Hershel Davis
Command Master Chief
U.S. Navy/UDT 11 & 12/SEAL Team 2 and 5
Naval Special Warfare Group 1
My Tho, Vietnam, Panama
June 10, 1960 – March 31, 1993
“I loved it. I miss it every damn day”.
Hershel Davis was born at home on October 17th,1941 in Chillicothe, Missouri one block from the railroad tracks. His father was Charles Marvin Davis. “My dad was a hard-shell Baptist from Georgia”. He graduated from the Chillicothe Business College and was an accomplished boxer. While at school he met his future wife and Hershel’s mother, Blanche Marie Lightner. Blanche’s father was a half Cherokee and Hershel proudly says that makes him an eighth Cherokee.
Hershel grew up on a farm one mile outside of town until he was eight years old. “We had an outhouse on the farm. A nice one. A three holer.” His father owned a cab company, a jewelry store and a night club in town. Charles bought a house and moved the family into town where Hershel grew up with one brother and two sisters. He attended the local Catholic School, St. Columbans, because his father wanted him to get a good education. All twelve grades were in the same building. There were 17 students in Hershel’s senior class and “probably 200, 250 in the entire school”. In high school he ran track, “I was a miler”, and played center on the basketball team. He recalled having an unstoppable hook shot. Hershel got himself into some trouble in the 10th grade and ended up spending 11th grade at Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri. “That really squared me away. I was a plebe, so the older boys worked me over”. Hershel played football but was not very good. He recalled his primary job on the football team was to fake an injury so the team could get a time out.
A squared away Hershel convinced Sister Maryann and the other nuns to allow him to complete his senior year at St. Clemens. He graduated on June 8th,1960 as a member of the National Honor Society. Hershel was accepted to college, but he wanted to join the Navy and went to see the local Navy recruiter. He took his entrance exam, scored well and was offered any position he wanted. Hershel was interested in nuclear submarines and signed a contract to go to submarine school.
Hershel began his Navy career on June 10th of 1960 and headed off for 13 weeks of bootcamp in San Diego. Hershel didn’t find bootcamp to be much of a challenge and headed to Machinist Mate School in Great Lake Illinois. After graduation in December of 1960, he went home to marry Janet Nicole Snyder, his childhood sweetheart. The newlyweds traveled to Groton, CT. where Hershel finished 13th in his class of 600 at Submariner School. He also completed Nuclear Power School while he was in Groton.
Hershel’s first cruise was on the U.S.S. Picuda where he served as a Machinists Mate in the Engine Room. After that cruise concluded he went to the University of Missouri to get his degree in engineering. In November of 1963 Hershel was a sophomore at the University of Missouri when he learned President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. “They canceled class for three days until his funeral was over”. Hershel returned to the Navy for a cruise on the U.S.S. Sea Poacher, but submarines were not what Hershel had hoped for. He secretly took the screening test to join the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), also known as ‘frogmen’. The UDT were amphibious units formed by the Navy during WWII. In 1983 the UDT training was expanded, and they became the current day Navy SEAL teams.
In January 1966 Hershel entered BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demoliton/SEAL) Class 36 and began 6 months of training at Little Creek, Virginia. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve done in my life”. 148 men enter his BUD/S class but only 19 graduated. In the 1960’s UDT held BUD/S on both the east coast and west coast. Today, all SEAL candidates attend BUD/S training in Coronado, California.
In BUD/S the men were assigned to boat crews. Each crew was assigned to a large rubber inflatable boat which they carried on their heads. “Seven men to a boat. You had to take that boat everywhere you went”. As training went on and men dropped out there were fewer men to carry the boat. With only three or four men to carry a boat the difficulty increased exponentially. The training was difficult physically and mentally. “Mind control. You can’t do what we did and do it with the kind of proficiency we had without being totally in control of your body” and mind. “There were a lot of things I was afraid of. But after I become a frogman, I don’t think there was anything”.
After training Hershel went to UDT 21 and deployed to the Mediterranean. “You were training all the time. That’s what I liked about it. You had no chance of not being in shape”.
One day the Master Chief told Hershel he needed a volunteer. ‘We have a shit detail down at Dessert Cove. A seaman threw a bunch of stuff over the side, and we need some volunteers to go get it’. Hershel said he would volunteer, and the Master Chief told him to go to operations and get his orders. When he picked up his orders, he learned that he would be on a team of frogmen that were part of the Astronaut Recovery Team and headed for Cape Canaveral to recover the space capsule from an Apollo mission.
Hershel learned from a buddy that a SEAL Team was deploying to Vietnam. Hershel wanted to get in the fight. With a little help Hershel was able to transfer to SEAL Team 2. On March 27th, 1969 Hershel landed at Tan Son Nhat Air Base in Vietnam. When he got off the plane the first thing he noticed was the heat. “I was sweating like a whore in church. I was wet all the time”. The SEAL team consisted of 12 men, and they operated out of a base in My Tho in southern Vietnam. Hershel was the machine gunner. The SEALs worked with the local Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, who were former Viet Cong (VC) soldiers who defected to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN).
“We worked at night. We owned the night”. “We worked on hard intelligence. That’s what kept us alive, and we always had surprise.” On a typical mission the SEALs would set up an ambush by lying on the jungle floor. When the enemy walked through “you pop up and you’re on top of them. You could shake hands with most of them”. The fighting was up close and personal. “90% of what we did was ambush”. “We would just appear. When you got surprise, you’re gonna win”.
Hershel said the VC and North Vietnamese thought the SEALs were evil spirts and thought they could keep the SEALs away by lighting candles around their huts at night. One night his SEAL Team crawled in from the jungle, blew out the candles and then all hell broke loose.
Other missions called for the SEALs to patrol in at night and hit the enemy at first light. Hershel recalled one such operation where his SEAL team surprised the enemy who numbered 39. The 12 SEALs eliminated all of them.
Sometimes the intel was wrong, or stale and the mission didn’t go according to plan. Hershel recalls one such mission where the entire team ran through the jungle to the river and jumped in. “They didn’t come in the water”. As they floated toward the South China Sea, they would set off a flare and soon they would be picked up by a ‘Mike Boat’ that was specially designed for operations in the rivers of Vietnam.
“We made life hard for the VC. I turned off a lot of birthdays”.
10 days into his tour Hershel found himself in a fire fight in an attack on a VC hospital. Hershel found himself within spitting distance of an enemy soldier. It was his first mission and he “was greenhorn”. He was slow to identify the soldier was the enemy and he was able to get off a few rounds before Hershel killed him. Hershel’s hand was badly wounded, and he was medevac’d to a hospital in Japan. He lost one and a half fingers on his left hand and spent 27 days recuperating. He told the doctor he wanted to go back to his team but the doctor told him he would have to go back to the state’s first and if his command wanted him to go back to Vietnam they would send him. “I was only there for 10 days before I got shot. Doc, that doesn’t work for me. I’m going back on my own”. Hershel had no cloths or shoes, only his hospital gown. The other patients gave him pants, a shirt, rubber sandals and twenty dollars.
He ran into two Naval aviators and told him he was trying to get back to SEAL Team 2 in Vietnam. They told him they could get him to southern Japan and Hershel said let’s go. When they landed the aviators helped find him a flight to Da Nang. He found another flight to Tan Son Hout and then a helicopter to Bihn Loc, “which was 20 clicks from My Tho.” Hershel asked the pilot if he could radio ahead and ask for someone from his team to pick him up. One Purple Heart and 20 hours later he was back with SEAL Team 2. He went out on a mission that night.
On another mission Hershel was the 11th in line as they walked through the jungle. The first ten men missed a boobytrap, but Hershel stepped on it. The explosion set Hershel flying through the air, eventually hitting the ground on his back. Hershel had his hands over his face and thought he had his right leg blown off. His teammate Roy said he still had his leg and his feet. Hershel was able to walk back to base but spent the next two weeks on crutches until the swelling in his leg went down.
On October 10th, 1969 he left Vietnam and returned to his wife and three children in Little Creek, VA. Over the next 23 years Hershel traveled the world in various capacities for the SEALs and the Navy. As part of SEAL training Hershel learned to parachute. When he returned to the states he joined the SEAL Team Parachute team. This was in addition to his regular SEAL duties. After two years Hershel estimates he had accumulated over 1,000 jumps. With all of those jumps only one was part of a mission. Hershel jumped into the Philippines for mission against the New People’s Army who were backed by the communists. The SEALs were there to provide support and training to the indigenous Philippine forces. “They killed them all.”
The SEALs spend hundreds of hours shooting their weapons and becoming excellent marksmen. “I was a hell of a shooter”. Hershel learned to shoot from a fellow SEAL R.J. Thomas. “He was very accomplished and tougher than shoe leather”. Hershel recalls one of the weapons he carried was a Stoner machine gun. It fired1200 rounds per minute. “We were the only ones to carry it”.
Sometime after his tour in Vietnam, Hershal was on a Mediterranean cruise and was operating on a training mission. Hershel went too deep and became disoriented. Fortunately, his swim buddy Tommy Mergeson saw what was happening, grabbed Hershel and activated his life vest which took both of them to the surface.
In 1970 Hershel attended Spanish language school at Fort Bragg in preparation for a deployment to South America. In Columbia the SEALs trained Columbian SEALs. They trained the Columbians in weapons and tactics and helped them assess their personnel. Hershel formed strong personal relationships with the Columbians, and they referred to Hershel as Hefe Davis and they taught him to do the merengue. The SEALs lived in a house in Boca Grande, Columbia the locals called La Casa del seis Gringos. During this deployment Hershel recalled the commander of the Columbian SEAL unit was Major Arrias. Hershel had a lot of respect for the Major. During a joint training exercise Major Arrias built a bomb and attempted to attach it to the bottom of a ship. The bomb exploded before he could attach it, and he was killed. “He was doing something he shouldn’t have been doing”. During this tour Hershel was promoted to Chief.
In 1973 the SEALs were in danger of being disband. Hershel was told to move to the Navy for shore duty. He did a rotation as an Armed Forces Courier and was based at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. He operated in two-man teams and was responsible for delivering Top Secret military documents around the world.
After a year Hershel became a Navy Recruiter. He continued to operate out of Hawaii and proceeded to exceed all of his recruiting goals. After two years Hershel was asked to go to Utah to turn around the recruiting operation there. He was told if he did a good job, he would be promoted to Master Chief. “Put me in coach”. It was hard recruiting during those years because Vietnam was winding down and “nobody wanted to join the service”. Hershel was a tireless worker and pushed the people working for him. He was persuasive and a good storyteller. He exceeded his goal again and was named Recruiter of the Year. “It got you notoriety and opened doors for you”.
After a year Hershel wanted to get back to the UDT Teams. He found an opening at UDT 12 for a Master Chief and the family moved to Coronado, California.
In 1989 Hershel headed to Panama as a Command Master Chief for an operational SEAL unit. There Hershel managed SEAL Team 4. The SEALs trained special operations military assets for several South American and Central American countries.
In 1993, after a 34-year military career, Hershel retired from the SEALs and started a successful weapons training business. On September 11, 2001 Hershel was a weapons instructor and teaching at the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois when he heard about the plane crashing into the first tower in New York City. Hershel would have liked to join the fight, but he was 60 years old. “I was still fit. I was a hell of a shooter”.
Hershel connected with a former SEAL that worked for him and was now the President of Blackwater, a private military contractor. He recruited Hershel to manage teams that were responsible for guarding CIA sites in overseas locations. Hershel spent 11 years with Blackwater in counter terrorism and drug interdiction roles. He spent three years in Pakistan, where the day time temperature was routinely over 130 degrees, guarding a CIA site that operated Predator Drones. He spent one year in Kabul, Afghanistan and seven more years at with Blackwater before he retired in 2011.
At 83 Hershel has a body that looks fit enough for a night operation in the jungle despite a recent stroke. He continues to work for the Suburban Law Enforcement Academy. “I’m getting’ a little old for it”. He also considers himself a good practicing Catholic. “Eternity is a long time. I hope the boss cuts me some slack”. Hershel has three children and five grandchildren.
What was so enjoyable about the Teams? “What SEALs do. Parachute, swim, jump, shoot, blow things up. Those are all the things I like to do”.
Hershel thank you for putting yourself in harm’s way in many remote and hostile locations around the world so the rest of us didn‘t have to. It’s clear from speaking with you that you were “Never out of the fight”.
“It’s been a good life. The Lord blessed me. I don’t deserve it”.