Rudolph Ernst Boesch ( ; January 20, 1928 – November 1, 2019) was a United States Navy SEAL, and two-time competitor on the reality competition show Survivor.
Born and raised in Rochester, New York, Boesch enlisted in the United States Navy at age 17. He became an Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) Frogman in 1951, serving on two UDT Teams. He was chosen as one of the first SEALs, becoming chief of the boat of newly created SEAL Team TWO in 1962. Starting in 1968 and 1970, Boesch completed two combat deployments during the Vietnam War, where he earned the Bronze Star for heroic action. During that time and later, Boesch set physical and operational standards at SEAL Team TWO. In 1987, he became Senior Enlisted Advisor for United States Special Operations Command. Designated the "Bullfrog", the longest-serving SEAL still on active duty, Boesch achieved considerable renown within the force for his physical fitness training regimens and his military appearance. After 45 years of continuous service, he retired from the Navy in 1990 as a master chief petty officer.
The oldest competitor on the inaugural Survivor: Borneo at 72 years of age, Boesch finished in third place. The program was the top-rated show on American television during summer 2000, and with his gruff, cantankerous manner, and his politically incorrect "Rudyisms", he became one of the show's most popular contestants. Boesch set the age record again when he competed on Survivor: All-Stars at 75. He parlayed his fame into several other television appearances, including hosting the show Combat Missions in 2002. He died from Alzheimer's disease in 2019.
Early life Boesch was born in Rochester, New York on January 20, 1928, the son of Austrian immigrants Clara (a housewife) and August (a butcher). Boesch credited his parents' Central European upbringing for instilling him with discipline and work ethic. He attended a Catholic primary school in Rochester; he later recalled that the nuns teaching there "beat intelligence into you. We did a little bit of everything – arithmetic, geography, honesty. Those were the things we learned." Boesch's father fought for the German Army during World War I, inspiring him to seek military service as well.
Military career Too young to join the Marines, Boesch dropped out of high school and enlisted in the United States Navy in April 1945 at age 17. Following boot camp at Naval Training Station Sampson in New York, he volunteered for the Amphibious Scouts and Raiders at Fort Pierce, Florida, where he was tentatively assigned to conduct covert reconnaissance of China's coastline.
The Second World War ended before the training completed, but he was still sent to China. For a while he and a few others guarded a decommissioned ship in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong. He then had a tour as a boatswain's mate (BM) on board USS Massey, a destroyer ported on the Chinese coast. That was followed by a period of shore duty in London. He volunteered for UDT Frogman training in late 1950, graduating in Underwater Demolition Team Replacement Class #6 in 1951.
Boesch met his future wife, Marge, at a wedding circa 1950–1951. They married in 1955 and had three daughters in the following years. Meanwhile, he served in UDT Team 2 and later UDT Team 21 alongside Richard Marcinko.
In 1962, Roy Boehm selected Boesch, a Chief Boatswain's Mate (BMC), to be chief of the boat of newly created SEAL Team Two. One of the first opportunities for the team came later that year during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they were put on alert for possible action. See photo caption. Orr Kelly's 1995 Never Fight Fair: Navy SEALs' Stories of Combat and Adventure contains a description by Marcinko, also a member of the team, of a near-suicidal mission that never took place – to parachute into Havana Harbor and attack strategic targets – and of Boesch fielding direct calls from President John F. Kennedy inquiring as to their readiness. In 1967, Boesch was promoted to the rank of master chief petty officer.
In 1968, Boesch was sent on a combat deployment to the Vietnam War, as a platoon chief based in Mỹ Tho in the Mekong Delta. The general combat mission of SEALs in Vietnam was to do intelligence gathering and to conduct raids and ambushes and make prisoner grabs. In Boesch's own 1995 retelling, he did all those things on that tour. In the 2010 Vietnam-era memoir SEAL Warrior: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, Thomas Keith describes Boesch leading a platoon in nighttime ambush raids against the Viet Cong during the war, operating in the delta and using LCM-8 "Mike boats" for access. Boesch earned the Bronze Star for heroic action during more than 45 combat operations. Another primary mission for SEALs during the conflict was to train South Vietnamese special forces. When Boesch deployed to Vietnam again, in 1970, as he later related, he was sent to Cam Ranh Bay, where he conducted training for the Liên Đoàn Người Nhái, the South Vietnamese equivalent of the UDT, as part of the so-called "Vietnamization" strategy. Boesch later concluded that these allied forces were capable, but overly dependent upon the U.S., and that "Vietnamization was an idea that came too late to do enough good."
Between the Vietnam deployments, Boesch trained and competed for the U.S. Navy's bobsled team. One was the Kennedy Memorial Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, in early 1970. Boesch also competed with the Hurricane Bobsled Club of the Adirondacks in competitions at Lake Placid.
During and after his stint in Vietnam, Boesch set physical and operational standards at SEAL Team Two. With the creation of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in 1987, its first Commander-in-chief General James J. Lindsay selected BMCM Boesch to serve as SOCOM's first Senior Enlisted Advisor. Before his retirement, Boesch was designated the "Chief SEAL" (a.k.a. "Bull Frog"), a title identifying the longest-serving SEAL still on active duty. Upon his retirement from the Navy on August 1, 1990, as a command master chief petty officer, he was awarded the Defense Superior Service Medal.
Boesch's time and character as a SEAL has been described in a number of books and other publications. Editor Bill Fawcett included his story as the opening, 30-page recollection in his 1995 Hunters & Shooters: An Oral History of the U.S. Navy SEALs in Vietnam. Orr Kelly's aforementioned 1995 volume included descriptions by Rudy (and Marge as well) of their parachuting experiences, along with a few of Rudy's recollections of Vietnam. In his 1998 memoir, Good to Go: The Life and Times of a Decorated Member of the U.S. Navy's Elite SEAL Team Two, former SEAL Harry Constance describes Boesch as giving a no-nonsense introduction to SEALs in training and then later giving him informal advice not to take a posting that would involve troublesome superiors. A 1999 documentary on the SEALs on the History channel featured Boesch (it was released later that year as the DVD The Complete History of the U.S. Navy SEALs). In an early 2000s interview, a SEAL said that Boesch was "a walking Bible on Special Operations." In his aforementioned 2010 memoir, Thomas Keith portrayed Boesch as a master of the military art of gathering resources: "From weapons to the men who would use them, Rudy could scrounge like nobody else in the SEAL Teams. He wasn't going to let anything or anybody get in the way of putting together the best platoon he could build, beg, borrow, coerce, or dig out of the Operations Department."
Boesch was a physical training fanatic whose dog tag listed "PT" as his religion and who through the decades gained a reputation for leading grueling runs that men would look for ways to avoid by faking injuries or hiding in bushes. In former SEAL James Watson's 1995 memoir Point Man, he states of 1964 training that, "We had to be physically fit to perform what was expected of us. And for all our trying [to get out of the runs], Rudy Boesch made sure that we stayed in condition." Kevin Dockery's 2003 work Navy Seals: A History Part III – Post-Vietnam to the Present includes three different SEALs relating how, when Boesch was 50 to 57 years old, he could keep up with or surpass trainees less than half his age in five-mile runs, obstacle courses, and open sea swimming. Boesch's own recollections of PT, as well as Vietnam and the SEALs in general, are on pages 162–169. In his 2011 memoir, SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper, former SEAL Howard E. Wasdin tells of being assigned to SEAL Team TWO in the late 1980s, where Boesch, though nearly 60 years old, nevertheless ran with the trainees over an obstacle course; he then made every person who finished behind him run it again. Even Boesch's physical appearance made a mark: Wasdin refers to him as an exemplar of military form; another account talks of his haircut and uniform being perfect at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning; and, in 2002's One Perfect Op, former SEAL Dennis Chalker said that, among SEALs based on the U.S. East Coast in the late 1970s, the style was known as a "Rudy Boesch haircut", an even more severe version of the normal military crew cut.
Overall, in his history of SEAL operations in Vietnam, former SEAL T.L. Bosiljevac writes that Boesch symbolizes much of what the SEAL teams represent and that, "There are a lot of colorful personalities among the teams, but even considering the best of those, Rudy Boesch is a legend. Everybody knows Rudy, and you can bet that Rudy knows everyone in return ... [including] some of the Navy's top brass." Several of these other accounts have also referred to Boesch as a legend within the SEALs.
Survivor Borneo
In 2000, Boesch appeared in Survivor: Borneo, the name later assigned to the inaugural season of the U.S. version of Survivor, filmed on the remote Malaysian island of Pulau Tiga. Initially placed with Tagi tribe, he befriended the former West Point student Richard Hatch. Despite his discomfort with Hatch's homosexuality and penchant for nudity, Boesch aligned with Hatch and admonished his tribemates to "shut up and let [Hatch] lead." Despite his earlier life of athleticism, Boesch struggled against the ageism of the younger castaways and needed Richard's alliance for his own safety.
Boesch found his niche in camp life cooking for his tribe, using the resourcefulness learned from his tours in Vietnam. His preparation area was dubbed "Rowdy Rudy's Diner". While his tribemates relied on boiling water to avoid pathogens, he drank unpurified water, advising, "If I'm not still standing at noon, don't drink it", and explaining that his lack of fear was based on his having drunk much fouler water in Vietnam. At the final challenge for tribal immunity, he single-handedly sprinted with a heavy wooden chest across the beach to seal his tribe's victory. He also won an individual immunity challenge by defeating the other competitors on a human-sized checkerboard.
Going into the final immunity challenge, Rudy was the most popular player remaining in the game. Thus, he was the favorite to win the million-dollar prize provided he made it to the final Tribal Council. Host Jeff Probst and the show's production staff thought Rudy was likely to win the final challenge and the game. In the final challenge, competitors had to stand in the hot sun for hours while touching an idol. Richard made a strategic move to drop out of the challenge early, while Rudy fatigued himself by competing for four hours, before inadvertently dropping his hand from the idol, which led to his elimination. This left 23-year-old Kelly Wiglesworth the challenge victor, and she voted Boesch out of the game as she believed she had a better chance of defeating Hatch than Boesch at the Final Tribal Council. Despite his resentment about Hatch's move, Boesch still voted for Hatch at the final tribal council, so Hatch became the first Survivor winner.