One Perfect Op

by Dennis Chalker

  Not all of our adventures with the Whalers took place on the water. Sometimes we had great fun with them just getting to the launch site for an exercise. Once, the boat wasn’t even going into the water when the trouble came up.

  One of the coxswains was hauling a boat to the marina in Virginia Beach to get it looked at. As he was driving the truck down Shore Drive, he looked to his left and saw the boat passing him. The trailer had come unhooked from the truck, and none of the safety chains were attached. Rolling on down the road, the trailer finally nosed into the median and came to a stop. It didn’t flip or anything, just stopped in the grass. That could have been a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. And it gave us some great ammunition for the harassment of that driver. We had been following him and saw the boat trailer unhitch from the truck. There wasn’t anything we could do but watch it roll on its way.

  The trailers weren’t the only way we transported our boats. We experimented with using helos to carry the boats to within range of a target and then release them into the water.

  On one exercise Cheeks, Scham, Rhino, Doc Holliday, Pooster, and I were in our Whaler hanging from the helo by a single-point hook. I was wearing my wet suit with a UDT life jacket over it, Scham had his Gore-Tex jacket on over his UDT, and Rhino was manning the coxswain’s position. There weren’t seats for us to be secured in the boat, and in hindsight that was a mistake.

  Once the helo picked us up, the boat began spinning underneath the bird. As the helicopter flew, we began spinning faster and faster like a top. As the G-forces built up, we began leaving the boat.

  Scham was the first one to hit the side of the boat and go over into the water, not a great distance below us. Then Cheeks and Pooster followed. I was hanging onto the rail, and Doc Holliday was doing the same thing on the other side. As the spin increased, the rail finally broke off the gunwale and I went into the drink.

  When I hit the water some fifty feet down, I still had that section of railing in my hands. “Well, this isn’t great,” I thought to myself. Looking up, I could see that Doc Holliday and the Rhino were still in the boat. The Rhino was hanging onto the wheel so hard he bent it. The crew in the helo finally saw what was going on and they started down to the water.

  All of us in the water started swimming away from the boat so that it didn’t come down on top of us. When we gathered up in the water, I could see that Scham wasn’t with us but was struggling a short distance away.

  When Scham had inflated his life jacket after hitting the water, it pulled his Gore-Tex jacket tight around his throat. The pressure on his throat was so great that he was choking and in danger of blacking out completely. He couldn’t reach either the release valve or the oral tube to his life jacket, and the Gore-Tex was pulled so tight he couldn’t get the zipper down.

  When we swam over to Scham, he was still struggling with the jacket and called out, “Stab me! Stab me!”

  “I’ll stab him!” one of the guys said, and he pulled out his K-Bar knife like he was going to plunge it into Scham’s chest.

  “No man! No! No!” we called out.

  This guy looked a little too enthused about using his knife. But instead of stabbing down with it, he thrust the K-Bar into the jacket from the side, missing Scham and puncturing the vest. That was a near thing. For a while there, it looked like Scham’s head was going to come off like a pimple.

  With the immediate danger over, we swam there in the water thinking this technique wasn’t the best one we had ever used. Later we used a dual anchor point on the lifting harness and that kept the boat from spinning.

  Hanging the boats from helicopters was always a scary evolution when we were starting out. And it really got hairy when we started doing it at night.

  Signals at night always caused us the most worry. Hanging underneath a helicopter in an open boat at an unknown altitude, you wanted to be sure the helo released you only when you were ready. We traveled in the bird and roped down to the boat when we approached our release point. The helo was supposed to be only about a hundred feet in the air when we went over the side and down to the boat.

  Shining a single red light up at the bird was our signal to drop the boat. As the evolution continued, the signal changed a bit, and now a single red light meant we were ready to be lowered down to drop altitude. Several red flashes meant drop the boat.

  On this exercise, we roped down to the boat and had troubles right away. Rhino was the first man down the rope, and he bounced off the engine cover, almost missing the boat entirely. The way the helo was moving, the slipstream had pulled the rope back to the stern of the boat. He recovered and clambered into the boat without any further trouble. Even though it was dark, we could see that we were much higher than planned. Instead of roping down at a hundred feet, we must have been five hundred feet or more in the air.

  Thank god Rhino had the foresight to get into the center of the boat and anchor the line for the rest of us. Now we could get into the boat without much trouble. Once we were all secured, it was time to give the signal that we were all on board. All of us were thinking: “Oh God, please don’t drop us. We’re at five hundred feet!”

  Crunching up a little bit, we gave the signal. There was a certain amount of relief when the helicopter started descending. Once we were good, we gave the flashing signal and they let us drop.

  I don’t care if you’re only at ten feet, that is a solid drop down to the water. The hull smacks down hard like you’re hitting cement. In spite of our level of fitness, absorbing that much shock takes a toll on your body. But we could heal; what we couldn’t see was what the abuse was doing to the boats.

  It was that dribbling Styrofoam that meant the end of the Boston Whalers for us.

  The waters off of Louisiana, south of New Orleans, were a great area for some of our training exercises. The Gulf waters had a number of oil drilling platforms that we could work on, developing methods to attack them in case of a terrorist seizure.

  On our first trip to Louisiana, we were flown down and then had to tow our boats to the exercise site behind our trucks. South of New Orleans, heading down the peninsula that jutted out into the Gulf waters, we had to pass through a number of smaller parishes and towns, and we stopped in this little town called Golden Meadow to get some breakfast. Sitting there in the restaurant was this big Cajun chief of police, just watching us. We had just ordered when he got up and walked over to our table.

  “What’re you boys doin’?” he asked us in a thick southern drawl.

  “We just ordered some breakfast,” one of the guys said. “We’re going to sit here and eat.”

  “Not in this town,” he said. “And you better go the speed limit gettin’ out. See that man sittin’ over there?” He pointed to another local sitting at a different table. “That’s the judge and the mayor. He’s my brother.”

  It wasn’t like you had to drop a house on us. We got the hint and left.

  It seemed we always had these little hassles with the locals when we operated in the deep South. They had their own customs and way of doing things that outsiders often didn’t understand. With our long hair and high-speed boats, that chief probably thought we were drug runners, or maybe worse, customs agents. We were operating on their territory and they wanted us to pass through peacefully and not stop on our way.

  Eventually we made it to the Governor’s Resort where we would be staying. The Mississippi River was right across the street, with regular river traffic moving along it. We did get some attention from the work boats as they traveled the river. You could see the crews out with binoculars, watching us as we made our boats ready for operation.

  We didn’t like the attention, but there was little we could do about it. Down in that neck of the woods, guys like us weren’t a daily sight.

  The area got more and more built up as we worked there over the years. As more people came in, we moved farther south for our exercises. Finally we reached the end of the peninsula at Grand Isle. By then we had become
familiar enough that no one thought much about us. Just those Yankees with their boats again.

  Once, while working on one of the oil rigs out in the Gulf, we had climbed up into the girders and were taking a break when one of the guys suggested we try some high diving from the platform. We were about fifty feet above the water and the platform itself was about eighty feet up. Back when I was in the Army in North Carolina, I had done some cliff diving and knew my limitations. I wasn’t about to jump from the eighty-foot platform, but fifty feet was okay.

  Some of the guys with us had been competition divers back in school. They put on a pretty good show of flips, somersaults, and whatever. I was doing some diving myself, arcing out over the water rather than just jumping feet first. Doc Holliday didn’t even want to jump into the water from that height. But that was okay, and the rest of us just continued with what we were doing.

  Then one of the divers tried a one-and-a-half flip and didn’t make it. We could see his eyeballs open wide as he realized he wasn’t going to complete that last flip and smacked into the water on his back.

  Doc Holliday, our corpsman, the guy who didn’t even want to jump into the water, didn’t show a moment’s hesitation as he launched himself from the platform. Every second counted if our Teammate was injured, and Doc just took the fastest way down.

  I dived in right behind Doc, and we got to our Teammate quickly. The guy was coughing up blood but kept saying he was okay. He had struck the water so hard that he’d bruised himself internally and was bleeding from his lungs.

  We got him on the boat and contacted the Coast Guard over the radio. A couple of the other guys piled in the boat and took off to meet the Coast Guard cutter halfway. Every time our boat hit a wave, you could see our injured Teammate wince and cough up some more blood. He was all right later, but for a while it looked like a near thing.

  Getting up onto the drilling platforms from the water required new climbing techniques. The lead climber during a tactical climb free-climbs. He may carry a runner line so he can rest at intervals, but he always carries a coiled caving ladder and then drops it down for the rest of the crew to come up. If the climber trailed the ladder behind him as he went up, it might catch on something and pull him off the structure.

  On one climb up an oil rig to try some new techniques, Doc Holliday was leading and he had the ladder with him. We passed up an aluminum pole with a hook on the end. Doc was going to put the ladder on the pole and raise it the last ten feet, hooking it to the edge of the platform, but he snagged the platform with the hook. Then he couldn’t get the pole untangled from the dangling ladder.

  I was standing about five feet below and to the side of Doc. The rest of the guys were farther below us, and I called down to them to move away from below us and get over to the side. Moving up to Doc, I looked at what I could do to get the pole untangled. The best thing seemed to be just to go up the ladder and set the hook solidly into the platform by hand and ignore the pole. Putting out a safety line would let the rest of the guys come up the ladder and continue the exercise.

  As I was going up the ladder, I heard a little sound that instantly rang in my ears. That sound was the soft ting of the hook breaking.

  I was going to fall and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Kicking back from the platform, I tried to push myself far enough away to clear any obstructions on my way down to the water. I wasn’t wearing a Pro-Tec, which was a helmet we decided to adopt for climbing soon after this incident. Balling up, I plunged eighty feet to the water. The White Rhino fell off the ladder and struck a stanchion but wasn’t hurt badly. The rest of the crew were all safely on the structure when the hook let go.

  When I hit the water, the broken hook and pole landed right next to me. The impact shook me up, but otherwise I was unhurt. Seeing Rhino in the water, I swam over to him. He was okay, but we bundled him into a boat right away.

  The XO was peering over the edge of the platform and called down to see if I was okay. Shouting back that I was fine, I told him to unroll another ladder. I had to get back up the ladder just to get that fall out of my system. It was a shaky business going up that caving ladder, but if I hadn’t done it right away, I might not have been able to do it as well later on.

  That was the hairiest situation I went through while free-climbing. And I was thankful the fall was into water and not something less yielding. The lesson learned from that exercise was to wear headgear for protection.

  There is a very large oil rig out in the Gulf run by Shell Oil. Called the Loop, the big rig is painted a bright yellow and you can see it a long distance away across the water. It was the biggest platform of its kind in the early 1980s.

  To get ready for our operations on the Loop, we went out to take photos of the maze of pipes and stanchions that disappeared into the depth of the Gulf underneath the rig. Truck was doing the underwater filming, while Pooster and I were safety divers with him. As Truck took his pictures, we looked around through the water. We both nudged Truck to try and get his attention away from the pipes and direct it toward what we could see.

  All around the rig were sharks. And not just little harmless varieties. This was a school of hammerhead sharks, one of the weirdest-looking killers swimming in the oceans. The wide flat hammer-shaped fin of their head has eyes at each end, and they could see us easily. But they just weren’t interested, which I thought was a fine situation.

  In all my time diving, I had never seen a school of sharks like that. And I didn’t particularly want to see them again. We had our film and returned to the boats without any other casualties than my own rapid heartbeat.

  That night we decided to do a training scenario where we would surface swim in to the rig. We had no rangefinder of any kind, so we were going to estimate the distance and go into the water from the boats about a mile from the platform. There were three squads swimming in on the op, and we all hit the water at the same time.

  After the scenario was over, it was estimated that we had really been dropped off between five and seven miles from the platform. So we swam, and swam, and swam. The current in the Gulf of Mexico is circular. We stroked for hours and the rig never seemed to get any closer. What it did do was drift to the side as the current pushed at us.

  The squads had all started out separately. But it wasn’t long before we were all intermingled on that long swim. We hit the water at about 0100 hours and didn’t get to the platform until 0500 hours, just as the sun was coming up.

  One of the guys from another squad decided to mess with me a little bit as we swam along. He was behind me and grabbed my leg, screaming, “Aaaaahhhhh!” Maybe he had heard about the sharks we met earlier in the day and maybe he hadn’t. But I sure remembered them. I thought I had been hit when he grabbed me.

  The joke didn’t last very long, though. As my Teammate watched, I turned around with my K-Bar knife in my hand. His eyes were a bit large as he looked at me, and I said, “You’re lucky.” Then we continued on.

  When we finally got to the rig, we all crawled onto the girders and just kind of lay there, panting. We looked like drowned rats—yellow rats at that: we had these yellow long johns on so that we would blend in with the structure. Our own Mr. T really showed his feeling as he kissed the big steel beams over and over.

  That swim was the second longest of my life. The only longer swim we had done was in BUD/S. All of us were pretty much exhausted, but we had to continue with the job. The only trouble is that with exhaustion come mistakes.

  Pooster and I had to lead-climb up the structure. So huffing and puffing, we went up into the girders. In spite of doing one hell of a job, Pooster made what could have been a real bad mistake. While he was walking out on a girder, he reached out and grabbed what he thought was a yellow pipe.

  The pipe Pooster grabbed turned out to be a rubber hose. Even though he had a good grip with his other hand, he swung out a bit over the long drop to the water. Smacking into that water and bleeding a little could convince those hammerheads w
e had seen to pay us a visit.

  Pooster was scared for a moment there, and I was as well. We finally got up to a platform underneath the main one and secured one end of the ladder. Dropping the other end down to the rest of the guys, we leaned back for a moment.

  The first guy up the ladder was Cheeks, and he immediately lay down on a grating. Cheeks was so drained, he passed out right there. We still needed to continue with the op, but the situation was changing. The work crew on the rig was starting to get up for breakfast.

  Here we were in crappy-looking yellow underwear, wearing goggles and carrying stainless steel revolvers. Not exactly a sight you’d want to see right before eating. The revolvers had been carried at our hips in Bianchi pancake holsters, loaded with wax bullets for our training shoot.

  But we were all so dingy we could barely operate. In spite of that, we completed the exercise, trying to stay out of sight of the rig’s crew. We finished what we had started out to do, but only just. One lesson we learned was that you don’t plan a long swim without a recovery period. That, and we soon got some navigational aids to help us better estimate our distance from a target.

  You have to be fit to do an operation. If you overexert yourself just getting to the target, you won’t have anything left for the action. And if you can’t operate effectively, you can’t do anyone any good. That was an important lesson we had driven home on that op.

  That exercise on the Loop wasn’t the only time Pooster and I had a run-in with sharks in the Gulf. There was the exercise when Pooster and I swam out from underneath an oil rig and came up on some local fishermen in a boat.

  The fishermen called out to us, “Hey, what are you boys doing here? We’re chumming for sharks!”

  For those of you who don’t know the term, or never saw the movie Jaws, chumming is where they throw scraps, chopped meat, fish guts, and blood into the water to draw sharks in. The smell of the blood is usually enough to set off the sharks’ appetite and feeding behavior, which means they bite almost anything in the water: bait, fish, or SEALs.