The Operator Read online

  The pack entered. The first instructor in line stopped dead in his tracks, hearing the music. Another one froze behind him. Not a word was spoken. The lead instructor looked at the four of us and asked, “What in the Good Christ are you thinking?”

  We were scared to death. Then he said, “That is entirely too little volume for TUPAC!” He walked over to the stereo and cranked it! He then walked over to Mark, who is about 5′5″, and looked down at him. This was the point where we usually started getting the shit beat out of us. With Tupac blaring, he eyeballed Mark but instead of yelling, “Drop!” he casually said, “Dance.”

  Instantly, Mark started throwing down. He was doing the robot, he was twerking, he was going off the chain. The other three of us stood at attention, not believing what was happening, and too shocked to laugh. I started thinking, Holy shit, it’s working!

  The remainder of the instructors came in and actually slipped out of character. They were laughing at Mark, staring at us, and then noticing all of the “bait” we’d placed. It was a huge violation, but they didn’t care. They strutted around the room, grabbing Gatorades or sodas and munching on candy and PowerBars, picking up our magazines and checking out guns and chicks, filling their pockets with tobacco. One instructor even ran his hand across a high windowsill and a Snickers fell into his grasp. He said, “Oh, you’ve gotta be shittin’ me!”

  They finally ordered all four of us to dance and we did. When they caught their breath from laughing at us, they said, “Congratulations. You passed inspection.”

  After the instructors left, we were sort of breathing hard but we’d done it. We all started to high five and change out of our inspection uniforms and into our working uniforms. But as a result of what had occurred something had sunk in: Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. There is never a perfect plan. Impossibilities only exist until somebody does it. We thought this way, gave it a shot, and won. Mission success.

  That elation lasted for about thirty minutes. We watched other classmates get their asses handed to them for a while. Then we got to the next evolution and BUD/S was in full swing again. It was refreshing to finally achieve a little victory. But the worst was still to come.

  *

  CORONADO IS A NAVAL BASE. Seals are aquatic animals. And the first two letters of SEAL refer to the sea. Not to mention that SEALs evolved from Navy frogmen.

  So all this time spent on dry land (or rolling wet bodies in dry sand), running, doing PT and the obstacle course, and cleaning our barracks might give the wrong impression of an excessively land-based Phase One. During the early days at BUD/S, a ton of time was spent at the pool. Though my swimming had come a long way, I still dreaded this and feared it would doom my chances of making it through to graduation for one painfully simple reason: sunburn.

  I am a very white man. I mean white like a sheet. It got to the point that when instructors would mess with me about my skin color, I’d simply say, “I just got off an eight-month deployment on a submarine.”

  But to me, the lack of melatonin was as serious as cancer. The pool is outside and the sun in San Diego is for real. I had to wake up at least thirty minutes earlier than I normally would just to slather on sunscreen. And even so, I had to reapply it at frequent intervals during the seemingly endless hours we spent at the pool. We would swim laps for about thirty minutes just to warm up. Then we’d do drills and tests, especially in the first few weeks. The instructors were still trying to weed people out so they’d come up with stuff to scare folks.

  One thing we did was called the “beehive.” Instructors forced the entire class to the center of the pool as close to one another as possible. Imagine 170 guys—by this point, we were down from the original two hundred—all crowded together in the deep end of an Olympic pool. I’m talking skin on skin, to the point that we couldn’t swim. Guys started to sink under the mass of bodies, and those on top would inevitably use those below as hand and foot holds to stay afloat. Dudes really freaked out. I quickly figured out that if you got pushed down, the only safe way out was to stay calm, hold your breath, and swim to the bottom. Then you could look up, find the outside of the “hive” and surface at the edge. It was really pretty simple, but water scares people. So does drowning.

  It’s rare, but SEAL trainees and actual SEALs have died during pool-training exercises, despite monitoring by medical staff. Fear can sometimes be the right reaction, the rational one. And a large part of becoming a SEAL is learning how not to let fear get in the way of accomplishing the mission. In this case, the mission was to stay in BUD/S. The beehive caused a lot of mission failure. I watched more than a few guys swim away from the hive, pull themselves out of the pool, and quit, then and there.

  I would survive the hive, but another pool evolution almost got me. It was a simple one-length sprint. The catch was this: If you won, you were done and got to sit out. If you lost, you swam again. By now we had about 150 guys. You can imagine how long this shit was going to take. One more thing to consider: A lot of the guys in BUD/S were collegiate swimmers and water polo players. At the very least, they swam in high school. My dumb ass had just learned how to swim. I knew I was going to be swimming many, many laps.

  To make matters worse, the instructors decided to mess with me. They told me that they “were concerned about my sensitive skin.” They told me that to be safe from the sun’s harmful rays, I’d need to wear my white T-shirt during this pool evolution. Obviously, they didn’t give a rat’s red dick about my getting sunburned, they were just bored and it was my turn in the barrel. So I was losing races that I probably would have lost anyway, but now I had a T-shirt billowing out and acting as a parachute, increasing my drag in the water.

  After about ten races, knowing that I couldn’t take 150 races—which, given the rate I swam with the shirt on, was the way it was headed—I decided that I’d respectfully ask permission to take off my shirt so that I had a chance. The instructor who I calculated would be most likely to give me a break was a mountain of a man by the name of Joe Hawes. He was a huge, ripped, black bald dude who’d played a commando in that movie The Rock with Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. He was scary looking, but “nice,” at least in comparison to his fellow BUD/S instructors. He was also the first African-American SEAL I’d met. So after deciding I had no other recourse, I went up to him and said, “Instructor Hawes, may I please take this T-shirt off so that I can at least compete to win? This thing is really slowing me down.”

  He stared at me for several seconds. I could see that his mind was spinning like a roulette wheel, and I knew I’d gambled recklessly just by asking. He looked down long and hard at his very dark skin, then looked back at me with a squint that somehow managed to suggest the lifelong burden of living in a racist world. He paused and did the same thing again.

  Finally he said, “I tell you what, take your shirt off but I must warn you. I was in your shoes once. I took my shirt off. You’re gonna hate yourself!”

  SEALs are damn funny.

  I won the next race and got out.

  I’m only mentioning this little victory because it was so rare in BUD/S. BUD/S isn’t about winning, it’s about getting your butt kicked over and over again and being able to get up, bend over, and get your butt kicked again. You never knew what was coming next, and if you thought about that, the anticipation only made things worse. In fact, I’d say that fear of what was next was almost inevitably fatal. You just couldn’t survive that kind of thinking. BUD/S was so bad, so hard, that nothing else mattered but doing what was right in front of you. If a guy doesn’t want to be a SEAL more than anything else in life, he can forget it. More than anything. I saw guys who hadn’t made it into SEAL training off the bat so they went to the fleet. Once there, they met a girl, got married, had some babies. Then belatedly they got “their shot.” Too late. If a guy had any priorities other than completing BUD/S, forget it.

  When I was growing up jumping off rooftops and just doing whatever else kids do that make their mothers wring
their hands and beg them to be careful, I’d say, “Mom, stop worrying. I’m here to do something special. Don’t even worry about me.”

  I don’t know where that came from, and I didn’t think I was being serious at the time, but looking back on it I did feel some vague sense of destiny. Maybe that started when I was shooting free throws with my dad. At first, even twenty in a row seemed nearly impossible, but somehow I accomplished that. And then I got the idea of making a hundred in a row, and I actually did it. It was all tied up with feeling my dad’s faith in me. I kept moving the target back and somehow getting there. Surviving SEAL training had become the new target, the most impossible to attain of all. I suppose the whole ordeal was the ultimate test of whether I was marked for something different. If I failed, I wouldn’t just be showing my father’s faith to be unmerited, I’d know once and for all that I was nobody special.

  At some point in the first four weeks of Phase One, I remember thinking, “I know that I have a past, although I can’t really remember it. I know that I came from somewhere, though even that is blurry. What sucks is that I don’t have a future. I’m never going anywhere. I’m just here. I’m in SEAL training and it’s never going to end. I’m going to be cold and wet for the rest of my life. That is until it gets so hot that I can’t bear it. Then I’ll be hot and wet … until it gets cold again.”

  That’s what BUD/S days are like. There are no positive outcomes. You wake up: BUD/S. You get tortured. You go to sleep, maybe, at night … you dream about BUD/S. You wake up: BUD/S. Then there are the lucky few who get up thirty minutes early to put on sunscreen. Then you get tortured. That is what life is. There’s no ending, and no beginning. There’s only an eternity of suffering. And this is after only two weeks!

  I know it sounds like hell, but Hell hadn’t even begun.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the fifth Sunday of Phase One, they put us all in tents on the beach. I shared my tent with my new swim buddy—one of those “rollbacks” who’d already washed out once and was getting a second, or possibly third, chance with my class. From the beginning of Class 208’s PTRR days, this guy had been one of the chief know-it-alls, spewing whatever he thought would make him look important—which mostly consisted of gripes and negativity about the training process: Everything about BUD/S was bullshit—except for him. It wasn’t that he was incompetent, he could actually perform physically, so much so that most of the class bought his line.

  I’d had the same swim buddy since the beginning, a great guy named Monte, but for some reason, just as Hell Week was about to cut loose, I was assigned this guy. Maybe it was a devilish handicap the instructors had engineered just for me, like the T-shirt-clad sprint in the pool. Whatever. There we were, this know-it-all and me sitting in the tent on our racks. You could hear the scattered murmur of quiet conversations seeping through from the tents all around us. Nobody was sleeping. We all knew Hell Week was coming, but we were unsure what it actually entailed. Suddenly my new swim buddy, this dude who’d always acted so macho and confident, said to me, “Hey, O’Neill, man, I’m really scared.”

  I thought he was joking. “Ha, ha, seriously, what’s up?” I asked.

  “No man. I’m very, very scared. I don’t want to do this!”

  I was bowled over, but I tried to calm him down. “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “We’re all in this together.”

  He said, “No man, I can’t do this.”

  On cue, explosions. Instructors running into the tents screaming and spray-firing automatic weapons loaded with blanks. Welcome to Hell Week, the Hollywood version of SEAL training, the part we’d all seen on TV, and so cool to see in person. This was it!

  The explosions came nonstop, deafening and breathtaking, like being inside the climax of a fireworks display. Shock waves slammed through my body. Instructors swarmed, ordering us here and there; students sprinted wildly, pinballed by other instructors screaming contradictory orders—to the surf zone to get wet and sandy, to the grinder to do push-ups and get soaked with the hoses. We were all desperately trying to stay with our swim buddies. Losing your buddy is about the worst thing a SEAL can do. So of course instructors were ordering swim buddies in opposite directions, then beating them down for not sticking together.

  This chaos was designed to see how guys can handle the stress of not knowing what in the hell is going on but feeling that they should know. It went on for a few hours that seemed like days. The poor officers in charge of getting head counts had no chance as people ran frantically around looking for their lost buddies. Through all the confusion, guys were being berated by instructors breathing fiery outrage: If you aren’t good enough here, can’t even manage to find your buddy in a piddling training exercise, you certainly won’t make it in the Teams! Guys bought it, too. Some quit right then. I thought it was nuts. We hadn’t done anything hard yet! My swim buddy disagreed. He quit about ten minutes into it.

  There would be moments—hours, days—ahead when it was hard not to envy his choice.

  After the long beatdown, when we finally managed to assemble our boat crews, we were ordered to grab our boats and paddle through the surf zone a mile north to the waterfront of the glamorous Hotel del Coronado, one of the ritziest pieces of real estate in the country. About one hundred yards of beautiful sand separate the balconies of the hotel and the massive rocks at the surf break. It makes for a great experience as a guest: the smell of the ocean, the cool breeze, and the sweet sound of waves crashing over jagged, razor-edged rocks. It’s quite a different experience as a BUD/S student.

  My senses scrambled by the breakout, my muscles already fatigued, I didn’t make the connection between this line of rubber boats paddling past the Hotel del Coronado and the almost identical formation of SEALs in rubber boats Matthew and I had seen from the other side, the beach side, when we first rolled into town. I could barely recognize the boy I’d been, standing on that beach less than a month earlier. The scant weeks between then and now had become an impenetrable border between what I’d been and what I was becoming.

  It would have been nice to reflect on that, but I had more immediate concerns. The rocks were coming up fast. Guys in our class had all read books about SEAL training and heard the horror stories about this particular evolution from previous classes. Our goal was to “surf” the wave and use its momentum to carry us to the rocks. Once we got there, our lead guy would jump out, quickly find footing, and get some distance from the boat. Then someone else would throw him the bowline. He’d cut the slack and hold the boat on and off while the rest of the crew jumped over the side onto the uneven rocks, trying to find a balance point so they could grab a piece of the side of the raft. From there our job was simple: Get the boat up and over the rocks and onto the sand on the beach. Sounds easy. The problem is that the waves don’t stop coming. They keep slamming over the stern, into the boat, onto us.

  We’d been warned: “The one thing you never want to do is get in between the boat and the rocks. Guys have been squeezed until their backs break when the waves hit them.”

  As the sound of the surf crashing on the rocks grew to a constant roar, we backed our paddles to maintain position until we were given a signal from an instructor, then dug in with our paddles, pulling the boat into the dip before a rising swell of water.

  Southern California was having some of its biggest surf in years. Guys were getting knocked all over the place and the boats threatened to run broadside against the rocks, which would have spelled disaster. Our lead guy jumped out and slipped, almost going down. Somehow he regained his balance and lunged for the rope just in time to keep the boat off the rocks. He pulled tight, and we all jumped out. We got slammed, trapped, and battered as we tried to maintain our cadence: “READY, UP … HEAVE!!! READY, UP … HEAVE!!!”

  After several minutes and multiple bruises, we finally worked the boat over the rocks and onto a gorgeous stretch of beach. We broke into a group smile despite our exhaustion, just uncomplicatedly happy to have survived.
That’s when the instructor came by and said, “Great job, Boat Crew Two! Now do it again!!”

  This was going to go on for hours. A half dozen more men quit before it was over.

  Except, there was no over in Hell Week. It just went on and on. We’d be doing regular BUD/S stuff, pull-ups, push-ups in the sand, jumping in the water, rolling in the dunes, just like before, except in Hell Week, everywhere you went, you carried a boat. On your head. While running. All. The. Frigging. Time. The rubber rafts SEALs use might be listed on inventories as “Inflatable Boat Small,” but the sucker weighs 320 pounds. This would become a form of brutal torture in the days ahead. Boat crews even carry their boat to the galley, which is a mile away. Think about that: Students get to run six miles a day just to eat meals. Eight miles a day during Hell Week because there’s a fourth meal. That’s a lot of running even without a big “small” boat on your head. And that’s just to avoid starving. The boat goes everywhere, including to the “O” course, where we had to haul it through every obstacle. Well, not the cargo net or the slide for life. Guys would almost certainly die.

  The constant bouncing and scraping gives your neck horrible kinks and I’m sure that most SEALs will have terrible lower back pain when they reach their sixties. It rubs so raw that a bunch of guys start to develop bald spots by Thursday. The boat becomes your worst enemy but it must also be your best buddy, right? Why else would you bring it everywhere?

  At any moment, day or night, we might hear the instructor yell the words we dreaded second most, “Prepare to up-boat!” followed by the words we dreaded most. “UP-BOAT!” This is where we would, as a team, lift our boat in an awkward “snatch” and rest it on our heads. That alone was painful after a few days, but nothing compared to what we knew was coming.

  “Extended-arm carry!”

  On command we hoisted the boat up as high as our arms could reach. Then we stood there, arms burning. The instructors usually made us stay in that position until some guys started to fail and more weight was added to the rest of us. Eventually every guy would fail and the boat would come back down on our heads, or worse, we’d drop it completely. Failure was inevitable, but the instructors acted as if we were the first crew in the history of BUD/S to do it so miserably. They’d scream at us, kick sand on us, make us do a few hundred more push-ups while they shoveled sand on our backs and necks with our oars. Then they’d make us stand back up beside the boat.