Doing it was even better. The freedom of flying through the sky, soundless, wind whistling past your body, was like nothing I’d ever done before. It was the same sense of freedom I felt underwater, but floating five or ten thousand feet in the air was even better: here I could breathe and see everything for miles. I’d go up as many times as I could, jumping from higher and higher altitudes, and allowing myself to fall closer and closer to the ground before I “pulled,” or opened, my chute. I took grief from the instructors, but I figured that in combat you’re less of a target free-falling than you are drifting lazily. So why open at five thousand feet and let some enemy platoon turn you into a bull’s-eye, when you can open at five hundred and stay alive?
I learned how to pack and rig chutes. I got myself a sport “flat,” which I modified to make more maneuverable. I bought whatever books on skydiving I could find and studied the intricacies of plotting a jump so that you land exactly where you want to, despite thermals, downdrafts, wind shear, and the thousands of other little variables that can cause cracked bones or broken skulls.
Despite the fact that we had to become jump-qualified, there was no intensive parachuting program at any of the UDT teams in the fifties and sixties: al! the jump training was run by the Army. In fact, traveling back and forth for one lousy practice jump could take all day. There were no facilities near Little Creek, so we’d have to convince one of the pilots from Langley Air Force Base — across Norfolk Bay — to fly us to Fort Lee, one hundred miles west in Petersburg, Virginia, or about the same distance northeast to Fort A.P. Hill, where there were approved drop zones. Finding pilots wasn’t difficult, as all the USAF “bus drivers”—transport pilots — had to qualify regularly in CARP, which stands for Computerized Airborne Release Point flying-
CARP, if pilots do it right, drops the 82nd Airborne right onto its predetermined target. If pilots do it wrong, you get Grenada, where drop zones were missed, timing went awry, and paratroopers were put in jeopardy. Most of the time, pilots do it wrong.
Anyway, we’d fly up to Ft, Lee or Ft. A.P. Hill, do a single jump, then like ET, we’d call home and wait for a bus from Little Creek to come pick us up. Much of the time we did our waiting in one establishment or another that served liquid refreshments. Sometimes we’d receive visitors, gentleman callers in Army khaki, who — after the proper pleasantries had been exchanged — we would mash into paste.
During my first year or so as a Frogman I had a pair of I unique experiences. One was that I got married. The lucky lady was Kathy Black, who I’d tried so hard to toss into the Uvingston Avenue pool back in New Brunswick the summer of 1958. We’d dated since then. I’d seen her whenever I went home on a visit, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
In the early sixties you didn’t shack up — not if you were from a good Catholic family (or even, like me, from a bad Catholic family). So we made our relationship format.
She said she’d be willing to put up with the long periods I’d be away from home; I really liked her, and we made a nice-looking couple. We didn’t have a lavish ceremony, but a nice one. Then we went on a brief honeymoon, Kathy got pregnant, and I left for a six-month Mediterranean cruise.
Typical Navy marriage.
„The second thing that happened to me was thai I became a lab animal. It was poetic justice. What do you find in science labs? Rats, monkeys, and frogs, right? So what more perfect animal to test a new airborne retrieval system than a Frogman.
It was called the Fulton Skyhosk Recovery System, and I volunteered as a guinea frog on a TAD, or Temporary Additional Duty (I’ve always thought of it as Traveling Around Drunk), that look me from St. Thomas to Panama City, Florida- Skyhook was designed to recover special-forces operators or CIA agents from behind enemy lines, snatch VIPs effectively and covertly, or retrieve (tranquilized) hostile prisoners: captured by our forces.
The principle was simple. The snatchee climbs into a bunny suit, which is a reinforced, one-piece, hooded jumpsuit, into which is constructed a heavy nylon harness, radio cable, and a microphone in the hood. The harness snaps onto a bungeecord rope about eight hundred feet long, which is in turn attached to a helium balloon floated from a tether.
Then a low-flying aircraft equipped with outriggers and sweeper bars comes in at about 130 knots or so and snags the line below the balloon. The line is locked automatically onto a winch through the use of explosive charges. Then — depending on the kind of plane that’s doing the snatch — the snatchee gets reeled in, either through a hatch in the belly or up a tail ramp, and it’s aloha, bon voyage, and sayonara.
The system had been tested mostly on sandbags, although twenty-two human lab-rats — company reps and Army special forces operators — had also participated. I was the Navy’s first volunteer, and the first pickup to be attempted without any emergency-parachute backup system.
I showed up at an airfield near Panama City, changed into the bunny suit, strapped in, hunkered down, held my knees, and watched as the plane, a Navy Grumman S-2 Tracker, banked in and came straight toward me at about five hundred feet.
It passed overhead and caught the line tethered to the balloon. I felt the line go, took about a step and a half, and then — shüüt, talk about your standing starts!
I felt as if I were riding at the end of a huge rubber band at 130 knots. I must have absorbed six g’s — snapped into the air like a cartoon character whose hundred-yard arms can’t hold on to a window ledge or tree limb.
The ground went bye-bye. The line pulled me higher than the aircraft — I went way above horizontal — and then I started to fall.
It occurred to me at that instant that maybe I should have worn a chute. I mean, what goes through the monkey’s brain is something like, “Okay, I’ve been twanged. So here I am on my back, and I’m moving forward at 120 knots or so. But am I moving because I’m being pulled, or did the line break and I’m moving on my own — and about to go splat?”
The only way to find out was to see for myseif. So I did a scissors kick and body-rolled onto my stomach.
Terrific. Now, by craning my neck into the wind, I could see the plane — and the line — and I knew I was okay. I tried to call the crew, but my roll had broken the radio cable and the microphone was useless. So I decided to have some fun.
I threw a hump — rolling my shoulders forward and dragging my hands, which is what you do in a parachute free-fall to move yourself laterally — and brought my body level with the top of the fuselage. Then, by finning my hands at my sides,
1 discovered I could break left and right.
I began to water-ski behind the Tracker, cutting through the prop wash to port and starboard. I tried waving at the pilots, but discovered, as I later put in my report, that activating any of my extremities too dramatically led to turbulent repercussions — in plain English, if I moved too much, I’d start to corkscrew. It was not a pleasant sensation.
So I spent the next fifteen minutes banking lazily left and right, while the air crew reeled me in, wondering what the hell was going on out there.
When I got close, I rolled over on my back again, reached down, grabbed my ankles, and tucked tight into a ball. That action brought me down so I swung like a pendulum and allowed them to winch me up into the Tracker’s belly more easily.
My head came level with the deck. I reached up and hoisted myself through the hatch, grinning at the visibly uptight crew chief who ran the winch. “Morning, Chief.”
“What the hell’s been going on out there, sailor? Goddamn cable’s been seesawing all the hell over the place. We thought you were unconscious, hurt — broken up.”
“Just water-skiing, Chief.”
“Don’t you b.s. me, you shit-for-brains, numb-nutted asshole.”
“Okay, you got me dead to rights, Chief. I wasn’t waterskiing.”!-
He smiled triumphantly.
“Screw you — I was bodysurfing.”
When we landed, I briefed a bunch of officers and company reps about what
had happened, and what I thought of the system. I didn’t tell them about the aerial waterskiing, although I did suggest that if the snatchee was to be nonparachute-qualified, it would be better if his arms were pinioned, so he couldn’t suffer turbulent repercussions.
One of the officers, a full captain, took me aside afterward and told me he thought I’d done a professional brief. He complimented me on my speaking ability and added that I obviously had initiative.
“Why don’t you apply to Officer Candidate School, Marcinko?” he asked. He explained that the Navy annually took fifty enlisted-men candidates in something called the OIP, or Officer Integration Program, and I appeared to be exactly the sort they were looking for. “I’d be glad to write a letter of recommendation for you.”
“Well, sir,” I told him, “fact is, I’m not sure that OCS is for me. Right now, I’d rather be a chief in the teams than CNO of the whole goddamn Navy.”
“How come?”
“You know chiefs, sir — they can gel things done. They control the real power in the Navy. Nothing moves unless a chief says so — including admirals.”
“You could get things done as an officer.”
“I’m not so sure, sir.”
“Why, Marcinko?”
“Hell, sir, first of all I’m a high-school dropout, and there are all these Academy-grad officers I’d have to contend with, so I’m at a disadvantage from the beginning, you know. So what would I have to look forward to? Probably a junior officer on some ship somewhere. And frankly, to be a juniorgrade fleet puke — begging your pardon, sir — overseeing some raggedy-ass sailors, well, it’s just better for me in the teams.
We swim. We dive. We jump — we stay active.“
He chewed on his pipe some and nodded the way officers nod when they’ve Just switched off all systems. “Well, you be sure to let me know if you ever change your mind.”
Chapter 5
Ultimately, I did change my mind about applying to Officer’s Candidate School. But it had less to do with some captain writing me a recommendation than with a salty chief petty officer named Everett E.»Barrett. Barrett was an EOD — Explosives Ordnance Disposal specialist — and a GM/G (Gunner’s Mate/Guns) who’d]ust made chief when I was assigned to the Second Platoon of UDT-21. The Secondto-None Platoon, we used to call it.
If ever I had a sea daddy, it was Ev Barrett. Talk about typecasting. Barrett was the perfect movie version of a chief petty officer — he would have been played by somebody like Ward Bond, if William Holden didn’t grab the part first.
I thought of him as an older guy, although he was probably only in his late thirties when I met him: a wiry, gray-eyed, sharp-featured man about five feet ten, with white-wall haircut — very short — and missing the ring finger on his left hand from playing with one too many explosive devices. He had a gravelly, bullfrog voice that preceded him by about fifteen seconds (you always heard Ev Barrett before you saw him), and he growled undeleted expletives in nonending strings and ingenious combinations — all in a New Englander’s flat-voweled accent. The term curses like a sailor had probably been coined about Everett E. Barren. He wasn’t an educated man — not formally educated, at least- He read exactingly and spelled phonetically. That’s as in F-0-N-E-T-I-K-L-E-E. And more than once I caught him reading us a new regulation with the paper upside down. But upside down or no, he’d look it over and then go nose to nose with some poor LT (jg) and recite a bunch of official-sounding paragraphs. Confronted by Barren’s performance, most officers would habitually buckle slightly at the knees, say,
“Yeah, sure, Chief, anything you say,” and that would be that. Barrett knew how to scare the bejesus out of officers.
Oh, but he was good. He scared the bejesus out of not just officers but all of us — me included. During my first Caribbean cruise in UDT-21, the radio on one of our boats went out just before we started amphibious maneuvers. I may have been a radioman, but I was no electronics technician. That didn’t matter to Barren.
“Marcinko, you bleeping motherblanker, get your blankety-blanking scrawny blanking ass over here,” he growled at me.
I got my blankety-blanking scrawny blanking ass in gear.
One did when Barrett summoned.
“You will btankety-blank have that blankety-blank blanking radio blankety-blankety-blank bleeping blanking fixed by the time we bleeping climb into the blanking boat tomorrow, or I will bleeping kick your blankety-blank-blank-bleeping blanking ass into blanking next blanking week.”
“Aye blanking aye. Chief.” Now, I didn’t know a transistor from a resistor, or a filter from a tube. But I broke out the schematics and worked all night, and the next morning, somehow — I still don’t know what I did — I got the damn radio fixed and working.
Not that I was worried about Barren’s kicking my ass into next week — although the chief was perfectly capable of punting it straight ahead about forty-eight hours. It was just that he had this uncanny ability to challenge people successfully to do more than they thought they could do.
Whenever someone said to Ev Barrett, “But Chief, that’s impossible,” Barrett would look him up and look him down and say, “Just bleeping do it and shut the bleep up.”
Barrett took hold of me like a groin-trained watchdog grabs a burglar by the nuts — and he Just wouldn’t let go.
It was always, “Marcinko, you bleeper-blanker, do this,” and, “Marcinko, you worthless blankety-blanking blankerblanker, get your bleeping butt in bleeping gear.” When we were detailed to Vieques Island for maneuvers and slept in tents on the beach, he’d make us police the area and rake the sand twice a day.. Vieques had always been considered vacation time for UDT platoons. You dove for conch and langostino and drank beer and rum and lazed on the beach and worked on your tan.
Not under Ev Barrett you didn’t. He made me take the platoon’s empty beer cans, fill them with sand, and build little patio walls in front of the tents. He designed (and we built) palm-frond patio roofs and beer-bottle wind chimes. At one point he sat the platoon down and taught us how to make palm-frond hats because he thought we weren’t being kept busy enough.
Frogmen making palm-frond hats? Ah, but to Barren, making blanking palm-frond hats meant we had to climb the tallest blanker-blanking palm trees to get the tenderest, greenest, most lush blanking palm fronds on the whole blanking island.
No detrital fronds for Ev Barren. And in case you’ve never done it, climbing a 45-foot palm tree is work.
Thing about it was, I didn’t mind the hazing and the yelling and the constant attention at all. I learned early on that the more Barrett ragged you, the more he thought of you- So he kicked my butt until I passed my high-school equivalency exam. And he made sure I went through advanced jump training. And he honed my administrative skills by making me type all his blanking platoon reports. And he finally coaxed and cajoled and bullied and domineered and strong-armed me until I took the Officer’s Candidate School qualification test — and passed.
When we were back at Linie Creek, he’d bring me home tor dinner, and I’d sit around all night with Barren and his wife, Delia, drinking beer and listening to his stories about the old Navy. Why he adopted me — because that’s exactly what he did — I still don’t know. I wasn’t the first sailor he’d taken under his wing and I wasn’t the last. But I’m glad he did, because he probably spent more time with me between 1961 and 1965, in both UDT-21 and then UDT-22 (a new unit formed in 1963, where Barrett’s Second-to-None Platoon was transferred en masse), than my father had all my life. And frankly, if you were a rowdy youngster in your early twenties (and I was), and you were looking for a positive male rolemodel (and I probably was), you could do a hell of a lot worse than Everett E. Barrelt, UDT, CPO, EOD, GM/G.
And rowdy I was. When Second Platoon deployed on cruises, for example, it fell to me and a friend to clear the enlisted men’s mess deck.
A little explanation is in order here. On board a ship, there is a rigid caste system. Officers live in Officer Co
untry, where enlisted pukes don’t blanking go without a good reason.
Chiefs normally have their own goat locker — their own galley and mess — and the rest of the ship’s company ate on the mess decks. That left us, and the Marines, at the bottom of the bilge. We were classified as troops, not as a part of the ship’s company, and therefore were subject to trickle-down amenities. We ate last. We showered last. We shit last. And in time of emergency we’d die firstBut UDT platoons are tight little cliques. We bunked together, shared duties together, swam in pairs, and we wanted to eal as a group, not have to walk into the mess deck and squeeze ourselves in singly among strange sailors or (worse)
Marines.
I was known as The Geek back then. Geek because I was geeky enough to spit shine the soles of my boots as well as the uppers. My buddy Dan Zmuda, real name Zmudadelinski, alias Mud, and I devised a method by which to clear out enough sailors from the mess deck so Second Platoon could eat together at the same table.
The technique we developed was simple and effective. First, we’d walk into the mess and fill our trays to overflowing with food- Everything from soup to nuts on the same tray. Then I’d sit down in the midst of a group of clean, neat, wellmannered sailors and bid them hello.
“Good day, gentlemen,” I would say, nodding politely.
Then Mud would drop onto an adjacent chair with a thud-
“Hi, tablemates,” he’d add, genteel as a yeoman.
The cordial greeting would be onset by Mud’s physical appearance. He was built like a fireplug, and just as solid,
and he kind of permanently tilted into the wind. His round, bulldog jaw jutted defiantly, his big Slavic nose (broken in any number of fights) was slightly askew- The rest of his Polack face looked as ifit’d been sandblasted. Even when he smiled, his eyes could develop this wonderful wild look — the sort of “watch carefully, folks, here it comes” grin favored by Hulk Hogan just before he trashes Andre the Giant.
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