by Orr Kelly
If he is not blowing enough, the instructor taps him on the chest. If too much, he gets a tap on the cheek. If he runs out of air near the surface, an instructor assists him the last few feet. If he runs out of air below ten feet, the instructors pull him, kicking and fighting, back down to the bell and “reload” him. Once back in the bell, they stand him up and make sure he is okay before sending him toward the surface again.
Once the diver successfully completes the ascent, using the rope, from both twenty-five and fifty feet, he is ready to make a free-floating ascent. He swims down to the bell at fifty feet and inflates his life jacket. On a signal from the instructor, he ducks out, begins his blow, and rockets upward. One instructor watches to make sure he doesn’t bang into the side of the tank. Another, waiting halfway up, grabs his jacket to slow him and, if he is not blowing, gives him a knee in the stomach. The whole procedure takes less than five seconds.
After each ascent, the diver goes through a test to make sure air has not entered his bloodstream, causing an embolism. As soon as he reaches the side of the tank, he shouts, “I feel fine.” One of the signs of an embolism is the inability to pronounce two words beginning with the letter f. After a quick check by a corpsman, he moves to a red line and stands at rigid parade rest for five minutes. Another sign of an embolism is the inability to stand still without twitching. The same process is repeated at a yellow line, a green line, and a black line.
When the students finish their training in the tank, they go out into the ocean for long underwater swims to perfect their skills at navigation in such combat operations as swimming into a harbor to attach mines to enemy ships.
When the successful trainees complete their six months at Coronado, they spend another three weeks at the Army Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they learn the fundamentals of parachuting using a static line. Then they spend another six months in training with a SEAL team before being certified as full-fledged SEALs and permitted to pin on the SEAL badge—nicknamed the “Budweiser” because of its similarity to the beer manufacturer’s trademark.
The Budweiser is a big, gaudy badge, a source of great pride to the SEALs and the result of a bureaucratic accident. Until about 1970, the SEALs had no distinctive insignia. Then several SEALs at the Pentagon began work to design a badge and get it approved for use by both UDT and SEAL team members. Al Winter, who was assigned to Washington at the time, recalls how they developed several sleek designs, similar to the wings worn by aviators. But the design needed the approval of a navy board, and the fliers turned thumbs down on the sketch. It looked too much like their wings.
The proposed badge had all the elements of the SEAL mission: an anchor representing the sea, wings representing the air, and a pistol representing the land. Winter suggested a blowup of the original design.
“I said, ‘Why not make it look gross as hell? I know we can get this one approved. It’s going to look bad. Then we’ll do a design change. We’ll just slim it down and make it the way we want it.’ Everyone thought that was a hell of a good idea, but it backfired. When we went to the fleet and said, ‘We’ve got a chance to get a really nice-looking emblem,’ the guys said, ‘No, we like what we’ve got.’”
Naval authorities have puzzled for years over the question of what kind of person becomes a SEAL, why some make it through training and even more don’t. The concern works two ways. Any program with a dropout rate of 50 percent or more is obviously wasteful. It would be much better if tests could be devised that identified those most likely to succeed and weeded out the others. On the other hand, there is always the worry that those who have the potential to become superior SEALs might be eliminated by the selection process or fail, for unknown reasons, to make it through training.
Winter recalls one incident when trainees were being badly battered in attempts to land on the rocks near the hotel: “I know in my class, people were screened out who should not have been screened out. We were doing stuff at the rocks, surf up, at night. It was a really dangerous situation. We had guys hurt. One of the better officers just up and said, ‘That’s it! This is really dumb.’ He was a strong leader. He took about six people with him.”
Scientists have done a good job of defining the physical characteristics of the typical SEAL. Perhaps surprisingly, he is neither a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger nor a Rambo, over-muscled both below and above the neck. He is what physiologists call a mesomorph, with a chunky, muscled body, averaging 176 pounds and five feet, ten inches, tall. Dr. Thomas J. Doubt, a physiologist at the Hyperbaric Medicine Program Center at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, likes to think of the typical SEAL as an Olympic-class athlete, more closely resembling a star at water polo than either a marathon runner or a sprinter.
What is puzzling to the navy and its scientists is that the physical profile of the man who makes it through training and becomes a SEAL is almost identical to that of the man who doesn’t make the grade. The difference is from the neck up.
In 1986, scientists studied 336 trainees in three consecutive classes at Coronado, trying to find out whether there was some difference that could have been detected beforehand between the 62 who completed the course and the 274 who didn’t. At the beginning of training, the trainees were all subjected to a battery of tests. Those who completed the course were tested again in the final week before graduation.
The physical differences—age, height, weight, and percent body fat—between those who completed the course and those who didn’t proved to be insignificant. What stood out was that the graduates tested higher on self-confidence, self-esteem, teamwork skills, and leadership potential.
But there were also interesting changes that took place during training. As might be expected, the graduates were more tired than when they started. They were also angrier, which might reflect their reaction to the rugged training course. More surprising is that the test scores of the graduates indicated that they were less likable, they responded with less validity, they were less service-oriented, and they were less reliable than indicated by their scores at the beginning of the course.
To succeed as a SEAL obviously requires a high level of intelligence, the ability to adapt readily to changing conditions, the ability to master one’s fear, extreme self-control and self-discipline, and a great deal of self-confidence. But the scientists have not been able to devise tests that will identify the men with the mental and emotional characteristics to become successful SEALs. One reason is the difficulty of sorting out these subtle differences. But another is the SEALs themselves, who resist efforts by scientists to fit them into neat little slots.
When the first two SEAL teams were formed, they had barely had time to organize themselves when they were thrown into action.
On the East Coast, that first real test came during a nine-day period between 27 April and 6 May 1962 when a sixman team was sent on a highly secret mission to reconnoiter the Havana shoreline for a possible amphibious assault against Fidel Castro’s Cuba. This was a year after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs and five months before the Cuban missile crisis.
Boehm, by then executive officer of Team Two, under Lieutenant Callahan, was put in charge of the operation. When the SEALs were being formed, he had argued unsuccessfully that the Underwater Demolition Teams should be converted into SEAL teams, a change that did not take place until two decades later. To emphasize his point, Boehm chose two more SEALs, in addition to himself, and three UDT men.
They flew to Key West and began practicing for the operation. George Walsh, one of the UDT swimmers, recalls nighttime drills off the coast near Key West. The men locked out of a submarine through the escape trunk and then waited in the water for the sub to retrieve them. The swimmers linked themselves together with a line. Those at each end of the line held little noisemakers that could be heard by the sub’s sonar. Using this as a guide, the sub ran slowly between the two sources of sound and snared the line with its periscope. From the periscope, the swimmers followed
a wire running at a forty-five-degree angle down to the escape trunk.
Every time they practiced this maneuver, Walsh watched the phosphorescence stirred up by the six swimmers and feared it would attract a hungry shark. “With all those legs going back and forth, we felt like live bait,” Walsh says.
On the night of the beach survey, the six men had barely locked out of the sub and begun swimming toward the beach when they saw trouble coming in the form of several Komar patrol boats. One depth charge would have done them in, but the boats swept right past, apparently looking for the sub.
The swimmers lined up along the beach in pairs about twenty-five to fifty yards apart, one man in each pair in close, the other a little farther out. They were so close that they could see people in their apartments along the shore and make out footprints on the beach.
Boehm was up almost on the shore while his buddy, James C. Tipton, was a few yards out. Suddenly Boehm made out the form of a man on horseback riding along the beach toward him. He signalled to the others to lie low and then dashed into a clump of bushes just above the beach.
“Damned if he doesn’t stop right there at that clump,” Boehm recalls. “He lighted a cigarette. I’m figuring I have to grab the horse’s reins with one hand, do him in with the other. I knew Tipton would be out of the water and with me. I was perched to take him out. My job was to get in there and get the information without anyone knowing we were there. But this guy kept looking out. He never made any moves.”
Finally, the horseman continued his ride up the beach.
The swimmers completed their survey along four thousand yards of beach—more than two miles—and they were exhausted as they swam out toward the rendezvous with the sub. By that time, all the underwater-breathing devices had begun to fail. Walsh’s breathing bag was full of water, and he discarded it.
For about half an hour they waited, treading water and swimming wearily in circles. One of the swimmers, Harry R. (“Lump-Lump”) Williams, finally voiced the fears they all felt.
“Lump says, ‘Maybe they ain’t going to come pick us up. What do we do then, Roy?’” Boehm recalls. “I say, ‘Swim to sea and drown.’ My famous order. Lump says, ‘What a chicken-shit order that is. I knew being a friend of yours would get me killed.’”
Almost desperate now, the men swam a little further out to sea. And then they saw the periscope. They had been waiting above a coral head that prevented the sub from getting close enough to pick them up. As the sub snagged the line binding the men together, they had been in the water for almost eight hours, and they were near total exhaustion. But their ordeal was not yet over.
One man, Walsh, had discarded his “lung.” The others still wore theirs, but they were not working properly. To enter the sub, they would have to swim down about thirty-five feet, crawl into the lockout escape trunk, and wait until the water had been expelled before they could get into the sub, a procedure that takes about four minutes.
Boehm and two of the men followed the wire from the periscope down to the trunk. Even when the trunk is open to the sea, a bubble of air is trapped inside. The three men took turns ducking inside long enough to fill their lungs. Boehm grabbed the intercom device that permitted him to talk to the skipper of the sub.
Boehm told him: “Well, Captain, we’re back. We have the information. Now the ball’s in your court. You can drown us or you can see if you can get these guys in.”
On the surface, hanging onto the periscope, Walsh looked toward shore and saw several Komars headed in their direction. He took out his knife and tapped a warning signal on the mast. Suddenly, the sub rose slightly and a hatch in the conning tower opened. The swimmers tumbled inside.
Walsh could hear Boehm’s voice, from the outside, booming through the intercom system: “If you don’t surface this goddamn boat, somebody’s going to get killed.”
Moments later, satisfied that his men on the surface had been taken into the sub, Boehm and the other two swimmers locked in through the escape trunk.
Their survey had found the gradient of the beach too steep for an amphibious landing. And of course, no such landing in Cuba was attempted.
Five months later, both the new SEAL teams were called upon as the United States prepared to respond to the news that the Soviet Union was in the process of installing, in Cuba, nuclear missiles capable of reaching targets in the United States. Del Giudice and his Team One flew to Little Creek and prepared to parachute into Cuba. One plan called for the SEALs to jump along with a mass drop of army paratroopers. Del Giudice convinced his superiors that wasn’t a good idea: the small SEAL contingent would be in more danger from the soldiers than from the Cubans.
The frogmen were called upon to make another surreptitious reconnaissance in Cuba. Lt. William T. (“Red”) Cannon headed a unit of men from SEAL Team Two and UDT Twenty-two on the mission. He and seven other men—four two-man swimmer pairs—made the actual swim.
They locked out of a submarine off the harbor at San Mariel and then swam on the surface to save the oxygen in their artificial lungs. As they entered the harbor, they expected to find heavy chains across the entrance, but were surprised to find there weren’t any.
Swimming underwater, they worked their way along the dock area, counting the Komar patrol boats. Their assignment was to determine whether it would be feasible, in the event of open hostilities, for the frogmen to swim in and knock out the patrol boats. They swam back out to the submarine, which was sitting on the bottom in about eighty feet of water, locked back in without difficulty, and reported that it would be an easy task to destroy the patrol boats.
Back in Little Creek, Cannon was briefed on the plan that would be followed in the event the Soviets refused to remove the missiles from Cuba. He and his swimmers were to set limpet mines with timbers on the Cuban boats. They would also mine a big transport ship so the Cubans could not move it out to block the entrance to the harbor. And then they would work their way overland to link up with a unit from Team Two that was scheduled to parachute into an area near San Mariel.
Before any of these plans could be put into action, the crisis ended when the Soviets began removing the missiles.
The members of SEAL Team One returned to the West Coast and resumed their preparations for operations in the western Pacific and Southeast Asia. The land-bound nation of Laos was under growing threat by communist guerrillas. And the United States feared that, if Laos fell, that would expose its long border with South Vietnam to infiltration.
Del Giudice was already familiar with the area. In the summer of 1960, he led ten members of UDT-Twelve in the epic voyage of the Mekong boat flotilla. Together with eight other sailors, Del Giudice and his men sailed up the Mekong River through South Vietnam and Cambodia in five fifty-two-foot LCMs (landing craft, mechanized). Nested on their decks were five smaller LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle and personnel) to strengthen the Laotian forces. Americans were a rarity in that part of the world in those early days, and the countryside was almost untouched by fighting. It was the lull between the French battles with the Viet Minh and the much bigger American and South Vietnamese war with the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.
Del Giudice particularly remembers how pleasant the cities of Saigon and Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, were.
“Saigon was a beautiful place,” he says. “The Street of Flowers was just that, with beautiful smells. It was well organized, very pleasant. Phnom Penh was that way too. Very laid back.”
The flotilla remained in Phnom Penh for almost two weeks and then continued, unarmed, up the Mekong toward the Laotian border. Residents of sleepy little villages along the way stared in awe as this strange flotilla worked its way up the river. Much of the route was uncharted, and several times boats became hung up on underwater obstacles. Most of one day was spent fighting the way upstream through the treacherous Sambor Rapids. The voyage had been timed to take advantage of high water. But that meant that, at times, the boats were slowed to less than one knot by the eig
ht-knot downstream current. Finally, on the Fourth of July, the Americans turned the boats over to the Laotians at Voun Khom and were hurried to the airport for the flight back to Saigon.
Within two months of the creation of the SEALs, at the beginning of 1962, Del Giudice had gone back to Vietnam with a SEAL lieutenant and a marine colonel “to get the lay of the land and see what the SEALs might do.” By the end of February, SEAL Team One was preparing to deploy part of its new force to Vietnam. In his own mind, Del Giudice had a clear idea of the direct-action type of operations at which the SEALs might excel.
But in many ways, the experience in Vietnam was to be a continuation of the long struggle by the navy’s frogmen to define their mission and understand who they are.
CHAPTER
7
A Pleasant Little War
CATHAL L. (“IRISH”) FLYNN LATER BECAME AN ADMIRAL. But in February 1964, when he arrived in Da Nang, he was a lieutenant (junior grade). As so often happens to SEALs, Flynn found himself a very lowly naval officer running a very secret and very important military operation.
Dave Del Giudice, the commander of SEAL Team One, had set up shop in the city itself in a building nicknamed the White Elephant, and he was busy building up the infrastructure to support the limited but growing American involvement in Vietnam. Flynn was in charge of a detachment of sixteen SEALs and four marines on the ocean side of the river that forms the large Da Nang Harbor.
Early 1964 in Vietnam was almost like B.C. in the Gregorian calendar. It was before the marines arrived, before helicopter gunships, before B-52 Arclight raids, before Rolling Thunder, Linebacker 1 and Linebacker 2, before search and destroy operations, before Agent Orange and defoliation, before Tet. The SEALs thus found themselves involved at the very beginning of the Vietnam War, as they were to be involved to the very end.
The first SEAL detachment of two officers and ten enlisted men arrived in Da Nang early in 1963 and became part of a small group of military men assigned to work under the Central Intelligence Agency. The goal at that point was to infiltrate agents into the north to stir up resistance against the government in Hanoi. Some of the agents were parachuted in or smuggled across the border. The job of the SEALs was to set up a system to land agents from the sea.