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has
to become a SEAL. We weren’t fucking
drafted
. Becoming a SEAL is a choice. And what that single softball
question revealed in the heat of battle is that each second we remained in
training was also a choice, which made the entire notion of becoming a
SEAL seem like masochism. It’s voluntary torture. And that makes no sense
at all to the rational mind, which is why those four words unravel so many
men.
The instructors know all of this, of course, which is why they stop yelling
early on. Instead, as the night wore on, Psycho Pete consoled us like a
concerned older brother. He offered us hot soup, a warm shower, blankets,
and a ride back to the barracks. That was the bait he set for quitters to snap
up, and he harvested helmets left and right. He was taking the souls of those
who caved because they couldn’t answer that simple question. I get it.
When it’s only Sunday and you know you’re going to Friday and you’re
already far colder than you’ve ever been, you’re tempted to believe that you
can’t hack it and that nobody can. Married guys were thinking,
I could be at
home, cuddled up to my beautiful wife instead of shivering and suffering
.
Single guys were thinking,
I could be on the hunt for pussy right now
.
It’s tough to ignore that kind of glittering lure, but this was my second lap
through the early stages of BUD/S. I’d tasted the evil of Hell Week as part
of Class 230. I didn’t make it, but I didn’t quit. I was pulled out on a
medical after contracting double pneumonia. I defied doctor’s orders three
times and tried to stay in the fight, but they eventually forced me to the
barracks and rolled me back to day one, week one of Class 231.
I wasn’t all the way healed up from that bout of pneumonia when my
second BUD/S class kicked off. My lungs were still filled with mucus and
each cough shook my chest and sounded like a rake was scraping the inside
of my alveoli. Still, I liked my chances a lot better this time around because
I was prepared, and because I was in a boat crew thick with bad
motherfuckers.
BUD/S boat crews are sorted by height because those are the guys who will
help you carry your boat everywhere you go once Hell Week begins. Size
alone didn’t guarantee your teammates would be tough, however, and our
guys were a crew of square-peg misfits.
There was me, the exterminator who had to drop 100 pounds and take the
ASVAB test twice just to get to SEAL training, only to be rolled back
almost immediately. We also had the late Chris Kyle. You know him as the
deadliest sniper in Navy history. He was so successful, the hajjis in Fallujah
put an $80,000 bounty on his head and he became a living legend among
the Marines he protected as a member of Seal Team Three. He won a Silver
Star and four Bronze Stars for valor, left the military, and wrote a book,
American Sniper
, that became a hit movie starring Bradley fucking Cooper.
But back then he was a simple Texas hayseed rodeo cowboy who barely
said a damn word.
Then there was Bill Brown, aka Freak Brown. Most people just called him
Freak, and he hated it because he’d been treated like one his whole damn
life. In many ways he was the white version of David Goggins. He came up
tough in the river towns of South Jersey. Older kids in the neighborhood
bullied him because of his cleft palate or because he was slow in class,
which is how that nickname stuck. He got into enough fights over it that he
eventually landed in a youth detention center for a six-month stretch. By the
time he was nineteen he was living on his own in the hood, trying to make
ends meet as a gas station attendant. It wasn’t working. He had no coat and
no car. He commuted everywhere on a rusted out ten-speed bike, literally
freezing his balls off. One day after work, he stopped into a Navy
recruitment office because he knew he needed structure and purpose, and
some warm clothes. They told him about the SEALs, and he was intrigued,
but he couldn’t swim. Just like me, he taught himself, and after three
attempts he finally passed the SEAL swim test.
Next thing he knew, Brown was in BUD/S, where that Freak nickname
followed him. He rocked PT and sailed through First Phase, but he wasn’t
nearly as solid in the classroom. Navy SEAL dive training is as tough
intellectually as it is physically, but he scraped by and got within two weeks
of becoming a BUD/S graduate when, in one of his final land warfare
evolutions, he failed re-assembling his weapon in a timed evolution known
as
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