Inside SEAL Team Six(19)

“Hey, Ron, you in there? It’s me, Don.”

No answer. Just a faint gurgling sound.

I kicked that door in too and found Ron slumped on the floor in a pool of blood. He’d cut his inner forearms lengthwise from his elbows to his wrists—the serious way. Blood oozed out of his mouth.

Where was it coming from?

I’d learned the ABCs of emergency medicine during corpsman training. Airway, breathing, circulation: clear the airway so the patient can breathe, establish a pulse, stop the leaks.

I used my smock to wrap one arm, pulled off my T-shirt and used it to wrap the other. As I reached into his mouth to sweep his airway, something cut my finger.

I carefully extracted what turned out to be a razor blade. Ron had apparently tried to swallow it.

I shouted to my fellow corpsman, “Dennis! Dennis, I need some help here! Bring a stretcher!”

We lifted Ron onto the stretcher, then quickly ran him over to the ER, where the surgeons sewed him up. Ron survived.

Most of my shifts weren’t as eventful. They usually ran from 9:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. As soon as all the patients were in bed and I’d helped out wherever I could, I’d go to a little room downstairs that contained a couple of old Lifecycles and start pedaling. Most nights, I’d keep going past the time the TV stations went off the air, finish at 6:00 a.m., do my chores around the ward, then go home.

The hospital staff considered me something of a wild man but enjoyed that my name was being mentioned in the local newspapers and even on the evening news. That’s because I was competing in and winning races throughout New England—bike races, 10 Ks, marathons.

Then a friend named Wally who worked in the ICU told me about a new race that involved swimming, biking, and running in succession, something called a triathlon.

I thought, That’s wild. A new challenge that combines three events. Bring it on! At that point I wasn’t much of a swimmer, so Wally helped me learn the crawl stroke at the base pool.

At the Sri Chinmoy triathlon six weeks later, competitors swam one and a half kilometers, biked forty kilometers, then ran ten kilometers. I finished in the top ten.

My parents had come to cheer me on, and they were standing near the finish line after the race when my dad heard a few of the top competitors talking about something called an Ironman.

“What’s an Ironman?” he asked.

Someone told him that there was an article about it in the May 1979 Sports Illustrated. I rode my bike to the library the next morning to look it up.

It turned out that a Navy commander named John Collins had organized the first Ironman competition in Hawaii in 1978 by combining three local events—a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike race, and a 26.2-mile run.

“Whoever finishes first,” Collins declared, “we’ll call him the iron man.”

The first race held had attracted eighteen people; fifteen of them started, and twelve finished. The winner was a twenty-seven-year-old Honolulu taxi driver and former military pentathlete named Gordon Haller.

I cut out his picture and pasted it on my wall for inspiration, then trained like a maniac. Several months later, in early February of 1980, I took a military plane from snowy, icy Rhode Island to sunny Hawaii.

I felt like a stranger in paradise as I lugged my $109 Motobecane bike through the terminal in a cardboard box, my Navy seabag slung over my back. Through the windows I saw palm trees, tropical foliage in bold colors, and tanned girls in sarongs.

I was winter white and marathon thin. The race owner—a woman named Valerie Silk Grundman—felt sorry for me and let me sleep on her sofa.

One hundred and eight people raced, and I finished in fifty-​seventh place. But my result didn’t matter to me that first time out; now I had a better idea of how to train for and compete in an ultradistance race.



Having completed my first Ironman, I couldn’t wait to get to BUD/S, the initial phase of SEAL training. But when I returned to Rhode Island, I was told that a new Navy policy had been handed down: all recently trained Navy corpsmen had to choose between the Marines or ships. I didn’t want either.

I said, “I’ve passed the test to qualify for BUD/S twice. Now I want to go to SEALs.”

“Regardless, you have to pick Marines or ships.”

I picked Marines and was ordered to report to the Marine Corps training school in Camp Pendleton, California. I thought, That’s perfect, because it’s not too far from Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. That was the home of BUD/S and SEAL Team One, the West Coast SEAL team (SEAL Team Two was East Coast).

The Navy allowed me ten days to travel there. That night, as I was sitting in my room listening to the Doors on my stereo, I looked at my trusted Motobecane and wondered if I’d get the opportunity to ride it when I was stationed with the Marines.