Lone Survivor_ The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 ( PDFDrive )

And it affected us all, deeply. We raised our tired voices, and the shout split
the noontime air above that beach in Coronado.
“Hooyah, Instructor Burns!” we bellowed. And did we ever mean it.
The SEAL commanders and chiefs stepped forward and took each one of us
by the hand, saying, “Congratulations,” and offering words of encouragement
about the future, telling us to be sure and contact their personal teams once we
were through.
Tell the truth, it was all a bit of a blur for me. I can’t really recall who invited
me to join what. But one thing remains very clear in my mind. I shook the hand
of the great SEAL warrior Joe Maguire, and he had a warm word for me. And
thus far in my life, there had been no greater honor than that.
We probably devoured a world-record amount of food that weekend. Appetites
returned and then accelerated as our stomachs grew more used to big-sized
meals. We still had three weeks to go in first phase, but nothing compared to
Hell Week. We were perfecting techniques in hydrology, learning tide levels and
demographics of the ocean floor. That’s real SEAL stuff, priceless to the
Marines. While they’re planning a landing, we’re in there early, moving fast,
checking out the place in secret, telling ’em what to expect.
There were only thirty-two members of the original class left now, mostly
because of injury or illness sustained during Hell Week. But they’d been joined
by others, rollbacks from other classes who’d been permitted another go.
This applied to me, because I had been on an enforced break when I had my
broken femur. And so when I rejoined for phase two, I was in Class 228. We
began in the diving phase, conducted in the water, mostly under it. We learned
how to use scuba tanks, how to dump them and get ’em back on again, how to
swap them over with a buddy without coming to the surface. This is difficult, but
we had to master it before we could take the major pool competency test.
I failed my pool competency, like a whole lot of others. This test is a royal
bastard. You swim down to the bottom of the pool with twin eighty-pound scuba
tanks on your back, a couple of instructors harassing you. You are not allowed to
put a foot down and kick to the surface. If you do, you’ve failed, and that’s the
end of it.
First thing these guys do is rip off your mask, then your mouthpiece, and you
have to hold your breath real quick. You fight to get the mouthpiece back in,
then they unhook your airline intake, and you have to get that back in real fast,
groping around over your shoulder, behind your back.