The headline that brought me to a Navy seal reunion in Coronado is simple and startling. "seal training caused murder, lawsuit says."

The story was published in the Virginian-Pilot, a daily paper out of Norfolk, Virginia. But the two trainee Seals convicted of the crime in question, Dustin Turner and Billy Joe Brown, now serving life sentences in Virginia, received most of their seal training in Coronado. Al and Delores Evans of Atlanta, Georgia, filed the suit against the U.S. government and four co-defendants. Filing date was June 5, exactly two years after their 21-year-old daughter Jennifer was abducted, raped, and murdered by the trainee Seals in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The suit alleges that "but for the training imposed by the defendant U.S.A. upon the defendants Turner and Brown, [the two] would not have raped and/or murdered" their daughter.

Does the seal's intensive bud/s (Basic Underwater Demolition and seal training) course break down citizens and rebuild them as killers? The Navy insists it must "refrain from discussion of ongoing litigation." In its place, who better to ask than seals themselves? And what better place to find them than the annual seal graduation and reunion weekend in Coronado?

The place to be, it turns out, is Bay Books. seal books are hot. Thirty-three are in print, and six seal authors are signing today. But the line snaking out from the bookshop along the sidewalk of Coronado's Orange Avenue is for one man only. Everyone's waiting to see the author of Rogue Warrior and its four sequels, Richard Marcinko, who has turned his own derring-do into a multi-book contract with Simon & Schuster.

Inside, the black-eyed, black-bearded, red-faced, pock-skinned, Hawaiian-shirted Marcinko looks up. "What's your name?"

"George," says the guy who's just handed him a book.

"Big George. What do you do?"

"I'm a chiropractor. A Vietnam vet. Last time I saw you was at Waldenbooks at Oceanside."

"That's always a long line up there, Jesus!" says Marcinko.

"I wrote a book too - on chiropractic," says George.

"And he's been cracking up ever since," says Marcinko. They laugh. George goes off to join one of the shorter lines for the five other authors. Four of them are ex-seals like Marcinko. Across the way, Barry Enoch, who's written Teammates, is intoning. "As long as there's a man on the face of this earth with the voice of freedom on his lips," he says, "and he cries loud enough and long enough, sooner or later there's going to be an American fighting man standing beside him. And that's what the seals are all about."

But that wasn't what seals were all about at two in the morning of June 19, 1995, at a Virginia Beach dance club called the Bayou. That night, Jennifer Lea Evans, an attractive 21-year-old pre-med student on vacation from Atlanta, was drawn to the good-looking Navy seal. She told her girlfriends to go while she stayed on with Dustin Allen Turner. Evans finally left the Bayou around 1:30 a.m., hand in hand with Turner. Soon after, Turner's very drunk swim-buddy Billy Joe Brown followed the couple out to his Geo. Turner says when Jennifer told Billy Joe to stop pawing her hair from his place in the back seat, he put his arm around her neck and applied a "sleeper" hold. Jennifer Evans was never seen alive again.

Brown claimed Jennifer was dead when he got in the car and that Turner said, "I think I fucking killed her!" Brown told police Turner then asked him to help bury the body.

After an intensive nine-day search, police found Jennifer's sexually abused body buried in woods an hour's drive west of the resort town and Navy seal base. With the help of more than 100 tips, police arrested Turner, 20, and Brown, 23. They charged both with abduction, attempted rape, and murder. Both were convicted, though the attempted rape charge against Turner was dropped. Turner and Brown are appealing their convictions.

Now two years later, Al and Delores Evans want to make a point. The seals training program, their $5 million suit alleges, "produces violent side-effects." It turns the trainee into a "lethal weapon." It "instills in the individual a sense of invincibility as well as euphoria, implying that he can do no wrong."

Further, the suit alleges the government knew that Billy Joe Brown had shown evidence of "violent tendencies" before joining the Navy, after being expelled from the Coast Guard in September 1990 for assaulting his instructor. The Navy had "created not merely a lethal weapon, but a highly volatile lethal weapon which should not have been released in public."

"This [lawsuit] is pretty much an individual thing - Jennifer's dad and me trying to make our point in the best way we can," says Jennifer's mom Delores from Atlanta. "Our position is that neither of these two guys - and in particular Billy Joe Brown - should ever have been admitted to the seal program and taught how to be a trained killer. We feel like they should do better screening and psychological profiling of these guys before they let them into an elite force like that. As well as concurrent critiques: are they handling the pressure well? Can they distinguish right from wrong? Or the battlefield from civilian life?"

"We are trained to survive," says Barry Enoch, sitting at his signing table opposite Marcinko. "And if that means killing the enemy instead of yourself...you want to come home. But it's not that you were trained specifically only to kill."

Marcinko thinks Brown and Turner slipped through the system because of new laws banning fraternization between trainees and instructors. "If it was like in the old days, some petty officer would be out on the beach drinking with these guys. After work they used to figure out what made their nuts screw around. Now you can't do that. So we don't see the real people anymore. If we allowed them to be team members and be fellow teammates and spend off-time together, this never would have happened. There's too much oversight today. The military is a goddamn social experiment."

Under the desert camouflage netting, rock music plays. The beer keg pours, the food table groans, the talk and the laughs are loud. It's the post-parachute drop party held on the very sands where so many of seals suffered during early training.

"The equipment we had, compared with what these young people have today, is like Model-T versus a Rolls-Royce," says Bill O'Brien, an elderly ex master chief from Underwater Demolition Team (udt)-11. (The class graduating this August weekend is number 212.) "We've all done many stupid things in our lives, but I tell you. These boys they produce today are top-drawer. In the field, you can rely on them. Yes, we bond when training. If you look at the word 'team,' you'll see there is no 'I' in it."

Charlie Free, an ex-seal who did two tours in Vietnam, says he recognizes that moment Brown and Turner had reached, when you've almost finished your basic training and have made it through. You're fitter, tougher, badder than anyone you know - and bursting to show it off. "I remember [almost] doing the exact same thing. I came home from training one night. I'd just learned that particular chokehold. My brother sat on the hassock in front of my dad, and I proceeded to demonstrate it and knocked him out flat on the floor. My mother screamed and went hysterical. My dad didn't even put his paper down. He just looked over the corner and said, 'He'll come to in a minute.' "

Free thinks you have to be a little crazy to want to join the seals to begin with. "If this kid had a prior criminal record and he had a screw loose - in the old days, those are the guys they looked for! Because nobody in their right mind would go through that training voluntarily. You had to have a screw loose, to be on the edge."

But Bill Salisbury, 58, spells out what he says are continuing trends of sadism within the ranks of seal instructors. "I think there is a culture of cruelty that has grown up during the past 30 years or so," he says.

Salisbury was for 17 years a seal officer himself, also with two tours of Vietnam behind him. "This culture goes beyond what's required for the missions that these young men have to go on. Like surf torture." Salisbury remembers being sent with his platoon to sit in freezing water at 4:00 in the morning. "You can't imagine how cold that is. The water comes in, breaks over your back. Then it recedes and the wind is blowing, and it's like razor blades cutting into your skin. The instructors are up on the beach with a fire going and rock and roll playing on their radio. And they say to us, 'You are going to stay in there till somebody quits!' We were in for over a goddamn hour, with our back to the surf. Until one young man got up. I can't tell you the relief I felt. But what does it prove? They [accidentally] killed a kid in 1988 because of this kind of treatment. They use that cold water not just to punish, but sometimes to play out, I think, the sadistic urge of individual instructors."

Instructors filling rubber inflatables with sand and making trainees carry them or demanding "incredible numbers of push-ups with people standing on your back" is just as senseless, Salisbury believes. "Instructors urinating on trainees' heads if they mess up, plain disgusting. And pool harassment," he says, also called pool competency, "has always been one of the worst rites of passage. There's the Missouri Hog-Tie; there is the Puerto-Rican Double Whammy." Both involve pulling out mouthpieces, tying up air hoses, turning off air till often the trainee ends up "anoxic" - on the verge of blackout from lack of oxygen - on the pool bottom.

Then there's the Island. "People talk about Hell Week being bad. It's nothing compared to the final phase - five, six weeks on San Clemente. As one instructor said, 'Out there, they can't hear you scream.' " Salisbury says he suspects these traditions arose from the places where officers' ideas were formed: Most are "Frat Rats," he says, "raised in college fraternity cultures with their hazing traditions...inculcated with elitist ideas of 'Muscular Christianity' cherished by Eastern establishments like Annapolis."

But the point, he says, is these methods don't make for better seals in action.

"Other elite training groups, like the Australian sas [Special Air services], have a selection phase where they make people go without sleep, do a lot of calisthenics, but it's only a few weeks, and then they say, 'Okay, you're selected for the course.' Then the focus is on how you shoot, move, and communicate in small units. So you're always being given exercises that will exhaust you and require you to think and act while you're exhausted and under pressure. But what you don't have...are these sadistic instances of punishment, which I think do brutalize certain trainees. If you kick a dog, you'll make him mean. And if anybody's a sociopath going in or is borderline, the chances are increased that he's really going to be one coming out."

A 1990 study by San Diego's Naval Health Research Center backs Salisbury's conclusions, saying bud/s graduates leave the course feeling physically invincible but saddled with lingering anger and tension.

Salisbury, who says he saw some of the toughest, most brutal instructors fall apart in Vietnam, says others feel the same. "They just are not in a position to come out and say this. I would say the newer leadership doesn't agree with me. I make them look bad. I think they'd like to see me go away."

"Clearly," says Lt. Commander Jim Fallin, spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, "the program is designed to test each man's mettle, both his physical strength, his mental fortitude, and his ability to operate in stressful environments.... At the same time, each and every student is given classroom training in good citizenship. They're reminded of their responsibilities as good citizens in our nation. There's a balance struck here. Let me say it in one sentence: There is no nexus between bud/s training and any criminal act."

Fallin says the Naval Special Warfare community remains "shocked and stunned" by the events that led to the death of Jennifer Evans. "Our heartfelt prayers continue to go to the Evans family."

Asked if the Navy had ever contacted her or her husband following the murder of their daughter, Delores Evans says no. "I haven't heard anything from the Navy throughout all of this.."

After contacting colleagues on the East Coast, Fallin says he can't verify "how or if there were any official communications between the Navy and the family."