by Don Mann
We also rehearsed recalls. Only the command head shed team would know the time of recall beforehand. Once the signal went out, all members of the team would assemble, listen to the warning order, and then run a full mission profile, in full gear—NVGs, gas masks, live rounds. We changed scenarios constantly, juggling the variables, such as the number of hostages and threats.
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We had to be ready with all bags packed—one bag loaded with jump and air-ops gear, another with dive gear, a third with counterterrorist gear, a fourth with winter-warfare gear, a fifth with desert gear, and a sixth with jungle gear. We were constantly tweaking, trying to make the recall lighter, quieter, and easier to assess.
Recalls occurred at least once a cycle and we never knew when they were coming. More than once, we were all at a party at a team member’s house when our beepers went off. Each time, all the operators straightened up, hurried to their cars, and drove to work as fast as possible.
Once there, we had four hours to get dressed, pack our gear, have our intel briefing, and go to our cage to get our weapons and ammo. We always kept our wartime ammo separate from the training ammo.
If you were a demolitions guy, you packed all of the demolition. If it was a jump op, the riggers would pack all of the chutes and related gear; if it was a dive op, the men in the dive locker would pack all dive-related gear.
Typically, a recall involved the entire assault team with coxswain and sniper support. We were the only maritime counterterrorism team in the world that could be wheels-up in fewer than four hours!
Once we were recalled the day before a team member named Conrad was going to be married. It was a big wedding, and all of us were invited. But Conrad was the only one who got permission to attend. Later, when we saw the pictures, we noticed that he was just one guy in the company of all our wives and girlfriends. The joke around the base was that it had been a lesbian wedding.
All the operators on ST-6 were trained to be shooters, jumpers, divers, and so on. But each one of us had a specialty. For example, some were breachers, some were coxswains, some were snipers, some were communications reps. I was the medic, a dive supervisor, and a lead climber. So as a lead climber, I was the guy who went up the ladder first, whether we were climbing up the side of a ship, oil rig platform, or building.
During specialized training (SPECTRA, we called it), each of us would work on his specific skills. I climbed at Yosemite; Red Rock, Nevada; and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to train with some of the world’s top climbers. I also attended advanced para-rescue medical training courses with the USAF Pararescue (PJs) and advanced mini goat-lab courses with the Army Special Forces, and I worked at the Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg as an “intern”—which meant that I was allowed to assist in all types of procedures in the emergency and operating rooms.
Then, during the team’s deployment cycle, all of us would pack up and deploy somewhere in CONUS (the contiguous United States) or OCONUS (outside the contiguous United States). We might travel as a team to Puerto Rico for a three-week dive trip, or to Arizona for two to three weeks of HAHO jumping. Sometimes we ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
The person or persons who had that specific specialty planned the trip. So I designed the climbing, medical, and dive deployments.
We trained for land, air, water, and mountain, arctic, jungle, desert, and urban terrain. No other maritime unit in the world was better trained, more versatile, or could deploy to as many locations in the world.
Given the level of expertise of the individual operators, we had spectacular advanced-training runs. Instead of static ship boarding, we practiced complex under-ways, which required the split-second timing of numerous components.
During under-ways, we’d parachute into the ocean and drop up to four cigarette boats on pallets approximately five miles away from the moving target ship.
We’d hit the water as close as possible to the cigarette boats, jettison our chutes, swim to the boats, and cut the assault boats free from the pallets. A steer-and-throttle man would board each boat and start the engine.
Then each boat crew would load its respective boat. Once all boats were loaded, we’d take off at a high rate of speed toward the target, generally a cruise liner.
These ops were always conducted at night. Sometimes we’d drop an extra boat, because if one hit the water at the wrong angle, it would sink to the bottom like a lawn dart.
Once the target ship passed, the assault boats moved into position. Two would attack from the starboard side, and two from the portside, in tandem.
With the assault boats bobbing up and down and the target moving at a good speed, a pole man would stand on the bow of the boat, with two men holding him, then extend a telescopic pole with the cave-in ladder attached and try to hook it to something solid on the deck of the target vessel.
At the same time the pole went up on the starboard side, one was also going up on the portside. If one boat dropped its pole or couldn’t attach its ladder, the cigarette boat behind it would move into position. If the worst-case scenario happened, we needed only one ladder to go up, because everyone could climb up the same ladder.
Once the pole was hooked, the pole man would pull the pole, which released a small caving ladder attached to it that unrolled down into the assault craft.
The ladder extended as far as forty feet. For ships with higher decks, we’d use two ladders attached to each other and conduct a multi-pitch climb, which was basically a two-stage climb. You’d climb up a good portion of the ship to a landing, then hook again for another climb to the main deck.
Every part of an under-way is quite dangerous. I had a buddy who fell off the caving ladder near the deck of the ship and landed thirty feet down in the assault boat. He was beat up pretty badly and ruptured his spleen. Our team doctor, who was on the ship, saved his life that night. And I witnessed plenty of other lead climbers being flung off the caving ladder once it went taut from the ship going in one direction and the ladder being secured down.
We typically assaulted ships in thin (three-millimeter) wet suits or, in warm climates, black skin suits. We each wore a holster with an S&W 686 revolver and carried gear on a black web belt—Ka-Bar knife, hostage gear, tie-ties, commo, medical supplies, and so on.
As the lead climber, I went up the ladder first and secured it to something on the deck with a piece of one-inch tubular nylon and a carabiner. Attached to the right side of my belt was a carabiner with two to three nylon runners I could sling over something solid and then attach a safety line from the runner to the ladder.
With the ladder secured, I would take up a position of cover and signal the rest of the team to board the ship.
As we reached the deck, helicopters would swoop in, and another element of SEALs would begin fast-roping in. Timing was critical. If the helicopters arrived before the guys on the boats were on deck, the assault boats and their crews would be sitting ducks.
The SEALs from
the helicopters would clear from the deck on up, leapfrogging from one position to another. And then they’d proceed to wherever they’d been tasked to go—a ballroom or a stateroom, maybe, in the case of a hostage rescue.
The guys on the boats would clear from the decks on down, and maybe secure the engine room; it depended on the op. Afterward, the assault boats were picked up by the helicopters, or they were driven somewhere and recovered.
Under-ways were by far the hardest thing we did, and we got very, very good at them.
We worked with ■■■■■■■the best helo pilots in the world. They liked to mess with us. Like the time we were sitting outside on the skegs during a training op in Puerto Rico and the pilot flew fewer than two feet over the treetops at 120 knots. At times, we thought they were crazy, and the feelings were mutual, I’m sure.
Our HAHO capabilities would have given them good reason to think so. We’d fly in thirty-man stacks, and after we jumped, we’d time it so that all thirty chutes opened at the same time and at the same altitude. We would exit the bird up to twenty-five miles away from the target and land just before sunrise.
Every man in the stack would be in communication with the others. You knew who was supposed to be in front of you and who was supposed to be behind you. You would count off from the rear, “Thirty okay,” “Twenty-nine okay,” and so on. In the case of a low jumper or a malfunction, a member of the stack would split away and accompany the distressed jumper to the alternate DZ (drop zone).
I loved the sensation of free-falling. But these weren’t recreational jumps. We were going down in full combat gear with oxygen and weapons.
Guys suffered serious injuries—I broke my back in two places on a HAHO, and I have seen broken legs, ankles, and backs; some men even died.
One night we did a 17,999-foot HAHO jump outside of Tucson where we exited the aircraft about twenty miles from the target. I was carrying a seventy-five-pound rucksack, my weapon, oxygen tank and mask, my compass board, and my altimeter, and I was wearing my jump helmet with comms.
Before opening the main chute, the procedure is to wave off and then look left and right before pulling; this way, when you open, you don’t have another jumper falling or flying into you, which can be fatal.
That night, when I exited, I waved off. But when I pulled, I flipped right through my parachute risers and started falling backward.
This caused my risers to quickly spiral all the way down to my helmet and jerk my neck, helmet, and jaw sharply to my left, knocking off my O2 mask. I thought I’d broken my neck and jaw. And when I looked up and saw the other jumpers way above me, I knew that I was dropping like a stone. My parachute wasn’t even partially opened.
When experiencing a malfunction, the jumper pulled his cutaway pillow with his right hand, which freed the main parachute. Then he’d pull the reserve handle with his left hand, which hopefully would deploy the reserve chute.
I performed my cutaway, enjoyed a short free fall, and seconds later saw a nice full reserve expand above my head.
All of us were wearing push-to-talk radios. The comms wire extended down my right arm from my radio and helmet to my right hand. Generally, when you push the button and talk, everyone on your stick is supposed to hear you.
I wanted to alert my team and tell them that I would meet them on the drop zone. But when I pushed the button and talked into the radio, I could manage only a mumble. The pain in my neck and jaw was so intense that I couldn’t open my mouth enough to make anyone understand what I was saying.
I palpated my jaw and realized that it was dislocated and way to the left of where it should be. So I did to myself what I had done to dozens of other people in ER. At around eight thousand feet, I placed my thumb on my bottom teeth, pushed down hard, and jerked my jaw right. It popped into place and hurt like hell!
Then I got back on the radio and said, “Guys, I had a cutaway.”
I landed approximately a thousand feet away from the target, grabbed my chute, and jogged over to catch up with the rest of the team.
Another time, on a deployment in Key West, I came very close to drowning during a night static-ship takedown. We were doing a four-hour oxygen dive on Dräger with a six-man boat crew, navigating in a crowded harbor through pilings, with all sorts of ship noises overhead.
Once we arrived at the target ship, we set a vertical de-rigging line from the hull of the ship, with loops in it for each diver. We attached the pole and ladder to the line as we all removed our Drägers, fins, and weight belts and attached them to the de-rigging line, continuing to breathe through the mouthpiece attached to the inhalation hose.
As I was waiting for the verbal signal to surface in the pitch-black water, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t breathe. My first thought was that the inhalation hose had gotten twisted with the constant moving up and down around the de-rigging line.
So I felt along the hoses, but I found no kinks or twists. I also rechecked to make sure that the open/close valve on my mouthpiece was open. It was.
Next, I reached for the O2 bottle, thinking it had somehow been shut, but it was open too. I repeated these procedures three times.
Meanwhile, my head started to hurt. So I reached up to my swim buddy and shook his fin. I motioned to him that I was out of air. But neither of us could see anything.
I put my hand on his mouthpiece, indicating that I wanted to buddy breathe with him, but he didn’t understand my signal and backed off.
All I could think to do was repeat my emergency procedures again. So I checked my hoses, mouthpiece, and O2 bottle. My head felt like it was about to explode. Now my only option was to swim up to the bottom of the ship with my hand over my head in case I hit the hull headfirst. I desperately wanted to take a mouthful of seawater and end the agonizing pain that I was in. It was a horrible thought, and one that still shames me.
Using the hull as a guide, I made my way to the side of the ship and approached the surface. But the ship was close to a large structure and I couldn’t squeeze through.
By this time it felt like someone had thrust an ice pick in my brain. Every nerve in my head was screaming.
With no idea how much time had elapsed or how many seconds I had left, I kicked on a steady course, hoping to find an opening to the surface. My body started to sink. I was running out of steam.
During the last moments underwater, I saw a light and followed it. I swam from midship to bow and surfaced! Then quickly uttered a prayer of thanks.
I swam to the portside of the ship, where my teammates were going up the ladder, and joined the stack. The light I saw was actually a moonbeam.
After the op, during the hot wash, where we discussed all phases of the op in detail, I told the team what had happened. It turned out to have been a very unusual malfunction in which the inhalation butterfly valve in my mouthpiece had sealed in the shut position.
I was lucky to be alive.
Despite the constant training activity, guys on the team complained that we weren’t getting enough real-world ops. Some felt that ST-6 had become a political show horse, something the military trotted out to impress the big money folks in DC.
Since I was the only corpsman on my assault team, I rarely got time off. Anything we did as a team that involved danger—which was everything—required my presence. Even if a small group of guys was sent off to do breaching or ordnance disposal, I had to go with them.
My family life was completely on hold, which made my wife, Kim, unhappy, since I was never home. We were actually deployed about three hundred days a year.
When I asked for leave to attend my sister’s wedding, I was told that I couldn’t go. I got the same answer when my second sister was married. I still regret missing their weddings.
I wasn’t allowed to visit my uncles when they were dying. Nor was I given permission to attend their funerals.
During this time, I got a call from my parents, who were living in Westerly, Rhode Island. Because they knew I
was very busy, they never asked me for anything. But this time my mom and dad said that my younger brother, Rick, was in real trouble and needed my help. He was drinking heavily and doing drugs; he had even attacked his wife and daughter with a Buck knife I’d given him for Christmas.
That night I sat down and wrote Rick an eleven-page letter. I spoke from my heart. I wrote:
Rick, you and I both were going down a road of trouble since we were kids. I diverted off—thanks to the Navy. But you’ve kept down the path, and now you’re in all kinds of trouble. You’re not working, you lost your family, you’re having cocaine seizures, you’re stealing cars. I know. You’re going down a dead end road and you will end up dead or in prison. These are the only options for guys who lead the life you are living. You’ve got to stop. I love you. You’re my only brother.
Please allow me to ask you just one favor. First, please stop drinking, drugs and partying for thirty days. Just stop. If you can’t, let me send you to rehab and I’ll pay. That’s the only favor I’m going to ask you for the rest of my life.
I went to my assault team officer and asked him if I could go to Rhode Island for the weekend. I told him that my brother was in a lot of trouble and I needed to help him.
The officer said. “Sorry, Doc, but we can’t afford for you to be away now.”
I decided to go anyway. The only person I told was my swim partner, Clell.
I said, “Clell, if we get recalled, you know where I am.”