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Old 4 June 2005, 20:12
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trident86 trident86 is offline
Been There Done That
 
Join Date: Oct 1999
Location: Chesapeake, VA
Posts: 2,381
Part 2

enlisted. By then we all knew each others’ strengths and weaknesses as we knew our own.
Following graduation from BUD/S four of us officers rented an old rambling house on 4th street in Coronado. We would often take our meals together at a favorite local restaurant - the Chart House*… where Spence invariably ordered his favorite: teriyaki shrimp.
(I never saw him order anything else.)

Times were good then and all too short. We were young, well trained, and eager to test our mettle in combat.

Four of us were assigned to UDT-13 and within a few months we deployed to the Philippines.* Spence deployed almost immediately from there to Vietnam as OIC of Detachment Hotel near Da Nang. There he led his detachment on river reconnaissance, combat demolitions,* and search & destroy operations* along the Key Lam river.
When Jim Hoover was seriously wounded at Dong Tam, Spence relieved him and I relieved Spence. Upon return from Vietnam Jerry, Spence, and I transferred to
SEAL Team One.
The time at SEAL One * was spent training hard, lining up to volunteer and compete for combat deployments, as well as making a general nuisance of ourselves at the local “watering holes” of San Diego. There SEALs and the Naval Aviators would compete for attention during off duty hours and in between deployments to the Western Pacific.

We trained hard and we played hard, and did the things young men do when they think they’ll live forever.

So it was a terrible shock to learn that Spence had been killed … and as it started to sink in… we wanted to know the specific details.

Officially the word from on high was he had died in a “training accident,” the location and purpose of which were highly classified and disclosed only on a need to know basis.
We needed to know more.

Gradually as the surviving members of his team returned to Coronado, we uncovered the bits & fragments that enabled us to piece together key parts of how the “training accident” occurred.

Spence and his teammates had been forced to abort a highly classified clandestine reconnaissance and attempted rendezvous under extremely hazardous combat conditions.
They had launched at midnight from a submerged submarine* on 3-4 June 1972. After several hours of fighting too strong a tidal current, they had been compelled to scuttle their only mode of clandestine transportation, a SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV)* whose battery power had ran out fighting the current.
They had launched at midnight from a submerged submarine* on 3-4 June 1972. After several hours of fighting too strong a tidal current, they had been compelled to scuttle their only mode of clandestine transportation, a SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV)* whose battery power had ran out fighting the current.
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