“You only get four guys, plus yourself,” he said as we walked through the Team area. “You’re going to need an air-ops guy, a cartographer, and an engineman.”
“Dave, Tim, Stan, and Bubba,” I said.
“Tell ’em to get their gear off the trucks,” said Frank.
We worked all night preparing the rubber duck, an F-470 Zodiac raiding boat, rigged to be paradropped at sea. Actually, we prepared two of them. In the SEALs, we have a saying: “One is none, two is one.” The inflatable boat would be mission-critical. If it burned in—that is, if its parachute failed to open—we’d have a spare.
I hit the Intel Department and loaded up on maps, charts, and satellite photos. I went to Operations, had everyone’s orders cut, and sent coded messages to the amphibious squadron recommending a time and location for the boat drop. The location was two hundred miles south of Jamaica. The middle of tropical nowhere. We’d be able to make our parachute drop unobserved.
The guys selected for this operation were solid. Surfer Dave was the point man of my assault element and a fine cartographer. Stan was a second-class petty officer, a quartermaster, and could be expected to help Dave with the beach chart. Tim was the platoon’s leading petty officer and had been around the block a time or two. He was our air-ops department head, a former member of the navy parachute team, and would be responsible for building up the rubber ducks. Bubba Nederlander was simply Bubba. A Tennessee hillbilly who was utterly without fear, he drank like a fish and fought like a tiger. He was an engineman, third class, and would probably stay that rank forever. He was a good guy, and later, like Dave, would prove unflappable in combat. I knew I could count on him to keep our outboards running, even with chewing gum and bailing wire.
After the rubber ducks were built, I gave the lads a warning order and told them we were going to Honduras. Nobody blinked. We went into isolation, meaning we were not allowed out of the Team area until we left for the airplane. It was standard operating procedure for a mission deployment. Frank and the rest of the Fifth had already left for A. P. Hill, and it was quiet. That night I watched Breaker Morant on video in the platoon hut and drank beer.
The plan for our first reconnaissance into Honduras had leaked—way above my pay grade—but this time we’d have airtight security. I hoped.
THE TAIL RAMP of the C-141 went down, and the back doors clamshelled open. After hours in the cold, dark tube of the aircraft, the tropical light was sudden and blinding. We’d left Norfolk on a sleety winter night, loaded our equipment and the two palleted ducks, and flown directly south to the at-sea rendezvous point. Now a hot blast of tropical air flooded into the airplane.
The plane was at fifteen hundred feet over the rendezvous point. The pilots had a visual on our ship, Fairfax County, a landing ship, tank, or LST. I bent down and looked off the ramp. Under the port wing, Fairfax County appeared as advertised. The C-141 pulled a wide circle and came into the wind.
We hooked static lines; the light turned green, and a drogue chute yanked the rubber duck off the tail ramp. We ran after it, plunging into the aircraft’s jet blast as the huge cargo chute blossomed over the Zodiac. Static lines opened our parachutes, and we steered to the place the Zodiac would touch down.
As we floated toward the water, we pulled on swim fins. At a hundred feet, we released the chest straps of our parachute harnesses, turned in to the wind, and prepared for a water landing. Although the army-issue T-10 parachutes were not known for their steering capabilities, we all landed within fifty feet of the boat. The C-141 dropped our second boat, loaded with additional equipment. Forty minutes after we’d left the airplane, we were pulling the Zodiacs onto the stern ramp of Fairfax County.
We stowed our equipment, weapons, and ammunition and were shown to our quarters. I changed into a dry uniform and met the captain in the wardroom. I remember him as a tall, affable man; he said he had known my father at the Naval War College. It was always good when they said that, I thought. I was proud and happy to find in my travels that my father was universally liked and respected.
The captain introduced me to his officers, and to one who didn’t need an introduction. Ralph Knight was also a JG, and he had been in my company at OCS. Ralph was a cryptological officer, an electronic spook, and, like me, was on detachment—not part of the ship’s company.
As we’d motored up to Fairfax County, we’d noticed several large trailer vans parked on her decks. The trailers bristled with antennae. Ralph and a small crew of linguists and code breakers were here to keep an ear on the Nicaraguans as we played our little game. Ralph, of course, didn’t say any of this. He never said much of anything. If you ever asked him what they did inside the vans, he’d tell you, “We repair flashlights.” I wouldn’t even have known he was a crypto officer if I hadn’t seen his orders back in Newport.
The captain filled me in on his end of the operation, and I filled him in on ours. He said that another ship, Boulder, was en route from Puerto Rico. Aboard it were a company of marines, a Navy Seabee detachment, and three companies of infantry from the Puerto Rican national guard. The marines would secure the landing site; the Puerto Rican units would operate with the Honduran infantry; and the Seabees were to make road improvements and dig any defensive positions called for by the marines. They’d be ashore for a week, then be back-loaded. It was your basic amphib operation, Fairfax County’s stock-in-trade, and everyone seemed to have their shit together.
The captain told me that two days before, Fairfax County had been overflown by a Russian-made May-type maritime surveillance plane out of Cuba. Agas Tara had again been in the press, and The New York Times had published updates. Although the operation wouldn’t be a surprise to the Nicaraguans, the timing and location of the landing were still to be kept as secret as possible. That meant the prelanding operations, principally our reconnaissance, were to be conducted with the greatest possible security. Although we would conduct the operation clandestinely, Honduras was a “permissive environment”; we were there at the request of an ostensible ally. I told the skipper that I expected no trouble.
The night before the operation, the captain, Ralph, and I were heloed to Boulder to brief the commodore and the commander of the landing force. At the briefing, there was an update from the intelligence officer. He indicated that there had been some activity in the Nicaraguan port of Puerto Cabezas. Troops had moved north on the highway toward the Honduran border, and at least two Russian-made patrol craft were in the harbor. Puerto Cabezas was less than fifty miles south of the border. This wasn’t a surprise; nor did it particularly bother anyone at the briefing. The terrain of Gracias a Dios would strongly favor the defenders, meaning us, and two patrol boats were not an issue to amphibious ships armed with five-inch guns and attack helicopters.
Ralph gave a brief synopsis of the Nicaraguan electronic order of battle. They had coastal surveillance radars operational, he said, and there had been an increase in traffic on Sandinista army frequencies. “They know we’re out here,” he said.
I was one of the last to brief. My operation was extremely straightforward and had just four phases. I would conduct my reconnaissance at night and insert over the horizon. I would communicate using brevity codes to report our arrival into Laguna de Caratasca, the completion of the survey, and our exit back to sea. For code words, I had selected the names of three girlfriends who had dumped me: Susan, Katherine, and Avis.
Following the recon, our scheduled pickup would be in broad daylight, approximately twenty miles offshore, and radio communications for the final part of our operation would be in the clear—on open, rather than encrypted, radio circuits. I would have a hydrographic chart of the beach-landing site prepared two hours after my return to Fairfax County.
The commodore told us that Boulder was to remain far offshore, appearing with her troops and landing craft only on the morning of the actual landing. This might not be a big surprise to the Nicaraguans, the commodore said, but it would be a little one.
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p; We were heloed back to Fairfax County, and I updated the guys. The following morning I inspected weapons and equipment and reviewed the charts. At 1400 I gave a patrol leader’s order, briefing them in detail on our operation—a process that took the better part of two hours. SEALs tend to brief the hell out of everything. We plan thoroughly because operations very seldom go as you think they will.
This one would be no exception.
An hour after sundown, Fairfax County sailed to within thirty nautical miles of the coast, then turned southeast, remaining in conventional shipping lanes. To anyone watching on radar, Fairfax County would appear to be a slow-moving coastal trader and not a United States Navy warship inserting a reconnaissance element. So we hoped.
At 2030 hours we departed our briefing spaces and dragged our F-470 Zodiac raiding craft toward the gigantic door at the aft end of the well deck. When the door was completely down, water swept into the well deck, and the hollow door thudded as it was beaten on by a large, following sea. Timing our movement between waves, we dragged our boat down the ramp.
The Zodiac’s bowline was attached to a cleat, and for a few moments we glided in Fairfax County’s wake, towed along as we secured equipment and weapons and tested the outboard engine. Night-vision goggles, marker buoys, radios, rucksacks, and personal weapons were secured with carabi-ners. As the bowline pulled tight, we worked without speaking. The only sound was water hissing down the huge ship’s steel sides.
The night was blustery, and squalls swept in from the west. Above the blow, a bright first-quarter moon would occasionally burst through breaks in the cloud deck. The moon was not the way we wanted it—high and bright in the sky, it occasionally lit us and the ship—but we were happy for the storm and squalls. The weather was supposed to last all night, and there was some comfort in that. Visibility in the rain was often less than a hundred yards—perfect for gaining our objective undetected.
Finally, I nodded to the well-deck officer: We were good to go. We released the bowline, and our Zodiac dropped back into the silvery wake of the ship. I put the tiller over and we turned west, skittering over the top of a large, rolling swell. The stern of the ship disappeared as the wave rose between us. Within moments the LST was lost in rain and darkness. I knew Fairfax County would now turn north, again doing her best to seem like nothing more than a coast-wise merchantman. I steadied up on course 170. Somewhere over the dark horizon lay the coast of Honduras, Laguna de Caratasca, and our area of operations.
Over twenty sea miles stood between the coast and us. We were a small black speck on an infinitely huge and dark ocean. We had eleven hours to infiltrate the target, conduct our recon, exfil, and move offshore to a prearranged rendezvous with Fairfax County. Until then we were on our own.
We plowed southeast, chugging up and down the faces of big swells. We were alternately thrust into bright patches of moonlight and swept over by cold, dark rainsqualls. I sat in the stern, working the outboard, as Dave, Bubba, Stan, and Tim pressed down on the boat’s tubes, presenting as low a profile as possible. There was not a light or stars to be seen. Only the vaguest glimmer of bioluminescence stirred in our wake. I kept on course and strained my eyes against the night.
After about an hour and a half, the coastline rose into view. It wasn’t much of a landfall. The low terrain was the merest smudge on the horizon; if not for dead reckoning, I’d have had no idea we were even getting close. To starboard, the coast seemed to be enveloped in a thin, low fog. There were no lights. The Mosquito Coast was, and is, a desolate, poor place, and there was not a single navigational light, nor the light from any dwelling, to mark the entry to the Laguna. After twenty miles on a compass heading, I hoped I was in the right place.
I slowed the engine to idle and listened. There was a steady sound from the shore—something like low, uninterrupted thunder. Occasionally, the noise was punctuated by a larger sound, a hollow boom merging into the general roar. I knew this was the noise of surf—big, big surf breaking in the channel’s mouth. Even out here, three or four hundred yards from the beach, the swells were the size of houses. As we were thrust up on the crest of a roller, I glimpsed the shore in the middle distance, and on the crest of a second swell, I made out a break in the tree line: the mouth of the lagoon. A four-hundred-yard-long, three-hundred-yard-wide channel connected Laguna de Caratasca to the sea. Somewhere inside the surf zone were the channel bar and the entrance to the bay.
Another boom. This one sounded like not-so-distant artillery. The waves in the vicinity of the bar were piling up against the tide pouring down the throat of the channel. I wasn’t overly concerned—yet. I had a visual on the channel mouth, and all I had to do was keep away from breaking waves and hit the slot.
The problem was that we were engulfed in another rainsquall. In a matter of seconds, visibility plunged to under a hundred yards. I told Bubba to keep an eye seaward, and we felt our way toward the channel. He was watching for the Big Kahuna, any rogue wave breaking far outside the rest. If we were caught from behind by a wave, we would broach. Although the Zodiac would not sink, it might capsize or pitchpole, scattering us and our equipment and flooding our radio. Not the way I wanted to arrive in Honduras.
The job now was to find the edge of the surf zone; we would then wait until we had timed several sets of waves. We had to pick the end of a smaller set and attempt to cross during a lull. It sounds easy. But poor visibility wasn’t our sole problem. The tide was at full ebb, and a rush of current, maybe five knots’ worth, was pouring down the channel. Laguna de Caratasca is over twenty-five miles long and five miles wide. The entire body of water emptied to sea through a three-hundred-yard opening. To maintain position off the bar against the ebbing tide would take some fancy boat handling.
Compounding matters, when swells met the rush of outgoing tide, they would occasionally lurch up, sucking out and pitching forward in what surfers call “closeouts.” Most waves break in a predictable manner; closeouts break almost without warning. Two-hundred-yard sections of wave would fold over and break almost instantaneously, sending a wall of white water across the entire channel. I studied the waves and waited for an opening.
“You’ve got a set coming,” Dave said quietly.
I turned and looked aft. Half a dozen cliff-sized waves rolled silently toward us, getting bigger as they came. I turned the boat 180 degrees, headed seaward, and gunned the engine. The Zodiac went nearly vertical as we made it up the face of the first wave. It was a monster. I put the tiller to port and headed for the low shoulder of the next wave as the breaker exploded on the bar like a depth charge.
Holy shit. I looked at Bubba. For a kid from Tennessee, he didn’t seem too impressed. I wasn’t comforted to think that maybe he didn’t know any better.
I stood up again and looked out into the blackness. The set had passed, I hoped. I would have to cross the bar in the relative calm between sets. But which sets? And how would I know when it was safe to go?
The rain stopped as though someone had turned off a tap. The moon came out and lit the channel and the Laguna beyond the bar. Suddenly, the way before us was clear. The sea behind us was also lit.
“Jesus tap-dancing Christ,” Bubba said.
This time he was impressed. Behind us, a massive set of waves crested up on the outermost part of the bar. Here was the Big Kahuna and his buddies. We were now a hundred yards from the mouth of the channel. These waves were the biggest we’d seen tonight. There would be no turning to seaward and getting away over them. Like it or not, we would have to run the channel. Now.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said. As if we had a choice. I pointed the Zodiac toward the shore.
As we moved into the impact zone, I gunned the engine, trying to keep the boat in the low spot between the last wave of the first set and the first wave of the new. A foot-thick layer of sea foam danced on the water around the boat. Behind us, a gigantic wall of water felt bottom and loomed up.
In slow motion, the wave pitched out. The lip was tw
o feet thick and fell trailing a white plume of spray. As it slammed the bar, the rumble was something we could feel in our chests. Another wave broke behind it. Then another. These waves were breaking 250 yards to seaward and rolling toward us in ten-foot walls of white water. The broken waves rushed at us, closing the distance between sets faster than I thought possible.
I gave the engine a squirt and overtook the white water in front of us, the remnant of the first set. The Zodiac bumped up, then dropped down five feet as we overhauled the broken section. We were now surfing, only we weren’t riding a surfboard; we were in an inflatable boat loaded with a thousand pounds of men and equipment, and it handled like a dump truck with four flat tires.
The good news was we were slotted right down the middle of the channel. The bad news was the Big Kahuna was still closing. Fast. We streaked along, and I kept the tiller as steady as I could. Any turn right or left could broach us, and the boat would flip and be run ashore. I steered and gritted my teeth.
The wave behind kept coming. Even broken, it was bigger and faster than the wave we rode. I knew from thousands of hours of surfing that one breaking wave does not usually overtake another. I also knew that sometimes they do. When it does happen, the doubled wave is bigger and even more unpredictable. I didn’t want to do the math. We were inside the channel mouth, and I could see beach, forest, and mangrove on either side of us. I knew the wave would have to peter out. Soon. The wall of white water behind us started to subside, gradually lessening until it faded out completely under us.
To my right was a rude jumble of fishing shacks, maybe five. This place was called Barra de Caratasca. It wasn’t a town, just a group of huts. They showed no light, but I didn’t want to be seen. I aimed the Zodiac at the left side of the channel and reduced speed. We puttered out of the impact zone and toward the darkness of the mangroves.
We were in.
I looked around the boat. Grinning like a monkey, Bubba had his hat folded back like Gabby Hayes. Dave knew exactly how close we had cut it. He rolled his eyes. “Cowabunga,” he said.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 14