by Rorke Denver
After Hell Week, we all expected the instructors to ease up a little. And in many ways they did. As the focus of our training shifted from tests of raw strength and stamina to learning the actual skills of war, the overall brutality of BUD/S definitely leveled off—by SEAL standards, that is, and not all the time. A couple of the real hammer instructors still seemed to get some twisted pleasure from riding the class even harder than before. They got in the habit of demanding ridiculous challenges before every meal. When we went out to San Clemente Island for small-arms, demolition, and land-warfare training, it wasn’t just “Give me fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, run up Frog Hill with your boat crew, run back down—then we eat.” They started having us run up the hill with four-by-four metal pallets on our backs like giant wings. The pallets weren’t super-heavy, maybe fifty pounds each. But they were extremely awkward to balance. And running down the hill with the pallets, we were supposed to “request permission to land” as if we were approaching the flight deck of the world’s dustiest aircraft carrier.
“This is Ensign Denver, flight twenty-one,” I’d say. “My wings are level. My flaps are down. Request permission to land.” If the instructor was satisfied with my delivery and my run, permission would be granted. If not, the instructor would answer, “Deck is full. Wave off. Wave off.” That meant another run up and down Frog Hill.
When the instructors were really dissatisfied or just grumpy for some unknown reason, they’d respond urgently: “Left engine is on fire! Put the fire out!” That meant running the metal pallet eight hundred yards down to the ocean, jumping in, then running back another eight hundred yards to Frog Hill.
It wasn’t that we couldn’t do it. After the big weed-out of Hell Week, everybody could and would. But nobody liked those before-meal challenges—or the consequences for coming up short. Those who finished first would go right to the mess hall for a dry, indoor meal. The stragglers would have to dive into the surf one more time, then take their meal dripping wet, sitting outside in the wind and elements.
The whole thing wasn’t any more painful than what we’d been going through. It was just irritating and uncomfortable. One sinister morning, the instructors were acting especially ornery and mean. “You can all eat outside today,” one of them said. As the class grumbled silently, my swim buddy Hoss decided to put himself on the line. He approached the instructors and proposed a deal.
Hoss looked just like his name. Weighed 230, not quite six feet tall, built like a Brahma bull on a pair of tree-trunk legs. Looking at Hoss, you wouldn’t think he’d be swift in the water. In fact, earlier in BUD/S, before he and I paired up, he’d had trouble passing some of the swims. He failed enough of them that he was in genuine danger of being rolled back in training. But Hoss was actually a very good swimmer, as strong in the water as he was on land. He just couldn’t swim straight. He kept veering off to the right. Once he and I paired up and I could keep him on target, he proved he was one of the better swimmers in the class.
Hoss pointed to a huge link of anchor chain that was on the ground at the base of the hill. The link was so large, a normal-sized man couldn’t even get his hands around it. “I think I can carry that link to the top and back down,” he told the instructors. “If I do, everyone eats inside. Everyone. If I don’t, well, whatever punishment you were thinking of, double it up and make it worse.”
Hoss was strong. But the instructors weren’t sure he was serious. “That link, that hill—that’s a bold call,” one of them marveled.
Frog Hill is nearly as steep as a double-black-diamond ski run. Under normal circumstances, if you had to hike it, you’d want to bring a walking stick. And the link must have weighed 120 pounds. But Hoss was serious. And given the way things had been going, most of the rest of us were willing to put our fate on his massive shoulders.
It took two classmates just to lift the heavy link onto Hoss’s shoulders. With a few scattered cheers and plenty of moral support, he began his trek up the hill.
He got off to a solid start. One foot in front of the other, steady and slow. But thirty paces or so up the hill, Hoss really seemed to be struggling. He was swaying noticeably. He staggered once or twice. He was managing only the tiniest baby steps. Soon he was shaking his sweaty head in frustration. I guess this bold offer of his was a little bolder than he realized. As I looked at Hoss, he reminded me of one of Hannibal’s elephants climbing the Alps or maybe Jesus on Calvary. He was on the side of the angels, but no one was entirely certain that guaranteed success.
The rest of us did what we could to encourage Hoss. We all surrounded him in a tight little circle, giving him just enough room to walk and breathe.
“Hoss! Hoss! Hoss!” we chanted.
He was sweating. He was groaning. He was nowhere near the top.
I was getting concerned. I didn’t want Hoss to injure himself. But I knew him well enough to know how much he wanted this—for himself, for the rest of us, for one meal at least completely dry. I knew Hoss would expect me to push him.
“We can take the beating,” I leaned in and told him. “But honestly, you can do this, bro. There is no doubt in my mind. You can find a second wind.”
Hoss looked at me like I was crazy. Then he scrunched up his face. He gritted his teeth. And he pressed on.
He took another step. Then another. And another. His steps were getting longer now, more like stomps. He just kept plugging until, against all odds, he reached the top of Frog Hill. He steadied his footing up there and somehow found one last burst of strength.
He lifted the gargantuan link off his shoulders and fully up over his head. As his arms went up, he let out a long, slow, guttural growl.
“HOO-YAAAAAAH!”
The whole class erupted in shouts and cheers. We knew Hoss had finished the hard part. We knew we’d all be eating inside. Literally, it was all downhill from here.
Hoss slid the weight back on his shoulders. He tromped to the bottom of the hill, a whole lot quicker and with a whole lot less strain than he’d made it to the top. When that link finally hit the dirt at the bottom of Frog Hill, the entire class erupted in delirious, congratulatory applause. It wasn’t just the promise of a dry, mess-hall meal we were cheering. It was the near-impossible achievement by one of our own. Everyone rushed over to Hoss, who could barely hold up that powerful body of his to accept all the back-pats and hugs. The instructors weren’t cheering quite like we were, but even they had to smile.
I’ll give the instructors credit. They held up their end of the bargain. We all ate in the mess hall that day—and for most days forward. And another BUD/S legend was born.
The physical and mental challenges of BUD/S are only the foundation of SEAL training. To become the premier warriors on the planet, all SEALs need to master a vast array of war-fighting techniques. In the Second and Third Phases of BUD/S—and in the first year or two after—the new guys need to become experts in the specialized skills of modern warfare.
They need to know the cool stuff. There is a whole lot of that to learn.
Shooting. Blowing things up. Diving. Navigating. Rappelling. Getting in and out of a firefight or an ambush. Surviving in a blistering desert or on a snow-topped peak. Leaping from a helicopter and diving off a moving boat. Sinking a ship or assaulting one. Modern warfare is a complex art and science. The day of the dumb grunt, if it ever existed, is ancient history now. For SEALs, the lessons come fast and furious. How to jump out of an aircraft with combat equipment and night-vision optics. (Like those rearview mirrors say: “Warning: Objects may be closer than they appear”—especially the fast-approaching ground.) How to swim for miles underwater without a single bubble floating up. (Get to know your Dräger rebreather.) How to build a campsite in a snake-infested jungle. (The first question: “Isn’t there somewhere else to bed down?”) How to blow a house door off its rusty hinges. (If the hinges are already rusty, you probably don’t need to blow it off. A crowbar or a sledgehammer will be easier, safer, and quicker. But if explosives are ne
eded, we have quite a selection to choose from.) How to kill a man with a gun, a knife, a garden tool, or a well-placed choke. (It’s all about picking the right tool for the job.)
We have some amazingly knowledgeable and experienced teachers in the SEAL instructor cadre who handle all the basics. When we want to go beyond their fields of expertise, we call in some world-class outside talent. Whatever the skill is, we have to be the best, and we find the finest experts who can get us there. One of America’s top hunting guides comes in periodically to show us his favorite tracking techniques. For him, a forest is like a digital GPS readout. Every broken twig, each bent grass blade tells him where to go. He is listening, looking, and smelling, every step he takes.
“Once you know what you’re looking for,” he told us, “the environment almost speaks to you. And everything I’m describing works just as well when you’re pursuing human prey.”
Better, actually. “Humans aren’t nearly as light on their feet as most animals are,” he told us.
It was amazing what he could read into a single deer—or Nike—print in the dirt: which way the target was running, how fast, how long ago, and how far he’d likely gotten since then.
A top Baja 1000 racer shared some of his most aggressive off-road driving skills. It was a heart-pounding adventure just riding with him—driver’s ed like it was never taught in high school. But he opened my eyes to how counterintuitive so much crisis driving is. Stepping on the gas to maintain stability and safety. Slamming left when you want the vehicle to go right. “It’s like the rules of the road were written in reverse,” he said with a shrug.
It turns out the back roads of western Iraq aren’t so different from those of western Mexico. The driver’s profession and ours both place a high premium on maintaining control at excessive speeds when our lives are on the line.
We want to know what all these experts know. We learn from world-class marksmen, knife-fighting pros, computer hackers, explosives gurus, and linguists who know Farsi, Urdu, and the most obscure dialects of Arabic. One group of SEALs flew to the Swiss Alps, where they got to practice highly aggressive free-fall techniques with cutting-edge canyon jumpers.
One of my favorites—and a favorite of many SEALs—is the hand-to-hand-fighting instruction we’ve gotten from mixed-martial-arts pros. There’s a lot of high-tech weaponry out there, but we still can’t forget what we call combatives. There are times you won’t use a gun even if you have one. Sometimes a fight will break out that shouldn’t end with a bullet in someone’s head. Or a deadly level of force isn’t needed to impede someone’s progress. You have to think fast, grasp the situation, and react. Depending on the circumstances, you don’t always go for the kill. Several of the top-ranked fighters of the mixed-martial-arts world have hosted our assault teams at their training compounds, and we’ve hosted them at ours.
“You guys clearly have the physical strength and the motivation,” one of the fighters told my group. “But there are some head strikes and choke holds that we’ve learned in the octagon that could be highly useful to you in a close-combat encounter on the battlefield.”
All of us were eager to learn.
He spent the next week schooling us on some of the most lethal takedown moves that have ever been applied to other humans. These guys aren’t just amazing athletes. Their brains are packed with deadly knowledge about human anatomy.
“Wrap your arms around the neck just like this,” one MMA champ said to a gym full of attentive special operators. “And squeeze—hard. The confrontation will end very quickly.”
I have learned quite a few moves from these guys. One of my favorites is the flying neck seal. It’s especially effective when an opponent is trying to flee and needs to be subdued. You run up behind him and, as you close the distance, you leap into the air and land on your target’s back, simultaneously squeezing an arm around the front of his neck from behind. It’s similar to what the MMA people call a rear-naked choke. The challenge is bringing your opponent to the ground in a such a way that you don’t kill him—unless you intend to.
If you want to motivate someone not to resist, you’ll need submission techniques such as joint locks and chokes to render an opponent noncombative. We use a lot of those during searches. Throw someone into a hold or a choke just to settle them down for a disciplined system of body search. We do this to reduce the threat, to maintain control, and to protect them and us.
Let me make one thing clear: We don’t practice this or any of these moves on random civilians or even enemy combatants. We save them for when the need is real. The best way to practice is on a big, aggressive, uncooperative SEAL. SEALs never make it easy on other SEALs—for the training value, of course.
There is some debate in the SEAL community over what kind of combatives program we should have. There are zealots on both sides. Some people say, “You can’t pretend you’ll be fighting without weapons. That’ll never happen. We don’t fight our wars in a padded octagon.”
Other people say “SEALs should be prepared to fight in the worst-case scenario.”
But both those arguments miss the point, I believe. The best thing for the fighting spirit is to fight. Just having those skills builds tremendous confidence in the SEALs.
Becoming a combatives expert fosters toughness. It strengthens character. It builds hardness. It is a historic warrior skill set. The Samurai, the Spartans, and every other fighting culture before us—they’ve all been proud experts in the hand-to-hand component of the fight.
So are the SEALs.
These various outside instructors really seem to enjoy working with the SEALs. Some call us unsolicited and offer their expertise. Others we have sought out and asked for help. All of them say we are highly receptive students. They know—and we know—that what we’re learning could well get an assault team member safely home to his wife and kids.
Often, the world’s greatest experts come from our own community, even when we bring outside backup or use someone else’s training facility. Over the years, we’ve developed some unique ways of teaching what our guys need to know. Our guys attend shooting school in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas. We have free-fall practice in Arizona and dive training in Virginia Beach, San Diego, and New-port, Rhode Island. We learn mountain warfare in the California Sierras and cold-weather fighting in Alaska. The desert terrain of California’s Imperial Valley, we’ve discovered, is a great stand-in for Iraq and Afghanistan. For MOUT training—Military Operations in Urban Terrain—we go to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and San Clemente Island, California, and sharpen our skills in built-to-scale mock cities, chasing armed bad guys through dark alleys and up blind stairways. This kind of practice made a huge difference when we finally found ourselves in urban war zones.
In Close Quarters Combat, for example, we learn how to barge into a house or a building, clearing and dominating the environment. It is a complex operation. Every spec-ops force has its own way of doing it. The SEALs believe in speed. Breaching the door, going from room to room, fighting in a house or other confined space. How to use a crash grenade as we’re storming through a door. How to assault a target so you get the bad guys and they don’t get you. It all starts with an effective breach. You have to get through the door. Or the window or the wall or the roof, whatever it takes—you have to get inside.
Learning basic breaching techniques is a twelve-week course. Most doors of virtually any house are a simple breaching problem. We know how to use a prefabricated strip charge or a breaching charge affixed to the door. The breacher detonates the charge so the door will blow off the hinges. In the drama of the moment, we are already inside and moving around.
What’s tricky is a building that’s fortified. They know you’re coming. They’ve barricaded themselves inside. There are options, mechanical and explosive. Sledgehammers. Chain saws. Hooligan tools, those metal pry bars favored by firefighters and house burglars. Quickie saws and plasma torches that cut through metal. A shotgun blast to blow the hinges off the
door. And the entire time that’s happening, someone could be shooting at you through the door.
Every training environment has its own unique challenges and its own potential for crazy stories afterward. That’s especially true of the air. The array of SEAL jump-training opportunities is simply staggering. As far as I can report, no SEALs have jumped from the Space Shuttle. But otherwise, if it’s flying in the sky, chances are SEALs are jumping out of it or hurling something down to earth. The jump training starts with static-line parachutes. Your chute is rigged to a static line connected to a cable inside the aircraft. You go out the door of the C-130, the C-17, or the C-141, floating down at whatever speed your body weight and that big round parachute will let you go. No cord to pull. No brake, no steering. You’ll go wherever the whims of the wind, temperature, weather, and terrain want to take you, into a field, a forest, or a big, gnarly Tijuana cactus with needles sticking out. That’ll ruin your day. I never caught a cactus, but plenty of guys did. They spent the next two hours with a pair of pliers, pulling needles out of their hands, arms, neck, and any other exposed body parts. Since much of jump training is in the desert, we also have to watch out for bugs, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and other unfriendly species. This is their home territory. We are literally just dropping in.
The ground is hard. If you spread your legs and try to anticipate the fall but you time it wrong, that’s when you will break an ankle or blow out a knee. But if you keep your feet and knees together and your eyes on the horizon, that will keep you upright. You’ll survive every jump you ever make.
It’s amazing what we can parachute to earth: Jeeps. Humvees. Assault boats. Giant supply bundles. Everything SEALs need to survive through a mission. We have gotten very good at safely and accurately dropping heavy objects out of aircraft.