Marcus luttrell

 
“Too slow!”
bellowed Schulz. “Much too slow...
drop!
” 
Schulz’s instructors roamed among us, berating us, yelling, harassing us as we sweated and 
strained to make the push-ups...
“Like a goddamned fairy.” “Get a grip on yourself.” “For 
Christ’s sake, look as if you mean it.” “C’mon, let’s go! Go! Go!” “You sure you wanna be 
here? You wanna quit right now?”
I learned in the next few minutes there was a sharp difference between “get wet and sandy” and 
just plain “get wet.” Parked at the side of the grinder were two of the inflatable boats, laden to 
the gunwales with ice and water. “Get wet” meant plunge over the bow, under the water, under 

---

the rubber seat struts, and out to the other side. Five seconds, in the dark, in the ice, under the 
water. A killer whale would have begged for mercy. 
Now, I’d been cold before, in the freakin’ Pacific, right? But the water in that little boat would 
have frozen the balls off a brass monkey. I came out of there almost blue with the cold, ice in my 
hair, and blundered my way to my little frogman’s marker. At least I’d gotten rid of the sand, and 
so had everyone else. Two instructors were going down the lines with freezing cold power hoses, 
spraying everyone from the head down. 
By 0600 I had counted out more than 450 push-ups. And there were more, I just couldn’t count 
anymore. I’d also done more than fifty sit-ups. We were ordered from one exercise to another. 
Guys who were judged to be slacking were ordered to throw in a set of flutter kicks. 
The result of this was pure chaos. Some guys couldn’t keep up, others were doing push-ups when 
they’d been ordered to do sit-ups, men were falling, hitting the ground facedown. In the end, half 
of us didn’t know where the hell we were or what we were supposed to be doing. I just kept 
going, doing my absolute best, through the roars of abuse and the flying spray of the power 
hoses: push-ups, sit-ups, screwups. It was now all the same to me. Every muscle in my body 
ached to hell, especially those in my stomach and arms. 
And finally Schulz offered us mercy and a quiet drink. 
“Hydrate!”
he yelled with that Old 
World charm that came so naturally to him, and we all reached for our canteens and chugged 
away. 
“
Canteens down!
” bellowed Schulz, a tone of pained outrage in his voice. “
Now push ’em out!
” 
Oh, yes. Of course. I’d forgotten all about that. I’d just had a nine-second break. Down we all 
dropped again and went back to work with the last remnants of our strength, counting the push-
ups. We only did twenty that time. Schulz must have been seized by an attack of conscience.
 
“Get in the surf!”
he bawled. 
“Right now!”
We floundered to the beach and darn near fell into the surf. We were now so hot, the cold didn’t 
even matter. Much. And when we splashed back to the beach, Chief Schulz was there, ranting 
and yelling for us to form up and run the mile to the chow hall. 
“Get moving,” he added. “We don’t have much time.” 
When we arrived, I was just about dead on my feet. I didn’t think I had the energy to chew a 
soft-boiled egg. We walked into that chow hall like Napoleon’s army on the retreat from 
Moscow, wet, bedraggled, exhausted, out of breath, too hungry to eat, too battered to care. 
It was, of course, all by design. This was not some kind of crazed Chinese fire drill arranged by 
the instructors. This was a deadly serious assessment of their charges, a method used to find out, 
in the hardest possible way, who really wanted to do this, who really cared enough to go through 
with it, who could face the next four weeks before Hell Week, when things got seriously tough. 
It was designed to compel us to reassess our commitment. Could we really take this punishment? 
Ninety-eight of us had formed up on the grinder two hours earlier. Only sixty-six of us made it 
through breakfast. 

---

And when that ended, we were still soaked, boots, long pants, and T-shirts. And once more we 
set off for the beach, accompanied by an instructor who showed up from nowhere, running 
alongside us, shouting for us to get moving. We had been told what awaited us. A four-mile run 
along the beach, going south, two down and two back. Thirty-two minutes on the stopwatch was 
allowed, and God help anyone who could not run eight-minute miles through the sand. 
I was afraid of this, because I knew I was not a real fast runner, and I psyched myself up for a 
maximum effort. I seem to have spent my whole life doing that. And when we arrived at the 
beach, I knew I would need that effort. There could not have been a worse time to make the run. 
The tide was almost full, still running in, so there was no appreciable width of drying hard sand. 
This meant running in either shallow water or very soft sand, both of which were a complete 
nuisance to a runner. 
Our instructor Chief Ken Taylor lined us up and warned us darkly of the horrors to come if 
thirty-two minutes proved to be beyond some of us. And sent us away, with the sun now 
climbing out of the Pacific to our right. I picked the line I would run, right along the high point 
of the tide, where the waters first receded and left a slim strip of hard sand. This meant I’d be 
splashing some of the time, but only in the shallowest surf foam, and that was a whole lot better 
than the deep sand that stretched to my left. 
Trouble was, I had to stick to this line, because my boots would be permanently wet and if I 
strayed up the beach, I’d have half a pound of sand stuck to each one. I did not think I could lay 
up with the leaders, but I thought I could hang in there in the group right behind them. So I put 
my head down, watched the tide line stretching in front of me, and pounded my way forward, 
staying right on the hardest wet sand. 
The first two miles were not that awful. I was up there in the first half of the class, and I was not 
feeling too bad. On the way back, though, I was flagging. I glanced around and I could see 
everyone else was also looking really tired. And right then I decided to hit it. I turned up the gas 
and thumped my way forward. 
The tide had turned during the first twenty minutes and there was just a slight width of wet sand 
that was no longer being washed by the ocean. I hit this with every stride, running until I thought 
I’d drop. Every time I caught a guy, I treated it as a personal challenge and pulled past him, 
finally clocking a time well inside thirty minutes, which wasn’t half bad for a packhorse. 
I forget who the winner was, probably some hickory-tough farm boy petty officer, but he was a 
couple of minutes better than I was. Anyway, the guys who made the time were sent up into the 
soft sand to rest and recover. 
There were about eighteen guys outside thirty-two minutes, and one by one they were told, 
“Drop!”
Then start pushing ’em out. Most of them were on their knees with exhaustion, and that 
kinda saved them a step in the next evolution, which was a bear crawl straight into the Pacific, 
directly into the incoming surf. Instructor Taylor had them go in deep, until the freezing cold 
water was up to their necks. 
They were kept there for twenty minutes, very carefully timed, I now know, to make sure no one 
developed hypothermia. Taylor and his men even had a pinpoint-accurate chart that showed 

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precisely how long a man could stand that degree of cold. And one by one they were called out 
and given the most stupendous hard time for failing to achieve the thirty-two-minute deadline. 
I understand some of them may have just given up, and others just could not go any faster. But 
those instructors had a fair idea of what was going on, and on this, the first day of BUD/S 
training, they were ruthless. 
As those poor guys came out of the surf, the rest of us were now doing regular push-ups, and 
since this was now second nature to me, I looked up to see the fate of the slow guys. Chief 
Taylor, the Genghis Khan of the beach gods, ordered these half-dead, half-drowned, half-frozen 
guys to lie on their backs, their heads and shoulders in and under the water with the rhythm of 
the waves. And he made them do flutter kicks. There were guys choking and spluttering and 
coughing and kicking and God knows what else. 
And then, only then, did Chief Taylor release them, and I remember, vividly, him yelling out to 
them that we, dry and doing our push-ups up the beach, were winners, whereas they, the 
slowpokes, were 
losers!
Then he told them they better start taking this seriously or they would be 
out of here. “Those guys up there, taking it easy, they paid the full price,” he yelled. “Right up 
front. You did not. You failed. And for guys like you there’s a bigger price to pay, understand 
me?” 
He knew this was shockingly unfair, because some of them had been doing their genuine best. 
But he had to find out for certain. Who believed they could improve? Who was determined to 
stay? And who was halfway out the door already? 
Next evolution: log PT, brand-new to all of us. We lined up wearing fatigues and soft hats, 
seven-man boat crews, standing right by our logs, each of which was eight feet long and a foot in 
diameter. I can’t remember the weight, but it equaled that of a small guy, say 150 to 160 pounds. 
Heavy, right? I was just moving into packhorse mode when the instructor called out, “Go get wet 
and sandy.” All in our nice dry clothes, we charged once more toward the surf, up and over a 
sand dune, and down into the water. We rushed out of the waves and back up the sand dune, 
rolled down the other side, then stood up like the lost company from the U.S. Navy’s Sandcastle 
Platoon. 
Then he told us to get our logs wet and sandy. So we heaved them up, waist high, and hauled 
them up the sand dune. We ran down the other side, dumped the goddamned log in the ocean, 
pulled it out, went back up the sand dune, and rolled it down the other side. 
The crew next to us somehow managed to drop their log on the downward slope.