Navy SEAL Museum opens to praise as downtown San Diego’s newest attraction

One of the most secretive forces in the military stepped into the spotlight Saturday in downtown San Diego with the opening of the Navy SEAL Museum, a small enterprise that hopes to evolve into one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

With help from lots of veterans, the museum made its debut near the Embarcadero, presenting highly visual exhibits that tell a story that dates back to World War II when underwater demolition teams (UDTs) destroyed obstructions that posed a threat to amphibious troops.

These “frogmen” were especially helpful in putting Allied forces ashore during the D-Day landings in France in 1944. They were predecessors to the far more versatile Navy SEALs, who came into existence in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy established a SEAL team in Coronado and one in Little Creek, Va.

There are now eight active (Sea, Air, and Land) teams, split evenly between the East and West coasts.

Today’s SEALs conduct special operations that can involve everything from rescuing hostages, to counter-terrorism, to strategic acts of sabotage.

Most of this work is secret, but there have been exceptions, notably in 2011 when members of SEAL Team 6 from Virginia killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Bin Laden’s body was transported on the San Diego-based aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea for a burial at sea.

The new museum is marketing itself as an expansion of the respected and long-established National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Fla. The 10,000-square-foot San Diego attraction hopes to draw 165,000 visitors a year and to eventually find much larger quarters in the downtown area.

At the moment, however, the focus is on getting the details right at the new museum, especially on things like the weapons and equipment SEALs have used over time, in training and in action.

There is a surround sound theater where visitors can watch recorded snippets of SEAL candidates trying to make it through Hell Week, a 5 1/2-day exercise that severely tests a candidate’s physical limits and mental fortitude. On display is a video in which a former SEAL explains how he became facially disfigured during combat.

And some of the museum’s walls feature large panels, photos and videos that explain, in layman’s terms, how many of the SEALs most complicated and consequential missions were planned and carried out.

“We have the weight of the community on our shoulders to do this correctly,” said Brian Drechsler, a retired SEAL who is now the museum’s executive director.

This drew praise Saturday from Phil Garn of San Diego, a naval historian and former special warfare combatant-craft crewman who helped transport SEALs. He’s been frustrated by movies and TV shows that misrepresent what SEALs do.

“You watch a TV show and see some guy say, ‘Hey, Joe, you go left and Rudy you go right,’”Garn said. “Then there’s big kinetic action right away. It overlooks all the planning you have to do, how you try to make a big circle of the unknown get smaller.”

He was sitting near Tom Egan of La Mesa, a former SEAL who was delighted by the virtual reality headsets that visitors can use to watch a realistic depiction of how SEALs plan and carry out dangerous missions, such as the search-and-seizure of a ship.

“It gives you a taste of what SEALs really do,” Egan said.

A short time later, Danielle Atkinson, a visitor from Huntington Beach, took off the VR headset and said, “Wow. You can see so much happening. That was really something.”

The Navy SEAL Museum is at 1001 Kettner Blvd. in downtown San Diego and is closed on Tuesdays.