The Operator Read online

  We were all seated at desks as though we were in high school, dead silent. Most of us were nervous. He walked slowly down the aisle to the front of the class, eyeballing us each individually along the way. Then he turned to face us, scanning the classroom from side to side. The room sank into an eerie silence made of equal parts fear and anticipation.

  Finally, he spoke in the rich and resonant voice of someone they hire to do voice-overs in historical documentaries.

  “Lookin’ good today, gents!” he said, pausing to make sure we’d all taken the bait. “Not you, me!”

  Nobody laughed. We were way too afraid to laugh.

  He then said, “Never mind my perfect physique, I’m not here to intimidate. I’m here to motivate!”

  Again, we didn’t know what was going on. We all recognized the humor but didn’t expect it. All the other instructors were the meanest guys on the planet.

  After more time staring over the class without ever once breaking a smile, Instructor A said, “I know what you’re thinking: I look a little tired. That’s because I am. I was up all night because I had to get my wife out of jail. She was arrested yesterday for shoplifting!”

  What the hell?

  Then he said, “We were leaving the mall together, she had her arm around me … security thought she was trying to steal an anatomy chart!”

  This was the kind of guy he was, all the more impressive for the contrast with every other part of the BUD/S experience. He believed in something that I would come to believe throughout my entire career. Morale is the key to everything. There is nothing wrong with keeping people happy. Granted, this environment was an odd place for him to do it: The instructors should have been trying to make us quit—for the simple reason that those who refused to quit against all reasonable odds were the only ones who could do what SEALs needed to do.

  I guess Instructor A thought, as our proctor, that there was enough hate to go around. I’d be willing to bet that there were several guys who wouldn’t have made it through the entire program without that little gust of support coming from Instructor A. He meant what he said about being a motivator.

  “I’m never going to ask you to do anything impossible,” he told us. “But I will make you do something very hard. Followed by something very hard, followed by something very hard, day after day after day, for eight straight months. And that sounds like a lot, to get from now to eight months from now, but don’t think about it that way. That’s not the way you achieve a long-term goal. Get up in the morning, make your bed, brush your teeth, little victories. Get to five o’clock PT, finish that, from PT get to breakfast. From breakfast try to make it to lunch, from lunch make it to dinner. After dinner, get back to your room into that bed that you made and do the same thing all over again. All you need to do to get from now to eight months from now and graduate is not do one thing: No matter what, never quit and you’ll be just fine.”

  That thought was what kept me going many times during Phase One, and especially when I first confronted the BUD/S obstacle course, one of the highest and scariest in the world, requiring a combination of endurance, upper-body strength, and steel-sphinctered fearlessness. Instructor N, a complete freak of nature physically, showed us how it went down. He was what an instructor should be: lean, fast, strong, and pissed off. He would flawlessly demonstrate each obstacle only once, and then it was our turn.

  If you’ve ever seen those American Ninja Warrior competitions on television, you’ll be able to picture the course—without the padding and the primary colors. A lot of climbing, jumping, balancing, and leaping over huge logs. One of the most daunting obstacles involved a fifty-foot-high cargo net secured between two telephone poles. You climbed up one side, crossed over, and climbed your ass down. The first time I crossed over the top, it felt like the wind was going to blow me over and I had to will myself to lift one leg up and over. Eventually I got so good at it, as did every BUD/S student, that I’d cross with my chest, flip both legs over at once, then climb down using only my hands and arms.

  But achieving that level of ease took months.

  Actually, the scariest obstacle was the “slide for life.” The first time I saw Instructor N demonstrate it, my brain yelped, Oh, no! This is an obstacle that is four stories high. I know that because that’s exactly what it is: A four-story building with no walls, only floors and beams in the corners. The task is very simple: Climb from the sand up to the first floor. Then climb to the second, then the third and fourth. There are several different ways to climb up but the easiest is to stand on the edge facing outward, reach up to the next level so that your hands actually go up to full extension, and behind your head, grab hold of the floor of the next level. Then, still facing out, you pull both legs up in a reverse-somersault. If you do it right, you’ll find yourself on your belly on the next level with your head just peeking over the edge. Once you do that all the way to the top, there’s a very thick rope connected to a pole on the back of the fourth story. From there, the rope goes at a forty-five-degree angle off the front edge all the way to the ground about forty-five meters away. The student’s job is to use the rope to get down, knowing there was nothing but the hard ground below him.

  The first few times we did it, we’d sit on the edge of the building, grab the rope, wrap our legs around it, and start to shuffle down. We quickly learned—and by quickly I mean after a few weeks—that there was a better way. Put your body on top of the rope with most of it against your chest, head facing down; bend one knee out and wrap the foot from that leg back over the rope for more stability, leaving the other leg straight out for balance; then, keeping your chest centered on the rope, pull yourself down, hand over hand, using your arms.

  The discovery of that technique came too late for Matthew. I didn’t see what happened, but I heard it. It was the very first time we attempted the slide. He was a few places behind me when, somewhere on the rope, he fell off and did his best impersonation of a sand dart, flying headfirst. The sound was sickening, a gasping shout then a heavy thud. I was only several meters ahead of him so I briefly looked back, not knowing it was Matthew. I couldn’t see much; a group of instructors and medical staff had closed in. Someone just got proper-fucked, I thought.

  He must have been able to angle his head up at the last minute, because he messed his shoulder up really bad but didn’t break his neck. Either way, his dream of being a SEAL plummeted to earth along with the rest of him. He was medically dropped from training that day. Over the course of my seventeen-year career, I saw him only a handful of times after that. Our time as stitch bitches paid an unanticipated dividend. He became a rigger in Naval Special Warfare—the first rigger on the Navy Parachute Team—and quite the skydiver himself. He was actually the first Navy rigger to make the Navy jump team, the “Leap Frogs.” I was proud of him.

  Most likely, it was a matter of chance that Matthew went down that day and I didn’t. A little gust of wind, the rope quivering at exactly the wrong time. Whatever, my good fortune gave me time to learn. I eventually got to the point that I actually enjoyed doing the obstacles. I could run through them all in just over six minutes, which isn’t bad, but more than half a minute short of the record, which at that time was held by a SEAL named Neil Roberts. He was just a name to me then, someone who could do something amazing, but he would have an important role in my future.

  *

  OF COURSE IN BUD/S THERE is no future, except for the next intimidating evolution, the next beatdown. The next time they throw you in the pool to drown.

  No joke. This is something that forced a lot of people out. They called it “drown-proofing,” a skill we practiced most days for the first few weeks. By practiced, I mean “tried not to die.” They tied our hands behind our backs and our feet together and then tossed us in the pool. We exhaled to sink to the bottom, then kicked off the bottom to break the surface and get another breath. Then exhale and back down. They call that bobbing. You do that for ten minutes at a time. After that you have to float
for five minutes without touching the bottom at all. It may surprise you to learn that it’s really hard to float tied up. After that, you swim—and by swim I mean wriggle like a worm—to the edge of the pool and back without touching the bottom. Then you do five more minutes of bobbing. The big finale is, they put a mask down at the bottom of the pool and you need to go down and get it with your teeth and show it to them. It’s a lot of time to be tied up in water over your head, and time moves extremely slowly when you think you might drown at any second.

  But even more than “drown-proofing,” what really stands out in memory is the four-mile timed runs. In the beginning, the time to beat was thirty-two minutes. It had dropped to twenty-eight by the end of training. For some reason, running always came naturally to me. At least, it came naturally when I was twenty and weighed about 180. When I eventually bulked up to 230, running was no longer my thing. Being able to carry my huge teammates was. Anyway, at BUD/S I was always near the front for the timed runs and the conditioning runs. I was never in the “Goon Squad,” which was the group that couldn’t keep up. They always got “extra attention” both during and after the runs: wind-sprints, bear-crawls up and down the dunes. They got their asses handed to them all the time. I never envied them, but I didn’t feel too bad for them, either. Running is not technique. It’s all heart, “put-out,” … and breathing.

  Anyway, one day just before one of our four-mile timed runs, I announced to the class, “You know, I think I’m gonna win this today.”

  My friend Dave, who was often the class motivator, said, “O’Neill, if you win this, you can have a weekend out on me!”

  The instructors came out with the vehicles and we waited in a fat line. One truck drove down two miles and stopped. That was the turnaround point. We would run by and yell out our names to be marked off. Don’t want any cheaters! At the signal I took off. I ran as fast as I could, figuring that if I built up enough of a lead at the turnaround, no one would try to catch me. I got to the truck at about eleven minutes, an insane five minutes ahead of pace.

  As I started back, I saw the rest of the class for the first time. Leading the pack were the two fastest guys in the class: Mark and Jimmy. The turnaround was about two hundred meters behind me before we crossed paths, and that was when I realized, “Holy crap, I can actually win this thing!” I ran for another minute or two before passing the bulk of the class. I remember seeing Dave in the front of that pack and he was yelling, “Yeah, O’Neill, go!” He later told me that he loved seeing this big dude in a white T-shirt with a bright pink face, hauling ass toward the class.

  I finished first in just over twenty-four minutes, which is really good for wearing boots and pants and running in the sand. I think it also helped that I grew up five thousand feet above sea level and wasn’t quite used to the fullness of the oxygen in California. I won most of the runs for the next few months before some others began to pass me by. To give you an idea of how fast we were, at the very end of BUD/S we ran a 5K. It was the first time any of us had run on pavement in running shoes in eight months. We were used to running in boots in the sand. I ran it in 15:15. That’s damn near All-State speed. And I finished third.

  I miss being twenty years old.

  A comical side note: I prepped for that first race I won by smoking a cigarette. Smoking is nasty and no one should do it, much less if you’re about to compete in a four-mile run. But it was a way for me to relieve stress during BUD/S. Drinking wasn’t an option most nights. So we had these Singaporean exchange students from the Singapore military, there to observe our training methods: Tan, Shory, Oh, and Tan. No kidding. They’d sneak out behind the infirmary and burn smokes all the time and I decided to bum one right before the run. Most in the class saw me do it and I gained a reputation for “hiding behind medical and smoking with the Singaporeans.” It was true, too, but it didn’t matter to me. BUD/S was hell and we all did what we needed to do to get by.

  *

  ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT stress relievers was humor. I realized something at an early stage in my SEAL career: SEALs are funny. I first discovered the strategic use of humor during one of the most comical times in training—well, comical for the instructors anyway; terrifying for the students. Room inspections.

  Room inspections are legendary at BUD/S. They are conducted every Monday and just suck. A lot of students stay in their barracks all weekend during the first few weeks of training and do nothing but clean. They strip the wax from the deck, then re-wax it. Then they buff it and wax it and buff it. They don’t realize that there is no way in hell that they’re going to pass, no matter what they do. Nobody passes the first inspection.

  The best advice I can give anyone aspiring to be a SEAL is this: Go out and have fun on the first three weekends. Sweep the floor, make your bed, and organize your locker. But have beer on Saturday, recoup on Sunday, and enjoy yourself. Don’t waste your first few weekends in your room on a fool’s errand. There are girls in San Diego, for God’s sake. Go find a few. You will not pass!

  And for officer trainees: You may not pass a room inspection the entire time you’re there! Go out and compare academy ring sizes or study vocabulary or improve your stamp collection. Do whatever officers do. You’re not passing, either.

  My roommates, Matt, John, and Mark, stayed in the room all weekend and cleaned the shit out of it. I decided that my time would be better spent at the mall watching movies and eating trash food. I lived for getting in my truck and turning right on the strand to the Carl’s Jr. in Imperial Beach. I’d order these huge burgers with barbecue sauce and onion rings on them. That’s one nice thing about BUD/S: You can eat anything you want, it’s not going to matter. You’re going to lose weight.

  But my roommates were pretty pissed at me when I showed up on Sunday and hadn’t done anything. I told them that it was a waste of time but they didn’t believe me. We cleaned the remainder of the day and went to sleep. The next day, we had 0500 PT, as usual, and then we ran to the galley. The inspection was at 0730, so we had time to get back and put on our “Inspection Uniform.” This consisted of boots that were spit-shined so aggressively you needed sunglasses to look at them and “greens” pressed and starched so stiff you could snap them in two.

  At 0730 precisely, we stood at attention in front of our open lockers, our UDT vests (which we hadn’t even used yet) laid out on our bunks. In a perfect world, the instructors would come in, we’d announce, “Room so and so ready for inspection!” and they’d see their reflections in our immaculate floor and notice that all horizontal surfaces were dust free and that our beds were perfectly made with hospital corners. They’d then inspect our lockers while noticing that everything was in alphabetical order and that all of our uniforms were in line. Then they’d see our vests, check the CO2 cartridges and actuator, and detect no corrosion. They’d tell us that we were model students in the best BUD/S class ever and that we were free to change out for the next evolution.

  Nope.

  Our room was on the top floor, the third, and just off the stairs. The instructors started on the first floor so we could hear the mayhem going on below. They were going room-to-room crushing people. I could hear students running to the surf zone, I could hear lines of guys doing eight-counts, I could hear the sheer evil coming out of many, many instructors. I think they brought in extra instructors from other phases of training just so they could assist in the fun. SEALs get bored.

  Here is how our first room inspection went down: Nine instructors came in like a fucking hurricane. Our senior guy, Matt, was trying to pipe up with, “Room so and so ready for inspection!” He got out, “Room …”

  All we heard was, “DROP!”

  We were knocking out push-ups before the inspection even started. The line of instructors came rolling in. One had a jar full of sand he threw at the ceiling, then started yelling at us in disbelief. “How in the hell did you get sand on the ceiling?!” What goes up must come down … so sand covered our immaculate floor. We did more push-up
s for that. Some sand fell on the bed and we did push-ups for that. They spilled salt water on our UDTs and told us that they would definitely be rusted. We were beat for future rust. They stepped on our boots and told us they were scuffed. We were ordered to hit the surf in our inspection uniforms. These shiny-ass boots would never sparkle again.

  I actually think back to these times, these inspections, as my favorite evolutions. Even though I was terrified of the instructors, it sort of humanized them. It was all a game and I could tell. These guys must have laughed their asses off afterward in the office. They were messing around, probably trying to one-up each other. I would even venture to say that they bet money on who could make someone cry first. But all the while, the students’ fear was real. They were facing potential dismissal from the program for screwing up. At least, that’s what they believed and it was enough to make them take the instructors’ upset seriously.

  But this sense of humor that I saw in the instructors stood out to me and I had an idea. We’d tried to be perfect the first three weeks and all we’d gotten was a larger dry-cleaning bill. We’d never reach perfection. But there was a way to pass, or so I thought. We didn’t need to impress the instructors, we needed to distract them.

  Instead of wasting our weekend cleaning, we wasted it shopping. We purchased two huge platters and filled one with cans of Copenhagen and the other with PowerBars and cookies. We hung pictures of our girls (and girls we only dreamed of) in our lockers and had music playing on the stereo. That was a big “no-no,” but what the hell? What were they going to do? Beat us?

  We loaded “horizontal surfaces” with candy bars. We laid out porn mags and gun mags, opened to just the right pages.

  With Tupac blaring, we waited for the commotion to hit us. They were close, we could hear them working their way through the building; the guys getting crushed, the screams outside. Holy crap, this might have been a bad idea. We could get dropped for insubordination. Too late now.