At the Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center, Ben Sherwood (The Survivors Club) explains, they quickly figure out who will be capable of accomplishing dangerous underwater missions:
They take young sailors and tie their hands behind their backs and bind their feet. They put the strap of a dive mask between the sailors’ teeth and then throw them in the Olympic-size pool. The challenge is to stay afloat and live. “The more someone struggles,” Morgan tells me, “the harder it is to get air and the more tired they get. You just have to inhibit the powerful, incredible instinct to breathe and your anxiety and alarm.” Morgan knows how scary it is because they also tied him up and threw him in so he could understand what the sailors were going through. Most trainees quickly realize that the only way to avoid drowning is to relax and sink to the bottom of the pool, kick off powerfully toward the surface, gasp for a little bit of air through clenched teeth and then fall back into the water and drop down to the bottom again.During this testing, a lot of sailors black out. They simply don’t get enough oxygen and lose consciousness. Morgan has watched many of them sink to the bottom of the pool before divers pull them to the surface. On the deck, the unconscious sailors are rolled on their sides, and as soon as they revive, an instructor shouts again and again: “Are you gonna quit? Are you gonna quit?” Sailors are given 30 seconds to answer or they’re kicked out of the program. If they say they want to keep going, they’re given another 30 seconds to recover and then they’re thrown back into the pool. It may sound sadistic, but the Navy is simply trying to identify who will survive the most dangerous missions and who won’t. Through this grueling test, it finds soldiers and sailors who refuse to give up, who can suppress the need to breathe, who trust that they’ll be rescued if something goes wrong and who are prepared to lose consciousness — or even die — following orders.