by Rorke Denver
“All our lessons,” the instructors say, “are written in blood.”
Translation: Everything our community knows, we have learned because somebody screwed up badly enough that one of us was hurt or killed.
There are so many examples to choose from. Four SEALs were killed and eight badly wounded at Panama’s Punta Paitilla airport in 1989, trying to destroy Manuel Noriega’s Learjet. Blame poor planning, too large a force, and lack of communication with a U.S. Navy gunship offshore. I promise you we never made those mistakes again. Under the weight of experiences like that, the message is hard not to grasp: Don’t screw up. And when you do, learn from it.
The instructors have some highly vivid expressions for driving their points home. “Congratulations,” they’ll say pretty much any time a student makes a mistake. “You just got your whole platoon killed.”
In my BUD/S class, the instructors especially enjoyed aiming that one at junior officers in training like me: “Good job, sir”—the sir still dripping with sarcasm. One day an instructor barked at one of my fellow junior officers: “You forgot to double-check your tank pressure. You and your swim buddy both drowned.”
At the beginning of training when they hear those comments, students are surely thinking: “My knife? Come on! I just killed my whole platoon because I forgot my knife today?” But eventually they all figure out the absolute importance of attention to detail. If you forget an essential piece of gear on a mission, it really can get people killed. That’s the truth.
In 1983, during the invasion of Grenada, a SEAL forgot a sat-phone on a helicopter, a radio ran out of batteries, four SEALs drowned in a high-seas parachute drop, and other SEALs had to be rescued by Marines. There were years of painful lessons in that one. A key one: Every tiny detail matters.
BUD/S room inspections are held each Monday. They can be withering. Everyone fails the first time. Matt and I were roommates during BUD/S, and we thought we had cleaned our room impeccably. But when the instructors barged in for that first inspection, they had no trouble finding little specks of dirt here and there. They dropped the mattresses on the gray metal bed frames and noticed small clouds of dust puffing up. They white-gloved the windowsill that we’d wiped ten minutes earlier. The wind had blown some beach sand in.
After the instructors informed the class that everyone had failed, we were hit with three solid hours of punishment exercises. Matt and I made a vow to ourselves. We didn’t care if we had to spend the whole next weekend with feather dusters and chamois cloths, we would do whatever it took to ace the next inspection.
First thing Saturday morning, we went to Home Depot and grabbed one of the jumbo carts. We loaded up so heavily in the cleaning supply aisle, the back of Matt’s white Ford F-150 pickup looked like a janitor’s closet on wheels. Professional-grade degreaser for the door and window frames. Designer floor wax for the linoleum. High-quality buffing pads for the wood furniture. A putty knife to fill the cracks and crevices. We even bought a mini-vac for the hard-to-reach corners of the room. We pushed all the furniture out into the hallway. We super-cleaned every last inch before pushing all the furniture back. It took us nearly fourteen hours working together to clean the tiny room. But when we finally finished, I swear the place was so immaculate, we could have rolled around on the floor in our dress whites and still taken an admiral’s twin daughters to a debutante ball. Clean like a BUD/S room had never been clean before.
And when the instructors arrived for the Monday inspection, I think even they were impressed.
“Now, that’s clean,” one of them said, summoning several other instructors to review what Matt and I had done.
“Clean,” the others had to agree.
Obviously, we’re not trying to create the world’s greatest force of spec-ops housekeepers. We’re not going to defeat the terrorists by out-vacuuming them. But there’s a tenet that lies at the core of this that really could save a young warrior’s life: You have to be willing to do more than the minimum. You have to be willing to sacrifice your rest and your free time to constantly improve.
It matters if all these details are attended to.
Damn right it does.
Just as important as the powerful content of BUD/S is the method we use to teach it. BUD/S is a total life-changing experience, and that requires a relentless, multilayered approach. The program is thoughtfully constructed and, I believe, psychologically sound. The purpose of BUD/S is not torture, though it certainly can seem that way to those going through it. That unbelievable physical regime is not an end in itself. The point isn’t simply to get these men into better physical shape, though that’s a nice by-product of all the PT they do. In fact, many skills the students learn will not be used directly on the battlefield at all. In our entire history, I don’t believe a SEAL was ever tossed into the water by enemy combatants with his hands and feet bound. Rather, there is a purposeful arc to the training.
What begins as a physical training program ends up being a mental assault on what each of these young men can withstand—and how effectively each candidate can work as a selfless member of a team. These training evolutions help the instructors get inside the students’ heads and help the students confront the core of who they are. Important decisions have to be made. The instructors are evaluating whether the students have what it takes to join us. The students are deciding if our community is really for them. Both sides need to be armed with the information to make smart decisions. If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter.
Of course, there is rigid discipline. Even a small slipup can have major consequences. The students are supposed to replenish the ten-gallon water jugs inside the instructors’ offices. God forbid one of those jugs is ever empty. When I was training, that happened once. The instructor yanked the plastic jug out of the cooler and hurled it across the Grinder. The echo was something ferocious as the jug bounced across the concrete and into the Grinder’s far wall.
“How stupid can you be?” a voice came thundering out of the office moments later. “What moron screwed this up? You people can’t even remember to replace a simple water bottle. Next, we’re supposed to trust you on the battlefield.”
The instructor stormed onto the Grinder and grabbed the first two unlucky recruits he saw.
“Get the entire class onto the beach right now,” he demanded. The beating for an infraction like that could be brutal, maybe three hours of push-ups in the sand with hundreds of mountain-climber leg kicks thrown in.
Early in BUD/S, students begin to notice that the instructors aren’t just demanding. Sometimes they can seem downright irrational. They’ll punish a class for poor performance or when someone screws up—yelling, berating, making everyone do an evolution all over again. But just as often, they’ll punish the class when everyone performs perfectly. Some days, they’ll be fair and judicious, passing out encouragement and even occasional praise. Other days, the slightest little thing will set these demons off. Or it’ll be nothing at all. With no obvious provocation, the instructors will just go berserk.
Singling out a trainee for a withering beat-down, whether he deserves it or not, or reacting excessively to small transgressions are examples of what I call “random acts of instructor violence.” The violence isn’t a literal physical assault. That has no place in SEAL training. But those extra PT evolutions sure can feel like abuse.
“What did we do wrong?” the trainees want to know after some especially grueling evolution.
“Nothing,” the instructor shrugs. “Just do it again.” And again. And again.
It’s brutal. But it does send a message: Fairness is an irrelevant concept in war. Screwing with the trainees’ expectations—forcing them to deal with failure, irrationality, and unpredictability—is a vital part of training SEALs. Things won’t be fair on the real-life battlefield, where the stakes are infinitely higher.
There the random acts are literally violent.
You can do everything right, and things can still go cata
strophically wrong. That’s what happened when more than a dozen friends of mine were killed on two helicopter rescue missions in Afghanistan. Lucky shots from insurgent RPGs brought those two birds down, killing everyone inside. No one in either helo did anything wrong.
It’s easy to understand how push-ups, pull-ups, and flutter kicks can prepare future SEALs for the physical rigors of the battlefield. But this mental training is just as vital, maybe more so. A SEAL who has faced frustration, disappointment, and changed circumstances a thousand times in training and worked around all those impediments to success is primed to face similar challenges in the real world of battle. Call it muscle memory. Call it mental exercise. It works.
Lesson by careful lesson, a culture of resilience is being baked permanently in. Those random acts of instructor violence in BUD/S, maddening as they can be, are an extremely effective way of teaching focus and composure under the highest-pressure circumstances. It’s an inoculation that can save your life.
None of this would work without phenomenally talented instructors. Few of the students now going through BUD/S realize how fortunate they are. Today’s instructors have had multiple tours of duty in some very hot war zones. They have Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, and Purple Hearts, often more than one. When these guys tell a trainee, “You just got your whole platoon killed,” that’s hard to take lightly. All of us have good friends—some of us have many friends—who have been killed in combat.
When I was a student, I wondered, “How many instructors have been in combat?” I didn’t have the nerve to ask. There wasn’t an easy way of finding out. Only later did I come to realize that hardly any of that generation of rock-hard, tough-talking, world-weary guys had ever actually seen any live combat themselves. They’d trained for it. They knew all about it. They certainly would have been phenomenal warriors if they’d gotten the chance. But Vietnam was over. The War on Terror hadn’t begun. Historic events were against them. They were left with a few small skirmishes and lots of opportunities to train.
You’d be mistaken if you thought that diminished their authority or their stature. These instructors were like gods to us.
The instructors are role models, advisors, evangelists, father figures, and disciplinarians. That gives them a huge amount of control over the trainees. And, of course, as a cadre, they do possess the power to block any student from becoming a SEAL. As students, we were in awe of these men. An instinctive instructor uses that fact to push his trainees to the max and beyond.
Students and instructors journey through BUD/S together. But the instructors always have the upper hand. They may seem to be doing the exact same workout the students are doing. But watch closely. The instructor just did one thousand sit-ups with the students. Good for him. Then he sends the class for a run down the beach or into the surf a couple of times. He’s exhausting them while he’s drinking water and catching his breath. Then he comes back out and just starts pounding on the class again.
A buddy of mine, once he became an instructor, loved to assign an exercise called the arm-hauler. You are flat on your stomach with your hands out. You bring your hands up above your head and then back to your hips—above your head and back to your hips. You’re lying on the ground, just swinging your arms like that. But soon the shoulders start to burn, and the agony that takes place after fifty of those things—let alone fifteen hundred—is horrible.
My friend started doing them with three-pound weights, then five-pound weights. He got up to ten-pound weights, and he could do sets of three hundred without a break. He could do arm-haulers forever. No student could possibly keep up.
The students have a term for the most fearsome instructors, instructors who demand the most, yell the loudest, and seem the most impossible to please. They are the “hammers”—loud, hard, and unyielding. They are the opposite of the “huggers,” instructors who are warmer, friendlier, and kinder. The truth is that BUD/S needs both. The BUD/S huggers, who’d be considered hammers anywhere else, motivate with support, encouragement, and understanding. The hammers motivate by demanding more and more and more. As the training officer who supervised the instructors, I had to create a balance between the two approaches. A big part of my job was also to insulate the instructors and protect the program from the latest harebrained idea from above.
While I was in charge of First Phase, a new senior officer checked on board. During one challenging and dangerous training evolution, we asked the students to paddle their boats into the rocks in front of the elegant Hotel del Coronado. The boat crews are required to land safely and portage, or carry the boats, over the rocks to dry land. In a January or February class, the water temperature is exceptionally cold. And the evolution is conducted at night. The instructors stand on the rocks, getting pummeled with spray from the water, holding light batons to guide the students to their landing spot.
During the winter months, those instructors stand very close to and sometimes in the water, wearing exposure suits, which keeps them dry from the oncoming waves. The new senior officer at the time said to me as we watched from a distance, “This is bullshit. If we’re supposed to be the model for these young men and set the example for them, we should be in the same uniform and be every bit as cold and suffering to show them how it’s done.”
I responded in a calm and respectful tone: “Let me make sure I understand your recommendation,” I said, sounding a little like one of those enlisted instructors I met on day one and their well-barbed “sirs.” “You would like me to direct my instructors to put themselves in a position where they’d be out in that cold water so long, their judgment and physical ability to respond will reduce to the point that they won’t be able to react to the inevitable emergencies? An emergency in this evolution could mean serious injury if not death, the one thing I am certain would end your career. Do I understand your guidance clearly, sir?”
He just walked away. We didn’t change a thing.
As carefully as we pick the students, as well thought out as the curriculum is, as hard as the instructors try, we don’t succeed with everyone. That’s the other major secret of BUD/S, starting with the right raw material. We have a sense of the trainees we’re looking for. We have ideas about where to find them. We have some reliable control measures to keep the wrong ones out. The rest of it is more an art than a science. In the end, it all comes down to the students, even Proto-SEALs like the twins.
Everybody loved the twins. Two handsome brothers from southern Illinois, they looked so much alike, Tim had to bleach his hair blond so we could tell him from Tommy. Upbeat personalities, the same goofy humor, they’d smile through all the toughest training challenges.
No one would ever have bet against Tim and Tommy. “Those are the guys you want at your side in a bad gunfight,” I remember one of the instructors saying. “They’ll still be smiling then.”
One night at low tide, the trainees were too far out from the beach for the instructors to make out faces. All they could see was the glow of the chem-lights the students were carrying.
Suddenly one of the lights came bouncing toward the beach. Only when the light got closer did the face become clear. It was blond-haired Tim, running toward the bell.
Then out of the distance behind him, here came Tommy like a rocket, tackling his brother twenty yards from the beach.
I thought about my brother. I had an idea what they might be going through. The instructors didn’t intervene, as Tommy dragged Tim back into line.
What happened next was like a slow-motion train wreck. Barely a minute later, Tim made a break again. And just as before, Tommy came running behind him.
“How can you do this?” Tommy shouted at his brother. “We’ve been talking about SEALs forever.”
“You better get your asses back in line or we’re gonna toss both of you,” one of the instructors said. But Tim’s decision was made. His BUD/S experience was over. He ran straight for the bell.
A chief stepped in front of Tommy, grabbed him by the T-shirt, an
d said: “Do not let this affect your game. You can get through. He’s not ready. You are. This is now your journey, not his.”
It all made sense, of course, but it did no good.
Three minutes after returning to the surf, Tommy was also running toward the bell. Both the twins DOR’d.
It’s rarely this dramatic. But quitting can be infectious. One quitter will often drag a few others along. As a phase leader and basic training officer, I always encouraged the students not to be dragged down by the decisions of others. They have to make up their own minds.
“Right now,” I’ve said to many new BUD/S classes over the years as they were approaching Hell Week, “you may be sitting next to a guy who just shared with you that he was in the Olympics last year for swimming or a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter who has you convinced he’ll be getting through this place without breaking a sweat. You’re gonna think that he is what we’re looking for. And you know what? He is going to quit two days from now. You’re going to see him quit and some of you are going to say, ‘If he can’t make it, I can’t make it.’ Don’t praise false idols. I promise you—one has nothing to do with the other. I don’t care where you’re from, what your history or your background is. Every one of you guys can make it through this course. You have the physical capacity to do it. You’ve proven that by getting here. Now it’s on you to believe that’s the case and to want it badly enough.”
It’s very hard to predict that at the beginning. Behavior is the only proof.
“Some guys have no quit inside them, no matter how much is asked of them,” I say. “These are the guys we want here. But we never know who’s in that category until we throw all of you into the meat grinder and see what comes out. It could be the little guy. It could be the big guy. It’s in your hands. It’s always the guys who truly want to be SEALs who kick this program in the ass. You have to want to win. You have to want to win so badly, losing is not even a possibility for you. If you feel that way, there is no obstacle the instructors can put in front of you that you won’t figure out how to get past.”