Читать книгу Three Simple Things - Thom Shea - Страница 13

Mahrer was correct. The next class was distinctly harder. From my point of view, the instructors seemed to loathe this class leader for some reason unbeknownst to the students. The first morning inspection went badly, I mean really badly. My room didn’t even get inspected. We went to the surf zone and got punished for something none of us seemed to be aware of. The order was given to bear crawl down to the obstacle course and stand by in the push-up position.

On any given day the obstacle course is hard to pass, even harder if you are wet and sandy and already tired. The course was about three quarters of a mile through the sand from where we started crawling toward the starting line. Along the way one person just stood up and walked over to the bell and rang it three times. The rest of us pushed on. By the time we all arrived at the starting line, it was an hour later.

I could not even stay in the push-up position without my arms collapsing. I knew the obstacle course was all upper body strength. For the first time in my life, I was facing something I knew I couldn’t do. It was daunting.

The first five students were on the course, and my name was called. Upon standing, I felt exhausted. The first obstacle was like trying to pick up an elephant with noodles. Once over the low wall, I heard the siren go off, signifying an injury. With that I stopped and took a knee as the class leader took a headcount and the instructors dealt with the injured student. The brief rest was needed. Then the reality of the injury took shape. A student had fallen off the “Slide for Life” and broken his back upon hitting the ground. Mahrer was right.

Mahrer was walking around the students and saw me and walked straight over to where I was kneeling. “If you don’t do things in life correctly the first time, it always takes twice as long and is twice as hard to do it right the second time.” With that, he walked away.

No truer words have ever been said regarding life’s big challenges. Now I was faced with a course that already had an 8 percent attrition rate when you try the first time. I wondered what the attrition rate was the second time as the instructors yelled to start again.

The rest of the class 196 first phase leading up to Hell Week was just like this every day: twice as hard, mentally brutal, physically overwhelming. Hell Week started with a blur, but the weather was warm and so was the water. On Tuesday we were back at the obstacle course to attempt to take the entire boat and crew up and over each obstacle. We had had no sleep at all since Saturday night. The majority of the quitters had exited, and we were down to 36 students from 72. I personally felt strong, so I went up the obstacle first to help get the boat over. My arm was stabilizing the boat as the rest of the boat crew climbed up. One of my buddies lost his grip and fell into the boat. The sudden jarring of the boat caused my shoulder to separate and the pain was rather interesting. I gritted my teeth as my swim buddies looked at me. We all knew what had happened, but if an instructor noticed it, I would be out again. We all stayed quiet and continued on.

I knew if I made it to Wednesday night at midnight, I would be rolled forward and not back to first day. At least that was how I was processing the shoulder being out of its socket and the purple color of my hand. I kept it hidden until after dinner on Tuesday night. The after-dinner festivities of Hell Week are without a doubt the most painful. Lifting the boat up over our heads and keeping it up there is hard even if you are strong. I was not strong at this point.

Mahrer, in his ever-calm demeanor, noticed the color in my hand and the fact my arm was no longer up over my head pushing up on the boat. “Shea, get your hand up on that boat and help your team,” he actually whispered. “You have five seconds, or you are kicked out of training for refusal to train.”

The sudden feeling of falling apart once again gripped me. “Chief, I can do this with one arm. I can hold my weight,” I said.

“5, 4, 3, 2, 1,” he counted. “Okay, step out, you are done.”

The rest of the night was again a blur, and I went to the hospital. The doctors used traction and some muscle relaxants to pop my shoulder back into place, admittedly more painful than the separation. And I sat in the bed again, not knowing my fate. I had tried so hard. I had done all that I possibly could do. The longer I sat, the lower I felt. My thoughts were centered around “is this all worth it?” Had I just set myself up to fail at something impossible so that the failing would be believable?

I always think it’s funny how we question ourselves when things go south. How we look at our struggles and try to find a way out of them instead of a way through them. There are always 1,000 ways to exit every problem: a thousand ways to quit.

The way forward was gray and unclear and profoundly disturbing. No one ever gets a third try, ever. I didn’t even want to try it again. My shoulder would not recover in three weeks, which was when the next class would be starting. I sat there.

After two days, Mahrer showed up at the hospital in uniform this time. He didn’t have a bell, which was the first point I noticed. He didn’t have any paperwork, which was striking. Mahrer came in directly without knocking. “How is the shoulder?” he asked, and I could tell he didn’t really care.

“They put it back in” is all I could muster to say.

“Shea, you get two weeks’ vacation. When you return you go directly to the rehab clinic! You will miss class 197 and go directly to class 198. Do you have any questions?” He dropped the grenade in my lap knowing I would not have any.

“When you leave the hospital, check in to first phase. They have your leave paperwork. Go somewhere and get your mind right and come back,” he said in his matter-of-fact nature. Then he said something again that rings as true today as it did then. “Don’t go home to your parents or girlfriend or old friends. They will talk you out of coming back.” With that, he turned and walked away.

My job in the Navy up to this point was as a corpsman. With the little training I had received, I knew the recovery for a dislocated shoulder was supposed to be more than six weeks. As a matter of fact, you weren’t supposed to even start working out hard for six weeks. The cards were stacked against me. As I looked down at my stupid arm and reached over and touched my shoulder, which immediately produced a sharp pain, I again felt the feeling of falling. This time I was falling and could not see the bottom. That sensation is brutal to feel, even though, lately, that was the feeling I seemed to be having the most. Failing and falling, getting back up, being enthused, and repeating the cycle seemed to be my life. However, this episode of falling didn’t produce the enthusiasm. I dreaded having to start over again. My body and my mind were toast. I had no respect for myself anymore. I sat there falling and spinning.

I even recall thinking, “Man I am tough, but I wonder if this is what caused people to commit suicide.” Not knowing what my future would be. Clearly seeing no way to recover my shoulder. The feeling made me angry and actually angry with other people.

Six weeks later I passed the entrance test with 105 pushups and 18 pull-ups. Off to the races, once again! Off to the last chance I would have to become a SEAL. Hell Week came without incident. Surf torture was a nonevent. The boat crew obstacle course appeared and disappeared in my mind. The freezing cold of the mud flats became the new sensation of how cold and miserable one could become. Two students left with flesh eating bacteria during that trial. Everything seemed normal, except I couldn’t stop coughing. By Wednesday night I was coughing up blood with each cough. As we processed through the medical screen, I was again pulled out. Pulled out to face Mahrer once again.

My walk to the first phase office in the dark was different. I cried because I realized sometimes not quitting wasn’t enough. I cried because I had let Mahrer down once again. Rounding the corner, I saw the bell in front of the office. If I rang it this would all end, and the strain would be over. I could go home and not face this pain and feeling of falling. I could just hit bottom and be done with it. With each step it seemed like the best choice. The closer I got to the bell, the stronger the pull to ring became. Still, when I stood there in front of it, seeing all those helmets, all those people who had tried and quit, I couldn’t do it.

Mahrer appeared in the door to the office, not seeming so intimidating as before. “Quit if you want. We aren’t going to kick you out. None of us would have gone through three first phases. Now, we don’t know anyone to do four. I personally think you get sick or injured as a way out. You have to defeat that demon before it kills you. I don’t care if you have pneumonia or flesh-eating bacteria in your lungs. Class 199 starts Monday. You don’t have to do the class up test. So show up or quit. The choice is yours,” he said, actually smiling this time.

By the way, no one recovers from pneumonia in five days. And, truth be told, I certainly didn’t recover. I showed up Monday with a fever and barely passed the timed run. For the next several weeks, I just barely passed everything. I was beaten like everyone else who failed or didn’t improve upon previous times. Each night I stopped caring about it all. I made it into Hell Week once again . . . not caring, not sure why I was doing it, and not willing to quit.

On Wednesday night they took me to the hospital with all five lobes 50 percent infiltrated with fluid. They didn’t need to tell me, I knew. I knew it was over. After a week in the hospital, and with no instructor coming to check on me, I knew it all was over. When I reported to the first phase office, they had orders for me to a new command and no one even mentioned training or anything. They had all moved on and I was insignificant to their day-to-day lives.

Completing Hell Week solidified my firm stance on the principle of “honor your word.” I realized in that exact moment of walking away, as you must also realize, that this is the point in life where you either keep on honoring your word or you just quit. Once again, the world did not give me what I wanted in the timeline I had wanted it. Once again, things did not work out the way my brain had perceived events should have. Being cast out again, having to literally lie there in the puddle of mud I had created again, trying to figure out who I was and where I was going, will always be the roughest time in my life. The moment of clarity came when I realized I could actually honor my word and start over.

No one should avoid feeling the gravity of failing or the weight of loss. Both my experience then, and in training leaders now, makes me realize the importance of this transition point. At this transition point, we all have three choices.

The first choice is made by a small group of people for various, truly believable reasons. They decide to simply quit on themselves, go home (and hope and pray), and leave a goal-driven life behind. The gravity felt is too heavy to experience and quitting seems to be the only way out. An observable truth is when this path is chosen as a coping mechanism to deal with failure, it will forever be a means of dealing with every loss or failure. The undeniable fact remains: “How you do one thing, is how you do everything.”

The second choice to be made, the one which most people make, seems the most obvious and least risky. I call it the backup plan. The numerous people who actually pick the backup plan clearly pushes the prevalence as you can find hundreds of books on backup plans and mitigating risk. Millions of dollars can be made mitigating risk of a bad decision and having solid backup plans that keep people from feeling the gravity of failure and loss.

I surely saw both options during my time of feeling the weight of loss once again. Going home to the safety of my father and mother and a small town was rather enticing. Quitting is the sailor’s siren song. Leaving the storm for the perceived safety of a cove is really hard to push away. But sailors and boats are meant to be at sea. I had chosen to be a SEAL; that was my sea.

The backup plan principle will seem to take the weight of loss from you. In hindsight, the backup plan model itself causes loss. The time wasted while you are engaged in securing the backup plan robs the primary plan of any potential to succeed. Most people who have a backup plan will eventually move to it, because the reality of a primary plan is simply that primary plans never work out the first time. I find it tragic to push two plans and always move to the backup plan when the primary plan falters the first time. Maybe I would have taken the backup plan had I had one. I did not have plan B; I had no way out, thank God!

What occurred to me during those months after being kicked out of BUD/S training was the gravity of giving very little measurable value to my word, my original word. I had to ask myself what I had actually lost. I had lost nothing because I didn’t have anything. I had to ask myself what I had failed at doing. I had not failed; I had been kicked out. The longer I let myself feel the weight and not immediately move to plan B or to quit, the clearer my situation became.

If I quit now, I was only quitting on the value of my word. I would be dishonoring my ability to say I was going to do something, anything, and then go and do it, no matter what.

Had I selected something else, I would also have lost all the value of my word holding any power in the world. The longer I carried that weight of loss, the more I began to see the power of honoring your word. I saw that to honor my word meant I had to stay committed. I had to finally admit I had quit on myself at West Point. I had to admit I did let the circumstances dictate the outcome instead of honoring my word and pushing through the circumstances.

Two months after being kicked out of BUD/S training, I committed all of myself to honoring my word to become a SEAL. At that exact moment in time, all the perceived weight, all the drama and depression, all the lack of direction ceased. I got back on point with my job. I had clear direction and wrote out a special request to present to my admiral with exactly what I wanted. I saw in his office for my entire lunch period, every single day, for six months. Each day, he repeated the same answer: No. I was written up. I was punished by my chain of command but I would not give up; for me, there was no other way. The last time I submitted it, the admiral finally relented and signed it despite all the no’s he had given up to that day.