The Operator Page 7

  “Prepare to UP-BOAT!”

  The issue this time was that there was an instructor standing in the boat adding to the weight.

  “You weak fuckers better not drop me!” he’d scream. “UP-BOAT!”

  We lifted again, fighting the exhaustion from the beating we were taking. We managed to hold the instructor up for a while, but in a period of time impossible to measure, our arms gave out and we dropped him. So now the instructor hammered us in disbelief that we’d just tried to hurt him. This went on for some time.

  I began to understand that the instructors wanted to see how we behaved as a team. If guys started yelling at each other for not “carrying their weight,” the whole team would disintegrate. I watched finger-pointing destroy crews during Hell Week, and later saw the same tendency ruin careers. That’s why the course is designed the way it is. The SEAL brass doesn’t want guys who blame others on the teams. The goal is to find guys who, no matter what, work together as a team and, most important, never quit.

  In Hell Week, everything was a race. We’d be up in the sand dunes, all standing in a column, and the instructors would point out a landmark and tell us to race around it, there and back, three times.

  The boat crews were divided by height. This might seem random, but in fact it was supremely practical. Crews of similar height meant that at least the weight of the boat would be equally distributed on everyone’s head and the boat itself would remain level as we hauled to hell and back.

  But it sucked to be one of the short guys. We called the shortest crew the “Smurf Crew.” Every class called the short crew that same name and I’ve never heard a good story involving the Smurf Crew. I’ve only heard of pain, suffering, and humiliation.

  Predictably, the taller guys ran the fastest; it was usually Boat Crews I, II, and III—numbered tallest to shortest—competing for the land races. I was in crew II, and we competed for pretty much every race with I and III. The Smurfs were always getting crushed. Water, land, anything, the Smurfs would finish last and always get extra attention from the instructors. Some of the instructors were short, too, which meant that they’d once been Smurfs themselves. That didn’t matter; they didn’t let up on the Smurf Crew, probably taking out on them the frustration they themselves felt back in the day. If you ever meet a SEAL who’s short, chances are he’s as hard as woodpecker lips because he was a Smurf.

  When we weren’t racing on land or in the surf, we’d do “Elephant Walks” where we began by lining up by height, Boat Crew I in the front and the Smurfs in the back, our boats touching bow to stern all the way down the line. These walks were about the speed of a slow jog with the instructors all around us yelling through megaphones, making this awful screeching feedback by yelling too close to the mouthpiece. It would have been unbearably annoying even without the siren, which came standard on Hell Week megaphones.

  Flogged by screaming, screeching, and sirens, we were ordered to keep the boats touching in a single-file line, “Nut to Butt,” and walk around California. It sounds easy but it sucks, just like everything else about Hell Week. The boats get ridiculously heavy after days of this, and guys are bitching at each other about keeping their heads under it to share the weight. Naturally, the Smurf Crew can’t keep up so they’re in the back, getting abuse from the instructors.

  The boats felt so much heavier as the week went on that we were convinced the instructors were filling them with sand while we were in the galley. We actually started standing watch on our boats as we ate. Not that it would have mattered if we’d caught them red-handed. Anyway, they weren’t doing that. We were just getting really tired.

  We also started getting shin splints. The overstressed ligaments in between shin and kneecap began to feel like razors sliding beneath the skin. My knees got so bad I wondered if I could keep going. I knew I wasn’t going to quit, but the pain of every step was so severe I began thinking it was possible I’d simply pass out at some point. Before that happened I learned that if I stretched out my hamstring the pain would diminish. I started doing that every day and the pain actually went away. But a lot of guys couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t run at all, and they quit.

  When a guy quit during Hell Week, he was immediately taken out of whatever evolution we were doing, brought back to the barracks, and cleaned up. The next morning a formation of quitters would be marched to a big bell that was set up right outside of the first-phase office and the guys would ring the bell three times each and then place their helmets in a line called, in case anyone had missed the point, “the quitter line.” Every morning that bell would ring and ring like school was letting out. All anyone had to do to quit was ring that goddamn bell whose sound seemed to follow us around everywhere.

  *

  WHEN PEOPLE SAY MAKING IT through Hell Week isn’t physical, it’s mental, that’s sort of true, but the mental part is talking yourself through the constant physical pain. It was painful the entire time; extremely painful. There were times I’d be running on the beach with a boat on my head and my knees screamed with so much pain that I was mad at them, yelling, “Why would you do this now?! I can’t quit because of sore knees!!” I’d broken my pinkie toe in the pool on the Friday before Hell Week began. That may not sound like a big deal, but even if you’re a hundred percent, Hell Week sucks. This is where the mental comes in. You can convince your body to do anything. Things are only impossible until someone does them. Tape your toe to the other toes, stretch your ass and your hamstrings to loosen your knees. Rub some fucking dirt on it, walk it off.

  Right before Hell Week, Instructor A pulled me aside and said, “You’re about to go to war for the first time and the enemy is all your doubts, all your fears, and everybody you know back home who said you couldn’t do this. Keep your head down and keep moving forward no matter what, never quit, and you’ll be fine.”

  That really hit me. I flashed back to that mine I’d worked at in Butte. I was having lunch with a friend and another guy. My buddy pointed to me and said, “Yeah, this guy’s going to the Navy in a few months. He’s going to be a Navy SEAL.” The other dude looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re never going to be a Navy SEAL. You’ll never make it.” When I heard Instructor A give that little speech, that stubborn thing in me just flared up, and I held on to it as resolutely as I held on to the boat, taking one step and then another, doing whatever they told me wherever they told me to do it, covered in cold salt water, sand and sweat, and body stink.

  Oh, yeah, and you don’t sleep. In the five days of Hell Week, from the kickoff on Sunday evening through the final evolution on Friday afternoon, you’re lucky if you drift off for twenty minutes once a day, wherever you happen to be, half collapsed on the beach or up to your knees in the surf, head nodding until an instructor screams you awake. We were always exhausted, always hurting, always cold.

  Once a day the instructors got us naked and put us through what’s called DeCon. It’s really just a hose-down with cold, fresh water, but it gets the sand off. No small thing when you’ve been caked in it nonstop for twenty-four hours and it’s penetrated every wrinkle and crevice of your body. You soap up, put on a clean pair of tri-shorts, which are kind of like spandex boxer briefs, and walk to the doctors’ office. They check you out. You’re chafing in every joint and bleeding out of every orifice, and maybe your body temperature isn’t recovering from the constant exposure to cold. The docs don’t want to lose any students to hypothermia, broken bones, or runaway flesh-eating bacterial infections from all the cuts and scrapes, but otherwise they aren’t too picky.

  As we left the checkup they gave us a handful of petroleum jelly to use on our chafing. Every part of our bodies had been rubbed raw. What they gave us never could cover it all, but that didn’t matter. There was only one place we were going to use it. Something terrible happens to a man who wears heavy cotton clothes that are soaking wet all of the time with salt water while he is constantly moving. The wet clothes/salt/sand rub on his skin constantly. Eventually a rash forms.
Then it gets worse and worse. Then it starts to bleed after a few days. It takes some serious mental strength to put up with this pain in the ass, literally, on top of ALL the other stuff.

  Needless to say, a man’s “junk” gets chafed really badly, too. And that hurts worse than anything. So all of the jelly goes on Hell Week nuts.

  After you lube yourself up, they hand you clean clothes, clean boots, and clean socks.

  I remember putting on my boots. My hands were so cold and stiff that I couldn’t tie the laces. I looked over at the guy standing beside me in his tri-shorts. He was cold and miserable, too, just hating life. I read his name tag. I said, “Hey, Sterling, will you pee on my hands?” It’s a safe way to warm them up. He looked down at me for a perfectly timed beat, then said, “Well, yeah, man, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

  I was like, “No, that’s not what I meant!”

  I’d never spoken with this guy before he peed on my hands. He’s one of my best friends to this day. He was as miserable as the rest of us. He just thought humor would be a nice change of pace.

  Nice to meet you.

  Getting dressed in clean dry greens was an intense relief—for all of thirty seconds. The first instructor who saw you step out of medical—it didn’t even matter if he was on duty—ordered you to get right back into the ocean and told you to then take a nice roll in the sand. The “sugar cookie” was back. And Hell Week was full bore again.

  We drilled nonstop until the sun started to go down. That was the only time the instructors would let us put down our boats and stand beside them. We stood there, soaked, feeling the wind getting colder as the sun dipped into the ocean. We did this every night and it was the one time when the instructors didn’t try to inflict chaos. They wanted a moment of calm, not out of compassion, but so we could use our own minds to mess with ourselves. As the wind picked up, cutting into the cold flesh through our wet clothes, only one instructor would speak: “Say goodbye to the sun, gents. It’s going to be another long, cold, wet night. All you have to do is quit and the pain and cold stops.”

  They’d up the ante by offering dry clothes, warm food, and coffee if we would only give up. It was that simple to quit. And the instructors wanted us to quit. They never came up empty. There’d always be a few rings of the bell before the sun set. Then we went on with the night.

  On night two, the survivors elephant-walked over to the “Steel Pier.” When we arrived, the instructors ordered us to put down our boats and jump in the cold water to perform some “lifesaving” drills. Basically we stripped off our clothes and tied knots in certain parts and blew into the garments to inflate them. It was old-school Navy stuff for “man overboard,” but we were just doing it to get cold. After a few minutes of that, we were told to throw our clothes up on the pier and tread water in our skivvies.

  This is where the mind fuck came in. Guys started to believe that they were actually getting colder because their clothes were off, though that wasn’t really true in the water. Again, truth didn’t matter. Only belief mattered. And some guys got out and quit because they stopped believing they could make it.

  We stayed in there for about thirty minutes, treading water and watching quitters. Then we were told to get out, but the instructors weren’t done with their fun. Once out, we were ordered to lie down, bare legs and backs, on the cold steel pier. Now this actually did make you colder. You could hear bodies shaking against the hard deck of the pier. Just in case we weren’t cold enough, the instructors sprayed us with the hoses. More guys quit. Then they told us to roll over on our bellies. Still more quitters. It sucked like this for a while, then we were ordered back in the water for more treading. Then back on the pier for more cold steel and cold hose water.

  I run into a lot of teenagers now who say to me, “I want to be a SEAL.” I’ll say, “What are you doing to prepare for it?” One of the common answers I get is “taking cold showers,” because they’ve heard about the steel pier evolution. I’ll say, “All right, here’s the deal, stop doing that right now. Don’t ever do that again.” They always ask why. I say, “Let me explain it to you: If I told you that in thirty days I’m going to kick you in the nuts as hard as I can, and to get ready for it, you had your best friend kick you in the nuts every single day until then, guess what, it’s still going to suck when I do it. You don’t get used to it. Take every warm shower you can from here to the time you get there.”

  So the steel pier taught me something. It was a pretty merciless event and I want to say that most of the quitters from Class 208 came from right there.

  *

  I HAD AN AGREEMENT WITH a friend of mine named John: If one of us felt like quitting, we’d find the other so we could get talked off the ledge. When they finally let us off the pier for the last time, I couldn’t find John anywhere. Hell Week went on as usual until breakfast, when we ran our boats to the galley. It’s the same galley where the regular Navy guys eat, and we’d sit right next to them, only we’d be wearing our training greens and they’d be in their blues or dungarees. I was going through the line and there was John, right in front of me, in dungarees and a light blue shirt. I said, “What the fuck, dude?”

  He said, “I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “Why didn’t you come find me?”

  “Because you would have talked me out of it,” he said.

  Off to the fleet he went.

  That was Wednesday morning. And here’s the irony: Wednesday morning is the key to Hell Week. If you live to see the sunrise on Wednesday, you’ll make it. Probably. The instructors realize that if you’ve made it through sixty hours of brutal physical punishment with no sleep to speak of, you’ve most likely got what it takes to be a SEAL. And they know that for any human, this is where the dementia kicks in. It’s unavoidable, and their attitude shifts accordingly. From Wednesday morning on, instead of trying to make guys quit, they’re more likely to talk them into staying. I don’t think we did anything all that difficult after Wednesday. Of course, having been awake for three days and covering hundreds of miles with boats on our heads, we found just keeping upright really difficult. But the instructors definitely eased up. At least, I think they did. Truthfully, I can barely remember.

  On Thursday night, the last night, we did a final evolution called “Around the World.” Students race their boats around Coronado Island, starting and ending at the BUD/S compound. It takes all night and is a ton of rowing. We rowed and talked. It was kind of peaceful without the sound of instructors screaming at us through megaphones accompanied by that horrible squelching sound. During the row, just past Naval Air Station North Island, I spouted off to my crew, “Hey, guys, is that an aircraft carrier over there?”

  “No,” they kind of mumbled.

  “Good!” I said. “Then I won’t ask why there is a dragon on the flight deck. I’m on a high, by the way!”

  At some point we pulled to the shore and were given “mid-rats”—Navy for midnight rations—and we sat on the beach eating. The instructors were there, and seemed like they were sort of over it, too. They weren’t really yelling at this point, just sort of complaining at us. Once we finished, we were back out on the water rowing through the bay about halfway to Imperial Beach. There was a designated spot on the man-made peninsula where we could cross the highway. That was fun. Groups of six guys, all drunk on exhaustion, carrying boats while trying to avoid traffic. On the Pacific side of the Silver Strand, we got back in the boats and finished our row up to the compound. The sun was up and we thought we were done for sure. Need I say that once again we were wrong? An admiral was supposed to be there to bring an end to Hell Week but, naturally, he was late. So the instructors had to get creative.

  The good news: We were finally able to leave the damn boats. The not-so-good news: They ran us straight to what were known as the “mud pits.” The mud pits are probably the place where the devil takes his mistresses. They’re not quite a hundred square yards in a fenced-in area. It is easily the nastiest, smelliest
sewage mud in the Lower 48. Students have actually been medically retired due to flesh-eating bacteria. Really? I wonder where they caught that? This place is disgusting. At first, they made us wade into it until we could tread mud. Then they ordered us to put our heads under. There is a damn sewer drain in there, seriously. I wasn’t sure if it was importing or exporting but it smelled awful. Then we got to play the rope game. There are two parallel ropes, one low and one high, over the pits. Students get on, feet on the lower rope, hands gripping the high one, then try to cross while instructors shake them off. No one has ever made it across and no one ever will. It’s just fun for the instructors to watch the students fall in the shit. Hey, why not? They all went through it, too.

  The admiral finally showed up about noon. He walked in with his entourage and for us it was like witnessing the Second Coming. We were all saved. Hell Week was over.

  He gave some “rah-rah” speech and officially pronounced us done. Then we got in a line, covered in filth, and he came by and shook each of our hands.

  I’ll never forget what he said to me: “Congratulations, O’Neill, you made it through Hell Week. Now wipe the shit off your face.”

  What an asshole.

  We were all escorted back to medical where we were given our final cold shower. Seriously? From there, we put on skivvies and were given two buckets of water each to stand in. The water was warm. So shocking. I thought I’d melt right into those buckets.