BLACKFIVE: Key West to the Hollywood strip

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Key West to the Hollywood strip

Posted By Uncle Jimbo

I have hesitated to chronicle this story, because almost no one will believe it is true. There are way too many "you have got to be sh**ting me" moments in this for it to all be true, but I will not preface this with "Now this is no sh**" as a matter of fact this is a love story not a war story, so to the extent that I am credible this was my adventure. This unfolds over 9 weeks in 1990 and I will serialize it here by writing it as it happened adding in the bits I have already chronicled such as Spanky & the Shark. Just a few highlights you can expect; a hot Swedish chick in bike shorts, her snooty rich chick girlfriend from Topanga Canyon, girlfriend Hmmm, my first ex-wife's best friend, Tesla, Warrant, XYZ, Riki Rachtman and the Cathouse, Cher and Ritchie Sambora, a water jump that ends up on land, lobster man and peacock sperm. Do I have your attention yet? I will check with Matty and y'all to see if I should move this to unclejimbo.com/blog, but here is the opening round.

People join Special Forces for many reasons, for me the usual desire to see what I had was really the main push, but I'll be honest hot chicks was a close second. So in this tale I am on my way to Key West, FL for a brand new school called the Waterborne Infiltration Course (WIC). It was taught by the same kind-hearted souls who were known as the Scuba Nazis from their role teaching the Combat Diver course for the Spec Ops community minus the SEALS who have this quaint little scuba diving and beach volleyball course out in Coronado.

Now both the SEALS and Special Forces need scuba diver guys to do all the sneak into the harbor stuff that makes such great movies, but there is a requirement that you are able to ignore drowning in order to play that game. So for me and the rest of the folks who learned the hard way that "A breath of water is like no breath at all" they came up with WIC. Basically it was all the other ways to cruise and sneak about in a maritime way, but on the top of the water not under it.

This meant Surface Swimming, Zodiac rubber boats just like Greenpeace which will come up later, and open sea kayaks. The course had just been dreamed up and I was in the second test class, and that should sound ominous, here's why. When a new course is invented the program of instruction is brand new. Now in SOF the idea is almost always to train at the hard edge of the envelope to ensure that standards and results remain the highest possible, but you don't want to kill people doing it. To give an idea of the dangers of training, we had a 23 yr. old die of a blown heart valve on a 12 mile road march and three people including my detachment commander getting shot just in my personal experience. So in the first test class of the course they had set some challenging standards for how far the students would swim, paddle and boat but they aimed at the lower end of the already challenging envelope to get some bench marks. After that iteration they determined that all the students survived and so as the second set of maritime guinea pigs arrived they ratcheted all the standards up to the top end to see how far we could go. Oh Joy!

Wait didn't I say this was a love story? So now that you know the hell, let's examine the heaven. We spent the first week of six learning tides and currents and navigation and buoys, and the only serious suffering was the daily PT sessions at 530 am. The scuba nazi instructors took great pride in their ability to "Break you", and since thy weren't allowed to actually drown us like the Combat Diver students they did much of their torture during PT. Now you might think that the prospect of those savages attempting to kill you before dawn cracks coupled with a curfew, I think 11 pm, would curb the night-lifing, HA! One can sleep once dead, no we needed to run wild and free and nasty if possible. In Key West that is Durty Harry's, which was the sleazy dive in the alley across the street from the Hemingway bar where the tourists flocked.

Durty Harry's had live music nightly and since this was 1990 that meant hair metal. So we had the basics, live rock and a sleazy bar, Hmmmm what are we missing, that's right hot chicks. Well that problem was solved with the evening bartendress. She was Swedish and this being the time when bike shorts were cool, well she was the reason why. Oh my lawdy, lawd Dag! Sorry, but c'mon blonde, blue-eyed and a body hard as woodpecker lips? Having been in Key West for a couple of years Minna (meena) had no trouble swatting my young ass down when I got gave her my best "Hi there, I'm am the Uncle Jimbo". But this was only week one of the course and I am nothing if not persistent.

More over the weekend and beyond