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

seem too much to ask in return, since we fight, almost without exception, on the
enemy’s ground, not our own.
That World War I English poet and serving soldier Rupert Brooke
understood the Brits do not traditionally bring home their war dead. And he
expressed it right: “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some
corner of a foreign field That is forever England.” There’s not a Navy SEAL
anywhere in the world who does not understand those lines and why Brooke
wrote them.
It’s a sacred promise to us from our high command. That’s why it gets
drummed into us from the very first day in Coronado — you are not going to be
alone. Ever. And you’re not going to leave your swim buddy alone.
I suffered a minor setback in the early part of that summer when I was in
Class 226. I managed to fall from about fifty feet up a climbing rope and really
hurt my thigh. The instructor rushed up to me and demanded, “You want to
quit?”
“Negative,” I responded.
“Then get right back up there,” he said. I climbed again, fell again, but
somehow I kept going. The leg hurt like hell, but I kept training for another
couple of weeks before the medics diagnosed a cracked femur! I was
immediately on crutches but still hobbling along the beach and into the surf with
the rest of them. Battle conditions, right?
Eventually, when the leg healed, I was put back and then joined BUD/S
Class 228 in December for phase two. We lived in a small barracks right behind
the BUD/S grinder. That’s the blacktop square where a succession of SEAL
instructors have laid waste to thousands of hopes and dreams and driven men to
within an inch of their lives.
Those instructors have watched men drop, watched them fail, watched them
quit, and watched them quietly, with ice-cold, expressionless faces. That’s not
heartless; it’s because they were only interested in the others, the ones who did
not crack or quit. The ones who would rather die than quit. The ones with no quit
in them.
It was only the first day of Indoc, and my little room was positioned right
next to the showers. Showers, by the way, is a word so polite it’s damn near a
euphemism. They were showers, okay, but not in the accepted, civilized sense.
They were a whole lot closer to a goddamn car wash and were known as the
decontamination unit. Someone cranked ’em up at around 0400, and the howl of
compressed air and freezing cold pressurized water forcing its way through those