I'm Ready for Law SchoolI started hallucinating early Thursday morning. My team and I were halfway done with what our instructors called "The Long Paddle" and I could feel my sanity slowly slipping away. A combination of severe sleep deprivation and extreme exercise can do this to you. I hadn't slept more than three hours since "Hellweek" began Sunday afternoon. As I looked around, I contemplated the extent of my delirium. I was reasonably certain that the Statue of Liberty didn't belong in San Diego, and I doubted that the tigers I saw running along the riverbank were real. My ears picked up the sound of our boat's leader arguing heatedly with Jenkins, but Jenkins had left the team two weeks ago. Looking around, I felt reassured by seeing the confused expressions on my teammates' faces. Even though I was stuck in a tiny dinghy with six potential crazies, at least I knew I wasn't the only one affected by the exercise. Hell week. I had experienced some incarnation of it during every year of my life, dating back to my peewee football days. But no previous “hell” could compare to the punishment the US Navy inflicts during Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training (BUD/S). Hell Week marks the sixth week of BUD/S and is a six-day celebration of misery designed to weed out weak candidates. Only the strong can survive. This year's week of torment was accentuated by an untimely cold snap; more than two-thirds of our original class had already dropped out. Running across soft sandy beaches wearing combat boots, wearing a mask full of salt water while lugging two steel tanks on your back, being soaking wet and covered in sand… all of this is enough to make most people question people of their desire to finish the program. But it was the cold that claimed the greatest number of victims. We shivered through the night and into the morning, as the cold air seeped into our bones. Visions of hot meals and warm beds haunted us; we knew that ending the suffering and the cold was as easy as quitting the program. And quitting was really very oriental. Simply stand in front of your classmates and ring a silver ship's bell three times...