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cleaned our gear. Dave was pouring coffee. No one else was there, so I figured I was in for a royal ass-chewing.
    â€œCome in and sit down,” Dave growled. I walked in and sat down.
    Handing me a cup of coffee, he sat across the table from me and said, “Gormly, you’re a dumb son of a bitch.”
    â€œThanks for the coffee, Captain.”
    He told me the platoon had done well on the mission, but he’d had no choice other than to grill me in front of my men. He knew they knew what I’d done, and he wasn’t going to tolerate such blatant violations of his diving procedures. Again he demanded, “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
    I’d already answered that question, and I couldn’t think of anything else to add. Finally, I just looked at him. “What would you have done?”
    Dave stared at me for about ten seconds. I figured he was about to reach across the table and rip off my head for being a wiseass. Instead a grin crept onto his scowling face. “Same thing you did.”
    Figuring I was out of the woods, I looked him in the eye and said, “Gotta train like you’re gonna fight—right?”
    Dave looked right back at me and said, “Gormly, you’re buying the rum and Cokes when we get back to St. Thomas.”
    I would have many occasions to remember that conversation later in my SEAL career. For one thing, Dave set the tone for me when I later commanded SEAL Teams: never come down too hard on someone who’s trying to do his job the realistic way. Another equally important lesson I learned was that if you don’t cut corners in training, you’re much better prepared for combat.
    The difficulties we faced underwater that day in 1966 were good preparation for the tense situations I faced later in Vietnam, Grenada, and other places. Staying locked and loaded was the only way to go.

2
    THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY
    A large sign at Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUDS) training tells new students what they can expect: “The only easy day was yesterday.” When I went through training, there were no easy days. And as I later learned, the axiom applied to just about everything in the SEALs.
    I reported to training, for the second time, in January 1964. Nothing could have deterred me once I started. When something is hard to get, you want it more. As I lay in my bunk that first night, I reflected on how I’d finally made it to this point. It hadn’t been easy.
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    I was born on February 10, 1941, in Long Branch, New Jersey. My father, James Louis Gormly, was from a New York Irish family. He was working on Wall Street in 1929 when the market crashed. That was probably an omen of things to come for the Gormly family, since none of us has ever gotten rich. My mother, Dorothy Percival Gormly, was also from New York. She had been married once before to an electrical engineer, Joseph Leopold. They had one child, my half brother, Joseph Richard Gormly (he took my father’s name).
    In 1942, when I was eighteen months old, my family moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia. With a partner, my father started a ship’s chandlery in Norfolk. He was too old for the military, so, like many others, he got into the wartime shipbuilding industry. His company got some lucrative government contracts to outfit the Liberty ships being constructed at Norfolk-area shipyards. For a few years I guess he did okay, although I was too young to remember. After the war, though, the chandlery went under and he turned to selling cars. My mother spent many years working in real estate. We never had a lot of money, but we did all right. But my father wasn’t home much, and in many ways, my older brother, Dick, stood in for him. Dick was twelve years older and was a good influence on me. Thanks to my father’s wartime prosperity, he spent three years at the prestigious Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg and then went to the University