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After reading about BUDS a few times, I have a personal theory that SEALs are a little extra retarded, because their failure scenario is so different from their success scenario.
If you join the Army with the goal of becoming a Ranger, but don't make it, you will probably still be an infantryman. You'll still get to do like 80% of what you would have done anyway, the combat and personal violence and the shooting and the toys, just without the rarified status and the special missions.
If you join the Navy with the goal of becoming a SEAL and fail to make the team, you're going to be doing something completely different, on a ship or on a base. A totally unrelated job.
You have to be kind of stupid to go in for that bet.
Huh, that’s interesting, I totally would have thought that the Marines would be the way more natural fallback but apparently not.
No, Marines have their own special forces and the fallback for that is usually 'normal getting shot at' jobs like machine gunner and infantry grunt. IIRC the most usual path into force recon is to try to transfer from normal light infantry anyways.
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It would be, but to try out for the SEALs you've already enlisted in the Navy so that's pretty much the way it goes for many people who turn out to be only 99th percentile athletes rather that 99.9th percentile.
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