The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh — or even get angry — it's served its purpose.

I used to think I was tough because I could endure pretty much any kind of pain. I thrived on leg workouts that made me collapse into a heap on the gym floor and writhe around like a cockroach that had signed on to be an extra in a Raid commercial. When I went to the dentist, I usually refused Novocain or nitrous oxide gas, figuring it was good practice in case I was ever interrogated by der Weiss Engel.

"Is it safe? Ha! Screw you, albino Nazi!"

Once I even burned a mole off my penis. For years I’d thought that the mole enhanced my penis in a kind of Marilyn Monroe way; you know, made it more photogenic. But then that bitch Cindy Crawford came on the scene flashing her precious little mole. That’s when I figured that the whole mole thing had been done to death and so I burned mine off with the soldering iron that came with my Radio Shack Junior Electronics Set.

I’m the trendsetter around here, Ms. Crawford, and you and the other aging super models better remember that.

Anyways, I’ve always been able to tolerate most kinds of pain. I thought I was mentally tough, too. In college I studied for hours on end without letting anything distract me. More recently, I’ve gutted my way through marathon workouts. Hell, once I even endured a double feature of Chicago and Moulin Rouge just so I could get laid.

Yep, I used to think I was pretty tough. But everything changed last week when I took a tour of the Naval Special Warfare Center in San Diego, California. After only a few brief hours, my alleged toughness was knocked down several pegs. Where I once thought I was a bloody steak of a man, I now know that I’m warmed-over meatloaf with a side of limp asparagus.

For the uninitiated, the NAVSPECWARCEN is where they train Navy SEALS. Most of you probably know of the SEALS through Hollywood movies like the one were Steven Segal saves the world by killing a bunch of bad guys by micro waving an explosive soufflé that sends out deadly shards of shrapnel. Not a bad depiction of a SEAL, but it hardly gives you an accurate idea of their mission since they don’t typically learn how to bake. Or maybe you saw G.I. Jane where a bald but still tasty Demi Moore takes long steamy showers after rolling around in the mud and surf with the other Navy SEAL candidates. Nice tits, but pure fiction. Women can’t be SEALS.

The SEALS are generally regarded in the real world as the most elite commando force in the world. Started in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy to be the maritime equivalent to the Green Berets, the SEALS have amassed an incredible history of successes in modern warfare. Trouble is, you never hear about their successes as their missions aren’t reported to the general public. Nope, their stuff is mostly cover-of-night, clandestine stuff accomplished by small units of two to sixteen men who are either out to blow something up or make sure a bad guy misses his next haircut appointment and for that matter, any other appointments he might have made in his life.

During my tour I learned about a typical mission. Two SEALS were recently instructed to wait in waist-deep snow outside a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan. They were waiting for a member of the Taliban to come out. They waited two days and nights and finally, like some two-footed Punxsutawney Phil, the be-robed bugger cautiously stuck his head out his cave. The SEALS then vaporized Taliban Phil and his shadow. Whether spring will come to Afghanistan in a timely manner is now anybody’s guess.

Maybe NAVYSEALS.com says it best:

"Whenever the Commander-in-Chief needs a no-nonsense, decisive and lethal solution to a foreign policy problem, including counter-terrorism strike forces, the U.S. Navy SEALS are the force of choice."

Yeah, it sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Trouble is, you video game playing fantasy-living powder puff, it ain’t exactly easy to pass the training. Historically, only about 27 out of 100 men make it through BUD (Basic Underwater Demolition) training and earn their SEAL trident. Of course, that’s while under the command of more charitable, softhearted CO’s. The success rate under the current SEAL regime in San Diego is far less: only about 17 out of a hundred make it. The vast majority of the rest are disenrolled by Drop on Request (DOR).

The helmets of students who failed the current class serve as a symbolic reminder of just how elite the SEALS are.

Before you become a SEAL, you have to be in enlisted in the Navy. Unfortunately, the Navy’s physical training doesn’t exactly prepare you to try out for the SEALS. Basic training in the NAVY has recently been shortened to 60 days and in a stellar case of namby-pamby political correctness, the fattest and slowest kids usually get to lead the drills so that they don’t feel inadequate. That kind of training won’t prepare you for the SEALS because from the moment training starts, you’re running, swimming, carrying bags of sand, and hoisting 300-pound boats up and carrying them on your head. You run to eat, you run to drills, you run to sleep.

In-between swimming and running drills, you learn life saving, knot tying, underwater knot tying, and surf passage in inflatable boats. Then there’s "drown proofing" where your hands and legs are tied and you’re left to flounder in water until you get the hang of it. Let’s not forget "surf torture" where you wade to your waist in freezing cold water, join arms with your classmates, and just sit there enjoying the frigid water.

Just before you go seriously hypothermic, you’re pulled out and given hot cocoa and a warm footbath. Wrong! Actually, you’re pulled out and forced to do calisthenics and drills and run obstacle courses and just when you start to feel like you might live, you go back in the freezing water. When the drill is finished, your balls have pulled up so high and tight that when you walk you lurch around like young polio-afflicted Forrest Gump.

And all this happens in the first five weeks when about 30% of the class has already DOR’ed. Then comes HELL WEEK. Hearing about this is when I started to realize the painfully exact degree of my wussiness.

Hell Week starts on a Sunday night and continues until Friday afternoon. Each day is spent playing vigorous volleyball and then wraps up with a big wienie cookout over open flame. Okay, it doesn’t, but what happens in reality seems even more improbable. Between Sunday and Friday, SEAL candidates will endure five days and five nights of almost non-stop training. What I mean by "non-stop" is that they get to sleep a total of four hours during the week, four hours! That’s how long I nap after lunch!

They swim and run and do calisthenics. A group of eight will take a log about the size of a telephone pole, sit down, and do sit-ups using the log as resistance until failure. They take these same poles and carry them over their heads for impossibly long times. They engage in boat drills in high surf and get tossed into the water again and again. They’re forced to wallow in cold mud until long after the cold starts turning the marrow in their bones to a new flavor of Ben and Jerry’s. And no matter what they’re doing, they’re kept sopping wet. If their activities have taken them away from the ocean, they’re hosed down.

Sure, they get to eat four times a day, but the teams of eight men have to carry a 300-pound boat on their head to and from the mess hall. Other special fun includes paddling a boat in the dark for 15 miles after three nights without sleep.

Students are allowed to stencil inspirational quotes on their paddles. This particular student learned about the SEALS through a show on the Discovery Channel.

The concept of Hell Week was started during WWII by one of the predecessors of the SEALS (Underwater Demolition Teams) and it’s remained largely unchanged since then. It’s hard to imagine what the response would be today if Hell Week didn’t exist and some insane person suggested it. You’d dismiss it with a chortle and a roll of the eyes because it’s hard to imagine that anyone could complete, let alone survive, this type of training...and yet a few special men do.

The purpose of Hell Week is to make SEAL candidates realize that they can do a hundred times more than they thought possible. Besides, there might be times when their mission requires them to run non-stop or sit quietly in freezing cold water or snow without sleep and they need to know they can do it. By the end of Hell Week, class size is usually down to about 25 sunburned, chafed, bruised, battered, barely living men.

But hey, no one has a right to complain cuz’ they get two whole days off before they go back to their normal, pantywaist training.

Captain Rick Smethers, the ranking officer at the NavSpecWarCen, explained that looks are deceiving when it comes to trying to figure out if a student will make it: "We’ve had guys come in here who look like they can’t miss–athletes—but they’ll drop out, and we’ll be scratching our heads. Then we’ll have some guy who’s never even been in the ocean before, from Kansas or someplace like that, and he’ll do just fine."

Although SEALS weight train, it’s not a big part of their training. It’s easy to see why. While they need to be strong, whether they come back from a mission alive or dead relies largely on mental toughness and physical endurance. Weight training is almost an ancillary pursuit, to be practiced during your free time.

Weight training doesn’t play that important a role in the training of SEALS.

Each passing week requires that class members improve their swim, run, and obstacle course times significantly. The students are also taught the fundamentals of underwater demolition and all of this happens in just the First Phase of BUDS training.

In the subsequent weeks–Second Phase and Third Phase—drill times are expected to improve still more, and students are also taught to dive with a "closed circuit" diving system that doesn’t emit telltale bubbles that could reveal their presence to hostile forces. Fun underwater drills include having your instructor swoop down on you from the surface, rip off your breathing gear and tie it into a seemingly hopeless knot while he points at you and laughs. You beat back the panic and untie the knots, give up and come to the surface, or drown.

SEALS spend a lot of time assembling and disassembling their closed circuit diving systems.

As students get more proficient in swimming and diving, they’re required to swim several miles underwater in the ocean, at night, and place mock explosives on pre-determined targets. They’re also taught breath-hold deep diving and submarine egress. Interestingly, for all their training, Navy Deep Sea Divers are actually better divers than SEAL divers. My buddy, CDR. Ryan Zinke, another XO of the Special Warfare Center, explained it this way: "While Navy divers go deep down for a long time to fix things, SEAL diver’s go down for a little while to blow stuff up."

CDR. Zinke explains how this metallic sphere is used for submarine training. Six to eight SEALS crawl into this tiny sphere and then wait as it’s filled with water. Claustrophobia is not a desirable trait.

In subsequent weeks, students learn basic marksmanship and land warfare. Each phase, of course, is filled with creative tortures designed to mentally and physically toughen SEAL candidates. The SEALS reason that the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.

Just before they finish BUDS training, they’re sent on a five-day, five-night mission that utilizes most of the commando skills that were taught in the previous 6 months. Finally, if you’ve managed to stick it out without suffering a mental or physical breakdown, you graduate. You thank God you made it and slap yourself on the back but you don’t have too much time to celebrate because you’re off to jump school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. After that, you’re assigned to a special SEAL team for more specialized training.

The cost to the Government to prepare one Navy SEAL? About 750,000 dollars. The pay a SEAL receives? Only 1,200 dollars a month, but there probably isn’t a SEAL alive that doesn’t think that the skill and self-confidence gained through their training make the paltry wage seem a bargain.

And in the days that have followed my little tour of the SEALS training facility, I couldn’t help wonder if in my wildest dreams I could complete their training program. Could I finish out Hell Week? Could I keep my cool while someone ripped off my dive gear? Could I handle the almost non-stop running and swimming? Could I survive without my Japanese moisturizing cream made from domesticated turtles that I hold so dear?

Granted, I’m way too old for that shit now, but a lot of it appealed to me. I like the discipline and the physical aspects, but most of all I liked the SEAL attitude. Unlike other branches of the armed forces, they exhibit discipline when it’s needed and not just for show. They can wear their damn knife anywhere they want, carry their guns any old way that pleases them, and they can even wear whatever headgear they want when they go on a mission. They don’t have to salute their commanding officers all the time and nobody gives a damn if you wore the wrong color socks–all stuff that would make an Army or Air Force General or Navy Commander have a fit of apoplexy.

Still, I honestly don’t know if I could have done what these guys do. I don’t know if I could want it that badly. I don’t know if I ever wanted anything that badly.

And so I’m left feeling a tad deflated. I’m no loser. I’ve had some measure of success in a lot of things. I’m not weak of mind or character, but still the question gnaws at me: Have I ever exhibited that degree of excellence in anything?

And as I shook hands with CMR. Zinke and thanked him, he told me that he was shipping out for a couple of months on March 1^st. He couldn’t tell me where he was going, but he winked and said that I’d read about him in the papers. Of course I won’t specifically read about him the papers, but if something big happens in the Middle East in the next couple of months, I’ll have a good idea who was involved and I’ll have further evidence of what tough really is.