CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FATE, IT SEEMED, SELECTED my destiny for me. A man couldn’t go against his fate. Military career counselors had warned me that a UDT path led to delayed promotions and a stunted career, that if I proceeded on this course I would never make admiral as my father had. But wasn’t vision more vital to the nation than gold braid on my cap and stars on my shoulder boards?

After mandatory rotation out of Red Dog Fane’s COMUDU-One, I pulled another “shore duty” at the General Line Course in Monterrey, a sort of graduate school for naval officers. I might have been a good student except my instructors bitched how I lacked commitment. Being thrust into a classroom environment or behind a desk too long took something out of me. I had graduated Annapolis in the middle of my 1949 class because I refused to sit and study more than the minimum I required to pass. Although I was an avid reader of history, especially military history, I didn’t do much better in the Line Course.

Elinor naturally liked our being there. It was real shore duty and I was home every night.

My old roommate Warren Parr stopped by Monterrey for a visit on his way to another WestPac tour. He was up for promotion to full commander, two jumps ahead of me. His old man and mine had both made it to admiral rank. It appeared Parr Jr. was on his way there as well.

“Bone, you big lug,” he chided. “When are you going to wise up and get out of this pond playing with frogs? You’ve been in the water so long your brain has shrunk.”

“I’m not taking a desk job.”

Red Dog Fane would have understood.

Stubbornly, I selected my own course through the shoals as I volunteered and applied for duty that advanced me toward the goal I had designed for myself out of the Naval Academy and which by now had become hardwired into my being. I was determined to become versed in every aspect of the undersea world—diving and swimming, EOD, amphibious vessels.

Elinor seemed ready to accept that she could never be a real Navy wife. Settling in one place barely long enough to memorize the street address, then uprooting the family to trek to the opposite coast. Then back again.

I was pulling sea duty aboard the USS PCE off the East Coast when Linda Jean was born a few months before the Korean War ended. The little girl was barely walking when I attended UDTR School at Coronado, followed by another Korean tour and then a year or so with Fane bouncing around with the teams everywhere from the Arctic to South America to China. I was even gone on a mission when Elinor gave birth to our son William Henry Jr. on June 8, 1956. She glared at me when I finally showed up.

“Maybe the kids and I should go stay with Mama until you get this … this whatever out of your system,” she suggested.

But she didn’t. Not this time.

The kid was still in diapers when I bundled newborn, three-year-old daughter, and unhappy wife into our old Ford station wagon and set out for the East Coast again. Frigid conditions diving off Alaska and around the DEW line in the Arctic were nothing compared to the temperature inside the Ford as I wended our way across the continent to my next duty station with the Navy Diving School in Washington D.C. “Hard-hat” diving was used primarily for salvaging; I considered it another step on the course I had set for myself.

Most roads in the Southwest were narrow and rough and air conditioning was a luxury not available in many vehicles. I was afraid Elinor was ready to give up on me by the time the four of us reached the Atlantic.

“Honey—?”

“Bill, don’t you think we’ve been gypsies long enough? We need a home, Bill, a real home.”

She was right, I knew she was right. I loved her, I adored the babies. Still, something in me just wouldn’t, couldn’t, give up. I flourished on physical and mental challenges that led me relentlessly back to the sea and its promises.

I completed hard-hat dive school in Washington, then dragged the family to the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance School at Indian Head, Maryland, on the Potomac River near the Patuxent River Naval Air Warfare Center Test Facility. Having previously attended EOD training, and afterward gained experience in demolitions, I was assigned as training officer over students from every military service, the CIA, and other government types. It was precise and dangerous duty involving correctly and safely disposing of, disarming, and utilizing explosives in various situations on land and sea. UDTs were required to handle dynamite, nitro, plastic, and other materials in blowing obstacles for amphibious landings, as well as destroying enemy targets ashore, such as bridges, railroad tracks, and even friendly arms and supply dumps to keep the enemy from getting them.

One of my students was an old Navy friend named Rudy Enders, whose position in EOD School I secured for him and whose path continued to cross mine well into our future. Another was a senior CIA agent up-training for clandestine assignments to Vietnam, where Army Special Forces was involved in training South Vietnamese troops. A Special Forces officer, Captain Harry G. Cramer, had already become the first SF soldier killed in Vietnam, on October 20, 1957. Both students would later influence my course in special operations.

Next stop was Underwater Swimmers School at Naval Air Station, Key West, Florida, where I was the school’s executive officer and Rudy Enders was training officer. I requested the assignment, thinking I needed advanced exposure to management techniques in the world of military diving. Our trainees were Navy, Marines, and Army Special Forces personnel, there to receive underwater experience in everything from submerged hand-to-hand combat to escaping from various situations to avoid drowning.

Enders and I made a good team. He was a year or so younger than I, shorter, since nearly everyone was shorter, stockier, with slightly bowed legs and buzz-cut hair bleached almost white by the sun. His passion was spearfishing.

One afternoon I arranged to use a Navy torpedo boat for the two of us to dive and spearfish on the sunken Luckenbach ship north of Key West in about seventy feet of water. Enders shot a 150-pound Jewfish with a powerhead. He missed his mark and the big fish fled, trailing blood in the water. We chased it until a shark suddenly appeared that looked about the size of a small submarine. It took the two of us about two seconds to scoot into the wreck and hide until the shark lost interest.

Shore duty meant home cooking and evenings with the family watching TV. It seemed as our family grew, Elinor’s dissatisfaction with Navy life became more clearly focused on me. Our third child, daughter Jana Lee, was born on May 20, 1958, as fresh as ocean breezes and as lovely as a sunrise. Elinor now had three powerful and beautiful weapons in Linda Jean, Bill Jr., and Jana Lee with which to try to knock some sense into my head.

“Honey, things are getting better,” I pleaded. “Bear with me. The kids will go places and see things most others will never experience. It’s a good life for them.”

“What about for wives? Bill, the Navy Wives Club and the little social cliques are no substitute for family life.”

At unexpected times, often prompted by the sound of a jet engine or the sight of an aircraft flying over, I experienced a flashback to that morning in Korea when I played my terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with the MiG that shot up my unarmed F9F. Nightmares were made of such memories—of going down with my plane, being trapped in the cockpit and regaining consciousness while underwater and sinking.

Rear Admiral Emerson E. Fawkes, head of the Design Branch in Bureau of Aeronautics, led pioneering efforts to devise a cockpit system that permitted underwater escape. It involved mechanical ejection in which a charge blew off the canopy and propelled the pilot free of the sinking aircraft, much the same as the procedure in an air exit, except underwater. I volunteered to be the first human subject to test the system for the Pilot Underwater Escape Program. I figured it might save pilot lives if I proved it could be done.

Tests included a series of simulated aircraft crashes in twenty-two fathoms of water in the Atlantic off the coast of Key West. We used a fully-instrumented aircraft in order to obtain water impact, deceleration and sink rate, entry attitude, and canopy implosion for a variety of crash conditions. We began with anthropometric dummies and reduced catapult charges and moved up to the first live test dummy—me.

“A live dummy,” Enders ribbed me. “Maybe you’re not as tightly wound as I thought you were.”

It was a serious undertaking, which meant conceivably I could die. Physical trauma was a possibility once I activated the explosive seat, followed by shock, air embolism, and drowning at one hundred feet below the surface. I was, however, the ideal subject to give it a go—former naval aviator, superb physical condition, experienced in diving and in the use of explosives.

I donned pilot gear in the morning sun with salt air blowing against the AD-1 cockpit hoisted onto the fantail of a transport LSD (landing ship, dock). I climbed in and sealed the canopy. Someone once commented on how parachuting from an aircraft “feels like committing suicide.” What about doing it underwater?

A member of the support personnel tapped on the canopy. “God look over you,” he mouthed.

Minutes later, the cockpit with me inside was hurled over the side. I felt it sinking like a stone. Rays of sunlight shafting from above faded. Saltwater filled the canopy.

I yanked the curtain to initiate the ejection charge. Immediately, I experienced a sensation of crashing into a stone wall. The seat, with me buckled into it, tumbled through the sea. I thought I was going to pass out. My lungs burned from lack of air.

Finally, I broke free of the seat and stroked toward the surface while UDT safety divers and a curious dolphin kept pace. Busting out into Florida sunlight, alive and uninjured, I gave a whoop of triumph, having successfully proved a pilot could eject underwater and live.

Eventually, the president of the United States awarded me the Legion of Merit for my “deliberate and heroic” contribution to naval aviation safety.

I never told Elinor what I had done. She would have thought the words “deliberate and heroic” should have included “foolish” as well.

After I received my promotion to lieutenant commander, now only one step behind my old Academy buddy Parr, I became eligible to command a UDT. I had my eye on UDT-21, the only team remaining on the East Coast following RIF (reduction in force) at the end of the Korean War. COMUDU-One in California retained two teams.

But first I wanted to complete my UW bona fides by qualifying in amphibious vessels to learn the duties and responsibilities in supporting underwater commandos. In November 1958, I reported aboard the USS Shadwell, an LSD ported at Little Creek, Virginia. LSDs were large ships designed to haul huge amounts of equipment, landing craft, and personnel to a combat beachhead. Beach assaults in the Pacific during World War II might have been unsuccessful but for the support of these big mother ships.

Assigned as the Shadwell’s operations officer, I set sail for deployment with Sixth Fleet while Elinor and the kids returned to California to stay with her parents. While I was away, Mom received letters from Elinor and her mother begging her to convince her hardheaded son to leave the Navy and accept “the other job” in California.

“Please, Marjorie, I don’t know how much longer the children and I can take it,” Elinor wrote. “For everyone’s sake, you have to make him quit.”

Mom admonished Elinor to suck it up and stop whining. “Billy is who Billy is,” she responded. “You should be proud of him, as I am proud of him and his father. He is accomplishing important things.”

These were exciting and dangerous times. I would have felt like a traitor and a coward to desert my country now. History was playing out right in front of me; I was a part of it.

The Soviets won the Space Race in 1957 by being the first to launch a satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. Fidel Castro was about to take over Cuba to add it to the communist win column. U.S. Army Special Forces were in Vietnam training guerrillas to resist Ho Chi Minh. The USSR built a wall around East Berlin, adding to tensions rising throughout Europe. New Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev threatened that communism would bury the United States and Western capitalism.

Having completed my year’s sea tour aboard the Shadwell, I prepared to take command of UDT-21, based at Little Creek, Virginia. A hard-muscled mustang lieutenant named Roy Boehm was sitting propped up at my desk in the skipper’s office when I reported aboard. In faded dungarees and unshined boots, he looked as salty as the former bos’n mate he had been in the South Pacific and on the Big Woo in Korea before he volunteered for UDTs and won an officer’s commission.

He looked me up and down, one amused brow cocked. I was bright as shit and Shinola polish for my first day back in the teams.

“Damn, skipper,” Boehm rumbled with a chuckle. “This ain’t no country club. You know that, right?”

This rough-talking sonofabitch bowed to no one. As a former bos’n coxswain, he knew how to get things done. Neither of us knew it at the time, but we were about to make history together.