* * *
The sun lay buried in the horizon as we marched double-time through the Naval Amphibious Base across the street. Wearing the same green uniforms, we sang out in cadence, looking confident, but the tension in the air was thick. If anybody is going to die, this is going to be the time.
We arrived at the pool located at Building 164 and stripped down to our UDT swim shorts. An instructor said, “You are going to love this. Drown-proofing is one of my favorites. Sink or swim, sweet peas.”
I tied my feet together, and my swim partner tied my hands behind my back.
“When I give the command, the bound men will hop into the deep end of the pool,” Instructor Stoneclam said. “You must bob up and down twenty times, float for five minutes, swim to the shallow end of the pool, turn around without touching the bottom, swim back to the deep end, do a forward and backward somersault underwater, and retrieve a face mask from the bottom of the pool with your teeth.”
The hardest part for me was swimming the length of the pool and back with my feet tied together and hands tied behind my back. I had to flip around like a dolphin. Even so, I’d rather be doing this than being awakened from a dead sleep and slapped around.
Although I did my duty, others didn’t. We lost a muscular black guy because his body was so dense that he just sank like a rock to the bottom of the pool. A skinny redheaded hospital corpsman jumped in the water, but instead of swimming straight, he swam in a horseshoe. An instructor told him, “Swim in a straight line. What the hell is wrong with you?” The instructors found out later that Redhead was almost blind. He had forged his medical records to get to BUD/S.
For every guy who would do anything to get in, there were guys who wanted to get out. Stoneclam wouldn’t let them.
“You can’t quit now!” Instructor Stoneclam screamed. “This is only Indoc. Training hasn’t even started yet!” We were still only in the indoctrination phase.
* * *
After three weeks of Indoc, we began First Phase, Basic Conditioning. Our class continued to shrink due to performance failures, injuries, and quitting. I wondered how much longer I could continue without being dropped because of a performance failure or an injury. Of course, most evolutions were a kick in the crotch, designed to punish us. Woe to the trainee who let the pain show in his face. An instructor would say, “You didn’t like that? Well, do some more.” Likewise to the trainee who showed no pain. “You liked that? Here’s another kick in the crotch.” The torment continued throughout each day—push-ups, runs, push-ups, calisthenics, push-ups, swims, push-ups, O-course—day after day, week after week. We ran a mile one-way just to eat a meal. Round-trip multiplied by three meals made for 6 miles a day just to eat! We never seemed to have enough time to recover before the next evolution hit us. On top of everything, the instructors poured on the stress with verbal harassment. Most of them didn’t need to raise their voices to tell us, “Grandma was slow, but she was old.”
Each one of us seemed to have an Achilles’ heel—and the instructors excelled at finding it. The hardest evolutions for me were the 4-mile timed runs on the beach wearing long pants and jungle boots. I dreaded them. Soft sand sucked the energy out of my legs, and waves attacked me when I tried to run on the hard pack. Some guys ran out in front, some stayed in the middle, and others like me brought up the rear. Almost every time, at the 2-mile marker at the North Island fence, an instructor would say, “Wasdin, you’re getting behind. You’re going to have to kick it on the way back.” With each run, the time demands became tougher.
I failed one 4-mile timed run by seconds. While everyone else went back to the barracks, the four or five others who also failed joined me to form a goon squad. After having spent nearly everything I had on the run, I knew this was going to suck. We ran sprints up and down the sand berm, jumped into the cold water, then rolled up and down the sand berm until our wet bodies looked like sugar cookies. The sand found its way into my eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. We did squat thrusts, eight-count bodybuilders, and all manner of acrobatic tortures until the sand rubbed our wet skin raw and nearly every muscle in our bodies broke down. It was my first goon squad—and the only one I ever needed. I may die on the next timed run, but I ain’t doin’ this crap again. There was one guy who swam like a fish but ended up in goon squad time and time again for not keeping up on the runs. I wondered how he ever survived all the goon squads.
* * *
In First Phase, one thing sucked more than the four-mile timed runs: Hell Week—the ultimate in train the best, discard the rest. It began late Sunday night with what is called breakout. M-60 machine guns blasted the air. We crawled out of the barracks as an instructor screamed, “Move, move, move!”
Outside on the grinder, an asphalt-covered area the size of a small parking lot, artillery simulators exploded—an incoming shriek followed by a boom. M-60s continued to rattle. A machine pumped a blanket of fog over the area. Green chemlights, glow sticks, decorated the outer perimeter. Water hoses sprayed us. The smell of cordite hung in the air. Over the loudspeakers blasted AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”
Terror covered the faces of many guys. Their eyes looked like two fried eggs. Only minutes into it, the bell started ringing—people quit. You can’t be serious. What the hell’s wrong? Yeah, instructors are running around shooting off machine guns and everything, but no one has smacked me in the face or beat me with a belt yet. I couldn’t comprehend why people were quitting already. Of course, my tough childhood had prepared me for this moment. More than physically, I knew that mentally I had mastered pain and hard work, and I knew I could master more. My father’s expectations for high performance from me produced my own expectations for high performance. In my mind, I strongly believed I wouldn’t quit. I didn’t need to express my belief in words—talk is cheap. My belief was real. Without such a strong belief, a tadpole has already guaranteed his failure.
* * *
One legendary Hell Week event occurs on a steel pier where the navy docks its small boats. We took off our boots and stuffed our socks and belts in them. My fingers were so numb and shaky that I had a tough time taking off my boots.
Wearing our olive drab green uniforms, we jumped into the bay with no life jackets, shoes, or socks. I immediately laid out in a dead man’s float while I undid the fly on my trousers. Still in a dead man’s float, when I needed air I’d bring my face out of the freezing water and take a quick bite of oxygen, then resume my position facedown in the water. When I started to sink too much, I kicked a couple of strokes. Meanwhile, I pulled off my trousers. Then I zipped the fly shut.
With my trousers off, I tied the ends of the legs together with a square knot. Then, using both hands, I grabbed hold of the waist and kicked until my body straightened up from its float. I lifted my pants high in the air, then slammed them forward and down on the water, trapping air in the trouser legs.
As my upper body hung over the valley in the V of my homemade trouser flotation device, I felt relief. I had been so concerned about drowning that I had forgotten how frigid the water felt. Now that I wasn’t drowning, I started to remember the cold.
Some of our guys swam back to the pier. We tried to call them back, but they’d had enough. Ring, ring, ring.
Instructor Stoneclam said, “If one more of you rings the bell, the rest of you can come out of the water, too. Inside the ambulance we have warm blankets and a thermos of hot coffee.”
After one more ring of the bell, Stoneclam said, “Everybody out of the water!”
“Hooyah!”
We crawled out of the water and onto the floating steel pier.
Instructor Stoneclam said, “Now strip down to your undershorts and lie down on the pier. If you don’t have shorts, your birthday suit is even better.”
I stripped down to my birthday suit and lay down. The instructors had prepared the pier by spraying it down with water. Mother Nature had prepared the pier by blowing cool wind across it. I felt like I was lying down on a block of ice.
Then the instructors sprayed us with cold water. Our muscles contracted wildly. The spasms were uncontrollable. We flapped around on the steel deck like fish out of water.
The instructors took us to the early stages of hypothermia. I would’ve done almost anything to get warm. Mike said, “Sorry, man, I gotta pee.”
“It’s OK, man. Pee here.”
He urinated on my hands.
“Oh, thanks, buddy.” The warmth felt so good.
Most people think it’s just gross—they’ve obviously never been really cold.
* * *
Wednesday night—halfway through Hell Week—was the one time I thought about quitting. The instructors wasted no time beginning Lyon’s Lope, named after a Vietnam SEAL. We paddled our black inflatable boat about 250 yards out to pylons in San Diego Bay, turned the boat upside down, then right side up (called “dump boat”), paddled back to shore, ran half a mile on land carrying only our paddles, tossed our paddles into the back of a truck, sat in the bay to form a human centipede, hand-paddled 400 yards, ran 600 yards, grabbed our paddles and used them to centipede-paddle 400 yards, grabbed our boats, and boat-paddled out to the pylons, then back to shore. We all had Stage Two hypothermia. Stage One is mild to strong shivering with numbness in the hands—most people have experienced this level of hypothermia. Stage Two is violent shivering with mild confusion and stumbling. In Stage Three, the core body temperature drops below 90 degrees, shivering stops, and a person becomes a babbling, bumbling idiot. There is no Stage Four—only death. The instructors calculated air and water temperatures along with how long we stayed in the water in order to make us as cold as possible without causing permanent damage or killing us.
It was standing room only at the bell. My classmates rang it like Coronado was on fire. The instructors had backed up ambulances and opened the doors. Inside sat my former classmates wrapped up in wool blankets drinking hot chocolate. Instructor Stoneclam said, “Come here, Wasdin. You’re married, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Instructor Stoneclam.” My muscles felt too exhausted to move, but they shivered violently anyway.
“You don’t need this. Come here.” He walked me to the backs of the ambulances, so I could feel their warm air hit me in the face. “Have a cup of this hot chocolate.”
I held it in my hand. It was warm.
“If we’d wanted you to have a wife, we would’ve issued you one,” he explained. “Go over there and ring that damn bell. Get this over. I’ll let you drink that hot chocolate. Put you in this warm ambulance. Wrap you up in a thick blanket. And you don’t have to put up with this anymore.”
I looked over at the bell. It would be that easy. All I have to do is pull that mother three times. I thought about the heated ambulances with blankets and hot chocolate. Then I caught myself. Wait a minute. I’m not thinking clearly. That’s quitting. “Hooyah, Instructor Stoneclam.” I gave him back his hot chocolate.
“Get back with your class.”
Handing him back that cup of hot chocolate was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Let me go back and freeze while I get my nuts kicked some more.
Mike H. and I had a six-man boat crew before the other four quit. Now it was only the two of us struggling to drag our boat, weighing nearly 200 pounds, back to the BUD/S compound—instructors yelling at us for being too slow. We cussed at the quitters. “You sorry pieces of crap.” When Mike and I arrived at the compound, we were still angry.
Mike and I had gone from being their comrades to cussing them out for abandoning us. It’s why the training is so brutal. To find out who has your back when all hell breaks loose. After Wednesday night, I don’t remember anyone else quitting.
Early Thursday morning, I sat in the chow hall. They’re going to have to kill me. After everything I’ve been through, they’re going to have to cut me up in little pieces and mail me back to Wayne County, Georgia, because I’m not quitting now. Inside me, something clicked. It no longer mattered what we did next. I didn’t care. This has got to end sometime.
Deprived of support in our environment and the support of our own bodies, the only thing propping us up was our belief in accomplishing the mission—complete Hell Week. In psychology this belief is called self-efficacy. Even when the mission seems impossible, it is the strength of our belief that makes success possible. The absence of this belief guarantees failure. A strong belief in the mission fuels our ability to focus, put forth effort, and persist. Believing allows us to see the goal (complete Hell Week) and break the goal down into more manageable objectives (one evolution at a time). If the evolution is a boat race, it can be broken down into even smaller objectives such as paddling. Believing allows us to seek out strategies to accomplish the objectives, such as using the larger shoulder muscles to paddle rather than the smaller forearm muscles. Then, when the race is done, move on to the next evolution. Thinking too much about what happened and what is about to happen will wear you down. Live in the moment and take it one step at a time.
Thursday night, we’d only had three to four hours total sleep since Sunday evening. The dream world started to mix with the real world, and we hallucinated. In the chow hall, while guys’ heads were bobbing in and out of their food and their eyes were rolling back in their heads from sleep deprivation, an instructor said, “You know, Wasdin, I want you to take this butter knife, go over there, and kill that deer in the corner.”
Slowly rising from my oatmeal daze, I looked over and, sure as hell, there was a buck standing in the chow hall. It didn’t dawn on me why the deer was in the chow hall or how it got there. Now I’m on a mission. I stalked up on it with my Rambo knife and got ready to make my death leap.
Instructor Stoneclam yelled, “Wasdin, what are you doing?”
“Getting ready to kill this buck, Instructor Stoneclam.”
“Look, that’s a tray table. It’s what they haul trays in and out of the kitchen with.”
What the…? How did it turn into a tray table?
“Just sit your dumb ass down and finish eating,” Instructor Stoneclam said.
The instructors had a big laugh about it.
* * *
Later, Mike H., Bobby H., and the rest of our crew paddled from the Naval Special Warfare Center south to Silver Strand State Park. It felt like we were paddling to Mexico, but the trip was only 6 miles. Paddle, fall asleep, paddle, fall asleep … Suddenly, Bobby banged the bottom of the boat, yelling, “Aaagh!”
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Big snake!” Bobby yelled.
We helped him kill the snake. “Snake!”
One guy stopped. “That’s the bowline.” We were beating the rope that’s used to secure the front of the boat.
We all looked at the rope and returned to our senses.
Five minutes later, Mike yelled, “Aaagh!”
“Is the snake back?” I asked.
Lights from the city glowed in the sky. “I just saw my dad’s face in the clouds,” Mike said.
I looked up. Sure enough, I saw his dad’s face in the clouds. I’d never met his dad and didn’t know what his dad looked like, but I saw Mike’s dad’s face in the clouds.
* * *
Another guy in our class, Randy Clendening, was bald. Everywhere: head, eyebrows, eyelashes, armpits, nut sac—like a snake. As a child, he ate some red berries and had a fever so high that it killed all his hair follicles. (When he made it to SEAL Team Two, someone called him Kemo—short for chemotherapy. The nickname stuck.) During Hell Week, Randy wheezed and sputtered.
“You OK, Randy?” I asked.
“The instructors just told me I had a dirty carburetor.”
“Wow, that must suck to have a dirty carburetor.” It hadn’t occurred to me that Randy had fluid in his lungs. The instructors discussed rolling him back to another class so he could recover, but that would mean doing Hell Week again—and we were so close to finishing.
* * *
On Friday, the instructors took us out into the surf zone. We sat in the frig
id ocean facing the sea with our arms linked, trying to stay together. Instructor Stoneclam stood on the beach talking to our backs. “This is the sorriest class we’ve ever seen. You couldn’t even keep the officers in your class.” Officers and enlisted men undergo the same training together. “You didn’t support them. You didn’t back them up. It’s your fault you don’t have any officers left. This last evolution, you had the slowest time in history. We have just received permission from Captain Bailey to extend Hell Week one more day.”
I looked over at my swim partner, Rodney. He seemed to be thinking what I was: Damn, we got to do this for one more day. OK, you’ve been screwing us for this long, stick us in the ass for one more day.
Somebody else, I don’t remember who, wasn’t going to do an extra day. He would rather quit. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.
“Turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you!” Instructor Stoneclam said.
Like a platoon of zombies, we turned about-face.
There stood our commanding officer, Captain Larry Bailey. He had led one of the first SEAL Team Two platoons in Vietnam. He also helped create the SEAL Team Assault Boat (STAB). “Congratulations, men. I am securing Hell Week.”
Some of the others jumped for joy—I was hurting too bad for that kind of celebration. Randy Clendening cried tears of relief; he’d made it through with walking pneumonia. I stood there with a dumb look on my face. What am I doing here? I looked around. Where did everybody go? We’d started with ten or twelve boat crews, six to eight men in each. Now we only had four or five boat crews. Why did those guys even start Hell Week if they knew they didn’t want it? They didn’t know they didn’t want it.
Medical personnel took Randy directly to the infirmary to ventilate him. They screened the rest of us. Some of the guys had cellulitis—infection had traveled from cuts to deep inside the skin. Others had damaged the band of tissue over their pelvis, hip, and knee, causing iliotibial band syndrome. All of us were swollen. The physician reached down and squeezed my calves. As he pulled his hands away, I saw the indentation of his hands imprinted on my legs. They also examined us for “flesh-eating bacteria” (actually, the bacteria release toxins that destroy skin and muscle rather than eating them). Since trauma covered our bodies from head to toe, we were meals on wheels for the killer bacteria.
SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper Page 7