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By Richard Marcinko
VIOLENCE OF ACTION
By Richard Marcinko and Jim DeFelice
VENGEANCE
By Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
DETACHMENT BRAVO
ECHO PLATOON
OPTION DELTA
SEAL FORCE ALPHA
DESIGNATION GOLD
TASK FORCE BLUE
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RED CELL
ROGUE WARRIOR
“Outstanding … a short course in special operations techniques and weapons.”
—Col. Calvin G. Bass, USAG [Ret.], Tulsa World (OK)
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THE ROGUE WARRIOR’S STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS
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“Riveting, suspenseful and tragic, ROGUE WARRIOR explodes like a hand grenade … a must read. Dick Marcinko is the last of a breed of salty, bigger-than-life characters, and his story is filled with special people who have special courage and spirit. ROGUE WARRIOR is a fascinating book—holds the reader like a vise.”
—Colonel David H. Hackworth, USA (Ret.), bestselling author of ABOUT FACE: The Odyssey of an American Warrior
“Marcinko makes The Terminator look like Tiny Tim….”
—Virginian Pilot and Ledger Star
“ROGUE WARRIOR [moves at] breakneck speed with the punch of a thriller…. You’ll learn more about SEAL Team Six than you’ll get from any Top Secret Pentagon briefing….”
—Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense
VIETNAM, 1968: Leader of a SEAL platoon, Marcinko became an expert at guerrilla war. When the Viet Cong overran Chau Doc, he and his men defied a spit-and-polish colonel’s orders and fought street to street, house to house, to rescue trapped civilian women….
CAMBODIA, 1973: Marcinko was training Cambodian Navy officers when the trainees disappeared, leaving him floating in a river above forty pounds of C-3 explosive rigged to explode—with Khmer Rouge gunners shooting at him from both shores….
A Military Book Club Main Selection
“Marcinko’s ornery and joyous aggression … brought him to grief and to brilliance in war…. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare … are galvanic, detailed, and told with a rare craftsman’s love … profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Richard Marcinko’s bestselling autobiography reads like the plots for about six Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone movies.”
—Sacramento Bee
“Marcinko recounts his life story with a two-fisted, in-your-face style, liberally sprinkled with profanity, rough humor, braggadocio, and violence both on and off the battlefield…. Despite, or perhaps because of, a personality that could abrade the paint off a battleship, he’s a fascinating man with a compelling tale to tell.”
—Booklist
WASHINGTON, D.C., 1980: In a Special Classified Intelligence Facility in the Pentagon, Marcinko and others listened helplessly as Delta Force commandos attempted the ill-fated rescue of the American hostages in Iran….
VIEQUES ISLAND, 1981: Nineteen thousand feet above the Caribbean island, Marcinko’s first parachute failed. His backup chute collapsed too. He was spiraling wildly in the blackness toward a target he believed held armed terrorists, a hostage, and a hijacked nuclear weapon….
“One of the first real peeks inside SEAL Team Six.”
—San Diego Union
“Special-warfare devotees will find ROGUE WARRIOR to their liking…. Marcinko’s anti-authoritarian behavior, as he improvises his own doctrine of unconventional warfare, makes for entertaining reading.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Marcinko was too loose a cannon for the U.S. Navy…. ROGUE WARRIOR is not a book for the faint of heart.”
—People
THE NORTH SEA, 1982: In freezing water with waves that flipped Boston whalers like pancakes, Marcinko led SEAL Team Six and German GSG-9 commandos in an anti-terrorist training exercise, storming an ice-encrusted oil rig….
CALIFORNIA, 1985: Marcinko and his Red Cell team staged a successful mock-attack on Air Force One, outwitting the Secret Service, a special SWAT team, an Air Force security detail, the FBI, Marine guards, Navy Security sweeps, Department of Defense police, local rent-a-cops, and the Point Mugu Naval Air Station’s fire department….
The Rogue Warrior® series by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman
Rogue Warrior
Rogue Warrior: Red Cell
Rogue Warrior: Green Team
Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue
Rogue Warrior: Designation Gold
Rogue Warrior: SEAL Force Alpha
Rogue Warrior: Option Delta
Rogue Warrior: Echo Platoon
Rogue Warrior: Detachment Bravo
Also by Richard Marcinko
Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior
The Rogue Warrior’s Success Strategies
The Real Team
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Blood Cries
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The Best American Mystery Stories of 1997 (edited by Robert B. Parker)
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ROGUE WARRIOR®
RICHARD MARCINKO
with
John Weisman
POCKET BOOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1992 by Richard Marcinko
Foreword copyright © 1992 by John Weisman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this hook or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN -13: 978-0-671-79593-1
eISBN -13: 978-1-4391-8-7838
ISBN -10: 0-671-79593-7
First Pocket Books paperback printing March 1993
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
ROGUE WARRIOR is a registered trademark of Richard Marcinko
Cover photo by Roger Foley
Printed in the U.S.A.
To the shooters—who have been, and always will be
To avoid compromising special operations sources and methods, certain names, locations, and time frames have been modified. Tactical details and chronological sequences have also been altered so as not to betray current SpecWar techniques.
It’s not the critic who counts…. The credit belongs to the man who actually is in the arena, who strives violently, who errs and comes
up short again and again … who if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement, but who if he fails, fails while daring greatly.
—Theodore Roosevelt
If we weren’t crazy, we’d all be insane.
—Jimmy Buffett
Contents
Foreword
Part One: Geek
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two: Unodir
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Glossary
Index
Foreword
IN THE HISTORY OF THE U.S. NAVY THERE HAS NEVER BEEN an unconventional warrior quite so unconventional as Dick Marcinko.
Perhaps the best indication of his capabilities was that in August 1980, at the age of thirty-nine, Marcinko, then a commander, was picked by the Chief of Naval Operations, Thomas Hayward, to design, build, equip, train, and lead what many believe to be the best counterterror force in the world, SEAL Team Six.
His route to the command of Six was circuitous. A renegade high-school dropout from a broken home in the Pennsylvania coal fields, Marcinko made the Navy his career and special warfare his obsession. As a gung-ho young SEAL officer in Vietnam, he operated behind enemy lines. While others dug in behind barbed wire and sandbags, Marcinko and his platoon—in black pajamas and barefoot, using captured Soviet weapons and ammo—hunted the Viet Cong deep inside their own turf.
During one six-month period, Marcinko’s SEALs performed an incredible 107 combat patrols, with more than 150 confirmed VC killed and 84 captured. During two tours in Vietnam, Marcinko won the Silver Star, four Bronze Stars with Combat “V,” two Navy Commendation Medals, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star. As a Naval attachè in Cambodia in 1973 and 1974, Marcinko’s exploits included body-surfing behind a patrol boat on the Mekong River during a Khmer Rouge ambush. He spent 291 days in combat in Cambodia, and was awarded the Legion of Merit for his actions.
The Navy was Dick Marcinko’s life. It gave him an education—a high-school diploma, a B.A., even a master’s in international relations. It also gave him a deadly trade: unconventional warrior. Ambushes, booby traps, exotic weapons, high-altitude parachute drops, underwater infiltrations—Marcinko is a virtuoso of them all.
The day he assumed command of SEAL Team Six, CNO Hayward’s orders to Marcinko were brief—almost to the point of curtness. He was told he had less than six months to bring the new unit “on line.” He was ordered to get the job done, whatever the personal or professional cost. “Dick, you will not fail,” is what Hayward said.
To achieve that goal, Marcinko rewrote the rule book on unconventional warfare, and its training. He cut corners. He stepped on toes. He wheedled and cajoled. He threatened—and occasionally he terrorized. His sin was that he believed the end was worth the means; his hubris, that he thought he could get away with it.
Indeed, if we’re talking heroic here about Dick Marcinko (and I believe we should be), he is heroic in the classic sense of the word: Dick’s warrior hubris was too much for some of the Pentagon’s Olympians, and so a few Navy technocrat “gods” brought him down as an example to others.
The specific tragic flaw that caused Marcinko’s fall was one of his most gallant qualities: loyalty. His loyalties always lay with the men under his command, rather than with the Navy system of which he was a part.
Marcinko has never been reluctant to admit as much. Soon after we met, I asked him if the litany of transgressions against the system the Navy accused him of committing were true.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Guilty as charged. Guilty of preaching unit integrity above other values. Guilty of putting my men before bureaucratic bullshit. Guilty of spending as much money as I can get my hands on to train my men properly. Guilty of preparing my men for war instead of peace. Of all these things am I indeed guilty. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima fucking culpa.”
Dick Marcinko’s story is as exciting as any piece of fiction—but it is more than that. It is the provocative chronicle of an American hero—a warrior whose legacies still live on, through the men he trained, and led, and inspired.
—John Weisman
Chevy Chase, MD
October 1991
Part One
GEEK
Chapter 1
January 1981
IT WAS A BIG FIRST STEP—NINETEEN THOUSAND FEET BETWEEN the soles of my boots and the scrubby jungle—but I didn’t have time to think about that. The green light was on and the jumpmaster was pointing vaguely in my direction, so I blew a polite kiss at him and went out for a walk—took a stroll off the deep end of the C-130’s greasy ramp and dove into the nighttime sky. Just the way I’d done it more than a thousand times before.
The ice-cold slipstream punched at me as the blacked-out plane disappeared overhead. I looked down. Nothing. Almost four miles to the ground—too far to see anything yet, or for anyone down there to have heard the plane.
I looked around me. Zippo. What had I expected? To see my men? That would be impossible, too, of course. We were showing no lights, carried nothing reflective, and were all dressed in dark camouflage tiger stripes, invisible in the blackness above our objective, Vieques Island, in the Caribbean far below.
I clenched my fist and tucked my elbow in silent triumph. Yes! Right on! The first eight seconds of this operation had gone absolutely perfectly. So far, we were ahead of the curve. I checked the altimeter on my wrist then pulled the rip cord. I sensed my chute slip out of the backpack and felt it separate.
I was yanked skyward by the harness in the bungee-cord way you’re always bounced by a chute. Then all of a sudden I veered sharply to my right and began to spiral wildly, uncontrollably, toward the ground.
So much for perfection. I looked up. One of the cells of my sky-blue silk canopy had collapsed in the crosswind. I tugged on the guidelines to shake it out and fill the chute with air. but couldn’t make it happen.
It didn’t help that I was carrying almost a hundred pounds of equipment strapped to a specially built combat vest or attached to my fatigues. The weight was a problem in the thin air during HAHO—high altitude, high opening—jumps. Most of what I carried was lethal. There was my customized Beretta 92-SF in its thigh holster, along with eleven clips of ammo—165 rounds of hollow-point Hydra-Shok, custom made hot loads that could literally blow a man’s head off. Hanging from a strap attached to my shoulder was a specially modified HK—Heckler & Koch—MP5 submachine gun and 600 rounds of jacketed hollow-point in 30-round magazines.
Then there were the other goodies: flash-bang grenades and thunder-strips to disorient bad guys; strobes and light-sticks for guiding choppers into a drop zone. Wire snips for cutting through fences. And I carried a selection of the miniaturized communications stuff we’d developed—strapped to my waist was a secure Motorola walkie-talkie (it came with lip mikes and earpieces so we could talk and listen to each other while moving. No Secret Service whispering into our shirt cuffs for us).
In the upper right-hand pocket of my combat vest was a satellite transceiver, a SATCOM unit about the same size as a cellular phone. On it I could talk to my boss, Brigadier General Dick Scholtes, who ran the Joint Special Operations Command, back at his Ops Center at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, as clearly as if I were in the next room instead of almost two thousand miles down the road.
I laughed out loud. Maybe I should punch up Scholtes now. “Hey, General, I’m calling about this little momentary snag that’s developed. Dickie’s about to go sq
uish.”
Another two air cells in the parasail collapsed and the chute folded in half. Okay, so it screwed up. No problem. I’d rehearsed this move maybe eighty, a hundred times during practice jumps. I did a cutaway, jettisoned the faulty canopy, then resumed free-fall. Fifteen thousand feet and cruising.
Five seconds later I yanked the cord on my second chute. It started to open nicely. Then it developed a fissure, folded in half, and collapsed just like number one, and the crazy corkscrewing began all over again.
I didn’t have any more backups.
I tore at the lines with both hands to open the parasail to its full width, screaming profanities into space.
It came to me in the absolutely clear way things come to dying men that I had been the thirteenth jumper to exit the C-130. This was a bad joke on Dickie. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. Down there—where I was about to splatter myself into strawberry-colored goo—were, according to what we’d been told, thirty to forty armed terrorists, a hostage, and a hijacked nuclear weapon.
This clandestine airborne assault was the culmination of five months of bone-wrenching, take-it-to-the-limit training—eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I was spiraling wildly in the blackness because the U.S. Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had chosen me to design, build, equip, train, and lead what I now believed to be the most effective and highly secret counterterror force in the world—SEAL Team Six.
Admiral Thomas Hayward, the chief of naval operations, gave me the order to create the unit himself, not ninety days after our disastrous April 1980 rescue attempt of the American hostages held in Tehran.
What the CNO had said to me was unequivocal: “Dick, you will not fail.”
I took his words to heart. SEAL Team Six trained harder than any unit had ever trained before, waiting for the opportunity to show the skeptical bureaucrat-sailors and dipdunk bean-counters prevalent in Washington that it was possible for the U.S. Navy to fight back effectively against terrorists. I had cut more than a few corners and stepped on a shoe store full of toes carrying out Admiral Hayward’s order.
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