Psycho’s threats were spookier when he delivered
them in a relaxed tone
like that, but there were plenty of times when his eyes went dark, his brow
twisted, the blood rushed to his face, and he unleashed a scream that built
from the tips of his toes to the crown of his bald head. An hour into Hell
Week, he knelt down, pressed his face within an inch of my own while I
finished another set of push-ups, and let loose.
“Hit
the surf, you miserable fucking turds!”
We’d been in BUD/S for nearly three weeks by then, and we’d raced up and
over the fifteen-foot berm that divided the beach from the cinderblock
sprawl of offices, locker rooms, barracks, and classrooms that is the BUD/S
compound plenty of times. Usually to lie back in the shallows, fully
dressed, then roll in the sand—until we were covered in sand from head to
toe—before charging back to the Grinder, dripping
heavy with salt water
and sand, which ramped up the degree of difficulty on the pull-up bar. That
ritual was called getting wet and sandy, and they wanted sand in our ears,
up our noses, and in every orifice of our body, but this time we were on the
verge of something called surf torture, which is a special kind of beast.
As instructed, we charged into the surf screaming like
senseis
. Fully
clothed, arms linked, we waded into the impact zone. The surf was angry
that moonless night, nearly head high, and the waves were rolling thunder
that barreled and foamed in sets of three and four. Cold water shriveled our
balls and swiped the breath from our lungs as the waves thrashed us.
This was early May, and in the spring the ocean off Coronado ranges from
59–63 degrees. We bobbed up and down as one, a pearl strand of floating
heads scanning the horizon for any hint of swell we prayed we’d see
coming before it towed us under. The surfers
in our crew detected doom
first and called out the waves so we could duck dive just in time. After ten
minutes or so, Psycho ordered us back to land. On the verge of
hypothermia, we scrambled from the surf zone and stood at attention, while
being checked by the doctor for hypothermia. That cycle would continue to
repeat itself. The sky was smeared orange and red. The temperature
dropped sharply as night loomed close.
“Say goodbye to the sun, gents,” SBG said. He made us wave at the setting
sun. A symbolic acknowledgement of an inconvenient truth. We were about
to freeze our natural asses off.
After an hour, we fell back into our six-man boat crews, and stood nut to
butt, huddling tight to get warm, but it was futile.
Bones were rattling up
and down that beach. Guys were jackhammering and sniffling, a physical
state revealing the quaking conditions of splintering minds, which were just
now coming to grips with the reality that this shit had only just begun.
Even on the hardest days of First Phase prior to Hell Week, when the sheer
volume of rope climbs and push-ups,
pull-ups, and flutter kicks crushes
your spirit, you can find a way out. Because you know that no matter how
much it sucks, you’ll head home that night, meet friends for dinner, see a
movie, maybe get some pussy, and sleep in your own bed. The point is,
even on miserable days you can fixate on an escape from hell that’s real.
Hell Week offers no such love. Especially on day one, when an hour in they
had us standing, linking arms, facing the Pacific Ocean, wading in and out
of the surf for hours. In between we were gifted soft sand sprints to warm
up. Usually they had us carry our rigid inflatable boat or a log overhead, but
the warmth,
if it ever arrived, was always short-lived because every ten
minutes they rotated us back into the water.
The clock ticked slowly that first night as the cold seeped in, colonizing our
marrow so thoroughly the runs stopped doing any good. There would be no
more bombs, no more shooting, and very little yelling. Instead, an eerie
quiet expanded and deadened our spirit.
In the ocean, all any of us could
hear were the waves going overhead, the seawater we accidentally
swallowed
roiling in our guts, and our own teeth chattering.
When you’re that cold and stressed, the mind cannot comprehend the next
120-plus hours. Five and a half days without sleep cannot be broken up into
small pieces. There is no way to systematically attack it, which is why
every single person who has ever tried to become a SEAL has asked
himself one simple question during their first dose of surf torture:
“Why am I here?”
Those innocuous words bubbled up in our spinning minds each time we got
sucked under
a monster wave at midnight, when we were already borderline
hypothermic. Because nobody
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