Proximity: A Novel of the Navy's Elite Bomb Squad

by Stephen Phillips

  “Lieutenant Kauffman founded the Bomb Disposal School on December 9,1941 at the Washington Navy Yard. The first students were midshipmen from Northwestern and Columbia Universities. Lieutenant Kauffman remained the first officer in charge for a year and a half. During that time the school expanded to additional locations at American University and to the other side of this facility at Stump Neck, Maryland.

  “During World War II, graduates of the Bomb Disposal School, commonly called ‘Disposaleers,’ formed units called Mobile Explosive Investigation Units. These men served with distinction in every theater of operation rendering safe ordnance, performing emergent disposals, and training their comrades. Countless lives and material were saved by these few.

  “The World War II disposaleers are the forefathers of today’s EOD Technicians. The Mobile Explosive Investigation Units were the precursors of today’s Mobile EOD Units.”

  The room was silent. Captain Grant had the genuine interest of everyone present.

  “Since World War II, EOD Technicians have served in every conflict this nation has been in. We especially proved our worth in Desert Storm, when Saddam Hussein flooded the Arabian Gulf with mines. Long after the troops came home, Navy EOD Techs were diving through a thick layer of oil disposing of hundred of mines on the sea floor.

  “Many of you undoubtedly know of these men’s exploits. If not, don’t allow this to interrupt your studies here, but you must read each of the books that chronicle their service. Read them and come to understand our roots.”

  Grant paused yet again, sipping his water. Jazz noticed that his sons were still very quiet.

  “Following his tour as OIC of the Bomb Disposal School, Kauffman was asked to form units that could be used to destroy beach obstructions and mines prior to amphibious landings. He thus formed the first Combat Demolition Units at Ft Pierce Florida, which later became known as Underwater Demolition Teams or UDT. Kauffman himself eventually commanded UDT Five.

  “In 1961, the need for a maritime component to Special Warfare was formed using UDT men. This new unit was called SEALs, which stood for sea, air, and land. The UDT were disbanded in the early eighties, so now only EOD and SEALs remain. You will work with our Special Warfare brethren from time to time. Remind them at every opportunity that we were here first.”

  Grant smiled to himself as everyone in the audience again chuckled at his remark.

  “Again, our purpose here today is to graduate three of the original seventeen men from EOD class Twenty Bravo Ninety Eight. Eventually the others in the back there will matriculate, but only after repeating portions of the difficult curriculum. Right gentlemen?”

  “HOOYA, sir!” someone yelled.

  “Hooya. Today Lieutenant Jascinski, Hull Technician Second Class Huang and Fireman Hopkins have completed the difficult curriculum of diving and disposal. From this day forward they are counted among the Navy’s underwater warriors.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, men of NAVSCHOLEOD, never lose sight of what you have and will accomplish. It is difficult. It is honorable. It is brave.”

  Captain Grant paused.

  “Well, perhaps that is enough for now. Let’s pin it on these guys so they can go celebrate.”

  Melanie had a huge grin on her face as she positioned herself to snap photos of Nicholas and Tyler. Nicholas stood on a chair in front of Jazz, pinning the crab on the flap on his pocket. Concentrating, he stuck his tongue out.

  After Nick stepped down, his younger brother pulled himself up onto the chair. Tyler squared his shoulders with his father, reared his fist back and slammed it into the crab, “tacking it on” against naval regulations.

  “Hooya, Daddy!” he said.

  The onlookers laughed and Melanie blushed. She practiced with her boys every day for a week.

  After the strippers pinned on Huang, and Fireman Hopkins was pinned by his father, the ceremony ended. Everyone shook hands, punched shoulders, and “Hooya-ed” the graduates. Melanie held the Jascinski clan back for more photos while everyone else filed out.

  She directed photos of Jazz, she and Jazz, their whole family together, and of Jazz and his parents.

  “Now, one just with you and your father,” said Eleanor.

  The Admiral and Jazz stood next to each other. The Admiral extended his hand again and Jazz took it. They shook once holding it for the flash.

  How official, thought Jazz.

  Huang and Hopkins left to give their guests a tour of the facilities. They planned to go to the training pool, and the buildings and practice areas for Ground and Air Ordnance Divisions. Jazz wanted to get back home. The boys behaved well and surely needed some ice cream.

  Back at the house, Jazz stripped off his sons’ church clothes and sent them downstairs wearing only gym shorts.

  “Jazz!” Melanie yelled from downstairs.

  “What, hon?”

  “Shirts! We have company!”

  Jazz selected two shirts from one of the boy’s dressers and headed downstairs.

  In the kitchen the Admiral handed him a beer.

  “Let’s go outside.”

  Jazz stood next to the picnic table on their back porch. He sipped his beer, waiting, feeling the Admiral had something important to say.

  “It’s a hell of a thing you did today.”

  Jazz could not tell by his father’s voice if this was a compliment or an admonition.

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “No, I mean it. You should be proud.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I have two gifts for you. The first is a piece of advice. Don’t worry as much about being a good EOD Tech because you’ll never measure up. Be a good officer, a good 1140, a good OIC. The bomb tech stuff will come, but your success or failure will be based upon your performance as an officer.”

  “Thanks, sir. That is good advice.”

  Both men drank in silence a few minutes more until Eleanor opened the door, interrupting them. She smiled and handed her husband a gift.

  “Here’s the present dear.”

  “Thanks, Eleanor. Give us a moment will you?”

  When she closed the door he handed the box to Jazz.

  “Open it.”

  Jazz set his beer down on the picnic table. He took the parcel from his father’s hands. It was wrapped in shiny gold paper and blue ribbon. Jazz noticed that it had some weight to it.

  He slid the ribbon off and peeled back the paper. Then he opened the box. Inside was a knife. It was a dive knife. Jazz recognized the black plastic handle and the darkened blade. It was the Mark-III, the mission knife used by UDT, SEALs, EOD, and other specialized diving units.

  “Holy cow, sir! Where did you get this?”

  “In my cruise box.”

  “What?” Jazz was confused. “Uh, I didn’t put it there...”

  “It’s mine. Was mine.”

  “What!”

  Admiral James J. Jascinski sat down at the table and took another long drag from his beer draining it.

  “Sit down.”

  Jazz sat.

  “What I’m about to tell you is in confidence. Nobody in my family knows, probably nobody left on active duty. Only your mother, and now you, are aware of this.”

  Jazz noticed that his father was whispering.

  “I tried out for UDT.”

  “What!” Jazz exclaimed.

  “I washed out. I rang the bell. I quit.”

  Now Jazz was speechless.

  “I volunteered during my first tour aboard USS Spiegel Grove. I had heard of UDT, and had seen the guys around the base at Little Creek. I went from Spiegel Grove right to UDT Replacement Training.”

  “Excuse my French, Admiral, but holy shit! I had no idea.”

  “Yes well, I did not want anyone to know. I rang the bell after four weeks into it. Before the day was out, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. I had never failed in anything in my whole life.

  “I tried to get back into training, but of course they wouldn’t let me. It w
as too late. I was given orders to a new ship, and I never spoke of it to anyone again until now.”

  The Admiral paused, letting what he just said to sink in. Jazz unsheathed the knife and looked at it.

  “When I left UDT training, I had to turn in my gear. Fins, mask, UDT vest. But I couldn’t find the knife. I signed some paperwork for it and then discovered it in my sea bag weeks later. I almost threw it away, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I decided to keep it as a memento of my failure, a symbol of my lack of fortitude. I put all my shame and weakness into that knife and locked it in my cruise box. I became determined to never again fail at anything.

  “Not often, but periodically I would return to the knife. Sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose, to remind myself of what it felt like to fail... so that I would never fail again.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yes, well. Perhaps you know a little more about me now. James, I genuinely thought you were making a mistake by doing this. I wanted a career for you, command at sea, admiral, everything. I wanted you to have a career like mine. No, I’d hoped you’d accomplish more than I did in my career. I even dared to hope you’d become Chief of Naval Operations. Leaving the mainstream Navy, going into this EOD thing, well all that was gone.”

  Jazz heard his father’s voice cracking. He looked up at the Admiral. Jazz saw moisture in his eyes and his skin had crimsoned.

  “Remember that night that you and Melanie came to the house?” asked the Admiral.

  “When I told you we were gong to Ingleside? Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, you’re mother and I had a knock-down-drag-out fight that night. She was angry with me for my behavior, said we’d never see you again. She gave me the full ‘Come to Jesus’ routine, a real hum-dinger. Of course I was having none of it. I swear it was the ugliest fight of our marriage.

  “Afterward she banished me to my ‘At- Sea Cabin.’”

  “The basement?”

  “Precisely. I sat down on the couch to watch TV and put my feet up on my coffee table down there.”

  “The cruise box.”

  “Right. So anyway, I opened it and found that damn thing. I looked at it and thought about things for a long damn time. Finally I realized that the knife had changed. I no longer felt like a failure for quitting UDT training and more importantly that it didn’t matter that you were never going to be CNO.”

  Then the Admiral began to openly weep. He looked down and held his breath for a moment.

  “I realized that you already have accomplished the one thing I never could.”

  A moment of silence passed before Jazz managed a, “Thanks, sir.”

  Jazz then smiled at his father and sheathed the knife. He stood and stepped past him to the door. He knew that James J. Jascinski Sr. needed time to himself.

  “Son.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Tell your mother I’m going for a walk. I’ll be back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jazz went inside and showed Melanie the knife his father found for him in an antique shop.

  ELEVEN

  Ingleside

  It was a short drive from Portland to Ingleside but the two places seemed a world apart. Jazz left the manicured lawns and franchised restaurants of Portland’s suburbia and headed for Ingleside’s Oncelerville of oil refineries and chemical plants dotting the Corpus Christi Bay. On his left were cotton fields, Jazz’s proverbial grickle-grass. Their spots of white and brown reminded him of a spice cake. After a week Jazz was still amazed at how flat the land was. The miles upon miles of uninterrupted view reminded him of being at sea. You could see a pick-up truck, whipping up dust as it drove toward you from ten miles away.

  Jazz guided the car down Ingleside’s Main Street for the third time in the past week. He drove past the breakfast burrito shop, a myriad of drinking establishments, and on towards the naval base.

  A sign at the main gate read:

  Naval Station Ingleside

  Mine Warfare Center of Excellence

  Two days before he visited the base just to orient himself. He had driven along the waterfront passing the piers and the quaywall slowly so that he could take a good look at all of the ships in port. Twenty-two Mine Coastal Hunters and Mine Countermeasures ships were stationed in Ingleside. At any given time two or three were at sea and one or two were in the shipyard, but there was always a flock in port.

  The larger Mine Countermeasure Ships or MCMs were christened with names that denoted bravery; Avenger, Warrior, Chief. The MHCs were named for birds; Osprey, Black Hawk, Commorant. Many of the MHCs had the same logo as their professional sport counterparts, Oriole, Raven, Cardinal.

  Then there was the USS Inchon, towering over her charges. The Mine Warfare Command Ship was converted from an Amphibious Assault Ship six years before. A ship of the Iwo Jima class, she was the shape and size of a World War II aircraft carrier. Inchon looked very much like her older sister, USS Lexington, which now sat across the bay in the Corpus Christi Harbor, a museum and memorial of Admiral Marc Mitscher and the other men who served aboard her.

  After Desert Storm, the Navy needed a ship to conduct command and control of mine warfare forces. Inchon became the answer to this problem. She was to command the MCM triad of EOD divers, surface ships, and helicopters.

  Jazz drove in the main entrance and turned left, heading for the building that housed Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Six Detachment Ingleside. He smirked remembering that his new commanding officer disapproved of the title, “Detachment Ingleside.”

  Two weeks earlier, the Jascinski family stopped through Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to Texas. Charleston was home to Jazz’s command, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Six. Stationed here was the command element including the commanding officer and his staff, a training department, a diver locker, a detachment of minehunting sea lions, and five MCM detachments.

  Jazz spent two days there in order to meet the commanding officer, the executive officer, the operations officer, and the men of the training department.

  The captain, Commander Solarsky, was insistent that there was no such entity as “Det Ingleside.”

  “Don’t ever let me hear or see anything with ‘Det Ingleside’ on it,” he had said with a raspy voice.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “When that place was established there was some fool notion that the folks down there would not deploy, that it was a shore det. They decided on their own that they were to develop Mine Warfare Tactics. Horsepucky! I have seven MCM detachments, two of which just happen to be in Texas. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Solarsky and Jazz had a long philosophical discussion about being an EOD officer. As the commander explained it, there were two types of 1140, those who belonged to the SEALs, and those who belonged to the fleet. The pseudo-SEAL officers in his mind were “wanna-bes.” They focused on fast-roping, parachuting, and small arms training. These men tended to be weak on demolition procedures and dangerous as divers and EOD Technicians.

  “Most of those somabitches couldn’t render safe a candle with a bucket of water,” he said.

  The other type according to Solarsky were pseudo-SWOs, they were ship-drivers, and divers. They focused on diving, demolition, and render safe procedures.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Jascinski, we are operators. All of the mobility skills are important. Just remember that they are not why you are here. You wanna cut throats and eat snakes, go with the frogs. You wanna swim into enemy waters and blow up mines, or render safe IEDs then this is for you.”

  Jazz actually found the discussion interesting. He sensed the division within EOD already, but Solarsky was the first to verbalize it.

  “Which kind are you gonna be, Lieutenant?” he challenged.

  “Uh, the second kind, sir.”

  “Damn right.”

  Solarsky’s final remark was a reminder that Det Four was a mobile detachment and did not have the full responsibility of a shore
detachment to respond to improvised explosive devices offbase.

  “Warrant Officer Fontaine will explain in detail. In any case, if you have to respond to an IED always report to the command duty officer here so we know what you’re doing. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Jazz pulled into the parking lot he noticed that all three high bay doors were open. Inside he spied rubber boats of all sizes, pickup trucks, HUMMVEEs, and horse trailers. He saw dive gear hanging on racks drying and Mark –16s and scuba jugs laid out on a cart. Several EOD Techs were moving around the compound, shirtless in khaki UDT shorts and boots, the divers called “utes and boots.” It was obvious that they just returned from an early morning dive.

  I am gonna love this, he thought. The captain was right, these guys are operators.

  The front of the building was all office space. The first offices were empty. Jazz guessed they must belong to Det Two. The second set then belonged to Det Four, his detachment.

  A barrel-chested diver was sitting at one of the desks. Jazz noted immediately that he was wearing salt-stained shorts and a T-shirt.

  Is this always the uniform here? he wondered.

  “Good morning.”

  The man looked up from his paperwork.

  “Good morning, sir. You must be the new OIC.”

  “I am.”

  The diver stood, came from behind the desk and extended his hand.

  “Welcome aboard, sir. I’m Chief Keating.”

  “Lieutenant James Jascinski.”

  “Great. Well you actually came on a bad day, sir. Most of the det is gone right now. Warrant Officer Fontaine, Senior Chief Reed, Petty Officer Quinn, and Petty Officer Sinclair are on a Secret Service job. Petty Officer Ball, he’s a new guy, is at Hazardous Materials Preparer’s Course. So, SK1 Delgado and I are the only ones in house.”

  “What did you say Ball was doing?”

  “Haz-Prep Course, sir. We have to have at least one person on the det certified to ship hazardous materials on aircraft. They learn how to properly package, store, and most important to prepare the paperwork required when we travel with explosives, diving gas, ammunition, fuel...”