SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden Read Online Free PDF Page A

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