From swim team to Navy

The Baltimore Sun

The Navy SEAL wannabes didn't notice him at first - the quiet, dark-haired man scaling the diving tower at their training tank in San Diego. He wasn't part of the SEALs' elite group, so how good an athlete could Austin Koth be?

Koth sprang off the board, pirouetted in the air and pierced the water as he'd done years before on the swim team at Calvert Hall.

Jaws dropped.

"Sure, that happened once or twice," David Crawfoot Jr. said of Koth's acrobatics at the Naval Amphibious Base in California. At the time, both men were assigned to the military's Marine Mammals Program.

There, in the pool after work, Koth would flaunt his high school ability.

"He would showboat [on the tower], doing back flips and somersaults," Crawfoot said.

Koth was one to back up his words with deeds, he said.

"A lot of guys [in the Navy] brag about what they can do," said Crawfoot, now retired from the service. "After a while, you learn to figure out what is truth and what is fiction.

"Austin always told the truth."

Petty Officer 2nd Class Edward Austin Koth, 30, died July 26, 2006, in Iraq when a roadside bomb he was disposing of exploded. A 1994 graduate of Calvert Hall, where he learned to dive, he had spent most of his eight-year hitch underwater as a diver and dolphin handler.

Now, in what Navy officials say is a rare distinction, one of the nearly 100 bottlenose dolphins being trained by the military to clear mines has been named after Koth.

"Koth made such an impression on the [dolphin] trainers that they wanted to honor him in some way," said Cmdr. Jon Wood of Naval Special Clearance Team One.

The 1-year-old calf's name is Austin.

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