On the California coast, young men get ready for the Navy SEALs' punishing selection course, known as Hell Week. During Hell Week, 24-year-old Kyle Mullen was exposed to horrendous physical and mental hardship, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia. Mullen ended up with exhaustion, an infection, and coughing up blood. 

The course started with 210 men. By the middle of Hell Week, 189 people had quit or been injured. Mullen, on the other hand, continued to slog for days, spewing blood the entire time. The instructors and medics leading the training did not stop him, possibly because they admired his tenacity.

When he stumbled out of the freezing sea at the end of Hell Week, SEAL leaders shook his hand, handed him a pizza, and ordered him to relax. He then returned to his barracks and collapsed on the floor. His heart stopped beating a few hours later, and he died.

That same afternoon, another man who survived Hell Week had to be intubated. Two more were hospitalized that evening.

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The SEAL teams have faced criticism for decades, both from outsiders and their own Navy leadership, that their selection course, known as Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S, is too difficult, too brutal, and too often causes concussions, broken bones, dangerous infections, and near-drownings. Since 1953, at least 11 men have died.

For just as long, the SEAL teams, who perform some of the military’s most difficult missions, including lighting-fast hostage rescues and the killing of high-level terrorists, have insisted that having a bare-knuckle rite of passage is vital for producing the kind of unflinching fighters the teams need. Without BUD/S, they argue, there could be no SEALs.

Privately, they talk of training casualties as a cost of doing business.

“They killed him,” his mother, Regina Mullen, who is a registered nurse, said in an interview. “They say it’s training, but it’s torture. And then they didn’t even give them the proper medical care. They treat these guys worse than they are allowed to treat prisoners of war.”

A SEAL's magic 

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The Navy discovered needles and performance-enhancing substances in Mullen's car when they went through his possessions. The captain in charge of BUD/S immediately initiated an investigation into 40 candidates who had either tested positive for steroids or admitted to taking them in violation of Navy regulations.

The Navy has made no connection between the sailor's death and narcotics. In the fall, the service is anticipated to disclose reports on the training death and drug use. A Navy official declined to comment on Mullen's death or allegations of widespread drug usage, stating that it would be inappropriate to do so until the investigations were public and Mullen's family was briefed on their conclusions.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of narcotics during BUD/S has some SEALs at the top concerned.

Suicide rates among #US troops rose by 15% in 2020, according to a #Pentagon report that the Defense Secretary described as “troubling". pic.twitter.com/OCBfozm465

— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) October 6, 2021

The instructors forced candidates through a gantlet of running, crawling, situps, and pushups on the hot sand on the first day of training, according to Mullen's mother. He collapsed late in the afternoon while racing in teams, carrying 170-pound inflatable boats above their heads.

A short while later, he called his mother from an ambulance, explaining that he hadn't had a drop of water all day. When he fell, a teacher insulted his limp body and told him to get up, he informed her. When he did not answer, physicians took his temperature, which was 104 degrees, and admitted him to the hospital for heatstroke.

Mullen was assigned to an internal recovery unit and given four months to heal before attempting BUD/S again.

'No other choice'

Mullen began speaking to his mother about performance-enhancing medications during his four-month wait, according to his mother.

He told her that men he met in the recovery unit were using steroids and human growth hormones and that he was thinking about doing the same. He told her he'd have to buy a used car to put the drugs in.

“In all his years playing sports, he had never touched that stuff,” she said. “I told him not to do it. But he ended up getting the car and sharing it with a bunch of guys.”

According to Benjamin Milligan, a former enlisted SEAL who recently released a history of the force, "Water Beneath the Walls," the drug problem during BUD/S is a logical consequence of the attitude the SEALs aim to foster.

In an interview, he stated that the SEALs seek operators who can identify unusual ways to get an advantage over the enemy. “You want guys who can solve problems in war, guys who know how to play dirty because war is a dirty game,” he said.