I'm working from undocumented memory, here...but to the best of my recollection...this is the Legend. Blackie and the Chief went to diving school together sometime in the late 40's...they were hard and fast buddies for ages. Hard hat divers are a limited crowd in the Navy so they served together often and bumped into each other at other times. Sometime in the very late forties or very early fifties, Blackie decided to go to UD school in Coronado, CA. He wanted the Chief to go along but Blackie was single and the Chief had us so he opted for a more family oriented career. This much is pretty solid...what follows is as I remember it from overheard stories and things the Chief said...or didn't say.
When the new class reported to the Coronado Amphibious School, they lined up on painted footprints and waited for instructors to give them the "word". A wiry little Chief stepped out of the admin office and immediately approached the newbies and yelled, "Any you S****** ********* *****s think you can whip my ass, step forward." This created a dilemma for the newbies....step forward and be considered cocky or undisciplined...stay back and be considered cowardly or not aggressive enough. Blackie had no trouble making the choice. Like the Chief, Blackie never met anyone he thought could whip him...he stepped up. So did about one third of the group. The Chief gave them all the evil eye, chewed them out for being undisciplined, disrespectful, "tough" guys and then told them that's just the kind of sailor they were looking for.He ordered the rest pick up their bags and get back on the bus. Blackie and his group were given 15 minutes to stow their gear in the barracks and get back out in formation to start training...the toughest course of training the military had to offer...back in the day they called it UD... Underwater Demolition ...the Frogmen...nowadays they call them "Seals".
Some time later I may go into some of the things they had to do....mud pit...swim...paddle boats...swim...combat training...swim...exposives...swim...firearms...and swim...and a lot of other stuff, too. One of the things they had to learn was extraction by fast boat...where a speed boat with a rubber dinghy tied along side roars at you while you are bobbing in the water. A man in the dinghy has a rubber loop kind of like a bicycle inner tube and as the boat goes whipping by, you have to hook your arm into the loop and you are swung up into the dinghy and have to scramble into the boat before the next frogman is whipped into the dinghy on top of you.
The final exercise of the training cycle took some time and required the UD candidates to display all of the skills that they had been taught...they were dropped off of a boat two to three miles off shore...had to swim into the beach with all their equipment...infiltrated into enemy positions...plant explosives...make maps of the facilities...avoid the guards and police dogs...do all the other magic then sneak back to the beach...swim about two or three miles out to the pick up line and catch the fast boat as it ripped by. If you missed the boat you had to wait until everyone else was extracted before they came back to you. Blackie had been making excellent marks in all phases of his training...had completed this exercise flawlessly...even found the hidden objectives that many had missed...was bobbing in the water watching the boat speeding along and in his own words, thought, "Just what the hell am I doing here?" He swam back to the beach, walked back to Coronado and tendered his resignation.Then he reported back to his previous ship.
Believe it or not...this was not an isolated incident. Many young sailors "came to their senses"... as the UD cadre called it...even at the last minute...not many of them skipped the free boat ride back in, but that was Blackie.
But that isn't the end of the story. The Chief was never sure why...maybe the escalating cold war...the warmer war in Asia... boredom...or maybe a feeling of unfinished business...but a little over a year later, Blackie re-applied for UD school. They do accept retreads...it can take as many as three trips for some to get through successfully...and they were glad to get Blackie back again. The wiry little chief promised to make it a lot harder this time, to which Blackie promised to break a sweat this time. Short version...he made it on the second go round and became a Frogman.
Sadly, that was just about the end of his friendship with the Chief...they remained buddies and swapped sea stories over cold ones but it was never the same after that. There was a lot of things that Blackie couldn't share and that put a strain on things. But whenever weird things happened anywhere in the world, we would speculate if they were Blackie's doings. Whenever he was asked about some of those places, he would grin real big and say, "I swear, little Chief, I can't even spell that place." BR>