Marcus luttrell

“Hooyah! Governor Ventura!”
Then Instructor Burns called us to order and said, “Gentlemen, for the rest of your lives there 
will be setbacks. But they won’t affect you like they will affect other people. Because you have 
done something very few are ever called upon to achieve. This week will live with you for all of 
your lives. Not one of you will ever forget it. And it means one thing above all else. If you can 
take Hell Week and beat it, you can do any damn thing in the world.” 
I can’t pretend the actual words are accurate in my memory. But the sentiment is precise. Those 
words signify exactly what Instructor Joe Burns meant, and how he said it. 
And it affected us all, deeply. We raised our tired voices, and the shout split the noontime air 
above that beach in Coronado.
 
“Hooyah, Instructor Burns!”
we bellowed. And did we ever mean it. 
The SEAL commanders and chiefs stepped forward and took each one of us by the hand, saying, 
“Congratulations,” and offering words of encouragement about the future, telling us to be sure 
and contact their personal teams once we were through. 
Tell the truth, it was all a bit of a blur for me. I can’t really recall who invited me to join what. 
But one thing remains very clear in my mind. I shook the hand of the great SEAL warrior Joe 
Maguire, and he had a warm word for me. And thus far in my life, there had been no greater 
honor than that. 
We probably devoured a world-record amount of food that weekend. Appetites returned and then 
accelerated as our stomachs grew more used to big-sized meals. We still had three weeks to go in 
first phase, but nothing compared to Hell Week. We were perfecting techniques in hydrology, 
learning tide levels and demographics of the ocean floor. That’s real SEAL stuff, priceless to the 

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Marines. While they’re planning a landing, we’re in there early, moving fast, checking out the 
place in secret, telling ’em what to expect. 
There were only thirty-two members of the original class left now, mostly because of injury or 
illness sustained during Hell Week. But they’d been joined by others, rollbacks from other 
classes who’d been permitted another go. 
This applied to me, because I had been on an enforced break when I had my broken femur. And 
so when I rejoined for phase two, I was in Class 228. We began in the diving phase, conducted in 
the water, mostly under it. We learned how to use scuba tanks, how to dump them and get ’em 
back on again, how to swap them over with a buddy without coming to the surface. This is 
difficult, but we had to master it before we could take the major pool competency test. 
I failed my pool competency, like a whole lot of others. This test is a royal bastard. You swim 
down to the bottom of the pool with twin eighty-pound scuba tanks on your back, a couple of 
instructors harassing you. You are not allowed to put a foot down and kick to the surface. If you 
do, you’ve failed, and that’s the end of it. 
First thing these guys do is rip off your mask, then your mouthpiece, and you have to hold your 
breath real quick. You fight to get the mouthpiece back in, then they unhook your airline intake, 
and you have to get that back in real fast, groping around over your shoulder, behind your back. 
Somehow you find yourself able to breathe in pure oxygen, but the only way you can breathe out 
is through your nose. A lot of guys find the cascade of bubbles across their faces extremely 
disconcerting. Then the instructors disconnect your airline completely and put a knot in it. And 
you 
must
try to get your inhalation and exhalation lines reconnected. If you don’t or can’t even 
try, you’re gone. You need a good lungful of air before this starts, then you need to feel your way 
blind to the knot in the line behind your back and start unraveling it. You can more or less tell by 
the feel if it’s going to be impossible, what the instructors call a whammy. Then you run the flat 
edge of your hand across your throat and give the instructor the thumbs-up. That means “I’m 
never going to get that knot undone, permission to go to the surface.” At that point, they cease 
holding you down and let you go up. But you better be right in your assessment of that knot. 
In my case, I decided too hastily that the knot in my line was impossible, gave them the signal, 
ditched my tanks over my shoulder, and floated up to the surface. But the instructors decided the 
knot was nothing like impossible and that I had bailed out of a dangerous situation. Failed. 
I had to go and sit in a line in front of the poolside wall. It would have been a line of shame, 
except there were so many of us. I was instructed to take the test again, and I did not make the 
mistake the second time. Undid the sonofabitch knot and passed pool comp. 
Several of my longtime comrades failed, and I felt quite sad. Except you can’t be a SEAL if you 
can’t keep your nerve underwater. As one of the instructors said to me that week, “See that guy 
in some kind of a panic over there? There’s confusion written all over him. You might have your 
life in his hands one day, Marcus, and we cannot, will not, allow that to happen.” 
Pool comp is the hardest one of all to pass, just because we all spent so much time in the water 
and right now had to prove we had the potential to be true SEALs, guys to whom the water was 
always a sanctuary. 
It must not be a threat or an obstacle but a place where we alone could survive. Some of the 
instructors had known many of us for a long time and desperately wanted us to pass. But the 

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slightest sign of weakness in pool competency, and they wouldn’t take the chance. 
Those of us who did stay moved on to phase three. With a few rollbacks coming in, we were 
twenty-one in number. It was winter now in the Northern Hemisphere, early February, and we 
prepared for the hard slog of the land warfare course. That’s where they turn us into navy 
commandos. 
This is formally called Demolitions and Tactics, and the training is as strict and unrelenting as 
anything we had so far encountered. It’s a known fact that phase three instructors are the fittest 
men in Coronado, and it took us little time to find out why. Even the opening speech by our new 
proctor was edged with dire warnings. 
His name was Instructor Eric Hall, a veteran of six SEAL combat platoons, and before we even 
started on Friday afternoon, he laid it right on the line. “We don’t put up with people who feel 
sorry for themselves. Any problems with drugs or alcohol, you’re gone. There’s four bars around 
here that guys from the teams sometimes visit. Stay the hell out of all of ’em, hear me? Anyone 
lies, cheats, or steals, you’re done, because that’s not tolerated here. Just so we’re clear, 
gentlemen.” 
He reminded us it was a ten-week course and we weren’t that far from graduation. He told us 
where we’d be. Five weeks right here at the center, with days at the land navigation training area 
in La Posta. There would be four days at Camp Pendleton on the shooting ranges. That’s the 
125,000-acre Marine Corps base between Los Angeles and San Diego. We would finish at San 
Clemente Island, known to SEALs as the Rock and the main site for more advanced shooting 
and tactics, demolitions, and field training. 
Eric Hall finished with a characteristic flourish. “Give me a hundred and ten percent at all times 
— and don’t blow it by doing something stupid.” 
Thus we went at it again for another two and a half months, heading first for the group one 
mountain training facility, three thousand feet up in the rough, jagged Laguna Mountains at La 
Posta, eighty miles east of San Diego. That’s where they taught us stealth, camouflage, and 
patrolling, the essential field craft of the commando. The terrain was really rough, hard to climb, 
steep, and demanding. Sometimes we didn’t make it back to barracks at night and had to sleep 
outside in the wild country. 
They taught us how to navigate across the land with maps and compass. At the end of the week, 
we all passed the basic courses, three-mile journeys conducted in pairs across the mountains. 
Then we headed back to the center to prepare for Camp Pen-dle-ton, where we would undergo 
our first intensive courses in weaponry. 
No time was lost. We were out there with submachine guns, rifles, and pistols, training for the 
not-too-distant days when we would go into combat armed with the M4 rifle, the principal SEAL 
weapon of war. 
First thing was safety. And we all had to learn by heart the four critical rules: 
1. Consider all weapons to be loaded at all times. 

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2. Never point a weapon at anything you do not want to put a bullet through. 
3. Never put your finger on the trigger unless you want to shoot. 
4. Know your target and what’s behind it. 
They kept us out on the shooting range for hours. In between times we had to dismantle and 
assemble machine guns and the M4, all under the eyes of instructors who timed us with 
stopwatches. And the brutal regime of fitness never wavered. It was harder than second phase, 
because now we had to run carrying heavy packs, ammunition, and guns. 
We also had a couple of weeks at the center to study high explosives and demolition. This mostly 
involved straightforward TNT and plastic, with various firing assemblies. The practical work 
happened only on the island of San Clemente. And before we got to do that, we had another 
rigorous training schedule to complete, including one fourteen-mile run along the beach and 
back. 
This was the first time we had run any race without being wet and probably sandy. Just imagine, 
dry shorts and running shoes. We floated along, not a care in the world. 
It was mid-March before we decamped to San Clemente for four weeks of training, long hours, 
seven days a week until we finished. This rugged moonscape of an island is situated off the 
California coast, sixty miles west of San Diego, across the Gulf of Santa Catalina. 
For almost fifty years, the U.S. Navy has been in command here, using the place as an extensive 
training area. There are no civilians, but parts of the island are an important wildlife sanctuary. 
There are lots of rare birds and California sea lions, who don’t seem to care about violent 
explosions, shells, and naval air landings. Up in the northeast, right on the coast, you find 
SEALs. 
And there we learned the rudiments of fast and accurate combat shooting, the swift changing of 
magazines, expert marksmanship. We were introduced to the deadly serious business of 
assaulting an enemy position and taught how to lay down covering fire. Slowly, then faster, first 
in daylight, then through the night. We were schooled in all the aspects of modern warfare we 
would one day need in Iraq or Afghanistan — ambushes, structure searches, handling prisoners, 
planning raids. This is where we got down to all the serious techniques of reconnaissance. 
We moved on to really heavy demolition, setting off charges on a grand scale, then hand 
grenades, then rockets, and generally causing major explosions and practicing until we 
demonstrated a modicum of expertise. 
Our field training tasks were tough, combat mission simulations. We paddled the boats to within 
a few hundred yards of the shore and dropped anchor. From that holding area, we sent in the 
scout recon guys, who swam to the beach, checked the place out, and signaled the boats to bring 
us in. This was strict OTB (over the beach), and we hit the sand running, burrowing into hides 
just beyond the high-water mark. This is where SEALs are traditionally at their most vulnerable, 
and the instructors watch like hawks for mistakes, signs that will betray the squad. 

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We practiced these beach landings all through the nights, fighting our way out of the water with 
full combat gear and weapons. And at the end of the fourth week we all passed, every one of the 
twenty trainees who had arrived on the island. We would all graduate from BUD/S. 
I asked one of our instructors if this was in any way unusual. His reply was simple. “Marcus,” he 
said, “when you’re training the best of the best, nothing’s unusual. And all the BUD/S instructors 
want the very best for you.” 
They gave us a couple of weeks’ leave after graduation, and thereafter for me it was high-density 
education. First jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they turned me into a paratrooper. 
I spent three weeks jumping out of towers and then out of a C-130, from which we all had to 
make five jumps. 
That aircraft is a hell of a noisy place, and the first jump can be a bit unnerving. But the person in 
front of me was a girl from West Point, and she dived out of that door like Superwoman. I 
remember thinking,