Now our hardnosed army sergeant was stuck on the wing for the rest of the exercise. There wasn’t any way off. The distance was much too great to jump, especially onto a hard runway surface. The takedown of the plane wasn’t scheduled for at least four hours. So our hotheaded NCO could look forward to a cooling-off period out where he couldn’t do any damage to us.
The sergeant just walked up and down the wing, peering over the side and trying to figure a way down. The authorities who were observing the situation had no idea what we were trying to do. All they could do was watch and report that they had a guy in uniform on the wing walking about and looking over the edge. There wasn’t any way for them to get a ladder up to this guy without us being able to see them. So he spent a long, cold time on the wing of the airplane.
When the exercise started, we began our negotiations with the people on the ground almost right away. There was one guy on the plane, a sixty-year-old man, who was really not having a very good time of it. I suggested to Red that we get rid of this guy as soon as we could. He agreed and decided to negotiate a trade of the old man and a young woman for some food for ourselves.
The negotiators wanted to know how the passengers were doing. We told them everything was fine, and we let the captain speak to the negotiators to help reassure them. So the negotiators agreed to send out a tray of food in exchange for two of the hostages. The food was going to be brought out by a medic. What they wanted was permission to bring the walkway out to reach the aircraft door.
We agreed to this with some conditions. We wanted to see the walkway come out first with no one on it. We could watch this whole procedure through the windows of the plane. Then we told them that the medical guy could come out but that he had better be a medic and not someone pretending to be one. If we found a badge or a weapon on the guy coming out, we would kill somebody and it would be on their heads.
The walkway came out and we watched the situation carefully. Then a man in a medical uniform came along the walkway pushing a serving cart. Opening the door, we told the guy to wheel the cart a bit closer and to take the cover off it. There wasn’t anyone trying to hide under the cart, and the only things in sight on it were food packages and containers.
Now there was the medic to deal with. We told him to turn around with his back to the plane and get down on his hands and knees. Now Red told me to frisk the guy to see if he was carrying anything.
Walking off the plane and onto the walkway, I patted down the medic. He was a big guy, something like six foot four and built like a rock. When I went up to him, I kicked his hands out from under him and he hit the ground hard, smacking his face on the walkway floor. If this guy got pissed enough, he could throw me through the wall.
Jumping on the guy’s back to give me a head start if he decided to get frisky, I continued with my role. I was silently thankful he didn’t get up and clean my clock. There wasn’t a weapon on him, but buried in his pants, I found a wallet with a badge in it. “Hey, we got a badge here!” I shouted.
In spite of the badge situation, we let the “medic” take the girl and the old man. Later, during the debriefing, I spoke to the “medic” and asked him if he was all right.
“Yeah. My nose is sore is all.”
“I’m really sorry about that.”
“Naw, that’s all right,” he cut me off. “I just never had that happen.”
“Well,” I asked him, “why did you have the badge on you?”
“I just forgot to take it out of my pants is all.”
So that was the lesson he learned on the exercise. All the medic had been tasked to do was deliver the food and try to get a look inside the plane. He was to make note of the number of terrorists on board, how we were dispersed, and what we were armed with. The badge had simply been an oversight. He had screwed up and realized it.
The Australian Team came in and did a takedown on the plane. All our weapons were loaded with blanks, but they did their job so well we didn’t have much of a chance to use them. The passengers were saved and the plane recaptured.
The terrorists were forced to sit down up front across from one of the big aisles leading to the door. The passengers walked by us on their way out, and one of them really let her feelings be known. As this girl walked by me, her face screwed up real tight. Then she spat on me and shouted, “You’re a fucking bastard!”
“Hey, I’m really a nice guy,” I protested.
But she wasn’t having any part of my explanations. Red and the rest of his team were all cracking up and making their own comments on the situation. They could get away with it. They had made me act the prick during the whole exercise, and that girl wasn’t the only passenger who didn’t exactly look at me with love in her eyes. “I hope I don’t run into any of these people on liberty,” I thought.
With the situation over, it was time for the debriefing and analysis. Quantas treated us really well, taking us to a big hotel and giving us several adjoining rooms, including a few for us to crash in. Several of the tubs were filled with ice and beer, so it was obviously time to relax.
The head pilot from the plane showed up and made certain he had a chance to speak to me directly. “If they ever give an Oscar for playing a terrorist, mate,” the captain said, “you damned well deserve one.”
When it finally came time for Purdue and me to leave Australia and return to the States, it was on board a Quantas flight. We had coach tickets, but the crew moved us up to business class. Then the stewardess gave us a bottle of champagne each. We asked her what this was for, and she said that we would be asked upstairs after the takeoff.
Sure enough, after takeoff she took us up to the first class lounge and sat us down with drinks in our hands. Then the captain came off the flight deck. It was the captain from our terrorist scenario. And he sat down and started shooting the shit with us. Of course, that was after he stated emphatically that we weren’t going to be taking that particular plane over. So for the rest of the flight to San Francisco, we went first class.
When we returned to Six, we gave a full report on everything we had done and what we had learned while in Australia. Reports like these made sure that all the men in the command had the opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences.
CHAPTER 10
GEAR, GUNS, AND A LOT OF TRAINING
On our arrival back, the Old Man told me I had to deal with my legal problems. The DUI (driving under the influence) charge was the one I had to beat. Otherwise the Skipper would have to hold a Captain’s Mast on me, kind of a limited Navy trial, and have more punishment come down on me than I was already facing. If things came to a formal Captain’s Mast, I would certainly have to leave Team Six, probably the Teams as a whole, and maybe even the Navy. But I hadn’t been left out in the cold. They saw to it that I had a good lawyer.
When I was in front of the judge, he looked at me and then looked at the three police officers that had to “subdue” me for the arrest. I had already admitted to having a few small beers that night and referring to the three officers by some much less than complimentary names. I even admitted to assaulting the officers, but only in my own defense after being struck.
The judge noticed that one cop was my size, one was smaller, and one was much larger. “The three of you couldn’t handle that man when you say he was intoxicated?” the judge said. “As big as you men are? Charges dropped.” But then he pointed at me and continued, “And you, Mr. Chalker. You owe this city fifteen hundred dollars, five hundred apiece for assaulting my officers. And your license to drive is suspended for ninety days. Case dismissed.”
Yeah! I’d been saved, and I was still in the Teams. I didn’t have all the money I needed to pay my fines, but Scham always seemed to have a couple of paychecks in his wallet. He loaned me the money and I was able to return to duty without any trouble. For several months after that, I would ride a bike to the base. The cops were watching for me, but they never found anything they could stop me for.
Marcinko had been t
asked with putting together a maritime counterterrorist force, and he had been given a very short time to accomplish it. He didn’t always have time to go through the niceties of the chain of command to get the job done, but he was able to get some money.
We were a “rich” Team. To accomplish our mission, we were getting state-of-the-art equipment, and we were receiving it in large amounts. Some animosity built up over that, but we needed the gear to get the job done.
In fact, we had so much equipment it started to turn into a problem. The boats and trailers parked in the compound made the place look like some kind of marina. Big steel Conex boxes took up most of the rest of the available open space.
The obvious excess of riches is part of what caused the friction between ourselves and the other Teams, which were still suffering under the post-Vietnam cutbacks. The military force of the United States had been severely reduced in size and effectiveness after Vietnam, with the Special Warfare Forces suffering the most. There was no funding for schooling, new equipment, and certainly not research and development. The Army Special Forces were reduced in size, the Army Rangers had gone away completely, and the SEAL Teams had taken bad cuts in their numbers.
With the creation of Dick’s new command, funding became available from sources the regular Teams couldn’t tap into. The allotment brought SEAL Team Six up and on line while SEAL Teams One and Two were still trying to work with weapons that had been almost worn out during combat in Vietnam. With our special mission and material requirements, the standard military guns and gear of just a decade ago were too outdated to do the job for us.
Our mission was secret and we couldn’t talk about what we did, so all our Teammates in the other units could see was a handful of SEALs who could let their hair grow and had more equipment than a Team three times their size. But we all still had the same basic job.
Everyone in Six had been selected in part because of the different specialty skills each man brought with him. Each of us would teach what we could to the others. For example, the guys who ran Air Ops were all highly qualified parachutists. Several of them held different free-fall records that were still on the books. These were the men who taught us how to pack chutes, operate the equipment, and reach a high level of competency much faster than we otherwise could have.
Even with our top-of-the-line instructors, we had to push hard to reach the level of competency we needed. While at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, we learned how to jump out of an aircraft and free-fall for thousands of feet before opening our chutes. This was new for me. All of us were jump qualified, but only a handful of guys in the Team were skydivers and free-fall qualified. During my first jumps, I mostly turned somersaults, seeing sky, earth, sky, earth as I tumbled through the air. It took about ten jumps before I became proficient enough to leave the aircraft in a stable position. But others in the Team had a much harder time than I did.
During one of our early free-fall jumps, Schamberger had to cutaway his main canopy. If your main canopy doesn’t open, you have to pull a cutaway pillow, a small padded grip, that releases the main from your harness before you open your reserve chute. That keeps your last chance of staying alive from getting tangled in with your malfunctioning main. When Scham cut away his main and pulled his reserve, though, nothing happened. There’s not a lot you can do in this situation. As far as Bob was concerned, it was the end of his life. But like any good SEAL or frogman, he was going to make death work to get him.
Falling through the sky, Bob followed the old frog rule: If you get in trouble, head for water. There was a river nearby, and Bob started to track for it. You can turn your body and control your direction of fall when skydiving. Properly done, you can track across a good distance, depending on how high you are when you start out. Bob figured if he hit the water, it would at least be a little better than auguring into the ground.
By turning toward the river, Bob changed the way the air was flowing over him. The slipstream grabbed the long tape that was to have pulled out his reserve chute and drew the canopy from the pack. Miracle of miracles, the malfunctioning chute opened up. With a good reserve over his head, Bob finished the job okay.
Later I had my first malfunction, and that’s a heart-stopping moment. My reserve opened okay and everything was fine. But in that first moment, all I thought was “Here we go!”
Pooster had it a little different. In his first seven jumps, he had five malfunctions and had to cutaway on every one. Despite that he stuck out the training and became very good at jumping. Of course, that was after he had a refresher course in how to pack his main chute.
There was a strict level of discipline at Six, though an outside observer might not have been able to see it at first glance. We were relaxed in our military protocols for the same reason we had longer hair than most. It would be a dead giveaway if you saluted someone during an operation who was supposed to be a civilian just like you. Using “sir” could get you noticed fast too. We all knew who our officers were, and we respected them properly. We just called them by their first names.
There were standards we all had to meet, and we were still a military unit. Faydog screwed up once on some minor liberty incident and Duke came down on him: no liberty for thirty days. This wasn’t much of a punishment as far as military discipline goes, except that there wasn’t anywhere to live in the compound.
Our buildings were packed. We mustered the Team in the same room that held our weight-lifting equipment. Assault Group One was at one end of the building and Two was at the other end. Between us was the weight room. At the other building was the quarterdeck that held our one admin desk. Behind the quarterdeck was the Skipper’s desk and then the XO’s desk. The communications gear filled up most of the rest of the room. The only other space available was the supply room where we kept all our general equipment, which would be drawn for specific operations. We didn’t even have our own armory to store our weapons. We kept them in cases in the SEAL Team Two armory.
The restriction situation with Faydog turned into a funny one. Coming into work one day, I saw a tent on top of one of the Conex boxes. Faydog had set up housekeeping in this little pup tent, and that’s where he lived for thirty days. We all got kind of a kick out of that.
Harassment among ourselves never ceased at Six. We would play jokes on each other whenever we could. One time when I was getting a ride back with one of the other squads, they waited until we were just half a mile or so from the hotel before they kicked me out the opened door of the truck. And they did this without the benefit of slowing down first.
And we competed with each other on a regular basis. Sometimes things deteriorated into a brawl, with two or more squads rolling around wrestling on the grass. But no one got hurt, and the animosity was always light.
Our squad had a regular “choir practice,” where we would gather at one of the guy’s houses and start barhopping. One of the guys was a real pain about getting ready to go out. When he was finally perfect, we could move on to our next Teammate’s house and pick him up. Nights like this, most of the public places were closed or close to it by the time we got there.
But the private clubs were open much later. The Fraternal Order of UDT/SEALs had their own place, and we often dropped in there. Some of the animosity between us and the regular Teams came out at the FO bar, but for the most part it wasn’t too serious.
The FO bar was managed by Bob Gallagher, known at SEAL Team Two as the Eagle. He had built up quite a reputation as a hard operator in Vietnam and was a neat guy to talk to. But Bob was bald as an eagle, and our long hair sometimes rubbed him the wrong way.
There was one night when the White Rhino from our Team really got into it with Gallagher. This guy was short and stocky and looked like a rhino, and he was as strong as one as well. He wasn’t the fastest runner in the outfit, but put a load on his back and he would out-hump you every time.
For some reason, Rhino started throwing his empty beer cans at the guy who was checking IDs at the door. Some
thing must have just bothered him because he kept chucking these empty cans. Finally the guy had enough and Rhino was asked to leave. One thing led to another, and before long Gallagher and the Rhino were out in the parking lot squaring off.
The White Rhino told Gallagher to take his best shot, which he did. The blow rocked the Rhino for a moment, then he came back and said, “Nice shot.” They ended up rolling around together for a few minutes until we finally broke it up.
About three days later I was back at the FO talking to Bob.
“You know that friend of yours from a few days ago?” Bob asked me.
“Yeah,” I answered, wondering what was up.
“Well, I’m getting too old for this shit,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “That’s why I’m carrying this now.” And he pulled out a blackjack.
There wasn’t another fight between the Eagle and the White Rhino that I remember. And maybe that was for the best.
Sometimes we had Team get-togethers, but we usually went out with our squads. There was this one place, the Casino, where we regularly met as a Team. The Skipper hosted a party there when Purdue and I were frocked for a promotion to E-5. There was a drink of the month for our groups, and that month it was schnapps. So the Skipper put down these drinks in front of Purdue and me, we belted them back, and he had the last laugh on us when it turned out to be water.
A real tightness developed in the unit from all this playing hard together, and we felt we had earned it. But like SEAL Teams One and Two, there would never be another time like this in Six. SEAL plankowners from that era told me what it had been like for them, and the same thing held true for us. Those early years, building something new, became the most amazing experience of our careers.
The heavy, high-speed training schedule also had a price. The Skipper had told us we would follow the rule: Train as you fight, and fight as you train. This meant live weapons on hard courses with fast-moving situations. Safety was always of paramount importance. We did a lot of dangerous things, and we always tried to stack the deck in our favor. But there were accidents and costs.
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