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

opened fire, spraying the room with bullets (blanks, I hoped).
There were piercing blasts from whistles, and the other door was kicked
open and three more men came crashing into the room. The only thing we knew
for sure right now was when the whistles blew, we hit the floor and took up a
defensive position, prostrate, legs crossed, ears covered with the palms of the
hands.
Hit the deck! Heads down! Incoming!
Then a new voice, loud and stentorian. It was pitch dark save for the nonstop
flashes of the machine guns, but the voice sounded a lot like Instructor Mruk’s to
me — “Welcome to hell, gentlemen.”
For the next couple of minutes there was nothing but gunfire, deafening
gunfire. They were certainly blanks, otherwise half of us would have been dead,
but believe me, they sounded just like the real thing, SEAL instructors firing our
M43s. The shouting was drowned by the whistles, and everything was drowned
by the gunfire.
By now the air in the room was awful, hanging with the smell of cordite, lit
only by the muzzle flashes. I kept my head well down on the floor as the
gunmen moved among us, taking care not to let hot spent cartridges land on our
skin.
I sensed a lull. And then a roar, plainly meant for everyone. “All of you, out!
Move, you guys! Move! Move! Move! Let’s go!”
I struggled to my feet and joined the stampede to the door. We rushed out to
the grinder, where it was absolute bedlam. More gunfire, endless yelling, and
then, again, the whistles, and once more we all hit the deck in the correct
position. In barrels around the grinder’s edge, artillery simulators blasted away. I
didn’t know where Captain Maguire was, but if he’d been here he’d have
thought he was back in some foreign battle zone. At least, if he’d shut his eyes,
he would have.
Then the instructors opened fire for real, this time with high-pressure hoses
aimed straight at us, knocking us down if we tried to get up. The place was
awash with water, and we couldn’t see a thing and we couldn’t hear anything
above the small-arms and artillery fire.
Battlefield whistle drills were conducted in the midst of high-pressure water
jets, total chaos, deafening explosions, and shouting instructors...“Crawl to the
whistle, men! Crawl to the whistle! And keep your goddamned heads down!”
Some of the guys were suffering from mass confusion. One of ’em ran for
his life, straight over the beach and into the ocean. He was a guy I knew really