Real Frogmen Eat Beaver

**Due to technical difficulties, Dick is unable to post...here is something he sent to me recently**
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The first time I ate beaver was in late February of 1965 at Camp Pickett, VA. I have to confess it was the foulest thing I have ever tasted. I had expected something sweet for although I was a brand spanking new Ensign direct out of NROTC at Cornell, I had done some reading on the subject. I was sorely disappointed as were my fellow classmates who had stayed up to enjoy the feast.

To explain: I was at Camp Pickett with Class 33 of UDTR, now known as BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/ SEAL) Training that began on 28 December 1964 at Little Creek, VA. We were down to 44 men by that time having started with 157 that stayed around long enough to get name tags sewed on the ragged fatigues we wore. I know that’s not the official number, but there was a lot of pressure at that time to reduce the number of dropouts and I guess the Instructors figured it was better to fudge the numbers than make training easier. Anyway, we were the survivors of Hell Week and sent off to Pickett for two weeks of weapons, patrolling and survival training.

We did a crawl course to teach us the basics of avoiding booby traps. The Instructors set off a 20# shaped charge, turned skyward before we started just to give us the idea that tripping the booby traps might be unwise. The object of the exercise was to follow a manilla line threaded through the woods, across a creek and under a bridge avoiding the many booby traps along the way. They were rigged with flares, M-80s and rockets just to let you know you were “killed”. No 20# shaped charges. I went though with Lt. Rik Trani, my swim buddie at the time. We were “killed” five times and thought it was pretty funny. A few years later Rik was killed by a booby trap in Vietnam. The memory of our lightheartedness haunts me still.

We did a lot of weapons training with M-60s, grease guns, sawed off Ithacas and handguns at pop up silhouettes and we were all packing M-1s for the patrolling exercises that we seemed to do day and night. Setting up an ambush on one of the other patrols was a daily favorite although we did a night assault on a radio tower including loading it with dummy demolitions. The final problem was the assault and demo of Kennedy Bridge located about 18 miles cross country from our camp. The route was defended by the Instructors at road crossings and they were protecting the bridge with machine gun nests. It was an overnight hump through the bush packing the explosives and weapons and when we had successfully completed our mission (“The firing assemblies better pop Gentlemen”) we had to E and E our way in pairs back to camp. We left before dark and straggled in the following afternoon.

I kept waiting for the survival component of the camp out to materialize. Mostly it seemed like an exercise in starvation. We were eating WWII C Rations and they were not giving us nearly enough of that. There was little time to do the hunting and gathering shit I had expected. You see, I figured that as a former farm boy who had once had a trap line and was schooled in hunting and fishing that this would be a snap. I had once actually caught a rabbit in a snare so I envisioned myself living fat on rabbit. I’d brought along wire for snares only to discover that there were no rabbits. Never saw a track. I’d also brought along a trotline, a series of hooks on a base line that could be left out for long periods. I imagined pulling in strings of fish that I could share with my grateful classmates. If there was a fish in the lake, I never saw him. Some of my classmates had resorted to rummaging in the local dump site for discarded C rations.

We were living in pup tents set up around a communal fire pit while the Instructors were ensconced in a snug cabin nearby. They were not enjoying the bracing weather of early spring in the mountains of Virginia…. rain, snow and freezing nights. We quickly learned that leaving your sodden boondockers out during the night required thawing them out over the fire before you could get them on in the morning.

One night after a hard day of patrolling and a meager dinner of C rations I headed down to the lake to check my trotline. One of the things I had failed to anticipate was the dearth of bait in the frozen ground. But, I had improvised with scraps from our rations. The trotline was bare as usual and as I was resetting the line a pick up truck pulled up beside me. Instructors Clements and Hammond climbed out of the truck and shined a flashlight in my face. “Uh oh”, I thought.
“What are you doing down here Mr. Draper? One asked.
“Just checking my trotline”, I responded, wondering if they were going to fuck with me.
“Any luck?”
“No Instructor”. I noticed that there was a distinct smell of whiskey in the air and that they both seemed a more than a little drunk. ‘Must be Hell fighting off the cold inside that cabin’, I thought.
“Check this out” Hammond said, lighting a cigarette and waving his flashlight toward the bed of the pickup. We walked to the side of the pickup and Hammond shined the light into the bed. There lay the shining corpse of a skinned beaver. It was huge, maybe 50 pounds, and clearly male for he had balls on him the size of Florida grapefruits. I figured the impressive gonads were the manifestation of this critter being in the beaver equivalent of the rut.
“Where’d you get him?” I asked, completely forgetting Trainee/
Instructor protocol.
“The Turk shot him” explained Clements. “Saw him swimming in the lake and shot him in the head”. I looked at the head. The military round had not done much damage. The Turk was an observer at our training class… an exchange deal with their special forces and a really scary dude. I think even the Instructors were wary of him. One look at him and you immediately thought ‘Stone killer’.
“You want it?” asked Hammond. I could not have been more surprised if he had invited me into the cabin for a cocktail and a chat by the nice warm fireplace. Instructors do not do nice things to Trainees. Ever. And this was to me FOOD! I had read stories of trappers living on beaver and didn’t recall any complaints.
I looked back and forth at Hammond and Clements not believing they were serious and wondering if it was some kind of trap.
“Go ahead, take it” said Clements. I didn’t wait for them to change their minds. I struggled to get the carcass out of the pickup and hanging on to the broad, flat tail slung it over my back. Calling out my thanks I started trudging up the hill to the camp. Fresh meat!

Nearly everyone was asleep when I arrived at our camp including my tent-mate, Henry Light. Hank was a fellow officer, one of the eight remaining from the original 22 that started Class 33. That’s not the official number either but, I know because I was #22, the lowest ranking Ensign in our class. I woke Hank up to hold a flashlight while I gutted out the beaver and our activity roused a few others who were curious about what was going on. Hank asked, “Where did you get this thing?”
“I caught him on my trotline” I responded, thinking no one would believe that. “I couldn’t get him in so I jumped in and stabbed him with my K-bar” I added, thinking I might as well make it ridiculous. He looked doubtful but…. there was the beaver. Where could it have come from? No one would have believed that the Instructors would give it to me. They would never give us fresh meat while they were attempting to starve us to death. No way. No one ever questioned the hole in the beaver’s head or the fact that I brought him to the camp already skinned.

By the time I finished gutting the beaver and washing it out we had a small group of hungry Trainees anxious to roast up some fresh meat. Someone built up the communal fire and one of the guys broke out a bottle of bourbon. The Instructors had carefully searched our gear for food when we arrived at Camp Pickett, but had overlooked bottles of whiskey. I guess they figured we needed it for medicinal purposes. I sliced off chunks of beaver meat and a half dozen of us sat around the fire roasting meat on sticks like at a summer camp weenie roast. While waiting we were all sipping bourbon out of C rats cans and feeling all right with the World. It quickly became obvious that beaver meat laced with spring time hormones was inedible. It was the foulest thing I have ever tasted before or since. It made the black snake we’d caught and boiled a delicacy by comparison. No one went for seconds and we all drifted off to our sleeping bags.

The next morning we went off on patrol and left Mr. Beaver hanging in a tree. When we returned we found that a dog or coyote had visited and chewed off a front leg and part of the shoulder. That pretty much discouraged anyone else from sampling beaver meat. I trimmed up the chewed on parts, hoping I’d figure out how to get some nourishment out of the damn thing. Eventually I tried boiling the meat, dumping off the nasty water and re-boiling with a few wild onions we found down by the creek bank. It was edible. Barely. I figured I could have eaten one of my boots given the same treatment.

Later, we actually did some survival training. The Instructors gave each pair of guys a domestic rabbit…. cute little unsuspecting critters. The object of the exercise was to kill, dress and eat the bunnies. A lot of guys having grown up in the city had never dealt with the more gruesome aspects of how meat actually gets into those cellophane packages. It was a learning experience. We also smoked some meat. The only “game” we could find were some robins that were dispatched with a 22 pistol and, of course, we had the beaver. Actually, the resulting beaver jerky wasn’t that bad. Maybe the drying process got rid of the hormones. Quite a few of us munched on beaver jerky on the long trek to Kennedy Bridge and back.

I never told anyone that the Instructors had given me the beaver. I doggedly stuck to my story of catching it on my trotline. If anyone doubted my story they never mentioned it. Maybe they just wanted to forget eating that particular beaver.

Birthday Ducks

Birthday Ducks

Hunting and fishing is not for pessimists. Only an optimist can sit hour after hour freezing in a deer stand seeing nothing or cast a fly endlessly with no results. We optimistically believe that in the next moment game will magically appear or that a heavy trout will rise to our fly. People who grow up watching televised basketball on wet, cold and windy days regard people like me who prefer to be out duck hunting on those nasty days as more than a little insane. Of course, we in the Brotherhood know full well that the ducks fly best when the weather is worst. But, even that knowledge often isn’t enough to motivate the most ardent out of a warm snug bed at 0 dark 30 on a miserable morning.

It took a lot of optimism to pry my arse out of my warm comfortable nest when the alarm went off at 5 am on a Sunday in early November. It was tempting to roll over for some more blissful sleep before a nice brunch and the early NFL game on TV. But, I could hear the wind in the trees outside the bedroom and the rain on the window sounded like the ticking of a spasmodic clock. It then occurred to me that this was my 65 birthday. What better present could I give myself than a day of duck hunting? With a “What the Hell” I threw off the covers and stumbled down to the coffee pot.

After a hasty breakfast I tossed my trusty Remington, a bag of decoys and the rest of my gear into the Durango and headed off to the Club. The traffic was non-existent on this wet morning and the wipers beat a steady rhythm with my headlights boring into the murk. As I drove I realized that our season thus far had been a bust…. the worst in anyone’s memory. The weather had been hot and dry with clear calm days. The golfers, bikers and beach goers of Vancouver were happy but the members of our Club were not smiling. The opener and the subsequent weeks had produced more mosquitoes than ducks and the only good news was that I had missed most of it. I was out of town. My first outing had been a sunny Wednesday (we shoot Sat., Sunday and Wednesdays) and it had been painfully slow. A lot of hours for a couple of birds. I was beginning to wonder if the bird flu scare might be real after all.

When I arrived at the Club I was surprised to find I was alone. No one else had showed up, a highly unusual circumstance this early in the season. Maybe they knew something I didn’t. No matter. I slid into four-wheel drive and slowly negotiated the deeply rutted road out to the West side of the large paddy. After dumping my gear in one of the blinds and ditching the truck out of sight, I waded into the paddy and started tossing out the decoys. A few mallards had noisily exited the paddy when I waded out. Not enough birds to generate great optimism but, something. Our Club has two large paddies, flooded oat fields surrounded by low dykes. The water varies from knee to gonad deep and the big one is about 350 yds long and 150 yds. wide. The other that we flood later in the year is slightly smaller. Permanent covered blinds are built into the dykes on the east and west sides. It is, without a doubt, a great set up.

The rain had subsided into a steady drizzle driven by a brisk North wind… definitely a lousy day for golf. The sky began to brighten a bit as I settled into the blind and organized my gear… load the 870, dump some shells into my pockets, hang my duck calls around my neck and pour a cup of coffee from my thermos. I zipped up my hunting jacket and sat back to await the dawn. I kept expecting to see the headlights of someone else bouncing their way out to join me, being grateful I’d already put out the decoys. But, nothing. Just the wet, windy predawn and me.

Out of nowhere two mallards plopped into the convenient hole I left between the two pods of decoys (just like it’s drawn up in the “how to” books). I ignored them. Too early. I took a sip of my coffee and a puff on the first cigar of the day. Looking up I spotted a flock of a half dozen ducks ghosting over the decoys and with wings whistling they accelerated out of sight. Getting a bit anxious now, I stared at my watch. Five more minutes. Finishing my coffee I groped for my duck call as another flock hove into view. I could see the far side of the paddy now and my watch said it was time. I gave a hail call and a couple of quacks, twisting around to figure out where they had gone. Suddenly they were right over the decoys with wings set. Surprised, I jumped up, fired too quickly and missed. My second shot collapsed a mallard in the decoys.

As I retrieved the duck I looked back at my blind. The large bush on the right side of the blind blocked my view from that side. The ducks were landing into the north wind but they were not circling and checking things out as they usually do, they were diving straight in. Well, if they kept that up I wouldn’t see them until they were over the decoys. So be it.

In the next half hour I put four more ducks in the bag, three of them mallards and one pintail. Ducks were pouring into the paddy with the wind under their tails. I’d be watching one flock and another would dive into the decoys. I didn’t have enough eyeballs to keep up with the action. I was still alone and wishing someone else had shown up. With only three birds to go to my limit, I decided to shoot only mallards. That resolution lasted only five minutes until three widgeons came in perfectly. Right down the chute they came three abreast with wings set in a picture pretty enough to be in a duck painting. I rose to take the easy triple and call it a day. Two came down cleanly and I missed the third…. Cleanly. It was like blowing a two-foot birdie putt. Oh well, five minutes later I made a nice shot on a passing mallard and my bag was full.

I unloaded the shotgun, poured myself another coffee and lit a fresh cigar. With the rain pattering on the plywood roof of the blind and the mountains shrouded in mist in the distance, I watched flock after flock of ducks wheeling and landing in the paddy. “Not a bad birthday” I mused. I thought of all the friends, some duck hunters, some not who were no longer with me in this life. I thought of the young ones who had left their blood on the soil of Southeast Asia and the others taken too soon by cancer.

I remembered all the dogs that had graced my hunting days. How they would have loved this wet morning. Zeke was the best of them. An English setter and highly intelligent with an exceptional nose, he was incredible on pheasants. Zeke went duck hunting with me often. He liked the action but didn’t much care for the taste of ducks. A pheasant or grouse he would bring to my hand, but a duck was a different matter. Oddly enough, he would swim out to retrieve a duck but when his feet were on shore he would drop the duck at the waters edge and refused to pick it up again. It was a compromise I could live with. It was easy to imagine him sitting next to me in the blind, wet and shivering with his keen eyes scanning the sky. He would have loved this day.

I laughed as a flock of teal buzzed the decoys like a squadron of F-4s and wheeled in perfect formation at the far end of the paddy. I shook like a spaniel to chase the ghosts of old friends and dogs away. I dug a dry rag out of my pack and carefully wiped the rain from my 870. I had purchased the gun in the Navy Exchange in Little Creek, VA in 1965 when I was assigned to an outfit now called SEAL Team Four. The gun was like me, old and worn with quite a few dings, but still functioning. I slipped the 870 into the case, dumped the dregs of the coffee and tossed the butt into the bushes. I stood and stretched the stiffness out of my bum knee. “Happy Birthday you old fart” I mumbled. “Quit bitching. You’re on the right side of the grass. Go pick up the decoys”.

My Captain

The last time I saw him I was standing at the end of a lonely pier watching him disappear over the horizon. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t cry easily in those days, unlike now, some 45 years later. He wasn’t my father, or necessarily a father figure. He was my Captain and was always addressed as such. Sure, I called him “Cap” and “Skipper” sometimes, but never Art or Mr. Kimberly.

Cap, a Marble Head, MA native, was short and slight, the wiry sort, and even in his early 40s could scoot up the rigging like a frightened monkey. He had unusually smooth skin on his face, deeply tanned that gave him the complexion of a polished western saddle. One blue eye sparkled and could drill a hole in you. The other one, the glass one, never looked quite right. The eye, his face and his lack of a sense of smell or taste were the result of a runaway winch on a sailboat that tore half his face away. That little adventure cost him his Masters License and job as an oil tanker captain. The only job he could get was captain of a charter boat… with foreign registry, of course.

If he ever regretted it, he never said so. On the other hand, he never said much of anything unless he was giving orders or had had a couple of rum swizzles, a vile concoction he drank because he could nearly taste it. We usually stood the 4 to 8 watches together. Coming on deck for the morning watch, I would take the wheel and sail the Yankee through the darkness while he paced the deck quietly humming and singing to himself in his gravelly voice. In foul weather or beneath a brilliant star filled sky, he never varied his rolling gait up and down the slick teak deck. Unless it was something to do with the course or trim of the sails, we hardly ever spoke.

As dawn approached the Skipper would take the wheel while I dashed forward to the galley to grab a cup of Frank’s thick coffee. Quickly back on deck, I would retake the helm while the Captain went below to shave and clean up. For the next hour I would have the Old Girl to myself. Keeping the sails full and drawing, surging through the waves, she responded quickly to light touches on the big spoked wheel. I would stand silently awed by the magnificent kaleidoscope of the Caribbean dawn. With a fine ship beneath my bare feet, a strong coffee near at hand and a beautiful day aborning, all was right with my World.


The Yankee had started life before World War I as a North Sea pilot schooner named Loodschooner 4. Steel hulled and nearly 100’ long; she sported high bulwarks and a raked clipper bow, a perfect design for the nasty weather of the North Sea. Irvin Johnson of National Geographic fame acquired the ship in 1932 and renamed her Yankee. He refitted her foremast with yardarms in a classic Brigantine rig making her a true “square rigger”. After five circumnavigations of the globe, Johnson sold her to Mike Burke of Miami Beach in 1959. Mike planned to use Yankee and her sister ship, the schooner Polynesia, on 10-14 day “barefoot cruises” in the Bahamas.

I signed on the Brigantine Yankee in 1960 as an 18-year-old deckhand following my freshman year at Cornell. It was my year off to grow up and earn some money to return. I came with little real sailing experience but it was clear I wanted to learn and was willing to work. So Cap taught me. First I learned the skills of a deck hand; the names of the sails, their parts and the various lines that control them, rigging, splicing and helmsmanship. Then, he showed me how to be a topmast man. How to safely climb the rigging, work on the footropes and set and stow the topsails.

As you might expect, the Skipper had an aversion to winches. The only winch on board was the anchor windlass. Everything else was hoisted and hauled by hand. Each deck hand was expected to find the proper line immediately in the pitch dark. No flashlights either, thank you. It was no easy task. The foot of each mast was a maze of lines; clew lines, buntlines, sheets, braces, downhauls and halyards. The safety of the ship depended on quick reaction for the squalls in the Caribbean came quickly and with ferocity. We were often roused from our bunks with the cry of “All Hands on Deck!” Rushing topside we would clew up the topsails, scamper up the rigging and hurry out on the footropes to lash the flapping sails to the yardarms. It was hard and dangerous work, unsuited for the faint of heart, especially agoraphobics.

Turnover was high on Mike Burke’s Windjammer Cruises ships. At $2.00 per day, a bunk and board plus $10 or so a week in tips it was a lot of work for what amounted to beer money in Nassau. But, I loved it. Whether sailing quietly at night with stars blazing overhead and phosphorescent waves curling off the bow or perched high in the rigging under a brilliant sky, sails full and the white hull charging through the waves like a spurred stallion beneath me, I ate it up.

The weeks passed quickly and Cap discovered I had other useful skills. When anchored, I’d swim off to a reef and spear a grouper or two for Frank, our perpetually cranky cook. Before long, I became the only person on the ship besides the Captain who dared cross the threshold of Frank’s galley when I found places where I could gig enough lobsters to feed both passengers and crew. I started taking guests out on snorkel and SCUBA trips when we visited various islands on our way to and from Nassau. “Damned expeditionists”, Cap called them, although he was clearly pleased for the Yankee had no organized activities for them.

Mike Burke was starting to talk about organizing an around the world trip for the Yankee. The previous owner, Irving Johnson had done it five times, all with hand picked college students. Burke was looking for paying customers and Cap was worried that the group that showed up with the coin might not have many hearty sailors among them. So, Cap started grooming me to go as First Mate. He started teaching me piloting, celestial navigation and the rules of the road. At dawn and dusk we’d be out on deck, sextants in hand, shooting stars and plotting our results. At noon we’d take our sun shots. When we started getting pretty much the same positions on the chart, he would simply nod in approval. Not big on praise was Cap. In fact, I can only remember one time that he gave me a real compliment.

On that day the Yankee and Polynesia happened to end up at the same anchorage off Gt. Abaco Island and we were both ferrying guests back and forth to the shore. Art, Frank’s assistant, and I were returning to the Yankee empty after dropping off a load of guests. A straight line back to the two ships would take you across a shallow sand bar where the waves were breaking now that the tide was going out. The coxswain of Poly’s launch had foolishly tried the direct route over the bar fully loaded and had swamped the boat dumping all the passengers in the drink. They were hanging onto the boat as it bumped and dragged on the bar while the waves washed over them. To pick up the guests who had already been in the water awhile without swamping our own launch would be tricky. I had Art ready the anchor of our double-ended launch, slid past them, dropped the anchor and backed down until we were abeam of the floundering guests. We carefully took them aboard and cautiously worked our way through the surf-like waves and off the bar. We left to Poly’s crew the unpleasant task of recovering their own damn launch and coxswain. After we dropped off the wet but happy guests at the Polynesia and returned to the Yankee Cap said, “Nice piece of seamanship, Dick”. I was stunned, as if I had just been awarded the Presidential Citation.

I learned a lot more than knots and seamanship from My Captain… like leadership. He demanded much of his crew, but he worked as hard as any one of us. Gruff and taciturn, he none-the-less looked after us, taking money out of his own pocket to see that we were adequately fed in port.

On one trip he taught me a lesson in courage. We were trying to beat a hurricane back to Miami and as we crossed the Gulf Stream during the night, were losing the race. With only the staysails set we were bombing along before the wind, solid waves coming over the high bow and sweeping the deck from bow to stern. Cap and I spent the night using our combined strength at the wheel to keep the Yankee on course while the water swirled aggressively around our legs. The guests and crew hunkered below with hatches battened. He remained calm and controlled even when we seemed on the verge of broaching and rolling her over. As the dawn broke grey and ugly and the rain washed the crusted salt from our eyes and ears, I could finally see the enormous waves that towered over our stern and threatened to “poop” us. If Cap was at all worried, he never showed it.

In the end, after nearly six months, I decided to leave the Yankee. Burke didn’t want to pay me much of anything for the round the world trip… not enough to go back to Cornell anyway, and, I feared, if I stayed away two years, I might never go back. On my final trip we dropped off the guests at Port Everglades. I was leaving the ship there while Cap and the rest of the crew sailed her back to Miami Beach. Cap called me down to his cabin when they were ready to get underway. He poured each of us a drink of the powerful rum we bought for $2.60 a case in Freeport and said, “Well, what are you going to do now?” He interrupted my rambling explanation which amounted to “Hitch hike to California” with “I guess you really don’t know do you?’’ He said, “I hope you figure it out.” We finished our drinks, shook, said our “good lucks” and I went over the side to tend the dock lines as they shoved off.

The slip where Yankee was tied up was not much wider than she was long and they needed to turn a 180 to get out of there. It would be a tight maneuver using the engine and spring lines. Instead he did the near impossible. Using the sails alone he backed the jibs and then the forestay- sail swinging her around as neat as you please. Now THAT was a real piece of seamanship! Normally Cap would have motored out of the harbor before hoisting the sails. But, as I tossed off the last line, he waved and started shouting orders. Before he passed the bell buoy he had every sail on her full and shining like gold in the slanting sunlight of evening. It was a thing of beauty. I stood there on the pier alone, duffle at my feet without another soul around to see it. I knew that he did it as a parting gift to me. It was a gift without price.

Funny SEALs

I know that sounds like a strange title since there is nothing funny about what the SEALs do and especially what they are doing now in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, back in the middle sixties when I served and before the SEALs got involved in Vietnam, things were a little looser. Then too, it takes a special breed of cat to survive BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training). No one makes it through Hell Week or the long ordeal it takes to become a SEAL without a thick skin and a healthy sense of humor (and, as you might expect, a few other qualities as well). Of course, SEALs are particularly ruthless with each other. A few examples:

C.B. Thomas, Gunner’s Mate First Class was the oldest guy on our Team. He’d served as a WWII frogman and was still jumping out of airplanes and swimming on underwater night operations in his late forties. Despite being married to a school teacher CB could not read or write. You might well ask how CB managed to pass the written tests to make it to 1st Class PO? Simple. Someone else took the tests for him. Nobody found this to be a problem since CB knew every weapon we had as intimately as his own testicles, was a demon with explosives and a diabolical booby trap expert. However, CB became the butt of many pranks.

It was a tradition in the Teams that if you got promoted or had a birthday, you got thrown in the drink. We had a pond behind our Team compound and a dunk tank for our re-breathers that sufficed. If frozen, we thoughtfully broke the ice first. CB enjoyed several birthdays each year. Even the Skipper participated in this fraud. One morning while we were all standing at morning “quarters” the Captain called CB “front and center”. CB marched to the head of the formation and saluted. The Skipper said, “Happy birthday on behalf of the Team.” CB’s birthday is in July and this was in January. Someone arrived with a cake complete with candles, CB thanked the Captain and as soon as we were dismissed he was carried bodily to the pond.

Because he couldn’t read, CB could not get a driver’s license, so he rode a bicycle to work. He usually leaned it against a shipping container in our compound. One day he came out to hop on his bike and pedal home only to find it welded to the side of the container. Another time it was hanging at the top of the flagpole. When I took over as Platoon Commander of 1st Platoon I inherited CB as my Leading Petty Officer. No one ever had a finer LPO and, in 1st Platoon we did not play many pranks on CB.

I had my own experience with this tradition. The SEALs are unique in the military in that officers and enlisted go through exactly the same training at the same time. It is usually a little rougher on the officers since nearly all the Instructors are enlisted and they can be a bit fussy about who they want to lead them later on in the Teams. As a result and because of the nature of the job, the distinction between officers and enlisted in the SEALs is, well, a little blurred. Anyway, we were on an eight-month Med cruise and I was the APO with 3rd Platoon.

Our ship was tied up in Naples, then one of the filthiest harbors on the planet. We set off one morning on a training run dressed in shorts, tee shirts, boots and soft caps. As we ran down the quay I had forgotten that I had recently been promoted to Ltjg. I recalled this fact when I found myself airborne and heading for the water some 20’ below. As I swam back to the pier through a raft of turds and garbage my Teammates were having a good laugh. After hearty congratulations we continued our run with me a little squishy.

On that same cruise I got a call one day to report to the XO of the ship. This is never a good sign. The XO is second in command on the ship and basically runs everything, including the SEALs that are riding along. When I got to his stateroom he said, “I just got a call from the Commodore. He told me that he observed a group of men lowering a man over the side with a rope tied around his ankles. They were repeatedly dunking the man in the harbor. They were wearing greens.” Now we both knew there were several groups aboard that wore the green fatigue uniforms…. The Marines, CBs and Beach Masters and, of course us. We each knew that none of these other groups would be likely to pull a stunt like that. “You know anything about this?” he asked. I answered honestly that I did not. He said, “OK, dismissed.” And as I turned to go, he added, “And, Mr. D***, tell your men that if they have a mind to do this again to at least have the sense to do it on the side of the ship AWAY from the Flag Ship.” Good guy, the XO.

One other tradition which I happily missed involved the removal of all the pubic hair of a Teammate one week or so prior to his upcoming wedding. The idea here is that after a week it would be nice and prickly. Needless to say, no one submitted to this indignity willingly. You might imagine the difficulty of getting a young, tough SEAL’s pants down and holding him long enough to get started. Once the razor got applied in the vicinity of his most cherished equipment, they always stopped struggling. Of course, underwear was never a problem because Real Frogmen don’t wear underwear. This exercise always required consumption of large quantities of beer and rum before getting underway. I recall one particularly raucous party that occurred about a week before Jack Lynch got married. Jack, now the President of the UDT/SEAL Association, was a solid and very muscular young man. The battle to get Jack’s pants down and get started was a memorable affair, nearly destroying the Virginia Beach bachelor pad. There were about a dozen guys walking around the Team for a week with various injuries and bruises. No word on what the bride thought.

We played one of the more memorable pranks on a young officer named Tom Hummer (yeah, really). Tom was a West Coast guy and just your basic hunk…. Tall, blond, well built and very good looking. He was also a very nice guy. Loi and I had the single officers over to the house for a home cooked meal from time to time and Tom was no exception. He knew Loi from that and other social occasions.

Every winter those platoons not deployed somewhere went down to Roosevelt Roads, PR for six weeks of “winter training”. We did a lot of underwater recon and worked with one of the subs fitted out for our operations. On weekends we were free and the bachelor guys used to take the water barge over to St. Thomas to chase the female tourists. Tom had hooked up with a secretary from New York. When we got back to Little Creek and were sitting around the officer’s hut one day he complained he had gotten a letter from his lady friend but that she had written it in shorthand. No problem, says I. Loi knows shorthand and can translate it for you. Agreed. She did and the result did not live up to expectations. It said bland stuff like “glad we met and had such a nice time together, blah, blah”. Several of us decided we could write a much more interesting letter. Oh, was it ever! It started out with “All I can think about is having my legs wrapped around your neck again.” It became more graphic and lurid from there. I typed it and at the bottom added, “Mr. Hummer, if this is your idea of a practical joke, I think it in very poor taste. Lois.”

The next day I gave Tom the sealed envelope and told him Loi seemed upset and would not let me see the letter. We spied on him as he went to his desk and opened the letter. His mouth dropped open and he turned white behind that nice tan. He grabbed his hat and was headed to the parking lot when I stopped him. He said he was headed out to our house to apologize to Loi. Thinking quickly, I told him Loi was sleeping in and he should call later. I then called Loi and told her that when Tom called she should say “Oh, no.” and hang up. Later, when he got set to call we were once again peeking. You could see that he had been planning his apology and was prepared to lay on the charm. When Loi hung up on him he just looked at the phone in disbelief. He then grabbed his hat and headed for the door. I knew it was time to bring this to a close. Tom’s a pretty tough guy and I figured he’d be pissed. Sure enough. When I stopped him and explained the joke the only thing that prevented him from killing me were the twenty witnesses standing around laughing. He vowed to get me back and he sure did.

Tom waited a couple of weeks until I let my guard down. I was driving the first car I’d ever owned, a ’66 Plymouth Barracuda (V-8, four on the floor). My baby. We parked head in toward a chain link fence and one afternoon I jumped in the ‘cuda and backed out smartly. I heard several loud “sprongs”, the unforgettable sound a hand grenade makes when the shoe flies off. I turned around and saw half a dozen white parachute rip cord strings running from the fence to the underside of my car. My initial concern of being blown up was quickly dispelled when colored smoke started billowing out from under my car. Now one smoke grenade puts out an incredible amount of thick brightly colored smoke. Tom had taped six of them to the frame and engine of my car. I foolishly thought for a moment that I could out run the smoke but within moments I was completely engulfed. I bailed out of the car and watched the multi-colored plume rise into the sky. What they thought over at the Base is anybodies guess. Natch, Tom and about two dozen guys emerged laughing their asses off. Tom vowed that we were still not even but, we each got sent in different directions and he never got another chance.

We were young, fit and full of piss and vinegar, doing dangerous things. I guess being a bit boisterous can be expected. One of the great joys of going to the reunions is to get together with these guys I came to know so well and listen to the stories. We laugh and rib each other and the forty years that have passed seem nothing. We forget for a while that we’re old, grey and beat up. The young, hard guys have got the ball now and they are doing a Hell of a job. I’ll bet they’re giving each other shit all the time too.

BUDS and Hell Week

I have been reading Couch’s The Warrior Elite in which he chronicles Class 228 in 1999 through their BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training). The obvious question is… how has it changed since I went through beginning on December 28th of 1964? Some guys from my class (33) who stayed in Special Warfare for 30 years told me at our last reunion that it was easier by far. Maybe. We went through a long time ago. Memories fade. I do know one thing, if Training makes the young men who survive do things far beyond anything they could ever imagine they were capable of, then it’s tough enough.

Couch’s account reveals that a lot of things have not changed. The officers go through the same shit as the enlisted men… and more. They have to lead while doing it and, since the Instructors who run the actual training are all enlisted men, any officer they deem not fit to lead them will not make it. Guaranteed. They make sure to weed out the “Rambos” and the loners (it is after all called a Team and no one can make it through BUDS alone). Of course, it’s physically challenging to the point that most people think you’re full of shit when you talk about it. I always believed successfully completing training was largely mental. By the end of Hell Week everyone who was going to quit already had and you’d have to kill a guy before he’d quit. By Friday afternoon any further punishment is pointless.

So what’s different? In my day Basic was 16 weeks long followed by 8 weeks at Underwater Swimmers School at Key West and 3 weeks at the Army Airborne School (parachute) at Ft. Benning. It was mid August before I was assigned to a Team. Today it takes 25 weeks including the SCUBA training, which is done right at BUDS. The big difference is that after Basic all SEALs go through an additional several months of SQT (SEAL Qualification Training) before they receive their Trident and are assigned to a Team. In my day guys were sent to Army Ranger School for this extended weapons and tactics training. One of the big differences has to do with allowing guys to get medically dropped and then pick up with another later class. When I went through if you got sick or hurt you were dropped and that was it. Also, they let guys try again and they try to talk them out of quitting. In Class 33 if you gave your helmet to an Instructor you were out of the training area that day. No exceptions. Frankly, my biggest fear was getting hurt bad enough that I couldn’t continue. Everyone is hurting at some point. By the end of training I was taping my ankles before every swim because my tendons were stretched out and on the final 2000 yd swim I had a boil on my arm as big as my hand with a hole in the middle the size of a dime. I finished second. I’m not sure picking up guys who were dropped from previous classes to continue with another class is such a great idea. After eight months together everyone knows everyone in the class like a brother. Adding new guys to the class as it goes along seems wrong somehow. But, dropping guys who would otherwise make good SEALs just because of a sprained ankle or broken arm is a waste too.

I do think our Hell Week was tougher. It seems like Hell Week today is very difficult for a couple of days and then tapers off. Our evolutions got more and more difficult as the week wore on and the last day was the worst. Here’s what I remember. It started at midnight on Sunday with the usual explosions, whistles and mass confusion. Lots of Instructors screaming at us while we did PT until no one could do it any more. We then duck walked about 300 yards. While I was quacking away Jack Lynch, a second class petty officer at the time assigned TAD for Hell Week, came up to me and pulled a wad of bubble gum out of his mouth and stuck it in mine. He said, “Chew this awhile, Sir”. (Always Sir, as in “You’re a piece of shit, Sir”). Later he came back pulled the gum out of my mouth and popped in back in his own saying, “You’re not good enough to chew a frogman’s gum, Sir.” They kept us going all night… PT in mud puddles that had ice on them, running, crawling and endless push-ups. At dawn they organized us into boat crews and we got to carry the IBSs to breakfast. We carried them everywhere and it got to be such agony that guys had nightmares about carrying those fucking boats for months afterward. By the end of Hell Week my knees were so swollen from the boats that I could barely bend them.

One similarity I noticed from the book was the division of the class into “eaters and nibblers”. The eaters definitely had it easier. It was winter in Virginia and cold with skims of ice on the water. We were on the go constantly and wet most of the time, probably burning 6-8000 calories a day. I ate everything I could and still lost weight, but some guys couldn’t eat at all. (We’d get up from the table and start running with the boats). I have no idea how the guys who didn’t eat made it.

After breakfast we went to the beach for Beach Games… log PT, boat races and the like. They couldn’t keep us in the water for long as it was about 34 degrees but we managed to stay wet and cold. I don’t remember much about the rest of that day except a lot of guys were quitting and they reorganized the boat crews again. As the most junior officer I still did not have my own boat crew. That night we did a tour of the swamps and lakes on the base, dragging the boats through the mud and carrying them between swamps and lakes. I don’t remember when we first slept… not for at least two days, I’m sure.

The next day we went to the pool and had relay races and water sports. The races were unusual in that we did them fully clothed (no boots) with helmets and face masks full of water and, just to make it interesting, we had to hold onto a bucket with both hands. Sometime we did it on our stomach and sometimes on our backs. It was more like controlled drowning than swimming. It was here that I opened my big mouth. An Instructor asked me how I liked it and I said it was like swimming with a Danforth anchor. He said, “Great idea!” and sent someone to fetch an anchor. They had us race with two guys holding the anchor. That was truly difficult. We also played underwater hockey. The puck was a bucket… the 4 wheeled kind with the mop rollers on the top. The object was to push the bucket across the bottom of the deep end to the opponent’s side. As always, it paid to be a winner and conversely pained to be a loser. Painful game. Imagine about 50 guys in the deep end of a pool all trying to push a bucket across the bottom and occasionally come up for air.

That night was the 18-mile run with about half of it on the beach. That night was as close as I came to washing out. One of my fellow officers was Ed Burnap, a fellow Cornellian who had been the tight end on our football team. Ed was a husky 6 footer. About half way thru the run he was really hurting and ready to drop out. I helped him until he got a second wind. Near the end of the run my thighs started to cramp up and I leaned on Ed for support. Forty years later we both remember that night vividly. If we hadn’t helped each other neither one of us would have made it.

After that we got some sleep. The Instructors were supposed to let us sleep for an hour or so, wake us up, put us in a dark room to watch cartoons (where we would, of course, fall asleep), give us a test on the cartoons which we would fail and then “punish” us for failing. The punishment was really to loosen us up after the run. But, the Instructors screwed up and overslept. We got about three hours and when they woke us up we could barely walk.

Fortunately, the next day was the Laskan Boat Trip, which was mostly paddling. It was about a 35 mile jaunt from deep in Virginia Beach through the back channels and out to Chesapeake Bay. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing about 30 knots… dead into us. An IBS is not like a canoe and has a lot of sail area. Paddling into the wind was nearly impossible in some places and we had to get out and drag the boats or carry them. By this time I had gotten my own boat but, I had the “Smurfs” all the short guys and I had only seven counting myself. (I think we actually used the IBLs during Hell Week which was the 10-man boat). It was so cold that the water in our bottles froze and our pants and jackets were stiff with ice. We were dead last, long out of sight of the other boats and when we finally arrived at the entrance to the bay I spotted all the boats lined up on the shore outside a small tavern. Natch, we pulled in there too. The whole class was inside eating hamburgers and getting hot coffee. I was just wrapping my hands around a hot cup thawing them out when Chief Blasé, the baddest Instructor of them all burst through the door. To say he was pissed was an understatement. After chewing out the boat officers for awhile they told us to paddle across Lynnhaven Inlet and meet them on the other side. It was about half a mile of 3’ chop and howling wind. When we got across we did boat push-ups until we couldn’t do them anymore and they started us down the beach toward the Base. The original plan had been to paddle back since it was about 10 miles, but the wind and waves made that idea impossible. In the soft sand it was quite a hike carrying that boat. One of my guys wanted to quit and I didn’t think 6 of us could carry the boat in that wind so I used all my persuasive powers to keep him from quitting (including threatening to kill him). When we got to the base there was a big rock jetty blocking our way with a chain link fence atop. We had to manhandle the boats around the jetty in the waves and got completely soaked in the process. We got to paddle thru a series of lakes back to the training area.

It was dark by the time we got back and we had completely screwed up the schedule. They loaded us into trucks and hauled us to Ft. Story, a big Army base of sand dunes and swamps right on the Bay where it enters the Atlantic.
We set up pup tents and ate cold C rations for dinner. We crawled into our sleeping bags and promptly went to sleep. No sooner were we all asleep than they woke us up and said we had to pack up and move camp. We stumbled I don’t know how far and set up camp again. They woke us again and again during the night and I can’t honestly say how many times. I was pretty much a zombie by then.

Dawn broke bright and cold. Everything was frozen with about a quarter of an inch of ice on the standing water. After a breakfast of cold C rats So Solly Day began. The drill: One whistle drop; two whistles crawl to the Instructor; three whistles get up and run. They led us into the swamp and when we dropped we broke the ice with our bodies and elbows. Every five minutes or so they would set off half a dozen 1/2 lb blocks of TNT around us blowing sand, mud and ice high in the air and down on top of us. We were all shaking uncontrollably from the cold. One guy, Ed Furguson, one of only two black guys in our class had his shoe blown off and several guys had the paint burned off their helmets. That’s how close the charges were.
At noon they passed out cans of C rats while we lay on a road surrounded by swamp. They continued to set off charges blowing mud, water and ice down on us as we ate lunch. I’ll never forget. I had a can of cold chicken and noodles…. Mixed with mud and sand. I ate it all and never ate chicken and noodles again.

Because guys were getting hypothermic they led us away from the swamp into the sand dunes but the crawling and blasting continued. They used 15 second fuses and would holler “Fire in the hole” when they lit them. I’d cover my ears, cross my legs and open my mouth to get prepared for the blast and then fall asleep only to be jolted awake when the charges went off.

Finally we arrived at the Death Trap, a long rectangular pit filled with water. There were two telephone poles, one at each end. There was a fixed cable about fifteen feet up stretched between the poles with a rope about six feet above that which was connect thru a series of pulleys to the back of a jeep. The object of the exercise was to walk across the bottom cable holding onto the rope. Of course, this was impossible since the driver of the jeep would back up putting slack in the rope and then pull ahead quickly snapping it taut. We all wound up in the mud and water below.

It was about 5 pm and we were done. We had survived Hell Week. Of the 200 or so guys who showed up for Class 33 only 36 made it to the end.