Inside the Mind of a Free Rider

How we get a thing is more important than getting it

Photo by Darren McBurnett “McB” (SEAL) Ret.

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There are some strong similarities between modern war-fighters, ancestral peoples, and ancient Stoics.

When I was going through the SEAL selection process called BUD/S, the evolutionary concept of “free-rider”, or those who seek to profit without contributing, goes by another name.

BUD/S gives its aspiring warriors three choices: one is to endure, two is to quit (which you are highly encouraged to do), and somewhere in between lies a wasteland in which a third option exists.

Over a period of about four weeks, a team of six or seven men carry a large rubber boat on their heads while running in soft sand with heavy boots and water-logged camouflage clothing. The discomfort and pain is profound. Each of the six men must, of his own volition, carry his share of the raft as it bounces on his spinal column for days at a time.

A man may, however, decide to “duck boat”, lowering his head slightly so as to decrease the weight he must carry, thus directly increasing the misery of his teammates to make it easier on himself. This man is labeled a “boat-ducker”.

We can learn an ancient lesson from the boat ducker.

Before we peer into this abyss, one caveat needs to be made. A man who goes to BUD/S but quits knows what it is to desire a noble thing and has the courage to show up to the crucible to see what he is inside. He has the honor to bow out, ring the bell three times, and maintain his dignity. He has potential. He can go on to learn from this failure, and like many who later become SEALs, he can go back to BUD/S and not only make it through the second time but excel.

Now the boat ducker does not carry his share of the weight on his spinal column; he neither wants to quit nor grind. What does this make him? A man who does not aspire to anything better than the exact condition he is currently in; who wants the End with a diabolical disregard for the Means; who wants the status of becoming a SEAL no matter how many broken necks and broken dreams he leaves in his wake by lowering his head that tantalizing ½ an inch, that ½ inch that reveals everything about him.

And what does it look like when the boat ducker seeks a free ride? I see the face of the man to my left wince in pain as the poundage crushing his spine increases in proportion to the amount the ducker shirks; I hear the groan of the man in front of me as he feels his legs pump more lactic acid; I feel the unit cohesion beneath the boat shift balance and unite in a primal rage against the boat ducker that harkens back to the days of our hunter-gatherer forebears; I see the red hot flushing of the face of the ducker and the way he sets his jaw in his failed effort to justify his self-inflicted uselessness.

We can extrapolate this out to everyday challenges outside of a training environment.

This is not your only challenge, boat ducker, that you will face in life. If you are willing to sabotage your soul in training, how will you endure the crucibles of real life when there is not an ambulance 100 yards behind you at all times?

If you duck boat right now, will you duck when your house burns down? If you duck boat right now, will you duck when your loved one is assaulted or when your country is invaded? If you duck boat right now, will you bear up under 100+ pounds of gear, or will you leave behind ammunition to lighten your load and place your team at risk? Will you bear up under rockets and bullets and remain calm as you inch closer and closer to the exact line at which life ceases and death begins, or will you fold?

“Of course I will stand up under that weight if it comes to that.” Will you? Then why are you not standing up to your full height beneath this pathetic rubber boat? It is amazing that a piece of rubber is enough to reveal the contradiction between what we say and what we do.

When you duck beneath that boat, you’re denying the very thing that makes you a human being. You are denying reason and submitting your actions to all the wrong thoughts: you are allowing the whining woe-is-me voice to spread like a cancer inside of your brain.

“But my chafing is bleeding; the sand is digging right through my skin into my muscle tissue.” Yes, but that does not make it pain unless you yourself label it as such, nor does it mean you should duck boat and break your brothers. “An instructor is screaming in my face for me to quit.” Yes, but that is not indignity unless you label it that way, and again, this does not mean you should duck boat and break your brothers.

It is like how the smartphone in our pocket is nothing but plastic and glass and metal and yet it dwells within our minds like a cocaine dispenser that must be touched again and again. Call it what it is: a phone, nothing more. Pain, nothing more. Screams, nothing more.

Things do not break us; our thoughts about them do.

Photo by Darren McBurnett “McB” (SEAL) Ret.

What would Epictetus say if he were running beside us underneath this boat, his beard knotted and his boots filled with wet sand and blood from his chafing? He would turn his brutal glance upon the boat ducker before him and say something to the effect of, “Difficulties reveal what men are.” [1.24.1]

And what of the overly empathetic who say, “But this is too harsh. Why does your training need to be this difficult and exclusive?”

Though I did not know it when the raft was compressing my vertebral discs and I was jackhammering from the cold water, I would feel far more intense cold leading my sniper team on winter missions and far more pain of mind and body carrying the weight of the wounded than I ever did in training.

BUD/S is not even the main event — it is a warmup. And like nature, it selects out, not in, for a reason — we do not know how useful to others we are until we are truly challenged.

This is why we can treat each challenge, no matter how small, as an opportunity to conquer our inner discourse so that when it matters we are there for those we love.

Every single one of us are under the boat in every single moment of life. It is by mastering the small things that we master the large.

It is up to us whether to duck down that ½ an inch or to stand up to our full height.

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