My First Day (As A Navy Seal) Episode 12

This is KPBS Midday Edition. I am Maureen Cavanaugh. KPBS is exploring ways to create stories you want to listen to, stories that originate right here in San Diego. Ben Betz came to San Diego to join the military. His goal to become a Navy seal, he describes his experience during the infamous hell week and a final episode of My First Day. The story is produced and hosted by Andrew Bracken. You are kept up for a whole week and you are trained constantly for a week. It started on Sunday night and they called it breakout. Around sundown, they would not tell us. They put us in a room. They blocked the room out and would not let you leave except to use the bathroom. You are in there sipping water and anticipating what is going to come. And then when they actually did the breakout, there would be instructors everywhere with blanks and there was a lot of noise and a lot of/bang grenades to disorient you. They would have you run around and have you in the water one minute and doing push-ups the next minute. It was just kind of like the attempt to really disorient you and exhaust you before anything even starts. Within minutes, there were people quitting. You know, I remember at the time, I am not even tired and people are quitting and you have this realization that they are not quitting because they're tired. They are quitting because they do not want to do this. Even when you are doing that, you are observing and realizing, okay. I saw the documentaries and I read the books but this is actually happening. You know, these are tough guys that say I am out of here. I will not do this. We would take our boats everywhere. That was the standard that was different from the other parts of training where you would use the boats and the boat went everywhere with you. You took across the Street to Chow. You took it down. We took this things hundreds of miles and we rode it all around the island. You know, there were a couple of dedicated times where they let us sleep for half an hour which was bizarre. You would feel like you had slept for days and you will go outside and it is still dark. You are so out of your own mind. When you would really start feeling it is when you would sit down. As long as you kept moving, it was easy to just keep going and not think about it too much and you are distracted by whatever is going on. The instructor and the staff understood that. They would mess with you psychologically during those times. You would be sitting down and eating dinner and they would walk around and who is going to quit. They are always planting the seed. I think the term selection is really important because it differentiates between it being a test of what you can do and being a selection of selecting for certain attributes that you may or may not be able to control. We need those actually -- attributes. There is this argument. Are you born ACL or do you become a sale? Is it something your parents taught you? How does it happen? I think, you know, events like that proved it is sort of in eight. There are certain things that if you do not have them, you will not make it. There are things you have no control over. You are completely exhausted and out of your mind, how you behave? There are people that quit in the journey, in the altered state and there were times when the instructor and staff would say this is a good guy and they would try to talk them into not quitting. Think about this for a minute. This is a big decision. This is going to impact the rest of your life. There were guys that stayed during that. I mean, any time you set down, that was when your mind would start running wild on you. I think about 48 hours in, you reach this point of exhaustion where it was not the physical exhaustion. Now it was sleep deprivation. Now, you start to really kind of have this mental struggle. That actually, at least for me and others that I talked to said the same, that lasted about 24 hours and then you reach this other state where they can do anything to you and it did not matter because you decided, you were past the point of making decisions. You were just going to do what they told you. That is when you had to be careful. You could push a guide to the point where he would kill himself through exertion. For me, and I think for most of the guys, biggest fear is that you would get hurt. You could not control that. You know, you have done all of this training and a program has already taught you the human body can extend -- take more than you thought it would. It is the partial Martes and that -- the arsenal Martes analogy. It's not like some long and drawn out form. One specific move 10,000 times comment that is the same thing here where, you know, you spend so much time doing it but then eventually, that becomes the comfort that you know that without a doubt, you can do these things under any situation and any circumstance. There is a big berm that the bulldozers push in the compound. They had us low crawl over this over and over but not coming over the crest. We knew what day it was. We knew it was getting close to when they would typically would secure. That meant it was the end. At one moment, we got to the top and we can see all the instructors and the staff from the compound which is a lot of people lined up and we realized that was the moment, you know. It was very emotional. No matter how exhausted you are, if something significant happens, you are able to tap into an energy reserve and put effort into sort of -- you recognize the significance of what is going on. I remember guys were physically crying. I do not remember that I did but I do remember being pretty overwhelmed emotionally and realizing that that is pretty much it. That was the moment, you know, you would realize, I will be a Navy seal at this point. You heard Ben Betz speaking on the final episode of the podcast, My First Day. It is produced and hosted by Andrew Bracken. To listen to the story, go to www.kpbs.org .