Prelude – Rebel Without a Sandwich : “It is better to walk than curse the road.” – Zambian Proverb
The Navy didn’t call them Hell Weeks anymore because Motivational Week sounded better and more humane. But the game remained the same, and that’s what these days were designed to do, convince naval cadets they had found hell on earth.
Imagine you have lost your mind, and your madness has led you to the most barren island along the North Sea coastline to frolic about in the icy water and perform unpleasant tasks to see how much it hurts. And you should have brought a packed lunch and a sleeping bag. Now, imagine you can’t leave. Welcome to hell! Apologies, I meant to say motivation.
Norway’s Mynedykkerkommandoen (MDK or Norwegian Naval EOD Command – originally called Minedykkertroppen) is a clearance diver group, a Norwegian Naval Special Forces unit. The MDK’s mission is to conduct reconnaissance and sabotage against enemy targets above and below water; its combat divers are tasked with disarming and rendering inert air, land and explosive ordnance waterborne and on-beach approaches. In the eighties and nineties, the general selection process was twenty-six weeks of intensive training and had one purpose, to eliminate those who did not have the physical and mental abilities to enter operational elite frogman commando units.
Prelude – Rebel Without a Sandwich
The six months course was not only about testing endurance; it was about seeing what happens when a person reaches or goes beyond the point of what they can mentally and physically endure. Training and selection are several months of purgatory, and when it’s finally over, only a handful remain standing during roll call out of the multitudes that applied. Most participants will come out of the ordeal with nothing to show for their pains but a lifetime to ponder how they got injured, failed a written test, or, woefully, why they didn’t have what it takes.
Naming one of the weeks during the many months of torment, adversity, and suffering, Hell Week had been an open declaration that what the applicants had signed up for bordered on institutionalised sadism. That’s why the Navy changed its name. These days of full-blown hell began, as they typically do, when we men lay down on our bunks, exhausted with aching limbs after a full day of running long distances and swimming through vast stretches of icy water. No sooner had we all breathed a sigh of relief that the day was finally over when a flashbang went off, announcing yet another ‘motivation exercise’ was about to commence.
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it.”
Our mission impossible didn’t come with the immortal words, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it.” No such luck. Orders that had to be obeyed were screamed out loud at our tired faces, and refusal was not an option.
We cadets, degradingly called tadpoles, were ordered to go out into the freezing night to retrieve heavy wooden boxes from a remote uninhabited island on the other side of Sotra to the West of Bergen. Then, by sheer force of will, hump the boxes over arduous, treacherous terrain, and strip naked to swim in rough, icy seas carrying the crates marked ‘Munitions’ aloft – and there wouldn’t be any dinner, breakfast or lunch.
All this begs the question, why? Why would anybody volunteer for such an ordeal? I couldn’t speak for the others, but I knew why I was there and why failure wasn’t a viable option. There’s an expression in mountaineering jargon, ‘feeding the rat’. The rat is an addiction to extreme risk and danger that occasionally demands to be appeased and placated.
Much more than craving adrenalin, the rat is only satisfied when it has gorged on what is beyond the boundaries of what is ordinarily deemed safe and reasonable. We are not talking about compulsively scaling climbing walls in gymnasiums here – what the rat needs is found on a narrow ledge halfway up a high mountain when the blizzard hits and all the food’s gone.
Paal had three rats to feed:
I had three rats to feed: the first one came from my father and thrived on the bitter taste of disapproval; the rat in the middle was a sex addict; and the third demanded mountain tops, the bottom of the sea, or foolishly leaping off a tall building or from a perfectly functional aeroplane – the third rat didn’t care how, as long as it got fed.
I was born in Scotland and spent most of my childhood in Zambia. When I arrived in Norway at the tender age of eleven, unable to speak Norwegian, I found myself in an identity crisis. Even by 1987, after several years of living in Norway, my father’s country, and having learnt the language fluently, I still needed to prove to myself and others that I was as Norwegian as everyone else.
It wasn’t enough to be accepted; I must achieve much more than that. I needed to prove myself an exceptional Norwegian to end the nagging self-doubt and conviction that I didn’t belong anywhere.
Failure to be amongst the chosen few would be the confirmation of my worst fears, the devastating proof I wasn’t a worthy real Norwegian. So, when I found myself in hell, I would keep going no matter what because on the other side was Norway, the prize, and I wanted a country because it didn’t feel like I had one yet.
“Mistakes, failures, insults, frustrations & rejections are part of life & growth”
I remember mentally repeating, “Mistakes, failures, insults, frustrations & rejections are part of life & growth. Nobody achieved anything worthwhile without them, accompanied by the thought, I would rather die than fail.”
Helenka understood her son’s dilemma. She was born to a Polish seafaring father and a Scottish mother and grew up with similar questions of identity. On this evening in 1987, she stood at her kitchen window on the island of Little Sotra, West of Bergen, watching a ferocious storm rolling in from the North Sea over the islands. She knew her son would be out there somewhere and that it would be dangerous by design wherever he was. She had grown accustomed to worrying about her son over the years, and watching the storm did not alleviate her nagging concerns.
Prelude – Rebel Without a Sandwich
When Helenka was asked to describe me, she adamantly said, “Paal is incapable of half-measures. Everything he has ever done throughout his life has been a total commitment, finding where the extremes were and then always going there. So it was not wise to tell him, ‘Beyond this point, there be dragons,’ unless you intended to send him out to meet those dragons because dragons were his friends.”
Four tortured young men, including myself, were in a speeding zodiac as the storm intensified, thrown about by the rough seas like ice cubes in a whisky glass held by a person with cerebral palsy. We had set out in the dark from Haakonsvern naval base, home to the Dykker og Froskemannskolen (Diver & Frogman School), where our training and selection took place.
Thrown around in a Zodiac by a rough sea
Earlier in the evening, upon receiving our orders, we had formed groups of four on the jetty and went to sea in rubber dinghies, departing from the naval base in darkness, close to exhaustion and with empty stomachs. What lay ahead would have been a challenge at the best of times, but as tired, cold and hungry as we all were, this felt like madness. But that was the whole point: having been designed to break us mentally and physically.
The reality was that although we could only get through the ordeal by working as a closely-knit team, a seemingly perverted paradox as we all understood we were also competing against each other. With only very few recruits going to make the cut, everybody was acutely aware that others must fail if they were themselves to succeed. Surrendering was not an option. However, fate would lend a hand, and I would do something that would be the Navy’s definition of defiance and disobedience. It would undoubtedly get me severely reprimanded if I got caught.
Prelude – Rebel Without a Sandwich
The reality was that although we could only get through the ordeal by working as a closely-knit team, a seemingly perverted paradox as we all understood we were also competing against each other. With only very few recruits going to make the cut, everybody was acutely aware that others must fail if they were themselves to succeed. Surrendering was not an option. However, fate would lend a hand, and I would do something that would be the Navy’s definition of defiance and disobedience. It would undoubtedly get me severely reprimanded if I got caught.
Getting away with it would require the other three in the boat to agree with what I was about to do and willingly disobey naval orders. All of us must be able to keep a secret too. Luck would also be required because somewhere nearby, bouncing on the choppy seas, were the other Zodiacs, and if one of them were close enough to see what we were about to do, the game would be up. But I was starving, exhausted and a little desperate.
In a Zombie like state
The faltering zombie-like state I had been in since the flashbang went off under our bunks was interrupted when I glimpsed the solitary streetlight on a bridge up ahead. I recognised that small old bridge, having crashed a five-hundred CC Honda XL motorcycle there a few years earlier.
Having shouted the proposed plan to my three comrades over the din of the outboard motor and got them all to agree, I turned the Zodiac sharply to starboard, heading toward the bridge between Litlesotra and Bildoy islands. Of course, I would have to get in and out fast without being spotted, but having weighed the odds, I believed that accomplishing our primary mission depended on successfully pulling off this operation first; I decided to go off the reservation for a few minutes.
Prelude – Rebel Without a Sandwich
Helenka saw from her kitchen window that the storm with ferocious gusts had arrived, and she didn’t like it. She thought, ‘You wouldn’t send a dog out on a night like this,’ while hoping her son was tucked up safely in his barracks back at the naval base on the mainland.
However, just when she’d convinced herself that he couldn’t possibly be out on such a night, the downstairs front door flew open. Her only son rushed up the stairs into her kitchen dressed in soaking wet naval commando battledress, with camouflage black and green all over his face, hoarsely mumbling as he grabbed the necessaries from the kitchen cupboard. “I was never here; you haven’t seen me.”
Then, as quickly as he’d arrived, he had gone again, disappearing back into the night. The only evidence she hadn’t imagined the whole thing was the puddle of rainwater on her kitchen floor.
Back on the boat, and heading out to sea.
Back onboard the Zodiac and heading out to sea, we four young men shared the loot. But this was no indulgent feast. I had only grabbed what he deemed essential to our mission: tinned sardines, beans and some packets of peanuts, just enough to provide a little energy and get us through the cold night and the following day.
Eating the sardines from the tin on a rough sea was a real challenge. We knew there would be repercussions if smelly sardine oil were found on our uniforms or empty tin cans were found in the boat. We solved the problem by sipping the oil from the tins before attacking the sardines. The empty cans and peanut packet wrappings were then non-ceremoniously given a wet burial. Mission accomplished.
I would make it through the six-month selection process and get accepted into the Frogman unit. On 31 October 1987, I would celebrate my twenty-first birthday and begin my adult life upon proudly graduating from DFS. The priceless lessons from those endless months of brutal hardship would be carried with me throughout my life, having taught me never to give up and always strive to grab opportunities with both hands. I would go on to experience many incarnations.
What lay ahead over the following decades was a series of life-changing career choices and events, changing when necessary, reinventing my personality, and accompanied by, some say, a remarkable ability to remain unscathed. This book is my story.