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At McP's, the Navy SEALs' favorite hangout in the southern California town of Coronado, the regulars can always tell an impostor. He's the one bragging about his exploits. Real SEALs never discuss their missions in a bar. They call the impostors--and there are many of them, cruising for groupies--the wannabes. Only wannabes pose as Rambos. The SEALs see themselves on a higher plane. A lieutenant commander who's spent 20 years as a SEAL explains: "We are developing in these guys warrior intellectuals. They fight well. And they read everything from Rommel to Clausewitz."
Reading books is not exactly the film image of secret warriors made famous by Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. But the Hollywood version is deceiving, a holdover from the Vietnam War days when the force did have its "snake-eaters" and lone wolves. Navy SEAL training is extraordinarily arduous, but it requires as much mental as physical toughness. Musclebound "Conans" are often the first to drop out of training. (Half of all SEAL recruits fail to complete the program.) During "Hell Week," the sixth week of the SEALs' grueling training, the students can sleep for only four hours--in six days.
Commandos in Delta Force, the Pentagon's secret counterterrorist unit, tend to be family men in their 30s. One drunk-driving charge and an Air Force special-operations pilot is tossed out of his unit. Attracting attention to yourself is considered bad form among special operators, many of whom are teetotalers or deeply religious. Says Neil Livingstone, a Washington consultant on counterterrorism: "There's no place in their ranks for showboats."
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Special-operations forces are clannish and insular. On a remote range at Fort Bragg, N.C., stands a compound ringed by a barbed-wire-topped fence with only a blue sign in front that reads SECURITY OPERATIONS TRAINING FACILITY. It's the self-contained home of Delta Force. One building houses the "climbing wall" with simulated jagged rocks for rappelling exercises. On another wall hang 60 different locks, which commandos practice picking. In a three-story "shooting house," operators learn how to clear a room, firing live ammunition at moving robots or three-dimensional holograms. "You have to have an ego," says Don Feeny, a former Delta member. "You have to be able to go into a room where five guys are out to get you and be completely confident you can handle them all."
Special operators also have to think on their feet. The Green Berets, who specialize in unconventional warfare and training foreign insurgents, spend three weeks screening applicants who can't. During one phase of Green Beret training soldiers parachute into North Carolina's Uwharrie National Forest. Local townsfolk play the part of guerrillas in the fictional country of "Pineland." One exercise has a blindfolded student ushered into a "safe house"--Ronnie Parsons's garage near the tiny town of Candor. The blindfold is removed and the student sees Parsons sitting behind a table with an AK-47 lying across it. He orders the student to sit down and dumps a live turkey in his lap, demanding that he cure it of pneumonia. To win the guerrilla's confidence the student has to bluff that he can care for the bird. "If they're not prepared to go into different cultures and adapt, we're in trouble," a Special Forces instructor explains.
Special-operations work can take a personal toll. Some commandos become so focused on their jobs they wall out family and friends. Divorce rates among the all-male combat commando units tend to be high. Husbands can be gone on secret training missions as much as six months out of the year. Marriages that survive tend to be strong. "If you're not an independent person, you're not going to make it in this job," says Stephanie Comer, wife of an Air Force commando. Most nerve-racking for the families is not knowing where the father is, when he'll be back, whether he's in danger. Some couples have secret codes they exchange if the husband has time to telephone from a distant country. For other wives, it takes several sleepless nights before they adjust to their husbands being away. In the back of their minds is the fear that their husbands may never come back--and they'll never really know why.
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