Refuse To Quit: A Female Navy SEAL's Story by Brandon Webb & Dina Santorelli

Author:Brandon Webb & Dina Santorelli [Webb, Brandon & Santorelli, Dina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SOFREP Books
Published: 2024-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Hell Is Coming

Monday

The sound of machine-gun fire shook me awake, followed by the smoky smell of spent shell casings, reminding me of Fourth of Julys spent with my dad in Brooklyn. But there was no time for reminiscing about hot summer nights because suddenly I was drenched with water and shivering. Ortega was standing at the door of my barracks spraying the entire room with a firehose as what seemed like the entire staff of BUD/S was yelling at me from all different directions.

“Move! Move! Move!” shouted Bucannon.

“Do you need an invitation, Rakinova?!” Gammon sneered.

I looked at my watch. Midnight. It was here. Hell Week.

And the instructors weren’t wasting any time.

“Let’s go! Wet and sandy now!” Jenkins was yelling through his bullhorn somewhere outside.

Olga and I bolted out the door and made a mad dash toward the shore, slamming into other students who were heading the same way. Olga nearly tripped over Jones from Georgia whose eyes were still closed, but he was running beside Wedge and Wang; it was difficult to see anyone else in the dead of night as we threw ourselves into the black ocean waves.

“Flop like fish!” Olga kept saying with what sounded like an imitation of Gammon’s south Florida accent.

I didn’t have the time or the wits about me to laugh. That’s because the instructors were barking out orders and I had my nose in the sand doing reps of push-ups and flutter kicks and then running back into the surf zone to get wet and sandy to start the evolutions all over again. All the while the sounds of bullets and bombs continued around me.

A new sound joined the chorus, too. The steady clanging of the bell as SEAL students began dropping like flies. I tried not to think of Amanda. Her loss was not only a crushing blow to me personally, but the entire SEAL unit. She would be a terrible loss.

“Fucking speed it up, Cartwright!” Yetka bellowed through his megaphone.

I don’t know how many hours passed while we pushed, kicked, and ran back into the cold Pacific over and over again. I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t just a fun torture exercise for the instructors—well, at least most of them—but was supposed to prepare me for the unexpected and difficult nature of the SEALs. Eventually Ortega barked at us to get our swim gear for a two-mile night ocean swim, and I collapsed in the sand to catch my breath.

“Two miles?” Olga asked in between heaves.

I shrugged. We’d been in the surf plenty after dark, but a two miler at night? That was a first. Then an instructor I didn’t recognize started playing the theme to the film Jaws over his megaphone, and if I wasn’t sure how my fellow SEAL students felt about the prospect of swimming that length at night, I knew it now as another wave of quitters marched to the bell.

“We got this,” I said, winking at Olga as we ran to the student locker cages to grab our swim gear.

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