Toward the end of AOT, our training ops were coordinated with a yearly army special forces exercise, a multiservice, multistate extravaganza code- named Robin Sage. The army uses Robin Sage to test its graduating classes of Green Beret candidates. The Green Berets are our counterpart units but not exactly our opposite numbers. Our roles are more complementary than reciprocal.
The Green Berets specialize in the organization and training of indigenous forces. They parachute into remote wadis and organize Afghani tribesmen into homegrown militia units. The army’s special forces specialize in training—everything from basic marksmanship to advanced infantry tactics, sabotage, and assassination. This process is called “force multiplication.” One Green Beret trains a dozen men. That dozen trains another twelve dozen. The special forces retain a considerable aptitude for direct action, and it goes without saying that to teach the black arts, you need to have mastered them.
The Green Berets inherited the mantle of the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, in World War II—they teach and organize resistance units and instruct partisans behind enemy lines. The SEALs also were an outgrowth of World War II combat. They trace their lineage to the navy’s CDUs, or combat demolition units, the outfits that cleared the beaches of Normandy prior to D-Day, as well as the Underwater Demolition Teams and Scouts and Raiders who sneaked, peeked, and operated against the Japanese in the Pacific. The Green Berets and the SEALs were both created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962. The president had been a small-unit commander, a PT-boat skipper, and he understood that a well-trained David can kick Goliath in the balls. If the Green Berets’ heritage is force multiplication, the SEALs’ mandate is hurting the enemy.
The operational element of the Green Berets is an A-Team, a unit roughly analogous to a SEAL platoon, that is, two officers and twelve enlisted men. A-Teams tend to specialize: One team may be scuba-trained, another might be trained demolitionists, another, arctic-warfare specialists, and still another, HALO-trained. In the SEALs, we do it all, and every SEAL is proficient in all aspects of special ops: Each of us is trained to jump, dive, do demo, boat work, and operate in all environs: jungle, swamp, and glacier. There are presently twenty thousand people wearing green berets. Let’s just say there are a lot fewer SEALs. A hell of a lot fewer. All of the SEALs who have ever served, since World War II, number fewer than ten thousand in total.
In Robin Sage, teams of Green Beret candidates are parachuted into remote locations, where they are expected to link up with partisan units operating against a conventional enemy force. The partisans are played by national guardsmen, reservists, and civilians specially recruited for the purpose. The exercise is as real as the army can make it. The student A-Teams have to find the partisans, convince them they are there to help, and train the locals to conduct a series of increasingly complicated special ops. The guardsmen selected as players tend to be clerks, cooks, and technicians with little skill in dirt soldiering. The civilians are, well, civilians. The partisan units are usually led by an experienced Green Beret or a SEAL who role-plays a local warlord. These partisan generalissimos prevaricate, make outrageous demands, and generally prove as difficult and mercurial as possible. Just like real warlords. For the student A-Team leader, it is an exercise in politics as much as tactics.
Our part in Robin Sage was to be OPFOR, opposing forces. We were to act in the capacity of the enemy’s special operations units. It was our job to locate, frustrate, and terminate the partisans and their capitalist masters. Lest you think the aim was a huge game of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ll point out that both sides were playing for keeps. The student A-Team had undergone months of training, and this was to be their final examination. If they failed, they’d be sent back to whatever evil world they came from, without the headgear of their dreams. For us it was the same, only worse.
Operations, even exercises, are taken with deadly seriousness in the Teams. SEALs are evaluated every time they operate. The job of the SEAL Teams is war fighting, not playing at war games; failure in a military exercise is unacceptable and inexcusable. SEAL officers have been relieved of command for screwing up on exercises. An operational SEAL platoon that cannot overcome a national guard unit and a mob of civilians has no business in the Teams. In this exercise, anything less than total success would be seen as a failure of leadership. My leadership. We were not expected to merely prevail, we were expected to dominate in this exercise and every time we geared up to operate. We were student SEALs with something to prove. We were up against men who desperately wanted to earn a Green Beret. This was war, and failure was not an option.
We did not get off to an auspicious start. I was given a five-square-mile radius in which I was told the special forces camp was probably located. That’s a great word, “probably.” I held a council of war with my senior enlisted guys, and we selected several likely camp locations within the area. We figured they would want to be far from roads or habitations but close enough so that Green Beret Lane Graders and exercise referees could check up on them. The camp would need a water supply and to be situated on terrain that was defensible and offered multiple routes of escape. There were five or six places that fit this description. The operations planning course was coming in handy. I would find the Green Beanies by deconstructing their operation. I knew that Robin Sage teams are usually inserted by parachute, and I also knew that the teams are quite often ambushed by Green Beret instructors after insertion and then force-marched to their camp. There appeared to be only one place on the map where jumpers could be inserted. That location was twenty clicks from the center of our five-mile radius. The drop zone was to the north, and that eliminated two of the probable locations at the south end of the zone. We were guessing, but these were educated guesses.
The second problem was to determine where we would insert. We didn’t want to land too close to the camp, and we didn’t want to be too far away. The A-Team and their charges could be expected to put out patrols, and we had to be careful that we did not become the hunted. Ideally, we’d get into the game without attracting attention. Finally, we briefed, geared up, and climbed aboard a pair of Red Wolf helos. Baby Zee was in full field gear during the brief, and I was not surprised when he jumped aboard my helicopter.
The ride to the insert point took nearly an hour. As forest and swampland streaked by below us, I was careful to follow our position on my map. I knew it was not unusual for Lane Graders to throw some shit in the game and tell the aircrew to drop us deliberately in the wrong place. Baby Zee saw that I was paying attention, and he got a strange smile on his face.
The helos crested a stand of trees and dropped down close to a river. We flew ten feet from the surface, the helicopters one behind the other, banking through turns low and fast, the pilots flying by night-vision goggles. Six minutes from insert, the doors came back, and the gunners manned their weapons. The squad unbuckled seat belts as wind swirled through the cabin, hot and sweet with the smell of JP-5.
The crew chief’s eyes found mine in the darkness. He held up two fingers. “Two minutes,” I shouted. We stood. Pressed up next to Baby Zee, I crouched in the door and looked forward. The night was clear, and a quarter moon was low in the west. I could see a bend in the river and a steep wall of trees at the turn. We were coming at it fast. The helicopter lurched, the deck lifting against my feet, G forces pressing me down as the aircraft flared. The helicopter mushed up, slowing, rotors beating loudly while the ship descended. Now visible beyond the trees was a small meadow perpendicular to the river. Our insert point.
We set down and jumped from the bird. Both helos pedal-turned and roared back into the sky, flat gray shapes soon swallowed by night. We ran from the landing zone by squads. As the engine noise faded, the Red Wolves continued north, touching down empty at several other LZs, a standard tactic to mask our true insertion point.
We jogged to the tree line. Once into cover, we grouped together, taking a few moments to shake off the noise and smells of the aircraft, hunkering down and tunin
g in to the night. I had the radioman send our brevity code for successful insertion, the word “Otter.” I was not entirely surprised when the headphones crackled back, “Lane Grader will make input.” Baby Zee could see my face as I listened. He leaned close.
“What’s up?” I whispered.
“Chu Hoi,” he said. It was a Vietnamese expression that meant “surrender.” The term was applied to defecting Viet Cong who agreed to work with the Americans. Defected VC had been used occasionally to guide SEAL search-and-destroy missions. They were called Kit Carson scouts.
“Who’s the scout?” I asked. “You?”
Baby Zee shook his head. He handed me a piece of paper. On it was an eight-digit grid. “You’re supposed to pick him up here.” The location was a road junction maybe six clicks away.
“When?”
“Dawn,” Baby Zee said.
I wasn’t digging this. Six clicks would be a long patrol, and I didn’t want to be hanging around road junctions, especially at dawn.
“Why do I need to pick this guy up?” It was not necessarily a stupid question. My mission tasking was to locate and attack the SF camp. Nobody had said anything about a Chu Hoi. Just because Baby Zee told me to get the guy didn’t mean this wasn’t a setup. As we learned in AOT, “Situation dictates.” This was my patrol, and I didn’t want to get my ass into a situation that I could not handle.
“Who’s going to be at the road junction?” I asked.
“People.”
I was getting pissed. “Look, I’m not in the mood for a fucking discussion out here. Who’s with this guy, and why do I need him?”
Baby Zee could see that I wasn’t going to meet anyone without more information. “The Kit Carson is on the level,” he said.
“Who’s gonna be with him?”
“Third Platoon captured him last night. You meet up with them, and they’ll hand him over. He can guide you to the SF camp.”
Sure, I thought. Sure. But blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken. We mounted out and patrolled for the road junction.
We managed to link up with Third Platoon, and the Chu Hoi, a skinny young man in a cammie top, field jacket, and blue jeans, came into our hands. Third Platoon had been in the area for a week; they had searched the south end of the zone without finding the camp. The scout had been captured walking down a road three clicks south of our rendezvous. They’d reported the capture to exercise control, and an umpire had informed them that the kid had turned—that is, defected. Third Platoon was heading north to run a simulated attack on a Hawk missile battery to the west. They were supposed to make their hit the next night. The commander of Third Platoon was a guy we called Cowboy Bob, and he was considered a good operator. The scout had shown Bob the location of the SF camp on his map. It was nowhere near any of the sites we intended to search.
“What do you think?” I asked Cowboy.
“I think you’re gonna step in some shit if you find that camp,” he answered. I was sure he was right, and I wasn’t very encouraged.
We spent the day laid up, the two platoons close by, waiting for darkness. During the day I questioned our scout. He didn’t look like a Green Beret; he looked like a staff weenie.
“Let me see your ID card,” I said.
“It’s back at the camp.”
“You were wandering around in civvies, on an exercise, without an ID card?”
He didn’t say anything.
“What do you do in the army?” I asked.
“What’s that got to do with the exercise?”
“It’s got a lot to do with how I’m going to treat you.” My face was green. My eyes were red. He thought about it.
“I’m a member of the 118th Military Police Company.”
“Regular army?” I asked.
“North Carolina Guard.”
I gave him a long, hard stare. “Are you gonna burn me?” I asked.
“I was told to lead you to the camp,” he said.
“Who told you to do that?”
“My company commander.”
“And you know where the camp is?”
“Yes.” He pointed at my map. The location was a hilltop, five, maybe six miles away. It was the same place he’d shown Bob.
“How many people?”
“Six SF, ten partisans.”
“What kind of weapons?”
“M-16s. A couple of M-60s. The SF guys have AK-47s.”
“You’re sure?” I asked him.
“I was there.”
The conversation went on very much as if he were a real Chu Hoi. It was a game, I knew, but it could easily become one I might lose. I talked to him for a while and gradually came to the conclusion that he really was going to show me the camp; he didn’t seem smart enough not to. Though his intentions might have been honorable, that didn’t mean he wasn’t being used. Just because he was following orders didn’t mean we weren’t being led into a nice airtight ambush. That’s why they call this stuff “special operations.” It was wheels within wheels, games within games, and I could see the hand of Senior Chief Jaeger in it. The bastard.
When night fell, we separated from Third Platoon and headed southeast. The going was slow, hard, and noisy; the underbrush was thick, and little light made it to the forest floor. We navigated by dead reckoning, walking a compass bearing when we could, following easier terrain when possible. We patrolled tight, dialed in and aware that somewhere out there was an A-Team with our name on it. The scout was kept behind me in the patrol order, with a specially tasked guy behind him. I doubt our guide had even half a clue that in the real world, the Chu Hoi would be shot in the head at the first sign of an ambush. Instant karma.
We made it to the vicinity of the hill, and the point man, the scout, and I went forward. We could see no sign of fires and could hear nothing. We skirted the base of the knoll, traveling almost completely around it, but found no tracks or obvious path leading to the top. The night was perfectly still, dark, and peaceful. We returned to the layup position and waited. There was no sound from the hilltop at dawn; no wood smoke, no sounds of men moving about, and no cooking smells. At midmorning I took one boat crew and the scout forward again, this time to search the hilltop. There was nothing there, no signs of habitation, no fire pits, no tracks, and no indication of sleeping places. The ground was undisturbed.
“You got the wrong hilltop,” I said to the scout.
He looked at the map and blinked at me. “This isn’t the place,” he said. “But this is where they told me it was.”
“You didn’t get a fix yourself?” I asked.
“You mean plot the location?”
“You know how to read a map?” I asked. It was a question I should have asked days before.
“I’m an MP,” the scout finally said. “Most of the time we follow roads.”
No shit, I thought. Baby Zee looked at me and smirked.
There were four or five other hilltops around the area, most taller than the one we were on. The closest promontory was only two hundred meters away, much closer than I wanted to be in daylight. We spent the remainder of the day hiding in a creek bed to the south. As we dozed through the cool morning, I realized that we were in a world of hurt. We might be in the area of the SF camp and we might not. I was no longer worried that my scout might lead us into ambush. It was now obvious that he couldn’t find his own ass with a ten-man search party. The hilltops would have to be checked one by one, at night, a dicey and time-consuming process. We waited, and by late that afternoon, our problem was solved for us.
It was a pig that would finally give the SF camp away. A real pig. While we were still in our creek-bed hide, an incredible series of screams echoed through the woods. Shrieks, squeals, and rooting, snorting noises, high-pitched and desperate. They never sounded human, but they didn’t sound animal, either. The noise of murder had come from the north. It sounded like someone killing a pig. And that was exactly what had happened. The SF camp had been delivered “fresh food” in
the form of a live hog. To feed the troops, the animal had to be butchered. We learned later that the hog was dispatched with a hatchet. There was only one hilltop in the direction of the squealing. We now had a target location, and we would find our quarry after nightfall. We spent the remaining hours planning the attack.
In fairness to the Green Berets, a camp makes a great target. They were required to have tents and shelters, cooking fires, and play host to a dozen gumbies selected primarily because they didn’t know a goddamn thing about hiding in the woods. The SF guys were entrenched, we were mobile. They were at a training base, and we were on patrol. They dozed in hammocks at night, and we laid up. On patrol we cooked no food, made no fires, did not smoke, and seldom talked. We had shooting pairs constantly on guard, and layup positions were selected primarily for inaccessibility and ease of defense. The SF guys were constrained by the requirement that they train a dozen people, and we were compelled only by considerations of stealth, surprise, and offensive action.
We contacted Red Wolf and laid on a two-bird exfil package. We designated a time window for a primary extract, right on the target, and a secondary extract two hours later on the empty hill we had searched in the morning. Unlike our insertion, the extract would not require the helicopters to land. We arranged for Red Wolves to show up with SPIE rigs, or special insertion and extraction—a fancy term for hundred-foot sections of line dropped from the doors of helicopters. The line is rigged with loops into which we would hook carabiners. Connected to the line by climbing harnesses, the team would be lifted out, eight men per rope. We’d get back home dragged along under the helicopters. Dangling from the line is a wild ride and the fastest way to get the hell out of Dodge.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 9