The crowd grew louder and louder.
We both broke through the finish line and ran chest-deep into the ocean. When we emerged, Gordon Haller took my hand. He said, “Great race. And thanks so much for pushing me.”
I said, “It’s an honor for me just to be talking to you. Thank you. You’re my idol.”
We lay on mats on the ground. Hawaiian girls came over to put leis around our necks and rub our shoulders. I’d just finished thirty-eighth out of 538 of the world’s top athletes. I had achieved something that had seemed almost unimaginable months earlier.
The race changed my life. It proved to me once and for all that anything is possible if you work hard and prepare yourself.
I said to myself, Now that I completed this goal, I need to focus on getting to BUD/S and getting in SEAL shape!
I determined that everything I did and everything I ate would contribute to making me stronger for BUD/S. That meant three healthy meals a day and no candy bars, sodas, or junk food. I had micro goals—to win individual races—but the macro goal was to become a SEAL.
I started doing visualizations. For example, I knew that BUD/S involved a lot of swimming under difficult circumstances, and I still wasn’t a strong swimmer, so when I was doing laps in the pool, I’d imagine myself in freezing water looking up at a black sky, every part of my body numb from the cold, from swimming for hours.
One weekend I completed a 240-mile ride around Okinawa in fourteen hours, setting a course record that stood for a long time afterward. And when I wasn’t swimming, running, or racing, I worked at the USMC Futenma base clinic improving my medical skills.
Most days involved routine tasks, but given the constant activity going on all around us, it seemed like things could change in an instant. I was on sick call at the clinic one afternoon when I heard two very loud pops outside. Someone shouted that an OV-10 turboprop light attack aircraft had lost an engine just before landing and had hit the runway. I grabbed my medical bag and ran the quarter mile to the scene of the accident.
The pilot had ejected first and seemed okay. But the copilot had bailed at an angle that shot him across the cement runway. I ran over to where he was lying and saw that the skin along the right side of his body had been scraped away, exposing his bones and organs. The poor guy was dead, but the Timex watch on his wrist was still ticking. Just like the ad.
Once I got a call that a Marine had passed out in the barracks. I ran there and leaned over the Marine to check his pupils. I knew that the Marines didn’t like the fact that a Navy corpsman with a beard and long hair continually aced their PRT (physical readiness test), but I wasn’t there to do anything but help.
The Marine was drunk. When he opened his eyes and saw me looming over him, he punched me full force.
I recoiled; my face throbbed, and blood trickled out of my nose. I was ready to smash him, but part of me said, Don, try to remain professional. Besides, there were eight Marines who were standing around watching.
One of them said, “Let it go, Doc. This guy’s usually not like this. He’s just really shit-faced.”
I was pissed, and the guy who sucker punched me didn’t even apologize.
So a couple days later, my eye still black and blue and my lip swollen, I walked into the clinic, found his shot records, tore them into pieces, and flushed them down the toilet. Then I left a note for the staff sergeant telling him that the Marine was behind on all his shots.
A month later, after the Marine had come in to get all his shots but still hadn’t apologized, I tore up his shot records again. Screw him!
One night around two a.m., I was on duty at the clinic when the bell rang. My buddy and I got up and answered the door.
This drunk Marine staggered in and asked, “Doc, can you help me out?”
“What’s the matter?”
“I got a real bad case of acne and it’s bothering me a lot.”
“Really?”
“I’m sorry for coming in so late after hours, but the bars just closed and I figured I’d stop by on my way back to the barracks.”
I looked at Kevin, my fellow corpsman, and he looked at me. We were both thinking the same thing: Can you believe this guy made an emergency call at two in the morning because of acne?
I said, “Look. We’ve got all kinds of drugs in the pharmacy. Some work, some don’t. But the best cure for acne is this old Indian remedy.”
“What’s that?”
“When you get up in the morning and urinate, cup the urine in your hands and splash it on your face. You do that for a month and your acne will disappear and never come back.”
“Really, Doc?”
“It works like a charm every time.”