We ended up cleaning that barracks three or four times before we could finally leave. The situation was so ridiculous it was funny. But we looked forward to the next time we hosted some Army guys up in our neck of the woods. Finally, by the middle of the afternoon, we could turn the building back over to them and leave.
There were Greyhound buses waiting to take us back to our compound. We stopped at the nearest Kmart and bought two trash cans, filled them with ice and beer, and were on our way back to Virginia Beach. We enjoyed ourselves, to say the least.
Back at our base in Virginia, I found out that I had been out of the Navy for a day and a half. My time in service had expired while we were isolated, and I had been officially a civilian during part of the Grenada operation.
Grenada wasn’t over yet. The SpecOps forces were trying to regroup, and the word was out that we might be sent back to the island to stand by on a contingency basis. A lot of stuff was going on right then, so Duke came up to me and asked if I was ready to go back down.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I’m ready to go back.”
“Well,” Duke continued, “you’re going to have to be back in the Navy to do that.”
Things were moving so fast, I hadn’t even taken the time to shower. My long hair was dirty, I still had the remainders of cammie paint on my face, and my uniform wasn’t quite up to inspection standards. Looking like a dirtbag, I followed Duke into Captain Gormly’s office, where he had everything set up and, I reenlisted in the Navy on the spot.
Now I was ready to return to Grenada for more action. We loaded out and were all set to go when the word came back to stand down. Some of the guys hadn’t liked their first taste of combat and were a little shaky about going right back.
Some of the older vets said this uneasiness had occurred every time a Team had first gone into action, back in Vietnam and probably well before that. I asked Duke about it and he told me, “Hey, that happens. Once they get back out, do some patrolling, and get a good indoctrination, then they’re back.” We weren’t in a position to do that right away, but things worked out for everyone eventually.
Personally, I was ready to go. I had proved to myself that this was what I wanted to do. Operating was something I would do at every opportunity that was offered. It was something I loved.
Back at the base, we had an award ceremony at our compound. We all wore three-piece suits rather than uniforms. That was quite a moment, though it led to a far more serious one. It was then that we started making arrangements for the memorial services for the four Teammates we had lost that first day.
These had been the first combat losses any SEAL Team had suffered since the end of the Vietnam War ten years earlier. Other SEALs, including members of our own Team, had been killed in training accidents, but that didn’t help when it came to our feelings about the four men lost in the waters off Grenada.
Losing Bob Schamberger hurt a lot, but losing the others was just as bad. Kenny Butcher had been one of the most easiest-going of guys. A little fireplug of a man when it came time to do his job, there wasn’t anyone better at it than Kenny. And he was very good at air operations.
Kevin Lundberg (Kodiak) had a bald head and a full red beard. People used to look at him and wonder. Not that he cared much what others thought. Kevin didn’t care for a lot of people. I first met him back on the West Coast and I don’t think he immediately liked me a whole hell of a lot. But things changed. Later, when I was dating Kitty, he would meet her and let her know when I was going to be late. And he made sure no one else took up Kitty’s time until I got there.
Steve Morris had been one of the newer members, joining SEAL Team Six shortly before the Grenada operation. I never got to know the man as well as I would have wanted; he was a very quiet guy. Steve was sturdy and built, but he didn’t talk much in the short time I was able to know him.
We gave those men, our brothers, a proper SEAL going away. Just like in the old tradition of the Teams when they were in Vietnam, we had a beer mess where we toasted our lost brothers. Funds were put together to care for the men’s families, especially the children. I believe a college fund was put together for Scham’s son, and he received Gracie, Scham’s Corvette, when he was old enough.
Some of the Team guys went to the homes of each of the men to attend their family services and show our respects. I went down to Florida and met Bob Schamberger’s parents. While there, I learned a bit more about Bob, saw the books he had grown up reading and the Purple Heart he had earned while in the Teams in Vietnam. It was good for me to be there, and Bob’s family was comforted by our being there, which also meant a lot.
About a year and a half after Grenada, the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek named a new barracks structure after one of our fallen. We were all in attendance when Schamberger Hall was dedicated. Bob would have liked that, no doubt about it.
CHAPTER 19
RED CELL AND A NEW MISSION
The year after the Grenada operation went down, I had a number of changes in my life and career. In January, Kitty and I got married. Then in the summer of 1984, I was offered another challenge by the same man who had brought me to SEAL Team Six in the first place. Dick Marcinko opened the door to several of us at the Team with an offer of a new position, new challenges, and a very new mission statement.
Vice Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy, and Operations, had directed Dick to design a unit to test the Navy’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Admiral Lyons well knew the dangers of terrorist attacks.
On April 18, 1983, an Islamic Jihad suicide truck bomb blasted the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. In the final body count, 241 Marines were killed along with 58 French Legionnaires. The U.S. military had taken steps to harden our sites to attacks like the one in Lebanon as well as to the more insidious terrorist hostage-taking and smaller bomb attacks.
Admiral Lyons wanted Marcinko to test the effectiveness of those measures and to prevent further attacks. To do this, Marcinko officially created OP-06D, the Naval Security Coordination Team, which we all called simply Red Cell.
The name Red Cell came about in part because it was being set up much like a terrorist cell. It would be a very small unit of men, smaller than an Army platoon, and pretty much autonomous in its actions. It would report to a very limited chain of command with only a few steps between an operator in the unit and the chief of naval operations himself. Because the color for the highest level of alert status was red, that became part of the name.
Dick had come back to his old command at SEAL Team Six to gather the kind of men he wanted in the new unit. He was looking for volunteers. A number of us interviewed with Dick, and he told us what would be expected of us and what we would do. The interviews were different this time only in that Dick already knew all of us and we knew him. So this time, instead of knocking us off balance by his staccato questions, he already knew how we would act and answered our questions instead.
We would be testing security at Navy facilities around the United States and throughout the world. There was beginning to be great concern about terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. So we would test sites that held some of the Navy’s most secret materials to make sure neither a device nor the materials to make one could be stolen.
The new assignment was going to be a different one, and it sounded like an exciting ride. A lot of traveling would be required as well as a lot of new training. I really liked where I was and what I was doing, but this had a lot of appeal to me. In a heart-to-heart meeting, I told Bob Gormly that I was thinking about the assignment.
Dick Marcinko and Bob Gormly had butted heads a bit during the change of command at SEAL Team Six, but I didn’t think that was due to any personal problems between the two men. It was more that they both saw the problems that had to be addressed and had different styles of leadership to get the job done. Captain Gormly told me something that made me feel pretty good about the whole thin
g.
“Denny,” Bob said, “no, I don’t want anyone to go, and yes, I don’t want you to leave the command. But I will not hold your going against you. If you feel a little devoted to—”
“It’s not that I feel devoted,” I interrupted. “I think it’s an opportunity to expand on what I’ve done here. Hopefully, I can eventually come back and bring those skills with me.”
“If you decide to go,” Bob continued, “and you don’t like it up there, I don’t care if it’s a week, three months, four months, or six months, you give me a call and you’ll have orders directly back here.”
That made me feel really good. It had been a hard decision to make, but I made it. And a number of others had made the same choice. Pooster joined me on the move as well as a bunch of our Teammates. We were all going to join the Old Man and his new unit up in Washington, D.C.
Pooster and I went up to D.C. to get settled in. Kitty stayed in Virginia Beach to pack up the household and come up later. D.C. was only a four-hour drive or so from Virginia Beach, so the separation wasn’t as bad as for some Navy families. We all stayed in a civilian hotel while looking for our own places to live.
Johnny Johnson had come up from Little Creek to visit us at Red Cell. Soon after his arrival, we had a get-together in the lounge at the Marriott in Arlington. It was a big room, with tiered seating going up from a wooden dance floor. Brass rails separated the tiers, and a wooden rail topped with brass surrounded the dance floor itself. Out on the dance floor was Pooster, and he managed to get into a hassle with somebody. Punches were thrown, and Pooster probably would have come out the better for it if he hadn’t missed with his second swing and nailed the brass rail with his fist.
Kitty and the Old Man were sitting on an upper level watching the floor show. Down on the dance floor, I was backing up Pooster and had a hold on the guy who had been fighting with him. While I was holding the guy on the floor, I could see Pooster’s boot coming in from the side. This wasn’t something I wanted to be meeting, so I turned my head out of the way and Pooster nailed the guy on the floor.
Now things were growing fast. The guy on the floor wasn’t going to be bothering us, but he had a number of friends in the immediate vicinity. They decided that picking a fight with Johnny Johnson might be a good way of introducing themselves. Since Johnny had boxed on the All-Navy team earlier in his career, this wasn’t the smartest choice they could have made.
Bouncing lightly on his feet, Johnny was making short jabs at anyone who cared to mix it up with him. He’d nail somebody, and the rest of us would watch the guy fall down. Duke was busy himself, and he learned a valuable lesson about clothes. Duke was holding one guy and grabbing at another when somebody came up and grabbed him by the tie. Duke’s head was pulled back, but he managed to deal with the situation quickly. Another lesson learned, this one on the value of a breakaway tie.
The guy who originally picked the fight with Pooster held some position with the hotel. After that evening, we learned that he no longer held the same job. But after we had tossed him out, he decided to return. This time he brought along a fire extinguisher, with the intention of hosing us all down with it. That didn’t work too well. We held him down and took his little toy away. Then hotel security came up and took the guy away, and the fight was over.
But the evening was far from finished. Johnny had a bad cough. He was a heavy smoker, and he used to hold his hand to his chest when he had a bad episode. After the fight, we decided to go out and get something to eat at a local Denny’s. I thought Johnny looked a little beat. His cough was acting up, and the fight seemed to have gotten to him. Maybe he had taken a blow when none of us saw it. I asked him if he wanted me to drive him, but he turned me down.
Saying he was okay, Johnny climbed into his own car and joined our little motorcade. As we were traveling along to the Denny’s, Johnny cut off and started back to the hotel where we were all staying. Looking back, I figured Johnny was just tired and had decided to turn in for the evening.
On his way back to the hotel, Johnny Johnson suffered a heart attack and died. We had lost one of our own to something none of us saw coming. Purdue, Pooster, and others joined the rest of his Teammates in escorting the body to Johnny’s home town in Oregon. We held a wake for Johnny down south at SEAL Team Six. It just went to prove to some of us that you can never take anything for granted. But to go out after a good time with a bunch of your friends isn’t a bad way to leave.
Even without Johnny, we had to continue on with our mission, and finding our own living quarters was part of it. The first place Pooster and I could find was on Duke Street in Alexandria, a Virginia suburb of D.C. The place would have been too expensive for just Kitty and myself, but it was big enough so that splitting the space and the rent with Pooster made it affordable. We had one whole corner of the building and it worked out well for all of us.
There was a nice little pub, Shooter McGee’s, which we all just called Shooter’s, across the street from our penthouse apartment. Shooter’s quickly became the unofficial second home and meeting place for Red Cell. Many of the guys that we dealt with regularly from the rest of the Special Operations community also dropped by our watering hole.
The new official home for Red Cell was in the E-ring at the Pentagon. It was a little room, secured with a combination-lock steel door, more like a vault than an office. At the beginning there were only four of us—Don Hubbard, Truck, Pooster, and myself—working at the Pentagon, but right behind us came Ho Ho, Knobber (who had reenlisted in order to come up to Red Cell), Sundance, and Butch Cassidy. Stevie Wonder, whom the Old Man had met during his time at the Washington Navy Yard, an ex-Marine with more than a little experience behind him, also came on board.
Eventually we were eleven enlisted men and three officers, but we didn’t look like any military unit anyone had ever seen. We held to our relaxed grooming standards, and the long hair, mustaches, and beards did tend to stand out a bit at the Pentagon.
Our uniforms were different too. Slacks and mostly pullover shirts were as close to the uniform of the day as we wore at the beginning of our time on the E-ring. But a lot of eyes would look at us as we walked up to our office on the ring, and that was more attention than we wanted. Red Cell was a very classified operation. We couldn’t do the job we were tasked with if people knew who we were. Slacks and a collared shirt became our regular outfit, and maybe a tie as well. But for a long time, the dress code at Red Cell was relaxed. Even jeans were worn. We were a lot more concerned with getting the unit together and following the Old Man’s mission statement than with following anyone else’s personal dress code.
Our goal was to test Navy facilities in the most realistic manner commensurate with safety. After a test penetration—a hit—on a facility, we would go back and survey everything we had done. It was only by showing them how we had done something that the security could be improved to prevent it from happening again. We also had the personal security of admirals, naval commanders in chief (CinCs—pronounced “sinks”), and other important or highly visible people to consider. These people could be a target on their respective bases or in a motorcade far from a government facility.
Prior to conducting any scenario, we would study the different terrorist groups that were interested in the area, or a specific group that might come to a new area and target a site. Once we had an idea of the terrorist groups that could be involved, we would adopt their known methods of operation and techniques. Making case studies of different groups was something we did almost constantly.
It was a number of months before Red Cell was fully operational to Dick Marcinko’s, and our, satisfaction. It was at least four months before we did our first real exercise. In the meantime, we had been building up our intel and equipment levels.
Heckler and Koch showed us the latest in firearms, and the basement range at their Chantilly, Virginia, facility was where we kept up our pistol and submachine gun qualifications. We incorporated Bill Scott’s Racing Schoo
l into our defensive driving profile. Defensive driving was not only something we could use in beating pursuit, it was also something we could recommend for drivers of those same high-ranked individuals we targeted.
We needed to learn how motorcades worked, how barricades could be breached, and what you could and couldn’t expect to do with a vehicle. The training was a challenge, and thrilling. Racing around a track at ninety miles an hour will get anyone’s blood pumping faster. But then learning how to take that same car at speed and drift it sideways, or spin it 180 degrees and head it the other way, that brings out a whole new level of excitement.
We learned about ramming, both how to do it and how to survive it. And we held competitions between ourselves to see who was picking up the material the fastest and the best. Distance races might not seem so interesting, but they are when you’re learning how far you can drive a car without its tires, just on the rims.
Jerry Smith ran the defensive driving program at the school. He had worked with a number of other government agencies, such as the State Department, teaching them the skills we wanted to learn. Working with Jerry and the other people at the school was very rewarding. We became good friends and even helped his facilities with our training. Building a range on his site, we were able not only to practice ourselves but to extend the training he could offer.
We also put together an obstacle course for physical training. That wasn’t our most popular construction project. It wasn’t having an O-course available for us that was a bother; we were looking forward to that. But the fact that almost every one of us came down with poison ivy after working in a field full of it was less than fun.
We all completed both the driving course and the instructor’s course. By working as instructors for the State Department guys at the school, we helped them and got better ourselves. There are few better ways to learn something than to teach it.
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