The Canoe Club

Four Naval Academy officers report to Coronado in the summer of 1987. Not all four will still be standing when the bell stops ringing.They call them the Canoe Club - the Academy men who arrive at BUD/S with fresh commissions and learn inside a week that a trainee is a trainee, sir or no sir. Ensign Matt Douglas comes west with three of them: Vic, a four-year wrestler afraid of nothing on dry land; Adam, quiet in a way that turns out to be nature rather than discipline; and Fredo, who drove a blue Rambler Ambassador across the country in three days just to have wheels in San Diego.The Pacific does not care about any of that. Neither does the brass bell at the edge of the grinder, with the helmets already lined up in the sand beneath it.What follows is First Phase and the surf and the cold that stops being weather and becomes the whole world. Hell Week, and the sound a man makes when he has stopped leaning toward the next minute. The tank at fifteen feet with the regulator torn out of your teeth. Night swims two miles out where the water has no bottom and the only thing between you and the dark is the man you were told never to leave.Some of them ring out. It is not the ones you would pick.The Canoe Club is the story of the year that made an officer - told in the language the pipeline actually uses, at the pace it actually moves, with the boredom and the paperwork and the friendships left in. It is about what the training takes, what it gives back, and the particular loneliness of getting through something the people you love will never be able to picture.Book One of the Canoe Club Legacy.