Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  Everyone became parachute qualified, including Boehm and me. Not merely conventional hop-and-pop, but also HAHO (High-Altitude, High-Opening) and HALO (High-Altitude Low-Opening). I wanted our commandos capable of jumping from an airplane at twenty-seven thousand feet and flying from over international waters into enemy territory.

  An article appeared in the Bayonet post newspaper at Fort Benning, Georgia:

  AIRBORNE NAVY: PARA-FROGMEN GRADUATE

  A new breed of American fighting man—the para-frogman—is being created through the joint efforts of the infantry school’s airborne air mobility department and the navy’s Underwater Demolition Team 21 at Little Creek, Virginia. Lt. Commander W. H. Hamilton Jr., one of 21 officers and enlisted men from UDT-21 who will complete airborne training May 13, said that the jump training will give the frogmen added mobility and another way to get to the objective.

  I established liaison with General “Jumping Joe” Stillwell, commander of all Army Special Forces, while Boehm buddied with Captain Rudy Kaiser to exchange training between UDT and elements of the 5th and 7th Special Forces Groups. With a handshake, we linked two competent groups of professional men of war.

  “I’ll set you up with a diving allowance list and increase your training,” Boehm promised Kaiser while I made a similar offer to General Stillwell. “We’ll teach you everything we know about water training and demo. In exchange, I want our men to know everything you know about parachute ops, foreign weapons, kitchen table demolitions, small-unit tactics, and Ranger-type ops. We both have beneficial training and can increase the operating and killing potential for both.”

  Officers and men, again including Boehm and me, attended the Special Forces “Q” (Qualification) course, while Army SF guys went through UDT training.

  It was a period of excitement, watching the birth of modern naval unconventional warfare. The men Boehm selected out of UDT-21 often became conspicuously absent from the naval base at Little Creek. They were always coming and going. As soon as they returned from one course, Boehm hustled them off to another, to train in everything from political assassination to waging covert nuclear war. Still, so far, we had barely tapped the surface of what commandos might be called upon to do in the name of national security and defense.

  “They believe in what we’re doing so much,” Ensign Gordie Ablitt commented, “that the guys volunteer to pay their own way to schools just to get the qualifications.”

  The men knew something was coming down, that they were being drawn into an orphaned twilight between UDT and something else, but we couldn’t tell them what it was. Only Boehm and I knew the true nature of our intended mission, but I assured our guys it would all become clear at the appropriate time.

  Lieutenant Mo Lynch, UDT-21’s executive officer and second-in-command to me now that Boehm was full-time training with our SpecOps group, was furious at having been excluded from the secret. He cornered Boehm.

  “Damn it, Roy,” he fussed, about to bust from curiosity. “What’s going on here? I’ve got guys scheduled for things—and you’re always snatching them up and sending them off on boondoggles. What’s all this training about? The least you can do is consult me.”

  “Sorry, Mo. I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Mo attempted every way he could to weasel the secret out of Boehm. He finally came to me.

  “Skipper, Boehm has just destroyed my Med Cruise by taking all the men. Whatever he’s doing is not good for morale. The men don’t know where they’re going from day to day, nor even why you’re doing this to them.”

  I winked at Roy. “What do you feel about that, Boehm?”

  “Mo’s a good man, skipper. I agree with him.”

  I nodded. “Look, Mo, you have no need to know. Boehm is instructed to carry out my orders.”

  Lynch pouted. “Without informing me?”

  “That’ll be all, gentlemen.”

  Boehm was thirty-eight years old, I was thirty-four. The grind sometimes had our asses dragging. But any officer who couldn’t hack it, who couldn’t or wouldn’t endure the same training as his men, didn’t belong in any unit in the military, much less a special outfit like UDT or Army Special Forces. Anytime one of my men took a step, an officer’s footprint had better be there before his.

  I was at the Pentagon on a task when the CNO called me into his office to inform me that the men we had been training for much of 1961 were being chopped from UDT to become a separate special warfare unit. At the same time I received orders transferring me full-time to the Pentagon.

  “I know it doesn’t seem fair to jerk you out now that you’ve got the unit going,” the new CNO, Admiral George W. Anderson Jr., apologized. “But you’re up for promotion and you’re needed here to oversee naval special warfare. Who do you recommend to take your place?”

  I didn’t have to think about it. “Lieutenant Roy Boehm, sir.”

  Before I had the opportunity to pass the news to Roy, an old friend of his at BUPERS—Bureau of Personnel—telephoned him.

  “Hey,” the yeoman greeted. “What in hell is a SEAL?”

  “Fury little critter lives in the ocean?”

  “You’d damned well better find out for sure, ol’ buddy. ’Cause you are now one with a license to steal.”

  On January 7, 1962, Department of Navy made its decision. Backdated to January 1, Navy SEALs were commissioned into service as the Navy’s answer to guerrilla warfare and Army Special Forces in the Cold War. I didn’t know where the acronym SEAL came from, but I knew how it originated: SEA AIR LAND. SEALs were authorized black berets and a gold unit crest that featured an eagle clutching a U.S. Navy anchor, trident, and pistol.

  Lieutenant Boehm received East Coast SEAL Team Two’s first orders, which meant the salty old sailor, WWII and Korean war vet, and former bos’n mate, was now acting commander and the very first SEAL to be commissioned in the United States Navy, with ten officers and fifty enlisted. SEAL Team One under the command of Lieutenant Dave Del Guidice was activated on the West Coast.

  “Damn, sir,” Boehm exclaimed when I arrived at Little Creek to congratulate the men. “You got this going. You should have received the first orders.”

  “Roy, you deserve it. You worked harder and longer at it than any of us. Now, shut your fat mouth and go out there and kick ass. I’m at the Pentagon now, but I’m still over Navy special warfare, which still makes me your skipper.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Keep my fat mouth shut. But, damn,” he added. “Damn, sir—we did it!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I WAS NOW A DEFENSE-ESTABLISHMENT beltway insider riding a desk. Long meetings and discussions in the morning with the Joint Chiefs or the president’s advisors, a quick lunch, then more conferences with National Security or the CIA and the other intelligence services. It reminded me of my early hectic days with Doug Fane on the West Coast—except with Fane we were as often out with the teams somewhere in the world as stuck in an office. There was no such relief in Washington, D.C., where everything, it seemed, was paperwork and bullshit.

  Fane had retired from the navy two years earlier, before Cuba and all that. He telephoned me the day he left. “Bone, I still say you’re a candy ass. By the way, do you know where I can find a new wife?”

  “You can have my ex-wife.”

  “Elinor? She’s gone?”

  “I might have had something, but I guess I kicked it around and lost it.”

  “Ex-wives come with the territory.”

  I hadn’t seen Elinor since she and the kids left me for California. Divorce papers came in the mail in August 1961 while I was deeply involved in getting the SEALs going. I couldn’t show up for the hearing, so the court awarded her a generous portion of my income and future pension and everything else we owned. Which wasn’t much, actually. Most Navy men gathered less moss than a rolling stone.

  I didn’t begrudge her; what she received from me would support Linda Jean, Bill Jr., and little Jana Lee. I signed the papers, put them back in the
mail, and then went out and got drunk with a Navy wife I met at the Officers Club at Little Creek.

  Lonely wives were a fixture around most Navy shore bases. Mary was thirty-three years old, tall, attractive, and lonely because her naval aviator husband spent more time on deployment than he did at home. While he was off flying, his wife stayed home and tested her own wings.

  She and I had a lot in common. Misery loves company and all that. My wife left me because of the Navy; Mary was ready to leave her husband because of the Navy. She was an unconfessed alcoholic; I was on the verge of becoming a heavy drinker, not to the point that it affected my life and career, but I could still toss ’em down. We were both drifting in our personal lives, flotsam passing in the night that got hung up on the same snag.

  One evening we were together in a Virginia Beach night club when her husband walked in on us. I heard Mary gasp above the sounds of Elvis on the jukebox, the clinking of glasses, and the melodious flirting mixture of male and female voices. I followed the direction of her gaze and saw the tall man in a flight jacket standing in the doorway looking over the crowd.

  “Oh, my God!” Mary cried in a muffled voice. “Bill wasn’t supposed to be back tonight.”

  That was another thing we had in common: her husband was also named Bill. He spotted us and, wearing a stricken look, walked slowly over to our table. He stood silently looking down on his errant wife and me. Poor bastard. None of the three of us spoke. We tried not to look at each other for what seemed about ten years.

  “You’re welcome to the lush,” the other Bill said to me and walked away.

  I resisted the urge to jump up and shout after him, “But I don’t want the lush!” Instead, I just sat there feeling about as low-down as a man could get.

  I felt responsible for breaking up Mary’s marriage. Maybe that and rebound was the reason I married her. I tried to talk her out of it, give her a way out. I tried to talk myself out of it.

  “Look, girl. I’m not much of a catch. Shore duty won’t last and I’ll be deploying again.”

  “What’s with you men and the sea?” she said. “It’s like you all keep trying to escape from the land.”

  Mary was pretty, but not very smart. I always figured she would have been a good and faithful wife if she had found herself some ordinary nine-to-five Joe with a new car and a little house in the suburbs. Certainly, she should never have ended up with another sailor who couldn’t stand the thought of barnacles on his hull.

  She and her preteen daughter moved into my apartment with me in D.C. I figured she’d be straying again as soon as I left the Pentagon and went back to the fleet. In the meantime, I tried to settle in and make a proper husband and military paper-pushing bureaucrat.

  Out at SEAL Team Two, Lieutenant John Callahan took over as the new skipper. Limited Duty Officers like Roy Boehm were generally not eligible for most command slots. I explained it to Roy, who accepted it willingly and returned happily to his old position in operations. He was, after all, unpolished and two-fisted, more at home in a sleazy waterfront bar than in an officer’s stateroom. He kissed no ass in kicking ass. He was never going to make captain or admiral anyhow.

  The day Callahan showed up to take over, Roy gave him a briefing on the team’s status.

  “I’m damned glad the ball is in your court now,” he concluded.

  At the Pentagon, the unresolved “Cuba problem,” as it was being called, was not going away and showed every sign of escalating into something unintended. I had worked with a number of the Quarters Eye bunch during the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs—Richard Bissell, E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, and Ted Shackley. It was difficult to keep up with who’s who in the CIA, as they were a secretive organization. I sometimes met one or the other of them over a drink to discuss growing concerns in the Caribbean over Nikita Khrushchev’s ICBMs.

  “If Americans knew what was about to happen down there,” Shackley remarked, “they’d crawl into their cellars and not come up again until after the fallout cleared.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AIR FORCE GENERAL EDWARD Lansdale, former OSS in World War II and now JFK’s deputy assistant secretary for special operations, was a square-jawed officer with a dark, penetrating gaze that gave him an intense, almost fanatical appearance. Outside the door to the larger conference room on the Pentagon’s fourth floor stood a Marine for security and, inside, a pot of coffee for alertness. Lansdale rose to his feet from the massive oaken table around which congregated grave-looking CIA operatives, top-level government officials, military Special Ops representatives, and various other advisors and consultants. I leaned back in my chair as he began speaking.

  “The president has to do something, and quick,” he asserted. “I’ve provided him a timetable for action to overthrow Castro. I’m suggesting guerrilla operations begin in-country by September for open revolt and overthrow of the communist regime—or the missiles will be there and we’ll be too late.”

  U-2 spy planes discovered surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles in Cuba a month ago, in August 1962. CIA Director John McCone concluded their presence made sense “only if Moscow intends to use them to shield a base for nuclear ballistic missiles aimed at the U.S.”

  Meetings like this one had been ongoing in Washington from shortly after New Year’s as various departments of the Defense establishment debated a response to possible Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Suggestions on what to do about it bounced around like Ping-Pong balls at a championship tournament. Options presented included: do nothing; diplomacy; give Castro the choice to eject the Russians or be invaded; an immediate full-force invasion to overthrow the dictator; guerrilla insurgency; blockade to prevent Russian ships from entering or leaving Cuban harbors.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff opted for invasion. JFK and Secretary of State Dean Rusk opposed it.

  “The Soviets won’t let an invasion proceed without doing something,” the president said. “They can’t permit us to take out their missiles, kill a bunch of Russians, and do nothing.”

  General Lansdale paced the edges of the room, tapping his teeth with the point of a pen, deep in thought. He stopped and wheeled to confront the table.

  “Damn it, I’m not talking invasion,” he said. “Why did we build Special Ops if we don’t intend to use them for that purpose?”

  His dark gaze fell on me. “Commander Hamilton, are your SEALs prepared to train and lead an insurgency inside Cuba?”

  I slowly stood up.

  “Sir, I think it’s a bad plan. Let me tell you why. First, an internal insurgency takes time to organize, arm, and coordinate. If Director McCone is right, we don’t have that kind of time. Besides, you’re talking about a job for Army Special Forces. Their primary mission is infiltration behind enemy lines to build up and train insurgents. SEALs prepare for direct action—quick insertions to take out an enemy leader, an ammo depot—”

  General Lansdale interrupted. “—or an ICBM site?”

  “Yes, sir. You give us the mission and we’ll pull it off better than anyone else in the world. That’s a money-back guarantee.”

  Lansdale nodded after a moment, and I sat down.

  I refrained from saying what was really on my mind. We had had our chance at the Bay of Pigs, and the president blew it by behaving like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. That one incident, I believed, left Khrushchev with the impression that Kennedy was indecisive and further emboldened the Soviets to do what they might not otherwise do.

  Six weeks after the Bay of Pigs failure, President Kennedy had attended the Vienna Summit, during which Premier Khrushchev threatened to close off American, British, and French access to West Berlin and actively halt the masses of Eastern Europeans seeking asylum through the Free Berlin corridor. Twenty percent of the entire East German population of 4.5 million people had already escaped.

  On August 13, East German troops and workers began to tear up streets in order to build a ninety-six-mile wall to isolate West Berlin in the middle
of East Germany and thereby prevent further escapes. It was all part of Khrushchev’s campaign to destabilize the West. Introducing ICBMs into Cuba was another part of the campaign. What he was counting on, in my opinion, was that Kennedy would avoid confrontation and accept the missiles and other Soviet encroachments around the world as a fait accompli.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I WAS TEMPTED TO CALL Dad and Mom on the telephone and warn them: “Dad, you and Mom get the hell out of Florida and head north. Go as far as you can get in Canada.”

  Mary made us drinks. It was late, nearly midnight. The night was hot and humid, like no air stirred for fear of bringing a wind that bore no good. Mary came out onto our apartment patio carrying cocktails—Make mine a double; hell, make it a triple. She wore a sheer nightgown, nothing underneath. I barely noticed. I was so exhausted from another day in the giant beehive that Washington had become for me.

  One time when I was a kid, I watched a beekeeper down the road from us in Virginia rob honey from his hives using smoke from a torch. The bees went crazy when smoke penetrated their little Fort Knox of honey, buzzing and frantically diving and banging about in mindless, frenetic activity. I felt like one of those bees now, as mad and insane as the very important people who were in and out of the Pentagon and the Defense Department at all hours, meeting each other in conference rooms, speaking in harried whispers in corridors, sometimes raising their voices to stress particular points.

  Mary and I sat not speaking, with a night view of the Capitol Building dome in the distance. I remembered—I would always remember—the story of Toshiko Saeki of Hiroshima.

  This was no way for humans to have to live, under constant fear of destruction.

  “Is there going to be a nuclear war?” Mary asked flatly.

  Newspapers and TV were full of speculation, in spite of all the secrecy. Enough facts had leaked into the reporting to make Americans ask questions.