Night Fighter

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

  “Maybe the kids and I should go stay with Mama until you get this … this whatever out of your system,” she suggested.

  But she didn’t. Not this time.

  The kid was still in diapers when I bundled newborn, three-year-old daughter, and unhappy wife into our old Ford station wagon and set out for the East Coast again. Frigid conditions diving off Alaska and around the DEW line in the Arctic were nothing compared to the temperature inside the Ford as I wended our way across the continent to my next duty station with the Navy Diving School in Washington D.C. “Hard-hat” diving was used primarily for salvaging; I considered it another step on the course I had set for myself.

  Most roads in the Southwest were narrow and rough and air conditioning was a luxury not available in many vehicles. I was afraid Elinor was ready to give up on me by the time the four of us reached the Atlantic.

  “Honey—?”

  “Bill, don’t you think we’ve been gypsies long enough? We need a home, Bill, a real home.”

  She was right, I knew she was right. I loved her, I adored the babies. Still, something in me just wouldn’t, couldn’t, give up. I flourished on physical and mental challenges that led me relentlessly back to the sea and its promises.

  I completed hard-hat dive school in Washington, then dragged the family to the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance School at Indian Head, Maryland, on the Potomac River near the Patuxent River Naval Air Warfare Center Test Facility. Having previously attended EOD training, and afterward gained experience in demolitions, I was assigned as training officer over students from every military service, the CIA, and other government types. It was precise and dangerous duty involving correctly and safely disposing of, disarming, and utilizing explosives in various situations on land and sea. UDTs were required to handle dynamite, nitro, plastic, and other materials in blowing obstacles for amphibious landings, as well as destroying enemy targets ashore, such as bridges, railroad tracks, and even friendly arms and supply dumps to keep the enemy from getting them.

  One of my students was an old Navy friend named Rudy Enders, whose position in EOD School I secured for him and whose path continued to cross mine well into our future. Another was a senior CIA agent up-training for clandestine assignments to Vietnam, where Army Special Forces was involved in training South Vietnamese troops. A Special Forces officer, Captain Harry G. Cramer, had already become the first SF soldier killed in Vietnam, on October 20, 1957. Both students would later influence my course in special operations.

  Next stop was Underwater Swimmers School at Naval Air Station, Key West, Florida, where I was the school’s executive officer and Rudy Enders was training officer. I requested the assignment, thinking I needed advanced exposure to management techniques in the world of military diving. Our trainees were Navy, Marines, and Army Special Forces personnel, there to receive underwater experience in everything from submerged hand-to-hand combat to escaping from various situations to avoid drowning.

  Enders and I made a good team. He was a year or so younger than I, shorter, since nearly everyone was shorter, stockier, with slightly bowed legs and buzz-cut hair bleached almost white by the sun. His passion was spearfishing.

  One afternoon I arranged to use a Navy torpedo boat for the two of us to dive and spearfish on the sunken Luckenbach ship north of Key West in about seventy feet of water. Enders shot a 150-pound Jewfish with a powerhead. He missed his mark and the big fish fled, trailing blood in the water. We chased it until a shark suddenly appeared that looked about the size of a small submarine. It took the two of us about two seconds to scoot into the wreck and hide until the shark lost interest.

  Shore duty meant home cooking and evenings with the family watching TV. It seemed as our family grew, Elinor’s dissatisfaction with Navy life became more clearly focused on me. Our third child, daughter Jana Lee, was born on May 20, 1958, as fresh as ocean breezes and as lovely as a sunrise. Elinor now had three powerful and beautiful weapons in Linda Jean, Bill Jr., and Jana Lee with which to try to knock some sense into my head.

  “Honey, things are getting better,” I pleaded. “Bear with me. The kids will go places and see things most others will never experience. It’s a good life for them.”

  “What about for wives? Bill, the Navy Wives Club and the little social cliques are no substitute for family life.”

  At unexpected times, often prompted by the sound of a jet engine or the sight of an aircraft flying over, I experienced a flashback to that morning in Korea when I played my terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with the MiG that shot up my unarmed F9F. Nightmares were made of such memories—of going down with my plane, being trapped in the cockpit and regaining consciousness while underwater and sinking.

  Rear Admiral Emerson E. Fawkes, head of the Design Branch in Bureau of Aeronautics, led pioneering efforts to devise a cockpit system that permitted underwater escape. It involved mechanical ejection in which a charge blew off the canopy and propelled the pilot free of the sinking aircraft, much the same as the procedure in an air exit, except underwater. I volunteered to be the first human subject to test the system for the Pilot Underwater Escape Program. I figured it might save pilot lives if I proved it could be done.

  Tests included a series of simulated aircraft crashes in twenty-two fathoms of water in the Atlantic off the coast of Key West. We used a fully-instrumented aircraft in order to obtain water impact, deceleration and sink rate, entry attitude, and canopy implosion for a variety of crash conditions. We began with anthropometric dummies and reduced catapult charges and moved up to the first live test dummy—me.

  “A live dummy,” Enders ribbed me. “Maybe you’re not as tightly wound as I thought you were.”

  It was a serious undertaking, which meant conceivably I could die. Physical trauma was a possibility once I activated the explosive seat, followed by shock, air embolism, and drowning at one hundred feet below the surface. I was, however, the ideal subject to give it a go—former naval aviator, superb physical condition, experienced in diving and in the use of explosives.

  I donned pilot gear in the morning sun with salt air blowing against the AD-1 cockpit hoisted onto the fantail of a transport LSD (landing ship, dock). I climbed in and sealed the canopy. Someone once commented on how parachuting from an aircraft “feels like committing suicide.” What about doing it underwater?

  A member of the support personnel tapped on the canopy. “God look over you,” he mouthed.

  Minutes later, the cockpit with me inside was hurled over the side. I felt it sinking like a stone. Rays of sunlight shafting from above faded. Saltwater filled the canopy.

  I yanked the curtain to initiate the ejection charge. Immediately, I experienced a sensation of crashing into a stone wall. The seat, with me buckled into it, tumbled through the sea. I thought I was going to pass out. My lungs burned from lack of air.

  Finally, I broke free of the seat and stroked toward the surface while UDT safety divers and a curious dolphin kept pace. Busting out into Florida sunlight, alive and uninjured, I gave a whoop of triumph, having successfully proved a pilot could eject underwater and live.

  Eventually, the president of the United States awarded me the Legion of Merit for my “deliberate and heroic” contribution to naval aviation safety.

  I never told Elinor what I had done. She would have thought the words “deliberate and heroic” should have included “foolish” as well.

  After I received my promotion to lieutenant commander, now only one step behind my old Academy buddy Parr, I became eligible to command a UDT. I had my eye on UDT-21, the only team remaining on the East Coast following RIF (reduction in force) at the end of the Korean War. COMUDU-One in California retained two teams.

  But first I wanted to complete my UW bona fides by qualifying in amphibious vessels to learn the duties and responsibilities in supporting underwater commandos. In November 1958, I reported aboard the USS Shadwell, an LSD ported at Little Creek, Virginia. LSDs were large ships designed to haul huge amounts of equipm
ent, landing craft, and personnel to a combat beachhead. Beach assaults in the Pacific during World War II might have been unsuccessful but for the support of these big mother ships.

  Assigned as the Shadwell’s operations officer, I set sail for deployment with Sixth Fleet while Elinor and the kids returned to California to stay with her parents. While I was away, Mom received letters from Elinor and her mother begging her to convince her hardheaded son to leave the Navy and accept “the other job” in California.

  “Please, Marjorie, I don’t know how much longer the children and I can take it,” Elinor wrote. “For everyone’s sake, you have to make him quit.”

  Mom admonished Elinor to suck it up and stop whining. “Billy is who Billy is,” she responded. “You should be proud of him, as I am proud of him and his father. He is accomplishing important things.”

  These were exciting and dangerous times. I would have felt like a traitor and a coward to desert my country now. History was playing out right in front of me; I was a part of it.

  The Soviets won the Space Race in 1957 by being the first to launch a satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. Fidel Castro was about to take over Cuba to add it to the communist win column. U.S. Army Special Forces were in Vietnam training guerrillas to resist Ho Chi Minh. The USSR built a wall around East Berlin, adding to tensions rising throughout Europe. New Soviet prime minister Nikita Khrushchev threatened that communism would bury the United States and Western capitalism.

  Having completed my year’s sea tour aboard the Shadwell, I prepared to take command of UDT-21, based at Little Creek, Virginia. A hard-muscled mustang lieutenant named Roy Boehm was sitting propped up at my desk in the skipper’s office when I reported aboard. In faded dungarees and unshined boots, he looked as salty as the former bos’n mate he had been in the South Pacific and on the Big Woo in Korea before he volunteered for UDTs and won an officer’s commission.

  He looked me up and down, one amused brow cocked. I was bright as shit and Shinola polish for my first day back in the teams.

  “Damn, skipper,” Boehm rumbled with a chuckle. “This ain’t no country club. You know that, right?”

  This rough-talking sonofabitch bowed to no one. As a former bos’n coxswain, he knew how to get things done. Neither of us knew it at the time, but we were about to make history together.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AT AGE THIRTY-ONE, BOS’N Mate First Class Roy Boehm had been the oldest of approximately 140 who began UDTR Class 13—“Lucky 13”—at NAVPHIBSCOL, Little Creek, Virginia, in July 1954 at the end of the Korean War. George Walsh was the next oldest at twenty-eight. Because of Boehm’s age, he was one of only two left standing at the end of selections when partners teamed up, like a kid unchosen in sandlot baseball. The other was a scrawny kid with a tendency to be a smartass.

  “Looks like me and you,” Boehm growled. “What’s your name?”

  “Digger.”

  “You got a fucking real name?”

  “Eddie O’Toole.”

  Boehm did everything the other Frogmen did during training, it just sometimes took longer. Black Hats ragged his ass.

  “You’re too fucking old, Boehm. You’re an old man. Old and crippled. A useless piece of shit and the stupidest trainee in the whole U.S. Navy. Come on, Boehm. Why don’t you quit? Quit before you kill yourself. You don’t have to do this shit anymore. You’re not going to make it anyhow.”

  “I ain’t never giving up.”

  At Guadalcanal during the Battle of Cape Esperance, the Japanese sank his destroyer, USS Duncan, out from underneath him. It blazed like a Viking funeral pyre when he leaped overboard.

  For the rest of that interminable night he swam towing a badly injured shipmate, Seaman Dubiel, toward a distant ink blot that had to be tiny Savo Island. Dubiel lapsed in and out of consciousness.

  As daybreak approached in a hard blue sky, he became aware he and Dubiel were no longer alone in the bright sea. Dorsals cut the surface like knife blades. He had never before experienced such near-mindless horror. Merely sighting a shark was enough to strike panic into the bravest heart. But to be in the water with them!

  The casual detached way the sharks approached set his heart pounding and ignited every nerve ending. Dark dorsal fins slicing the water, snake eyes glinting, teeth-filled jaws drooping. Boehm held on to his comatose friend, unwilling to abandon him even though to do so might distract the sharks and save his own life.

  Dubiel screamed. He must have had some awareness at the last instant before his body exploded out of the water like an insect sucked in by a bass. He twisted violently in the white froth and then, gripped in the shark’s jaw, he was wrenched from Boehm’s grasp and was gone, his scream broken off to linger in Boehm’s nightmares. Although Boehm managed to reach Savo Island ahead of the sharks, he vowed never to go into the water again.

  Having survived sharks and the sinking of one ship, Boehm was aboard another destroyer, USS Bennett, when the ship took Frogmen aboard prior to the invasion of Saipan, and he received his first astonished look at the special men he had heard so much about. They were chiseled, hard-muscled young specimens who carried themselves with a reckless, special air. Each was flagged with blue-green paint as camouflage and then marked with black stripes from toes to chin and down each arm in order to use their bodies to measure the depth of water near shore. UDT—Underwater Demolition Teams. It was said a man had to be “half fish and half nuts” in order to join up.

  “Look at them, Boats,” one of the gunners chided Boehm. “Why don’t you go with them? Get your ass shot off. I’ll take care of your girlfriend for you.”

  Dropped from rubber boats, Frogmen swam and waded ashore, where they planted and detonated underwater explosives to knock out man-made obstacles, and mapped enemy minefields by swimming among the mines and counting them. All this was accomplished under fierce defensive fire from the Japanese shore while they were armed only with knives and explosive packs and wearing no more than sneakers, fins, swim trunks, and dive masks. Frogmen—a term coined by a comic book writer because of the UDTs’ fins and blue-green camouflage—porpoised the surface of the water, grabbing a breath of air when they could between mortar rounds and machine-gun fire.

  The encounter with them and the UDTs’ legendary exploits had more of an impact on Boehm than he at first realized. At the time, however, he was too war-weary to pursue it. All he wanted was to get out of the Navy when the war ended and go home to New York and marry his girlfriend. Besides, after the loss of Dubiel to sharks, he associated diving and the undersea world with death. He couldn’t help but look warily about for sharks every time he went over the side to clean the ship’s screws or props.

  He returned to New York after V-J Day to discover his girlfriend pregnant by a draft evader. She gave his engagement ring back and he left, needing a stiff drink and a good fight.

  He decided the Navy was his home after all. What was so special anyhow about a little ticky-tacky house in the suburbs and a houseful of snotty-nosed brats? Had he survived the sinking of the Duncan and the sharks only to end up bullshitting with other veterans at the VFW?

  He went down, reenlisted, and ended up on the USS Furse, a battered radar patrol destroyer heading out on a Far East cruise to China. The ship put in at Tsingtao, then held by Nationalist President Chiang Kai-shek in his struggle against the communists of Mao Tse-tung. The United States backed Chiang. Boehm was assigned to help train a platoon of Chiang’s Nationalist troops. That was where he met and befriended a Nationalist Chinese army officer named Colonel Kang and a holy man named Li.

  Li was a very quiet, peaceful man with a wispy gray beard and a dirty black robe to cover his birdlike body. Colonel Kang was tall for an Asian, with shined boots and a thin mustache. He insisted that Cold War conflicts from now on were more apt to be uprisings of “the people” against oppressors rather than full-blown, set-piece wars with nuclear missiles flying everywhere. Future war, he predicted, lay in cloak-and-dagger, behind-the-lines night figh
ting guerrillas using unconventional tactics, as per Mao’s writings. The Orient would show the way to the rest of the world.

  Boehm visited Li for the last time when the Furse pulled out of port and the United States withdrew from China to permit Mao and Chiang Kai-shek to work out the nation’s destiny between them.

  “You are a warrior who has a mind willing to learn,” Li said to Boehm in farewell. “As a warrior, you will be involved in much and have many things upon which to think. Guerrilla wars, both nationalist and revolutionary, will by their very nature flare up in many countries. Outbreaks may be initiated on many grounds, but all will be supported by commandos and all will be anti-Western.”

  Boehm carried with him Li’s and Kang’s comments on guerrilla warfare. He studied Mao and Sun Tzu, picking up everything he could find on unconventional doctrine, tactics, and strategy. Although UW had been practiced in America since its earliest days on the frontier, it remained alien to much of the American mind. The Navy especially was not ready for “new” concepts. It remained steeped in the doctrines of large-scale global conflict. It often seemed stuck in preparing for the last war rather than for the next one.

  Early in 1954 after Boehm returned from Korea, he and Chief Warrant Officer Tom Moss, his supervisor, were spearfishing from a whale boat in the Virgin Islands when Boehm spotted an eight-foot blacktip shark basking on the sandy bottom. A chill trickled down his spine as he flashed back to Cape Esperance and the shark snatching Dubiel. It occurred to him that he had not extracted revenge for that long-ago day of terror. He suddenly wanted to kill this shark more than he had ever wanted anything.

  He ripped his combat knife from its sheath, dove into the water, and flew swiftly through the clear seawater, coming down on top of the big fish from slightly behind, surprising it. His knife flashed. Blood spilled.

  The fish exploded. With his legs and arms wrapped around the blacktip, Boehm stuck to its sandpaper hide like wool to a rasp. As though fused together, he and the fish thrashed across the bottom, boiling up sand and silt and blood. He continued stabbing the fish. Thirty, forty times, until in its death throes it slowly sank to the bottom.