But since I’d decided to go the warrant route, I had to serve with another team as a freshman warrant before I could return to ST-6. I accepted the position as the SEAL Team Two training officer at Little Creek, Virginia.
My wife, Shannon, however, wasn’t ready to go. She loved living in Panama and wanted to complete the language course she was teaching. So she, Chonie, and Dawnie stayed in Panama for another ten months. I checked into ST-2 and missed them a lot.
Because of the experience I gained in the Central and South American waterways, I taught VBSS to all the platoons. I was also the director of weapons training, winter-warfare training, the MOUT (military operations in urban terrain) course, and ST-2’s PT program.
ST-2 was known for having the toughest PT of all the teams, partially because of the difficult winter-warfare training they’d been through and the counterterrorism ops they ran in Europe.
But when I saw what they were actually doing—some flutter kicks, push-ups, and sit-ups on the grinder, then one run through the obstacle course, a two-mile ocean swim in good weather, and a six-mile run once a week—I was disappointed and made it my mission to step up the PT.
Instead of their running the obstacle course once, I bumped it up to three times, followed by a three-mile run. And after that, I made them complete the cycle twice more, for a total of nine times through the obstacle course and three three-mile runs.
One morning, the CO, Captain Joe Kernan (who is now an admiral), asked to join us. We were doing lunges across a football field when he said, “Doc, this is pretty hard. I guess you’ve been picking up the PT pace.”
I said, “Yes, sir, and I’m going to pick it up even more.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but the older guys on the team were starting to complain about the PTs becoming too difficult. The young guys, meanwhile, were eating them up.
After the lunges, each guy lifted a buddy on his back and sprinted across the field, then did more lunges. I worked the team up to nine times through the obstacle course, twelve-mile runs, and two-mile swims, even in frigid cold and pouring rain.
My XO called me in his office one morning and said, “Look, I can’t move my arms.” I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t.
All the department heads were complaining that their men were exhausted from the PTs and were falling asleep during the day. But I didn’t let up. I considered my tough PTs a badge of honor. Like they had taught us in BUD/S, “The more sweat and tears you put into training, the less blood you shed in war.”
One time one of the SEALs’ elbows, wrists, and shoulders locked up on him during PT. He was cramping so bad it looked liked he was experiencing rigor mortis.
The CO heard about it and said to me, “Doc, that was a rough PT.”
Then the master chief said, “Doc, I keep hearing these PTs are too tough. Everyone is so tired they can’t do their work. You’ve got to ease up.”
The SEALs on ST-2 started calling me Warrant Officer Manslaughter. Even all these years later, people are still talking about the brutal PTs I ran at ST-2.
I always pushed myself just as hard as I pushed the people I trained. Probably harder. Years before this, when I was at ST-1, I came very close to dying from overtraining. In addition to all the work required of a SEAL and the PT I was doing with the team—which included two hours of PT each morning—I’d ride my bike to the Coronado pool every day before work and swim two to four miles with the masters swim team. During lunch I’d run 13.1 miles (in under ninety minutes), and after work I’d ride forty to sixty miles or go to Nautilus.
Weekends there were even more grueling. Saturdays, I’d swim 4 miles and bike 156 miles. Sundays, I’d bike 120 miles and run 20 miles. I was working out a minimum of sixty hours a week.
With all the training I was doing, I barely had time to replace all the calories I was burning. I was so lean that when I took a breath, you could see all the veins in my chest and abs. My commanding officer looked at me one day and asked, “Doc, where is the other half of your body?”
One day when I walked up to the pool, my coach noticed that my skin had turned a greenish hue and that my ankles were badly swollen and had red spots all over them, as though I’d been bitten by some kind of insect.
He told me I needed to take a break. But I couldn’t—I was training for the longest triathlon in the world: 3.1-mile swim, 156-mile bike ride, and a 32-mile run. I felt I could win it.
After the four-mile swim workout, the coach and I went for a twenty-mile run at a sub-seven-minute pace. He said, “You’re sweating, and you never sweat. You’d better take a break.”