Veteran Voices: Andy Haffele’s journey to becoming a Navy SEAL

Editor’s note: The Vail Veterans Program and the Vail Daily will highlight the service of an Eagle County veteran each month in Veteran Voices. Look for the column online and in print on the second Monday of each month.

There’s a twinkle in Andy Haffele’s eye as he recounts a smug moment of his travels down the long and winding road to his becoming a United States Navy SEAL.

“I had a lot of edges growing up,” said Haffele, a resident of Eagle along with his wife, Kristina, and their three boys. “I had a wild side and that’s OK because one of my favorite lines is from a SEAL recruiter who says, ‘We’re not looking for choir boys.'”

Rewinding to the beginning, Haffele is a product of Monroe, Wisconsin. He didn’t come from a military family, which is somewhat atypical, but once he set his sights on a goal, it usually came to fruition.

“I was 15 years old and on the track team,” Haffele said. “A senior told me that he was going to the Naval Academy to become a SEAL. I did a couple of months of research and decided that was what I wanted to do. I set my sights on that target and never looked back.”

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But it was football that Haffele credits for “saving my life,” while also being one of the biggest draws to the military life.

“It kept me on the straight and narrow,” Haffele said. “Ironically, my best friend’s dad was the coach and he instilled a lot of military lessons on that football field that definitely made boot camp easier.”

Haffele was part of an incoming class of around 1,100 that started basic training for admittance to the Naval Academy, knowing full well that there were only 16 SEAL spots available. Throughout the first year, that number got chipped down to about 900 candidates.

“I made a lot of friends,” Haffele said. “But I didn’t have that game-changing friendship that first year.  None of this was resonating with me and I was fed up.”

To further complicate things, the Navy throws a huge Cinderella-type ball at the beginning of junior year to celebrate the candidates’ pending commitment. 

“I needed a date to the ball and my buddy voluntarily coughed up his sister for my date,” Haffele said. “Things came together and we ended up going to Ring Dance together and from there, we just never looked back. Kristina has been with me ever since.”

Of the candidates that remained, 55 of them were medically qualified, had all the boxes checked … and had marked SEALs as their first choice.

In January, the academy has Service Selection Night. Everyone puts in their Dream Sheet, which outlines each candidate’s top three. Depending how that pans out determines where you go. Haffele made the cut. He would move on to SEAL training.

The joke among the trainees was that the hardest part of Hell Week was surviving the medical checks.

“As fate would have it, I popped up on their radar because my oxygen levels weren’t great,” Haffele said.  “I had an infection and my lungs were definitely messed up.”

“I got a medical rollback, which meant that I was going to have a two-to-three month reset of my training, basically starting all over again,” Haffele said. “It’s been proven that if you get rolled back, you have an even greater chance of not making it through the program. Ultimately, it was God’s plan to give me the skills to continue to perservere through what I would eventually have to deal with.”

Resigned to the extended training program, Haffele finally received his SEAL trident pin and he and Kristina were married. 

“We had been in Hawaii for SEAL training when we were doing a live fire training drill,” Haffele said. “It’s arguably one of the more dangerous things we do. You’re shooting and moving in a chaotic fashion and I was accidentally shot in the chest by one of my teammates. I remember waking up with no use of my right arm.”

“When the doctor opened up my chest, he realized that the blast had actually blasted out the upper right cavity of my right chest. Subsequently, I went through 50 units of blood and almost died three times.

“When the doctor came out to talk to Kristina, he told her that if they had friends or family that wanted to see her husband alive, they needed to be on the next plane to Hawaii. The doctor said he’d done what he could but if the bleeding did not stop on its own, there was nothing more they could do.”

About the two-week point, the doctors felt like Haffele was going to make it.

“Being an officer in the SEAL teams is an incredible privilege,” Haffele said. “You work with some of the most phenomenal human beings on the planet. They come with a lot of baggage, like we all do, but those guys you have the privilege to lead, to be in charge of, are very, very special.”

John Dakin is a 2022 inductee to the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame.