Wretched Weather and What It Can Teach Us About Ourselves
“Frogman Weather” as a path to integrate ancient toughness into soft modern sapiens
My mission is to triangulate how to optimally be an ancient animal in the modern world.
Ancient forms of hardship are eradicated and we are left with an existential void in the exact shape of that hardship. I believe we need to gaze into that void, to fill it once again, but only by uniting the best of both ancient austerity and modern luxury.
There is no going back to hunter-gatherer living for eight billion people, and it would be masochistic madness to deny the joys of books, antibiotics, and stable food supplies.
The only path is forward.
I study combat units because they are one of the closet throwbacks we have to the world of our pre-state ancestors. They understand the ancestral way of life: moments of intense stress amidst an ocean of true peace and calm, two natural extremes.
This means without the ungodly middle-ground way of life of smart phones and emails and traffic lights and infantilizing rules and cultural rot brought on by sheer boredom and atrophy because the hunting, gathering, rituals, defense, communities, and hardships that molded us are no more.
One way to understand life outside the middle ground and fill a bit of this void is through “frogman weather”.
Frogman weather is a term used by Navy SEALs for weather so brutal that the enemy would think only men who are insane, suicidal, or godlike would wage an assault in.
Are they then insane?
No, because the frogman is fully aware of what he is doing. This makes him more lethal since a calmly calculated enemy is far more terrifying than an impulsive and irrational enemy.
Suicidal?
No, at least not in the traditional sense of wanting to die because he thinks that he’s worthless or he hates life. If frogmen were actually suicidal, they would be good for one mission at most before removing themselves from the gene pool. Rather the frogman knowingly accepts the risks for a higher purpose and is willing to die for it.
And what about godlike?
This too misses the mark. But marketing in warfare is incalculable, and the deeper you can drive fear into the depths of enemy minds and souls and nerve-racked bodies before you “see the whites of their eyes”, the weaker they will be.
What then is the enemy actually sensing beneath their faulty premises? That the only men who could do such a thing are uncommonly dedicated and tempered.
But to pull it off, frogmen actually needed to back it up.
Frogmen are pulled from America, a country so affluent and advanced that it has lifted millions out of poverty and misery only to swaddle them in softness and indolence. Most of the world is ignorant of this luxury, and consequently they are more robust in certain regards.
Frogmen are coal that is hardened to crystal later in their lives through training; more often than not, their enemies are iron sharpened by iron from the moment they first open their eyes upon the world: hunger and cold and zealotry.
What the enemy gets by birth, we must go out of our way to earn.
What then if a man decided it was too uncomfortable to climb a 100’ cliff in a thunderstorm to assault an entrenched enemy? This sounds reasonable. But is this un-frogman saying anything else but, “Why do you assume human animals are capable of overcoming? Of enduring hardships and being willing to bleed and gasp a last breath for an idea? Of suspending self-gratification for a higher cause?” When phrased this way, the evasion is not so easy; it reveals a thing both untrustworthy and unadmirable.
So what if frogmen only trained for perfect weather? Well who controls the weather? Not commanding officers, not Presidents, not the trigger-squeezer on the rubber raft freezing his ass off. No, Neptune controls the weather.
We may be able to wait for sunshine and calm seas, but the hostage held by terrorists may not.
What follows? That the weather (like all hardship) is not under our control - but our preparation for it is. It then becomes a simple, unavoidable question: is my desire for comfort more important than saving a life?
The frogman – just like his ancient forbears before him – must do the over-the-beach assault whether he feels like it or not, and think of tiger sharks, and endure the contact point between jagged rocks and ten foot swells, and the enemy on the high ground.
The body is strong, but the mind becomes the bottleneck to success: can he gain control of a mind that wants nothing to do with any of it? Can he, from the seat of command we all possess, calm the mind, regulate the body, and complete the mission?
This is the ultimate and purest form of mindfulness; it is a drug, an opportunity to find the fullest engagement of oneself as a rational animal; it can be fallen in love with.
It shows something alive and vibrant and awake. It is rising to the occasion as opposed to submitting to it; it is being an asset as opposed to a liability; it is, above all, a sign of respect for reality and nature.
Nothing reorients the mind to the real world - the land of cause and effect - like the unforgiving rage of the ocean or the bizarrely impersonal bullet.
It is crossing the Delaware at the mercy of pitch black night, and then rain and then sleet and then snow as temperatures drop and floating ice blocks ram your overburdened raft, and to do it shoeless because your Army was penniless, and then slaughtering the German mercenaries you were hunting down. Washington made the night's password “victory or death” – not “defeat or life” – to match the mental state of his men with the do-or-die elements.
And how can we bring it closer to home?
Is it raining? What then? Has no human ever run in the rain? And what does it say about me if I don't? Will I be ready for the real struggle when others rely upon me? How will I know if I don’t train for it? What would George Washington say?
It makes you wonder if the weather is actually wretched, as opposed to an opportunity to learn what we are inside and how deep that hardship-shaped hole actually goes.
Lance Armstrong loved racing in the rain — not because he enjoyed it, but because he knew everyone else would dread it and want to go easy in the rain. He would crush his opponents when they were already demoralized and lazy. Thrived in that Frogman weather!
Loved this essay, Sam; happy to have found your Substack.
I was thinking about the "forage war" . From what I have read, George valued in put from subordinates and intelligence. As painful as it is to admit, without French arms, French money, French troops, and the French fleet we would probably have Charles' picture in our public buildings. Franklin getting a monarch to commit to the establishment of a republic is one of the great diplomatic feats of history.