Never Give Up: 6 BUD/S Classes to Be a Navy SEAL. Johnny Collins
- Paul Pantani
- Mar 23, 2025
- 16 min read
Updated: Dec 20, 2025
Life in the Teams as a K9 Handler and Transition Struggles
He didn’t expect this part of the job.
He expected operations Orders. A clear enemy. Instead, he stood inside a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, responsible for keeping men alive who had been captured by the very forces he once hoped to join. Cameras were always on. Every action was documented. Every mistake carried weight far beyond the fence line.
That wasn’t the plan.
Johnny Collins grew up in rural Maryland, far from military bases and beaches, shaped by structure, discipline, and a long family history of service. From early on, he fixated on one idea. Becoming a Navy SEAL. Not as a vague ambition, but as a fixed destination. Everything else was noise.
The path there wasn’t clean. Family instability. Drift. Missed steps. Hard resets. When he finally committed, he committed fully, entering the Navy in 2006 with a SEAL contract and a narrow margin for error.
That margin disappeared quickly.
What followed wasn’t the story he expected to tell. Training setbacks. Physical injury. A forced exit from the pipeline. Then a long detour into a role few people associate with elite military ambition.
You can listen to Episode 188 while you continue to read by clicking below.
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From Rural Maryland to the Call to Serve in the Military
Johnny Collins grew up in Sykesville, Maryland, about forty minutes outside Baltimore. It was farm country. Spread out. Quiet. If you wanted to go anywhere, you needed a car. There were no sidewalks leading to anything that mattered. You figured out how to occupy your own time or you didn’t.
This was before social media. Before constant internet. There were no video games filling the gaps. Boredom didn’t come with a screen. It came with space. Johnny learned to deal with that early. He used his imagination. He stayed active. He competed.
He was the oldest of three. A younger brother. A younger sister. Being first meant expectations arrived before explanation. You were supposed to set the tone even if no one told you how.
Sports gave that structure somewhere to land. Wrestling taught him what it felt like to lose in front of people. He lost often. At the time, it just felt frustrating. Later, he’d recognize how much mindset mattered when preparation and effort were close but outcomes weren’t. Football gave him contact and aggression. Lacrosse became his favorite. Faster. Less scripted. More instinctive. It fit him.
At home, service wasn’t an idea. It was normal.
His father served with the Maryland State Police. Twenty five years as a state trooper. Twenty years on SWAT. That kind of work shaped the household. Rules were clear. Accountability was expected. You didn’t need speeches about discipline when you watched someone live it every day.
On his father’s side, service ran deeper. His grandfather had been a Marine. No stories about glory. No family mythology. Just examples that stayed quiet but visible.
From early on, Johnny fixated on one thing. Becoming a Navy SEAL.
Not because he understood the job. He didn’t. Not because he could explain the mission. He couldn’t. It started simpler than that. The name stuck. The idea stuck. It represented difficulty and purpose in a way nothing else around him did. As he learned more, the interest didn’t fade. It narrowed.
That focus sat there even as other things unraveled.
His parents divorced while he was still in high school. Structure loosened. Supervision fractured. The house changed, then his life did. He bounced between multiple high schools. Lived with friends for stretches. Freedom arrived before direction did.
He admits he used it.
More room meant more partying. Less accountability. Less urgency. His relationship with his parents deteriorated during that period. Not because of one event. Because of drift. Expectations didn’t disappear. They just stopped landing.
He barely graduated high school. Tried one semester of college and walked away from it. Not out of protest. Out of disinterest. He worked construction jobs. Picked up shifts where he could. Spent time at a Hollywood Video store. Enough income to keep moving. No real plan.
The SEAL idea never left. It just went quiet.
What brought it back wasn’t dramatic. It happened on a work shift. A coworker put in his notice and said he’d enlisted in the Army. Johnny remembers judging it for a moment, then catching himself. That guy was leaving to serve. Johnny was shelving movies.
That contrast stayed with him.
It wasn’t about the Army versus the Navy. It was about momentum. Someone else was moving forward. He wasn’t. That realization didn’t come with inspiration. It came with discomfort.
He started asking himself what he was actually doing.
If he was going to commit, he wasn’t going to hedge it. He didn’t want a safer path. He didn’t want options. The only thing that made sense was the one goal that had been sitting in his head since he was a kid.
Navy SEAL.
Not because it was realistic. Because it demanded something from him that everything else had avoided. Commitment. Preparation. Consequences.
That decision didn’t clean up his life overnight. It narrowed it. Once the goal came back into focus, everything else started to look temporary. Jobs were placeholders. Habits were negotiable. Time felt more expensive.
He didn’t romanticize the process. He didn’t believe it would be easy. He just believed it was necessary.
That belief mattered because it came before readiness. Before credentials. Before proof. It came at a point when his life had very little structure left to lean on.
What followed wasn’t a smooth transition from drift to discipline. It was uneven. There were missteps. There were failures. But the direction stopped changing.
First Attempt at Navy SEAL training, BUD/S failure, and Guantanamo Bay
Johnny didn’t ease into the Navy. He walked straight into a recruiter’s office and asked for a SEAL contract. No preface. No backup plan. The recruiter didn’t pitch him. He tested him.
Pushups were fine. Pullups were fine. Swimming wasn’t. Running wasn’t great either. It wasn’t enough to stop the process, but it exposed the first narrow margin. He still moved forward.
The ASVAB stopped him.
He failed it the first time. Not by a hair. Enough that it mattered. The contract didn’t disappear, but it wobbled. He was told to come back. He didn’t argue. He studied for five to six months. Retook it. Passed. That result kept the door open.
The PST came next. He failed that too. The swim crushed him. By the time he got to the run, there was nothing left. He didn’t quit. He identified the weakness. Learned the combat sidestroke. Trained until it held. Passed the next time.
By October 2006, he entered the Navy.
Boot camp was not what he expected. It was slow. Procedural. Predictable. He describes it as easy and monotonous. The physical work wasn’t demanding enough for him, so he trained on his own at night. Dive motivator PT gave him something closer to what he wanted, but most of the work happened outside the schedule.
He graduated at the end of 2006 and expected momentum to carry him straight into training.
It didn’t.
Orders stalled. One week turned into another. Then another. He waited one to two months at Great Lakes, stuck in a holding pattern with limited training access and no control over the timeline. When he finally classed up in February 2007, the relief didn’t last long.
BUD/S stripped things down fast.
He completed indoctrination. Entered first phase. Cold, sand, pressure, repetition. Then the swims began to matter. His ocean times weren’t there. Before Hell Week even arrived, he stood in front of a board. Instructors told him exactly where he fell short.
He was rolled.
At the time, candidates were allowed one performance roll and one medical roll. He had just used the first one without ever touching Hell Week. On paper, it looked procedural. In reality, the margin narrowed hard.
He classed up with the next group. Made it into Hell Week. Finished it. That should’ve stabilized things.
It didn’t.
Boat carries had been grinding him down. By the end of first phase, his neck was done. Cartilage damage. Bone on bone. He couldn’t turn his head. X rays confirmed it. He was medically rolled into another class.
That second roll bought time, not comfort. The pain stayed. He trained through it because that was the expectation and because stopping didn’t feel like an option. When he entered second phase, he believed the worst was behind him.
Second phase took him back to the pool.
Pool competency didn’t allow for momentum. It was precise. Step driven. Miss a sequence and you failed. He failed twice on Friday. He went into the weekend knowing he had two attempts left and no rolls remaining.
The training space was there. Tanks. Belts. Time. He didn’t use it the way he should’ve. He sat with the failure. Thought about it. Let it expand. Monday came. He failed again.
That was the end.
There was no argument. No spectacle. He had exhausted the system. Johnny was dropped from BUD/S on August 31, 2007.
After that, everything blurred. He didn’t leave the Navy. He still owed time. But the identity he’d been building for years collapsed faster than the paperwork moved. He describes that period as directionless. Quiet. Unsteady.
The Navy didn’t ask what he wanted next. He became needs of the Navy.
He was assigned to Guantanamo Bay. He arrived in January 2008. The billet was supposed to be one year. It stretched to nineteen months.
Before Guantanamo, there was staging and training. Mississippi. Washington state. Riot gear. Camp procedures. Control. Containment. None of it resembled the role he’d trained for, but it moved him forward.
Guantanamo was not downtime.
He worked in detainee camps holding men captured by special operations forces. His job wasn’t interrogation or punishment. It was to keep them alive. Fed. Stable. Accounted for. Prayer calls couldn’t be disrupted. Every action was recorded. Cameras were constant. Extractions were filmed and sent up the chain.
This was a high visibility environment. Political oversight was always present. Mistakes didn’t stay local.
He was assigned to the worst camps and the worst pods. Hunger strikes were common. Detainees refused to leave their cells. That meant forced extractions. Shield teams. Riot gear. Chairs. Tubes. The work was physical and repetitive. There was no sense of progress. Just cycles.
The chain of command wasn’t neutral. Former SEAL candidates were labeled. “BUD/S duds.” Leadership slowed paperwork. Blocked movement. Required him to strike a rate before he could even apply to return to training. The options were limited. Aviation Ordnance or Gunner’s Mate. He chose Gunner’s Mate to preserve mobility.
Even then, resistance continued.
Minor issues escalated. Scrutiny increased. He felt targeted. Leadership wanted slips. He had to operate perfectly in an environment designed to provoke mistakes. There was no advocate pushing his packet. Every step required favors and backchannels.
The detainees weren’t the hardest part. They were predictable. The system wasn’t.
He trained whenever he could. Ran. Swam. Lifted. He stayed locked onto the idea that this detour was temporary. Over time, he learned something harder. Effort alone didn’t move institutions.
WATCH
Getting back to BUD/S, Seal TEAM 7, and K9 Handler
Johnny did get another shot.
It didn’t come quickly, and it didn’t come cleanly, but eventually the door opened again. He returned to the pipeline and finished what he had started. This time, there were no rolls left to burn and no illusions about margins. He graduated BUD/S and moved forward into SEAL Qualification Training.
SQT was different.
The focus shifted away from endurance for endurance’s sake. It wasn’t about seeing who could take the most pain. It was about competence. Teamwork. Doing the job the right way. Johnny describes it as professionally validating. For the first time, performance was measured by contribution, not survival.
That distinction mattered.
When he earned his Trident, it wasn’t relief. It was grounding. He had finished something that had collapsed once already. There was no celebration built into it. Just the quiet understanding that the real work was about to start.
He was assigned to SEAL Team 7.
The Team didn’t care about his path to get there. No one asked about past failures. No one gave credit for persistence. Early time at the Team was humbling. The reality came with some real words,
"I checked into my team, it was like, nobody gave a shit. Nobody asked, I never
talked about it. It was like, that's BUD/S man. Like, nobody cares about BUD/S.
Like you're in the, you're in the big leagues now, you're in the SEAL teams. Like
we talk about SEAL team shit."
There was constant learning. Very little tolerance for ego. Credibility wasn’t inherited from training. It was earned daily through work ethic and reliability.
Deployment followed.
Operational life didn’t resemble training scenarios. There was a lot of waiting. Long stretches of preparation and planning punctuated by moments where responsibility sharpened fast. He describes the tempo as uneven but demanding. Mistakes carried consequences that training never could. That reality accelerated maturity in ways he hadn’t expected.
Senior teammates mattered. Mentorship wasn’t formal, but it was unmistakable. You learned who to watch. Who stayed calm. Who didn’t cut corners. Trust inside a platoon built slowly and disappeared quickly when someone made poor decisions or let attitude get ahead of the mission.
As his comfort level grew, so did his willingness to operate under uncertainty. He became more deliberate. More detail focused. Less reactive. That wasn’t a personality change. It was an adaptation to an environment that punished carelessness.
As his SEAL career progressed, he wanted more responsibility, not less.
He wanted to wear multiple hats. Sniper. Breacher. K9 handler. These weren’t accidents or convenience assignments. He sought them out. He says plainly that timing, opportunity, luck, and working hard all played a role. There was no clean selection narrative. Just be ready when chances appear.
Becoming a K9 handler changed his daily reality.
Dogs arrived green, usually from strong bloodlines. They weren’t interchangeable. They had to be trained up to the Team’s standard. If they met performance requirements, they stayed. If they didn’t, they were eventually transferred to police departments. Johnny understood the institutional framing. Dogs were serialized equipment, like weapons. But he also understood the limits of that comparison.
You could replace a rifle. You couldn’t shortcut a bond.
He preferred bringing his dog home rather than leaving it in a kennel. Feeding. Conditioning. Hydration. Care. All of it mattered. Stronger bonding improved performance. Whether a dog went home or stayed in the kennel depended on leadership and circumstance, but Johnny believed responsibility didn’t end at the workday.
He trained with his dog for about a year before deploying. They deployed together for roughly seven months. After returning, he became a trainer at the dog team. Later, he handed his dog off to another handler so it could continue operating.
That dog was killed on a subsequent deployment.
Not long after, Johnny was slated to deploy again. He traveled to Iraq intending to serve as a dog handler with another dog from the kennel. Leadership in Coronado had approved it. The plan was for him to deploy for the final three months, then rejoin the Team.
That plan ended on arrival.
Leadership took custody of the dog and sent him back. No discussion. No adjustment. The approval was reversed in place. The reasoning didn’t align with how Johnny understood safety or effectiveness.
He raised concerns.
He questioned the practice of transferring a dog to a handler who hadn’t trained with it. Not philosophically. Practically. To assess it, he conducted an improvised evaluation. He placed low, medium, and high explosive odor sources. The dog alerted on all three. The handler didn’t recognize any of them.
Johnny documented it.
He refused to turn the dog over without reporting what he observed. He sent the results back up the chain. He describes the situation as tense. The report didn’t go over well. The issue wasn’t the data. It was that he forced it into the open.
That moment mattered.
It wasn’t the only factor, but it was one of several that pushed him toward a decision he had been circling for a while. The physical toll was accumulating. Not from one injury, but from years of repeated cycles. Deployments. Training. Preparation during downtime. The emotional strain of time away from family and anything resembling civilian life added up.
The operational identity of being a SEAL had become dominant. It shaped how he viewed himself. It also demanded constant readiness, even when there was no deployment on the calendar. Humor and dark comedy helped. Accountability to teammates kept things sharp. But over time, he became more aware of how cumulative stress affected decisions and relationships.
Leadership inside the Teams was often informal. You recognized it immediately through competence and calmness. He also watched peers struggle when ego or entitlement conflicted with team expectations.
He started thinking about life after the military earlier than most. Not in a structured way. There was no formal transition planning. Just awareness. Every SEAL career ends. Performance doesn’t change that.
He felt the internal tension clearly. Loving the work. Recognizing the cost. Slowly separating identity from uniform without knowing what would replace it. Watching teammates leave highlighted how differently people handled that shift.
Eventually, leaving active service stopped feeling optional.
Transition, Meaning Reassignment, and Redwatch Firearms Training
Johnny didn’t leave the Teams with a finished blueprint for what came next.
What he had was awareness. A sense that staying any longer wasn’t going in the right direction. That same instinct had shown up earlier in his life, and it showed up again as he stepped away from active service. He didn’t frame it as certainty. He framed it as timing.
The first phase after leaving the Navy felt thin.
Structure disappeared fast. The pace slowed. Feedback became indirect. In uniform, standards were visible and enforced. In civilian life, expectations varied depending on who you were dealing with. He noticed that immediately. Discipline and urgency didn’t carry the same automatic weight.
He took work where it made sense.
One opportunity came through a friend who was still active duty. A networker. Someone who paid attention and passed information along. Johnny had kept his clearance. He had qualifications. He checked the boxes. That made the entry easier. The job involved firearms instruction. Teaching people how to shoot. Being on the range every day. It fit his background and kept him sharp.
He stayed in that role for four and a half years.
It was a good gig while it lasted. He enjoyed it. But he paid attention to direction. In June of 2024, he left the job. Two months later, the entire contract disappeared. That timing wasn’t lost on him. He saw the same pattern he’d seen before. Staying too long in something that was shifting underneath you carried its own cost.
After that, he didn’t rush.
The job he holds now came from another networked connection, not a cold application. He works for the District Council of Iron Workers and the California Iron Worker Employers Council. His role is Safety Director.
It wasn’t a plug and play transition.
For six months, he shadowed his predecessor. Job sites. Inspections. Policies. Procedures. He learned what to look for by watching. They went line by line through the requirements. What is needed to be present. What OSHA expected. What compliance actually looked like when it was done right.
During that period, he earned his OSHA 30 certification. He attended a superintendent’s course. He went through additional schools tied to the role. He didn’t treat the learning phase as something to rush through. He treated it like training.
For those six months, everything looked clean.
No accidents. No issues. Job after job, everything met the standard. He didn’t have many questions because nothing was wrong yet. He’s direct about that. You don’t always know what to ask until the problem shows up.
His predecessor retired on December 31, 2024. Johnny took over fully on January 1, 2025.
The first week, there were two accidents.
There had been zero during the entire shadowing period. Since taking over, he’s averaged roughly one accident a week. That shift forced the learning curve to steepen fast. Now the questions mattered. Who to call. How to investigate. How to correct without overreacting. How to enforce standards in an environment where authority isn’t inherited.
Iron workers weren’t new to hard work or risk. He respected that immediately. Long days. Physical labor. Heights. Consequences. He jokes that it felt like SEALs without the ocean. Different tools. Same seriousness. He understood the culture faster than he expected.
What surprised him was how much leadership still depended on approach.
He had to ask questions openly. He had to be willing to look inexperienced in a new industry. That wasn’t comfortable at first. Earlier in his career, he avoided asking questions if he thought they’d make him look unprepared. That habit didn’t serve him anymore. In this role, not asking questions carried real consequences.
The work today is direct. Site visits. Policy review. Accident response. Prevention. He’s accountable for standards in environments where mistakes don’t always show up immediately, but when they do, they’re physical.
Outside of work, he stayed connected to the community.
He’s been involved with SEAL Future Foundation for several years. Volunteering at shooting events. Teaching civilians how to shoot. Helping people prepare. Staying sharp without needing to be in the fight himself. He values that role. He’s clear about it. He’s not in that arena anymore, but he can help others get ready for it.
Those events also became a place of reconnection. Guys he hadn’t seen in years showing up. Conversations are picking up where they left off. Networking without forcing it. Sometimes it turned into mentorship. A call for advice. Someone’s son is thinking about the Teams. Someone’s brother is struggling through training. He offers what he can and lets the outcome be theirs.
Hunting became another outlet.
It wasn’t something he grew up doing. He didn’t jump into it blindly. His boss hunted and brought him along. Dove. Duck. He learned the process the same way he learned everything else. Through guidance and repetition. In January, he went to Texas on a SEAL Future Foundation deer hunt and took his first buck.
He frames it in familiar terms. His job is now the collateral duty. Training before deployment. The deployments are different. Hunts. Trips. Skill development. He’s preparing to get his first bow.
It’s not about replacing what he did before. It’s about redirecting the same mindset.
In our conversation, Johnny talks about a desire to start his own training company. He's since done that and now owns Redwatch Firearms training. A premier training group founded and operated by four battle-tested professionals: four former Navy SEALs
His relationships with his parents have stabilized. Improved. He visited them recently. His mom still lives in Maryland. His dad is in Florida. Work travel made those visits possible. A safety convention took him to Florida, where he spent time with his father. Then he went up to Maryland to see his mother. Those connections matter more now than they did when he was younger.
He’s realistic about where he is.
This phase isn’t about proving capability. It’s about applying lessons. Asking questions sooner. Staying connected to multiple communities instead of anchoring everything to one identity. He talks openly about watching other guys struggle when they leave because being a SEAL was all they’d ever known.
He doesn’t want that to be his story.
He believes transition doesn’t come to you. You move toward it. You put yourself in situations where you’re uncomfortable again. Willing to look inexperienced. Willing to ask.
Today, his life is quieter. More balanced. Still structured, just differently. The standards remain. The urgency is controlled. The confidence is earned, not performed.
Closing
Johnny Collins’ story doesn’t resolve with a title, a role, or a single defining moment. It resolves through continuity.
What carries through every phase of his life isn’t elite selection, failure, or redemption. It’s decision making. Showing up when the plan breaks. Taking responsibility when authority isn’t automatic. Asking questions before mistakes compound. Letting go of identities that no longer fit without discarding the lessons they built.
His path moved from rural Maryland to the Teams, through collapse, recovery, responsibility, and recalibration. None of it followed a clean arc. None of it offered guarantees. What remained consistent was effort applied honestly and adjusted when reality demanded it.
If you’re reading this while thinking about your own transition, the takeaway isn’t to abandon who you were. It’s to carry forward what actually works. Discipline. Awareness. Accountability. Then decide, deliberately, where those traits belong next.
The mission changes. The standard doesn’t.
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