I believe we have managed to find a balance that is close to right. The cadre and the top leadership both seem to get what we are doing here.
The instructors seem to have found a level everyone can live with. BUD/S is still extraordinarily difficult, far tougher than when I went through, tougher than when I returned to Coronado as a training officer after my Iraq deployment. And yet in the past three years we have graduated some of the largest classes the training center has ever seen.
Both sides have gotten much of what they needed.
Instructors still grumble sometimes about pressure from above, just as the leadership still grumbles about uncooperative instructors. That tension is probably inevitable, maybe even healthy. In the end, we still need a better understanding of what all that toughness is for. It’s not to torture. It’s not to injure. It’s not to drive away. It’s certainly not to meet some politician’s or some general’s quota of how big the force should be.
We’re making SEAL warriors here, and the world has never needed them
more than at this moment in history. That has to mean something. We’re creating a challenge that will help the community discover—and help the candidates discover—who the right new guys should be.
17
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.
—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
* * *
We had already shot the bonfire scene. Like all the scenes in Act of Valor, it came right out of the SEALs’ experiences at war. Scott, one of the directors, had asked me what I would say to the guys as we were heading out on deployment. Did I give a little speech to get them motivated? I told him they didn’t need to be motivated. They couldn’t wait to get to war. I told him that before a deployment I liked to talk to the guys about balance. Without balance in life, a warrior will have problems on the battlefield. I said it while the cameras were rolling just like I’d said it plenty of times before.
When we were finished filming that part of the scene, Scott asked, “Does someone have a toast or something?”
I didn’t have a toast. But Chief Dave came up with one. He said he’d heard it a couple of times from other SEALs. It came originally from something people used to say in Scotland, Dave told us. It was a short poem or incantation that might be uttered on the way to another round of beers or Scotch whisky—or an especially difficult fight.
“To all those who have been downrange, to us and to those like us. Damn few.” That was the modern-warfare version Dave came up with.
I liked that. It felt like us on the beach, a special group of warriors heading into battle together, not an ounce of hesitation among the whole lot of us.
* * *
When they asked if we’d like to be in a movie, all of us answered exactly the same way.
“No.”
Dave, Sonny, Ajay, all of us—immediately, emphatically, unequivocally, “No.”
A bunch of active-duty SEALs teaming up with a couple of independent Hollywood directors to appear in a big-screen feature film—I don’t think so. We weren’t actors. We were SEALs, secret warriors, the quiet professionals of the battlefield, famously suspicious of outside attention, shrouded in decades of mystery and intrigue.
We’d had that old refrain drummed into our heads for years: Do your job—and keep your mouth shut.
So of course I was wary—more than wary—when Mike “Mouse” McCoy and Scott Waugh showed up in Coronado in the summer of 2008, saying they wanted to make a movie about the SEALs. The Bandito Brothers, Mouse and Scott called their production company, weren’t total strangers to our community. Two years earlier, they’d been hired by the Naval Special Warfare Command to make an online recruiting video about the Special Warfare Combatant Craft Crewmen who operate and maintain our high-performance boats. That video, which was shot during a couple of training exercises, came out great. The footage was dramatic. That video gave an unusually vivid overview of how important and special the boat teams are.
Even ordering a recruiting video was a little unusual for the SEALs. We always thought that slick recruitment promos were for branches of the service that had trouble attracting manpower.
But this was a unique period in our history—and our nation’s. America was fighting two wars at once, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The SEAL leadership was reluctantly open to the idea of creating a higher public profile, as long as it could be done our way.
Now Mouse and Scott were back with a truly ambitious plan. No little video this time. They had been green-lighted by the most senior SEAL leadership to make a full-length, high-impact, theater-release, military-action movie about the SEAL brotherhood. Not just a gunfight movie. Not just another blood-and-guts war film. Something that looked great on the screen but also represented us in a way that was authentic.
Just meeting those two, you could tell they weren’t your typical Hollywood hotshots. Before they’d ever gotten behind a camera, both had built careers as movie and TV stuntmen. They’d been jumping off rooftops, falling through windows, and taking punches from Vin Diesel and Sylvester Stallone and two full generations of major action stars. Mouse was also a champion off-road motorcycle racer who’d won the grueling Baja 500 and Baja 1000. Scott was the son of the original “Spiderman,” Fred Waugh. With his dad, he’d developed the 35 mm helmet-cam and an innovative handheld camera called the Pogo Cam, which brought higher levels of intensity and realism to fast-paced onscreen action. They were scrappy, focused, and eager to prove themselves on the toughest possible terrain. Calling their little company the SEALs of Hollywood wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
“We want to do this right,” Scott said the first day he and Mouse returned to Coronado. They repeated that intention over and over again.
But if they were going to make a SEAL movie that was anywhere close to the truth, they had to interview some SEALs.
About twenty-five of us were invited—more like ordered—by the Navy public-affairs office to report to the beach one morning and speak with the movie directors. The half-hour interviews would be videotaped. But they wouldn’t be released. This was backstory information, research that might help the filmmakers figure out what to put in their film.
I didn’t make any special preparations. I showed up in my regular blue instructor T-shirt. The questions Mouse and Scott asked were basic conversational stuff. Where are you from? What made you join the SEALs? What about the SEAL teams appealed to you? What was training like? What jobs have you had?
I think Mouse and Scott were impressed by the SEALs’ diversity, that we weren’t all giant storm troopers with a one-dimensional focus on war. The guys they interviewed were a typical SEAL cross section of backgrounds and types, and most of us had families who meant a lot to us. We spoke about our time on the battlefield and our role as trained warriors. But several of the guys also shared their personal motivations, their commitment to service, their deep desire to protect their families, their country, and their brother SEALs.
If Mouse and Scott were surprised to be hearing this, I think some of the SEALs were just as surprised to be saying it so directly. That certainly applied to me.
I got choked up when I talked about Mikey jumping on the grenade in Iraq. I never discussed that with anyone. I wasn’t on the rooftop when that happened. But it was such a powerful thing in our mythology, serving with a guy who was willing to do that without hesitation.
A couple of weeks later, I got a call from the captain who was the Navy’s project leader for the film. “I’d like to show you a video compilation they put together from those interviews,” he said. “Would it be okay if I stopped by your house?”
He arrived the next day.
It was just a short montage, not even five minutes long. But I couldn’t believe how powerful those edited interviews were. Hearing Dave and Sonny and me talking about our SEAL experiences and our lives. Clearly, the Banditos knew how to tell a story. I didn’t even remember saying half the things I said.
When we finished watching the video, the captain said to me: “The directors would like to meet with you and your wife. They are interested in casting you and Dave in the lead roles in what will become a theatrical-release movie.”
No one had mentioned the idea of us being in the movie. I told the captain it didn’t sound like something I’d be interested in. Maybe I could offer them some guidance on their story or be a sounding board. But I didn’t see myself doing something like that.
“SEAL, not actor,” I whispered to Tracy as the captain walked to his car.
Scott and Mouse didn’t waste any time getting back to San Diego. Those crafty little bastards showed up at my house with a really beautiful bouquet of flowers for Tracy. We’d barely sat down in the living room when they had me opening up again. We talked about my grandfather, who was killed in World War II as a member of a B-24 Liberator aircraft fighting squadron. They asked me why Churchill meant so much to me. Then they presented their case for me being in this movie.
They
’d gotten into the editing room, Scott and Mouse said, and they were moved at what they saw and heard. Powerful stories. Gripping stories. Humble stories from real-life warriors who rarely if ever spoke like that and, frankly, didn’t seem to realize how inspiring their experiences were. When he and Scott were watching the raw footage, Mouse said, the idea hit them like a rifle butt. “If we’re gonna do this right,” he said, “we have to cast the real guys.”
No professional actors could tell this story as effectively. Only real SEALs could do justice to the role of SEALs. These roles required a genuine understanding of the human dimension of these characters, plus, for the battle scenes, an extraordinary level of special-operations training and skill.
“Here’s how I can explain it,” Mouse said. “It would be way easier to teach Navy SEALs how to act than to teach actors how to be Navy SEALs.”
The real-SEALs idea was not well received in Hollywood. The industry experts and shrewd investors seemed skeptical as well. You can’t cast a bunch of no-name military guys in a big action movie and expect to put a lot of butts in the cineplex seats. Active-duty SEALs might be wonderful warriors, but they aren’t trained actors. And no one’s ever heard of them. Put Colin Farrell, the Rock, or Chris Hemsworth in the movie, said the people who supposedly knew.
But Scott and Mouse wouldn’t budge. They’d raise their own money, they decided, and take their chances with us.
“You and Dave are the right guys for the leads,” Mouse said before they left the house that night. “We believe we can make something very special here. We believe we can represent your community authentically like it has never been done before.” If we agreed to participate, he said, we would get full veto over the story to ensure they didn’t screw it up or reveal anything they shouldn’t. “If it doesn’t happen on the battlefield or in your lives,” he said, “we don’t want it in the film. We will expect you to keep us honest here.”