A Day in the Life as a Navy SEAL

Article written by Navy SEAL Brandon Webb

“THE ONLY EASY DAY WAS YESTERDAY”

This is one of my favorite SEAL sayings and is true to the Frog Man heritage.  I have never been more fortunate to serve with a finer group of  men. I wouldn’t trade my time in BUD/S and the SEAL Teams for anything.

In the unlikely event you make it through Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL  training (aka BUD/S), you will start SEAL Qualification Training, and it is here  you will earn your Trident.

As a new guy, you will go straight into SQT, and that’s where your real  training begins.  This is also where you will be closely watched to make  sure that you are a safe and competent SEAL. Plenty of BUD/S graduates have  washed out of this portion for getting a chip on their shoulder or for just not  making the cut.

After successfully graduating SQT, you’ll get your Trident and then get  assigned to a SEAL or SDV Team.  Here the real work begins. I remember  checking into SEAL Team 3 and getting my a** handed to me during my first Team  PT!  Team life is very challenging and rewarding.  You can expect to  go through a very thorough 12-18 month training cycle prior to deploying.   This consists of the following:

A Typical Day at the Team

• 0700-0900Team PT (PT followed by a 6 mile run or 1-3 mile ocean swim).
• 0900-1200 Team training: Air Operations, Close Quarter Battle, Over the  Beach, Diving, Ship Boarding and Marksmanship training are examples of training  blocks.
• 1200-1300 Lunch (although working lunches are not uncommon)
• 1300-1700 More Team Training.
• 1800-2000 Debrief over beers at the Team Room or local bar.

 

These are just a few of the schools available, just about any DoD  school is available for SEALs.

• Army Parachute Rigger
• SEAL Sniper School
• Dive Maintenance School
• Armorers Course
• Defense Driving/Race Car Driving School
• Advanced Demolition
• Language School
• Breacher Training
• Lock Picking School
• Stinger Missile Gunner School
• Diving Supervisor
• Jump Master

Below, I’ve comprised a few excerpts from my book the “Red Circle” (St.  Martin’s Press 2012).  My hope is that this gives you an idea of what you  guys can expect to experience if you take the “red pill” and successfully  complete BUD/S.

Red Circle, The Making of a US Navy SEAL.

By: Brandon Webb

Nemesis Excerpt

On Friday morning, June 14, 1997, two days after my twenty-third birthday, I  arrived in my dress whites on the main quarterdeck of the pre-training office in  Coronado to check in for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. It had taken  me more than four years to get this far, and I was aware that the odds of making  it through the course were somewhere between 1 and 3 out of 10. I was nervous as  hell.

The grunt on duty handed me a check-in sheet with a list of signatures to  collect that would grant me admission, signatures for such items as Medical,  Dental, Admin, and Physical Training Rest and Rehabilitation, or PTRR. As I  scanned the page I heard a roar like the crash of a gigantic surf coming from  outside. The sound practically shook the building.

“Forty-nine! Fifty! Fifty-one!”

It was a BUD/S class doing their PT on the grinder, the legendary  concrete-and-asphalt courtyard just outside the quarterdeck doors where BUD/S  calisthenics take place. I can still feel the shivers that ran up my spine as I  stood there in the sweltering June heat hearing the thunder those guys  produced.

Walking outside, I saw about thirty hard-looking guys in brown shirts and tan  UDT shorts doing PT in the courtyard with a chiseled blond instructor leading  them through the exercises. The students were lined up on the black concrete,  their feet positioned atop staggered rows of small white frog-feet outlines  painted onto the grinder’s surface. Just off the edge of the concrete there hung  a shiny brass ship’s bell with a well-worn braided rope trailing down from the  ringer. At the foot of the bell, more than a hundred green helmets lined the  ground in a neat, mournful row, each helmet inscribed with the name and rank of  one more would-be SEAL who would never go on to graduate training.

“Sixty-one! Sixty-two! Sixty-three!”

This was the infamous brass bell, one of the most dreaded symbols of SEAL  lore. If you reached the point where you decided you just couldn’t take it, I’d  heard, where the training was just too brutal to go on, you would signify that  you were stepping out by leaving the grinder and ringing the brass bell three  times. You would leave your class helmet behind. The brass bell was a one-way  street out of BUD/S.

It was good to finally see that thing, sitting there silently suspended in  the air as if it were taunting me. “Go on, sit there and wait,” I almost  murmured out loud. “I’ll be damned if I’ll ever touch you.”

I walked to the PTRR check-in office to get my processing started. The door  was closed and I had to knock quite loudly to be heard over the roar of the  class as they counted out their push-ups.

“Eighty-five! Eighty-six! Eighty-seven!”

“Have a seat,” said a guy about my age, sitting on a bench outside the door. “They’ll be right with us.” I sat down next to him and asked him what duty  station he was from. He told me he’d come here right out of boot camp. He nodded  at the guys we were both watching.

“They just finished Hell Week,” he said. “That’s why they look so hard and  fired up.” We both sat and watched the thirty guys pounding out their PTs. “That’s why they’re wearing those brown shirts,” he added. “They give you those  when you survive Hell Week. If you survive Hell Week.”

Everyone in the Navy knew about Hell Week, which comes near the end of Phase  One, typically starting on a Sunday evening and ending the following Friday.  Hell Week is where you are pushed hard for five and a half days straight, with  scarcely more than an hour’s sleep per day, right up to the limits of physical  and especially mental fortitude.

I sat there gazing at these guys who were in a place I envied, chatting with  my new buddy, swapping bits and pieces we’d heard about Hell Week, when I was  suddenly snapped to attention by a voice that sliced the air like a steel  blade.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” The blond instructor had  focused his attention on the two of us. “What are you looking at?!” Clearly this was a rhetorical question and I didn’t even try to answer.

“You are not fit to breathe the same air as this class!” he yelled  at us. “If you know what’s best, you will turn the fuck around and shut the fuck up, or I will personally ensure that you are on the first  boat leaving San Diego Bay for the western Pacific ocean this week!”

Jesus. I hadn’t even started checking in, and here I was already being faced  with the threat of going back to the fleet. I quickly turned the fuck around and shut the fuck up and my bench mate followed suit. A few  minutes later we were let into the PTRR office and given our room assignments.  We would be starting the following week.

BUD/S Class 215 consisted of 220 men, at least at the outset. That number  wouldn’t hold for long. BUD/S training is broken into three phases, preceded by  a five-week indoctrination phase, called indoc. The six weeks of First  Phase focused on physical conditioning and included the infamous Hell Week.  Second Phase consists of eight weeks of diving and water skills, and Third  Phase, nine weeks of land warfare. The whole thing adds up to more than seven  months, the whole purpose of which really boils down to one of two things: to  prepare you for the real training, which comes after you graduate—or to spit you  out.

It started spitting us out right away.

That first week of indoc we all did the initial BUD/S PT test over again, and  not all of us passed. Just during indoc, we lost twenty guys. Boom. Ten percent  of the class, gone, and we hadn’t even started First Phase yet.

There were two guys in my BUD/S class whom I already knew from that pre-BUD/S  course we’d taken in Great Lakes a year earlier: Rob Stella and Lars the blond  überdude with the tree-trunk thighs. Stella was quite the comedian and became a  good friend. Lars I never had the chance to know well: in our first week of  First Phase, he quit.

Our first week. This completely flipped me out. Seeing guys like  Lars quit, especially so early on, was a revelation. This was not about who  could do the most push-ups or the shortest run times. This was about  persevering, about not quitting. These guys might be able to knock out twice as  many pull-ups as I could, but that didn’t necessarily mean they could handle the  mental stress—being constantly yelled at, ripped apart, and put down, at the  same time that we were being put through physically punishing environments.

Over the coming months, I saw guys who looked like Conan the Barbarian,  accomplished athletes who had been at the top of their game in professional  sports, who had qualified for Olympic trials, seriously tough, mean-looking  dudes, cry like babies as they walked across the grinder to go ring that brass  bell. And I saw guys who weighed barely over a hundred pounds take the most  brutal physical and psychological punishment and keep on trucking without  complaint.

However, there was little time or cause to feel smug about any of this.  Frankly, I was relieved to have made the first cut. I knew that the first six  weeks was a weeding out process—and that I was already a pretty good candidate  for being one of the early weeds. As I had feared would happen, my long months  on the USS Kitty Hawk had made me soft. Before checking in to BUD/S I had taken  a thirty-day leave, and I spent a lot of those thirty days trying like hell to  get back into some kind of condition. By the time I got to BUD/S, I thought I  was in pretty decent shape. I quickly learned that I was wrong.

In fact, I learned it on the first Monday morning of First Phase.

Our PTRR instructor in charge said a few words and turned us over to the  First Phase instructor staff. Everyone in the class knew that we were about to  enter a world of hurt, and the moment we were handed over to the First Phase  staff on that warm mid-July morning, we did. All two hundred of us had lined up  on those staggered white frog feet painted on the black grinder, and we now  faced someone we would quickly recognize as our worst enemy.

The men who gravitate to become First Phase instructors are among the most  physically fit people on the planet. They see themselves as guardians of the  gate, and they are there to punish and bring the pain. They are the most feared,  the meanest, ugliest, most physically conditioned guys you’ll ever meet. We had  eight instructors for First Phase, but four of them comprised the A list, the  ones who would be a constant abrasive presence in our lives until we either made  it on to Second Phase or rang that damned brass bell……..

Getting Dirty Excerpt

The training continued. We spent the next eighteen months in a lengthy  workup, a seemingly endless procession of training blocks that took me all over  the country and through some of the finest programs in the world. We would spend  three or four weeks with the platoon, stationed in Coronado, then go off to a  specialized school somewhere in the country for a training block, then rotate  back home and repeat the cycle.

The truth is, SEALs never stop training. When we aren’t actually  deployed we’re always learning new skills, continuing to hone our existing  skills, and keeping ourselves in peak physical condition.

Rigger School

Four weeks of parachute training at an Army school in Fort Lee, Virginia,  learning to pack, repair, and jump with different kinds of chutes. We learned  how to jump with a stacked duck: you take two Zodiacs, wrap them up  with their engines and equipment, stick on two chutes, toss the whole thing out  the back of a C-130 and jump with it. We were mixed in with Army guys right of  out boot camp, to their instructors’ great distress, because we were a totally  corrupting influence. We drank hard and chased women every night, then showed up  barely sober for class every morning. It was pretty rowdy.

Marine Operations (MAROPS)

We would take fully loaded Zodiacs fifty to a hundred miles out onto the open  ocean. Nothing like navigating on the choppy Pacific surface in a fifteen-foot  rubber boat a hundred miles from shore.

Over the Beach Training

About a month, part at Coronado Beach and part on San Clemente Island. We  went through drills where we had to get our team extracted off a hot  beach (that is, while being fired at), and others where we had to get our team onto a hot beach—all with live fire.

Land Nav

A few weeks at Team 3 base in Coronado, followed by four weeks in the Laguna  Mountains, much like we’d done in Third Phase of BUD/S but a good deal more  intense.

Desert Warfare

Niland again for four weeks. This was one of the most important training  blocks, and I’ll say more about it in a moment.

Dive Phase

Four weeks off the San Diego docks—will say more about this one, too.

Close Quarters Battle (CQB)

At John Shaw’s famous shooting range in Mississippi; also more on this  shortly.

Gas and Oil Platforms Training (GOPLATS)

In the event that terrorists ever took over an oil platform out on the ocean,  we needed to be ready on a moment’s notice to go out there and take it back.  This involved nighttime dives fifty to a hundred miles off the coast of Los  Angeles. We would swim underwater for miles using a Dräger rebreather, then come  up out of nowhere, hook a titanium caving ladder up onto the rig, snake up the  ladder and ambush whoever was up there. Sometimes there were bands of terrorists  (simulated) we would have to capture and subdue. Because of my diving  experience, they often made me point man on these ops, which meant the whole  platoon relied on me to put them on the target. (It was quite an honor,  especially being a new guy.)

Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS)

This is a critical part of training, essentially the Navy SEAL’s version of  piracy on the high seas; similar in a way to GOPLATS, only in this case we were  going out on fast boats and taking over ships on the open ocean. Less than two  years later, in my capacity as a sniper, I would be point man on an operation  just like this with a genuine terrorist ship in the Persian Gulf—and in that one  we definitely would be loaded with live fire.

Air Support

Working with an A-10 squadron outside Las Vegas, calling in live fire at  night. The A-10 Thunderbolt (Warthog) was the first U.S. Air Force plane  designed specifically for close-quarters support and saw its first serious  combat use during the Gulf War. It’s amazing how much ordnance those A-10s can  deliver. Those Air Force guys are excellent pilots, and I loved working with  them. It was my first experience getting on the radio and calling in  ordnance—something that would save my life, and lives of quite a few other guys,  a few years later in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Inter-Operations (INTEROPS) Training

A week in Northern Virginia with some intelligence people from the Defense  Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Defense’s version of the CIA. We  did things like inserting a guy on the beach and then linking up with another  agent and transporting him to a safe house. It was fascinating to be exposed to  that world and see how intelligence agents work in hostile territory. It was  also something I would learn a great deal more about many years later on the  mean streets of Iraq.

One of our biggest and most important training blocks was the land warfare  training, which took place, once again, out at Niland. A lot of the combat  training we’d had up to that point, even in STT, consisted of basic contact  drills, and a lot of the tactics taught there had been developed in the first  years of the SEALs’ existence, which happened to be the Vietnam years of the  sixties and early seventies. As a result, the entire approach to direct  engagement was primarily oriented around the conditions of jungle warfare: you  come into enemy contact, lay down a ton of fire, and quickly disappear into the  jungle canopy. The whole point of guerilla warfare is to avoid open, direct  contact. When U.S. troops first encountered that style of warfare in the jungles  of southeast Asia it completely threw them, but that was the style of combat  SEALs cut their teeth on.

In the desert, though, it’s a completely different scenario. You’re in the  open, and there are not a whole lot of areas you can disappear into. How do you  successfully survive an enemy contact out in the open desert? It’s a context  that’s going to last way longer than the five or ten minutes of the typical  enemy contact in a jungle-warfare scenario.

This was Team 3’s specialty: as a team we were responsible for southwest Asia  and the Middle East. Back then, Team 3 owned the training philosophy around open  desert contact with the enemy. Just a year or two before, a SEAL named Forrest  Walker had taken a few guys from his training cell all over the world to visit  with various special ops units to learn from their experiences with desert  warfare, especially the British and Australian SAS, and they had built a solid  desert warfare program. Team 3 was fortunate to be the beneficiaries of  Forrest’s excellent work. (I would later serve in Afghanistan in the same  platoon with Forrest.) We practiced in contact drills that would last up to an  hour: sixteen guys moving constantly, using the desert terrain, conserving our  ammunition, and at the same time putting down a continued rate of firepower for  over an hour. It takes some skill to conserve ammo so that nobody runs out, at  the same time maintaining a steady rate of return fire, and all the while  staying in constant motion and using the difficult desert terrain to your  advantage.

It also takes a massive amount of coordination. We would suddenly have  contact, which always brought with it an element of surprise; even though we  were expecting it, we never knew exactly when it would come or from what  direction. And the lane graders (instructors) who had set this whole scenario up  ahead of time would constantly shift the elements of the scenario, challenging  us throughout the process. To simulate incoming fire, they would throw grenade  simulators into our midst. Often these exercises took place at night, and they  would have rigged chem lights on the targets that they could trigger, simulating  muzzle flashes. They also had remote detonation devices so that, depending on  how our response was unfolding, they could instantly change up the scenario by  blowing up something off to our left, or our right, or behind us, big fireballs  going on all around us through the course of the hour. We would instantly have  to figure out which direction that initial contact was coming from, respond  immediately with a blistering volley of overwhelming fire, and at the same time  identify an out—exactly which direction do we go to extract ourselves from this  contact unscathed? Whoever found out first had to communicate it instantly and  effectively to the rest of the squad.

In a firefight, you can’t afford the luxury of coming up with a great plan.  You don’t have five minutes to think about it. A decent plan executed right now  is a lot better than a great plan executed five minutes from now—when you’re  dead.

Typically the squad would split up into two elements. One guy would peel off  and say, “Hey, I’ve got an out over here!” and while half the squad was laying  down fire the other half would stop firing, get up, run back, get down, and  start laying down fire—at which point the first half, hearing the lull in fire  when that group shifted back and then the renewed fire when they picked it up  again, would start shifting in turn. It had to be a beautifully choreographed  machine, all unfolding on the fly, taking into account the terrain and  conditions as well as the fact that the source of enemy contact might be on the  move, too.

And all of this was happening with live rounds. This is something that sets  SEAL training apart from most of the other military trainings: everything we do,  we do with high-speed live fire, real bullets—hundreds of thousands of rounds.  You have to be incredibly careful. We were.

We also had four heavy M60 machine guns in the platoon. An M60 is  gas-operated, air-cooled, belt-fed, and weighs twenty-three pounds. It can deal  out a sustained rate of about 100 rounds per minute, or in bursts of 200 rounds  per minute (nine rounds per second), with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per  second. We’d typically fire it off in bursts of three, four or five rounds—three  is ideal because that gets the job done but also conserves ammo. I was one of  the M60 gunners and carried a thousand of those 7.62 mm caliber rounds on me. My  roommate Franny had one of the other big guns, and we would sig off each other:  I’d go dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, then  I’d pause and move as I heard Franny pick it up: dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat, dat-dat-dat—and we’d keep switching back and  forth, conserving each other’s ammo, playing off each other, keeping that fire  going. This would last for an hour or more.

We did one big final exercise where they combined together everything we’d  learned and ran us through a few hours of contact. They went out of their way to  make it realistic and threw everything in there—bombs going off, live  helicopters coming in to extract some of us, jets dropping ordnance, everything.  Most people in the military never see training like this.

The realism was remarkable.