“Right, give that man a cigar. So can we replace that forty in any way?”
“Hail, yes, Senior Chief,” Signalman Second Class Tracy Donegan said. “We put two, maybe three of the twenty-mike-mike smoke rounds in there and that takes the place of the forty.”
“Another cigar,” Sadler yelped. “True. And we can kick that smoke out a thousand yards, not two hundred. As of today the Colt is remanded to the armory. Anybody packing one should get it turned in. If we don’t have enough Bull Pups to go around, which we don’t, you’ll be drawing an MP-5 sub gun. Any questions?”
“Yeah, when do we get more of the Bull Pups?” Kenneth Ching, quartermaster first class, asked.
“Soon as we can. We’ll evaluate any future missions. If it looks like we’ll need more long guns instead of sub guns, we’ll go back to the Colt. Okay, spread out a little, we’ll get the day started off right. Drop and give me fifty good ones, and I mean the chest hitting the fucking floor. Do it.”
The chief did it, as well as Murdock and DeWitt, who had come up to the formation. Sadler liked that the officers did all of the training and physical workouts that the EMs did. That absolutely cemented unit loyalty.
Sadler wasn’t the first finished with the fifty. When he did finish, he stood and watched the ones slower than he was. “Stand when you’re done. The last man finishing gets to do another fifty.”
Jaybird caught the honor, and shouted a different swear word between each push-up.
When he was done, he stayed on the deck.
“Next, ladies, we do fifty bent-knee sit-ups. Let’s go, now.” Sadler dropped to the floor and started the gut-tightening exercise that had always been hard for him. He had to push to beat half of the platoon.
He watched the last ones finish. “Not bad. I beat two more of you than normal. Means we have to do more workouts. We’re moving up to a hundred of the big three soon, so you might want to do a little extra training on your own.” He looked at the two officers, who had finished their sit-ups.
“Ready, sir?”
“Lead out, Senior Chief.”
Sadler led them at a steady trot out of the building and past some structures to the O course. Obstacles at about twenty stations were situated in a square plot of sand. They all knew the spot well.
“Lieutenant, sir, you will be timer at the end, and Commander, you start Alpha Squad off at thirty-second intervals. We haven’t been here for a while, but anything over nine minutes will get you another try. Alpha Squad lead out.” Sadler watched the men go. He figured it was the toughest obstacle course in the world. If there was a worse one, he hadn’t seen it.
This one had a course record of four minutes and thirty seconds. BUD/S trainees had to do the course in ten minutes or they didn’t move onto the next step to becoming a SEAL. Most of his men could do it in from six to eight minutes, Sadler guessed. The course began with the parallel bars, the stump jump, and the low wall. Then came the rope climb and the high wall to go up and over. Next the thirty-foot-long barbed-wire crawl with the wire down to three inches off the sand at one point, the five-story cargo-net climb, the balance logs, the log stack, the rope transfer, and the two consecutive hurdles five and ten feet high. That was the toughest one. The men had to jump for the top of the five-foot hurdle and land on their belly on the crossbar, then muscle up until they stood on the five-foot bar, then lunge for the top of the ten-foot bar four feet away. There were more obstacles, but Sadler figured he’d know them when he saw them this time.
Long ago Sadler had learned that this course ate up upper-body strength for a snack. The best way was to attack each obstacle using as many muscle groups as possible to spread the workload. Those who tried to simply muscle their way through usually didn’t finish.
The men groaned, sweated, ran, and climbed. Sadler went after the last man in Alpha Squad, and came out the other end with a time of eight minutes and thirty-two seconds. He would have the times of each man, and hoped that he wouldn’t be the slowest. He took over the timing from the lieutenant, and the officer hurried out to take his turn through the course monster.
As each SEAL finished the course he dropped and did twenty-five push-ups, then rolled over and tried to relax.
Sadler checked the men’s times. So far Jaybird was the fastest with six minutes and ten seconds. When it ended, Sadler found two of the platoon members were over nine minutes. He’d have a talk with them and suggest they do the course every day for a week on their own time.
Ed DeWitt came boiling in as the last man through, and checked his time. Seven minutes and forty-two seconds. He grunted in surprise and turned away. The O course played no favorites.
Sadler walked over to where most of the SEALs sat on the sand. “On me. I want a column of ducks by squads, let’s move it. Yesterday was the only easy day.”
“Hoo-ha!” the men bellowed in unison.
The senior chief led them back to the platoon area at a six-minutes-to-the-mile run through the sand. At the home base he barked out the new orders.
“We’re going on a little swim. Water’s warm, so we’ll use only our cammies and the new Draegr Auto-Mix units. I want full combat vests and with the usual ammo and your assigned weapon. Let’s do it. In ten minutes we have to be in the water.”
The swim with combat gear to the tip of the North Island Navy Air Station went as planned, with Ed DeWitt leading them with the plastic compass board to give them the right direction. They went down to fifteen feet and using visual contact, and two-man buddy lines, the platoon swam at the lieutenant’s direction toward the end point. They came up once at the two-mile mark, barely letting their eyes break the surface of the blue Pacific Ocean to check on their angle. DeWitt adjusted his azimuth, and went down and swam the rest of the way to the marker buoy.
They surfaced and gathered around the JG. “Moving back, we’ll put Donegan on the board. Donegan, I want you to take us down to forty feet and lead us back to the BUD/S beach. It’ll be a good check on the new automatic control Draegr we’re breaking in. If anyone has any trouble, yank your buddy’s tie-line and get to the surface at once. Everyone understand?”
When no one objected, DeWitt handed the compass board to Donegan, the newest member of the platoon. He and his buddy on the tie-cord swam to the head of the line and promptly duck-dived, and the rest of the platoon followed. The senior chief knew the new rebreather was supposed to calibrate the right amount of oxygen and nitrogen mix in the rebreathed air. If they went to a hundred feet, the computer in the Draegr compensated with more nitrogen. When they came back up to fifteen feet, the mix had the required amount of oxygen. This would be their first full-scale, combat-simulated check on the deeper swim.
The Draegr worked fine at forty feet and the SEALs were pleased with it. When they came up on the home beach, they attacked it in the usual fashion. Two men charged in swimming hard and using a wave to surf in the last few feet, then lay log-still in the surf and sand watching the beach for any enemy activity. When they were sure it was clear, they charged into the dry sand and went into a defensive position with their weapons pointing shoreward. Then the rest of Alpha Squad stormed into the beach the same way, followed by a line of SEALs from Bravo Squad.
Murdock waved at the men and they all stood, now lathered with dry sand on their wet cammies. A black-shoe lieutenant commander came toward them, but stopped just short of the dry sand.
Murdock saw him and ambled that way, not flicking a grain of sand off his face, hands, or uniform. He held the Bull Pup in front of him at port arms, ready to bring it down to fire in the flick of an eyelash.
“Sailor, I’m hunting Lieutenant Commander Murdock. Is this his platoon?”