Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  Our training week ran from 0500 Monday morning to whenever the duty instructor felt like letting us off on Saturday. Usually we’d get liberty by 1400, after the training area had been cleaned to his satisfaction. There was a duty instructor each night, too. He started after the night training exercise and got up the next morning to take muster and lead the morning physical training (PT) and run—all done before breakfast, which we ate at 0700.

  For meals the enlisted men had to run a mile and a half to the base mess hall, and we officers had to run just a half-mile to the BOQ. But while enlisted men ate as much as they wanted, officers got only one serving per meal. We never got enough to eat.

  Our family was renting a two-bedroom apartment in Virginia Beach, about a twenty-five-minute drive from the training area. I went home on the weekends as soon as liberty went down, eating everything in sight until Sunday night, when I went back to the barracks. A couple of the married guys lived closer to the base and went home every night, but I didn’t trust myself to get up in time to drive in for the 0500 muster, so I stayed at the barracks during the week. We had only one car, and it saved Becky from having to get up, bundle up our son, Kevin, and drive me to the base.

  Hell Week is the defining period of BUDS. Usually, if you made it through that, you made it through the rest of the training. The instructors did their best to keep us cold, wet, sandy, and miserable for five and a half days. For my class, the winter weather at Little Creek made this easy.

  Our Hell Week started at midnight on a Sunday. I had a fever and all the symptoms of the flu, but I kept quiet about it because I didn’t want to risk being pulled out of training. I decided I’d just gut it out. The weather cooperated with the instructors. It was in the low thirties and raining—great for the flu, I guess, because by 0900 the first morning I felt fine, even though I was soaked from head to foot and cold. The rest of the week we had the entire gamut of wintertime weather—rain, cold, snow, you name it.

  The first thing the instructors did, after rousing us from our racks and screwing around with us a little, was divide the class into boat crews, with an officer in charge of each. Each crew would stay together for the duration of Hell Week, so anyone who quit would draw down on the number of people in his crew, thus making it harder for those who stayed.

  Everywhere we went that week we had to carry our Inflatable Boats Large (IBLs), eleven-man rubber rafts that weighed at least a ton. We never had more than six men carrying them. The best way to carry them was on our heads, and we all got shorter, thicker necks that week. One of Instructor Chuck Newell’s favorite tricks was to get a running start and jump up into one of the boats as we were running down the road. Chuck stood about six feet, two inches and weighed about 195, all of it muscle. He’d stand up in the boat like Ben-Hur in the chariot, yelling at us to hurry up. Then if the crew didn’t pick up the pace (or even if they did), he’d start running around in the boat and jumping up and down. He was a lot of fun.

  By the first night of Hell Week, we’d been cold and wet all day long. Around six P.M. we stood at attention in front of the instructor’s hut, IBLs on our heads. Out of the hut strode Chief Petty Officer Tom Blais. At five feet, ten inches tall and about 190 pounds, Tom was a sight to behold. We’d already heard how he’d fallen from the top of the fifty-foot “cargo net” on our obstacle course. As he hit the ground back first, he had the presence of mind to take a judo “beat” with his arms to help break his fall. Still, he broke his back. Most men would have been medically discharged from the Navy. Not Tom. He worked hard, rehabilitated himself, and here he was standing in front of us, a raging bull ready to make our lives miserable.

  “Good evening, class!” he roared.

  “Good evening, Instructor Blais.”

  “I can’t hear yoooou.”

  “Goooood eeeeevening, Instructor Blais!”

  “How’s your spirit?”

  “AAAARH!” we roared. (The instructors were always interested in how we felt—it was so comforting!)

  “Tonight,” he said, “you’re going on a trip around the world.”

  This dream vacation consisted of a trip around the base and its surrounding waters. We’d travel in and under our trusty IBLs. Because the instructors were so concerned for our comfort, the route offered us many opportunities to get in and out of the water and cross beaches, sand dunes, and roads. That way we wouldn’t always be in or on the cold water. They didn’t want anyone to get sick!

  This being a winter class, we could always count on unpredictable but usually nasty weather, and that night met our expectations. The temperature was in the midthirties, and the wind was blowing about thirty knots out of the northeast. As usual, it paid to be a winner. When your boat crew finished, you could “rest” until the next evolution started—usually right after the last boat crew finished the previous evolution. Any rest was welcome in Hell Week.

  As Blais finished explaining the course, Waddell stormed out of the instructor’s hut and yelled, “Class, ten-hut.”

  We snapped to attention.

  “Hit the deck.”

  Sixty bodies slammed onto the wet asphalt, IBLs crashing down on top of us.

  “Lean and rest.”

  Sixty bodies pushed themselves (and the IBLs) up to the beginning position for push-ups: arms extended and locked under your chest, feet straight out behind you. I thought we were going to do push-ups until Instructor Waddell got tired—which might be a long time, since he’d been off all day resting.

  “Bernie,” Blais said, “what are you doing? I’m in charge of this evolution. You can’t just come out here and start giving my men orders.”

  “Tom, you’re being too easy on these pukes.”

  “Bernie, these guys are tired—they’ve been working hard aaaall day.”

  As the two instructors went on and on, my arms started quivering. The boat got heavier. And heavier. They did the good-guy-bad-guy routine for what seemed like an hour and was probably no more than three minutes.

  Finally: “Okay, Tom, I guess you’re right, they do look tired. Class, on your feet,” roared Instructor Waddell.

  I pulled my feet up under me, urging my men not to drop the boat. The instructors had already warned us to “take care of your equipment—it will take care of you.” We struggled to attention.

  “Hit the deck, lean, and rest,” Blais yelled. “I’m in charge of you people—I give the orders.”

  And so it went until they got tired. It was great to see the two instructors working in unison. We all appreciated the lesson in teamwork. When they finished playing with us, we hauled ass.

  A portion of our trip involved dragging and paddling our boat down a drainage ditch that paralleled the southern boundary of the base. As we came to the road leading in from Gate 5, it appeared we could simply portage our boat across the road and put it back in the ditch on the other side. Not so fast, Ensign. Blais met us at the road and told me that we could portage the boat. But, he said, my boat crew and I would have to go through the drainage pipe to the other side, so we could get the full benefit of the training evolution.

  “Not a problem,” I thought, but then I went down to look at the pipe. It was high tide and the ditch was nearly full, which made paddling the boat considerably easier than it would have been at low tide. But the high tide also made the pipe considerably fuller than it would have been at low tide. There was barely two inches of clearance between the water and the top of the four-foot pipe. Still, no real problem for future frogmen.

  I huddled the boat crew and told them I would lead. We would go through head first, on our backs, with our noses pressed against the top of the pipe so we could breathe. The other side was only fifty feet away. I told them we would take it slowly, and nobody would drown. (I didn’t have a plan in case someone panicked in the extremely tight area.)

  My main concern was the kapok life jackets we were required to wear throughout Hell Week. Ostensibly, they were for our safety. In fact, though, they were so waterlogg
ed and heavy, I worried that one of the guys might be dragged down as we made our way through the pipe.

  After I briefed them, I turned around and started through the pipe with the other six guys close behind me. We acted so quickly that Tom didn’t know we had started until I was about halfway through the pipe and all the guys were well inside.

  Suddenly I heard Tom yelling at me to get back out of the pipe immediately. Normally we responded to an instructor’s orders as soon as they were out of his mouth. But at the moment, we were committed; attempting to turn the train around in the pipe would have been too risky. So I muttered “F--- you” in Portuguese, and continued through the pipe to the other side. (Portuguese for “f—you,” phonetically “for-doo-say,” was our class motto. We’d learned it from the four Brazilians in our class for cross-training, and we yelled it in unison whenever an instructor gave us a command. The instructors loved the spirit we showed. They didn’t figure out what we were saying until we’d safely finished training.)

  As soon as my head emerged, Tom was in my face, screaming that he hadn’t said “Simon says.” I told him he had given me my directions, and I had carried them out. Once the last guy came out of the pipe, Tom pulled me aside and calmly explained that he had gotten his neck in the wringer during the previous class because a boat crew had panicked in the pipe and two of the trainees nearly drowned. They had to be resuscitated after the instructors pulled them out. Tom had been ordered by the CO of the Amphibious School not to use the pipe again. So now Tom was only telling the boat crews to go through the pipe to see how many men would quit. Three members of a crew ahead of ours had. I said something like, “No harm, no foul,” and dropped for fifty push-ups to pay for my unsuccessful attempt at humor.

  One of the evolutions toward the end of Hell Week was a long boat trip. The instructors loaded us into trucks and drove us to Laskin Road in Virginia Beach, about fifteen miles away. We unloaded the boats, and each crew took off in Broad Bay headed for Little Creek. I began to think this might be an easy day. The weather was finally cooperating with the trainees—it had cleared and was in the midforties—and we had a good crew. Soon we were well in front of the other boats. One of the axioms of training was “It pays to be a winner.”

  The instructors were keeping an eye on everyone from the deck of an outboard-driven Boston Whaler, but our IBLs were spaced so far apart, hours could go by before we saw the instructors.

  About noon, though, the Whaler crossed the bay toward us and my guts churned: Petty Officer First Class Herb Clements, a reasonable instructor we’d nicknamed the Trainees’ Friend, had been replaced by our resident madman, Petty Officer Second Class Gene Fraley. He circled us, commenting on how far in front we were and how we were going to be standing under hot showers before we knew it.

  I was waiting for the ax to fall. I figured Fraley’d tell us we were doing so well we ought to go back and help the next boat. Instead, he pulled up alongside of us and pulled a steel garden rake from the gunwale of the Whaler. I couldn’t imagine what he had in mind, but I did know we weren’t going to like it.

  I wasn’t wrong. Fraley took the rake and started hitting our main tube. One of my men—Jerry Sweesy, a huge Sioux Indian from South Dakota—and I tried to fend him off with our paddles. But Fraley succeeded in sinking the tines of the rake in the tube. We began to lose air.

  IBLs had two main tubes filled with air, fitted together amidships. Fraley had punctured the one that ran around the stern, and soon we were at water level, paddling our asses off but getting nowhere.

  Fraley was cackling like a witch. He said, “Mr. Gormly, your boat seems to be suffering from a lack of oxygen. If you’re not careful, it will soon fill with water and be awfully difficult to paddle.”

  I thanked him for his consultation on the matter and told him to get the hell out of there before he found himself in the same situation. Sweesy was wild-eyed, and I think Fraley saw I meant what I said. He hauled ass, laughing.

  Gene Fraley was a hell of a guy. When he left his instructor job and went to SEAL Team Two, he did good work in Vietnam—until he killed himself preparing a booby-trapped flashlight one day in the winter of 1968. I was between tours in Vietnam, and I arranged for a Navy C-1A to fly seven of us (that’s as many men as the plane would hold) to East Lansing, Michigan, for his funeral. We had to stand there in the cemetery, freezing, with a forty-knot wind blasting snow in our faces. Just before the bugler blew taps, Tom Blais turned to me, pointed toward the heavens, and said, “I bet Fraley is up there laughing his ass off at us.”

  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.”