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As I passed under it, I saw the propeller was not turning—standard procedure when divers are near.
    Surfacing just on the port side, I looked down and saw my men coming to the surface right under me. When they were all next to me, I told them to climb into the rubber boat Gerry had put over the side to help us get into the landing craft. Then I pulled myself out of the water and low-crawled in just behind Gerry.
    He was more excited than we were. He had been watching us through binoculars when he first saw the five armed men, apparently before I did. Gerry had started yelling to me, but realized there was no way I’d hear him, so he immediately ordered the boat toward the beach and told the machine-gunners to stand by to fire. Under our rules of engagement—the orders fighting men receive before going into a potential combat situation—we couldn’t fire unless fired at. As it turned out, the armed men jumped down behind the berm when they saw our boat, and Gerry never saw them come out again.
    All of us were breathing hard. We were pumped—we’d just become “combat swimmers.” With the adrenaline starting to wear off, we all realized how vulnerable swimmers are in broad daylight. I was proud of the men, and I told them so. They did exactly what they’d been trained to do. Our preplanned emergency procedures had worked. I remember thinking I never again wanted to swim to a hostile beach without some means of self-defense. Even our .38-caliber revolvers would have been better than nothing. (A revolver works fairly well after being exposed to salt water—all you have to do is make sure the barrel is clear before firing.) Later, when UDTs began doing missions in Vietnam, each swimmer was armed, usually with an M-16 rifle.
    By voice radio we reported to our superiors; then, sitting about a thousand meters off the beach, we waited for a reply. About an hour later we were told to head for another beach farther east, and run our boat into it to see if there were any obstacles. Gerry and Bill and I just looked at one another and shrugged.
    We didn’t get to the new beach until well after dark. Since we hadn’t gotten any sand samples on our first reconnaissance, we decided to take the boat in and put people over the side at the beach, under cover of the boat’s .30-caliber machine guns. We approached the beach cautiously and got the samples and departed without incident.
    It turned out the guys on the first beach had been friendlies. They thought we were part of a Dominican UDT that had defected to the rebels earlier in the day, and the only reason they didn’t fire was that we submerged before they could shoot and they were afraid of our boat offshore. I felt a little foolish, but as I was to learn later in Vietnam, friendly fire is just as deadly as hostile fire.
    U.S. Army forces stayed in the Dominican Republic for some time. We left in May 1965, our routine deployment finished.
    Â 
    A year after our Dominican Republic adventure, Dave Schaible and I were sitting on the porch of our barracks at the UDT-SEAL training facility in Charlotte Amalie, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the late-afternoon sun we were sipping rum and Cokes, feeling good about what we’d accomplished in the six weeks we’d been there. The Team was finishing a very successful training period in which we’d written the book on submerged reconnaissance. By this time I was a platoon commander and scheduled to take my men on a six-month Mediterranean cruise starting in June 1966. I had other ideas, though. I wanted to become a SEAL.
    â€œCaptain,” I said to Dave, “I want to go to SEAL Team Two in March instead of taking the platoon to the Mediterranean in June.”
    â€œGormly,” he replied, “that’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.”
    Well, that was his opinion, but I think it was one of the smartest.

PART 2
    Fire One: First Vietnam