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VOL. 3/ISSUE 42
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2015
SEAL Museum expansion is hooyah! Patrick McCallister FOR VETERAN VOICE
patrick.mccallister@yahoo.com
The National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum opened its recent $2.2 million expansion in April. That is to say it added bunches of new interactive displays to the 13,500 square feet of indoor exhibit area, along with some pretty cool stuff outside. Folks seem to be liking it. “We’ve been very solid,” Rick Kaiser, executive director, said. “Normally the summer is our down time, but we’ve doubled our (visitor) numbers since last summer.” Visitors have to pass the new Navy SEAL Children’s Obstacle Course to get inside. Yeah, don’t let the name fool you. This obstacle course modeled after the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training course in California gives adults a challenge. Many visitors are unable to resist trying at least a few of the obstacles. Heading inside, a SEAL Delivery Vehicle greets visitors. The submersible floods when underwater, allowing SEALs to covertly enter areas where they like to go unnoticed. The submersible can be opened underwater without creating a large air bubble. After paying $10 for admission ($5 for the 6- to 12-year-olds) visitors walk into a display hall and see a 14-foot steel beam from the World Trade Center. Last year members the Fire Department New York’s Ladder 6 bicycled from the 9/11 Memorial, New York City, to the Fort Pierce museum to deliver the beam. An accompanying truck carried the beam behind the cycling first responders. Above the beam is a video visitors activate that tells how the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, bound first responders and military special combat units together against America’s new enemy — followers, such as Osama bin Laden, of Sayyid Qutb’s puritanical and militant form of Islam. As visitors continue tours under suspended drones and other military hardware, they come upon an area dedicated to Operation Neptune Spear — the Central Intelligence Agency operation that ended with bin Laden’s 2011 death in Abbottabad, Pakistan at the hands of Navy SEALs who
Staff photo by Patrick McCallister Andy Brady, community outreach director of the National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum, shows one of the new displays. The Fort Pierce museum opened a $2.2 million expansion in April. This was the museum’s third expansion. The first was in 1992. The second was in 2012. The museum is working on an about $8 million expansion and eyeing an annex at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Calif. were delivered by the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers. The central display is an accurate recreation of the Waziristan Haveli, the compound bin Laden may have lived in for five years. CBS constructed it for filming documentaries about the operation and donated it to the museum. That’s just the start of the new SEAL museum. There’s an area dedicated to “SEAL Science.” Andy Brady, community outreach director, said the sciences behind some of the nation’s most specialized fighters and fighting are amazing. “You can spend 45 minutes just reading this stuff,” he said. Reading stuff on interactive touch screens is reminiscent of using tablet computers. Then there’s the authentic replicas of the weapons SEALs use. Of course, the ones at the museum don’t fire anything other than the imagination. Folks have the opportu-
nity to dress like SEALs and get pictures with those replicas. Displays take visitors from the modern SEALs back to their World War II predecessors. They eventually steer visitors to the Trident Challenge. The daring get to plan SEAL missions and see what comes of them via video-gaming technology. “If you pass you get your trident; if you don’t you go back to BUD/S,” Kaiser said. BUD/S is the 24-week Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, where the hardest year of SEALs’ lives start. The trident, of course, is the symbol of the storied unconventional warfare group. This is the museum’s third expansion. The first was in 1992. The second was in 2012. Fort Pierce is where the Navy established its Amphibious Training Base in 1943, and the Navy Scouts & Raiders. They were the
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