They are America’s Jedi knights: the elite of the elite, an all-star team of commandos, “tier one” special operations warriors given mission-impossible assignments in the most dangerous parts of the planet. A week ago, when Seal Team 6 took out public enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden, Jon Stewart hailed its members as real-life “X-Men,” ABC compared them to Superman, and Newsweek described them as “the coolest guys in the world,” working “anonymously and without public recognition.” Each year, according to the Navy Seals Web site, about 1,000 men start Seals training, and usually about only 200 to 250 succeed. Basic training includes the infamous “hell week”: five and a half days in which candidates sleep only a total of four hours and must run more than 200 miles, and do physical training for more than 20 hours per day. And after years of more training, only a fraction of experienced Seals members go on to join Seal Team 6, a secret unit created after the failed attempt in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran and tasked mainly with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency assignments.
Books of The Times
Muscle Memory: The Training of Navy Seals Commandos
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: May 8, 2011
SEAL TEAM SIX
Memoirs of an Elite Navy Seal Sniper
By Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin
Illustrated. 331 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99.
THE HEART AND THE FIST
The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy Seal
By Eric Greitens
Illustrated. 309 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.
Members of Team 6 have reportedly hunted down war criminals in Bosnia, engaged in some of the fiercest battles in Afghanistan, and in 2009 they took down three Somali pirates and rescued an American hostage with just three bullets.
By coincidence there are two new memoirs by former Seals members: “Seal Team Six” by Howard E. Wasdin, a Team 6 member who was seriously wounded in the battle of Mogadishu in 1993; and “The Heart and the Fist” by Eric Greitens, a former Rhodes scholar who joined the Navy Seals in 2001 (and who was not a member of Seal Team 6). Although the two volumes could not be more different in tone — Mr. Wasdin’s narrative is visceral and as action packed as a Tom Clancy thriller; Mr. Greitens’s is more philosophical and big picture oriented — both are coming-of-age stories that, like earlier Seals books, recount the ordeal of basic underwater demolition training in grueling detail.
Both books will also leave readers with a new appreciation of the training that enabled Seal Team 6 to pull off the Bin Laden raid with such precision, making its way into the heavily secured compound, killing the terror mastermind with two shots, scooping up a gold mine of intelligence and making a getaway despite one downed helicopter.
Just as important as the tactical lessons in specific skills (like sniper surveillance, sentry removal, intelligence gathering), both authors emphasize, are practice, teamwork and stress and endurance training, which help equip members of the Seals with the emotional ability to manage fear and the muscle memory and instinct to grapple with any sort of contingency and physical threat.
“Seals are frequently misunderstood as America’s deadliest commando force,” Mr. Greitens writes. “It’s true that Seals are capable of great violence, but that’s not what makes Seals truly special. Given two weeks of training and a bunch of rifles, any reasonably fit group of 16 athletes (the size of a Seal platoon) can be trained to do harm. What makes Seals special is that we can be thoughtful, disciplined and proportional in our use of force.”
Mr. Wasdin too underscores the members ability to find “the appropriate level of violence required by the situation, turning it up and down like the dimmer on a light switch,” adding, “You don’t always want the chandeliers on bright.”
It was his painful childhood in Florida and Georgia with a bully of a stepfather, Mr. Wasdin says, that prepared him for the worst of Seals training and, later, actual combat, teaching him how to control his “thoughts, emotions, and pain at an early age” as “a matter of survival.” He recalls that his stepfather “would mercilessly beat me with a belt,” when he failed to pick up every pecan that fell from the trees onto their family’s driveway: “Didn’t matter if any had fallen since I had picked them all up. It was my fault for not showing due diligence.” He worked picking watermelons for his family and learned to drive an 18-wheeler. He signed up to do Search and Rescue for the Navy at 20, after running out of money to keep paying for college.
Mr. Greitens took a very different path to the Seals. Growing up in Missouri, his big fears were that he’d “been born at the wrong time” — that “the time for heroes” might have passed — and that he might miss his “ticket to a meaningful life.” He attended Duke University, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and earned a Ph.D., writing a dissertation on humanitarian movements and relief work.
- 1
- 2