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

ordered from one exercise to another. Guys who were judged to be slacking were
ordered to throw in a set of flutter kicks.
The result of this was pure chaos. Some guys couldn’t keep up, others were
doing push-ups when they’d been ordered to do sit-ups, men were falling, hitting
the ground facedown. In the end, half of us didn’t know where the hell we were
or what we were supposed to be doing. I just kept going, doing my absolute best,
through the roars of abuse and the flying spray of the power hoses: push-ups, situps,
screwups. It was now all the same to me. Every muscle in my body ached to
hell, especially those in my stomach and arms.
And finally Schulz offered us mercy and a quiet drink. “Hydrate!” he yelled
with that Old World charm that came so naturally to him, and we all reached for
our canteens and chugged away.
“Canteens down!” bellowed Schulz, a tone of pained outrage in his voice.
“Now push ’em out!”
Oh, yes. Of course. I’d forgotten all about that. I’d just had a nine-second
break. Down we all dropped again and went back to work with the last remnants
of our strength, counting the push-ups. We only did twenty that time. Schulz
must have been seized by an attack of conscience.
“Get in the surf!” he bawled. “Right now!”
We floundered to the beach and darn near fell into the surf. We were now so
hot, the cold didn’t even matter. Much. And when we splashed back to the
beach, Chief Schulz was there, ranting and yelling for us to form up and run the
mile to the chow hall.
“Get moving,” he added. “We don’t have much time.”
When we arrived, I was just about dead on my feet. I didn’t think I had the
energy to chew a soft-boiled egg. We walked into that chow hall like Napoleon’s
army on the retreat from Moscow, wet, bedraggled, exhausted, out of breath, too
hungry to eat, too battered to care.
It was, of course, all by design. This was not some kind of crazed Chinese
fire drill arranged by the instructors. This was a deadly serious assessment of
their charges, a method used to find out, in the hardest possible way, who really
wanted to do this, who really cared enough to go through with it, who could face
the next four weeks before Hell Week, when things got seriously tough.
It was designed to compel us to reassess our commitment. Could we really
take this punishment? Ninety-eight of us had formed up on the grinder two hours
earlier. Only sixty-six of us made it through breakfast.
And when that ended, we were still soaked, boots, long pants, and T-shirts.