Thank you folks for replying. You don't know how much it means to me.
It's like 3am here at our home, I live on the island of Negros here in the Philippines. I'm wide awake over worrying about this.
I've got a long and convoluted story. But let me try to cover the highlights of my situation.
In the late 70's I quit high school and my Dad, a union seaman, got me my seaman's papers.
I sailed out of the Gulf for 4 years on merchant ships as a deck hand (ordinary seaman). I decided to do a stint in the Navy as an EM (Electricians Mate) so I could come out and sit for my merchant marine electricians exam.
So in 1981 I entered the Nav, I loved it. I had great evals and took honor man in my A-school. Everything I did, I did to the best of my ability.
They sent me to a ship in overhaul in Bremerton, Wa.
There, I got an idea and, along with a couple of friends, I tried out for and passed the screening test for UDT/SEAL. I was liking the Nav back there enough to start thinking of maybe making it a career.
I passed BUDS (SEAL Basic) in 1983, I was sent to a UDT/SDV Team.
This is an SDV:
I was selected soon after arriving at my new command for a platoon deployment. An SDV platoon is a SEAL platoon that totes around that little sub, there are 12 SEALs to a SEAL platoon, so we get pretty close to each other.
My first deployment was to Subic, where UDT/SEALs had facilities on the base there.
One day, we were up in the jungle training and in a freak accident, a grenade I had thrown took a bad bounce and my dive buddy caught a piece of frag in his throat. We emergency medivacked him from the jungle to the base hospital by boat. He underwent surgury to remove the frag, and recovered. The doctors had cut him open from his ear to his collarbone to remove the frag from his neck, left him scarred up really bad. But thankfully he survived.
The rest of that deployment was uneventful and in early 1985 we went back to our command base in Coronado where I was immediately grabbed up for deployment in another platoon.
During that platoons training, in August of 1985, I reenlisted for another 4 years.
I'll post this and come back for the "rest of the story"...