Oh yeah, one more thing. The most dangerous and deadly environment on earth is the ocean. SWCC’s work and actually thrive in this environment. It takes a special kin of man to drive a tiny little boat into the nighttime ocean with thirty to forty foot seas pounding the life out of you for 12 to 13 hour straight!
Case in point; about three months before I retired I went on a short 3 hour training trip with my Special Boat Detachment. Those three hours turned into five and a half hour of the most excruciating pain of my life. It was as if a 300 pound gorilla was beating the sh*t out of me the whole way. In our two boat formation we broke all but one solid steel weapons mounts. The training cadre representative that was riding with us hurt his back so bad he had to be medivaced to a hospital. When we finally got to where we were spending the night, I peed blood when I went to the bathroom.
A few years back, the Airforce brought out some equipment that they use to test the G-Forces that their fighter pilots sustain while in dogfights. The attached it to an 11 meter RIB and didn’t go one hour before we broke it! The Airforce called NASA, and they sent out some rocket scientists with G- shock measuring equipment used on the space shuttle. We took the NASA scientists out for a 6 hour ride. Their equipment survived, but the next day the lead scientist told us that, if we were astronauts, we would be force to retire. In just one 6 hour trip, our bodies had sustained more G-shocks than an astronaut is allowed to have in his ENTIRE career!
The men in the Special Boat Teams are ruthlessly hard bastards. They have to be. Everyday we climb onto our boats and ride into the most severe and dangerous operational environment known to man (we’ll maybe outerspace is worse). You have to be committed. We make our living counting on the fact that our enemies will never follow us into that hell, or will never suspect that we might come to their shores form that hell.
This is your gut check. How badly do you want it?
