“Hooyah!”

“Respect. I expect you to show complete respect for the instructor staff, the class officers, and the senior petty officers. You are in the military. You will be courteous at all times. Understood?”

“Hooyah!”

“Integrity, gentlemen. You don’t lie, cheat, or steal. Ever. You lose an item of gear, you put in a chit and report it. You do not take someone else’s gear. I won’t pretend that has not happened here in the past. Because it has. But those guys were instantly finished. Their feet never touched the ground. They were gone. That day. You will respect your classmate. And his gear. You do not take what is not yours. Understood?”

“Hooyah!”

“I’m your class proctor for the next two weeks. And I’ll help you, if you need help, over matters of pay, family, and personal concerns. If you get injured, go to medical and get it fixed and get back into training. I’m your proctor. Not your mother. I’m here to teach you. You stay in the box, I’ll help you. You get outside the box, I’ll hammer you. Understood?”

“Hooyah!”

“Finally, reputation. And your reputation begins right here. And so does the reputation of Class Two-two-six. And that’s a reflection on me. It’s a responsibility I take very personally. Because reputation is everything. In life, and especially right here in Coronado. So stay focused. Keep your head right in the game. Put out a hundred percent at all times, because we’ll know if you don’t. And never, ever, leave your swim buddy. Any questions?”

“Negative!”

Who could ever forget that? Not me. I can still hear in my mind the sharp crack as Instructor Reno snapped shut his notebook. It sounded to me like Moses, hammering together the granite slabs which held the 10 Commandments. That Reno was a five-foot-six-inch giant. He was some presence in our lives.

That day we bailed out of the classroom and went for a four-mile run along the beach. Three times he stopped us and told us to get in the surf and “get wet and sandy.”

Our boots were waterlogged and each passing mile was murder. We never could get the sand out of our shorts. Our skin was chafing, and Reno didn’t give a damn. At the end of the run, he ordered us to drop and start pushing ’em out. He gave us two sets of twenty, and right toward the end of the first set, I noticed he was doing the exercise with us. Except he was using only one arm, and he didn’t even look like he was breathing hard.

That guy could have arm wrestled a half-ton gorilla. And just the sight of him cruising through the push-ups alongside us gave us a fair idea of the standard of fitness and strength required for us to make it through BUD/S.

As we prepared to make the mile run to the chow hall around noon, Reno told us calmly, “Remember, there’s just a few of you here who we’d probably have to kill before you’d quit. We know that, and I’ve already identified some of you. That’s what I am here to find out. Which of you can take the pain and the cold and the misery. We’re here to find out who wants it most. Nothing more. Some of you won’t, some of you can’t and never will. No hard feelings. Just don’t waste our time any longer than necessary.”

Thanks a bunch, Reno. Just can’t understand why you have to sugarcoat everything. Why not just tell it like it is? I didn’t say that, of course. Four hours with the pocket battleship of Coronado had slammed a very hefty lid on my personal well of smart-ass remarks. Besides, he’d probably have broken my pelvis, since he couldn’t possibly have reached my chin.

We had a new instructor for the pool, and we were all driven through the ice-cold jets of the decontamination unit to get rid of the sand on our skin. That damn thing would have blasted the scales off a fresh haddock. After that, we piled into the water, split into teams, and began swimming the first of about ten million lengths we would complete before our years of service to the navy were complete.

They concentrated on buoyancy control and surface swimming for the first few days, made us stretch our bodies, made us longer in the water, timing us, stressing the golden rule for all young SEALs — you must be good in the water, no matter what. And right here the attrition began. One guy couldn’t swim at all! Another swore to God he had been told by physicians that he should not put his head underwater under any circumstances whatsoever!

That was two down. They made us swim without putting our heads up, taught us to roll our heads smoothly in the water and breathe that way, keeping the surface calm, instead of sticking our mouths up for a gulp of air. They showed us the standard SEAL swim method, a kind of sidestroke that is ultra-efficient with flippers. They taught us the technique of kick, stroke, and glide, the beginning of the fantastic SEAL underwater system that enables us to gauge distances and swim beneath the surface with astounding accuracy.

They taught us to swim like fish, not humans, and they made us swim laps of the pool using our feet only. They kept telling us that for other branches of the military, water is a pain in the ass. For us, it’s a haven. They were relentless about times, always trying to make us faster, hitting the stopwatches a few seconds sooner every day. They insisted brute strength was never the answer. The only way to find speed was technique, and then more technique. Nothing else would work. And that was just the first week.

In the second, they switched us to training almost entirely underwater throughout the rest of the course. Nothing serious. They just bound our ankles together and then bound our wrists together behind our backs and shoved us into the deep end. This caused a certain amount of panic, but our instructions were clear: Take a huge gulp of air and drop to the bottom of the pool in the standing position. Hold it there for at least a minute, bob up for new air, then drop back down for another minute, or more if you could.

The instructors swam alongside us wearing fins and masks, looking like porpoises, kind of friendly, in the end, but at first glance a lot like sharks. The issue was panic. If a man was prone to losing it under the water when he was bound hand and foot, then he was probably never going to be a frogman; the fear is too deeply instilled.

This was a huge advantage for me. I’d been operating underwater with Morgan since I was about ten years old. I’d always been able to swim on or below the surface. And I’d been taught to hold my breath for two minutes, minimum. I worked hard, gave it all I could, and never strayed more than about a foot from my swim buddy. Unless it was a race, when he remained on shore.

I was leader in the fifty-yard underwater swim without fins. I already knew the secret to underwater swimming: get real deep, real early. You can’t get paid for finding the car keys if you can’t get down there and stay down. At the end, they graded us underwater. I was up there.

Throughout this week we took ropes with us underwater. There was a series of naval knots that had to be completed deep below the surface. I can’t actually remember how many guys we lost during that drownproofing part of the Indoc training, but it was several.

That second week was very hard for a lot of guys, and my memory is clear: the instructors preached competence in all techniques and exercises. Because the next week, when phase one of the BUD/S course began, we were expected to carry it all out. The BUD/S instructors would assume we could accomplish everything from Indoc with ease. Anyone who couldn’t was gone. The Indoc chiefs would not be thanked for sending up substandard guys for the toughest military training in the world.

And while we were jumping in and out of the pool and the Pacific, we were also subjected to a stringent regime of physical training, high-pressure calisthenics. Not for us the relatively smooth surface of the grinder, the blacktop square in the middle of the BUD/S compound. The Indoc boys, not yet qualified even to join the hallowed ranks of the BUD/S students, were banished to the beach out behind the compound.