John B. Allen / Mr. Ballin (25:47)
Yeah, so. So the way. And so to become a Navy seal. So forget the Navy. The SEAL Team six thing. I never did it. It's like. It's like once you become a seal, there's additional training and you do that, but just to become a Navy seal, like from. From the streets being a civilian to a seal, assuming you enlist and do not become an officer, which is sort of. It's a nuance there. But most people enlist in the military to become seals, the vast majority. So that's the route I took. It takes, you know, about two Years from the time you say I want to do it, to actually getting your trident pinned on your chest and then you're not even ready to deploy. You just are technically a Navy seal. And the truth is it's like an unbelievably grueling and soul searching process that, you know, as much as I went in really well equipped with information because I didn't finish the story. But the family friends of mine were Seal Team 6 guys and I went to meet with them in New Hampshire and they're at this like compound where other Seal Team 6 guys were out in the shack, out in the woods. And it was like, it changed my life. Cause I saw these guys that are like so tough and everything, but they're like, it's a full blown meritocracy, like anyone can try out. You just gotta be able to suffer long enough to make it through. And basically it's like, you know, it's baptism by fire. It really is. And I was really drawn to that. And I think that I'm the type of person that suffers really well a lot of times because I create the suffering unto myself. But with SEAL training, initial SEAL training, what I was sort of told is there isn't a way to describe how difficult it's going to be because this sort of varies for each person. But there's one aspect of training that undoubtedly is like a great equalizer across the board and it's water. In fact, when you walk into it gives me chills just thinking about this. When you walk into what's called the combat training tank, it's this massive pool, very famous pool that's got all this, like the fences are all blocked off so you can't look in. And it's blocked overhead by some special technology, like no one can see it, but it's where all the SEAL training happens. And it says, over the top before you walk in. Water will make cowards of us all. And every time you're in the training area for this pool, you couldn't look at the water. You could only either be in the water and be basically underwater, or your back was turned to the water. And just imagine like sitting around a pool deck, you're getting hosed off all the time and all you hear behind you is silence or people coming up and someone screaming, red line, red line. And it's because someone passed out underwater. It happened every day. So it's like this vicious underwater training that you don't really ever get to witness. You either are directly experiencing it or you're Listening to it with your back turned. And it's just, it's. Everything is a psychological. Everything is psychological torture. And the water part, there's a whole block of training that's all. It's called dive face. And it's sort of benign when you look at it. On paper, it's like nine weeks of like scuba training. But like, it all culminates in this one test called pool comp. Or it stands for pool competency. And it's basically you're demonstrating your ability to stay calm during an emergency underwater. And it's a 20 minute test. It's. It has to take 20 minutes. And you go underwater with your tanks on your back, your scuba tanks, and you go to the bottom of the nine foot section of the pool. So it's like a six foot section. It slopes down to nine feet, slopes down to 15ft. And your test takes place in the nine foot section. And there are all these line markers that. Imagine if you're swimming a pool, you see line markers going up and down to designate the lanes. You and seven or eight other guys are testing at the same time, but you're all. You have to stay on your lane marker and you crawl on your hands and knees, up and down on the nine foot section on your line. And periodically, pretty quickly, you have two instructors who are testing you at the same time, and they have a little, what do you call it, what's that? The snorkel. They're on a snorkel and one by one they'll alternate. One guy dives down and they grab you and your train part of the test is as soon as you feel someone grabbing you, you have to go into the fetal position and just wait. You can't do it. You cannot fight back. You fail the test if you remotely fight back. They come down, they turn off your air, and they start tying knots in your hoses. They take your weight belt off, they screw with you for a few seconds, and at first the problems they create for you are relatively minor. And it's just sort of like, you know, it's harrowing to be down there. You don't, you can't see them. You're just crawling and you're trying to time your breaths because you don't want to be hypoxic when they come down. You don't want to be on an exhale and they're watching your bubbles. They wait for you to be on an exhale, to come down and grab you, but you're sort of like slowly hyperventilating, preparing for someone to come down and grab you. The second they grab you, you gotta wait. And the first time, it's like you know, 15 seconds of them tossing you around. And then when you're done and you know they've swam away from you, you follow the same procedure. No matter what, no matter how outta air you are, no matter how panicked you are, you have to follow the exact same procedure every single time. And I can probably even do it now because it's so ingrained. It's like you stop, you get on your knees, you never plant your feet on the bottom of the pool. You reach back, you turn your air on, quarter turn back, trace to your J valve, flip your J valve up, trace your manifold to your straps, go down to your chest strap, make sure there's a 3 inch bitter end down to your waist strap, 6 inch bitter end, reach back to back. There's a whole process to it, none of which gets your air on if there's a significant problem. But you have to demonstrate, like if there's a big knot in your hoses and you turned your air on and you hear a ka tung, which means the air is on, but it's not coming through, you can't jump to the next, you can't jump to step 10, which is ditch your tanks, undo the knot and breathe again. You have to follow the procedure without air. And so it takes you like 45 seconds or so to fix the problem. And then as soon as you're back up and running, you turn and you give your okay symbol to the instructors and you go back to crawling. And for 20 minutes you do this. But each time they come down, it takes longer for them to create the problem, and it takes longer for you to fix the problem. And especially towards the end, they tie these things called whammy knots, or it's actually not called the whammy knot. I forgot what it's called where they teach you. It's actually like skydiving, where when you get under canopy, when you skydive, even if your canopy's fucked up, if you can fly it, don't ditch it, because you don't know if your reserve is going to be better than this one. So you get taught to like, okay, when you're underwater, if you get an air source, even if water's partially coming in, that's still a viable air source, don't ditch it. And so by the end of your test, about 14, 15 minutes in, they start giving you these knots that are unrecoverable, but you can breathe on them. And it requires doing this tilting. You can't see me, but you tilt your head to the side and you gotta hold the mouthpiece barely into your mouth, and there's a leak on the side of your mouth. So every inhale, water comes into your mouth and you have to drink the pool water to get one little tiny gulp of air. And so you are hovering on the verge of passing out for the last six or seven minutes. And it's simulated drowning. I mean, that's basically what it's designed to be. It's. Can you stay calm when your body is signaling to you that you're fucking drowning?
