P robably everyone who’s heard of SEALs has heard of Hell Week. It’s five and a half days of continuous beat-down designed to see if you have the endurance and the will to become the ultimate warrior.
Every SEAL has a different Hell Week story. Mine actually begins a day or two before Hell Week, out in the surf, on some rocks. A group of us were in an IBS—“inflatable boat, small,” your basic six-man rubber dinghy—and we had to bring it ashore past those rocks. I was point man, which meant it was my job to clamber out and hold the IBS tight while everyone else got off and picked it up.
Well, just as I was getting set, a huge wave came up in the surf and took the boat and put it down on my foot. It hurt like hell, and immediately got numb.
I ignored it as much as I could, and eventually wrapped it up. Later on, when we were finished for the day, I went with a buddy whose dad happened to be a doctor and had him check it out. He did an X-ray and found it was fractured.
Naturally, he wanted to put it in a cast, but I refused to let him. Showing up at BUD/S with a cast would mean I would have to put my training on hold. And if I did that before Hell Week, I’d have to go back to the very beginning—and no way I was going through everything I’d just been through again.
(Even during BUD/S, you’re allowed to leave base with permission during your off time. And, obviously, I didn’t go to a Navy doctor to get the foot checked out, because he would have sent me back—known as “roll back”—immediately.)
The night Hell Week was supposed to start, we were taken to a large room, fed pizza, and treated to a movie marathon— Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, Braveheart. We were all relaxing in a non-relaxing kind of way, since we knew Hell Week was about to begin. It was like a party on the Titanic. The movies got us all psyched up, but we knew that iceberg was out there, looming in the dark.
Once more, my imagination got me nervous. I knew at some point an instructor was going to bust through that door with an M-60 machine gun shooting blanks, and I was going to have to run outside and form up on the grinder (asphalt workout area). But when?
Every minute that passed added to the churning in my stomach. I was sitting there saying to myself, “God. ” Over and over. Very eloquent and deep.
I tried to take a nap but I couldn’t sleep. Finally, someone burst in and started shooting.
Thank God!
I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to be abused in my life. I ran outside. The instructors were throwing flash-crashes and had the hoses going full-blast. (Flash-crashes and flash-bang grenades give off an intense flash and make a very loud noise when they explode, but won’t injure you. Technically, the terms are applied to different grenades used by the Army and Navy, but we generally use the names interchangeably.
I was excited, ready for what some people think is the ultimate test for SEAL trainees. But at the same time, I was thinking, What the hell is going on? Because even though I knew all about Hell Week—or thought I did—never having experienced it, I really didn’t understand it in my bones.
We were split up. They sent us to different stations and we began doing push-ups, flutter kicks, star jumpers…
After that, everything ran together. My foot? That was the least of the pain. We swam, we did PT, we took the boats out. Mostly, we just kept moving. One of the guys was so exhausted at one point, he thought a kayak coming to check on us in the boats was a shark and started yelling a warning. (It was actually our commander. I’m not sure if he took that as a compliment or not.)
Before BUD/S began, someone told me the best way to deal with it is to go meal-to-meal. Go as hard as you can until you get fed. They feed you every six hours, like clockwork. So I focused on that. Salvation was always no further than five hours and fifty-nine minutes away.
Still, there were several times I thought I wouldn’t make it. I was tempted to get up and run over to the bell that would end my torture—if you ring this bell, you’re taken in for coffee and a doughnut. And good-byes, since ringing the bell (or even standing up and saying “I quit”) means the end of the program for you.
Believe it or not, my fractured foot gradually started to feel better as the week went on. Maybe I just became so used to the feeling that it became normal. What I couldn’t stand was being cold. Lying out on the beach in the surf, stripped down, freezing my ass off—that was the worst. I’d lock arms with the guys on either side of me and “jackhammer,” my body vibrating crazily with the chills. I prayed for someone to pee on me.
Everybody did, I’m sure. Urine was about the only warm thing available at that point. If you happen to look out on the surf during a BUD/S class and see a bunch of guys huddled together, it’s because somebody out there is pissing and everybody is taking advantage of it.
If that bell was a little closer, I might have stood up and gone and rung it, gotten my warm coffee and doughnut. But I didn’t.
Either I was too stubborn to quit, or just too lazy to get up. Take your pick.
I had all sorts of motivation to keep me going. I remembered every person who told me I’d flunk out of BUD/S. Sticking in was the same as sticking it to them. And seeing all the ships out off the coast was another incentive: I asked myself if I wanted to wind up out there.
Hell no.
Hell Week started on Sunday night. Come about Wednesday, I started feeling I was going to make it. By that point, my main goal was mostly to stay awake. (I got about two hours of sleep that whole time, and they weren’t together.) A lot of the beating had gone away and it was more a mental challenge than anything else. Many instructors say Hell Week is 90 percent mental, and they’re right. You need to show that you have the mental toughness to continue on with a mission even when you’re exhausted. That’s really what the idea is behind the test.
It’s definitely an effective way of weeding out guys. I didn’t see it at the time, to be honest. In combat, though, I understood. You can’t just walk over and ring a bell to go home when you’re being fired at. There’s no saying, “Give me that cup of coffee and the doughnut you promised.” If you quit, you die and some of your boys die.
My instructors in BUD/S were always saying things like, “You think this is bad? It’s going to suck more once you get to the Teams. You’ll be colder and more tired once you get there.”
Lying in the surf, I thought they were full of shit. Little did I know that in a few years, I’d think Hell Week was a cakewalk.
B eing cold became my nightmare.
I mean that literally. After Hell Week, I would wake up shivering all the time. I could be under all sorts of blankets and still be cold, because I was going through it all again in my mind.
So many books and videos have been done on Hell Week that I won’t waste more of your time describing it. I will say one thing: going through it is far worse than reading about it.
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