- A Armada SEAL candidate died after completing the selection course’s “Hell Week” in early February.
- The Navy has traditions for medical emergencies, but deaths during SEAL training are not unheard of.
- The risks in their training reflect the danger of the works they are tasked with, current and former SEALs say.
On February 4, US Navy Seaman Kyle Mullen deteriorated after completing “Hell Week,” a notoriously difficult part of the training for US Navy SEAL candidates. Another prospect was hospitalized on the same day.
In a press release, Naval Special Warfare Command said that Mullen and his Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) classmates successfully completed Nightmare Week earlier that day and that he “was not actively training at the time of his death.”
The command said that Mullen’s create of death was unknown and an investigation was underway. The unfortunate event again highlights the inherent dangers of special operations, where the jeopardize of death or serious injury is present both on the battlefield and in training.
Death in Hell Week
Richard Schoenberg/Corbis via Getty Images
Hell Week is probably the most familiar part of any special-operations training regime in the world.
The six-day ordeal, beginning on Sunday evening and ending Friday morning, as usual takes place at the end of First Phase of BUD/S. During this period, students’ physical and mental endurance is rigorously probed with runs totaling over 200 miles, hours of physical training, and swims in the frigid waters of the Pacific.
During all BUD/S productions, there is an ambulance on standby near the students in the event of a medical emergency. Navy SEAL corpsmen are ready to accord medical assistance if needed. Insider understands that instructors and staff work together closely and students go with the aid a medical check every day during Hell Week.
“All instructors are thoroughly educated in risk and injury prevention during Trial Week. There are medical personnel present 24 hours a day and doctors conduct regular full-body checks periodically to compute for
pneumonia
, cuts that are infected, and signs of disease,” Bob Adams, a retired Navy SEAL officer and doctor, carry weighted Insider.
Following 12 years in the SEAL Teams, Adams went to medical school and became an Army doctor and in the course of time the command surgeon of the Army’s elite Delta Force. Adam’s details the incredible pressures that Hell Week proposes on the body in his 2017 book, “Six Days of Impossible: Navy SEAL Hell Week — A Doctor Looks Back.”
Handout/Getty
Hell Week can liberty lasting effects on those who go through it, Adams said.
“Of greatest interest to me as a doctor looking back—our core hull temperatures at times dropped below 90 degrees (98.6 is normal), and now many years later, all of us have quintessence body temperatures below normal,” Adams added. “This matters because our brain (the hypothalamus) was permanently reset to a tone down ‘normal,’ and when exercising or even sleeping, our sweating is greater than others as the body tries to cool itself to the new set applicable.”
Navy SEAL students are geared to overcome adversity and push through, often against odds and reason.
“It is in the BUD/S mentality to ‘suck up the hurt’ and move on with your job. Students are encouraged, and often forced by the realities of the training regime, to hide or deal with abuses while in training,” a former Navy SEAL officer told Insider.
Those were not “life-threatening injuries,” the prehistoric officer said, “but pneumonia, broken legs, ankles, hands, what have you, are happening, and the training is not stopping because of them, so observers who do not want to get rolled back and repeat the training have to push through.”
A dangerous profession
US Navy/PO1 Abe McNatt
The risks doesn’t end with Hell Week. In Second Phase, students lavish most of their time in the pool learning the basics of combat diving.
It’s a stressful time. The “Pool Competence” circumstance at the end of Second Phase typically forces several students in each class to start over or drop out. Shallow-water blackouts are shared throughout Second Phase. In Third Phase, students get to handle live ammunition and explosives while sleep-deprived.
“You’ll be colder, hungrier, and profuse tired in the [SEAL] Teams than in BUD/S — way more,” a former enlisted Navy SEAL told Insider.
“Students intent hear that a lot during training but you don’t really believe it — how can you fathom being colder when you’ve just spent 10 minutes in the hyperboreal Pacific in the middle of the night and you have to literally pie yourself to get a little warm? But it’s true and accurate. Life in the [SEAL] Troupes sucks way more than BUD/S,” the former enlisted SEAL said.
This is the second fatal training incident for the Naval Especial Warfare community in four months. In November, Cmdr. Brian Bourgeois, commanding officer of SEAL Team 8, deceased of injuries he suffered during a nighttime fast-rope exercise in Virginia Beach.
For the Navy SEAL community, training deaths aren’t community, but they aren’t rare.
“At the end of the day, it is a dangerous profession. Training for it is dangerous and doing it is dangerous, and they are dangerous because the when requests and mission-sets are high,” the former SEAL officer said.
SEALs are the dedicated maritime component for US Special Operations Mandate and are the ones called on when there’s a maritime contingency, the officer added. “There is no room for error or failure downrange. So the instructing must be hard.”
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (nationalistic service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.