Probably everyone who’s heard of SEALs has heard of Hell Week. It’s five and a half days of continuous beat-down designed to see if you have the endurance and the will to become the ultimate warrior.

Every SEAL has a different Hell Week story. Mine actually begins a day or two before Hell Week, out in the surf, on some rocks. A group of us were in an IBS—“inflatable boat, small,” your basic six-man rubber dinghy—and we had to bring it ashore past those rocks. I was point man, which meant it was my job to clamber out and hold the IBS tight while everyone else got off and picked it up.

Well, just as I was getting set, a huge wave came up in the surf and took the boat and put it down on my foot. It hurt like hell, and immediately got numb.

I ignored it as much as I could, and eventually wrapped it up. Later on, when we were finished for the day, I went with a buddy whose dad happened to be a doctor and had him check it out. He did an X-ray and found it was fractured.

Naturally, he wanted to put it in a cast, but I refused to let him. Showing up at BUD/S with a cast would mean I would have to put my training on hold. And if I did that before Hell Week, I’d have to go back to the very beginning—and no way I was going through everything I’d just been through again.

(Even during BUD/S, you’re allowed to leave base with permission during your off time. And, obviously, I didn’t go to a Navy doctor to get the foot checked out, because he would have sent me back—known as “roll back”—immediately.)

The night Hell Week was supposed to start, we were taken to a large room, fed pizza, and treated to a movie marathon—Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, Braveheart. We were all relaxing in a non-relaxing kind of way, since we knew Hell Week was about to begin. It was like a party on the Titanic. The movies got us all psyched up, but we knew that iceberg was out there, looming in the dark.