One Perfect Op

by Dennis Chalker

  Pooster and I quickly decided that we should practice our climbing techniques. Since we had become adept at our job, we moved out of the water quickly and worked from the first platform instead. And we were particularly careful not to fall back into the water.

  CHAPTER 12

  A DRY SPELL

  There were also training trips where we didn’t get wet at all. While out west for some parachute training, Duke asked me to see about setting up an E & E (escape and evasion) course for the desert. Researching what might be available, I met Dave Gancy in Arizona. He was a professor at Arizona State who was known as a desert survivalist. He had lived with the Indians, and he ran desert marathons.

  When I met Gancy, it was pretty obvious this guy knew what he was talking about, and he was willing to pass on some of his knowledge. Arriving on site in a barren chunk of the desert, we broke up Assault Group One into two units, each doing a different course of training. I was in the first group, and we went north to work with Dave on a five-day, four-night desert trek.

  Before we even started out, we broke the group down even further to a number of eight-man teams for the trek itself. This wasn’t going to be the most comfortable walk I had ever taken. We were starting out light, no food and only a quart of water each. But we had emergency supplies with us in the way of first aid gear, communications, and even IV packs for the corpsman to treat severe dehydration cases.

  Just like a regular military patrol, each group had its own maps and routes with checkpoints along the way. We had to touch at each one of these checkpoints, most of which were supposed to have a source of water of one kind or another.

  The first day we found the checkpoint without a lot of trouble. We had been out of water for about an hour, so we were getting a little thirsty. The checkpoint turned out to be a pipe coming up out of the ground with water dripping from it. It took half an hour to fill one canteen. But while the canteens were filling, we were sweating and losing even more water. And just to add some of nature’s little irritations to the mix, there were small bees all around the pipe, and us. The insects were living on the moisture around the pipe, whether it was the dripping water or our sweat, they didn’t care. While we were suffering through the situation, I talked to Dave Gancy about what more we could expect on our walk.

  Before the exercise began, we had a safety briefing concerning what we might encounter. Emergency procedures, medevac of the injured, water conservation, and desert survival techniques were all covered. The lectures took a whole day, with a number of speakers, military and civilian, giving us different information.

  One of the things we talked about was rattlesnakes. I remembered that run-in with a rattler back when I was in Kilo Platoon. But Dave told me not to expect much. He said his last class had gone though the same area without seeing any snakes at all. He thought we’d be lucky to see maybe one.

  So here we are at the first stop, and Toad finds a little cove, kind of a miniature canyon in the rock, with walls about ten feet high. There was shade, and the area looked cool and smooth, so Toad just walked in and sat down. The shade would help his body conserve water while we were all getting our canteens filled.

  When Toad took his seat, he just stopped moving. A few minutes later, we looked over at him and called out, “Hey, Toad! Do you want to fill your canteen or what?” He didn’t answer loudly at all.

  It was hot and we were all sweating, but Toad seemed to have an extra layer of sweat all over him. Looking over, we could see a rattler curled up right behind his ass, softly rattling every now and then. The snake was calm, but it did look ready to change its mind in a heartbeat. Toad had heard the rattle and froze, figuring that if he even spoke out loud, the snake might strike.

  “Hey, Dave,” one of the guys called out. “We’ve got kind of a situation over here.”

  It only took one look at what was going on for Dave to step in and take charge. First he told all of us to relax and back away. Then, working his way in closer to see the snake clearly, Dave entered the canyon himself and started to talk Toad out of his predicament.

  Dave had Toad sit up straight and then very gradually stand up. All the time Toad was moving, Dave was watching the snake. When the snake reacted or buzzed a bit, Dave had Toad freeze. When the snake calmed back down, Toad would move some more. It must have taken about fifteen minutes for Toad to stand up and get out of the little canyon. It was obvious that Dave knew what he was doing and had been around these kinds of snakes a lot.

  Once Toad was in the clear, like all good SEALs and frogmen, we wanted to look at the snake, but Dave had a better idea, and we all just left the snake alone. Toad was relieved to have gotten out of that situation with his ass intact, literally.

  After having drunk our fill, we continued on the course. There were two very different ways of getting to Point B from where we were. The first way as the crow flies: climbing straight up and over about a 2,000-foot mountain. The other was around the base of the mountain, which would take a lot longer.

  Our group decided to go over the mountain. As we climbed, everyone started to get dehydrated again. At the top of the mountain, we expected to find a cache site with water in it within an easy walk. We were wrong.

  On the other side of that mountain was a ravine that looked like the Grand Canyon. It was on the far side of that ravine that we would find our next marker and the cache site. Now we had to go down the mountain, into the ravine, and back up the other side. It was starting to get dark by the time we got to the bottom and were traversing the ravine.

  One of the other groups had taken the other route and gone around the base of the mountain, and they got through the ravine and to the site about four hours before we showed up. It was about 2100 or 2200 hours when we arrived at Point B.

  Now we were really thirsty and looked for the cache site. The guy who met us there showed us the cache and what was waiting there. Instead of a source of water, we found a bunch of one-liter bottles marked “poison water.” What was in the bottles was a mixture of half water and half beer.

  The bottles were to simulate finding bad water. In real life, bad water could be poison or contaminated. If you got sick from the water and had diarrhea, losing that amount of moisture from your body could kill you fast. After being out in the desert, drinking that beer-water mix would relieve your thirst for a moment, but then you’d have alcohol in your system. As the body burned up the alcohol, it would use up the water in your tissues and dehydrate you worse than if you hadn’t drunk anything at all.

  A couple of the guys just said to hell with it and drank the bad water anyway. I know Kodiak was one of them, and there were several more. By the next morning, people were starting to get really dehydrated and tightening up.

  By the time we were back on our compass course and headed on to the next point, one of our guys who had drunk the bad water was in physical danger. The dehydrated man was evacuated out of the exercise for a while. The corpsmen treated him, and he was back with us before long. But we continued with our cross-desert trek.

  The next point had a well, a deep hole in the ground. Using 550 (parachute) cord, we could lower our canteen cups down into the fifty-foot-deep well and fill them about half full. Gradually we filled the canteens and had our water, so everyone was happy for the moment.

  One of the things we were learning on this trip was to tank up whenever we found a water source. Tanking up was drinking your fill, until you felt you couldn’t take another drop. Then you drank about a quart more. You got a little bloated in the belly, but the large amount of water hydrated your tissues. This way you built up a bit of a bank for when you were next on your way to dehydration.

  We spent the night at the well site and were all freshened up the next morning when we started off again. Daylight was just breaking as we began moving along, and now we were entering a more severe desert environment.

  Instead of more open country, we were walking along a dry riverbed. At turns in the riverbed, you could find shady spots
where the ground was dark. In those places, we were told, you might be able to find water soaked into the ground.

  When we found these dark spots, we dug in. And we never found any water. One of the guides, who could have been an ex-Army guy, was one of Dave Gancy’s best friends and had helped him set up the course. While we were looking for the cache site, trying to find water, this guy was on a ridge line about five hundred feet away from us. Putting his hands on his hips, this guy called down to us, “So you were told there was water here, huh? Looks like you’ve been screwed.”

  It was probably for the best that he never heard Kodiak’s comment. Looking up at the ridge line, Kodiak growled, “I’m going to kill that motherfucker!”

  He probably would have too and eaten him afterward. We were all getting pretty dehydrated now. The IV bags in the medical kits were starting to look pretty good. But they were not “officially” part of our equipment. They were part of the emergency gear to be used only in case of an accident.

  The next point we had to hit to get any water was a place called “the deserted ranch.” At the ranch was supposed to be a well site. When we finally got there, we found a little pipe sticking up from the ground.

  Water came out of the pipe, but that didn’t mean it was any good. With our survival gear, we each had these little filter straws that let you purify the water as you drew it though the straw. Sucking the water through the straws, we found a heavy sulfur content that the filters did little to eliminate.

  But water was where you found it and we used what was available. We had little pump rigs that would draw water through the straws and fill the canteens. So we pumped away to get the water we wanted so badly. The stuff still tasted like shit, but it was wet. I had brought some Tang powdered orange drink just in case we ran into unpalatable water. Mixing the Tang in my canteen, I found it still tasted like shit, only orange flavored.

  When we had all filled our canteens, we decided on our next move. It was the middle of the day in the desert, not the best time to go traveling. We had a ready water supply and some scattered shade. We decided to spend the day at the well, tank up, and continue on when it got cooler toward nightfall.

  Setting up a little bivouac, we found what shade we could. Staying in groups of two, we lay up for the balance of the day. When night fell, off we went. That night we reached our link-up point, where all the groups would come together. Now we were bordering a state park near an Indian reservation. With the whole group together, we moved on to the last watering site.

  Tanking up again, we filled our canteens and then moved out. On this final part of the course, Dave was leading us himself and he would break us off in pairs as we passed points known only to him. We would camp out that night, then complete the last leg of the course into the state park on our own the next morning.

  As we walked along a dry creek bed, we came across rattlesnakes three different times. The snakes were lying across the creek bed, absorbing the last bit of heat from the day. Amazingly enough, not one person in our patrol stepped on a snake. It was getting dark, and the snakes looked like small logs or branches. But it wasn’t until one of the people toward the back of the patrol shouted, “Holy shit!” that the “logs” curled up and started rattling.

  So as we walked along, dodging snakes, Dave dropped us off. The spot where I was left with my partner looked a little bit like heaven might. Here we were in the middle of the desert, and there was a barbed wire fence. Near the fence was this square patch of green grass, maybe twenty-five square feet of sod, like someone had laid a carpet down. Desert grass or whatever it was, it was soft and appealing. That was going to be my bed, I decided, and lay down looking up at the stars.

  There was a moon shining a silver-gray light across the desert. The stars were brilliant, and there were more of them than you can ever see anywhere near a city. I had my water, was close to the end of the exercise, and just felt good. It was really something to be out there in the desert on your own like that.

  It was about 0100 hours in the morning when I lay down. The last instructions Dave had given us were for the next day. In the morning, a shotgun blast would be the signal for us to start the last leg of our compass course. We would get up at the sound of the shot and start out on the heading we had been given. The path would take us into the state park.

  In the morning, we all moved out. Gradually guys would link up as their paths crossed. The course was only about two hours long, so it wasn’t any big final push. There wasn’t much question of when we had hit the park. When we came up on a paved road, we followed the road and soon reached our last point.

  Now we finally had the chance to get into some water. There was a river, and we could soak a bit. We hadn’t eaten in five days, but right then the water was a lot more important. We probably looked more like a bunch of walruses than SEALs, everyone splashing in the water, letting it run off them, and generally tanking up. Later we went up to Pinnacle Pete’s, a local steak house, to get our first full meal in a while.

  We were told to tank up on water first, from a source that was right outside the restaurant. Since we had been so dehydrated, Dave told us, even one or two beers would be enough to put us right on the ground. A couple of the guys didn’t believe him. Purdue and another Teammate even went so far as to have a shot of red-eye; since we were out west, they considered it a tradition.

  Those old Western movies have it wrong. No one would come in off the desert, walk into a saloon, and have a belt of whiskey. Actually, Purdue and his partner were kind of interesting to watch. It wasn’t more than two minutes after they had their shot that they wavered a bit, and then pitched right over.

  None of us drank after Purdue’s example, but Dave still had designated drivers for us all.

  CHAPTER 13

  A NEW GROUP AND SOME OTHER CHANGES

  By the spring of 1983, it had been decided that a third assault group was needed to better fulfill our tasking. Our training pulled guys in and out of the area a lot. A third group would let us have a longer break between the standby group that had to remain in town and the training group that could leave the area for more distant schools.

  Some of the people for the new group would be taken from the two existing groups, but the balance of the manpower was going to be brought up from the rest of the Teams. This was going to increase the manning at SEAL Team Six by a third.

  Volunteers from Six were sought to start filling out the new group. The opportunity to form a new group was enticing, but most of us were reluctant to leave the positions we already held. The chiefs came down to talk to us. They wanted a good half-and-half mix from the old groups to make up the new one. There had always been a good-natured rivalry between the two assault groups, just as there had always been between the different squads in each group. But this would be for the betterment of the Team as a whole.

  I volunteered for the new group. Duke became the first leader of what was now Assault Group Three, and Ho Ho became the group chief. There were two squads that had come over intact from groups one and two, and two that were mixed and hadn’t operated with each other before. To build up some fast squad integrity, we came up with nicknames for our units. First Squad, where I was, we called the Bros. The unity formed up fast, and it wasn’t long before we were as tight as we had been in our last squad.

  One of the other squads was made up of a lot of guys with Latino backgrounds, so they picked up the name Los Hombres. Another squad tried to name themselves the Heat, but we kept calling them the Meat, and that’s what stuck. The last squad was one of the mixed ones, so we called them the Spare Parts, which they didn’t think a whole hell of a lot of, but that’s the name that stuck.

  A few years had passed now since Six had been formed, and concerns were coming down the pike about money and expenses. The Skipper ran too loose a ship to satisfy the Navy bean counters, and they didn’t like some of the expenditures that had been made. Everything we had was for a reason, but we weren’t explaining those reasons to an
yone who wasn’t in the direct chain of command and probably few enough of them. Top-of-the-line guns, electronics, munitions, and equipment were never too good for the mission, at least not according to the Skipper.

  Time was also forcing changes at Six. The Skipper put in for an extension so that he could remain the commanding officer of SEAL Team Six. But the Navy has its own set of rules regarding commanding officer rotations. The Skipper had been at the helm of Six for three years. The Navy considers a two-year command tour sufficient for most officers.

  So Dick’s time was up for his tour at Six. None of us wanted to see him go, but rotating command was one of the things officers had to do. That was one of the advantages of being a petty officer or a chief: you could spend most of your career in a single command. That wasn’t the case for officers, and Dick came under that rule.

  Dick’s rough way of dealing with anyone not directly involved with his Team or mission also burned a few bridges behind him. He just didn’t have enough pull to beat the Navy rules. It was time for him to go and another officer to step up to the command.

  There were mixed feeling among the men about the Skipper leaving. He had built the unit, selected us, trained us, and saw to it we had what we needed to get the job done. He had rubbed some people the wrong way, but he had always stood behind his men.

  Dick was the kind of leader who always made sure his men and his command were taken care of first. He asked for everything that we could give, plus some more. But he also made sure that we had absolutely every bit of help that was in his power to give us. The style of command that Dick used was a lot different from that of any other officers I had known. It was almost like he was playing Lee Marvin’s character in the movie The Dirty Dozen. To get the mission done, he fought against the established Navy way of doing things. He put his trust in all of us because he knew we were the ones who were crawling through the ditches, getting down in the mud, and pulling the triggers. He made us feel that we had more input in how things would be done than any other people. And he was also the man who made it all start to happen.