by Brandon Webb
As it turned out, dive phase was no joke. Yes, they now focused our time more on teaching us specific skills than on raking us over the coals and sifting out the early quitters. Now that we were wearing brown T-shirts, they treated us with a little more respect, but it was still brutal.
Our new instructors were just as intent as our First Phase instructors on letting us know they were not messing around. Right away, they had us on the ground doing push-ups, yelling and screaming in our faces. Whatever else we were doing—our classroom work, dive training, instruction in scuba, how to use a rebreather, and other key dive skills—the basic physical training kept going in the background, every single day, and it got harder and harder, the bar higher and higher, the times shorter and shorter. Our conditioning runs went from 4 miles to 6 miles to 8 miles. All our minimum times started dropping. The 2-mile ocean swim dropped from eighty minutes to seventy; the 4-mile soft-sand run (in boots) went from thirty-two minutes to under twenty-nine; the O-course time dropped from fifteen to eleven minutes.
While we were in the classroom most of the day, it was not what you would think of as a normal classroom. For example, they kept buckets of ice water (which we had to keep filling) placed above us on racks over our heads. If someone started nodding off in class, the instructor could tug on a string—and ice water would pour down over the entire table. This was not community college. This was BUD/S.
About halfway through the dive phase we had a test called pool comp (short for “pool competence”) that was Second Phase’s version of Hell Week.
I jumped in with my gear, a set of double aluminum 80s and an aqualung rig, and sank down about 15 or 20 feet deep into the combat training tank. Suddenly three instructors were on top of me—they call this a surf hit—and without warning they ripped my mask from my face and yanked off my fins, leaving me with nothing but a set of tanks and a regulator in my mouth.
Then they started in on me, one of them ripping the regulator hose out of my mouth and quickly tying it in knots.
I hadn’t known exactly what to expect, but I knew it would be something like this, and I was as ready for it as I could be. That’s the drill in pool comp. They put you through five or six really bad situations underwater, and you have to get out of them. If you come up to the surface, you fail.
I also knew that right at the end of the ordeal we would be hit with a truly messed-up situation, something so difficult that it’s essentially impossible to get out of. This is called the whammy. You deal with it as best you can, then signal that you’re okay and head up to surface. You’re not expected to get out of the whammy, just to stick it out as long as you can.
I reached the point where I was sucking air directly out of the tank valve, because I absolutely could not undo the knot that bastard had put in my hose. I’d been down there for maybe fifteen minutes, getting worked over by several instructors, and it had seemed like an eternity. Now I was sucking in whatever air I could get out of that tank, trying to breathe in the little air bubbles that were leaking off my regulator. Finally I figured there was no way out of this whammy, so I signaled and headed up.
As I broke the surface, my instructor said, “Webb, that wasn’t the whammy.”
“What?” I gasped. That had to be the whammy. There was no way anyone could get that hose untied. The pisser of it was, I could have stayed down there longer, but I was positive that my test was over. Well, it wasn’t.
I practically felt nauseous. I had failed pool comp on my first try—and we only got two tries. Occasionally they would hold a review board and decide to give someone a third shot at it, but that was the exception, not the rule, and I had no illusion that this would happen for me. No, I had just one shot left.
This was a Friday, so I would have to wait until Monday to retest. That weekend was torture.
Monday finally came. I went back down in the tank, and no matter what they threw at me, I stayed down there. I don’t even remember what the whammy was like, because I was so focused on the fact that I was not going to surface, no matter what. I’d stay down there until that tank ran out of air—and then stay down there some more.
Finally an instructor swam down and started shaking me, yanking me up by the hair and making urgent Come up! gestures. At that point, I figured it must be okay. It was. My whammy was over.
I was relieved that I passed, but it still blew my mind that it had taken me two tries. I was supposed to excel in anything water related. There was that lesson again, which I would strive to remember always and in all situations: Don’t be cocky. Don’t make assumptions going into a challenge—ever. No matter what you know, or think you know, put your ego in check, and keep your eyes open to what you can learn.
By the time pool comp was finished, we had lost another twenty guys, one of them being our class officer in charge (OIC), Kim Terrance.
Every BUD/S class has a senior OIC, typically the highest-ranking student in the class. Terrance was a gifted athlete who swam for Stanford and was probably the best swimmer in our class (along with his swim buddy, Travers, about whom I’ll say more later). About halfway through Second Phase he ended up being rolled for medical reasons, and we got a new OIC named Rob Byford. Rob was a mustang officer, meaning he had started out as an enlisted man. Having Rob take over as our class OIC was a gift: He was a standout leader who always stood up for his guys, and everyone looked up to him. I keep in touch with him to this day.
Toward the end of Second Phase we had one more test, an open-ocean swim that covered a course of 5.5 nautical miles (a little over 6 statute miles). This evolution had no time limit; we just had to complete it.
When the day came for our swim, the weather had turned bad. In fact, it turned out that we had the worst conditions our instructors had ever seen for this evolution. A persistent south wind had risen up that morning, making the waves choppy. We were going to be swimming due south, the wind and chop in our faces. That wind never let up, not for a moment.
They stood us on the Coronado beach for inspection. We wore nothing but our UDT shorts and a wet-suit top with a beavertail; equipment consisted of a dive knife (which had to be kept sharp as hell), canteen, and signaling flare, along with a mask, pair of Scubapro fins, and UDT life vest with CO2 cartridge inflator. There would be a safety boat hovering in the vicinity, but that was only for dire emergencies. We would be swimming in pairs, on our own out on the open ocean.
We swam out until we were about a quarter mile from shore, then turned left and headed due south, bound for the Mexican border. That nagging south wind blew in our faces the whole time, making the ocean rough and choppy and dashing cold saltwater in our mouths. It made the swim take forever. That far offshore, and with that constant wind and chop, even keeping our sense of direction was a challenge. Fortunately for me, I had learned how to do this as a kid and was able to pick out landmarks from the mountains onshore, keep my bearings, and swim pretty much a straight line. Looking up every once in a while, I saw other guys (including some who were much faster swimmers than I was) tacking back and forth as they went, swimming in a long series of S-patterns.
After a few miles, my swim buddy, Disco Stella, was having problems keeping up, and he started tapping me periodically so I would slow down. We stopped every so often to tread water and drink from our canteens, but never for more than a few seconds. In an exhausting situation like that, you don’t want to lose your momentum, because once you do you might not get it back. Eventually Stella got so tired he went belly up, a dead stop in the middle of the ocean. We had about a mile left to go.
“I need a break, man,” he said. “We need to stop.”
“No, we have to keep swimming,” I said.
“I need some water!”
Both our canteens were empty by now, and Stella was starting to hallucinate.
“Dude,” I said, “the only water around here is saltwater. We can’t stop.”
“No, I gotta stop now,” he said.
“Look,” I pleaded, “just keep g
oing for another mile. We have to make it to the finish line—there’ll be plenty of water there.”
It did no good. He wouldn’t budge. Finally I grabbed him by the belt and started swimming. I swam the whole last damn mile dragging him along with me. I thought that mile would never end. When we finally reached the finish line and I pulled him in to shore, I felt ready to die.
On the bus back to base that night, nobody said a word. Instead of the usual joking and giving each other shit, the bus was filled with a weird, solemn silence.
* * *
Third Phase was nine weeks of the basic soldiering skills of land warfare, SEAL-style: explosives and demolition, marksmanship, land navigation and reconnaissance. It didn’t get any easier. Our O-course time dropped from eleven minutes to ten and a half, the 4-mile timed run went from twenty-nine minutes to twenty-eight, and they added a 13-mile run, in boots.
As Third Phase began we were issued new equipment. Now, instead of the BUD/S greens we’d been wearing, we got camouflage outfits and web gear, which we call second-line gear. (First-line gear would be the clothes you’re wearing, your pants, your belt, and so forth. Second-line or web gear, also called H-gear, is your chest harness, which carries all your magazines for your bullets, your compass, and your other kit. Third-line gear is your backpack.)
We started out doing basic firearms training, both rifle and pistol, first with classroom study and then on to practical application in labs, taking apart the weapons and putting them back together. We also did some shooting, although nothing like what I would be doing later on, in advanced SEAL training. The bulk of this part of Third Phase was a big land navigation course up in the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego. We packed up our gear and a load of MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat) and headed up there. It was December 1997, just before Christmas.
After a few days of orientation, we spent a week of classes doing map and compass work. The whole thing culminated in an individual land nav exercise, almost like a race. It was freezing, snow on the ground. We didn’t get much sleep. The instructors were sitting around a raging bonfire in the middle of their camp, drinking beer. Not us. In the earlier phases we’d been organized in boat crews; now we were organized into squads of seven guys each, all the squads sprinkled around this big camp. None of us had fires, and they took away our MRE heaters, so we were eating cold food. We were in our tactical layout, boots on, standing watch and rotating every couple of hours.
After a while the instructors started giving radio calls to make sure we were up and paying attention. God help you if you missed a radio call, because if you did, it would be a long night. Luckily in our squad we had our stuff wired tight. When we got called, we answered, and the instructors didn’t mess with us. We could hear other guys getting rousted in the middle of the night, and the next morning we could tell they hadn’t slept. The instructors had them running back and forth between their camp and the instructors’ camp, doing push-ups in the snow, making their lives just miserable. They were cold and wet all night long. In many ways, it was not so different from what we would be doing a few years later in the mountains of Afghanistan, although there, the stakes would be higher.
We walked away from that land nav exercise knowing how to navigate even without a map or compass.
The land nav portion concluded with a test that dissolved the squads. Now it was every man for himself. The air started crackling with tension. We all knew that if we didn’t pass, we didn’t graduate.
For the land nav test the instructors had planted a series of navigation points out among the mountains. At each point there was an ammo box with a unique code inside, and when we reached that point we would open the box, radio in that number along with our coordinates, so they’d know we were on the right mountain, and then move on to the next. We had to hit all the points and hit them in the right sequence.
I ran into another one of the guys out there and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” He just stared at me, frantic. “I think I just missed my last point!” he blurted, then pointed off into the distance. “I’m supposed to be on that mountain way over there!” He went trundling off frantically through the forest. Poor bastard.
I was lucky: For some reason I did not have much difficulty with the navigation. Here again, I think my background helped. Growing up on the sailboat, being around charts and maps and compasses, I’d learned how to find my way around without street signs, storefronts, and all the usual landmarks most of us learn as kids. As a result, I finished my test a few hours early. I didn’t want to go back to camp; they would just find something else for me to do. So I slipped back near to camp, tucked in under a bush, and lay down to catch a few hours of shut-eye.
Next thing I knew I was getting kicked and hearing a familiar voice. “Webb, what the fuck are you doing?” I opened my eyes and looked up. Was I awake, or was this some cruel nightmare?
It was Instructor Shoulin.
I thought I’d left him behind in First Phase. No such luck. He had dropped in on our Third Phrase land nav test to help out. Of course, he had found me.
“What. The fuck. Are you doing?” he repeated slowly as if speaking to a child.
I didn’t really have an answer, and I was just coming out of REM sleep after a long time of no sleep at all, so I wasn’t all that coherent. Besides, the question was rhetorical: He knew damn well what I was doing. He checked my coordinates and could plainly see I had finished the course. “You sonofabitch,” he growled, and he cracked a slight, evil smile. Oh, shit.
For the next thirty minutes, he had me bear-crawling up and down this mountain, on all fours, in the snow. That was my reward for trying to sneak some time off. After torturing me for a while, he finally sent me back to camp. He had made me pay for that little bit of stolen sleep. Although I had to admit, it was worth it.
That day something happened that shook us all.
We had an officer in the class named Travers who had been Kim Terrance’s swim buddy. Travers was another outstanding athlete, an absolute physical specimen, and up to that point he had been a gray man, performing smoothly and quietly blending in. During the land nav portion of Third Phase, Travers’s squad started screwing up right and left—falling asleep on radio watch, messing up their patrols, just not getting the hang of things and consistently being called out and punished for it. Suddenly, because of the poor performance of his squad, Travers was that guy. He couldn’t take it—and he threw in the towel. He quit.
I was absolutely stunned. We all were. Travers was not only an accomplished athlete, he was a frigging U.S. Naval Academy officer. The standards for these guys are so high and they have been so thoroughly vetted by the time they’ve reached this point that for one to quit BUD/S was unheard of. He had quit in our sixth month—just five weeks before graduation.
Of all the things that happened throughout BUD/S, Travers’s quitting was one of the most sobering. People often assume that Hell Week is the big thing, that once you get past Hell Week you’re over the worst of it and it’s all downhill from there, but I would have rather done Hell Week twice than have gone through Third Phase. They just kept cranking up the pressure, pushing us to our limits, adding on layers of physical and mental stress, sleep deprivation, and increased responsibility (like working with demolition and live fire while exhausted), and it never let up for a moment.
The next day, Friday, we packed up our site, loaded the trucks, and were just about to pull out when the last few guys who had failed their tests and spent all night doing it over ran into camp wild-eyed and caught our convoy just in time. They were so exhausted they couldn’t say a word, but they’d made it.
And just when I thought we’d all made it, I found out that for me, at least, it wasn’t over yet. Sitting on that bus, as we relaxed and headed back to civilization, my left quad suddenly seized up, just above the knee. It was excruciating—and crippling. I don’t know if it was all the adrenaline coursing through my system from the land nav, or the sheer cold, or what caused it, but when I
woke up the next morning in Coronado I could barely put any weight on my left leg.
I was now in deep shit. Third Phase wasn’t over yet. To meet the criteria for Third Phase we needed to pass at least two out of four timed runs. I still needed one more run—and I could barely walk. I spent that weekend worrying.
The following Monday I went into BUD/S Medical and told the guy I had a bad quad. He pulled my file, glanced at it, and said, “Holy shit.”
“What?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “You’ve never been in here before!”
A few of the guys (we called them Sick Call Commandos) were constantly going in to Medical, complaining about this or that. Almost everyone had been in at least once or twice. Not me. In six months, I had never once come in to Medical.
The guy took care of me, hooked me up, got me on crutches—and I lucked out. It happened that we were just then hitting Christmas break. For the next two weeks all we had to do was show up for one PT a day, and they didn’t count toward our passing. That gave me two weeks to heal. I went in every day, and while everyone else did PT I sat and read magazines.
When January came, there was no more putting it off. I had to get out there and finish that 4-mile run, and do it in less than thirty minutes. Strange to say, the instructors were quite encouraging. They knew I was dealing with an honest injury and wasn’t sandbagging it. They could see I was in pain.
Four miles is about 6,436 meters, and a meter is about my stride, which means that during that run, my left leg came down hard 3,218 times, and each time was agony. It took everything I had, but I finished the run.
* * *
After Christmas we shipped out to San Clemente Island, about 80 miles off the coast of San Diego. This island is completely dedicated to navy activities, and the SEALs have the northwest end to themselves with a BUD/S camp out there we call the Rock.