and then at what point did you start thinking all right i’m not going to be able to was it did you make it to 21 before you got before you joined the navy so you made it to 21 no in 1966 i joined the navy because the draft was closing in as they needed more men you had different steps so if you have if you were married then you avoided the draft if even if you were going to school but you weren’t willing to make that kind of credit no no no no no you weren’t that just getting nuts right yeah you weren’t willing to go that distance you know when the women in southern california at that time were incredible and you grew up where the women always took the pill well that’s not true because the pill came out in the early 60s but nobody took it for a while so when the pill came about it was a whole new different social scene and you know everybody got their jihad on if you know what i mean and so it was very fruitful to be a a young man and a young woman in southern california in 1965 and so so you’re so you’re getting your your jihad on and and then so at what point are you did you say you joined the navy yeah we joined it in 1966 the draft was closing in and everybody had tried to get into a national guard unit or a reserve unit so there was nothing left because everybody of draft eligibility did that so i went into the summer marine where submarine reserves which was the least desirable of any reserves right because you had to go in the summary and so i did that and that proved my gateway to go into seal team i’m going to tell you the little story if you wouldn’t mind commander so i’m on the ship and i’m turning a wrench right i wanted to be in the engine room because i wanted to see how those you know diesel motor was probably 15 feet long and it was a real good learning experience because i learned a lot of things about diesel but the problem is you couldn’t take a shower in the submarine because there was no in the showers they had potatoes because there was no room we had about 85 people on the submarine there was no room for anything including the shower so you were out to sea for two weeks at a time and as an engineman you were really greasy uh and you could wash yourself but you couldn’t really get yourself clean so you get in your rack and you put your face on your pillow and you know you wake up in four hours for your next gig and your face is so greasy that your your face slid off the pillow right and i didn’t like to be greasy i didn’t mind muddy or dirty but greasy it’s not good you know when you had pimples on your face and this is the worst part so we used to go to a bar down here in san diego i can’t remember the name of the the boat bar and you’d walk in and people would smell you before they would see you because it was a snorkel submarine where the the boat snorkeled to recharge the batteries and it permeated everything with diesel fuel so you smell like diesel fuel so people would you walk in the bar people would sniff and say oh my god where did this guy come from and you’re perfectly clean i mean your skin’s clean but you just stink like diesel fuel right so after you know a little while on that summary and i went to the cob the chief of the boat and i said cop you know i’m i’m really not a quitter this is a volunteer service and a submarine i want to go to the army uh the army is good because i can sit in the mud and the mud you wash off and you don’t stink right so so you’re in there you’re in the navy reserves at this point but aren’t you but i’m activating but you’re active after duties so you join the reserves you go through boot camp yes but your salary is boot camp but your active duty so you you don’t have any break you’re straight up you when you joined you joined no you you had as long as you wanted to kind of fake it in the reserves but usually it’s a two-year gig so that’s why i joined and then when i was 21 it worked out my time schedule perfectly right so then then you were activated got it and then you went was submarine boot camp actually different than regular boot camp no it was up at hunter’s point in san san francisco and the marines would drill you and they tried to instill discipline and it was like a nine-week school it’s because you you went to boot camp but you only learned about submarines because you’re a detriment when you go on that diesel summary you know submarines from world war ii not nukes but diesel boats and if you don’t if you turn the wrong valve it could be the wrong you know it could be all over for the entire summary you got to know what you’re doing when you’re not summary so we went to that boot camp and then the next step did you not did you not put two and two together on one event to be on a submarine because i wasn’t the sharpest two of the shed but i knew there’s one thing i didn’t want to god bless the guys that are on submarines absolutely look i’ve spent probably my whole navy career probably spent a month on a submarine total maybe a month and a half and it doesn’t take much to figure out that it’s a special it’s a different breed of human being that goes on there and can deal with it because you’re in a confined space you know there’s someone that sleeps in your bed when you’re not sleeping in your bed racking right yeah it’s called hot rack and echo charles so this is the deal echo they only have so many beds they have more people than they have beds so when it’s your turn to go to sleep someone you share a bed with someone or maybe two people so you get to sleep for six hours and then when you get out of bed someone else is getting into your bed it’s warm right so this is just it’s not normal it’s not normal it’s not and they’re just as greasy as you oh maybe not greasier yeah and and everything is confined you know and you literally don’t see the sun and so it’s a d so i’m just wondering you didn’t you didn’t think too much you didn’t think to yourself oh well i’m going to be on a freaking aluminum can underneath the ocean for months at a time maybe that’s not the right deal yeah but that was just you know all my friends most of my friends joined the submarine reserves and so then they went on the submarines so that that’s just the way it was anything to avoid the army how long did you spend on in the submarine service month and a half not long at all not long at all so after a month and a half of smelling like diesel and being stuck underwater you went to the chief of the boat right one time and that’s where i cut you off where you went to him and said said all right i’m done you know i i just i just don’t like it and i’m not the right guy to be this you know and he says posey do i have a deal for you he says you go down and take this test this afternoon at 12 o’clock and you can be a seal team guy and i said well nobody knew because this is 1967 nobody knew what it meant right what seal team was and i thought well seal team well they have seals i thought all right seals and uh i said well does that mean that you train seals and to do tricks for recruiting and he says they’ll explain it to you so i go over to the a part of the base and they put a hard hat outfit on me and the first test was to drop you over the side of the ship in the bay and you walk around on the bottom of the of the bay for a half hour to see if you’re claustrophobic and so they drop me over at the side and they uh you know i walk around for a half hour in the mud you walk through the mud and this is in the old school like what is it the mark 8 dive helmet thing yeah you know yeah yeah and you know it was real old school it’s real yeah and so that was part of the examination did you have the big ass lead like boots and you couldn’t you had to shuffle the boots not walking them so all of the sediment that’s been there for 150 years i mean you took one step and you couldn’t see for the next five minutes you know so they had me walking around and then what else did they do with you oh then then they pull you up and they i said hey i passed the test what do i where do i go what do i do and they said well you have to take the other test and i said oh okay and nobody knew what seal team was right so i talked to the guy there and he was a dive guy and i said well what sealed him he says man it’s the greatest you go down to san diego you lay on the beach you are a lifeguard for marines who make marine landings at camp pendleton right and you have a girl under each arm and in each hand you have a bear and the navy buys you beer he said really the navy buys you beer yeah and these girls are gorgeous they’re they’re wonderful down in san diego i said man that’s the life for me that’s what i want to be right so you didn’t know because there’s no internet there’s no books i think men with green faces with his first book if i’m not mistaken from world war ii and i checked that out of the library and that didn’t you know you didn’t know what you got there so you just didn’t know which was i think a plus where were you where were you stationed when all this was happening long beach okay so then they transfer me to san diego and i go to the team area the friday before training starts and i go there and oliveira i don’t know if you ever heard of him he’s my proctor and i show up at like four o’clock in the afternoon and he says where you been i said well they just brought me in the bus here i don’t know what to do and he says i said what do i do what do you want me to do do i need a book bag because i thought it was a school i didn’t know and he says no no no you don’t need a book bag you just show up monday morning we’re going to take care of you he said really yeah so i go over at that time we had three quonset huts at the end of coronado at the end of the base and i go there and he gets me a rack and so i’m sitting there the weekend and these guys come in and they tell me what’s happened and say okay it is what it is right i’m not in the army so i’m pretty happy so that’s how it just all started then it started going downhill monday morning so what was the wake-up call like monday morning so you had no idea not a clue you didn’t know it was going to be physical you know nothing about hell week nothing you just thought you were going to a navy school where you’re going to learn about whatever right some demolition and that type of thing diving and it would be nothing where you ran or swam or whatever so what in your mind as you start getting physically and mentally abused at a high level on monday morning what made you decide okay well i’ll just stick with it hey you know i’ve been in that see the motivation is i’d been in that submarine and there was no way in god’s green earth that i was going to go back to that summary they’re going to have to kill me i was not going back to that summary no way so how did the training kick off um you know it was just physical training and evaluation and they gave us the test the sealed team test and everybody passed it and back then we had eight count burpees in with the you know run floor exercise than the swim so but it was you know i was half the man i i am now so it was a lot easier to uh to pass what class were you in originally 44 then 45 and then 46 so you got rolled a few times yeah i got mumps the first time what the hell what’s what’s that mumps it’s a disease a childhood disease from the 50s that they have inoculation your kids got the shot right so you didn’t get the shot and you randomly got oh there was no shot then got it and then the second time i got encephalitis from the bay from the dirty water and then they gave me some drugs and i got over that in about four weeks and the third time i was ready to go then i knew what was going on you know so how far did you make it on each of those previous occasions two weeks and then three weeks and then away you know 46 i was good and did you did you start to understand what the mission was that you were getting yourself into yeah because people explained it you know we had extensive training at the tradewinds of of what was happening and how things went down so uh then you got it you got you understood what’s going on you know in that time it was much different than it is now because the navy controlled everything you were a navy asset all funding came from the navy as from not from socom or being a national asset like in seal team six so it’s always where the money comes from what you know how they dictate your life and so we were like the dog in the manger udt even seal team because the navy you know we were poisoned to the navy if you wanted to make any headway you had to be a surface naval officer to make any headway because there was we never had an admiral we never had anybody i believe well i think we had a captain so it was very difficult for people with a career to do that if you weren’t an enlisted person
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