Hell Week in SEALs, hell years at home - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Hell Week in SEALs, hell years at home

No, this book is not about those SEALs, the members of the former SEAL Team Six credited with killing Osama bin Laden on May 1.

“SEAL Team Six” happens to be in bookstores shortly after the Pakistan raid, but the SEAL in this memoir left his team in 1995.

Hull Maintenance Technician 1st Class Howard E. Wasdin jumps from planes 752 times, shoots to a top sniper slot, and survives serious wounds. He is in the index of Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down,” but his own take on Mogadishu is compelling and commendable.

His youth is memorable, too. “Hell is for Children” is an apt chapter title; he is 4 when his future adoptive father hits him “to the point where I could taste my own blood. That was Leon’s way of helping my mother keep her male child on the straight and narrow.”

Wasdin enlists at 20, and his childhood had prepared him for “pain and hard work.”

While freezing on the beach during Hell Week, a buddy’s urine warms his hands. After a sniper’s day in the dirt, the threat of Lyme disease prompts “having your buddy use tweezers to pull a tick out from around your anus.”

Such frank descriptions are far from tedious and seem timely, even if the authors’ lips are sealed about how SEAL training in 1987 compares with 2011. Besides, other details endure.

In Operation Desert Storm, 14 Iraqis surrender, and Wasdin realizes “they were just poor sonsofbitches who were half starved to death” and “human beings just like me.” In Somalia, the odor of gangrene from a child’s land-mine injury is noticeable 10 yards away. Two buddies join him in treating the boy’s leg.

Wasdin’s legs are shot in battle in Mogadishu. Recuperating in Georgia, he goes hunting in a wheelchair, shoots from 150 yards and wheels himself to the fallen deer. “Hearing it die, I thought, I’d have been just as happy to come and watch you, instead of taking your life. I’ve seen enough things die.” He never hunts again.

He leaves the Navy when his injuries prevent him from doing “what my Teammates were doing.” Now a chiropractor, helping patients helps lessen survivor’s guilt.

Some pearls of Wasdin’s wisdom:

• Staying alive: “Do not mess with DoE nuke sites,” advice after observing Energy Department snipers.

• Applying camouflage paint: “It’s important to appear the opposite of how a human being looks: Make the dark become light and the light become dark.”