Read Combat Swimmer for Free Online

fellow trainees, I ran into a hot, stuffy classroom. (We ran everywhere we went.) As we stood at rigid attention, the side door to the classroom slammed open and a large black man in green fatigues roared, “Good morning, class, I am Instructor Bernie Waddell. You can call me Bernie—ha, ha, ha.”
    â€œGood morning, Instructor Waddell,” we responded in unison. Nobody in their right mind would have considered calling him Bernie.
    â€œWelcome to Class Thirty-one. I’m going to go over a few things you people need to know. How’s your spirit?”
    â€œ AAAARH, Instructor Waddell!” we roared.
    â€œAll right. Now listen up, because I’m not going to repeat myself—I say again, I’m not going to repeat myself. Do you people understand?”
    â€œYes, Instructor Waddell.”
    He went on to give us the do’s and don’ts of getting through training. But I was so intimidated by his presence I didn’t hear most of what he said. Chief Petty Officer Bernie Waddell was a legendary instructor, the one most feared, and most respected, when I went through training. Bernie went over all the reasons he had seen people quit. It was a tongue-in-cheek dissertation: “I don’t have any clean skivvies”; “I don’t have any skivvies”; “My wife doesn’t know I’m here”; “I just wanted to get off my ship”; and on and on. What we all got out of that first lesson was this: if you didn’t quit, the instructors seldom threw you out. Just what Ron had told me.
    The training course was designed to test one’s mental toughness. They wanted to see who would quit when the going got tough. The ones who quit, we didn’t want on the Teams—on combat missions, the going was always tough.
    People started quitting left and right. One particular instance really stunned me. This officer was best in every phase of our two-week preconditioning training. He had the best time on the obstacle course. He was one of the best swimmers and runners, and he had a great attitude. Yet the first night of Hell Week, as we were sitting in the kitchen of the Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ), he looked at me and said, “I’m not going back out.” We were all cold and wet from head to foot. It was miserable, but we had come through so far and he wasn’t hurt. He just didn’t want to be cold and wet. Good thing he quit, because we had a lot of cold and wet in front of us.
    Our training week ran from 0500 Monday morning to whenever the duty instructor felt like letting us off on Saturday. Usually we’d get liberty by 1400, after the training area had been cleaned to his satisfaction. There was a duty instructor each night, too. He started after the night training exercise and got up the next morning to take muster and lead the morning physical training (PT) and run—all done before breakfast, which we ate at 0700.
    For meals the enlisted men had to run a mile and a half to the base mess hall, and we officers had to run just a half-mile to the BOQ. But while enlisted men ate as much as they wanted, officers got only one serving per meal. We never got enough to eat.
    Our family was renting a two-bedroom apartment in Virginia Beach, about a twenty-five-minute drive from the training area. I went home on the weekends as soon as liberty went down, eating everything in sight until Sunday night, when I went back to the barracks. A couple of the married guys lived closer to the base and went home every night, but I didn’t trust myself to get up in time to drive in for the 0500 muster, so I stayed at the barracks during the week. We had only one car, and it saved Becky from having to get up, bundle up our son, Kevin, and drive me to the base.
    Hell Week is the defining period of BUDS. Usually, if you made it through that, you made it through the rest of the training. The instructors did their best to keep us cold, wet, sandy, and