OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- The big house. That's what the Helvenston family called their $322,000 Spanish-style home with the three-car garage in the hills above the Pacific.

Or rather, it was the house that used to be theirs: They put it on the market in 2001 after Scott Helvenston couldn't sell enough of his military-style workout videos to cover the advertising bills.

After that, the Helvenstons -- all four of them -- moved into a 26-foot travel trailer for a year. Scott, the former Navy SEAL instructor, actor, fitness guru and stuntman, was reduced to campground security guy. He tooled around in a golf cart, asking vacationers to turn down their radios.

Then Helvenston heard of the big money that his former SEAL buddies were making with private security companies overseas. First, he applied to DynCorp, one of the biggest, but turned down the job -- guarding Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Helvenston, who was raised without a father, didn't want to be away from his children for a year.

In the past few years, these kinds of jobs had been popping up constantly, particularly for men with training such as Helvenston's.

The soaring demand had lured so many SEALs, Green Berets and Delta Force operators that some U.S. generals openly worried about losing talent. The elite troops -- who can cost millions of dollars to train -- were taking their skills to private industries that then profited from taxpayers' investment.

Another such job was with Blackwater USA, which was offering contracts of just a couple of months in Iraq for $600 or more a day.

That was more like it.

Reservoirs of strength

People who knew Scott Helvenston -- "The Helv" to close friends -- struggle to explain how strong he was, physically and mentally. They point to his joining the SEALs when he was just 17. They bring up the time when he represented the Navy in a world military pentathlon championship. He won, perhaps the closest thing to being named the best military athlete on the planet.

Or they mention the time his parachute malfunctioned. He broke both wrists and both ankles, but stood and tried to walk away.

"It just seemed like he always had to prove himself," said his mother, Kathryn Helvenston-Wettengel. "I don't know if he did that, or the world put it on him."

Just after Helvenston's eighth birthday, his father, a doctoral student, killed himself. The little boy was the last one in the family to see his dad alive.

Friends and family say that losing his father that way led to Helvenston's drive -- and to his later zeal to be a good father to his daughter, Kelsey, and son, Kyle.

Helvenston's drive catalyzed his innate athleticism. One day, 2-year-old Scott looked his mother in the eye and announced, "I'm Scotty Bod!" And he was, too, for the rest of his life. When he was about 4, his mother said, some college football players taunted him at the neighborhood pool, saying he was too little, the pool was for grownups. Scott dashed angrily to the diving board, tore off his flotation vest and, before she could stop him, dove in and swam the length of the pool.

Underwater.

An end to high school

The summer before 11th grade, Helvenston moved to Winter Haven, Fla., and there he met three other boys -- among them Ed "E.T." Twyford -- with whom he became close friends. The others were a year older, and when they graduated from high school, Scott told his mother that he saw no need to stay, either.

Instead, he got his GED and on June 28, 1982, drove to Orlando and joined the Navy. As was to become his habit, he had a lofty goal, though he had to explain to Twyford exactly what a Navy SEAL was.

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