by Couch, Dick
DICK COUCH RECALLS HIS FINAL days in Vietnam:
In the spring of 1971, I was a month away from finishing my SEAL deployment in Vietnam. The first half of that year was a bad time for us in SEAL Team One.
Half of the SEALs in the platoon in the neighboring province had been killed in an ambush. The other platoon operating out of Solid Anchor with me recently had six SEALs wounded, including both platoon officers. All of them had been medevaced (medically evacuated) out with combat wounds. I had the only effective SEAL platoon still operating in the lower Delta, and with the end of our tour in sight, we were being very careful. We operated mostly after dark, one squad going out every other night.
One morning I came in from patrol and found the base commander waiting for me in the platoon hooch.
“Lieutenant, the air reconnaissance people have found what looks like a trawler in a river inlet on the coast south of us. COMNAVFORV [Commander, Naval Forces, Vietnam] wants me to put someone on the ground for a firsthand look. How soon can you be ready to go?”
The base CO, the third of my tour, was a senior Navy commander whose last job was commanding officer of a destroyer—a Navy surface warship. A fair man, but he knew little of what we were doing out there in the mangrove.
“Could you show me on the map, sir?” I replied.
He pointed to an inlet on the coast well away from the base and in a particularly nasty area. The previous month my boat officer, friend, and classmate, Bob Natter, had been ambushed not far from the trawler site. The ambush killed one of our SEAL advisors and three of his LDNNs (Vietnamese SEALs). Everyone else in the boat, including Bob, was seriously wounded. It was reasonably safe in the daytime, if you had sufficient air cover, but no place you wanted to go at night unless you had a good reason to be there.
“Support?” I asked.
“All the gunships and OV-10s you need,” he replied. These OV-10s were the famous Navy Black Ponies who flew the OV-10 Bronco close-support aircraft and often worked with SEALs. “This one has top priority.”
I knew about the priority. Over the past few weeks, strike aircraft from the carriers on Yankee station had caught two trawlers sneaking south loaded with arms—further evidence of North Vietnam’s continued escalation of the war in the South. Trawlers were a hot item.
Since I had just come in from the bush and had been up for more than twenty-four hours, I sent my chief petty officer in with the other squad. They heloed into a clearing a few klicks from the trawler and patrolled in with helicopter gunships weaving overhead. The chief found a deserted hull well grounded in mud. It had been there for some time, and it did not matter whether it was an arms runner or a fishing boat; the hulk had not seen blue-water duty in years and probably never would again.
My chief was a good one. He took pictures, set a satchel charge on the keel to break its back, and got the hell out of there—neat, clean, no casualties.
I met him on the helo pad when he arrived back at Solid Anchor. “The thing’s a derelict, boss,” he reported. “Hasn’t been used for months and now it never will. We busted it good.”
Case closed, or so I thought. The base commander was again waiting for me when the chief and I returned to our SEAL hooch.
“You have to go back in,” he told me. “COMNAVFORV wants to send a team of inspectors down to look at the craft. They’ll be here tomorrow so you’ll have to go in and guard it tonight. They want to make sure it’s not disturbed.”
“Not disturbed!” the chief exploded. “I just broke the keel of the damn thing and blew a hole in the bottom in the process. It was a worthless hulk—still is.”
He handed the commander the Polaroids. “Sir, it ain’t going anywhere.”
“Uh, the chief’s right, sir,” I added, “and that’s a bad area. The VC don’t want us there, especially at night. Remember when Natter and Thames went down there with the LDNNs a few weeks ago.”
Lieutenant Jim Thames, the LDNN advisor who had been killed, was a friend of mine. Putting him in a body bag and taking him up to the base at Binh Thuy for shipment home was very fresh in my mind.
“That may be,” the base commander replied, “but those are my orders—and yours. You’ll have to go back in and spend the night there.” We went back and forth a short while, but the commander was firm. And so was I. Then he hit me with the line that no officer wants to hear. “Lieutenant, that’s an order. Are you disobeying a direct order?”
I considered this for a moment, but no more than that. “Yes, sir, I am.” He regarded me with a cool stare, then walked out of the hooch.
There was an Underwater Demolition detachment at Solid Anchor, and though I was the senior SEAL on the base, the UDTs were a fleet detachment and did not work for me. The base commander sent them in that night, and they boarded the trawler. Morning came and nothing happened. The political implications of this new symbol of North Vietnamese aggression grew through the following day, so the next night they put in a company of ARVN (South Vietnamese) soldiers to guard the hulk. The VC did come the second night and wiped out close to half the company. After that, everyone seemed to lose interest in the trawler.
I finished my tour without incident. The base commander and I seldom spoke to each other and never about the trawler. I managed what few SEAL platoon commanders were able to do in 1970–71: I took all of my men home with me.
I’ve often thought about my decision not to go back in on that trawler. While the base commander took no action, he could have written me up—even court-martialed me. I did not feel right about it. My men applauded the decision, since they knew as well as I did just how foolish the mission was. When the VC came and mauled the ARVN company, it seemed that I had been vindicated. But I still knew that I had disobeyed an order—a lawful order.
Furthermore, what if they had come in the night before and taken out the UDT squad? The UDT guys were good, but they didn’t have the training and operational experience of my SEALs. If they had been hit that night, their lives would have been on my conscience: they went on the mission when I refused.
I debate that decision with myself to this day. There was no question in my mind that the order was stupid and ill-conceived, one that would have put my men at needless risk. The work we did was dangerous enough without inviting disasters, and getting caught at night in the mangrove by a large VC force was just that. You either ran, fought, or died—sometimes all three. But I had sworn to obey the lawful orders of “those appointed over me” and that day I had refused.
Sometimes, on reflection, I think that I should have gone in on the trawler, then after dark, faded a hundred meters or so into the mangrove. It would have been an uncomfortable night, but we had done it many times before. We felt reasonably safe out in the swamp at night—we were Navy SEALs. And this would have kept the UDT guys out of it, perhaps even weighed against the decision to put in the ARVN company. Yet my men counted on me not to put them at risk unless it really counted. They had followed me into some hard situations that tour. I owed them a lot.
I don’t really have a sure answer for this one. I didn’t then and I still don’t now. Had there been a Junior Officers Training Course for SEAL officers in my day, as there is now, I might have made a better decision. Or a more informed one.
I do know that in the course of a naval career, the character of a combat leader will be challenged in ways unimaginable to a midshipman or a brand-new junior officer. The nineteenth- century U.S. Navy oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury rightly exhorted us that “where principle is involved, be deaf to expediency.” A good place to start, but I am afraid it is seldom that simple. The black-and-white is easy; the tough choices are gray. Our future leaders must take every opportunity to study the examples, as well as the mistakes, of those of us who have gone before them. It may help them to develop the strength of character they will need to make tough choices when their time comes.
THREE U.S. NAVY SEALS were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions in Vietnam. Their stories, whil
e exceptional, illustrate the typically overwhelming-to-impossible circumstances often faced by the Teams in that vicious conflict.
On March 14, 1969, then-twenty-five-year-old SEAL Team One Lieutenant Junior Grade Joseph “Bob” Kerrey of Lincoln, Nebraska, was leading a raid on an island in Nha Trang Bay on the South Central Coast of Vietnam.
“It was a pretty straightforward operation,” Kerrey recalled more than forty years after the events. “It involved the interrogation of a Vietnamese who had got tired of it all, because the Vietnamese fought until they were tired or the war was over. He just got tired of it. He’d been doing it for four or five years, and he wanted to go home and see his family. So he swam off an island. He had told the [American] Special Forces guys that on this island was a group of North Vietnamese who were sappers, and they had been responsible for blowing up a number of mostly civilian targets in the city of Nha Trang. He agreed to lead us to where they were. And the object was to round them up. He told us they were sleeping in two different groups. So we went up the back side of the island, which was a fair amount of climbing [up a 350-foot sheer cliff]. We positioned at the first sleeping group, but at the second sleeping group we got there a bit too late. They had broke camp and were on the move. Some sort of explosive device was thrown and it started a firefight.”
A grenade exploded at Kerrey’s feet and propelled him back onto rocks. “I felt down where the leg was and it was mashed up pretty good and bleeding pretty good so I tied a tourniquet onto it and I tried to stand and couldn’t.” Despite excruciating pain, Kerrey directed fire into the enemy’s compound. “There was a lot of confusion. We didn’t quite know and had to figure out what’s going on. You knew there were rounds coming in from two different directions so we had to reposition ourselves. We now knew it was a life-or-death situation, so were returning fire and taking fire. I didn’t really think about anything other than stopping the bleeding, and trying to come out on the high end of a pretty lethal firefight that was going on.”
Kerrey’s SEALs managed to survive, and prevail, and capture several Viet Cong prisoners who provided valuable intelligence. Kerrey’s Medal of Honor citation hailed his “courageous and inspiring leadership, valiant fighting spirit, and tenacious devotion to duty in the face of almost overwhelming opposition.”
Kerrey was evacuated by helicopter to the 26th Field Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay, then on to a Navy hospital in Philadelphia, where he endured months of rehabilitation. “There are some rare people who don’t appear to have any physical fear at all,” he recalled. “I don’t happen to be one of those. And I think most of us aren’t. I think soldiers know that death doesn’t come quickly, that it can be painful as can be, it can be disfiguring, so you set it aside on behalf of the guys that you’re with. . . . I cared deeply about the guys I was with. I would fight for them and protect them and carry them out if necessary if they were injured. So I wouldn’t have thought for a second to put myself in between live fire and one of my men to do it.” As with many Medal of Honor recipients, Bob Kerrey was reluctant to receive the award for his actions at Nha Trang. He was presented the award by President Richard Nixon on May 14, 1970.
THREE YEARS AFTER KERREY’S Medal of Honor mission, on April 10–13, 1972, an operation unfolded when Lieutenant Thomas Norris of SEAL Team Two, among the dwindling number of American advisors remaining in Vietnam in the wake of President Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy of turning the war over to local forces, volunteered to rescue two downed American aircrew personnel.
The rescue mission was triggered by the events of April 2, 1972, when an EB-66 electronic warfare aircraft was shot down by an SA-2 Soviet-made surface-to-air missile. The aircraft crashed just south of the North/South Vietnamese border—what was then known as the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, but it was anything but demilitarized. Of the six crewmen, only one parachuted safely and survived, USAF Lieutenant Colonel Iceal “Gene” Hambleton. USAF First Lieutenant Mark Clark was subsequently shot down in an attempt to rescue him. They were dubbed by their call signs Bat-21 Bravo and Nail-38 Bravo respectively. The American airmen had parachuted separately into an area that was surrounded by nearly thirty thousand North Vietnamese troops who were launching a ground-based offensive southward, their biggest of the war.
A series of failed rescue attempts had been made by air, killing several Americans in the process, and Thomas Norris was the downed airmen’s last hope.
Lieutenant Colonel Hambleton was an Air Force ballistic missile expert with a highly compartmentalized, top-secret security clearance. His value to the patrons of the North Vietnamese regime, the Soviet Union, was inestimable; his rescue was a strategic imperative for the Americans. So began one of the longest and most costly combat search-and-rescue missions in U.S. history. Over the next week, more rescue aircraft were shot down, the total number of Americans killed reached ten, and two Americans were taken prisoner.
The two airmen were on the ground, alive and in hiding, and located about a half mile from each other. Both were in contact with orbiting American aircraft on their survival radios. And they were in the path of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers making their way south during the 1972 Easter Offensive. The rescue had to be a ground operation, as helicopters were not going to work in the overwhelmingly North Vietnamese–controlled area. American rescue pilots and air controllers hit upon a brilliant idea to help Hambleton navigate on foot toward a rescue spot. “Hambleton was a very avid golfer,” Norris told us, “particularly in Arizona. He knew the golf courses there and we knew the North Vietnamese had our radios and they were listening to what we were saying. So we utilized golf courses to work him to the river. It took him a while to understand what we were doing, but he finally got the hang of it. We’d tell him, ‘You’re on the 18th hole at Phoenix.’ So he knew, ‘Okay, I’ve got to hit my ball 385 yards this way and then I hook to the right and then I hit it another 285 yards this way, and I get to the green.’ By golf courses, we were able to work him down to the river. It took him a couple days to get there.”
On the evening of April 10, Norris led a patrol north to search for Hambleton and Clark. The five-man patrol consisted of Norris and four South Vietnamese Sea Commandos. They set out from a small outpost, heading north and dodging main-force North Vietnamese units that included tanks and motorized artillery. They located Lieutenant Clark, put him in a sampan, and the next night floated him south to a friendly outpost and safety. Nail-38 Bravo was safe; this left Bat-21 Bravo—Lieutenant Colonel Hambleton.
The rescue of Nail-38 Bravo took courage, luck, and nerves of steel as the North Vietnamese troops passed close by. But Bat-21 Bravo would prove to be more challenging. His signal was becoming faint, his physical condition was deteriorating, and his location was farther into enemy-controlled territory than that of Nail-38 Bravo. One of Norris’s Sea Commandos was wounded in a North Vietnamese mortar attack on their forward operating base. Two of the remaining three refused to go back; it was simply too dangerous for them. The fourth, Petty Officer Nguyen van Kiet, volunteered to follow Norris in the attempt to save Hambleton. “I’m going with you,” declared Kiet. Norris replied, “Kit, I’m not sure I’m coming back from this.” Kiet said, “If you go I go.”
Norris and Kiet, now disguised as fishermen, headed back north on April 12 just after dark. They hadn’t much time. North Vietnamese troops were pouring into the area and Hambleton was getting weaker, barely able to speak on his survival radio. At dawn on the thirteenth, Hambleton was told to get in the river near where he was hiding and float downstream; help would be waiting for him. Hiding under a bank from enemy troops and pinned down, Norris and Kiet saw Hambleton float by but could do nothing.
Finally they were able to work their way down the fog-shrouded river, slip past sleeping troops in enemy guard posts, find the exhausted Hambleton, and get him into their sampan. Norris told us, “My concern was his health, because on his hands there were spots that looked like gangrene. He was bashed up. He’d been down there
now eleven days.”
Norris and Kiet hid Hambleton in the bottom of the native craft, covered him with vegetation, and pretended to tend their fishing nets, floating past whole companies of enemy troops. As they passed through enemy lines, an alarm was raised and they came under fire. Norris was able to call in an air strike on the enemy positions to cover their escape. When they returned to the outpost, a waiting medevac helo whisked Hambleton to safety—mission complete. That night their outpost again came under attack and half the garrison, including two of the Sea Commandos, were killed. Norris and the survivors fought the enemy through the night and were lifted out by helo the following morning. Hambleton recovered, having successfully been shielded from capture by Norris and Kiet. It had been an incredibly costly rescue operation. “I had to stand by and watch six young men die trying to save my life,” Lieutenant Colonel Hambleton wrote from an Air Force hospital after he was rescued. “It was a hell of a price to pay for one life. I’m very sorry.”
The Medal of Honor was presented to Lieutenant Tom Norris by President Gerald Ford on March 6, 1976. Norris accepted the award with some reluctance, explaining to us years later, “I still today don’t think it’s a Medal of Honor mission. It’s just what I do. It was my job and I was just fortunate enough to be really, really successful at it, but any other SEAL in my spot would have done the same darn thing. I’m not unique, I’m just an average guy that was pretty good at my job.” He added, “To me, the true heroes of that operation were those that gave their lives in an effort to recover a fellow American. They gave everything. What more can you ask?” Norris was indeed good at his job. Having recovered the two downed pilots, he was preparing to go back after a third aviator when it was learned that this pilot had been discovered by the North Vietnamese and killed.