Project Person // On failure

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My husband told me of his greatest failure just moments after it happened, returning to the passenger seat of our car in the parking lot of the Naval Special Warfare Command.

There, I could barely see him; the sun had not yet risen on that day that had already changed our lives. 

After months of brutal training and an entire childhood of wistful dreaming, David dropped out of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training, affectionately called BUD/S. 

At 4:45 that morning, he rang the quitter’s bell and placed his helmet—the one stenciled with his last name and Class 276—in the line of quitter’s helmets. His dream of being a Navy SEAL was then officially over, yet his six-year enlistment in the Navy still stood, with barely a dent. We awaited his new orders, ready to take whatever job and post we were assigned. 

I drove him to a diner where we ate pancakes and cried. 

BUD/S is known as the toughest military training in the world, with an attrition rate north of 80%—and that’s for those who even make it to training. We shouldn’t have been so surprised by where we found ourselves, yet when we left our jobs and family back in Georgia, we never considered we would have been on that side of the statistic.

We had done our research. A friend-of-a-friend Navy SEAL Commander gave us a tour of the base. A retired SEAL prepared David for the Physical Screening Test. 

David had trained—a lot—and he was excelling. 

But we were in our early twenties, and we hadn’t yet learned the extent to which my husband was a homebody. 

Boot camp quickly showed us this, and we processed the jarring self-discovery in the letters we wrote during those months. Memories came flooding back to him then, from summer camp as a kid to freshman year as a college student. He craved the security and routine of home—and he spiraled without them. 

Then, joining a community of SEAL families really shed light on this aspect of my husband’s wiring. A few wives took me in as soon as we arrived on Coronado Island, and we found ourselves at cookouts with real-life Navy SEALs before David ever even started BUD/S. They were as impressive as the movies made them seem, but now we saw they had real marriages, children, and homes—and they were gone from them, a lot. 

David wondered if he could handle this life, if he even wanted it at all. And when he was wet and cold and an officer was yelling at him through a megaphone to do it again, faster… he began to ask himself, “What for?” 

So when he called me one evening while I was with the SEAL wives and told me he was ready to drop from the training the next day, my new friends laughed. “They all say that!” they told me. 

When I joined David at our little apartment later that evening though, I knew he meant it. 

He called his dad and talked it through. He ate and he slept, so we couldn’t blame it on the exhaustion. And at four the next morning, he asked me to drive him to base. 

And it was there I learned that few things are sadder than a man who has cut the anchor line and is watching his dream sink to the unreachable depths of the ocean floor. 

Soon enough, David was given his next assignment: language school in Monterey, California. 

We drove our dog and UHaul up the California coast and, upon pulling into the idyllic coastal town, decided there was no better place on earth to heal. There, we found a group of people in our same boat: men who joined the Navy to become SEALs and now found themselves in training for a desk job. 

These men were strong enough to make it to BUD/S, smart enough to make it to the Defensive Language Institute, and humbled by the path that brought them from one to the other. I decided they were the best men on Earth. 

They felt differently, referring to themselves as “the BUD/S Duds”. 

That year in Monterey was healing and humbling for David, as were the following five behind a desk.

During this enlistment, I started a business that gained quick traction. I had a team, exponential growth, and an interview on The TODAY Show. But I also had debt, anxiety, and three small children. In the hard moments, I begin to ask myself, “What for?” 

I said yes to each opportunity that came my way, growing the business as quickly as I could. But one day my 5-year-old handed me a drawing of me crying, with a big red X drawn on top.

I knew this wasn’t the pace or life I wanted, but I was terrified of failure, so I wrapped the anchor line around my wrists and felt as though I would be pulled under. 

One day, I found myself at a gathering of entrepreneurs where one said he had exited three businesses, one successfully. “But what about the other two?!” I wondered. 

I didn’t want to idolize quitting. But I didn’t want to ignore it, redirect, or rebrand. 

I realized that failure was rarely as honest and clear as a quitter’s bell and a line of helmets, so I returned home and wrote myself a resignation letter, printing it out and putting it on my desk. 

(This is the complicated paradox of entrepreneurship—you have the autonomy you always craved, but who picks up the pieces when your own arms give way?) 

I finally let go. By some miracle, I sold my business, and I could spin it all into a shiny story. I could even say I’d exited, successfully. 

But what I wanted more than a headline was to heal. 

David let his failure shine on all parts of him. In fact, it’s like he’s luminous now—glowing from the inside with that deep peace of self-awareness and freedom that comes from having lived through something hard. He didn’t shy away from his story or from all that he learned, and he gave himself thoughtfully and freely to our family, to his work, and even to a second enlistment in a job that better fit his personality. 

Somewhere in there, a high-school kid named Brian reached out and said he wanted to be a Navy SEAL. He asked David to train him, and David wondered what he could offer but his own experience. He nervously agreed to meet with Brian, and they began to text and train often. David asked him hard questions, giving him scenarios to consider. 

“Do you think he can make it?” I asked.

“I think he can,” David said. “But will he? You never know.” 

He did. 

We were invited to return to Coronado Island for the pinning ceremony when Brian graduated from BUD/S. It had been fifteen years since we last sat in that parking lot, and I couldn’t help but think of the men in dress whites and tridents we would encounter, of all the generous SEALs who told us how to make it. 

And I am so grateful for all they taught us. 

But then I thought of David and Brian, now cemented on opposite sides of the statistic, and I wondered: 

What would we have learned if we had spoken to a BUD/S Dud? 

As a teenager, David dreamed about who he would become—the elite, the tip-of-the-spear, the Navy SEAL from his childhood movies. 

As a man, he now knows it’s all about who he’s becoming—a person of character, humility, and love, no matter the title. 

But those posters don’t sell. 

Success is an inspiration, a beacon, a megaphone in the arms of an instructor yelling from a truck to run faster, faster, faster. 

But failure—when stewarded well—can be an artist, a coach, a kind father gently disciplining. 

And that’s not so bad. 

It makes me wonder: what if we didn’t have to rebrand failing? What if we owned that part of our story? And what if we attempted such bold, ludicrous ventures that of course, by nature and probability, we’d have to fail a few times?

I think we’d have a lot more Navy SEALs in this world. 

And I think we’d have a lot more BUD/S Duds, too—the best men on Earth. 

-Callie

I pulled a few blurry images from an old blogspot blog I found in the depths of the internet:

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Next time, I’m sharing my 15th Project Person profile, one of my favorite yet. It’s a WILD and moving story I talk about all the time and am grateful to now have written in one place. Stay tuned!