Retired Navy SEALS master chief was one of the ones who refused to quit

Retired SEALS Master Chief Rick Kaiser recalls his training and combat experience during an interview March 27 at the Boys & Girls Club of Manchester conducted by Steve McMahon, left, a club board member.

Imagine undergoing training led by people whose sole mission in life is to do everything they can to ensure you fail, to push you to your limits until you break.

That’s the purpose of Hell Week, a test of endurance that only 25% of Navy SEAL candidates complete.

“Hell Week consists of 5½ days of cold, wet, brutally difficult operational training on fewer than four hours of sleep,” according to navyseals.com. “Hell Week tests physical endurance, mental toughness, pain and cold tolerance, teamwork, attitude, and your ability to perform work under high physical and mental stress, and sleep deprivation.”

After listening to retired SEALS Master Chief Rick Kaiser recall his experience, the Navy might be sugarcoating it a bit. His memories of Hell Work sound worse than that.

“Every minute of every day is full of something you’re doing — running, swimming, pushups, paddling boats,” Kaiser said during a March 27 talk at the Boys & Girls Club of Manchester.

And that “fewer than four hours of sleep” comes in small doses.

“When I say very little sleep in a week, you get a couple of hours, and it’s not all at once. It’s like 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there,” Kaiser said.

Instructors working three eight-hour shifts take turns pushing recruits faster and harder than they have ever been pushed before. Relentlessly.

“You pray that the next group of instructors are the nice guys and not the jerks … because what they’re trying to do is make you quit. That’s the bottom line,” Kaiser said during an interview conducted by Steve McMahon, a board member of the Boys & Girls Club. “They want you to quit in training and not in combat. They don’t even make any bones about it. They want you to quit.”

Kaiser never quit. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, native joined the Navy at age 17. (His mom had to drive him to boot camp.) After attending Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training in Coronado, California, he was assigned to SEAL Team Two, where he served for five years before he was selected for duty for SEAL Team Six in 1985. He served there until 2012, working as a sniper, explosive expert and training chief, among other duties.

Kaiser’s accolades include receiving the Silver Star Medal for Valor during the Battle of Mogadishu, the basis of the 2001 film “Black Hawk Down.” He shared leadership lessons from his career in “Frogman Stories,” a book published in 2023.

Kaiser looks back on his military career with fondness.

“I get uncomfortable when people thank me for my service because I always say — and it’s true — I don’t consider it service. It was an honor,” Kaiser said. “I really enjoyed my time in the military, and I wouldn’t change anything. I’m just another guy that did an unusual job.”

Kaiser now serves as the CEO of the National Navy SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, which was built on the training grounds of the original Navy combat divers, the Frogmen.

“That’s where the guys trained to take the beaches of Normandy in France on D-Day in World War II,” Kaiser said. “The very first wave of the guys that went in there were the frogmen to clear the beaches, because the Germans had put up a whole series of obstacles to slow the landing craft down.”

In New Hampshire, Kaiser has worked with Swim With a Mission, a Bedford-based nonprofit that raises money to provide services to veterans, such as mental health counseling, housing, recreational housing and other needs. The SEALS Museum plans to open another museum in San Diego this year.

“We’re just normal family guys doing an abnormal job, and that’s a fact,” Kaiser said. “We have the same problems everybody else does. We have the same problems with drinking, PTSD, suicides, all that maybe amplified a little bit because of what we do. And our families paid a price for it, so God bless them.”

The Boys & Girls Club of Manchester (mbgcnh.org) will host a Fall Speaker Series Luncheon on Sept. 18, with Jessica Buchanan, an aid worker who was kidnapped in Somalia in 2011 and rescued by a Navy SEALS team.