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

There were about eighteen guys outside thirty-two minutes, and one by one
they were told, “Drop!” Then start pushing ’em out. Most of them were on their
knees with exhaustion, and that kinda saved them a step in the next evolution,
which was a bear crawl straight into the Pacific, directly into the incoming surf.
Instructor Taylor had them go in deep, until the freezing cold water was up to
their necks.
They were kept there for twenty minutes, very carefully timed, I now know,
to make sure no one developed hypothermia. Taylor and his men even had a
pinpoint-accurate chart that showed precisely how long a man could stand that
degree of cold. And one by one they were called out and given the most
stupendous hard time for failing to achieve the thirty-two-minute deadline.
I understand some of them may have just given up, and others just could not
go any faster. But those instructors had a fair idea of what was going on, and on
this, the first day of BUD/S training, they were ruthless.
As those poor guys came out of the surf, the rest of us were now doing
regular push-ups, and since this was now second nature to me, I looked up to see
the fate of the slow guys. Chief Taylor, the Genghis Khan of the beach gods,
ordered these half-dead, half-drowned, half-frozen guys to lie on their backs,
their heads and shoulders in and under the water with the rhythm of the waves.
And he made them do flutter kicks. There were guys choking and spluttering and
coughing and kicking and God knows what else.
And then, only then, did Chief Taylor release them, and I remember, vividly,
him yelling out to them that we, dry and doing our push-ups up the beach, were
winners, whereas they, the slowpokes, were losers! Then he told them they better
start taking this seriously or they would be out of here. “Those guys up there,
taking it easy, they paid the full price,” he yelled. “Right up front. You did not.
You failed. And for guys like you there’s a bigger price to pay, understand me?”
He knew this was shockingly unfair, because some of them had been doing
their genuine best. But he had to find out for certain. Who believed they could
improve? Who was determined to stay? And who was halfway out the door
already?
Next evolution: log PT, brand-new to all of us. We lined up wearing fatigues
and soft hats, seven-man boat crews, standing right by our logs, each of which
was eight feet long and a foot in diameter. I can’t remember the weight, but it
equaled that of a small guy, say 150 to 160 pounds. Heavy, right? I was just
moving into packhorse mode when the instructor called out, “Go get wet and
sandy.” All in our nice dry clothes, we charged once more toward the surf, up