BEFORE I WENT TO THE COMMERCIAL DIVING SCHOOL IN Seattle, I thought it would be a good idea to enroll in a PADI Dive course to learn the basics, especially since it was worth two credit hours and the final checkout dive involved diving for crabs and spearfishing. We took a morning drive from Eugene, Oregon, to Hood Canal, Washington, for my instruction. Oddly enough, the man I was assigned to dive with was a former SEAL. He had enlisted for five years and decided to leave the service and go to school. He didn’t talk a lot about it, and I hadn’t even heard of the SEALs at that point; the group had only been around officially since 1962, when the navy was staking its claim within the Special Operations Forces. When he did talk about being a frogman, he talked about how he had logged so many hours diving underwater and that diving in the “teams” was hard work and long hours. He had been assigned to a SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV) team on the West Coast and spent most of his time in a small open-water submarine in near-freezing water temperatures. He hated being cold, and I could not help but notice his SEAL-issued wet suit looked much better than mine.
The first two SEAL teams were picked largely from the navy’s Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) and trained to serve as guerrilla and counterguerrilla units that could operate from sea, air, or land. Their predecessors were the Naval Demolition Units (NDU) who landed on Omaha Beach during the D-day invasion. They did not swim in under the cover of darkness; they rode the first wave of landing craft to the beach. They landed in waist-deep water during low tide with basically only a pistol, a knife, and a sack of demolition charges. Their mission was to blow up the Nazi obstacles on the beach so that the next waves of landing craft could make it in as the tide rose.
A story told by one of the first frogmen is that the landing craft he and his teammates were in took heavy fire on the way into the beach. Only a few managed to make it to the first obstacle of concrete and steel. They set the charges but were quick to realize that the only cover on the beach was the very obstacles they were to destroy. When he waved to his teammate placing a charge on a nearby obstacle to hold off on igniting the fuse, his right arm was shot off by enemy fire. His buddy was also hit. He lay bleeding on the beach until a corpsman came by and gave him a tourniquet and a wave good-bye. His wounded buddy managed to link up with him, and there they were, two wounded Naval Demolition Unit frogmen left on the beach, braced against the concrete and steel.
As the battle moved inland, a few German soldiers were captured and sent down the line. A sergeant asked if the wounded frogmen could watch them. The frog with the one arm drew his pistol with his only arm and set about his newly assigned guard duty. As more Germans were captured, they were sent once again down the line to the newly designated POW holding area. By the end of the day’s battle, the two frogs were guarding one hundred POWs, or so the story goes.
As I mentioned earlier, when I was stationed in London, I worked under Admiral Jeremy Boorda, who was the first sailor to rise through the ranks from seaman to become the chief of naval operations. I was there during the fiftieth anniversary of the D-day landing, and Boorda brought over those two sailors who had been with the NDU during D-day. At the ceremony on Omaha Beach, Boorda presented them both with the Navy Commendation Medal, the highest honor he could give without going through the bureaucracy.
I shook hands with one of them. Though he must have been in his seventies at the time, he still had a handshake like a vise grip. I asked him if he was a SEAL, and he said, “Nah, I’m just a wannabe.” But this was only because he was in the NDU before the SEAL Trident was even a thought. That Navy Commendation Medal was the only award they got, and it took the navy fifty years to get it to them. And he didn’t feel comfortable calling himself a SEAL.
But all this was later. I didn’t know any of the SEAL history right after I graduated college. All I knew was that I needed to get certified as a diver. We had some good times while my trainer was checking out my diving chops; once, we decided to mix diving with a little spearfishing. He lent me his speargun, and as I was looking for targets of opportunity, I saw a pair of eyes sticking up out of the mud. I lined up a shot right between the eyes, let the spear go, and hit the thing hard and square.
I was not prepared for what happened next. All of a sudden the bottom erupted, and whatever that thing was began to drag me down into the deeper channel of the Hood Canal. I’m not exactly sure how deep it was—I wasn’t interested in looking at my depth gauge—but I knew I was heading for Davy Jones’s locker. The speargun was attached to my wrist, and I was desperately trying to remove it. Fortunately, I was able to separate from the speargun and fish assembly at about ninety feet. The speargun vanished into the deep waters, along with the king of the halibuts. We didn’t have halibut in Whitefish Lake.
I felt bad about losing the speargun on my first hunt underwater. It was like telling your coach that you just lost the ball. I bought my trainer another speargun, and he was cooler than I was about the whole thing. Despite my losing the gun, he signed off on my certification and went night diving for halibut.
But, psychologically at least, that experience prepared me for my first official introduction to the SEALs. That came from an Oregon alumnus, John H. Dick. Dick was an All-American player for the Oregon Ducks basketball team; the annual award for the team’s best defender is named for him.
He was also a navy man to the core. He enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and eventually rose to the rank of two-star rear admiral. He was the captain of the USS Saratoga, a Forrestal-class aircraft carrier, from 1967 to 1969.
I met Admiral Dick at an Oregon football game. I’d come back from being certified to dive and had decided to check in on the football team. Admiral Dick was speaking to the team as he did often before the games, and we got to talking. He was incredibly charismatic, articulate, and engaging, and he walked the walk. He didn’t just recruit for the navy; he believed in the navy.
I told him about my plans, which at that point were to go to a commercial diving school in Seattle, learn how to deep-sea dive, and pursue a career in underwater geology.
Admiral Dick had another idea. He told me that if I liked diving I should consider the navy. There was a special program for divers called the SEALs, and he thought I would fit in well with the group. The program was entirely on a volunteer basis: I would go to Officer Candidate School, and from there I would go to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training in Coronado, California. Even better, I’d get paid during all this, and I could leave at any time. The navy was being downsized, and it wasn’t holding recruits to obligations if they quit.
Admiral Dick was hard to say no to. He called the recruiter, I took a physical and written exam, and then I sat through a half-hour film on the SEALs called Men with Green Faces. You can see it on YouTube. It’s still watchable, even nearly fifty years after it was made.
I can see how the navy would use that film to prescreen people. It doesn’t glorify the SEALs. It focuses on the gritty aspects of physical training, unit cohesion, and the personal satisfaction of accomplishing the hardest tasks. It says right up front that people who are in the military for medals and ribbons are not going to be happy in the SEALs; recognition for your efforts is going to come from your fellow team members.
The film also emphasizes the mental aspects of being a SEAL. It shows how SEAL activities support intelligence-gathering operations and stresses having or gaining the ability to keep cool in adverse situations.
The film doesn’t sugarcoat anything. Again and again, viewers are told that SEALs are going to be called on to do the toughest jobs, and that actions that would get most combatants medals are considered routine for team members and therefore usually go unrecognized by the brass.
There was something else that struck me about it when I saw it in 1984, and that aspect has stuck with me: there are no names in the film. SEALs and SEAL trainees who speak in the voice-overs aren’t identified, and there are no names or titles superimposed. The only speaker who is identified is the narrator, who isn’t named until the end of the film.
The one thing the film doesn’t linger on is the dive work or the cold-weather maneuvers SEALs do. In this, it’s a product of its times: the film was made during the Vietnam War, and it focuses on jungle combat in Southeast Asia. SEAL duties, I was to learn, encompassed more. A lot more.
I’d had a vacation scheduled, and I went on it after I had my meeting with the recruiter. But the film and the possibilities the SEALs offered were in the back of my mind as I ran on the sandy beaches. I realized that I was doing a lot more thinking about SEAL activities—or what I thought SEAL activities would be—than I was about geological exploration and surveying.
After the short vacation, I came back to Eugene, Oregon, for the annual alumni football game. It was a time when the varsity would play the alumni in an exhibition match during the final practice of spring training. I’ll tell you this much: there’s a reason why athletes train every day. After not playing for nearly a year, being back on the field was brutal. My play had not improved with absence, and the day’s only saving grace was a keg of beer on our sideline. Oregon has wisely discontinued the game; having its alumni pushed up and down the field offered better training for the medical trainers than it did the varsity team.
But I was there for the game, and so was Admiral Dick. I met him on the sidelines, right next to a keg the alumni had set up.
He came right over to me and said, “I have a set of orders for you. The first set is for you to report to Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. I also have a set of follow-on orders for you for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) in Coronado, California. These orders are voluntary, but I would urge you to accept them.” He stuck out his hand. “What do you say?”
I knew what I was getting into—or, at least, I thought I did. I had gone through double practice days and triple practice days as a football player for Oregon, and I figured I could handle the BUD/S—the basic SEAL training—regimen.
So I shook his hand, and he gave me the oath. And then, after sixteen weeks of Officer Candidate School, I learned what real physical training was.