Freezing to Death
After enlisting with the U.S. Navy, I underwent difficult training in California and the wilderness of Montana. Due to my perseverance, physical endurance and stamina, I was selected to join the Navy SEALs, which is one of the most elite task forces in the U.S. military. Our regular training with the Navy finished in December. As soon as I was chosen for SEALs, I was given a month and half off to celebrate Christmas and New Year with my family in Buffalo, New York.
With winter intensifying, 2014 was ending. In December 2014, Buffalo experienced the worst blizzard in 50 years. Buffalo was buried in snow. One couldn’t go out without sunglasses because the snow made it too bright for the eyes. Christmas arrived, and I celebrated with my parents, sister, brother-in-law and their three little sons. My nephews are adorable and little devils. The youngest one, Jake, is very outgoing and not bothered by cold. The minute I would walk towards the door, he would chase me wanting to join. He is going to be 2 years old on February 29th. In Buffalo, we measure the snowfall in feet than inches. Indeed, it was the coldest Christmas I had ever experienced, colder than “a polar bear’s toenail”, as the saying goes.
Well; we were alright. We were used to the cold weather and celebrating Christmas in snowy, stormy winters. That is how Christmas should typically be and we were Buffalonians after all. In the entire family, my youngest nephew, Jake, and I were most comfortable with winter. Man, I had fun! Especially with little Jake. Christmas and the New Years were over with a blink of an eye, and I was scheduled to return to camp Fort Bliss in El Paso in Texas, to resume training with the SEALs.
It was January 25th. El Paso was experiencing a typical warm winter. The shining sun was pouring over the city. It was cold in the evening with a cold breeze hitting my face. Coming from Buffalo, I was roaming around with shorts and t-shirt. Our trainer kept telling us that our training in Fort Bliss was a warm-up.
“Get ready for the toughest training of your lives”, he said with a deep, loud voice.
I would grin each time he said that. “You don’t scare me with cold weather!”, I would mumble. “I’m from Buffalo.”
I had no idea what was coming my way though. We were finally taken to Alaska for an advanced cold-weather training in Juneau. The training was designed to test our physical stress of the environment and operate in frosty condition.
I, together with 29 other fresh recruits, flew to Juneau Naval base, Alaska in a gray Boeing C-17 Globemaster III.
I had mixed feelings about the cold-weather training, which was designed to push our mental and physical limits in extreme cold weather. The tight, heavy-duty belts of the aircraft held me tight enough to make breathing hard for me. That made me even more nervous. As we were getting closer to Alaska, my anxiety was growing. After landing in Juneau, I started feeling comfortable. It was not as freezing as we Americans on the other end of the country had thought it was. The blue hues of dawn falling over the snow covered the white mountains.
“I can deal with this”, telling myself. This was our final phase of training. After this phase, we will officially be the SEAL Team. We will be there to protect our freedom in the deepest seas, highest elevations, and roughest grounds.
We will be the unbreakable, un-penetrable SEALs. The first few days of the cold-weather training included shooting and climbing icy mountains. We were being trained under the harshest of conditions. Blizzards were hitting us on and off every day. I could not see anything, but white snow. Trees, ground and mountains were covered with snow. Pools, ponds, and even drops of water were frozen. It was cold; seriously cold. Even for a Buffalonian. It was the final stages of our training in immensely cold weather. So far only 19 of us have survived. Others had either lost fingers, toes or abandoned to avoid freezing.
We were approaching the final stages of our training. It was February 19, 2015. We just jumped from an aircraft on mountains full of polar bears. Our objective was one thing: to cross walk down the mountain and frozen rivers and make it to the camp on our own. The name of the game is “survival” here. Prior to embarking on the last stage of training, we signed a waiver to free the Navy of liability had we lost our lives during training.
Now we were getting closer to our camp, but we reached the area mostly occupied by bears. I was shivering; my voice was cutting through the freezing wind while carrying half of my body weight in weapons. Some of us lagged behind, others were faster than me. I conquered the mountain. I thought I was done with the harshest part. No! I have a frozen pond ahead of me. I put on my integrated goggles. I could see any living object with them. I see at least five bears scattered on the pond. I have two options here: to break the icy layer on top of the river and swim across to avoid bears, or to walk on the frozen river and most likely confront bears, because it is hard to evade all five of them. The challenge with the first option is that I would most likely suffocate under water if I could not make it across with one breath, or I would freeze to death. The problem with the second option was that I might face bears that are only visible while I have my goggles on, but not very visible without them in the white snowy weather. I can’t aim accurately and shoot with goggles on and can’t spot them with goggles off.
By the time I spot them without the goggles, they will be too close for me to pull my rifle and shoot. If I swim under the ice, it will be a trouble. If I walk on the ice, it will be a real terror.
