Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  Mom, unlike Elinor, was meant to be a Navy wife. She understood that a woman signs on for the Navy when she marries into it. All those years I never once heard her complain about the Admiral going to sea.

  “Billy, are you sure you’re doing the right thing, marrying Elinor?” Mom asked, looking concerned. “It takes a different sort of woman to be a Navy wife.”

  But, damn it, I was in love. What was that old saying about love conquering all, including, I suppose, bad breath, flatulence, and old age?

  Funny, though, for all that I was almost born on the sea, I was once afraid of the water, like Doug Fane. I was wading in the surf at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, when I was three years old and something unseen brushed against my ankle and nipped me. I shrieked and fled to safety, flapping my arms like a seagull with a broken wing.

  It took Mother a month to get me off the sand and into the water again. But once she got me back in, she couldn’t get me out. I spent much of my free time in the sea from then on. One of Dad’s old Annapolis classmates, commanding officer of the USS Seal, even took me for a cruise in his submarine when we were stationed at Panama. At Greenbrier and at Bullis I competed in both football and swimming.

  I returned to Happy Valley after my first UDT mission exhilarated and with a new direction for my career. My flying buddies considered me foolish. In a letter, Elinor accused me of having completely lost my mind. Senior officers tried to dissuade me, pointing out that voluntarily changing a career path was looked upon in a negative light. Dad’s letters expressed his disappointment. He couldn’t understand why a young officer with a good record would consider jumping ship for a tiny nondescript outfit destined to remain underwater and metaphorically out of sight.

  “For the last several months,” read my last fitness report from Valley Forge, “this officer has noticed an uneasy feeling while flying; this has caused him to consider seriously the thought of terminating his career as a naval aviator. … It is conceivable that a recent change in marital status [my getting married before deployment] and the occurrence of several accidents involving [other pilots in] the F9F type aircraft have precipitated the decisions which this officer has been contemplating for some time.”

  Any decisions I made had little to do with flying. My mind had simply gone elsewhere, to a field that appeared more challenging. I submitted an official response for my decision: “Undoubtedly a sure aid to promotion in the present day navy is adherence to conventional career paths, but I am not entirely convinced that non-adherence precludes advancement. There must be a place in the navy for officers, although perhaps for only a few, motivated along UDT/EOD/diving lines in addition to the more conventional motivations, and I want to be one of these.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ELINOR HAD MOVED IN with her folks at Rancho Santa Fe, California, when I shipped out for Korea. We were actually on the same continent together for less than four months total of the first eighteen we were married. That was the way things were in the Navy. You often missed important family occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, family reunions, the birth of children. … I remembered the emptiness I felt—and my brother, Frank, must have felt as well—every time Dad shipped out for new ports or wars. But we always had Mother, and Mom wasn’t the bitching sort. She took it in stride, and, of course, that made it easier for Frank and me.

  I gave up flying in Korea, but that didn’t mean I stayed home with Elinor. I requested UDT training and headed back out to sea for a year while awaiting orders—first as operations officer aboard the destroyer USS Buckley and then on the patrol ship USS PCE. Elinor met me once when the PCE docked in Norfolk. She traveled from the West Coast to the East Coast by airplane and bus, even though she was six months pregnant; obviously, my thirty-day postwar leave hadn’t been wasted. She waited at the bottom of the gangplank among a boisterous gaggle of wives, children, girlfriends, and parents when ship’s company, laughing and calling out to happy faces in the crowd, jostled our way ashore into waiting arms.

  I was a full lieutenant by this time and easy enough to spot, what with my height and the new bars glinting on the shoulder boards of my dress whites. Elinor proved harder to spot, being tiny like she was and enveloped in the throng. She was also the only female, I noticed, who was not ecstatic with delight and waving her arms and shouting. That took the cocky grin off my mug.

  She looked tired when she dutifully embraced and kissed me. She wore a drab-gray maternity blouse and, as though in afterthought of the occasion, a red ribbon in her hair. I put my arms around her and protectively helped her out of the crowd.

  “How long’s your visit this time?” she asked. “Visiting” was how she referred to our time together. “Will you be with me when the baby’s born?”

  “I—”

  I still hadn’t told her about applying for UDT.

  I rented a hotel room for the week. We did all the things reunited families on shore liberty are supposed to do—like eat out and go to the movies, get together with shipmates and their families, attend a party. … What we didn’t do was a lot of talking. I mean real talking, like new husbands and wives do when they’re about to start having and raising children and discussing future plans.

  Elinor seemed distracted, withdrawn, when we were alone together. It occurred to me that I had been unfair and selfish in marrying her. I recognized this same kind of bitterness in some of the other wives. Several of my fellow officers had already given up their careers in deference to their women, had moved on to Dubuque or Chicago to settle down as sales reps or corporate engineers.

  I took Elinor’s hand across the restaurant table. “Elinor? Elinor, we can work it out.”

  I owed her that much.

  A tear squeezed from the corner of one big brown eye. “I-I … Oh, God, Bill, I’m so—”

  She didn’t say it. But I knew. Unhappy. And it was my fault.

  I was out to sea when our daughter, Linda Jean, was born. But I called her on the ship-to-shore.

  Shortly thereafter, I received orders for Underwater Demolition Team Replacement (UDTR) School, which included a “travel” week. I spent it getting acquainted with our new baby and reacquainted with my wife at her parents’ home in Rancho Santa Fe on my way to Coronado Naval Amphibious Base, located across the bay from San Diego.

  She exploded on me when I finally revealed my new duty station. She first went into that dead cold silence that you knew, just knew, was a short fuse burning. Then she opened up with a blistering broadside that scorched my timbers fore and aft.

  “Bill, we have a beautiful little girl. Don’t you know what that means? It means Linda Jean has a right to expect her father to be here with her when she takes her first step, when she goes off to kindergarten, here to give her first date the father’s once-over. Not off to some war or gone to a dark corner of the world. Bill, for God’s sake! We want you home with us. That’s where you belong.”

  Was that really where I belonged? She knew who and what I was when she married me. I also knew who and what she was. But … but we had been in love.

  “Honey, I’ll only be down the coast from you and Linda Jean and across the bay.”

  I may as well have been on my way to the other side of the world. There would be no time off to see her and the baby. UDT training required that a trainee consider nothing beyond each grueling day. The outside world—Elinor and little Linda Jean, the continuing war in Korea, my Mom, Dad, Frank, all of it—must cease to exist if I was going to survive the next twelve weeks.

  “I thought we were married,” Elinor sobbed. “You know, husband and wife and baby makes three. But we’re only ever visiting.”

  “Honey—?”

  “Which comes first, Bill? Me or the Navy?”

  Every good Navy career man had an answer for a question like that: “Maybe you shouldn’t ask me that, babykins. Hell, darling, there’s only one Navy.”

  But no good Navy career man ever actually said it if he valued his marriage.

  I sto
od at the door as I left with a packed sea bag dragging from one hand and my face hanging out, brain locked, and balls sucked up. How could a six-four naval officer turn into a little boy when confronted by a five-three woman with a baby in her arms? For God’s sake, it wasn’t like I was deserting them.

  “Love both of you more than anything,” I murmured before I slung the sea bag on my shoulder and started to walk off.

  Her shrill response stabbed me in the back. “More than anything? Is that all you’re going to say? Is that all?”

  History stretching back to the beginning of civilization was full of men who were not content to simply grow roots and moss, work a nine-to-five, and wait for a pension and grandkids. Odysseus took to the sea. So did Columbus and Magellan and the Vikings.

  From childhood Dad and my brilliant mother instilled in me a strong sense of history. I was fascinated by the way history played out over time. Dad also cursed me with his sense of restlessness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I SUPPOSE I MIGHT HAVE been tagged as one troubled young lieutenant (JG) when I alighted from the yellow cab at the gate to Naval Amphibious Base Coronado in February 1953. I stood outside the entrance with my sea bag while the cab turned around and headed back up the Silver Strand toward Coronado and San Diego.

  What kind of man left his family to endure the torture of pain, fatigue, humiliation, cold and heat, and mental and physical exhaustion of the toughest training in the entire United States military? And for what? A vision of a commando force? Sounded like some pipe dream by a kid who had read too many superhero comic books.

  From where I stood at the gate to the Amphib base, seeing the shimmer of the Pacific Ocean that stretched from here all the way to Asia, smelling the salt in the crisp air, feeling it in my bones and in my blood … I was born for this.

  I drew in a deep breath, resigned to my destiny, and hoisted the sea bag to my shoulder. The Marine outside his little guard shack watched me. I nodded at him and produced my ID. He saluted crisply.

  “Good luck, sir,” he said.

  I walked on through the gate.

  Men, it seems, have always been drawn to the prospect of swimming with the fish and exploring the vast areas of Earth covered by water. Underwater diving can be traced back more than five thousand years. Divers were active in military exploits at least back to 500 B.C. when a Greek named Scyllias used a hollow reed as a snorkel in order to swim in undetected and cut the mooring lines of an enemy Persian fleet.

  Alexander the Great, conqueror of much of what was then known as the “civilized world,” was undoubtedly aware of using swimmers in battle. In 333 BC, he faced enemy combat swimmers himself after laying siege to Tyre. The city on an island managed to hold out against Alexander for seven months by attacking his shipping. Swimmers at night cut anchor ropes to smash Alexander’s ships and their soldiers and sailors onto shoals and rocky shores.

  Although no record exists of Alexander himself using divers in his conquests, he was nonetheless intrigued by the idea. Legend has it that he foreshadowed SCUBA—Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus—when he constructed a crude diving bell from a barrel and remained at the bottom of the sea for a full day.

  While a hollow reed or a barrel allows a swimmer to submerge and still breathe, it is virtually impossible to suck air through any tube more than two feet long, and breathing in a barrel turns to deadly carbon dioxide in a very short time. Therefore, adventurers and enterprising “frogmen” over the centuries experimented with various other methods to live underwater, such as air-filled “breathing bags” or pumps on long surface-to-diver air hoses.

  Besides being a master painter, Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452, was one of the most versatile geniuses in history. His ideas and designs included a flying machine, a parachute, a diving bell, and a self-contained underwater breathing contraption that could have been a prototype of SCUBA systems invented centuries after his death.

  Between 1500 and 1800, diving bells led to crude, one-man diving outfits, which eventually led to German-born Augustus Siebe developing the first practical deep-sea “hard-hat” diving suit.

  In 1866, Benoit Rouquayrol designed a regulator that adjusted the flow of air from a tank to the diver, a necessary prerequisite for SCUBA. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a French naval lieutenant, and engineer Emile Gagnon improved upon the concept in the midst of World War II by redesigning a car regulator to provide compressed air automatically to a diver upon demand. The two Frenchmen attached their demand-valve regulator to hoses, a mouthpiece, and a pair of compressed-air tanks to invent the first workable “open-circuit” demand-type SCUBA. They patented it in 1943 as the Aqua-Lung.

  This simple device fundamentally altered diving and was eventually adapted for military purposes, both in its original form and “closed-circuit,” which emitted no bubbles and made the approach of underwater swimmers virtually undetectable. Underwater breathing was not extensively used by UDTs until after Doctor Christian J. Lambertsen invented and tested his own form of SCUBA in 1942 while still working on his MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

  In between the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War, Lambertsen collaborated with Commander Doug “Red Dog” Fane to keep Fane’s cherished UDTs alive. His diving research and developments in oxygen and mixed-gas-circuit rebreathing for military use earned him recognition as the father of U.S. combat swimming. It was not until 1947 that the Navy’s acquisition of Aqua-Lungs and Lambertsen’s designs gave impetus to diving as an aspect of UDT operations.

  Fane encouraged UDT deployment to new frontiers in the American peacetime fleet. Although UDT numbers had been drastically reduced postwar to a barely sustainable size, they could at various times be found working and training in the frigid waters off Point Barrow, Alaska, in the Antarctic, in the Bering Sea, off the China coast, in the Philippines, and in Latin America. Three months before the outbreak of the Korean War, a few team members took part in atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.

  The Korean War recorded the first use of the Aqua-Lung in combat diver operations when UDT Frogman William Giannotti dove down to locate the minesweeper USS Pledge, which the enemy had sunk off Wonsan Harbor. Soon, Frogmen not only became comfortable underwater but also began to leave the tracks of their webbed feet on land. By the time I reported to Coronado for UDTR, the Korean War had stalemated in the Hill Fights along the 38th Parallel and the U.S. military establishment was beginning to show more interest in using commandos in an increasingly dangerous world.

  At Coronado, we UDT trainees were assigned to World War II–era Quonset huts with curved steel walls and wooden floors. Heads and showers were in separate buildings. First order of business that followed sign-in and billeting was the issuance of training uniforms and pairing off into swim buddies. Uniforms consisted of green cotton utility tops and bottoms, heavy boondocker boots, and red-painted helmet liners with the students’ billet numbers painted on them. I became Billet No. 88. No name, no rank. Officers and enlisted were treated exactly the same. Everybody was a mere number.

  “What’s your boot size, Eighty-eight?”

  “Twelve, sir.”

  “I ain’t no sir, shithead. I work for a living.”

  The instructor cadre, called Black Hats, paired us off. I looked down on top of my new buddy’s head—a stocky little bos’n third class with a heavy jaw that made his face look out of balance. A pair of amused brown eyes anchored a crooked, bony nose between them. Billet No. 65 was from “New Joisey,” so “Joisey” became his nickname. Everybody had nicknames in the military. My old moniker followed me. Bone.

  Wearing the red helmet liners was mandatory, except inside classrooms and to bed. All a student had to do to quit was take off his liner and place it on the ground. He would be out of there and back to the fleet before the sun set.

  Formal classrooms lay behind our billets, but the real classroom was the ocean and the sand and the boiling-down sun. Instructor cadre were apparently selected as much f
or brawn as for brains. They were fit-looking specimens with broad shoulders and narrow waists who sometimes ran backward on long runs, not even breathing hard while they blistered us with a torrent of abuse.

  “You’re a bunch of puke pussies. You’re slow, you’re lazy, your breath stinks and you don’t love Jesus. Come on, ladies, get with the program or your sorry ass is out of here. How did we ever get such a herd of worthless kikes, spics, niggers, and honkies?”

  The reasoning behind it was to ride the trainees so hard that those with any quit in them at all would quit. If a man had “quit” in him, it was better it come out now.

  “If you’re a quitter, we don’t need you in UDT,” snarled the instructor we called Little Hitler. “You’d bug out when the shit came down and we really needed you.”

  The first month was mostly physical conditioning and harassment. Hard, pounding runs in heavy boondockers, sweaty utilities, and helmets that bounced on heads of hair skinned down to flesh. Six or eight miles at a time in formation along the surf line, carrying wet sand bags and tortured by Black Hats.

  “Run, shitbirds, run, RUN! Are you men or pussies?”

  The most minor transgression called for a penalty. Duck waddles or push-ups. “Get down. Get down. Give me fifty. Knock ’em out, shit-for-brains.”

  The first guy dropped out on the second day. Removed his helmet liner and he was gone. That started the exodus.

  “This class will graduate in a phone booth at this rate,” instructors predicted.

  “Joisey,” I said, “me and you will still be going strong when the rest of these pogues are gone. It takes brains and balls—and you and me have ’em. They’re just testing to see if we can take the bullshit.”