PIONEERING NAVY SEAL, 82, ISN’T SLOWING DOWN
African-American barrier-breaker, to be honored Saturday, still contributing
VIRGINIA BEACH — Bill Goines nearly missed his chance to make history by becoming the first black Navy SEAL — all because of an accident in his high school shop class in Ohio.
While sawing a piece of wood, he cut off a portion of his right index finger. That shortened digit – his trigger finger – would prove to be problematic as he tried to follow his childhood dreams of becoming a Navy “Frogman” like the ones he saw in the movies.
You could say he improvised while talking with a recruiter as he tried to join an underwater demolition team in the 1950s: He told
him he was left-handed.
But he calls it something else.
“I lied right then,” Goines said.
Turns out, he became adept at using each hand for different tasks. He bowls with his left and writes with his right. He had no problem handling a weapon.
The finger mishap is just one of the obstacles Goines overcame in a storied career that saw him join the first group of Navy SEALs created by President John Kennedy in 1962. He served in multiple combat deployments to Vietnam and became such an accomplished skydiver that he was part of a SEAL parachute demonstration team that performed at airshows around the country.
Not bad for a guy who taught himself how to swim in a creek where one of his friends drowned as a child because blacks weren’t allowed in nearby pools.
The 82-year-old Goines and his historymaking career will be honored on Saturday by The Whats Charitable Fund at the Philippine Cultural Center in Virginia Beach, a city he has come to love even after first arriving there during the height of segregation and facing discrimination throughout the region.
“Norfolk was really hell back in those days for coloreds,” he said. “I helped integrate a lot of places — not on purpose.”
While Virginia was segregated, the Navy was integrated. Goines said a few guys he worked with were clear that they didn’t like him, but most of them looked out for him. He recalls them insisting that a bar off Shore Drive, popular with underwater demolition team members, let him in or they’d all leave. It did — and gave him free drinks too.
Goines tells similar stories about the now-shuttered Duck-In at the mouth of the Lynnhaven Inlet. He and his teammates would swim there from their base at Little Creek for beers.
In contrast to that camaraderie, though, he faced discrimination around town at nearly every turn. “At times I hit a stone wall,” he said. “I felt like getting on something and going AWOL because it was just kind of rough.”
He didn’t though, and his story continues to inspire others.
Honors are nothing new for Goines. Interspersed with hundreds of family photos on the walls of his Virginia Beach home are resolutions paying tribute to him from the Virginia General Assembly and others. There’s even an exhibit dedicated to him at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
But Saturday’s honor is important to him because it will be a fundraiser to provide college scholarships.
“To me it’s a rewarding thing, because a lot of these kids need the money. They need book money,” he said. “Some of them can’t go to college because they don’t have the money to buy the books. The neediest ones are the ones we focus on.”
Since retiring from the Navy as a master chief in 1987, Goines has continued to find ways to contribute. For more than a decade, he served as Portsmouth schools’ police chief. After that, he volunteered to work with SEALs again by helping to recruit minorities throughout the East Coast.
These days, he still talks with high school and college students about what it takes to become a SEAL, but he doesn’t travel as much.
He says he’s starting to get tired. He’s battling a variety of health problems he thinks may be associated with exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. But his wife makes sure he continues to help others and stays active. After all, he said, he still needs to travel to Oregon — the only state he hasn’t been to — so he can check it off his bucket list.
One thing has never changed: If he has a goal, he intends to meet it. He didn’t let a physical problem stop him all those years ago, and he won’t now.
“I’m just going to hack it out until I lay out,” he said.