Adjusting Core SEAL Questions for a Higher Mode of Living

Body armor for mind and soul

John Noble. Off Duty, 1891

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There is one word that comes to mind when I think about combat: pure.

For however brutal and senseless it was at times, it was also clear and simple. Part of the root of this purity, I think, had to do with a perfectly clear understanding that all I had to do was fix my mind on those things that I had control over and shrug off the rest.

There are three questions the SEAL Teams teach you to ask in a constant recurring stream until it is second nature:

“What is the condition of my weapon?

What would I do if I were contacted right now?

How can I best support my buddy?”

These lessons are pressure tested by reality, based on evolutionary principles, and written in the blood of warriors who died and gifted us this wisdom.

You are judged on one criteria: by how well you can keep your mind bent on these three questions, and obsessively and lovingly answer them on the fly.

What follows? I argue that the same questions apply today whether in a combat zone or not, and that we can adjust this wisdom of war-fields to our everyday lives.

“What is the condition of my weapon?”

In my former profession, if I entered an uncleared room, confronted a Taliban fighter, and squeezed the trigger, the ideal outcome is that the round leaves the chamber. But there is a concept called “dead man’s gun”, which refers to the weapon of a man who fails to confirm that he has a round chambered before he relies on that round with his life. He was, in other words, not asking this question – the man holding this gun is a corpse who doesn’t know it yet. Failing to ask a mere question meant death. 

But what happens now? The odds of being physically destroyed by another man are significantly lower than the odds of being psychologically and spiritually and emotionally destroyed.

I no longer need to check the condition of my weapon – I now need to check the condition of my thoughts.

So-and-so thinks I am a fool. Well, am I a fool? I will look into it. But whether it is true that I am fool or not, if I choose to be angry at his thought, what do I end up making myself? I bring his accusation to life: I become a fool. I can play the victim of every random impulse that appears inside of his brain and be led about by the nose-ring like a cow to slaughter, and I can even play the same sort of victim to my own thoughts and grab my own nose-ring and throw myself off a cliff. This is the well-worn path of self-imposed victimhood.

But who’s in command here inside of my head? Some rogue thought or me? Since I know that his thought is not my thought because my mind is running the script of “what is the condition of my mind?”, I feel zero compulsion to spend another second of my life thinking about him or his worthless thoughts.     

But as I walk away, it turns out so-and-so is a tyrant, and he calls out to me, “You can ignore my opinion, but you can’t ignore my fist and you can’t ignore my bullet.” Did I say that my thoughts could control your pink hands or little bullets? No, you wretched beta, I simply said that they can control my response.

This is the ultimate test for things that can die; this is what shows how hard we have studied and what we have trained ourselves for, and to meet it well is proof of a life lived with the most intense acceptance and gratitude and depth of thought.  

Not checking my weapon meant death, but not checking my thoughts leads to something far worse – slavery and uselessness.

“What would I do if I were contacted right now?”

Walking an ancient foot path along an irrigation ditch at midnight has its risks: IED’s, ambushes, and dogs whose barks can wake the sleeping enemy.

There is something beautiful in these risks; they’re opportunities to think ahead, to fortify ourselves, to accept that things will go wrong and we will be ruthlessly tested. Should the worst happen, what will I do?

Well, was I asking my question? For this dictates the outcome.

If I were not asking, I would probably bow to a mammalian impulse because I failed to override it with human reason: I would run instead of fighting.

But why would we need this in a non-combat environment? Well how many things in life go exactly as planned? Even a trip to the super market has its dangers: a flat tire, an empty gas tank, a downed tree, a heart attack, a raid by Hamas, a Russian invasion.

How useful am I if I only visualize each and every thing to go perfectly well when in reality everything goes wrong?

And if I fail to visualize worst case scenarios when it really matters, lulled into inertness by the appearance of peace and stability, what follows? I would be freely choosing failure over success; I would be a madman. I’d be plaguing my friends and family and countrymen to ruin; I would be worthless, and all because I refused to ask a simple question.

So our combat wisdom can be changed to this: “What would I do if the worst thing that could happen, happens right now?”

“How can I best support my buddy?”

This core human question can remain just as it is. It is flawless. Perfect.

How did this nobility come into being? I can only assume that it is because we are born as one part of a larger whole: one man alone on earth detached from humanity is as useless as a foot detached from the body. It is probably why we’re generally disgusted by selfish chumps who care nothing for others, and why we admire those who leave society better than it was when they found it.

What then?

What if nature crafted us to do the opposite of these three things? I wouldn’t test my impressions and I would be a slave; I wouldn’t prepare for the worst and I would be corpse; I wouldn’t seek to help others and I would be an abject narcissist. If this were really our nature, the lights of our ancestors would have been snuffed out hundreds of thousands of years ago and we would not be here to fill our lungs with the clear night air.

We can reframe the SEAL wisdom in the following way, and habitualize the asking and the answering until they become axiomatic:

“What is the condition of my thoughts?

What would I do if the worst thing that could happen, happens right now?

How can I best support my brothers and my sisters?”

This is body armor for the mind and soul. We are born for something higher. Something pure.

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