by Couch, Dick
And their radios wouldn’t work. One of the SEALs was frantically punching buttons on an encrypted satellite radio, trying to contact other U.S. forces invading the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. The SATCOM 101 device was their primary radio, but it wouldn’t work. The codes and frequencies in the “crypto” gear had somehow been switched in the vast chain of command, and no one had given the SEALs the new data. “How the hell would we know?” recalled Kendall. “We were already on the ground fighting, and when we tried to use our radios they were worthless.”
Their backup field radios wouldn’t work, either. Those radios could receive calls, but they couldn’t transmit far enough. “Our tactical radios were only good for line-of-sight communication,” said one of the SEALs.
“Our commanding officer’s helicopter got shot up while trying to land at the Grenadian governor general’s mansion and made an emergency landing on the deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Guam (LPH-9, Amphibious Platform, Helicopter; essentially a small helo aircraft carrier), so I had no commo with him,” recalled Kendall, the assault team leader. “We had no SATCOM, no commo with the general flying in the airborne command post, or with our own commanding officer. We just didn’t have the radios to reach them.”
This was the SEAL team’s first test in combat, and it was going badly.
The SEALs’ mission seemed relatively simple. They were to capture a lightly guarded radio transmission tower and briefly hold it until U.S. Army and other American personnel could arrive and set up a broadcast for the island’s Commonwealth governor general to transmit to the Grenadian people, telling them to cooperate with invading American forces to restore stability to the island, which was a member of the Commonwealth.
Grenada was a small south Caribbean island of about one hundred thousand people that had received its independence from Britain in 1974, but remained a member of the Commonwealth of Nations led by Great Britain. For the previous four years, it had fallen under the increasingly Cuban-influenced rule of Marxist prime minister Maurice Bishop. Six days before the U.S. invasion, political chaos had broken out. Bishop and several other officials were gunned down on the orders of even more radical cabinet members of Bishop’s own government; martial law was declared. Hundreds of U.S. and foreign students were thought to be in danger at the local medical school. More than a thousand Cuban and Soviet bloc troops, engineers, and advisors were thought to be on the island, augmenting Soviet-bloc-trained Grenadian military forces.
Inside the Oval Office, President Ronald Reagan saw the prospect of another communist toehold in the Americas as unacceptable, and he ordered the American military to capture the island and restore constitutional democracy. The invasion was supported by other Caribbean nations and backed by a secret plea for help from the governor general of Grenada, Sir Paul Scoon, the local representative of the Commonwealth and Queen Elizabeth on the island.
The SEALs’ target in these opening hours of the invasion was on a hilltop near a beach area called Cape St. George Beausejour, on the west side of the island of Grenada. This objective consisted of one small building with several rooms and a radio transmitting tower, separated by a fenced-in field that was bigger than a football field. The mission was thought to be vital to the overall American invasion of Grenada, because it would sever a major line of enemy propaganda communication with the population.
Just before the mission, a senior officer told Lieutenant Kendall, “It’ll be a piece of cake. You’ll be in and out in two hours.” But having served in combat in Vietnam with Underwater Demolition Team 12, Kendall knew better, and always expected the worst could happen. And now, with no radio communications, few rations, low ammunition, little water, surrounded by enemy troops, and trapped in a small building being shredded by enemy fire, Kendall was in the middle of what he called a “royal shitstorm.”
What Jason Kendall and his SEALs did at Cape St. George Beausejour on this day foreshadowed the words of another SEAL, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Admiral William McRaven, when he spoke in 2014 to graduating students at the University of Texas, his alma mater. Every SEAL knows, said McRaven, that “the darkest moment of the mission” is “the time when you must be calm, composed—when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.” McRaven added, “You must be your very best in the darkest moment.”
Kendall didn’t have time to reflect on it then, but his fifteen years as a frogman had prepared him for this moment, beginning with his initial training in Coronado, California. As Admiral McRaven described it, “Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacle courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet, and miserable. It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.” But, McRaven added, “the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure, and hardships,” and those factors were exactly what Jason Kendall and his SEALs were facing at this moment in Grenada.
“This was not an ideal mission for Navy SEALs in the first place,” recalled Kendall years later. “We were a surgical military instrument, best designed for lightning strikes, not for a strike-and-hold operation. We were equipped for a quick in-and-out operation like an embassy assault or hostage rescue, not a prolonged field operation. We were not prepared to engage in a protracted battle like this; that’s not what we do. The idea is to get in and hit somebody hard, and either snatch, rescue, or kill them, and then get the hell out of there. We were not equipped for a pitched battle.” Since it was expected to be only a three-hour operation, the SEALs carried rifles and pistols and a limited supply of water, rations, and ammunition.
Kendall’s small force was composed of two separate squads of SEALs. They had never trained together prior to the mission but the two squads were melding well. From basic small-unit tactics to urban-warfare procedures, their training was the same; they were SEALs. Now, having captured the radio station, they had set up defensive positions. Kendall again briefed his team on the rules of engagement, or ROEs, and emergency procedures in the event they had to make a hasty withdrawal. This seemed unlikely, but standard special operations doctrine calls for it—hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Earlier that morning, at daybreak, the SEALs had landed by Black Hawk helicopter in the field that adjoined the radio transmitter at Cape St. George Beausejour, and they quickly captured the station building after a brief firefight that chased off a handful of Grenadian guards. A short time later a military truck pulled up to the station and twenty armed Grenadian soldiers in their blue field uniforms piled off. They looked like service station attendants with automatic weapons. The SEALs were on alert, concealed, and well positioned to confront them.
Kendall stepped from behind cover and, in accordance with his rules of engagement, identified himself as an American military officer. He asked them to disarm and leave the area. “We’re American soldiers,” he announced “We’re here to liberate the island. Put down your weapons and withdraw.”
Instead, the Grenadians responded by opening fire, and they paid a terrible price for it. Kendall jumped behind a tractor and the SEALs raked their opponents with automatic weapons fire for less than thirty seconds, devastating the Grenadian unit. Half were killed immediately and the rest seriously wounded. Kendall’s SEALs hastily converted one of the rooms in the station to a makeshift morgue for the dead and another to an infirmary for the wounded and dying Grenadians. Then four Cuban POWs who showed up in a separate truck in the wake of the firefight were captured by the SEALs. “I directed my medical corpsman to do the best he could do with the wounded and dying,” recalled Kendall, who realized that meant the SEALs would soon have no medical supplies for themselves. No Americans had yet been hurt.
Without warning, a station wag
on carrying a family of five Grenadian civilians drove right into the SEALs’ perimeter. Kendall felt he had no choice but to hurry them into the radio station building to shield them from danger. “We were pretty scary looking,” recalled Kendall. The family—a father, mother, and three children under twelve years old—were “absolutely terrified,” especially when they grasped the bloody scene of wounded and dying soldiers inside.
The SEALs had achieved their objective by capturing the target area, but they could tell no one about it since their radios didn’t work. Kendall figured that hearing nothing from the SEALs, other Americans probably would assume his team of SEALs was all dead by now.
Kendall realized that without any way of summoning help to evacuate the civilians, he’d have to set them free. This created a terrible dilemma for the SEALs, one that resembled the quandary faced by Lieutenant Michael Murphy and his SEALs in 2005 when two local Afghans wandered into their path during Operation Red Wings, a story told by Marcus Luttrell in his book Lone Survivor.
“If we let them go,” argued one SEAL to Kendall, “they’re going to give away our position!”
“We’re already compromised!” replied the young lieutenant. “There’s no way they’ll survive a firefight inside this house.”
“The hell with them, they’re prisoners, they stay here! Whatever happens, happens!”
Kendall overruled the objections. He was schooled enough in the Geneva Convention to know there were certain things he couldn’t do as an officer responsible for the safety of civilians, and keeping the family detained in those circumstances was one of them. He escorted the family to their car, pointed them in what he thought was a safe direction, and told them to go. Kendall never forgot the look on the faces of the mother and father, a mixture of extreme gratitude, terror, and jubilation. Before they left, the children hugged Kendall’s legs so hard he had to pry them loose.
The SEALs redistributed ammunition, went to their defensive positions, and held fast. Kendall scaled the radio tower with his backup transceiver, desperately trying to make contact with the American forces coming onto the island. Still no luck.
“Holy crap!” yelled a SEAL from the roof. “We’ve got trucks coming on our left flank, an APC [armored personnel carrier] on the right. This is it; they’re here!” The Grenadians were closing in for a major assault not long after the family escaped—though the enemy’s appearance was probably only coincidental, Kendall thought.
In front of the house where the SEALs had sought refuge, a Soviet-made BTR-60 armored personnel carrier (APC) pulled up to the entrance and opened fire with a heavy machine gun, blasting off pieces of the building. The trucks stopped and each deployed a dozen or more armed men. It was clear that they had come in force to retake the radio station.
Kendall quickly pulled his men back from the perimeter, intending to carry out a defensive action from the main station building. The Grenadians flanked the structure and opened fire, while the APC fired rounds point-blank. Up close and personal, a 20 mm cannon is a devastating weapon. The APC’s turret swung back and forth, punching holes in the walls.
To counter the APC, the SEALs would need antitank weapons. They had none. “The cannon was just ripping away at the house,” according to Kendall, “and they were also raking it with small arms. The house was coming apart like paper. The floor of the house was awash in blood. We were all covered in blood from tending to enemy wounded from the previous assault. We won that firefight, but we were getting the worst of this one. This was a close-quarter battle. We were fighting it out at ten feet. The Grenadians were shooting up the entire building.”
The SEALs could hold their own with the Grenadian infantry, but the armored vehicle with its cannon was another matter. With the building about to come down on their heads, one of the SEALs got a clear shot at the APC with a bullet-trap grenade and managed to jam the turret. The APC could still shoot, but the gunner was now unable to traverse the turret. This gave Kendall and his SEALs a breather, but their situation was still precarious in the extreme.
The Grenadians were well armed with good reserves of ammunition. They were now pouring heavy automatic weapons fire into the building. Inside, the walls were exploding, bullets splashing everywhere. When bullets pass close by, they carry a sonic wave and produce a distinctive snap. “They were essentially blowing us out of the building,” recalled Kendall, who was now increasingly hearing the sonic snap-snap of rounds breaking close over his head. If the 20 mm came back on line, they had no chance.
Behind the radio station was a broad meadow leading to a path that cut between the cliffs to the beach. This was their preplanned escape and evasion route. When SEALs plan their first training missions in BUD/S, they include alternative escape routes and emergency procedures. Clearly, if Kendall and his men remained to defend the radio station, they would all be killed. The APC surely had a radio and more soldiers could arrive at any moment. Kendall gave the order to pull out. He told his SEALs to redistribute their remaining ammunition and prepare to leapfrog across the meadow for the beach. “When we reviewed the escape-and-evasion plan before the operation started,” Kendall explained, “I told my guys if things go to shit, we’ll head for the water. If we can get to the sea, we’ll try to steal a boat or something and get away from the coast. They had us surrounded on three sides, and we had to do something. We decided to fight our way out and make for the water. Because in SEAL training, when you’re in that kind of situation, you’re taught to go to the water. We’re good in the water.”
Kendall had no option but to lead his men across the field and down a steep slope that led to the beach. It was a dramatic scene—but this wasn’t the movies. Twelve Americans had every reason to fear they were going to die in that open field. In life-and-death situations, mortal danger can cause men to freeze, totally immobilizing them. Often, only the confidence instilled by repetition and drill can get them moving. Often, there is a fine line between preparation and bravery.
“I’m going first, I’m going out the door,” Kendall said to the second of his two squads lining up behind him as they got ready to try to “leapfrog” through the kill zone. “When you see us go down, you follow.” Fire and maneuver is a standard infantry tactic in which one element moves position while the second element provides covering fire. The SEALs had performed this countless times in training; now they would do it in a desperate effort to save their lives.
Kendall later said, “I’ll remember to my dying day everybody stacking up behind me lining up to go out the door. We were used to doing assaults through doors, lining up on the outside to go in. Now we were lined up inside to go out into a three-way crossfire.”
Looking out the window, Kendall could see bullets shredding a nearby wall. He thought, “God, I’m not going to make it two steps out of this door. I’m going out this door and I’m probably going to be dead within fifteen seconds. But I gotta do this.”
“Here we go!” he announced.
The SEALs burst out of the rear of the house and started leapfrogging down the sloping open field. It was about 2:30 P.M. The SEALs needed no direction; they had done this many times, beginning at BUD/S, where they learned basic squad tactics. The open area behind the station was the size of a football field. They would be terribly exposed, but escape was their only hope.
“Go, go!” Kendall yelled as he and his squad bolted from the radio station toward the base of the transmitter antenna. They laid down covering fire while his second squad sprinted into the field. Grenadian troops were moving along the chain-link fence on both sides. Thirty yards into the field, using the antenna’s cement anchors for cover, the second squad went down and began to return fire sparingly, using single shots to conserve ammunition.
Jason Kendall was knocked down three times running across the field—once when the heel of his boot was shot off, and another when a round glanced off an ammunition magazine strapped to his torso. The third time, a bullet destroyed his right elbow, flipped him into a somersault,
and caused him to lose his rifle.
“I was trying to figure out how the hell we’d get out of there,” recalled Kendall. “On our left and right flank, enemy troops were following us down the fence line shooting the living daylights out of us. Halfway down the field a bullet went through my elbow and practically took my arm off. I was sure I had lost my arm. I managed to pull off my knee pad and stick it in my arm as a bandage. I thought I was going to bleed to death.”
Kendall paused to get a quick count. A SEAL team leader, just like a boat-crew leader in BUD/S training, must always account for his men. Kendall was a man short. Back in the field, his wounded radioman was making his way across the field, dragging the useless radio. While the SEALs laid down a base of fire, Kendall screamed for his wounded man to abandon the radio. The young man pulled his 9 mm pistol and destroyed the SATCOM radio with its classified encryption components. As the SEALs expended the last of their ammunition, the final member of their team rejoined the others.
At the end of the field, the SEALs were trapped by a high wire fence. “By the time I got to the fence, everybody was kind of bunched up, taking rounds and trying to suppress fire,” recalled Kendall. “They looked at me and said, Holy shit. My arm was flapping around and there was blood all over me. We couldn’t go over the fence because it was too high and it had wire on top.
“We gotta cut the fence,” said Kendall. His SEALs looked at him. Their faces registered a vivid impression to him, a look that said, “Now what—we’re screwed!” One SEAL said, stating the obvious, “We don’t have any wire cutters!”