CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AT AGE THIRTY-ONE, BOS’N Mate First Class Roy Boehm had been the oldest of approximately 140 who began UDTR Class 13—“Lucky 13”—at NAVPHIBSCOL, Little Creek, Virginia, in July 1954 at the end of the Korean War. George Walsh was the next oldest at twenty-eight. Because of Boehm’s age, he was one of only two left standing at the end of selections when partners teamed up, like a kid unchosen in sandlot baseball. The other was a scrawny kid with a tendency to be a smartass.

“Looks like me and you,” Boehm growled. “What’s your name?”

“Digger.”

“You got a fucking real name?”

“Eddie O’Toole.”

Boehm did everything the other Frogmen did during training, it just sometimes took longer. Black Hats ragged his ass.

“You’re too fucking old, Boehm. You’re an old man. Old and crippled. A useless piece of shit and the stupidest trainee in the whole U.S. Navy. Come on, Boehm. Why don’t you quit? Quit before you kill yourself. You don’t have to do this shit anymore. You’re not going to make it anyhow.”

“I ain’t never giving up.”

At Guadalcanal during the Battle of Cape Esperance, the Japanese sank his destroyer, USS Duncan, out from underneath him. It blazed like a Viking funeral pyre when he leaped overboard.

For the rest of that interminable night he swam towing a badly injured shipmate, Seaman Dubiel, toward a distant ink blot that had to be tiny Savo Island. Dubiel lapsed in and out of consciousness.

As daybreak approached in a hard blue sky, he became aware he and Dubiel were no longer alone in the bright sea. Dorsals cut the surface like knife blades. He had never before experienced such near-mindless horror. Merely sighting a shark was enough to strike panic into the bravest heart. But to be in the water with them!

The casual detached way the sharks approached set his heart pounding and ignited every nerve ending. Dark dorsal fins slicing the water, snake eyes glinting, teeth-filled jaws drooping. Boehm held on to his comatose friend, unwilling to abandon him even though to do so might distract the sharks and save his own life.

Dubiel screamed. He must have had some awareness at the last instant before his body exploded out of the water like an insect sucked in by a bass. He twisted violently in the white froth and then, gripped in the shark’s jaw, he was wrenched from Boehm’s grasp and was gone, his scream broken off to linger in Boehm’s nightmares. Although Boehm managed to reach Savo Island ahead of the sharks, he vowed never to go into the water again.

Having survived sharks and the sinking of one ship, Boehm was aboard another destroyer, USS Bennett, when the ship took Frogmen aboard prior to the invasion of Saipan, and he received his first astonished look at the special men he had heard so much about. They were chiseled, hard-muscled young specimens who carried themselves with a reckless, special air. Each was flagged with blue-green paint as camouflage and then marked with black stripes from toes to chin and down each arm in order to use their bodies to measure the depth of water near shore. UDT—Underwater Demolition Teams. It was said a man had to be “half fish and half nuts” in order to join up.

“Look at them, Boats,” one of the gunners chided Boehm. “Why don’t you go with them? Get your ass shot off. I’ll take care of your girlfriend for you.”

Dropped from rubber boats, Frogmen swam and waded ashore, where they planted and detonated underwater explosives to knock out man-made obstacles, and mapped enemy minefields by swimming among the mines and counting them. All this was accomplished under fierce defensive fire from the Japanese shore while they were armed only with knives and explosive packs and wearing no more than sneakers, fins, swim trunks, and dive masks. Frogmen—a term coined by a comic book writer because of the UDTs’ fins and blue-green camouflage—porpoised the surface of the water, grabbing a breath of air when they could between mortar rounds and machine-gun fire.

The encounter with them and the UDTs’ legendary exploits had more of an impact on Boehm than he at first realized. At the time, however, he was too war-weary to pursue it. All he wanted was to get out of the Navy when the war ended and go home to New York and marry his girlfriend. Besides, after the loss of Dubiel to sharks, he associated diving and the undersea world with death. He couldn’t help but look warily about for sharks every time he went over the side to clean the ship’s screws or props.

He returned to New York after V-J Day to discover his girlfriend pregnant by a draft evader. She gave his engagement ring back and he left, needing a stiff drink and a good fight.

He decided the Navy was his home after all. What was so special anyhow about a little ticky-tacky house in the suburbs and a houseful of snotty-nosed brats? Had he survived the sinking of the Duncan and the sharks only to end up bullshitting with other veterans at the VFW?

He went down, reenlisted, and ended up on the USS Furse, a battered radar patrol destroyer heading out on a Far East cruise to China. The ship put in at Tsingtao, then held by Nationalist President Chiang Kai-shek in his struggle against the communists of Mao Tse-tung. The United States backed Chiang. Boehm was assigned to help train a platoon of Chiang’s Nationalist troops. That was where he met and befriended a Nationalist Chinese army officer named Colonel Kang and a holy man named Li.

Li was a very quiet, peaceful man with a wispy gray beard and a dirty black robe to cover his birdlike body. Colonel Kang was tall for an Asian, with shined boots and a thin mustache. He insisted that Cold War conflicts from now on were more apt to be uprisings of “the people” against oppressors rather than full-blown, set-piece wars with nuclear missiles flying everywhere. Future war, he predicted, lay in cloak-and-dagger, behind-the-lines night fighting guerrillas using unconventional tactics, as per Mao’s writings. The Orient would show the way to the rest of the world.

Boehm visited Li for the last time when the Furse pulled out of port and the United States withdrew from China to permit Mao and Chiang Kai-shek to work out the nation’s destiny between them.

“You are a warrior who has a mind willing to learn,” Li said to Boehm in farewell. “As a warrior, you will be involved in much and have many things upon which to think. Guerrilla wars, both nationalist and revolutionary, will by their very nature flare up in many countries. Outbreaks may be initiated on many grounds, but all will be supported by commandos and all will be anti-Western.”

Boehm carried with him Li’s and Kang’s comments on guerrilla warfare. He studied Mao and Sun Tzu, picking up everything he could find on unconventional doctrine, tactics, and strategy. Although UW had been practiced in America since its earliest days on the frontier, it remained alien to much of the American mind. The Navy especially was not ready for “new” concepts. It remained steeped in the doctrines of large-scale global conflict. It often seemed stuck in preparing for the last war rather than for the next one.

Early in 1954 after Boehm returned from Korea, he and Chief Warrant Officer Tom Moss, his supervisor, were spearfishing from a whale boat in the Virgin Islands when Boehm spotted an eight-foot blacktip shark basking on the sandy bottom. A chill trickled down his spine as he flashed back to Cape Esperance and the shark snatching Dubiel. It occurred to him that he had not extracted revenge for that long-ago day of terror. He suddenly wanted to kill this shark more than he had ever wanted anything.

He ripped his combat knife from its sheath, dove into the water, and flew swiftly through the clear seawater, coming down on top of the big fish from slightly behind, surprising it. His knife flashed. Blood spilled.

The fish exploded. With his legs and arms wrapped around the blacktip, Boehm stuck to its sandpaper hide like wool to a rasp. As though fused together, he and the fish thrashed across the bottom, boiling up sand and silt and blood. He continued stabbing the fish. Thirty, forty times, until in its death throes it slowly sank to the bottom.

Boehm and Chief Moss lashed the conquered fish to the side of the whaleboat, like Hemingway’s character did in The Old Man and the Sea. Boehm grinned happily, the curse lifted.

“Will you approve my transfer chit to UDT school?” he asked Moss.

“Roy, you’re on the borderline, age-wise.”

Boehm slapped the dead shark. “After this, you call me old?”

In November 1954, the twenty-one surviving members of UDTR Lucky 13 assembled in the auditorium at the Amphib School Building to graduate. Boehm limped in with them on the bad leg he brought back from World War II, limped back out, grinning. He was UDT, assigned to UDT-21.

A few weeks later, Captain Don Gaither, commander, Underwater Demolition Unit Two (COMUDU-Two), stopped Boehm at UDT-21 headquarters. The bos’n was on his way to New London, Connecticut, to test a two-man submersible called the Mine Hunter.

“Where do you think you’re going, Boats?”

“I have to be in New London in the morning, sir.”

“Negative. You’re staying here tonight. You are taking the exam tomorrow for Limited Duty Officer.”

Boehm stared. “Me, sir? An officer? I’m no gentleman, sir. I don’t know a salad fork from a chopstick. I don’t want a commission. I don’t have time for it.”

“The hell you say, Boats. What’s this I’ve heard about your sea warriors? There’s talk the Navy may implement and build up naval special operations. Unconventional warfare. You have a chance to become a part of it—especially if you’re an officer.”

Unconventional warfare? Boehm snapped a crisp salute. “Yes, sir. Get my ass in and take the exam.”

When I took over as skipper of UDT-21, Boehm was a UDT trainer with a field commission as a lieutenant. He was rough around the edges, foulmouthed as only a sailor could be, but a better man I couldn’t have selected for my second-in-command.