“I’m used to bullshit,” Joisey said. “My old man’s a politician.”
I was wrong about officers and enlisted being treated the same. Black Hats were senior enlisted who seemed bent on proving the officer class a bunch of pussies who couldn’t hack it with the Bluejackets. They came down especially hard on Academy graduates when they had a chance to make us crawl in the mud. In spite of the harsher treatment, the attrition rate among officers was lower than among the enlisted. Perhaps it was because those of us who got into Frogman training had more sand in our craws than the general run of fleet brass occupied with their fitness reports and promotions.
“You’re a fucking lowlife ring-knocker, Eighty-eight, sir,” Black Hats raved. “Lower than whale shit, flyboy. It’s my personal mission, sir, to make you crawl. You won’t be in the phone booth when what’s left of this fucked-up class graduates.”
“I’ll be there if all that’s left in it are you and me and Joisey.”
“Sir, wipe that grin off your face. Get down! Get down! Knock ’em out.”
“How many, Instructor?”
“Do ’em until I get tired, ass wipe.”
I shrugged. Joisey sighed and dropped to the ground with me. Buddies did everything together. We pumped out push-ups until we were red-faced and panting.
“Reckon he’s tired yet, Bone?” Joisey gasped.
Empty bunks in the Quonsets increased. Fewer and fewer trainees showed up for morning formations while red helmet liners filled up the “Quit Zone.” One morning, before sunup as usual, we rushed to the beach to do our daily dozens—more like daily one hundreds—whereupon Little Hitler marched us to the main classroom instead.
“You pukes will keep your pie holes shut and listen. One of you so much as sneezes, I’ll personally heave your ass in the bay and chum for sharks.”
Trainees snapped to sitting attention in our seats when the NAB commander marched in and introduced a speaker. We had had lectures but rarely a speaker. Legendary Commander Francis Douglas “Red Dog” Fane’s pale eyes sparked as he stepped briskly to the podium. He was a ruddy-faced man in his forties, of average height, with a round Scottish face, short red hair turning gray, and a thick neck bunched into muscular shoulders. He wore Navy browns minus his jacket.
“You men,” he rumbled in a measured, aggressive tone, “are on the precipice of a new era in international warfare. Exciting things are happening as we enlarge our training to include not only the sea—on it and below it—but also land operations. I foresee a time in the very near future when the Frogs of UDT will become the spearhead for clandestine ops against tyranny around the world, when we will deploy to carry out missions that no other unit in the world is qualified to undertake. We are already conducting daring missions of the sort in Korea. From what I’ve heard”—he paused and his straight gaze stopped on me—“one or two of you may already have gone on some of these missions.”
Oh, shit! Black Hats would rain down fire and brimstone on my tadpole ass if they found out about that.
Fane explained how the UDT world was changing, webbed feet developing land calluses as UDTs added elements to their arsenal and worked their way up to becoming the unconventional night fighters he had been working to create for the past decade. All kinds of new tools were appearing—closed-circuit underwater breathing, new and faster boats, “skim boats,” submersibles with electric engines that pulled swimmers beneath the waves twice as fast as the swiftest Frog could swim.
An expression somewhere between pride and expectancy appeared on Fane’s Irish face. His chin and eyes lifted toward the heavens.
“We now have the elements of sea and land in our repertoire bag,” he said. “Next, we need to get ready for the sky.”
Sea, land, and sky.
Trainees were really pumped up when we filed out of the classroom. It was on our sunburned faces. I paused at the doorway where Fane was standing, waiting for us to exit.
“Whattaya think you’re doing, Eighty-eight?” Little Hitler growled. “Move! Move!”
I snapped Fane a salute. A slight grin touched the corners of his lips. He returned the salute, along with a sly wink. “See you back in Korea soon, Lieutenant Hamilton.” The smile broadened. His voice lowered so Little Hitler wouldn’t overhear. “This time you’ll be official.”
* * *
Fane’s appearance marked the beginning of so-called “evolutions,” each of which seemed designed to bust a trainee’s ass and wash him out of the course.
The Death Trap consisted of two perpendicular ropes suspended horizontally fifteen feet above a muddy pond. We attempted to make our way hand over hand across the water on the ropes while explosions below shattered the air, vibrated the ropes, and splattered us with mud and water.
“If you fall down there, shitbirds, you’ll come back up with the next charge of dynamite.”
No one wanted to test him.
Joisey lost his grip on the Slide for Life, a tall wooden tower from which trainees slid on a long rope across a wide pond of stagnant water. He plunged into the pond and came up spluttering with moss and mud dripping from his head and face.
“Try it again, Instructor? I ain’t quitting.”
Around the World happened in the dark with seven-man crews paddling, pushing, or carrying an IBL (Inflatable Boat, Large) over hundreds of yards of mud and sand, through barbed wire, ditches, and mud flats, across and around obstacles, racing to beat the other crews to a sea wall bordering the entrance to the bay. Joisey and I with our team came in second after our guy from Portland sprained his ankle and we had to carry him in the boat.
Both Murder Ball and the Obstacle Course were ballbusters. The Obstacle Course was a series of torture devices consisting of lines of elevated logs, barbed-wire crawls, water-filled ditches, and climbing walls—all of which had to be negotiated at breakneck speed. Murder Ball exceeded all other evolutions for sheer physical brutality. It was like sandlot football between criminals and savages. The objective was to win. Biting, gouging, wrestling … almost anything went except shooting an opponent.
A Bluejacket from Texas broke his leg and had to be recycled to the following class.
The Circus required nothing beyond pure stamina and determination. It was simply ass-busting burnout PT that ended only when the last man collapsed from exhaustion.
There was little order in how the various evolutions played out. Apparently, whim and randomness determined the pattern. In between the events, of course, came swimming. Mile-long ordeals in the bay with masks and rubber fins called “duck feet.” Navigation exercises on long swims out to sea and then back again to a designated landmark ashore.
“Not this dune, you idiot, sir. That one. Now, do it again until you get it right. But, first, knock out fifty push-ups.”
“Which arm?” I panted.
“Fifty with each, smartass, sir.”
“Bone, you are an idiot,” Joisey wheezed as, resembling a thoroughly drowned rat, he dropped down on the sand to do penance with me, as was his buddy duty.
Eventually, SCUBA was introduced, along with Cast and Recovery, a technique for getting in and out of the water rapidly. Swimmers rolled—cast—out of an IBS (Inflatable Boat, Small) tethered to the side of a speeding motor launch. Recovery was just the opposite. A snare man in the IBS used a figure-eight loop to snatch swimmers out of the brine as the launch pulling the rubber boat barreled past.
At last came the apocryphal seven days to weed out those who were just hanging on by their fingernails and teeth—Hell Week. Days and nights of one evolution after another all condensed by lack of sleep during which we were pounded into a near-catatonic state of severe mental and physical exhaustion. Less than one quarter of the 125 men who began training eight weeks ago survived Hell Week.
Joisey and I hung in and hung tough. We were still there when training moved into its final phases, where we learned the real war skills—demolitions, explosives charges and formulas, hydrographic beach recons, small unit train
ing in patrolling, weapons, raids and ambushes, five-mile swims, simulated real-world missions. … Trainers evaluated and graded us both as individuals and members of detachments. It was necessary that men think on their own but act as a team.
Finally, on the last day surviving members, who had lost an average of twenty pounds each, were marched to the Amphib School main classroom to graduate. Like special military men before us, we had all learned something vital. Men you could depend on when the shit came down were those who hung in there and worked hardest to get what they wanted. The tough exposure to UDT created a band of brothers, elite operational rogues willing to sacrifice everything for each other, including their lives.
Joisey breathed with relief when we entered the main classroom to graduate. We removed for the last time the red helmet liners with the numbers on them that served as our names during training.
“There were times, Bone,” Joisey confessed. “There were times. … But, Eighty-eight, we did it!”
CHAPTER NINE
I BARELY HAD TIME TO go home—rather, go to Elinor’s parents’ home in Rancho Santa Fe—and kiss my unhappy wife and baby daughter, Linda Jean, hello and good-bye before I found myself back in the Korean theater, where my combat career had begun.
“Bye, honey. It’ll soon be over.”
“Bill, no—!”
My new assignment was as research and development officer for UDT-5, headquartered at Camp McGill outside Yokosuka, Japan. I could have dreamed of no better slot from which to extend the operating arm of UDTs.
The war was winding down. That was the general feeling as our forces and theirs stalemated along the 38th Parallel. Peace negotiations dragged on as they had for the past two years while the shooting continued. Nonetheless, everyone seemed encouraged that the war was only months, perhaps only weeks, away from an armistice. It seemed the world might escape the cocking of the nuclear hammer for the first time after World War II.
President Harry Truman had fired General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 as commander of UN forces because of his aggressiveness and willingness to go nuclear and replaced him with General Matthew Ridgway. Ridgway was, as politicians like to say, more circumspect.
Pilots in Valley Forge’s ready room and crews throughout the ship fell stone silent that day when the carrier’s skipper played MacArthur’s farewell speech over the intercom. Dad, who knew the general, had told me thrilling stories about General Mac in the South Pacific. Chills broke out down my back as I listened with other pilots to that controlled voice fill the ready room.
“I am closing my fifty-two years of military service,” he said. “When I joined the army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. This world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain of West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that ‘old soldiers never die, they just fade away.’”
I was determined that I not “just fade away,” at least not until I had contributed my best.
For my second Korean tour, I was lodged at Camp McGill in a former officers’ quarters built by Germans for the Japanese during World War II. My roommate was UDT Lieutenant John Reynolds, a lean, mean slab of a man a little older than me and a few inches shorter. Reynolds had dark eyes and a darker sense of humor—“If I were God, I’d have made octopuses and platypuses, but I’d never have made people.”
In response to peace talks, UDT-5 began shutting down its activities against the NKs.
“Sonsofbitches are starting to send out patrols against us,” Reynolds complained. “Bastards are actually shooting at us when we try to go ashore.”
Shortly before I checked in, UDT-5 took significant combat casualties when North Koreans and Chicoms cornered a detachment and the detachment’s accompanying South Korean guerrillas behind enemy lines.
“We need to be more invisible when we insert,” I suggested.
“Parachutes?”
“Yes, that too. But more invisible.”
“You’re the new genius at Research and Development,” Reynolds replied.
The Korean War ended with a ceasefire on July 27, 1953, four months after Josef Stalin died, to be eventually replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. Some fifty-four thousand American military had died on that cold, dreary trash pile. But while this war may have ended, I was sure more than ever that we needed commandos in a dangerous nuclear world. The ceasefire allowed Reynolds and me the opportunity to work on some of our ideas.
I remembered Commander Fane talking about how, back in 1947, he explored using early-day helicopters to deploy UDT operators. Reynolds and I batted the idea off each other and then decided to revive his efforts. I directed a confidential memo to Commander, Underwater Demolition Unit One (COMUDU-One), UDT-5’s parent command, with a copy to Fane at UDT-1 explaining what we had in mind:
A complete operation might be conducted in the following manner: helicopters, each carrying six swimmers could proceed at low altitude to an objective area from a remote sea or shore base. Swimmers would be dropped and the planes could then retire. The helicopter would later return, lay a protective smoke screen, and pick up the swimmers.
It is believed that the particular advantage in this type operation lies in the ability to conduct reconnaissance operations in normally inaccessible areas with an element of secrecy and surprise not possible with present methods. There need be no surface units within visible distance of the objective area.
I persuaded helicopter pilots from nearby Atsugi Airfield to help Reynolds and me try out our scheme in a series of exercises off the Japanese coast. Reynolds promptly dubbed them “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Poseidon.” Abbot and Costello were a popular comedy duo starring in such movies as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.
A half-dozen Frogmen volunteers from UDT-5 waited with some degree of amused skepticism while pilots and flight crew chiefs under our direction removed cargo seats from a Sikorsky HRS-3 and installed a solid aluminum bar to which we might attach a Jacob’s ladder. The ladder was for recovery purposes.
“It might have been safer if we’d kept the war going,” one of the Frogmen cracked.
Casting looked simple enough. The chopper flew out over the water at the height of a three-story building and at about 40 knots true airspeed. Swimmers jumped out wearing full combat gear—pack, knives, weapons, ammo, fins, and face mask. Equipment exploded in all directions when we struck the water. We ended up half-drowned with perhaps one fin remaining and the rest of our gear sinking beneath the waves.
I gasped my way to the surface and quickly counted heads to make sure no one was missing or badly injured. Reynolds swam over.
“Bad idea, Coyote,” he managed around a lung full of salt water. “Maybe we ought to slow that chopper down.”
But not too much. It was necessary the helicopter maintain some speed during infiltration in order that enemy radar not smell a rat and guess what we were up to.
During the next few jumps we bundled individual equipment around flotation bladders and dropped them first. Not too bad. A few men bounced off the water and skipped across the waves like flying fish. One was knocked unconscious. A trailing safety boat plucked him out of the drink.
“Maybe we should slow it down a tad,” I conceded.
We finally got it right after about a hundred jumps without losing a swimmer. The fastest safe drop speed seemed to be around 30 knots at an altitude half that of a three-story building. Optimum body posture was feet first, legs together, arms tucked across the chest, and body bent slightly forward at the waist to allow it to knife smoothly into the water.
A helicopter or two could slide in fast under cover of darkness or a smoke screen, slow to a safer speed, and dump their human loads into the ocean near shore without the land-bound enemy being any the wiser. It was UDT’s first successful foray into bec
oming airborne.
Now for the recovery.
It was the same principle as recovery by boat at sea, in which a retriever with a loop in a rubber raft towed by a fast boat snatched a swimmer out of the water and flopped him like a netted fish into the IBS. The procedure sounded simple enough to use with a helicopter pickup.
Instead of to a rubber raft, we attached the loop to a flexible Jacob’s ladder, whose other end was secured to the aluminum bar on the floor of the HRS-3 using bungee cord. Theoretically, the bungees took up slack and cushioned the swimmer below when he grabbed the loop as the chopper flew by.
Reynolds discovered what happened when a swimmer was too slow monkey-climbing the ladder to the chopper door. He was halfway up the ladder when the next man grabbed the loop as it passed by. The bungee cord took the shock, stretched like the rubbers on a slingshot, and launched Reynolds off the ladder like a stone.
I laughed. “You looked like a bullfrog thrown out of a mop bucket.”
With a few modifications we now had a workable helicopter cast and recovery system.
“Parachutes next?” I mused.
Reynolds rolled his eyes.
I was, after all, UDT-5’s research and development officer. So I needed to continue researching and developing. I talked the South Korean Air Force, now more or less in peacetime mode, into providing a C-46 platform for parachute training. We barely got started before COMUDU and the Pentagon stepped in and closed us down.
“War’s over,” I was informed. “You’re going home.”
CHAPTER TEN
SEA DUTY, WAR, AND long separations lurked in the shadows of every Navy marriage. After Korea, for the first time since we were wed, Elinor and I and toddler daughter Linda Jean lived under the same roof for a period of more than a few days or weeks at a time. I tried, honestly tried, to live the conventional life—wife, family, Ford station wagon in the garage, mortgage.
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