I turned to Matt McGraw, and I remember saying, “How the hell did you get here, kid? You’re supposed to be in school.”
But Matt was on the verge of exhaustion. He just shook his head and said, “Thank God, thank God, Marcus.”
I know this sounds crazy if you haven’t gone through what we went through. But this was an unforgettable moment. Two guys fell to their knees and wept. Then we all began to hug one another. Someone was saying, “It’s over.”
Like the remnants of a ravaged army, we helped one another back over the sand dunes, picking up those who fell, supporting those who could barely walk. We reached the bus that would take us back to base. And there, waiting for us, was Captain Joe Maguire, the SEAL commanding officers, and the senior chiefs. Also in attendance was the ex-SEAL governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, who would perform the official ceremony when we returned to the grinder.
But right now, all we knew was the baptism of fire that had reduced Class 226 by more than half was over. It hadn’t beaten thirty-two of us. And now the torture was completed. In our wildest imaginations, no one had ever dreamed it would be this bad. God had given us justice.
We lined up on that sacred blacktop, and Governor Ventura formally pronounced the official words that proclaimed we never had to tackle another Hell Week: “Class Two-two-six, you’re secured.” We gave him a rousing “Hooyah! Governor Ventura!”
Then Instructor Burns called us to order and said, “Gentlemen, for the rest of your lives there will be setbacks. But they won’t affect you like they will affect other people. Because you have done something very few are ever called upon to achieve. This week will live with you for all of your lives. Not one of you will ever forget it. And it means one thing above all else. If you can take Hell Week and beat it, you can do any damn thing in the world.”
I can’t pretend the actual words are accurate in my memory. But the sentiment is precise. Those words signify exactly what Instructor Joe Burns meant, and how he said it.
And it affected us all, deeply. We raised our tired voices, and the shout split the noontime air above that beach in Coronado.
“Hooyah, Instructor Burns!” we bellowed. And did we ever mean it.
The SEAL commanders and chiefs stepped forward and took each one of us by the hand, saying, “Congratulations,” and offering words of encouragement about the future, telling us to be sure and contact their personal teams once we were through.
Tell the truth, it was all a bit of a blur for me. I can’t really recall who invited me to join what. But one thing remains very clear in my mind. I shook the hand of the great SEAL warrior Joe Maguire, and he had a warm word for me. And thus far in my life, there had been no greater honor than that.
We probably devoured a world-record amount of food that weekend. Appetites returned and then accelerated as our stomachs grew more used to big-sized meals. We still had three weeks to go in first phase, but nothing compared to Hell Week. We were perfecting techniques in hydrology, learning tide levels and demographics of the ocean floor. That’s real SEAL stuff, priceless to the Marines. While they’re planning a landing, we’re in there early, moving fast, checking out the place in secret, telling ’em what to expect.
There were only thirty-two members of the original class left now, mostly because of injury or illness sustained during Hell Week. But they’d been joined by others, rollbacks from other classes who’d been permitted another go.
This applied to me, because I had been on an enforced break when I had my broken femur. And so when I rejoined for phase two, I was in Class 228. We began in the diving phase, conducted in the water, mostly under it. We learned how to use scuba tanks, how to dump them and get ’em back on again, how to swap them over with a buddy without coming to the surface. This is difficult, but we had to master it before we could take the major pool competency test.
I failed my pool competency, like a whole lot of others. This test is a royal bastard. You swim down to the bottom of the pool with twin eighty-pound scuba tanks on your back, a couple of instructors harassing you. You are not allowed to put a foot down and kick to the surface. If you do, you’ve failed, and that’s the end of it.
First thing these guys do is rip off your mask, then your mouthpiece, and you have to hold your breath real quick. You fight to get the mouthpiece back in, then they unhook your airline intake, and you have to get that back in real fast, groping around over your shoulder, behind your back.
Somehow you find yourself able to breathe in pure oxygen, but the only way you can breathe out is through your nose. A lot of guys find the cascade of bubbles across their faces extremely disconcerting. Then the instructors disconnect your airline completely and put a knot in it. And you must try to get your inhalation and exhalation lines reconnected. If you don’t or can’t even try, you’re gone. You need a good lungful of air before this starts, then you need to feel your way blind to the knot in the line behind your back and start unraveling it. You can more or less tell by the feel if it’s going to be impossible, what the instructors call a whammy. Then you run the flat edge of your hand across your throat and give the instructor the thumbs-up. That means “I’m never going to get that knot undone, permission to go to the surface.” At that point, they cease holding you down and let you go up. But you better be right in your assessment of that knot.
In my case, I decided too hastily that the knot in my line was impossible, gave them the signal, ditched my tanks over my shoulder, and floated up to the surface. But the instructors decided the knot was nothing like impossible and that I had bailed out of a dangerous situation. Failed.
I had to go and sit in a line in front of the poolside wall. It would have been a line of shame, except there were so many of us. I was instructed to take the test again, and I did not make the mistake the second time. Undid the sonofabitch knot and passed pool comp.
Several of my longtime comrades failed, and I felt quite sad. Except you can’t be a SEAL if you can’t keep your nerve underwater. As one of the instructors said to me that week, “See that guy in some kind of a panic over there? There’s confusion written all over him. You might have your life in his hands one day, Marcus, and we cannot, will not, allow that to happen.”
Pool comp is the hardest one of all to pass, just because we all spent so much time in the water and right now had to prove we had the potential to be true SEALs, guys to whom the water was always a sanctuary.
It must not be a threat or an obstacle but a place where we alone could survive. Some of the instructors had known many of us for a long time and desperately wanted us to pass. But the slightest sign of weakness in pool competency, and they wouldn’t take the chance.
Those of us who did stay moved on to phase three. With a few rollbacks coming in, we were twenty-one in number. It was winter now in the Northern Hemisphere, early February, and we prepared for the hard slog of the land warfare course. That’s where they turn us into navy commandos.
This is formally called Demolitions and Tactics, and the training is as strict and unrelenting as anything we had so far encountered. It’s a known fact that phase three instructors are the fittest men in Coronado, and it took us little time to find out why. Even the opening speech by our new proctor was edged with dire warnings.
His name was Instructor Eric Hall, a veteran of six SEAL combat platoons, and before we even started on Friday afternoon, he laid it right on the line. “We don’t put up with people who feel sorry for themselves. Any problems with drugs or alcohol, you’re gone. There’s four bars around here that guys from the teams sometimes visit. Stay the hell out of all of ’em, hear me? Anyone lies, cheats, or steals, you’re done, because that’s not tolerated here. Just so we’re clear, gentlemen.”
He reminded us it was a ten-week course and we weren’t that far from graduation. He told us where we’d be. Five weeks right here at the center, with days at the land navigation training area in La Posta. There would be four days at Camp Pendleton on the shooting ranges. That’s the 125,000-acre Marine
Corps base between Los Angeles and San Diego. We would finish at San Clemente Island, known to SEALs as the Rock and the main site for more advanced shooting and tactics, demolitions, and field training.
Eric Hall finished with a characteristic flourish. “Give me a hundred and ten percent at all times — and don’t blow it by doing something stupid.”
Thus we went at it again for another two and a half months, heading first for the group one mountain training facility, three thousand feet up in the rough, jagged Laguna Mountains at La Posta, eighty miles east of San Diego. That’s where they taught us stealth, camouflage, and patrolling, the essential field craft of the commando. The terrain was really rough, hard to climb, steep, and demanding. Sometimes we didn’t make it back to barracks at night and had to sleep outside in the wild country.
They taught us how to navigate across the land with maps and compass. At the end of the week, we all passed the basic courses, three-mile journeys conducted in pairs across the mountains. Then we headed back to the center to prepare for Camp Pen-dle-ton, where we would undergo our first intensive courses in weaponry.
No time was lost. We were out there with submachine guns, rifles, and pistols, training for the not-too-distant days when we would go into combat armed with the M4 rifle, the principal SEAL weapon of war.
First thing was safety. And we all had to learn by heart the four critical rules:
1. Consider all weapons to be loaded at all times.
2. Never point a weapon at anything you do not want to put a bullet through.
3. Never put your finger on the trigger unless you want to shoot.
4. Know your target and what’s behind it.
They kept us out on the shooting range for hours. In between times we had to dismantle and assemble machine guns and the M4, all under the eyes of instructors who timed us with stopwatches. And the brutal regime of fitness never wavered. It was harder than second phase, because now we had to run carrying heavy packs, ammunition, and guns.
We also had a couple of weeks at the center to study high explosives and demolition. This mostly involved straightforward TNT and plastic, with various firing assemblies. The practical work happened only on the island of San Clemente. And before we got to do that, we had another rigorous training schedule to complete, including one fourteen-mile run along the beach and back.
This was the first time we had run any race without being wet and probably sandy. Just imagine, dry shorts and running shoes. We floated along, not a care in the world.
It was mid-March before we decamped to San Clemente for four weeks of training, long hours, seven days a week until we finished. This rugged moonscape of an island is situated off the California coast, sixty miles west of San Diego, across the Gulf of Santa Catalina.
For almost fifty years, the U.S. Navy has been in command here, using the place as an extensive training area. There are no civilians, but parts of the island are an important wildlife sanctuary. There are lots of rare birds and California sea lions, who don’t seem to care about violent explosions, shells, and naval air landings. Up in the northeast, right on the coast, you find SEALs.
And there we learned the rudiments of fast and accurate combat shooting, the swift changing of magazines, expert marksmanship. We were introduced to the deadly serious business of assaulting an enemy position and taught how to lay down covering fire. Slowly, then faster, first in daylight, then through the night. We were schooled in all the aspects of modern warfare we would one day need in Iraq or Afghanistan — ambushes, structure searches, handling prisoners, planning raids. This is where we got down to all the serious techniques of reconnaissance.
We moved on to really heavy demolition, setting off charges on a grand scale, then hand grenades, then rockets, and generally causing major explosions and practicing until we demonstrated a modicum of expertise.
Our field training tasks were tough, combat mission simulations. We paddled the boats to within a few hundred yards of the shore and dropped anchor. From that holding area, we sent in the scout recon guys, who swam to the beach, checked the place out, and signaled the boats to bring us in. This was strict OTB (over the beach), and we hit the sand running, burrowing into hides just beyond the high-water mark. This is where SEALs are traditionally at their most vulnerable, and the instructors watch like hawks for mistakes, signs that will betray the squad.
We practiced these beach landings all through the nights, fighting our way out of the water with full combat gear and weapons. And at the end of the fourth week we all passed, every one of the twenty trainees who had arrived on the island. We would all graduate from BUD/S.
I asked one of our instructors if this was in any way unusual. His reply was simple. “Marcus,” he said, “when you’re training the best of the best, nothing’s unusual. And all the BUD/S instructors want the very best for you.”
They gave us a couple of weeks’ leave after graduation, and thereafter for me it was high-density education. First jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they turned me into a paratrooper. I spent three weeks jumping out of towers and then out of a C-130, from which we all had to make five jumps.
That aircraft is a hell of a noisy place, and the first jump can be a bit unnerving. But the person in front of me was a girl from West Point, and she dived out of that door like Superwoman. I remember thinking, Christ! If she can do it, I’m definitely gonna do it, and I launched myself into the clear skies above Fort Benning.
Next stop for me was the Eighteenth Delta Force medical program, conducted at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That’s where they turned me into a battlefield doctor. I suppose it was more like a paramedic, but the learning curve was huge: medicine, in-jections, IV training, chest tubes, combat trauma, wounds, burns, stitches, morphine. It covered just about everything a wounded warrior might need under battle conditions. On the first day I had to memorize 315 examples of medical terminology. And they never took their foot off the high-discipline accelerator. Here I was, working all day and half the night, and there was still an instructor telling me to get wet and sandy during training runs.
I went straight from North Carolina to SEAL qualification training, three more months of hard labor in Coronado, diving, parachute jumping, shooting, explosives, detonation, a long, intensive recap of everything I had learned. Right after that, I was sent to join the SDV school (submarines) at Panama City, Florida. I was there on 9/11, and little did I realize the massive impact those terrible events in New York City would have on my own life.
I remember the pure indignation we all felt. Someone had just attacked the United States of America, the beloved country we were sworn to defend. We watched the television with mounting fury, the fury of young, inexperienced, but supremely fit and highly trained combat troops who could not wait to get at the enemy. We wished we could get at Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda mob in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or wherever the hell these lunatics lived. But be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
A lot of guys passed SEAL qualification training and received their Tridents on Wednesday afternoon, November 7, 2001. They pinned it right on in a short ceremony out there on the grinder. You could see it meant all the world to the graduates. There were in fact only around thirty left from the original 180 who had signed up on that long-ago first day of Indoc. For myself, because of various educational commitments, I had to wait until January 31, 2002, for my Trident.
But the training never stopped. Right after I formally joined what our commanders call the brotherhood, I went to communication school to study and learn satellite comms, high-frequency radio links, antenna wavelength probability, in-depth computers, global positioning systems, and the rest.
Then I went to Sniper School back at Camp Pendleton, where, unsurprisingly, they made sure you could shoot straight before you did anything else. This entailed two very tough exams involving the M4 rifle; the SR-25 semiautomatic sniper rifle, accurate to nine hundred yards; and the heavy, powerful 300 Win Mag bolt-action .308-caliber rif
le. You needed to be expert with all of them if you were planning to be a Navy SEAL sniper.
Then the real test started, the ultimate examination of a man’s ability to move stealthily, unseen and undetected, across rough, enemy-held ground where the slightest mistake might mean instant death or, worse, letting your team down.
Our instructor was a veteran of the first wave of U.S. troops who had gone in after Osama. He was Brendan Webb, a terrific man. Stalking was his game, and his standards were so high they would have made an Apache scout gasp. Working right alongside him was Eric Davis, another brilliant SEAL sniper, who was completely ruthless in his examination of our abilities to stay concealed.
The final “battleground” was a vast area out near the border of Pendleton. There was not much vegetation, mostly low, flat bushes, but the rough rocks-boulders-and-shale terrain was full of undulations, valleys, and gullies. Trees, the sniper’s nearest and dearest friends, were damn sparse, obviously by design. Before they let us loose in this barren, dusty no-man’s-land, they subjected us to long lectures stressing the importance of paying attention to every detail.
They retaught us the noble art of camouflage, the brown and green creams, the way to arrange branches in your hat, the dangers of a gust of wind, which might ruffle your branches alone if they weren’t set tight, betraying your position. We practiced all the hours God made, and then they sent us out onto the range.
It’s a vast sweep of ground, and the instructors survey it from a high platform. Our stalk began a thousand yards from that platform, upon which the gimlet-eyed Webb and Davis stood, scanning the acres like a pair of revolving radars.
The idea was to get within two hundred yards of them and then fire through the crosshairs at the target. We had practiced doing this alone and with a partner, and boy, does this ever teach you patience. It can take hours just to move a few yards, but if the instructors catch you as they sweep the area with high-powered binoculars, you fail the course.