There is a postscript to this story. On November 30,1990, the ship’s bell was rung and a chief boatswain’s mate called out, “Commander, United States Navy, arriving,” as Tom Williams marched down a red carpet onto a podium inside the Meeting House at the Little Creek Amphibious Naval Base.
Forty minutes later, as he left, the bell sounded once again: clang-clang, clang-clang. But this time the chief announced, “SEAL Team Two, departing,” as Tom Williams proudly returned the salute and marched down the red carpet as SEAL Two’s sixteenth commanding officer.
It didn’t take too long after I’d assumed command to realize that very little had changed about the way the Navy viewed SpecWar in general and SEAL teams in particular. Our missions were designed by idiots in Washington who were either ship drivers or nuclear dip-dunks; officers who had no idea about the capabilities of SEALs, or the limitations of such elements as terrain, weather, or what the nineteenth-century strategist and philosopher Von Clausewitz referred to as “friction”—the fog of battle that is a fancy way of restating Murphy’s Law: “What can go wrong will go wrong.”
The result of this sort of fuzzy thinking at the Pentagon was that, during exercises, we’d be given a task like “neutralize the enemy by moving ten kilometers through Camp Swampy in five hours.”
You can’t move through a swamp at two clicks an hour in a boat, much less do it on foot through hostile territory. Hadn’t any of these people ever wrestled their way through the Mekong Delta with the booby traps and the pungi pits and the trip wires? The Navy unit I was leading wasn’t pointed on one end, painted gray, and named after a state. And “neutralize the enemy”?
“Does that mean I can kill the motherfuckers, Admiral, Your Grace, sir?”
“No—we’re concerned about the media image you might generate if you cause large numbers of casualties. Just neutralize them.”
“Do you have any suggestions about how I do that, Admiral, Your Panjandrumcy? Perhaps I could hire a company of hookers to keep them busy while I sneak in and hog-tie ’em.”
“That’s your problem, Commander. Just file your plan in triplicate, sign each copy, attesting to the fact that if there are any screwups they were your fault not ours, then burn them all so we don’t leave a paper trail for the media and the Congress.”
“Aye-aye, Your Worship. ”
There had to be a better way of doing business. The chain of command was so cumbersome as to impede the sorts of things that SEALs do best. So, one of my first goals was to change the way requests went up the ladder and orders came back down.
That was made easier when a new commodore arrived at SpecWar Group Two. He was a captain named Dick Coogan, a ship driver, but one who’d once worked on the Mekong River. So he knew about SEALs, and he knew about riverine environments, and he was open to new ideas. More significantly, as it turned out, he’d left his wife and kids back in Newport, Rhode Island. He was a célibataire géographique who lived at the BOQ, which happened to sit right across the street from SEAL Two’s HQ.
At one time Coogan had a chief of staff, Scott Sullivan, a West Coast SEAL. That was significant, too. First of all, East Coast SEALs don’t think much of West Coast SEALs. In Vietnam, the SEAL One groups were much more passive than we were, sitting up in the Rung Sat Special Zone on their butts rather than getting out into the villages and upcountry.
In the U.S., the West Coasters tended to be more system oriented than those of us from Little Creek. In rock-and-roll terms, if we from SEAL Two were the Rolling Stones, the SEALs from California were the Monkees.
So Scott Sullivan set up shop. He didn’t like the East Coast. He didn’t like SEAL Team Two, and he didn’t like me. I said fuck too often for his taste. I was too wet and wild. I didn’t like to go home at four-thirty and sit across the Formica dinette from my wife and ask her how her day had gone. I didn’t say “May I” every time I broke wind. And I had the nasty habit of going straight to the commodore when I needed to get an urgent question answered. That really upset Scott’s sense of order and decorum.
I’d come in at three-thirty with something I needed from the commodore and try to see him. Most often, Scott would say, “He’s busy, Dick. I’ll handle it for you tomorrow.”
“But I need to know this now, Scott.”
“Well, that’s impossible. He’s tied up.”
After one too many “It’s impossible,” I set up an alternative system.
Remember, Commodore Coogan lived at BOQ, right across from our HQ. When he finished work every afternoon, Dick Coogan used to drive up, park, drop his briefcase off, then head to the BOQ bar for a beer before he went back to his room to do whatever homework he’d brought with him. He wasn’t the sort to screw around, so all he ever did was work.
I called a meeting of all my junior officers in my cabin.
“There will be,” I told them, “a commodore watch from now on. You will assign yourselves a schedule. You will watch for him to drive up. You will go to the BOQ bar. You will get the fucking stool next to the commodore’s and you will keep him company. You will fucking keep him amused. You will fucking tell him stories about what we are doing, and how well we ate doing it. And each commodore watch officer will see me before he goes off to work, just in case there is any little fucking tidbit I want dropped on Commodore Coogan that particular day.”
I ran a regular public relations program. One night the commodore learned about my PT program. Another, he learned about the exercises at Fort A.P. Hill. Another, he learned about our new counterinsurgency tactics. The officers even invited him out to play war games with us—and he accepted. At one point, I had to take a run over to Ft. Bragg, 240 miles away. I was having a beer with Coogan and asked if he’d like to go.
“Sure, Dick.”
So off we went. The next morning Scott Sullivan looked high and low for his boss—except he was with me, watching a Special Forces exercise and learning new things about Spec War capabilities.
Now these sorts of stunts used to piss Scott Sullivan off something fierce. He hated it when I’d end-run him by talking to the commodore after business hours at the BOQ bar, then telling him the decisions we’d reached the next morning.
“You can’t do that,” he’d whine.
“Do it to thyself, Scott,” I’d say. “Read my lips—I don’t work for you. I work for the commodore.”
It came to a head early on. I had two foreign-exchange officers with Two. One was a Brit from the SBS—the Special Boat Squadron with which Rich Kuhn had served a tour. The other was a German from the Kampfschwimmerkompanie, the German combat-swimmers.
I believed that SEALs should train with other NATO special forces, and I’d gotten Dick Coogan’s chop on plans to go to Europe and do just that. Then Rudy, the German who was posted to us for a year, suggested that it might be fun to have a group of Kampfschwimmers visit us, and we’d go to Puerto Rico and play there.
So he drafted a message to his boss—who approved the idea and sent a detachment to train with us. But being a good, orderly German, he also cc’d the minister of defense’s office in Bonn. The bureaucrats in Bonn went ballistic because things were being done out of sequence, and not enough people had said “May I?”
A nasty message went from the German minister of defense to the Pentagon. It got passed to the CNO. The CNO said, whoa, there, and sent a rocket to CINCLANTFLT, who mortared COMNAVSPECWARGRU TWO, where it was received gratefully by Scott Sullivan, who called me on the carpet and chewed my ass out but good.
“Who the hell are you to be asking exchange officers to send messages to their goddamn minister of defense, Marcinko? You may not work for me, but the goddamn chain of command still applies to you—and when it comes to message traffic, which is an administrative function, not a tactical function, I am fucking God, do you hear me fucking loud and fucking clear?”
He did, in fact, have me by the balls. “Aye-aye, sir.”
“So from now on, Marcinko, any goddamn messages you want to send, you wi
ll clear through Staff—which means through me. Got it?”
“But—”
“No buts. You have run rampant over chain of command. You’ve tried to make me look the fool. You’ve rubbed my nose in it. Now it’s payback time. Every damn message that goes out from now on will have to be cleared through Staff and chopped by me, or it doesn’t move.”
After work, Rich Kuhn and I found ourselves a booth at a friendly tavern and talked it over. I spoke of murder. He calmed me down. I described unique forms of torture. He, being the excellent XO that he was, channeled my energy in more realistic and constructive directions. We drank beer. We plotted. We schemed.
Scott had chewed my ass on Thursday. We sent no messages on Friday. Over the following weekend, I set up a typing pool to draft messages. By the time we were finished, I’d drafted somewhere close to 150 of them. At 0630 Monday morning, I signed them where it said “DRAFTEE,” timestamped each one, then carried them over to Staff.
“Morning, Scott.”
He saw the fourteen-inch pile of papers. “What the hell—”
“I’ve got a couple of messages for you to sign.”
“Leave them with my secretary. I’ll get to them when I have time.” He looked at me with a malevolent grin. “If I have time.”
“Whatever you say, Scott. But they all have time stamps, and many of them are time sensitive, so if you are late getting them out, it’ll be reflected on your watch, not mine.” And I walked out.
By the time I got back to my cabin there was a message from him to get back to Staff immediately. “Screw him,” I told the yeoman. “We don’t work for him. Let him wait.”
Half an hour later he called me back.
“I’m giving you a direct order—get the hell back here and pick up these goddamn messages.”
“Say what?”
“You heard me loud and clear, Marcinko—get the hell back here, and that’s an order.”
“Excuse me, Scott, but I don’t work for you, so you can’t order me to do anything. Now, as to the matter of messages, I was only following your administrative guidance. You wanted all our messages—you got ’em. Now, asshole, the ball’s in your court. You’ll have to send them out. I can’t, because you haven’t signed off on any of them yet, and I’m the draftee, not the clearance officer. And besides, Scott, you’re the Staff puke paper-pusher. So push your goddamn paper—I have a goddamn command to run.”
“Marcinko—”
“Screw you, Commander. Uppa you ess, as we used to say.”
He went screaming to the commodore, but it didn’t do him any good. He had to sign off on every message anyway. And that afternoon, a piece of paper from Staff, with Scott’s chop attached, was messengered to SEAL Two HQ, telling me I had the authority to release my own messages once more.
That evening, I took commodore watch myself. I sidled up next to Dick Coogan as he sat at the bar, ordered myself a Bombay on the rocks, and said, “So how’s it going, sir?”
He looked at me kind of funny. “I hear you and Scott were really going at it today.”
“Jeez, I don’t know about that, Commodore. Y’know, he runs your staff, and I run my command, and I try to make it all work smoothly.”
“Didn’t sound so smooth today. Scott tells me you were really out of line.”
“Commodore, sometimes I follow his guidance. But when I don’t like his guidance, I get yours. I don’t think he likes that very much.”
Coogan laughed. “Probably doesn’t like it at all.” He ordered a fresh drink for himself and told the bartender to pour me a second Bombay on the rocks. “I’ll tell ya one thing, Dick,” he said, ticking the rim of my glass with his, “the son of a bitch was pounding up and down the quarterdeck, spitting bricks. You really had him talking to himself today.”
I raised my gin and toasted him. “Just doing my job, sir.”
Chapter 16
I NEVER SET OUT TO MAKE ENEMIES. BUT I HAVE ALWAYS been both an aggressive and a mission-oriented creature, so I will do whatever it takes to get the job done—and damn the consequences. That attitude never won me a lot of friends among the ranks of conventional Navy officers, many of whom I intimidated, coerced, strong-armed, threatened, and occasionally pummeled into the concrete. Still, I prospered within the system. One reason was that my adversaries habitually underrated me. They saw only the hard-drinking, bar-brawling, madman-under-fire Marcinko. They never knew that my fitreps as a staff aide and attachè were just as proficient as those from Vietnam. They thought because my shirtsleeve is 35 while my inseam is only 32 and I said “fuck” to admirals I was nothing but a coarse, knuckle-dragging snake-eater. Sure I said “fuck” to admirals, but not all admirals—just those who said “fuck” to me first. I’ve been known to use words with more than one syllable; I’ve been known to write coherent documents in simple, declarative sentences.
It has always served my purpose to keep people off-balance. I kept Charlie off-balance in Vietnam by hitting him hard where he least expected to be hit. I kept my officers and men at SEAL Two off-balance by continually challenging them to do 100 percent more than they thought they could do. And I kept staff assholes like Scott Sullivan off-balance through a combination of unpredictability, bureaucratic harassment, profanity, and the underlying threat of crude, rude physical intimidation. Much of the time it was an act—an act intended to bring political results—but Scott and those like him didn’t realize it.
Indeed, my enemies traditionally overlook the fact that I have always been a political animal. I discovered early in my career, for example, that it was easier to drop something on people from a great height than it was to push it up through the chain of command. I broached the idea of going to college with Admiral Peet, rather than saying “May I?” to some commander; as an attachè, I briefed admirals who could help the Khmer Navy instead of wasting my time on junior officers who couldn’t. And when I wanted to take SEAL Team Two on a full command deployment to Puerto Rico, for example, I didn’t write a memo to Scott Sullivan and ask him, “Please, sir, pass it on.”
I finagled a meeting with a vice admiral I knew and sold him the idea of moving SEAL Team Two to Roosy Roads, lock, stock, and barrel, for ten weeks of full-tilt exercises. My logic was irresistible: in a U.S./Soviet war scenario, we wouldn’t deploy Two squad by squad. Instead, the entire command would be shifted to a forward position.
But the whole command had never been moved at once before, and didn’t the admiral think it was about time we tried to see if it was feasible?
Absolutely, the admiral said. I’ll see that this gets approved, the admiral said.
So I watched like an innocent bystander as he dropped my plan from three-star heaven downward, onto the heads of unsuspecting junior officers. When commodores and captains came to me and said, “What hath you done and why are you causing me all this shit?” I looked at them innocently and said, “Moi?”
That’s what I said. We all knew better, of course. What I thought was, “Parce que je suis un phoc et vous êtes les phocees—I be the fucker and you be the fuckees.”
But I had plausible denial—and I had my command deployment. It was a complete success, too: the first full-scale deployment ever of an entire SEAL team and its support mechanisms. Still, the officers I offended probably filed my name in the “what goes around comes around” bin.
I have been accused of arrogance—and I admit to it. I have been accused of rubbing people’s noses in manure—and liking it too much. Guilty as charged. To be honest, there is a part of me that has always been self-destructive—a part that wants to “pull low” no matter what the consequences may be. Part of it is easy to explain: I like the feeling of living life on the edge, of pushing myself to the absolute limit, of feeling immortal.
During my enlisted days, my self-destructive urges could be attributed to the exuberance (or foolishness) of youth. As a junior officer in Vietnam, I could plead bloodlust and the ecstasy of battle—adrenaline addiction, if you will. But as a unit
commander, I had no real excuse for playing the sorts of malevolent head-games on my superiors that would return to haunt me later. Yet that is what I did—and they did indeed come back and whack me. In most cases, I fought for my men—for their welfare, comfort, or to ensure that they had the best equipment and training. In others, I screwed with my brother officers because I just plain didn’t like their attitude.
During my second Vietnam tour in 1968, for example, the CO of SEAL Two was a lieutenant commander named Ted Lyon, or, as he pedantically signed all his reports, E[dward] Lyon III. He was a prematurely gray, ascetically thin, ramrodstraight marathoner whose Spartan, punctilious, by-the-book perspective seemed—to me, at least—the sort of austere mentality that, all too often, is the sorry end product of rulerwielding, guilt-inspiring parochial-school nuns.
Ted was an okay CO, in that he left me alone and wrote me good Streps. (“A dynamic, aggressive officer … of athletic build and fine appearance … unhesitatingly recommended for promotion when due,” is representative of his prose.) But as a SEAL leader, a sea daddy, a man to look up to, I found him lacking those ineffable, deadly hunter’s qualities that make great warriors great warriors. When I thought of Ted, which in truth wasn’t very often, I always thought of him with a loaded clipboard in his hand, not an M16.
Segue eight years, to 1976. I was now a lieutenant commander and had Ted’s old job commanding SEAL Team Two. He, a full commander, was CO of UDT Team 21. Our outgoing change-of-command ceremonies were scheduled for the same day. About two months before they were to take place, Ted called me.
“Dick, could you change your change-of-command date? I’d like to use the parade ground, but I see by the calendar you’ve already got it booked for your ceremony. Seems to me that, since I’m senior to you, you could move from Friday back to Wednesday and let me have it.”
He sounded so … prissy. That was it. Ted was a prissy, clipboard-carrying asshole, and I couldn’t stand him. So screw him. “Fuck you,” I told Ted. “I’ve had this planned for a long time.”
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