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at that point. If you happen to look out on the surf during a BUD/S class and see a bunch of guys huddled together, it’s because somebody out there is pissing and everybody is taking advantage of it.
    If that bell was a little closer, I might have stood up and gone and rung it, gotten my warm coffee and doughnut. But I didn’t.
    Either I was too stubborn to quit, or just too lazy to get up. Take your pick.
    I had all sorts of motivation to keep me going. I remembered every person who told me I’d flunk out of BUD/S. Sticking in was the same as sticking it to them. And seeing all the ships out off the coast was another incentive: I asked myself if I wanted to wind up out there.
    Hell no.
    Hell Week started on Sunday night. Come about Wednesday, I started feeling I was going to make it. By that point, my main goal was mostly to stay awake. (I got about two hours of sleep that whole time, and they weren’t together.) A lot of the beating had gone away and it was more a mental challenge than anything else. Many instructors say Hell Week is 90 percent mental, and they’re right. You need to show that you have the mental toughness to continue on with a mission even when you’re exhausted. That’s really what the idea is behind the test.
    It’s definitely an effective way of weeding out guys. I didn’t see it at the time, to be honest. In combat, though, I understood. You can’t just walk over and ring a bell to go home when you’re being fired at. There’s no saying, “Give me that cup of coffee and the doughnut you promised.” If you quit, you die and some of your boys die.
    My instructors in BUD/S were always saying things like, “You think this is bad? It’s going to suck more once you get to the Teams. You’ll be colder and more tired once you get there.”
    Lying in the surf, I thought they were full of shit. Little did I know that in a few years, I’d think Hell Week was a cakewalk.
    B eing cold became my nightmare.
    I mean that literally. After Hell Week, I would wake up shivering all the time. I could be under all sorts of blankets and still be cold, because I was going through it all again in my mind.
    So many books and videos have been done on Hell Week that I won’t waste more of your time describing it. I will say one thing: going through it is far worse than reading about it.
    R OLLED B ACK
    T he week after Hell Week is a brief recovery phase called walk week. By then they’ve beaten you so bad your body feels permanently bruised and swollen. You wear tennis shoes and don’t run—you just fast-walk everywhere. It’s a concession that doesn’t last for very long; after a few days, they start beating the hell out of you again.
    “Okay, suck it up,” the instructors yell. “You’re over it.”
    They tell you when you’re hurt and when you’re not.
    Having survived Hell Week, I thought I was home free. I traded my white shirt for brown and began part two of BUD/S, the dive phase. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way I’d gotten an infection. Not long after second phase started, I was in a dive tower, a special training apparatus that simulates a dive. In this particular exercise, I had to practice with a dive bell, making what is called a buoyant ascent while keeping the pressure in my inner and outer ears equalized. There are a few methods for doing that; one common one is to close your mouth, pinch your nostrils closed, and gently blow through your nose. If you don’t or can’t clear properly, there will be trouble . . .
    I’d been told this, but because of the infection I couldn’t seem to get it. Since I was in BUD/S and inexperienced, I decided to just suck it up and take a shot. That was the wrong thing to do: I went on down and ended up perforating my eardrum. I had blood coming out of my ears, nose, and eyes when I surfaced.
    They gave me medical attention on the spot and then sent me to have my ears treated. Because of the medical problems, I was rolled back—assigned to