Navy SEALs And The Sign On The Door

The first thing most people get wrong about Navy SEALs is that they love the limelight. “Three Navy SEAL snipers take out Somali pirates,” the headlines trumpeted a few weeks back. “Head shots, every one!” In Coronado, where they put incoming would-be SEALs through BUDs, there were groans. BUDs stands for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL — the six-month course you have to get through, just to start the three-year process of becoming a SEAL. “Oh, great,” they were saying. “Now, everyone will think, ‘how cool to be a SEAL.’ Now we’ll get a bunch of young guys trying to sign up who think this is some kind of video game.” In other words, young kids who think it’s easy to go out and blow things up, and kill people — kids who have no idea the time, training or sheer force of will it takes to do the job. (That’s one of the reasons the Naval Special Warfare Command has allowed us to film BUDs make-or-break Hell Week, the most access the SEAL command has granted to training at their Coronado base since 2003.) Kimberly Dozier tell’s Lt. Jay’s remarkable story: The media didn’t help — every network was pursuing interviews with “the three SEAL shooters.” Not the entire SEAL unit, or two, or however many were there, who carried out the entire mission. Nor any of the Navy sailors on the boat who provided support, and trawl those waters for several months without a port call, trying to catch up with those fast pirate boats like a swimming elephant trying to catch a water skeeter. The SEALs said no. That’s why it’s so remarkable the SEAL command let the lieutenant we profiled tell his story. They don’t normally do that. But his “sign on the door” that he posted on his hospital room, at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, had become an internet sensation. It was snapped by some folks visiting injured troops and sent round and round — not just to troops and their families coping with combat injuries, but to trauma patients and cancer patients and anyone facing an uphill battle to recover. It read something like this: Attention to all who enter here. If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got doing a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20% further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid re-growth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. The Management That was aimed at anyone who walked in his room and wanted to offer pity for how he looked, what he’d lost, and how much he faced to come back. Read the entire CBS News story here.