I'm Ready for Law SchoolI started having hallucinations early Thursday morning. My team and I were halfway through what our instructors called “the long paddle,” and I felt my sanity slowly evaporating. A combination of severe sleep deprivation and extreme exercise can have this effect. I hadn't slept more than three hours since Hellweek started Sunday afternoon. Looking around me, I contemplated the extent of my delirium. I was reasonably certain that the Statue of Liberty had no place in San Diego, and I doubted that the tigers I could see running along the banks of the river were real. My ears picked up the sound of our boat's leader having a heated argument with Jenkins, but Jenkins had left the team two weeks ago. Looking around, I felt reassured seeing the confused expressions on my teammates' faces. Even though I was stuck in a small inflatable boat with six potential lunatics, I at least knew I wasn't the only one affected by the exercise. Hell week. I had experienced some incarnation of it in every year of my life, since peewee football. But no previous “hell” could compare to the punishments meted out by the U.S. Navy during Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training. Hell Week marks the sixth week of BUD/S and is a six-day celebration of misery intended to weed out weak candidates. Only the strongest can survive there. 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 on sandy beaches while wearing combat boots, donning a mask filled with salt water while lugging two steel scuba tanks on your back, getting soaked and covered in sand... all of this is enough to incite most people question their desire to complete the adventure. program. But it was the cold that caused the most victims. We shivered all night and well into the morning, the chill of the air seeping into our bones. Visions of hot meals and warm beds haunted us; we knew that ending the pain and the cold was as simple as abandoning the program. And stopping was so far east. Simply stand in front of your classmates and ring a silver ship's bell three times....