Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  We called for an Army Cobra helicopter fire team to cover our descent. The Cobras had just been introduced to the delta, and this was the first time they’d supported any of our operations. When they came in view overhead, we started down the pass. One of my guys and one of the PRUs took the point.

  The pass was narrow, and the walls offered natural cover for anyone wishing to lob grenades on us from above. We kept the Cobras tightly overhead. Two-thirds of the way down the pass, the PRU on the point tripped a grenade booby trap. Fortunately, my guys reacted fast enough to avoid injury. When the grenade went off, I thought it had been thrown down on us. I contacted the Cobras and told them to start giving us fire support. They started “wagon-wheeling” and putting down fire on the tops of the walls of the pass.

  But the PRU couldn’t walk and was losing blood. Doc O’Bryan patched him up, Drew slung him over his back, and we continued down through the pass out into the rice paddy, with the Cobras keeping up a steady stream of covering fire.

  As we reached the rice paddy, Drew staggered under the weight of the wounded man, so he and I alternated carrying him as we ran. (Fortunately, this was not the rainy season so the paddy was relatively dry.) Halfway to the village I heard rounds overhead—then, a split second later, the unmistakable sound of a heavy-caliber machine gun, from probably a Chinese 12.7mm, from somewhere on the mountain. I remember thinking, “What next?” The Cobras bought us enough time to reach the tree line at the village, where we linked up with the rest of the PRUs. They were really glad to see us. They were getting nervous about the reported battalion and wanted to get out of there before dark.

  We were all exhausted, but our troubles weren’t over yet. The Mike Force captain came to me and said his Cambodians were about to mutiny. He wanted to disarm them. Would I help? The Cambodians were sprawled on the ground talking, so I had my guys quietly surround them and hold them under guard while the captain and his NCO took their weapons. They were apparently planning to capture the two Mike Force Americans and turn them over to the VC battalion approaching from Cambodia, as a “token of goodwill.” When all the weapons were collected, we left the disarmed Cambodians to come up with another token and boarded the PRU trucks for the ride back to Chau Doc.

  Back at the villa, I learned that Joe had been worse off than we thought. With massive internal injuries, he had died on the operating table aboard a hospital ship in the Bassac River. He was the only guy I lost in my two tours, and I felt like shit. Being aggressive was one thing, but I had pushed too far on this one.

  Back at Binh Thuy the next day, Art Price said our battle on Nui Coto had really stirred up a hornet’s nest at IV Corps Headquarters. The commanding general had read my after-action report and wanted to see me as soon as possible. We got in Art’s jeep and headed for Can Tho.

  Outside the general’s office we met a very nervous Army officer, the IV Corps G-2 (intelligence officer), whose reporting was being called into question by the results of our operation. The operations officer, a personable Army colonel with whom I’d worked before, gave Art and me a quick brief. Then I repeated for the general what I had written in my after-action report. He asked a couple of questions, one of which was “What the hell were you SEALs doing on Nui Coto?”

  I let Art handle that one. He said he’d personally endorsed the operation because we were going after the weapons the VC were using to shoot up his PBRs. This was a bit of an overkill response as it turned out—the general just laughed and said it was a good thing we’d gone because he now had an accurate picture of the area. We exchanged a few more pleasantries about Army and Navy matters and left.

  A few days later, the operations officer called to tell me what happened afterward. The minute we walked out of the office, the general was on the radio to the colonel who’d been in charge of the Vietnamese ranger operation on Nui Coto, telling him to report to IV Corps Headquarters ASAP. When he arrived, the general asked him to explain the differences between his reporting and mine (and Drew’s). Apparently, instead of just fessing up, or even saying that the situation had changed in the two weeks between operations, the colonel tried to bullshit. He complained that Drew and I, a sergeant and a Navy lieutenant, were not to be believed over an Army colonel. Wrong answer. The general fired him, telling him to proceed immediately to Saigon and await orders. By the time the operations officer called me, the colonel was already back in the States pushing paper.

  Nui Coto was a viper’s nest. We’d made the IV Corps commander realize that, providing the information he really needed to deal with Nui Coto and its strategic place in the VC resupply effort. When IV Corps finally decided to act, it became a regiment-sized operation, and it took them a week of heavy fighting to gain control of the mountain.

  I’d learned a valuable lesson on this mission: SEALs need to stay near water. I remembered that for the rest of my career.

  16

  BOLD DRAGON: LONG TUAN REVISITED

  In late August 1968 the 9th Platoon and Lieutenant Dick Anderson finished their six-month tours and left Vietnam. I became the officer-in-charge of Detachment Alpha.

  Now that I was handling the three platoons from SEAL Two, I decided I’d try to find more gainful employment for our young tigers. Bill Early and I had talked about it, and we decided that one of the more strategic things we could do, without making the Saigon staffies too nervous, was to make life difficult for the enemy in the coastal Secret Zones. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the commander of naval forces in Vietnam (COMNAVFORV), also wanted the VC and NVA to feel uncomfortable in their “safe havens.” NAVFORV wanted to run sustained operations in the Zones, and since I’d spent time in the Long Tuan Secret Zone during my first tour, I was asked for advice. Although there still wasn’t much intelligence to operate on, I gave them a plan: give me a couple of naval gunfire support ships, and I’d take two SEAL platoons and create hate and discontent in the Secret Zones.

  NAVFORV liked this, so they assigned the U.S.S. Weiss to us as a platform from which to conduct our operations. Like the Ruchamkin, on which I’d deployed for the Dominican Republic crisis in 1965, Weiss was an old World War II APD. It had plenty of room for two SEAL platoons and two of our LSSCs.

  The LSSC had been introduced in-country in June 1968, the result of a crash project begun during my first tour. In May 1967, engineers had come to us in Binh Thuy and asked us to describe the best boat to support our operations in the delta. Then they went back to the States, designing, building, and testing the LSSC in less than a year. A squad-sized boat, with two inboard Ford Interceptor gasoline engines and twin out drives, it had ceramic armor on the interior and mounts for machine guns and grenade launchers. It ran about thirty knots with a load of SEALs, and its modified planing hull was seaworthy enough to allow us to use it along the coast. It was a good boat to support the types of operations we envisioned. We could launch over the horizon and have enough sea-keeping capability and speed to get the squads to a launch point on the coast. The LSSC could also come up the canals and rivers that emptied into the South China Sea.

  We kicked off Operation Bold Dragon on October 5, 1968, with two platoons—one from SEAL Team One and one from Team Two. It was the first time we had ever done an operation together. I decided we’d maximize the assets we had and run squad-sized missions every night, weather and the enemy permitting.

  Weiss’s commanding officer was a senior mustang lieutenant commander and one of the best ship handlers I’d seen. COMNAVFORV had designated me task group commander; the captain told me he was there to support me and, although I was very junior to him, that I was the expert and he’d do whatever I said as long as it wouldn’t endanger his ship. I couldn’t have asked for more. He told me his combat information center (CIC) gang was good at handling gunfire-support ships and aircraft and that his deck force had removed their boats and modified the davits—cranes—needed for the LSSC. They were a can-do outfit.

  The operations officer, Lieutenant Grant Telfer, and I got together and started p
lanning. I saw immediately that Grant knew what he was doing, and I decided my going ashore with one of the squads would be no problem. Once our operations started, Grant stayed in CIC as long as we had troops in the field, sleeping on a cot and having all his meals brought to him. (He must have liked what he saw in our operations, because after his tour on the Weiss, he applied for and went through BUDS training. He was almost a lieutenant commander when he graduated and took a platoon to Vietnam. Grant later worked for me when I was the operations officer for Naval Inshore Warfare Command Pacific.)

  We picked up the SEAL Team One Vinh Long platoon and went to sea to rendezvous with the two gunfire-support ships. I wanted to brief them in person on our operations. The U.S.S. Dupont, a Norfolk-based ship, was the senior of the two. Both ships had been on the northern gun line, where they’d been providing long-range, indirect fire support for the Marines in I Corps. They were experienced shooters but their targets up north had been well beyond the Marines’ lines, so damage assessment had been vague. They were looking forward to providing direct, close-in gunfire support for us.

  I decided to have the Vinh Long platoon concentrate on the Vinh Long and Binh Dai Secret Zones, while the Binh Thuy platoon took the Long Tuan. The two areas were about equal in size. Our platoon would kick off the operations, and I’d lead the first mission. One of the officers in the Binh Thuy platoon had accidentally wounded himself on a previous mission, so I took over his squad.

  On one of the missions, I decided to insert at the mouth of one of the canals emptying into the South China Sea. We’d patrol up the canal to see what we could find, then establish an ambush site about a kilometer in, where the canal joined another canal running from the Bassac to the Vinh Long River. This looked like a good place for interdicting any traffic between the two rivers.

  We loaded an LSSC and headed for the beach, some fifteen miles away. I stopped the boat just off the small surf zone, and we swam in, but stayed in the water observing the area for about fifteen minutes. After seeing no activity, we waded over to the canal and started moving inland. Canals afforded the best way to move in the Secret Zones. If I’d thought we could get away with using a sampan, I would have done it. Wading along the bank, we could conceal our movement.

  Staying in the canal also meant we left no tracks going across the beach. On a previous mission I had mistakenly concluded the VC didn’t use beach patrols, so we’d walked from the surf to the dune line, hurriedly brushing our footprints as we’d been taught in UDT basic training. Ten minutes later we sat in the dunes watching two VC puzzle over what the marks meant. They must have figured them out, because about an hour later we heard H & I mortar fire landing in the dunes.

  When we’d gotten about 500 meters up the canal, I heard a sampan coming our way. I got the patrol out of the water, and we set up an ambush facing the canal. Soon we saw a sampan and two people with weapons cruising slowly toward the sea. Slung over my back was a recently developed, silenced M-16 for taking out sentries. It used special down-loaded ammunition; the round’s speed stayed subsonic in order to eliminate the ballistic crack. That made the weapon really quiet; a phft was the only sound you heard when the rifle fired. But because the bullets were down-loaded, they didn’t expel enough gas to move the bolt back automatically to load another round. To get another round in the chamber you had to operate the bolt manually. To keep quiet you had to do it slowly; otherwise you got the same clanging or clacking sound you normally heard when an M-16 bolt went back and forth. I decided to test our new weapon on the two VC.

  Fred McCarty whispered that he’d like to do the honors. He was an old squad mate from my first Vietnam tour, and I owed him the opportunity. I gave him the weapon, and when the sampan came within fifteen meters of us I signaled him to fire. No reaction from the boat. Fred must have missed, even though the rifle’s front sight was coated with illumination paint so the shooter could see it come on target.

  He carefully moved the bolt back and forth, putting the next round in the chamber, sighted the rifle again, and fired. This time I saw one of the VC grab his side and mutter something to his buddy. Neither of them appeared to realize that they had come under fire by a highly trained SEAL squad and their state-of-the-art weaponry.

  Fred loaded another round and fired. The other VC grabbed his chest and looked down. Both of them just kept standing in the sampan. Neither one made a motion that would indicate that he knew what was happening.

  I’d seen enough. Signaling to the squad to hold fire, I opened up with my M-16. The two VC were launched over the side. I fired just two three-round bursts, and the air was quiet again in less than five seconds. After listening awhile for any VC reaction, I decided to continue up the canal. But before leaving, I told all the guys to go ahead and get the laughs out of their systems. They thought Fred had flat missed the VC, but I knew better. The rounds were so weak they had no killing power. That was the problem with a truly silenced weapon: you had to make a head shot to do any damage.

  We set up an ambush at the point I’d picked in advance. After four hours, when we’d heard nothing, I decided to push off, cross the canal, and patrol back to the beach north of the canal we had inserted on. We moved uneventfully through the mangroves and reached the sandy area, 500 meters inland from the water, about 0400.

  In the middle of the dunes, the point man stopped and signaled “danger front.” With me crouched beside him, he pointed to a group of three dugout shelters in the dune line. I hadn’t seen anything like them before. Candles were burning inside the dugouts, so they were inhabited. The structures appeared to be reinforced with wooden beams. They would be virtually invisible from above. We moved forward and set up a defensive perimeter. The point man and I went to the closest shelter and looked inside. A woman and a child were asleep on a mat. In the next one, we again saw women and children asleep. No men were to be seen.

  It would soon be daylight, but I didn’t want to pass up this area. I decided we’d hold reveille and see what happened. Shelter by shelter, we pulled the people out. Still no sign of any males. When we finished, ten people stood in front of us. I told the troops to look around. I didn’t like the fact that there were no men in what should have been a secure area for the VC. The women were very nervous, but I figured they’d never seen any “round-eyes,” at least none as ferocious-looking as us, in our cammies and war paint.

  One of the guys signaled he’d found something: elaborate bunker works constructed along the dune line. I crawled to the top of the dune and looked out to sea. Exploring the bunker works, we found the VC had dug trenches connecting all the bunkers and reinforced them with wooden beams and mud. All the bunkers—they were about 200 meters from the water—had firing slits overlooking the beach. I was surprised at the effort that had gone into their construction. It was as if they’d been built with the expectation that someday they’d be needed to repel an amphibious landing.

  It was nearly sunrise. I picked up the radio handset and called the LSSC to come get us, telling them to hustle. We’d stayed longer than I’d intended, and I wanted to be out before it got daylight. I was still worried about the absence of men. Not only did my sixth sense warn me we were being watched, but the bunker line seemed to go on forever, and we hadn’t had time to search it all. One of the guys reported finding a recently extinguished cigarette butt in one of the bunkers. That made me certain we weren’t the only armed men in the area.

  And after getting over their initial shock, the women had become unusually belligerent. One of my semi-Vietnamese-speaking SEALs said he’d overheard one of them tell another that the men would be back soon to kill us. I called Dupont on the radio, told them where we were, and gave them the reference point to the bunkers to our south. The ship called back in about ten minutes, saying they were in a good position to shoot. By this time, it was light enough to see the LSSC clearly—it was on its way, about a thousand meters offshore. I signaled with my flashlight.

  I got the squad moving toward the water. We
were about fifty meters away when all hell broke loose—heavy automatic-weapons fire from the bunkers in the dunes to our south. We hit the deck returning fire, but we were in a bad position. We had no cover, and even though the guys were putting effective fire into the bunker line, I knew we weren’t bothering the VC, as well protected as they were.

  Rounds were hitting all around. Rifle-fired grenades, automatic weapons—the whole nine yards. Sand was being blown into our eyes by the rounds hitting near us. We were in a bad spot out in the open, but we were close to the water and our boat was on the way. Miraculously, no one appeared to have been hit yet.

  I’d crawled over to the radioman right away, and now I called Dupont to tell them to fire on the bunkers. The radio crackled, “Shot—out”: they’d fired a salvo. Yelling to the guys, “Hunker down—incoming!” I watched the dune line, the radio handset at my mouth, ready to correct fire as necessary.

  A fraction of a second later, the shells, sounding like small freight trains, flew over us. The dune line erupted. I heard a tremendous explosion, and bodies flew about a hundred feet into the air, along with sand and debris from the bunkers. The whole line of dunes to my left just disappeared. I couldn’t believe my eyes: a dead-center hit. In the sudden quiet, I told the ship, “Cease fire—target eliminated.” In disbelief, Dupont’s gun boss asked me to verify that order.

  None of us had been hit. We headed for the boat, which lay just beyond the surf shooting everything it had into the dunes, giving us cover as we waded out.

  In the boat, I grabbed a set of binoculars. Body parts and weapons lay scattered where the bunker line had been. Suddenly, a round cracked over our heads and then another. Apparently some fool thought he could still turn the day for Uncle Ho. I called for another salvo from the ship and watched it tear into what was left of the dunes. The firing stopped. On a notion I told them to fire another salvo, this time 200 meters inland. I figured that might hit any VC bugging out of the area. I sent another few salvos north and south, too, as we headed to sea.