TAKING SOULS

4.

THE FIRST CONCUSSION GRENADE EXPLODED AT CLOSE RANGE, AND FROM THERE

everything unraveled in slow motion. One minute we were chilling in the common room, bullshitting, watching war movies, getting pumped up for the battle we knew was coming. Then that first explosion led to another, and suddenly Psycho Pete was in our faces, screaming at the top of his lungs, his cheeks flushed candy apple red, that vein in his right temple throbbing.

When he screamed, his eyes bugged out and his whole body shook.

“Break! The fuck! Out! Move! Move! Move!”

My boat crew sprinted for the door single-file, just like we’d planned.

Outside, Navy SEALs were firing their M60s into the darkness toward some invisible enemy. It was the bad dream we’d been waiting for our entire lives: the lucid nightmare that would define or kill us. Every impulse we had told us to hit the dirt, but at that moment, movement was our only option.

The repetitive, deep bass thud of machine-gun fire penetrated our guts, the orange halo from another explosion in the near distance provided a shock of violent beauty, and our hearts hammered as we gathered on the Grinder awaiting orders. This was war alright, but it wouldn’t be fought on some foreign shore. This one, like most battles we fight in life, would be won or lost in our own minds.

Psycho Pete stomped the pocked asphalt, his brow slick with sweat, the muzzle of his rifle steaming in the foggy night. “Welcome to Hell Week, gentlemen,” he said, calmly this time, in that sing-song Cali-surfer drawl of

his. He looked us up and down like a predator eyeing his kill. “It will be my great pleasure to watch you suffer.”

Oh, and there would be suffering. Psycho set the tempo, called out the push-ups, sit-ups, and flutter kicks, the jumping lunges and dive bombers. In between, he and his fellow instructors hosed us down with freezing water, cackling the whole damn time. There were countless reps and set after set with no end in sight.

My classmates were gathered close, each of us on our own stenciled frog footprints, overlooked by a statue of our patron saint: The Frogman, a scaly alien creature from the deep with webbed feet and hands, sharp claws, and a motherfucking six-pack. To his left was the infamous brass bell. Ever since that morning when I came home from cockroach duty and got sucked into the Navy SEAL show, it was this place that I’d sought. The Grinder: a slab of asphalt dripping with history and misery.

Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training is six months long and divided into three phases. First Phase is all about physical training, or PT. Second Phase is dive training, where we learn how to navigate underwater and deploy stealthy, closed circuit diving systems that emit no bubbles and recycle our carbon dioxide into breathable air. Third Phase is land warfare training. But when most people picture BUD/S they think of First Phase because those are the weeks that tenderize new recruits until the class is literally ground down from about 120 guys to the hard, gleaming spine that are the twenty-five to forty guys who are more worthy of the Trident. The emblem that tells the world we are not to be fucked with.

BUD/S instructors do that by working guys out beyond their perceived limits, by challenging their manhood, and insisting on objective physical standards of strength, stamina, and agility. Standards that are tested. In those first three weeks of training we had to, among other things, climb a vertical ten-meter rope, hammer a half-mile-long obstacle course studded with American Ninja Warrior type challenges in under ten minutes, and run four miles on the sand in under thirty-two minutes. But if you ask me, all that was child’s play. It couldn’t even compare to the crucible of First Phase.

Hell Week is something entirely different. It’s medieval and it comes at you fast, detonating in just the third week of training. When the throbbing ache in our muscles and joints was ratcheted up high and we lived day and night with an edgy, hyperventilating feeling of our breath getting out front of our physical rhythm, of our lungs inflating and deflating like canvas bags squeezed tight in a demon’s fists, for 130 hours straight. That’s a test that goes way beyond the physical and reveals your heart and character. More than anything, it reveals your mindset, which is exactly what it’s designed to do.

All of this happened at the Naval Special Warfare Command Center on prissy-ass Coronado Island, a Southern California tourist trap that tucks into slender Point Loma and shelters the San Diego Marina from the open Pacific Ocean. But even Cali’s golden sun couldn’t pretty up the Grinder, and thank God for that. I liked it ugly. That slab of agony was everything I’d ever wanted. Not because I loved to suffer, but because I needed to know whether or not I had what it took to belong.

Thing is, most people don’t.

By the time Hell Week started, at least forty guys had already quit, and when they did they were forced to walk over to the bell, ring it three times, and place their helmet on the concrete. The ringing of the bell was first brought in during the Vietnam era because so many guys were quitting during evolutions and just walking off to the barracks. The bell was a way to keep track of guys, but since then it’s become a ritual that a man has to perform to own the fact that he’s quitting. To the quitter, the bell is closure. To me, every clang sounded like progress.

I never liked Psycho much, but I couldn’t quibble with the specifics of his job. He and his fellow instructors were there to cull the herd. Plus, he wasn’t going after the runts. He was in my face plenty, and guys bigger than me too.

Even the smaller dudes were studs. I was one man in a fleet of alpha specimens from back East and down South, the blue-collar and big-money surf beaches of California, a few from corn country like me, and plenty from the Texas rangeland. Every BUD/S class has their share of hard-ass backcountry Texans. No state puts more SEALs in the pipeline. Must be something in the barbecue, but Psycho didn’t play favorites. No matter

where we were from or who we were, he lingered like a shadow we couldn’t shake. Laughing, screaming, or quietly taunting us to our face, attempting to burrow into the brain of any man he tried to break.

Despite all that, the first hour of Hell Week was actually fun. During breakout, that mad rush of explosions, shooting, and shouting, you are not even thinking about the nightmare to come. You’re riding an adrenaline high because you know you’re fulfilling a rite of passage within a hallowed warrior tradition. Guys are looking around the Grinder, practically giddy, thinking, “Yeah, we’re in Hell Week, motherfuckers!” Ah, but reality has a way of kicking everyone in the teeth sooner or later.

“You call this putting out?” Psycho Pete asked no one in particular. “This may be the single sorriest class we ever put through our program. You men are straight up embarrassing yourselves.”

He relished this part of the job. Stepping over and between us, his boot print in our pooling sweat and saliva, snot, tears, and blood. He thought he was hard. All the instructors did, and they were because they were SEALs. That fact alone placed them in rare air. “You boys couldn’t have held my jock when I went through Hell Week, I’ll tell you that much.”

I smiled to myself and kept hammering as Psycho brushed by. He was built like a tailback, quick and strong, but was he a mortal fucking weapon during his Hell Week? Sir, I doubt that very fucking much, sir!

He caught the eye of his boss, the First Phase Officer in Charge. There was no doubt about him. He didn’t talk a whole lot and didn’t have to. He was 6’1”, but he cast a longer shadow. Dude was jacked too. I’m talking about 225 pounds of muscle wrapped tight as steel, without an ounce of sympathy.

He looked like a Silverback Gorilla (SBG), and loomed like a Godfather of pain, making silent calculations, taking mental notes.

“Sir, my dick’s getting stiff just thinking about these gaping vaginas weeping and quitting like whiny little bitches this week,” Psycho said. SBG offered half a nod as Psycho stared through me. “Oh, and you will quit,” he said softly. “I’ll make sure of that.”

Psycho’s threats were spookier when he delivered them in a relaxed tone like that, but there were plenty of times when his eyes went dark, his brow twisted, the blood rushed to his face, and he unleashed a scream that built from the tips of his toes to the crown of his bald head. An hour into Hell Week, he knelt down, pressed his face within an inch of my own while I finished another set of push-ups, and let loose.

“Hit the surf, you miserable fucking turds!”

We’d been in BUD/S for nearly three weeks by then, and we’d raced up and over the fifteen-foot berm that divided the beach from the cinderblock sprawl of offices, locker rooms, barracks, and classrooms that is the BUD/S

compound plenty of times. Usually to lie back in the shallows, fully dressed, then roll in the sand—until we were covered in sand from head to toe—

before charging back to the Grinder, dripping heavy with salt water and sand, which ramped up the degree of difficulty on the pull-up bar. That ritual was called getting wet and sandy, and they wanted sand in our ears, up our noses, and in every orifice of our body, but this time we were on the verge of something called surf torture, which is a special kind of beast.

As instructed, we charged into the surf screaming like senseis. Fully clothed, arms linked, we waded into the impact zone. The surf was angry that moonless night, nearly head high, and the waves were rolling thunder that barreled and foamed in sets of three and four. Cold water shriveled our balls and swiped the breath from our lungs as the waves thrashed us.

This was early May, and in the spring the ocean off Coronado ranges from 59–63 degrees. We bobbed up and down as one, a pearl strand of floating heads scanning the horizon for any hint of swell we prayed we’d see coming before it towed us under. The surfers in our crew detected doom first and called out the waves so we could duck dive just in time. After ten minutes or so, Psycho ordered us back to land. On the verge of hypothermia, we scrambled from the surf zone and stood at attention, while being checked by the doctor for hypothermia. That cycle would continue to repeat itself. The sky was smeared orange and red. The temperature dropped sharply as night loomed close.

“Say goodbye to the sun, gents,” SBG said. He made us wave at the setting sun. A symbolic acknowledgement of an inconvenient truth. We were about to freeze our natural asses off.

After an hour, we fell back into our six-man boat crews, and stood nut to butt, huddling tight to get warm, but it was futile. Bones were rattling up and down that beach. Guys were jackhammering and sniffling, a physical state revealing the quaking conditions of splintering minds, which were just now coming to grips with the reality that this shit had only just begun.

Even on the hardest days of First Phase prior to Hell Week, when the sheer volume of rope climbs and push-ups, pull-ups, and flutter kicks crushes your spirit, you can find a way out. Because you know that no matter how much it sucks, you’ll head home that night, meet friends for dinner, see a movie, maybe get some pussy, and sleep in your own bed. The point is, even on miserable days you can fixate on an escape from hell that’s real.

Hell Week offers no such love. Especially on day one, when an hour in they had us standing, linking arms, facing the Pacific Ocean, wading in and out of the surf for hours. In between we were gifted soft sand sprints to warm up.

Usually they had us carry our rigid inflatable boat or a log overhead, but the warmth, if it ever arrived, was always short-lived because every ten minutes they rotated us back into the water.

The clock ticked slowly that first night as the cold seeped in, colonizing our marrow so thoroughly the runs stopped doing any good. There would be no more bombs, no more shooting, and very little yelling. Instead, an eerie quiet expanded and deadened our spirit. In the ocean, all any of us could hear were the waves going overhead, the seawater we accidentally swallowed roiling in our guts, and our own teeth chattering.

When you’re that cold and stressed, the mind cannot comprehend the next 120-plus hours. Five and a half days without sleep cannot be broken up into small pieces. There is no way to systematically attack it, which is why every single person who has ever tried to become a SEAL has asked himself one simple question during their first dose of surf torture:

“Why am I here?”

Those innocuous words bubbled up in our spinning minds each time we got sucked under a monster wave at midnight, when we were already borderline hypothermic. Because nobody has to become a SEAL. We weren’t fucking drafted. Becoming a SEAL is a choice. And what that single softball question revealed in the heat of battle is that each second we remained in training was also a choice, which made the entire notion of becoming a SEAL seem like masochism. It’s voluntary torture. And that makes no sense at all to the rational mind, which is why those four words unravel so many men.

The instructors know all of this, of course, which is why they stop yelling early on. Instead, as the night wore on, Psycho Pete consoled us like a concerned older brother. He offered us hot soup, a warm shower, blankets, and a ride back to the barracks. That was the bait he set for quitters to snap up, and he harvested helmets left and right. He was taking the souls of those who caved because they couldn’t answer that simple question. I get it. When it’s only Sunday and you know you’re going to Friday and you’re already far colder than you’ve ever been, you’re tempted to believe that you can’t hack it and that nobody can. Married guys were thinking, I could be at home, cuddled up to my beautiful wife instead of shivering and suffering. Single guys were thinking, I could be on the hunt for pussy right now.

It’s tough to ignore that kind of glittering lure, but this was my second lap through the early stages of BUD/S. I’d tasted the evil of Hell Week as part of Class 230. I didn’t make it, but I didn’t quit. I was pulled out on a medical after contracting double pneumonia. I defied doctor’s orders three times and tried to stay in the fight, but they eventually forced me to the barracks and rolled me back to day one, week one of Class 231.

I wasn’t all the way healed up from that bout of pneumonia when my second BUD/S class kicked off. My lungs were still filled with mucus and each cough shook my chest and sounded like a rake was scraping the inside of my alveoli. Still, I liked my chances a lot better this time around because I was prepared, and because I was in a boat crew thick with bad motherfuckers.

BUD/S boat crews are sorted by height because those are the guys who will help you carry your boat everywhere you go once Hell Week begins. Size

alone didn’t guarantee your teammates would be tough, however, and our guys were a crew of square-peg misfits.

There was me, the exterminator who had to drop 100 pounds and take the ASVAB test twice just to get to SEAL training, only to be rolled back almost immediately. We also had the late Chris Kyle. You know him as the deadliest sniper in Navy history. He was so successful, the hajjis in Fallujah put an $80,000 bounty on his head and he became a living legend among the Marines he protected as a member of Seal Team Three. He won a Silver Star and four Bronze Stars for valor, left the military, and wrote a book, American Sniper, that became a hit movie starring Bradley fucking Cooper.

But back then he was a simple Texas hayseed rodeo cowboy who barely said a damn word.

Then there was Bill Brown, aka Freak Brown. Most people just called him Freak, and he hated it because he’d been treated like one his whole damn life. In many ways he was the white version of David Goggins. He came up tough in the river towns of South Jersey. Older kids in the neighborhood bullied him because of his cleft palate or because he was slow in class, which is how that nickname stuck. He got into enough fights over it that he eventually landed in a youth detention center for a six-month stretch. By the time he was nineteen he was living on his own in the hood, trying to make ends meet as a gas station attendant. It wasn’t working. He had no coat and no car. He commuted everywhere on a rusted out ten-speed bike, literally freezing his balls off. One day after work, he stopped into a Navy recruitment office because he knew he needed structure and purpose, and some warm clothes. They told him about the SEALs, and he was intrigued, but he couldn’t swim. Just like me, he taught himself, and after three attempts he finally passed the SEAL swim test.

Next thing he knew, Brown was in BUD/S, where that Freak nickname followed him. He rocked PT and sailed through First Phase, but he wasn’t nearly as solid in the classroom. Navy SEAL dive training is as tough intellectually as it is physically, but he scraped by and got within two weeks of becoming a BUD/S graduate when, in one of his final land warfare evolutions, he failed re-assembling his weapon in a timed evolution known as weapons practical. Brown hit his targets but missed the time, and he flunked out of BUD/S at the bitter end.

But he didn’t give up. No sir, Freak Brown wasn’t going anywhere. I’d heard stories about him before he washed up with me in Class 231. He had two chips on his shoulders, and I liked him immediately. He was hard as hell and exactly the kind of guy I signed up to go to war with. When we carried our boat from the Grinder to the sand for the first time, I made sure we were the two men at the front, where the boat is at its heaviest. “Freak Brown,” I shouted, “we will be the pillars of Boat Crew Two!” He looked over, and I glared back.

“Don’t fucking call me that, Goggins,” he said with a snarl.

“Well don’t you move out of position, son! You and me, up front, all fucking week!”

“Roger that,” he said.

I took the lead of Boat Crew Two from the beginning, and getting all six of us through Hell Week was my singular focus. Everyone fell in line because I’d already proven myself, and not just on the Grinder. In the days before Hell Week began I got it into my head that we needed to steal the Hell Week schedule from our instructors. I told our crew as much one night when we were hanging in the classroom, which doubled as our lounge. My words fell on deaf ears. A few guys laughed but everyone else ignored me and went back to their shallow ass conversations.

I understood why. It made no sense. How were we supposed to get a copy of their shit? And even if we did, wouldn’t the anticipation make it worse? And what if we got caught? Was the reward worth the risk?

I believed it was, because I’d tasted Hell Week. Brown and a few other guys had too, and we knew how easy it was to think about quitting when confronted with levels of pain and exhaustion you didn’t think possible. One hundred and thirty hours of suffering may as well be a thousand when you know you can’t sleep and that there will be no relief anytime soon. And we knew something else too. Hell Week was a mind game. The instructors used our suffering to pick and peel away our layers, not to find the fittest athletes.

To find the strongest minds. That’s something the quitters didn’t understand until it was too late.

Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end. That forgetting happens the second we give control over our emotions and actions to other people, which can easily happen when pain is peaking. During Hell Week, the men who quit felt like they were running on a treadmill turned way the fuck up with no dashboard within reach. But, whether they ever figured it out or not, that was an illusion they fell for.

I went into Hell Week knowing I put myself there, that I wanted to be there, and that I had all the tools I needed to win this fucked-up game, which gave me the passion to persevere and claim ownership of the experience. It allowed me to play hard, bend rules, and look for an edge wherever and whenever I could until the horn sounded on Friday afternoon. To me this was war, and the enemies were our instructors who’d blatantly told us that they wanted to break us down and make us quit! Having their schedule in our heads would help us whittle the time down by memorizing what came next, and more than that, it would gift us a victory going in. Which would give us something to latch onto during Hell Week when those motherfuckers were beating us down.

“Yo man, I’m not playing,” I said. “We need that schedule!”

I could see Kenny Bigbee, the only other black man in Class 231, raise an eyebrow from across the room. He’d been in my first BUD/S class, and got injured just before Hell Week. Now he was back for seconds too. “Oh shit,”

he said. “David Goggins is back on the log.”

Kenny smiled wide and I doubled over laughing. He’d been in the instructors’ office listening in when the doctors were trying to pull me out of my first Hell Week. It was during a log PT evolution. Our boat crews were carrying logs as a unit up and down the beach, soaked, salty, and sandy as shit. I was running with a log on my shoulders, vomiting blood. Bloody snot streamed from my nose and mouth, and the instructors periodically grabbed me and sat me down nearby because they thought I might drop fucking dead.

But every time they turned around I was back in the mix. Back on that log.

Kenny kept hearing the same refrain over the radio that night. “We need to get Goggins out of there,” one voice said.

“Roger that, sir. Goggins is sitting down,” another voice crackled. Then after a beat, Kenny would hear that radio chirp again. “Oh shit, Goggins is back on the log. I repeat, Goggins is back on the log!”

Kenny loved telling that story. At 5’10” and 170 pounds, he was smaller than I was and wasn’t on our boat crew, but I knew we could trust him. In fact, there was nobody better for the job. During Class 231, Kenny was tapped to keep the instructors’ office clean and tidy, which meant that he had access. That night, he tiptoed into enemy territory, liberated the schedule from a file, made a copy, and slipped it back into position before anyone ever knew it was missing. Just like that we had our first victory before the biggest mind game of our lives had even begun.

Of course, knowing something is coming is only a small part of the battle.

Because torture is torture, and in Hell Week the only way to get to past it is to go through it. With a look or a few words, I made sure our guys were putting out at all times. When we stood on the beach holding our boat overhead, or running logs up and down that motherfucker, we went hard, and during surf torture I hummed the saddest and most epic song from Platoon, while we waded into the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve always found inspiration in film. Rocky helped motivate me to achieve my dream of being invited to SEAL training, but Platoon would help me and my crew find an edge during the dark nights of Hell Week, when the instructors were mocking our pain, telling us how sorry we were, and sending us into the head-high surf over and over again. Adagio in Strings was the score to one of my favorite scenes in Platoon and with bone-chilling fog wrapping all around us, I stretched my arms out like Elias when he was getting gunned down by the Viet Cong, and sang my ass off. We’d all watched that movie together during First Phase, and my antics had a dual effect of pissing off the instructors and firing up my crew. Finding moments of laughter in the pain and delirium turned the entire melodramatic experience upside down for us. It gave us some control of our emotions.

Again, this was all a mind game, and I damn sure wasn’t going to lose.

But the most important games within the game were the races that the instructors set up between boat crews. Damn near everything in BUD/S was a competition. We’d run boats and logs up and down the beach. We had paddle races, and we even did the damn O-Course carrying a log or a boat between obstacles. We’d carry them while balancing on narrow beams, over spinning logs, and across rope bridges. We’d send it over the high wall, and we dropped it at the foot of the thirty-foot-high cargo net while we climbed up and over that damn thing. The winning team was almost always rewarded with rest and the losing teams got extra beat downs from Psycho Pete. They were ordered to perform sets of push-ups and sit-ups in the wet sand, then do berm sprints, their bodies quivering with exhaustion, which felt like failure on top of failure. Psycho let them know it too. He laughed in their face as he hunted quitters.

“You are absolutely pathetic,” he said. “I hope to God you fucking quit because if they allow you in the field you’re gonna get us all killed!”

Watching him berate my classmates gave me a dual sensation. I didn’t mind him doing his job, but he was a bully, and I never liked bullies. He’d been coming at me hard since I got back to BUD/S, and early on I decided I would show him that he couldn’t get to me. Between bouts of surf torture, when most guys stand nut to butt to transfer heat, body to body, I stood apart. Everyone else was shivering. I didn’t even twitch, and I saw how much that bothered him.

Image 13