by Orr Kelly
The second phase lasts for another nine weeks and concentrates on working with explosives, reconnaissance, land navigation, small-unit tactics, patrolling techniques, rappelling, and the use of SEALs’ weapons.
For the final four weeks of that phase, the men fly to San Clemente, a rocky, brush-covered island about sixty miles off the California coast, where they learn to use the arsenal of weapons favored by the SEALs, practice with explosives, and swim.
Until recently, when new masonry buildings were erected, the SEAL encampment was a rough collection of Korean War-era one-story wooden buildings set in a cove below the island airstrip. One, no fancier than the others, was called the Hell Box—named for the electrical device used to set off an explosive—and served as the headquarters for the instructors.
For the officer-trainees, the period on the island is probably more demanding than any of the other phases. They are required not only to go through all the training given to the enlisted men, but also to act as officers. If there is a night exercise in which the men have to work their way through “enemy” positions set up by the instructors, the officers have to not only plan the operation but lead their men and give orders. This means they are up earlier and get to bed later than the other trainees.
For several nights, the instructors stress fire control. Unlike soldiers, who are taught to fight and shoot, the SEALs are taught how to avoid fighting and how to avoid shooting. They are warned not to give away their positions by shooting back when they hear or see gunfire. The shooting may simply be “reconnaissance by fire,” in which troops shoot randomly to see if there is any response. The students learn that they can often crawl right through the enemy position in the dark if they keep quiet and maintain strict discipline.
“I’ve walked away from more firefights than I’ve gotten into,” says Warrant Officer George Hudak, one of the few Vietnam veterans remaining as an instructor. He tells about one night in the Plain of Reeds in Vietnam. “We saw a little fire. We said, ‘We’ll move this way.’ We saw another. ‘Move this way.’ Before I knew it, there were about 150 fires around us. We walked right through a base camp. I was scared to death one of my guys would panic and we’d have to start shooting.
“Too many people get this gunslinger attitude. Every time someone shoots, they want to dump their load. I tell them they should assess the situation. Is this guy really shooting at me? The only time you want to shoot is if you have him. Then shoot. But if not, why shoot? You can only fire so long. You’ve got seven men. How many does he have? You have five or six minutes of firepower. If you dump your load and come hauling ass out of there, you could run into another situation and not have anything left to shoot.”
After the trainees learn this lesson so well that they are reluctant to shoot at all, they are suddenly confronted with an ambush in which the instructors pop off a flare that leaves them feeling naked and exposed. Now they must locate the enemy guns, aim accurately, and lay down covering fire that will permit them to extricate themselves from their predicament. In each case, whether it is working their way through an enemy position or responding to an ambush, the officers are expected to tell their men what to do and make sure they do it right.
Perhaps the most demanding test is on the firing range. One three-man unit lies on the ground, protected by a section of telephone pole. Behind and to the right of them, another unit takes advantage of similar scant shelter. Then they both fire live ammunition from their M-16 rifles at an imaginary enemy. At a shouted order from the officer in charge of the first group, the men cease fire, stand, turn, and dash back to drop down behind another log. The other three men continue their covering fire with the bullets passing a few feet from the men who are pulling back. It is as close as a man can come to being in a firefight without actually being shot at, and it is frightening. It is no wonder that some officers forget to stop shooting so their voices can be heard, or are too frightened to shout above the din of the gunfire.
Hudak teaches them to use claymore mines with thirty-second fuzes, plus smoke and tear gas. “Smoke yourself to get out of there,” he tells them. “Make ’em pay to kill you.”
Although the exercise ends when the men have pulled back to the bottom of the firing range, in actual combat the goal would be to continue their withdrawal out into the nearby ocean. “That’s our lifesaver right there,” says Lt. Comdr. Richard (“Rick”) Sisk, pointing to the ocean. “That’s why we take water so seriously. Not just because it is a way to get in. If things go bad, we’re going to be heading for the water. Not many people will follow you at night into the water.”
While veteran SEALs complain about what they see as a softening of the training, they agree that the preparation for small-unit combat given at San Clemente represents a marked improvement over what was provided a few years ago. In the four weeks at San Clemente, the men learn tactics that, in the past, they would not have learned until they had been in a SEAL team for many months.
On the firing range, the trainees get a chance to shoot hundreds of rounds from the special weapons in the SEAL arsenal. They are introduced to the old .45-cal. pistol. But the SEALs soon learn to prefer the Heckler & Koch P-9S or the simple Sig Sauer P-226 9mm pistol. Because its only safety feature is a double-action trigger, the Sig Sauer is not issued to regular military units.
Another favorite, especially among counterterror units, is the H & K MP-5 submachine gun, good for shooting quickly and accurately. It operates so smoothly that a man can fire off its thirty-round magazine with one hand. A bigger machine gun is the M-60, a slimmed-down version of a standard infantry weapon used by the Germans during World War II. The eighteen-pound model used by the SEALs makes a big, booming sound. With a tracer every five rounds, it is easy to walk a stream of bullets right into the target, even firing from the hip. Together, these two weapons take the place of the Stoner, an automatic weapon favored by Vietnam War-era SEALs but no longer in use.
Other weapons include a twelve-gauge, pump-action shotgun with a powerful kick; the 60mm mortar; the Gale McMillan 86 sniper rifle; and the big .50-cal. sniper rifle, developed for the SEALs and used to take out heavy targets such as generators, trucks, and aircraft. The SEALs also use a special navy version of the standard M-16 infantry rifle, with drainage holes and a Teflon coating to protect it from moisture, and the M-14 rifle, capable of hitting targets at seven hundred yards.
The work at San Clemente also includes intensive instruction in the use of explosives. Today’s SEALs favor a plastic explosive designated C-4 and a similar material called C-5. The C-4 comes in a twenty-pound pack. Inside are eight two-and-a-half-pound canvas sleeves, called socks, that can be taken out and shaped around an object or cut to a size suitable for the target. The explosive itself is relatively insensitive. It can be cut, molded into various shapes, and even dropped without going off.
In preparation for a blast, a SEAL wraps a length of explosive cord, called det cord, around the block of C-4 several times. The det cord is also relatively benign—until it is set off. Then it burns at the rate of twenty-six thousand feet—four and one-half miles—per second. This gives it a high level of what explosives experts call brisance, a sharp shattering or crushing effect, which sets off the C-4 with a bang.
After preparing an explosive, the SEAL has to get far enough away to be safe from the blast. One method is to place a timer on the explosive. When the time comes, the timer sets off a very sensitive blasting cap which, in turn, ignites the det cord. Another method involves attaching a fuze cord to the blasting cap and then reeling out a length of cord. The fuze cord is similar to the det cord but much slower burning. It burns at the rate of a foot every forty seconds. Thus, if a SEAL lays out a ten-foot length of cord, crimps on a fuze igniter, and sets it off, he has a little more than six minutes to get away.
A third method, used for large explosions such as beach clearance projects, uses an electrical wire to carry a spark from a hell box to the detonating cap. The hell box creates a current of electri
city by means of a plunger, a squeeze mechanism, or a crank.
One of the lessons taught to today’s SEALs is just the opposite of what the World War II frogmen did. When in doubt, they overloaded the coral reefs or obstacles they wanted to get out of the way. But Hudak stresses how much can be done with a small amount of explosives.
At first, when given an assignment, many trainees are inclined to load themselves up with as much as forty pounds of explosives.
“With two pounds, you can destroy a building or screw it up so it can’t be used,” Hudak tells them. “With two pounds, you’ve got five or six charges, if you know what you’re doing.”
In this way, the training is focused squarely on the kind of work SEALs might be expected to do, moving surreptitiously behind enemy lines, perhaps for days, carrying everything they need to sustain themselves and to fight effectively. They are taught, for example, how to use readily available materials to make explosives. Just outside the cove where the SEAL encampment is located is a small rocky island, called Bird Island, covered with a thick layer of white guano, deposited there by generations of sea birds. Mix the dung with diesel oil and presto: you have an excellent, homemade explosive.
In the past the island had another meaning for SEALs during their stay at San Clemente. While the instructors got the fires going, trainees were sent out with rubber boats to dive for abalone, the succulent shellfish that once covered the California coast in great abundance but has now become a rare treat.
Everything the SEALs do is closely related to the water. It is only a short swim from the camp to the rocky border of the neighboring navy airstrip. There the SEALs practice crawling up out of the water for an assault on the field. Only after a man, lying flat on his belly, has peeked over the edge of the runway does he realize how big and formidable a target even a small airstrip can be.
If the trainees dive down just a few yards from shore, they find metal tetrahedrons, underwater obstacles that look like giant jacks of the kind that little girls play with. These provide excellent training in the techniques for attaching explosives to similar obstacles during actual landings, just as the UDT men of World War II did.
The water near the encampment also provides the setting for one of the most arduous challenges of SEAL training: the five-and-a-half-mile swim. The swim is done on the surface, with the man clad in a tight-fitting helmet, face mask, wet-suit top, gloves, swim fins and booties. If the water temperature is below sixty degrees, he must wear the pants of the wet suit as well, although many SEALs think that is more trouble than it is worth.
It is probably impossible to swim out into the Pacific off the California coast without giving at least a passing thought to what might lie hidden beneath the surface, such as a man-eating great white shark.
Several years ago, when Capt. Theodore Grabowsky was a young officer assigned as an instructor, he was accompanying the swimmers in a power boat. On one side of his craft was lashed a small rubber boat so a swimmer who got in trouble could be pulled from the water quickly.
Suddenly two of the swimmers shouted that they had seen a shark. Grabowsky had his coxswain pull up beside the swimmers, but with the rubber boat on the side away from them, and then began an interrogation.
“How big was the shark? Do you see it now? Put your head in the water and see if you can see it.”
Grabowsky knew that if he took the two swimmers out of the water, there would never be an end to shark-sightings. He also knew that, if there really was a shark there and one of the men was bitten, he would be in big trouble. Failing to see the shark again, the swim buddies remained in the water and completed the swim. When they finally struggled up onto the shore, they were so tired and so happy to have finished the swim that they didn’t even remonstrate with Grabowsky for leaving them in the water as possible shark bait.
Although SEALs often see sharks and other large marine creatures, in the nearly half-century that UDT men and SEALs have spent swimming on and under the world’s waters in the line of duty, none of them has been attacked by a shark. The only exception was one SEAL on his day off, out swimming with his girlfriend in the Virgin Islands, who was attacked and killed by a black tip shark.
Far more dangerous is hypothermia, a condition in which the body temperature drops to dangerous levels. Dr. Flinn says that in the winter, when the water temperature is in the fifties, the doctors at the training center see one or two cases of hypothermia a month.
The danger of hypothermia increases as the men progress in their training. As they become more fit, the percentage of body fat, which normally serves as insulation, decreases sharply. A normally active person may have 17 to 22 percent body fat. But in the final phase of training, the would-be SEALs are often down to a body fat of only 4 to 7 percent.
One of those who has experienced hypothermia and lived to tell about it is Albert W. Winter, who went through training at Coronado in 1957. The trainees were assigned a relatively short swim, from their training center north along the coast to the rocks below the Hotel del Coronado. It should have been a simple outing for would-be SEALs, but the instructors had failed to take into account a strong southward current.
The men had been warned that they would be dropped from the program if they failed to make the swim, but one by one they gave up and had to be pulled from the water. Even though he was floating backward, one man fought off would-be rescuers until he was finally convinced that he would not be dropped.
Winter, who was a strong swimmer, was paired with an even stronger swimmer and he and his partner were among the few who made the full swim.
“We were making progress, and I think that kept me warm while I was swimming,” Winter says. “But as soon as I hit the surf line, I almost didn’t get through. I basically crawled up on the beach and lay down and started shivering. Had I had a weak heart I would have died, I’m sure. By all rights they should have lost me. I was really in bad shape. I was out of control. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t talk. They weren’t smart enough to know they should have gotten me to the hospital. They covered me up, took me in a jeep to a warm shower. It was a long time before I could talk. I was just shaking.”
By the late 1980s, the navy had become much more aware of the danger of hypothermia and knowledgeable about how to treat it.
The first step is to take the person’s temperature, using a rectal thermometer. This gives a reading of the core temperature inside the person’s body. In most cases of hypothermia, it is 90 or 91 degrees, compared with the normal 98.6 degrees. If it has dropped as low as 87.5 degrees, there is serious risk of heart failure.
Instead of being put into a hot shower, a man with the symptoms of hypothermia should be placed in a whirlpool bath with warm water. His arms and legs remain outside the tub and then are gradually warmed. If the cold extremities are warmed first, that causes a rush of cool blood to the core of the body and can make the person’s condition worse. As soon as possible, the person should be taken to the nearest hospital emergency room.
The training base at San Clemente is equipped with a dry sauna—one of the few amenities—rather than a whirlpool bath, for use in warming swimmers. The instructors are all trained in dealing with hypothermia. But even that was not enough to save the life of Hospital Corpsman Third Class John Joseph Tomlinson after a five-and-a-half-mile swim at San Clemente on 14 March 1988.
The water temperature was between 57 and 59 degrees, and the seas were calm. In the last half of the swim, a current of about one knot was running against the twenty-three swimmers. Tomlinson and his swim buddy had been in the water for nearly four hours and were almost to the beach when he appeared tired and cold and then lost consciousness. When he was pulled from the water, his face was blue, his eyes were dilated, and froth was coming from his nose and mouth. The rescuers could discern no pulse or breathing.
He appeared to be dead. But victims of hypothermia have been known to revive from such a condition after being warmed. The instructors administered cardiopulmonary resus
citation and hurried Tomlinson to the sauna. A weak heartbeat was detected for about two minutes, and he took a couple of breaths on his own about an hour after he had been carried from the water. He was later flown to an emergency hospital, where he was pronounced dead of hypothermia.
The rules for the five-and-a-half-mile swim were later modified to require swimmers to wear wet-suit bottoms if the water temperature is below sixty degrees. The theory is that this will prevent a substantial heat loss through the legs, but it also adds to the burden the swimmer must propel through the water.
The final seven-week phase of the training at Coronado focuses on swimming underwater. The students are taught how to use two types of SCUBA gear: the air tanks familiar to recreational divers and the pure oxygen systems of the type developed by Lambertsen fifty years ago. On some assignments, the SEALs also use mixed-gas systems, in which the diver breathes both oxygen and another gas, such as nitrogen or helium.
Much of the training is conducted in a fifty-foot-tall diving tower filled with 110,000 gallons of water, which is normally maintained at a very warm ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit. In it, the trainees learn to function underwater in full view of the instructors. (Before the tank was built, the students actually went out into the ocean for their training dives.) At the bottom, the tank is equipped with the kind of lockout chamber found on a submarine. Originally designed to permit crew members to escape from a disabled sub, the chamber is now used routinely by SEALs to depart from a submarine and return.
To learn how to rise safely to the surface from a submarine, the trainees swim down to a bell-like shelter, which is suspended at twenty-five feet. While standing in the shelter, they breathe air that is compressed by the water pressure. When the instructor taps on the bell, the trainee takes a breath, grabs a rope, and starts up, hand over hand, one foot per second. But since the air in his lungs is under pressure, he has to blow air out as he ascends. He is taught to hold his head back and blow.