Review: The Warrior Elite by Dick Couch

An interesting read on what it takes to be a Navy SEAL, including BUD/S orientation, hell week, physical screening tests, combat diving, drown proofing, surf torture, obstacle courses, demolitions training, parachute jump school, seal qualification training, and much more.

• It’s extraordinary what these guys manage to accomplish. Hell week alone is insanity—5 straight days of training where they do more than 20 hours of training per day, sleep less than 4 hours total, run 0ver 200 miles, and experience misery I can hardly imagine—and they describe that as no more than a “speed bump” in the training of a SEAL.

• At first, putting people through such torture seems unnecessary, but when you think about the type of conditions a SEAL will be faced with in the real world, it makes more sense. To succeed in such conditions, they need soldiers who would rather die than quit, and programs like hell week are one way to figure that out. I was particularly struck by one scene in the book where a drill instructor is going especially hard on one candidate, putting him through one tortuous exercise after another, when they both start laughing, realizing that this candidate will never give up, never stop, never quit. I can’t imagine there are many people like that in the world, but if you were building something like a SEAL team, they would be the ones you’re trying to find.

• Torture aside, the amount of training SEALs go through is pretty mind blowing. They spend years learning and learning and learning. In reality, it never stops, and they train more or less nonstop their entire careers. On the one hand, it makes me wonder why in so many other professions, you train initially, and then training stops. How much more could we accomplish with the never-stop-learning attitude of SEALs? On the other hand, it also makes me think of the ever-increasing amount of knowledge and specialization it takes to become an expert in the modern world. Doctors, soldiers, researchers, astronauts, and so many other professions take decades to train, and as human knowledge continues to increase at an ever increasing pace, I can only imagine the amount of training time will grow. I wonder if we’ll eventually hit a limit where the amount of time it takes to create an expert starts to butt up against the lifespan of a human being?

Rating: 4 stars