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rituals. Of course, as the saying goes, “no battle plan eversurvives contact with the enemy.” Teamguys never need an excuse to haze newguys, but showing up in that van ended up being the metaphorical equivalent of putting on a pair of pork-chop drawers and jumping into the lion’s den.
    I had a 0730 muster to make. I faked nonchalance as I followed the flow of personnel to the back of our headquarters building, trying my best to be inconspicuous.
    Unfortunately, my height, my blond hair, and being the only one of some seventy-five sailors in dress uniform made camouflaging difficult. As the others mustered by platoon, I slid in among the techs to listen to the brief.
    When the command master chief was finished, I was about to attempt a hasty retreat. “Hold it, newguy,” somebody called out behind me. I froze.
    “C’mere, newguy,” somebody joined in. I turned around. Most of the Team had scattered, but about a dozen Teamguys stuck around to size me up. I waited. One of the guys, with Oakley shades and a smile like the Cheshire cat, jerked his head to the right.
    “Let’s see what you got,” he said, motioning to the pull-up bar at the base of the steps. “Give me twenty-five.”
    “Roger,” I said. One of my BUD/S instructors had warned me to show up in shape, because there would be a test. I could do twenty-five pull-ups no problem, but I’d never done them in my dress blues.
    I hopped up and grasped the bar, quickly counting out my twenty-five. When I completed the set, I hopped back down and scanned the small crowd. A couple of them gave me short nods before turning to begin their days of work. I stood alone at the pull-up bar.
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    On my second day in the Team, I drove the van to work again and braced myself for another day of team building. When I met my platoon chief, he was wearing a blue UDT/SEAL instructor shirtwith the sleeves rolled up, green shorts, and freshly spit-shined jungle boots. A gruff Italian-American from New Hampshire, Tony (of course his name was Tony) wore his jet-black hair greased back like a cliché. His vast experience as a Frogman spanned eight combat deployments, and he had all the tattoos to prove it. A spiderweb tatt splayed out from his right elbow, eventually giving way to at least two other ink jobs on the same arm. On his forearm was a trident and the word frogman. He looked me up and down with a disapproving scowl. Then he grunted and kind of jerked his head toward his office as if to say, “Follow me, newguy.” I sat down for the first of many one-way conversations with Tony. When he finally spoke, his New England roots announced themselves in his thick, clam-chowda accent.
    “Lacz,” he said, “you’re a newguy; you’re meant to be seen not heard. Keep your gear and department squared away, always carry a pencil and paper, and shut the fuck up. Just get your ass to work, and I’ll keep you busy. Ya got it?”
    “I got it, Chief,” I said enthusiastically.
    “Good. Now get the fuck out of my office.”
    Tony was a genuine break-glass-in-case-of-war kind of guy, and I looked up to him from the moment I met him. As I walked out of his office to start my day of team building, I felt good knowing Tony was my platoon chief.
    Over the next couple of weeks, my fellow newguys trickled in. There’s safety in numbers, and every time I showed up at the Team and another newguy had checked in, I felt a little better about my chances of surviving the day without any major incidents. Plus, I was a little longer out of BUD/S than most of them. Jonny came directly from 18D, but the others came straight out of SQT. That didn’t really mean shit in the platoon, but it was a small victory for me mentally.
    Eventually, we had a group of four newguys at the bottom of Charlie’s totem pole.
    Besides me, there were Jonny, Biff, and Biggles. Jonny was a Koreankid from Los Angeles and the platoon’s other corpsman. He was also a sniper. He was only about five foot seven, but he