American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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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.”