A SEAL trainee died during Hell Week — his mom was just told why
Classmates said Kyle Mullen was one of the strongest students in BUD/S Class 352.
BY MATT WHITE | PUBLISHED MAY 27, 2023 2:35 PM EDT
Kyle Mullen died hours after finishing Hell Week at SEAL training. This week the Navy finally told his mother Regina why. Photo courtesy Emily Kelly, US Navy photo.
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Amonths-long investigation released this week paints a dark picture of the training conditions at the Navy’s grueling SEAL selection course — specifically, it’s Hell Week portion — in late 2021 and early 2022.
SEAL instructors, the report found, were “hunting the back of the pack,” picking off students they deemed too slow or weak for the Navy’s infamous Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S. And those instructors believed they were acting on their boss’s orders, or at least had tacit approval. Referencing a hill that would-be-SEAL students climb to finish the infamous crucible of Hell Week, a top SEAL commander told instructors: “Zero is an okay number on the berm.”
Kyle Mullen wasn’t at “the back of the pack” and he was determined to be “on the berm” at the end of Hell Week. At 6-foot-3, the former college football player was, classmates later told his mother, Regina, one of the strongest students in BUD/S Class 352 in January and February 2022.
But as he developed pneumonia in the middle of Hell Week, the safety investigation found, the school’s “no slack” training culture and lax supervision led to a long list of missed warning signs of Mullen’s increasingly dire condition, despite multiple medical checks. Hours after the class “secured” Hell Week on the morning of February 4, 2022, he was found unresponsive in the barracks by classmates and was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/kyle-mullen-seal-training-hell-week/
