Video: Ben Chworowsky, 21, of Waukesha, Wis., participates in the one-week "Advanced Training Course" at the Extreme Seal Experience in Chesapeake, Va. Chworowsky wants to prove to himself that he is strong enough to become a Navy Seal. He intends on enlisting in the Navy as soon as he can.
chesapeake, Va. — At 4 a.m. on Hell Night, Mark Parris and 12 other wannabe SEALs were sitting up to their necks in the most vile water they had ever seen.
As a pair of frogs mated a couple of inches from Parris’s face, he was ordered to do push-ups and flutter kicks by a retired Navy SEAL named Don Shipley. With his waterlogged boots, Parris struggled along with the other men to lift his legs. And there were hours more of running, lifting and paddling ahead.
Parris, a 51-year-old electrician from Long Island, N.Y., with arthritic knees, was suddenly filled with doubt about his decision to sign up for an Extreme SEAL Experience, a week-long course that offers civilians a rare taste of what it takes to be a Navy SEAL.
The pond “was full of I don’t know what slime,” he recalled later. “There had to be snakes in there. And it smelled. I thought, ‘This disgusting pond. Why I am doing this?’ ”
Months before an elite SEAL team seized the public imagination by killing Osama bin Laden, Parris and his miserable pond mates had each agreed to pay Shipley $1,900 to push them to the limits of their physical and mental endurance. In addition to Parris, there was a gun-happy insurance account manager from Vallejo, Calif., a sandwich delivery guy from Taiwan who sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a home-schooled farmhand from South Florida.
They fell into two categories: young men who wanted to become SEALs, and middle-aged men who wanted to test their manhood.
Bin Laden’s death made their decision seem only slightly less insane to their friends and family.
“When I told my wife I was coming, she said, ‘It’s menopause,’ ” said Parris, who spent three years swimming and working with a professional trainer to prepare for the course. He lost 25 pounds in the process.
The last obstacle he faced was arthritis, which for years prevented him from walking up stairs unaided. Then, six months ago, he received three injections of a special oil-based fluid in his knees to make it easier for him to run.
“I felt like I was 20 years old again,” Parris said.
He got to test his knees during Hell Night, a 24-hour-period of nonstop physical exertion that is supposed to simulate the famous Hell Week that SEAL candidates must endure. Real SEAL school, called Basic Underwater Demolition school, lasts six months, and about 80 percent of the participants don’t make it through.
Shipley, who founded the Extreme SEAL Experience in 2006, said Hell Night doesn’t truly replicate the rigors of Hell Week. But for his customers, it’s challenging enough.
They run more than eight miles, carry a 200-pound log above their heads, get sprayed in the face with cold water and have someone scream in their ear that their “man card” is being taken away because they are “doing push-ups like a girl.”
The point, Shipley said, is to get them push past the pain. A lot of it is mental, not just physical.
The rail-thin sandwich delivery guy from Taiwan dislocated his kneecap during the first run but still made it through the rest of the night. The only guy who didn’t finish was a buff computer engineer from Richmond who threw his back out. For the rest of the week, the other guys called him “back boy.”
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