Английский для военных/Military English. Метод кейсов/Cases. Решения, ответы, словарь, глоссарий

To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel

– the centerline and the deepest part of the ship. This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship – where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship’s machinery is deafening and where it is easy to get disoriented and fail.

Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission, is the time when you must be calm, composed – when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.

If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

The ninth week of training is referred to as «Hell Week.» It is six days of no sleep, con-stant physical and mental harassment, and one special day at the Mud Flats. The Mud Flats are area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and cre-ates the Tijuana slues, a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.

It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind and the in-cessant pressure to quit from the instructors. As the sun began to set that Wednes-day evening, my training class, having committed some «egregious infraction of the rules» was ordered into the mud.

The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The in-structors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit – just five men

– and we could get out of the oppressive cold. Looking around the mud flat it was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was still over eight hours till the sun came up – eight more hours of bone-chilling cold.

The chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything. And then, one voice began to echo through the night, one voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two and two became three and before long everyone in the class was sing-ing. We knew that if one man could rise above the misery then others could as well.

The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singingbut the singing persisted. And somehow the mud seemed a little warmer, the wind a little tamer and the dawn not so far away.

If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person – Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela and even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala – one person can change the world by giving people hope.