SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (9 page)

I’d rather be doing this than picking watermelons.

*   *   *

Danger had become a constant companion. Danger or no danger, one of our instructors always spoke in the same monotone. In a classroom at the Naval Special Warfare Center, Instructor Blah’s jungle boot stepped on a 13-foot-long black rubber boat resting on the floor in front of my class. “Today, I’m going to brief you on surf passage. This is the IBS. Some people call it the Itty-Bitty Ship, and you’ll probably have your own pet names to give it, but the navy calls it the Inflatable Boat, Small. You will man it with six to eight men who are about the same height. These men will be your boat crew.”

He drew a primitive picture on the board of the beach, ocean, and stick men scattered around the IBS. He pointed to the stick men scattered in the ocean. “This is you guys after a wave has just wiped you out.”

He drew a stick man on the beach. “This is one of you after the ocean spit you out. And guess what? The next thing the ocean is going to spit out is the boat.”

Instructor Blah used his eraser like a boat. “Now the hundred-and-seventy-pound IBS is full of water and weighs about as much as a small car, and it’s coming right at you here on the beach. What are you going to do? If you’re standing in the road, and a small car comes speeding at you, what are you going to do? Try to outrun it? Of course not. You’re going to get out of the road. Same thing when the boat comes speeding at you. You’re going to get out of the path it’s traveling. Run parallel to the beach.

“Some of you look sleepy. All of you drop and push ’em out!”

After push-ups and more instruction, we went outside, where the sunshine had dimmed. Soon we stood by our boats facing the ocean. Bulky orange kapok life jackets covered our battle dress uniforms (BDUs). We tied our hats to the top buttonholes on our shirts with orange cord. Each of us held our paddle like a rifle at the order-arms position, waiting for our boat leaders to come back from where the instructors were briefing them.

Before long they returned and gave us orders. With boat handle in one hand and paddle in the other, all the crews raced into the water. Losers would pay with their flesh—
it pays to be a winner
.

“Ones in!” our boat leader, Mike H., called.

Our two front men jumped into the boat and started paddling.

I ran in water almost up to my knees.

“Twos in!”

Two more jumped in and started paddling.

“Threes in!”

I jumped in with the man across from me, and we paddled. Mike jumped in last, using his oar at the stern to steer. “Stroke, stroke!” he called.

In front of us, a seven-foot wave formed. I dug my paddle in deep and pulled back as hard as I could.

“Dig, dig, dig!” Mike called.

Our boat climbed up the face of the wave. I saw one of the other boats clear the tip. We weren’t so lucky. The wave picked us up and slammed us down, sandwiching us between our boat and the water. As the ocean swallowed us, I swallowed boots, paddles, and cold seawater. I realized,
This could kill me
.

Eventually, the ocean spit us out onto the beach along with most of the other boat crews. The instructors greeted us by dropping us. With our boots on the boats, hands in the sand, and gravity against us, we did push-ups.

Then we gathered ourselves together and went at it again—with more motivation and better teamwork. This time, we cleared the breakers.

Back on shore, a boyish-faced trainee from another boat crew picked his paddle up off the beach. As he turned around to face the ocean, a passengerless boat filled with seawater raced at him sideways.

Instructor Blah shouted into the megaphone,
“Get out of there!”

Boy-Face ran away from the boat, just like the instructors told us not to. Fear has a way of turning Einsteins into amoebas.

“Run parallel to the beach! Run parallel to the beach!”

Boy-Face continued to try to outrun the speeding boat. The boat came out of the water and slid sideways like a hovercraft over the hard wet sand. When it ran out of hard wet sand, its momentum carried it over the soft dry sand until it hacked Boy-Face down. Instructor Blah, other instructors, and the ambulance rushed to the wounded man.

Doc, one of the SEAL instructors, started first aid. No one heard Boy-Face call out in pain. The boat broke his leg at the thigh bone.

As training progressed, dangers increased. Later in training, instead of landing our boats on the sand under the sun, we would land our boats on boulders at night in front of the Hotel del Coronado while ocean currents cut at us from two directions. Legend has it that those boulders used to be one rock before BUD/S trainees cracked it with their heads.

*   *   *

The sun lay buried in the horizon as we marched double-time through the Naval Amphibious Base across the street. Wearing the same green uniforms, we sang out in cadence, looking confident, but the tension in the air was thick.
If anybody is going to die, this is going to be the time.

We arrived at the pool located at Building 164 and stripped down to our UDT swim shorts. An instructor said, “You are going to love this. Drown-proofing is one of my favorites. Sink or swim, sweet peas.”

I tied my feet together, and my swim partner tied my hands behind my back.

“When I give the command, the bound men will hop into the deep end of the pool,” Instructor Stoneclam said. “You must bob up and down twenty times, float for five minutes, swim to the shallow end of the pool, turn around without touching the bottom, swim back to the deep end, do a forward and backward somersault underwater, and retrieve a face mask from the bottom of the pool with your teeth.”

The hardest part for me was swimming the length of the pool and back with my feet tied together and hands tied behind my back. I had to flip around like a dolphin.
Even so, I’d rather be doing this than being awakened from a dead sleep and slapped around.

Although I did my duty, others didn’t. We lost a muscular black guy because his body was so dense that he just sank like a rock to the bottom of the pool. A skinny redheaded hospital corpsman jumped in the water, but instead of swimming straight, he swam in a horseshoe. An instructor told him, “Swim in a straight line. What the hell is wrong with you?” The instructors found out later that Redhead was almost blind. He had forged his medical records to get to BUD/S.

For every guy who would do anything to get in, there were guys who wanted to get out. Stoneclam wouldn’t let them.

“You can’t quit now!” Instructor Stoneclam screamed. “This is only Indoc. Training hasn’t even started yet!” We were still only in the indoctrination phase.

*   *   *

After three weeks of Indoc, we began First Phase, Basic Conditioning. Our class continued to shrink due to performance failures, injuries, and quitting. I wondered how much longer I could continue without being dropped because of a performance failure or an injury. Of course, most evolutions were a kick in the crotch, designed to punish us. Woe to the trainee who let the pain show in his face. An instructor would say, “You didn’t like that? Well, do some more.” Likewise to the trainee who showed no pain. “You liked that? Here’s another kick in the crotch.” The torment continued throughout each day—push-ups, runs, push-ups, calisthenics, push-ups, swims, push-ups, O-course—day after day, week after week. We ran a mile one-way just to eat a meal. Round-trip multiplied by three meals made for 6 miles a day just to eat! We never seemed to have enough time to recover before the next evolution hit us. On top of everything, the instructors poured on the stress with verbal harassment. Most of them didn’t need to raise their voices to tell us, “Grandma was slow, but she was old.”

Each one of us seemed to have an Achilles’ heel—and the instructors excelled at finding it. The hardest evolutions for me were the 4-mile timed runs on the beach wearing long pants and jungle boots. I dreaded them. Soft sand sucked the energy out of my legs, and waves attacked me when I tried to run on the hard pack. Some guys ran out in front, some stayed in the middle, and others like me brought up the rear. Almost every time, at the 2-mile marker at the North Island fence, an instructor would say, “Wasdin, you’re getting behind. You’re going to have to kick it on the way back.” With each run, the time demands became tougher.

I failed one 4-mile timed run by seconds. While everyone else went back to the barracks, the four or five others who also failed joined me to form a goon squad. After having spent nearly everything I had on the run, I knew this was going to suck. We ran sprints up and down the sand berm, jumped into the cold water, then rolled up and down the sand berm until our wet bodies looked like sugar cookies. The sand found its way into my eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. We did squat thrusts, eight-count bodybuilders, and all manner of acrobatic tortures until the sand rubbed our wet skin raw and nearly every muscle in our bodies broke down. It was my first goon squad—and the only one I ever needed.
I may die on the next timed run, but I ain’t doin’ this crap again.
There was one guy who swam like a fish but ended up in goon squad time and time again for not keeping up on the runs. I wondered how he ever survived all the goon squads.

*   *   *

In First Phase, one thing sucked more than the four-mile timed runs: Hell Week—the ultimate in
train the best, discard the rest.
It began late Sunday night with what is called breakout. M-60 machine guns blasted the air. We crawled out of the barracks as an instructor screamed, “Move, move, move!”

Outside on the grinder, an asphalt-covered area the size of a small parking lot, artillery simulators exploded—an incoming shriek followed by a boom. M-60s continued to rattle. A machine pumped a blanket of fog over the area. Green chemlights, glow sticks, decorated the outer perimeter. Water hoses sprayed us. The smell of cordite hung in the air. Over the loudspeakers blasted AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”

Terror covered the faces of many guys. Their eyes looked like two fried eggs. Only minutes into it, the bell started ringing—people quit.
You can’t be serious. What the hell’s wrong? Yeah, instructors are running around shooting off machine guns and everything, but no one has smacked me in the face or beat me with a belt yet
. I couldn’t comprehend why people were quitting already. Of course, my tough childhood had prepared me for this moment. More than physically, I knew that mentally I had mastered pain and hard work, and I knew I could master more. My father’s expectations for high performance from me produced my own expectations for high performance. In my mind, I strongly believed I wouldn’t quit. I didn’t need to express my belief in words—talk is cheap. My belief was real. Without such a strong belief, a tadpole has already guaranteed his failure.

*   *   *

One legendary Hell Week event occurs on a steel pier where the navy docks its small boats. We took off our boots and stuffed our socks and belts in them. My fingers were so numb and shaky that I had a tough time taking off my boots.

Wearing our olive drab green uniforms, we jumped into the bay with no life jackets, shoes, or socks. I immediately laid out in a dead man’s float while I undid the fly on my trousers. Still in a dead man’s float, when I needed air I’d bring my face out of the freezing water and take a quick bite of oxygen, then resume my position facedown in the water. When I started to sink too much, I kicked a couple of strokes. Meanwhile, I pulled off my trousers. Then I zipped the fly shut.

With my trousers off, I tied the ends of the legs together with a square knot. Then, using both hands, I grabbed hold of the waist and kicked until my body straightened up from its float. I lifted my pants high in the air, then slammed them forward and down on the water, trapping air in the trouser legs.

As my upper body hung over the valley in the V of my homemade trouser flotation device, I felt relief. I had been so concerned about drowning that I had forgotten how frigid the water felt. Now that I wasn’t drowning, I started to remember the cold.

Some of our guys swam back to the pier. We tried to call them back, but they’d had enough.
Ring, ring, ring.

Instructor Stoneclam said, “If one more of you rings the bell, the rest of you can come out of the water, too. Inside the ambulance we have warm blankets and a thermos of hot coffee.”

After one more ring of the bell, Stoneclam said, “Everybody out of the water!”

“Hooyah!”

We crawled out of the water and onto the floating steel pier.

Instructor Stoneclam said, “Now strip down to your undershorts and lie down on the pier. If you don’t have shorts, your birthday suit is even better.”

I stripped down to my birthday suit and lay down. The instructors had prepared the pier by spraying it down with water. Mother Nature had prepared the pier by blowing cool wind across it. I felt like I was lying down on a block of ice. Then the instructors sprayed us with cold water. Our muscles contracted wildly. The spasms were uncontrollable. We flapped around on the steel deck like fish out of water.

The instructors took us to the early stages of hypothermia. I would’ve done almost anything to get warm. Mike said, “Sorry, man, I gotta pee.”