“Yup.”
“I better go get squared away. See you guys later for a beer or something.”
Bill tossed me a sharp salute. “Aye-aye, Ensign Rick.” He cracked a smile, then broke into full-faced grin. “I don’t frigging believe it. You — an officer. Finally we’ve got someone who understands us.”
I turned and headed for the executive officer’s office. In a way they were right: I did understand them, and they knew I’d be around for a while; I wasn’t one of the usual SEAL officers who had a reserve commission, did one tour, and then quit. On the other hand I could see the pitfalls of coming back to Little Creek only ten months after I’d left.
In the minds of many with whom I’d be serving I’d still be The Geek, the guy who ate peas and spaghetti through his nose. I was still the uncontrollable E-5 Frogman who had the reputation of being an animal. I was let’s-drive-the-truck-onthe-sidewalk-through-the-tunnel-in-Naples Marcinko.
I knew I’d have to change their minds. I took a deep breath and walked through the XO’s door. Joe DiMartino rose to greet me.
“Dick — welcome aboard.”
“Thanks, Joe. Good to be here.”
He gave me a firm handshake and a pat on the back. He was easily ten years older than I, and a full lieutenant. Joe had seen action in Korea, and he’d been around during the Bay of Pigs, when the CIA had used Frogmen to help train some of the Cuban maritime assets before the abortive invasion. He was one of SEAL Team Two’s “plank owners”—those sixty officers and men who had been selected to form the initial unit back in January 1962.
DiMartino looked like his name. The boot of Italy was written all over his craggy face, from olive skin and dark eyes to an aquiline nose and uneven white teeth that showed when he smiled.
His uniform was anything but formal: khaki shorts and the blue-and-gold T-shirt in which SEALs did their morning FT.
“Is that the uniform of the day?”
Joe D nodded affirmatively. “Roger that. You’re overdressed, Marcinko.”
“I’ll remember tomorrow.”
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Help yourself.”
I took a paper cup, filled it from an um that sat atop a twodrawer, olive-green file cabinet, and raised it in a steaming, silent toast in Joe’s direction. “What’s up?”
“The usual bullshit. We’re halfway through a training cycle, and you’re gonna have to play some catch-up. I’m planning to send you over to Bravo Squad at Second Platoon as soon as you finish your quals.”
“Roger that. How’s the CO?”
“TNT? He’s okay, but he’s overworked. He’d like to Jump and shoot, but the son of a bitch is buned under a ton of paperwork. Makes him prickly, but don’t take n personal. In fact we should get moving right now — see him before it gets too busy. He’s got some things to say to you.”
“Let’s go.”
We walked out into the corridor. The battleship-gray walls of the low building hadn’t been painted in some time, and the floors were scuffed and dirty. But there was a good, lived in feeling about the place. Moreover, it was both informal and low-key when it came to dress regs and spit and polish, which suited roe just fine.
Joe D rapped on the CO’s door. From inside came a distinct growl. “Come.”
We stepped inside and saluted. Lieutenant Commander Tom N. Tarbox lifted his short, bulky frame from behind his desk and returned the salutes. His nickname was TNT because he often became too hot to handle. He brooked no bullshit.
TNT sat me down and read me the gospel. He asked how my wife was doing. I told him she was due lo have our second child within the month. He nodded and ordered me to get Kathy squared away as soon as possible because families were a drain on an officer’s time if they weren’t settled down and comfortable. I’d be assigned to work in submersible operations — diving — until I satisfied all my SEAL qualifications.
I’d have to go to fire-support school, where I’d learn how to call in artillery strikes from offshore vessels. I’d be required to take language training — Spanish — and requalify in HALO — High Altitude, Low Opening — parachute work, and was that all a roger, Ensign Marcinko?
I’d have to become familiar quickly with SEAL weapons and tactics, and if I was out of shape, God help me because Tarbox demanded that his officers lead from the front, not from behind, and did I get each and every word of that, mister?
“Aye-aye, sir.”
He shook my hand, told me he was glad to have me aboard, and kicked us out. “I’ve got too much goddamn paperwork to deal with to play nursemaid. See you later at the Officers‘
Club for a beer. Ensign. Now haul ass.“
* * *
There’s a world of difference between UDT and SEALs.
As a Frogman I was a conventional wamor whose operational boundary was the high-water mark of whatever beach I was sent to reconnoiter. As a SEAL. my real work only began at the high-water mark — and then it continued inland for as far as I felt comfortable. I was no longer Just a Frogman, but an amphibious commando who could harass the enemy, cany out intricate ambushes that would confuse and terrorize adversaries, disrupt supply routes, snatch prisoners for interrogation, and help to train guerrillas.
In SpecWar parlance, when I became a SEAL, I became a force multiplier. The principle is simple: send me in with 6 SEALs and we will train 12 guerrillas, who will train 72 guerrillas, who will train 432, who will train 2,592—and soon you have a full-tilt resistance movement on your hands.
Another way of looking at it is that SpecWar operators like me can help a government out, or they can help a government out. It all depends on what kind of national policy you want to pursue. SEALs can’t make policy. That’s for the politicians to do. But if there is a policy that allows us to act, then we can throw ourselves into our deadly work with surprising ingenuity, passionate enthusiasm, and considerable diligence.
That’s what happened in September of 1966, when the Navy ordered a contingent from SEAL Team Two to be ready to leave for Vietnam shortly before Christmas.
I was coming back from a training’session in Puerto Rico with my squad — Bravo Squad of the Second Platoon — and we’d just flown into Norfolk Naval Air Station when I saw Two’s new CO, Lieutenant Commander Bill Earley, on the tarmac.
As we came down the ladder, he waved us over. Earley, a West Coast SEAL who’d already been nicknamed Squirrelly because of his habit of constantly fidgeting his six-foot-two frame whenever he sat down, gathered six of us officers in a tight circle around him and gave us the good news.
“We’re authorized for Vietnam. Two reduced platoons— twenty-five men in all,” he shouted over the 100-dedbel screams of unmumed Jet engines. “Twenty enlisteds — and five of you guys.”
I have never been the shy type. I didn’t wait for Squirrelly to finish another sentence. I grabbed him by his elbow and walked him down the ramp so I could pitch my case. He was taller than me, but I was stronger, and I had his arm and wasn’t going to let it go until he gave me the answer I wanted to hear-
To his credit, Earley didn’t laugh at me until he’d heard me oul. Then he swung out of my grasp, told me I was an obnoxious son of a bitch, that I shouldn’t shit a stutter, and that the con job hadn’t worked.
When he’d finished taking all the air out of my sails, he added, “Marcinko, the reason I’m going to send you to Vietnam has nothing to do with logic, or with the pitiful excuse for begging you just performed. I want to inflict you on those poor Vietnamese bastards for two reasons- First, it’ll deprive you of pussy. That’ll make you especially mean, which will result in a high number of VC casualties, and I’ll look good as a result- Second, you’re the most junior guy here — so you’re expendable — cannon fodder — if you step on a mine or get sniped, we don’t lose much experience, and I’ll still look good. So pack your bags.”
Until that moment, I had never seriously considered kissing another man.
The weeks betw
een September and Christmas are still a blur. The platoon leader, who also ran Alfa Squad, was an LT named Fred Kochey. He and I had about eight weeks in which to take twelve individual SEALs and make us ail into a tough, effective, deadly combat unit.
My squad. Bravo, had real potential. Ron Rodger was part Indian, a strong young kid with a hell of a punch — when he hit you, it snapped. He carried the machine gun. When he hit you with that, you snapped. The utility man, Jim Finley, was the kind of guy who could go anywhere, walk into any foreign country and talk to people even though he didn’t speak a word of the language. We called him the Mayor because wherever we went, he’d be out pressing the flesh within minutes, just like a goddamn politician.
The radioman was Joe Camp, a real hustler, who doubled his salary playing poker. Bob Gallagher, the dark Irishman we called Eagle (because he was a bald, beady-eyed, competitive’s.o.b.), loved to bar brawl, shoot, and generally raise hell. My kind of guy. I made him assistant squad leader and assigned him to cover our rear. Jim Watson — Patches, because he liked to sew so many school patches on his uniform he looked like a walking Navy recruiting ad — was point man, Jim was one of Seal Two’s plank owners — an original SEAL.
It was right that he’d be the tip of the Bravo Squad spear.
We had no medic in Bravo Squad. I told the guys that was because Junior men didn’t die — only old guys, like Kochey’s antiques in Alfa, would need to be patched up.
Beneath the black humor lay reality. Indeed, my job would be to get Bravo Squad back in one piece. The key to staying alive would be team integrity. We practiced constantly, first at Camp Pickett, in Blackstone, Virginia, then at Camp Lejeune. North Carolina. The problems seemed endless. All the mundane tradecraft things I’d never thought much about now became huge tactical obstacles. How do five-and-one or tenand-two walk a trail? How do you look for booby traps? How do you use a point man — and what about rear security? Where in the squad does the radioman go? Or the machine gunner?
If there’s an ambush, who’ll break right and who’ll break left?
We constantly practiced our fields of fire because there are no safety regs when you’re walking with weapons locked and loaded on jungle trails. The asshole who stumbles and shoots his buddy in the back can cause a lot of damage- The solution is for everybody to know how everybody else is carrying his gun, and what portion of the clock his, weapon is responsible for. Point man, for example, can deal with a wider field of fire than fourth man, who can only shoot from two to fourthirty on the right, and from eight to ten o’clock on the left.
There were so many questions — and so little time to find the answers. What about the problem of right-handed shooters? Everybody in my squad was right-handed. That meant we all carried our weapons slung over the right shoulder pointed toward the left — so we were unprotected on one side. I decided that half of us were going to carry weapons southpaw-style.
On the plus side was our squad spirit. My guys were absolute renegades — ail they wanted was to take on bad odds.
I could put them on a ridge and feed them ammo and they’d melt their barrels before they’d give an inch. In fact, one of the toughest problems I had to face at first was keeping them from chasing the enemy and running into an ambush. Because if these Bravo Squad sons of bitches got fired on, they wanted revenge.
(Their aggressiveness would carry on to Vietnam, where all five of my men, Rodger, Finley, Watson, Camp, and Gallagher, would win the Bronze Star or Navy Commendation Medal on our first tour. Bob Gallagher went on to complete four Vietnam tours. On his third, although he was wounded so seriously he could hardly walk, he saved his squad— brought them all, including the squad leader, whom Gailagher carried, out to safety under heavy fire. For that escapade,
“Eagle” won the Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest military decoration.)
But spirit alone doesn’t keep anybody alive. We’d have to be able to kill the enemy before he killed us. This is more difficult than it sounds. I first realized how tough it was going to be at Camp Pickett — in the dead of a fall night. I was running a night-ambush, live-fire exercise. I’d strung us out into pairs along a ridgeline of dunes, forty yards above a simulated canal. The situation was supposed to resemble the Mekong Delta, where we would be assigned. But instead of a sampan filled with VC and supplies, we’d be shooting at a six-by-eight-foot piece of plywood towed behind a jeep.
We’d set up nice and quiet — we’d learned by now how to move without upsetting leaves and branches, and we’d moved quietly into our places and dug firing positions. Our weapons were locked and loaded. We lay in pairs, waiting for the “sampan” to come by. The woods returned to normal: the only sounds we heard were the birds and the bugs.
We were in full combat gear. Green uniforms, load-bearing vests full of 30-round magazines for the M16s we carried, double canteens — everything. All I could see were problems.
The green uniforms had to go. They provided no camouflage; we were always visible against the foliage. The vests had to be redesigned because they made too much noise — jinglejingle is not a good sound in the jungle-jungle. Our boots left gringo-sized footprints on the trails. Easy to follow if you were a VC looking for a Yankee to hurt. We did not want the VC walking a mile in our shoes.
I gave hand signals. “Enemy coming. Get ready.” The squad went down in their holes.
Now the jeep started to move. “Ready.”
I waited. “Now—‘
The ridgeline erupted as six 30-round magazines were expended in unison. I was blinded by the muzzle flashes and lost my target picture but kept shooting anyway. I ejected, thrust another 30-round mag in my M16, and blasted away.
So did everybody else.
“Shit — goddamn it, son of a bitch!” Gallagher’s voice came down the line, followed by Gallagher, who exploded out of his hole six feet straight into the air. He landed on top of his partner, Watson, and started throwing punches. “You asshole scumbag—‘
I ran up the line and pulled them apart. “What the—”
“It’s his fault, Mr. Rick.” Gallagher ripped his fatigue shirt off. His back was covered with ugly red blisters. “It’s Patches’ friggin‘ shell casings. The son of a bitch ejected them down my neck.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“You dipshit—”
I shook them by the scruffs of their necks. “Oh, this is just peachy. We are supposedly in the middle of a rucking ambush, and you shit-for-brains assholes are arguing about where your hot brass is going, while the fucking enemy is cutting your throats.”
I stomped off toward the jeep path to check the targets.
“This is no way to run a rucking war.”
What I discovered made me even more unhappy. There were six of us. We had each emptied two 30-round magazines at the six-by-eight target, which had been moving at a speed of five miles per hour, at a distance of 120 feet. We had fired 360 shots. There were precisely two bullet holes in the target.
The squad was summoned. I poked a ballpoint through each hole.
“So, this is what a highly trained, well-fucking-motivated squad of killers can do when it tries, right?” I growled in a passable Ev Barrett parody.
I let their perfidy sink in. I looked at the crestfallen faces.
“Didn’t you go to marksman’s school?” I put an index finger over Patches Watson’s heart. “Don’t you hang a fucking Expert Marksman’s Badge on that walking billboard you call a jumpsuit?”
He hung his head in shame. “Yes, sir, Ensign Rick.”
The Barren in me took over. “Well, it is not rucking good e-fucking-nuff for you to wear a motherfucking cocksucking dingle-fucking-dangle medal and shoot only two fucking holes in this motherfucking piece of plywood. Or do I have it all wrong, gentlemen?”
No answers.
“Boys,” I said softly, “those probs and stats don’t fuckin‘ excite me at all.”
Silence -
“Now, I’ll tell you somethin
g — we’re all at fault here. I mean, how many times did I hit the target? Okay, so we’ve got a prob to solve. Let’s solve it- Are we leading the target too much? Are we not leading it enough? I mean, what gives?”
We did what was necessary: we drilled again and again and again until we could shred the plywood target whether it was lowed at five miles an hour or fifteen. We practiced shooting in teams of two — remember swim buddies, and how I said you would see that material again? — from a confined space, like a camouflaged hole, or from behind trees. Each of us learned how to fire from close quarters without showering his neighbor with hot brass.
Our training continued from fall into eariy winter- For Halloween we visited the Vietcong village at Camp Lejeune, where Marines in black pajamas and cartoonish Asian accents carried AK-47s and tried to play trick or treat with us. Marines should never attempt war games with SEALs. We gave the bogus VC our own brand of So-Solly U.S. Mateen, boobytrapping their booby traps, playing hide-and-seek during their ambush exercises, and staging our own sneak attacks on their “secured” VC hamlet. It was all fun and games and playacting. We hiked. We camped. We shot the hell out of targets.
When we had time, we’d waltz into Virginia Beach for some full-contact bar-brawling.
A word or two here about that. I have always believed that being a SEAL, like being an NFL linebacker, requires a certain amount of aggressive, close physical contact with your fellow human beings. Some may disagree with me. But I find that there is something truly rewarding about putting your back up against the back of someone you trust with your life, and taking on all comers. Sure, you take a certain number of clings in the pursuit of these unruly activities. But in the long run, I believe the rewards outweigh the liabilities. And when, as an officer, my most important job is to build unit integrity, (here are few better ways in which to build it than late at night, in a bar, when it’s you and your five guys against the rest of the world.
Thus endeth the sermon.
Early in December, we trooped over to the infirmary and upgraded our inoculations. We were still nursing sore arms and butts when the base legal officer sat us down and drew up last wills and testaments for those of us going overseas.
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