Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces
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“I came over and pushed the AK-47 at him,” Watson recalls. “I didn’t think it was funny.”
When the SEALs had time to think back on the incident, they realized why the American, despite his hesitation, lived and the other man died. The Soviet-designed AK-47 rifle is deservedly one of the most popular automatic assault rifles in the world. But it has a serious design flaw, and that flaw cost the Vietnamese his life.
A little lever on the side of the rifle is used to change it from single shot to semiautomatic or automatic fire. But instead of going in that order, through semiautomatic to automatic, the AK-47 goes to automatic and then to semiautomatic. In automatic, if the rifleman pulls the trigger, the weapon continues to fire. But in semiautomatic, he must pull the trigger for each shot.
In his excitement, the Vietnamese pushed the lever all the way down, through automatic, to semiautomatic. Before he realized he had to pull the trigger a second time after his first shot missed, he was dead. If he had gone into full automatic, he would have cut Watson in half.
Documents found at the scene revealed that the man killed that night had been a formidable foe, one whose skills the SEALs could well respect. He had twice been named soldier of the year and had been awarded the North Vietnamese equivalent of the Medal of Honor. He had been responsible, the year before, for the sinking of the Jamaica Bay, the world’s largest dredge.
Another SEAL who hesitated when he first came face-to-face with an enemy soldier was Bill Bruhmuller, like Watson a senior petty officer and a plank owner of Team Two. Shortly after he arrived in Vietnam, Bruhmuller was crouching on the bank of a river in an ambush position. Although he didn’t realize it at the time, his unit had stumbled onto a major Viet Cong crossing point. Before crossing, the VC sent their own version of the SEALs—scout swimmers—along the edges of the river to make sure the coast was clear.
“I can still very clearly see this one scout swimmer right dead in front of me. He could see me, see my outline. He was as surprised as I was. I had my M-16 on my lap,” Bruhmuller says. From the muzzle of his rifle to the man’s head was less than two feet.
“I hesitated,” Bruhmuller says. “I wasn’t sure what to do. Do I jump in and grab this guy? It all happened in a split second. I think I hesitated that split second, then I fired and killed him.
“I think when it happens the first time, there is a tendency to hesitate. We like not to think we will hesitate, but probably it is the reluctance to shoot somebody. Once you’ve done that, you don’t hesitate anymore. Reality sets in. You realize these guys are trying to kill you. He who acts first is the survivor,” Bruhmuller says.
Often, in that first face-to-face encounter with the enemy, there was no time for hesitation.
Rodney Pastore, who later became command master chief of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, had that experience on a “morning-glory” operation. Although the SEALs learned to feel most comfortable in the dark, one tactic they also favored involved arriving at the target at first light—hence the term morning glory. In this operation, Pastore was in a unit that descended on a suspected Viet Cong base camp in three helicopters. As the helicopters pounded the three hooches with rockets, the SEALs hit the ground running.
Pastore was carrying an M-60 machine gun. Although most infantry units consider the M-60 a crew-served weapon, requiring two or three men to carry the gun, tripod and ammunition, the SEALs made it a one-man weapon. One man could thus pack tremendous firepower; but even stripped down, the version used in Vietnam weighed about twenty pounds and was a cumbersome armful in a firefight.
As Pastore came around one corner of a building, he confronted a Vietnamese carrying an AK-47 rifle. With his relatively lightweight rifle, the VC probably had the advantage as both men fired. But Pastore’s muzzle was pointed at the other man. The Vietnamese’s was pointed slightly off to the side. Before he could bring it around, he was dead.
“He didn’t have a chance. He didn’t get it around fast enough,” Pastore says. “That’s how it works. It’s not like the old cowboy days with the quick draw. The person who hesitates just doesn’t get to tell the story.”
As Pastore continued on around the building another VC began to shoot at him, but a SEAL quickly cut him down. Pastore stuck his head in the hooch and saw one man lying dead. Beside him lay two women. Just then a phosphorous shell hit the building, and the white-hot molten metal began to drip through the grass roof. Pastore ran to the helicopter.
As it lifted off, he thought back to the two girls he had seen in the building, by then enveloped in flames. “I remember looking down and noticing those girls didn’t have any holes in them,” he says. “I think those girls probably just fainted.”
Unlike most modern military men—aviators who drop bombs on an unseen enemy, or sailors in an Aegis cruiser who launch missiles against a dot on the radar screen—SEALs are often so close that they can see, touch, and smell those they kill. For most of them, that first death of an enemy is easy to remember. But subsequent deaths tend to blur together.
“I personally think it is very easy to kill someone,” says Ronald K. (“Ron”) Bell, now a retired captain. “What’s scary is that it’s too easy. I didn’t have any problem. And that’s what scares me. You just pull this button and somebody dies in front of you.”
Most SEALs quickly became inured to the sights and sounds of the death they inflicted. During training, they had come to terms with their consciences and looked upon what they did, under lawful orders, as morally justified.
The cruelty they often saw exhibited by the other side also seemed to justify their own actions. Lt. Red Cannon, who had been involved in the reconnaissance of the Cuban patrol boats in 1962, served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. On one patrol with a combined SEAL-Vietnamese force, they came upon a village that had just been looted by a Viet Cong unit. The people told them which way the VC had gone. Cannon and his men followed them for a while and then turned off to carry out their primary mission.
On the way back, they found the village in an uproar. Cannon tells what they found:
The VC had come back and punished [the villagers] for telling where they went. They killed the two nuns at the girls’ school, decapitated them, and hung them upside down with their heads in their crotches. They did the same with the little girls. There was a whole row of them, must have been ten or twelve, just lying on the floor, with their heads between their legs.
That was what affected me most. They were vicious people. I had the feeling the war was just, because of the cruelty the VC inflicted on the people.
After a while, most of the SEALs became somewhat callous and a few may even have taken pleasure in killing. One officer recalls how, when they felt the need for a party, “we’d go out and kill a tax collector.” An article in the New York Times reported a sign on the wall at a SEAL base in the Mekong Delta: “People who kill for money are professionals. People who kill for fun are sadists. People who kill for money and fun are SEALs.”
Because they struck unexpectedly, and usually in the dark, the SEALs soon began to seem to many Viet Cong more numerous and perhaps even more ferocious than they really were. With their faces painted to blend into the darkness and the jungle, they became known as “the men with green faces.”
In Vietnam, there was always the problem of telling the enemy from the friendly, the farmer violating curfew to get to or from his fields from the VC moving in for an attack. The SEALs, operating far from their bases in very small numbers, tended to err on the side of their own safety. Al Winter describes one such situation:
“You’re sitting on a river bank in an ambush situation. You have some bad guys coming down. It’s dark. You hail ’em over, and all they have to do is pitch a grenade in the dark and kill a couple of your guys. We didn’t take that chance. If they were curfew violators, and they were in a place where they shouldn’t be, we would take them under fire and clean up afterwards. That bothered me. Sometimes you got the bad guys, sometimes you didn’t.”
Larry W. Bailey, a retired captain who served in Vietnam and later commanded the training center at Coronado, says, “My experience is: every time somebody dies, somebody has screwed up. We don’t charge enemy trenches. People get killed because that’s their job. Ten percent of your troops going over the berm, across the barbed wire, are going to get killed, actuarially, demonstrably. We don’t play that kind of game. Take this with a grain of salt, but every SEAL that got killed, that I know of, got killed unnecessarily, because somebody screwed up. That doesn’t say anything bad about SEALs. It says we are so damn good we are the only ones who can get ourselves killed, in a perverse sort of way.”
In fact, SEAL Team Two went through the entire Vietnam conflict with the loss of only nine men killed. Team One, which operated there longer, lost thirty-four men. But a number of those were lost in accidents or because of errors rather than enemy action.
One such tragic incident occurred on 20 August 1968. Warrant Officer Eugene S. Tinnin—one of the men involved in the reconnaissance of Havana harbor in 1962—headed a nine-man squad assigned to check out a suspected VC base area in Vinh Long province. A patrol boat dropped the men near their target, and they carefully worked their way in until they were in sight of a pagoda which they suspected was used by the VC. Tinnin left four of his men in an ambush position near the pagoda. Then he and the other four men set out to patrol in a circular pattern around the area. The two teams kept in touch with brief, whispered messages over their radios.
Then the men in the ambush heard sounds of movement in the darkness in front of them. The sounds came closer. When it seemed they were about to come under attack, they fired into the darkness. A rapid burst of fire came back. And then there were anguished cries in English.
Tinnin, lost in the darkness, had led his patrol back into the kill zone of his own ambush. He was killed in the brief exchange of fire, and five other men, four SEALs and one Vietnamese accompanying them, were wounded.
Bailey was personally involved in a similar incident. He was commanding a squad sent to ambush the Viet Cong at a river crossing. Bailey led his men into the ambush position, so close that they could hear the VC revving up the engines on their boats. And then he found that two of his men, an American and a Vietnamese, had gotten lost in the dark.
“I went back, to my great peril, I thought. We were in a hostile area and we could literally hear the boats knocking against each other. There I am, not knowing if the VC are going to get me or I’m going to run into my two lost troops and they’re going to blow me away. I found them and brought them back to where I had mustered everybody else and told them exactly where to go,” Bailey says.
Either the American did not hear Bailey’s whispered instructions or he misunderstood. The two men remained where they were as Bailey crept back to his other men.
About two hours later one of the SEALs, assigned to face toward the rear of the ambush position, saw two silhouettes, outlined by the light of the setting moon. Bailey turned to face the rear: “I saw two heads looking around. They started moving from my center to my right. I really thought they were my guys, who, for some reason, had gotten up and started wandering around. That was really violating patrol discipline.”
Bailey pointed at the leading figure. The man next to him said, “It’s Hien,” the Vietnamese member of the team. The two figures dropped to the ground. Bailey figured it was curious the man would drop when he heard his own name.
“I had made no move,” Bailey says. “My weapon was on the ground between me and this other guy. They started moving again. I pointed to them, and he said, ‘It’s Hien.’ This guy never learned to whisper. They dropped to the ground again.
“I got my weapon in under my belly. They started moving to the right flank of my ambush. They were moving right up on a guy who didn’t know what was happening.”
Bailey knew Hien always wore a baseball cap and carried a carbine. He looked for both telltale signs and couldn’t recognize them. And he couldn’t believe that the two men would have left their position and begun wandering around in the dark.
“I remember making a conscious decision: ‘Hien, if it’s you, you’re about to die.’ He was walking up on my ambush position. I just blew him away.”
It was Hien. As soon as Bailey fired, the American, who was just behind the Vietnamese, began to holler. He was not hit, but he later found that one bullet had gone through his hat and another left a hole in his pants leg just below the tip of his penis.
Bailey hurried to the man he had shot. “If he died a painful death, he died a quick one,” he says. “I gave him mouth-to-mouth. But when I blew in his mouth you could hear the bubbles coming out his belly.”
A different kind of accident claimed the lives of four members of Team One on 18 May 1968. Two of the men took it upon themselves to take apart a captured Chinese 82mm mortar. Another SEAL was just approaching to tell them not to fool with the shell when it exploded. Three men died that day and one more died of his wounds a week later.
Five more members of Team One were killed on 23 June 1970. The men had just returned to Seafloat, a SEAL base on a cluster of barges anchored in a river near the tip of the Ca Mau Peninsula, the southernmost point of land in Vietnam. Eager for leave in the nearby city of Can Tho, they piled onto an army helicopter that had just returned from a combat mission.
As the chopper was at about twenty-five hundred feet, approaching Can Tho, its rotors came off, and it plunged to earth so violently that blades of grass were later found embedded in the metal of the weapon carried by one of the SEALs. All aboard the craft, including the five SEALs, were killed.
In the Rung Sat Special Zone and the delta, the SEALs formed a special bond with the crews of the boats that took them on their missions and got them back out again. One SEAL recalls with real affection, “They were very special guys, ordinary old-fashioned sailors, Mark one, mod zero, out of the fleet. They are hard to come by these days. Tattooed, dirty fingernails, foul language. They could make these boats work and get them into the places we went.”
Actually, the SEALs almost always felt safer when they slipped into the water or stepped off into the mud. While cruising on the rivers, they worried constantly about a rocket attack from the shore.
They used a variety of boats. One was the thirty-foot PBR (patrol boat, river) that could make twenty-eight knots with its jet propulsion system. But dirty water, of which there was plenty, could clog the motor and bring the boat to a stop. Both the PBR and the larger Swift boat, or Fast Patrol Craft (PCF), carried .50-cal. machine guns and other weapons.
The light SEAL-support craft (LSSC), a twenty-six-foot vessel, was used frequently by the SEALs because it was just the right size for a squad. It, too, suffered from dirty water clogging its pumps. Two other high-speed boats used for squad-size operations were the Boston Whaler and the SEAL team assault boat (STAB).
For bigger operations, the SEALs relied on the thirty-six-foot medium SEAL support craft (MSSC), which could carry a fully-equipped platoon, or the even bigger Mike boat—landing craft, mechanized (LCM)—which was modified for use in a variety of roles.
The tie between the SEALs and the boat operators was matched by their close link to the young pilots of the UH-1 Sea Wolf helicopter gunships and the fixed-wing OV-10 Black Ponies. While the SEALs could also call for help from other American or South Vietnamese air units, they always felt more confident if they knew their own friends were overhead. On a number of occasions, Sea Wolf pilots landed, lightened their helos by removing guns and ammunition, and then returned, unarmed, through enemy fire to pull out trapped SEALs.
The SEAL involvement in Vietnam went through a series of fairly distinct phases. First was the involvement in Da Nang, where they provided backup for Vietnamese carrying out harassing raids against the north. Then there was the assignment to keep open the shipping lanes and disrupt Viet Cong movement in the Rung Sat Special Zone. Then came intensive operations in the delta and in other parts of Vietnam. In each phase, the SEALs went through a period of learning, finding out how their special skills could be adapted to the particular situation.
One of their most intriguing experiments was with the use of scout dogs. Bill Bruhmuller of Team Two took the lead in this effort. They rigged a special harness so a man could parachute with the dog strapped to his chest and then let the dog down on a long leash before they reached the ground. Most of the dogs adapted readily to this new experience. But one, after the first jump, wouldn’t even go close to an airplane.
In Vietnam, SEALs took their dogs on nighttime patrols. As they lay quietly in ambush positions, they would keep an eye on the dog. As the dog sniffed the air, his head would swing back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. If he sensed someone approaching, his ears would go up. Then he would freeze with his nose pointing straight ahead, an indication that someone was close. The dog was able to sense anyone approaching the ambush well before the men could.
The one shortcoming of the dogs was that their legs were not long enough to propel them through the deep mud in which the SEALs frequently found themselves, so their usefulness proved to be limited.
Often, as the SEALs searched for their proper role, there was conflict with superiors, including those in the navy, who didn’t understand what the SEALs were doing and didn’t approve of it, either. Thomas L. (“Tom”) Hawkins, who retired as a commander, tells with a touch of lingering bitterness of the army general, a division commander, who told him, “I know you SEALs. You SEALs are assassins. I don’t want you here.”
Ted Grabowsky later reflected on the way the SEALs were perceived by others in the navy: “We had no status, no standing in the regular navy. Some part of the navy saw us as some sort of quasi-criminal element, not a respected profession, that should only be used in desperate circumstances. And when you were through using it, you would stop forever. Like it was some sort of immoral activity.”