Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (5 page)

What I knew, I had been told by my father, who worked with the SEALs during his ground tour in Vietnam. I told the recruiter I was a navy brat and an SMA graduate. I told him I wanted a challenge. I seemed sincere, because I was.

The recruiter told me the SEAL program was full, but they needed helicopter pilots. I was born into a navy family, and I knew that where there was a will, there was a waiver. I agreed to take the flight aptitude test, along with the test for SEAL training. I passed both. The recruiter said they still needed helicopter pilots, so I played a trump card. I said that if I couldn’t become a SEAL, maybe I’d wander down the hall to his army colleague’s office and become a Green Beret.

Two days later there was an opening in the SEAL program. I wound up with a “contract”: I would attend navy officer candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island. After that, the navy guaranteed that I would receive orders to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in Coronado, California. But they didn’t guarantee that I would pass, or that I would get a second chance if I was injured and forced to drop out. If I failed, I’d be sent to the fleet: haze gray and under way, just like the regular navy. I had no intention of joining the regular navy; I wanted to be a SEAL, I said. The recruiter reminded me patiently that I
was
joining the regular navy—and if I flunked out of OCS, I’d be sent directly to the fleet, as an enlisted man.

I signed on the dotted line.

In the span of three days, I’d gone from budding psychologist to wanna-be naval commando. I’d turned my back on everything I thought I would be. Gone were five years of study and my plan for a life. I’d jumped off the end of the world. I have been told that breaking up with my girlfriend was a very B-movie reason to join the SEALs. Maybe it was. It all seems very beau geste now, but it didn’t then. I wanted to change the direction of my life.

I called home and told my parents I’d just joined the SEALs. There was a long pause. This from the kid who turned down an appointment and said he’d had enough of the military. This from the hippie psych major who’d picked a school that was close to the surf. Again Dad passed up a great chance to razz me. He said, “Well, be careful.”

I cleaned out my apartment, sold my books, and drove back to my parents’ home, now back in Biloxi, Mississippi. My dad had since retired from the navy and was the southern manager for a company that manufactured bow thrusters for oil-field support ships. Dad got me a job installing and repairing bow thrusters, and I spent the summer waiting for my OCS class to start and pining over Lisa.

Three weeks before I was to report to Newport, I flew to New England. After graduation from Mount Holyoke, Lisa was working as the news director of a country-music station in Brunswick, Maine. I don’t know what I was thinking, that we would suddenly patch things up, or what. I wasn’t even really invited; I just called her up and said I was coming.

Our reunion was strained. Lisa’s job at the radio station required her to get up at four
A.M.,
in time to have the morning news cobbled together from the Associated Press wire. Sitting in her apartment, I’d listen to her read the news between songs about broken hearts and wrecked pickup trucks. I hung around for a few days like a Christmas puppy no one wanted. One night at dinner I said quietly, “I think I should go.” She didn’t try to talk me out of it.

On our last night together, we made love in a bitter and selfish way. Then I lay awake in the dark and watched her sleep, and when her alarm clock rattled, I stared at the ceiling as she dressed, brushed her hair, and pushed through the front door. “Lock it when you go,” she said.

I remember that moment as the last of my boyhood. I had loved her in a desperate, complete, and frightening way. I think now that I loved her with a heart that had never been broken, and that is why I have loved badly since.

Carrying my seabag, I walked to the bus station and paid $33.50 for a one-way ticket to Newport. When the bus pulled up, rain was falling in a terrific sheet, and I was drenched in the few moments it took the driver to punch my ticket and toss the seabag into the luggage compartment. I found a seat in the back of the empty bus, placed my head against the glass, and wept silently.

I remember officer candidate school only as a jostle of shouting instructors and the sharp smell of floor wax. It was, I thought, considerably less difficult than Staunton. I commanded a company, studied very little, and nearly flunked celestial navigation. In sixteen weeks I spent every dime I earned on bourbon and hotel rooms in Newport, which was still something of a hometown to me, and when I was on liberty, I ripped a new hole in it. I dated nurses, dental technicians, and the daughter of a commodore. Counting time until graduation, I sat in my OCS room and listened to Vivaldi, Pure Prairie League, and pop music I’d taped from British radio stations. At night the wind would blow down Narragansett Bay and rattle the frost from my windows. Alone in the dark, I told myself I was over Lisa.

A week before I was to ship out, Lisa surprised me by driving down from Maine. She met me on the OCS quarterdeck, and we got a room in town. The night before my commissioning, she put on a blue nightgown and slept next to me. She kissed me, called me pet names, but would not make love to me. In the morning I got up early, put on my uniform, and she drove me back to the base.

When she dropped me off, she said, “Now, just walk away like Marlon Brando.”

The following morning my father administered the oath and swore me in as an ensign in the United States Navy.

It would be ten years before I saw or spoke to Lisa again. By then I would be a completely different person. A man who had passed through fire.

MARCH 1981. SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.
It was a good hour and a half before sunrise, and a cold fog scudded across the moon and rolled over the ten-mile stretch of beach called the Silver Strand. It was 0435 hours Pacific standard time, that somniferous span of the twenty-four-hour clock referred to by the navy as “oh-dark-thirty.” One hundred and forty-five SEAL trainees were assembled before a podium on the asphalt “grinder” of the special warfare training compound on the Naval Amphibious Base, Coro-nado. Thin wisps of fog blew between the ranks. Standing silently, the men looked like a formation of ghosts.

I was one of ten officers—nine ensigns and a lieutenant—standing at parade rest before evenly spaced columns of sailors and petty officers. We all wore the uniform of SEAL trainees: starched green fatigues and jungle boots, with our names stenciled on white tape across our right pec and the right ass cheek of our trousers. The only thing distinguishing an officer from an enlisted man was a stripe painted fore and aft on the officer’s helmet.

These men were all who remained of the perhaps three hundred who had requested to attend SEAL training. Before this group had undergone a single day of instruction, the number of volunteers had been culled by two thirds. During pretraining, prospective students had been investigated, inspected, jabbed with needles, placed in hyperbaric chambers, and quizzed by shrinks. The tests washed out claustrophobics and those afraid of heights, the overly aggressive and the passive, people without perfect vision or hearing, those with trick knees, flat feet, color blindness, or heart murmurs, people with allergies, and those with criminal or juvenile records. One hundred and forty-five men had been judged by the navy to have the physical, academic, and psychological qualifications necessary to undergo SEAL training. They would start Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Class 114, the hundred and fourteenth class of naval commandos to be trained by the United States. The course we were about to undertake was declared by the Department of Defense to be “physically and mentally demanding.”

That’s a no-shitter.

Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, BUD/S to its initiates, is the most brutal training meted out by the U.S. military. Attrition rates of 60 to 90 percent are the norm. There have been classes, in fact, from which no one graduated. No one graduated because everybody quit.

Every man standing on the asphalt this morning knew the odds, and the navy did, too. These volunteers had been literally x-rayed to make sure any impediment was identified. Only those deemed most likely to succeed would be allowed into a class. The navy needed SEALs and did everything in their power to make sure the men assigned to BUD/S would make it through training. The navy would do everything, that is, except make training easier.

What lay ahead of Class 114 was a course much evolved since the navy first trained frogmen at Force Pierce, Florida. A punishing regime of twelve- to twenty-hour days would be devoted to physical conditioning, small-unit and guerrilla tactics, ambushes, demolition, and booby traps, as well as familiarization with a plethora of U.S., allied, and enemy weapons. In addition to discovering the more visceral aspects of being a commando, trainees would learn hyperbaric medicine, cartography, land and maritime navigation, open- and closed-circuit scuba diving, hand-to-hand combat, communications, and intelligence-gathering operations.

We’d learn all this stuff, that is, if we made it through the first day.

It is axiomatic in the military that training is tough because war is tougher. But what lay ahead of Class 114 was more than a training regimen; it was a rite of passage, an experience that would forever separate the men who had been there from the men who had not.

These were the sorts of lofty thoughts I had as I stood in the fog. You could almost hear “God Bless America” playing in my shaved little head. I had no goddamn idea what I was in for. The truth was, I was a tadpole, a wanna-be frogman, and I didn’t know shit about what it would take to become a Navy SEAL. And, it turns out, neither did the navy.

The Defense Department’s best physicians, physiologists, and psychiatrists had assembled profiles of SEAL graduates in an attempt to fill classes with men who would survive BUD/S. Despite their best efforts, farm boys, surfers, professional athletes, deep-sea divers, and Olympic hopefuls numbered among the dropouts, and regular 140-pound Joes were among the people who would succeed. The truth was, nobody knew what kind of man would make it through SEAL training. There is no way to quantify motivation.

I don’t remember much about the group that started Class 114. I will never forget the handful of men who were to graduate with me. The dropouts left my memory. The men who were to graduate were a slice of America. There were kids from Nebraska who had never seen the ocean before. There were beach bums. Cubans from Miami. Tough guys and quiet types. The bony and the buff. Those who would make it through Class 114 were the most unlikely set of bastards you ever laid eyes on. Standing in the fog that morning, no one could know that only thirty-two men would still be around on graduation day six long months from now.

Our class’s student leader was Lieutenant Mike Heyward, a Citadel graduate and surface warfare officer. He was older than the ensigns by a couple of years and had volunteered for BUD/S after serving for four years in the fleet, mostly on destroyers. Mike was the oldest of the officers save one, Ensign Rick James, who, at the ripe old age of thirty, had gotten a waiver to attempt training. Like Mike, Rick had previous service, having been an artilleryman in the 82d Airborne before attending naval officer candidate school. The remainder of the officers in my class were also OCS graduates.

Prior to Class 114, it had been difficult for OCS types, ninety-day wonders, to receive orders to SEAL training. The slots were reserved for men the navy felt would be better motivated and more thoroughly prepared: that is, four-year ROTC graduates. Times change. As I write this, nearly every officer assigned to BUD/S now comes directly from the Naval Academy. When I went through, NROTC types got most of the slots, with an occasional OCS guy tossed in as food for the lions. Special preference seemed to be granted to the navy’s premier ROTC units: Duke, Notre Dame, and Boston College, some of the schools I’d blown off to surf in California.

In 114 all of the officers except Mike were liberal-arts majors from state schools. Why the switch? In the several classes previous, NROTC officers had attrited at an alarming rate. They succumbed to a variety of medical calamities. They fractured their skulls and had near-drownings, they gave in to hypothermia and stress fractures, but mostly, they just quit. Not enough officers were graduating. It was decided, as a test case, to put a load of OCS guys through. That’s why there was a sudden opening for me when I threatened to join the army: We were going to be guinea pigs.

When the navy switched from NROTC grads, they seemed to go in heavy for college jocks. The officers in my class included a member of the U.S. water-polo team, a four-time all-American decathlete, a college football player, a former paratrooper, one wild-ass redneck, a couple of California Beach Boy types, and me. I was taller than most and not as muscled as many. In college I had rowed NCAA crew and was a varsity fencer, two sports not noted for plebeian appeal.

A national-caliber athlete I was not, but I had been an ocean lifeguard and scuba diver since I was sixteen. I was a strong swimmer; I could handle sail- and powerboats and felt I knew my way around the surf zone. I knew that the odds were against me. I had no idea if I would make it to graduation; I knew only that I would not quit. I had turned my back on my previous life. I’d told myself and anyone who would listen that I would leave BUD/S on graduation day or in a bag. From a twenty-one-year-old ex-fencer, it was tough talk.

The door to the first-phase instructor’s office opened, and a long shadow fell on the formation. Master Chief Dick Roy, the naval special warfare training group’s command master chief, stepped onto the asphalt. A Vietnam veteran of both UDT and SEAL Teams, Dick Roy at forty years of age was athlete enough for any ten of us. The master chief sprang to the podium, six-five and 220 pounds of muscle. Want a visual? Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body and Clark Gable’s head, pencil-thin mustache, jug ears, and all.

Mike Heyward called the class to attention: “Class 114 all present and accounted for, Master Chief.”