A platoon of US Navy SEALs gathers around the sparse cover at the base of a hill.
The commanding officer receives a last minute transmission, and turns to his men with a grave
look on his face. Despite being in almost constant action for the last four days,
and with only four hours of solid sleep to each man, the orders are in: the SEALs must
take this hill. Leaving it in enemy hands would endanger friendly forces elsewhere.
With grim determination, the SEALs check and double-check their equipment. They’ve got a job
to do. But as the attack kicks off the weary men are in for a shock for what awaits them.
Machine gun rounds whiz over their heads as artillery drops just meters away. The
ear-deafening explosions make them lose track of where they are or where they are going to.
The smoke burns their eyes and blurs their vision. But that will not stop them from
reaching the enemy position on the hill above. The only problem is getting there. To do so,
they must crawl through hundreds of yards of mud and barbed wire;
sometimes sinking all the way up to their neck in dirty water or mud.
If that were not enough, they must crawl through over a hundred feet of piping filled with muddy
water and possible snakes to get through to the other side. But even if they survive the hundreds
of yards of fire-swept barbed wire fields and muddy ditches they must crawl through, the final
obstacle is a rope bridge they must cross under fire and ensuring that no man is left behind.
Despite all these challenges, the men preserve and take the hill with no casualties; the unseen
enemy retreating before they could engage in the close combat the SEALs desperately wanted.
While this scenario might come straight out of a war movie, it is actually based upon the
culminating event of Basic Underwater Demolition School, or BUD/S (pronounced BUDS), Hell Week.
It is a testament of their combat training so far and incorporates lessons learned from
the entire week while teaching the aspiring SEALs that even when they are the most tired,
exhausted, hungry, and weak the most will be expected out of- combat is unforgiving and does
not care what they have already gone through. Even though this scenario sounds intense,
it is actually just a very small piece of what actually goes on at BUD/S throughout the seven
months trainees- affectionately known as tadpoles by their instructors- attend one of the most
difficult training programs on the planet. From day one, SEAL instructors are looking to maximize
attrition and for good reason. There is a high probability that today's trainee could be serving
alongside an instructor tomorrow in an active-duty SEAL Team abroad. So while their methods might
seem intense, out of the ordinary, or downright sadistic, they all serve the common purpose of
crafting some of the world’s finest warriors and ensuring those that do not want to be there quit.
While that event might seem tough, the entire process from beginning
to end is meant to find each trainees’ limit and then exceed that every day.
Before training even begins, all prospective SEAL candidates must attend what is called Indoc.
Indoc is a five-week precursor to BUD/S that each person must pass just to begin training.
It is here that candidates receive their first taste of the SEAL community. Their days are along
and regimented, usually starting at 5 o’clock in the morning and ending twelve hours later.
During those twelve hours, they are constantly being pushed physically. Whether it is group
runs on the beach wearing boots and utes (pronounced oots)- also known as camo pants-
doing group exercises, swimming for hours in the pool, basic diving, or tackling the obstacle
course, the instructors unleash a full barrage of training to get the most out of their students.
While these might sound easy at first, the instructors have a way of making even the
simplest of tasks impossibly difficult. For instance, as part of their swimming
qualifications, students must learn the practice of drown proofing. The
purpose of this is to expose students to a variety of controlled ‘in extremis’-
latin for “the point of death”- situations and see how they react. Students must be able to
get to the surface safely if any of their gear fails while on a mission in the water.
There are a couple of ways to do this and one of the most common is having students tie their
feet and hands together then jumping into the pool to free themselves before they pass out! Another
way instructors place students in extremis is by purposefully pulling off their diving equipment
while in the pool and then watching as the student clears and replaces it back in working order.
Useful for sure but definitely not for the faint of heart.
The terror in the pool does not end there. Another seemingly impossible
task is to swim 50 meters underwater. While that might sound easy, it is not uncommon
for students to pass out during this evolution. The obstacle course is another not so easy task.
There is a wide range of high and low obstacles that require agility, speed, and endurance to
conquer, including an almost 60-foot rope tower to climb. Making matters worse is that in BUD/S,
it pays to be a winner, and the weakest students are often punished severely with
more exercises and mind games, with the slowest runner of the obstacle course usually being buried
up to his neck in the sand by his classmates. While the instructors in Indoc may seem like they
are trying to humiliate and beat down the students for no reason, in reality, they are beating them
down only to build them back up. The best way they do this is by assigning each student a partner
known as a swim buddy, which is to remain with him at all times. Each swim buddy cannot be more than
several feet away at a time and if they do each person risks fear of expulsion from training.
This selfless devotion to another is the beginning of creating a coherent team. By indoctrinating
students now that at the end of the day all that matters no matter how tired, stressed, or in pain
they are is the person beside them, only then can they truly begin to grasp what it means to work in
a team. Those that cannot grasp that concept or who psyche themselves out now leave the program.
Once prospective SEALs make it through Indoc, the next, most grueling phase begins. The first
phase builds upon most of the skills learned in Indoc and pushes trainees past any sort of mental
or physical breaking point they might have thought they had before. It is here that the
students are first introduced to some of the SEAL pipeline’s most legendary challenges.
The first challenge they must overcome now and almost every day throughout their training is
the infamous PT arena called the grinder. The grinder does not look imposing at first. It is
merely the asphalt courtyard in between where all the men live in their barracks. One would not even
know of its use as an epic training ground minus the various pull-up and dip bars that adorn its
sides. But make no mistake. Many thousands of men have been made and broken upon it.
Each day the men will train on the grinder. Thousands of push-ups, crunches, pull-ups,
burpees, and other bodyweight exercises will be done here. But that is not all. Throughout
their time here, instructors will continually spray them with water to ensure their whole
time spent here is wet. While this might seem refreshing in the scorching California summers,
at night and in the winter this just adds another layer of misery.
Speaking of being wet, that is one constant that trainees can count on their entire time at BUD/S.
In fact, the instructors give it an affectionate name: wet and sandy. Whenever a trainee fails
to perform, or even at an instructor’s whim, the men can be forced to run into the surf and
roll around to make sure their entire bodies are covered in sand and water. The added discomfort
of the gritty sand and chaffing to follow serves to add a constant stressor to their environment.
The punishment of the First Phase goes beyond just expanding the physical torment of Indoc but the
teamwork aspect as well. Now, SEALs are broken up into roughly six-man boat crews to an Inflatable
Small Boat or IBS. The IBS is one of the foundational platforms SEALs must conquer since
this small, silent craft is what they will use to creep up on enemy shorelines across the world.
The IBS weighs several hundred pounds, and once seawater and sand are factored in, it feels like
it weighs a ton since it is required to be carried over their heads wherever they go. The boat team
is expected to work together to accomplish tasks. Those that perform well are usually rewarded
with extra rest or warmth while those who fall behind face a variety of punishments from before
as well as a new one: rock portage. The beaches of Coronado are adorned with
hundreds of rocks that jut out menacingly into the shoreline. Often as punishment,
or at the direction of the instructors, boat crews are forced to row into the waves by
these rocks and get smashed into them as the undertow flips their boats in the air.
The punishments here go far beyond just physical though. For those that fall behind or
fail to complete events on time, they are assigned to what is called the goon squad. The goon squad
is the slowest and lowest-performing group of candidates in a class. These men are singled
out for extra “remediation” and punishment workouts that slowly suck their resolve.
Here, men are usually forced into a downward spiral since the extra time it takes to complete
these workouts puts them further behind everyone else still working towards the events of that day.
Ultimately, very few men sent to the goon squad will ever regain
their place amongst the rest of the class. Further compounding the mental torture is the
ever-present bell. The bell sits in the center of the grinder and is a constant reminder that
getting out is only three rings of the bell away. Any trainee at any time can walk up to
the bell to quit. Doing so ends their misery but closes the door to the SEAL community forever.
For those that manage to make it to the end of First Phase, there is one last
event remaining that sends a chill down the spine of all who know its name: Hell Week.
Hell Week is the culminating event of the First Phase. It is a brutal event encompassing a
continuous weeklong beat down that tests the mind and body of all those who dare partake in it.
The week starts with the men eating a large meal for dinner and then going down to their cots on
tents on the beach. The instructors give them a few frightful hours of sleep until sometime,
usually around midnight, an instructor bursts into the tent with an M-60 machine gun firing
blanks and throwing flashbang grenades telling the trainees to start running. This event, known
as the breakout, signals the start of Hell Week. Throughout the entire week, the men will complete
many of the events they have done before; only now they will have no rest. The men are
allowed only two, one-hour naps twice throughout the whole evolution. The chronic sleep deprivation
makes the men feel disorientated and hopefully lose focus on the pain and only on the next event.
By the end of the week, those who did not quit or get dropped for medical reasons face their
last challenge of a simulated combat scenario known as Not So Sorry. Once this is complete,
Hell Week is over and then the next phases of their training can resume.
While the next two phases are no less grueling than the previous two,
they are challenging in their own ways. Most of each class will drop out by the end of the First
Phase and very few leave during the next two. Just exactly why that is, is probably because learning
the actual skills of advanced diving and small unit tactics are things that can be taught, while
the mental and physical toughness of being a SEAL is something students either have or they do not.