CORONADO, Calif. -- The world looks very different from forty feet up, hanging onto a rope wall.  My advice?  Don't look down.

A lot of phenomenally fit people, including world-famous athletes and Olympians, have frozen at the top of the wall, which is part of the legendary obstacle course on the Navy SEAL base here in Coronado. Who knew that vertigo routinely kicks in at forty feet without a safety net?

SEALs have a reputation as the fittest and most fearless of the military's special forces.  Their legend grew even more after SEAL sharpshooters -- firing from a heaving ship at dusk -- killed three Somali pirates and freed Captain Richard Phillips after his ship had been hijacked in the Indian Ocean last year.

When I traveled to Coronado the day after the operation against the pirates, the SEALs' reactions were consistently matter-of-fact.  "It's what we're trained to do," was a typical response.

Video: From high-tech weapons and underwater demolition to hand-to-hand combat and parachuting into war zones, NBC's Chris Jansing takes a look at the making of a Navy SEAL.

And that's what started my nine-month quest to find out what makes these guys tick. 

The grueling physical challenges of SEAL training -- while fascinating to watch as long as you're not doing it -- didn't surprise.  A couple of things did. One was the amount of mental challenges thrown at the SEAL candidates every day.  As one told me, "They tell us from day one that it's 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. And you don't always believe that, but being here now, I'd say that's definitely the truth." 

'They're all studs'
An instructor put it another way: "They're all studs," he said of the 18-to-28-year-old men who report for training. But often it's the super-studs who are the first to drop out.

And that leads to the second surprise. You think SEALs look like Rambo? They don't -- think more along the lines of Daniel Craig's James Bond. The average size of a SEAL is probably 5ft.-10, 175 pounds.

Video: NBC's Chris Jansing talks to the women behind the SEALs.

The Navy commissioned Gallup to look at almost 8,000 attempts to get through the key SEAL training, known as BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL).  It turned up very interesting findings about who's most likely to succeed.  The sweet spot?  Twenty-two to 25-year-olds, college educated, and NOT from glamour sports (football, basketball and baseball players don't do any better than non-athletes).

Who does? Water polo players are number one.  Triathletes, lacrosse players, boxers, rugby players, swimmers and wrestlers, in that order, also fit the bill.  Endurance sports are great predictors of success:  mountain biking, climbing and rappelling, skiing and snowboarding.  The study has helped the Navy re-make recruiting.

The man behind many of the SEALs' recruiting innovations, Captain Duncan Smith, also has been looking to a totally new group: young men who probably never considered a military career. High on the Navy's list are Arab-Americans and those whose families hail from such countries as the Ukraine or Kenya. They're looking for young men with cultural backgrounds and language skills that will help them blend in wherever SEALs operate. The challenge? Finding an incredibly fit, intelligent, fearless 23-year-old American who also happens to speaks Swahili.
 
World hotspots
The SEALs I met can't seem to get enough of being SEALs. They're patriots, yes, but as one told me, most of all they love to be where the action is. And Iraq and Afghanistan and other dangerous hotspots around the globe are their playing fields.

A Master Chief -- that's the highest rank for an enlisted SEAL -- put it this way:  "What is it like? It's the best thing in the world. It's life on steroids.  Everything's fast. Everything's exaggerated. … Everything is just extreme with us. That's what it's like. And I'm saying it's a good thing."  

NEW YORK – Guy Francois' eyes welled up with tears as he spoke about his three children in Port au Prince, the Haitian capital devastated by a huge earthquake.

"No contact at all. Nobody. I can't get in touch with nobody," said the 55-year-old cab driver. "I've been crying since last night. I don't know what happened. I don't know what's going on with my kids." 

In the wake of the poverty-struck Caribbean nation's worst earthquake in over 200 years, residents of New York's "Little Haiti" community are grimly holding out hope and praying for their loved ones. But with virtually all communication lines down, most can do nothing but bide their time and wait for news.

Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

A woman is comforted as she prays for the victims of an earthquake that hit Haiti at St. Jerome's Church in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York on Wednesday.

Francois, who has lived in the United States for 23 years, said his children in Haiti are 29, 27 and 15 years old. Despite his best efforts, he has not been able to contact any of them.

It was a story shared by many others of Haitian descent in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood. Besides watching television in an effort to glean information about family and friends based on locales indentified in news reports, they had almost no information about the fate of their loved ones.

Francois said he stayed up all night in front of his TV. "It's terrible. If I could get in touch with them, I'd feel better. But no contact," he said as he stood in the bitter cold outside the dispatch station for the Fast City Car & Limo Service. Many of the company's drivers are Haitian, about eight of whom were jammed into a small room drinking coffee and sharing stories. "Everyone has the same problem," he said.

For some who had heard from loved ones the news was grim. Pierre Julian, 43, who shares a cab with Francois – they split driving the same cab in 12-hour shifts – said he received a phone call from his mother-in-law saying that his wife had died in the quake. "That's life," he said grimly.

John Makely / msnbc.com

Jude Saintphard, 71, in the "Botanica Du Roi Salomon" religious goods store in Brooklyn N.Y., reacts to the news out of Haiti a day after the earthquake.Â

Prayers of hope
Down the block at Botanica Du Roi Salomon, a religious goods story, owner Mary Louis, 61, and her friend Jude Saintphard, 71, were also waiting for word from loved ones.

"Right now we are on our knees begging the whole world for help," said Saintphard.

"We wonder why the country deserves such misery," said Louis, reflecting upon Haiti's history of political upheaval and natural disasters.  

"It was bad before," said Saintphard. "But now there is nothing left."

The shop sells religious statuaries, prints of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, incense, frankincense, myrrh, and candles from such religious figures as High John the Conqueror, a local folk hero whose candle says he is the "Conqueror over all evil conditions."

Louis said she is praying for her fellow Haitians. "We hope for better days. It is such a nice country. It is warm all year. We used to eat all natural foods…. Now those things are all gone."

Seth Wenig / AP

Friends and neighbors gather around a computer seeking news from Haiti in Savoir Faire, a Haitian record store, in New York, on Wednesday.Â

No words to explain
Jean-Claude Michele, 41, the pastor for the Faithful Church of God in Brooklyn, said he had received dozens of calls from members of his church, but that most people could not reach Haiti.

"We don't really have any words to explain what happened," Michelle said. "We can only pray and organize with one voice and one plan ahead."

"We have been going through tough times throughout Haiti's history," he added. "If it's not political unrest, it's natural disasters. It's not that we are used to it, but maybe God built us that strong and with purpose. Hopefully things will change and destruction will also help us restructure the country."

He said he hoped that the U.S., Canada, France and some of the world's other large countries would help Haiti. For his part, he said, he was planning to solicit donations of money, as well as medicine and other goods to send to Haiti. He said he would go to Haiti himself, if possible, to help deliver the goods.   

Click here for more Haiti coverage:
'Horrific' devastation from Haiti quake
How to help? List of charities
Timeline: A history of Haiti

By Moritz Loew, Senior Director, Field Sales Ops, msnbc.com

NEWARK, N.J. -- I boarded United Airlines Flight 634 yesterday morning and quickly used up three of my presumed nine lives. I was flying back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas via a layover at O'Hare.

What started out a very mellow red-eye flight home after a long, but very productive week turned out to have a very interesting ending when the right-side wheels failed to deploy on our Airbus 319 when attempting to land at Newark.

What happened? Still not sure why.

After listening to Lady GaGa, Kisha and LMFAO nonstop for most of the flight (not kidding), I pulled my headphones off as I noticed the pilot aborting our initial landing attempt. Initially I thought pilot had hit the gas to pull out of a busy traffic pattern, which is very common at Newark. So I thought there would be a basic announcement. But when the pilot came on, he said there was an issue with the plane that they were investigating and would update us shortly. When he came back on, he stated the issue was with the right-side landing gear and that we should prepare for an "unusual" landing. He said that we should prepare to brace and be ready to evacuate the plane immediately once we stopped.

AP

A United Airlines Airbus 319 sits on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International after making an emergency landing.

Brace, brace, brace
Now, I was upgraded  on the Chicago-to-Newark leg and sitting in the second row next to a man  who had his 3-year-old daughter and wife sitting in front of him. So my immediate thoughts were of his child getting off safely and me getting home in one piece to my own very favorite, Ainslie Piper Loew. A moment or two later, the lead flight attendant restated that we were short a set of wheels, that we would need to put our heads down and hold our ankles for the brace position once signaled by the crew. Both the pilot and the rest of the crew had nerves of steel and their voices where nothing but calming while giving us just the right amount of information to get the job done. The 3-year-old, Sasha, was calm but Mom gave a bit of a panicked look when the lead flight attendant asked me to make sure the front cabin door got opened and the chute deployed if "something happened to her."

The pilot flies around for about 15 minutes dumping fuel and waiting for the emergency crews to get into place. During this time the other flight attendants make sure all exits are covered and give us reassurances of what to do. Then the pilot comes back on and tells us we would touch down in three minutes and get into position. That's when the crew yells the words you don't want to hear – BRACE, BRACE, BRACE.

During this time we all looked at the emergency cards. I shared that my brother and brother-in-law were both pilots who had their stories of planes landing with all sorts of broken things.
In fact, my daughter was given the middle name "Piper" as appreciation of the both of them, who have flown quite a few Piper Cub planes over the years. 

I was just trying to rest any fears but in truth I was a little nervous inside. I thought of sending a text to my wife Bethany as many others were doing to their loved ones. But I concluded  that A) if they can land safely on the Hudson, they can land on this nice runway minus a couple of wheels; and B) if something dreadful where to happen I would not want that to be the last she heard from me.

The next 90 seconds seemed like nine minutes, but the plane was coming in extremely smoothly with no tipping side to side and every foot we got closer to the ground the better I felt. We then gently hit the ground while the pilot simultaneously cut the electricity to help reduce the risk of fire. We rolled along initially at 100 mph (according to my brother) and the pilot did everything so well that no one  even felt the absence of anything missing until around 50 mph, when  the plane slowly tilted to the right side. But despite the right engine starting to drag and spark, the pilot kept the plane perfectly straight as to ensure the wing didn't dig into the ground, which would have been disastrous. I have literally had way rougher touchdowns that this with all three landing gears deployed!

On the ground
As the plane slowed to a halt, the cabin broke out in cheers and applause. Upon full stop the father next to me grabbed his daughter. The door was opened by the calm and collected flight attendant. I went to the door to deploy the chute. I pulled down the big lever and the door opened easily, but when I pulled the handle for the exit chute it would not deploy, as it seemed that the door would not stay all the way open. After pulling and pushing a few times, the flight attendant grabbed my shoulder and told me not to worry and just exit via the left side. Just like in the training films, you kick your legs out in front of you, cross your arms and very quickly slide down the rubber chute. 

Upon hitting the ground, the emergency crew yelled for us to run quickly toward the line of emergency trucks and rescue teams. As I began to run, I looked back over and saw that the fireman already had foam hitting the engine, which quickly doused any sign of smoke, etc. At this point, a rush of euphoria hit me, as if I had one the Megamillion lottery! I ran to a nearby bus and immediately called Bethany to let her know we had experienced an "unusual" landing with only two out of three gears down but not to worry, I was very safe.

 

MIAMI—In an out-of-the way warehouse district in southwest Miami-Dade county, FBI agent Brian Waterman and Julie Rivera, an agent with the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, approached a tiny medical supply company that they suspected was nothing more than a front for Medicare fraud.

After knocking on the door, calling the office number and peering through the mail slot, they found no one inside the 250-square-foot facility, which had only a desk and a few medical supplies on shelves along the wall.  "The equipment on the wall certainly wouldn't justify one percent of what's billed to Medicare," said Waterman.

According to the agents, the office space was used by two separate owners to justify fraudulent claims to Medicare for equipment never delivered to actual patients. The last owner, Waterman said, was the most aggressive.  "This company billed for $1.4 million. We have no indication whatsoever that any of those claims were legitimate claims."

The agents said it's a scenario they see all the time and insisted the Medicare theft problem isn't getting any better.  "It's huge, it's huge, it's like an epidemic," said Rivera.  "They're just bleeding the system and as long as Medicare keeps paying out the money they're just going to keep committing the fraud."

Julie Rivera of the HHS Office of Inspector General and FBI agent Brian Waterman investigate fraud in the Miami area.

A $60 BILLION THEFT FROM TAXPAYERS

Officials said Medicare pilferage is so widespread, with so much of it never detected, that no one can accurately say how much it costs American taxpayers. But a figure widely used by law enforcement officials suggests a staggering $60 billion a year is stolen from the national entitlement program, which funds medical treatment, equipment and prescriptions for 45 million seniors and the disabled.

"Every taxpayer funds the Medicare system," said Waterman.  "We all pay taxes, we all pay for this. The people that are stealing from Medicare are stealing from us." 

VIDEO: Battling the Medicare fraud 'epidemic'

The amount of money stolen in any given scheme is on the rise, as criminals find new ways to tap into Medicare's automated computer system, a trust-based operation designed to quickly pay claims from legitimate doctors and medical suppliers.  A veteran Justice Department prosecutor tells NBC News that if a person stole a million dollars from Medicare through false-billing schemes a decade ago, it was considered a major case. These days, he said, it's not uncommon for individual fraud cases to involve $30 million to $50 million or more. 

Recently, in Miami, Ihosvany Marquez and several alleged conspirators were indicted on charges of having filed $55 million in phony Medicare claims for HIV, AIDS, cancer, pain and varicose vein treatments.  Authorities said Marquez used some of the approximately $21.6 million Medicare paid out for those claims to buy diamond jewelry, horses and a fleet of luxury cars, including Lamborghinis, Bentleys, a Ferrari and eight Mercedes-Benz automobiles. Marquez has pleaded not guilty and is currently in jail without bond.

Prosecutors say this Lamborghini was part of a fleet of cars purchased with stolen Medicare money.

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION VOWS TO PUT ON THE "HEAT"

President Barack Obama has gone as record saying that Medicare fraud is a major concern of his administration and has argued that reductions in fraud costs could help pay for his national health care program. 

On May 20, 2009, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, and Attorney General Eric Holder established a Cabinet-level task force known as HEAT, which stands for The Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team.  "We are going to be aggressively pursuing this criminal activity, cracking down on people and getting ahead of it. And we are going to be watching billing operations very carefully," said Sebelius.  "The president takes this very seriously.  He wants Medicare to be solvent and secure."

In addition, HHS and the Justice Department now have seven Medicare fraud prosecution strike forces in place — in Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Detroit, Brooklyn, Tampa and Baton Rouge.  Since the first strike force office opened in Miami in March, 2007, the strike forces have indicted more than 460 individuals and organizations for allegedly billing the Medicare program falsely for more than $1 billion.

"If you're trying to steal from the Medicare program, we're going to go after you aggressively.  And if we prove our case, which I hope and expect we will, you're going to go to jail," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said. "We want taxpayers knowing that the money is going to the elderly and it's not going to fraudsters."

USING DEAD DOCTORS TO EXPLOIT MEDICARE

Professor Malcolm Sparrow, a fraud expert who teaches at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of  Government, praised the Obama administration for addressing the Medicare fraud problem.  "There  has been more attention paid to this issue," he said.  "There seems to be a genuinely increased commitment to confront it, and to begin at least to admit the potential scope of the problem.  All that is good news."

Sparrow has long been critical of Medicare's system for licensing health care providers and paying claims, arguing the procedures are easily exploited by criminals who have learned how to overwhelm the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which pay the claims, by flooding them with bogus bills for services never rendered.

"They know there are not a lot of resources at the other end to ask questions and test the validity of those claims," he said.  "If they hit these systems with tens of thousands of claims, they can steal millions of dollars at the speed of light."

In testimony last spring before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on crime, Sparrow told of the particularly embarrassing discovery that Medicare had made lots payments to doctors who were actually deceased and whose names had been submitted by criminals.  "From 2000 to 2007, between $60 million to $92 million was paid for medical services or equipment that had been ordered or prescribed by dead doctors.  In many cases, the doctors had been dead for more than ten years," Sparrow said.

NEED FOR MORE DATA AND COOPERATION

Prosecutors and agents specializing in Medicare fraud have criticized CMS for making payments to fraud artists too quickly, without proper investigation.  Numerous law enforcement sources complained to  NBC News that law enforcement investigators often aren't told by Medicare that a potential fraud is brewing until it's already long under way, has reached a massive scale and the criminals have closed the illicit clinic and moved away to open a new one.

"These (schemes) take a while to build, a while to set up, and they are able to operate for years under the radar without any threat of detection," said Sparrow.  And disappearing before the authorities arrive isn't hard, either, he said.  "The government acts as if it's surprised that nobody is home.  Well it's no surprise they're not home, they're out on their luxury yachts."

To keep even further ahead of regulators, criminals regularly shift their billing schemes. Years ago, agents said, they saw lots of phony bills for milk supplements.  After that, crooked company owners concentrated on durable medical equipment such as wheelchairs and breathing machines.  

Next came phony AIDS infusion treatments and home nursing care.  The latest false billing schemes, authorities say, involve bogus home therapy services.

HHS Secretary Sebelius told NBC News that fraud detection and the sharing of information need to be improved and said her department is addressing those issues. "We are trying to really improve the systems, upgrade the data systems, sharing real-time data with law enforcement, which has never happened before. It was always way after the fact," she said. 

Complicating the enforcement efforts, Sebelius said, is CMS's mandate to effectively serve the millions of Americans who depend on Medicare and to quickly pay the doctors and healthcare professionals who care for them. "Medicare pays about $430 billion worth of claims a year.  Four million claims a day go out the door." Striking the balance between proper service and criminal detection is a big challenge facing regulators, she said. "I think the balance is making sure at the front end that (health care providers) are properly licensed, making sure that we verify who it is that we're paying."

Meanwhile, federal agents continue to work their fraud cases on the streets and find no let-up in the criminal activity. 

"The fraud is easy. It's not difficult to steal from Medicare," said Brian Waterman, the FBI agent. "We could arrest, you know, hundreds of people every month, but there's a line of people to take their place. The money you can make doing something like this is just too good."

Mark Potter's report is part of NBC Nightly News' series Fleecing of America airing all this week.