Inside SEAL Team Six(27)
A trainee who wanted out at any point during those two months had to ring a bell outside near the grinder and place his helmet beside it. Guys usually did this at night to avoid embarrassment. You’d be half asleep and hear the bell ring. And in the morning you’d look out and see more green helmets.
There was actually one BUD/S class a couple of years before mine where no one passed. From my perspective, BUD/S was 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical.
Halfway through phase one, the forty or so of us who remained began hell week—five days and five nights of continuous training on a maximum of four hours of sleep. Torture, some people might call it, from sundown Sunday to sundown Friday. We didn’t know when it was coming.
Hell week started with the instructors tossing smoke grenades in our tents while we were sleeping and firing blank rounds, yelling and screaming. That initial high-anxiety moment was followed by nonstop boat exercises, carrying inflatable Zodiacs over our heads, timed runs, crawling through mud, calisthenics. Seems like we never got a chance to catch our breath.
The instructors almost never gave us time to sleep either, and when they did, they made sleeping difficult. Once four of us were told we had an hour to nap, but we had to do it under a sprinkler. And one of us had to be on patrol the whole time, running around the other three.
During meals you’d see guys pass out and their faces fall into their plates. Guys actually closed their eyes and dozed off while they ran. A couple of times I managed to paddle in the ocean and sleep at the same time.
It was nonstop cold, wet, sore, and exhausting. I thought the Ironman race was tough. Hell week was like ten Ironman competitions in succession.
Day five I was hiking through the Tijuana mudflats at night, thinking I was following a guy with long black hair, a black leather jacket, and black pants. I followed him for about an hour and was trying to remember who he was when I realized there was no one in front of me. I’d been hallucinating the whole time.
Guys imagined they were seeing witches, pigs, and babies in trees. Beautiful mermaids smiled at them and waved. Rocks turned into talking turtles.
About half of the class managed to make it through phase one. Those of us who did got to exchange our green helmets for blue ones.
Phase two consisted of eight weeks of rigorous dive training. We were still required to do all the runs and PT (calisthenics, obstacle course, and so on).
Included were something called jock-up drills. We’d be down on the cement holding ourselves in push-up position for hours while wearing weight belts and twin scuba tanks on our backs as the instructors screamed at us, “Straighten up your back! Get all the way up! Hold it! Hold it longer!”
Your hands would be burning into the asphalt; your back would be sagging under the weight. The instructors didn’t stop until all of us gave up. Added to that were at least two dives a day. We learned both open-circuit diving (using tanks with compressed air) and closed-circuit diving with the Dräger LAR V (breathing 100 percent oxygen).
With the Dräger, exhaled breath passes through a chemical filter that removes the carbon dioxide and replenishes the oxygen. The advantage of the Dräger is that it produces no bubbles that can be detected by an enemy. The disadvantage is that breathing 100 percent oxygen for more than four hours or deeper than thirty feet leads to oxygen toxicity.
We also learned how to dive using another closed-circuit rebreather system—the MK 15, which is a closed-circuit mixed-gas underwater apparatus especially suited to deep-water dives.
We worked in two-man swim teams, starting with two-mile ocean swims and going all the way up to five-and-a-half-mile swims. Instructors taught us how to approach land undetected and how to attack ships.
At the end of phase two, all remaining trainees exchanged their blue helmets for red ones and began phase three—nine weeks of land-warfare training. The second half took place on San Clemente Island—an uninhabited island owned by the Navy since 1934, about fifty-five nautical miles south of Long Beach, California. A beautiful place.
Again the intensity of PT went up. We ran and swam longer distances (five and a half miles in the ocean) and still had to continually lower our time on the obstacle course run, and swim. But the twenty-six of us who had made it this far were now in terrific shape.
The training became more operational in a sense. Instructors taught us how to fire, take apart, and assemble different weapons—9 mm SIG Sauer P226 and MK23 Mod 0 .45-caliber handguns, MK43 and M2HB machine guns, HK MP5 9 mm automatic submachine guns, an M16. We fired mortars, shoulder-held rockets, and grenade launchers. And we learned how to blow up underwater obstacles with C4, dynamite, and TNT.