Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  We struck out moving west from the house, creeping down a long gully and fording a small stream. We hadn’t gone ten minutes before the bellyaching began. They complained about wet feet, sore backs, branches whiplashing faces, and the considerable evening chill. Joe, who was the first to lose his patience, pushed the point man aside and began forging through the underbrush like a baby bull.

  His tantrum lasted about six minutes. At which point, a loud craaaack that could only be a high-powered rifle about fifty yards away sent my squad of greenhorns scrambling for the deck.

  There was a chorus of “What the fuck!”’s and “Goddamn”’s.

  Normal crawled back to where I hunkered and stage-whispered, “What the hell was that?”

  “That was one of my neighbors. You assholes are making so much noise that you probably woke him out of a deep sleep. He’s letting you know he doesn’t appreciate it.”

  “You mean there are armed people out here?”

  “Of course. This is the backwoods, asshole.”

  “Holy shit. You’re going to get us killed.”

  “Not if you do things the way I’ve told you to do ’em.” I made the universal sign for circling wagons and drew the men close.

  “Listen up. You guys are dressed in camouflage clothing, so no one can see you. And you’re moving like a herd of goddamn animals. So, my neighbors are going to think you’re deer.” I paused. “Guess what, assholes—out here, they shoot deer without benefit of hunting licenses.” I let that sink in. “Think, goddammit. We are a patrol. We are supposed to move quietly. The probs and stats of success—that’s MTBFR in your language—are in inverse proportion to the noise we make. Got it?”

  There was a chorus of nods and uh-huhs.

  “Okay—change point man and move out, quietly.”

  Dagwood led the way. I watched as he slithered through the underbrush. The boy showed promise. He moved carefully, his toes testing the ground, his body working around the undergrowth, his eyes constantly moving, sweeping the area ahead of him—even though he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. He wasn’t Patches Watson, my old point man from Bravo Squad, Second Platoon, Vietnam, 1967. But Dagwood was doing okay for a cake-eating civilian. He had the right instincts—I just had to develop them.

  Of course, he led them straight into a bog. Now they were wet and cold. The wood firearms were getting heavier by the second, increasing their misery index in geometric progression. I didn’t permit any talking, but from my position in the rear I could hear a lot of cursing through clenched teeth. We’d passed the red Cyalume stick by four hundred yards before Dagwood realized the error of his ways. To atone for his sin he marched straight back into the bog, where Joe lost a boot.

  It served him right. At dinner, Joe’d asked why I tied my shoelaces in big, fat, tight knots, instead of floppy bows. I explained that they stayed on my feet that way.

  “But it’s a waste of money,” he said, whining like your typical bottom-liner. “That means you have to cut your boots off every time you wear them.”

  “That’s the idea.” I told him about combat training in Panama, where you had to worry about three feet of slimy mud, or quicksand. I explained how slackly laced boots have the tendency to come off when you’re sucked out of a plane at 150 miles per hour.

  As I spoke, I took a good look at him. Joe was nodding. His head was bobbing up and down. But he wasn’t listening. I could almost hear my words bouncing off the wall as they came out his other ear.

  Shit—I wasn’t doing this for my benefit. In fact, Joe’s attitude was similar to the shit-for-brains demeanor of a SEAL captain I had to deal with when I commanded SEAL Team Six more than a decade ago—a guy whose attitude was so bad that he still pisses me off even though I haven’t seen him in almost ten years.

  The asshole in question’s name was—well, I’ll call him Pinkney Prescott III. That’s close enough without being libelous. I always referred to him as Pinky the Turd. Pinky was destined for great things. His daddy, Pinky II, had been a four-star. So had his granddaddy, Pinky da foist, who had been foisted on the Navy because he was a younger son sans trust fund from a pseudo-aristocratic Main Line Philadelphia family.

  Like his ancestors, Pinky went to Annapolis, where he was a mediocre student. He graduated in 1972, too late to go to Vietnam. Uncertain of what to do, he somehow ended up in Navy SpecWar. How he made it through BUD/S no one knows. But evidently he graduated, because in 1973 he was sent to UDT-11 in Coronado, California. He lasted about a year at the team, then was shipped back east, where he was assigned to UDT-22.

  While other officers clamored to deploy with their troops, Pinky always favored desk jobs. He jumped quarterly, dove semiannually, and shot only once a year, the bare minimum according to the regs. Indeed, for more than twenty years Pinky held a series of staff positions at Little Creek, where the East Coast Underwater Demolition Teams and SEALs were headquartered, and—as he rose through the ranks—at PHIBLANT (that’s AmPHIBious Forces, AtLANTic), at LANTFLT (AtLANTic FLeeT) HQ in Norfolk, and finally in the bowels of the Pentagon.

  There, planted safely behind a desk, he mastered the art of writing memos full of bureaucratic doublespeak. Somewhere along the line he also perfected the delicate art of kissing admirals’ asses without swallowing too much shit.

  By the time I became CO of Six, his years of obfuscating and puckering had paid off handsomely. He’d made it to the Olympus of staffery: he was commodore of all East Coast Navy SpecWar and had just been frocked to rear admiral. He was also famous for his nitpicky memos. They were known as rockets.

  Well, Pinky rocketed me early in 1981 to tell me I’d spent too much money on shoelaces. I am serious. This is no joke. Polysyllabically he ordered me, forthwith, to instruct my men to tie their boots with bows, not knots.

  I paid a call on the good commodore and told him in my own polyfuckingsyllabic style where he could put his cocksucking motherfucking shit-eating rocket, and what I’d do to his scrawny little pencil-dicked pus-nuts sphincterfaced body if he wrote any more like them.

  For some reason, my approach did not sit well with soon-to-be-admiral Pinky, who tried (but failed) to get me court-martialed for attempted murder. He hated me. So what? Fuck him—let him get in line.

  I was more patient with Joe than I had been with Pinky. I went over the ground again, explaining that knots are fail-safe. With knots, tied as tight as you can do ’em, there are no bows to come undone when you’ve been mud-sucked by knee-deep ooze. My lips flapped in the wind. The lights may have been on, but no one was home.

  Because obviously, he hadn’t listened. Half an hour later we retrieved his shoe—bow and all. It was filled with muck. Boy, was his foot going to hurt. He turned his back on me as he put it on, but from the angle of his shoulders, I could tell that he was tying knots in his bootlaces. Better late than never.

  By the time we got back to the house at 0440 with all the Cyalume sticks stashed in my knapsack, I was pleased at the progress they’d made, although I was careful to hide it. Joe had relinquished the position of squad leader to Crabcakes, who turned out to be a grunt of the strong, silent persuasion. Joe became second-in-command—the detail man. Like Crabcakes, Dagwood toughed things out in silence. He’d grit his teeth, hunker down, and do whatever he was told. I’d have liked to see a bit more initiative, but I was perfectly happy to take yes for an answer. Normal still spent too much of his time fussing over extraneous matters, like whether we’d survive the evening. But when I snared a wood snake, he actually touched it—albeit with one finger—and along about 0100 he stopped complaining and complaining and complaining about his wet feet.

  His silence made me happy. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but in my line of work you take your pleasure where you can. And Normal’s acceptance of his condition told me he was making progress, too.

  I let them sleep until 0615, then over coffee we rehashed the night’s events. I handed out some copied pages from a SEAL training manual that showed p
ictographs for silent field signals. “Instead of talking, we’ll be using these,” I said. “Memorize them. The quiz begins at zero nine hundred.”

  By the end of the day we’d made real progress. Before lunch, we were forming skirmish lines and practicing fields of fire. The afternoon was spent working on camouflage. And in the evening, we repaired to the tree line bordering the manor house to set up our first ambush position. I broke out my supply of air rifles, provided eye protection, and watched as they blasted away at a series of paper plates I’d stapled to trees and stumps, while they crawled along the edge of the lawn.

  Even Normal was getting into the spirit of things. He’d blackened his face, wore a knit stocking cap low across his eyebrows, and used the F-word at least once a sentence. That night, we patrolled twenty-five yards from my neighbor’s house without alerting his dog. As we took a five-minute breather about ten yards farther on, we heard the door squeak. We watched my neighbor amble outside, take a steaming leak off the porch, shake himself off, and wander back to his TV.

  Normal gave me a big double thumbs-up. The shit-eating grin on his face told me he was having the time of his life. Was he ever. After only seventy-two hours, he didn’t even flinch when a wood snake writhed through the dead leaves, skimmed over his leg, and slid into the underbrush. “Fuuuuck you, cockbreath,” he murmured as the reptile disappeared. When I heard that, I knew we’d just passed total breakthrough.

  Slowly but deliberately I led them through a SpecWar Genesis, similar to the one I’d experienced almost three decades before. I’d purified myself in battle in Vietnam, where I was forged on an anvil of blood and live fire. Joe’s dweebs sanctified themselves on a different altar, fortified by the heat of their newly burning muscles, and the iciness of the mud in which they played.

  Ah, they were as clay in my hands, and verily, I formed them and shaped them and made them into, well, weekend warriors.

  The First Day I taught them how to play with the toys of Spec War.

  On the Second Day they learned about camouflage and how to crawl on their bellies because a man must crawl before he can walk.

  On the Third Day they studied the fruits of intelligence and learned how to read the signs of the land and the waters.

  On the Fourth Day they discovered the joys of booby traps.

  On the Fifth Day they learned about surprise attacks and were taught the precepts of ambush. And verily, they memorized the watchwords of their new faith and recited them upon demand: “An ambush is a surprise attack by a force lying in wait within a concealed position upon a moving or temporarily halted target, sir.”

  When they failed—and fail they did—they were punished and forced to do hard labor and give me twenty, thirty, forty push-ups.

  And then it was the evening and the morning of the Sixth Day, the time to create a training operation in my own image, to see whether they could put together everything they’d learned and function as a unit—even, verily, a unit with some integrity.

  And so I rented five complete paint-ball outfits—semiauto paint-ball submachine guns and pistols, thick goggles and face masks, and a thousand rounds of Splatmaster ammo in visibility orange, fluorescent pink, bright red, chrome yellow, lime green, and turquoise, and I sent my guerrillas into the woods as a colorful four-man infiltration team of rainbow warriors.

  Their mission was to find, and neutralize, a VC command facility—that was me—by a specific time, working their way point to point along a series of markers that required them to use all the navigational and patrolling skills we’d learned. I explained that there might be surprises along the way, so they’d have to keep their eyes open for booby traps, minefields, and other assorted battlefield obstacles.

  I gave them the coordinates of the first checkpoint (telling them at the last minute that they’d find directions for each subsequent marker at each checkpoint), a set of maps, four waterproof radios with lip-mikes and earpieces, and turned them loose.

  Ten minutes after they left the house, I slipped into the woods and began tracking them. It didn’t take long for me to catch up. On the one hand, they were leaving a fat wake behind them: lots of broken branches and muddy footprints made their trail easy to pick up. On the other hand, they were moving well for amateurs—counting their paces and keeping their eyes open.

  They made the first marker way ahead of schedule, shifted coordinates, and moved confidently on, counting paces. I’d set a small booby trap fifty yards beyond the marker—a snare-and-pit arrangement. Dagwood almost stepped into it. But he didn’t. He stopped, he looked, and he listened, just as I’d taught him to do.

  His fist clenched, he held his arm level with his shoulder—the sign for an emergency halt. Then he gave the sign to take up temporary defensive positions.

  Joe, Crabcakes, and Normal dropped and fanned out on each side of the trail, their paint guns sweeping the underbrush in complementary arcs. I clenched my fist in triumph. Yes!

  Dagwood crept forward and looked. Then he crawled to Crabcakes and whispered in his ear. Crabcakes nodded. The squad detoured around the trap, counting paces, then found the trail again and resumed their patrol. This was terrific—much better than expected.

  The next two markers were harder to find. So, all the time they’d gained they now lost. That was good: during the upcoming war game, they’d have to contend with my old adversary Mr. Murphy, of Murphy’s Law fame. It was time to learn how to work despite the omnipresent Murphy.

  I watched as they made their way through an area in which I’d left some obvious tracks. Crabcakes and Dagwood conferenced, then Dagwood led the men in a wide circle through the underbrush. They were following Roger’s Rule and circling back to ambush whoever was tracking them. Goddamn—they’d listened, and they’d remembered. They were running an A+ so far as I was concerned.

  When I left to make my way to the VC bunker, they were working their way around a second series of booby traps—a simulated minefield filled with IEDs that was bordered on one side by a long trench filled with spikes, and on the other by a bog about six feet deep, with a foot of soft mud—and some pressure-plated IEDs—at the bottom. They’d use the bog if they were smart. That would add the elements of cold and wet to the mix. They’d survive if they were careful. I hoped Joe’d remembered to knot his boots.

  Meanwhile, I repaired to the ambush site. I’d set my VC position carefully. It was a hootch built a yard off the ground at the end of a thirty-yard-wide spit of land that extended about three hundred feet into the biggest of my lakes, about a mile and a half from the Manor as the crow flies. As the patrol maneuvers, however, it’s about a five-mile hike. The minipeninsula was sparsely vegetated and slightly elevated, which afforded me a two-hundred-degree view of the ground from the raised, four-by-eight-foot plywood porch.

  The only way they’d get within firing range was to use the water. The dweebs would have to swim across the lake or around the spit and attack from the blind side at the rear of the hootch.

  I’d run a similar action in Vietnam in 1967, on a nutmeg-shaped island called Ilo-Ilo, which sat at the mouth of the My Tho River where it ran through the Mekong Delta into the South China Sea. It was there I’d developed by chance a common-sense, KISS strategy that allowed me to kill beaucoup VC without taking any casualties: hit through the back door whenever possible.

  Instead of coming up the river on Ilo-Ilo from the west, where a big, wide canal ran eastward in a series of inviting S-curves, some primal SpecWar instinct made me hit the island from the east, infiltrating through a thousand yards of impenetrable, backbreaking marshland and thornbushes. I lucked out. The VC had set all their ambushes and booby traps on the canal, facing west. I was able to hit ’em from the rear and decimate ’em.

  Doom on you, Mr. Charlie.

  Now, I wanted to see if Joe’s dweebs would make the same kind of decision I’d made. If they came at me from the land side, I’d make hamburger out of them. But if they attacked from the water, they’d be able to hit my position
and win the exercise.

  I extracted a Stroh’s from the cooler I’d stashed in the hootch and took a pull, while I attached the detonator wires to the dozen Claymore IEDs I’d rigged across the peninsula. I checked the empty beer cans strung on wires along the water’s edge. Any attempt to crawl over them would set them jangling—and give me advance warning of a waterside attack. I pulled my black T-shirt over my head. They’d be at least another half hour getting here and I wanted to grab some rays while I could. I finished my beer, popped the top on a second, closed my eyes, and relaxed.

  The sound of snapping twigs brought me out of a half doze. I pulled my shirt on, slipped the goggles over my eyes, brought my paint-ball submachine gun up, turned on the CO2 supply, and cranked a round into the chamber. There was movement to my ten o’clock.

  They’d fucked up and taken the land approach. Joe’s dweebs were assholes and I was about to hunt ’em all down. How many times had I told ‘em—unconventional warfare means just what it says. Unconventional. Dirty. Spooky. Nasty. Unfair. The Marquis of Queensberry, I explained, was a queen, and he was buried.

  It was time to teach them a lesson. I grabbed the detonator, swung over the porch rail, and dropped onto the ground, just in time to see the glint of a paint-ball gun barrel veer in my direction from a clump of rattail ferns. I hit three Claymores and watched as geysers of sand exploded fifty yards away. I hoped no one was lying on top of the mines—even though I wasn’t using real ordnance, the sorry bastard who got too close would be sore for a couple of weeks.

  I rolled left and fired a quick burst, rolled again and scrambled for cover under the hootch, taking the detonator with me. I fired another charge.

  The first of my prospective victims stuck his head up. It was Crabcakes. I could see his beard as he tried to find a sight picture for his paint-ball gun. His eyes went wildly from right to left—he was disoriented and couldn’t pick me up.