CHAPTER 16
VISITING WITH THE GOVERNOR: DON’T SPIT ON THE FLOOR
We were expecting flat land with the occasional tree and branch to contend with on the insertion. What we found was a lot different. The ground directly below us slanted off at about a 45-degree gradient. This was a steep hillside, not a flat yard! To make matters worse, instead of the small trees and brush we expected, we had large ponderosa pines that towered above the ground with their heavy branches.
When I went down the rope, I found out just how heavy those pine branches were because I broke most of them on my insertion. My web gear and equipment absorbed most of the punishment, so I was all right when I got to the ground. My shooting partner managed to smack into and break whatever branches I missed. Duke and the other members of our Team followed closely behind us down the rope. When we hit the ground, most of us, myself included, started rolling down the hillside, finally stopping when we hit a tree or were blocked by a Teammate.
So much for our first combat insertion. The only good thing about the hillside was that it protected us from any fire that could have come from Fort Frederick or the house. A five-foot-high stone wall was up the hill between us and the house. Behind us was an east-west road that led off to town. The driveway moved in a shallow U shape between the wall and the house, roughly paralleling the main road. At either end of the driveway was an iron gate in a wrought-iron fence that surrounded the property. The fence was about seventy-five yards behind us and maybe a hundred yards from the mansion proper. We were inside the fence, between it and the house, close to the center of the driveway, when we first hit the ground.
Moving up to the stone wall, we quickly regrouped and set up security with the machine gunners—Timmy, Johnny, and Bubbaloo—out on the perimeter. Holding security with each other as we moved, we jumped up and got over the wall and began moving in toward the house. There was a paved area with steps going straight up to the house. To our right was a covered porch with two balconies above it. To our left was a long two-story house used for the servants and crew.
Up against the wall of the house with my shooting partner, I was looking at the porch and saw a door in the side underneath it move a little. The door looked like it might lead to a cellar or some other space under the porch, but that wasn’t important right then. Immediately I covered the door with my weapon. “Hey, Duke,” I called out. “We’ve got some company under the porch.”
“Okay, hold what you’ve got,” Duke said.
Just about then the door opened a bit and the barrel of an AK-47 poked out. “Here we go,” I thought. Clicking off the safety of my weapon, I switched over to full automatic and prepared to fire.
It was a very good thing that I didn’t fire right then. I give credit to our training and my own discipline. The weapon came out the door, but it wasn’t being held in a threatening manner. He had the rifle in one hand and the stock in the other, kind of like he was surrendering with it and just pushing the door open with the barrel. The man holding that AK was Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon, the man we had traveled so far and so fast to rescue.
“AK,” I told Duke. “He’s holding it out.”
Duke just walked up with his shotgun in his hand, took the AK-47, and spoke to Scoon: “Mr. Scoon. We’re U.S. Navy SEALs. We’re here to get you out. Is anyone else in there we should know about? Any more weapons?”
“No,” Scoon said. “Only my family and staff.”
“Okay,” Duke continued, turning to my partner and me. “Continue with the mission. Clear the rest of house.”
Going up into the main house, my partner and I set up to enter the first room. Instead of following all the procedures we had drilled with for months, we kicked in the door and dove into the room. Landing on our shoulders, we did a ninja-style shoulder roll, came up with our weapons at the ready, and swept the room with the muzzles, clearing out fields of fire. Nothing was there but the furniture.
If anyone had been in the room, we would have put on quite a show. That dive and roll bit was straight out of the movies, and the only reason we did it was that we were both too nervous to think. The two of us looked at each other and laughed. Then we got our shit together and continued clearing rooms the right way. Somewhere in there, I finally managed to dig that dry wad of dip out of my mouth.
There had been some footprints in that first room, leading out toward the back. Whoever they belonged to must have beat feet into the heavy bushes behind the house. Our second unit had inserted into the yard behind the mansion, fast-roping into the tennis court. Anyone coming out the back would be their concern.
It didn’t take long to realize we were the only people in the house. The footprints must have been from one of the people who had fired at us when the birds were coming in. Empty 7.62×39mm AK-47 brass told us which room the shots had come from. Apparently, while we had been kicking that first door in, the guards had bailed out and taken off.
Some of the guys from the front group had linked up with the guys who had inserted in the back and cleared the other side of the building at the same time. There were no threats in the mansion. All the problems that might come at us would be from the outside.
To ensure our security, Duke had us set up a perimeter from the house as well, covering the entire yard and the areas beyond. My shooting partner and I were joined by Pooster on a third-floor balcony. We had a good field of fire and could see much of the island around us.
Governor Scoon and his party were very glad to see us once they got over their initial shock, since we looked as much like a street gang as a military unit. My shooting partner was a good example, with his long hair mostly stuffed up under a red bandanna, his face camouflage of jagged lightning bolts, his wraparound silver sunglasses, and a camouflage jacket complete with several pin-on buttons of rock stars. I wonder what Scoon thought of the Adam Ant button on the uniform of one of his rescuers. The guy with the machine gun in one hand and the chain saw in the other also probably raised a few eyebrows.
Some incoming fire started up, just a shot or two from an AK-47 at first but then a constant few rounds. When some 85mm RPG-7 antitank rockets starting hitting the tile roof, that got our attention immediately. The first rockets must have come in at too shallow an angle to detonate the warhead. For the most part they just skipped off the roof and ricocheted away.
But one rocket went past the three of us, missed everyone along the way, and detonated deep inside the building, demolishing one of the sitting rooms. No one was hurt by the explosion, except maybe Lady Scoon in her concern for the house. This was a gorgeous old-style Victorian mansion furnished with French and English antiques. It was a nice place to look at, but we all felt like sitting ducks at that moment.
Duke must have felt the situation was a little exposed for the people we had come to rescue after that RPG went off. To protect Governor Scoon, his wife, and some nine other men, Duke moved them into the dining room since it was central in the house and the least exposed large room.
While there was a lull in the incoming, I looked over at my partner and noticed he had been badly cut at the elbow. I could see practically to the bone. In all the excitement of the action, he had never even noticed that he was hurt. I strapped a pressure bandage over the wound, which was about all I could do at the time. The wound didn’t bother him particularly, and we continued keeping a watch from our balcony.
Later on, back at a hospital, the doctors dug out a fragment from a 23mm cannon shell. Apparently my partner had been hit even before we reached the ground. Some stray fragments probably nailed him while he was leaning on the fast-rope frame in the door of the Blackhawk. At the time, my head had been only inches away from his elbow.
Up on the balcony, we were laughing with nervous tension. The rush of combat, the adrenaline, gave us a good taste of what had been going on with the older vets. You keep your head on straight and follow your training—that was what we had been told, and it proved to be true. But the rush of combat also gives you a
kind of ultra-alert high. You feel, hear, smell, and taste things with more clarity than at any other time in your life. At the same time, things that would normally slow you down if not stop you completely, like my partner’s wound, you don’t even notice.
We were supposed to arrive and leave fast, so we were running light in the way of weapons and equipment. Each of us had an MX-360 Motorola radio for communications among ourselves. For the longer-range commo with command, we had a 101 SATCOM radio. But in the confusion of coming in under fire, the SATCOM had been left on board the Blackhawk.
Lack of the SATCOM made our communications situation a bit tight. One of the guys came around and collected up all our spare batteries, and to save battery power, only one man of every shooting pair kept his radio on. You were normally within shouting distance of your partner anyway, so this wasn’t a problem.
Things quieted down for a while after the initial excitement. The RPGs weren’t coming in very often now, and we had a chance to consolidate our positions. Duke gave us strict orders not to challenge anyone unless they were in the compound proper. Everyone in our immediate vicinity had been accounted for, and our search of the house and grounds hadn’t found any stragglers. A ten-foot-wide stone sidewalk extended about 250 yards to another mansion on our northwest. We knew there were some people there, since we had taken gunfire from that house during the insertion.
From where we were on the second floor of the mansion, looking southwest, we could see the port at Saint George’s Harbor. Uphill to our southeast was Fort Frederick, where the majority of the antiaircraft fire was originating. A little closer than Fort Frederick and more to the east was Richmond Hill Prison where our Army counterparts and the Rangers were having a hard time of it. Down below us, toward the water, another bunch of antiaircraft fire was coming from a little fort. Behind Scoon’s mansion was a tennis court, and then another mansion some few hundred meters away.
So we kept a close eye on the pathway and the other house as well as the wrought-iron fence and two gates in front of the house.
One of the new weapons we had with us was a bowling-ball-sized rocket grenade you could fire from an M16. The weapon was called a RAW, for rifleman’s assault weapon, and it clipped on the front of an M16. To fire it you just pulled the safety pin and fired the rifle at the target. Firing the rifle launched the rocket, which carried three pounds of high explosive. This was about like firing a 90mm recoilless from the end of your rifle.
The RAWs were very new. We had only gotten them a few weeks before the op, and they looked pretty good. Only three of the new RAWs were with us; we had one, and the rest had gone with the second group to the radio station. We had all had a briefing on the RAW, but none of us had fired any except for the one SEAL in ordnance who had brought them to our attention.
We had several M72A2 LAWs (light antitank weapons), though, to give us some antiarmor capability. The LAW we had up on the balcony had taken some punishment during the fast-rope in and ended up a little bent. The fiberglass tube of the LAW is extended to fire. The rocket inside the LAW tube burns its fuel with a boom rather than a whoosh, all the fuel being spent before the rocket even leaves the three-foot-long tube. With the tube of our launcher bent, I wasn’t sure the rocket would even leave the tube if it was fired.
But we did have some additional weapons to fall back on. One of the snipers had a .50 caliber RAI 500 rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition. That rifle could take out a man at well over a thousand meters and give most light vehicles a very bad time as well. One of the machine gunners had an H&K 21 light machine gun instead of an M60. SEAL Team Six had a couple of the H&K 21s, and a few of the gunners preferred them over the M60. The differences between the two weapons were mostly technical. Both guns could be handled by one strong man like a big rifle. From a practical standpoint, the M60s and the H&K 21 fired the same ammunition from belts, and that was all that mattered.
We also had some M18A1 Claymore mines. The sightly curved plastic Claymore bodies held over a pound of C4 plastic explosive and seven hundred steel ball bearings. When fired, the mine would launch those steel balls in a wide swath, cutting down everything in front of it. Just to be sure anyone who used the mine knew which end was which, the manufacturer put “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY” in big raised plastic letters on the front of the mine. The rear of the mine says “BACK” just to be sure.
We had used some of the Claymores to cover the driveway and gates, putting them in front of several large trees and camouflaging the electrical firing wires that ran back to the security posts. A couple of the M60 machine guns had been set up below us on a second-floor balcony. Anything we couldn’t handle with our M4s would be covered by the M60s. Our security had been set up quickly, according to our training, but not so quickly that we were sloppy about anything.
It was still early in the morning. A little over four miles away to the southwest, we could see the Rangers jumping onto the Salines airstrip to capture it. Their parachute canopies were blocked from clear view by the black smoke of antiaircraft shells detonating in the sky. They were jumping so low they weren’t wearing reserve parachutes, because if their mains didn’t open they were too low to deploy a reserve before impact. These guys were getting shot from the sky and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do to help them.
Cobra helicopter gunships were flying right over us, turning and wheeling through the air, covering the Rangers and other U.S. forces. The 23mm antiaircraft fire was intense, and the inevitable happened. We saw two of the Cobras get hit and go down. My hat is off to the pilot of one of the birds. He dumped all his ordnance, ejecting it away rather than chance hitting his own troops. Then his stricken bird crashed into the bay, killing him.
A Marine CH-46 pilot came in to rescue the crew of the other shot-down Cobra, which had made it to the beach. The pilot of that big CH-46 did a perfect high-speed flare, tilting back as slowing down before landing very near the Cobra. A CH-46 has two large multiblade rotors both fore and aft on the fuselage. It can carry a hell of a lot of troops or a big heavy load but doesn’t maneuver all that well compared with the smaller birds. Most of us didn’t know a CH-46 could even do that maneuver, and that pilot may have wondered as well until he saw a fellow deep in the shit. The wounded pilot of the Cobra was picked up and carried to the CH-46 by that same great flier. He was wounded himself in the exchange by the Grenadians who were coming up on the downed Cobra to take out its crew.
We didn’t have much time to watch the action, though. There was some movement down by the iron fence near the gates. Three guys were walking up to the driveway. Two of them were in Cuban uniforms, one of them in civilian clothes, all of them carrying AK-47s. My Spanish wasn’t very good, but I knew how to shout “Alto!” (halt).
You could see the three men over the stone wall, through the few trees and scrub. When we yelled, their weapons came up. And that was the last mistake they made. Two M60 machine guns and at least three automatic rifles opened fire.
All our training shooting at each other with wax bullets had given us the edge. Those wax projectiles stung, and you learned fast. What you learned was target acquisition, accuracy, and speed on any individual you saw with a weapon. When we saw their weapons come up, the threat was there and the training took over.
The fire seemed to go on for at least a minute. Probably it was more like a few seconds. I suppose that we may have been a little more excited than we were during training. We seem to have put out a little more fire than usual. The foliage wasn’t blocking our view anymore. The storm of bullets cut a window through it. One guy tried to climb the fence but didn’t make it. He was almost cut in half by the M60s. I wasn’t sure if we had gotten all three, but we had a sign later that we probably had.
Three nurses in white uniforms and caps were walking down the road around an hour after the incident. Life goes on, even in the middle of a war. We were watching them when suddenly one stopped, looked at the side of the road, and clamped her hands over her mouth. The shredding that
7.62mm and 5.56mm bullets do to a human body is a little hard even on the strong stomachs of people in the medical professions.
Now, of all things, the phone rang inside the house. Governor Scoon picked it up. It was somebody checking to see if he was all right. The noise of our little firefight had probably gotten someone’s attention back in the city. When the governor was asked who he had with him, Duke said, “Tell them you have a battalion of Marines up here.” The governor relayed the message. We weren’t in a mood to trust anyone on the outside right then. Apparently the answer was sufficient, and the conversation ended.
In that short fire we put out, I had used about three magazines, and a couple of the other guys had used about the same. Now that bandoleer of extra ammunition came off my shoulder and we all started reloading our magazines. In just a few moments our loads were full again, which was more comfortable.
Very soon afterward we had other visitors at the gates. Two BTR-60PB eight-wheeled armored personnel carriers showed up, one at each gate. The BTR-60PB is a big angular steel box that carries a crew of two and up to fourteen armed troops. In a turret on top are two machine guns, a 7.62mm PKT, much the same as our M60 machine gun, and a very large 14.5mm KPV heavy machine gun. That large gun could send huge two-ounce slugs at us, traveling at over three thousand feet per second. It would literally chop its way through a target.
According to our very limited intel dump, there were only supposed to be four BTR-60PBs on the whole island. But when we asked Governor Scoon, he said there were more like twenty of the damned things rolling around. Now one of the BTRs sat on the road while the other started toward the gate.
One of the guys with the RAW must have decided to open fire on the BTR. The RAW rocketed off the end of his weapon and flew straight up into the air. We watched this high-tech ball of explosive fly up into the air and then come right back down. All we could say was “Holy shit!” as this bomb smacked into the front lawn. And there it lay, a big dud. For the rest of our stay at the governor’s mansion, we avoided that particular spot on the lawn. Lesson learned: Test your new weapons before going into combat.
One Perfect Op Page 15