THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL NUMBERS yet on how many recruits the SEAL Athlete effort has brought in or how many of those have graduated BUD/S, but, anecdotally, things seem off to a good start. In February, Class 264 arrived on Coronado for Indoc—the three-week BUD/S preparatory phase that functions as a preseason workup—with 250 men. So many recruits are typically lost during Indoc—due to injuries, poor performances, and second thoughts—that they can't even fill all 190 available slots at BUD/S. Class 264 performed so well, there were more than 190 men left at the end of Indoc, meaning some were turned over to the next class even though they had passed. It was the first full BUD/S class in more than 20 years. "I would love to have this become a regular thing," Herbert says. "Get more guys than I can class up, and let them fight it out to get those limited seats."

Graduation rates have also jumped—by 23 percent, the most significant increase in more than two decades. By this past April, the SEALs had already met their recruiting quota for the year. "We'll always see some fluctuations," Smith says. "But we hope the trend continues, because 2011 is tomorrow."

Of course, if Smith's task is to find men who can make it through training, the job of BUD/S is to test the limits. While recruits no doubt emerge fitter, they don't really begin to learn the skills necessary for the job until they move on to SEAL Qualification Training. Until then, their instructors will run them through a highly orchestrated physical and mental wringer. "We're trying to stress them out to the point that they're freaking out," an instructor—who had recently recovered from being shot in the hip in Iraq—explained during a BUD/S session last spring. "Then we watch what they do."

By the third morning of BUD/S, 17 of the original 141 men from Class 265 had already quit. The remaining 124 were running across wet sand in teams of six or seven, each team carrying a 12-foot-long, 300-pound inflatable rubber boat on their heads. (Many of them will leave with temporary bald spots as a result.) Each man's camouflage fatigues, orange life jacket, and combat boots were soaking wet and flecked with sand. Their hats were secured to their shirts so they wouldn't lose them when they paddled their boats 100 yards out and flipped them over—a Sisyphean task known as "dumping boat"—before getting back in and paddling to shore. It looked like a particularly coordinated bout of frat-house hazing.

It wasn't yet 9 a.m. and they'd already done a timed run through an obstacle course, several hundred push-ups and sit-ups, and numerous sprints and "bear crawls"—gorilla-like, four-points-of-contact shuffles up and over a 20-foot-high sand berm. They had a 1.5-mile ocean swim to look forward to in the afternoon. And then there was the shouting.

"You dummies! Is that how you carry a boat?"

"You better be sprinting!"

Every BUD/S class is full of surprises. Guys who run five-minute miles might lack the strength to keep up on the obstacle course, and all-American swimmers often run like beached sea lions once they hit the sand.

"It's nearly impossible to predict for that x-variable that makes people successful here," Smith told me. "Ultimately, it's probably a manifestation of a lot of other attributes we can't properly measure."

During the last half-hour of day three, five more members of Class 265 trudged wet and dejected from the beach to a small brass ship's bell in a courtyard at the BUD/S compound, each ringing it three times—the signal that he had given up on trying to become a SEAL. "It doesn't matter how athletic you are," an instructor told me. "BUD/S is still going to kick you square in the nuts."