- i'm clint emerson, retired navy seal. i spent time at seal team3, the nsa, seal team 6. (rock music) i was no incredible athletenor was i some genius. i was your average kid growing up in texas who just had a lot ofpassion to go down this path. i was a troublemaker at heart, i still am. i enjoyed getting in trouble, but more importantly, ienjoyed not getting caught.
that somehow extended into an adult profession of roamingthe planet, causing trouble, and not getting caught. first, you have to take a leapof faith and join the navy. you have to be willingto be a sailor first before you can be a seal. for me, i wanted nothingto do with being a sailor. i wanted nothing to dowith those big, gray ships. i knew since i was 10 years old,
i just wanted to be a seal. i went it, i was still in college. i joined the navy, isigned the dotted line. didn't tell my parents. nobody knew i was goinguntil about two weeks before the plane tookoff to go to chicago, up at great lakes is whereyou go through boot camp. boot camp is roughly eight weeks. in about week three or four, they'll say,
"hey, who wants to be a seal? "who wants to be eod?" that starts the process. they tell you, "hey, you needto show up on this morning, "at this time, over at the swimming pool." the first thing you have to do is a swim. then you have to do pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, and then you have to do a run. all of which has to be done
in a certain amount of timeon the swim and the run, and then your push-ups, pull-ups,and sit-ups have to meet a minimum standard. then from there, you justfinish out boot camp. you get orders, and yourorders will be either, you know, to an a school,which gives you a mos, or a job that you'regoing to do in the navy, or you're gonna go to buds. i had to go to an a school,and i picked the medical route.
i went to corpsman school, and so that was in additional three months after boot camp where you learn basic emt skills and nothing more. then i went to buds,which is in san diego. first thing they had me do while i was in my dress blues was go hit the surfzone, get wet and sandy, and that is the big welcome to buds.
you know exactly where you're at when that happensbecause the pacific ocean is always around 55 degrees. it's cold, getting sandyis part of your life from there on out. every guy has their own anxieties about differentchallenges they know they're going to face in buds. for me, it was a particularsection of pool comp.
pool comp is inside of thesecond phase of training which is focused all on everything from divephysics to dive medicine and then, of course, beingcomfortable in the water. pool comp is truly testing how comfortable you are underwater while you're breathing on scuba and making sure that you can remain calm in stressful situations.
you got your fins, you got your mask. you got all the common equipment, and you're just going back and forth along the bottom a very deep swimming pool known as the combat training tank. while you're going back and forth, the seal instructors areabove doing shark attacks. of course, they wait untilthey see all the bubbles come out and then they come down,
taking your air away,ripping your mask off, maybe thump you in the head, take your weight belt offto mess up your buoyancy, and then start pulling otherstraps and stuff apart. once they get down, then it's on you to put yourself all back together again in a proper order. if you don't do it in the right order, well, then you're out, you fail.
you have to do all this with whatever air youhave left in your lungs, and of course, if you go to the surface, that's considered quitting, so you're out. this just goes on and on until you get to the point when they do what's called the whammy knot. you're going back and forth, they strip you down,
give you a little bit of a beating, tie your hoses in this huge knot that you know you can't get out. you have to sit there and work on it until they come downand give you the okay. the goal is just makesure you remain calm, conserve your air thatyou have in your lungs, work the problem. the relief is when they come down,
they get face to facewith you, mask to mask, and they give you the okayto head to the surface, and you know you've passed. it's probably the longest20, 30 minutes of your life. as you approach the end of buds, you come back from the island, you just start preppingfor graduation from buds. it does not make you a seal. for me,
you graduated and then i went off to my specialty, and so withinthe seal community, guys specialize in specific jobs. you can be a comms guy. you can be a sniper. you can be an ordinance guy. for me, i was a medic, and so i went to a specialoperations medical school.
somewhere in the middle of allthat, you go to jump school. jump school is one-month army school, learning how to be a paratrooper. it's all static linejumping meaning hooking up a line to a wire inside an airplane, and i'm either going out adoor or going off a ramp, and that line is pulling my parachute out for me so that wheni depart the aircraft, the parachute pops up behind me
and you float to the ground, usually at 15 feet per secondand the landings can be, hmm, sometimes interesting. and then when you're done with that, you check into a seal team. i checked into seal team3, and once you check in, you're on a probationary period where your peers are watching you and ensuring that you are the kind of guy
they wanna work with. you have to prove yourself. part of proving yourself is the cheese board and walkthroughs. the cheese board, they canask you any question they want about being a seal, aboutthe equipment you use. how fast does a 5.56 round travel? what's the velocity? well, it's 28 feet per second.
they can ask you anything under the sun, and you better answer it accurately or you have to do it all over again, and when you're at a seal team, you only get so many triesbefore they get rid of you. even though they've investedall of that time, money. they don't care because they wanna always maintain the best guys in their team.
now you go to ordinance, and all the parts of every weapon are sitting in buckets, mixed up. not one part goes with another part. you have to go through all these buckets, and put all the weapons together. half a dozen, maybe more, weapons that at the end,you'll have completed. all put together,
and then they'll function test them and make sure you did it properly. once you get done with that, now you go into your platoon, which is the group of guys you're gonna train and workwith for the next year, two years, three years. those guys, for me when i went through,
was the last step in theprocess of getting your trident. they decide when it'stime for you to get it. your peers, which personally,i think is the way to go. it was a long road to get there, but well worth it in the end, and once you get that trident, now you are a seal, but you're still earningyour way as a new guy, and as a new guy, you're doing everything.
when you're not doing everything, then you're volunteeringfor everything else and earn the respectof your more seasoned, veteran guys that are at the team. over time, usually, i probably didn't feel comfortable as an operator versus a new guy until about somewhere between three and five years at the command.
it takes a long time to not feel like a new guy which is a good thing. it keeps every seal somewhat humble and always learning, always training, always trying to be better, and never thinking that you are the best at something 'cause there'salways room for improvement. so, are you tough enough,smart enough to be a navy seal?
anyone can do anything. i know that sounds socliche, but the reality is is if you, if you'retruly dedicated to it, both mind and spirit, and you've got the passion and the drive, then you can be whatever you wanna be, certainly a navy seal.