Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (13 page)

But it was hard for me. It seemed when I shoved my boot in and reached upward, the foothold slipped downward, and my intended handhold got higher. Obviously, if I’d weighed 118 pounds soaking wet, this would not have been the case. First time I climbed the net, ramming my feet into the holes, I got kind of stuck about forty-five feet off the ground, arms and legs spreadeagled. I guess I looked like Captain Ahab trapped in the harpoon lines after a trip to the ocean floor with Moby Dick.

But like all the rest of our exercises, this one was completely about technique. And Instructor Reno was there to put me straight. Four days later, I could zip up that net like a circus acrobat. Well...okay, more like an orangutan. Then I’d grab the huge log at the top, clear that, and climb down the other side like Spider-Man. Okay, okay...like an orangutan.

I had similar struggles on the rope bridge, which seemed always to be out of kilter for me, swinging too far left or too far right. But Instructor Reno was always there, personally, to help me regain my equilibrium by sending me on a quick rush into the ocean, which was so cold it almost stopped my heart. This was followed by a roll in the sand, just to make the rest of the day an absolute itching, chafing hell until I hit the decontamination unit to get power washed down, same way you deal with a mud-caked tractor.

Naturally, the newly clean tractor had it all over us because no one then dumps it into the deep end of a swimming pool and more or less leaves it there until it starts to sprout fins. It was just another happy day in the life of a fledgling student going through Indoc. Understandably, Class 226 shrank daily, and we had not even started BUD/S.

And you think it was a great relief finally to get through the day and retire to our rooms for peace and perhaps sleep? Dream on. There’s no such thing as peace in Coronado. The place is a living, breathing testimony to that Roman strategist who first told the world, “Let him who desires peace prepare for war” (that’s translated from the Latin
Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum
— Flavius Vegetius Renatus, fourth century). Or, as a SEAL might say,
You want things to remain cool, pal? Better get your ass in gear.
I knew I was close.

That old Roman knew a thing or two. His military treatise
De Rei Militari
was the bible of European warfare for more than 1,200 years, and it still applies in Coronado, stressing constant drilling, training, and severe discipline. He advised the Roman commanders to gather intelligence assiduously, use the terrain, and then drive the legionnaires forward to encircle their objective. That’s more or less how we operate in overseas deployment against terrorists today.
Hooyah,
Flavius Vegetius.

Coronado, like New York, is a city that never sleeps. Those instructors are out there patrolling the corridors of our barracks by night into the small hours. One of them once came into my room after I’d hot mopped it and high polished the floor till you could almost see your face in it. He dropped a trickle of sand onto the floor and chewed me out for living in a dust bowl! Then he sent me down to the Pacific, in the company of my swim buddy and of course himself, to “get wet and sandy.” Then we had to go through the decontamination unit, and the shrieking of those cold hydraulic pipes and the ferocious jets of water awakened half the barracks and nearly sent us into shock. Never mind the fact that it was 0200 and we were due back under those showers again in another couple of hours.

I think it was that time. I can’t be absolutely sure. But my roommate quit that night. He went weak at the knees just watching what was happening to me. I don’t know how the hell he thought I felt.

One time during Indoc while we were out on night run, one of the instructors actually climbed up the outside of a building, came through an open window, and absolutely trashed a guy’s room, threw everything everywhere, emptied detergent over his bed gear. He went back out the way he’d come in, waited for everyone to return, and then tapped on the poor guy’s door and demanded a room inspection. The guy couldn’t work out whether to be furious or heartbroken, but he spent most of the night cleaning up and still had to be in the showers at 0430 with the rest of us.

I asked Reno about this weeks later, and he told me, “Marcus, the body can take damn near anything. It’s the mind that needs training. The question that guy was being asked involved mental strength. Can you handle such injustice? Can you cope with that kind of unfairness, that much of a setback? And still come back with your jaw set, still determined, swearing to God you will never quit? That’s what we’re looking for.”

As ever, I do not claim to quote Instructor Reno word for word. But I do know what he said, and how I remember it. No one talks to him and comes away bemused. Trust me.

Thus far I’ve only dealt with that first two weeks of training on the land and in the pool, and I may not have explained how much emphasis the instructors put on the correct balanced diet for everyone. They ran classes on this, drilling into us how much fruit and vegetables we needed, the necessity for tons of carbohydrates and water.

The mantra was simple — you take care of your body like the rest of your gear. Keep it well fed and watered, between one and two gallons a day. Start no discipline without a full canteen. That way your body will take care of you when you begin to ask serious questions of it. Because there’s no doubt in the coming months you will be asking those questions.

This was an area, I remember, where there were a lot of questions, because even after those first few days here, guys were feeling the effects: muscle soreness, aches and pains in shoulders, thighs, and backs where there had been none before.

The instructor who dealt with this part of our training warned us against very strong drugs like Tylenol, except for a fever, but he understood we would need ibuprofen. He conceded it was difficult to get through the coming Hell Week without ibuprofen, and he told us the medical department would make sure we received a sufficient amount to ease the pain, though not too much of it.

I remember he said flatly, “You’re going to hurt while you’re here. That’s our job, to induce pain; not permanent injury, of course, but we need to make you hurt. That’s a big part of becoming a SEAL. We need proof you can take the punishment. And the way out of that is mental, in your mind. Don’t buckle under to the hurt, rev up your spirit and your motivation, attack the courses. Tell yourself precisely how much you want to be here.”

The final part of Indoc involved boats — the fabled IBS (inflatable boat, small) or, colloquially, itty-bitty ship. These boats are thirteen feet long and weigh a little under 180 pounds. They are unwieldy and cumbersome, and for generations the craft has been used to teach BUD/S students to pull a paddle as a tight-knit crew, blast their way through the incoming surf, rig properly, and drag the thing into place in a regimented line for inspection on the sandy beach about every seven minutes. At least that’s how it seemed to us.

At that point we lined up in full life jackets right next to our boats. Inside the boat, the paddles were stowed with geometric precision, bow and stern lines coiled carefully on the rubber floor. Inch perfect.

We started with a series of races. But before that, each of our teams had a crew leader, selected from the most experienced navy personnel among us. And they lined up with their paddles at the military slope-arms position, the paddles resting on their shoulders. Then they saluted the instructors and announced their boat was correctly rigged and the crew was ready for the sea.

Meanwhile, other instructors were checking each boat. If a paddle was incorrectly stowed, an instructor seized it and hurled it down the beach. That happened on my first day, and one of the guys standing very near to me raced off after it, anxious to retrieve it and make amends. Unhappily, his swim buddy forgot to go with him, and the instructor was furious.

“Drop!”
he yelled. And every one of us hit the sand and began to execute the worst kind of push-up, our feet up on the rubber gunwales of the boats, pushing ’em out in our life jackets. The distant words of Reno sung in my ears: “Someone screws it up, the consequences affect everyone.”

We raced each other in the boats out beyond the surf. We raced until our arms felt as if they might fall off. We pulled, each crew against the rest, hauling our grotesquely unstreamlined little boats along. And this was not Yale versus Harvard on the Thames River in Connecticut, all pulling together. This was the closest thing to a floating nuthouse you’ve ever seen. But it was my kind of stuff.

Boat drill is a game for big, strong guys who can pull. Pull like hell. It’s also a game for heavy lifters who can haul that boat up and run with their team.

Let me take you through one of these races. First, we got the boat balanced in the shallows and watched the surf roll in toward us. The crew leader had issued a one-minute briefing, and we all watched the pattern of those five- to six-foot breakers. This part is called surf passage, and on the command, we were watching for our chance. Plainly, we didn’t want to charge into the biggest incoming wave, but we didn’t have much time.

The water was only a fraction above sixty degrees. We all knew we had to take that first wave bow on, but we didn’t want the biggest, so we waited. Then the crew leader spotted a slacker one, and he bellowed,
“Now! Now! Now!”
We charged forward, praying to God we wouldn’t get swept sideways and capsize. One by one we scrambled aboard, digging deep, trying to get through the overhanging crest, which was being whipped by an offshore breeze.

“Dig! Dig! Dig!”
he roared as we headed for two more incoming walls of water. This was the Pacific Ocean, not some Texas lake. Close to us, one of the nine boats capsized, and there were paddles and students all in the water. You could hear nothing except the crash of the surf and shouts of
“Dig! Stroke! Portside...starboard...straighten up! Let’s go! Go! Go!”

I pulled that paddle until I thought my lungs would burst, until we had driven out beyond the breakers. And then our class leader yelled,
“Dump the boat!”
The bow-side men slipped overboard, the others (including me) grabbed the strap handles fixed on the rubber hull, stood up, and jumped over the same side, dragging the boat over on top of us.

As the boat hit the water, three of us grabbed the same handles and climbed back on the upturned hull of the boat. I was first up, I remember. Weightless in the water, right? Just give me a chance.

We backed to the other side of the hull and pulled, dragging the IBS upright, flipping it back on its lines. Everyone was aware that the tide was sweeping us back into the breakers. Feeling something between panic and frenzy, we battled back, grabbed our paddles and hauled out into flatter water and took a bead on the finish line. We paddled like hell, racing toward the mark, some tower on the beach. Then we dumped the boat again, grabbed the handles, carried it through the shallows onto the beach, and hauled it into a head carry.

We ran up the dunes around some truck, still with the boat on our heads, and then, as fast as we could, back along the beach to the point where we had started, and the instructors awaited us, logging the positions we finished and the times we clocked. They thoughtfully gave the winning crew a break to sit down and recover. The losers were told to push ’em out. It was not unusual to complete six of these races in one afternoon. By the end of Indoc week two, we had lost twenty-five guys.

The rest of us, somehow, had managed to show Instructor Reno and his colleagues we were indeed fit and qualified enough to attempt BUD/S training. Which would begin the next week. There would be just one final briefing from Reno before we attacked BUD/S first phase.

I saw him outside the classroom, and, still with his sunglasses on, he offered his hand and smiled quietly. “Nice job, Marcus,” said Reno. He had a grip like a crane. His hand might have been bolted onto blue twisted steel, but I shook it as hard as I could, and I replied, “Thank you, sir.”

We all knew he’d changed us drastically in those two weeks in Indoc. He’d showed us the depth of what we must achieve, guided us to the brink of the forthcoming unknown abyss of BUD/S. He’d knocked away whatever cocksure edges we might still have possessed.

We were a lot tougher now, and I still towered over him. None-theless, Reno Alberto still seemed fifteen feet tall to me. And he always will.

4

Welcome to Hell, Gentlemen

Battlefield whistle drills were conducted in the midst of high-pressure water jets, total chaos, deafening explosions, and shouting instructors...
“Crawl to the whistle, men! Crawl to the whistle! And keep your goddamned heads down!”

W
e assembled in the classroom soon after 1300 that last afternoon of Indoc. Instructor Reno made his entry like a Roman caesar, head held high, and immediately ordered us to push ’em out. As ever, chairs scraped back and we hit the floor, counting out the push-ups.

At twenty, Reno left us in the rest position and then said crisply, “Recover.”

“Hooyah, Instructor Ree-no!”

“Give me a muster, Mr. Ismay.”

“One hundred and thirteen men assigned, Instructor Reno. All present except two men at medical.”

“Close, Mr. Ismay. Two men quit a few minutes ago.”

All of us wondered who they were. My boat’s crew members? Heads whipped around. I had no idea who had crashed at the final hurdle.