|
T
RAINING
W
e were put on immediate standby, but it would turn out that we
weren’t needed in Afghanistan or anywhere else at that moment.
My platoon would have to wait roughly a year before we got into
action, and when we did, it would be against Saddam Hussein, not
Osama bin Laden.
There’s a lot of confusion in the civilian world about SEALs and
our mission. Most people think we’re strictly sea-based
commandos, meaning that we always operate off ships, and hit
targets on the water or the immediate coastline.
Admittedly, a fair amount of our work involves things at
sea
��
we are in the Navy, after all. And from a historical
perspective, as briefly mentioned earlier, SEALs trace their origins
to the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs.
Established during World War II, UDT frogmen were responsible
for reconning beaches before they were hit, and they trained for a
variety of other waterborne tasks, such as infiltrating harbors and
planting limpet mines on enemy ships. They were the mean, bad-ass
combat divers of World War II and the postwar era, and SEALs
are proud to carry on in their wake.
But as the UDT mission expanded, the Navy recognized that the
need for special operations didn’t end at the beach line. As new
units called SEALs were formed and trained for this expanded
mission, they came to replace the older UDT units.
While “land” may be the final word in the SEAL acronym, it’s
hardly the last thing we do. Every special operations unit in the U.S.
military has its own specialty. There’s a lot of overlap in our training,
and the range of our missions is similar in many respects. But each
branch has its own expertise. Army Special Forces—also known as
SF—does an excellent job training foreign forces, both in
conventional and unconventional warfare. Army Rangers are a big
assault force—if you want a large target, say an airfield, taken
down, that’s their thing. Air Force special operators—parajumpers
—excel at pulling people out of the shit.
Among our specialties are DAs.
DA stands for “direct action.” A direct-action mission is a very
short, quick strike against a small but high-value target. You might
think of it as a surgical strike against the enemy. In a practical sense,
it could range from anything like an attack on a key bridge behind
enemy lines to a raid on a terrorist hideout to arrest a bomb maker
—a “snatch and grab,” as some call it. While those are very
different missions, the idea is the same: strike hard and fast before
the enemy knows what’s going on.
After 9/11, SEALs began training to deal with the places Islamic
terrorists were most likely to be located—Afghanistan number one,
and then the Middle East and Africa. We still did all the things a
SEAL is supposed to do—diving, jumping out of planes, taking
down ships, etc. But there was more emphasis on land warfare
during our workup than there traditionally had been in the past.
There was debate about this shift far above my pay grade. Some
people wanted to limit SEALs to ten miles inland. Nobody asked
my opinion, but as far as I’m concerned, there shouldn’t be any
limits. Personally, I’m just as happy to stay out of the water, but
that’s beside the point. Let me do what I’m trained to do wherever
it needs to be done.
The training, most of it anyway, was fun, even when it was a
kick in the balls. We dove, we went into the desert, we worked in
the mountains. We even got water-boarded and gassed.
Everybody gets water-boarded during training. The idea is to
prepare you in case you’re captured. The instructors tortured us as
hard as they could, tying us up and pounding on us, just short of
permanently damaging us. They say each of us has a breaking point,
and that prisoners eventually give in. But I would have done my best
to make them kill me before I gave up secrets.
Gas training was another kick. Basically, you get hit with CS gas
and have to fight through it. CS gas is “captor spray” or tear gas—
the active ingredient is 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, for all of you
chemistry majors. We thought of it as “cough and spit,” because
that’s the best way to deal with it. You learn during training to let
your eyes run; the worst thing to do is rub them. You’re going to get
snotty and you’re going to be coughing and crying, but you can still
shoot your weapon and fight through it. That’s the point of the
exercise.
We went up to Kodiak, Alaska, where we did a land navigation
course. It wasn’t the height of winter, but there was still so much
snow on the ground that we had to put on snowshoes. We started
with basic instruction on keeping warm—layering up, etc.—and
learned about things like snow shelters. One of the important points
of this training, which applied everywhere, was learning how to
conserve weight in the field. You have to figure out whether it’s
more important to be lighter and more mobile, or to have more
ammunition and body armor.
I prefer lightness and speed. I count ounces when we go out, not
pounds. The lighter you are, the more mobile you become. The little
bastards out there are faster than hell; you need every advantage
you can get on them.
The training was pretty competitive. We found out at one point
that the best platoon in the Team would be shipped out to
Afghanistan. Training picked up from that point on. It was a fierce
competition, and not just out on the training range. The officers
were backstabbing each other. They’d go to the CO and dime each
other out:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
