Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

to BUD/S with every intention of graduating. And yet within the first
forty-eight hours of Hell Week, most of those young men had
surrendered to the brutal challenge, rung the bell three times—the signal
for DOR, or drop on request—and walked away from their dream of
becoming a SEAL. They had quit.
Hell Week was not a fitness test. While it did require some athletic
ability, every student that survived the weeks of BUD/S training prior to
Hell Week had already demonstrated adequate fitness to graduate. It was
not a physical test but a mental one. Sometimes, the best athletes in the
class didn’t make it through Hell Week. Success resulted from
determination and will, but also from innovation and communication
with the team. Such training graduated men who were not only
physically tough but who could also out-think their adversary.
Only a few years before, I had suffered through my own BUD/S class
Hell Week on this very beach. We began our Hell Week with 101
students. When we finished only 40 of us remained. Some of the most
gifted athletes in the class and loudest talking muscleheads had been
first to quit. Those of us that had made it through realized we could push
ourselves mentally and physically much further than most ever thought
possible through the pain, misery, and exhaustion of days without sleep
—precisely what Hell Week was designed to do.
Now I wore the blue-and-gold shirt of a SEAL instructor. Following
two combat deployments to Iraq, I was assigned to our Naval Special
Warfare Training Center to instruct the Junior Officer Training Course—
our officer leadership program. In addition to my day job, I supported
Hell Week as an instructor. As the officer in charge of this Hell Week
shift, my job was to oversee the crew of BUD/S instructors who ran the
training. The instructors were experts at their jobs of putting these