Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  As we set off, we heard a sampan somewhere back up the canal, coming toward us. I moved the platoon back into the ambush position but told them not to fire until I did; I didn’t want to kill some fisherman breaking curfew, even though we were in a free-fire zone.

  As the sampan approached the river, I could see two people with weapons, hunkered down. I cut loose with my M-16. The two VC disintegrated under withering fire from the platoon—twelve SEALs on full automatic are a fearsome sight. We did such a good job that we sank the sampan before I could get them to cease fire. Two of my men jumped into the canal in an attempt to retrieve whatever they could, but there was nothing left to retrieve. We found punji stakes floating where the sampan had been, so I surmised the two VC had been on their way to build punji pits for unsuspecting American boys.

  We had partly accomplished my objectives for the night. We hadn’t been shot at, but at least we had done some killing and I had seen the platoon in action. More important, they had seen themselves in action. I later learned it was the first time they had killed anyone, and they were happy as hell to have had the chance. All in all, it was an okay night. I had seen some “procedural” things I didn’t like, but those would be easy to correct. What I did like was the way these men reacted to the hit—they had been aggressive, and they seemed to like it. I felt much better. My hand hadn’t bothered me, and it was great to be leading a group of SEALs in combat again.

  One of the reasons the platoon had seen little action was that Vinh Long was not a target-rich environment. As it turned out, Dick Marcinko’s platoon was about to leave Binh Thuy to be replaced by a SEAL One platoon. Hearing of this, I started politicking with Bill Early in Saigon. He convinced higher headquarters that U.S. interests in Vietnam would be best served if I were to move my platoon to Binh Thuy instead. I knew the Binh Thuy area, and I also knew it encompassed more turf than Vinh Long. It included all the area described by the Bassac River, the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, and the Cambodian border. In other words, it was huge. And it contained a lot of bad guys.

  On June 6, 1968, we arrived in Binh Thuy. The move was uneventful and the turnover with Dick’s platoon was equally so. They’d had some great operations, particularly during the Tet Offensive, when they had been very active in Chau Doc. It turned out that the platoon had been a lot more active than Dick. When his assistant showed me a compilation of their operations, I was surprised to see that Dick had been on only about a tenth of them. I asked and his assistant confirmed it. Seems Dick spent a lot of time coordinating and setting up operations that others in his platoon ran. He was ahead of his time, commanding from the rear. I later found out that Dick, having lost one of his men, had been deeply affected by the violence of the operations in Chau Doc. Apparently, he led only a few operations after Tet, for one of which he was awarded the Silver Star.

  Dick admitted to me later, over a few beers, that he had written his own award recommendation for the Silver Star. I’m sure he deserved it. The recommendation had to be approved by higher authority, and at least two witnesses had to testify to his actions. Still, I didn’t like this business of starting the recommendation yourself. True, some of the officers on the CTF-116 staff were doing the same thing. But in SEAL Team Two, you didn’t write up your own awards for heroism. Dick was more politically astute than the rest of us SEAL Two officers. He knew that down the road the number of medals collected during Vietnam would pay dividends for promotion. The rest of us weren’t thinking about our careers, just trying to do the job at hand. At that time I had no concern about getting promoted—hell, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do.

  Some things had changed in Vietnam since my first tour. Making the rounds of the subsectors, I learned that as a result of the Tet Offensive, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units were operating south of the Bassac River. There seemed to be more bad guys than when I’d left, and they were more aggressive. I also noticed that their activity had moved farther away from the main river. Except for crossings, large units were seldom seen near the Bassac. We’d have to go farther inland to get to the areas they considered safe. Except for the fact we didn’t target innocent civilians, we did in fact employ “terrorist” tactics on the VC and NVA—we terrorized them in their safe havens.

  I also found out that the VC and the NVA knew who SEALs were now—because we were making their lives difficult. When I got to Binh Thuy I heard a rumor that the VC high command (COSVN) had put a price on the heads of what they called “the men with green faces.” I was flattered. This was a sure sign we were hurting them. I went to the IV Corps NILO to see if there was any truth to the rumor. He was surprised I hadn’t heard. He said the COSVN was offering the equivalent of $10,000 for any SEAL officer captured. The bounty went down to about $8,000 for a captured enlisted man, and any SEAL was worth about $5,000 dead. Was this true? Who knows? No SEAL was ever captured, and we brought all of our dead back with us.

  The bounty talk changed how we went on liberty, but not much else. Can Tho, the largest city in the Mekong Delta, was a good place to go for a decent meal. I just made sure we didn’t set any patterns. No insignia marked the jungle green fatigues we wore when not in the field. I didn’t allow the troops to wear cammies except on operations. Out of cammies, we blended well with the rest of the Navy guys. Usually we wore civilian clothes to Can Tho. And though an edict had come out forbidding U.S. military personnel from carrying concealed weapons, I carried a concealed .38-caliber revolver in a shoulder harness whenever I left the base. I ordered the troops to do the same every time they went off base in civilian clothes. The ban on concealed weapons was a stupid regulation, probably started by some Saigon bureaucrat. It made no sense in a war zone.

  Also new since my first tour was the full establishment of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). The “Phoenix” program, established to attack the Viet Cong infrastructure and just getting started when I had left in June 1967, was now pushing ahead and achieving great success in the Mekong Delta. The action arm of the program, the PRUs, were being “advised” by SEAL enlisted. Each province in the delta had its own PRU, and with the exception of the one at Chau Doc, they were advised by SEALs. Most SEAL platoon commanders worked closely with PRUs in their operation areas—I was no dummy, I did too. The PRUs were for the most part former VC who had decided life was better on the other side. They knew what was happening in their area, and they always had more information than they could act on, so we often did operations they couldn’t.

  Because PRU advisers got lonely, being the only Americans in their units, I allowed each of my guys to go to a province for two weeks to work with the PRUs. It was all done unofficially, but it was good for us and the PRUs. Our guys came back with a wealth of information, and the PRU adviser had company. Another bennie for the PRUs was that we had priority access to the Navy helicopter gunships (Seawolves) attached to CTF-116. When we called, they came fast and they were effective. When we operated in squad-sized strength with the PRUs they had that access as well, and it enabled them to take more risks.

  However, because there were so many more NVA troops in the delta, I began to run a lot of platoon-sized operations. Not that we often had a full platoon—but ten shooters were better than six. We needed firepower. The enemy’s situation had changed, but our self-proclaimed mission remained the same: to kill VC and disrupt their operations wherever and whenever we could. My old operating area was a more target-rich environment than it had been a year before. It was time to kick ass again.

  12

  ATTACK AT DAWN: DUNG ISLAND

  Not long after we relocated to Binh Thuy, the action picked up. I found out through one of our intelligence networks that the VC leadership in Ba Xuyen Province was planning a high-level meeting on Cu Lao Dung, an island near the mouth of the Bassac River. The VC cadres ran the show. They “recruited” people for their main force units by terrorizing the Vietnamese villagers, threatening to kill relatives unless the people joined. And to establish “credibility,�
�� they often carried out their threats. Getting rid of the VC cadres was the key to success in the delta.

  I contacted the Seawolf detachment at Binh Thuy, and we set up a reconnaissance flight. Seawolves normally patrolled all up and down the Bassac supporting the PBRs, so the flight over my prospective OPAREA wouldn’t sound any VC alarms.

  We left Binh Thuy in two helos (the normal flight configuration) in midafternoon so I could see the area in daylight and after dark. Flying down the Bassac, I was again struck by the raw beauty of the river and the surrounding delta. The Bassac was like a freeway to the Vietnamese. There were precious few good roads in the Mekong Delta, and most of the people couldn’t afford cars or trucks anyway, so they used the river and canal systems. Dung Island was at the mouth of the Bassac, about eighty miles from Binh Thuy. The trip took about an hour and a half flying low and slow.

  Dung Island, really a close group of three islands separated by canals, was a notorious VC stronghold, strategically situated between the Long Tuan Secret Zone to the north and the Ba Xuyen Secret Zone to the south. Dung Island was on the route the NVA forces took as they infiltrated out of the U Minh Forest, across the Mekong Delta, to the region around Saigon. It was, in effect, an extension of the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  As we neared the island complex, I began recognizing landmarks from previous visits during my first tour. Just after we relocated to Binh Thuy, we destroyed a rice processing plant and captured an eighty-foot junk, which we turned over to the local Vietnamese River Assault Group to use against the VC. In fact, our target this time was not far from the rice factory, which I’m sure the VC restored a few days after we did our damage. That was the nature of the war.

  I told the pilot to fly along the south side of Dung Island, looking for evidence of a large VC presence. As at all crossing points on the river, the VC kept only a small group of caretaker soldiers on the island to maintain the hootches and bunkers that would serve as rest areas for the NVA moving north. As we flew, some ambitious VC shooter decided to take a few potshots at us with his rifle. We ignored him. The VC kept .51-caliber antiaircraft guns on the island, and he could have been baiting us.

  As we turned north, just before reaching the easternmost part of the island, our prospective operating area started to come into view. Dung Island was densely wooded, with far fewer paddies than most areas in the delta and some of the densest canopy outside the mangrove swamps. On the rice mill operation, we had inserted in an area that, from the air, looked devoid of people. Ten meters off the river we had encountered a cement sidewalk leading through a hamlet that was completely invisible from 1,200 feet up. Near the sidewalk we saw two “hootches” that were two stories high and would have looked perfectly natural in southern California. It was a very interesting area, and I was looking forward to getting back.

  As we flew over the target area, I noticed some large hootches— possibly a rest area, if the size of the complex was a clue. It was tucked between two large canals. Our best bet would be to insert to the northwest, patrol until we reached one of the lesser canals running toward the hootch complex, and take the canal the rest of the way to the target. We’d have to cross three large, open areas, but I wasn’t too worried since we would be moving at night.

  We flew over the area only once, so as not to attract attention. The reconnaissance was also helpful to the Seawolf crews, whom I’d use on the operation. As we broke away from the island, another VC gunner started shooting at us, this one with an automatic weapon. I let the birds attack him, because to ignore fire from an automatic would have been abnormal behavior for a Seawolf patrol. They made a couple of passes, shooting up the trees. Then we headed southeast to the subsector headquarters to clear our operation. As usual, the advisers said, “Have at it and good luck.” After refueling at Soc Trang airfield, we headed home.

  As we flew over one of the VC-controlled islands in the Bassac on our way back to Binh Thuy, the helo suddenly lost RPM. An “unpowered” helicopter has the glide path of a rock. Fortunately, having the wings overhead allows the pilot to “autorotate.” This is an emergency procedure for landing a helo when the engine quits. To do it right, the pilot needs as much altitude as possible. We were at about 200 feet—way too low. The pilot jerked back on the collective (a control lever) to give the blades as much lift as possible, and we started up. The problem is, when you pull collective without power, the blades tend to slow down considerably. We got to about 800 feet and, just before we stalled, he killed the collective. We started falling fast, but the blades, free to spin, began to turn. That was the trick: you got the blades turning fast, so that when you pulled collective again, at about fifty feet, you could generate enough lift to bring the bird to its minimum rate of descent just as it hit the ground. This was not a challenge for a Seawolf pilot if he started the process at 1,200 feet. But with only 800 feet we hit the ground with a distinct thud. My seat collapsed and one of the gunners was thrown partly out of the bird. The other helo kept circling overhead, providing eyes and cover.

  I was out of the bird as soon as it hit. We set up security while the crew chief tried to sort out the problem. All was quiet.

  The second important trick in auto-rotating is to find a dry, level place to land. Again, not hard to do when you start at 1,200 feet in daylight. If we had landed in a flooded rice paddy we would have had a hard time breaking the suction to fly out, but somehow our pilot had managed to find a nice dry spot in the dark from 200 feet. As it was, the Gormly luck held (I’d been through this before, on my first tour), the crew fixed the problem, and we lifted off smartly about ten minutes later.

  The next morning, I held a briefing for the troops. We all massaged the plan, making some good changes based on recommendations from the troops. Given the expected number of VC and the area where we were going, I opted to take the entire platoon, minus two guys I’d sent off to work with one of the PRUs. In all, there would be ten of us, plus a National Policeman who knew the area. I told them to be ready to leave by nine the following morning.

  The next day we boarded our slow but heavily armored LCPL and headed downriver. Long boat rides were a pain, but I wanted the troops to be well rested. There’s no sleep like the sleep you get on a boat moving slowly downstream. Just after dark, about five miles northwest of Dung Island, we rendezvoused with our Light SEAL Support Craft (LSSC). (LSSCs had replaced STABs as our primary insertion boats soon after we got to Binh Thuy.) The LSSC had traveled independently from Binh Thuy, picking up our policeman on the way. I had already contacted the PBRs patrolling in the area; they came alongside to get briefed, so they’d know where we were and what to do if we got into more shit than we could handle. The Seawolf fire team, which had already relocated to Soc Trang Airfield, would go on alert when I radioed them we were about to land. All forces were in place. We were ready to go kick ass.

  With the sky cloudy and the moon in its fourth quarter, the night was dark—almost perfect for operating. We made our last-minute preparations and boarded the LSSC. Soon Dung Island came up on the boat radar, and I could see the canal mouth I had picked as a reference point. I wanted to insert at a spot northwest of a large canal that marked the northern boundary of our target. To extract us, the LSSC would come to the other end of the canal. Unless I really needed them, I didn’t want to bring the LCPL or the PBRs into the canal. Though it was big enough for them to navigate, it was not big enough to allow the boats to stay out of range if we were taking fire from heavy weapons. Also, the canal was off-limits for the PBRs at that time (too dangerous), though I knew if we needed them, they’d be in there in a flash.

  The LSSC eased into the insertion point about 0200. I looked through my night-vision device, but because the foliage was so thick I couldn’t see much. There seemed to be no hootches in the area, and it was quiet. The boat nosed into the brush overhanging the riverbank, and we slipped silently off the bow two by two.

  Insertions always got our adrenaline pumping. No matter how quiet it seemed, we all
expected to get hit as soon as we stepped off the boat. As I’ve said, our SOP once we were off the boat was to get inland about ten meters, set up a semicircular perimeter facing away from the river, and wait while the boat backed out as quietly as possible. At about that point, your adrenaline starts to wear off, and most people have an overwhelming urge to “clear bilges.” I factored that into the patrol plan: as we sat in the perimeter, those who heard the call of nature dropped their cammie pants and heeded it. Among other things, this helped ensure that the next adrenaline kick, the one that came as we reached the objective, would not produce gas expulsions that could tip off the enemy to our whereabouts.

  At night, smell and hearing are your two most useful senses. The technicians testing my hearing during my annual dive physical used to accuse me of cheating. It turns out I have the hearing range of a dog. I can hear tones well above and below the frequencies audible to the average person. Maybe it’s nature’s way of compensating for my astigmatism. The Navy doesn’t care how well you can smell and doesn’t test for it, but on operations I could easily smell things that indicated Vietnamese activity. Other SEALs developed similar acuity. Hearing and smelling could keep you alive.

  The VC used the same senses, of course, though for some reason their hearing was never impressive, and their eyesight was notoriously poor—probably a diet thing. But they could smell, and we accounted for that. We never used deodorant before an operation, and we applied mosquito repellent only as a last resort. Many of our guys consumed copious amounts of the famous Vietnamese condiment nuoc mam, a sauce made from fermented fish oil. The Vietnamese put it on all their food and, like garlic, it permeates the body. You could smell a nuoc mam factory ten miles downwind.