Death in Navy SEAL training exposes a culture of brutality, cheating, and drugs | Hacker News Reader

Death in Navy SEAL training exposes a culture of brutality, cheating, and drugs

boston.com

14 pointsbreck11 comments

As I've aged, I've seen more and more a common trend occurring across many areas, where hubris in selection and promotion procedures, accompanied by denial of fundamental flaws in those procedures, leads to nothing but rampant corruption. A system based on narcissistic delusion eventually has no room for anything but delusion.

It's disgusting to me that the people running this program can assert, with no irony, that exposing recruits to extreme conditions necessarily precludes monitoring those recruits for life-threatening conditions. It says less about the fortitude of the recruits than the negligence or incompetence of those running the recruitment program.

Yes. USA values short term reward. It is an accessible culture, as a pro, and I still wish we could value the long term view, too.

I have a story, maybe not entirely related:

Three years ago I hugged and consoled a seriously drunk and upset, and traumatized older (60?) ex-SEAL, wearing a Hawaiian shirt crying outside my home in the downtown of a large city. He was in crisis and was asking for an ambulance. Crying about how his friends were butchered in front of him during action, some long time ago. He is a really huge person .. tall and strong, and emotionally unstable.

And I waited until an ambulance came to take a look at him.

I looked him up later, and he's a kind of troublemaker, known to the police for making a boisterous kind of upset.

So, it's frustrating to me. I don't feel I helped my fellow citizen well enough. I expect the guy will be in crisis again. And I end up disappointed in myself, my skills, and realize I need to research and train up on providing crisis resources.

I wonder when they will do an in-depth expose of the culture of brutality and cheating that the Spartans had.

One of the points of having such a rigorous, grueling training program, is that when stuff hits the fan on a mission, they can look back and say, "hey, this is bad, but Hell Week was worse, and we all made it through that."

Basically, every elite military unit in history has had a very brutal/dangerous entry.

What’s the saying? Exercise like it’s a battle and battle like it’s an exercise?

Or to identify individuals who can cope with some of the most difficult, dangerous and impactful decision making on earth.

For all of the supposed training Spartans had, they held military domination for less than half a century (counting the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE to their defeat at Leuctra in 371 BCE. The image of their training comes from non-Spartan sources centuries after their Golden Age. Athens maintained naval domination without such "training." Rome, too. But I digress. The real point of this is that the most rigorous training doesn't have to involve life-death situations based on infection, PEDs, or other incidents off-course. The article here doesn't seem to focus on deaths occurring in the midst of the course, ie, during the training program itself (eg, drowning or severing a spinal chord during action). I think there's debate for the merits of the training, but leaving that aside, the idea of monitoring these warriors when they're "at rest" (in quotes of course), when it's both feasible and does not interfere with the training itself, seems more than fair. Heck, between treating infections and suffering withdrawal, they probably should receive treatment as part of their survival training...why shouldn't that be good practice in the field?

> In 2018, Caserta left a note for his parents criticizing the Navy for its treatment of him and saying he did not want a military funeral, and then hurled himself into the tail rotor of a Navy helicopter.

Jeez..that’s a pretty horrific way to off yourself.

> Since 1953, at least 11 men have died [during BUD/S].

I was very surprised by this. My guess would have been ~1 per year, so ~70.

That being said, it does seem like there's much room for advancement of health monitoring technology to get that number lower.

Doing military stuff is just dangerous in and of itself.

In Desert Storm, the first Iraq War, half of all deaths were not related to combat.

"292 killed (147 killed by enemy action, 145 non-hostile deaths)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

well yeah, and water is wet, I mean this is not the olympics, the specialization these gents have signed up for is particularly nasty, brutish, and unfair in a nasty, brutish, and unfair industry.

> industry

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

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