RD's Art - Class 29 Book

 

In June of 2000, RD completed and published a book titled "To Be Someone Special - The Story of UDTra Class 29". It had been in the making for about a year. and is all about his Underwater Demolition Team Training Class #29 in the winter of 1962, Coronado, California.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were 41 graduates of that class, seven officers and thirty-four enlisted men. The initial group numbered approximately four hundred enlisted men and 30 officers, but the attrition rate was steep over the twenty-six weeks of intense training as men voluntarily dropped out or were dropped due to injury. On December 10, 1962 Class 29 graduated forty-one victorious frogmen. RD was one of those enlisted men. He was also one of the nineteen enlisted men who came straight out of Navy boot camp to UDT training, a new experimental policy instituted in 1962 in an effort to improve the trainee attrition rate while not compromising the quality of training. It was successful in Class 29 and those nineteen "boots" were proud of their achievement.

After training the frogmen were assigned to either UDT 11, UDT12, or SEAL Team One, west coast Teams. They rotated from advanced training to deployments in Vietnam over the course of their enlistments. 

RD's book is about their shared experience in training, not about their time in Vietnam. In the 1960s the UDTs and newly formed SEAL Teams were secretive by design. The mystique of "The Men With Green Faces" had a huge role in their success. Nowadays with all the movies, books, and even video games about Navy SEALs the public doesn't realize the UDT/ SEAL Teams operated as a clandestine force, a secret weapon in Vietnam.

 

 

RD located and contacted as many of his classmates as he could. That in itself was quite a roller coaster ride, the reunions, the long telephone conversations, the joy at finally getting contact information on a classmate only to learn he was no longer alive. Eleven of the forty-one had died, and two he could not find. He asked the twenty-seven living teammates, seven officers, "The Magnifient Seven", and twenty enlisted, to write about their memories of training, and they did! And Jack Sudduth, OIC of the training unit, contributed his memories of training, and that class in particular. As for the thirteen who could not contribute, and a few who could but didn't, RD wrote about those men whom he remembered well yet struggled to tell their stories as they would want them told.

 

 

The book is heavily illustrated with photographs, charts, artwork, and even poems. As RD received each story from a classmate we filed it in a separate folder then searched for appropriate photographs to accompany the story. RD's memories of training, already vivid and accurate, were stimulated by what his teammates wrote. For months he re-lived and breathed his UDT training experiences in his head and his fitful sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, in June of 2000, we took the finished manuscript, created on our home PC, to Kinkos, ordered fifty copies of the 180 pieces of paper, most printed on both sides, brought those back home where we formed an assembly line on the big flat surface of a bed, and walked up and down with armloads of papers, making RD's book. We hadn't numbered any of the pages for a couple of reasons so it was essential we not make mistakes in the page order as we assembled fifty books. Then back to Kinkos to have them bound with coil binding and clear plastic front and back covers. 

This was a huge undertaking by RD, born of love for the Teams and his desire to share his memories with his classmates, let them know what they meant to him. He never intended to make the book available to the public therefore most people don't know about this creative project of RD's. The books were well received by his classmates, treasured even, well...except for one. One of RD's closest friends in Class 29 was married to a woman who insisted he walk away from his experience in the Teams and not look back. She was offended by the booklet RD sent out, a preview of the book, with Team art included, a humorous thing. Perhaps she had her husband's best interests at heart. We'll never know. It was she who wrote to RD and told him to stop corresponding with her husband. It made him angry and broke his heart but he did what she asked, no, she demanded. And he made the offhand comment to me that the guy always did have a problem with the women in his life.

Throughout this class's training RD's boat crew excelled but it was during Hell Week they really pulled ahead, so much so the instructors suspected that somehow they had sneaked in an outboard motor. But no, they truly were an exceptional crew with six enlisted men and ENS William T. White III as coxswain. RD tried to explain the dynamics of that to me several times but I didn't really understand. I came away with this...Mr. White knew the water, the waves, and how to read them from his experience surfing all his life and his crew trusted him completely. They won Hell Week and secured early, a big thing. RD was surprised to learn that thirty-eight years later Jack Sudduth still believed Boat Crew 6 must have cheated. No, they were really that good!

 

 

At some point when there was discussion about naming the book RD suggested "Yesterday's Wine", after Willie Nelson's song with that title. He created a cover using that theme. But he was outvoted and the other cover with Barney House's art was preferred. When we assembled the books I made one with RD's Yesterday's Wine cover for I think it says a lot about him and his relationship to these men.