So far as I was concerned, such activities were a piece of cake—if the men did it, I humped my body up the rope or out the hatch or into the water, too. Still, for reasons I could never explain, the guys would get back to Little Creek exhausted from these cheery, playful 14-hour excursions. So, I’d excuse them from CO watch at the Fraternal Order Bar—a fancy way of saying I was going drinking with them—and let them go home to see their wives and girlfriends for a couple of hours while Paul and I had a few beers alone.
Then, when we could almost hear the sounds of fucking and sucking, we’d beep everybody and see how fast they’d scramble back to the base. The men hated me for it, but it was a way of keeping them sharp—seeing who’d show up and who’d turned off his beeper while he was getting laid; or who would forget his weapons or chutes.
After half a dozen dry runs, the whole Team was pissed off at me for crying wolf when they thought they were entitled to a few hours of downtime. Too bad for them—the only way we’d get good at deploying in a hurry was to practice, practice, practice. They bitched and they moaned and they called me names even Ev Barrett never thought of. But they worked hard—and they stayed aboard. During my three years as CO of SEAL Team Six, the only men who left the unit were the ones I selected out. Despite the horrendous schedule, the lack of downtime, and the incredible pressure, my retention rate was 100 percent.
And we even had time for fun, every now and then. We took part in a shoot-off with Delta at Ft. Bragg and held our own. In fact, they selected their best shooters to compete, while I sent Paul and whoever else happened to be at Little Creek that week. Officially, the contest was a draw. But we won—and they knew it. The competition was good for both units because, in fact, there was no one else who came close to either of us.
Competition was natural: Delta was more than twice the size of SEAL Team Six, and Charlie and I had argued endlessly over everything from my unit’s size to the choice of weapons (Delta used the .45 automatic as its basic sidearm, while SEAL Six used 9mm and .357) to management and tactics. I believed Delta had been overly influenced by the formal administrative and training structures of the British SAS; Charlie thought SEAL Team Six had been unduly influenced by the Marx brothers. We agreed to disagree, and if the shooting competition proved nothing else, it was that my frenetic, chaotic training schedule was as effective as his more controlled and rigid one.
In one area, however, there was always total cooperation and complete agreement between Delta and Six: the units shared crucial information about ordnance. Bullet loads, specialized ammo, breaching charges, flash-bang and concussion grenades—as soon as anyone from Six heard about anything new, they’d call Delta to see if it had been tried over at Ft. Bragg. And the men from Delta would do the same with us.
Although we’d practiced boarding ships under way, Six had never staged a full-scale assault exercise on a civilian passenger liner that had been hijacked by terrorists. The scenario seemed logical to us (and also to the Palestine Liberation Front. The PLF, a terror group with ties to Iraq, Syria, and Libya, would hijack the cruise ship Achille Lauro five years later). So I rang up a friend of mine I’ll call the Italian Stallion, who was the executive officer of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Stallion and I had met when he was a weapons instructor at the FBI Academy at Quantico. He became a part of the informal intelligence network I put together during my years at the Pentagon. A no-crap former Midwest police officer with a bodybuilder’s physique, a specialty in weapons, and a terrific sense of humor, Stallion and I had become fast friends quickly. Most of the FBI agents I’d ever met acted like insurance agents. The Stallion was a weight lifter, a party animal—a real pussy hound—and a damn good shooter. If anybody knew where I could find a Love Boat for hire, it would be him.
“I’ll check on it and get back to you in a couple of days, buddy,” Stallion told me.
A few days later he called with good news: Norwegian Cruise Lines was willing to loan us a Love Boat that was sailing empty between Jacksonville and Miami. Stallion said the ship’s crew was willing to double as “passengers,” his FBI agents would role-play the bad guys—a valuable lesson for them—and Six could be the cavalry.
We put together a full-scale operation, tracking the liner as it left Jacksonville and sailed into the southbound shipping lanes, listening in as the “terrorists” hit—the crew broadcasting a fake distress call and the terrorists grabbing the radio to state their demands. We set up a command-and-control unit, blanketed the area with discreet observation craft (we know they were discreet because Stallion’s FBI guys looked for us but never saw us), and when we were ready, we did an intercept.
I was in the command chopper, supervising the boat crew that was to fast-rope onto the Love Boat’s fantail, watching the action out the aft hatchway. I had communications that allowed me to speak, like the voice of God, into the earphones of all the players simultaneously. Paul, who had a new radio handle, PV, testimony to his Prince Valiant haircut, was in charge of six Boston whalers. Gunners in one of the whalers and snipers in two small choppers would pick off any of the FBI tangos who saw us coming. We’d kill them before they could warn their pals or wax the hostages.
We hit the ship at 2200, when visibility was best for us (we had night-vision devices) and worst for the terrorists (they didn’t). Everything was planned down to the second. Every man knew his job. What no one remembered was that we were not alone on our mission: Mr. Murphy and his insidious law had also come along for the ride. Unless we were both careful and lucky, we were about to enter the TARFU Zone.
Okay, class, let’s see how the phoques get fucked. I watched aghast as my small sniper choppers staged a near-collision because the pilots weren’t talking to each other properly. I saw PV’s boats approaching from the wrong angle—goddamn tangos picked them up right away. Then the Blackhawk I rode in flared above the Love Boat’s fantail too soon, and my Katzenjammer Kidz went over the rails before the snipers were in position to protect them.
Katrinka fix. “Screw it.” I threw off the headset, grabbed the thick nylon line, and went over the side myself. Just as I hit the rope, the Blackhawk put its nose up and began to swerve away from the ship. Shiit.
Mr. Murphy giggled. “Marcinko, you pus-nuts dip-dunk asshole geek: the goddamn chopper pilots saw six men go—they have no idea you’re on the rope, too.”
I looked down. There was deck below me, but not much of it anymore. I let go and fell the final twelve feet or so, bouncing ass over teakettle. I hit the deck on a swell, and as the stern fell, I slid toward the gunwales, my feet pedaling furiously to no avail. It was like sliding down a goddamn bowling alley.
“You shit-for-brains,” gloated Mr. Murphy. “This is a cruise ship—it has waxed decks.”
Mr. Murphy was right: we’d never thought about waxed decks. Navy ships don’t have waxed decks.
We’d lost the element of surprise, so the “terrorists” were ready for us, too, and put up a big firefight. The question of who killed who was not a problem, as we’d loaded up with special Canadian training ammo—Simmunition FX cartridges filled with fluorescent red marking compound—so when someone was hit we’d know they’d been shot. The red dye also helped tell us whether all our target work with those three-by-five cards had been worthwhile.
Once we engaged, the situation improved. The SEALs moved in their prechoreographed “dances,” clearing cabins and staterooms, rescuing hostages, and zapping bad guys. They looked like lethal demons as they swarmed over the ship in their tigerstripe-and-black fatigues, balaclava hoods, gloves, and blacked-out faces. Our communications systems worked, so we knew where everybody was, and what each team was doing. Our shooting was on the money—better by far than that of the FBI “terrorists.” So despite the fact that we “lost” three SEALs, we wasted all the bad guys with wellplaced kill shots. So far as I was concerned, three casualties was an acceptable rate for a first-time exercise.
We learned a lot from our Love Boat cruise. For example, while
we’d killed all the bad guys who were shooting at us, we didn’t have enough people on board to interrogate all the passengers and make sure there were no terrorist “sleepers” still around. There weren’t even enough SEALs to secure the ship, much less deal with wounded hostages and interview hysterical passengers, all at the same time. I realized that if we ever did this one for real, SEAL Six would have to be bolstered by Delta, or the FBI.
After the exercise, Stallion and I did a walk-through to review where things had gone right, and where they’d gone wrong. He, for example, was concerned that SEAL Six hadn’t preserved evidence, but moved everything around. “You can’t do that, buddy,” he insisted. “If you’re gonna bring the boat back to U.S. territorial waters, the investigation’s gotta follow Department of Justice guidelines, otherwise the scumbags walk.”
“If they’re alive.”
Stallion smiled. “Gotcha.”
Still, the fact remained that if we took down a ship in international waters and we were ordered to bring some of the terrorists back alive, we’d have to be pristine about the way we went about our jobs and handled both evidence and suspects. I made note and had the men memorize the Miranda warnings—although it was doubtful we’d ever utter them aloud. The only warning I wanted to give a terrorist was, “April fool, motherfucker.”
In time, the “cry wolf” factor became something of a problem. Our training exercises were complicated by a number of false alarms in which we were scrambled by JSOC, then stood down. Once it was a plane hijacking. Another time it was a terrorist attack. Another time it was a pair of crazy Cubans. It got so that I’d assemble everybody and make a speech telling them this was it and we were going out to kick fucking ass and take fucking names, and fuck all terrorists and fuck all communists, and fuck the whole fucking world except for SEAL Team fucking Six. I’d really get myself worked up.
Then Prince Valiant would stand up and say, “What the CO really meant to say was … .” and he’d interpret my ranting and raving and explain that all we had were preliminary indications, and nothing had been decided yet, and so on and so forth, and stop me from chewing the carpet and making a damn fool out of myself. It got so bad that I’d call JSOC to complain about their goddamn yanking us back again and again. I didn’t want any more exercises. I wanted Bravo Squad’s first night on the river at Juliet Crossing. I wanted Ilo-Ilo Island. I wanted Eighth Platoon at Chau Doc. I wanted SEAL Team Six to go out and kill us a bunch of Japs.
We wouldn’t be doing any of our killing in Iran, either. A back-door deal had been made, and even as Jimmy Carter flew back to Plains, Georgia, on Inauguration Day, 1981, the fifty-three American hostages were being released by their Shiite terrorist captors. So much for our original mission as a part of a second hostage-rescue attempt. That left us our counterterror role.
I thought our time had finally arrived later in January 1981 when the Macheteros, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization, blew up a bunch of planes near San Juan. I got word from JSOC about a stolen nuclear device and a maritime environment—Vieques Island, where I’d trained as a Frogman. The situation looked good. All the signs were there: fresh intelligence from NSA; a real-time scramble and loadout—and a 56—man mass HAHO night jump and ten-mile para-glide onto our objective, something no unit had ever accomplished before.
We scrambled. We went. But Vieques, too, turned out to be yet another dry hump. An exercise—what they called a full mission profile.
It occurred to me, as Paul and I sat at the Fraternal Order Bar the day after we flew home from Puerto Rico, that it might be gratifying for the men, if ultimately unrewarding for our careers, to stage a live-fire hit on JSOC headquarters. Paul drained his beer and called for another round. “Don’t worry, boss—we’ll get lucky soon.”
Chapter 20
IT TOOK A LONG TIME BEFORE SEAL TEAM SIX GOT LUCKY. Despite repeated presidential rhetoric about terrorists being able to run but not hide, there were hundreds of terror incidents between October 1980, when SEAL Team Six was formed, and July of 1983, when I gave up my command—and the U.S. did little to interdict any of them. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the men, or the ability, to do the job. Moreover, SEAL Team Six could launch a preemptive strike against terrorists if there was hard intelligence an American target was about to be hit. The fact that there were so many attacks and no action by Six told me that either our intel apparatus was screwed up beyond repair and incapable of developing the hot information necessary to deploy a first strike, or the administration didn’t have the guts, or the will, to act.
Additionally, Ronald Reagan saw terrorism through his own ideological prism, instead of viewing it through the warrior’s clear glass. He viewed terror as a byproduct of the EastWest struggle, another form of surrogate warfare waged by the Soviets against the West, not as the far more sinister struggles of anarchy against order, of culture against culture, of sociopaths against society—which would outlast the Cold War. He was mistaken.
So SEAL Team Six trained and rehearsed and drilled—all balls to the wall. But we did no actual counterterror. We played on trains and planes and automobiles. We drove up to Washington, D.C., and practiced rescuing hostages from a subway train—the nation’s capital allowed Delta and Six to play in the city’s new metro system after it had shut down one night. We visited Atlanta and assaulted various types of aircraft at Eastern Airlines’ hub facilities. We commandeered a raceway in California and spent weeks perfecting stuntdriving techniques—every trick from bootlegger’s turns to controlled head-on crashes.
We went to mountaineering school—the men got so good at climbing things that when we checked into hotels and I told them to go to their rooms, they often did so by scaling the outsides of the buildings. The Team traveled to Germany for joint exercises with General Ricky Wegener’s GSG-9 commandos. We played war games and strategized with the Brits and the French and the Italians. But we didn’t do a single thing for real.
Four of my boat crews (remember, there are two boat crews to a platoon. You will see this material again) spent six months in Egypt, where they taught some of President Mubarak’s Army Rangers a few basic CT techniques. The sessions were only moderately successful. No matter how hard we tried, it was almost impossible to teach the Egyptians about specialized operations. Their capabilities were—to be tremendously kind—crude. Even though we worked with the most elite of their Rangers, we found their marksmanship unsatisfactory, their physical condition second-rate, and their motivation nonexistent.
One reason for these flaws was Egypt’s military caste system. In Egypt—as in most Third World countries—enlisted men, who were basically peasants, were treated like slaves, while officers, many of whom were political appointees, were treated like princes. Often, the officers wouldn’t even bother to show up for training—figuring that when it came to the crunch, the enlisted men, not them, would do the fighting. The concept of officers leading from the front was unknown; the phrase unit integrity didn’t translate from SEAL into Arabic.
I decided to motivate the officers in my own subtle fashion—by slapping a few captains and lieutenants around in front of their men when they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do the work properly. That got the officers’ attention. It also caused a couple of migraine headaches at the Presidential Palace, which rocketed the U.S. embassy. I was asked politely but firmly to desist slam-dunking Egyptians. I desisted. (I should have been allowed to continue my strong-arm methods, because at least they were working. As it happened, neither we. nor any of the other Special Ops units that visited Cairo to tutor, assist, inculcate, train, or educate, would do the Egyptian military much good. When it finally came to the crunch in 1985. and Egyptian commandos” rushed a hijacked Egyptair plane in Malta, they killed fifty-seven of the passengerhostages and destroyed the plane while trying to rescue it, as American Special Ops advisers watched in horror.)
Looking back on it now, my mood was probably not improved by the fact that I’d sustained a stress fracture of my right leg durin
g a HAHO jump just before we deployed to Cairo. The whole leg was somewhat tender, and the Egyptians, who had a hard time controlling small boats under the best of circumstances, kept knocking my bad leg with their gunwales almost every time we rehearsed water-based infiltrations and extractions. Paul wanted me to see a doctor. I refused—I could live with the pain, and I was worried that, once I checked into a medical facility, the doctors might rule me unfit to jump, swim, and shoot with my Team. No jumping, swimming, or shooting meant no commanding—and I was not about to relinquish SEAL Team Six before we’d completed a real CT mission. So I suffered in silence, although my vile temper often betrayed my nasty physical condition. There were a number of black-and-blue Egyptian Army officers who could vouch for it.
On the positive side, our six months in Egypt gave us the opportunity to learn a little bit about the Arab mentality—at least the Egyptian Arab mentality. It was also a chance to sneak and peek at the ships in the Suez Canal, and to work on harbor assaults against actual hostile targets—unsuspecting foreign shipping at Port Said or Suez. All our findings went into dossiers. Who knew if we’d ever have to operate in Egypt covertly, or whether or not Egypt would stay friendly to the U.S. Besides, SEAL Team Six was on a diplomatic mission—and as I’d learned at the Defense Intelligence School back in the seventies, all military diplomats are spies—so, while we taught our students, we also built up our operational files and tactical data bases. And while we played, we watched as the Israelis and the Soviets played intelligence tag with us, trying to figure out what the hell a bunch of Navy assholes were doing in Egypt besides teaching Egyptians to swim and climb anchor chains.
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