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

Somehow you find yourself able to breathe in pure oxygen, but the only way
you can breathe out is through your nose. A lot of guys find the cascade of
bubbles across their faces extremely disconcerting. Then the instructors
disconnect your airline completely and put a knot in it. And you must try to get
your inhalation and exhalation lines reconnected. If you don’t or can’t even try,
you’re gone. You need a good lungful of air before this starts, then you need to
feel your way blind to the knot in the line behind your back and start unraveling
it. You can more or less tell by the feel if it’s going to be impossible, what the
instructors call a whammy. Then you run the flat edge of your hand across your
throat and give the instructor the thumbs-up. That means “I’m never going to get
that knot undone, permission to go to the surface.” At that point, they cease
holding you down and let you go up. But you better be right in your assessment
of that knot.
In my case, I decided too hastily that the knot in my line was impossible,
gave them the signal, ditched my tanks over my shoulder, and floated up to the
surface. But the instructors decided the knot was nothing like impossible and
that I had bailed out of a dangerous situation. Failed.
I had to go and sit in a line in front of the poolside wall. It would have been a
line of shame, except there were so many of us. I was instructed to take the test
again, and I did not make the mistake the second time. Undid the sonofabitch
knot and passed pool comp.
Several of my longtime comrades failed, and I felt quite sad. Except you
can’t be a SEAL if you can’t keep your nerve underwater. As one of the
instructors said to me that week, “See that guy in some kind of a panic over
there? There’s confusion written all over him. You might have your life in his
hands one day, Marcus, and we cannot, will not, allow that to happen.”
Pool comp is the hardest one of all to pass, just because we all spent so much
time in the water and right now had to prove we had the potential to be true
SEALs, guys to whom the water was always a sanctuary.
It must not be a threat or an obstacle but a place where we alone could
survive. Some of the instructors had known many of us for a long time and
desperately wanted us to pass. But the slightest sign of weakness in pool
competency, and they wouldn’t take the chance.
Those of us who did stay moved on to phase three. With a few rollbacks
coming in, we were twenty-one in number. It was winter now in the Northern
Hemisphere, early February, and we prepared for the hard slog of the land
warfare course. That’s where they turn us into navy commandos.