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A Death at BUDS, or How Anti-Science Ideologies Trickle Down to Harm Heroes
TLDR: Media bias against drugs leads to people ignoring obvious, medically supported interventions. This creates room for other people to cheat the system, which creates dangers. Kyle Mullen would probably be alive today were he on a medically supervised steroid cycle instead of buying a used car to store his illegal drugs in and learning how to use them from some mix of bros at the base and bros on the internet. I say bring on the Space Marines, or at least provide pure drugs at military expense, it’s only polite.
By any reasonable standard, Kyle Mullen was a Hero in the making, in the classical sense. A muscular 6’4 SEAL candidate, choosing to forego a career out of an Ivy League school to serve his country.
He finished the toughest parts of SEAL training, and died on the beach afterward. NYT article here, all quotes are from that article. The NYT story was a real gut punch, expose and heartbreaker all rolled into one, I recommend reading the whole thing and now it’s circulating through the “Summarize a real journalist’s work, make two generic comments, and pass it off as your own” internet chain. Slate chimed in to probably say the whole thing is to be blamed on Toxic Masculinity, The National Review of course needs to Defend Tradition while blaming the drugs, even some Arab website hopped on to call it an example of American brutality, cheating, and drug culture.
What none of the think pieces suggested was the obvious solution: if steroids make you better at the things we want SEALs to be good at, give them steroids. Why are SEALs buying them independently and taking them secretly, when it would all go much better if the SEALs program offered an option to be put on a mild steroid cycle under doctor’s supervision? At the very least, that’s as upsetting as schoolteachers buying their own school supplies!
Teaching trainee soldiers to cheat goes back to at least the Spartan Agoge, and I doubt Lycurgus was totally innovative on this one. But you can prevent trainees from going off the rails by providing reasonable rails. What killed Limewire et al (or at least made them less prominent), wasn’t suing some random college kids for downloading an album, it was creating a legal framework for listening to music online and paying for it. While testing is suggested as a solution, it hasn't worked in sports so I fail to see how we can be optimistic it will work here.
If cheating is easy and it works, then the only solution is to obviate the need for it by making it legal in a managed form.
The Dead Pool is a real phenomenon, steroids are nothing to play with. But those kinds of results come from out of control drug use without medical supervision by guys who are used to pushing their limits, and are OK with dying in the process. There is no question that overuse of steroids can have negative health impacts, but a light, managed cycle isn’t going to make it any more likely that anyone dies, it would probably reduce the odds of other injuries during BUDS if it were used to manage existing problems and lead to more medical supervision. Steroids are like anything else, they follow the 80/20 rule: the first extra push gets you most of the results, then you can keep adding more and more to get attenuated marginal gains. WADA isn’t going to test SEALs before they kick in doors and disqualify guys that don’t have clean piss. Putting all SEAL candidates who want it on a basic cycle would obviate the desire to go on more, level the playing field, and improve performance.
Instead, the Navy chooses to make the competition ever more fierce, and just hope that guys won't cheat or get themselves into trouble.
Like everything else in American life, the competition at the top is increasingly fierce. The bifurcation of American life into a Barbell Chart of winners and losers doesn’t stop anywhere. SEAL training is particularly brutal, consider this story of a man who was probably tougher and in better shape than anyone on theMotte:
Seriously, I don’t know the whole story, but in what universe is a guy 50/50 between commando and snack counter? There wasn’t a slightly more useful landing spot?
You’re asking these guys to take a gamble between doing their dream job being a certified superhero, with highly paid job opportunities galore in a variety of fields after they serve their country with honor, and obscurity behind the snack counter. Is it any wonder that they’ll do anything to win, especially when you already select for guys willing to risk death?
I’m really just putting this quote here as a laugh line. We ask SEALs to be elite, to be the best, to sacrifice their bodies, their lives, and often parts of their souls; but God forbid they break the rules by taking medicine that makes their lives easier.
Early aughts Rick Reilly really did a number on America, we’re still recovering from it and realizing just what Better Living Through Chemistry can do for us. But our sportswriters and their cousins in the hard news are the main way the public hears about steroids: I would bet that more NYT writers/editors know someone using Test to transition than using Test to hit a PR. They’re pulling their info from SI, not from T Nation. Much of the NYT commentariat and audience views male weightlifting and fitness with vague suspicion of wrong think. That combination gives us a public discourse about steroids soaked in myths about roid rage, tiny testicles, and ignoring all the scientific studies of the health benefits of testosterone supplementation. Much like a recent discussion of plastic surgery, if everyone keeps it a secret you only ever notice the bad work, not all the work that passes.
The result is that someone like Kyle, who should have been serving his country with distinction, or at least living the probably pleasant life of a former Yale football captain, instead chose to buy a used car to hide his drugs in, inject himself with God-only-knows-what, and died before he ever saw an enemy combatant. What a waste. Let’s at least consider the possibility that the problem wasn’t drug use as such, but using illegal drugs dosed by an amateur, with the obvious preventative being legal drugs dosed by medical professionals under regular observation for results. Recognize that bad results come from homebrew experimentation, not from the substance itself. Let's give Justice to Kyle, not by weakening SEAL training or introducing an ever expanding and expensive team of nannies to keep an eye on everyone, but by doing something that might actually have saved his life.
I consume a lot of media generated by former SEALs, and have heard commentary both directly about this case and about training in selection in general.
The impression I get is that allowing PEDs would be akin to lowering the standard, and that's not okay. Lowering the standard means the guy next to you in combat is less likely to be able to pull his own weight and therefore more likely to get himself and others killed. Further, while the training is very physically demanding, the physical burden is a means to weed out individuals that are not able or willing to push themselves through the pain. PEDs would supposedly make for a lighter physical burden, which means a candidate could get through without needing to exert the same level of mental toughness.
From what I hear, the standards have changed very little. This stat is likely an artifact of far more people being given the chance to try. The Navy has expanded the SEAL pipeline by recruiting sailors directly into the occupation, rather than requiring recruits to select a non-spec-ops career first and then apply for SEAL training. They've also added training for the training, with a course that will prep you for BUD/S itself.
To add to this, his mom tells a story that the instructors rang the bell on his behalf, and that his tibia was broken in two places.
From what I hear, this is bullshit. Quitting is voluntary. Instructors will badger and heckle you to quit, but they can't quit on your behalf. Even if they did ring the bell, in order to quit you have to sign paperwork asserting that you are quitting before you can be processed out.
If you end up with an injury that prevents you from completing the training you can try again after you heal.
I'm also wondering exactly what the X-ray showed. His mom says his tibia was broken in two places, but from everything I can find you would not be able to walk, much less run, with such an injury. You can't just grit your teeth and push through the pain, your leg will collapse. If the leg bending in the wrong spots isn't noticeable, the massive swelling from blood and bone marrow spilling out of the fractures would be.
Cute theory, but in any athletic endeavor, especially one where there is no testing, if someone is using, then all the winners are probably using. Some of the former seals whose content you consume are probably using, including some of the ones that are moralizing about it.
That doesn't make any sense. By that same logic, they should weed out athletic recruits, ban training before BUDS, and specifically pick recruits with sub-optimal builds for the course. PEDs only make for a lighter physical burden in the same way that being in good shape, or being the optimal size and build, or any number of other natural or trained advantages would make for a lighter physical burden.
Malcolm Gladwell, of all people, makes that argument really well here: [Largely quoting another work]
The recruit who uses PEDs is arguably showing a level of dedication far above that of the recruit who does not. He is showing skill at (often illegally) acquiring the tools he needs, he is showing diligence in dosing and cycling, he had to train hard to use these tools. At any rate, it's no more or less unfair than a million natural advantages between candidates.
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I think you'd be able to walk unassisted with a hairline tibia fracture, even though it'd feel shitty and be a bad idea.
Not that I think we should take the story at face value.
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