Combat Swimmer (6 page)

After Fraley left, we could hardly move the boat through the water. Other crews started passing, looking at us with not too much sympathy. Someone had to be first, and better them than us. We struggled to the Lynnhaven Inlet bridge, where Lynnhaven Bay empties into the Chesapeake Bay, and encountered a three-knot current from the incoming tide. We could do nothing but tie off to a buoy until the tide changed. The rest of the boats had already been through by now. We were dead last.

The tide changed late in the afternoon, and we got through just after dark. We still had a long way to go, and the final part involved moving the boat across the beach at the base and into a lake for a paddle to the training area. We got to the beach about midnight and manhandled the deflated boat across it and into the lake. By now the temperature had again dropped below freezing, and the lake was almost solid ice.

By the time we reached the shore in front of the training area, we were all pissed and absolutely exhausted. I later found out that when Chief Petty Officer Jim Cook, our senior enlisted instructor, heard what Fraley had done, he told him to stay out of the area until the next day. Good call on Jim's part, because I was ready to strangle the guy. Sweesy wanted to rip off his head and shit in the socket.

Chief Cook was so full of warm and fuzzy thoughts about our plight that he welcomed us at the lake's edge. He took one look at the refuse that had once been a fully inflated IBL and observed that it was full of water. He said, “Mr. Gormly, you'd better dump boat so you can get it out of the water.”

I looked at the guys, and as one, we all shrugged. By that time it didn't matter. To “dump boat,” all members of the crew stand on one main tube, then reach across the boat and grab the gunwale line on the other tube. Leaning back in unison, they pull on the gunwale line until the boat is tipped over on top of them, inverted in the water. That way all the water inside is dumped out. Next the men move to the other side and reverse the process to get the boat right side up again. Dumping a completely inflated boat full of water isn't easy. Dumping our boat proved to be impossible.

We struggled for the better part of thirty minutes in ice-covered water, breaking the ice with our bodies to begin with, and couldn't get the boat over. Finally Cook thought we'd had enough and told us to just drag the IBL back to the rack and secure it. We got that done just in time to pick up another IBL to start the next evolution, which was already under way by that time. Pays to be a winner.

 

On “So Solly Day”—the aptly named last day of Hell Week—we had to crawl through an obstacle course set up in the sand dunes behind Beach 7. We conducted much of our training there—demolition, beach reconnaissance, whatever. The beach itself was no more than thirty meters wide, but the dunes behind it stretched about two hundred meters to the south.

The instructors were blowing up explosive charges all around us, standard procedure for So Solly Day. Suddenly Tom Blais stopped the class. I was miserable—wet and cold, with sand completely filling my green fatigues. I was exhausted from the week's activities. My brain was working at half speed from lack of sleep. But I knew the end was in sight. I figured all I had to do was get through the morning and I'd be home free. Blais came to where I was lying facedown in the sand. Without saying anything to me, he started scraping out a hole in the sand just under my face. Then he placed a half-pound block of TNT with a piece of time fuse sticking out of the end two inches from my nose. He lit the fuse and walked away.

“Newell,” Blais said, “do you think Ensign Gormly will move before the charge goes off?”

“Damn right,” Chuck Newell responded. “He's not stupid.”

“Mr. Gormly, do you trust me?”

“Yes, Instructor Blais.”

“Do you think I'd just watch as your head departs your body?”

“No, Instructor Blais.”

“See, Chuck, he trusts me. Ten bucks says he doesn't move.”

“You're on.”

Many things went through my mind while the fuse cooked away. I wasn't going to quit, so I reasoned that Tom would do something before the charge went off. But as the fuse got shorter, I began to wonder if my mental acuity wasn't being tested and I was about to fail, big-time! Still, I wasn't going to quit or move.

I watched the fuse burn right into the charge. When it hit the blasting cap, I'd be history. Would the rest of the instructors let that happen? The fuse kept burning and my mind went blank—probably the brain's way of allowing the body to deal with impending death. The pungent smell of cordite filled my nose. Maybe Blais really meant to kill me. The fuse burned and burned, almost into the charge now, and I couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. Oh, well, I figured—I wouldn't know what hit me. The world grew eerily silent.

“Har, har, har,” I heard. “See, Chuck, he
is
that stupid.”

“Damn, Tom, you're right—here's your ten.”

“Mr. Gormly, you can open your eyes now,” Blais said.

I did. I looked where the hole ought to be and saw the charge still sitting there, the fuse no longer smoking. It turned out the “charge” was only the cardboard covering of the half-block of TNT and time fuse. That was a lesson in trusting your teammates. And a little amusement for the instructors. Later on in training, Blais said he couldn't believe I had just lain there. Others he had pulled the trick on had hauled ass. I told him I knew he wasn't about to kill a trainee on purpose, so I hadn't really worried at all—right! Tom and I later served together in SEAL Team Two. He was one hell of an operator in Vietnam.

 

On July 2, 1964, I graduated from UDT Replacement Training. Our featured speaker was Vice Admiral John S. McCain, Commander Amphibious Forces, United States Atlantic Fleet (COMPHIBLANT), known to all in the Navy as “Mr. Sea Power.” The admiral gave a great pitch. He told us we were now part of the cutting edge of the amphibious force—the UDT—and, in a nutshell, we'd be the first to kick ass during war. We loved this—we'd gone through nearly six months of BS to get the opportunity to go to war first. The speech was short and to the point. We
really
liked that. All we wanted to do was get our diplomas and get to the Teams.

In later years when I was called upon to give graduation speeches to BUDS classes, I remembered Admiral McCain's words. I'd simply tell them they had just completed the most rigorous training in the U.S. military. Now it was time for them to go to the Teams and get ready to kick ass.

 

UDT Training Class 31 was unique because of our extremely high officer-to-enlisted ratio; we had over thirty officers at the start, out of a total class of about one hundred people. Of that starting hundred, ten officers (including two Brazilians) and fifteen enlisted (including two Brazilians) graduated. Seventy-five men didn't make it, but that's average for basic UDT training. Some would say the high officer-to-enlisted ratio was not good, but it didn't matter in UDT basic training because we all did the same things and shared the load equally. That's one reason why SEAL officers and enlisted have close relationships.

The bonds established in our training are much like the bonds formed in combat; rank is not the determining factor. In my view this closeness was one of the things responsible for the combat success of SEALs. Mutual trust and respect among all Team members are givens, and they develop in the basic training course. At first, Yale, Harvard, the Naval Academy, Penn State, and various other institutions of higher learning were represented in our group. At the end of basic training, we were all from the same place: Tom and Bernie's Charm School.

I
reported to Underwater Demolition Team 22 and was assigned to a platoon to learn the ropes. My instructor was Chief Petty Officer Everett Barrett, who gave me a clipboard with a blank sheet of paper attached. He said, “Always carry this with you, Ensign, and walk fast. The front office will think you're busy.”

In those days UDT-22 and UDT-21 rotated platoons with two amphibious ready groups (Navy-Marine contingency forces) in the Mediterranean and Caribbean respectively. When platoons weren't deployed, they were getting ready to deploy. So you were either in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean or training.

I found out that in essence, the basic UDT mission—hydrographic reconnaissance—was pretty basic stuff. So the platoons spent more time trying to learn what I would call SEAL skills, which were different and more fun.

The Teams had a different quality back then. The enlisted men provided all of the continuity or corporate memory and much of the leadership. Once they got in a Team, they seldom left until they retired. They did a great job of instilling unit pride in the junior officers. I doubt we officers pulled our share of the load. In those days, nearly all of us were reservists. We had little concern for anything other than having the most fun possible. We did our time in the Teams and left active duty. The few regular officers who were UDT-qualified and wanted to pursue careers in the Navy had to go to sea to get promoted. After their initial tour, they could expect only one more with the Teams before they became too senior to hold any Team job. That meant the top leadership (CO/ XO) usually weren't current on our skills. This became apparent to me when, on my first night-parachute jump with UDT-22, the CO hooked his static line to an electric cable in the plane instead of the anchor cable and almost creamed in before he managed to deploy his reserve chute. To compound matters, he blamed it all on the jumpmaster rather than accept blame for his blunder.

I also found out that being in a peacetime UDT wasn't nearly as exciting as I had thought it would be. We had no immediate expectations of combat. To substitute, we turned to such things as “touch” football. Using no pads, we had about the same amount of contact as in regular football—I never got banged up so bad playing regular football. Everyone who wasn't deployed showed up at each game, cheering those of us who were playing and unmercifully harassing the other team. The games we played against local Marine units were brutal. I think every time we played them there was a fight—the Marines were just as frustrated as we were over the lack of real combat. Despite no “rumors of war,” Team morale soared during football season.

When Dave Schaible took over the Team in October 1964, it was a bright day in my career. He was my “Sea Daddy,” one of the best leaders I ever had the good fortune to work for, and we had a strong friendship until he died in 1988.

Dave took one look at what the Team had been doing and said, “Boys, you haven't been spending enough time in the water.” He had this weird notion that a UDT shouldn't be running around on land trying to be a SEAL team. But I didn't immediately benefit from his new emphasis, because the platoon to which I was now assigned was sent to the Caribbean in March 1965. That turned out not to be a routine deployment. Instead, I had the opportunity to do my first real mission.

The platoon commander was Lieutenant Junior Grade Gerry Yocum. Ensign Bill Bishop (fresh out of training) and I were his assistants. A country boy from Pennsylvania, Gerry taught me a lot about being a good platoon commander. Bill and I would later serve together in SEAL Team Two. He became an outstanding SEAL platoon commander and was awarded the Silver Star in Vietnam.

Normally there were only two officers per platoon, but Dave wanted us to get as much experience as possible, so he started putting three officers in each deploying platoon. We left Little Creek in March on board the
Ruchamkin,
a converted World War II destroyer. The superstructure had been lengthened and heightened to allow the ship to carry an entire UDT of 100 troops.

We sailed to Vieques Island, off Puerto Rico, in company with the rest of the Caribbean Amphibious Ready Group, and participated in a huge amphibious exercise designed, no doubt, to impress Fidel Castro. After the exercise we moved our gear ashore to begin three weeks of “fun in the sun,” i.e., twelve-hour days honing our reconnaissance and demolition skills, and long night swims practicing sneak attacks against ships anchored offshore. We'd been on Vieques three days when we received an emergency back-load—“Get back on board”—order. The ready group was to proceed, at best speed, to a position off the coast of the Dominican Republic. My platoon was to stand by for a landing or to take out U.S. citizens, depending on what Lyndon Johnson decided to do in the wake of a “communist” takeover of the Dominican government. We were going to war—or so we thought.

The Dominican Republic crisis of 1965 has become a footnote in history. The country shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, which is located on the western end. The Republic had been ruled for thirty-one years by a ruthless dictator, Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated in 1961. The country then went through a short period of political upheaval, but made changes by national elections, not by violence. In September 1963, Juan Bosch, the elected president and a former university professor reputed to be “soft on Communism,” was overthrown by a military coup, which established a junta. The junta leaders had many of the same economic and social problems that had bedeviled the island republic for years. In early 1965 a series of crises, which the government blamed on Bosch, caused the junta to crack down on Bosch's supporters. The civilian head of the junta, faced with growing rioting and unable to get enough support from his military, resigned. Bosch's supporters took control of the government the next day. Fighting ensued between various factions in the military. Members of the junta asked Lyndon Johnson for help, saying the lives of American citizens in the Dominican Republic were at risk. Johnson in turn ordered U.S. forces to go protect Americans and to escort them out of the country.