Fireworks were going off in my brain, a real Fourth of July celebration, but I didn’t give a hint of the explosions. “Thank you very much, sir. Then I think the War College is no longer a point of discussion.”
He extended his hand toward me. I shook it, stepped back, and saluted. “Thank you, sir.”
Once outside the CNO’s suite I let out a whoop that they probably heard at Little Creek. I galloped like a wide receiver down the corridor, skidded around the corner, and burst into Bill Crowe’s suite. The secretaries and aides didn’t even have a chance to react as I went through his door. I didn’t say a word—just threw him a double thumbs-up.
Crowe looked back at me with a big, wide, warm grin that told me he’d greased the skids with ten yards of Vaseline. “I gather, SEAL Six, you didn’t use goatfuck as a noun.”
Chapter 18
THERE WAS A SPECWAR CONFERENCE AT LITTLE CREEK IN July of 1980. I went to it. I did a lot of listening, not a lot of talking. I badly wanted to be able to tell the commodores who ran NAVSPECWARGRU ONE and TWO—Dave Schaible at ONE and Ted Lyon at TWO—that I was forming a new command and I’d be coming to raid their turf for warm bodies after August 15. But the CNO had ordered me not to say a word about SEAL Team Six, and my compliance was a matter of common sense and basic mathematics. Ted and Dave were captains, and no matter how you add it up, four bars plus four bars does not equal four stars.
I began to realize the depth of the Navy’s commitment to Six as I worked on the unit budget. The training-ammo allowance for SEAL Team Six’s ninety men was larger than the training-ammo allotment for the entire U.S. Marine Corps. The overall first-year budget for SEAL Six was more than East Coast and West Coast SEAL budgets combined—about the same as two F-14 fighter planes.
But money doesn’t mean much without the right men. On August 16, the day after the unit was officially “created” on paper, I drove down to Little Creek to begin interviewing prospective team members. I paid a courtesy call on the SpecWar commodore, Ted Lyon.
Ted was still as prissy as he’d been when we wrangled over the Little Creek parade ground. He didn’t much care for the way I looked. I was letting my hair and beard grow out, so I was uncommonly shaggy. Instead of a starched uniform I dressed in jeans, an open-necked, button-down shirt, and a sport coat. Long gone were my Geek-polished boots. Instead, I wore ragged running shoes.
I dropped into a chair in his Spartan, meticulous office. “Morning, Ted.”
He saluted formally. “Commander.”
It was going to be one of those days. I rose and returned the salute. “Sir.” I may have said “Sir,” but I was thinking “cur.”
I explained what I was doing at Little Creek, and that I’d be starting to talk to prospective team members immediately. Ted shook his head. “No, you won’t. There’s been no paperwork on this, Dick. And unlike some others I can think of, I do everything by the book.” He rapped his knuckles on the desk to emphasize each syllable. “By the book.”
I looked at him. “You’re not serious.”
“Oh, yes, I am. Just who the hell do you think you are to waltz in here and create havoc? This command will not respond to that sort of behavior. We actually observe a few of the formalities here. So, if you want something from now on, Dick—if you want anything from now on, Dick—put it in writing. Send it up through the chain of command. Send it to Staff, which will evaluate your proposal. If Staff approves, then your suggestion will be sent up the line for the appropriate action.”
“Well, fuck you very much, Ted.”
“And don’t speak to me in that way. Unlike the days when each of us was a unit commanding officer, I am now your direct superior.”
Actually, he wasn’t. I wouldn’t be reporting to Ted—he wasn’t a part of Six’s chain of command. Ted’s view, however, was that any East Coast SEALs—including Six—came under his administrative purview. And he was determined to make me obey. This wasn’t the time or the place to screw with him. So I gritted my teeth, rose, and saluted. “Aye-aye, Commodore. Now, what paperwork do you wish, sir, so that I may commence interviewing prospective personnel for my new command?”
Ted smirked. “A memo from the CNO routed through CINCLANTFLT and SURFLANT to COMNAVSPECWARGRU would suffice—if you can get it.”
“Tell you what, Ted—it’s Saturday. I’m going to go have a few beers with the boys. I’ll be back next week and we’ll talk.”
At 0915 the following Wednesday, the exalted Commodore Edward Lyon III was shaking his head in disbelief as he read a rocket from Admiral Hayward, which I’d had sent directly to Ted’s attention. It had been routed through CINCLANTFLT, SURFLANT, and COMNAVSPECWARGRU, just as Ted had ordered. The gist of the telex was simple: “You asshole, get out of Marcinko’s way or I will squash you like a bug. Give him everything he wants. Strong message follows. Love and kisses, Admiral Thomas Hayward, Chief of Naval Operations.”
The hate with which Ted looked at me was incredible. No wonder. His daughter, who worked as a bartender, had seen me drinking over the weekend with a number of SEALs and reported the fact to Daddy, who began our session by berating me for allegedly violating operational security guidelines. But despite the looks and the accusations, there was nothing Ted could do. Three hours later, I was interviewing candidates for SEAL Team Six.
I spent four days evaluating sailors at SEAL Team Two and the UDTs at Little Creek. For many of those who’d served under me six years before, it was a shock. They remembered the spit-and-polish CO who wore white-walls, demanded that Team members shave all facial hair, and ordered his officers to carry calling cards. Now they were being interviewed by a guy looking like Lobo the Wolf Man, who suggested strongly that they keep their hair unkempt and get their ears pierced.
What was I looking for? Shooters, of course. If you can’t kill the bad guy, then everything else is FUBAR. Second question: what’s the best way to get where the bad guys are? Ilo-Ilo Island taught me that: why knock politely on the front door and eat bullets when you can hop and pop through the back door—where you’re least expected—and feed them some lead. And the option package includes all kinds of fun ways to arrive at the back door: you can swim or come by boat or chopper; you can climb up, or you can parachute down.
Third question: what sort of people can slide in the back door most easily? Dirtbags. Dirtbags with union skills—truck drivers, crane operators, bricklayers, electricians, longshoremen. But I wasn’t looking for just any dirtbags. I wanted motivated dirtbags—AVISes—the guys who try harder. I went through each candidate’s BUD/S records to see where they ranked in their classes. Whereas the number one man may have breezed through, the guy who was seventy-seventh probably had a bitch of a time in the water, didn’t like crawling through mud, and hated demolition—but he never quit. Experience had taught me that warthogs who tough it out are better in combat than your natural gazelles.
I made my selection—just under half the unit. The rest of Six would come from California. I called Paul Henley at Coronado. “Paul—XO, what’s happening? How’s the job?”
“Not bad. It’s a living.”
I giggled. “Terrific. How about earning a living as my XO?”
“Wha—?”
“I mean it. I have a job for you.”
“What is it?”
“Can’t talk on the phone. I’m flying to San Diego tomorrow to do some interviewing.” I gave him the flight number. “Meet me at the airport—I’ll explain everything. And tell Marilyn to start packing. Your ass is coming East in less than two weeks.”
September 1 was Labor Day. On September 2, I checked out of the Pentagon to assume my new command. I got a warm send-off from Admiral Crowe, paid my respects to a two-star admiral named Art Moreau, who had run yards of interference for me as I was putting SEAL Team Six together, and called Ace Lyons, who’d received his second star and was heading up the Mobile Logistic Support Force at the Seventh Fleet, out in the Pacific. My last stop was the CNO’s cabin. Bill Crowe took me
there.
Tom Hayward rose from his desk and came around in front of it.
“I’d like to thank you, sir, for the opportunity to command SEAL Six.”
“You were the best man for the job, Commander,” Hayward said.
“Do you have any final words of advice for me?”
The CNO took my hand and shook it solemnly, but warmly. “Yes, Dick,” he said. “It comes down to this: you will not fail. That is an order.”
A bunch of my prospective troops were waiting when I drove through the gate at Little Creek at about twenty hundred. It was like Papa Bear coming home—lots of “Daddy, Daddy, what did you bring me?”
We went to a private club, run by the Fraternal Order of UDT/SEALs near the base, and over several cases of beer I told them in general terms what I’d be asking of them, and not to be expecting much vacation time between the next morning and, oh, 1996. Faces fell.
“I said it was gonna be hard work, guys. I didn’t say it wasn’t gonna be fun.” I took a bar napkin and a pen and drew a globe, framed by an old-fashioned “horseshoe” toilet seat. Above the drawing, I wrote PHOC-6; below it, the letters W.G.M.A.T.A.T.S. “That’s the unit emblem,” I said as the napkin got passed from man to man.
Somebody asked what it all stood for.
“Phoc is French for ‘seal.’ The globe means we have a worldwide mission, and the letters at the bottom stand for ‘We Get More Ass Than A Toilet Seat.’”
We were a group of about thirty that night—the “close hold” core of SEAL Six, officers, chiefs, and enlisted men. That was one of the best things about Six—there would be no caste system in my unit. If a man was good enough to die with, he was good enough to eat, drink, and get laid with. SEAL Team Six would be run according to Barrett’s First Law of the Sea, and Marcinko’s First Law of Unit Integrity: screw everybody but us.
Paul Henley sat at my elbow, listening and not saving much. That was par for the course. He was yin to my yang. I was the archetypal LDO—Loud, Dumb, and Obnoxious; he was quiet and deep. Paul hadn’t seen combat, but had everything else working for him: language skill, CT training, brains, and best of all, guts. And he was an Academy grad. If I was a bastard, at least I had a legitimate son as my XO.
Lieutenant Mugsy finished one beer and called for another. Mugsy was another Academy grad. A boxer, light heavyweight division, he’d been to EOD school so he could play with explosives. And he understood CT: he’d taken over Paul’s old job commanding MOB-6. He was big, ugly, and aggressive. Yeah.
The Senator was another lieutenant. Tall—over six three—and distinguished looking in a preppy, yuppie way, he had a reputation as a ladies’ man who could order the “right” wines and knew which fork to use. He was young and had been through training only recently. I figured he’d be good if we needed to infiltrate somebody as an executive. And if he didn’t work out? Well, every unit needs cannon fodder.
That sounds cold, doesn’t it. Well, it’s a fact of life in the military. Every unit does need cannon fodder. The small SpecWar units that get sent behind the lines are cannon fodder—for battalions and divisions. Recon platoons are cannon fodder for the companies of which they’re a part. Every man who takes the point on a patrol knows he is cannon fodder—expendable. The difference is, I told the men I was picking why I’d chosen them. I told them they were expendable—that we were all, ultimately, expendable. They came anyway.
Lieutenant Cheeks got his nickname because he looked like a squirrel hoarding nuts in his mouth. An ex-Marine, Cheeks had seen combat in Vietnam. I knew he was an aggressive son of a bitch, a guy I could count on to drop a tango before the tango dropped him—or me. He was married to a Filipino and spoke just enough Tagalog to make him sound authentic, which gave him the additional plus of a second language.
The Duke was another ex-white-hat, an enlisted man who’d seen his share of combat in Vietnam before attending OCS. Now a lieutenant, JG, he’d become an experienced training officer—something Six needed. That, plus the combat experience, was good enough for me.
I pulled Ensign Trailer Court right out of Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. I took one look at his naive baby face and realized we could slip him in anywhere in the world as a high-school student. Clean-shaven (he never grew any facial hair—I don’t think he was able to grow facial hair) and apple cheeked, he was our resident health nut, our jeepdriving Mr. Outward Bound—good at rock-climbing and skiing—who existed on nuts and twigs and other healthy things to eat. But deep down, there was another, more shadowy facet to Trailer’s personality, a dark side. It was that aggressive undertone, which I somehow instinctively perceived, that led me to select him from the group of ensigns made available to me.
The last officer at the table was Ensign Indian Jew. To me, Jew personified the ideal SpecWar officer: he was a big, strapping, spirited ex-enlisted man who reminded me of me as a child. Except he is better looking, and I fight dirtier. I’d been his commanding officer at SEAL Two when he’d been an enlisted man. Six foot plus, dark haired, well muscled, moviestar handsome, I remembered Jew as a carefree guy who worked out on the weight pile every day, could press more than four hundred pounds with ease, and whose only real responsibility in life was his beloved blue Corvette.
Even as a kid, Jew had impressed me during field exercises. He’d always asked to be given the most demanding jobs, which he handled with aplomb. He was aggressive and bright, and not the sort I wanted to see finish his hitch and leave. SpecWar needed kids like Jew, and I wanted to ensure his career in the Navy, if he wanted one.
One evening I asked him what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He told me he’d always dreamed of becoming an officer and making SpecWar his career. It was an obsession, he said.
I knew what Jew was talking about; I’d felt exactly the same way myself at about his age. So I took him under my wing, in much the same way I’d adopted Lieutenant Tom Williams. I was tough but encouraging. I convinced Jew to attend school and made sure he took the right courses for a degree that would further his Navy career. Then, when I moved to the Pentagon, I hand-carried Jew’s personnel package through the bureaucratic maze myself. Between his determination, my greasing the wheels, and the help of a few enterprising officers, Jew ended up at OCS.
In the meantime, he’d married a young beauty named Denise, the girl he’d been dating since she was fifteen and he was eighteen or nineteen. Good-bye, Corvette; hello, station wagon. In my book that was a plus: the kid needed responsibilities.
After he completed OCS, I pulled more strings and got Jew detailed to SEAL Two. SEAL Team Six was being designed, and I wanted him as part of the package. By getting Jew assigned to Little Creek, he’d be on the shelf until Daddy Demo came home.
The enlisted men swapping stories at the club that night had backgrounds as varied as the officers’. I’d chosen them for youth and stamina, for combat experience, language specialties, and aggressiveness. A couple of the youngsters were picked because Six, like all units, needed cannon fodder.
Baby Rich was one of them. When I’d interviewed prospective SEAL Six members, I took one look at Rich’s round, naive baby face, gangling, tall body, and ham-sized fists, and laughed. “What the hell makes you think you can cut it, junior?”
“I know I can, sir.”
I shook my head. “You’re a regular tyke, a cherry. If I take you, it’ll be as an expendable, kiddo. If there’s a rope to climb and it looks like it’s gonna break, you’re the one who goes up to see. If we need to throw a jumper out of the plane to check the wind—you’re gonna be ‘it.’” I gave him my Sharkman Crazy Otto look and wiggled my eyebrows. “How does that sound to you?”
“Sounds fuckin’ ducky to me, Commander.” He thumped my desk for emphasis. “Count me in. Shit, sir, I always wanted to be a fuckin’ SEAL—and now that I are one, I wanna be the best fuckin’ SEAL there is. So if that means getting myself killed in your unit, as opposed to sitting somewhere with my thumb up my ass, I say go for it.
”
Of course I hired him—who wouldn’t have?
Others I chose because they were just plain crazy. I figured, if we were going to jump out of planes at thirty-five thousand feet, free-fall, then parasail another fifteen, craziness was a definite requirement.
You want crazy? Okay—there was Snake, popping the poptop on his Coors. Snake was a dark-haired petty officer, third class. A former paratrooper from the Eighty-second Airborne and a qualified radio operator, Snake combined natural athletic ability with considerable strength and imagination. I liked him because he wouldn’t try to outthink you—he’d simply outperform you every single time.
Pooster the Rooster was another PO3. Pooster was a spelunker from the Pacific Northwest whose specialties were shooting and women. He was deadly at both. Pooster got his handle from the Italians during SEAL Two deployments in the Mediterranean. He’s got copper-red hair that stands up in a perpetual cowlick, almost like a rooster tail. The locals in Naples and Rome would point at him and exclaim, in pidgin English, “Mista Poosta-Roost.” The moniker stuck.
Larry and Frank were my Gold Dust Twins. They’d met as swim buddies during BUD/S and become as close as brothers. Even though Larry was at SEAL Two in Virginia, while Frank had been posted to BUD/S in Coronado, California, they’d still start and finish each other’s sentences seamlessly.
But talk about opposites. Gold Dust Larry had dirty-blond hair and a face that looked as if it had weathered one too many brawls. Gold Dust Frank was dark haired, and he looked like a bulkier version of the actor Mark Harmon. Larry was moody—when ecstatic, he looked as if he’d never had a happy day in his life. Frank was ebullient, with smiling eyes, the kind of guy who walked into bars and made easy conversation with the ladies.
Larry’s skills included specialties in ordnance (he’d helped me build my wooden soldiers for the Iranian raid) and air operations—he could fly a plane. He’d seen combat as a Marine, so I knew he’d pull the trigger if he had to. Moreover, I’d been his CO for a short time at SEAL Two. He’d arrived just as my successor and I were exchanging command. I hadn’t gotten to know Larry well, but he’d impressed me as steady and dependable—the first guy to show up, and one of the last to leave.
ROGUE WARRIOR® Page 28