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

This is formally called Demolitions and Tactics, and the training is as strict
and unrelenting as anything we had so far encountered. It’s a known fact that
phase three instructors are the fittest men in Coronado, and it took us little time
to find out why. Even the opening speech by our new proctor was edged with
dire warnings.
His name was Instructor Eric Hall, a veteran of six SEAL combat platoons,
and before we even started on Friday afternoon, he laid it right on the line. “We
don’t put up with people who feel sorry for themselves. Any problems with
drugs or alcohol, you’re gone. There’s four bars around here that guys from the
teams sometimes visit. Stay the hell out of all of ’em, hear me? Anyone lies,
cheats, or steals, you’re done, because that’s not tolerated here. Just so we’re
clear, gentlemen.”
He reminded us it was a ten-week course and we weren’t that far from
graduation. He told us where we’d be. Five weeks right here at the center, with
days at the land navigation training area in La Posta. There would be four days at
Camp Pendleton on the shooting ranges. That’s the 125,000-acre Marine Corps
base between Los Angeles and San Diego. We would finish at San Clemente
Island, known to SEALs as the Rock and the main site for more advanced
shooting and tactics, demolitions, and field training.
Eric Hall finished with a characteristic flourish. “Give me a hundred and ten
percent at all times — and don’t blow it by doing something stupid.”
Thus we went at it again for another two and a half months, heading first for
the group one mountain training facility, three thousand feet up in the rough,
jagged Laguna Mountains at La Posta, eighty miles east of San Diego. That’s
where they taught us stealth, camouflage, and patrolling, the essential field craft
of the commando. The terrain was really rough, hard to climb, steep, and
demanding. Sometimes we didn’t make it back to barracks at night and had to
sleep outside in the wild country.
They taught us how to navigate across the land with maps and compass. At
the end of the week, we all passed the basic courses, three-mile journeys
conducted in pairs across the mountains. Then we headed back to the center to
prepare for Camp Pen-dle-ton, where we would undergo our first intensive
courses in weaponry.
No time was lost. We were out there with submachine guns, rifles, and
pistols, training for the not-too-distant days when we would go into combat
armed with the M4 rifle, the principal SEAL weapon of war.
First thing was safety. And we all had to learn by heart the four critical rules: