The Navy's official name for Death Row was: Devices, Explosive, Disarmament of, Training in, and officially it was only one phase of the program at the Underwater Demolition School. Unofficially it was Death Row, and it was the thing students who came for UDT thought about and dreaded from the time they got there until they either graduated or were flunked out and sent back to the fleet. The students were all volunteers, but volunteering was not enough. They had, in addition, to pass both mental and physical tests and a third test that they called the Drained Brain. This was an attempt by psychiatrists to find out whether the volunteers were capable of underwater demolition work. If a volunteer passed all these preliminary examinations he was first physically conditioned and then introduced to a thing called an Aqualung, the name of which the Navy had changed to self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and the students had reduced to scuba.
