Navy SEALs Essays - Military Engineering, Underwater Demolition Team

Navy SEALs Navy SEALs United States Navy SEALs, who are they, what do they do, why are they so secretive? A Navy SEAL is a highly trained individual. He must go through the toughest training in the world. The government will send them to the ends of the earth to do tasks that would send chills up most of our spines. Most of their operations even though top secret involve capturing an individual of power, to get information through capturing anything our government thinks important . They are sometimes required to kill certain individuals. They rarely work alone, they depend on each other. Some say that your swim buddy is closer to you than your wife. This is just a glance at what they do. A history lesson on how the Navy SEALs came to be, started back in World War Two. The navy considers the Scouts and Raiders to be the direct-and earliest-frontrunners of today's SEALs. But despite the original intention, the Scouts and Raiders did not become broad-based commandos like the SEALs. In most of their operations, they were limited to direct support of the amphibious force, guiding marine and army units ashore. Later a few of them served with guerrilla units behind enemy lines in China, and many were blended in with the Underwater Demolition Teams involved in the campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific. One of the first missions to bring fame to the Scouts and Raiders started out with seventeen sailors boarded a small, wooden-hulled boat and headed up the Wadi Sebou, a stream that went through Port Lutey (now Kenitra, Morocco). Their task was to cut the cables anchoring a boom and antishipping net stretched across the river directly under the machine guns and cannons in a fort overlooking the river. With the way cleared, American warships would be able to fight their way up the river and protect soldiers moving in to seize the city's military airfield. Not being limited to just sabotage the Scouts and Raiders were also becoming experts in bomb disposing, one was a two-thousand ?pound mine dropped by parachute. If the mine came down on land instead of water, it was supposed to go off seventeen seconds later. But sometimes the fuzzes jammed and the experts were called in. If in tinkering with the mine, the bomb-disposal man started it ticking again, he had something less than seventeen seconds to get away. The reliance on physical stress as a way of testing a man's capability and screening out those who don't measure up remains an important part of the training of the navy's SEALs to this day. Today's SEALs are also experts on using explosives and, if need be, disarming enemy munitions. So there is a direct link back to the bomb-disposal experts trained half a century ago. The first volunteers came mostly from Seabees, (construction workers for the navy) with officers raided from the bomb-disposal school. Training began with a one-week ordeal that is still known as Hell Week and that quickly eliminated forty percent of the class. The survivors were proud of their accomplishment, but they joked that "Hell Week separated the men from the boys; the men had sense enough to quit and left us with the boys." The trainees at Fort Pierce spent much of their time in rubber boats and in the mud, and they ran miles every day. But surprisingly, little attention was paid to swimming. The assumption was that they would paddle ashore as part of an amphibious operation and do their demolition work in relatively shallow water while army demolition experts took over at the high-water mark. Although men of the Underwater Demolition Teams later prided themselves on their nickname of the Naked Warriors, the trainees at Fort Pierce were anything but naked. They did their work dressed in soggy fatigues, with heavy boondocker shoes on their feet and awkward metal helmets on their heads. Much of their training was done at night. The men quickly became very good at handling high explosives. Those who couldn't overcome their fear of being blown to kingdom come were sent off to other assignments. They were probably the smart ones. As the UDT men later realized, they and their explosives-filled rubber boats were disasters waiting to happen. The newly trained men now will use their tactics. Operating from small rubber boats at night, the men took soundings of the water depth all along the planned invasion beaches. They even crawled ashore one night and brought back a bucketful of sand so army experts could test it to determine how well it would support tanks and other heavy