Idle Chatter (an e-mail on an old subject)
{My old high school Coach,]
Here’s some idle chatter, an exchange between my sister and me after she sent a NEW YORK TIMES article on the death of a Navy SEAL candidate at BUDS, their Basic Underwater Demolition School. Between 1994 and 1996, when [the wife] and I were stationed in Guam, I trained a fair bit with members of Teams One and Five in running, swimming, and martial arts. That was a feather in my athletic cap, being able to play on that level.
I also knew Navy guys who were training in hopes of going to BUDS, which was a life defining rite of passage for those approaching it and the guys who had made it through.
In a separate conversation, an Army General friend of ours, who once oversaw the Ranger training command, knew of my interest in training and so on. He explained that it’s actually not hard to get folks in shape for Ranger School, in terms of ruck marching and sustained aerobic output - but the problem is bone density, or lack thereof. Some of the best candidates go down with stress fractures, at an alarming rate. ‘Kids don’t run around and play - or lift weights - anymore, so they don’t harden their bones the way we used to.’
My sister had also recently made the remark that I’m insane, still lifting weights at my age.
This is the note I sent after she sent the article:
“ . . . . it’s very interesting, raising questions about what on earth the Navy can do while faced by the crisis of a substantially weaker generation of kids entering the training pipeline.
The story seems straightforward at first: a SEAL candidate, run ragged by training and the brutal milestone of Hell Week, dies of edema in his lungs. That’s a fairly common condition, though his severity was off the charts in terms of duration and intensity. Criticisms arise: the SEAL’s have lost candidates before, so they should tone down the training.
No, say the SEAL’s. This is life and death. We’re selecting warriors for the most dangerous business in the world, and that’s part of the bargain. This debate is not new.
So the SEAL’s start going through his belongings, and they find a giant load of steroids. Tests subsequently reveal more than 40 BUDS candidates are popping ‘roids. Hang on, they realize, this means two things:
1. Pathologically, things aren’t so clear any more. Did the ‘roids contribute to his death?
2. ‘Roids - again? The first steroid scandal, or discovery that kids were using them, was in 2009. They tested folks for a few years, but that ran out of gas, probably because the budget couldn’t swing it.
A larger question hangs in the air: kids have to use steroids to handle the class? Also - the class still has an 80 or 90 percent failure rate, so a lot of ‘roided up folks are still failing. These kids are so weak, so untrained, that they can’t pass the class while on performance enhancing drugs?
Already the Navy is running a BUDS-prep, to get people in shape for the class. Those poor bastards are probably wondering what to do.
Were we insane then? Am I insane now, or was HG Wells right all along in THE TIME MACHINE? The Eloi, the soft, above ground dwellers, will be preyed upon and eaten by the Morlocks, the below ground folks.”
She replied,
"There's a lot of similar conversation in the parkour world. Two friends, {Ernie and Bert] are Special Ed tutors. And science is discovering that some kids who can't sit still in class have an underdeveloped part of their brains from not tumbling enough - literally, hanging upside down from a swingset, somersaults, etc -- and their internal gyroscopes are off. Other examples abound.
It's also partly the Cult of Safety. Some woman at a park told us off once for jumping from the ground onto a bench, which is probably about.... 2 feet? We were teaching children to do "dangerous" things.”
So, Coach, this is all to say that as your son has moved in with the grandchildren, I trust you’re bolting the squat rack back together and telling them, ‘OK, gang: after school on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, it’s going to be fun with Grandpa in the garage. It’s for your own good.’
