Damn Few

by Rorke Denver

  Not even the horrors of Hell Week.

  3

  HELL, YES

  If you are going to go through hell, keep going.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  * * *

  We’d all seen the YouTube videos. An American or a Westerner is having his head chopped off with a long, rusty bread knife by a savage in the very same neighborhood where we were assigned. Those images were burned in everybody’s mind.

  “I gotta ask you something,” I said one afternoon to five of my closest guys: Big D, Ro, Lope, Cams, and Red. We were on a roof together, catching our breath after an especially rugged gunfight.

  “Here’s the scenario,” I said. “Everybody’s dead but you and your swim buddy. You’re trapped on the side of a road, and there’s no escaping. Two hundred bad guys are bearing down on you. Your magazines are empty. You’ve expended every round. Are we all in agreement on this? You’ll have your knife in your fighting hand and a grenade in the other, pin pulled and ready to go. Better dead than a prisoner.”

  No one even needed time to think.

  “Yes,” said Lope.

  “Yes,” said Ro.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said the others.

  “Your loved ones back home might call that suicide,” I told them. “They may say, ‘Let ’em take you prisoner. As long as there is life, there is hope.’”

  “There’s no hope in that,” Big D said. “I’d go out before I’d ever go with them.”

  “In this era of combat with this enemy,” Lope agreed, “I’m not throwing up any white flags.”

  The bad guys knew who we were. They knew we were the special operators. They knew we were different from the regular troops. The way the Viet Cong knew “the men with green faces,” these people knew us. Capturing us, they’d have a bigger prize. Whatever they’d do would be worse. They’d have a better video.

  “Dying is definitely a better way to go,” Red said. “Being tortured and mutilated and having your body defiled so your family can see it on TV? I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  Just the thought of what was coming was too much for some guys.

  The Sunday night before Hell Week, the instructors put us to bed early in fifty-man canvas tents on the beach. The wind was picking up. Sand was blowing around. I don’t think anyone got much sleep at all. Lying in the darkness, imagining how brutal the next five days would be, a couple of my classmates made life-changing decisions right then and there. They didn’t say a word to anyone. They just climbed off their cots and hurried out of the tent. Soon enough, the bell was ringing again. No one tried to stop them. If you’re quitting in the tent, there’s no way this is for you.

  Hell Week is BUD/S on steroids with hardly any sleep. From Sunday night until Friday noon, the challenges, mental and physical, never, ever let up. It’s evolution after painful evolution of unspeakable intensity with ingenious new abuse layered on. The instructors are extra-maniacal. The exercises are twice as fast. Even the weather often turns to crap for Hell Week. I know that’s hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. San Diego could have just been enjoying seventy straight days of 75-and-sunny. Eight times out of ten, dark clouds blow in for Hell Week and the temperature drops ten or fifteen degrees. The students shake their heads and mutter: “The instructors must have a switch somewhere.”

  The instructors think that’s funny. One of them always nods knowingly at the coming storm: “God must really love SEALs. He makes Hell Week even harder so only the best men get through.”

  My Hell Week, like all Hell Weeks, arrived with a bang. Literally.

  First, we heard some rustling outside the tent.

  Then—ka-boom!

  Someone tossed a simulation grenade right next to my cot. Suddenly three or four instructors were rushing frantically around, kicking sand, shouting and firing Mk 48 machine guns. The weapons were loaded with blanks. But they were painfully loud, and they were spewing round after round of sizzling hot brass. The shell casings were bouncing everywhere, including down the backs of people’s uniform tops. It was a full, five-sense overload in there—whistles blowing, sirens wailing, smoke billowing everywhere—the worst wake-up call ever. Groggy and disoriented, my classmates and I leaped out of our cots and onto our feet. This was Breakout, evolution number one of Hell Week.

  “Hit the surf!” one of the instructors shouted, and we all went running for the frigid Pacific. That run was damn near the last time any of us were dry or warm all week.

  The instructors called us out of the surf, split us into our boat crews, and ushered us onto the Grinder, which had been transformed into the Southern California version of a live-action urban fire zone. The grenades were going off in all four corners. Smoke bombs choked the square with an acrid haze while huge fire hoses sprayed mist on everyone. A .50-caliber, tripod-mounted machine gun was on the rooftop, blasting away. Instructors were back with their Mk 48s, still spewing brass. The cadre had set up what looked like carnival stations around the Grinder with special challenges at each one. The boat crews moved through the smoke together, locking arms so we didn’t lose anyone, performing bursts of flutter kicks, push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, low crawls, and buddy drags.

  No student could ever remember how long Hell Week’s opening mayhem went on for. But anyone who knew what was coming next would never want Breakout to end.

  We had done log PT before. We had lunged with logs, marched with logs at chest level, executed extended-arm log carries, and done log sit-ups. But somehow in the opening night darkness of Hell Week, log PT turned into something truly evil. The pace was stepped up dramatically. Every instructor had a bullhorn and was yelling in our ears. “We’re gonna keep at this till someone quits!” the instructors kept saying. And more often than not, someone did. Even when we were doing the exercises correctly, somehow it didn’t feel like we were.

  Then came the shout, “Surf torture!”—and we headed back to the water again.

  A long line of class members stretched down the beach, facing the ocean.

  “Lock arms!” the instructor demanded as we linked ourselves in a long human chain of interlocked elbows. We clenched our hands together in front of us.

  “Forward march!”

  We marched together into the surf. It couldn’t have been more than 52 or 53 degrees in there. We walked farther out until the water was chest-high on most of us.

  “Halt!” the instructor said.

  Then “Take seats!”

  That’s where the real torture began. We floated along in this arm-locked line, bouncing in the rough surge of the Pacific, catching breaths when we could, as the constant waves smashed over our heads.

  Boom, boom, boom. The waves kept breaking over us.

  With all the strength we had, we were holding on to each other and trying to keep our heads up in the great wash cycle of the Pacific as our battered bodies were tossed helplessly around. Water was rushing over us, into our eyes, mouths, and noses. Sand and sea life were in the whirling mix. Wave after wave, the surf was pushing this long, floating line of prospective SEALs, who were trying desperately to hold on, closer and closer to the beach.

  I’m not sure how this sounds, describing it now. But with the surf pouring over our heads and our bodies bouncing up, down, and sideways and the water as cold as it was, it was a hugely disorienting experience. And that was the point. Seeing if we could keep our cool instead of panicking. Trusting our fellow students to help hold us upright. Going with the flow to ride out the surf. Building the cohesiveness that we would eventually carry with us to the battlefield.

  And Hell Week was just getting started. It was amazing how much the instructors could cram into the very first night.

  Just to make sure everyone felt sufficiently taunted, the SEAL bell, which had been hanging on the Grinder outside the First Phase classroom, it was hooked to the back of a Ford 4x4 on an L-shaped metal bracket. Wherever we went during Hell Week, the truck was parked nearby. Sometimes, as the bouncing brass bel
l was pulled from bay to beach to exercise field, you could hear a stray clang or two. It was as if the witches of Hell Week were singing out to the class: “It’s here, fellas. The bell is right here for you. It’s always here.”

  Hell Week hasn’t changed much over the years. “Surf torture” is now officially renamed “surf immersion,” which I guess is more politically acceptable. Most students still use the old name, and believe me, the experience is every bit as torturous as before. You end up with just as much sand and salt water in your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. But class after class, those first killer days of Hell Week are when the largest concentration of people quit.

  Anytime we came out of the surf, the instructors liked to yell, “Sugar cookies!” We knew what that meant. We had to drop immediately onto the dry, abrasive sand. We rolled around down there until our sticky, wet bodies were totally coated in sand. Then we carried on whatever evolution was planned for next. No matter how often “sugar cookies” was called, the instructors seemed to get special glee from the order, knowing how miserable we must feel. All these years later, I still feel itchy just thinking about it. But “sugar cookies” was just an irritation. “Steel pier” felt genuinely life-threatening.

  On Monday night, the instructors lined us up single file and marched the whole class onto a mammoth steel-and-concrete pier that extended seventy-five yards or so into San Diego Bay.

  Here we go, I thought to myself as I stood with the others on the pier in our green uniform pants and tops. I’d heard about this. We all had. “Steel pier” was legendary.

  We began on the concrete part of the pier. Placed every five paces was a fat fire hose and giant industrial fan like you might see spraying mist from the sidelines of a high school football game on a hot Friday night. It definitely wasn’t hot on that pier.

  They marched us onto the steel grating that led to the water.

  “Enter,” one of the instructors called. He seemed to mean it. Like a long line of giant lemmings, we jumped one at a time off the edge of the pier and into the bay.

  The water was deep there, easily over our heads. The water temperature was a degree or two warmer than the open ocean, but certainly no more than 55 or 56 degrees. As we treaded that icy-cold bay water, our heads bobbing just above the surface, our boots and green fatigues soaked through, an instructor paced on the pier above us with a bullhorn, offering special deals to any students who wanted to come out.

  “It’s warm up here,” he offered, his voice sounding oh-so-understanding. “If you quit now, we got hot coffee and doughnuts in the truck. Don’t you like doughnuts? You’ll never have to be wet or cold again.”

  “Quit now, beat the rush,” another instructor said. “We’ll get you to a warm bed in a hurry.”

  I knew if we stayed in that water long enough, our body temperatures would fall so low, we’d all get hypothermia. How long were they keeping us there? We didn’t know if there was a time limit. We didn’t know if they were waiting for the first student to drown. But guys started quitting the program after a minute or two.

  From the water, I could see them getting wrapped in towels and led off toward the coffee-and-doughnut truck.

  We treaded that water for about ten minutes, I’d say, every second of it horribly numbing and cold. I was sure I was better off than some of my classmates. Look at those little guys, I said to myself, glancing over at a couple of the smaller ones. I’m a big polar bear. They don’t carry the body mass I do. I’m in a good position compared to them.

  That didn’t raise my body temperature one degree or make me feel any warmer. But it did bring some comfort. Plus, I kept reminding myself, that freezing-cold water was working as an anti-inflammatory, healing and helping my body to recover from the previous rounds of abuse.

  At that point, a loud whistle blew. The instructor with the bullhorn started to yell: “Okay, everybody out!”

  We scrambled out of the water and hustled back up the steel grating onto the concrete pier. The same way concrete gets hot in the summer, it gets cold in the winter. It takes on the temperature of the day. Well, we were all about to get a lesson in thermal conduction right on that pier.

  “Take your green tops off,” the bullhorn instructor demanded.

  We did.

  “Lie on the concrete,” he said.

  “Arms out. On your backs. This is your rest time. Put your arms out so you’re nice and cold on the concrete.”

  Not too restful.

  “Don’t be warming up by touching a buddy,” he warned.

  That’s when someone turned on the hoses and fans, letting that frigid mist rain down on all of us. So our rest and warm-up break after being in the bay was to lie in a pool of cold water on the pier with fans blowing mist across the concrete and us.

  An instructor was walking down the line of shivering bodies, trying to push students’ arms flat against the concrete. It wasn’t easy. Some people’s bodies were jackhammer shivering so hard, they just couldn’t keep their limbs down. Their muscles were cramping. Their arms were seizing up. Honestly, it was hard to know which was worse—dog-paddling in that mid-50s bay water or lying on the icy wet slab of concrete.

  But there was no time to ponder. “Back in the water,” Instructor Bullhorn demanded, and so we jumped back in, this time minus our uniform tops.

  We went back and forth like that, from bay to pier to bay to pier, discarding an article of clothing each round, tossing away our T-shirts, then our boots, then our pants until we were down to our swim trunks and nothing else. The experience brought a whole new level of understanding to the concept of wet-and-cold.

  Hell Week isn’t designed to kill you. It’s designed to make you wish you were dead—or at least to push you to the edge of physical and mental endurance to see how you react. While the demands are mostly physical, the journey through them is all about mental attitude. The harder Hell Week got, the more important that turned out to be. So whatever the instructors were throwing at me, I had the same response: “Fine. I can get through this. I have no doubt I can. Let other guys quit if they want to. I’m not going anywhere, no matter what they put us through.”

  As a student at BUD/S, I never allowed myself to think, I have a choice here. I never let that concept anywhere into my consciousness, not even the faintest possibility I might not survive Hell Week and BUD/S. It wasn’t like I answered the should-I-leave question with “I’m staying.” It was that no such question was ever even asked.

  Years later, when I began to supervise BUD/S training, including Hell Week, I came to understand more clearly the fine line between tough and torture. We were always careful in walking that line. As instructors, we took precise measurements of the wind speed, the water temperature, and how exhausted the students were likely to be. After years of putting recruits through Hell Week, we know how hard to push them. And we push right up to the edge of that limit.

  The random acts of instructor violence really started flowing in Hell Week—more random and more violent every day. Hammers and huggers alike, the whole instructor cadre seemed to believe this was their big chance to break us down, like we were extra ripe now and they didn’t want to miss their easiest opportunity. Never gentle before, the instructors seemed genuinely possessed. And the possession always got worse when the sun went down.

  During Hell Week, each twenty-four-hour day is divided among three shifts of instructors: Alpha Shift handles 4 p.m. to midnight, Bravo Shift has midnight to 8 a.m., and Charlie Shift takes 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The later it gets, the crueler the instructors are.

  Just before 4 p.m., after eight full hours of Charlie Shift, it’s Alpha time. The Alpha Shift instructors load into a convoy of work trucks, announcing their arrival over a bullhorn as they slowly roll up. “The sun is going down soon,” one of them will say as the trucks approach the class. “Alpha’s here now. No more of this daytime bullshit. The night belongs to us.”

  They then proceed to prove it.

  And whatever level Alpha establishe
s, Bravo is inevitably worse. “You thought it was bad with Alpha,” one of the Bravo instructors is sure to announce before midnight. “Colder, harder, wetter—Bravo time.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the students understand. “The real demons are here.” And the minutes keep ticking on.

  That round-the-clock relentlessness is eventually what is toughest about Hell Week. Day and night, the evolutions are never over. From one horrible trial to another with hardly any breaks—the demands are trying in deep and profound ways. Between Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon, the only real interruptions are for meals—full breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, and midnight rations. The instructors circle the tables like maniacal high school cafeteria monitors, making sure every student is eating enough.

  They yell at anyone who isn’t banging sufficient food down, then stand over him until he gobbles several large mouthfuls. Those who won’t or can’t eat are pulled from training and, if they’re up to it, rolled back to a subsequent BUD/S class. I’ve seen it happen more than once.

  Across the full five days and nights of Hell Week, the schedule calls for two short bursts of sleep. We barely got that in my class. Shivering and numb, we were finally taken back to the tents on Wednesday afternoon and invited to collapse on the cots. Thank God no one has found a way to bottle the smell in there. Thirty guys under stinky canvas—raw, miserable, and snoring, some not even bothering to get up to urinate—lay like zombies for an hour or two.