The Operator Read online

  From behind me I heard my instructor yell to the recording instructor, “O’Neill, FAIL. Failure to follow instructions.”

  What?

  “Get out of the fucking pool, O’Neill!”

  I got out of the pool and grabbed my abandoned gear from the diver who’d retrieved it. I sat down, steaming, and listened to more people fail for about an hour. It was my turn again. Same result: Fail.

  I think the instructors intended to be especially hard-ass on a Friday—knowing they could torture us by making us worry all weekend about it. If a student performed flawlessly in every respect, they’d grudgingly give him a pass, but any hesitation, even the slightest slip, equaled failure. By the end of the day, only half the class had passed.

  I knew I’d have another two shots on Monday. If I failed then, I’d get rolled and have to wait in PTRR until the next class started second phase. If I failed with that class, Class 209, I was out and would never be a SEAL.

  From the moment I heard that awful word “fail” echoing across the pool, a loop tape began to run in my head: I must pass this. I can’t get rolled. I need to get through BUD/S on the first attempt!

  This was going to be a lovely fucking weekend.

  *

  WE WERE GIVEN ACCESS TO the gear and the classroom and fully utilized it. On Saturday I practiced nonstop until the sun went down. After, I went to a buddy’s room to watch Heat. It had just come out and everyone wanted to see it. I watched it through to the end. As the credits rolled, I realized I hadn’t the slightest idea what the movie had been about. The entire two hours, I’d been thinking only about pool comp. I eventually did watch Heat again after BUD/S. Damn, that was a great movie. That was the first time Hollywood included “mag changes.” A realistic gunfight for a change.

  So the weekend sucked, especially Sunday night. Sunday nights always sucked at BUD/S. But this Sunday the usual misery was amplified by that lovely loop tape running nonstop. Must … pass … can’t … get … rolled. I felt like an X-Man getting his butt kicked by Magneto.

  Monday was a great deal for the guys who’d passed on Friday. They were assigned their “single hose regulator”—the modern kind recreational divers use—and were working on regular diving in the deep end of the pool, maybe even having … fun—or at least that’s what I was thinking, aching with jealousy as I sat with my back to the pool waiting for my name to be called. I listened as some passed and some failed and then I heard my name called. I walked over and asked permission to enter.

  I drew an instructor who was a notorious dick. I was not excited. We did the same routine: He crushed me, punched the mask off my face, and turned off my air. I got the air on and kept going. He slammed me against the bottom and tied my stuff in knots. We went at it for a solid thirty minutes. I decided that I was not going up until I was about to drown. I went through about eight knots until I got one that was impossible. I worked it for about a full minute and then decided that I couldn’t get it. It was time to surface. I gave the thumbs-up to the instructor and permission was granted. I kissed the deck, exhaled all the way up, slowly, and surfaced. “I FEEL FINE!”

  The instructor didn’t say a word. He tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. He stared at me for a few very long seconds without indicating anything. He didn’t smile, he didn’t frown. He just stared.

  “I should fail you for keeping me down there so long. You untied three of my whammy knots,” he said, then looked up and announced, “O’Neill, pass.”

  It was sad to see the guys who failed twice that day. Three had been in my boat crew. The one who shocked me the most was Dave. He’d been the voice and spiritual leader of the class since Day One. He’d been in a class several months before 208 and gotten hurt before Hell Week. So he’d been rolled into our class. He knew the drill but wasn’t a loudmouth. Okay, so he was a loudmouth but he was a great one. He was a motivator and a true “swim buddy.” He knew all of the instructors’ names and made sure we did, too, when we’d call them out or give them a “Hooyah.” He’d been instrumental in keeping me positive during Hell Week, and I owe my survival in large part to him. I’m sure a bunch of the guys felt the same way.

  On that Monday, he failed pool comp for the fourth time. I remember watching him leave the pool in his brown shirt, shorts, and tanks. The rest of us were sitting there on the opposite end watching. He turned around and yelled, “Good luck, 208!” A true class act. It was predictable, and just, that he ended up graduating with Class 209 and went on to one of the SEAL teams on the West Coast.

  *

  THE EVER-DWINDLING NUMBER OF CLASS 208 students moved on to the actual dive training. At first we’d just swim out on a bearing for a few hundred meters, then surface to see if we were close to where we thought we should be, correct any mistakes, and take a new bearing back to the beach. Soon the dives became a bit more challenging: We’d swim multiple bearings and try to find different “targets,” counting our kicks to measure distances. It was nice to finally be learning some actual Navy SEAL shit.

  Even better, we began diving beneath the undercarriage of big Navy ships, and learned about the assembly and placement of limpet mines that could take out any one of them. Gliding silently under the monstrous keels, past propeller shafts and propellers and rudders that seemed forged for a race of giants, felt surreal, almost magical. I always paid attention to the massive seams of the ship, as well. It’s possible under that massive amount of steel for your compass to lose all sense of magnetic north and spin crazily. If that happens, you find the welding seams of the ship and follow them out from underneath. No one wants to drown while swimming in circles under a bunch of shipmates.

  Doing several of these dives every day would be enough of a workout for most people, but not us. Our SCUBA training was supplemented by the PT, of course, which never stopped. One night the instructors were keeping us up, beating us down until almost midnight. We were desperate to get to bed since we knew we’d be waking up in about four hours. We didn’t dare gripe aloud, but our tormentors looked like they could hear our collective silent groan. One said, “See that hoop over there? If we have anyone in the class who can make a three-pointer, we’ll secure the beating right now, and you can go to bed.”

  I heard myself saying, “I can do it.”

  It had been quite a while since I’d made a free throw, it was late, I was beat, and with all my classmates looking and the stakes so high, it was far more pressure than an arena full of screaming spectators. But what the hell.

  “Get over here then, hotshot. Let’s see what you got.”

  As I walked up to the three-point line, someone in the ranks mumbled, “He played in college!”

  What an asshole. The instructor smiled. “Okay, O’Neill,” he said. “You can shoot this three-pointer but you got to make it on your knees.”

  As I got on my knees, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. I just chucked it up there. What else could I do?

  Nothing but net.

  Despite my lucky shot, our respite was brief and insufficient. Nothing could save us from the most dreaded part of second phase—the 5.5-nautical-mile swim (which works out to more than 6.3 normal people miles).

  We did ours on a Friday. It would be our only evolution of the day and then we’d have the weekend to recover. Thank God. But, as I mentioned, the second-phase instructors didn’t like us. As we were getting our swim brief, the lead instructor announced, “Gents, the currents have shifted today so instead of swimming south to Imperial Beach from here, we’re loading up the buses, driving to IB, and swimming back.”

  He was full of shit because the current never went that way. They just wanted us to suffer, trying to swim over six land miles against the current. As I was imagining creative ways to kill him, he said, “You’ll be conducting the 5.5-mile swim… . I’ll be in one of the safety boats with my sandwiches, my bucket of KFC, and my Cokes conducting the 5.5-mile picnic! I’ll be throwing chicken bones at you the whole way, chumming the water.”
r />   I was laughing. He was a dick, but that was funny.

  “If you think there aren’t great white sharks out there, you’re lying to yourself.”

  I stopped laughing.

  We pulled on wetsuit tops and loaded the bus. It took a long time to get there in a freaking bus going fifty miles an hour. And now we had to swim back. Against the current.

  After we arrived, we lined up in two rows facing our swim buddies. I’d been reunited with my original first-phase buddy, Monte. Monte was then and still is perpetually hilarious. Not this day. I faced him and the ocean. He faced me. I was watching him, thinking, I’ve never seen anyone look more miserable. I’m sure he was thinking exactly the same thing about me. I didn’t like swims. Two nautical miles was plenty. Now we were about to do five and a half.

  Instructor Picnic gave the order and we backed into the water, then started swimming toward Coronado. Did I mention this was in the ocean? It was immediately obvious that we were pushing against a strong current. This was going to be a long-ass day. All I remember is kick, stroke, glide, breath, kick, stroke, glide. The beach was concave so, rather than follow it and have to travel farther, we headed out into the ocean on a beeline for the compound. Every swim pair did this and the tactic spread us all way out. There weren’t nearly enough safety boats to monitor us all. At one point we stopped and Monte, a California surfer, said, “Bro, we’re like three miles out to sea.”

  I had my back to the beach at this point so I turned and looked. He wasn’t lying. There were no boats near us and no other pairs, either. We were hungry and thirsty, but had nothing. “This sucks. Let’s go.”

  We swam on. Like we had a choice. Five and a half hours into it we were finally close to the surf zone and swimming up the beach. Monte and I had switched sides a mile or so back and now I was facing the beach, and guiding us along it. We were opposite the “O” course so we knew that we only had a couple of hundred meters to go. At this point I could see a big commotion on the beach. An officer in his khaki uniform was screaming at us—all of us. A few instructors were yelling through bullhorns for us to get out of the water. “What the hell?”

  The officer was the XO of the entire command. A man of his exalted rank shouldn’t have been out there and certainly shouldn’t have been yelling. Something had happened. We assumed a medical emergency so we hauled ass to the beach. I can still remember the feeling of my feet touching sand in the shallows. Finally! Only two pairs had finished the course. We were two hundred meters shy, but I didn’t care. It was over, we were out, and it was the weekend.

  We later learned that the XO had discovered the instructors had purposely made us swim against the current. He knew that would put us dangerously close to the hard limit of the human body’s ability to withstand exposure to cold water. Plus, we were so spread out that if anyone went down, he wouldn’t have been pulled out in time. It was a very dangerous stunt they’d pulled, and I’m sure the instructor staff got an earful from the boss. We got some satisfaction imagining that.

  I was in a great mood all weekend. Now that the 5.5-mile swim was behind me, there was nothing to prevent me from becoming a Navy SEAL.

  My underage buddies and I hit Tijuana that weekend, and hit it hard. We came back to work a little poorer and a lot hungover, anticipating an easy day in the classroom. We sat at our desks Monday morning, still laughing at our buddy Jimmy, whom we’d dragged back across the border shit-faced and minus his flip-flops. He’s half Asian and has brown skin, so we ended up spending more than a few minutes explaining to the border patrol that he was in the US Navy, not a barefoot illegal.

  Just then one of the instructors came running in. He’d obviously been present for the “earful” from the boss about Friday’s aborted swim. He said, “Classes are canceled for the day!”

  Say what?

  “Since not all of you finished the mandatory 5.5-mile swim on Friday,” he said, “we’re doing it again right now!”

  Oh, fuck me.

  It couldn’t be true.

  But it was. And there was more.

  “This time, gents, we’re not sure of the current,” he said. “So we’re going to swim halfway to Imperial Beach and then back!”

  What a dick! They knew damn well, again, which way it was going. They could have let us swim with the current and be done in a few hours. That wasn’t going to be the case and it was time to get our rubber on.

  Once again I found myself in formation, face-to-face with Monte and the water. Didn’t we just fucking do this? I remember how disheartened he looked. His hood was a bit tight so it made his pouty face look chubby. As I looked him over, I got nervous. Where an emergency flare should have been fastened to the end of a big-ass knife on his cargo belt, he’d taped instead a king-size Snickers bar. I laughed my ass off, but said, “Dude, if they see that we’re both fucked!”

  Monte said, “Bro, if you don’t say anything, I’ll split it with you!”

  It was insane! After all we’d been through, was I really going to risk getting ripped from BUD/S over two thousand calories of chocolaty peanutty goodness?

  Why, yes, I was.

  Luckily for us, the instructors were so freaked about almost getting fired, they never noticed. The swim was miserable, the water was cold, the whole thing sucked again. Except for my portion of the Snickers at the halfway point. That was delicious.

  To this day, I think making us do the 5.5-mile swim for a second time was the meanest thing anyone has ever done to me, with the possible exception of terrorists shooting at and trying to blow me up. That shit was definitely mean. But we did the swim for a second time and, this time, we all finished. I was relieved. I thought that would be the last hard thing we did, but only because I never learn.

  CHAPTER SIX

  San Clemente Island is a twenty-one-mile-long apostrophe of land, essentially the ridge line of an underwater mountain thrusting nearly two thousand feet above the Pacific seventy-eight miles west and slightly north of San Diego. It’s officially uninhabited, and owned in its entirety by the Navy. The only development is the Naval Special Warfare compound. This is where SEAL training reaches its climax. If it weren’t for the live ordnance frequently exploding in its vicinity, it would be an excellent place for a camping trip. The surrounding water is the clearest I’ve seen, a shimmery blue-green that resembles a cut and polished aquamarine gemstone. I could see down to a depth of twenty-five feet, even at night. There are lobsters and fish everywhere. The whole coastal area is a breeding ground for great white sharks, notorious for occasionally mistaking humans in wetsuits for sea lions, their favorite cuisine. It wasn’t uncommon for half of a four-hundred-pound sea lion to wash up on the beach where we trained.

  Still, shark attacks are extremely rare, and no SEAL has ever been bitten by a shark. Swims go on even when fins are spotted. The manual’s only advice is “use caution.” But there’s another apex predator on the island, as well—SEAL instructors. Because this small plot of land is far removed from the Coronado command structure, the instructors feel they have something close to free rein. They have a motto for the last forty days of training: “No one can hear you scream.” There are no days off and nothing else for the instructors to do except relentlessly torment trainees.

  We all thought that Phase Three of training would be fun because we’d finally get to play with some of the Navy’s toys. The course covered land warfare tactics, weapons training, and demolition. And some of it was fun. Before we got to the island we hit Naval shooting ranges in San Diego and learned land navigation at Mount Laguna on a multiday “camping” trip. Both experiences were challenging in an entertaining way, especially since we were all on an extended high from the knowledge that we’d almost certainly become SEALs.

  The fun stopped at San Clemente Island.

  We landed on the island in the early evening and split up into teams. Each team had a room with bunk beds. Once we put our gear away, we were brought into the classroom for a lesson the instructors said would
feature “shark appreciation,” followed by a “shark appreciation swim.” At night.

  We watched about two hours of the best of Shark Week and then were told to get our wetsuits on for a swim in the bay. Usually swim pairs spread out and guys race to win. This swim was different: We all swam huddled close together in beehive formation. I guess we were hoping for safety in numbers. In retrospect, that might have been counterproductive, inasmuch as we resembled a large, poorly swimming school of tasty-looking fish. It was a relief to get out of the water.

  The next time we went swimming, we were packing, loaded down with haversacks full of C-4. Even the great whites knew better than to fuck with us. We practiced blowing up WWII-style obstacles old-school frogman style by holding our breath, free diving down, and tying as much boom as possible to the obstacle before returning to the surface for air. It was up to another two pairs to swim down with a wheel of detonation cord. We’d do practice burns to see how long the cord took to burn down, calculate the delay we wanted, then measure out the proper amount. After it was wired and set, we lit the fuse and everyone got clear to watch the show. Seeing several hundred pounds of C-4 going off underwater for the first time is a thrill. Water doesn’t compress, so it shoots several hundred feet in the air. You see the plume, then you hear the boom.

  We blew shit up underwater for a few weeks, then moved on to weapons and small unit tactics. I’m aware that this still sounds like fun, but remember, we were miles away from humanity, and at the mercy of inhuman SEAL instructors. We quickly understood that their terror would reign for forty days and forty nights. There was no way we were going to get a day off. With no distractions, the instructors got bored. When they got bored, we got beat. Every day we did pull-ups in full gear and had to sprint up a mountain we called “frog hill”—just to get to breakfast. After all we’d been through, though, the PT stuff was more annoying than painful. Even the fourteen-mile run was more a scenic island tour than a form of torture.