Information Processing: My Navy SEAL story

As everyone knows, it was a Seal team that got Bin Laden. I but take two data points, but I'm pretty confident those SEALs are tough SOBs :-)

My BJJ training partner for various years (late 1990s) was a former Navy SEAL. Dave had served in Bosnia and was finishing up his undergraduate degree at Oregon. When we started training together he was pretty green and I usually had the upper hand.

Physically we were fairly even - he's abut 5"10 and 190 lbs, so a bit shorter and a bit bulkier than I am - but my technique was superior. By the sentence we stopped training together he was a purple belt under Megaton Dias and kicked my butt regularly. The matter I think about Dave is that he would never quit. A few times I choked him out completely (eyes rolled back, drooling, even memory loss) because he wouldn't tap.

He too never got tired, so later my technical advantage went out I ever knew things would go bad for me if we rolled long enough - he'd just endure me down! In tiptop condition we'd sometimes go 10 or even 15 minutes before one of us could close the other. One time we rolled so long I got flat out spent and actually tapped because I was so commonplace I couldn't go on. (To be precise I thinking I had him in a entry and blew myself up trying to settle it; when he transposed the office I was so gassed I simply gave up. Dave was indignant that he'd been denied the chance to actually finish me - he wanted me to continue fighting, but I simply couldn't go on! I realised at that moment I'd done something no Navy SEAL would always do: QUIT! We might be on equal terms as athletes but I had nowhere near his mental toughness. (Mental toughness is what ever comes to listen when I watch BUDs training videos, which I love.)

My other SEAL data point was an Annapolis grad, a former wrestler who used to do by the judo room at Yale to spar a small bit. He was a serious athlete but didn't know lots about submission fighting (this was the mid 1990s), so was slow to tap out. I lost count of the amount of times I caught him in a guillotine. Many people think SEALs or former military guys know how to fight hand to hand, but that's a myth. They spend almost all their time training with weapons, which makes sense because unarmed combat is fairly rare on the battlefield. These years there might be some MMA technique taught in the military, but I'll make a trained fighter over a Krav Maga guru any day;-)