SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (10 page)

“It’s OK, man. Pee here.”

He urinated on my hands.

“Oh, thanks, buddy.” The warmth felt so good.

Most people think it’s just gross—they’ve obviously never been
really
cold.

*   *   *

Wednesday night—halfway through Hell Week—was the one time I thought about quitting. The instructors wasted no time beginning Lyon’s Lope, named after a Vietnam SEAL. We paddled our black inflatable boat about 250 yards out to pylons in San Diego Bay, turned the boat upside down, then right side up (called “dump boat”), paddled back to shore, ran half a mile on land carrying only our paddles, tossed our paddles into the back of a truck, sat in the bay to form a human centipede, hand-paddled 400 yards, ran 600 yards, grabbed our paddles and used them to centipede-paddle 400 yards, grabbed our boats, and boat-paddled out to the pylons, then back to shore. We all had Stage Two hypothermia. Stage One is mild to strong shivering with numbness in the hands—most people have experienced this level of hypothermia. Stage Two is violent shivering with mild confusion and stumbling. In Stage Three, the core body temperature drops below 90 degrees, shivering stops, and a person becomes a babbling, bumbling idiot. There is no Stage Four—only death. The instructors calculated air and water temperatures along with how long we stayed in the water in order to make us as cold as possible without causing permanent damage or killing us.

It was standing room only at the bell. My classmates rang it like Coronado was on fire. The instructors had backed up ambulances and opened the doors. Inside sat my former classmates wrapped up in wool blankets drinking hot chocolate. Instructor Stoneclam said, “Come here, Wasdin. You’re married, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Instructor Stoneclam.” My muscles felt too exhausted to move, but they shivered violently anyway.

“You don’t need this. Come here.” He walked me to the backs of the ambulances, so I could feel their warm air hit me in the face. “Have a cup of this hot chocolate.”

I held it in my hand. It was warm.

“If we’d wanted you to have a wife, we would’ve issued you one,” he explained. “Go over there and ring that damn bell. Get this over. I’ll let you drink that hot chocolate. Put you in this warm ambulance. Wrap you up in a thick blanket. And you don’t have to put up with this anymore.”

I looked over at the bell.
It would be that easy. All I have to do is pull that mother three times.
I thought about the heated ambulances with blankets and hot chocolate. Then I caught myself.
Wait a minute. I’m not thinking clearly. That’s quitting.
“Hooyah, Instructor Stoneclam.” I gave him back his hot chocolate.

“Get back with your class.”

Handing him back that cup of hot chocolate was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
Let me go back and freeze while I get my nuts kicked some more.

Mike H. and I had a six-man boat crew before the other four quit. Now it was only the two of us struggling to drag our boat, weighing nearly 200 pounds, back to the BUD/S compound—instructors yelling at us for being too slow. We cussed at the quitters. “You sorry pieces of crap.” When Mike and I arrived at the compound, we were still angry.

Mike and I had gone from being their comrades to cussing them out for abandoning us. It’s why the training is so brutal. To find out who has your back when all hell breaks loose. After Wednesday night, I don’t remember anyone else quitting.

Early Thursday morning, I sat in the chow hall.
They’re going to have to kill me. After everything I’ve been through, they’re going to have to cut me up in little pieces and mail me back to Wayne County, Georgia, because I’m not quitting now.
Inside me, something clicked. It no longer mattered what we did next. I didn’t care.
This has got to end sometime.

Deprived of support in our environment and the support of our own bodies, the only thing propping us up was our belief in accomplishing the mission—complete Hell Week. In psychology this belief is called self-efficacy. Even when the mission seems impossible, it is the strength of our belief that makes success possible. The absence of this belief guarantees failure. A strong belief in the mission fuels our ability to focus, put forth effort, and persist. Believing allows us to see the goal (complete Hell Week) and break the goal down into more manageable objectives (one evolution at a time). If the evolution is a boat race, it can be broken down into even smaller objectives such as paddling. Believing allows us to seek out strategies to accomplish the objectives, such as using the larger shoulder muscles to paddle rather than the smaller forearm muscles. Then, when the race is done, move on to the next evolution. Thinking too much about what happened and what is about to happen will wear you down. Live in the moment and take it one step at a time.

Thursday night, we’d only had three to four hours total sleep since Sunday evening. The dream world started to mix with the real world, and we hallucinated. In the chow hall, while guys’ heads were bobbing in and out of their food and their eyes were rolling back in their heads from sleep deprivation, an instructor said, “You know, Wasdin, I want you to take this butter knife, go over there, and kill that deer in the corner.”

Slowly rising from my oatmeal daze, I looked over and, sure as hell, there was a buck standing in the chow hall. It didn’t dawn on me why the deer was in the chow hall or how it got there.
Now I’m on a mission.
I stalked up on it with my Rambo knife and got ready to make my death leap.

Instructor Stoneclam yelled, “Wasdin, what are you doing?”

“Getting ready to kill this buck, Instructor Stoneclam.”

“Look, that’s a tray table. It’s what they haul trays in and out of the kitchen with.”

What the…? How did it turn into a tray table?

“Just sit your dumb ass down and finish eating,” Instructor Stoneclam said.

The instructors had a big laugh about it.

*   *   *

Later, Mike H., Bobby H., and the rest of our crew paddled from the Naval Special Warfare Center south to Silver Strand State Park. It felt like we were paddling to Mexico, but the trip was only 6 miles. Paddle, fall asleep, paddle, fall asleep … Suddenly, Bobby banged the bottom of the boat, yelling, “Aaagh!”

“What the hell?” I asked.

“Big snake!” Bobby yelled.

We helped him kill the snake. “Snake!”

One guy stopped. “That’s the bowline.” We were beating the rope that’s used to secure the front of the boat.

We all looked at the rope and returned to our senses.

Five minutes later, Mike yelled, “Aaagh!”

“Is the snake back?” I asked.

Lights from the city glowed in the sky. “I just saw my dad’s face in the clouds,” Mike said.

I looked up. Sure enough, I saw his dad’s face in the clouds. I’d never met his dad and didn’t know what his dad looked like, but I saw Mike’s dad’s face in the clouds.

*   *   *

Another guy in our class, Randy Clendening, was bald. Everywhere: head, eyebrows, eyelashes, armpits, nut sac—like a snake. As a child, he ate some red berries and had a fever so high that it killed all his hair follicles. (When he made it to SEAL Team Two, someone called him Kemo—short for chemotherapy. The nickname stuck.) During Hell Week, Randy wheezed and sputtered.

“You OK, Randy?” I asked.

“The instructors just told me I had a dirty carburetor.”

“Wow, that must suck to have a dirty carburetor.” It hadn’t occurred to me that Randy had fluid in his lungs. The instructors discussed rolling him back to another class so he could recover, but that would mean doing Hell Week again—and we were so close to finishing.

*   *   *

On Friday, the instructors took us out into the surf zone. We sat in the frigid ocean facing the sea with our arms linked, trying to stay together. Instructor Stoneclam stood on the beach talking to our backs. “This is the sorriest class we’ve ever seen. You couldn’t even keep the officers in your class.” Officers and enlisted men undergo the same training together. “You didn’t support them. You didn’t back them up. It’s your fault you don’t have any officers left. This last evolution, you had the slowest time in history. We have just received permission from Captain Bailey to extend Hell Week one more day.”

I looked over at my swim partner, Rodney. He seemed to be thinking what I was:
Damn, we got to do this for one more day
.
OK, you’ve been screwing us for this long, stick us in the ass for one more day.

Somebody else, I don’t remember who, wasn’t going to do an extra day. He would rather quit. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

“Turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you!” Instructor Stoneclam said.

Like a platoon of zombies, we turned about-face.

There stood our commanding officer, Captain Larry Bailey. He had led one of the first SEAL Team Two platoons in Vietnam. He also helped create the SEAL Team Assault Boat (STAB). “Congratulations, men. I am securing Hell Week.”

Some of the others jumped for joy—I was hurting too bad for that kind of celebration. Randy Clendening cried tears of relief; he’d made it through with walking pneumonia. I stood there with a dumb look on my face.
What am I doing here?
I looked around.
Where did everybody go?
We’d started with ten or twelve boat crews, six to eight men in each. Now we only had four or five boat crews.
Why did those guys even start Hell Week if they knew they didn’t want it?
They didn’t know they didn’t want it.

Medical personnel took Randy directly to the infirmary to ventilate him. They screened the rest of us. Some of the guys had cellulitis—infection had traveled from cuts to deep inside the skin. Others had damaged the band of tissue over their pelvis, hip, and knee, causing iliotibial band syndrome. All of us were swollen. The physician reached down and squeezed my calves. As he pulled his hands away, I saw the indentation of his hands imprinted on my legs. They also examined us for “flesh-eating bacteria” (actually, the bacteria release toxins that destroy skin and muscle rather than eating them). Since trauma covered our bodies from head to toe, we were meals on wheels for the killer bacteria.

I took a shower, then drank some Gatorade. In the barracks, on the top rack of the bunk bed, lay my brown T-shirt. A friend had given it to me as a post–Hell Week present. We bought our own underwear using our clothing allowance, but only guys who finished Hell Week were allowed to wear the brown T-shirts. Having it made me so happy. I lay down and went to sleep. People kept watch on us while we slept to make sure we didn’t swallow our tongues, drown in our spit, or simply stop breathing due to fatigue.

The next day, I rolled over on the top rack of my bunk bed and jumped off the way I always did, but my legs weren’t working. My face hit the deck, giving me a bloody nose and lip. I tried to call Laura collect, to let her know I made it through Hell Week, but when the operator came on the phone, my voice wasn’t working. It took a few hours for my voice to come back.

A driver took us over to the chow hall in a van. People helped us get out of the vehicle. As we hobbled into the chow hall, all eyes seemed to be on us. We were the ones who had just made it through “the week.” It had been the coldest week in twenty-three years; hail had actually rained down on us at one point. While eating, I looked over at the tables where the guys who had quit during Hell Week sat. They avoided eye contact.

I had begged one of them not to ring out, but he abandoned Mike and me to carry that boat by ourselves.
Could’ve at least waited to quit until after we got that boat back to the barracks
. He walked over to my table. “I’m sorry, man. I know I let you guys down, but I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

I looked up at him. “Get out of my face.”

*   *   *

Training resumed slowly, starting with a lot of stretching exercises. Then it picked up speed. Time limits tightened. Distances increased. More swims, runs, and obstacle course trials. Academic tests continued. Pre–Hell Week, we had focused on topics such as first aid and boat handling. Now we focused on hydrographic reconnaissance. Enlisted men like me had to score 70 percent or higher. Although we had lost all our officers, officer standards were 80 percent or higher.

A new evolution we had to pass was the 50-meter underwater swim. At the pool, Instructor Stoneclam said, “All of you have to swim fifty meters underwater. You’ll do a somersault into the pool, so no one gets a diving start, and swim twenty-five meters across. Touch the end and swim twenty-five meters back. If you break the surface at any time, you fail. Don’t forget to swim along the bottom. The increased pressure on your lungs will help you hold your breath longer, so you can swim farther.”

I lined up with the second group of four students. We cheered the first group on. “Go for the blackout,” some of us said. It was a new way of thinking that would influence future activities—pushing the body to the edge of unconsciousness.

When it was my turn, I hyperventilated to decrease the carbon dioxide in my body and decrease the drive to breathe. During my somersault into the pool, I lost some breath. I oriented myself and swam as low as I could. After swimming 25 meters, I neared the other side. During my turn, my foot touched the wall, but I didn’t get a great push-off.