“They Are Half-Drowned Psychopaths” — Why US Marine Snipers Refused To Copy The Brutal SBS Wet Hide
Four men spent 72 hours submerged to their chests in freezing seaater, breathing through reeds, defecating into sealed bags strapped to their thighs. While a 12man Marine Scout sniper team with thermal imaging worth $400,000 failed to locate a single target in the same operational window. The British team reported 11 confirmed positions.
The Americans reported zero. Master Gunnery Sergeant Puit received both afteraction reports on the same morning, and the numbers refused to make sense. He had spent 22 years training the finest precision shooters the United States military had ever produced. His snipers carried the M40A5, a weapon system refined across five decades of institutional knowledge.
Their ghillie suits were manufactured by contractors who had studied vegetation patterns across 14 climate zones. Their spotting scopes cost more than a family sedan. And yet the report in his left hand showed results that made the report in his right hand look like a clerical error.
The operation had taken place in a coastal region where insurgent leadership moved exclusively by small boat navigating channels too shallow for naval interdiction and too narrow for drone overwatch. American intelligence had tracked the network for 7 months without a single positive identification. Satellite passes produced blur. Signal intercepts produced static.
The targets moved at night, changed routes randomly, and never used the same landing point twice. What Puit did not yet understand was that the British approach to this problem began not with technology, but with a question that would have seemed absurd to any American planner. How long can a human being remain motionless in water cold enough to induce hypothermia? The answer, as he would later learn, was considerably longer than anyone at Quantico had ever thought to ask.
The equipment disparity alone should have predicted the outcome in the opposite direction. Pruit’s team carried kit worth approximately $22,000 per operator, excluding weapons. The standard deployment loadout included PVS 31 binocular night vision devices at $18,000 per unit, A/PQ, 15 infrared aiming lasers at $2,800, and communications equipment that allowed realtime data transmission to command elements 40 m away.
Their boots were designed by a biomechanics laboratory in Oregon. Their hydration systems featured antimicrobial reservoirs. Every piece of gear had been selected through a procurement process that evaluated 743 individual items before final approval. The British operators who would eventually be inserted into the same operational area carried kit worth approximately 900 per man.
Their wets suits were commercial diving models modified inhouse with additional neoprene panels. Their breathing apparatus consisted of lengths of hollow reed tested and cut during the insertion phase. Their communications equipment was a single encrypted burst transmitter shared among all four operators used only for extraction coordination.
One man carried a spotting scope that had been manufactured in 1987. Puit would later describe the disparity as looking at two different centuries of warfare sitting on the same beach. But the equipment told only part of the story. The real difference began years before either team reached that coastline in selection processes so fundamentally opposed that they might have been designed by different species.
The Marine Scout Sniper course accepted candidates who had already proven themselves in reconnaissance battalions, infantry units, or special operations support roles. The attrition rate hovered around 60%. Considered brutal by conventional military standards. Training lasted approximately 11 weeks with additional specialized courses available for those who qualified.
The curriculum emphasized marksmanship, fieldcraft, and observation skills refined through decades of institutional experience. The special boat service selection process began with a question that Puit would not hear until 3 months after the coastal operation when a British liaison officer explained it during a joint planning session.
The question was simple. Can the candidate survive sustained misery without psychological degradation? The answer required four weeks in the breakon beacons followed by jungle training conducted in Biz or Brunai depending on availability followed by a resistance to interrogation phase that lasted 36 hours without sleep, food or the certainty that the exercise would ever end.
Candidates were subjected to sensory deprivation, stress positions, and questioning techniques designed to identify the precise moment when a human mind begins to fracture. Those who reached that moment were removed from the course. Those who did not reach it, who maintained cognitive function while every physical and psychological system screamed for surrender.
Those were the candidates who progressed to operational training. Of the approximately 300 candidates who began UKSF selection each year, fewer than 30 completed it. The attrition rate exceeded 90%. Puit learned these numbers 6 weeks after the coastal operation, and they explained nothing about why four men in wets suits had outperformed his entire team.
Statistics described outcomes, not mechanisms. He wanted to understand the mechanism. The answer arrived in the form of a technique so counterintuitive that three separate Marine officers refused to believe the initial briefing was serious. The wet hide concept had originated during the Falkland’s war when SBS reconnaissance teams faced a problem that seemed to have no solution.
Argentine positions along the coastline were protected by thermal imaging equipment, primitive by modern standards, but effective enough to detect any human heat signature within 600 m. Conventional hide positions, even those dug into frozen ground, produced thermal blooms that Argentine operators had learned to identify.
The solution required eliminating the thermal signature entirely. Human bodies produce heat. Seawater absorbs heat. The logical conclusion was horrifying in its simplicity. Submerge the operators. What the briefing documents described as partial aquatic concealment involved positioning operators in tidal zones where water levels fluctuated between chest and neck depth.
The operators would remain stationary for periods ranging from 8 to 72 hours depending on mission parameters. Body temperature would drop to levels that produced no detectable thermal signature. Movement was prohibited except for essential biological functions which were managed through sealed collection systems. The technique had worked in the Falklands.
It had worked in the Gulf. It had worked in locations that remained classified, and it had worked on that coastline where Puit’s team had failed. But the briefing omitted the detail that mattered most. What happened to the human mind during those 72 hours? A former SBS operator speaking during post operational debrief of the joint training exchange described the psychological reality in terms that made Puit understand why his Marines had been right to refuse the technique when it was later offered as an exchange program
option. The cold stops being cold after the first 6 hours. The operator explained, “Your body surrenders to it. The pain becomes a frequency like tonitis. You stop noticing. But the water, the water never stops moving. It breathes against your chest. It finds every gap in your suit. And your mind starts to interpret that movement as intention.
The water is trying to get inside you. The water is patient. The water has been waiting for you. By hour 40, you’re having conversations with the water. By hour 60, you are negotiating with it. The operator paused before adding the detail that Puit would remember for the rest of his career. The men who complete SBS selection are not brave.
Bravery implies a choice between fear and action. These men have had the fear response trained out of them through sustained exposure to conditions that would break a normal human being. What remains is not courage. What remains is something closer to controlled dissociation. They can separate their consciousness from their physical experience in ways that clinical psychologists find genuinely disturbing when they study them afterward.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Puit requested the psychological evaluation files from the joint training exchange. What he found in those documents would reshape his understanding of what the human mind could be conditioned to endure, and why the American approach to special operations, despite its technological superiority, could not replicate results that began not with equipment or tactics, but with a selection process designed to identify a specific type of psychological anomaly.
The wet hide technique was not a method. It was a filter. And what it filtered for could not be purchased, requisitioned, or trained into existence through any curriculum the Marine Corps had ever designed. The numbers arrived on Puit’s desk 3 weeks after the AL4 operation concluded. They were not dramatic. They were devastating.
During the 17-day period in which British SBS elements maintained wet hide positions across the southern Iraqi waterway network, coalition forces achieved positive identification on 14 high value targets. Of those 14, 11 were subsequently captured or neutralized within 48 hours of identification. The jackpot rate stood at 78%.
pulled the comparative data from American sniper operations during the same period. United States Marine Corps scout sniper teams operating with superior optics, encrypted communications equipment valued at over $40,000 per unit, and dedicated intelligence support from theater assets achieved positive identification on 23 targets.
Of those 23, nine resulted in successful subsequent operations. The jackpot rate was 39%. The compromise rate told an even starker story. American positions were detected or forced to relocate on 11 occasions across the 17-day period. The British wet hides, all four of them manned by a total of eight operators, experienced zero compromises.
Not one position was detected. Not one team was forced to withdraw before mission completion. Puit requested the raw observation logs. What he found in those documents would fundamentally alter his understanding of surveillance methodology. The SBS teams had maintained continuous observation for periods that his own snipers would have classified as medically impossible.
One team logged 97 hours of unbroken position maintenance in a tidal marsh where water levels fluctuated between chest deep and neck deep twice daily. The operators had urinated and defecated in place, processed their own waste through sealed containers that they carried out upon extraction, and consumed a total of 4,000 calories each across 4 days, roughly one quarter of the caloric intake his own teams required for similar mission duration.
The afteraction report from the senior SBS operator was three pages long. It contained no complaints, no equipment requests, no recommendations for improved support. The only notation regarding conditions read tidal patterns consistent with pre-mission briefing. No significant issues. Puit had read thousands of afteraction reports in his career.
He had never encountered one that classified 97 hours of immersion in sewage contaminated water as presenting no significant issues. The medical examination data was equally confounding. Upon extraction, all eight British operators showed signs of mild hypothermia, moderate dehydration, and early stage trench foot. All eight declined medical evacuation.
All eight returned to their forward operating base, conducted equipment maintenance, and reported ready for subsequent tasking within 36 hours. When Pruit’s own teams experienced comparable environmental exposure for even 12-hour periods, the standard recovery protocol required 48 to 72 hours of rest, medical monitoring, and psychological assessment.
The British protocol appeared to consist of hot tea and dry socks. He found himself returning to a phrase from the selection documentation, voluntary discomfort as baseline expectation. The SBS did not train their operators to tolerate suffering. They selected for individuals who did not process suffering in the way normal humans processed it.
The training merely confirmed what the selection had already identified. This distinction proved impossible to translate into American doctrine. Kuit submitted his formal assessment to Marine Corps Sniper School in late April 2003. The document ran to 47 pages. It detailed the wet hide methodology, provided technical specifications for the equipment modifications required, outlined the environmental conditioning protocols, and included comprehensive medical risk assessments.
The response came 6 weeks later. It was two paragraphs. The first paragraph thanked Puit for his thorough analysis and noted that elements of the British methodology might be incorporated into future advanced reconnaissance training. The second paragraph stated that the medical liability exposure associated with sustained immersion operations exceeded acceptable risk thresholds under current Marine Corps medical protocols.
The wet hide technique was not rejected because it didn’t work. It was rejected because the institution could not accept the human cost of making it work. Puit understood the decision. He even agreed with it from a certain bureaucratic perspective. The Marine Corps could not subject American service members to conditions that would generate injury rates, disability claims, and potential fatalities at the levels the British methodology implicitly accepted.
The legal and administrative frameworks were incompatible with the operational requirements. What he could not reconcile was the gap between what his institution said it wanted and what it was willing to pay to achieve it. The British accepted that wet hide operations would destroy bodies. Operators who spent careers in cold water emerged with joint damage, chronic respiratory conditions, and circulation problems that manifested in their 40s and 50s.
The SBS did not hide this reality. They simply considered it an acceptable exchange rate for the capability the technique provided. American military culture could not make that bargain. The institution was designed to protect its members from the consequences of their service, not to select for individuals willing to accept those consequences as the price of admission. Neither approach was wrong.
They were simply different answers to the same question. How much of a human being are you willing to consume to achieve a tactical objective? Puit never formally proposed adopting wet hide methodology for Marine Corps scout snipers. The assessment he submitted was filed referenced in two subsequent doctrinal reviews and ultimately incorporated into a training module that bore almost no resemblance to what he had observed in the Alour marshes.
The module taught marines to operate in wet environments. It did not teach them to become something that could survive those environments indefinitely. The distinction was everything. In 2004, a year after returning from the exchange posting with the SBS, Puit was transferred to Marine Corps Base Quantico as a senior instructor in advanced surveillance techniques.
It was the kind of assignment that did not invite discussion. The posting carried enough institutional weight to avoid the appearance of demotion while placing him at sufficient remove from operational decision-making that his views on British methodology would generate no further administrative friction. He did not characterize it to himself in those terms.
He accepted the assignment, reported on the appointed date, and began teaching officers who would never implement what he had observed in conditions approximating those he had witnessed. The classes were good. The officers were intelligent, motivated, and technically capable. They asked the right questions about ranging, wind correction, position concealment, and optical signature management.
They did not ask the question that occupied him. What happens to operational effectiveness when an institution systematically eliminates everything that falls outside its medical protocols? That was not a question asked in classrooms. It was not a question he could answer within the boundaries of instruction. In 2005, one of his students, a left tenant rotating through an accelerated course before deployment to Fallujah, asked after class why allied training programs consistently showed higher operational persistence rates at lower resource
expenditure. Puit said it was a complex question involving many variables. The left tenant said he understood and left. Puit watched him go and thought about 97 hours in a marsh, three pages of afteraction report and two paragraphs of institutional response. He did not return to the question for the remainder of that instructional year.
He kept one item from his exchange tour with the SBS. It was not a piece of equipment or a tactical manual. It was a single photograph given to him by the British liaison officer on his final day in theater. The photograph showed four men emerging from a reed bed at dawn. They were covered in mud, their faces barely visible beneath layers of camouflage paste and organic debris.
The water around them was the color of weak tea. Their equipment was minimal. Binoculars, cameras, and the sealed containers that held the intelligence that would guide three successful raids over the following 72 hours. None of the men were smiling. None of them appeared to register that they had just completed what Puit’s own training would have classified as a near impossible feat of human endurance.
They looked in the photograph exactly like what they were. Professionals completing a routine task. The photograph sat on his desk for the remaining 3 years of his career at Quantico. Visitors occasionally asked about it. He never explained it. There was nothing he could say that would make an observer understand what they were looking at.
It was the kind of photograph that defeats language. Not because language is insufficient, but because language solves a different problem. Language describes things. This photograph was evidence. Evidence that a selection process beginning in the frozen uplands of Wales and ending in white lit resistance to interrogation rooms produced not better soldiers, but a different category of person entirely.
people for whom the same reality was organized differently. In 2007, Puit retired from active duty after 26 years of service. The ceremonies said what such ceremonies say, distinguished career, dedication to the training of the next generation, a legacy present in every sniper who had passed through his courses.
He shook hands, received a medal, answered the speeches with brief acknowledgements, and drove home that evening. He took the photograph from his desk on his final working day, wrapped it in craft paper, placed it in a box with several other items that did not belong to government inventory, and moved it home. It waited there for 4 years until the researcher called.
12 years after his retirement, Puit was contacted by a researcher compiling data on British special operations methodology for a RAND corporation study. The researcher asked him to characterize the fundamental difference between American and British approaches to longduration surveillance operations. Puit’s response was not included in the final report.
It was, the researcher noted, not suitable for an academic publication. What Puit had said was this. We train snipers to complete missions. They select people who don’t know how to stop. The researcher thanked him for his time and ended the call. Puit sat for a while with the phone in his hand, looking at the garden outside the window. It was early morning.
The grass was wet. There was nothing in that wet grass that could not be explained by the weather. The Rand study was published in 2021. It contained extensive analysis of equipment, doctrine, and training methodology. It made no mention of wet hides. It recommended increased investment in unmanned surveillance systems as the future of longduration reconnaissance.
The SBS continues to conduct wet hide operations. The selection course at pool still includes the cold water phase. The pass rate remains below 8%. Not because no one knows how to raise it, but because those who run the course understand that raising it means changing what it filters for. And what it filters for is the only reason four men in a reed bed can be worth 12 men with thermal imaging.
The exchange program had been Puit’s idea, though he would not have described it that way. What he had done was submit a request for observational attachment to a British special forces element operating in southern Iraq framed as a professional development opportunity and worded carefully enough that no one in his chain of command felt compelled to refuse it.
The request moved through three levels of administrative review and emerged approved with the notation that the attachment would be limited to non-kinetic observational phases only. Someone in the approvals chain had added the phrase for force protection purposes. Puit noted the phrase and said nothing about it.
He arrived at the British forward operating base in early March of 2003, 2 weeks before the formal commencement of hostilities. The base occupied a position in the Kuwaiti desert that offered no tactical advantage and no logistical convenience, which Puit eventually understood was deliberate. The SBS did not position themselves for convenience.
They positioned themselves for obscurity. A base that looked like nothing in particular attracted attention from nothing in particular. The Americans he had left behind were housed in a facility with perimeter lighting visible from 6 mi. The British base was visible from approximately 300 m and only then if you were looking for it.
The liaison officer who met him at the vehicle checkpoint introduced himself as Captain Hler said nothing further and drove to a prefabricated accommodation block that smelled of diesel and mildew. The room contained a cot, a folding table, and a wall hook. There were no mirrors. Puit unpacked his kit, found the ablutions block, and reported to the operations room at the time he had been told to report.
Hesler was there along with three other men whose rank Puit could not immediately determine from their dress. They were studying a laminated map of the southern waterway network. None of them looked up when Puit entered. He stood in the doorway for approximately 30 seconds before Hler indicated a chair at the back wall. Puit sat in the chair and watched.
The conversation at the map table was conducted in a shorthand he could not follow, a compressed technical language built from shared operational history that excluded anyone without the same history. He had observed this in American special operations units as well, but the British version had a particular quality he could not immediately name.
It took him 4 days to identify it. The quality was the complete absence of emphasis. Everything was said at the same register. Route distances and personnel casualties and extraction timing were discussed in the same tone as weather forecasts and ration preferences. The affect was not flat. It was calibrated. They had learned through some process could not reconstruct to remove gradation from their speech so that nothing sounded more urgent than anything else which meant that everything received the same quality of attention. He spent the first
week observing planning cycles. The SBS conducted mission planning in a way that inverted the American sequence. American planning began with the objective and worked backward to the personnel requirements. British planning began with the personnel and worked forward to what those specific personnel in those specific conditions were capable of doing.
The distinction sounds minor written down. In practice, it produced plans with a different relationship to failure. American plans failed when the objective turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. British plans failed less often because they had been built around the actual constraints of the operators rather than the theoretical capabilities of a generic force.
Puit observed two complete planning cycles before the first insertion. Both were for reconnaissance tasks in the tidal marshes north of Bazra, where the waterway network was dense enough that vehicle traffic was impossible and foot patrol risked detection by fishing communities whose loyalties could not be confirmed. The insertion method for both tasks was identical.
Four operators, commercial wet suits, reed breathing apparatus fabricated on site from materials sourced within 3 kilometers of the target area. No radios during the approach phase, no thermal clothing. The operational temperature at night in that region in March was between 6 and 9° C. The water temperature was lower. Puit reviewed the medical data from the first insertion after the operators returned.
He reviewed it three times. The second and third reviews produced the same result as the first. The readings were not aberant. They were simply outside the range that his training had prepared him to expect from human beings who had survived the experience. He asked Hesler about the medical protocols.
Hesler said there were no formal medical protocols for wet hide extraction beyond standard hypothermia management and wound assessment. He said this in the same tone he used to discuss root distances. Puit asked whether there was a minimum recovery period before the operators could be tasked again. Hler said the operators determined their own readiness. Puit said he understood.
He did not understand. The second insertion took place 8 days after the first with the same four operators. Two of them had completed the first insertion with documented trench foot that had not fully resolved by the time the second mission began. The medical officer, a Royal Navy surgeon left tenant named Morris, who appeared to be approximately 26 years old, had documented the condition and noted that both operators had been advised of the risks associated with deployment before full resolution.
He had also noted that both operators had declined to postpone. Morris had signed off on their fitness for tasking. Puit read this section of the medical record four times. On the sixth day of the second insertion, a signal came through on the burst transmitter indicating that one of the four operators had sustained a laceration on his right forearm from submerged debris.
The laceration was described in the signal as minor. The signal also requested no change to the extraction timeline. Puit was in the operations room when the signal was received. He watched Hesler read it and mark the location on the map. Hler did not change the extraction timeline. He did not send a response to the signal.
He replaced the map on its stand and returned to the planning table for the next rotation. Puit asked him afterward whether there was a protocol for operator injury during a wet hide position. Hler said the protocol was to complete the task. Puit said he meant whether there was a medical response protocol.
Hler said the medical response was to complete the task, treat the injury upon extraction, and assess fitness for subsequent tasking. He said this without apparent awareness that the answer was unusual. Puit did not pursue the question further. The results of the second insertion came back 41 hours after extraction. Nine confirmed positions.
Three high value individuals identified with sufficient certainty for targeting. The signal to noise ratio in the intelligence product was the highest PUI had seen from any reconnaissance operation in his career. The information was clean, cross-referenced, and prioritized. It had been compiled by four men lying in sewage contaminated water for 78 hours in near freezing temperatures, one of whom had an open wound on his forearm.
Puit submitted his observational notes to his own command via encrypted communication that evening. The response came back 48 hours later. It acknowledged receipt and asked whether there were any force protection concerns arising from his attachment. He wrote back that there were none. He did not describe what he had observed in any detail.
He had learned somewhere in the previous two weeks that the details would not translate. The joint planning session where Puit finally heard the SBS selection rationale articulated directly took place 6 weeks after his return. It was a working group on longduration reconnaissance integration conveyed to identify interoperability gaps between American and British reconnaissance doctrine.
There were seven Americans and four British at the table. The conversation was professional and inconclusive for the first 90 minutes. Then a British warrant officer named Callaway who had not spoken until that point said that the core interoperability gap was not doctrinal but anthropological. He used that word anthropological. Puit noted it in his working group minutes.
Callaway said that British longduration reconnaissance capability was not a product of technique or equipment or doctrine. It was a product of selection. The technique existed to exploit a specific human characteristic that the selection process identified. Without that characteristic, the technique was not merely ineffective but dangerous because it placed operators in conditions they could not psychologically sustain which created cascading failures in observation quality reporting accuracy and extraction discipline. He said this with
the same calibrated affect Puit had observed in the operations room in Uwait. He was not arguing. He was describing. One of the American colonels at the table asked what specific characteristic was being selected for. Callaway said the simplest description was an altered relationship with physical discomfort.
He said that most human beings experience sustained physical suffering as a signal requiring response. The candidates who passed SBS selection experienced it as information requiring acknowledgement but not necessarily response. The difference was not a matter of pain tolerance in the conventional sense. It was a matter of signal processing.
They still felt what everyone else felt. They had simply ceased to treat sensation as instruction. The colonel said that sounded like a description of sociopathy. Callaway said it was a reasonable analogy in some respects, but that the characteristic manifested selectively. The operators in question had entirely normal effective responses in nonoperational contexts.
They formed attachments, experienced distress, sought comfort. the altered signal processing appeared to activate under conditions of extreme physical stress and not otherwise. He said clinical psychologists who had studied the population found this selective activation genuinely difficult to categorize.
He said it was one of the reasons the SBS had historically been cautious about publishing anything on the subject. Puit wrote the word anthropological in his notes and circled it twice. He had been in the Marine Corps for 23 years at that point. He had never heard a military briefing use the word. The working group produced a summary document that recommended further study of integration possibilities and identified three areas for potential shared training development.
None of the three areas involved wet hide methodology. Callaway signed the document along with the other British representatives. He did not appear to find this ironic. Puit signed it as well. He found it precisely as ironic as it was, which was completely. There was a period in the two years following his return from the exchange posting when attempted to engage the problem through official channels one more time.
Not the wet hide technique specifically, but the underlying question it represented, whether the Marine Corps selection and training pipeline was producing the right human profile for the reconnaissance requirements it was being asked to meet. He wrote a think piece which is what the Marine Corps called internal analytical documents that were too discursive for formal reporting.
The think piece ran to 14 pages. It drew on his observations from the exchange program, the working group discussions and a reading of the available psychological literature on sustained stress response and operational effectiveness. The think piece was read by two officers who responded with substantive feedback and one officer who forwarded it to the inspector general’s office on the grounds that it contained implicit criticism of the Marine Corps selection standards.
The IG inquiry found no basis for action. The think piece was filed. Puit received a verbal communication from his immediate superior suggesting that further analytical work of this nature would be better directed through the established doctrinal review process. He understood this to mean that further analytical work of this nature would be better not pursued.
He did not pursue it further. The photograph helped. It did not help in the sense of resolving anything. It helped in the sense of maintaining the precision of his memory against the institutional pressure to reinterpret what he had seen in terms compatible with existing doctrine. Photographs are resistant to reinterpretation in a way that memories are not.
The four men emerging from the reed bed at dawn did not become more explicable with repetition. They remained each time looked at them exactly as inexplicable as they had been on the morning Hler had handed him the print. He had asked Hler why he was giving it to him. Hler said he thought it might be useful. Puit asked useful for what? Hler said useful for remembering what the question actually was as opposed to the question the institutional framework kept trying to substitute for it.
This was Puit would later reflect the most precise formulation of his entire professional difficulty that he had ever heard from another person. He had not been able to think of a response at the time. He had taken the photograph and put it in his kit bag and it had traveled home with him and it had sat on his desk for 3 years and it had performed exactly the function Hler had described.
The question the institutional framework kept trying to substitute was how do we improve our wet hide capability? The actual question, the one the photograph kept in focus was, “What kind of human being does this capability require? And what does it mean that we have decided not to produce them?” Pruit never answered the second question to his own satisfaction.
He is not certain it has an answer in the form of an answer. It may be the kind of question that functions primarily as a calibration device, a way of ensuring that other questions are being asked with appropriate precision. He retired in 2007, having asked it regularly for 4 years and received no institutional response that addressed it directly.
The last time he raised it was during a curriculum review meeting at Quantico in the spring of 2007, 3 months before his retirement date. A colonel was presenting a proposed update to the advanced surveillance techniques module. The update included new material on thermal signature management, updated equipment protocols, and a section on environmental conditioning.
The environmental conditioning section covered wet operations up to 12-hour duration. Puit waited until the presentation was complete and then asked whether the curriculum review had considered the SBS methodology data from the AL4 period. The colonel said the methodology had been reviewed and determined to be outside the scope of Marine Corps medical doctrine.
Puit said he understood. He did not raise the question again. He drove home from Quantico on his retirement day in late August, the photograph wrapped in craft paper on the back seat, and did not return to the base for professional reasons. He returned once two years later for the retirement ceremony of a colleague.
He stood in the same building where he had taught for 3 years and looked at the updated curriculum materials on the wall display and felt nothing in particular which seemed to him the appropriate response. The Rand researcher found him through a former colleague who had given his name as someone with direct observational experience of the British methodology.
The researcher was thorough and the questions were good. He had clearly read the available literature and had a sophisticated understanding of the doctrinal differences between American and British special operations training. He asked Puit about equipment, about selection ratios, about the specific operational metrics from AL4.
Puit answered all of these questions. He answered them carefully and at length. The researcher recorded the conversation. Near the end of the call, the researcher asked the summary question, the one designed to produce a quotable characterization for the introduction or conclusion of the study. Puit recognized the question for what it was and gave the answer he had been carrying for 12 years without having found a better context to deploy it in.
The researcher was quiet for a moment after he said it. Then he said he appreciated the clarity of the formulation. Then he said it was not suitable for an academic publication. Puit said he understood. He had known when he said it that it was not suitable for an academic publication. That was partly why he had said it in exactly those words.
The study was published 14 months later. Puit read it over two evenings. It was careful, thorough, and correct in everything it said. What it said did not include the mechanism. It described the gap and recommended technology as the solution to the gap, which was the same solution the Marine Corps had been implementing for 20 years while the gap persisted.
Puit read the executive summary a second time, then closed the document and did not reopen it. The SBS continues to conduct wet hide operations. The selection course at pool still includes the cold water phase. The pass rate remains below 8%. Not because no one knows how to raise it, but because those who run the course understand that raising it means changing what it filters for.
And what it filters for is the only reason four men in a reed bed can be worth 12 men with thermal imaging.
