Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [9]
The UDTs would rotate on tours overseas in six-month shifts. On my first deployment, I ended up headquartered at Subic Bay in the Philippines. It was like being on the frontier, and my friends and I were a wild bunch. Lot of cheap beer, lot of easy, pretty girls. I wore a necklace made out of shark’s teeth, sported an Australian bushman’s hat, and grew a beard and a Fu Manchu mustache. That’s when I started lifting weights, thinking maybe I’d play pro football after I got out.
From Subic Bay, our different detachments would be dispatched to Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Guam. I spent time off the coast of Hanoi waiting with a Marine division for a Normandy-type invasion. That never happened. It was supposed to speed up “Peace with Honor,” Nixon’s political sell job. I served seventeen months of overseas deployment. Being a frogman, you defy death on a weekly basis, in war or peace.
In between my two deployments in Southeast Asia, we were conducting massive war games back in California. One pitch-black night, I was sure I was going to die. We were running “ops” on a river that was flowing like hell. I was in the first of two boats. We figured, hey, we’re going downstream and we don’t even have to paddle. This is gonna be a piece of cake. I was strapped in with ammo, lying there studying the shorelines, when all of a sudden we began hearing a dull roar. You can’t say anything, because on an op it’s all hand signals; you don’t want to give away the mission. Pretty soon the noise became deafening. My buddy, Rick, stood up in the front of the boat and said, “Oh my God, it’s a dam!”
Rick jumped out of the boat, made it to shore, and was able to run down and signal the second group so they wouldn’t go over. For us, it was too late. All six in my boat jumped into the river. Loaded down with ammo as I was, I landed in a churning mass of white water. I hit the side of the dam, desperately scratching for something to hang onto like the proverbial cat—but over the top I went.
When I landed, even though I was a championship swimmer, the current was so powerful that it spun me around like a pebble in a washing machine and kept sucking me under. I began accepting that I was not going to survive. Was I going to let my breath out and drown, or just hold it until I passed out? Those seemed like my only choices. I felt a sense of deep calm settle over me.
Then I had a crystal-clear vision of my parents. George and Bernice were bending over my casket, crying. I had the impression they were also angry—or maybe it was my own rage—that, after serving in Vietnam, now I was going to die in California! At the same time, I felt my boots scrape against the river bottom. And I shot up to the surface. After taking a few breaths, somehow I broke away from the washing-machine effect. Of the five guys who’d been with me, I was the one under the water longest, and the last one out.
For the first time, I began to think that there was a mysterious force guiding everyone’s life, a destiny, something bigger than coincidence. Because at least one of us should have drowned, but we all made it back alive.
When they sent divers over the next day to retrieve all the lost weapons, it was considered too dangerous even to try. Initially, the brass were going to court-martial me for losing my weapons . It was my first big confrontation with wrongheaded authority. I said, “Oh really? Well, I will then seek justice toward whoever did not brief us that there was a dam we’d have to somehow negotiate around. Because of their negligence, this almost cost the lives of five Navy SEALs.”
All of a sudden, the court-martial idea disappeared.
My last day of active duty, at the end of 1973, was close to the end of the American debacle in Vietnam. I was a naïve kid, and I didn’t know any better than many of my peers what was really behind it. Except for watching the news with my father, who’d said that stopping the “domino” effect of Communism was a shuck and that it wasn’t about anything other than money.
It was many years