Brandon Webb - Mastering Fear: A Navy Seal’s Guide

TOTAL FOCUS

THE RED CIRCLE

THE MAKING OF A NAVY SEAL

AMONG HEROES

THE KILLING SCHOOL

Also by Brandon Webb

THE POWER OF THOUGHT

The brave man is not the one who has no fear, he is the one who triumphs over his fear.

N ELSON M ANDELA

MY FRIEND KAMAL is a world traveler; he has meditated with Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lamas monastery, trekked the Himalayas, and hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. He served in the U.S. Army and studied to be an ER doctor. He has launched tech companies, runs his own venture capital firm, and is a bestselling author. In person, he makes quite the striking impression: flowing mane of silver hair, quiet voice behind steely gaze, the super-calm demeanor of a Buddhist master. Here is a guy with all the ingredients for success on a mega scale. But I recently learned a secret about Kamal.

He couldnt swim.

At first I had a hard time believing it. I thought he had to be exaggerating. To me, swimming comes as naturally as breathing. I grew up on and in the water. My family lived for years on a sailboat. I spent more than a decade in the navy, trained and deployed as a U.S. Navy SEAL. The idea of not knowing how to swim was beyond my comprehension. But here was my friend, this amazing, talented guy who had accomplished so much in his life... and he couldnt swim.

I gave him kind of a hard time about it. I pointed out that the human body is more than 60 percent water; did he realize he was already floating around inside his own skin? I wondered aloud if, when his parents conceived him, the egg cell had to swim down to meet the sperm cells, instead of the other way around.

Dude, I said. How can you possibly not know how to swim?

The answer was simple.

Fear.

Kamal had been terrified of water his whole life, he told me. A few times, when he was living in the Dominican Republic, he went kitesurfing. He always wore a life jacket, but that didnt make any difference. He was still terrified. What would happen if he fell and hit the water? He told me stories about being out at his buddy Tim Ferrisss house in the Hamptons. Tim has a big, beautiful pool in his backyard where people hang out and go swimming and have a fantastic time, and Kamal felt awful that he could never join in.

Kamal, I realized, hated the fact that he couldnt swim. And it wasnt as if hed never tried to learn. Hed taken courses, studied in online workshops. For a while he lived in a building in San Francisco with the only heated outdoor Olympic pool in the city, and he brought in a private instructor. That hadnt worked, either. No matter what the various teachers tried, he couldnt handle the feeling of his feet not touching the bottom, and he would quickly reach the point of panic. Now he was thinking about doing one of those immersion courses in Florida. Or so he said. But I noticed he kept putting it off.

I stopped giving him a hard time about it.

Instead, I decided to do something about it.

I had a week coming up at home in New York. Look, I said. You give me a commitment for a week, and Ill teach you myself. But you have to commit to meet me, every day at the same time, rain or shine. Give me a week, and Ill have you swimming.

Okay, he said.

On the appointed morning, I went into the New York Athletic Club, right off Central Park South, headed upstairs to the pool, found a free lane, and slipped into the water. I got there a little early so I could take some laps while I waited for Kamal. As I shot silently up the lane, my thoughts slipstreamed back two decades.

I T S NIGHTTIME OVER the Persian Gulf, summer of 1995. The four of uspilot, copilot, another crewman, and mehave been out in our H-60 Seahawk helicopter doing sonar ops. Its been a long night, and we need to refuel on a nearby destroyer before heading back to the aircraft carrier were calling home.

The pilot slows us down to a crawl as we approach the vessel below. Landing on a destroyers deck is always dicey, more so on this moonless night. Someone needs to spot the deck as we hover in place high above the ship and talk the pilot down. Tonight the spotter, the guy strapped into the gunners seat down in the belly of the bird, is me.

I crack open the door and look down, scanning for telltale lights. There arent any. Thats weird. I glance upwardand now I see lights. What? For the span of a single breath, I experience total disorientation. Why are there lights up here at eye level when the destroyer is way down below us? Then the disorientation evaporates as I look down again and see water, right there at my feet. Persian Gulf waterchurning, grinning, reaching up for me, curling around my ankles.

Oh, shit.

Were not hovering high above the ship after all. Our goddamn pilot has put us right down in the drink. Seawater is pouring into the cabin, caressing my legs, climbing the interior walls, searching for the engine. Hey, baby. Im here. Come to Papa. This is not good. If the engine chokes and dies, we flip upside down, sink straight to the bottom of the Gulf, and dont come up again. Ever.

Altitude! I shout into my comms. Altitude!

And heres where it really starts to get fun. Because our pilot, the guy in charge of this operation, the guy whos supposed to be our leader, is now seized by full-on panicand he freezes. Whats happening? he screams as he takes exactly zero corrective action. Oh God oh God oh God... ! This is not what you want to hear from your helicopter commander in a moment like this. Fear has paralyzed him, taken him, swallowed him whole.

And because of that, all four of us are going to die, right here, right now.

I FINISHED MY laps and pulled myself back up onto the pools edge to wait for my friend.

I knew what it was that had Kamal in its grip. And I knew why all those other teachers whod tried to help him had failed. They thought they were supposed to teach him how to swim. They were wrong. This wasnt about learning how to swim.

It was about learning how to harness fear.

During SEAL training theres a pool competency phase where the instructors do everything they can to freak you out. They send you down with an oxygen tank and then tie your air hose in knots so it doesnt work, anything to throw you into a panic, and then see if you can find your way out. You sit there, waiting for your turn with your back to the pool, and listen to the classmate ahead of you in the water, thrashing and drowning. It never got to me, but it sure terrified the living crap out of quite a few classmates. And I could understand why. I might not be afraid of the water normally, but I just about shit my pants that night over the Gulf.