Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  The case against Duke didn’t stick either. We all felt the Red Cell had gone too far in their treatment of exercise hostages, but none of us thought it right to punish legionaries for the transgressions of Caesar.

  My staff lawyer said that the Navy IG was pressing the JAG hard for convictions. I was supposed to take the guys to a Captain’s Mast and give them letters of reprimand, which would have killed their careers. I said I was going to do the right thing, and the hell with the inspector general.

  My lawyer agreed, but said I’d better conduct the hearing and dismiss the charges, which otherwise might be brought to another commander who might be more inclined to buckle under to the IG. As usual, he was right. We scheduled the hearing for the afternoon of February 17, 1988.

  Duke’s hearing fell on the morning of the same day. The admiral who ran it chewed on Duke for a few minutes and then dismissed all charges, saying the wrong person was before him and he wasn’t going to ruin Duke’s career over something for which Duke wasn’t responsible.

  I did a repeat performance at 1300. Duke was there to take full responsibility for the actions of the two men before me, and I had to tell him to shut up so I could get on with it. After telling each of them I expected them to exercise better judgment in the future, regardless of what a senior officer might tell them, I dismissed the charges.

  Soon afterward the bomb dropped. The Navy inspector general sent three of his lawyers down to find out why justice had not prevailed. They summoned my lawyer, who told me he learned from them that the IG was so mad, he had threatened to have me relieved of command. That was impossible, but my lawyer told me, “Better watch your Six with the IG from now on.”

  The Iron Eagle investigations finally came to an end late in 1989. With respect to SEAL Team Six, they found no command-sponsored corruption. Three men admitted to bringing one automatic weapon each back from Grenada (and not turning them in during my amnesty). Four other members of SEAL Team Six were charged with submitting false travel claims. One pled guilty and received a slap on the wrist. One was found not guilty at a court-martial. After that charges against the others were dropped. Two non-SEAL petty officers I’d found cheating on travel claims before the NIS investigation were convicted at courts-martial in 1987.

  The Marcinko aspect of the investigations had different results. Dick and a civilian associate were charged with conspiring to defraud the government of $50,000 while he headed the Red Cell. The case centered on the grenades and other explosives Dick had contracted to buy in 1984, ostensibly for Six and his fledgling Red Cell. I was subpoenaed to testify that as commanding officer of Six at the time, I had neither requested nor wanted the explosives. The government alleged that Marcinko and the civilian, who manufactured the ordnance, were in collusion to charge twice what it cost and split the profit.

  When Dick was charged, he had his lawyers request for his defense documents he knew were highly classified. They hoped the government would drop the charges rather than risk public exposure of classified information. This wasn’t an unusual tactic.

  I was the head of the SEAL division in OP-06, the OPNAV sponsor for Six, and the senior SEAL on the Navy staff. The request hit my desk at the speed of light. I went to talk to my immediate boss, Rear Admiral P. D. Smith, about how he wanted to handle the situation. Normally, when a request for classified information is received, a “flag review officer”—an admiral—is assigned to go through the material and declassify it or deny access, whichever is appropriate.

  I really enjoyed working for P.D. He was a hot-shit naval aviator, one of the Navy’s foremost experts on antisubmarine warfare. He’d also spent a couple of tours in the Pentagon and knew his way around the building.

  P.D. said to me, “Bob, I’m going to recommend that you be designated the flag review officer.”

  “You can’t do that.” I grinned. “The Navy just got finished deciding I wasn’t good enough to be promoted to admiral.” The latest rear-admiral selection board had reported a few months before, and though P.D. and a lot of other folks hoped I’d be picked, I wasn’t.

  He laughed. “Everyone knows that’s bullshit. Besides, I won’t be able to find a flag officer who’ll touch this with a ten-foot pole.”

  I didn’t comment on that one.

  “Who’s better qualified than you to determine which, if any, of the material can be declassified?”

  He had a point: All of the requested material concerned Six. None dealt with Red Cell.

  Once the OPNAV lawyers determined there was no conflict of interest, I was designated the flag review officer. Since we had to do it, I was determined we would do the review thoroughly and fairly. After reviewing the list of documents, neither I nor the other SEAL officers working for me could see their relevance to the charges, which all had to do with events that took place after he’d left Six. We all considered the request frivolous and wanted to tell Marcinko’s lawyers to pound sand. But I had already conferred with the OPNAV lawyers and knew we couldn’t do that.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff were the original authority for nearly all the classified information. I called my compatriot at the special operations division of the JCS, and he agreed to set up a committee composed of special operations people from all the services and the joint staff to review all the documents. It took us about a month to wade through them, and the bottom line was that not much could be declassified. I sent a letter to Marcinko’s lawyer telling him so. In fact, we erred in Marcinko’s favor and probably gave him more than he’d expected.

  As for the trials, I didn’t think my testimony would be particularly damaging; still, I didn’t want to testify against a fellow SEAL, nor was I privy to any of the evidence amassed against him by the U.S. Attorney General. I still couldn’t believe he’d been stupid enough to do what he’d been charged with. When I gave my testimony, I simply said what had happened. The single question the defense lawyers asked me on cross-examination seemed irrelevant. I left the witness box, glad to be out of there.

  The trial ended with a conviction for the civilian and a hung jury for Marcinko. In 1990, however, the U.S. Attorney General retried him and got a conviction. Again, I had to testify. Marcinko served time in a federal prison.

  Dick had once been a good naval officer. When he became a convicted felon, he shamed the uniform he’d worn for so many years. He discredited himself, the Navy, and SEAL Team Six in the process of trying to steal taxpayers’ money. While Dick commanded Six, he created an aura of suspicion around the Team. The way he did business made many question his honesty. When his actions at OPNAV brought him under scrutiny again, his former association with Six brought the command under scrutiny, too. Six became known within the upper echelons of the Navy as “the command under constant investigation”—Dick Marcinko’s legacy.

  PART 5

  Fire Four: A New Way of Doing Business

  Of all the events that have affected SEALs since they were formed in 1962 nothing has had as much impact as the formation of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in 1986. SOCOM put the special operations forces of all the services under one command for the first time in military history. That put the “care and feeding” of Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, and Air Force Special Operations Forces under one commander.

  SOCOM didn’t happen because all the players thought it was a good idea, and it didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of years of frustration with the way the services dealt with their special operations forces. It didn’t happen until Congress made it happen.

  From 1983 until 1990 I held positions from which I could influence the process. The Grenada operation focused congressional attention on the general problem of conducting joint operations and the specific problem of how special operations forces are best integrated in battle. From 1986 to 1988, while commanding Naval Special Warfare Group Two, I strongly supported the SOCOM concept because I thought it was right for the military and the country. In the Pentagon from 1988 to 1990 I fought hard to ens
ure SEALs weren’t abandoned by the Navy, which had struggled to keep us from participating in the new command. During this period I fought “battles” as intense, if not as bloody, as any I faced on real battlefields.

  23

  THE OLD WAY OF DOING BUSINESS: PUT THEM BACK IN THEIR CAGES

  By late 1968 the country had grown weary of the Vietnam War. Most junior SEAL officers resented the war protests and the denigration of our efforts. But it was clear to many of us that our government’s policy was not to win the war. SEALs were still fighting and winning our own battles in the Mekong Delta and the Rung Sat, but “winning” was a function of killing more bad guys than the platoon before you. When Nixon was elected president, he said he was going to get us out of Vietnam. What we didn’t know was that he was simply going to declare victory and leave. By the end of 1971 all SEAL combat platoons had been withdrawn. Nothing was left but advisory teams with our Vietnamese counterpart units. When I assumed command of SEAL Team Two in August 1972, we had one team left in-country, and they’d been withdrawn by November.

  SEALs, like the rest of the military, were downsized beginning in 1972. For the next ten years we had to scratch out a living in the Navy. The SEAL Teams had grown because of Vietnam, and the military hierarchy accepted the fact that we’d done a superb job there. But there was also a general feeling among the conventional leaders that organizations such as SEALs and Army Special Forces didn’t have an application in a peacetime environment. I often heard the line “We need to put them back in their cages.” That meant reducing drastically the number of SEALs. SEAL Team One, which had more than quintupled from its original size of ten officers and fifty enlisted, got hit harder than SEAL Team Two, which had only doubled. People and funding were cut. In October 1973, when I commanded SEAL Team Two, we, along with the rest of the military, were put into DEFCON 3 for the Yom Kippur War. I didn’t have enough gear to outfit more than two of the seven platoons we had to provide under the war plans. My entire time in command of SEAL Team Two was spent fending off attempts to downsize us further, including one attempt to decommission the command.

  Our biggest problem was having enough money to keep our people trained. It was almost impossible to do any realistically rigorous training at our home bases in Little Creek and Coronado, and we had to get out of town for such non-civilian-friendly activities as blowing things up. So we had to send the troops away. The problem was we didn’t have any money to pay their expenses. While I was in command of UDT-12 in the late 1970s, we were still doing most of our mission-essential training with “no-cost orders,” meaning the men had to pay for their own meals and lodging if they wanted to go. (Most of them did.) I used to explain to my bosses that we used travel money like ships used fuel oil. Most of the time I wasn’t successful.

  During the Carter administration the military hit a low. The Navy leadership made a decision to fund new technology at the expense of the men and money needed to operate them; we called the result “hollow force.” SEAL procurement programs were minuscule compared to those in the rest of the Navy. Often we didn’t put a big enough blip on the screen to get noticed. Sometimes, when funding for large programs was reduced, our technology disappeared completely, being absorbed into the overall program reduction.

  When I took command of UDT-12 in 1979, I inherited a hollow command. Naval Special Warfare Group One had been forced to consolidate a number of functions under the group’s staff that had historically, and correctly, been the responsibility of the UDT-SEAL commanding officers. By the time I took over UDT-12, the consolidation had cost the Teams their control of mission-essential equipment. The equipment was lost because of the philosophy that we needed only enough gear to support the three UDT-SEAL platoons deployed in the Pacific Theater, while the ones in Coronado, preparing to deploy, could share what was left. For example, UDT-12 had only ten of the needed hundred Emerson closed-circuit scuba and twenty parachutes of a similar required number. UDT-11 and SEAL Team One were in like positions because the equipment had been equally allocated by Naval Special Warfare Group One. In other words, we had about thirty of our primary scuba rigs available to support the training of three units, each with a minimum of sixty or seventy people in Coronado at any one time.

  By 1980, all special operations forces had similar problems. It’s not surprising Desert One was screwed up. There just wasn’t much emphasis on special-operations-forces capability in the Department of Defense. In essence, SEALs worked at the lowest level. Their employment was left up to whatever local operational commander they were assigned to—just as in Vietnam.

  Within the Navy programming system we were lumped by the surface-force commanders into a funding category with other nonship units such as the Seabees and assault craft units. The group commanders received part of a pie that surface-force commanders divvied up among all the oddball units. We were oddball units.

  The point is, not all the money Congress thought it had appropriated for SEALs ever reached our coffers. Our procurement programs for boats and submersibles, though they cost what to us was big money, were peanuts compared to the cost of a ship or plane. I used to tell my bosses we could run our whole program for five years for the price of one F-14 fighter. We always had to take our “fair share” of the routine, across-the-board program cuts mandated by the Navy, but coughing up our “fair share” often meant we lost a whole program. Cutting $500,000 out of one of our programs would essentially kill it. The same amount of money could be absorbed easily in a major shipbuilding program by reducing something like staff administrative travel.

  Finally, some admirals thought SEALs were not all that important to the Navy. We needed to be put back in our cages until the next war—but when would the next war occur? For special operations forces, war is sometimes small and fast.

  24

  HUNTING IN THE GULF: JOINT SPECIAL OPERATIONS AT WORK

  One day in January 1985, I heard from the general who had commanded the Joint Headquarters during Urgent Fury. Calling from his new command, he told me I had to appear with him before a Senate subcommittee reviewing the use of special operations forces in Urgent Fury.

  When we testified, we said all the problems we’d encountered in Grenada had been fixed. That was true for the problems we could fix. But the fundamental issue of who would be in overall charge of special operations forces was beyond our “pay grades.” The senators thanked us for our time and told us we’d performed as well as could be expected in Grenada. Then they sent their staffers off to write the Nunn-Cohen Amendment to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. As the legislation was being drafted, Congress raised a few trial balloons for the Pentagon to shoot at. And the shooting was intense. The Department of Defense did not want Congress telling it how to command its forces.

  The Goldwater-Nichols Act had the greatest impact on the military structure since the 1948 legislation that established the Department of Defense. Goldwater-Nichols made the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a decision-maker rather than a consensus-taker. It also directed more power to the commanders in chief (CINCs) of the regional war-fighting commands, giving them peacetime control of the forces assigned to them. In essence it codified what we all had known for years—CINCs, not individual services, fight wars. The Navy was the most vocal in opposing the change, but each service chief knew he would lose a lot of clout in the budget process. And he would lose day-to-day decision making about the employment of his forces.

  Special operations forces gained a new lease on life through the Nunn-Cohen Amendment, which directed the establishment of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), headed by a four-star officer and with the same stature as the regional commanders in chief. The new SOCOM would have its own money to train and prepare forces for employment by the regional CINCs, but most of all it required that all special operations forces not actually assigned to a regional CINC be assigned full-time to the new SOCOM.

  In 1987-88, while I was in command of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, the Navy fo
ught hard to keep from implementing the Nunn-Cohen Amendment. Navy staffers had managed to get the authors of the bill to write some ambiguous “sense of Congress” words into the legislation that gave DoD the option to assign SEALs to SOCOM or not.

  Almost as soon as the new commander in chief of U.S. Special Operations Command took command in 1987, he started asking for “his” SEALs. The Secretary of the Navy told him to pound sand, because in the Navy’s view SEALs should be exempted from SOCOM. SEALs, the Navy said, were being trained and prepared to support fleet operations, and the Navy didn’t need the new special-operations-forces command to tell them how to do it.

  The Navy was really afraid of “functional” CINCs generally; they didn’t want the assignment of aircraft carriers to an Air Force “CINCAIR” to be the next item on the table. Wanting to squash the notion of functional CINCs, period, the Navy chose as its battleground the assignment of SEALs to SOCOM. But no one was seriously considering establishing a bunch of functional CINCs. The issue was special operations forces and only special operations forces. Congress wanted them to be supported better than the services had been supporting them.

  I got caught right up in the fight. I strongly supported putting all SEALs under the new command, and I didn’t hide my opinion—not a very popular position with some of my admirals. But I knew putting all special operations forces under one commander was the best thing to do: for the country, because it would provide cohesive organization to the forces and improve their operational readiness; for the military, because it would charge one commander with the responsibility for forces each of the military services found difficult to fit into their core missions; for SEALs, because they would have a commander who appreciated their special support requirements.