CHAPTER TEN

Never, Ever Quit!

If you want to change the world…

don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

I stood at attention along with the other 150 students beginning the first day of SEAL training. The instructor, dressed in combat boots, khaki shorts, and a blue and gold tee shirt, walked across the large asphalt courtyard to a brass bell hanging in full view of all the trainees.

“Gentlemen, ” he began. “Today is the first day of SEAL training. For the next six months you will undergo the toughest course of instruction in the United States military. ”

I glanced around and could see some looks of apprehension on the faces of my fellow students.

The instructor continued. “You will be tested like no time in your life. ” Pausing, he looked around the class of new “tadpoles. ” “Most of you will not make it through. I will see to that. ” He smiled. “I will do everything in my power to make you quit! ” He emphasized the last three words. “I will harass you unmercifully. I will embarrass you in front of your teammates. I will push you beyond your limits. ” Then a slight grin crossed his face. “And there will be pain. Lots and lots of pain. ”

Grabbing the bell, he pulled the rope hard and a loud clanging noise echoed across the courtyard. “But if you don’t like the pain, if you don’t like all the harassment, then there is an easy way out. ” He pulled the rope again and another wave of deep metallic sound reverberated off the buildings. “All you have to do to quit is ring this bell three times. ”

He let go of the rope tied to the bell’s clapper. “Ring the bell and you won’t have to get up early. Ring the bell and you won’t have to do the long runs, the cold swims, or the obstacle course. Ring the bell and you can avoid all this pain. ”

Then the instructor glanced down at the asphalt and seemed to break from his prepared monologue. “But let me tell you something, ” he said. “If you quit, you will regret it for the rest of your life. Quitting never makes anything easier. ”

Six months later, there were only thirty-three of us standing at graduation. Some had taken the easy way out. They had quit, and my guess is the instructor was right, they would regret it for the rest of their lives.

Of all the lessons I learned in SEAL training, this was the most important. Never quit. It doesn’t sound particularly profound, but life constantly puts you in situations where quitting seems so much easier than continuing on. Where the odds are so stacked against you that giving up seems the rational thing to do.

Throughout my career, I was constantly inspired by men and women who refused to quit, who refused to feel sorry for themselves, but none more so than a young Army Ranger I met in a hospital in Afghanistan.

It was late one evening when I received word that one of my soldiers had stepped on a pressure plate mine and had been MEDEVACed to the combat hospital near my headquarters. The Ranger regimental commander, Colonel Erik Kurilla, and I quickly made our way to the hospital and into the soldier’s room.

The soldier lay in the hospital bed, tubes extending from his mouth and chest; blast burns streaked up his arms and across his face. The blanket covering his body lay flat to the bed where his legs would normally have been. His life was now changed forever.

I had made countless visits to the combat hospital in Afghanistan. As a wartime leader you try not to internalize the human suffering. You know that it is part of combat. Soldiers get wounded. Soldiers die. If you allow every decision you make to be predicated on the possible loss of life you will struggle mightily to be effective.

Somehow though this night seemed different. The Ranger lying in front of me was so very young: younger than my two boys. He was nineteen years old and his name was Adam Bates. He had arrived in Afghanistan just a week earlier and this had been his first combat mission. I leaned over and touched my hand to his shoulder. He appeared to be sedated and unconscious. I reflected for a minute, said a little prayer, and was starting to leave when the nurse came in to check on my soldier.

She smiled, looked at his vitals, and asked me if I had any questions regarding his status. She informed me that both of his legs had been amputated and that he had serious blast injuries, but that his chance for survival was good.

I thanked her for taking such great care of Ranger Bates and told her I would return when he was conscious. “Oh, he’s conscious, ” she stated. “In fact it would be good for you to talk with him. ” She gently shook the young Ranger, who opened his eyes slightly and acknowledged my presence.

“He can’t speak right now, ” the nurse said. “But his mother was deaf and he knows how to sign. ” The nurse handed me a sheet of paper with the various sign language symbols displayed on it.

I talked for a minute, trying to find the strength to say the right thing. What do you tell a young man who has lost both his legs serving his country? How do you make him feel better about his future?

Bates, his face swollen from the blast, his eyes barely visible through the redness and the bandages, stared at me momentarily. He must have sensed the pity in my expression.

Raising his hand, he began to sign.

I looked at each symbol on the sheet of paper before me. Slowly, painfully, he signed, “I—will—be—OK. ” And then he fell back asleep.

As I left the hospital that evening I could not help but cry. Of the hundreds of men I talked with in the hospital, never once did anyone complain. Never once! They were proud of their service. They were accepting of their fate, and all they wanted was to get back to their unit, to be with the men that they had left behind. Somehow Adam Bates personified all those men who had come before him.

A year after my hospital visit in Afghanistan, I was at the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regimental Change of Command. There in the stands was Ranger Bates, looking sharp in his dress uniform and standing tall on his new prosthetic legs. I overheard him challenge a number of his fellow Rangers to a pull-up contest. With all he had been through—the multiple surgeries, the painful rehab, and adjusting to a new life—he never quit. He was laughing, joking, smiling—and just as he promised me—he was okay!

Life is full of difficult times. But someone out there always has it worse than you do. If you fill your days with pity, sorrowful for the way you have been treated, bemoaning your lot in life, blaming your circumstances on someone or something else, then life will be long and hard. If, on the other hand, you refuse to give up on your dreams, stand tall and strong against the odds—then life will be what you make of it—and you can make it great. Never, ever, ring the bell!

Remember… start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden, and never, ever give up—if you do these things, then you can change your life for the better… and maybe the world!

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

May 17, 2014

The University’s slogan is “What starts here changes the world. ” I have to admit, I kind of like it. “What starts here changes the world! ”

Tonight there are almost eight thousand students graduating from the University of Texas. That great paragon of analytical rigor, Ask. com, says that the average American will meet ten thousand people in their lifetime. That’s a lot of folks. But, if every one of you changed the lives of just ten people, and each one of those folks changed the lives of another ten people—just ten—then in five generations—125 years—the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.

Eight hundred million people. Think of it: over twice the population of the United States. Go one more generation and you can change the entire population of the world, eight billion people. If you think it’s hard to change the lives of ten people, change their lives forever, you’re wrong.

I saw it happen every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. A young Army officer makes a decision to go left instead of right down a road in Baghdad and the ten soldiers in his squad are saved from a close-in ambush.

In Kandahar province, Afghanistan, a noncommissioned officer from the Female Engagement Team senses something isn’t right and directs the infantry platoon away from a five-hundred-pound IED, saving the lives of a dozen soldiers.

But, if you think about it, not only were these soldiers saved by the decisions of one person, but their children yet unborn were also saved. And their children’s children were saved. Generations were saved by one decision, by one person.

But changing the world can happen anywhere, and anyone can do it. So, what starts here can indeed change the world, but the question is: What will the world look like after you change it?

Well, I am confident that it will look much, much better, but if you will humor this old sailor for just a moment, I have a few suggestions that may help you on your way to a better world. And while these lessons were learned during my time in the military, I can assure you that it matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform.

It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social status. Our struggles in this world are similar and the lessons to overcome those struggles and to move forward—changing ourselves and the world around us—will apply equally to all.

I have been a Navy SEAL for thirty-six years. But it all began when I left UT for basic SEAL training in Coronado, California. Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacle courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep, and always being cold, wet, and miserable.

It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL. But the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure, and hardships. To me, basic SEAL training was a lifetime of challenges crammed into six months.

So, here are the ten lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room, and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack.

It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

During SEAL training the students are broken down into boat crews. Each crew is seven students: three on each side of a small rubber boat and one coxswain to help guide the dinghy. Every day your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surf zone and paddle several miles down the coast.

In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be eight to ten feet high and it is exceedingly difficult to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in. Every paddle must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert equal effort or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously tossed back on the beach. For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.

You can’t change the world alone—you will need some help—and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the goodwill of strangers, and a strong coxswain to guide them.

If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.

Over a few weeks of difficult training, my SEAL class, which started with 150 men, was down to just 42. There were now 6 boat crews of 7 men each. I was in the boat with the tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of the little guys—“the munchkin crew, ” we called them. No one was over about five foot five.

The munchkin boat crew had one American Indian, one African American, one Polish American, one Greek American, one Italian American, and two tough kids from the Midwest. They outpaddled, outran, and outswam all the other boat crews.

The big men in the other boat crews would always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim. But somehow these little guys, from every corner of the nation and the world, always had the last laugh, swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us.

SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed; not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education, and not your social status.

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.

Several times a week, the instructors would line up the class and do a uniform inspection. It was exceptionally thorough. Your hat had to be perfectly starched, your uniform immaculately pressed, and your belt buckle shiny and devoid of any smudges.

But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat or pressing your uniform or polishing your belt buckle, it just wasn’t good enough. The instructors would find “something” wrong.

For failing the uniform inspection, the student had to run, fully clothed, into the surf zone and then, wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of his body was covered with sand. The effect was known as a “sugar cookie. ” You stayed in that uniform the rest of the day, cold, wet, and sandy.

There were many students who just couldn’t accept the fact that all their effort was in vain. That no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right, it was unappreciated. Those students didn’t make it through training. Those students didn’t understand the purpose of the drill. You were never going to succeed. You were never going to have a perfect uniform.

Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.

If you want to change the world, get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.

Every day during training you were challenged with multiple physical events. Long runs, long swims, obstacle courses, and hours of calisthenics, something designed to test your mettle.

Every event had standards: times you had to meet. If you failed to meet those standards your name was posted on a list, and at the end of the day those on the list were invited to a Circus.

A Circus was two hours of additional calisthenics designed to wear you down, to break your spirit, to force you to quit. No one wanted a circus. A Circus meant that, for that day, you didn’t measure up. A Circus meant more fatigue, and more fatigue meant that the following day would be more difficult—and more Circuses were likely.

But at some time during SEAL training, everyone—everyone—made the Circus list. And an interesting thing happened to those who were constantly on the list. Over time those students, who did two hours of extra calisthenics, got stronger and stronger. The pain of the Circuses built inner strength, built physical resiliency.

Life is filled with circuses. You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it will test you to your very core.

If you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the Circuses.

At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course contained twenty-five obstacles including a ten-foot-high wall, a thirty-foot cargo net, and a barbed-wire crawl, to name a few.

But the most challenging obstacle was the “Slide for Life. ” It had a three-level, thirty-foot tower at one end and a one-level tower at the other. In between was a hundred-foot-long rope.

You had to climb the three-tiered tower and, once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung underneath the rope, and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end. The record for the obstacle course had stood for years when my class began training in 1977. The record seemed unbeatable, until one day, a student decided to go down the Slide for Life—headfirst.

Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted the top of the rope and thrust himself forward. It was a dangerous move, seemingly foolish, and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury and being dropped from the training. Without hesitation, the student slid down the rope perilously fast, and instead of several minutes, it took him only half that time. By the end of the course he had broken the record.

If you want to change the world, sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle headfirst.

During the land warfare phase of training, the students are flown out to San Clemente Island, which lies off the coast of San Diego. The waters off San Clemente are a breeding ground for great white sharks. To pass SEAL training there are a series of long swims that must be completed. One is the night swim.

Before the swim the instructors joyfully brief the trainees on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente. They assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark—at least not recently.

But you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position—stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid. And if the shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts toward you—then summon up all your strength and punch him in the snout, and he will turn and swim away.

There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim you will have to deal with them.

If you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.

One of our jobs as Navy SEALs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We practiced this technique extensively during basic training. The ship attack mission is where a pair of SEAL divers is dropped off outside an enemy harbor and then they swim well over two miles underwater using nothing but a depth gauge and a compass to get to their target.

During the entire swim, even well below the surface there is some light that comes through. It is comforting to know that there is open water above you. But as you approach the ship, which is tied to a pier, the light begins to fade. The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight; it blocks the surrounding street lamps. It blocks all ambient light.

To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel, the center line and the deepest part of the ship. This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship, where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship’s machinery is deafening, and where it is easy to get disoriented and fail.

Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission, is the time when you must be calm—composed—when all your tactical skills, your physical power, and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.

If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

The ninth week of training is referred to as Hell Week. It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment, and one special day at the mudflats. The mudflats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana slues, a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.

It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mudflats and spend the next fifteen hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind, and the incessant pressure from the instructors to quit.

As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some “egregious infraction of the rules, ” was ordered into the mud. The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit; just five men and we could get out of the oppressive cold.

As I looked around the mudflats, it was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was still over eight hours till the sun came up, eight more hours of bone-chilling cold. The chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything. And then, one voice began to echo through the night, one voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two and two became three and before long everyone in the class was singing.

We knew that if one man could rise above the misery, then others could as well. The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing, but the singing persisted. And somehow the mud seemed a little warmer, the wind a little tamer, and the dawn not so far away.

If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person, a Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela, and even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala. One person can change the world by giving people hope.

If you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.

Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell, a brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at five o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT, and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training.

Just ring the bell.

If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

To the graduating class of 2014, you are moments away from graduating. Moments away from beginning your journey through life. Moments away from starting to change the world, for the better. It will not be easy.

Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often, but if you take some risks, step up when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden, and never, ever give up… if you do these things, then the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today. And what started here will indeed have changed the world, for the better.

Thank you very much. Hook ’em, Horns.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my editor Jamie Raab for her patience and understanding. You crafted a beautiful book that I know will stand the test of time. I also want to thank all those great friends who agreed to be mentioned in the book. Your courage in the face of tremendous adversity inspired me more than you will ever know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Admiral William H. McRaven (U. S. Navy retired) served with great distinction in the Navy. In his thirty-seven years as a Navy SEAL, he commanded at every level. As a Four-Star Admiral, his final assignment was as Commander of all U. S. Special Operations Forces. He is now Chancellor of the University of Texas System.

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