by Don Mann
I accepted the offer and took two Navy guys with me—a lieutenant and an E5 who were both preparing to go to BUD/S.
The San Blas Islands are actually an archipelago of 378 islands and cays—49 of which are inhabited—that string out along the Caribbean coast of Panama nearly all the way south to the Colombian border. They’re home to the Kuna Indians, who worship the ancient god Erragon.
The islands are as close to a tropical paradise as you can get—powdery soft beaches, clear blue-green water, gently swaying palm trees, and tree-covered slopes and mountains.
We packed our rucks for what was supposed to be a weeklong trek through the jungle.
The SF warrant officer was a big man, weighing about two hundred fifty pounds and standing about six two. As three of us from SBU-26 and eleven SF Reserve guys listened to him give the patrol leader’s order, I took notes. As the only SEAL on the op, I didn’t want to be overbearing, but the PLO sounded incomplete.
At one point I said, “Warrant, I didn’t hear the loss-of-comms plan.”
The WO grinned and answered, “You guys in the Navy….We don’t need any loss-of-comms plan, because our radios work.”
That was a bullshit answer coming from an inexperienced operator. You always have a loss-of-comms plan. Comms fail often, and for a variety of reasons.
I said to the lieutenant and E5 I’d brought with me, “If the shit hits the fan, we will stick together.”
We set out early the next morning into the jungle. It was extremely hot and humid. The terrain was steep. The SF guys were noisy and smoking nonstop. They had to take frequent breaks because they weren’t used to carrying heavy gear.
A platoon is supposed to move quietly and use hand and arm signals. Every member is supposed to have assigned responsibilities—the point man, rear security, automatic weapons, and so on.
This platoon would patrol for twenty minutes, then the WO would call out, “Okay, guys, let’s take a break.”
When a platoon on patrol takes a break, it’s supposed to establish 360-degree security weapons at the ready. But this WO would plop down on the log or a rock, take off his boots, rub his feet, then eat a sandwich.
He’d say in a booming voice, “These friggin’ boots are killing my feet.”
Meanwhile, all the SF guys would take out their cigarettes and light up.
The first day out, we were walking through the jungle when one of the SF soldiers ran up to the warrant and said: “Hey, sir, I left my AT-four against a tree the last time we took a break.”
An AT-4 is a powerful antitank grenade and rocket launcher. Any twelve-year-old could have picked it up, snuck up behind our very noisy patrol, and blown us all away.
Instead of castigating the soldier, the WO shouted, “Break!”
Then he turned to the soldier and said, “We’ll wait here while you go back and get it.”
If a SEAL ever did that, he’d be relieved from SPEC WAR—but a SEAL would never do that! When the SF Reserve soldier returned, the WO simply said, “Good job. You found it.”
After the mission, he probably put the guy in for a medal. It was pathetic.
We were about half a day out when a local Indian came down the jungle path on horseback. Through our interpreter, the WO asked, “If we pay you, can you get us some horses to carry our gear?”
He pulled out a big wad of money and said that he wanted to hire a dozen horses and twelve Indian guides.
The Indian guy said, “Sí, señor.” And took off.
We waited in the same spot for hours before the Indian came back with the guides and horses. All the SF guys piled their gear on the horses.
I told our guys, “We’ll carry our gear.”
Now we moved in this long, noisy circus caravan with all the Indians and SF guys with all of their gear on horseback. The three of us Navy guys walked in the middle of the patrol.
The horses had an amazing ability to climb up the steep mountain trails. They were better at it than the SF guys, who had to stop all the time and were constantly complaining about the heat, humidity, insects, their sore feet, and their tired legs.
The WO had all of the comms loaded on one of the horses. As the horse was climbing a particularly rocky, narrow mountain trail, it lost its footing and fell hundreds of feet into a deep ravine. That was the end of all our communications equipment. We didn’t even attempt to retrieve it.
At the end of the first day, instead of being stealthy and setting up camp with half of the guys sleeping while the other half kept watch, the WO had one of the Indian guys lead us to a Kuna village. It featured a group of huts that had sides made of reeds and roofs of thatched palm fronds.
As the older Indians lounged in hammocks, younger women wove molas—layered lengths of fabric intricately cut and sewn into various colors and designs. Their calves were wrapped in loops of beads, and they wore bright yellow and red blouses that highlighted their tanned skin. Large gold hoops adorned their ears and noses.
It was like a scene out of National Geographic. But we definitely didn’t belong there.
The WO pulled out his wad of money and asked through the interpreter, “How much will it cost for us to stay here and have you cook us dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow?”
He negotiated a price with the local chief and we stayed the night. While we were there, I’m sure one of the kids from the village ran ahead to warn the Panamanian general. The WO didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned about that.
As a matter of fact, next morning after breakfast he asked the local chief, “Do you know where General X is?”
Talk about giving away our objective. By this time I’m sure the whole archipelago knew where we were going.
We lodged in local villages all of the three nights it took us to get in.
The farther we got, the slower we seemed to move. When we arrived at the general’s mansion, on the fourth day, it looked like the set of a movie—a gaudy, modern villa smack in the middle of the jungle with stables, a beautiful modern kitchen, and fancy tile floors.
As the WO started to walk up the driveway, I stopped him and said, “Warrant, we need to do a recon of the area first. The general’s probably gone anyway, but we should do surveillance for a while and watch what’s going on before moving in.”
The WO smirked at me and said, “You’ve seen too many movies. Don’t worry about it.”
It took all my restraint not to deck him right there.
He and a couple of his men starting walking up the long driveway, as obvious as sitting ducks. As they approached the gate, a young male servant came running out of the house.
The Spanish speaker in the group asked, “Where’s the general?”
“Oh, he left two days ago.”
Big surprise.
For the next twenty-four hours we searched the house, stables, and property for drugs and weapons, but we didn’t find anything. The whole mission seemed like a big waste of time, resources, and energy.
My only consolation: I slept in the general’s bed and took his shaving gear. It’s very high quality and I still use it.
I want to point out that I’ve worked with many exceptional SF guys throughout my career, but those reservists were terrible. I could have taken a troop of kids and been more successful.
Five days later, me and the other two Navy guys were back at Rodman Naval Station on the other side of the isthmus. That afternoon Lieutenant Adam Curtis and I were lying on the pier when our captain, Mike F., walked over and said, “The secretary of defense wants to meet with you.”
We stood up, buttoned our shirts, and straightened out the dirty, sweaty camo uniforms we’d been wearing for three days as two black cars pulled up and a group of Secret Service agents in dark suits emerged. Behind them walked Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
Seven of us stood at attention. The captain made the introductions.
When he got to Adam, who was standing to my right, Captain Fitzgerald said, “This is Lieutenant Curtis. He’s the o
ne who was kidnapped with his wife driving back from the airport.”
Secretary Cheney nodded and said, “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That’s when we decided to invade.”
As the new year, 1990, began, our pace at SBU-26 didn’t slow down. In fact, many of my teammates from ST-6 requested orders to SBU-26 because they wanted a piece of the action. Chasing the rainbow.
Our patrols started to expand up and down the Pacific coast of Central and South America, and throughout the rivers and waterways from Panama all the way to Bolivia. We were now on the front lines of the war on drugs, which had been declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and grown in intensity during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
The “war” was actually a campaign of foreign military aid and military intervention, with the assistance of participating countries, the goal of which was to reduce or eliminate the sale of illegal drugs.
Over the next two years, I worked with SBU-26 conducting hundreds of VBSSs (visit, board, search, and seizures) throughout Central and South America. We seized hundreds of tons of marijuana and cocaine. But our enthusiasm was quickly dimmed by the rampant local government corruption.
Whenever we entered a foreign country that was cooperating with us—Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, and so on—we’d always meet first with local officials, and they’d brief us on where we could operate. Inevitably they directed us to little villages in the jungle. We’d raid family-run cocaine labs that had fifty-gallon drums and burn down some huts. Seize drugs and equipment.
But it didn’t take long for us all to realize we were attacking the tip of the iceberg. The big drug dealers and labs were being protected by corrupt government officials and were, therefore, untouchable.
Another component of the war on drugs was something we called mobile training ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Many of the guys we trained were conscripts with no gear, no training, and little funding. Also, they understood that they had to operate within the political restraints of their country and region. So they weren’t allowed to fully execute their jobs.
Still, we taught them how to shoot, patrol, and establish comms.
One of the MTTs we conducted took place in Riberalta, a little town of about 78,000 on the edge of the Amazon basin in northern Bolivia. The town was primitive and filthy, like something out of the Wild West, but with lots of mosquitoes, and everybody rode a motorcycle.
It wasn’t unusual to see a family of four riding on a Suzuki 125—the wife on the back of the seat, one kid on the gas tank, and another one on the handlebars. Cars and trucks were luxuries that few of the locals could afford.
For some reason, the people who lived there dumped their sewage upstream, so the water we cooked and bathed with was badly polluted. Even though we were careful about what we ate or touched, all of us got sick.
One day we were in our room and the LT said, “Hey, Doc. There’s some guy outside selling rolls.”
All of us were hungry, so I went to check these rolls out. They were covered with seeds and in a plastic bag, and they looked clean. They tasted great.
We must have eaten a hundred of them over the next couple of days. One night we were chewing on the rolls when the LT stopped and closely inspected the seeds.
“These aren’t seeds,” he shouted. “They’re moving!”
The seeds turned out to be tiny bugs. But they tasted better than anything else we ate during that deployment.
Before we departed Panama, the commanding officer called me and the LT into his office and said, “Guys, I want you to make sure that nobody gets in trouble. I’m sending you down with a couple of trucks, our best boats, and I want them back looking like they do now, no scratches, dents, or dings.”
We were in Riberalta about a week more when one of the SBU-26 guys, a petty officer third class named Hutch, was driving one of the trucks down a dirt road to a four-way intersection when this eleven-year-old boy on a Honda 125 cut in front of him. Hutch slammed on the brakes but still hit the boy with the truck.
The boy flew off the bike, hit the road hard, and lay on the ground unconscious. Bolivian authorities arrested Hutch and threw him in a tiny, filthy, barbaric-looking jail cell.
The boy, meanwhile, was loaded into the back of a vehicle and dropped off at the so-called hospital.
I received a call over the PRC-77 radio to get to the hospital ASAP and was there in ten minutes. When I examined the unconscious eighty-pound, eleven-year-old boy, I saw that his pupils were unequal and not reactive to light—a sign of serious head trauma. Otherwise, he was breathing fine and didn’t appear to have any other injuries.
The hospital looked like a dirty garage—so filthy and ill equipped that you wouldn’t want to use it to work on your car. I introduced myself to the doctor on duty and told him that I was an American medic and was there to help the unconscious boy.
The doctor said, “Do not interfere. The boy will either live or die. Don’t bother this process.”
What?
“Doctor,” I said. “I don’t want to cause trouble here, but I insist that we take care of this boy immediately. Check his vital signs, do pupil checks, and order an MRI and a CAT scan as soon as possible.”
He became very agitated, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer.
It was obvious to me that we needed to get the boy to a real hospital. Brian L., also from ST-6 and executive officer at SBU-26, searched for a plane and pilot; he tracked down a confiscated drug plane and we used that to fly the boy to a real hospital in the city of Santa Cruz. (Note: Brian L. is now one of the highest-ranking admirals in SEAL teams.)
There I met a Bolivian doctor who had trained in the United States and had actually saved the life of a SEAL buddy of mine in Vietnam.
He assembled his OR team, which was made up of an anesthesiologist; an assistant, who wore flip-flops; and myself.
I asked him, “Where can I wash up?”
He said, “Don’t worry about that.”
None of the team scrubbed up or wore surgical masks or gloves.
The impact of the accident had caused the boy’s brain to slam forward against the front of his skull, then push back again—coup-countercoup, it’s called. His injury required brain surgery.
As the Bolivian doctor spoke to me in broken English, he took a scalpel, cut along the top portion of the boy’s head, then peeled down his face, exposing his skull.
Then, as I held the boy’s head, the doctor picked up an old hand drill that you wouldn’t want in your toolbox and started to drill into the boy’s skull.
As he was doing this, the doctor asked me, “So, how’s the pussy in Panama?”
I said, “Fine, Doc. But don’t you think we should pay attention to what you’re doing?”
As he drilled, he used a piece of gauze to catch the tiny bone fragments that were falling free from the boy’s skull.
The doctor d
rilled six holes in the boy’s head. I initially thought he was just drilling the holes to relieve the pressure on the boy’s brain. Instead, the doctor took a wire saw, put it in one hole, and started to saw through the bone. Then he did the same thing to the next hole. Once he’d finished with all six holes, he lifted off the top of the boy’s skull and placed it on a table.
The boy’s exposed brain was about the size of his fist and mostly gray.
While the Bolivian doctor continued to talk to me, he reached down and started to cut away pieces of the front of the boy’s brain that had turned black.
He said, “Black brain, no good.”
He was correct. The black parts of the brain were necrotic and would have caused infection and resulted in the boy’s death.
When he was finished with the frontal lobe, the Bolivian doctor sliced off the black parts of the temporal lobe and the back of the brain.
I said, “Doc, you’re cutting away so much of his brain. Is he ever going to be okay?”
“Oh, yes. He’ll learn to work around it. He’ll think differently. But he’ll be okay.”
As I watched, the doctor took a piece of IV tubing and cut some slits in it. Then he placed the tubing on the boy’s brain and pushed it down, so that the blood drained away. He said, “Look, drainage tubing made in Bolivia,” and he laughed.
Next, he picked up the skull section and put it back, saying, “Look, it’s just like a bowling ball.”
As I watched in a combination of wonder and horror, he mixed some liquid with the bone fragments and then used that as a superglue to hold the skull section in place.
He carefully peeled the face back up over the skull and lined up the nostrils and eye sockets.
“That’s it!” he announced.
Miraculously, the boy recovered. Months later, he was back on his motorcycle riding around town.
While I was attending to the injured boy, the LT was trying to get Hutch out of jail.