Charlie was big in both stature and wit. He was a huge man with hands the size of shovels and giant shoulders. Standing about six foot four inches tall, he weighed in at two hundred and thirty pounds. His mouth was as big as his body. He kept up a steady stream of smack talk, day and night.
We called him “the Bully.”
A former deck seaman, Charlie grew up in the Midwest and joined the Navy after graduation. He spent about a year chipping paint and brawling with his crewmates in the fleet before going to BUD/S. The way Charlie told it, being out in the fleet was like being in a gang. He told stories about fights on the ship and in port or on cruise. He hated being on the ships and wanted nothing more than to become a SEAL.
Charlie was one of the top candidates in the class. He was consistently smart and aggressive, and it didn’t hurt that his last job before Green Team was as a CQB instructor for the East Coast SEAL Teams. The kill houses came naturally to him. And he was a crack shot to boot.
“No move call,” I said.
“Keep it up and you’ll be back in San Diego working on that tan,” he said. “At least you’ll be ready for next year’s calendar.”
SEALs are based in two places—San Diego, California, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. A healthy rivalry existed between the two groups, based mostly on geography and demographics. The difference between the teams is minimal. Teams on both coasts did the same missions and had the same skill set. But West Coast SEALs have the reputation of being laid-back surfers and the East Coast guys are thought of as Carhartt-wearing rednecks.
I was a West Coast SEAL, so hanging with Charlie meant a steady diet of digs, especially about the calendar.
“Right, Mr. May?” Charlie said, snickering.
I didn’t appear in it, but some of the teammates put out a calendar a few years back for charity. The pictures were cringe-worthy shots of guys without shirts on the beach or near the gray-hulled ships in San Diego. The move may have helped feed the poor or fight cancer, but it brought on years of mocking from the East Coast teams.
“No one wants to make a calendar of pasty white East Coast guys,” I said. “I am sorry if we have our shirts off enjoying the sunny San Diego weather.”
It was a battle that would never end.
“We’ll settle this on the range tomorrow,” I said.
My fallback was always shooting. I didn’t have the wit to go up against Charlie or the other smooth talkers in Green Team. It was widely known that my jokes were always weak. It was better to beat a quick retreat and then do my best to outshoot those guys the next day. I was an above-average shot, since I’d pretty much grown up with a gun in my hand during my childhood in Alaska.
My parents never let me play with toy guns because by the time I was finished with elementary school I was carrying a .22 rifle. From an early age, I knew the responsibility of handling a firearm. For our family, a gun was a tool.
“You need to respect the gun and respect what it can do,” my father told me.
He taught me how to shoot and be safe with my rifle. But that didn’t mean I didn’t learn that lesson the hard way before it completely stuck with me.
After one hunting trip with my father, it was freezing out, too cold to stand outside and clear our rifles. I joined the rest of my family in the house. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. My sisters were at the kitchen table playing a game.
I pulled off my gloves and started to clear my rifle. My father had taught me how to clear the chamber several times, emphasizing safety. First, take out the magazine and then work the action to eject any rounds before looking in the chamber and then dry firing in a safe direction into the ground.
On this particular occasion, I wasn’t paying attention and I must have chambered a round, and then I slid the magazine out. Pointing the gun toward the floor, I took it off of safe and squeezed the trigger. The bullet exploded from the barrel and buried itself into the floor in front of the wood stove. I hadn’t been paying attention because I was trying to warm up. The boom echoed throughout the house.
I froze.
My heart was beating so hard it hurt my chest. My hands were shaking. I looked at my father, who was looking at the tiny hole in the floor. My mother and sisters came running over to see what happened.
“You OK?” my father asked.
I stammered a yes and checked the rifle to make sure it was clear. With my hands still shaking, I put the rifle down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot to check the chamber.”
I was more embarrassed than anything else. I knew how to handle my rifle, but I’d gotten careless because I was more focused on getting warm. My father cleared his own rifle and hung up his coat. He wasn’t angry. He just wanted to make sure I knew what happened.
Kneeling down next to me with my rifle, we went through the steps again.
“What did you do wrong? Talk me through it,” he said.
“Take the magazine out,” I said. “Clear the chamber. Check it. Take it off of safe and pull the trigger in a safe direction.”
I showed him how to clear it properly a couple of times, and then we hung the gun in the rack near the door. It takes only one time to screw things up. And I learned from it. It was a huge lesson, and I never forgot again.
Just like I never forgot another “moving, move” call after that day in the kill house.
Our daily schedule in Green Team during the CQB portion started at dawn. We worked out as a class each morning. Then, for the rest of the day, half of the thirty-man class would go to the range and the other half would go to the kill house. At lunch, we’d switch.
The ranges were some of the best in the world. This wasn’t your basic range where you shot at targets from a line. No, we’d race through obstacles, fire from the skeletons of burnt-out cars, and do a set of pull-ups before racing to shoot a series of targets. We always seemed to be moving. We already had the basics down, we were learning to shoot in combat. The instructors worked to get our heart rates up so that we had to control our breathing while we shot.
Our training facility had two kill houses. One was made of stacked railroad ties. It had a few long hallways and basic square rooms. The newer house was modular and could be reconfigured to resemble conference rooms, bathrooms, and even a ballroom. We rarely saw the same layout more than once. The goal was to throw something new at us each day to see how we handled it.
The pace of training was fast. The instructors didn’t wait for people to catch up. It was a speeding train, and if you didn’t catch on by the first day, you would most likely be heading back to your previous unit in very short order. Like a reality show, each week our numbers grew smaller as guys washed out. It was all a part of preparing us for the real world, and ferreting out the “Gray Man.” He was the guy who blended into the group. Never the best guy, but also not the worst, the Gray Man always met the standards, exceeding them rarely, and stayed invisible. To root out the Gray Man, the instructors gave us a few minutes at the end of the week to perform peer rankings.
We sat at beat-up picnic tables under an awning. The instructors gave each one of us a piece of paper.
“Top five, bottom five, gentlemen,” one of the instructors said. “You’ve got five minutes.”
We each had to make an anonymous list of the five best performers in the class and the five worst. The instructors didn’t see us all hours of the day, so top-five-bottom-five allowed them to get a better sense of who was really performing well. A candidate could be a great shot and do everything perfectly in the kill house, but outside of training he wouldn’t be easy to work with or live with. The instructors took our top-five-bottom-five and compared them with their lists. Our assessment contributed to the fate of a candidate because it drew a clearer picture of the student.
At the beginning, it was kind of obvious who the bottom five were in the class. It was easy to see the weak links. But as those guys started to disappear it wasn’t so easy to pick the bottom five anymore.
Charlie was always in my top five. So was Steve. Like Charlie, Steve was an East Coast SEAL. I used to hang out with Steve and Charlie on the weekends and during our training trips.
If Steve wasn’t working, he was reading, mostly nonfiction with an emphasis on current events and politics.
