Extreme SEAL Experience Blog Archives
Gear Grenade
Added: Sunday August 17th 2008By: Don Shipley
August has been a nice break, with very nice weather, and very unusual for a typical August in Virginia. A nice break, but work never stops here, and my days for the next week or so are about getting prepared for the September guys.
What have I been doing
I’ve been going through every single piece of gear and equipment I have, and no small task.
While it’s not backbreaking work rifling through the many para bags and cruise-boxes I have, its always sentimental with much time spent reminiscing.
Every piece of gear has a story or two behind it.
I still have my Escape and Evasion belt for Combat Swimmer Operations. It was simply a web belt worn over my wet suit and held a bayonet, a one quart canteen, a pistol holster, chem-lite, strobe light, spare face mask, and rubber straps in case one of my fins broke during the dive.
Diving all over the world, in all types of water...
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My Worst Day of BUD/S.
Added: Friday August 29th 2008By: Don Shipley
I was asked in E-Mail “What was the worst day you spent in BUD/S?”
Hell that’s easy, my last day…
No, it wasn’t sentimental; it was the “nothing is fair” thing we had been taught all through training that reared its ugly head on our final day and caused much pain.
Each phase had its own form of an organized beating for the Class caught doing something stupid.
First Phase was the IBS Boat Hike, which amounted to hours of torture with the boats for some infraction.
Second Phase was the “Jock Up Drill” which was hours of doing a variety of exercises with Scuba Tanks and an “I saw God” type of misery.
Third Phase, we did “Flights” which amounted to running a long, steep hill over and over with a wooden or metal pallet on our backs, and very little fun was had…
What brought on an organized beating in BUD/S? Well, cheating was at the top of the list, but that was kinda funny as we were taught...
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Spiders, Snakes, and Sharks.
Added: Sunday September 07th 2008By: Don Shipley
I’ve had three different guys over the past couple days express concerns and fears over spiders, snakes and sharks. No SEAL likes any of them either, but we don’t give them much thought. There is too much to do on a mission, too much to think about, to give much more than a fleeting thought to being bitten or attacked by one.
We all have a few stories though.
For Team PT one day we all did a hydro recon of a beach in San Diego. It was an administrative daylight one, where we’d all line up parallel to the beach and swim in, taking soundings every 25 meters. The guy running the recon was in the middle of the long line of swimmers, and when time came to drop our lead weights and measure the distance to the bottom, (soundings) he’d wave his arm back and forth and yell, “MARK.”
The word “MARK” was yelled by each man up and down the line, and we’d measure and record the depth to the bottom.
It wasn’t easy to stay on line during the...
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