“Good luck, kick ass, but please be safe. Please come home.”

“You know I will.”

You will drive through a gorgeous city on a beautiful summer’s day. The bloom isn’t quite as sharp as it was in the spring, but you will still smile softly at all of the flowers popping up along the highway. You will drive over that iconic bridge and see the island before you. You’ve run and surfed the beach before, but this will feel different. You will present your paperwork to the guard post and park your car just inside the gate.

You will see things you’ve only witnessed in pictures. You’ll walk through the compound to check in and have your gear issued, but you will stop on your way when you see that sign mounted behind the pullup bars. That big blue and gold sign:

Be Someone Special

You’ll smile but know to wipe it off in the name of professionalism when you are briefed by your instructors alongside the rest of the gentlemen (and the first lady in history). You will have erred on the side of caution and worn a suit for that first evening which you will find makes you woefully overdressed compared to your classmates. This will initially put a target on your back, but you’re not worried too much. You know you’ll earn their trust. It’s not your first rodeo.

The beginning will consist of tours and explanations of the process. Crawl. Walk. Run. There will be some basic fitness tests for data collection: timed runs, bodyweight bench press for reps, weighted pullups, swims and shuttle runs. You and a new buddy will laugh at the observation: it’s like the NFL combine, but with a lot more white guys. You’ll be heavier than your 10k days, yoked up, but you’ll have planned it like that. You know that the extra weight will keep you warm, and you will need it to lose as the trials take their toll. Don’t worry, you’ll still run plenty fast. These guys think a 12-minute 2-mile is crazy.

During the introduction period, you will run on the beach with the guys even after working out throughout the day. How much of this is a show of machismo remains to be decided, but you will know that shit hasn’t hit the fan yet. The honest truth is that boots and pants and the sand really aren’t as bad as people would tell you. You’ll all laugh and talk shit and wonder what is in store.

 The actual assessments will start, and things will begin to ramp up. The instructors will become aggressive, but you’ll see them laughing with the Philipino ladies working the cafeteria. It’s just games. Tattoos are always an easy target of ridicule (and there will be no shortage of ink around these parts). Don’t worry, you’ll know it’s coming and you’ll have a few quippy one-liners ready for the cadre. There will be one instructor who takes a liking to you. You’ll know because he always makes a point to fuck with you (and you’re both 5’8” in boots). He’s funny, and you’ll both appreciate the other without being able to admit it. One day you’ll have a pen thrown at your feet.

“Why didn’t you catch that?”

“Because I failed to react in time.”

A wry smile that he clearly doesn’t want to reveal will cross his lips. He knows you understand.

 At the end of each day, you will be sent back to your bunks to lovingly stencil your boots, your fins, masks, everything. Your last name is to be etched into a particular place in every piece of gear, but you will know that somehow this equipment will find itself “misplaced”, and you will make special markings in various places to make them easier to pick out in a jumbled mess of everybody’s stuff.

You will also be sent back with homework, vague handwritten essays to be turned in each morning. You’ll hear through the grapevine that “they” don’t actually care what you write, just that you follow the crazy directions. They will become more complicated as each day passes

Every other word to be written in cursive, and every third letter to be capitalized. 1000 word minimum.

You and your bunkmate will fight off sleep’s temptation to get it right. It’s a test of attention to detail and commitment.

You will take a tour of what you will call in your notes “The Batcave”. The halls will be littered with trophies, patches, plaques, and pictures. You will all be told to take your phones from your rooms so that they can be placed in storage lockers for the seminar. You will be shown software that you always figured existed, but seeing them in real-time will make you realize how completely we run the world. It will be both amazing and worrisome.

You will play games on the beach with a small team of psychologists watching.

Get those buckets over to that flag without talking to your teammates or using your hands. You have ten minutes. Go.

You will be asked to plan and present everything from bank heists to golf tournaments to see how you would map out a mission with your colleagues.

You will run that legendary obstacle course that you’ve seen so many videos of, that 50-meter-high cargo net, the ropes, the tower. It’ll be awesome, even if the instructors give everyone the cross-armed stare of a disappointed parent. You will carry your sea bags with you between sessions, packed with everything you will need for the day. Your group is not allowed to walk. You must “run” everywhere. Even at meals, you will take turns standing guard in front of your bags by the cafeteria door, as no instructor would pass off the opportunity to rain chaos down on you should they find your equipment undefended.

You will go to the pool for various tests. You’ll quickly flick your boy’s shoulder as you pass each other by the pool showers. Just to get one over on the instructors. They would bring the pain if they caught you, but they didn’t. We won, and they can’t take that from us. It’s funny: In all of this barbarity, you still have to shower before entering the pool. Can’t leave the maintenance guys hanging, I guess.

Some of the tests you’ll be good at. Some you’ll be bad at. But then there will be the 50-meter underwater swim. You know that you can handle 25 yards effortlessly as a warmup to pool workouts, but this is something else entirely, the mythical 50m underwater. You won’t be surprised that you completed it, but you thought it would involve being dragged out of the pool as your semi-conscious body drifts into the wall. Eating later, you’ll be glad you weren’t the first to ask “is it just me, or was that easy?” It’s all just games.

One Friday, you will return to your rooms. There will be surfboards in the drying cages outside. Guys on the upper floors of the building will be leaning against the railing. You’ll hear that somebody from another class forgot a piece of gear, and his buddy covered for him. We were about to witness the payment of his debts.

A swoled up white boy will enter the ground floor courtyard in tighty-whities. The guys on the second floor will be screaming and blaring music as he does pushups and a classmate provides his best instructor impression.

Your rooms are all on the ground floor. A friend of yours (the biggest Phillipino you’ve ever seen) will turn to you.

“It really is kind of like prison… in a fucked up fun way.”

“Ninja school/prison.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

It’s Friday evening. The instructors are all gone. When the cats are away….

You’ll go to the cafeteria alongside another class, and a guy will notice your nametag.

“D’you know ***?”

“Hell yeah, I do!”

“He’s a good dude.”

A good dude. The ultimate compliment. The mark of the samurai. You’ll even see signs in various rooms reminding you to leave things as you found them etc., but they all end with “being a good dude starts here”. You’ll feel stupid upon hearing that certain individuals that have been featured in certain books and certain movies are “personae non gratae”. I suppose it justifies the saying: fear the quietest man in the room, not the loudest. There is a great difference between having a shiny piece of metal on your chest and being “a good dude”.

You’ll run out to a grassy field by the bay to meet with the instructors. It’s the open water swim. Time to make that money. You’ll be murdered-out in your all-black wetsuit, hood, mask, and fins (no SCUBA gear, unfortunately). You swim much better in fins than you do typical lap swimming, and you have a talent for “sighting”, keeping yourself going in a straight line. Guys who smoked you in the pool will become cannon fodder when exposed to Mother Nature’s beautiful madness.

You will finish and wait for the others on that grassy field, stuffing your swim gear back into your bag. It’ll be a beautiful day, and the city skyline will gleam before you as boats of every size sail and motor through the bay. You will have your hood and mask pulled down around your neck, and you will smile warmly as the saltwater dries in your hair and drips down your face as if you’d just put your surfboard back into the corner of the garage. One of the guys will turn and see you looking up at that California sun and ask.

“Isn’t it great?”

Towards the end of your stay, you will be awoken in the middle of the night and taken to the pool. You can’t really prepare for trying to unlock a padlock at the bottom of the pool in the middle of the night with a diving mask that’s been covered up with duct tape. You’ll be mad at yourself, but you’ll have plenty of company. It’s all part of the game.

You’ll all be corralled together on the pool deck.

“Drop on down.”

You will be held in the pushup position for what feels like an hour while you are asked various questions. The class is punished even when someone gets it right.

“Push ‘em out”

Twenty pushups. Then back to the up position (packs on backs, of course). Guys you banged out 100 pushups with on the standardized testing now can’t extend their elbows. You can only groan and rely on your skeleton to hold you up, but you know that the failure is the point. This is how you’re supposed to feel. Everything is going to plan. Some will cry, but you’ve always been a crier and know it would be false bravado to judge them. Whatever gets you through.

You will be run from the pool to the other side of the island, to the wild Pacific. You will be told to lock arms and take “seats” in the surf, just deep enough so that the break whips you around, but shallow enough so that Mother Ocean washes sand into your eyes, ears, and nose. The water is warm this time of year. You’ve been surfing without a wetsuit lately, but you know it won’t matter. Anything less than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit means that hypothermia is inevitable. They just get to keep you in longer. You will start shaking violently, harder than you ever have in your life, convulsing. That’s ok. It’s only when you stop shaking that you need to worry, like when you stop sweating in the heat.

You’ll be left to marinate in the surf until you are called out of the water to put all of your hands up. This will happen multiple times, the perfect opportunity for people to quit at the thought of being sent back into the murky depths for another round. You know what these pauses are. Medical checks. You can see a vehicle on the beach. It’s got its high beams on, but you can tell it’s an ambulance. Your favorite instructor will shine a light in your eyes and tell you to stick your arms up higher. He’ll act like he’s messing with you, but the flashlight is to make sure that your pupils are dilating properly and that you have enough motor control to lift your hands above your head. All of the pageantry is meant to keep you thinking that you are being bathed in utter savagery, but the truth is that there are strict rules and timelines that must be met. You’ll think of an old line you’ve heard hundreds of times.

“They can’t kill you. There’s rules.”

This is why they keep their sunglasses on at night: so that you can’t see their eyes as though they are some malicious gods who could snuff your life out at a moment’s notice, because this is a rite of passage as old as humanity itself: from the Apache scouts of the Southwest to the Comanche horsemen of the Great Plains, Australian aborigines, Mongolian Keshik archers, the Zulu of South Africa, and the Maasai of the Great Rift Valley.

The night sky will go from a black void to a light blue. Here comes the sun. You will be called out of the ocean and placed on the sand. The class will have thinned in number.

Injured students from other classes will be brought out as aides to distribute Styrofoam containers. A Clayton’s fucking breakfast burrito with hash browns?! The truth is, you would have scarfed down a bag of dirt if they brought it to you. You will all eat ravenously with your hands, knowing the food will keep you warm, even if your body doesn’t feel like taking anything in. You will all ask each other how you feel, just trying to keep the focus off your own misery. Take care of your people. Your pain isn’t special.

There will be the logs, the legendary logs. It will hurt, but you won’t remember a lot of it. The entire ordeal will end as abruptly as it should. There will be no ticker-tape parade in Times Square. You don’t get a gold star for doing your job. A linebacker from Georgia will pass you by with sunken, hollowed-out eyes, but you all look like that by now. You’ll all be too tired to speak and just sort of intimately tap each other as you are ordered back to your rooms to wash the sand and salt off.

There will be some final meetings over the next few days, mostly debriefings, asking you about your experience. What could be improved upon? Did you ever feel unsafe/abused? Etc. Then you will all say goodbye and pack up, wondering if you’ll meet back on that compound, if you’ll “class-up” together.

You’ll drive back over that bridge, and the realities of empire will have set into your mind (probably years longer than you care to admit). This is not some great crusade. There will be no jump into occupied France. There is no dragon to slay at the end of the deep, dark forest. Rather, you will be helping to hoard blood-stained gold for that very dragon. This is for the stock portfolios of defense contractors. For what? Getting paid to do “cool guy stuff”?

Maybe that’s why you crossed that bridge in the first place: to say goodbye to an old buddy. A few weeks later you will get a call. It will hurt, but you will graciously decline. You will de-select, and that’s ok. You will feel like a dear friend died. There’s a little boy in you that is mad, but you will know that you made the right call.

“C’mon babe, let’s go play some volleyball”.