The Operator Read online

  Finally we were given fresh UDT shorts and our first brown shirt. Everyone who has yet to graduate Hell Week wears a white T-shirt, even under his greens. A brown shirt is the first rite of passage on the way to becoming a SEAL. By this point, I was so sleep deprived from five and a half days of Hell Week I no longer had a firm grip on where I was or what I was doing. As it happened, my father had been in contact with his SEAL friend, the guy I’d taken hunting up the mountain a hundred years before. Now he was back in Coronado. He asked, “How’s Rob doing?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t heard from him,” my dad said.

  “Well, good. It’s Wednesday. If you haven’t heard from him that’s a good thing. He’s still in it.”

  That meant I’d probably make it through the week, he said.

  My dad asked my mother if she wanted to surprise me by making the trip to California. They both really wanted to see me because the idea of SEAL training scared them shitless. Of course, we didn’t know that there’d be much graver things to worry about in the years to come.

  As luck would have it, when my parents arrived at the base they ran into my favorite instructor, Instructor A, who told them he could sneak them into medical to see me.

  Standing there in my underwear, waiting to get checked by a doc, I saw Instructor A approaching. “Hey, Rob,” he said, “put your hands up and face me. I’m going to document how you’re chafing.” He had one of those little disposable cameras, and I still have that picture. The chafing was truly impressive. But he’d really taken the picture to distract me from the fact that my parents were walking up. I must have heard something because I turned and spotted them. They were both looking at me with tears in their eyes. My dad’s tears were probably tears of pride, and my mom’s most likely tears of concern as she beheld the chafed, bruised, and battered body of her son.

  I was merely amused by the clever turn my imagination had taken.

  My dad said, “You’re not dreaming this, Rob, we’re really here.”

  “Sure you are,” I said.

  I turned around and walked into the clinic, where I was examined and told I was good to go. Instead of a handful of petroleum jelly, this time I was handed the entire tube, followed by a sixty-four-ounce Gatorade and an entire large pizza. Take it up to your rack and eat it, they said.

  “How much time before our next evolution?” I asked. “Will I have time to eat all of this?”

  The doc responded, “There are no more evolutions. Hell Week is over.”

  I didn’t believe him. Hell doesn’t end.

  I was escorted up to my room. Some of my four roommates were there already. Amazingly, three out of four of us had made it, which was the inverse of the class as a whole. We ate our pizzas, drank our Gatorade, took warm showers, doused ourselves with petroleum jelly—doubling up on the Hell Week nuts—and got under the blankets. All of the mattresses had been put on the floor. No need to freak out during our first eight hours of sleep in a week, fall off the top bunk, and break our damn necks. Ha, ha. The thought struck me as hilarious.

  And that was it. Ten hours later I woke up to a note that one of the sentries had left in my locker. It informed me that my parents were waiting to take me to breakfast. They actually were here. I wondered if the dragon would be joining us.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After Hell Week, students have what is known as a “Walk Week.” It’s the only time we were allowed to walk anywhere and there were no timed evolutions or tests. A guy’s body gets so broken during Hell Week that at least a week is needed to recover. More, actually, but a week is what they gave us, nine days if you count the weekends to either side.

  Then, broken bodies healed or not, it was business as usual, only now the days would be even longer. We would still do our evolutions each day, but the evenings were spent studying hydrographic reconnaissance and WWII-era Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) tactics—which basically meant charting underwater approaches to invasion-site landings on beaches.

  We would separate ourselves by twenty-five meters each, perpendicular to the beach, and swim out as a group, measuring the depth with primitive little “lead-lines” or heavy sinkers on the end of thick fisherman’s line. Utilizing this eighteenth-century technology is tedious, and basically useless in the twenty-first century when a submarine can map the whole deal with a few blasts from a side-scan sonar. None of us would ever use this skill again.

  Didn’t matter. They kept us up late most nights reading off the markings from our recon and making pretty maps that no one would ever read. No doubt we spent two weeks doing it only because the instructors knew that it sucked. They had to go through it, why shouldn’t we?

  While the instructors were busy torturing our brains, they also made sure to torture our bodies. Our first evolution on the Monday after Walk Week was a timed ocean swim. After a man undergoes the ordeal of Hell Week, he’s prone to have a phobia of Mother Ocean for some time. I still have mine and don’t care if I never get in salt water again. Bet you didn’t think you’d hear a SEAL saying that. I actually had people ask me, while I lived in Virginia Beach, if I wanted to “go to the beach this weekend.” I told them I’d rather go to Nebraska. No one has ever been attacked by sharks while sitting on a barstool or singing karaoke.

  We were all a little concerned as we stood in line facing the water, ready to be inspected. My favorite instructor, Instructor A, walked in front of us. He was casually strolling and sort of smirking. He could walk slowly because there were only about thirty-three of us left out of the original two hundred. He could sense our anxiety as he announced in an uncharacteristically subdued voice, “First time in the ocean since Hell Week, eh, gents? Kind of spooky, isn’t it?”

  It took me a few weeks to realize how funny that was.

  Only one other thing really stands out to me from the last two weeks of Phase One. We were getting a briefing on some sort of reconnaissance gear and the class instructor said, “Okay, gents, you’ll need to pay attention to this part of the instruction because you’ll be the one in your platoon responsible for this. And most of you will make it to your platoons because you made it through Hell Week.”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard anyone discussing my possible future as a SEAL without leaning hard on the phrase “in the unlikely event.” What a great feeling.

  Now we were ready to start learning how to dive. I know there are a lot of divers out there who fondly remember the amazing experience they had learning how to dive. I’m sure they couldn’t wait to go again, and as often as possible. Well, this is the Navy, boys and girls, and I assure you that we can make anything fun suck. Especially during SEAL training.

  Naturally, there was still 0500 PT on the grinder, still the mile run each way to chow and back. Then, delightfully sweat-soaked, we got to exercise our brains in the classroom, learning diving physics and diving medicine. It’s very important to understand things like Boyle’s law and the partial pressures of oxygen and nitrogen and their effects on the human body. Once you understand that volume and pressure are inversely related, and that a full breath of air at a depth of thirty feet will expand to twice its volume at the surface—popping your lungs like an overstretched balloon—you tend to pay attention when you’re told to exhale hard on the way up from a dive. You don’t, your lungs explode. The compressed oxygen in your brain expands, too, forming bubbles and causing an arterial gas embolism. All of which means you probably die. Good shit to know.

  We were also learning how to “jam” our bottles, or fill our SCUBA tanks with air. This was pretty straightforward: being able to read pressure gauges and understand which of the thin copper pipes went where and how to turn them on and off and equalize pressure. In second phase it’s common to hear a student yell, “Bleeding down!” followed by a loud, short hiss of air. Then you know he’s just opened a hose or gauge. If the student screws that up, though, and hasn’t properly turned the bottle off, the loud hiss will continue. Instructors know this sound well and will
be on that student like vultures on roadkill. He’ll find himself in the front lean and rest position doing forty push-ups. That’s the minimum cost of messing up in second phase. It’s fifty in third phase.

  We also prepped for the written tests we needed to pass before qualifying to get in the water. These tests are infamous, a surprise stumbling block that can get guys who think they’re through the shit rolled back to the next class. Nobody who survived Hell Week had to go through that again—too cruel even by SEAL instructor standards. But anyone flunking the tests would get bounced back to PTRR limbo until the next SEAL class arrived at the point where they’d fucked up, then they’d join in. SEALs are physically adept but they need to be smart, too. If you can’t study or take written tests or understand physiology, you probably won’t make it.

  We all knew that we’d moved past the hardest part of BUD/S. But the instructors still didn’t like us and certainly didn’t owe us anything. All we’d done was get to the end of first phase. They’d done that years ago and then gone on to Teams and deployed. We weren’t even “meat” to them yet. They still beat us and loved it. And they were still BUD/S instructors so they were creative as hell. One of the worst beatings I ever received at BUD/S was also easily the most annoying: We’d done something stupid and the instructor lined us up on the “second phase grinder.” We were in off-set rows on the cement facing him. He sat on the podium with a megaphone and said, calmly and in a monotone, “On your backs.”

  That meant we had to lie down as fast as possible on our backs with our feet closest to him. Then, “On your feet.” We jumped back up facing him.

  “On your belly.” We fell down again, this time on our stomachs with our heads closest to him.

  “On your feet. On your belly. On your feet. On your back. On your belly. On your back. On your feet. On your back. On your belly. On your back. On your feet.”

  Each command was calm. Each separated by about three seconds. We did this approximately forever. At first, I was annoyed. And then I was pissed. Then sweat was streaming off my head, chin, and fingers. Then there was a pool of sweat. Then I started to bleed. Two hours into it, it stopped just like it started. The instructor looked at us as if nothing had happened, a bland look on his face.

  He raised the megaphone to his mouth and, just as calmly, said, “Go to chow.”

  Flop around like beached fish for two hours. Run a mile, eat. Run a mile back, find a way to focus on memorizing depth and pressure tables. Nothing to it.

  *

  IN FACT, MOST OF US did pass the tests, qualifying us to go on to another notorious part of BUD/S: “Pool Week.”

  We thought something called Pool Week would be fun. But that was only because, for people smart enough to pass the written dive test, we were extraordinarily stupid. The week started with us running to the pool a little more than a mile from the BUD/S compound. No big deal, except we were running with old school–style “twin 80s” SCUBA tanks, which weigh about sixty pounds.

  Twin 80s have double hoses, each feeding over a shoulder and into a part of the diving gear called a regulator, which has a rubber bit that fits into the diver’s mouth. The right hose is for inhaling and the left for exhaling. It is an archaic method and is only used to screw with the students: These double hoses are easy to tie into knots while the student is diving. You didn’t read that wrong. I’ll explain later.

  To begin, we were taken to the shallow end of the pool and lined up in two columns, one facing the other. While wearing our masks we bit down on the mouthpiece with the air valve turned on. Then we sat down on the pool bottom for our first experience of breathing underwater. Unbeknown to us, we were using the worst of the hoses and actuators. The exhalation tubes on most of the rigs leaked. When we exhaled, water rushed in and fouled our next breath, giving us the sensation of drowning. Because most of us were diving virgins, we had no idea that it shouldn’t feel like this. It felt scary, claustrophobic, as if we were waterboarding ourselves.

  None of this was accidental. The instructors wanted to see how we dealt with the panic. They were screaming and taunting and calling us “pussies” just to add to the stress. If guys stood up to try to get air, they were hauled out of the pool and treated as if they potentially had a gas embolism and later made to sign safety violations and threatened with banishment to the fleet. Technically, an embolism would be possible at a depth of four feet but highly unlikely. They were just beating us up.

  I didn’t stand up, but I still remember the miserable feeling of drowning for about twenty minutes. I managed to figure out how to exhale out of the side of the actuator while spitting out some of the leaking water and swallowing the rest. Others figured it out, too. The whole time I was thinking, “Jesus, people do this for fun?!”

  In truth, the fun was just getting started, and no real fun-lover should miss what was coming at the end of Pool Week—the pool competency test, known as “pool comp.” The cover story for pool comp was that it tested whether a diver could handle a “surf hit” as he dealt with heavy surf. I say that’s a handful of bullshit: If you’re dumb enough to try to breathe compressed gas through the surf zone, you deserve a big air bubble in the brain. Say hi to Darwin for me.

  It won’t surprise you to learn that in reality, pool comp was simply another excuse for instructors to beat the daylights out of the students while also scaring the snot out of them.

  To prepare, we were taught procedures and techniques: If there’s a problem with the breathing apparatus, first reach back and make sure your air is on. If that’s not the issue, you need to take off your bottles—what we called the air tanks—to visually inspect them. Make sure you do it properly: Weight belt comes off first and then is placed across the back of the legs as the student kneels on the bottom. Chest strap is released first, then the waist strap. The bottles are lifted up and over to be checked for knots. If there are knots, untie them. When they’re untied, get some air. Hold your breath and put the bottles back on. Fasten your waist strap first, then your chest strap. Put your weight belt back on and continue with your dive.

  If you can’t untie the knot, you must set the bottles down, look over at your instructor, and give him a thumbs-up to indicate that you want to surface. Once you get the okay, you must put your lips on the pool floor and “kiss the deck,” and then begin a controlled ascent while constantly exhaling. The smooch of the pool bottom is to make certain that students have to surface from at least nine feet down—which means proper exhalation on the way up is necessary to avoid lung issues. I’m sure the instructors also enjoyed making us suck face with rough concrete.

  Once a guy surfaced, he immediately had to yell, “I FEEL FINE!” There was an important safety reason for that: If someone surfaced incorrectly and experienced an embolism, he’d have a hard time pronouncing the letter “F.” It would sound more like an “M.” Or so they told us. Anyway, not saying those words instantly upon surfacing resulted in immediate failure.

  The test, which was on a Friday, required us to swim from one side of the pool to another, back and forth, in the nine-foot section of the pool. We went in alphabetical order, six guys at a time. The rest sat on the side of the pool quite a distance away with their backs turned so they couldn’t see what was happening. I remember sitting there with my bottles on, going through the procedures in my head. About twenty minutes into it, I heard my first “I FEEL FINE!” followed by “So and so … FAIL, get out of the pool!”

  Again, “I FEEL FINE!” … Again, “FAIL, get out of my pool.”

  This went on as they got closer to the “O’s.” Finally, I heard, “O’Neill, get up here.”

  I asked permission to enter the pool and it was granted. I began my swim, back and forth, excited to knock this out and be done with it. Barely a minute into my swim I got crushed. My mask was ripped off my face and my fins were removed roughly. My air was also turned off. I suppose this could happen in the surf zone. I waited for this “simulation” to end as I held my breath. I calmly reached
back and turned my air on. All good. I could barely see without my mask but I could breathe, so I continued my dive by crawling on the floor instead of swimming. Most divers would do that in the ocean, right?

  After a minute of this, I was hit hard again. The regulator was pulled from my mouth and I could sense the instructor tying a knot in the hose. I waited the thirty seconds or so, calmly holding my breath. Once he was gone, I reached back and turned my air on. This made the hoses buoyant; they popped over my head where I could see the damage. The left hose had a major knot in it that I couldn’t untie. The right hose had been knotted, too, but apparently not as badly because the sudden increase in air pressure when I turned the tank back on had forced out the knot. Now it was leaking air, and at least I could breathe, but not without taking in water with every breath. Fortunately I had experienced this feeling of drowning all week and could easily handle swallowing a little water with each breath for the next fifteen minutes. The whole time I was hoping SEAL candidates don’t do in pools what little kids do in pools.

  So far so good and I was far from feeling panic. I continued back and forth for the next fifteen minutes, getting hit hard every now and then. I saw four more knots but I managed to get them all undone by following procedure. Some came undone when I turned my air back on, some didn’t and I had to remove my tanks and untie them manually.

  I got hit a fifth time, I could feel the instructor using his feet and hands on this one. We’d heard from the guys who’d gone before us that when the instructors wanted to make you fail, they’d tie a knot so tight it was impossible to get out. They called this their “whammy knot.” That’s what I feared was happening beside me as the instructor gave my hoses special attention. When he finally finished, I reached back and turned my air on. Nothing. Weight belt off, undo chest strap, undo waist strap, pull off tanks, and inspect. I tried to get even a little air but there was nothing coming out. I tried my best to undo the knot but it wasn’t happening. After holding my breath for about a minute while working the knot, I finally decided that this was it. I turned to the instructor and gave him the signal to surface. He gave me the okay. I kissed the bottom of the pool, turned my head to the side, and began to exhale. I did this all the way to the surface and took a huge breath of California air and then yelled, “I FEEL FINE!”