Combat Swimmer (4 page)

“No, thanks—I'd rather do it myself.”

He pulled the Mark 6 off my back, laid it on the deck, handed me a cup of coffee, and went right to the barilyme canister. I watched as he disconnected the hoses, unscrewed the canister top, and dumped the water and barilyme through the bilge grates.

“What the hell did you think you were doing, swimming with the rig in this condition?”

“My job.”

“Bullshit—this was a training mission, and you should have surfaced and gotten picked up by the safety boat.”

Dave looked at me—hard—put the canister down, and stalked off.

Yeah, it was a training mission—part of a large battle-readiness exercise for UDT-22. We were working out of our winter training base, the submarine base at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. We'd go back to St. Thomas, get a good meal and some sleep, and prepare our gear for the demolition mission we'd run early the next morning. Then we'd be back at the target island at 0500, the same way we'd come today, to destroy all the obstacles we'd found. All part of the battle exercise. But I knew that if I had the same problem with my Mark 6 again, I'd handle it the same way. Dave taught us to treat every training mission as the real thing.

Deacon came up to me, and I began to lay into him for telling the CO about what I did. Before I could get two words out of my mouth, he interrupted: “It was stupid for you to keep swimming the rig in that condition, and it was
really
stupid for you to be briefing Tom under the Bubble on your alternate lock-in plan!”

Deacon set a personal record for cumulative words as he chewed me out. And as usual, he was right.

I went to the wardroom after I'd debriefed the troops and we'd cleaned our gear. Dave was pouring coffee. No one else was there, so I figured I was in for a royal ass-chewing.

“Come in and sit down,” Dave growled. I walked in and sat down.

Handing me a cup of coffee, he sat across the table from me and said, “Gormly, you're a dumb son of a bitch.”

“Thanks for the coffee, Captain.”

He told me the platoon had done well on the mission, but he'd had no choice other than to grill me in front of my men. He knew they knew what I'd done, and he wasn't going to tolerate such blatant violations of his diving procedures. Again he demanded, “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

I'd already answered that question, and I couldn't think of anything else to add. Finally, I just looked at him. “What would you have done?”

Dave stared at me for about ten seconds. I figured he was about to reach across the table and rip off my head for being a wiseass. Instead a grin crept onto his scowling face. “Same thing you did.”

Figuring I was out of the woods, I looked him in the eye and said, “Gotta train like you're gonna fight—right?”

Dave looked right back at me and said, “Gormly, you're buying the rum and Cokes when we get back to St. Thomas.”

I would have many occasions to remember that conversation later in my SEAL career. For one thing, Dave set the tone for me when I later commanded SEAL Teams: never come down too hard on someone who's trying to do his job the realistic way. Another equally important lesson I learned was that if you don't cut corners in training, you're much better prepared for combat.

The difficulties we faced underwater that day in 1966 were good preparation for the tense situations I faced later in Vietnam, Grenada, and other places. Staying locked and loaded was the only way to go.

A
large sign at Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUDS) training tells new students what they can expect: “The only easy day was yesterday.” When I went through training, there were no easy days. And as I later learned, the axiom applied to just about everything in the SEALs.

I reported to training, for the second time, in January 1964. Nothing could have deterred me once I started. When something is hard to get, you want it more. As I lay in my bunk that first night, I reflected on how I'd finally made it to this point. It hadn't been easy.

 

I was born on February 10, 1941, in Long Branch, New Jersey. My father, James Louis Gormly, was from a New York Irish family. He was working on Wall Street in 1929 when the market crashed. That was probably an omen of things to come for the Gormly family, since none of us has ever gotten rich. My mother, Dorothy Percival Gormly, was also from New York. She had been married once before to an electrical engineer, Joseph Leopold. They had one child, my half brother, Joseph Richard Gormly (he took my father's name).

In 1942, when I was eighteen months old, my family moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia. With a partner, my father started a ship's chandlery in Norfolk. He was too old for the military, so, like many others, he got into the wartime shipbuilding industry. His company got some lucrative government contracts to outfit the Liberty ships being constructed at Norfolk-area shipyards. For a few years I guess he did okay, although I was too young to remember. After the war, though, the chandlery went under and he turned to selling cars. My mother spent many years working in real estate. We never had a lot of money, but we did all right. But my father wasn't home much, and in many ways, my older brother, Dick, stood in for him. Dick was twelve years older and was a good influence on me. Thanks to my father's wartime prosperity, he spent three years at the prestigious Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg and then went to the University of Virginia. I never held his good fortune against him—I loved Virginia Beach, and never wanted to go to prep school. And my grades were never good enough to get me into UVA!

Both my parents died, destitute, in 1977. My father died in May, the victim of many heart attacks and strokes brought about by hard living. My mother died of a heart attack in December. Both were alcoholics and had smoked heavily for many years. My brother died of throat cancer, brought about by copious consumption of booze, in 1993. After becoming a very successful insurance broker he also died penniless because of poor business and personal decisions. Early in my life, I'd decided to follow a different course.

The summer of 1962 was a pivotal period in my life. I had a big decision to make: what to do after college. After attending Louisburg Junior College in North Carolina for two years, I was finishing my B.A. in history that December at the Norfolk Division of William and Mary. To get through college, I worked thirty-five to forty hours a week at J. C. Penney's. Four nights a week I worked at a Tastee Freeze. Plus, I was taking a course in night school three evenings a week so I'd have enough math credits to graduate. In order to see my future wife, Becky, I would go by her house about two o'clock in the morning, after leaving the Tastee Freeze.

One night I told Becky I was thinking about chucking it all and going to Hawaii to surf for a year. I reasoned I could always come back and finish that last semester in school. I asked her what she'd do if I went to Hawaii. She said, “Have at it, but don't expect me to be here when you get back.” I decided I'd better keep on track instead.

We got married on August 4, 1962. I kid her about her thinking she was marrying Virginia Beach money. In fact, neither family had much. We were determined to make it on our own. Becky had a great job with the local telephone company. In those days Ma Bell was one of the best employers in town, and she made more than I did in both of my jobs.

The turning point came on a warm, sunny day in September 1962. I sat on my surfboard 100 yards offshore, waiting for a good wave and wondering what to do after college. Back toward shore, another surfer was paddling out to the lineup. I knew all the guys who surfed in Virginia Beach, and most of the better surfers from other areas. This guy was a good surfer, but I didn't know his name or anything about him. As he settled in to wait with me, I introduced myself and asked who he was and what he did for a living.

He told me he was Ron Smith and he was in the Navy, stationed at Little Creek, Virginia. And what kind of job did he have that allowed him to surf whenever he wanted? He was the executive officer of an Underwater Demolition Team (UDT). His boss, he said, liked to play tennis, so they had an agreement. If Ron could surf whenever the waves were good, he would watch the shop while his boss played tennis every afternoon.

As we got to know each other better through surfing, he began to talk to me about joining the Navy after I finished college. I was impressed by his character and his willingness to befriend a younger guy. But mostly I was impressed with his job. I figured a job that allowed you to surf anytime you wanted was the job for me.

Ron helped me with the paperwork for getting into the Navy, and I reported to Officer Candidate School at Newport, Rhode Island, in January 1963. I'd hoped to start UDT training that summer, but it didn't work out that way.

I passed the running, swimming, and strength parts of the test easily. All that remained was the pressure and oxygen toxicity test, which I knew nothing about but wasn't worried. However, I made the mistake of listening to the diving corpsman who administered the test. He told us that if we felt the least bit uncomfortable to let him know.

The test was conducted in a recompression chamber. They took us down to 120 feet to see if we could handle the pressure, and then brought us up to 60 feet, where we were to breathe pure oxygen for thirty minutes. This part of the test was designed to see if we were susceptible to oxygen toxicity—a real problem if you wanted to be a frogman.

I had no idea what the symptoms were, and I later found out that the Navy had no real idea why people developed oxygen toxicity, except that it happened sometimes when you breathed pure oxygen under pressure. I began to feel funny after about ten minutes, and I signaled the corpsman. He immediately pulled off my mask and told me to forget about UDT.

We later figured out that I had hyperventilated from the excitement. It didn't matter; UDT wasn't hurting for officers, and I was out of luck. There was no provision for another test. So I finished OCS with the notion that I would do my required three years and get out.

Then a strange thing happened. I got orders to report to UDT training at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia, home of the East Coast UDT and SEAL teams. The officials at OCS told me not to question the orders: some doctor probably reviewed my record and decided there was no problem. So I reported for training in June 1963—and the corpsman assigned to the training unit took a look at my record and said, “Sorry, Charlie, you're not qualified—you flunked the oxygen test.”

I was pissed, but all my yelling got me nowhere. The Navy sent me to the Naval Amphibious School to await new orders. Because I was a three-year reservist and had a family in Virginia Beach, someone in the Bureau of Naval Personnel probably decided the cheapest thing for the Navy to do was to leave me at Little Creek to do my time with the “Gators.” I went to a few training courses and then had the good fortune to get orders to Assault Craft Unit 2 (ACU-2) at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek. There, at a diesel engine maintenance course, I met Tom Gaston, a fellow ensign assigned to UDT-21. Tom convinced the UDT doctor to give me another test. I took it and passed with no problems. I even took a second test to make sure. And in nearly thirty years of diving pure-oxygen and mixed-gas scuba, I never experienced a problem with oxygen toxicity. Thanks, Tom.

 

In November 1963 I received my orders to report to UDT Replacement Training Class 31, beginning in January. I was a little worried about how the instructors would see me—in those days most people got only one chance at UDT training. But when I walked through the door to the administration building and “instructor's hut” my apprehensions were dispelled. Chief Petty Officer Tom Blais looked up from his desk. “Welcome back, Mr. Gormly. Hit the deck and start doing push-ups until I get tired.”

In those days, the first two weeks of training were devoted to physical conditioning as the instructors tried to get all the men who'd been serving on ships in shape for the rigors of “Hell Week,” the third week of training. For me the conditioning phase was sort of a pacing period: I'd been working harder on my own beforehand. In fact, throughout the course I found training wasn't as hard for me as for others in the class. First, Ron Smith had done a great job of letting me know what to expect. “Don't quit,” he advised, “and you'll make it, because they rarely throw anyone out.” Second, I'd had plenty of opportunity to get in shape while biding my time at ACU-2. Third, with a wife and baby depending on me I had plenty of motivation. And finally, I'd had a high school football coach who instilled a never-quit attitude in me. I figured that if I'd survived two-a-day summer practices under his ex-Marine-Corps-drill-instructor tutelage, I could get through anything.

When morning training started, we all got a taste of things to come. With the rest of my fellow trainees, I ran into a hot, stuffy classroom. (We ran everywhere we went.) As we stood at rigid attention, the side door to the classroom slammed open and a large black man in green fatigues roared, “Good morning, class, I am Instructor Bernie Waddell. You can call me Bernie—ha, ha, ha.”

“Good morning, Instructor Waddell,” we responded in unison. Nobody in their right mind would have considered calling him Bernie.

“Welcome to Class Thirty-one. I'm going to go over a few things you people need to know. How's your spirit?”

“
AAAARH,
Instructor Waddell!” we roared.

“All right. Now listen up, because I'm not going to repeat myself—I say again, I'm not going to repeat myself. Do you people understand?”

“Yes, Instructor Waddell.”