The Operator Read online

  *

  MATTHEW AND I FINALLY ARRIVED in Coronado at dusk and went straight to the beach. We checked into a shady motel—or the shadiest one we could find in this ritzy resort area—and decided to wait until the next day to check into BUD/S. Since we were staying on the beach, Matthew and I decided to get our masks and go for our first swim in the Pacific. We’d been out there for about an hour when we noticed, off on the horizon, a bunch of inflatable boats with green “chem-lights” attached to the sides. There must have been about seven of them. They were rowing to the north and it looked as though they were attempting to row around the entire island. It was Thursday at sunset.

  The boats were full of men from BUD/S Class 207. There are four classes a year, numbered consecutively from Class 1 a half century earlier. This 207th group to go through the training was completing the last evolution of their last night of Hell Week. It’s called “Around the World,” a complete circumnavigation of Coronado Island in these inflatable rowboats. The men had been awake since Sunday but would be done soon. Matthew and I looked at this and were in awe. Holy shit. This is real, there they are.

  We checked in the next day to BUD/S. Class 208.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Matthew and I might have been ready for BUD/S, or at least thought we were, but BUD/S wasn’t ready for us. Class 205 hadn’t quite graduated yet, so we were sent to the other side of the base to live in the barracks that housed the guys who had quit BUD/S or been kicked out. They called it “X Division.” These guys were miserable. Their dream of becoming Navy SEALs had cratered. Now, instead of wearing the green uniforms of SEAL trainees, these guys wore dungarees and boondockers and spent the day picking up trash and swabbing the decks. They lived in limbo, not knowing where their next duty station would be. Most likely they’d end up assigned to the fleet where they’d spend the next four years doing more trash picking and deck swabbing. It was a bleak prospect, and their attitude sucked accordingly. But they were still total know-it-alls.

  You only had to be around them for a few minutes before you learned that their sorry position was everyone’s fault but theirs. The training was designed to make you fail, the instructors were vindictive sociopaths, I’d be better off to just quit now before the assholes beat me down and made me embarrass myself. I remember seeing groups of eighteen-year-old dudes crowding around these quitters, hanging on every word. Despite having failed to master the challenge of Phase One, they maintained their pose as experts, expounding on everything: from where to stand in formation to where to go on the weekends. The young dudes treated it like gospel. Living with those folks was a total downer and I’m positive that more than one good guy has quit just from being exposed to the negativity of X Division. They even had T-shirts made, sort of a tongue-in-cheek shot at BUD/S. Instead of the eagle, anchor, pistol, and trident on the SEAL insignia, the shirts showed a turkey, bell, and mop. They read, “BUD/S X Division. The only easy day was every day. Ya-Hoo.” At least someone kept his sense of humor.

  Lucky for Matthew and me, we were reassigned after a few days to a BUD/S barracks, building 602, right in the heart of the BUD/S compound. From the air, Coronado Island looks like a giant sperm cell—a long, curving tail attached to a teardrop-shaped head. The SEAL base is like a big dash mark where the tail meets the head, projecting into the bay toward San Diego. Building 602 sits in the middle of the dash, sandwiched between SEAL Team One on one side and SEAL Teams Three and Five on the other.

  But even in our new digs, Matthew and I were still in limbo. SEAL training consists of three phases. The first, which is the one in which most trainees quit or wash out, is the physical training part that ends a few weeks after the infamous Hell Week. Phase Two is diving and Phase Three is land warfare and demolition.

  Before actual training begins, all newcomers tread water in a holding pattern called PTRR, which stands for physical training rehabilitation and remediation. This is also where trainees go if they get “rolled back” from one of the three phases—giving them a chance to recover from injuries or just maintain physical shape while they wait to join the next class once that class reaches the point where the student was rolled. Guys get rolled for all types of reasons: getting hurt, failing a test too many times, general sub-par performance. It’s a way to keep people around while they recover from injury (rehabilitation) or get better at whichever skill they lack (remediation). There’s no limit on how often a guy can get rolled; it’s all about how much the instructors like you.

  For new guys like us who hadn’t yet been assigned to a class—or “classed-up”—there were a few weeks of preliminary training to get us ready physically and mentally for the grueling trial of Phase One. The training was also a chance for instructors to identify guys who never should have gotten into SEAL training to begin with, and focus the kind of highly unpleasant attention on them that would ensure they didn’t make it further.

  I remember the first time I ever saw a BUD/S instructor go off on a student. I had heard RDCs yell at boot camp and thought that was bad. This was next-level stuff. It was one of the Chief Petty Officer instructors, they were gods to me, and he found a guy lazily running his mouth about BUD/S. He was talking loudly about how he wasn’t worried about the BUD/S hype, saying he wasn’t scared at all. He’d been through Army boot camp and was even a Drill Sergeant himself. He knew what to expect and had already been through the worst the military could dish out.

  Unfortunately, the guy happened to be Matthew. He found out right then that his prior military experience didn’t matter here. Going nose to nose, this guy with a picture-perfect black mustache—like something out of the 1890s: the style preferred by the frogmen of the UDT (Underwater Demolition Team), the SEAL predecessor—laid into Matthew to the point where it scared the shit out of the entire class. I don’t remember what the Chief said, but imagine the instructor as a nine-hundred-pound grizzly and Matthew as the dude who just kicked the bear’s cubs. I will never forget Matthew repeating, “Yes, Chief, yes, Chief, no, Chief …” He may have peed his pants. I’m pretty sure I did.

  We soon discovered that this chewing out was more the rule than the exception. The instructors were loud and mean as hell day in and day out. I quickly realized that the absolute worst thing a trainee could do was make an excuse. That reality might seem glaringly obvious, but there are some complete boneheads out there who have a reason for everything. They get beat the worst and they never learn. Lucky for me, I was a fast learner. As long as I accepted that I was always wrong and they were always right, it wasn’t that bad. Whenever an instructor asked why I did something he obviously didn’t like, I responded with, “Because I am an idiot!” Deflate the situation, take your lumps, get on with life.

  When we weren’t eating crow served up by the instructor, we were doing conditioning runs and spending hours in the pool swimming. They were saving the real beatdowns for Phase One, week one, day one. But we didn’t know that yet. BUD/S instructors like to surprise the students. At the conclusion of the PTRR training cycle, we only had to successfully complete the initial test we’d passed at boot camp: five-hundred-yard swim, no fins, sidestroke or breaststroke, in twelve and a half minutes; eight pull-ups, dead hang; forty-two push-ups, perfect form; fifty sit-ups, perfect form; 1.5-mile run in eleven and a half minutes in boots. You would think that everyone would be ready for this by now. Some guys failed. Matthew was one of them.

  This was not good for him. I remember being right there as he struggled on the pull-ups. They’re not as easy as they look when you do them properly, which means extending arms full out and hanging from the pole before pulling back up, and guys do lose some strength after the swim. Still, Matthew had managed six in boot camp, and they should have been a cakewalk after a few weeks here. The pressure of everyone watching is surprisingly intense, but that usually adds adrenaline, which boosts the number. Bottom line: Matthew was starting to lose belief that he had what it takes, and in BUD/S nothing is more fatal.

  Matthew and the oth
er guys who failed had to go before a “review board.” Most were booted into X Division and a life of mopping latrines. These were the underachievers who’d been targeted the entire time for poor performance.

  The board was held in a conference room right by the grinder—the concrete-asphalt courtyard where we happened to be working out at the time. Sitting below the office windows of the Commanding Officers, the grinder is a place designed to make even the slightest slip or moment of less-than-full effort painfully visible. But I couldn’t help being distracted, glancing nervously at the door, waiting for a dejected, rejected Matthew to come slumping out. But that’s not what happened. He shot from the door in a full run and slotted right into formation.

  I found out later that when it had been Matthew’s turn to stand, the hearing officer said, “Can you hear the workout going on outside the door?” Matthew said, “Yes, sir,” and the hearing officer replied, “Go join your class.”

  That was a Friday. We had a graduation of sorts from PTRR, trading our standard five-point navy caps for the BUD/S helmets we’d wear throughout training, or as long as we survived. The weekend was spent chilling out and getting our helmets painted and stenciled with our name. Each training phase requires a new paint job. Green for the first, then blue for Phase Two, and finally red. Each time we painted a new color over the old, we knew we’d achieved a milestone. I’d reached my first: I was painting my helmet green. It was going to be a great week.

  Or so I thought. It wasn’t that I didn’t know Phase One would be tougher than PTRR. I just figured it couldn’t be too much worse. I figured wrong.

  *

  BEFORE DAWN MONDAY MORNING WE mustered outside of building 602 for a head count. Each class has an officer in charge, OIC in the ubiquitous military shorthand, who is a trainee just like the rest of us. Our OIC was Lt. Mike, who in addition to facing all the hurdles we faced—officers get no special treatment; in fact, sometimes the enlisted instructors like to single them out—had to begin his BUD/S career being responsible for about two hundred teenagers with practically no military experience. Poor Lt. Mike: It must have been frustrating the way we showed up. Guys were late, missing, or in the wrong crews. Head counts were off. We could all see the frustration in his face. Not only were we about to get hammered in our first PT (physical training), we couldn’t even get roll call right. If we failed to get it together, we’d get a beatdown. Lt. Mike would get crushed.

  I remember early on, after I’d seen what a tough position officer-trainees are in, I spoke to an ensign whose father was an admiral. I said, “Well, this has got to be tough, being an officer, because not only are you afraid of BUD/S but you have to lead everybody.” He said, “Afraid of BUD/S? Why would I be afraid? There’s no point in being afraid. Let that go.” I thought, Wow, that’s a hell of an attitude. It was something of a revelation to me, the first inkling I had that I needed to get over the fear, because fear is self-induced. Of course, it would take a long time for that revelation to sink in fully. In the meantime, I had to get through BUD/S.

  We eventually got our roll call right, split into seven-man boat crews, and made our way, in formation, to the grinder. Even after the chaotic muster we were early—it was still pitch dark out—but the instructors were ready for us. The grinder floor is painted with sets of fins. Each student is supposed to stand on a set and the PT begins. We didn’t even get to our fins, though, before we were being hit with torrents of cold water. Instructors were everywhere, holding hoses spewing frigid streams of liquid as we were supposed to be counting off. There was no hiding. They made sure that, somehow, the head count was wrong. They ordered everyone to “hit the surf.” We all sprinted out of the compound and ran the quarter mile to the beach, lunging into the waves. Southern California has palm trees and sunshine, but even in June, the Pacific water temperature hovers around 60 degrees. I remember thinking, I’m from Montana, there’s no way in hell they can get me cold. I really needed to get comfortable with being wrong.

  We got back up to the grinder wet and shivering and stood on our fin marks. Like a rampaging street gang, the instructors split up and searched for the weak links in our herd, in this case guys who’d cheated and hadn’t gotten completely wet. They found a few unfortunates with dry patches and escorted them back out to the beach for “special attention.” Another quarter-mile run and another cold plunge, this time featuring total submersion. Still dripping and shivering properly this time, they were ordered to make a “sugar cookie,” which meant rolling on the beach until every square inch of their bodies was covered with the grit of crushed volcanic rock and shell that makes up California beach sand, turning them into human sandpaper and making the mandated “bear crawls” and “wind sprints” up and down the sand dunes all the more painful.

  Not that it was much easier for the rest of us on the grinder. An instructor who appeared to be on speed led us through hundreds of push-ups of endless variety: military, diamond, dive-bombers; followed by an equally varied array of painful ab exercises. That SEAL I saw at the pool in basic training? Now I knew where his eight-pack came from.

  As we sweated and sucked air, instructors swarmed us, screaming nonstop. If a guy failed mid push-up, it was like wolves on prey. Three or four would bend over, screaming in the guy’s face. It was total humiliation. I even saw young men cry out of fear. After a few minutes of being told what a piece of human shit he was, the weak link was ordered to hit the slushy. That is a rubber raft full of ice water. A barrier over the top of the water in the middle of the raft ensures that the student being punished goes in, headfirst, all the way. Needless to say, it sucked.

  And we hadn’t even eaten breakfast yet.

  The beatdown went on for an hour. It was a total shock. Beatdowns didn’t mean instructors were punching you in the face, but they might as well have been. When PT ended, an instructor yelled, “Hit the surf, get to chow, be back ready to run at seven fifteen!” So after another plunge in the frigid Pacific, it was run a mile to the galley, jostle among two hundred other guys for food, run a mile back, and be ready for a six-mile conditioning run in a little over an hour.

  Have a wonderful 1-1 day.

  We started our trek to chow wet and sandy, moving at a kind of trot we called the “BUD/S shuffle.” This was the minimum speed at which we were permitted to go anywhere. God help the man who is caught walking. I was beat, shaken to the core, and shocked to see the sun just rising over San Diego. Keeping this up until past sunset seemed a complete impossibility.

  Even as I reflected on impending doom, I knew I was thrilled to be there. I had no certainty I was going to graduate—if I were being honest, it seemed a long shot. I told myself it didn’t matter. I was living my dream to even attempt this.

  I would never quit. I was certain of that. Everyone I knew back home told me I couldn’t do it. There’s no way; it’s too hard and you’re not a tough guy, you’re too skinny, too slow, and too weak. Those guys will eat you alive. The only person who really believed in me was my dad. Even my mom and siblings talked behind my back about how I’d never make it. Proving them wrong was my motivation. That, and something BUD/S did that was both diabolical and brilliant. When you quit, you have to put your helmet in “the quitter line.” Your helmet has your class number and last name on it. There was no way in hell I was going to put my father’s name in a line of quitters: He was the only one who believed in me.

  *

  BUT EVEN IF I DIDN’T quit, failure and injury loomed as a constant threat. I had so far to go, twenty-six weeks, and I knew that 80 percent of those shuffling along beside me wouldn’t make it. I’d never wanted anything more in my life than not to be one of those guys.

  Looking back after all these years, chow time that day is a blur, just like all of the other times we ate during training. The whole process was as mechanical as a fighter jet refueling in midair. I can’t remember how anything tasted, but I do remember this: There was no food shortage.

  I’ve seen a lot of movies abou
t SEAL training, many filled with silly fantasies. The most ridiculous scenes occur in a movie called G.I. Jane in which SEAL trainees have to eat out of trash cans, or are forced to skip meals. The reality is quite the opposite. For me, it was all you can eat, and quite a selection: everything from a huge salad bar to appetizers to four entrees, coffee, soda, whatever we desired. The last thing the instructors wanted was for guys to go down from lack of calories. The problem was finding a good balance. Yes, we were starving at lunch after three tough evolutions, but if we stuffed ourselves and had a six-mile conditioning run right after, the result was predictable. The runs were bad enough without puking. I remember watching guys just pee down their own legs in mid-stride. You sure as hell can’t ask to go to the little boys’ room, and you’ll get drilled for whipping it out, but you can pee your pants if you want. So you definitely didn’t want to be peeing and puking at the same time. It’s just bad for morale.

  The rest of Day 1-1 is veiled in a haze of exhaustion and emotional shock. I’m sure we did the BUD/S shuffle back to the grinder and went right into another kick-in-the-nuts evolution. I’m sure that was followed by another and another, then a shuffle back to the galley for mini sandwiches. The first week was designed to scare us and show us what we’d be doing for the next twenty-six weeks. The only thing I remember clearly is meeting our class proctor the evening before Day 1-1. I’m not sure if it was part of the job description for a class proctor, but this guy took it on himself to be our protector, going to creative lengths to get our heads right and give us the best chance of surviving BUD/S. His name was Instructor A, on the surface a textbook image of a chiseled Navy SEAL. He had strong features and a square jawline. His blue UDT/SEAL instructor shirt looked like it was painted on. “Extra-medium,” he called it.