Chapter Forty-Eight
Coronado, California
CHRIS WALKER’S HEART pounded against his ribs as the SEAL instructors splashed into the Combat Training Tank.
Less than a mile away, tourists sipped Bloody Marys at the historic Hotel del Coronado, while toddlers built sand castles, kids skim-boarded and surfed in the Pacific, and couples lounged on beach towels soaking up the Southern California sun.
Inside the enclosure of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, a young Chris Walker, barely out of high school, stood on the pool deck with his SCUBA rig next to him, hoping he wasn’t about to drown.
If Hell Week was the crucible that tested a candidate’s mental fortitude, Pool Comp further culled the herd and tested their ability to remain calm in the water under stress, a hallmark of Navy frogmen.
After nearly four months of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, he was lean and strong; his damp brown cotton T-shirt, a sign of completing the arduous Hell Week, clung to his taut muscled frame.
He was in the most uncomfortable shorts ever designed.
Known as UDT shorts, they had not evolved since the early days of World War Two when the predecessors of today’s SEALs had worn them on beach reconnaissance operations off Normandy, North Africa, and islands in the Pacific Theater.
Walker had survived First Phase of what was touted as possibly the toughest training ever devised by a modern military: surf torture, log PT, lifesaving, underwater knot tying, drown-proofing, freezing swims, long soft sand runs, the obstacle course, and the infamous Hell Week.
But this was different. The Second Phase instructors did not care that you were tough enough physically and mentally to graduate from First Phase.
They did not care if you were a great leader or if you had the “teamability” so crucial to success when operating as part of an elite unit.
They did not care about your resilience.
They cared only about finding out if you had the trait that differentiated the SEAL Teams from every other special operations unit in America’s arsenal; they needed to find out if you were comfortable in the water.
In an enemy harbor in the dark of night, when placing a limpet mine on the hull of an enemy ship, could you deal with a malfunction in your rig—no light, no air, in the unforgiving medium of the ocean?
Would you blow the mission and kill yourself and your swim buddy, or could you problem-solve in the most dire conditions?
Pool Comp was that test. It determined if you would continue on to learn combat diving with a Dr?ger LAR V rebreather and then move on to the land warfare phase of training, or if you were packing your bags for the fleet.
Master Chief Clay Harlan stood at the end of the line of SEAL candidates, arms crossed, his face shadowed by the ball cap Walker had never seen off his head.
“Gear up.”
The SEAL candidates donned their fins, hoisted the buoyancy compensators—twin 80 tanks they had been told to call “cylinders”—with hoses onto their backs, then tugged their masks into place, performing buddy checks and then dive supervisor checks.
“First three, prepare to enter the water,” Harlan said.
Walker and two candidates made their way to the edge of the pool and placed one hand against their masks and regulators.
“Enter the water.”
Walker stepped forward and splashed into the Combat Training Tank, entering another world. The tank had a military-sounding name, but in reality, it was just a big swimming pool, one where the candidates of Walker’s BUD/S class would prove they had what it took to become frogmen.
Twelve feet down, the world was blue and cool.
He calmed his nerves with slow deep breaths of the nitrogen-and-oxygen-mixed gas.
If all went well, he would be under for about fifteen minutes.
He settled on the bottom and began his crawl, focusing on the objective and concentrating on the rhythm of his breathing.
Rhythm.
Then came the first hit.
An instructor slammed Walker into the bottom of the pool, ripped his mask away, and yanked his regulator from his mouth.
Remain calm. Think about your procedures.
Another instructor tore his fins from his feet and then delivered two swift uppercuts to Walker’s abdomen, forcing the air from his lungs.
Walker forced himself to relax as an instructor spun him around and slammed him into the deck while the second one delivered another punch to his gut.
Then it was quiet.
Procedure.
This was the test.
“If you can’t get comfortable under the water,” Harlan had said, “then you’ve got no business being a frogman. Panic is the enemy.”
Panic is the enemy.
Then don’t panic.
Air. That’s the priority.
Walker moved to his knees.
Without his mask his sight was blurry, but he could go through the correct procedures in the right order with his eyes closed. He reached back for his hoses to find that they had been tied to the manifold at the top of the tanks.
That was to be expected.
He felt his heart rate slowing to conserve what little oxygen was left in his lungs, his body constricting the flow of blood to his extremities and directing additional blood to his vital organs.
He unclasped the nylon that harnessed the tanks to his back, reached behind his head, and grabbed the mess of hoses and manifold, pulling it over his head in front of him.
Work the problem.
He concentrated on the knot.
Some instructors saw their jobs as gatekeepers to the SEAL Teams. Others saw themselves as mentors.
Master Chief Harlan was the latter. It was from Harlan that Walker first learned that the word panic was derived from the Greek god Pan, who was associated with nature, wild places, and sudden uncontrollable fear.
Every Friday and before each major evolution, Harlan addressed the classes that passed through his phase of BUD/S.
He was a warrior poet passing along what wisdom he had acquired via life experiences to the next generation of frogmen.
He told the class that the Greeks believed Pan inflicted irrational fear in soldiers.
So much so that the words panikon deima meant “fear of Pan.” Panic, he had told them, was not just fear; it was primal, internal, a fear of fear.
Panic was the enemy, and that enemy came from within.
After that Friday sermon, Walker had taken to the web to research psychologists who had studied panic.
He initially came across Freud and Jung, who explained that the physical symptoms—a rapid heartbeat, cottonmouth, and tingling—were a response to unresolved trauma and a confrontation with what they called the shadow self.
Did panic come from within or without? Walker found that Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Seneca declared that panic was a failure of reason.
If panic was a failure of reason, then reason was the antidote.
Trust in the procedure.
Trust in reason.
Walker untied the knot, brought the regulator to his mouth, and sucked.
Nothing came.
He felt his carbon dioxide levels rising, his brain telling his body to breathe. If he succumbed to that instinct, he would take water into his lungs. Here at BUD/S it meant failure. On a mission it meant death.
Reason.
He reached for the valve knob and twisted.