Jackson Quigley

I think the reunion put something in motion that neither of us was ready for. And this is a good thing... I love challenges. You (New School Diver) and I (Old School Diver) now have the chance to document a very important, (and missing), time in the Army Diving History Timeline. 

As a Vietnam Diver I was in a group of men, who certainly thru no fault of our own, or any fault of the Army Dive Community itself, that was separated from that very same Dive Community by the fact that they were drafted and reported straight to Navy Dive School after basic. After Dive School they ended reporting to Ft. Eustis, to an almost defunct dive unit, to wait for their Vietnam Orders to come down--it was a given fact that we were going to war. And once they got to Vietnam, they spent as much time working with the Navy as they did the Army.

 We received very little training while we were at Eustis. We sat around in the dive unit cleaning gear and breaking up our boredom diving in the tank. We had a quick one-day course in explosives so we could give C-4 Training to OCS. We dove the odd drowning jobs and a plane wreck on the Potomac... that at least got us ready for all the body recovery job we would do in Vietnam (we simply called them Floaters). We were kept busy with KP & Guard Duty. Many of us were farmed out to various survival or NCO type training... just to keep us out of the Master Diver Sargeant's way.

 Then we went to war, we travelled individually, not as members of a detachment, company, or even unit. We really had no ties to anything Army, except for Basic Traiing. 

Most of us were assigned to Engineering units for the first time since WWII and Korea. When we arrived in Vietnam, we were in fear that we might end up in another MOS... and a few actually did. Even harder to believe is that some divers actually arrived in units that had no diving gear. It was a real cluster fuck.

To further our isolation, when we were in-country we crisscrossed Southeast Asia by helicopter or LCM 8 as individual dive teams. There were very few company sized engineering projects. We dove 24/7, an average of 3 - 5 dives a day, seven days a week. We didn't even keep dive logs. A lot of the time was spent teaching ourselves the skills we would need to be Engineer Divers (a term yet coined). There were very few Master Divers in the Vietnam diving ranks. When I got Vietnam, I had never even operated an pneumatic tool underwater, or changed a screw. We used our limited COD skills to wrap det-cord around the propellor shaft to loosen things up. When were called up to blow things up...we blew the shit out of things. Anything else...it was OJT.

I lived all these years with all this subconsciously weighing me down. And then, the US Army Divers Association brought me back together my brothers... We had not been together for 56 years. And now, almost as a fluke, I have the chance to join you in rectifying the past. We have the chance to bring the Delta Divers back into the fold. Let's not squander it.

Let's both chew on this, and talk again next week to discuss our next move.

Thank You...

Jackson