The Monkey Handlers

by G Gordon Liddy

  The obstacle course run was scheduled perfectly—1100 hours—plenty of time for breakfast to digest beforehand and, afterward, to cool down before the big noon meal. Stone gravitated back to the contest table and searched the entries for contestants he knew. He nodded with satisfaction when he saw the name “Wings” Harper. His endurance and upper-body strength were legendary, even in the SEALs. His real name was Herman, but no one ever called him that. He was a hell of a runner, but that wasn’t how he acquired his nickname. Harper’s body was so dense, he was a “sinker.” He had gotten through the swimming requirements on sheer guts. The name “Wings” referred to the apocryphal story that he had made it through BUD/S by using water wings.

  Stone didn’t recognize the next five names, but he certainly did the sixth. It was Master Chief Virgil “Pappy” Saye, so called because he had managed to stay in an operator’s slot in the teams until he felt forced into retirement at the age of forty-seven, after thirty years in the navy, rather than accept transfer to a nonoperational billet and become what he referred to as a “support puke.” Saye was black, had a completely shaven head, and a lean, well-developed body that looked thirty. Master Chief Saye was said to be furious about what he viewed as unfair treatment at the hands of Pentagon brass, and would be out to prove something on this run.

  As eleven o’clock approached, a crowd gathered at the obstacle course to watch. The course was notorious for its difficulty. Some years ago, a West Coast SEAL training officer, the much decorated Scott Lyon, had pronounced the East Coast “O” course a “kiddies playground” and proceeded to make it as tough, if not tougher, than the one he had designed for the West Coast at the Naval Amphibious Warfare Base at Coronado, off San Diego. Each man was sent off separately, at one-minute intervals, and his start time noted. The contestant having the fastest time won. This was necessary because the first obstacle—parallel bars that inclined upward, then straightened out—had to be mounted one at a time. Any obstacle missed had to be done over again from the beginning.

  As Stone’s name began with an S, he started way back, right after Pappy Saye. He didn’t watch those taking off way ahead of him. He wouldn’t be able to follow their progress anyway, and he wanted to spend the time before his own start productively by doing stretching exercises.

  When Pappy Saye’s name was called, Stone made his way forward to watch his start. Cheers went up from the crowd as Pappy took position facing the parallel bars. He was a legend. The parallel bars were “walked” up and across on straightened arms. The exercise was designed to burn out all but the strongest triceps and deltoid muscles. Straight off the end of the parallel bars were the “lily pads.” These were pilings of differing diameter, set vertically into the ground at differing height and spacing, taken at a dead run and missed at bodily peril. They led to a sixteen-foot wall. If he could hit the right lily pad, Stone knew, the leap to the top of the wall would be only twelve feet.

  Pappy Saye tensed as the timer got ready to start him. He was as focused as anger could make him, his concentration fierce. His advantage, Saye knew, was that he had run this course more times than any man there. Hell, maybe more than any man, period. Pappy took the starter’s signal and was off the mark and onto the parallel bars in a flash, putting to shame Olympic gymnasts as he nearly ran across the bars with his supple, powerful arms. In moments, he was on the lily pads, hit the correct one, and vaulted the wall, buoyed by a great start.

  Stone watched Pappy and knew he was in a real race. At the starter’s signal, he was up on the bars as quickly as Pappy, but not quite as fast over them. He hit the right pad and vaulted over the wall, then sprinted through the soft sand to a wall twenty-four feet high. Pappy, already over it, could not be seen. Stone went up this second wall with the aid of a hanging rope, “walking” his way to the top with his feet as fast as he could.

  On the other side of the wall, Stone crawled on his belly, using elbows and knees, under ten yards of barbed wire. This got sand all over the inside of his clothes. It was planned deliberately so the sand would chafe and sting when mixed with his sweat. Out from under the barbed wire, Stone sprinted to a sixty-foot-high cargo net, sweat starting to let the sand in his crotch do its dirty work.

  Pappy Saye drove himself with such intensity that his feet skidded in the soft sand. It held him up a moment, like an automobile spinning its wheels. As a consequence, he and Stone arrived at the cargo net at the same time and Saye felt challenged by more than time and himself. Stone, allowing for the difference in ages between himself and Pappy, expected to arrive on the other side of the net ahead of the powerfully muscled black man with the shaven skull now gleaming in the sun from sweat.

  Both Stone and Saye went for the sides of the net, where it was attached to the sixty-foot uprights. It wouldn’t sag as much there and slow them down. Stone took the left side, Saye the right. Both men, to Stone’s surprise, reached the top at the same time, climbing hand over hand, foot over foot, using the net as a rope ladder. At the top, they both risked death by diving over the crossbar to snare the net on the other side with one hand, then began a rapid descent. They both hit the sand running at the same time and sprinted to the twenty-foot-long rolling logs—so named because they were set up horizontally, in the direction of the course, unfixed, so as to be allowed to roll and throw a man off as he tried to run along their length. The way to stay on was to do it fast, and Stone and Saye did. Then, side by side, now directly competitive, they sprinted to the log barrier.

  The log barrier was built by placing a large number of pilings horizontally on the ground, perpendicular to the path of the contestants. Then a row with two fewer logs was set atop the first layer and so on until there was room for just one at the top of the pyramid. The men had to go over it, touching every log on the way up and again on the way down, then race through the sand to the rope swing. They brushed each other doing it and the physical touching added to their sense of personal rivalry.

  The rope swing was built of two pilings twenty feet high, with a crossbar piling that extended several feet out over each vertical support. From the extensions hung ropes, one on each side. From the middle of the crossbar was suspended a steel ring. Stone and Pappy each grabbed one of the ropes and climbed, hand over hand, opposite each other, then let go with one hand and reached for the center ring to swing over to the opposite twenty-foot rope and down to the ground. The two men reached for the ring at the same time, banged into each other, exchanged ropes, and made it to the ground at the same time.

  They sprinted up and over another log barrier like the previous one, then ran to the Belly Buster.

  The Belly Buster was so named because it consisted of two logs, each set horizontally across the path of the contestants. One was set five feet above the sand, the other at eleven feet. The correct way to take the obstacle, Stone had been taught, was to run as fast as one could and leap up onto the first log, then mount the second and go over. That was the theory, but Stone had found that, invariably, on the first leap, the log hit him right across the abdomen, thus earning its name. Those not in the best of shape were struck across the chest. Either way, the blow is jarring and takes the breath out of a man. Stone, to his disgust, got it in the belly again. To his surprise and envy, the more experienced Pappy made a “school solution” mount and was ahead of him by a few feet on the other side and even farther in the lead after they went over yet another piled log barricade. Pappy, therefore, made it first to the Weaver.

  The Weaver resembled a large ladder, about five feet across and made of smooth metal pipe. One end of the ladder was inserted in the earth at a steep angle, then, at the middle, the ladder was bent so that the other end was in the earth at an angle of the same degree. The crossbars laddered up, then down. The device had to be negotiated by “weaving” the body through the crossbars, or rungs of the ladder, over and under, over and under, four rungs up and four down. The lithe Pappy Saye was still ahead of Stone at the other side of the Weaver and, angry at himself for b
eing bested by the older man, Stone said, sharply to himself but out loud, “Come on, Stone, you love this shit!” He drove his body mercilessly as he and Pappy Saye raced to the rope bridge. As they ran, the two men heard the crowd in the background give a collective, “Oh!” followed by clapping as a contestant fell from another obstacle and rose, uninjured, to repeat it. Such was their focus on their own performances, however, that the sounds barely registered in their minds. Stone reached the next obstacle first by a hair.

  The rope bridge was reached by climbing fifteen feet up a tiny flexible ladder designed for exploring caves, using the hands and boot heels. That brought Stone to the top of a pillar. Pappy Saye, his waist and crotch now raw flesh from the sand and stinging from the salt in his own sweat, was so close to Stone he was tempted to grab him by the leg and throw him off the caving ladder. Instead, he vented his frustration by saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

  From the top of the pillar extended a bridge consisting of three ropes, arranged in the shape of a V. Balancing on the outstretched strands that formed the widest part of the V, Stone, closely pursued by Pappy, walked rapidly across the lower rope. Once at the other end, he slid down a rope to the ground and sprinted to the Tower, arriving just two steps ahead of Pappy.

  The Tower was square-shaped and consisted of four storys, each eight feet high. In the top story, at the very center, was a shoulder-width hole. Not permitted by the rules to use the corners, Stone and Pappy hit the first story on the run and leaped up to the floor above, grabbing it with their hands, then using upper-body strength to lever themselves up to the platform that formed the first floor. They repeated the process until, at the third floor, Stone found that the lighter-weight Saye had beaten him there by a fraction and was already on his feet. Saye got to the space under the hole in the fourth floor first, jumped up, planted his hands on either side of the hole and, pressing his body weight firmly and swiftly, rose up through the hole to the top of the tower. While Stone was coming up through the hole, Saye was already descending from the tower, using the Crawl for Life.

  The Crawl for Life was a forty-foot-long rope that slanted down at a broad angle from the tower to the ground. Saye followed the rules, negotiating it by a commando-crawl downward along the top of the rope. He dropped to the ground as soon as he safely could and ran to the bottom of another rope, arriving there just as Stone hit the ground from his own crawl for life.

  Saye used the rope to swing up to a supported beam and ran along a twenty-foot-long horizontal telephone pole. As soon as Saye dropped the rope, Stone had it and was up on the beam, chasing Saye down the telephone pole. He was right behind him when Saye jumped to the ten-foot-long overhead Monkey Bars, and Stone, arm muscles burning, followed immediately behind Saye, hand over hand, to the end, where they both jumped down onto another set of lily pads. At the other end of the lily pads, the two men were even again as they ran through the sand, its softness dragging at their boots at every step, to the Rooftop wall.

  The Rooftop was a wall inserted into the ground at a severe angle so that the far side was pitched downward like half a pitched roof. Stone and Saye raced to the high edge, exposed to them, leaped upward onto it, then slid down the sloping far side to the ground, then sprinted, matching each other pace by pace, to the Wall Scale.

  Stone reached it first by half a stride. It was a wall, thirty feet long, set vertically into the ground. Along the sheer face of it were small strips of wood placed from four to ten feet high with which a man could cling with fingertips and boot-sole edges. Saye crowding him from behind, Stone inched along the wall’s face for thirty feet and dropped to earth to sprint to the Hurdles.

  The Hurdles were just that: eight telephone poles set horizontally across their path, one after the other, at hurdle height. Under the rules, they had to be negotiated using the hands only. If a foot touched a hurdle, the entire obstacle had to be renegotiated. As Saye and Stone hit the ground on the other side of the hurdles, Stone was only a footstep ahead. But, because he had started a minute behind Saye, he was now ahead of the other man by a minute. The watches timed his completion of the obstacle course, in six minutes, nine seconds, then started again as he launched without stopping into the three-mile run, still in his boots, entirely through soft sand, flesh from waist to thigh chafed and raw, soaked in stinging sweat. Pappy Saye swung into the three-mile run fueled by sheer willpower and guts, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Stone’s age advantage.

  Stone completed his run in nineteen minutes, sixteen seconds. As he crossed the finish line, he raised his fist and shouted, “I love this shit!” Cheers from the crowd answered him. His performance was good enough to beat Pappy Saye, but not Wings Harper, who beat him by twelve seconds. The fact that Wings would have drowned trying to beat him swimming was little consolation, and the performance of the forty-nine-year-old Pappy Saye was astonishing. There were other finishers not far behind, but Stone didn’t know any of them. One thing he did know: He wanted Wings and Pappy for his team. The trick was how to recruit them.

  It was easy enough for Stone to fall in with the two men as they walked to cool down. It was Pappy Saye who gave him the opening he wanted. Wiping his sweat-shining shaven skull with his pulled up T-shirt, he muttered, “… not just your hat made a brass. Whole muthafukin’ head solid brass tell me too old t’operate. Take a look at them times, baby, then stick ’em in your ass.”

  “Tell ’em, Pappy,” Stone said. “Bastards did the same thing to me.”

  “T’ you, Mr. Stone? No way. You not that old, man.”

  Stone wiped his face with his forearm. “Didn’t use age. Used a bullshit hearing degrade. Wanted to make me a support puke; ’s why I resigned.”

  “So that’s what it was,” said Wings Harper. “I heard it was physical but didn’t believe it. Not with the shape you’re in. You should’ve fought it, man. I got the same thing from stuff going bang in my ears in Nam.”

  Stone looked at him, “Why didn’t you?”

  Wings kicked the dirt in front of him. “Oh, figured it wasn’t worth it. Hell, I had my twenty in; got my retirement. So’s Pappy. But you don’t. That’s the difference.”

  “That,” said Pappy darkly, “an havin’ to be a support puke!”

  “You really miss operating, don’t you, Pappy?” Stone said.

  “Do the fish miss water?”

  “Yeah.” Wings laughed. “Sometimes I think if I could have just one more op, maybe the itch would go away.”

  “Bullshit,” said Pappy. “Itch ain’t never gonna go away.”

  Stone made his move. “How’d you guys like to scratch it just one more time?”

  Wings stopped walking. “You know something we don’t know?”

  “It’s not official. You could get killed or arrested, and I couldn’t help you because I’d be killed or arrested right along with you.”

  “I’m in,” said Pappy.

  “You’ve got two,” said Wings.

  “You haven’t even heard what it is yet!” Stone protested.

  “Don’t try to get out of it, Mr. Stone,” said Pappy. “It ain’t like you.”

  “We need one more guy,” Stone said.

  “Won’t be so easy,” Wings said. “A lot of these guys were SDV and SBU people—unless you’ve got water ops in mind?”

  “Not sure what we’re going to end up having to do,” Stone said, looking around at the other contestants. The SEAL Delivery Vehicle and Special Boat Unit guys were good men and the best at what they do. They all knew that, but still … “I need operators—the more experienced the better.”

  Pappy turned to Wings. “How ’bout Arno?”

  “He here?” asked Wings.

  “Saw him last night. Said he was gonna enter the five-thousand meter and, naturally, the jump accuracy.”

  “Which he’ll fuckin’ win.”

  “No contest,” agreed Pappy.

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Stone, “but I never worked with him. He ended up
teaching HALO and that stuff, didn’t he?”

  “And HAHO,” Wings said, differentiating between high-altitude jump with a low-altitude parachute opening after a long free-fall, and high-altitude opening with a long glide of up to a hundred miles, both methods of clandestine insertion into hostile territory.

  “Saw him once win over a thousand bucks usin’ a square chute. Landed on a quarter, stepped right fucking on it, from six thousand feet. Then he bet he could do it on a dime. There were no takers.”

  “Plus,” said Wings, “he’s almost as good a shot as you, Mike. You can work with him.”

  “Sounds good. Let’s see if he’s interested.”

  “They did the five thousand earlier this morning,” Wings said, glancing at his watch. “We get our ass in gear, should be able to see the jump contest over at the ball field.”

  The three men walked toward the field, only to stop suddenly at the sound of an explosion, heads snapping around in unison toward the blast. The cause was obvious. Fifty yards away, the propane tank that had fed the hot-dog grill was describing a lazy arc sixty feet in the air above a fireball at the grill site. Women and children in the area were either running or on the ground with fright. The former UDT/SEALs were all standing, admiring the display.

  “Someone screwed the bottle on wrong,” Pappy commented.

  “Screwed the pooch is what they did,” Stone said. “Beer and propane don’t mix.”

  “Sounds just like an officer,” Pappy said, grinning at Wings.

  “Absolutely,” Wings agreed. “Always tryin’ to fix responsibility.”