Death in Navy SEAL Training Exposes a Culture of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs

New York Times ^ | 8/30/22 | Dave Phillipps

[Callahan]

… the prevalence of drugs at BUD/S has some men in the top reaches of the SEALs deeply unnerved…

Sailors who enter the program bolstered by steroids and hormones can push harder, recover faster and probably beat out the sailors who are trying to become SEALs while clean…the inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up selecting only the very best cheaters…

….The Navy uncovered what the senior SEAL leader called “a steroid ring” in 2012. He said BUD/S began testing candidates that year, but the testing lapsed a few years later...

By 2016…Brandon Caserta went through BUD/S and told his father, Patrick Caserta, a retired Navy senior chief petty officer, that drugs were “rampant.”

… “He refused to do them, but he said the guys that did definitely had an edge,”…

… In a perverse way, the drug problem at BUD/S is a natural outgrowth of the mind-set the SEALs try to cultivate…

The SEALs want operators who can find unconventional ways to gain an advantage against the enemy, he said in an interview.

“You want guys who can solve problems in war, guys who know how to play dirty, because war is a dirty game,” he said.

An often heard unofficial adage in the SEALs holds that, “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”

During BUD/S, he said, the “enemy” to be outfoxed is the course itself.

“No one can do everything the instructors ask, so you have to learn how to cheat to get through,” he said. “Everyone knows it happens. The point is to learn how to not get caught.”

“Basically, you are selecting for guys who are willing to cheat,” he added. “So, no surprise, guys are going to turn to drugs.”…

[ealgeone]

That’s the interesting take on this. Did the guys find a way to win? I remember stories after the Gulf War about the use of amphetimines to keep the guys going.

You know the other guys are using.

[TankerKC]

The instructors continue to make the course more difficult and brutal and the attrition rate keeps rising. In his opinion it’s an issue of ego, arrogance and increasingly toxic environment like hazing at fraternities.

I'm not going to begin to pretend that I know what BUD/S is like. But, I have been in military programs where attrition makes it seem 'elite.' The desire for high attrition leads to situations where passing is basically luck.

Add that in with a desire to pass minorities, women and poofters, and you end up not graduating the best of the best.

[ansel12]

His French 13th Regiment loved going to Chad to fight and were always wanting to get back to it.

[ansel12]

When you are in training and being tested to see if you can make it in the real world after months of inadequate food, terrible days and losses, and living in heat and humidity (ie-Vietnam), that is definitely not the time to be using drugs to artificially get you past the check marks while you are being evaluated.

[Monterrosa-24]

In my Armor Officer Basic class of 107 1st and 2nd Lieutenants, we had five Marines. In those days (1977-78) we had no scramblers on radios and still used code via CEOIs and did not speak in the clear. Our senior Marine who had been an enlisted man in Vietnam seemed confused by Army radio procedures and explained to the instructor, “Sir, we want the enemy to know who we are. We want them to know where we are going. We want them to come and meet us there. And we want them to bring all their friends.” He got a round of applause.