Inside SEAL Team Six(24)

Apoplectic with fear, they couldn’t answer.

The poor baby’s face had turned blue. I took it from them and held its head in my hand.

Immediately, my combat medic training kicked in. My brain was shouting at me, Airway, Don! Airway! Check the airway!

The baby was close to death, but I remained calm.

I looked down the baby’s throat, saw something stuck there, then reached in with my little finger and popped a white piece of plastic out of the way. The baby started making sucking sounds and crying. The blue around its lips started to fade and then changed to a healthy pink.

The parents grabbed the baby, thanked me quickly, and drove away.



In March of 1982, bursting with excitement, my girlfriend, Kim, and I packed our stuff and hopped in my black TR6, which didn’t have working brakes. We drove across country in three and a half days with only a handbrake. I arrived at BUD/S in Coronado (about five miles south of San Diego) on March 31, 1982, fired up and ready for action.

When I looked out on the field where guys from the previous BUD/S class were running around with scuba tanks on their backs, with instructors yelling at them, I thought, This is for me! I’ve arrived. The first two weeks, known in those days as pretraining (it’s changed since), were intense. There were over a hundred men in my class. Most looked fit, but some looked like they’d been spending a lot of time drinking beer and eating pretzels.

Then the instructors handed all of us phase one green helmets and immediately started kicking our butts.

Phase one, which started on June 18, consisted of two months of grueling physical conditioning and training. It included:

Timed runs in the sand

Swimming

Calisthenics

Timed obstacle course

Small-boat seamanship

Hydrographic surveys and creating charts

Rock portage in a rubber raiding craft

We were constantly in motion and ran everywhere, including to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’m talking roughly six miles a day in boots just to eat, in addition to long daily runs on Coronado Beach.

First thing in the morning after the 0430 muster, the instructors would order us on the asphalt grinder and we’d do all kinds of calisthenics—flutter kicks, good-mornings, dive-bombers, push-ups, sit-ups, triceps push-ups, pull-ups, and rope climbs. If it was chilly, they’d spray us with cold water just to place another challenge in our way.

From their perspective it was all about seeing how much pain and discomfort we could take and how willing we were to push ourselves.

Being a wiry triathlete type with little extra meat on my bones, I developed an oozing sore on my tailbone from working out on the asphalt and had a constant bloodstain on my shorts.

From the grinder we’d run to the obstacle course, where we’d climb up ropes and walls, run through mud, crawl under barbed wire, hang by our arms, and so on. The instructors would launch a trainee every thirty seconds and challenge him to pass the guy ahead of him.

“Come on, push! For your sake, I hope you can move faster than that!”

And each time you ran the course, you were expected to beat your previous time. The instructors evaluated each candidate at the end of each phase of training and took great pleasure in eliminating the weak candidates, whom they referred to as “shit birds.”

Our first-phase proctor looked like he’d been ripped from the cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine. His name was Bob Donnegan and he happened to be the world arm-wrestling champ at the time—hard, and tough, with huge arms.

One morning he’d climbed up three towers to show us some aspect of the course when he lost his footing, fell about thirty feet, and landed on his back with a thud. The ground around us literally shook, and we thought he was dead.

My training kicked in again and I ran over, knelt by his side, and shouted, “Instructor Donnegan, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

He turned his head to look up at me and growled, “Get the hell out of here.”

Then he stood up in his blue and white dive shirt and UDT dive shorts, brushed himself off, and said, “Listen up, you hooligans. I never, ever want to see any of you do anything like that. You understand?”

“Yes, Instructor Donnegan.”

We stood in silent awe, figuring the guy must have bones made out of steel.

I found out right away that my reputation as an Ironman and long-distance athlete had preceded me, which was both good and bad. The instructors sort of grudgingly respected me but expected more from me too.

The reason for that was Ray Fritz, who happened to be a SEAL from my Navy Reserve unit and the friend of a BUD/S instructor.

Funny guy, Ray. Because when I met him, he actually tried to talk me out of becoming a SEAL.

Knowing that I was corpsman, he said, “Don, why do you want to go to BUD/S? Hell, you’ve already proved yourself physically. You and I should go into sports medicine. There’s a fortune to be made there.”