Born in 1936 in Dayton, Goines was one of the 40
men chosen to join SEAL Team Two and was also the only Africa-American on
either team.
Goines’ pioneering feat began after seeing a film
that depicted Navy frogmen, performing underwater demolition operations during
World War II while he was a junior at Lockland Wayne High School.
“My fate was sealed right there. That’s exactly
what I wanted to do,” Goines said, the Cincinnati.com reported.
Goines would enlist into the Navy in 1955 after
receiving his diploma to begin training as a frogman. He was with five Army
Rangers, two foreign Naval officers, four U.S. Navy officers, and 85 other Navy
enlisted men.
According to Cincinnati.com, all the Rangers and
one of the foreign officers dropped out three weeks after and when the time for
graduation came in 1957, he was one of the 13 men left standing.
And then five years later in 1962, President
Kennedy established the first two SEAL teams and Goines was selected after
several interviews for the unit, famously known for the 2011 raid in Pakistan
on the compound housing former Al-Qaeda leader and Sept. 11 mastermind Osama
bin Laden.
“I was one of 40 selected to become the nucleus of
future Navy SEALs,” Goines told NBC News. “I remember asking this lieutenant,
‘what was our mission gonna be? And he said, ‘It’s too secret to talk about.’”
In his over 30-year career, Goines jumped out of
moving planes on stealth missions that soared as high as 30,000 feet and flew
as fast as 300 mph. “We jumped out of everything,” he told the Cincinnati.com.
“We even jumped out of balloons in France and Belgium, just experimenting.”
He swam for miles unassisted and survived the
trenches of Vietnam after exposure to Agent Orange.
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