The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi Read Online Free Page B

blues, I felt like I’d finally arrived.
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    Some guys will tell you that SEALs are made. They’ll describe BUD/S, tell you about the approximately 80 percent attrition rate, and attempt to illustrate all the ways that Naval Special Warfare takes the toughest men and turns them into SEALs.
    I say that’s bullshit.
    SEALs aren’t made. They’re born. From the moment a candidate steps onto the beach in Coronado, he either has what it takes or he doesn’t. In spite of the Navy’s best efforts, there is no real way to identify what that “it factor” is. Men join the ranks from all walks of life, from all regions of the country, of varying heights and sizes. The fastest, strongest, and leanest aren’t guaranteed to make it through training. What guarantees success cannot be measured in minutes or pounds. The men who do graduate from BUD/S and SEAL Qualification Training and go on to join the Teams all possess an intangible drive and resilience worth more than thousands of hours of preparation on any track or in any pool.
    The Teams don’t “make” SEALs, but they do sharpen those abilities a man already possesses. They peel away the layers covering up the killer instinct lying dormant somewhere inside and show him how to be useful. The Teams chip away the excess.
    We call it a brotherhood because we forge bonds through our experiences,but also because we are a family of men separate from all others. Our innate warrior spirit unites us. On the most basic, most primal level we are cut from the same cloth.
    I was twenty-one when I started BUD/S with Class 245 in early 2003. I completed five weeks of Indoctrination and Pre-Training before starting the first and most challenging phase of BUD/S. Day one started on the BUD/S Grinder, the big asphalt courtyard where students muster in the morning. I looked around at the more than two hundred men who started the six-month course with me. Most of them would be gone by week six. The group was full of guys with beastlike physiques and I-belong-here looks projected with varying degrees of certainty. At six foot three and around 200 pounds, I fit right in. I knew that my “unfuckwithable” expression was authentic, and I knew that the vast majority of the others’ weren’t.
    The first quitter DOR’d (drop on request) before PT even started on the first day. In order to quit, you have to ring “the Bell” three times to announce to your classmates that you’re not Teamguy material. Quitting becomes extra humiliating when a guy has to cross in front of a formation of 150 of his peers gutting out their three hundredth four-count flutter kick. The Bell goes everywhere the class goes, whether it’s to the O-Course, or the beach, or anywhere else. Ringing it promises hot coffee, donuts, and a lifetime of regret.
    I quickly found brothers. Meat eaters sense each other. Boat crews are chosen by height, and mine was the six tallest men in 245. As such, we probably should have been the slowest, but Tim Martin pushed us to keep up the pace. Tim was a physical freak of nature from Wisconsin with unreal speed and a persistent positive attitude. No matter how shitty the evolution, he’d flash the same wide, goofy grin and utter some encouragement. His constant reminders that “you got this” got me through more than one of the coldest moments of Hell Week.
    When we got fatigued and hypothermic, we turned to Matz. He was a quiet New Englander from New Hampshire with dark hair and adarker sense of humor. During the worst moments, he would unleash some pseudophilosophical babble to distract us. We laughed, when normal people would probably cry. It fed us. BUD/S is the beginning of a bond forged by adversity and strengthened by sacrifice.
    The first eight-week phase of BUD/S is an endless physical conditioning exercise and is easily the toughest of the phases. It’s push-ups and flutter kicks as infinite as the Coronado Beach sand and as constant as the cold and wet that gets blasted