Letter home:
Scuba School/U.S. Naval School for Underwater Swimmers
April 30, 1967, U.S. Naval School, Underwater Swimmers, U.S. Naval Base, Key West, Florida 33040
Dear Mom & Dad:
Well, we arrived here Friday evening and will begin scuba training tomorrow. The barracks here are built like those on a ship, with offices, classrooms, etc. located in the same building. The food is very fine.
The wings I've pinned on the letterhead are a smaller replica of the parachute wings we were awarded at Fort Benning. They should look good with Mom's other pins.
We have some other pararescuemen here from Vancouver, Washington. They are already attached to a unit, have gone through most of their training and are in the Reserves. They lucked out and received their parachute training at the U.S. Forest Service's Smoke Jumpers School at Prineville, Oregon.
I don't have much more news, so I'll write again later.
Love, John
The U.S. Naval School for Underwater Swimmers, located in Key West, Florida, was the school I was most looking forward to going through. I had been scuba diving since 1959, and had my own equipment, so I was quite comfortable in the water.
In our preconditioning training, we had been swimming, doing calisthenics, and running all day, so we were in shape for these schools. During the three-week training at Ft. Benning for jump school, we had actually de-conditioned a bit. SCUBA School was supposed to be one of the toughest of the schools, physically.
On our first day at Key West, we were formed up into a running squad. We snaked our way downtown, singing as we ran very early in the morning. I often wonder what the residents of Key West thought of us and our running through their town. The instructors at Key West were Underwater Demolition Team members, and some were also SEAL Team members.
Key West at sunrise is much different than the tourists can imagine. Running in formation, singing at the top of our lungs so as to wake up anyone within earshot, we jogged in two lines, looking for all the world like a centipede with its legs synchronized chasing a bug with a green head, white back and green trunk. We were in shorts, and the instructor would stay in front of us, daring us to catch him. He stopped us in an alley, dark and cool in the early morning air. The ground was damp as he dropped us for pushups, then had us roll over onto our back. He shouted, "Dying Cockroach Position!," and we lifted our legs straight up into the air, along with our arms. "Head up, I said HEAD UP!!" the instructor shouted. One of the guys had let his head touch the ground. We stayed in this position, silently, for several minutes. After running and singing, at first this was a relief, but then the unusual static posture started getting to us. My neck muscles groaned audibly in my ear. My legs were getting quite heavy, and starting to shake. I was just about to put my head down when I heard an death wail, a loud "AAAAHHHH!" and a thump.
It was Bob Means. He hadn't been at Jump School, but he had joined us for Scuba School. I had enjoyed his company, and his fun-loving spirit. So it was with some trepidation that I looked over to see him with his eyes closed, laying on his side on the ground and not moving. The instructor shouted, "Means, what the hell is going on?" Means replied, "Sir, I died." The whole class broke into laughter, lost their position, and guffawed on the ground. The instructor, sensing he was loosing control, shouted "Alright Ladies, everyone up, form up, and we'll do a little more running." But he couldn't help smiling about Means' antics.
We trotted out of the alley, took a left turn and headed for the beach. Instead of just running on the sand, we crossed over to the water, and ran into the ocean paralleling the coast. At first, he had us just running. Then we went a little deeper, running in ankle deep water. After five minutes of this, he had us run out just a little more, until we were almost knee deep in the water.
Running in this deep water was like moving your legs in Jello. The water slows the legs down, and we had to lift our knees very high to clear the water's surface to keep going forward. Exhausting, totally exhausting! When we ran back to the school, we were dragging, and our songs didn't have the spirit of earlier that morning. We must have sounded like horse frogs dying of thirst trying to sing.
After the run, everything hurt, again. My body felt like a sausage that had just been packed, without bones and with muscles that didn't work too well.
. 
