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

Our field training tasks were tough, combat mission simulations. We paddled
the boats to within a few hundred yards of the shore and dropped anchor. From
that holding area, we sent in the scout recon guys, who swam to the beach,
checked the place out, and signaled the boats to bring us in. This was strict OTB
(over the beach), and we hit the sand running, burrowing into hides just beyond
the high-water mark. This is where SEALs are traditionally at their most
vulnerable, and the instructors watch like hawks for mistakes, signs that will
betray the squad.
We practiced these beach landings all through the nights, fighting our way
out of the water with full combat gear and weapons. And at the end of the fourth
week we all passed, every one of the twenty trainees who had arrived on the
island. We would all graduate from BUD/S.
I asked one of our instructors if this was in any way unusual. His reply was
simple. “Marcus,” he said, “when you’re training the best of the best, nothing’s
unusual. And all the BUD/S instructors want the very best for you.”
They gave us a couple of weeks’ leave after graduation, and thereafter for me
it was high-density education. First jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where
they turned me into a paratrooper. I spent three weeks jumping out of towers and
then out of a C-130, from which we all had to make five jumps.
That aircraft is a hell of a noisy place, and the first jump can be a bit
unnerving. But the person in front of me was a girl from West Point, and she
dived out of that door like Superwoman. I remember thinking, Christ! If she can
do it, I’m definitely gonna do it, and I launched myself into the clear skies above
Fort Benning.
Next stop for me was the Eighteenth Delta Force medical program,
conducted at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That’s where they turned me into a
battlefield doctor. I suppose it was more like a paramedic, but the learning curve
was huge: medicine, in-jections, IV training, chest tubes, combat trauma,
wounds, burns, stitches, morphine. It covered just about everything a wounded
warrior might need under battle conditions. On the first day I had to memorize
315 examples of medical terminology. And they never took their foot off the
high-discipline accelerator. Here I was, working all day and half the night, and
there was still an instructor telling me to get wet and sandy during training runs.
I went straight from North Carolina to SEAL qualification training, three
more months of hard labor in Coronado, diving, parachute jumping, shooting,
explosives, detonation, a long, intensive recap of everything I had learned. Right
after that, I was sent to join the SDV school (submarines) at Panama City,