Bloody Toes and Brotherhood

/
Active Average Oakley assault boot eric california sequoias snow outdoors 2015-02-28 13.06.34 (2).jpg

After I stumbled and lost bits of consciousness on my way back to camp, my SEAL instructors thought it was either wise or funny (they’re sadistic like that) to immediately send me back out to retest me on the land navigation course I had just failed.

Saturated with melted snow, seething with pain, and disoriented via exhaustion-induced confusion, I did what they had trained me to do. I dropped 3 bags of M&Ms into my belly, chased them down with a canteen of water and shuffled my sorry ass back into the snow-covered woods to pass the un-passable and become a SEAL.


I wasn’t 100 yards into…

...a snow-covered field when my legs started to wobble again. On the first test, I had used ziplock bags to protect my exposed feet from the snow, and it ended up costing me two of my toenails, which I ended up ripping off and tossing into the snow. The good news: circulation was flowing again. The bad news: the blood started to fill the tips of my socks.

As I slugged through the snow, my feet crossed the chasm from nice and warm to cold and agonizing and then finally settled into a twisted combination of numbness and incineration. Turns out that encasing body parts in frozen blood is as damaging as encasing them in frozen water. Ice is ice.

With my body failing from exhaustion and hypothermia, the cold reality of failing the land navigation course for the second time and being dropped from SEAL training started to settle in. I wasn’t about to quit, but I started to suspect that my body may have decided to throw in the towel.

Then Joe appeared.

Joe was a fellow SEAL trainee and medic in the course. He refused to let me out of his sight even though it was also his final chance to pass.

“Dude, you’ll get dropped from training if you stay with me. Get out of here,” I said to him, but he wouldn’t leave my side. Joe began to leapfrog back and forth between going out and getting his points and coming back to check on me.

With a newfound confidence generated from knowing that if I did pass out in the snow Joe would be there to get me back to safety, my body and mind recovered and just somehow kept going. It was palpable proof of 1+1 equaling 50.

Right there, in that moment, I learned the three elements of a true tribe -- love, respect, and possessiveness -- that I’ve been teaching in our Superhuman Performance Discourse and cultivating in our online tribe ever since.

On that day, it took just a single tribe member to save me from complete failure and allow me to ultimately become a SEAL. If he hadn’t shown up, I would have failed. And it’s not like I would have known that I failed because a member of my tribe didn’t show up. I would have just failed.

Eric

How many opportunities have you lost or are going to lose by operating alone?

/ / Comment

Eric Davis

Eric Davis served our country as a U.S. Navy SEAL and decorated veteran of the Global War on Terror. Eric has been recognized as one of the premier sniper instructors in the U.S. military and has served as a Master Training Specialist at the SEAL sniper school in Coronado, CA.

He is an expert of technical and physical surveillance and was part of an elite group hand-selected to perform intelligence collection in denied areas around the world.

Eric has spent years developing, writing and executing curriculum for the SEAL Teams. By leveraging his expertise in the development of systems, structures, processes and practices Eric was instrumental in significantly reducing the failure rate, of Naval Special Warfare’s internationally recognized Sniper course. 

Since departing from the SEAL teams, Eric has worked in corporate performance, sales and leadership training bringing an unprecedented amount of innovation, efficiency and structure to the domain of business and performance.