by Couch, Dick
Epigraphs
I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity.
My Nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies.
If knocked down, I will get back up, every time.
I will draw on every remaining ounce of
strength to protect my teammates
and to accomplish the mission.
I am never out of the fight.
FROM THE SEAL ETHOS
You are not alive unless you are living on the edge.
And living on the edge like these swimmers and the rest of those men, you are alive. I mean, you are alive.
I think that was the most fun I had in my life.
WALTER MESS, WORLD WAR II
OSS MARITIME UNIT OPERATIVE
It’s just the way we were, the teams and the men, the camaraderie, it lives with you forever. I mean, you never forget your buddy. You never forget your shipmate. You never forget the team. You never forget the operations.
That’s what comes back, memories of all of the good times and the bad times, but always the good times.
I’m very proud and happy to have been part of the military, part of the SEALs, part of special warfare and if I was a younger man I would still love to be back in there with them.
RETIRED LIEUTENANT JOSEPH DIMARTINO (USN RET.)
D-DAY VETERAN AND ORIGINAL MEMBER OF SEAL TEAM TWO
They just vanished. They came out of darkness and disappeared back into it. I mean, it’s incredible.
JESSICA BUCHANAN, AID WORKER
RESCUED BY SEALS IN SOMALIA
We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who has training in the severest school.
THUCYDIDES
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
ISAIAH 6:8
CONTENTS
Epigraphs
Naval Special Warfare Command Organizations
Preface by William Doyle
Preface by Dick Couch
Authors’ Note
1 The Fantastic Hour
2 Dawn of the Naked Warriors
Photo Insert A
3 Hot War, Cold Water
4 The Birth of the SEALs
Photo Insert B
5 Into the Jungle
6 Tragedy and Resurrection: The Post-Vietnam Years
Photo Insert C
7 Terror and Destiny: Mideast and Antiterror Operations
Epilogue
Afterword by Rear Admiral Garry J. Bonelli
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: U.S. Special Operations Command Structure
Appendix B: Naval Special Warfare Command—Missions and Structure
Appendix C: Overview of Naval Special Warfare Legacy Units by Tom Hawkins
Appendix D: SEAL Ethos/Creed
Appendix E: Those Who Made the Ultimate Sacrifice
Notes on Key Sources
Index
About the Authors
Also by Dick Couch
Also by William Doyle
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
by William Doyle
This book is a battle history of the U.S. Navy SEALs from their origins through today. Based in large part on interviews with more than one hundred former Naval Special Warfare members, it is our effort to tell the story of a remarkable elite fighting force and its ancestors, a group of warriors who have contributed directly to critical moments in American military history from the landings at D-Day and battles in the Pacific, through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the battles against international terrorism.
I learned military history from my father, in a lifetime of conversations about his experiences in the South Pacific during World War II as a U.S. Army intelligence and military police sergeant.
He survived Japanese air raids, helped protect General Douglas MacArthur in the jungle of New Guinea, rode on PT boats, and suffered from tropical diseases that brought him to the edge of death on several occasions. He met hundreds of people whom he found utterly fascinating, including GIs and sailors from every corner of the United States, highly proper British officers and beautiful Australian nurses, native islanders who seemed to have stepped out of the Stone Age, and a friendly Japanese POW who spoke fluent English and had served as a conductor on a Tokyo trolley car before the war.
I once asked him, “Why was it such an amazing time for you?”
“Because every morning when you woke up,” he said, smiling, “you had no idea what was going to happen that day. Absolutely anything could happen!”
Today, there can be few American service personnel who experience that feeling more intensely than the U.S. Navy SEALs. When they awake every day, they know there’s a chance they’ll be called upon to conduct some of America’s most complex, dangerous, and far-flung military missions, and to do so in a veil of anonymity and secrecy.
I first became fascinated with the U.S. Navy SEALs during the course of writing A Soldier’s Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq, published in 2011. It told the story of one American army soldier’s work with Iraqis and the U.S. military during the Battle of Ramadi, a turning point in the Iraq War.
During my research interviews for the book, I heard an increasingly common refrain from American and Iraqi veterans of that event: the Navy SEALs, they said, were silent heroes of that battle. The American commander of that battlespace in 2006, then-Colonel Sean MacFarland, told me the SEALs were among the most effective fighters and most professional teammates he had ever worked with. The central figure of my book, Captain Travis Patriquin, admired the SEALs so much that he spent as much of his time as he could at their “Shark Base” special operations compound at Camp Ramadi, trading intelligence, tactical tips, and breaking bread with the men he called his “super-friends.”
Then, in 2008, when I read a remarkable book by former Navy SEAL Dick Couch about the SEALs in Ramadi, called The Sheriff of Ramadi, it became even more clear to me that the SEALs helped provide the critical muscle, targeted application of force, and Iraqi police training needed by Patriquin, MacFarland, and their American military colleagues to help the Iraqi tribes largely expel al-Qaeda from the strategic province of al-Anbar, and to give their people a chance, however fleeting and fragile, at a better life.
In 2012, I was introduced to another hero of the Battle of Ramadi, SEAL Team Three Chief Chris Kyle, the top sniper in U.S. military history and author of American Sniper. Chris served from 1999 to 2009 and saw action in almost every major battle of the Iraq War. He and I wound up writing a bestselling book together, American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms. Tragically, while we were writing the book, Chris and his good friend Chad Littlefield were killed in the course of trying to help a fellow Iraq War veteran. I will always treasure Chris Kyle’s patriotic self-sacrifice, enthusiasm, humility, and humor, and his great passion for American history, an interest he shared with many of the SEAL veterans I’ve met.
In 2013, the TV director Carol Fleisher, my writing and production partner on an award-winning A&E documentary on the history of White House tape recordings, suggested we team up to explore the possibility of a PBS network documentary and companion book on the history of the U.S. Navy SEALs. We realized it could be an important, essential program and book. Many of the SEALs’ greatest battle stories have rarely or never been told, and the SEALs were among the most intriguing modern warriors well before the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 and made them legendary in the popular consciousness.
Great idea, I tho
ught, but nearly impossible to pull off, given the SEALs’ historical aversion to publicity. But then we checked with sources in what’s called “the Naval Special Warfare Community” (read: SEALs) and we realized that it might be possible to do it, and do it right, but only if we had a strong partner. Ideally that person would be a former SEAL, someone who could give us a true insider’s perspective, who could introduce us to some of the critical players in SEAL history, and who could open doors for us to tell the story the way it deserved to be told.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that one man fit that bill perfectly. His name was Dick Couch. He’d written eighteen books, many of them on the SEALs and on special operations. He was a combat leader in Vietnam and a longtime SEAL officer on active duty and the reserves. And he was highly respected by the many veterans and serving SEALs he stayed in close touch with over the years. Pretty soon, Dick teamed up with Carol as a consultant on the PBS special, for which we obtained a Production Assistance Agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense as well as the cooperation of the Public Affairs Office of the Naval Special Warfare Command, and with me as coauthor for this companion book. That’s how this book wound up in your hands.
Any book about the SEALs is by definition only part of the story, since many moments and operations in SEAL history remain in the shadows of classification and secrecy, and SEALs are by nature very averse to revealing details of their operations to outsiders. In this book, we’ve done our best to tell as much of the full declassified story as best we can, through the eyes of the SEALs in the midst of combat, and through the window of some of the most illustrative and historic engagements and operations of the SEALs and their predecessors. This is by no means a complete history of the SEALs’ operations, nor is it a tactical or top-down administrative history.
We have done our best to verify and cross-check the information in this book with firsthand witnesses, third-party accounts by historians and journalists, and declassified government documents, as indicated in the source notes. But it is important to understand that much of the history of the SEALs is classified and therefore out of reach for responsible authors, including ourselves. Also, different people can remember events quite differently; that’s just a fact of journalism and history.
The early history of the SEALs is obscured by the fact that much of it simply was not written down in the form of after-action reports or other documents for the “institutional memory,” and SEALs often did not even share much information with each other about their operations at the time, as they were too busy and too discreet. As former SEAL Bob Gormly noted, “SEALs and UDTs [Underwater Demolition Teams] have been excellent at never writing anything down on paper. I tell people we’re like an Indian tribe: information gets passed down to the younger troops from legends being told around the fires. That’s okay, but when all your old chiefs go out, their experience goes with them.” In light of this, we are donating interview transcripts from our project to U.S. Navy historians, to add to the historical record.
This book was a collaborative effort and we did our best to help the reader see the history of the U.S. Navy SEALs through the words of those who experienced it. We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we have been honored to write it.
Visit William Doyle at www.facebook.com/williamdoylenyc
PREFACE
by Dick Couch
My sole connection to William Doyle before he called and asked me to help with this project was through his work. The research for my book, The Sheriff of Ramadi; Navy SEALs and the Winning of al-Anbar, brought me into contact with Captain Travis Patriquin and the role he played in the Battle of Ramadi. I had read Bill’s book A Soldier’s Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq, which I found to be a marvelous documentary on the life and death of this worthy warrior. Now he was calling me about a book on the history of the Navy SEALs.
I’m not a historian; my nonfiction works (I’m also a novelist) chronicle current special operations training and operations. Historians are old guys with longish hair, half-moon reading glasses, and faded corduroy jackets—the ones with the frayed elbow patches. But I listened to what Bill had to say and considered the prospect of us working together on a history of the SEALs. He told me of the PBS special on SEAL history, and the opportunity we would have to help with that production. The more we talked, the more I warmed to the project, both the prospect of working with Bill and working with those individual Navy “frogmen” and SEALs whose stories would form the basis of this history. And I’m a sucker for a good war story. My work as a novelist and with nonfiction books on special operations has taught me that, regarding SEALs and frogmen, the real thing is far more compelling than any of my fiction.
A few years ago, I attended the fiftieth anniversary of the SEAL teams. If we go back to our roots of our community, the frogmen of World War II, we are but seventy years old. It was the over 3,000 Marine casualties at the Battle of Tarawa in November 1943 that documented the need for pre-invasion intelligence and helped spawn the Navy frogmen of the Naval Combat Demolition Units and Underwater Demolition Teams—the forebears of today’s SEALs. I was born one month before the Battle of Tarawa. So what you are about to read in Navy SEALs all took part during my lifetime. And I was privileged to be a part of it.
I’m often asked why a kid from southern Indiana wanted to be a Navy frogman. I think I was captured when I read The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau and watched the Lloyd Bridges TV series Sea Hunt. In high school I built an aqualung and began diving in the cold clear waters of the limestone quarries near my home. I dove alone for two years before I found a dive buddy. When I was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy I thought I might be a little closer to my goal of becoming a frogman. That was in the summer of 1963 and few people, including myself, had heard of these new teams with warriors called SEALs. But when I graduated from Annapolis in 1967, Naval Academy graduates were not allowed to be frogmen, let alone SEALs.
While I attended Annapolis, the superintendent was a distinguished admiral by the name of Draper Kauffman. He was a legendary figure who had much to do with the development and training of the Naval Combat Demolition Units during World War II. When he was at the helm of the Naval Academy, we midshipmen were in awe of him.
In the spring of 1967, I was a first-class midshipman just a few months from graduation. That April my company mates and I were required to attend a reception at the home of our revered Academy superintendent. When it was my turn to meet Admiral Kauffman, he asked me, “Mr. Couch, what will be your choice on Service Selection Night?”
“A destroyer out of Japan to begin with, sir,” I replied. “But as soon as I can, I’m going to request orders to the Underwater Demolition Teams.”
The great man put his arm around me like he was my dad and said, “Son, you’re regular Navy. You have a wonderful career ahead of you in the fleet. You can be a destroyer man, an aviator, or a submariner, but there’s no future for you in underwater demolition. That’s not why you’re here at Annapolis.” Back then, a career in UDT or SEALs was not considered a viable path for a career naval officer.
“I appreciate the advice, sir,” I told him, “but I’m going to do it anyway.” He smiled, I smiled, and he moved on to speak with the next midshipman in line. I think that to this day, I’m the only Navy SEAL who had one of the original UDT leaders personally try to discourage him from becoming a Navy SEAL.
Following graduation from the Naval Academy in 1967, I served aboard a Navy destroyer with duty in Vietnam. And after reporting aboard, I immediately put in for orders for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training, or BUD/S. My skipper passed my request along as “forwarded, not recommended.” Yet in the fall of 1968 and following my tour aboard ship, I found myself in Little Creek, Virginia, and in the east coast version of BUD/S Training, suffering alongside other officers and enlisted sailors who wanted to be frogmen as badly as I did. There were seventy-nine of us who began that BUD/S class; thirteen of us graduated.
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In early 1969 I checked into my first team, UDT-22. Within hours of my arrival, I met Joe DiMartino. Here I was, a green junior-grade lieutenant being welcomed aboard by a man who had been on Omaha Beach ahead of the first waves of infantrymen. And he treated me like a brother. Wow! I might have been alive (just) when it all began, but I was serving with men who were there when it all started.
I’m honored to have served in the UDTs as well as the SEAL teams. Indeed, all of us who were in the teams are proud of our heritage. We are also immensely proud of the current generation of Navy SEALs. We stand in the shadow of their accomplishments and professionalism. And we are very proud to have played a part in the development of what is now modern Naval Special Warfare.
In this book, Bill has asked me to share some of my experiences in Vietnam. I agreed to this to document just how capable and courageous my brother SEALs were, to illustrate how critical the proper training and experience were to our work, and to be completely candid about some of the difficulties I faced as a platoon commander who tried his best and sometimes came up short. I was a “one tour wonder” in Vietnam, a SEAL who had but a single six-month hitch in the combat zone and then came home. There are other SEALs and Americans who had three, four, and five tours in the combat zones of Vietnam, and there are 58,000 Americans who never came back. The magnitude of their service and sacrifice, and that of all the Naval Special Warfare heroes who have given that last full measure, is beyond the power of words to express.
Shortly after Bill and I began this project, a number of folks, including my agent and current publisher, asked why I was undertaking this work. There was and is, I’m happy to report, a good deal of interest in my other works—the novels and the nonfiction that address special operations and special operations training. So I had to ask myself, why am I doing this? It’s certainly not that I don’t have plenty of work, along with time that needs to be allocated to fishing, skiing, and hiking here in Idaho.
Those of us who are, or have been, Navy SEALs see our community through two foci. One focus is our personal experience on active duty—what we did, our teammates at the time, and the times in which we served. The other is the current operational posture of the Navy SEALs. Certainly today, there is no mystery about SEALs nor, within the constraints of classified tactics, techniques, and procedures, what they do. And there are more than a few current-day SEALs who are out there writing books about their personal experiences. So for me, it’s only been recently that I’ve thought about those other times, and the men who served before my time and those who came to the teams after I left active service. During my work on this book, I’ve become increasingly aware that ours is a rich history with colorful and courageous men who served their teams, their teammates, and their nation well. Like many of our sister special operations components, the SEALs were born out of necessity, and over their brief life span have continued to evolve to meet the new direct and asymmetrical threats in combating insurgency and terrorism. It’s a worthy history—one deserving of a PBS documentary and our best efforts with this book.