by Couch, Dick
“I gotta pair,” Kendall said. He was losing blood and struggling to think clearly. Navigating through his bloodstained pocket, he produced the tool. “Now cut the damn wire!”
The Americans sliced through the fence and hauled off toward the trees. Once in the dense brush behind the field, they had a brief respite from their pursuers. Yet their prospects were anything but good; they were outnumbered, had ammunition only for their pistols, and they had no communications. No one else in the American military knew where they were or if they were still alive.
Kendall remembered thinking, “We’re all going to get whacked for sure.”
In the late afternoon, Lieutenant Kendall and his group of eleven SEALs were moving quickly through the cover of thick jungle, bracing for an expected final ambush by enemy troops. But the Grenadians had paused their attack, probably to regroup with reinforcements, and probably dealing with a lot of wounded soldiers.
The SEALs kept heading for the open water. On reaching the shore, they descended the path to the beach and waded out into the water. The shoreline arced in a shallow crescent that formed a scenic bay surrounded by rocky cliffs. The SEALs began swimming, but they knew it was a temporary sanctuary. It was clear that if they kept swimming close to shore, they would be sitting ducks for the Grenadians on the cliffs. Kendall told them to ditch all their equipment except sidearms and signal flares, and to swim parallel to the beach. A short way along the shoreline, they came back into a rocky portion of the beach and made their way up into the cliffs, where they were now protected from above by overhanging ledges and vegetation.
More Grenadians arrived and searched along the shore and high on the cliffs until nightfall. Kendall and his men could hear them talking as they searched above and around them, but the SEALs remained undetected. As dusk approached, the Grenadians finally pulled back to the radio station.
“We were out of ammunition,” recalled Kendall. “We were down to our pistols and knives and a few signaling devices spread out among the guys so everyone had something to fight with and signal with.” They had been battling all day with little food or water, and between gearing up and rehearsing for the invasion, they hadn’t slept for days.
A series of deafening explosions shattered the nearby meadow, and the SEALs realized they could be killed any second by something they hadn’t expected: American fighter-bombers strafing nearby Grenadian positions. “We had our own damn Navy put five air strikes on top of us trying to get the bad guys. We were pretty rattled. Having escaped a superior force of Grenadians, we were about to get bombed by our own Navy.”
As darkness fell, Kendall sent two pairs of SEALs to swim across the bay to steal a few of the small fishing boats they’d spotted earlier, so the whole group could make it out into the open sea. He told the swimmers, “If something happens and you can’t get the boats, you just swim out to sea and listen for the rescue aircraft.” They never came back. “We waited and waited for those swim pairs,” Kendall remembered. “After a few hours nothing happened. We never heard any gunfire, so we just assumed the boats were gone or they couldn’t get to them.” It turned out that the boats were snagged to the bottom by their fishing nets and couldn’t be freed, so the SEALs just headed out into the water, as Kendall told them to do.
Soon after dark, two U.S. Hughes 500D observation helos, or “Little Birds,” made a pass over the nearby radio station. The SEALs heard the choppers roar in over the beach and assumed they were looking for them, but the men huddled in the side of the cliff could do nothing, as they didn’t want to alert enemy forces who could be nearby. Kendall, in consultation with his senior petty officers, decided to wait until after midnight before trying to swim out to sea. His wounded arm was throbbing and he had lost all feeling below the elbow. Another SEAL suffered from a wound in his upper leg. The SEALs hunkered down, but just before ten o’clock they again came under fire.
Unknown to Kendall, the Little Birds had taken fire from the Grenadians at the radio station and a nearby antiaircraft battery. Since nothing had been heard from the SEALs and the Grenadians held the radio station, the U.S. force commander assumed they had been killed and sent an air strike against the radio station. While the SEALs burrowed into the rocks and vegetation, a squadron of Navy A-7 attack jets made several strafing runs on the radio station and surrounding area. Again the SEALs were on the wrong end of friendly fire, this time from the A-7s’ Vulcan gun pods—20 mm rounds at seven thousand rounds per minute. Stray rounds splashed around them, chipping at rocks and bringing down tree limbs.
After the A-7s left, Kendall’s chief petty officer turned to him and said, “Sir, maybe it’s time we got the hell out of here.” Kendall agreed. The SEALs had had enough friendly fire. Descending the rocky cliff would have been dangerous in the dark, but there was an outcropping from which they could jump. With a strong leap, they could clear the rock face and make the water. Kendall’s right arm was useless and he was in incredible pain. The SEALs had pain drugs in their medical kit, but Kendall feared the side effects; he was still in command. Unsure if he had the strength to make the leap from the cliff, he had two of his SEALs throw him off. The remaining ten of them made the water and began to swim seaward. Kendall had to drag his useless arm through the water; the other wounded had to swim as best they could. But the SEALs were well prepared for this. In BUD/S training, the trainees are bound, hands and feet, and made to swim this way. They call it “drown-proofing.”
“We were several miles out in the open ocean,” Kendall later explained. “We could barely see the outline of Grenada, though we could hear the Marines conducting combat operations on the island. We were trying to swim as far away from that damn island as we could because we couldn’t be close to the shore when the sun came up.” He added, “We were hoping against hope that that SAR bird [search-and-rescue plane] was up and would spot us. We knew there were some ships out there but we didn’t know where.” The SEALs were now five pairs of bobbing heads in the vast, dark ocean, and the probability of being rescued was, in Kendall’s words, “infinitesimally small.”
Hours passed. “My biggest concern,” recalled Kendall, “was that from spending all day fighting, sweating and not drinking water, and then spending all that time in salt water, we’d get dehydrated very quickly. I was really weak, and my swim buddy had taken a round through the back of the leg.”
Then, just before sunrise, the SEALs heard the sound of an approaching aircraft. It sounded like a C-130. “I hoped to God it was that search-and-rescue bird,” recalled Kendall, who fired up a couple of precious signal flares. Then a fireball erupted in the sky. It was a gigantic illumination parachute flare dropping slowly down from the C-130. “It was like the sun dropping down on us,” recalled Kendall.
The overjoyed SEALs looked around the bright water and realized that incredibly, all of the previously separated SEALs had wound up in the same small patch of ocean, now including the two men who had gone on the aborted attempt to get boats. The C-130 found the SEALs in the water with its powerful searchlight, and vectored a Navy ship to their position. They’d been in the water for close to five hours when they were rescued.
By this time, Kendall had been awake for over forty-eight hours. The last time he had been this beat up and sleep-deprived was during his Hell Week with BUD/S Class 52. Once on the deck of the USS Caron, he again counted his men. During every BUD/S Hell Week, exhausted, half-dead officers and petty officers again and again count their men. BUD/S instructors do unspeakable things to leaders who lose track of their men. So Kendall counted his men. Once the count was right and he knew his men were safely aboard, he passed out. When he awoke a day later in the hospital at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, his first question was “Where are my men?”
U.S. Navy SEAL Lieutenant Jason Kendall was awarded a Silver Star for his actions in Grenada, the citation for which reads, in part: “Determined to hold his position, he twice engaged the enemy and eliminated their combat effectiveness, taking 10 wounde
d prisoners of war without casualty to his assault element. Administering to the enemy wounded, he again established a defensive perimeter. Engaged a third time by a numerically superior force, his position came under heavy automatic weapons, RPG-7, and 20-mm. cannon fire. With complete disregard for his personal safety, he directed fire and maneuver tactics which allowed his force to take up new positions. Although painfully wounded himself and closely pursued by a large enemy force, he courageously directed his men in evasion and escape maneuvers which resulted in the safe extraction of his entire force.”
All twelve SEALs who assaulted the radio Grenada tower on October 25, 1983, are alive today. Jason Kendall’s shattered arm almost forced him to be medically retired, but he recovered sufficiently to complete a full career as a Navy SEAL, including participating in Operation Assured Response in 1996, when SEALs and other U.S. military forces rescued and evacuated over 2,100 people, including 435 Americans, from war-torn Liberia.
“We should have all died,” said Kendall, recalling his Grenadian ordeal. “More than once that day I thought we were finished. It’s a frigging miracle that we all lived.”3
THE GRENADA INVASION MARKED a sea change for the SEALs, for American special operations, and for the U.S. military. It marked a shift from America’s historical reliance on warfighting dominated by conventional forces to a new world where special operations units like the SEALs played an increasingly critical role in fighting threats and conflicts small and large.
The U.S. Navy SEALs were experiencing a difficult time in their own history. Funding in the Navy budget for Naval Special Warfare dried up in the 1970s, and while training continued at Little Creek and Coronado, and Cold War–style exercises were held with foreign partners in Europe and elsewhere, actual operations were rare.
According to one SEAL who joined in 1975, “I can remember being issued an M-16 and cleaning it one day and looking down the barrel and not seeing any rifling. Basically it was a smooth-bore weapon. It had so many rounds fired through the barrel that it was absolutely worn-out.”
At the same time the SEALs were enduring their severe post-Vietnam drawdown, their popular image was enjoying a tremendous boost from an unexpected place: Hollywood, California. “It seemed like half the tough guys on 1970s and ’80s TV—Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett in Hawaii Five-O, the Tom Selleck character in Magnum, P.I., and on and on—were SEALs or ex-SEALs,” wrote former SEAL Rorke Denver. “Network scriptwriters,” he added, “seemed convinced that SEALs were the toughest, shrewdest, most devious, most physical, most expertly trained warriors around, a breed apart from any other commandos you’d want to stack them up against.” In fact, there was an earlier burst of screen-generated interest in Naval Special Warfare when some 1950s-era UDT members and 1960s-era SEALs were inspired to join after watching the 1956 movie The Frogmen, starring Richard Widmark, and the 1960s TV series Sea Hunt starring Lloyd Bridges.
But despite the SEALs’ growing mythic reputation in pop culture, the reality of the SEALs’ first major post-Vietnam combat operation was one of tremendous difficulty.
One U.S. Navy SEAL described the Grenada operation, code-named Operation Urgent Fury, as “one screw-up after another—nothing seemed to be going our way.” Another SEAL recalled, “Our Intel had been atrocious. Nobody knew really what we were going to be facing.” An Army special operator recalled, “We had no decent maps. We were able to get our hands on a Michelin guide to the Windward Islands with a somewhat usable chart of Grenada. This allowed us to get a basic feel for the layout of the island.” The Wall Street Journal reported, “When the battle was under way, frustrated commanders ashore could see the Navy ships at sea, but they couldn’t reach them by radio. The Navy couldn’t talk to the Army. The Air Force couldn’t talk to the Marines.” Many American troops, already groaning with heavy equipment, wore all-weather, polyester combat outfits that were unsuited to a tropical environment like Grenada. “We were like slow-moving turtles, my rucksack weighed 120 pounds,” said one American trooper. “I would get up and rush for 10 yards, throw myself down for 10 or 15 minutes [to recover].”
One SEAL recalled how the hurried planning for the Grenada operation caused different SEAL small-unit assault teams to be mixed together at the last minute. “A lot of our tactics, techniques, and procedures worked differently, and mixing units on the eve of an operation can be catastrophic, particularly when you don’t have communications, and you’re not used to working with the same people. We violated some of the things we should never violate. Part of the reason that this mission is so sensitive is because of all the screw-ups that were done in haste to get into battle.” SEAL commander Robert Gormly recalled, “I inherited a command that we all—the members of the command as well as myself—learned wasn’t ready to go into combat. We were lacking some training, and we certainly lacked equipment. The boats at the time were horrendous, they were in terrible shape.” Gormly had less than three days to plan his operations in Grenada.
The SEALs had four main missions in the Grenada invasion: to help the Air Force place beacons at the Point Salines airfield on the southwestern tip of Grenada to guide in troop-carrying transport aircraft; to scout a beach on the northeastern coast of the island for a possible Marine landing; to rescue and protect the senior Commonwealth official on the island, Governor General Scoon; and to secure the radio tower that was several miles north of Scoon’s residence. For the latter two operations, the SEALs were supposed to be relieved within a few hours by other American forces. Few of these missions went off as planned; the first mission, which was the first major known SEAL combat operation since the Vietnam War, was a tragedy. It was a chilling echo of the fatal aerial drop of Spence Dry in 1973 during Operation Thunderhead, only this time, four SEALs were lost.
On the night of October 23 and early morning of October 24, 1983, twelve SEALs were supposed to be dropped into the ocean along with their assault boats from low-flying C-130s, rendezvous with the destroyer USS Caron, then cover miles of open water to perform a reconnaissance on Point Salines Airfield, in advance of a planned airborne assault by the 75th Ranger Regiment. “At 1800 we listened on the SATCOM radio as the planes reported their drop runs,” remembered Gormly. “My guys on the ship sent a radio report that they were ready and the weather was okay. The planes turned final and dropped.” Then things went bad. Tropical squalls can arise without warning, and the seas suddenly became windblown and choppy. It was pitch-black, instead of the planned-for partial light of dusk. The C-130 dropped the men too far apart. And the SEALs had not recently trained for such a complicated drop in these severe conditions. “I didn’t know it at the time,” admitted Gormly, who had taken over command of the unit only earlier that year, “but they had never done a night boat drop—or any night water parachuting, for that matter.”
Gormly was shattered by the accident: “Four good SEALS drowned, and one of the two boats capsized, apparently also because of the squall. I was devastated. I blamed myself (and still do) because I had done nothing to prevent it.” SEALs Machinist Mate First Class Kenneth Butcher, Quartermaster First Class Kevin Lundberg, Hull Technician First Class Stephen Morris, and Senior Chief Engineman Robert Schamberger were never found. The surviving SEALs tried to complete the mission, but the rough seas threatened to swamp their remaining inflatable boats. Gormly recalled bitterly, “The damn boats weren’t capable of doing what we needed to get done. They weren’t seaworthy.” On the night of October 24, frogmen from SEAL Team Four successfully conducted a classic UDT-style night mission to check the condition of a potential Marine landing beach on northeast Grenada, an amphibious landing that was called off when the SEALs reported unfavorable conditions.
Just before daybreak on October 25, Bob Gormly was aboard a Black Hawk helicopter leading the SEAL mission to rescue and protect the governor general of Grenada, Sir Paul Scoon, his family, and several aides. All were being held under house arrest at the Commonwealth governor general’s mansion on the outskirts of the capital
, St. George’s. Gormly’s assault team leader and Vietnam veteran SEAL Lieutenant Wellington “Duke” Leonard remembered the approach to the target: “That helo ride was absolutely fantastic for me. We flew treetop level all the way into the target zone, then popped up as we approached the mansion. The birds were crowded. I had to squat for the whole sixty-one-minute flight. Nobody could move. We had fifteen guys in the bird—all combat troops—and everybody was jammed in place.”
Leonard and twenty-one SEALs managed to successfully exit their Black Hawk under fire by fast-roping through trees and brush onto the residence’s grounds. But as Bob Gormly prepared to exit his command helicopter, it was hit by an antiaircraft weapon and at least forty-six rounds of ground fire, and the chopper had to abort from the mission. The wounded helicopter took the SEALs’ SATCOM radio with it and was forced to make an emergency landing on the deck of an American warship offshore.
Hearing the sounds of the firefight outside and not knowing what was going on, Sir Paul Scoon, his wife, and aides took refuge in the basement. They heard footsteps above them in the main reception room and voices calling urgently, “Is anyone here? Mr. Scoon, Mr. Scoon?” Scoon’s wife wondered, “Suppose they are Russians?” Her husband replied, “No, those voices have American accents, and they must be here for our protection.” One of Scoon’s guards opened the door and beheld a Navy SEAL pointing his gun directly at him. “We are here to protect the governor general and not to harm anyone,” came the announcement, and the relieved Grenadians were moved to the mansion’s dining room, deemed by the SEALs as the most defensible spot in the house against heavy fire.
The SEALs thought the mission would last forty-five minutes. Instead, the encounter lasted twenty-six hours. At the same time, Lieutenant Jason Kendall and his SEAL assault team were fighting for their lives at the Grenada radio transmission tower; elsewhere, thousands of U.S Army troops and Marines were pouring into different spots around Grenada.