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attention.
    â€œHit the deck.”
    Sixty bodies slammed onto the wet asphalt, IBLs crashing down on top of us.
    â€œLean and rest.”
    Sixty bodies pushed themselves (and the IBLs) up to the beginning position for push-ups: arms extended and locked under your chest, feet straight out behind you. I thought we were going to do push-ups until Instructor Waddell got tired—which might be a long time, since he’d been off all day resting.
    â€œBernie,” Blais said, “what are you doing? I’m in charge of this evolution. You can’t just come out here and start giving my men orders.”
    â€œTom, you’re being too easy on these pukes.”
    â€œBernie, these guys are tired—they’ve been working hard aaaall day.”
    As the two instructors went on and on, my arms started quivering. The boat got heavier. And heavier. They did the good-guy-bad-guy routine for what seemed like an hour and was probably no more than three minutes.
    Finally: “Okay, Tom, I guess you’re right, they do look tired. Class, on your feet,” roared Instructor Waddell.
    I pulled my feet up under me, urging my men not to drop the boat. The instructors had already warned us to “take care of your equipment—it will take care of you.” We struggled to attention.
    â€œHit the deck, lean, and rest,” Blais yelled. “I’m in charge of you people— I give the orders.”
    And so it went until they got tired. It was great to see the two instructors working in unison. We all appreciated the lesson in teamwork. When they finished playing with us, we hauled ass.
    A portion of our trip involved dragging and paddling our boat down a drainage ditch that paralleled the southern boundary of the base. As we came to the road leading in from Gate 5, it appeared we could simply portage our boat across the road and put it back in the ditch on the other side. Not so fast, Ensign. Blais met us at the road and told me that we could portage the boat. But, he said, my boat crew and I would have to go through the drainage pipe to the other side, so we could get the full benefit of the training evolution.
    â€œNot a problem,” I thought, but then I went down to look at the pipe. It was high tide and the ditch was nearly full, which made paddling the boat considerably easier than it would have been at low tide. But the high tide also made the pipe considerably fuller than it would have been at low tide. There was barely two inches of clearance between the water and the top of the four-foot pipe. Still, no real problem for future frogmen.
    I huddled the boat crew and told them I would lead. We would go through head first, on our backs, with our noses pressed against the top of the pipe so we could breathe. The other side was only fifty feet away. I told them we would take it slowly, and nobody would drown. (I didn’t have a plan in case someone panicked in the extremely tight area.)
    My main concern was the kapok life jackets we were required to wear throughout Hell Week. Ostensibly, they were for our safety. In fact, though, they were so waterlogged and heavy, I worried that one of the guys might be dragged down as we made our way through the pipe.
    After I briefed them, I turned around and started through the pipe with the other six guys close behind me. We acted so quickly that Tom didn’t know we had started until I was about halfway through the pipe and all the guys were well inside.
    Suddenly I heard Tom yelling at me to get back out of the pipe immediately. Normally we responded to an instructor’s orders as soon as they were out of his mouth. But at the moment, we were committed; attempting to turn the train around in the pipe would have been too risky. So I muttered “F--- you” in Portuguese, and continued through the pipe to the other side. (Portuguese for “f—you,” phonetically “for-doo-say,” was our class motto. We’d learned it