By Ed Offley, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.
Feb. 12–NAVAL SUPPORT ACTIVITY — — PANAMA CITY
It’s a picture-perfect morning on St. Andrew Bay. A cool breeze flows in from the water, bringing with it the soft murmur from the engine of a distant powerboat. Cormorants skim the surface of the bay, and pine needles overhead glitter in the late-morning sunlight.
It’s hell on earth.
Class 06-30-2C is in the sand pit.
Just minutes earlier, the 20 U.S. Navy Dive School students came jogging down Solomons Drive in a tight formation as they concluded a five-mile run. For five hours now, they have been pressed to the limit by their Training Team’s unrelenting schedule: 0430 reveille, 0500 breakfast, 0530 PT exam, then nearly four hours of intense train ing in the pool.
Already they have learned “drownproofing,” technique for staying afloat without the help of life vests or rafts; how to wear and use the standard Navy diving mask, fins and snorkel; the proper procedures for safely entering the water while wearing diving gear; and how to retrieve and clear water from the facemask while remaining sub- merged. They have done pushups until their muscles screamed for relief.
Permeating the tests, exercises and physical training events — and adding mental stress to their already aching bodies — is an unbending, in-yourface regime of military discipline that rises to the level of oppression. The class hasn’t seen this jack-in-the-box routine since the Great Lakes boot camp grinder, or plebe summer at the Academy — if then.
On order, Class 30 forms in two lines of 10 facing Hall, the training team leader.
“This is the eight-count bodybuilder,” he announces, calling off each element by number.
“One,” Hall says, dropping from attention into a squatting position.
“Two,” he barks, throwing his feet back to reach the leaning rest position on hands and feet, back straight and arms locked at the elbow.
“Three … four,” he snaps, doing a full pushup.
“Five,” he adds from the leaning rest position, throwing his legs apart in a leg split.
“Six,” he calls, bringing his legs together again.
“Seven,” he says, jerking his body back into a squat.
“And eight.” Hall ends, jumping back to his feet.
The students wait, still at attention. “We will do ten of these,” Hall announces.
“HOO-YAH TEN!” the students shout.
“Stand to,” Hall orders them. “Are you ready?”
“HELL, YEAH,” Class 30 responds.
On count, 20 bodies drop to a squat. They lunge into the leaning rest, push down, push up, split their legs, close them again, jump back into a crouch, leap back to their feet. And again. And again, eight more times.
Hall continues the litany in a monotone that carries over the sand pit, his 39-year-old body working like a precisely tuned machine. The other instructors, in bright yellow sweatshirts, stand and watch the students.
The sole civilian student, Lucas, catches their eye first. Face stretched with pain, by the end of the third set he can’t keep the pace. His pushups are puny little things that don’t come close to the ground. He jumps back into the crouch with a wobble and teeters instead of snapping to his feet.
“Everyone is doing it except you, Lucas,” an instructor snarls.
Hall leads them through the four sets. Forty of the eight-counts. Class 30 is unraveling badly as fatigue sets in.
Without warning, Hall shifts gear. He intones, “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen …. “
Class 30 has been briefed.
The 20 bodies race from the sand pit, sprint 30 yards and fling themselves into St. Andrew Bay. The water is all of 6 inches deep, so they must do a full roll to properly soak themselves. The cool water is for an instant wonderful, but now the students must make it back to the sand pit before the countdown ends.
“Four, three, two … ” Hall chants, as the wet bodies throw themselves flat onto the sand.
Hall summons Bibler up front to lead the exercise. Within minutes the 20 sets of canvas UDT shorts, white T-shirts, arms, legs and faces are caked with sand.
Tymofy in the back row, starboard side, is suddenly surrounded by yellow shirts. Their comments are drowned out by Bibler’s hoarse cadence of the eight-count, but Tymofy suddenly bellows, “HOO-YAH, Instructor! I want to be here. I want to be here — really bad!”
Instructors Foster and Pendino stroll through the heaving mass, picking up double handfuls of sand and throwing them on the students’ backs, legs and necks. The eight-count ends.
“Nineteen, eighteen …. ” Hall intones.
Back to the water at full speed, dropping, rolling, on their feet. Moselle is last out of the bay, and Hall is down to “three” as she throws herself head-first into the sand pit like a runner stealing home.
“On your backs –on your bellies,” Hall orders. The students comply instantly and find themselves basted with sand.
Having attracted their ire, Tymofy is next to lead the eight-count cadence.
“Attention to orders,” he chants hoarsely. “The exercise is an eightcount bodybuilder.
“HOO-YAH EIGHT-COUNT BODYBUILDER!” they shout back.
“Stand to” the petty officer croaks.
Squat, lunge, down, up, split, together, squat and up again. And again. And again ….
Instructor Vann steps up. “Some of you people are giving up way too soon,” he says in a stern voice. “When you think you don’t have anything left, you do.”
“Anybody want to quit?” Vann asks.
“HELL NO,” Class 30 shouts in unison.
It goes on forever. And this is just the first real day. Indoctrination day
The first day — only yesterday but seemingly a lifetime ago already — was eerily civil and calm.
Class 30 silently marched down Skylark Drive and Crag Road in the blackness before dawn. The base seemed still asleep, but other groups of students — the Marine Combatant Divers, the Air Force PJs, a pair of earlier Two-Charlie courses — also were up. Here and there they assembled with diving gear, jogged to the PT course, headed for muster and class. Occasional barked commands and Jody calls, chants in cadence, pierced the cool air.
Class 06-30-2C formally meets for the first time in its assigned classroom up on the second deck of the Momsen Building. It’s your basic Navy school setting: two-man tables and hard chairs, whiteboard and overhead projector and harsh neon ceiling lights that cast a pallor over the group. Dressed in Navy blue winter uniforms, they sit quietly, murmuring — about as coherent a team as any 21 strangers waiting to board a plane.
The sound of traffic on Thomas Drive is a low drone outside the two open windows. The sky is just beginning to brighten when the five members of Training Team 6 enter. All conversation instantly halts. The burly team leader strides front and center and introduces himself.
“Welcome to Dive School,” Engineman Chief Timothy Hall says in a brisk voice. The second sentence out of his mouth is a flat warning. “Diving School is not for everybody.”
The students listen silently.
“We will be putting each and every one of you under a lot of stress,” says Hall, his thick forearms crossed across his chest, obscuring five rows of ribbons. “We are going to take you out of your comfort zone.”
He repeats the basic message. “You are all volunteers, but this is not a job for everybody. If you feel ‘This is not for me,’ come and let us know.”
Since Navy diving is inherently more dangerous than other assignments, students are allowed to drop on request (DOR) with no blemish on their records, Hall explains.
There are numerous ways in which a student can get tossed from the program: a single DUI and the student is out; failing a classroom test or key PT exam or swim test and a student will face a review board that can order him back to the fleet. Doing “something stupid” such as an unauthorized absence (UA) or violation of military discipline will bring the walls crashing in.
Hall quickly establishes the parameters for the next 14 weeks.
On the military structure of Dive School: “You may outrank one of your instructors,” he says, glancing at the four commissioned officers in the class. “You do not challenge his authority.”
On the strictness of performance scores: “If you fail the (PT) run by one second, you fail. If on the pull-up your legs are crooked, you fail.”
“You are going to leave here in one of two ways,” Hall continues. “As a DOR or with a Navy Diver pin on your chest.”
After introducing the other four instructors and reviewing a list of housekeeping procedures, Hall again underscores the harsh realities of Dive School by introducing Navy Career Counselor 1st Class Latonya Luter. Her message to the class is short and to the point: “If you are disenrolled from training, I’m the first person you will talk to,” she says.
The instructors set a firm tone from the outset. “We try in the beginning to be very separated from the students,” Hall earlier explained. “If you befriend students it changes things. It’s hard to kick someone out if you’re friends.”
Hall says little about his 20-year Navy career to the class, nor does he waste time discussing his previous assignments as a ship’s husbandry diver with the Shore Intermediate Maintenance Facility (SIMA) in Norfolk or subsequent salvage work at Pearl Harbor. There are no details on his volunteer work as part of a massive Navy diver effort to help in the retrieval of debris and passenger remains from TWA Flight 800 after its crash in New York in 1996.
In fact, he says essentially nothing about himself. “I don’t want you to know much about me,” he tells the class.
One instructor unbends a little.
Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Joe Pendino steps up. As class proctor, the 34-year-old instructor will be the person who the students can turn to for advice and assistance — the “good cop,” as another instructor later notes. Pendino takes roll call, reviews the daily class procedures and regulations. He gives a very short summary of his 10-year Navy career.
Enlisting in 1992, Pendino served for six years with two Virginia-based diving units before leaving the service in 1998 to work as a heavy equipment operator back in Missouri. In the wake of 9-11, he adds, the Navy called him up and invited him to re-enlist.
After a tour with an explosive ordnance disposal unit that included participation in the salvaging of the Civil War ironclad Monitor, Pendino in late 2002 joined the salvage ship USS Grasp in the Mediterranean. After three years, he returned to Panama City in June 2005 as an instructor at the Dive School.
Pendino ends on a high note: “I wouldn’t do anything else in the Navy,” he says.
Engineman 1st Class Charles Foster, 35, doesn’t talk about himself to the students. Instead, he talks about service as a fleet diver.
Speaking of his own three-year tour on the Grasp, Foster explains, “A junk boat is fine but SIMAs are good places to learn how to dive. They get in the water four to six hours a day — and work and work and work.”
Another instructor tries to nudge Foster to talk about himself.
“Why do you want to be here?” Photographer’s Mate Chief Chad Vann asks Foster.
“I want to be here because if I’m not here, I’m UA,” Foster deadpans.
Both Vann and Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Whitney Chastain then tell the students that, like Hall, they do not care to share their personal backgrounds.
Chastain does tell them that he is the designated class hospital corpsman. Students should come to him if they are having any problems with ailments or minor injuries. “Short of the bones coming out of your leg, come see me first,” he says.
The class then breaks up for a day of bureaucratic chores: mandatory urinalysis, CPR class, drawing PT clothing and swim gear. The pool deck
This is where it starts in earnest.
The training pool behind the Dive School building looks like a normal 33-yard swimming pool, but the steam rising from the water and the heavy stench of chlorine betrays its purpose as a proving ground for would-be Navy divers and not a place for recreation.
It is 0712 on Day 2 of training, and the instructors are spread out around the pool deck, waiting for Class 06-30-2C to mount the stairway from below. The sun rising over Panama City across the bay casts a brilliant orange light in the sky that is reflected on Alligator Bayou just behind the training area and the pool itself. The yard boat Poseidon growls to life 50 feet away and edges out from the pier, taking a diving class out to sea.
This is actually the class’s second visit to the pool today. They were up here at 0530 taking the mandatory 500-yard timed swim before mustering on the far side of the south parking lot for the rest of the PT test: 42 push-ups in two minutes; 50 “Navy curl-ups” in two minutes; 6 full pullups in 10 minutes, and a timed 1.5-mile run.
The students are generally in excellent physical shape, and they go through the reps with little problems.
Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class
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Copyright (c) 2006, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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