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

which point he left us with muscles on fire in the straight-arm, outstretched rest
position. He actually left us there for almost five minutes, and everyone’s arms
were throbbing. Eighty push-ups and now this new kind of agony, which ended
only when he said, very slowly, very quietly, “Recover.”
We all yelled, “Feet!” in response, and somehow we stood up without
falling over. Then David Ismay called out the wrong number of men present. Not
his fault. Someone had simply vanished. Reno was onto young Dave in a flash. I
don’t quite remember what he said, but his phrase contained the loud
pronunciation of the word wrong.
And he ordered Lieutenant Ismay and our leading petty officer student,
“Drop, and push ’em out.” I remember that first day like it happened this week.
We sat and watched Dave complete his push-ups. And when they’d done it,
damn near exhausted, they called out, “Hooyah, Instructor Reno!”
“Push ’em out,” said Reno softly. And, somehow, they set off on twenty
more repetitions of this killer discipline. Finally they finished, doubtless
wondering, like the rest of us, what the hell they had let themselves in for. But I
bet they never called out the wrong number of men present ever again.
I now understand that SEAL ethos — every officer, commissioned or
noncommissioned, must know the whereabouts of every single one of his men.
No mistakes. At that early stage in our training, our class leader, David Ismay,
did not know. Reno, who’d only been with us for about fifteen minutes, did.
Again, he surveyed his kingdom and then spoke flatly. “Most of you aren’t
going to be here in a couple of months,” said Instructor Reno. And, as if blaming
each and every one of us individually for the wrong head count, he added, “If
you guys don’t start pulling together as a team, none of you will be here.”
He then told us we were again about to take the basic BUD/S screening test.
I graphically recall him reminding us we’d all passed it once in order to make it
this far. “If you can’t pass it again this morning,” he added, “you’ll be back in
the fleet as soon as we can ship you out.”
At this stage, no one was feeling...well...wanted. In fact, we were beginning
to feel abandoned in this world-renowned military coliseum — a coliseum where
someone was about to bring on the lions. Before us was the five-point screening
test:
1. A 500-yard swim, breaststroke or sidestroke, in 12 minutes, 30 seconds
2. A minimum of 42 push-ups in 2 minutes