by Orr Kelly
Back in Da Nang, the SEALs, who were among the tiny group of Americans that knew about the U.S.-backed OP 34A raids on the north, listened in puzzlement to the less-than-candid reports coming out of Washington.
“I thought, oh shit, this thing has gotten out of hand,” Flynn recalls. “The American people needed to be told about 34A to make a competent judgment of whether this was another sinking of the Maine. The North Vietnamese knew. The Russians knew. The Chinese knew. The South Vietnamese knew. Who were we fooling?”
Still, the SEALs at Da Nang remained so imbued with the need for secrecy about the operations in which they were involved that they didn’t talk, even among themselves, about the inconsistencies between what they knew and what was being said publicly. Some of those involved still refuse to talk about those events of nearly three decades ago.
One of the questions that remains is whether any Americans were involved in operations against the north. A number of those who were there, among them Flynn, Weyers, and Mulford, say neither they nor any of their people went north. That was not for want of asking.
Weyers, who relieved Flynn, says: “I always said we would get better results if we went along. But we never got permission. I think sometimes they would go up there, get skittish, and come back without ever having done anything. If we had been able to send someone along, it would have made a lot of difference.”
Ted Grabowsky, who served at Da Nang as a lieutenant from the spring until Christmas of 1966, about two years after the Gulf of Tonkin confrontation, almost went north inadvertently.
He would frequently accompany the commandos on training missions where they would swim ashore along the South Vietnamese coast. It finally occurred to someone that, when a Nasty boat roared out of the China Beach dock with an American aboard, his sun-bleached hair shining like a beacon, the boat was probably on a training mission. So a plan was worked out where Americans would accompany the Vietnamese on an actual mission and then be transferred to another boat when they were out of sight of land.
“This was a very important op, way the hell up north. I got orders to be on the boat, very visible. As we got underway, it began to rain,” Grabowsky recalls. He told the petty officer accompanying him to go below and get some sleep. The three-boat formation, heavily laden with fuel and ammunition, started out slowly but gradually picked up speed. There was no English-speaking interpreter aboard. But the skipper managed to ask, “You go?” When Grabowsky said he was, the Vietnamese grinned and replied, “Number one!”
The transfer of the two Americans was supposed to be made at a point designated Alpha. Grabowsky tried to learn from the skipper and navigator where Point Alpha was. Both seemed puzzled.
The night was calm, with smooth seas and no moon. The three blacked-out boats raced north through the night. As they burned off fuel, Grabowsky could feel the surge of additional speed.
“I realized I’m going with these guys. I got the skipper to send a message to the officer in charge [in another boat] to say I was aboard. We got a message back: ‘That’s wonderful. We’ll have a beer when we get back.’”
As Grabowsky watched, the commandos began putting on flak jackets and helmets, breaking out the ammunition, and checking their weapons. Grabowsky was wearing a pair of dark green tennis shoes, socks, shorts, and a light jacket. He had an M-16 rifle with one clip in the weapon and another in his pocket. He descended into the cabin to tell his companion they were going to war.
“He told me, ‘I’m not going.’” When the officer insisted that they didn’t have much choice, he replied, “I’m not mentally prepared.”
Concerned not only about danger, but also about the international incident that would be caused if two Americans were captured by the North Vietnamese, Grabowsky made one more try to influence the officer in charge. He suggested they turn around and drop the two Americans at a U.S. Coast Guard vessel patrolling along the seventeenth parallel, the line dividing the two parts of the country. Even though this would throw off his timetable, the officer agreed. The three boats turned sharply and roared back down south.
Aboard the Coast Guard vessel, the silence of the night was suddenly shattered by the eighteen-thousand-horsepower roar of the six engines of the Nasties as they circled the American boat at top speed in the darkness. Two of the boats pulled up on one side and abruptly stopped. Then the big black bow of the third boat loomed over the other side of the Coast Guard vessel, powerful floodlights snapped on, and two half-naked Americans leapt aboard.
As suddenly as they had appeared, the Nasties backed off into the darkness and sped north to make up the lost time. After establishing their identity, the two Americans got off a coded message to confirm the mission was going ahead without them.
“The guys did carry out the mission. They did just fine. For us, it would have been just a long boat ride,” said Grabowsky, who later rose to the rank of captain. And what was the mission? “A whole bunch of stuff—still classified.”
Despite the prohibition on direct American involvement in the raids against the north, a few enlisted men did go along, although they did not go ashore. Later in the war, SEALs themselves carried out secret operations in North Vietnam.
In those early days, the SEAL involvement in Vietnam consisted almost entirely of men from the West Coast team, working out of Da Nang. One of the few exceptions to this arrangement was the assignment of one man from Team Two, on the East Coast, as an adviser to the Vietnamese equivalent of the SEALs—the Lien Doc Nguoi Nhia or LDNN, “soldiers who fight under the sea”—in the southern part of the country.
Lt. Roy Boehm, who had been the first acting commander of Team Two, was sent over as an adviser in 1964. Boehm couldn’t get permission to operate as he wanted to, but on “training missions” he would happen to bump into the enemy and engage in a firefight. On weekends, he would visit villages in the area east of Saigon and treat those who were ill. In the process he met a man named Minh, a common name in Vietnam, who turned out to be the commander of the local Viet Cong battalion. The two became friends.
“They’d hit us and I’d see a flag come up on their side,” Boehm recalls. “I’d call the action off and get up on the parapet. He’d walk out. I’m sure they had a sniper on me. I sure had a sniper on him. He’d say, ‘Meet you at the tax building.’”
Minh drove a cab in Saigon when he wasn’t engaged in combat. Boehm would climb into his cab and they headed for Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon where few Americans ventured. They managed to converse in a mixture of French, English, and Vietnamese.
“We’d talk. We’d eat. I respected him more than some of the people I was working with,” Boehm says. “Hell, I hated my supply officer more than I did my VC enemy. I learned a lot about their thinking and learned to respect them, to admire them. If you have an enemy you can admire and respect more than your [South Vietnamese] counterpart, you’ve got problems.”
Boehm, a patriot and a professional fighting man, continued to carry out his orders and even developed an ingenious sensor system that caused the Viet Cong in the delta all sorts of trouble. But on subsequent visits to Vietnam, he became more and more disillusioned.
“They really ruined a beautiful war,” he says. “I felt that we had corrupted and contaminated South Vietnam completely. The streets were filthy. The black market was rampant. Military men were prostituting their most solemn and binding obligations. I was completely disgusted. We kept escalating and escalating. And the more we escalated, the worse it got.”
SEALs continued to serve in Da Nang and other places in I Corps, the northernmost of the four areas into which the Americans divided their command structure, throughout the war. They continued to instruct and advise the Vietnamese frogmen. They carried out their own secret operations under the American military’s Studies and Observation Group (SOG), and they worked on special assignments for the CIA. But as the American buildup began in 1965, the SEALs shifted their attention increasingly to the southern part of the country, from
Saigon down into the delta.
While assigned at Da Nang in the early days, the SEALs were under strict orders not to become involved in combat. In the south, they assumed a direct combat role at a crossroads for the war. As in Da Nang, the first SEAL platoons to arrive were members of the West Coast team, SEAL Team One. Except for a few individuals in advisory roles, members of the East Coast team, Team Two, were not to enter the Vietnam War until later.
Saigon lies about forty miles from the South China Sea. Between the capital and the sea is a delta area, then known as the Rung Sat Special Zone. It is a huge mangrove swamp, crisscrossed by meandering streams, a wonderful sort of mysterious place much like the bayou area of Louisiana, and a favorite hiding place of pirates. For the Americans, control of the zone was critical because ships carrying war supplies to Saigon had to be able to move safely up and down the river. For the Viet Cong, it was a critical transit route between the huge Mekong River Delta south of Saigon and the area to the north. Both sides had a similar goal: to be able to move safely through the area while disrupting the other side’s use of the zone.
In their brief existence the SEALs had planned and trained for the kind of hit-and-run raids from the sea that their Vietnamese counterparts were conducting against North Vietnam. They knew how to slip ashore at night, blow up a radar station, and get away again. But they knew little or nothing about skulking around in a swamp in the darkness.
When Maynard Weyers arrived in the Rung Sat Special Zone in 1966 to take over a detachment from SEAL Team One, he found a thoroughly demoralized unit, unable to adjust to working in a swamp. The unit had stopped operating.
“Once you stop, these guys are going to get in a world of shit,” Weyers says. “These guys want attention, one way or the other. If they’re not operating and busy, there are going to be fights, all sorts of stuff.”
The executive officer of the naval command in Vietnam told Weyers, “If I could, I’d get you guys kicked out of this country.” Weyers’s predecessor, Lt. James Barnes, told him not to unpack. Barnes was disillusioned, but he had made a lasting contribution to the SEAL structure in Vietnam. He began what came to be known as the barn-dance cards, in which every SEAL unit wrote a brief report after each mission. The cards served as a guide to others going on missions in the same area and were even studied back in Coronado. The information they passed on ranged from reports on enemy strength and tactics to such practical advice as “remove leeches with mosquito repellant.”
Barnes told Weyers he had written to Captain Bucklew, by then commander of the Pacific Fleet’s Naval Operations Support Group, saying, “This is not for us.” He suggested the SEALs pull out of Vietnam.
As Weyers recalls, the response from Bucklew was blunt: “No way! This is the only war in town. If the SEALs want to stick around, they damn well better be involved.”
Over the next few months, the SEALs set about finding how they could be useful in this strange kind of war. Night after night, they crept out into the darkness to set up ambushes. Patrols frequently lasted forty-eight hours and sometimes as long as seventy-two hours without sleep. Often the SEALs would take up their ambush positions and stand silently in one place all night, using Dexedrine to stay awake. A length of string stretched from one man to another. If one man began to snore, a gentle tug on the line would bring him back to wakefulness. The training in dealing with sleep deprivation during Hell Week began to make a lot of sense.
Many times, especially in the early days when their intelligence information was inaccurate, out of date, or nonexistent, the SEALs failed to make contact with the Viet Cong. But there were other creatures in the swamps to keep them company. The water level rose and fell with the tides in the South China Sea. When the tide was out, crabs could be heard scuttling through the mud. Sometimes a large snake slithered through an ambush position. Often, when the water was slack, an alligator, aware of some strange presence in its bailiwick, nosed up for a closer look. “Those damn things would flop their tails. Man, they’d flip that tail and just scare the shit out of you,” Weyers recalls.
Very early in their time in the Rung Sat, the SEALs learned that they could operate in very small units, sometimes as few as two men, seldom more than five or six, if they planned ahead for support from helicopter gunships or artillery. That way, if they stumbled on a VC company or battalion, they could call in overwhelming firepower to destroy the enemy or at least to provide protection while they were extracted. In this way, they were able to take the night back from the Viet Cong, forcing them to move more cautiously, making them less effective.
In mid-August 1966, Weyers and a small group of SEALs were moving through the Rung Sat in a boat when American helicopter pilots reported spotting several Viet Cong craft nearby. It was daytime, a time when SEALs feel almost as uncomfortable as Dracula. But Weyers decided to send a squad to investigate the sighting.
Radarman Second Class Billy W. Machen was the point man. The scene is etched in Weyers’s memory:
“Machen said to me, ‘Jeez, I’m not real crazy about this daytime stuff.’ I said, ‘Well, the helicopters are going to be covering the whole time.’ He said, ‘Okay,’ and they went in, patrolling toward where the boats were. Before they got there, the helicopters—there were two of them—said they were running out of fuel. So they left. And about that time the shit hit the fan. These guys got ambushed. Machen got killed. They were in dire straits in there, and it became an issue whether we can bring the body back. The helicopters finally came back and gave enough cover to get the hell out of there.”
One of the men carried Machen’s body out, fulfilling the promise SEALs make to each other that a dead or wounded SEAL will never be left behind.
Ten months earlier, on 28 October 1965, Comdr. Robert J. Fay had been killed during a mortar attack in Da Nang. But Machen was the first SEAL to die in a firefight, and his death had a profound impact on his comrades.
“When Machen got killed, I wondered, should we be doing this?” Weyers says. “Once somebody gets killed, then it becomes real. Before, it was a game. I had real questions in my own mind, should we be doing this? It was a bummer, anyway. I shouldn’t have made the decision to send him in.”
In the weeks following Machen’s death, a number of SEALs decided this wasn’t for them.
“Once we lost the first guy, guys bailed out of there. It is all well and good to play the role until the shooting starts. There were a lot of plank owners [original members of SEAL Team One] that bailed out. I’ve always had a bad feeling about that,” Weyers says.
The reaction of those who left the team exposed one of the unavoidable shortcomings of the training the men had received. Combat is infinitely more dangerous and more frightening than anything else a person has ever experienced.
“There’s no way you can tell how a guy will be under fire unless you shoot at him,” Weyers says. “That’s a real problem. A guy can parachute and free-fall and dive and mess with demolitions. But there is only one way to tell how a guy is under fire, and that is to shoot at him. And you can’t do that.”
For the SEALs, the death of Billy Machen on 16 August 1966 marked the end of the pleasant little war.
CHAPTER
8
The Men with Green Faces
WHEN SEAL TEAM TWO WAS PREPARING TO SEND ITS FIRST units to Vietnam in 1967, an uncle who had served in the rangers called James D. (“Patches”) Watson aside and gave him a piece of advice: “When you go into combat, the first time you have to kill somebody, don’t hesitate. Shoot!”
That moment came for Watson, a senior petty officer and plank owner of Team Two, on 13 May 1967.
Too often in those early days, the SEALs went out on ambushes, hoping enemy troops would come down a trail or float past in a sampan. Too often they were sent out with intelligence that was out of date or just plain wrong.
But on this assignment, the intelligence was specific, and it was good: A leader in the campaign to block ship traffic between the sea and Sai
gon would arrive at a hut hidden in the forest that night. Watson and a small group of SEALs were assigned to capture him.
Silently, Watson and two other SEALs crept through the mud and took up positions near the enemy hooch. Finally the man they were after approached, surrounded by his bodyguards. The SEALs’ plan was to wait until the men had entered the hut and put down their weapons. Then they would burst through the walls of the grass shack and confront the men before they could react.
But before going inside, the target of the operation, exhibiting the caution that keeps some guerrilla fighters alive against all odds, took a look around the compound. Holding his AK-47 assault rifle at the ready, the man walked directly toward Watson—and then saw him.
Watson rose up from the mud. Clearly visible in his hands was a featherweight twelve-gauge shotgun with an eight-round magazine and a pistol grip. Gunsmiths at the Frankfort Arsenal had made the gun to his order. It was not automatic and required the user to pump each shell into the chamber. But it was so simple and reliable that a man could simply rinse it in a stream and be confident it would fire when he pulled the trigger. For close-in fighting, Watson much preferred it to a more complicated automatic weapon.
Perhaps he assumed the Vietnamese would be awed by his little shotgun; perhaps he still hoped to take the man prisoner; or perhaps it was reluctance to take a human life. Whatever the motive, despite the warning from the old marine and his own training, Watson hesitated. The Vietnamese, who had been at war a lot longer than the young Americans, didn’t. A single shot from his AK-47 automatic rifle shattered the stillness. But the bullet missed. Watson fired, hitting the man in the chest and killing him.
As the bodyguards rushed out, Watson emptied his shotgun and then picked up the other man’s AK-47 and chased the enemy soldiers off into the darkness.
When the shooting stopped, Watson turned to see one of his teammates rolling in the mud with laughter at this scene straight out of a Hollywood shoot-’em-up.