This rigorous vacation is no day at the beach
By LOUIS HANSEN, The Virginian-Pilot
© September 15, 2006
Last updated: 7:01 AM

Standing outside a cabin in rural Chesapeake, Evert Viglundsson looked every bit the buff and chiseled Navy SEAL. Forest green make up, streaked with black smudges, coated his face. His camouflage uniform bulged over his ripped muscles, and a tough-looking M-4 was strapped to his chest. But he’s from Iceland. Iceland has no military.

So Viglundsson, 34, and a couple of his friends packed adventure gear and their adrenaline addictions and flew to Norfolk this week. For six days, they would be warriors. “Hoo-yah!” Viglundsson and his buddies shouted as they prepared for a night mission along the Northwest River. They learned the term from American movies.

They’re part of the high adventure of adventure tourism. Jump from planes, scuba-dive, patrol the swamps of southeastern Virginia with SEAL Training Adventures – cold water and pain included, all for $1,999.

Steve Erle, a Navy reservist and Maryland chiropractor, purchased SEAL Training Adventures from a retired local SEAL after completing the course last year. About a dozen men signed up for Erle’s first full special-ops event this week.   A few dozen other men and women will join them in a 24-hour SEAL adventure challenge beginning today.

Erle sees the possibility to expand the adventure tour business and promote Navy special operations. A few former SEALs were among the instructors at the six-day camp.  “We push ’em, push ’em, push ’em beyond their limits,” Erle said.  Those limits stretch from scuba diving in lake waters to sky diving from 14,000 feet above Suffolk farms.  The activities’ appeal reached two basic groups – young men looking to enter SEAL teams and older men looking for answers to existential questions.

Jay Parker, 55, runs a restaurant in Queens, N.Y. He’s paid off the mortgage on his suburban Long Island house and his children have moved out. About a week ago, Parker soaked in a hot tub in tony West Hampton and shared his vacation plans with a friend.   By the end of the night, about 100 people at the house party had called him crazy.  “It’s been a lot of years since I challenged myself,” said Parker, the only camper with a full shock of gray hair. “I think every so often you should test yourself.”  By Wednesday morning, Parker was grinding out push-ups and leg lifts with the rest of the class, albeit more slowly and with more breaks.   Between events, he briefly spoke with his wife.  “She’s pretty surprised I’m not dead,” Parker said.

Mike Gibson, 21, is earning college credit for a week of scuba diving, devouring ready-to-eat meal s and humping gear through the Tidewater swamps.  Gibson, a senior at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, grinned when the trainers started hosing down the campers with cold water. It was just as he imagined Hell Week at SEALs training.  “I wanted to do this since I was 14,” he said.  Gibson will write a 60-page thesis on special warfare and his one-week training. After graduation, he plans to attend Navy officer candidate school and apply for the SEAL teams.

Others came from across the country to run through woods armed with rubber guns, makeup and deet .   As dusk fell, Don Shipley, a retired senior chief who spent nearly all of his 24-year Navy career as a SEAL, gathered the men inside his rural cabin.  Shipley stood next to an easel and briefed the fidgeting platoon about their mission – take out a key piece of a nuclear weapons production plant along the Iran- Pakistan border.  Trek through the woods to a boat launch on the Northwest River. Mount an attack on a group of Arab pirates, played by 10 teenagers and 20-somethings. Steal their boats.   The Arab pirates milled about for three hours while the warriors plotted, scouted and plotted again. Arabic music played from a laptop.   A few minutes before midnight – the warriors’ deadline – the entire platoon of green-faced men charged down the main road toward the teenagers. “Bang-bang!” they shouted. “You’re dead!”  Shipley lit a firecracker and threw it into a wooden container. Boom!  Mission accomplished. Pirates dead. Some men shouted “Hoo-yah!”  Shipley threw a twist into the exercise. The platoon had been compromised – they would no longer bomb the factory. Instead, they would spend the night in the swamps and farmland trying to escape and evade the enemy.  Another unplanned twist: One of their black inflatable boats sprang a leak.   A dozen men would now have to crowd into one inflatable. Shipley and three others would fill the seats of a small aluminum fishing boat.  Shipley hooked a line to the bow of an inflatable boat . The huddled men sat on their paddles.  The fishing boat putt-putted into the distance, warriors quietly in tow.

· Reach Louis Hansen at (757) 446-2322 or louis.hansen@pilotonline.com.

Robert Traustason came from Iceland to take part in the six-day adventure tour. Here he and his fellow campers do leg lifts as part of a physical training session Wednesday morning.

Instructor Don Shipley, at top, helps campers Jeff Mackston, left, of New York and Philip Admire, who lives in the Dominican Republic, plot an attack.

Cameron Payne of Kentucky completes his para-training with his first jump in Suffolk.

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