SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (4 page)

Every day they will run timed distances, negotiate the obstacle course, paddle inflatable boats, and swim in timed events called “evolutions.” All of the students’ runs are conducted in fatigue pants and combat boots. Pounding out the miles in combat boots frequently leads to stress fractures of the legs and ankles. Lengthy swims in the cold Pacific can bring on hypothermia and even pneumonia. It is literally possible for a BUD/S student to go from heat stroke to chilblains in the course of one afternoon. And the medical attention is not particularly fawning. If a student is not dead or exhibiting a compound bone fracture, the docs in sick bay invariably prescribe an aspirin and a nice, long run.

Every time a physical evolution is performed, a student is expected to improve. Once a week the students will run a six-mile course against the clock. They will also complete a two-mile swim, and a trip through the obstacle course. If the student turns in a time that is higher than his previous attempt, he will come in for some extra attention. A first offense is likely to earn a trip to the surf zone, a roll in the sand, and the opportunity to run again. Running six miles on the beach is hard enough; it’s a lot tougher in wet trousers that are filled with sand. And the Goon Squad waits for those who are unable to “get with the program” and turn in faster times.

During the first phase of training, students take academic classes, including communication, first aid, lifesaving, and the history of Naval Special Warfare. Students who fall asleep in class are splashed awake with waste baskets full of seawater. Class members quickly learn that class time should not be confused with nap time—the coursework only gets more involved in the second and third phases, and many would-be SEALs have found themselves dismissed for poor academic performance.

Since staying in BUD/S is so hard, the instructors make quitting very, very easy. A student can quit, any time he wants, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In the courtyard outside the instructors’ office is a bell. To quit, all a student has to do is ring it three times. He doesn’t need a reason, and he won’t be asked to fill out a form. No one will try to talk him out of it. No prejudicial remarks will be placed in his record; he can leave Coronado Island that afternoon, and may resume his previous Naval occupation. Students who drop from the program place their helmets in an ever-lengthening line under the bell. The helmets are the way the instructors count coup.

Every morning, there are two or three more helmets under the bell. Some mornings there are a dozen. Four weeks into first phase, and six weeks after students come to Coronado, training culminates in a six-day ordeal called “Hell Week.” In the era before the Discovery Channel, SEAL students entered this black hole with no idea of what it entailed, or what it would take for them to survive. Now, any American with a television set can watch Hell Week in convenient, one-hour episodes.

Living through Hell Week is another thing entirely.

During first phase, students are lined up by height, tallest to smallest. Based on this criterion they are assigned to boat crews. Groups of men are assigned to an IBS, inflatable boat small. It’s inflatable, but at ten feet, it isn’t that small. And it weighs almost two hundred pounds, empty.

For the next six weeks students will live, breathe, eat, and sleep with their boat. It will become an object that they love and hate in equal measure. During Hell Week, students will take their IBS with them everywhere, running with it balanced on their heads. They will carry it to the chow hall and back. They will swim towing it. They will drag it through the obstacle course. They will place guards to watch over it when they use the bathroom. Occasionally, they will even use it in the way it was intended and paddle it from Coronado, California, to Tijuana, Mexico, and back. Their IBS will be taken into the biggest surf the instructors can find, and in a legendary evolution called “Rock Portage,” the students will heave out into the surf, turn around, and deliberately land their boats on the ten-foot granite boulders of the breakwater in front of the Hotel del Coronado.

During Rock Portage, it’s not unusual for students to break arms or legs or simply quit—because it’s just too damn scary.

Hell Week begins with a simulated firefight called “Breakout.” Machine guns are fired over the students’ heads, and they are sprayed with fire hoses as artillery simulators, flash-crashes, and smoke grenades are tossed into their ranks. A series of contradictory orders are shouted by instructors over bullhorns. The object of Breakout is to frighten and disorient—and it works.

Instructors tell the astonished students that the whole week is going to be like this—and that the worst is yet to come. It’s not unusual for ten or fifteen students to quit during the first hour.

Those who survive Breakout are assigned new boat crews. Blinking in the light of parachute flares, deafened by machine-gun fire and the explosions of quarter-pound blocks of TNT, class officers and petty officers are told to muster their men and account for the missing. It is as close to real combat as the instructors can make it.

Hell Week has just gotten started.

During this six-day ordeal, students are permitted not more than four hours of sleep. The evolutions go on twenty-four hours a day, and are conducted by three shifts of instructors who are rotated in fresh day and night.

Every evolution students undertake is a race against the other boat crews. Every time someone quits, the remainder of their boat crew has to carry the departed man’s load. A boat that loses one man has lost 16 percent of its muscle. Two people quit, and the boat has lost 30 percent of its strength. Hell Week becomes an object lesson in teamwork.

Class officers and petty officers are expected to lead—from the front. Officers who find themselves wanting in leadership have the matter brought to their attention by the instructors. BUD/S is one of the only schools in the United States military where officers and enlisted men are trained together. The course and curriculum is exactly the same for enlisted man and officer alike. At BUD/S, there is an officer assigned to oversee each phase of training, but the principal instruction is given by enlisted men. The case can be made that in the SEALs, enlisted men select the officers who will eventually lead them. In BUD/S, it’s not just the weak officers who are culled from training. The imperious, the impulsive, and the reckless will also find it impossible to graduate.

As always, it pays to be a winner. In a series of races, long-distance paddles, and problem-solving exercises, boat crews who finish last are hammered, and made to do the evolution all over again. Those who come in first place might be allowed an extra cup of coffee with their chow, or the chance to doze in their boat for ten minutes while the other crews try to catch up.

During Hell Week, students are fed four times a day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack called “midrats.” Of course, this means they have to get to and from the chow hall—which means that their daily excursion is now eight miles round trip instead of six. And they will carry their two-hundred-pound inflatable boat on their heads everywhere they go.

A constant game of psychological warfare plays out between instructors and students. Often, instructors will offer a cup of hot coffee and a doughnut to the first person to quit. For students who have been awake for five days, and just spent hours bobbing around the Pacific Ocean, the temptation represented by a cup of hot coffee is overwhelming. When a man is faltering, there is always an instructor to remind him that it’s perfectly okay to quit for medical reasons. “This stuff is crazy,” a smooth-talking instructor will tell a member of the Goon Squad. “There’s no reason to put yourself through this. You’ve got nothing to prove. We’ll give you a ride back to the barracks, you can take a hot shower, and we’ll get your orders out tomorrow morning. No one will even know.”

By the time Hell Week is over, a class will be reduced as much as 90 percent.

Hell Week starts with a bang, and it ends with a whimper. Sometime on Saturday morning, six days after they started, instructors quietly tell the students to secure their boats and return to the barracks. No SEAL will ever forget the moment that his boat crew was told that Hell Week was over. The survivors look like shipwreck victims. Their uniforms are torn and their feet are so blistered and ulcerated that a class can be tracked by the bloody footprints left by its members. By Saturday morning, some men can no longer walk without support. Some have hands and feet that are swollen like balloons, and others are sunburned beyond recognition, the skin on their faces peeling off in sheets.

But all of them have one thing in common—they did not, and would not, quit.

After Hell Week, students are allowed for the first time to wear olive-drab T-shirts under their camouflage utilities. This is the only acknowledgment instructors will give them, but it marks a fundamental change in the relationship between teacher and trainee. From this day forward, the students are treated as if they are worth teaching.

In the second phase of BUD/S, students are taught the science of combat swimming. They are introduced first to basic open circuit scuba and then to the more exotic world of oxygen rebreathers and mixed gas breathing rigs. They are taught to swim long distances underwater, precisely navigating from point to point. Students will dive two to three times a day, and in between dives carry out physical evolutions such as timed runs, obstacle courses, and, of course, more swimming.

The academics get harder as well. Not only will the students learn diving physics and the mechanical and electronic characteristics of their diving rigs, they will also learn how to operate submarine escape trunks and study the physiology of diving casualties, such as gas embolism, nitrogen narcosis, and the bends. They will learn the principles of hyperbaric medicine, and how to operate diving rescue chambers. Students who don’t make it academically will be out just as quickly as those who don’t cut it on the runs.

The third phase of training is land warfare. It begins with marksmanship training and an introduction to the venerable M-16 assault rifle. Students also learn to assemble and disassemble every weapon in the U.S. arsenal, including pistols, machine guns, submachine guns, assault and sniper rifles, as well as antitank weapons and grenade launchers. Stopwatches will click as blindfolded students disassemble and reassemble these weapons for time. Trainees will also learn to operate the principal weapons used by the enemies of the United States, including the AK-47 and its variants the RPK, AKM, and AK-74.

The last six weeks of third phase are spent on a Navy-owned island off the Pacific coast called San Clemente. There, students will undergo accelerated classes in land navigation, small-unit tactics, communications, combat marksmanship, advanced first aid, and the demolition of explosives.

They will learn the art of hydrographic reconnaissance, and how to slip ashore at night to reconnoiter a target, use infrared cameras, and draw maps. Training on the island culminates in a seven-day “war,” where students recon a section of the island, locate and blow up underwater obstacles, and conduct demolition raids.

All of those exercises are conducted with live ammunition and real explosives. The margin for error and the tolerance for mistakes is zero. There are SEALs who will tell you that the last six weeks on San Clemente were harder than Hell Week. Maybe they are. The strain is certainly higher on the class officers who have to plan and brief attacks and demolition raids under the watchful eye of their instructors—all of whom are combat veterans who have done these operations for real.

Twenty-six weeks after the beginning of BUD/S, students will find themselves standing once again on the asphalt in the courtyard of the Naval Special Warfare Training Group. The graduation ceremonies at BUD/S are low-key. Unlike the Green Berets’ Q Course, where students graduate and are handed the headgear of their dreams, sailors graduating from BUD/S are not yet considered SEALs. Ahead of them is an additional year and a half of advanced training, to include military freefall parachuting and advanced courses in everything from counterterrorism operations to the rudiments of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

It’s been said that SEAL training is not so much a battle of wills, but a struggle against oneself. No amount of physical conditioning is enough to prepare a student to meet the challenge. Students are made to come to grips with misery. The test is always against oneself.

But as difficult as it is to get through BUD/S, life is tougher in the operational SEAL Teams. What happens on Coronado is practice. SEAL operations in the real world are combat. BUD/S has to be difficult. It is imperative that the men who come into the Teams are individuals who can be counted on, men who think, and adapt, and never quit.

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SEALs operate at the pinnacle of the military’s hierarchy. In the Teams officers are frequently addressed by their first names, and the spit and polish is kept to a minimum. Every SEAL who mounts out for a mission has earned the right to be there. And every SEAL knows that one screwup, one malfunction, one misstep in planning or execution could cost the life of a brother.

This is a world so far removed from the typical civilian workplace that it is almost incomprehensible. Imagine the politics in your own office or shop. Think of some difficult, incompetent, or vindictive coworker. Now imagine that you are in a swirling firefight in a back alley in a remote corner of Maz-i-Sharif. When your office adversary stumbles, you will move without thinking and without hesitation. You will break cover, expose yourself to enemy fire, and drag this person to safety. Anything less than your full commitment, any hesitation whatsoever, any unwillingness, any fear or backtalk will disqualify you instantly and forever from continuing with the Teams.

It is almost impossible for civilians to conceive how much these men care for and trust each other. In the career of a typical SEAL operator, his life will be saved a dozen times by teammates who will variously drag him from burning wreckage, kick sizzling hand grenades out of range, keep firing while he is pinned down, or pull him half drowned back into a submarine. In the Teams, these are not seen as heroic acts—far from it—they are the actions expected in everyday work.