I found it somewhat depressing to realize that this was not the first time I have been in this sort of bleak, lose-lose position.
Mugs Sullivan directed me by long-distance phone to a beer-nuts-and-pickled-pig-foot joint just off the A Road at the end of the Port Tampa dock, told me to S2, and wait to be contacted. How the hell he knew about these places was something I cannot fathom—except for the fact that he is an old chief, and old chiefs know everything.
Our man pushed through the door an hour and three-quarters (and three cases of Coors Light) later. I knew he was our old Frog by his faded denim cutoffs, thong sandals, and the way he walked—that rolling, roily, bow-legged, splay-footed gait common to fleet sailors and cartoon characters with big muscles and cans of spinach in their pockets. He stood five foot six or seven, with the round, mischievously cherubic face of a falling angel, a thatch of thinning gray hair, a barrel chest and rock-hard beer belly to match, tanned, muscular arms bedecked with faded blue tattoos that ran from brachs to biceps, and huge, wide scarred hands.
He walked right up to me as if he’d known me for years, put his big mitt out and shook my hand. His palm was as rough as forty-grit sandpaper, and his grip was strong enough to make me wince. “Fuck you, you worthless cockbreath,” he said by way of greeting. “I’m Grose.”
Grose. Grose—nobody had ever called him anything else but that; in fact, I’m not sure he even had a first name—was a legend in the teams. He’d joined the Navy in the early forties and seen action in the North Atlantic during World War II. He’d been a fleet sailor, a boatswain’s mate, a hardhat salvage diver—he’d even worked with Roy Boehm for a while. But diving wasn’t enough of a challenge, so he’d joined the Teams in the early fifties—the oldest and meanest guy ever to go through UDT Replacement Training at Little Creek up to that point.
By the time I was an enlisted tadpole he’d already retired. But they all were still talking about him. He was, they all said, the roughest, toughest damn Frog who’d ever lived. Took on twenty nasty Corsicans in Bastia and sent them all to the hospital. Ate a whole live rooster—feathers and all—in Dominica. Blasted a mile-and-a-half-long trench in the Philippines—an explosion so big the desk jockeys at Subic shit and thought Mount Pinatubo had blown its top. He’d been an instructor at Little Creek when Ev Barrett went through replacement training, and Barrett’s butt still bears symmetrical scars from the burnished tips of Grose’s size eight, triple-E boondockers.
After retirement, he’d packed his gear and gone south. Dropped out of the Frog scene altogether. Rumor had him in Costa Rica or Mexico. Others swore they’d seen him in the Philippines, or Bali. In fact, he said, he’d bought (and currently lived aboard) a forty-two-foot Grand Banks—a trawler-hulled, twin Leland diesel fishing boat, which he berthed over in Clearwater, on the Gulf Coast. And, he added, he did keep up with Frogs—at least the few he respected—mostly old Frogs who also respected his privacy.
He was a loner, except for the tight circle of fax friends that included Mugs. He had never become a part of Tampa’s huge Navy retired community. He didn’t shop cutrate at the commissary at MacDill, or bother with the free Happy Hour hors d’oeuvres at the Chiefs’ Club. He never showed up at reunions, either. Never visited the SEAL Museum’s annual Muster in November, or the Little Creek bash every July. But they still talked about him at both.
He made a good living, he said, sucking down a Coors Light. Mostly in construction-related areas. He paved driveways, roughed-in plumbing in new houses, or drove a concrete truck.
I watched the faces of my youngsters as Grose talked about the Navy—his Navy. They were rapt with attention; awestruck kids who hung on his words. And rightly so. Today’s Navy is not the wooden-ships-and-iron-men Navy of yore. Today, it is the other way around. Sure, we have all the technogoodies. And the youngsters who make it through BUD/S these days are probably better educated than those who came before them. But Grose and the chiefs like him are veterans of a Navy whose tradition can be traced directly back from Bull Halsey through Farragut and John Paul Jones. They know the history that is too often ignored by today’s four-starred manager-leaders.
We piled in our cars and convoyed back to Clearwater. I rode with Grose and on the way described our situation. He reamed my ass in a manner that would have made Roy Boehm and Ev Barrett envious, drained the last Coors from a big thermos cooler on the worn bench seat, wadded up the still-wet can with his left hand like an old paper napkin, tossed it over his shoulder through the open cab window into the scarred bed of his well-used but not abused dark green F-250 diesel, and backhanded me in the chest hard enough to take my breath away.
“Don’t worry, son,” he said. “I’ll have you up and running in no time.” It was said as a simple statement of fact—and I believed every word of it.
We sat in the well-appointed cockpit of his boat and went over nautical charts. The Pajar supply ship had departed Port Tampa Dock about the same time we’d left for Grose’s pier in Clearwater. It had an average speed, Grose estimated, of just over six knots—that’s just under seven miles per hour for you nonnautical types. The initial phase of its journey—clearing Port Tampa, sailing down the channel through Tampa Bay, under the Sunshine Skyway and clear around St. Petersburg into the Gulf, was a thirty-nine-mile haul, according to the lines on Grose’s charts. Divide the mileage by the speed and you get 5.5 hours.
Grose’s Grand Banks, which he’d named FYVM, had a top speed of just over eight knots and a range of six hundred nautical miles running its twin Leland two-hundred-horsepower diesels at a 6.5-knot cruising speed. When we did the calculations and figured in all the variables, we had two and a half hours from now to get ourselves under way, so we could intercept the supply ship as it cleared the channel, and follow it to its target.
A forty-two-foot Grand Banks can sleep eight under normal circumstances: two in each of the forecastle cabins, two in the amidships bunks, and two in the main cabin, which has a couch that converts into a double bed. We were eleven, and we’d have to haul a boat load of equipment. Well, we could hot-bunk if necessary. Ah—the editor asks me to explain that nautical term. Okay. Hot-bunking is when three shifts of sailors share the same bunk because there isn’t enough space aboard ship (or sub) for each man to have his own bed. So as soon as one man rolls out, the next rolls in. The bunk stays warm, and the phrase “hot bunk” was born to describe it. Happy, editor dearie? Okay—back to the narrative—since this was the tropics, we could also sleep out on the foredeck and flying bridge.
The only weapon he had on board was his shark gun—a stainless steel Mossberg 12-gauge—and a brick—that’s fifty rounds—of hollowpoint sabot slugs. That was okay—we had weapons from Michigan courtesy of the United States Army, and a shit-load of government-issue ammo.
We had a fair amount of equipment, too, for folks on the run. There were my night-vision glasses. I also had the pair of secure radios, and the cellular phones I’d bought. And Grose’s boat had just about every electronic toy you could find. He had a SATCOM direction finder that allowed him to pinpoint his position and track a course. He had the latest VHF radio equipment. He’d installed the newest generation of radar and short-wave equipment. He had a computer and a modem. There was even a fax.
And even if all of that failed, we could still track our quarry. The NIS beacon was still working, so we could shadow the supply vessel from up to six miles—ten thousand yards away—which would give us good cover.
Of course, we had no boarding equipment, no swim gear, no Zodiacs or Boston Whalers, and no extra fuel bladders for the Grand Banks. But what is life without adventure?
So we improvised. Grose hit an ATM and came up with a fistful of dollars. Stevie Wonder handed over the last of the cash he’d received from the Priest, and we pooled it all. Then Pick, Half Pint, Gator, and Duck Foot hit the Clearwater Dive and Sport Shoppe and bought masks, fins, knives, and all the soft mountaineering rope they had in stock. Rodent, Nasty, and Wonder discovered the wonderfu
l world of Surplus Sam’s, where they bought ten five-gallon Jerry cans for extra diesel fuel, ten five-gallon red plastic gas containers, five wrist compasses and five Silva compasses on lanyards, ten sets of BDUs—those are the oxymoronically named Battle Dress Uniforms—belts, coral booties, and mesh assault vests, all in black except for the coral shoes, which were blue, and a dozen infrared Cyalume light sticks.
Cherry headed to the Winn Dixie, where he stocked up with a week’s worth of rations—and, more important, beer. Doc Tremblay made a run to the drug counter at Piggly Wiggly, where he assembled an off-the-shelf tactical first-aid kit—everything from painkiller to splints—which he then broke down by category and stored in plastic Ziploc freezer bags. The bags were then crammed into the pockets of his combat vest. The Ziplocs would keep everything waterproof, he said. I hoped so—I hate soggy Advil.
Then, his Florence Nightingale imitation finished, he drove with Grose to the neighborhood Zodiac dealer, where they paid a wad of Grose’s cash for the smallest rigid inflatable and forty-horsepower outboard in stock. I watched as they drove up with the goddamn boat sticking out the end of Grose’s pickup. Where the hell we were going to store the damn thing I had no idea, but it was better to have one than not have one.
We sorted, stacked, and stowed for an hour until Grose was satisfied that everything was shipshape. He topped off the tanks and made sure the Jerry cans and gas containers were filled brimward with diesel and regular. Finally, Grose scrutinized his boat—and us. I’d always thought the term “stem-to-stern inspection” was a cliché. I discovered by watching Grose’s attention to detail that it was not a cliché—it was a fact of life.
He pronounced us ready. He faxed Mugs a scrawled sitrep that he signed S.I.Y.F.H.—for Shit In Your Flat Hat, an old Chief’s curse directed at other chief petty officers—then assumed his position on the flying bridge and instructed Wonder to disconnect the electric and telephone lines that ran from the cabin to a box on the pier. That done, he started the twin diesels. After a minute or so of throaty growls, he shut them down, and rumbled at Wonder, who was now standing by the bow rail, to connect everything up again. Grose clambered onto the pier, roiled up the dock, climbed aboard his truck, and roared off without a word.
Twenty minutes later he was back. He drove up and retrieved from the back of his truck a heap of what looked like commercial tuna netting. He rolled it into a ball, slung it over his shoulder, carried it down the pier, then tossed it down into the Grand Banks’s cockpit.
I looked at the pile of mesh and asked, “What the hell’s that for?”
Grose ignored me. He lowered himself onto the deck, picked up the netting, wrestled it forward, and stored it in a locker next to the wheelhouse. He pulled himself back up onto the flybridge and checked all his gauges and dials in a full precruise inspection, even though he’d done it less than half an hour before. When he’d assured himself that all systems were “go,” he started the engines and played with the throttles until he was happy with what he heard. That was when he waved at Wonder to disconnect the electric and phone lines, and signaled Cherry and Nasty to cast off their bow and stern lines.
They all obeyed smartly. He waited until the youngsters had coiled the hawsers neatly and jumped aboard. He flicked his throttle levers, edged slowly eight, nine, ten yards away from the dock, nudged the throttles again, spun the wheel, and reversed as effortlessly as if the Grand Banks had been attached to a pivot post. Then, pointed in the proper direction, he gave the boat some power and slid evenly into the channel.
Finally, he descended into the wheelhouse, plucked a Coors from the reefer, opened the port-side door, looked in my direction, and answered my question with a question. “Didn’t you say you needed a caving ladder, asshole?”
WE CLEARED THE MARINA CHANNEL RIGHT ON SCHEDULE, PICKED up the Helen G. Kelley as it sailed almost due west out from Tampa, then dropped way behind as it turned slightly to the north, its wake cutting a lazy swath across the wide, deep blue expanse of the Gulf. We’d dropped the Zodiac overboard as soon as we’d cleared the breakwater and were now towing her to give ourselves more room on the deck. It was Grose’s idea. “Trawlers are always towing their dinghies,” he growled. “Nobody’ll give us a second thought.” So we hitched a hefty fifty-foot line to the inflatable’s bow, tossed it, and let it ride behind.
The Grand Banks with its big, flat trawler’s hull and high cabin rode the swells with an easy grace. This craft had been built not for speed but for comfort and endurance—it was a real old-fashioned cruising boat. The main cabin settee was upholstered, not foam. The glass was thick and tinted. The appointments—down to the built-in bud vases, in which Grose stored his collection of swizzle sticks—had been individually crafted. The paneling, deck, and trim were real teak.
The galley was tiny but functional, although Doc and I would be cramped cooking for eleven. Grose had packed the boat with creature features. There was a microwave, a TV set, even a CD player and a rack of Montovani’s greatest hits. Best of all were the two extra refrigerators he’d built into the main cabin, which kept six cases of beer at a constant thirty-eight degrees.
Grose, an omnipresent Coors in his big paw, sat like a proper aristocratico in his captain’s chair and kept the supply ship between ten and fifteen thousand yards ahead of us, tacking us back and forth in gentle, random legs. We were too small for them to see us, unless they had the kind of equipment used by the Navy or the Coast Guard’s drug interdiction forces. But they were big enough for us to make ’em out on Grose’s state-of-the-art radar gear.
Navigation was no problem. We could track them on our charts by plotting their course in relation to ours by using Grose’s satellite position finder in conjunction with the radar. Grose assigned watches—four hours on, eight hours off—just as if we were serving in a man o’ war.
Which, as a matter of fact, we were. During the first watch we worked on equipment, loading magazines, rigging charges and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), cleaning weapons and storing them safely out of the salt air environment. These, after all, were U.S. Army issue Berettas, not our usual Heckler & Koch USPs, and they required tender, loving care so they wouldn’t jam on us at the critical moment. If they’d been USPs we could have towed them astern for a week and still shot the hell out of ’em if we ran a patch through the barrel and used dry ammo.
With Doc at the conn, and me playing naviguesser, Grose and Duck Foot used some of the mountaineering rope and the length of tuna netting to fashion a jury-rigged caving ladder. Actually, it looked more like one of those old cargo nets on which Marines clamber down into landing craft than a piece of stealthy assault gear. But as you have probably heard before from your Brit friends, buggers can’t be choosers.
* * *
When the watch changed again, I stretched out on the aft deck cushions to take a late-afternoon combat nap. From under half-closed lids I watched Half Pint work his way down the tow rope so he could sack out solo in the Zodiac. I smiled at his ingenuity. You need to find your own space aboard a ship—someplace you can crawl into, and leave the world behind. For some, it’s the chain lockers. For others, it’s the forecastle, or the athwartships passageways. On subs, I’ve seen sailors sneak into missile tubes in search of solitude. It’s not a game. Serving in a ship is a stressful, sometimes emotionally difficult situation. There are always people around you. There is no privacy. Not in the head, not in the showers, not even in your bunk. So you carve out someplace that is yours—a private, quiet spot where you can be alone with your thoughts.
I lay back and filled my lungs with the wonderful, salty sea air. The weather was perfect—calm, following seas, easy easterly breezes, lots of sun and high clouds. As soon as we’d cleared the coast I’d pulled the bandages off my face and deep-sixed the fucking liver. Now, the sun felt great on my skin. I closed my eyes and dreamed SEAL dreams about cold beer and hot women.
Have I ever told you how detrimental a bucket of cold seawater is to a classic comba
t-nap hard-on? If not, lemme tell ya—it’s wilt city, folks. I wiped the water out of my eyes, sat up, and peered at Wonder and Gator, the laughing perps who’d snuck up and doused me good.
I smiled back. After all, I can take a joke. So, I hoped, could Gator. Because I picked him up by the collar and belt, wrestled him to the rail, and tossed him overboard. Then I turned toward Wonder with good-natured murder in my eyes.
Wonder didn’t wait for me—he relieved himself of wallet, watch, and wraparound shooting glasses, then jumped without any coaxing. He hit the water in a perfect cannonball. The man has talent.
It was suddenly playtime aboard the FYVM. From the main cabin, Nasty, Cherry, and Doc came swarming. Doc was screaming “Cast and recovery! Cast and recovery!” as the three of them gang-tackled me. We roiled around the deck. Rodent and Pick grabbed for a piece of me. There were three guys on my legs, and two on my arms, and for a while I was kicking, screaming, and wriggling enough to keep ’em off me. But by the time Duck Foot joined the party, there was nothing I could do but accept my fate with grace—and take as many of the sons of bitches with me as I could.
“Fuuuck you—” I nabbed Doc tightly around the neck with my right arm, and hooked Nasty with my left. My bare feet had trouble getting traction on the wet teak deck, but I windmilled until I made it to the rail, pushed up, over—and hit the water with my two unwilling hostages.
I let them go and kicked to the surface, spitting water, watching the FYVM move off. From the flying bridge, Grose tossed me the bird, then spun the wheel and came about.
The change of course disturbed Half Pint, who sat up in the Zodiac, shook himself awake, discerned the situation and windmilled his index finger like a B-movie ossifer signaling a cavalry charge. The Grand Banks came to life, the line drew taut, and Half Pint draped himself over the side, a human snare to grapple us swimmers into the Zodiac as it swept past.
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