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

officers and petty officers are told to muster their men and account for the missing. It is as close to real combat as the instructors can make it.
    Hell Week has just gotten started.
    During this six-day ordeal, students are permitted not more than four hours of sleep. The evolutions go on twenty-four hours a day, and are conducted by three shifts of instructors who are rotated in fresh day and night.
    Every evolution students undertake is a race against the other boat crews. Every time someone quits, the remainder of their boat crew has to carry the departed man’s load. A boat that loses one man has lost 16 percent of its muscle. Two people quit, and the boat has lost 30 percent of its strength. Hell Week becomes an object lesson in teamwork.
    Class officers and petty officers are expected to lead—from the front. Officers who find themselves wanting in leadership have the matter brought to their attention by the instructors. BUD/S is one of the only schools in the United States military where officers and enlisted men are trained together. The course and curriculum is exactly the same for enlisted man and officer alike. At BUD/S, there is an officer assigned to oversee each phase of training, but the principal instruction is given by enlisted men. The case can be made that in the SEALs, enlisted men select the officers who will eventually lead them. In BUD/S, it’s not just the weak officers who are culled from training. The imperious, the impulsive, and the reckless will also find it impossible to graduate.
    As always, it pays to be a winner. In a series of races, long-distance paddles, and problem-solving exercises, boat crews who finish last are hammered, and made to do the evolution all over again. Those who come in first place might be allowed an extra cup of coffee with their chow, or the chance to doze in their boat for ten minutes while the other crews try to catch up.
    During Hell Week, students are fed four times a day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack called “midrats.” Of course, this means they have to get to and from the chow hall—which means that their daily excursion is now eight miles round trip instead of six. And they will carry their two-hundred-pound inflatable boat on their heads everywhere they go.
    A constant game of psychological warfare plays out between instructors and students. Often, instructors will offer a cup of hot coffee and a doughnut to the first person to quit. For students who have been awake for five days, and just spent hours bobbing around the Pacific Ocean, the temptation represented by a cup of hot coffee is overwhelming. When a man is faltering, there is always an instructor to remind him that it’s perfectly okay to quit for medical reasons. “This stuff is crazy,” a smooth-talking instructor will tell a member of the Goon Squad. “There’s no reason to put yourself through this. You’ve got nothing to prove. We’ll give you a ride back to the barracks, you can take a hot shower, and we’ll get your orders out tomorrow morning. No one will even know.”
    By the time Hell Week is over, a class will be reduced as much as 90 percent.
    Hell Week starts with a bang, and it ends with a whimper. Sometime on Saturday morning, six days after they started, instructors quietly tell the students to secure their boats and return to the barracks. No SEAL will ever forget the moment that his boat crew was told that Hell Week was over. The survivors look like shipwreck victims. Their uniforms are torn and their feet are so blistered and ulcerated that a class can be tracked by the bloody footprints left by its members. By Saturday morning, some men can no longer walk without support. Some have hands and feet that are swollen like balloons, and others are sunburned beyond recognition, the skin on their faces peeling off in sheets.
    But all of them have one thing in common—they did not, and would not, quit.
    After Hell Week, students are allowed for the first