http://www.uniontrib.contrib/mon/index.html

Over the past seven years, 1,133 whites completed SEAL training, compared with 20 blacks and 103 Latinos.

To excel can be 'hell'

By James W. Crawley
STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2000

"Ka-BOOM!" "Rat-tat, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat."

It' s 8:18 p.m. on a previously quiet Sunday evening in seaside Coronado.

Tent flaps fly open and 78 men run out into the night.

Their eyes and ears are assaulted by a cacophony of explosive concussions, machine-gun muzzle flashes and blaring whistles. Water is sprayed over the men as they do calisthenics on the concrete slab known as the "Grinder."

Next, the men are herded into the nearby surf, sitting with arms linked as the chilly, 62-degree water crashes over their bodies.

Hell Week has begun.

For the next 110 hours, a cadre of SEAL instructors harasses, cajoles and intimidates these officers and sailors of Class 232 to drop out of the Navy' s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course.

"Hell Week is the defining moment," said Don Crawford, a retired SEAL and Naval Special Warfare Command historian.

No matter what happens later in his career, every SEAL has had to survive the rigors of Hell Week, Crawford said.

The path to becoming a Navy SEAL, Army Green Beret, Army Ranger or Air Force air commando is an obstacle course meant not to train but to eliminate the unprepared.

So many are being eliminated that high-ranking military officials are changing the way sailors, soldiers and airmen are trained for special operations.

One-third or fewer of the soldiers and sailors who enter Army Green Beret and Navy SEAL selection programs graduate. At the Air Force special-operations indoctrination course, called "Superman School," about 10 percent finish.

Minorities typically fare far worse.

Failure rates for blacks and Latinos have risen in recent years at Navy SEAL and Army Special Forces schools, military records show. The Air Force doesn' t track students' race in its air commando training.

During six of the past seven years, the graduation rate of blacks in SEAL training has been one-third to one-half that of white sailors, while the Latino graduation rate largely has been a few percentage points less than the rate for whites.

But percentages are just one measure. Over the past seven years, 1,133 whites completed SEAL training, compared with 20 blacks and 103 Latinos.

Often, a class will start with only one or two black trainees.

With so few blacks attempting SEAL training, retired Navy SEAL Capt. Everett Greene noted that most African-Americans have no role models or cohorts during training.

Several minority officers said black men often do their best when they can bond with other blacks in school, social or work settings.

Without that companionship or bond, Greene added, "the ones and twos become zeros very quick."

At Fort Bragg, N.C., where the Army trains Green Berets, black graduation rates have been slightly higher than those of whites for two of the past three years for the initial Green Beret training, the 24-day Special Forces Assessment and Selection course.

But the story is very different during the longer, follow-up Special Forces Qualification Course, known as the "Q course," where prospective Green Berets learn skills like blowing up bridges, firing a mortar or treating wounds.

Blacks fared much worse than whites, Latinos and other minority groups.

Between 1997 and 1999, about 53 percent of African-Americans who earlier completed the assessment course passed the follow-up Q course, compared with 71 percent of whites and 62 percent of Latinos.

The worrisome graduation rates, for both minorities and whites, are fueling changes in the way the military selects and trains its commandos.

n

When Capt. Ed Bowen arrived as the new commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado in October 1999, he began to worry that the school had less to do with preparing trainees for SEAL duty and more with harassing sailors until they quit.

"What we were doing was senseless," Bowen said.

A falling graduation rate coupled with problems retaining veteran commandos was causing a shortage of SEALs.

Bowen has started a series of changes in hopes of boosting graduations and quality. Although those steps aren' t directly targeting the minority question, Bowen believes they may help boost minority graduations.

"I think we can do it better and increase the number of graduates," he said.

One change was a surf-acclimation program to help build up the trainees' tolerance to cold ocean temperatures. Hypothermia is a major attrition factor for trainees.

In the first class after the changes were instituted, 14 trainees dropped out the first week, compared with 50 in the previous class.

And in the most fundamental change, Hell Week also has been altered.

It has been moved to the third week of the course, instead of week six. The belief is that students will be more physically fit and less likely to be injured during the five-day trial if it' s held sooner than later.

Now the SEAL course is more than just seeing how much punishment a trainee can take. "It' s also a good teaching experience," Bowen said.

After Hell Week, the new curriculum emphasizes combat training. Students will put on rucksacks, learn to patrol and practice small-boat missions.

"They didn' t swim any less or sleep any more," said Rear Adm. Eric Olson, who commands the SEALs.

The goal is a 10 percent to 15 percent improvement in the graduation rate, Olson added.

Times also are changing for the Green Berets.

Out in the piney woods east of Fort Bragg' s main garrison area is Camp Mackall. Eight times a year, several hundred men walk through the gates and start 24 days of physical and mental stress. None are known by their name or rank, just their number.

One of the toughest barriers for minorities at Camp Mackall had been the swim test -- 50 meters in camouflage uniform and boots.

Six times more blacks than whites failed the swim test, an Army study showed. The failures illustrate that fewer blacks, because of cultural, economic or geographic factors, learned to swim than their white counterparts.

The Army began a two-week remedial swimming program this year, taught by retired Green Beret Charles Simmons.

"The majority aren' t afraid of water; they need to know the techniques," said Simmons, who is black.

During Simmons' first class, 14 of 15 students passed the test.

But swimming hasn' t been the only barrier for minorities.

About 30 percent of those who passed the initial course failed land navigation and combat tactics classes taught during the follow-up Q course.

Further analysis indicated that most of the dropped trainees were minorities who had been in noncombat jobs before applying to Special Forces.

Those Q-course failures are a major drain on Special Forces because the Army loses valuable time and money moving and training those students at Fort Bragg, said Lt. Col. Michael Nagata, who until recently oversaw Green Beret training.

Nagata devised a new training system that he hopes will "front-load" the dropouts in the shorter, less-expensive Assessment and Selection course.

But don' t think the assessment course has gotten easier.

Unlike the old way, where students got hot meals, showers and a bed every night, trainees now spend 13 days sleeping under ponchos, eating combat rations and learning land navigation and tactics. "In the past, you would show up and we' d assess you on the skills you came to the door with," said Maj. Tony Fletcher, who runs Camp Mackall. "We needed a method to assess their commitment and motivation and that (each) was trainable."

Adding the training should reduce student dropouts during the later Q course, Special Forces officers said.

Nagata believes minority completion rates may rise because the additional training should help those from noncombat units, from which most of the minority troops come.

At Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the air commandos' "Superman School" is changing, too, with instructors now working with students to erase weaknesses. Those who fail one test are dropped only if they fail a subsequent test.

"With our low numbers, anything an instructor can do to get the numbers up is appreciated," said Master Sgt. Craig Showers, indoctrination course commandant.

n

Back in Coronado, it' s 9:30 a.m. Friday.

It has been slightly more than 109 hours since Hell Week started, and 57 men remain. The rest of the original 78 quit, were injured or were culled by instructors.

The trainees are crawling through the brown water and muck of the "demolition pit," two muddy ponds connected by culverts and surrounded by a sand berm on the Silver Strand beach.

One of the slime-covered sailors was Bowen, who at 53 is 30 years older than many trainees. His broad smile stood out amid the trainees' grimy grimaces.

He crawled alongside students, offering words of encouragement or a pat on the back as machine guns barked blanks and whistling firecrackers burst nearby. Despite his intrusion, the instructors ignored their boss' s presence.

Unlike his predecessors, Bowen has spent hours running and swimming with the trainees, offering encouragement. It' s his way of motivating them to succeed.

After negotiating the concrete culverts, the students lay and sat submerged along the edges of the northern pit, which had two long ropes stretched above the muck.

As the gunfire died down, the instructors told the trainees to cross the pit using the ropes. One by one the exhausted men, feet planted on the lower rope, hands grasping the upper one, tried to cross the pit. Four sailors, with loud encouragement from instructors, pulled and yanked the top rope. Trainees bobbed and weaved before flopping into the water.

In among the trainees, Bowen suggested they try working together.

"Think about how to do it as a team, not as an individual," he said.

Working as a team, not physical stamina, is the real lesson of the SEALs course and the other services' special-operations training.

Within a few minutes, the students organized themselves into a line that inched its way across the ropes, now too heavy to be pulled or yanked.

Bowen then gathered the 57 trainees around him and announced, "Hell Week is secured."

Lots of hard work remained. More students will leave during the remaining six months of training -- either recycled to later classes because of injuries, like Class 232' s two black trainees, or dropped after failing.

n

No matter what happens at Coronado, Fort Bragg and Lackland, graduation standards will not be compromised, not for racial diversity or a lack of commandos, military officials said.

The changes move away from pressuring candidates until they quit to training them to measure up, said Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, deputy commander in chief of the Special Operations Command. However, he added: "This does not mean we have altered the exit criteria. We haven' t."

From even higher, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, himself a Green Beret, said that while increasing minority numbers is a goal, it' s important to maintain standards. That' s because the use of special-operations forces has strategic consequences far greater than their small size, he said.

"They' ve got to meet the standards we demand of them," Shelton said during a visit to Coronado. "As we speak today, they do -- and I' m confident they will in the future."

For now, Shelton admits special-operations forces are still coming up short with minorities.

"The initiatives that are ongoing have made some improvement," he said, "but not to the level I think we can be satisfied with."

Copyright 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.