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

signifying resignation, and we hadn’t even had lunch on day one.
Most of us thought they were a bit hasty, because we knew a certain part of
the afternoon was taken up by the weekly room inspection. Most of us had spent
all day Sunday getting into order, cleaning the floor with a mop and then high
polishing it. Somehow I had found myself way down the waiting list to use one
of the two electric buffers.
I had had to wait my turn and did not get finished before about 0200. But the
time had not been wasted. I’d fixed my bed gear, pressed my starched fatigues,
and spit-shined my boots. I looked better, not like some darned sand-encrusted
beachcomber, the way I had most of the day.
The instructors arrived. I cannot remember which of them walked into my
room. But he gazed upon it, this picture of military order and precision, and at
me with an expression of undiluted disgust. Carefully he opened my chest of
drawers and hurled everything all over the room. He heaved the mattress off the
bed and cast it aside. He emptied the contents of my locker into a pile and
informed me that he was unused to meeting trainees who were happy to live in a
garbage dump. Actually, his words were a bit more colorful than that,
more...well...earthy.
Beyond the confines of my room, there was absolute bedlam; stuff was
hurled all over the place in room after room. I just stood there gaping as the
entire barracks was ransacked by our own instructors. Outside in the corridor, I
could hear someone bawling out Lieutenant David Ismay, the class leader. The
soft, dulcet tones of Chief Schulz were unmistakable.
“What kind of rathole are you running here, Mr. Ismay? I’ve never seen
rooms like these in my life. Your uniforms are a disgrace. Hit the surf...all of
you!”
There were, by my count, thirty rooms. Only three of them had passed
muster. And even those guys were not exempt from our first ocean plunge of the
afternoon. In our shiny boots and pressed fatigues, we pounded back down to the
beach, leaving a scene of total chaos behind us.
We raced into the water, deep, right into the waves. Then we turned and
floundered back to the beach, formed up, and headed back to the BUD/S area.
Chief Taylor was back in our lives with a major rush, obviously preparing for the
last evolution of the day, on the beach or in the water. We did not know which.
All day long we had been wondering precisely who he was, but our inquiries
had yielded little save that the chief was a true veteran of the teams who had
seen combat in overseas deployment four times, including the Gulf War. He was