by Couch, Dick
We slept well that night, very proud but totally exhausted. It was Whiskey Platoon’s first combat operation. The liberated prisoners were quickly shipped out, and I forgot all about them in the rush of new operations.
I’m often asked what I remember most about this POW operation that took place close to forty-five years ago. What stands out in my mind to this day is how the quality of the cadre training at SEAL Team One and the talent of a veteran petty officer like Walt Gustavel combined to allow an inexperienced SEAL leader like myself to enjoy this kind of success on his first SEAL combat operation. It was a tribute to the professional culture that was emerging in the SEAL Teams in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Much later, I found out that we had captured one of the main Communist Party prisons in the Mekong Delta. The occupants were captive South Vietnamese soldiers and some local men who wouldn’t cooperate with the VC. One of the freed captives later told military debriefers that twenty men had died of starvation in the prison in the previous year, and another sixty had been executed for a variety of “crimes.”
THE NAVY SEALS WERE born of the Cold War, and they received their baptism of fire in the hot jungles of Southeast Asia. Vietnam would become the war that defined the SEALs as a modern fighting force.
David Del Giudice, SEAL Team One’s first commanding officer, related to us the very earliest days of the mission: “Once SEALs were established, their first priority was Vietnam. Jon Stockholm and I received orders dated January 10, 1962, to proceed to Vietnam to find a role for SEAL involvement. Based on that survey, on March 10, two instructors, Bob Sullivan and Doc Raymond, arrived in Vietnam to begin training South Vietnamese in clandestine maritime operations. Due to their good work, SEAL Team One personnel continued to operate under CIA control until the end of 1963 when CIA relinquished support and control of most operations in the North to MACV [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam]. This operation became the maritime portion of OP-34A [Operations Plan 34, an effort to infiltrate South Vietnamese into North Vietnamese territory] under MACSOG [Studies and Observation Group, a command that focused on clandestine operations and also included U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and South Vietnamese personnel] operational control. The second operation based on our survey resulted in Phil Holt, Jon Stockholm, and nine enlisted men, two from SEAL Team Two, to deploy in April 1962 to train selected South Vietnamese Coastal Force personnel in reconnaissance, demolition, and prepare them to instruct succeeding classes of South Vietnamese Biet Hai sea commandos. A follow-on detachment deployed to Vietnam with Al Routh as OIC [officer in charge] and George Doran from SEAL Team Two as AOIC [assistant officer in charge] along with eight enlisted men from SEAL Team Two.”
With the landing of the Marines in 1965 and the escalations that followed, the role of American combatants, and the Navy SEALs, increasingly became one of direct-action combat.
Tom Hawkins has described how the SEALs’ culture of secrecy and autonomy led to an unusual reality in their early years in action: they were, to an extent, their own bosses. “At the time of their formation and throughout much of the Vietnam conflict, the existence of the Teams and their activities remained successfully classified outside of ‘need to know’ military circles,” wrote Hawkins. “Operationally, SEALs did not belong to the Amphibious Force Commander and, in Vietnam, they essentially reported to themselves by acting almost unilaterally in the regions where they were assigned. While extremely successful, this led to a paradigm of suspicion that would follow them significantly after Vietnam and throughout the Navy in the forthcoming years.” Hawkins even remembered an Army general in Vietnam telling him, “You SEALs are assassins. I don’t want you here.”
“We had no status, no standing in the regular Navy,” recalled former SEAL Ted Grabowsky. “Some part of the Navy saw us as some sort of quasi-criminal element, not a respected profession, that should only be used in desperate circumstances. And when you were through using it, you would stop forever. Like it was some sort of immoral activity.” Vice Admiral Robert Salzer, who worked with the SEALs as commander of riverine warfare in 1967–68 and again as commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam from 1971 to 1972, described his mixed opinions of the SEALs: “They were in small detachments, and we kept them on a very firm leash. SEALs are a two-edged sword. It was something like having attack-trained German shepherds: you had to keep them on a very tight leash. They did good work, but what they really wanted to do was to get out and mix it up and have a shooting match. They had some real feats of derring-do. When General [Creighton W.] Abrams [American commander in Vietnam] was having a down period, I would always try and find some particularly hair-curling things the SEALs had done, because he loved tales of personal bravery, and those guys had that.”
There certainly were problems that had to be addressed. The SEALs had been established to conduct small-unit direct-action warfare in a maritime environment. Nobody in the Navy, outside of the SEALs, knew what that meant; and if they did, they didn’t understand how it applied to operations in Vietnam. The other problem is one that has always plagued elite unconventional units: prejudice. Some officers of the regular Navy thought the SEALs were prima donnas.
With the exception of an ongoing advisory effort, the SEALs began operating in squads and platoons in a direct-action role in Rung Sat Special Zone, a Viet Cong–infested mangrove swamp between Saigon and the South China Sea. The Rung Sat was critical to the continuing war effort from South Vietnam. It controlled the approaches to Saigon through the Long Tao River, since Saigon is approximately fifty miles inland. SEAL platoons began combat rotations into the Rung Sat in 1966. Many SEALs cite these early Rung Sat deployments as the first time the SEALs cut their teeth on a sustained direct-action effort. The Rung Sat presented special challenges and missions for the new SEALs. According to a 1967 command history, these operations included “harassment of the enemy, hit-and-run raids, reconnaissance patrols, intelligence collection, and curtailment of guerrilla movements through ambush and counter-ambush tactics.”
The first SEALs in the Vietnam War zone were a strikingly different-looking sight than their “naked warrior” ancestors in the Underwater Demolition Teams, who were often outfitted with little more than a Ka-Bar knife and swim shorts. “The first SEALs in combat wore Marine Corps green uniforms and camouflage uniforms when they could get them,” reported Tom Hawkins. “A lot of the later SEALs wore camouflage tops and Levis instead of uniformed pants. It’s more comfortable. By the way, SEALs also wore pantyhose, to keep the leeches off of you when you’re going through the canals. They carried as much ammo as they could. You see pictures of the guys with bandoliers of weapons crisscrossed across their chests. That’s not for Hollywood. A SEAL squad in a field carried an enormous amount of firepower. If you even saw a demonstration of what they could do when seven guys unloaded, it’s just unbelievable. They took everything into the field that they could.”
SEALs were soon operating from riverine bases around the lower Mekong Delta. From 1966 through 1971, platoons from SEAL Teams One and Two conducted direct-action operations against the Viet Cong. The strength of the two SEAL teams grew to nearly four hundred active SEALs, but there were seldom more than 120 SEALs in Vietnam at any one time.
Most often, SEALs worked for a conventional Army, Navy, or Marine ground-force commander. Early on in the Mekong region, SEALs learned that the key to successful operations was good intelligence. Veteran SEAL petty officers became quite adept at ferreting out information from the local sources. For the most part, they were not trained for this; these intelligence-collection skills were learned on the job to better accomplish the mission. Good intelligence led to successful missions.
When SEALs had no good targeting information, they would often go out and sit on a canal bank or a jungle trail and wait for the Viet Cong to come to them. Sometimes they sat out all night with the bugs and leeches, only to return with nothing to show for it. Even in those early days, there was no substitute for good intelligence. Dur
ing the course of the Vietnam War, SEALs became good at small-unit tactics and operating at night in enemy-controlled territory. Quite often the boat-support sailors would take their SEALs close to the objective, and the SEALs would make the final journey to the target in sampans or on foot in squad file, moving through the night just like the Viet Cong. These missions were developed and launched as unilateral direct-action operations, but we seldom went out without a local guide or a contingent of Vietnamese scouts.
Invariably the most successful operations were a result of locally developed intelligence on a specific target: an arms cache, an enemy base camp, or senior Viet Cong leader. Like later SEAL operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam-era SEALs operated from relatively secure bases that were under the control of a conventional sector commander. Most operations were conducted at night in enemy-controlled territory, but SEALs then, like now, stood ready for a quick-reaction mission to rescue a downed pilot or a POW recovery. The Underwater Demolition Teams, which continued in existence for twenty years after they spawned the SEALs in 1962, also deployed to Vietnam, but not in the combat strength of SEALs. While their combat roles were mainly restricted to reconnaissance and demolition duties, the UDTs suffered twelve killed and some forty wounded.
During the surprise enemy Tet Offensive onslaught of early 1968, according to SEAL Team Two’s Command History for that year, “three SEAL [Team Two] Platoons handled themselves capably and professionally.” That’s quite an understatement: they took part in rolling waves of heavy, close-quarters street fighting that sometimes evoked the battle at the Alamo. According to the document, “The SEAL Platoons in Vinh Long [6th Platoon] and My Tho [7th Platoon], which were almost completely destroyed, were instrumental in thwarting the Viet Cong attempts to overtake the cities. The Eighth Platoon, in Chau Doc at the time, together with a small PRU force, succeeded in liberating that capital of that province.” (Note that platoons from SEAL Team One were alphabetized, as in Whiskey Platoon, and Team Two platoons were numeric.)
At Chau Doc, a city on the Cambodian border, a detachment of SEALs assisted U.S. Army Staff Sergeant and PRU advisor Drew Dix in a successful, extremely high-risk operation to rescue an American nurse trapped deep inside the city, an operation that resulted in Dix being awarded the Medal of Honor. “Basically; the Viet Cong had overrun the entire city of Chau Doc,” remembered Harry Humphries, a SEAL who participated in the operation. When Humphries arrived at the American tactical operations center, or TOC, in the city, the SEAL witnessed a sight he would never forget: “I could see an officer lying on a couch, staring up at the ceiling, with the focus of his eyes some 2,000 feet beyond it. He was a very cool and collected, experienced old Army soldier. In the background, I could hear the voices coming in over the radio, voices from soldiers at the Army Special Forces bases scattered throughout the area. And those voices were screaming about thousands—5,000 from one voice, 6,000 from another—of enemy troops crossing the Cambodian border.” Humphries was amazed at how calm and cool the Army officer looked, because in a few hours, those thousands of enemy troops would be in Chau Doc, and the twenty or so Americans defending the city would probably be dead.
Humphries and Drew Dix entered a jeep to drive across the beleaguered city to attempt to rescue the nurse trapped deep behind enemy lines. SEALs Frank Thornton and Wally Schwaleberger jumped in as volunteers and the two jeeps sped off into the chaos of Chau Doc. “How we made it through those streets I don’t know,” recalled Humphries, who manned a heavy .50-caliber machine gun mounted in his vehicle, with Army Sergeant Dix at the wheel. “God was with us. It was just one firefight after another.” The city, recalled Drew Dix, “was totally under the control of the VC.”
When the team arrived at the French colonial house where they believed American nurse Maggie Higgins was trapped inside, Viet Cong fighters opened fire on them from nearby buildings. Dix called out to Higgins, “Maggie, Maggie, are you there?”
“I’m here,” replied Higgins in a voice gripped with fear. “I’m under the bed, and they’re inside!”
“Get down and stay down!” replied her rescuers, who could now see Viet Cong running around inside the house, which was perforated by enemy fire. Higgins could hear Viet Cong outside her bedroom door, shooting. She recalled, “I ran to the front door, which had the metal grate on it. And in doing so, the Viet Cong were running the opposite way. We were passing each other, I was looking at them and they were looking at me! They were surprised to see me there.”
“Then we opened fire and just swept the area,” remembered Humphries. “We continued sweeping the area until we figured all of the VC were down or gone. We killed five or six, maybe as many as eight, inside of the house. They just piled up like cordwood right in front of us. Then things were quiet in the house.”
“The key, the key, find the key!” shouted Drew Dix, who immediately realized how silly the words sounded, as the building was in shambles. Dix didn’t think they could shoot the lock off, but nearby, Humphries felt they were being too polite toward private property and they could have blown the lock off the door in a second. Luckily, Higgins managed to quickly locate the key, open the gate, and link up with her rescuers. Over the next two days, the Americans and their South Vietnamese counterparts managed to take back the city of Chau Doc in a series of fierce street-by-street battles.
A Vietnam-era SEAL named Hal Kuykendall recalled another mission during the Tet Offensive that illustrated how critical SEAL training and teamwork were to surviving in combat.
“One of the hairy operations that I remember being on is one night during Tet. We were inserting on a river bank with seven SEALs in a small, fiberglass boat called a LSSC, or Light SEAL Support Craft. It was about 11 o’clock at night. Just as we were about to get off the boat, we got ambushed. There were muzzle flashes all along the riverbank. The Vietcong were sitting there waiting for us. Before each operation we informed the headquarters of the AO [Area of Operation] where we would be operating so we wouldn’t be in the same area as other friendly forces. Apparently a South Vietnamese passed our insertion coordinates to the enemy.”
The Viet Cong opened fire on the SEALs. Kuykendall continued: “They shot us up so bad that our boat lost steering, we were sitting in the kill zone while they shot us to pieces. Luckily, the LSSC had a .30 caliber machine gun mounted on the rear of the boat. We used it and our own machine guns to return an overwhelming amount of firepower to get the VC’s heads down. So we all saved each other’s life than night because we didn’t panic, and instead returned fire as we had been trained. I can’t believe we weren’t all killed in the initial burst of fire from the VC. But somehow or another, we lived. The thing is we didn’t curl up in a fetal position and hope it would go away, we all got up and returned fire systematically. We had a really good boat coxswain, who used his engines to back us out of there and out to a safe place. We were all part of a team and we all had a job to do and we didn’t shoot all our bullets in the first few seconds. We took turns shooting and really worked as a team and that’s how we got out of the ambush. There were many operations when we saved each other’s lives by working as a team.”
No discussion of SEALs in Vietnam would be complete without a mention of the SEALs’ brother warriors, the boat guys. SEALs were often assisted by and worked closely with Mobile Support Teams (MSTs) from Boat Support Unit One (BSU-1) on the west coast. BSU-1 and its east coast counterpart BSU-2 were the forerunners of today’s Special Boat Teams. A great many SEALs had their operational chestnuts pulled from the fire by these courageous sailors. During the tour of co-author Dick Couch’s Whiskey Platoon in 1970–71, only two of the SEALs from that platoon earned Purple Hearts. Five members of the boat support detachment were wounded on that tour supporting the platoon SEALs. Then there were the SEAL advisors who helped establish the Vietnamese SEAL program, the Lien Doc Nguoi Nhia, or LDNNs. Translated literally, they were “soldiers who fight under the sea.” These brave South Vietnamese soldiers, when properly trained a
nd led, could be very effective.
Among the most successful SEAL operations in Vietnam were those conducted by the SEALs who worked with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, the PRUs. The PRU program was a CIA-sponsored effort that later became part of the secret Phoenix Program, a CIA campaign to disrupt the Viet Cong leadership structure in the South, largely through targeted “snatch and grab” operations. After a successful raid in September 1967, one SEAL said in a rare interview with a reporter, “We like to grab people. That’s of real value. Killing them does no good. Any time we make a hit we’re there to take them alive. But once we’re seen, we’re compromised. Our primary mission ceases and we turn to our secondary mission: killing VC.”
The PRUs drew their fighters from Vietnamese rural villages and Nung tribesmen of Chinese origin who lived in Vietnam. These units agreed to fight on the side of the South Vietnamese government so long as they could fight as a unit. The CIA controlled their pay. The Agency paid and they fought. Navy SEALs, along with Army Special Forces soldiers and Marines, served as PRU advisors. In the case of the SEALs, there were anywhere from 60 to 120 Nungs for every SEAL advisor or pair of advisors. It was lonely duty for a SEAL, sometimes living day in and day out with these rough men in their home villages, with only an interpreter for communication. PRU advisors were always chosen from veteran SEALs. The PRUs operated in fourteen of the sixteen provinces in IV Corps, the designated military sector in the southern part of South Vietnam. After their formation in 1967, the PRUs killed or captured thousands of suspected communist operatives.
The Phoenix Program collapsed in 1971–72 in the wake of publicity over alleged abuses, torture, and extrajudicial executions, but postwar Vietnamese communist testimony confirmed that the PRUs were the deadliest and most effective force fielded in South Vietnam. In the 1972 and 1975 communist offensives spearheaded by the North Vietnamese Army, there were surprisingly few signs of the Viet Cong leadership cadre, which had largely been decimated by Phoenix and related programs. Of the charges of brutality, one Phoenix historian, Dale Andrade, wrote, “Both SEALs and PRUs killed many VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure, the parallel government and primary target of the SEALs] and Viet Cong guerillas, that was war. They also inevitably killed innocent civilians. That was regrettable, but inevitable when fighting an enemy that wrapped itself in the population.”