by Don Mann
“No, sir,” I answered.
“Where’s my PRC-seventy-seven radio?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Where are all the burlap bags?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Did you smash our lights?”
“No, sir.”
His face started to turn red, and he barked, “I need to know the truth!”
I repeated my name, rank, and service number the way I’d been taught.
Shaking his head in exasperation, he said, “You don’t understand, Petty Officer Mann. I’m being serious.”
So was I.
We kept going back and forth like this until the commandant finally broke role and shook my hand.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve been selected as the class honor graduate.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’d go to war with you anytime. But now I need to know the answers to my questions.”
I told him what he wanted to know, and he gave me the honor of raising the Stars and Stripes to signify that the course was over.
That’s when I learned that the commandant’s real name was Captain Ralph E. Gaither and he was a U.S. Navy hero who had spent 2,675 days in captivity in Vietnam.
SERE School had lasted ten days.
When I returned to the ST-1 base in Coronado I was told that my platoons hadn’t been formed yet.
Determined to become a better corpsman, I requested permission to attend the Special Forces medical lab in Fort Bragg, North Carolina—known in the military as Goat Lab.
The executive officer at ST-1 said, “It’s not required. Are you sure you want to go? The course is long and difficult.”
“Yes, sir.”
Goat Lab proved to be the most demanding and useful eight weeks of training I’ve ever had, because the Special Forces medics in attendance had spent the past ten months learning lab work and diagnostics at Fort Sam Houston, in Texas. Goat Lab for them was the combat-trauma phase of a larger course of study.
Although I had ER experience, I’d never learned how to do blood work and diagnose diseases. As the only SEAL in a class of twenty, I was very much behind the other guys and trying to catch up.
Day one, each one of us was given a patient in the form of a diseased goat. (Back in the Vietnam era, they’d used sick dogs.) Mine was a big fellow with a long red beard, so we named him Barbarosa, after the character Willie Nelson played in the movie of the same name.
I’ve always loved animals and don’t hunt. But now, after two other SF guys strapped Barbarosa down, I had to shoot him in the leg with a thirty-aught-six. Bam!
For the rest of Goat Lab it was my job to keep Barbarosa alive.
The bullet left a small entry wound and a large exit hole in his upper thigh. First thing I did was stop the bleeding. Then I cut away the damaged tissue, which is called a primary wound debridement.
The other SF medics and I took turns in surgery. I acted as the primary surgeon on Barbarosa and served as assistant surgeon and anesthesiologist for other guys in the class on their animals. And they did the same for me.
It was hard work. Every four hours, day and night, you had to check your patient’s vital signs—temperature, pulse, and respiration. And during the day, you did blood work. A classmate would hold the goat’s head back while you found a vein, inserted a catheter, and took blood. Then you’d put a sample of blood under the microscope and examine and measure red blood cells and white blood cells, and check for diseases.
I spent days and nights with Barbarosa and grew fond of him.
One cold morning in January, we were doing the morning report with the course veterinarian and he asked how all the patients were doing. I was seated in the back of the room. Once again, as the only SEAL, I was known as Baby Killer.
I’d been up late into the night studying medical manuals in my effort to catch up with the rest of the class.
The vet asked, “How did everything go last night?”
One of the SF medics answered, “Things went fine. But we had one patient that died.”
“What do you mean, he died?”
“He died,” the SF medic answered. “We went in the pen this morning to look and he was dead.”
“How do you know he was dead?” the vet asked.
“He was lying there and he wasn’t breathing.”
The vet raised his voice and said, “A patient is never dead until a doctor pronounces him dead. Now get out there and resuscitate him.”
Since I was the closest one to the door, I got to him first. The goat had rigor mortis with frozen saliva on the side of its mouth. It was obviously dead.
I got down on the ground and performed mouth-to-mouth for a good twenty minutes, up until the vet said, “Okay, the patient is now confirmed dead.”
The dead goat’s mouth was disgusting, which probably explains why none of the SF medics offered to relieve me.
That episode taught me a lesson that helped me save some lives over the years: never assume someone is dead on the basis of how he looks.
Our final test, called trauma day, was intense. I waited with my medical bag as Barbarosa was led around a corner by two SF guys. Minutes later I heard a loud boom followed by the SF guys screaming, “Medic! Medic!”
I tore around the corner to see Barbarosa on the ground. He was a bloody, smoldering mess. His face had been set on fire. One of his eyes had been pulled out, his right leg had been amputated, and he had two sticks impaled in his chest. In addition, he had suffered several slash wounds that weren’t obvious at first.
I slammed into action: ABCDE.
First, I checked for an airway. Barbarosa didn’t have one, so I did a sweep with my fingers. You do this with a patient whose mouth has been damaged in order to clear away broken teeth, broken bones, blood, mucus, or vomit.
I discovered that Barbarosa’s tongue had been cut and stuffed down his throat; I pinned it to his lip, which is exactly what you would do with a human patient on the battlefield with a prolapsed tongue.
Once he was breathing again, I started to stop the leaks. The slash wounds were treated with direct pressure, but a lot of the bleeding was coming from the sticks that had been impaled in his chest. I chose to leave them in, because I knew that pulling them out would cause more damage.
I made a one-inch slice in his throat and inserted a tube so he had an airway. Then I managed to get two large-bore IVs in him. His vital signs started to stabilize.
I checked Barbarosa’s pupils and saw that they were unequal and not reactive to light, which indicated that he’d probably suffered a severe head injury too. So I had to be careful in terms of moving him. I made a backboard from a camo-colored poncho liner and two bamboo sticks and dragged him over to the vet, who was seated near the incinerator a few hundred meters away.
If I had failed to check something or Barbarosa had died, I would have flunked the course. A lot of guys did.
The vet said, “Okay, you passed. Now throw him in the incinerator.”
Goat Lab was gruesome, and it certainly was hard for someone who loves animals, but the skills it taught me enabled me to save human lives.
In January, I went to Army jump school in Fort Benning, Georgia. All the military services attended this training, which qualified you as a rope jumper, or a static-line jumper. After doing five static-line jumps, I earned my silver jump wings. But static-line jumping isn’t the same as free fall, which is typically what we did in the SEAL teams. The difference is that in static-line jumping, the line that deploys the main canopy is attached to the inside of the aircraft. In free-fall jumping, the parachutist falls to a designated altitude and then deploys the canopy himself.
My first free-fall jump occurred when I returned to ST-1 in Coronado. I remember the thrill of floating down through a beautiful clear blue sky near where Kim and I were living in a double-wide trailer in the community of San Ysidro. As I tried to locate the top of our trailer from the air, I noticed dozens of police
cars gathered nearby with flashing lights.
Soon after I reached the ground, I learned that a brutal massacre had taken place at our neighborhood McDonald’s. A mentally disturbed unemployed welder named James Oliver Huberty told his wife he was going “hunting humans,” walked into the fast-food restaurant after lunch armed with an Uzi submachine gun, a 9 mm Browning pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun, and killed twenty-one unarmed people ranging in age from seven to seventy-four.
There were so many victims that the town’s funeral homes had to use the local civic center to accommodate all the wakes.
That horrible incident underlined something I’d learned in SEAL training and that I believe even more strongly today: You can’t anticipate all the challenges that are going to be thrown your way. All you can do is prepare yourself to the best of your abilities.
Chapter Seven
SEAL Team One
Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In June of 1983, fourteen of us from Foxtrot platoon assembled on the grinder and Commander McCurry, commander of SEAL Team One, pinned a coveted SEAL trident on my chest and congratulated me.
I was not only extremely proud but also fired up and ready for war. Not like some crazed psychopath, but as a professional commando prepared to fight for God and country.
But the reality was that in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. The Vietnam War had ended years earlier.
That didn’t mean that we sat around doing nothing. Quite the opposite. When we weren’t doing ops, we trained nonstop.
At the time, SEAL Team One consisted of six fourteen-man platoons and a headquarters element commanded by a Navy commander. Sometimes platoons were divided into two seven-man squads or three- and four-man elements. All platoon personnel were dive, parachute, and demolitions qualified.
A typical SEAL platoon is made up of two officers, a chief, and eleven enlisted men. Responsibilities are divided into positions on patrol (point man, patrol leader, commo man, M60 gunner, corpsman, and rear security), department leadership (diving department head, air department head, ordnance/demo department head), and by rank.
The officer of each platoon is called the platoon commander. Under him is a junior officer, the senior enlisted man known as the platoon chief, and the next senior enlisted, the leading petty officer, who is in charge of the day-to-day management of the enlisted platoon members.
In addition to ST-1, UDT-11 and UDT-12 were stationed at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, and in 1983, soon after I arrived at ST-1, those UDTs were converted into SEAL Teams Three and Five; they continued to be based in Coronado. In 2002 a fourth West Coast SEAL Team was commissioned, ST-7.
SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven are organized under Navy Special Warfare Group One (NSWG1), which is commanded by a Navy captain. Its geographical responsibilities include the Pacific and Central commands.
On the East Coast, UDT-21 was converted into SEAL Team Four in 1983, and SEAL Teams Eight and Ten were added in 2002. SEAL Teams Two, Four, Eight, and Ten fall under Navy Special Warfare Group Two (NSWG2), based in Little Creek, Virginia.
The team that no one talked about was SEAL Team Six. All you heard was that SEALs in ST-6 were the cream of the crop. They had the best equipment, got the most important ops, and received the most money. You couldn’t request orders to go to Six; you had to be selected.
ST-6’s very existence was classified. Even though in 1980 it was still very new, it already had a special aura around it.
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Flying under the radar, supply planes and supply helicopters landed at the staging area (Desert One) on the night of April 24, 1980. But one of the eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters that were going to be used to insert the Delta Force rescue team experienced mechanical difficulties and had to be abandoned. The other seven ran into a sandstorm, known as a haboob, that caused severe navigation problems and forced one to turn around and go back to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
The six remaining RH-53Ds arrived at Desert One an hour late. And one of them was badly damaged.
With only five functioning RH-53D helicopters left, the commanders on the scene requested permission to abort the mission. President Jimmy Carter gave his approval.
Now things went from bad to worse.
As one of the RH-53 helicopters prepared to leave, it crashed into a C-130 Hercules transport plane. In the ensuing explosion and fire, five USAF aircrew in the C-130 and three USMC aircrew in the RH-53 died.
In the aftermath of the mission—which also damaged President Carter’s chances of being reelected—■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
The members of SEAL Team Six were considered the most highly trained and lethal warriors in the world.
As soon as I heard that there was a special group of longhaired undercover SEALs stationed on the East Coast,
I knew I wanted to be part of the team. But at the beginning of 1983, I was a wet-behind-the-ears SEAL corpsman on a year of probation with the following mind-set: Don’t talk, listen. Do what you’re told, and work as hard as you can.
Most of our leaders at ST-1 were hardened Vietnam combat vets. Legendary soldiers, like Master Chief Claude Willis Jr., who was the most decorated African American in the military. He was a short guy who was loved by everyone on the team. Whenever anyone got in trouble with the police, which happened a lot when SEALs and Marines drank together, Master Chief Willis would put on his uniform with all the medals on it and go talk to the police.
He served as a jumpmaster when we jumped. We’d be on a plane at about ten thousand feet ready to jump. We’d watch the light go from red, to yellow, to green. Then the jumpmaster would yell: “Go!”
I remember seeing a SEAL standing in the door looking nervous just before a night water jump when Willis tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Holy shit! What’s wrong with your chute? Go.”
Then he pushed him out.
Under normal circumstances, each SEAL platoon operates according to two-year deployment cycles: twelve to eighteen months of pre-deployment workup, followed by six months of active deployment in a theater of operation. This is so that at any given time, at least two of the six platoons in a particular SEAL team are on active deployment.
It involves a tremendous amount of training, which gives each individual operator a chance to acquire and develop specific skills.
The normal workup or pre-deployment cycle is divided into three phases. Phase one is called the professional development phase (PRODEV), during which individual operators attend formal schools and courses. These can include learning:
Scout/sniper operations (Special Operations Target Interdiction Course, or SOTIC)
Breacher operations (learning barrier penetration and methods of entry)