Before we left for another training site, the ROKs hosted a feast for us. There were a lot of dogs running around the ROK compound. When we came in for the feast, I noticed the canine population seemed to be smaller. During the meal, I wondered out loud to Chambo what it was we were eating. “Probably dog” was his answer.
After our Korean adventures, Kilo Platoon returned to the Philippines and from there we went on to Thailand where we worked with their SEALs. The border situation with Cambodia was running hot at that time, and we could hear artillery and mortar fire off in the distance at night, but we never saw any action.
Working weapons with the Thais proved interesting at one point. I was running one of the stations on the M72A2 LAW (light antitank weapon) range while Billy Almond was running the whole evolution. As one Thai took a bead on a target, a teammate of his decided he wanted to see what the first guy was aiming at. So he slipped in behind the other, sighting along the LAW tube, and looking right up the exhaust end of the rocket that was about to be fired.
“Cease fire!” I shouted as I pulled the curious one away from the firing line. If that LAW rocket had been fired, the observer would have been missing his head. Billy caught the situation at about the same time I did. Afterward he just looked at me and shrugged.
We had given a full class on the M72A2 LAW rocket. We showed the Thais how it was used and made sure they knew about the safety procedures and the dangerous back-blast area. But there always seems to be somebody who doesn’t get the word or thinks it doesn’t apply to him.
Our tour in Thailand was a great time. We were staying near a resort area, and the beach looked nice. I wondered how much the local culture was like Vietnam’s had been less than ten years earlier. The people were very friendly, and they lived in the same kind of hooches that were all over Southeast Asia. I learned a lot about the local culture. Then our deployment plans continued and we were on our way back to the Philippines.
Some of the trainings we conducted in the Philippines were real UDT-style operations. We spent a week on LPSS-574, the Grayback, a special transport sub for the Teams. The Grayback had two big hangars on her bow, with huge domed hatches that would open hydraulically. Swimmers could get into and out of these hangars from inside the forward compartment of the submarine, launching rubber boats, swimmer pairs, or even little submarines without ever breaching the surface.
On one night operation we came up to Horse Beach and launched rubber boats from the submarine hangars. Breathing from the multiple rigs inside the hangars wasn’t anything special, but when those big doors opened up, it was a sight to see.
The moonlight filtered down through the water, and the natural luminescence of the water made sparks of blue-green light dance about in the silver-colored gloom. Then we had to release our air and move to the surface. The first guy let go and did a free ascent; I was the next guy in line. It wasn’t any big deal, you just blew out the air in a steady stream as you rose to the surface. When we were all together, we climbed in the boats and moved to the beach.
The return operation to the Grayback was much the same. We paddled the boats out to the rendezvous point and dove down to the sub. The boats were pulled in later, and each of us just held his breath and swam into the hangar. Once in the hangar, we could breathe off the boat air from the regulators that lined the sides. I was down in the hangar breathing off a rig when one of our officers came into the hangar. Instead of taking the rig I was holding for him, he pulled my rig out of my mouth and started using it. We had a few words about that later.
But the crew of the sub were professionals. We locked in and out a number of times at fifty feet. The people were good to us, and we berthed in the forward torpedo room where arrangements had been made for transporting whole SEAL platoons. The food was everything we had been told submarine chow was supposed to be. When you can be stuck underwater on long cruises, even just mediocre food could crash a sub crew’s morale, so subs were known to serve some of the best food in the Navy. The whole crew looked like moles with their white skins, and I soon learned why. After only a week on board, our “sun conditioning” (tans) started to fade and the light outside seemed awfully bright when we climbed off the sub.
There were little submarines that could also operate from the Grayback’s hangars, black-hulled SDVs, or swimmer (now SEAL) delivery vehicles. We never worked with the SDVs from the Grayback; instead we learned about them at their shore facility. The Mark VIII SDVs were a little over twenty-one feet long and a few inches over four feet tall and wide. The SDV has two compartments, one in the front for the pilot and navigator and one in the rear for the cargo. Since the SDVs operated while full of water, flooded in the wet condition, each person on board had to wear a breathing rig or use the boat air. Most of the time, the swimmers who were going on the operation breathed off their own rigs, and the two-man crew ran off of boat air.
The little subs were crowded, dark, and more than a little cramped. Riding in one was definitely not for the claustrophobic. But they could move a group of up to six swimmers and their gear a lot farther than you could push yourself with fins.
On my first workup swim in one of the SDVs, we just moved around in the bay during the day. Several of us hung onto the outside of the boat as it moved along through the water. It was like a normal dive, only we didn’t have to kick very hard. Personally, I just watched the scenery, which really wasn’t much, the water being murky.
But the night operational swim was considerably different. I was riding in a Mark VIII SDV, launching from pier side on an attack swim against an anchored ship. Moki Martin and Cooper were the driver and navigator of our SDV, both having a lot of experience in the little wet subs. We were breathing off Emerson closed-circuit rigs, which turned out to be a really good thing because what was supposed to be a ninety-minute ride turned into a four-hour underwater trip. Chambo and I were sitting in the very cramped front section of the SDV, behind the pilot and the navigator. The rest of our guys were in the rear compartment.
First we were almost run over by a destroyer. Then, when we reached the target, we were supposed to surface at pier side, leave the SDV, and attack the ship. We didn’t come up to the pier, however. Instead we smacked into the keel of our target ship, and I swear it felt like those tons of steel hit me right in the back of the neck. We hit so hard the SDV hull cracked, and we had to do an emergency surface right there. Everyone got out okay, and we continued with our operation.
We finished out our tour in the Philippines with one really memorable parachute jump. Bordering the drop zone was a meandering body of water that got its name from having passed the town of Olongapo just outside the main gate of our base at Subic Bay. Olongapo didn’t have the most modern sewage facilities, and the river picked up its name, Shit River, for just that reason. If you came into contact with the river, there was a series of something like fourteen different shots you had to get to guard against diseases they didn’t even have names for yet.
To keep up our jump qualifications, we used an open field just to the right and inside the fence at the main gate as a drop zone. We had a CH-47 helicopter and were going to do a simple drop. Not all plans go as intended. Those dash-2 model chutes we were using could be steered, but only in a limited way. There was a mistake on the release point, and a number of us headed for Shit River.
The only reason most of us didn’t take a dip in the river was that we slammed up against the chain-link fence surrounding the base. Mike Faketty managed to miss the fence, and the drop zone, but he didn’t miss the river. When Mike hit that water, you could hear a groan come up from all of us. He was not a happy person, even less so when he received his shot series from the corpsman. The jump master who had given us the go on the release point was not Mike’s favorite person after that. I believe the man went on liberty while Mike was getting his shots.
Still Mike survived his little mishap on the jump with little more than two sore shoulders and a sore ass. We razzed him a bit on his parachuting ski
lls, which reminded me of my first Team jump not more than a few months before.
Soon after Kilo Platoon first formed up back in Coronado, we set up to do a parachute jump. It was going to be a static line water jump from a CH-47 helicopter. In a static line jump, the parachute opens automatically from a line anchored to the jump aircraft. You almost can’t screw it up, and even if you do, you still have a reserve chute with you. Even though I still get butterflies before a jump, after more than 3,700 jumps, a static jump is easy. But the chutes don’t steer very well.
I was going to be the man in our stick who carried the IBS, so they put me on the edge of the ramp at the rear of the helicopter with the big rubber boat slung from my front. On the way down, the rubber boat would be unrolled, inflated from a CO2 bottle, and lowered on a tether line, so it would hit the water before I did. That way our water craft would be ready for us to climb on board and continue with the operation. But on this first jump, no one climbed in the boat after I landed, because on that jump I didn’t even hit the water. I landed in the middle of the softball field near the base, where UDT Eleven and SEAL Team One were playing a game. Right out in center field, the new meat came down with his rubber boat inflated, his swim fins on, and not a drop of water nearby.
Some of the other guys hit the edge of the field, but most of them made the water, landing over by the sub pens near the base. The release point for our jump may have been the jump master’s mistake, but I had to hear about it for a very long time afterward.
CHAPTER 7
ECHO PLATOON AND A TASTE OF HIGH SPEED
It was early in 1980 when Kilo Platoon returned from the deployment to Southeast Asia. My career plan now was to work in the Intelligence Department at SEAL Team One and start going back to school. In the Intel Department, we gathered information and created reports to move up to higher command or disseminate in the Team. Making charts, taking photographs, and analyzing data all took place in the department. Working in a department would give me the time I needed to work toward my degree, and it looked like this was work I could enjoy doing. But another offer came up that completely derailed my plans.
There was a very select platoon at SEAL Team One that had been operating for a few years prior to my getting to the Team. Echo Platoon was the West Coast contingency platoon for counterterrorist actions. At SEAL Team Two on the East Coast, Mob Six (Mobilization Platoon Six) was assigned the same mission. Both platoons had been operating since the late 1970s and were building up reputations as hard operators.
The mission for Mob Six and Echo Platoon was to react to any terrorist activity in our area of operations, centering on the marine environment. Both units would remain on standby at their respective Teams for deployment to any hot spot in their area. The units were the sharp edge of the Navy’s counterterrorist program. They would kick the doors in, rescue the people, and eliminate the terrorists. If an oil rig was captured, a private yacht taken over, or a Naval facility seized, the men of Mob Six or Echo Platoon would be the first called on to take action.
The missions required very specialized training to board ships under way, climb, shoot, and swim. Stinger and I, along with several other guys, were asked to join Echo Platoon after Kilo returned, and we both agreed.
The counterterrorist mission required a hard-charging SEAL, and that was a description that fit Stinger and me. We knew a little bit about what Echo did, even though information on it was kept just to the command. After we got in the unit, they gave us a full briefing on the mission and what we would be doing.
Echo was only my second SEAL Team platoon assignment, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was the kind of thing I wanted to do. The training was great and so were the guys I met there. In the platoon I met Pooster, Perdue, Faydog, Kevin Banker, Sluggo, Doc Luben, and T. K. “The Old Gummer” Davis, all of whom became lifelong friends. Stinger had another change in his life besides the new platoon assignment. He got married to Kathy, a girl he had met when she was working in the chow hall during BUD/S.
Marrying into the Teams was tough, but it wasn’t as bad as trying to stay with a man through BUD/S. I can’t remember one of my enlisted classmates being married in Class 101. It took a special woman to be married to a Team guy, and even then it was very hard to stay together during a Team career. But that was all something I was going to learn in the future.
Stinger wasn’t going out with us on the weekends quite as much as he used to back when he was a wild bachelor. But training at Echo had introduced me to new actions that took up a lot of my off-duty time. Rock climbing was something I was really getting into, and Faydog, Pooster, and I would go up to the mountains on the weekends and indulge in this new sport. Both my friends were good climbers and taught me a lot.
A lot of new training came with joining Echo Platoon. Room entries—what we called door kicking—were something we practiced continually. Down at the helo (helicopter) base, we went in and hunted each other through some of the old buildings. Our operational handguns were usually customized M1911A1s, the venerable old .45 automatic. For a lot of our training, we used stainless steel Smith & Wesson Model 66 revolvers because we could shoot special ammunition through them. Wearing gas masks and using wax bullets instead of hard projectiles, we could safely fire on each other and establish hits with little question of just where the bullet had gone.
Training was hard and fast, but we still managed to have fun doing it. One of the things we would do was stage quick-draw contests where two of us would see who could shoot the other guy first. You had to nail the other guy quickly, so instead of waiting for the weapon to come into line before firing we would pull the trigger more than once as the pistol was coming up from the holster. You could watch the wax rounds kind of walk across the floor and up into the target. Okay, so it wasn’t traditional Old West shooting, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. We also trained with shoulder-fired weapons, usually a carbine version of the standard M16A1 with a fourteen-inch barrel, what we still called in the Teams a CAR-15.
Besides shooting, there were other techniques that had to be learned, like how to get aboard a boat while it was under way. The technique involved catching up to a boat, attaching a line, and climbing on board. This sounds easy, but it’s a whole lot different when you have to do it. The first time you try and catch a boat is quite an experience, like trying to ride a bull. I was being groomed to be a catcher; in other words, the first guy to make contact with the boat we were trying to board.
Standing up in the front of a speeding small boat, I would have two guys hanging onto my ass to try and steady me. Runners also went out to either side of the bow to aid in my stability. There were foam cushions all over the bow of our Boston Whaler and at first I couldn’t figure out what they were for. Maybe they were extra flotation in case the bow of the boat dug into a wave. When we hit our first rough water, I found out what the cushioning was for. It kept you from losing your teeth when you fell over and smacked into the boat.
I bounced off the bottom of the boat and got right back up. I liked the challenge and soon learned how to keep my feet. Once I had attached a line to the target, we would use a caving ladder to gain the deck of the ship. This was one of the very first boarding techniques we used, and it took a lot of time to learn how to do it right.
We spent six months in Echo Platoon learning the ropes and conducting local training. Range time to practice firing our weapons was included in the schedule every day, and we spent time keeping up our climbing techniques, studying possible targets and situations, and learning about terrorist groups and their preferred operational styles. The situation was still a new one, so it was flexible. We never stopped learning.
Other aspects of Echo Platoon caused some raised eyebrows among the rest of the command. We had relaxed grooming standards compared with the rest of the Teams and the Navy as a whole. We let our hair grow long so that we could blend in with a civilian crowd on a real-world operation. With a regular military haircut, you stood out. If
you had what the East Coast SEALs called a Rudy Boesch haircut—Rudy was a master chief and original member of SEAL Team Two—you stood out even in the Teams. Some of the old-school SEAL chiefs and officers didn’t much care for our haircuts, but there was only a single platoon of us.
In June 1980 the word came out that Mr. Marcinko was coming to town and would be conducting interviews for a new Team. Everyone in the command prepped for the interviews. A number of people whose opinion I valued—Chambo, Gustaval, and T. K.—talked to me about the new unit. I was told that if I was given the opportunity to screen for the new Team I should take it. Some of those guys remembered when the SEAL Teams were first formed and what the first years had been like. It wasn’t something I wanted to miss out on.
When you hear something like that, you have to take it seriously. Being in the Teams meant you already wanted to take on the hard jobs. This situation could mean a new field of skills to learn and missions to accomplish. This could be a case of my being in the right place at the right time and I wasn’t going to let myself lose out.
A few months before, I had met Dick Marcinko, but only in passing. We had both been at an East Coast specialized demolition school at Harvey Point. Purdue and I had been sent to the school as part of our Echo Platoon training. I saw him there, complete with a beard and Rudy Boesch haircut, but no one talked about him in particular, and I didn’t ask.
There was some scuttlebutt about then–Lieutenant Commander Marcinko. The stories centered on his having a platoon on the East Coast with the same mission as Echo, counterterrorism in a marine environment. He was the leader of Mob Six. And what he was doing was getting the schools lined up, buying the gear, and preparing his men for their mission.
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