I figure there might be a few of you guys out there. I’m ‘mentoring’ a high school kid who has long wanted to get into law enforcement. I can help him with that. Lately, he’s become interested in Special Forces, and SEALs in particular. He’s talked to the Navy recruiter at his high school, who wasn’t exactly a wealth of information. I know next to nothing about how one gets into that MOS.
Any real world advice/info would be appreciated. He’s a good kid … good grades, athlete, police explorer.
J,
I will send you a PM with my number, you can give me a call. Be more than happy to help out! Things have changed a bit for those interested in the SEAL, EOD and DIVER communities.
A book written by Dick Couch titled “Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior” is a great read. Couch was a SEAL (IIRC) who lives near and interviews soldiers as they progress through the phases required for SF. I’ve reread it several times in the last few years.
Go to a NAVY ROTC school (free tuition) Get a degree and get commissioned Base pay approx. E-1(1,600) O-1 (2,600) if you are going to do it start higher up the ladder. Then go to S.D. BUD’s and take it from there.
That isnt as easy as it sounds. Alot harder for a Naval Officer to get into BUDS. They actually have boards to determine who gets those very few slots. Usually your USNA peeps get the benefit of first priority.
I figure there might be a few of you guys out there. I’m ‘mentoring’ a high school kid who has long wanted to get into law enforcement. I can help him with that. Lately, he’s become interested in Special Forces, and SEALs in particular. He’s talked to the Navy recruiter at his high school, who wasn’t exactly a wealth of information. I know next to nothing about how one gets into that MOS.
Any real world advice/info would be appreciated. He’s a good kid … good grades, athlete, police explorer.
Go to the Navy Special Warfare website. You can find it through the Navy’s homepage. Many recruiting districts around the U.S. have a few SEAL officer recruiters or SEAL enlisted men on special duty. You can also find the location where they hold occasional, or even weekly, mock entrance physical fitness tests. There’s one near where I live, and I go and do the test once in a while, because I refuse to concede the fact of my age or that I’ll have been retired from the military for 10 years (minus a couple of recalls to ACDU), come September of this year Have the kid go do that first, to get a gauge of where he stands, fitness-wise.
Believe me when I say that the mental aspects of BUD/S are are lot harder than the physical aspects. It just seems when you’re in the course that the physical side of being constantly tired, cold, wet, hungry (did I mention cold and wet?) and filled with sand in every orifice of your body, and being harangued on a neverending basis by the instructors, is more difficult. It’s not an MOS, by the way. In the Navy, officers hold a Designator. Enlisted folks hold an NEC (Navy (or “Naval,” I forget) Enlisted Classification). SEALs are NEC 8492, if I remember correctly.
There are a very limited number of slots for officer accessions into the special warfare community. Like others have said, it can be tough for one to get into the training pipeline.
There are about 25 or so SEAL motivator types located across the country. Last I heard, they were trying to double that number. These persons are not just SEALS, they can be a DIVER or EOD type. Usually a retried member.
THese days, if a kid walks into a recruiting office and says he wants to be a SEAL, DIVER, or EOD type, that recruiter should put this kid in contact with the local motivator.
Dick Couch also wrote Warrior Elite about a class going through BUD/s and the follow up book, The Finishing School about the advanced training after BUD/s for SEAL candidates are good books if someone is interested in special warfare.
Chosen Soldier was very good. It lets the reader know what Army Special Forces are about. Couch as a retired SEAL, contrasts the mission of Army SF and Navy SF a little in this book which may be helpful.
I have no personal experience but I enjoyed those books and think they’d be good information for a boy interested in SF.
Send him to SOCNET.com. Have him do an intro as per SOPs, then read all of the threads. There are a bunch of SEALs and other SF types over there, so he can ask any number of guys (SF, Ranger, PJ, CCT, FR, etc.). There are even SEAL motivators that post frequently.
Right, that’s a great documentary. I had seen it then read Warrior Elite and it all seemed to match up. Warrior Elite follows class 228 if I remember correctly. It kind of makes an old guy wish he could go back in time and give that a go.
My mistake. I meant that Navy hospital corpsmen that were SEALs or Marine Reconnaissance types held NEC 8492 (Special Operations Technician, or “SOT Tech,” for short). I don’t know if that’s still their NEC or not.
Right, that’s a great documentary. I had seen it then read Warrior Elite and it all seemed to match up. Warrior Elite follows class 228 if I remember correctly. It kind of makes an old guy wish he could go back in time and give that a go.
Hell with that (haha!). Log PT. “The Dirty Name.” Surf passage. Sugar cookies. “Face the ocean, drop down and give me twenty and a loud HOO-YAH!!” Ulcers in the back of your heels (the calcaneous region), blistering and rashes on the inside of your quads, which get rubbed raw from wet sand and constantly double-timing it (“If you’re walking, you’re wrong shitheads!!”) everywhere you go. Drown proofing. 5 mile ocean swims with rocket fins and low-60s or high 50s water temps. The difference in studliness between a winter class and a summer class (winter guys are a lot tougher than those summer gay-Bobs ;-).
Frog hogs (hee-hee). Hell Week T-shirts. Running with Twin-80s. Underwater knot-tying. San Clemente Island and blowing shit up. Gettin’ in a fight at the Gator Gardens on a Friday night, and then running from the SPs and diving into the “mammal” zone to get away from them. Haircut Friday. Doing flutter kicks right next to the Rain Birds, which are going full blast. Paddling around Point Loma and into the Bay. And then back again. “Problem solving.” “Stealth and concealment” on the beach, at midnight, after two days of almost no sleep. Carrying the bell around. Being told to “go ring it, you pussies, because NONE of you got the balls to make it through.” 9 guys piling into a Suburu pickup and going to Dirty Dans (later, “Pure Platinum”) and Pacers (if you have to ask what those bars are, never mind). And the all-time favorite: 90 minutes in the “Leaning Rest” just for nodding off in a first-aid class.
There’s an SF type who once was a non-SF officer, got out, and then came back in as an enlisted man at, like, 45 years old. Became an ‘A’ Team operator and received the DSC or some other high-ranking award for snake-eating activities at the age of 47. Now THAT dude is born-again hard!1
Brave Men Dark Waters is a good book. If you like action/adventure books, special forces books are great. Like I said to Jen, it makes me wish I were about 20 again so I could try out. I’ve always been a shitty swimmer though.
No more FROG corpsman. They are SO’s now. SEAL Operators. they went to their own rate a few years ago. Same with EOD and Diver (ND). No more different rates filling those communities…
Yeah, depends who you talk to. Limits the promotion numbers. Kind of like the SeaBee rating…easily gets locked up. All the special groups did very well when competing for advancement within their rates. But now they have to compete against their own, and they all do the same thing, so you really have to shine. EOD and SEALs are doing OK, because their numbers are down. Onece those number get up up, like the Divers, it will slow down alot!
“SOT Techs” used to get extra promotion points, back when I was an enlisted Corpsman. Helped me go from E-1 to E-7 in under 8 years. Couldn’t argue with that. I can see how it can hurt, though, when the rating becomes filled up. I was the director for admin at a Navy dental center during my twilight tour, and all my dental techs were stuck in no-advancement hell for years, so crowded was their rate. It wasn’t unusual to see an E-5 with 18 years and happy to have made it that far. I put out 7 E-4 techs in one year because they’d all hit high-year tenure. Bet the Nav’s giving out a ton of waivers for high-year, nowadays
Have the kid go do that first, to get a gauge of where he stands, fitness-wise.