No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL by Mark Owen, Kevin Maurer Read Free Book Online Page B

instructors came over to helpwith the gear, shaking our hands and welcoming us to the canyon. Their hands were callused from hours on the rock face.
    The first two days were no big deal. It was more of a refresher, with nothing too high or hard to climb. We had to make sure that everyone remembered the safety precautions and basics we had learned previously before getting into the newer, more demanding climbing the last day.
    We split up into two-man teams. Each team had its own instructor. I was paired with Jeff, one of the newer SEALs in the platoon. He wasn’t a fan of heights either. There was no way I was going to show my fear, and Jeff was trying hard to hide his nerves from me as well. If your teammates ever see a weakness, you’ll never hear the end of it.
    Our “billy-goat” instructor led us over to one of the climbing routes. He was short and stocky, with leathery skin and a long goatee. He had the strongest handshake I’d ever felt. A North Face beanie covered his scraggly brown hair. He was an ex-con who’d been to jail for assault. He’d beat up the guy who was banging his wife, or at least that’s what he told us during one of the breaks.
    It was decided that I’d go first while Jeff would belay as I climbed. I kept up a steady soundtrack of what I was doing as I inched up the cliff face. None of my talking made sense. It was sort of gibberish, but it was comforting for me. I am sure it annoyed Jeff.
    “Oh yeah, lucky cam number four,” I said, holding the cam in my open hand. “Lucky blue number four.”
    Each camming device was a different color, based on the size. I set my own “pro,” or my own protection, as I climbed. That meant it was up to me to do it right, because if I fell—something I was trying not to think about at the time—the rope would be pulled taut in the camming devices. We were taught to place the cams roughly every ten feet into cracks in the rock face and ledges. If I fell with my closest cam being ten feet below me, I’d fall a total of twenty feet before the rope caught me. If I’d placed that cam wrong, I didn’t want to think about falling to the next one below that.
    I decided to put them in at five-foot intervals as I climbed, in an attempt to make myself feel more comfortable.
    “Yep, every five feet works great,” I said to myself as I set another cam into the rock face.
    I made it up the first pitch without issue and belayed Jeff as he climbed up. Jeff led the next route, and I stayed below him to belay his climb. Once we both had several chances to practice our lead climbing techniques, the instructor took us up to a bigger wall. The shadow of the wall seemed to stretch out for miles. I tried not to look up to the top of the cliff, which blocked out the sun.
    “You’re first,” the instructor said to me.
    I didn’t have much to say this time. I was too nervous to talk. This rock face was much bigger and flatter than the others we had climbed. There were half the hand- and footholds available, and we would have to stay very focused on choosing a clean route up the face.
    I climbed quickly at first, easily finding hand- andfootholds. As I climbed, I set pro into cracks or pockets in the rocks. I had been in such a good rhythm between climbing and setting my pro that I hadn’t noticed I was using entirely too many camming devices and was about to run out. Placing my last cam into a big crack in the rock, I was officially stuck. I couldn’t go any higher. To be honest, I didn’t want to.
    For the first time since I started to climb, I took my eyes off the rock face in front of me and started to look around. I was pretty fucking high up. I could see the Las Vegas Strip and the desert stretching all the way to the horizon. I glanced down and saw Jeff, now a lot smaller. He looked like a garden gnome.
    Any chance I had of keeping my fear in control was slipping away, a lot like my hold on the rock.
    I wished I was anywhere else as I looked up into the