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us down to 120 feet to see if we could handle the pressure, and then brought us up to 60 feet, where we were to breathe pure oxygen for thirty minutes. This part of the test was designed to see if we were susceptible to oxygen toxicity—a real problem if you wanted to be a frogman.
    I had no idea what the symptoms were, and I later found out that the Navy had no real idea why people developed oxygen toxicity, except that it happened sometimes when you breathed pure oxygen under pressure. I began to feel funny after about ten minutes, and I signaled the corpsman. He immediately pulled off my mask and told me to forget about UDT.
    We later figured out that I had hyperventilated from the excitement. It didn’t matter; UDT wasn’t hurting for officers, and I was out of luck. There was no provision for another test. So I finished OCS with the notion that I would do my required three years and get out.
    Then a strange thing happened. I got orders to report to UDT training at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia, home of the East Coast UDT and SEAL teams. The officials at OCS told me not to question the orders: some doctor probably reviewed my record and decided there was no problem. So I reported for training in June 1963—and the corpsman assigned to the training unit took a look at my record and said, “Sorry, Charlie, you’re not qualified—you flunked the oxygen test.”
    I was pissed, but all my yelling got me nowhere. The Navy sent me to the Naval Amphibious School to await new orders. Because I was a three-year reservist and had a family in Virginia Beach, someone in the Bureau of Naval Personnel probably decided the cheapest thing for the Navy to do was to leave me at Little Creek to do my time with the “Gators.” I went to a few training courses and then had the good fortune to get orders to Assault Craft Unit 2 (ACU-2) at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek. There, at a diesel engine maintenance course, I met Tom Gaston, a fellow ensign assigned to UDT-21. Tom convinced the UDT doctor to give me another test. I took it and passed with no problems. I even took a second test to make sure. And in nearly thirty years of diving pure-oxygen and mixed-gas scuba, I never experienced a problem with oxygen toxicity. Thanks, Tom.
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    In November 1963 I received my orders to report to UDT Replacement Training Class 31, beginning in January. I was a little worried about how the instructors would see me—in those days most people got only one chance at UDT training. But when I walked through the door to the administration building and “instructor’s hut” my apprehensions were dispelled. Chief Petty Officer Tom Blais looked up from his desk. “Welcome back, Mr. Gormly. Hit the deck and start doing push-ups until I get tired.”
    In those days, the first two weeks of training were devoted to physical conditioning as the instructors tried to get all the men who’d been serving on ships in shape for the rigors of “Hell Week,” the third week of training. For me the conditioning phase was sort of a pacing period: I’d been working harder on my own beforehand. In fact, throughout the course I found training wasn’t as hard for me as for others in the class. First, Ron Smith had done a great job of letting me know what to expect. “Don’t quit,” he advised, “and you’ll make it, because they rarely throw anyone out.” Second, I’d had plenty of opportunity to get in shape while biding my time at ACU-2. Third, with a wife and baby depending on me I had plenty of motivation. And finally, I’d had a high school football coach who instilled a never-quit attitude in me. I figured that if I’d survived two-a-day summer practices under his ex-Marine-Corps-drill-instructor tutelage, I could get through anything.
    When morning training started, we all got a taste of things to come. With the rest of my