by Brandon Webb
And now here I was, just days away from graduating boot camp, trying to figure out how the hell to get myself on the track to BUD/S.
“Sorry, Webb,” the SEAL told me. “You have orders to Search and Rescue—and they’re undermanned in that program. We can’t just yank you out. You’ll have to wait until your final duty station and then apply for a transfer.”
Talk about taking the wind out of my sails. I pleaded with him to let me switch programs, but he said there was little he could do for me.
“Be patient,” he said. “You’re showing promise; you’ve got good traits. Keep at it. Just apply at your next command.”
I was not happy about this, but what the hell, I told myself. At least I wasn’t headed to a ship to chip paint. Search and Rescue would be a great program, SAR would be a great position—and besides, as soon as I got to my command, I could apply and get fast-tracked to BUD/S.
Hey, how long could it take?
* * *
My dad showed up in Orlando for my graduation from boot camp. It was a good feeling, walking out of there knowing I’d accomplished something significant. I could tell he was proud of me.
A year earlier, when he first heard I was serious about going into the navy, my dad had been there for me and cheered me along, even giving me a Ford Ranger to drive, as a combined high-school-graduation/congratulations-for-enlisting-in-the-navy gift. While so many other people were pooh-poohing my aspirations to be a SEAL, my dad had been totally supportive. Given our rocky history together, this had felt especially good to me.
Things had not gone well for my parents’ marriage. After returning from that ill-fated boat trip to New Zealand (minus one teenaged son), they had found themselves faced with irreconcilable differences and unable to work things out. Maybe the stress of coming back to reality in the States after their big boat trip exacerbated things. I’m sure finances were no help. Whatever the particulars and reasons of the moment, my dad decided to move out.
My mom was crushed, but in time managed to get past it (if not entirely over it), and eventually she met another guy. Within a few years my dad must have realized what he’d lost, because suddenly he was trying to win her back. It was a one-way bridge he’d driven her over, though, and she wasn’t going back.
Every now and then he would come visit me on the Peace, Captain Bill’s dive boat, and do a little scuba diving. Our relationship continued to be pretty much just as strained as it had been on the deck of the Agio. On one of these visits, soon after my seventeenth birthday, we went diving off Gull Island, a little pinnacle rock off the back side of Santa Cruz Island. We anchored up, and he was one of the first guys into the water. A half hour later he headed up toward the surface to see where the boat was—and surfaced right smack into a big patch of kelp. It was a very bad spot, with the surf breaking over an especially rocky coast. He got tangled up in the kelp, panicked, and spit his regulator out.
At the time, I was serving in the role of rescue diver, so I dove in to help him out. I can remember the scene as if it were happening right now: I’m staring out at Jack Webb, this tough-guy hero of mine who is panicking and yelling for help, and I’m the one there to rescue him. It was hard to wrap my head around, but my training kicked in. I dove into the water, swam the 300 or 400 yards in a flash, and pulled his ass out of there. It put us in a weird situation, and we’d never talked about it, but it hovered there, making our already complicated relationship even more awkward.
Right after graduation from boot camp I got my first military paycheck. I couldn’t wait to look at it. I ripped open the envelope and stared at the numbers. It was for about $700. Considering I’d been there for two months, that came to a little more than ten dollars a day. I’d been making better money than that working on the dive boat when I was fourteen! I didn’t care. It was something—and I was in the navy, on the road to becoming a SEAL.
I had a week before I would be checking into Aircrew Candidate School in Pensacola, so I bought a plane ticket to go see my dad, who was now living in Jackson Hole, right on the Idaho-Wyoming border. I flew into Salt Lake, where he met me, and we drove up to his place, where we had a great time together. We went skiing, drank beer, goofed off. We drove around in my Ford Ranger, which he was keeping for me in Jackson Hole while I was going through my navy training. I had the sense that he was trying to reach out to me, and I appreciated it, even though things still felt a little strained between us.
The week came to an end and it was time for me to get back. I had a few uniforms I wanted to get dry-cleaned. I’d pretty much blown my whole paycheck on the ticket out and my return ticket to Florida, and I had no cash left.
“So Dad,” I said, “could you hook me up with a little cash so I can get these uniforms cleaned, pressed, and looking sharp when I go back?”
He looked at me for a moment without a word—and then started giving me a hard time, berating me for hitting him up for money.
What the hell? I stared at him, not believing what I was hearing. After all this time, after all we’d been through, he was going to make me feel guilty about helping me out with a little dry-cleaning? I’d saved his goddam life, for crying out loud, and he couldn’t help me make sure I had a clean uniform?
I lost it and started yelling at him—and before either of us knew what was happening I was sitting there behind the wheel of that Ranger, bawling my eyes out in anger and frustration.
Instantly he knew he had screwed up in a big way, and he felt truly terrible about the whole thing—at least so I would learn many years later. At the time, it sure didn’t show. A blanket of quiet hostility settled over us. He gave me the money. I vowed to myself that I would never ask him for anything again, ever. I left the Ranger with him and told him it was his now. I didn’t want it.
We did not part on good terms. Soon, though hardly soon enough, I was out of there and on a plane back to Florida for the next leg of the journey.
* * *
My next stop was Pensacola, way out on the Florida panhandle, where I would check in for two months of training at the Naval Aircrew Candidate School.
Aircrew school was a much more relaxed environment than boot camp had been. While boot camp was all about physical conditioning, aircrew school was mostly about giving us an orientation, as well as screening to make sure none of us had any physiological problems with flying.
We’d get up early, put on our shorts and T-shirts, go do a little PT, eat breakfast, and then hit the classroom. They strapped me into a flight simulator, a big cylindrical chamber outfitted with a seat and handles. Once they shut me in, the thing started moving, spinning at different speeds, now faster, now slower, changing both speed and direction at unpredictable intervals; the whole time a voice was talking to me from some unseen speaker, walking me through the various maneuvers. Clearly the thing was designed to put our inner ears to the test, to push the limits of our capacity to withstand acceleration and extremes of motion without getting vertigo. We called them spin-’n’-pukes.
Some guys washed out right then and there. A few others didn’t survive drug testing (I wondered how they’d gotten this far), and one or two had mental health issues that knocked them out of the running.
The PT standards in aircrew school were a bit more severe than we’d had in boot camp. Still, there wasn’t much of it. To me, the PT seemed pretty easy, and I could feel myself starting to get out of shape. For some of the guys, though, it wasn’t easy at all, and a few more washed out because they couldn’t meet the physical standards.
Pensacola was a great place to be young and in the navy. We were right on the border of Florida and Alabama, and things were fairly loose. Girls were everywhere, and most places in town didn’t check your ID at the bars if you were military. I was in heaven.
Most of our class were headed to work in aircrew jobs or other navy jobs. Only a handful of us were going on to Search and Rescue, and when it came time to graduate we said, “Oh, shit.” We were excited but also somewhat terrif
ied. We knew our next step was going to be a good deal harder.
After Aircrew Candidate School I headed down the block for four weeks of Search and Rescue school, and sure enough, here things kicked up a notch. Although it was just down the street, it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Search and Rescue school was a completely different world.
At SAR school they ran a tight ship, and the atmosphere was serious and professional. We showed up early every morning for inspection, and our uniforms had to be perfect. From there we went to PT, followed by a 3-mile conditioning run, followed by some swims, then the classroom, and then we hit the pool for training.
The training environment revolved around a huge indoor pool that simulated sea state, the irregular swell of waves on the open ocean, in a space the size of a large gymnasium. They had huge spray machines to simulated helicopter rotor wash, and parachute-like devices hanging down from cranes, which they used to drag us through the pool. We learned the basics of lifesaving, then moved on to more advanced techniques for rescuing downed airmen.
Imagine you are a pilot and you’ve had to eject from your craft. It’s the middle of the night, and you’ve parachuted into rough water. You can’t see a thing, you’re weighed down and badly entangled in a web of parachute shroud lines, and the water is freezing cold. We’re the guys who jump out of helicopters into this environment to save your ass.
When people are plunged unexpectedly into the water, they tend to panic, and even though you’re the guy swimming out there to save their life, they tend to grab on to you and push you down. It’s not conscious, it’s out of pure panic. Still, conscious or not, they are doing their level best to drown you. So we did a lot of what they described as drown-proofing.
The objective was to make sure we were ready for whatever conditions might be thrown at us. They taught us how to get the pilot out of his chute and then either clip him into a litter or fit him fast with a rescue strap device that slips under the arms. Then we would have to clip ourselves in and get us both hoisted up and into the waiting helo, all while the victim was panicking and trying to fight us off. There are dozens of different types of harnesses, straps, chutes, and other systems, and we had to know the procedures for every one of them—and we had to know them blind, backward and forward, because we might be dealing with them in the worst of circumstances, with a panicked or incapacitated human being on our hands. We also had to master a range of first-aid techniques, because you never know what kinds of injuries a downed pilot might have sustained.
Near the end of the four weeks, it was final exam time. We all filed into the locker room and sat down on benches to wait while they called us out, one by one, to go to the pool for our turn. When my name was called, I stood up and walked out into the open pool area.
The place was noisy and dimly lit, simulating a nighttime scene. The rotor chop simulator spray was on, the hoist equipment was up and running, and there below me was a downed pilot flailing around in the water, on the edge of drowning.
I leapt off the platform, eyes looking to the horizon as instructed, and felt myself splash down into the tank. I swam directly toward the panicked victim, trying in vain to sense when I was getting close. It was impossible to hear anything over the roar of the machinery and chop of the waves. Suddenly two huge arms wrapped around me like a steel bear trap, and we were both thrashing in the water. I could feel his panic. I knew it was simulated and that he was in reality a skilled instructor posing as a terrified pilot—but he was a good actor, and he was taking me down.
The shroud lines were everywhere. I knew I couldn’t let myself get tangled in those goddam ropes, but it was very difficult not to. For an instant I flashed on that picture of my dad, struggling to fight clear of that cloying bed of kelp and spitting out his regulator in panic. I wanted to say, “For Chrissake, calm down—I’ll get you out of here!” But I knew that when someone is in a panic, there’s no talking to him. Finally I managed to free myself from the guy’s grip, wrestle him into the harness system, and get him hoisted up onto the helo.
Once he was laid out on the floor, I saw that he was badly injured. His injuries were simulated, of course, but the special effects were very good—and I had to administer the correct first aid if I wanted to pass the test.
That exam was tough. Fortunately for me, my years of experience on Captain Bill’s dive boat had sharpened my water skills to a fine point, and I made it through okay. Not so for some of the others. The drown-proofing was where the most people washed out. In that frantic, darkened, noisy environment, feeling themselves being dragged down by a crazy person, they would lose their grip and panic themselves. A few of our victims “drowned.”
Search and Rescue was an excellent training experience. Graduates of this program are an elite bunch. Howard Wasdin, the SEAL who fought in the “Black Hawk Down” battle of Mogadishu and went on to write the book SEAL Team Six, started out training as a search-and-rescue swimmer. I was proud when I finished the course, and I’m proud to this day to have belonged to the SAR community.
But I still wanted badly to get to SEAL training.
* * *
After SAR school it was time to pick an “A” school where I would receive basic training for whichever specific naval job I elected to do. In the navy, your occupational specialization is referred to as your rating; your rating is earned through “A” school. If you want to be a cook, you go to mess specialist “A” school. If you’re a submarine sonar guy, you go to “A” school for sonar.
Search-and-rescue swimmers were deployed on helicopters, and as far as I could see, the only job on an aircraft that didn’t involve turning wrenches was antisubmarine warfare operator, or AW. This was the early nineties, when we hadn’t yet shifted from Cold War thinking and were still largely oriented toward a big Soviet submarine threat that no longer existed. Today the same rating is called aviation warfare systems operator. By whatever name, it boils down to being the guy who works the sonar in the back of the helicopter—and that sounded damn exciting to me. I put AW at the top of my wish list.
The navy is usually pretty fair in awarding top finishers their choice of orders. Since I had been at the top of my class at both Aircrew Candidate School and SAR school, I got my pick, and soon I was headed for Millington, Tennessee, for four months of antisubmarine warfare/sonar operator training.
They taught us some fascinating skills in Millington, including how to read a sonar gram (not the same thing as sonogram). We would drop sonar buoys out the back of a helicopter, then read the signals they emitted on a screen or, more typically, burned onto a printout. We learned how to see harmonic frequencies in the readout, and from these pick out the blade rate and discern how many blades were on that particular prop. There would be a whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—that last being a top rotation where it would cavitate (create an air pocket that then implodes), and by counting the number of whooshes between cavitations we could tell it was, for example, a four-bladed prop. Other clues from the sonar frequencies would tell us how many cylinders the engine had. It was amazing: From this little screen or printout we could say, “Okay, we’ve got a one-cylinder engine, four-blade prop—so that’s a type 209 class Soviet sub.” We memorized a ton of different submarine traits and characteristics so that, in a clinch, we could classify any one of them immediately without even thinking about it.
Toward the end of my time at “A” school I again inquired about orders to BUD/S. It turned out, the rules had just changed. In the past, it had been possible to go right from “A” school to BUD/S. In fact, one guy had just done that a few months earlier, but he was the last to go through that door before it slammed shut. They had since restricted anyone from leaving “A” school with orders to BUD/S. Once again, I was told I’d need to wait and take up my request after arriving at my final duty station. This would be when I deployed as part of an active helo squadron—which would not be for close to a year.
Graduation day came, and we all sat huddled in the classroom wai
ting for our orders. We’d heard that half of us would go to the West Coast and half to the East Coast. Wherever we each ended up was where we would spend the next three or four years of our lives.
We knew they used class rankings to pick our assignments for our next duty station, so everyone with mediocre grades was horse-trading—a thousand dollars cash, sex with their sister, anything not to be sent east, or sent west, depending on the person’s particular aversion. There were guys from the Midwest who were terrified they would have to go hang out with those fruitcakes in California. In my case, the destination was helicopter training, then duty station with a helo squadron, which meant orders either to San Diego or Jacksonville, Virginia. I did not want to end up in Virginia. BUD/S was based in San Diego, and I knew I’d have a better chance of making it into SEAL training if I was already stationed right down the street.
I’ve never been a great student, but I’ve always been able to pull out A’s and B’s when I absolutely had to, and I was graduating near the top of the class. Still, I feared I would end up being sent to an East Coast squadron.
It turned out I was worried for nothing: The orders were all for the West Coast.
I was going home.
* * *
After nearly a year out east, I returned to California in January of 1994 with orders to report to HS-10, the helicopter training squadron in San Diego where I would learn the ropes before finally deploying as part of an operational squadron. However there were a few more hurdles to clear first before joining HS-10, and the toughest of these was what came next. Before you can become a pilot or rescue swimmer, or take any other job where there is significant risk of capture, you need two things. You have to have secret clearance, and you have to go to survival school.
The term “boot camp” was first used by the marines back in World War II, “boot” being slang for “recruit.” Those of us who showed up for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training that January might have already been through many months of training, but we were clearly still green, still boots—and survival school was boot camp on steroids.