On SEALs and Safety

Fiction, truth, and unconventional modes of mind

Henri Motte. Siege of La Rochelle. 1881

We are in a conundrum: safety is an ideal we strive for because it extends our lives and yet it deadens us; on the other hand, danger is avoided at all costs because it can kill us and yet it enlivens us.

This makes sense since the conditions we evolved under—danger, scarcity, confrontation—are no longer with us. Safety, then, is not a baseline human environment. It is an aberration, a deviation from the conditions that shaped our noble and savage ancestry.

Deserts, storms, and cannibals once gave us a reason to pressure test our minds and bodies. In safety, danger is no longer rooted in the mud and blood of our past, meaning those inside this aberration have lost some primal calibration. Thus a Slack message can feel as deadly as falling into a punji pit in the jungle, and our aberration validates such beliefs with wellness webinars, health apps, trauma rituals often without the trauma itself, HR intervention without handling the problem face to face… the list goes on.

I have seen this lost calibration within myself. What is laughable when we are accustomed to danger can become devastating when we are blinded by safety.

My point is safety is theater and with this theater comes consequences: cognitive closure, crippled creativity, and muscular fragility.

What, then, can we do about these consequences? Can we break this aberration? If so, how?

It helps to look at an archaic human environment. One example of ancient danger is combat, and one example of combat is a Navy SEAL mission in the Vietnam War.

Eight SEALs would swim, stalk, or soar into a remote patch of jungle for a mission, depositing themselves into the middle of thousands of enemy soldiers who wanted to kill them. It was, in a word, dangerous. Thus a SEAL’s entire existence is spent training for the worst case scenario.

It goes like this: Your face is smeared with green paint as you lay low in a black vessel with twin engines muffled. It edges up to the jungle at the opening of a narrow canal and you slide neck deep into muddy water. You do not move for twenty minutes. You let the mosquitos feast on your “face like a pin cushion.”¹ You listen with every cell of your body as the night sounds of the jungle return to normal; beetle, toad, and macaque letting you know no one else is moving in the area. You raise your arms out of the water… ever…so…slowly until the drops from your elbows to the canal are no louder than the drops of rain from the heavens. You wade the three hundred meters to your target—a Viet Cong commander. Suddenly you look up and see a bamboo structure above your head; it is an outhouse and this canal is a pool of feces. You wait for the sun to creep across the horizon. Stay still; urinate in Levi jeans. At last, the signal. You emerge from the mud and sprint, setting perimeter around the hootch while others kick down the door. And then time contracts: yellow muzzle flashes from the jungle; a roar of fire as you and your team synchronize fire into the forest; a sprint to the water; not enough oxygen for lungs; climb aboard the vessel beneath mini-guns blazing; and lay on the floor with the gagged commander staring at you as if you made him realize he had been sleepwalking his entire life up until that very moment.

What then?

A numerically inferior force breaks the enemy by breaking conventional modes of thought. 1,350 cubic centimeters represent one of the most complex organic structures in the universe—the human brain. What is the point of life if not to probe the depths of this miracle? We may then exploit the laziness of the enemy’s brain by turning their mantra of “This is how things are done” into their funeral oration.

And yet the Viet Cong knew danger, far more than their weak and wealthy American enemy. So why were the VC bodyguards slaughtered and the head honcho seized? Because they unwisely did not imagine warriors with green faces rising out of their shithouse. It seems, then, it is not danger itself that matters, but how we choose to respond to danger. Not only does this danger mode of mind heighten our experience of life, but it strips away every aberration until reality is bare, visceral, unmistakable. And in this way reality becomes a sandbox with little shovels and plastic castles in which we can create and destroy with the awe of a child.

In danger, the un-lazy put every aspect of the world up to question because everything either kills us or makes us feel as if we had just been born. Danger is the risk of death, and the risk of death is the reminder of life. A bullet is death and life. A python in the canal is the end and the beginning.

And so we come back to safety. Without danger, where is the death? And without death, where is the life? Where is the enemy, whether it be frost bite, heat exhaustion, reddish-brown vipers, or rifle-wielding warriors? Where is the mind spurred into interrogating every thought, grounding each in the black soil of primal psychology and asking “Can this work? Is this true? How can I excel?”

Without the risk of death, the line between fact and fiction begins to blur, and so too does the mind within its ancient cathedral of cortex and sinew.

This I-will-question-everything mode of mind is at work at this very moment: Terrorists are in a hospital with their AK’s pointed at the entrance—so we place C4 on a rear wall and invent a new door. POW’s are in a camp protected by impenetrable cliffs—so we climb the sky, leap off the plane on a moonless night, land two miles off shore, scale the “impenetrable” cliff, and rout the enemy camp. A frigate needs to find a home at the bottom of a bay—so we dive twelve feet beneath the surface with a rebreather, compass, watch, depth gauge, and limpet mine, so as to swim up beneath the metal monster in utter blackness and blow it to hell. A doorway is a problem to be solved. A canal is an opportunity. A broken branch is death. A leaf in a ghillie suit is life.

So much for combat cognition.

I am not saying safety is wrong—only those who have never known danger would make this claim. I am saying the aberration of safety is wrong with its domestication of the human mind, chronic un-creativity, and bodily fragility. A man who can squat 500# may be just as powerless as one who cannot squat 20# when it comes to saving a child from a burning building. An academic whose thesis falls apart in thirty-two degree water—is her mind truly vibrant, open, awake, creative, and attuned to reality?

Nature does not obey the safety aberration—she breaks it, and then she breaks its disciples. Does this mean we should immerse ourselves in danger? I do not think so. Danger itself would merely be an evasion, an escape into the brute force of nature and away from the burden of disciplining oneself in safety.

Let us put a bullet in this aberration. My mission is to embrace the mindset of danger without the danger itself. It is to bring a convention-breaking mode of mind into the colossal safe-space that is the developed world.

What then?

I believe in my bones the cure for the ills of safety—and for most of the ills of the modern world—is to train for worst case scenarios. Not merely for the worst case which will probably never come to pass, but for the training itself.

It is to carry within our mind’s eye the signs the Viet Cong left for our SEALs along the muddy rivers of Vietnam: “You die, SEAL”

What, then, can the sufferers of safety say to such an enemy? Let us, as always, lean into it:

Thank you. Thank you for the reminder I am alive when I might not be. For teaching me the world is a playground and war, politics, art, work, parenting, and survival may be put to question. For reminding me to test every assumption against ice, sweat, steel, and time. For giving me a reason to make iron of my muscle. For teaching me a never-ending sense of purpose. For reminding me to smile at the truth revealed beneath the aberration of safety and live so hard until nothing is left at the end of my days but a burned out shell. Thank you, above all, for the reminder I never really needed you in the first place.

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The fall of Babylon; Cyrus the Great defeating the Chaldea. John Martin. 1831.

1. Plotner, Darryl Young. The Element of Surprise: Navy SEALs in Vietnam. Ballantine Books, 1990. I loosely based the entire paragraph on one of his actual missions.