Nice haircut, picker. 
Yea - one thing I don’t miss is that good old high 'n tight.
But who’s gonna tell a group of 100 guys who’ve just finished several months of hyper-intensive leadership and combat training without seeing a woman, a beer, a real bunk or a hot meal that their haircuts are stupid?
Rangers Lead The Way!
A Seal or anyone else in the physical condition required for special ops training doesn’t float.
Not even buck naked with thier lungs full to bursting. Certainly not with fatigues, combat boots. And then consider that they try to hang on to some degree of weapons.
Plus, I would imagine they all have a pretty low body fat ratio, which also reduces buoyancy.
I met a guy at a wedding who was Air Force Special Forces who talked to me about it for a while, one of those things where both your girlfriends are friends so you end up hanging out. He told me that he was going to do some dive training with some Navy SEALs in a week or so, and among the things they would be doing was experiencing a controlled shallow water blackout under observation as part of drownproofing training. He said the SEALs called this “seeing the wizard.”
You know, I thought that too, but you would be surprised at the number of SEALs that have a beer gut. Doesn’t seem to slow them down though…
Bull pucky, I lived with a seal who was actively a seal when I was living with him, and he was very open about being a seal. I even have 2 beaches named after me, one in Lebanon, one in Lybia [well, named for my D&D characters=)]
Though I would have loved it if a few of his teammates had been drowned, they were serious assholes. Pity the one really nice one died in training just after I left Don=(.
down proofing
step 1 float
step2 bob
step 3 swim 100 meters
step 4 front and back flip
step 5 grab scuba mask with teeth
also your hands are tied behind your back and your feet are tied together.
Crap.
Unless the Marine Corps has radically altered its swim training, then this is nowhere near factual.
Boot camp swim training is…swim training.
After boot camp, swim training is…swim training.
With a few exceptions, Marines aren’t expected to actually fight in the water, so training in hand-to-hand water combat as a matter of course would be a waste of time.
Yes, he was exaggerating to make himself sound more bad ass.
Saw a documentary on Navy SEALS which said there was a lot of “drown proof” type stuff during Hell Week. They have their arms tied behind their back and their legs tied together and are told to bounce off the bed of a swimming pool or in the sea, take a gasp of air, then sink and bounce again. I think there was other stuff involving wrestling in water, etc. The point was to push them past the instinctual panic in a “near drowning” type situation and get them to react and function effectively in such a situation.
I heard that the most elite fighting units are actually the SEALs that fail this test and drown, and are then brought back as zombie SEALs.
This is a 7 year old thread, just bumped.
Army Rangers? There are thousands in the 75th Regiments at any given time, and that’s not counting everyone that graduates Ranger school. I think you can take that one off the list. (And yes, I realize this is 7 years old now).
Then why don’t they perform the first task of an army: to find, know and never lose the enemy?
That’s not what the Marine’s Hymn says:
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea;
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your SEAL friend was only MOSTLY drowned.
that drowning shit is a myth
And your source of information is…?
The tough part is that they push off the bottom of the pool, reach the surface, take a breath, then exhale it so they will sink back to the bottom and be able to push off again. If they don’t exhale, they will float enough to be helplessly stuck somewhere in the middle of the water and a diver will have to rescue them. Spending 20 seconds under water with no air in your lungs is excruciating to most people.
One of the things they do is 50 meter underwater swims where they cannot come up for air. It isn’t uncommon for people to black out and have to be pulled out of the water. I am pretty sure that is the goal though. It helps people overcome their fear of drowning, overcome their fear of death and trust their team mates.
There is also water boarding at SERE school.