SEAL of Honor (24 page)

In any trouble spot throughout the world, wherever and whenever American interests are threatened, SEALs are most likely involved. In most cases SEALs are in and out before the main combat action begins, a role requiring a special breed of warrior.

There are just over two thousand active-duty SEAL operators, comprising about one-tenth of the U.S. Navy’s personnel. Because of the nature of their highly specialized training and missions, members of the SEAL community tend to be very close-mouthed and guarded. The elite of all special operations forces, SEAL operators are fully mindful of their training, responsibilities, and, most important, their ethos. SEALs effectively “police” themselves and are hesitant about, if not resistant to, non-SEAL or -NSW attempts to penetrate their community.

While some may view this reluctance as being aloof or arrogant, it is neither. The SEAL bond and sense of community is developed in and through BUD/S training. While the first law of nature is self-preservation, the metamorphosis, the
fundamental rewiring, of those who successfully complete BUD/S brings the SEAL to realize that any one of his teammates is more important than himself. It is this fundamental mind-set that separates SEALS from all other military units and that is foreign to most non-SEAL operators. It is the mind-set of a warrior.

Having completed BUD/S, each and every SEAL knows what every other SEAL knows. In the civilian workplace many people with many different thought processes, training, capabilities, and character intermingle with varying degrees of attitude and commitment, if any, to the overall mission of the enterprise. In all too many cases, most believe that what is best for them is what is best for everyone else and the workplace.

However, as a member of the warrior community, all SEAL operators know each other’s thought processes, endurance, training, capabilities, and character. They know that their lives are in their teammates’ hands. This knowledge of each other is necessary to accomplish their core missions, and it is this stark distinction from the civilian world that may appear to isolate SEAL operators from others.

SEALs are fully aware that they are the most highly trained and specialized military unit in the world, and that SEAL missions are, in most cases, beyond the level of training and capability of any other military unit. With that awareness comes an underlying level of confidence that is clearly visible in how SEALs talk, act, and carry themselves, as well as in their interaction with the civilian populace. It is this fundamental difference that may lead some to view SEAL operators as distant and overbearing.

But there is a difference between confidence and conceit, commitment and convenience, and character and contrition. It is the SEALs’ fundamental difference in thought process and attitude that provides them with confidence, commitment, and character. Thankfully, conceit, convenience, and contrition simply do not apply to the warrior community.

Unlike the mission statements framed on many corporate walls, but in most cases totally unknown to their workers, the SEAL Creed is ingrained into every aspect of a SEAL’s being. The SEAL Creed is not simply words. SEALs eat it, breathe it, and live it—every minute of every day:

SEALs are not maniacal individuals hell-bent on self-destruction. They have hopes and dreams for themselves and their families just like each of us do. However, SEALs are acutely aware that freedom is not free. They understand better than most that everything has a price that must be paid. Like the Spartan warriors described in Steven Pressfield’s
Gates of Fire
, SEALs know that their “seasons are marked ... not by calendared years themselves, but by battles. Campaigns fought and comrades lost; trials of death survived. Clashes and conflicts from which time effaces all superficial recall, leaving only the fields themselves and their names, which achieve in the warrior’s memory a stature ennobled beyond all other modes of commemoration, purchased with the holy coin of blood and paid for with the lives of beloved brothers-in-arms.”

SEALs give all and ask for nothing. Their reward is coming home to their families and friends, watching them and others enjoy the freedoms they helped secure, ever vigilant that for as long as the Lord tarries, the fight is never complete.

Thank God for America’s warriors. We continue to enjoy our freedoms because of men such as these.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

—SEAL motto, quoted in Richard Schoenberg,
The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

 

 

 

S
EAL platoons operate on a twenty-four-month cycle. Of those twenty-four months, eighteen consist of training work-up followed by a six-month deployment overseas in an operational status. The type of training work-up is dictated by three major factors: advanced individual and platoon-level skills that will be necessary for the conduct of all special operations, the anticipated methods of delivery (insertion) and extraction most likely to be used while on deployment, and the geographical area of operations.

The West Coast (odd-numbered) teams are primarily responsible for the Pacific Rim, the Far East, Africa and the Middle East, and eastern bloc regions; the East Coast (even-numbered) teams are responsible for South and Central America, the Mediterranean and Caribbean areas, Europe, and Russia. Even though the teams have primary areas of responsibility, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) dictates that each team be utilized to maximum efficiency, thereby necessitating an overlapping of geographic regions of responsibility.

In the teams SEAL operators are either on a mission or preparing for the next one. It is a constant cycle. The predeployment work-up is divided into three distinct phases: professional development (PRODEV), Unit Level Training (ULT), and Squadron Integration Training (SIT).

PRODEV is a six-month training block in which individual SEALs attend a number of schools and courses, leading to individual qualifications and designations that, when combined with the other SEALs, allow the platoon to operate as an effective operational combat team. Depending on the operational needs of the
overall team, or platoon, SEALs acquire any number of advanced skills: sniper; breaching; surreptitious entry; electronic and media exploitation; technical surveillance; high-threat protective security; advanced weapons training; advanced driving skills (rural, urban, security); advanced climbing and rope skills; advanced air operations, including high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) and high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) parachute jumping; parachute rigging and packing; diving supervisor; range safety officer; instructor school; leadership school; foreign weapons; unmanned aerial vehicle and precision bombing operator; language school; and advanced special operations.

ULT is the following six-month training block that follows PRODEV. It allows individual SEALs to perfect the skills they obtained during PRODEV and incorporate them into the platoon/team core mission areas: land warfare; close-quarters combat; urban warfare; maritime interdiction; combat-swimmer operations; long-range interdiction; air operations; special reconnaissance and maritime operations; and combat operations involving advanced marksmanship and heavy weapons.

The first ninety days of ULT is commonly spent on getting back to basics, such as hydrographic reconnaissance combined with underwater demolition of submerged targets. Another twenty-one days are spent on air training, including several “Duck drops” from different aircraft during both day and night. “Duck drop” is a term used to describe the practice of dropping inflatable watercraft from aircraft. Other training includes combat equipment jumps, fast-roping, rappelling, and SPIE (Special Purpose Insertion/Extraction) rig techniques.

Mission planning is conducted in the classroom, followed by intelligence gathering and reporting. This is followed by Intel Week, when a platoon will reconnoiter a local utility facility, gathering photographic and sketch data, and then compile a comprehensive report on the facility’s strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.

Mission planning is followed by the Combat Swimmer course (CSC) over the next twenty-one days. The platoon will execute over thirty dives in this course, including a full mission profile, in which SEALs are inserted by aircraft or surface vessel at a predetermined location for a thirty-mile “over-the-horizon” transit in a vehicle. This is followed by a “turtleback,” which is a surface swim in full dive gear, then a four-hour multileg dive into the enemy harbor to place limpet mines on the hulls of designated target ships, and then evasion of the antiswimmer measures put in place by the trainers.

The platoon then moves on to land warfare. Here they again start with the basics of small-unit tactics, building to a full mission profile in simulated combat situations. Here the training takes place nearly twenty-four hours a day. One of the
SEALs’ favorite and most intensive training exercises is the immediate-action drill (IAD). Although IADs are classified, it is safe to say that they are so effective that they can totally mislead the enemy into believing that they are up against a whole company (one hundred men) of soldiers. Special attention is given to the use of small arms, including pistols and sniper rifles. Skills needed for sniper and countersniper operations and close-quarters battle are all emphasized.