Mykel Hawke wears a MTM Air Stryk

For Lost Survivors, Mykel Hawke stands kitted out in black: a holstered sidearm, a big fixed-blade knife strapped down his front, a canteen in his right hand. On the wrist holding the canteen is a watch with a black strap and a squared steel case. Hawke is a retired US Army Special Forces officer, a Green Beret who made captain across twenty-four years of service and qualified as a Special Forces medic. On this show he plays no one but himself.

Lost Survivors ran a single season of six episodes on the Travel Channel in 2013. Hawke and his wife, Ruth England, called the format mobile survival: the two are dropped blindfolded into a stretch of jungle, swamp, or deserted island with almost nothing and have to find their own way back out. It is the opposite of a costume drama. Whatever is on his wrist is there to be used.

The brand is MTM Special Ops. Its media page lists Hawke and Lost Survivors as a placement and names two models on the show, the Air Stryk and the round SEAL diver. The watch in this frame has a squared case, which makes it the Air Stryk rather than the diver. The Air Stryk is a roughly 45mm tonneau case in 316L steel with an ana-digi face, analog hands over a carbon-fiber dial, two small digital windows, an electroluminescent backlight, and water resistance to two hundred meters. It runs a Swiss quartz movement and sells for around a thousand dollars.

So a man who spends each episode pared down to a knife and his own training carries a two-hundred-meter dive-rated tactical watch with a digital readout he mostly does not need. The depth rating is dead weight in a swamp. The part that earns its place is the plain one: a legible analog dial and a backlight for reading it after dark. MTM puts him on the same page as 50 Cent, who wore the Air Stryk in Expend4bles. Hawke is the one on the list who used to do the job for real.