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

students to the test. They were especially skilled at weeding out those
who don’t have what it takes to become a SEAL. For me, to observe Hell
Week from the instructor perspective was a whole new experience.
The BUD/S students were grouped into teams—“boat crews” of
seven men, established by height. Each seven-man boat crew was
assigned an IBS—inflatable boat, small. An IBS was small by U.S. Navy
terms but awfully large and heavy when carried by hand. These large
rubber boats, black with a painted yellow rim, weighed nearly two
hundred pounds and became heavier still when filled with water and
sand. A relic from the Navy Frogmen (Underwater Demolition Team)
days of World War II, the dreaded boats had to be awkwardly carried
everywhere, usually upon the heads of the seven boat-crew members
struggling underneath. On land, the boat crews carried them up and over
twenty-feet-high sand berms and ran with them for miles along the
beach. They carried them on the hard asphalt streets back and forth
across Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, trying like hell to keep up
with instructors leading the way. The boat crews even pushed, pulled,
squeezed, and muscled the unwieldy boats through the ropes and over the
telephone poles and walls of the notorious BUD/S obstacle course. Out
on the Pacific Ocean, the boat crews paddled their boats through the
powerful crashing waves, often capsizing and scattering wet students and
paddles across the beach like a storied shipwreck. These damned rubber
boats were the source of a great deal of misery for the men assigned to
them. Each boat had a roman numeral painted in bright yellow on the
front, indicating the boat crew number—all except the boat crew made
up of the shortest men in the class, known as the “Smurf crew.” They had
a bright blue Smurf painted on the bow of their boat.
In each boat crew the senior-ranking man served as boat crew leader,