by Orr Kelly
Although the drop was to have been made at dusk, it was after dark when the men stepped out into the night six hundred feet above the water. The darkness made it more difficult to land safely in the water and to find the boats and each other.
The jump was also made in weather conditions that were marginal at best. A wind of more than twenty knots was whipping the ocean to at least sea state five on the Beaufort scale. Sailors call this a fresh breeze, creating moderate waves, with many whitecaps and some spray.
When the jumpers gathered and climbed into their boat, they found that four men were missing. Exactly what happened to them will never be known. But there are two plausible theories.
One is that the men were so heavily burdened with weapons, ammunition, and other gear—adding up to perhaps four hundred pounds—that their life jackets did not provide enough buoyancy to keep them afloat, or to bring them back to the surface quickly enough after they had plunged into the rough seas. SEALs are trained not to release their parachutes until they have reached the water. For a parachutist to judge the distance from the water in the daytime is difficult; at night, it is virtually impossible. But with the wind blowing so hard, the SEALs at Grenada had a powerful incentive to shed their chutes just before hitting the water, to avoid being dragged. If they released too early, they would have plunged deep into the stormy sea and perhaps have been injured as well.
The other theory is that the jumpers were unable to get rid of their chutes after hitting the water, became tangled in the shroud lines, and drowned.
“Letting them jump out of an aircraft … when they could have flown to an island and walked aboard ship was unconscionable to me,” says Adm. Ace Lyons, who had commanded naval forces in both the Atlantic and Pacific. “Nobody is ever held accountable.”
But many SEALs, who agree that the condition of the wind and waves would have ruled out a jump in training, emphasize that, with the can-do spirit drilled into the SEALs, it is unrealistic to think they would refuse to jump. It would be almost like members of a championship football team refusing to play in the Super Bowl because of bad weather. For the members of SEAL Team Six, especially, Grenada was the Super Bowl, the chance to prove themselves after nearly three years of hard training.
Four SEALs lost their lives that night: Machinist Mate First Class Kenneth Butcher, Quartermaster First Class Kevin Lundberg, Hull Technician First Class Stephen Morris, and Senior Chief Engineman Robert Schamberger.
The surviving men headed toward shore in a Boston whaler from the USS Clifton Sprague. But the engine flooded out, and the men were unable to make it to shore before dawn. They called off the operation for fear that they would be discovered, thus alerting the Cuban defenders on the island to the impending invasion.
The special operations commander recommended delaying the entire operation a day, and the same attempt to infiltrate SEALs and air force technicians into the area of the airfield was attempted the next night, 24 October. Again the boat’s motor flooded out and the men failed to make it to shore.
By this time, the mission of the SEALs and the other special operations forces had been dangerously compromised. These small, lightly armed units should have time to get in, do their work, and get away or go into hiding before the shooting starts. But in Grenada, time simply ran out.
Early on the morning of 25 October, C-130 transport planes carrying six hundred Rangers streamed over the airfield at five hundred feet without the help of the beacons the SEALs had hoped to place in position. They found the airport without the beacons, but it was an hour and a half before all the soldiers were on the ground. During the drop they came under heavy, but inaccurate, fire from Grenadan forces. But casualties were miraculously light. Not a single soldier was killed by enemy action, although two died in parachute accidents.
Whether it was necessary for the SEALs to parachute into the sea is still a matter of debate. One argument is that members of SEAL Team Four were available nearby at Puerto Rico and could have boarded a ship there, sailed close to Grenada, and then taken a small boat to shore without jumping out of an airplane—and that they would have been called upon if SEAL Team Six had not been so eager to show off its skills in a real war.
Others argue that the SEALs available in Puerto Rico could have been taken to Grenada by submarine and slipped ashore. But Adm. Chuck LeMoyne, one of three SEALs to reach the rank of admiral, says that would not have been practical because members of that team had not practiced leaving a submarine underwater.
“Submarine skill is a very complex operation,” he says. “It is akin to flight operations underwater. It takes an awful lot of coordination and skill by both the sub crew and on our part. We need to work together, to rehearse. It is damn difficult, dauntingly difficult.”
Many of the arguments about the Grenada operation hinge on the haste with which it was carried out. The beach survey conducted by SEAL Team Four at the northern end of the island dramatizes the come-as-you-are nature of the whole operation.
The team members were on a routine transit to the Mediterranean when the marine amphibious force with which they were traveling was ordered to change course, land on the tiny island of Grenada, and seize the Pearls airfield. For the SEALs, it was a straightforward assignment of the type that SEALs and their predecessors in the UDT had been doing for forty years. In fact, this call to action came only a few months after the navy had decided to convert its eight UDT teams into SEAL teams.
Adm. Irish Flynn, who was the leading advocate of the change, explains the reasoning: “The distinction between SEALs and UDTs had started to blur, and there was an overlap in capabilities. The amphibious force needed a force that could do both SEAL and UDT things, but there wasn’t enough room on the ships for both. We saw that the UDT and SEAL portions of a mission tended to be sequential rather than concurrent. We saw that the same guys could do both things, provided we broke down the doctrinal barriers between them. We cross trained them. And then we thought, the hell with it, let’s just call them all SEALs. That’s what we did.”
Grenada was the first test of this concept, and it worked out well. While members of Team Six, at the southern end of the island, carried out the type of commando operation in which SEALs, and especially the new Team Six, specialize, members of Team Four performed the traditional UDT mission.
Which is not to say they had an easy time. They were fifteen miles at sea when they left the USS Fort Snelling at about ten o’clock on the night of 24 October, and they had a long, rough ride to the beach.
Silently creeping ashore, they were able to see that the airfield was only lightly defended. But they also could see that the condition of the shoreline, with the wind and high surf, would make an amphibious landing extremely hazardous. Early in the morning, they flashed back the message “Walking track shoes,” which meant only tracked landing craft could make it ashore and they would find it tough going.
Because of the warning from the SEALs, the marine commanders decided to make the assault by helicopter, rather than to make a combined helicopter-amphibious landing. The marines quickly captured both the airfield and the nearby town of Grenville. At the airfield, there was minor opposition but no casualties. At Grenville, the Americans were warmly welcomed by the citizens.
Within a few days, the U.S. forces succeeded in subduing the resistance of the Cubans and the Grenadan defense forces, locating the students, and arranging to fly them off the island. The Reagan administration, which had prevented news coverage in the critical early hours of the operation by barring reporters and photographers and preventing those who did manage to reach the island on their own from transmitting their reports, declared the operation a victory.
But soon, disquieting reports began to emerge. The public learned of the deaths of the four SEALs. Then it learned of confused communications, the loss of helicopters, and the misuse of army Special Forces. This victory-turned-sour was to have a profound effect on the Pentagon’s special operations forces, especially the SEALs.
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Brig. Gen. Richard A. Scholtes, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, met with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed session. His testimony was so highly classified that it is still unavailable. But it soon became known that his account of the failure on the part of senior commanders to understand the role of the SEALs and the other special operations forces and to use them properly, came as a sobering shock to the senators who heard him.
Sam Nunn, the Democratic senator from Georgia who later became chairman of the committee, and Senator William Cohen, the Republican from Maine, took the lead in urging the creation of a new overall Special Operations Command that would include all of the special operations forces, unlike the existing Joint Special Operations Command, which included only the highly specialized units such as the army’s Delta Force and the navy’s SEAL Team Six.
It was obvious to the SEALs and to the navy generally that the SEALs would become a small part of an army-dominated command structure—a tiny cog in the big green machine—and they set out to fight the change.
They had some good arguments. Unlike army and air force special operations forces, which often operate independently of major army and air force units, the SEALs have a vital role to play in day-to-day fleet operations. They are essential to the amphibious force in preparation for landings on hostile shores. They can attack enemy ships in ports and other areas where surface ships, and even submarines, can’t penetrate. And during the period after the Vietnam War, when many in the navy were wondering if there was still a role for SEALs, a few farsighted SEAL officers had worked hard to find ways in which they could be valuable to the fleet.
By the early 1980s, the navy had carved out a major role for itself in a war with the Soviet Union. Instead of merely protecting convoys carrying army equipment to Europe, the navy planned to take the war to the Soviets with its carriers and submarines. Part of the strategy involved disrupting Soviet operations by hitting unexpectedly on the periphery of their empire.
“The SEALs were not major actors, but we kept getting into the room, into the plans, in order to show we could do useful things in these strikes at the periphery of the Soviet Union,” Flynn says. “We worked and worked and worked that, attacking the Soviets at vulnerable points, outposts. The question was, how do you take those down with the least amount of force? How do you run an economy-of-force operation while you keep the fleet out where they can come around and clobber the Soviets where it hurts them? The SEALs account for a lot of that.”
The SEALs were also finding other ways to make themselves useful to the fleet. Capt. Dave Schaible, one of the early leaders of SEALs in Vietnam, called a series of long-range planning sessions in which the SEALs thought of ways to tie themselves to the fleet. The SEALs already had their traditional role with the amphibious fleet, but they found ways to make themselves useful to the carrier fleet as well.
In exercises, they went ashore and worked their way to within eyesight of a target to be hit by carrier aircraft and demonstrated that they could provide instantaneous battle-damage assessment. Within moments after an air strike, the SEALs could tell the strike force commander by radio whether he had to send in more bombers or whether he could shift his forces to hit another target. The SEALs also showed how they could get close enough to a target to mark it with a laser beam to guide the bombers, increasing the odds that the target would be destroyed on the first strike.
The result of all this effort was that, when the question arose whether to include the SEALs in the Special Operations Command or to let them remain in the navy, the SEALs had truly made themselves an indispensable part of the fleet. Top navy officials also worried that, if one vital component of the service could be taken away, what would be next to go?
The SEALs, who presumably were most strongly motivated to keep themselves out of a joint command, were given the responsibility for spearheading the issue on Capitol Hill. But they did not do a very good job of making their case.
Bill Cowan, the marine who had worked with the SEALs in Vietnam, was a member of the staff of Republican Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire when the issue came up. He thought the SEALs should become a part of the new joint command and warned the secretary of the navy, “If we go to war and the SEALs don’t end up playing, it’s going to be their fault.” But he also understood why the SEALs and the navy resisted the change, and he was amazed they didn’t make a better case. “They had a good argument if they had presented it,” he says. “But they didn’t have a plan, didn’t know how to talk to the folks on the Hill.”
The result was that, as a direct outgrowth of the brief operation in Grenada, the SEALs did become part of the Special Operations Command. The arrangement was, and remains, an uncomfortable one for the SEALs. Often they feel themselves submerged in a sea of army green. But they soon realized that the change was not all bad. Gen. James J. Lindsay, the soldier who became the first commander of USSOC, was a veteran Green Beret. He had a feel for what the SEALs could do, and he gave them his strong support, in men, money, and equipment.
By the mideighties, the money was beginning to flow. Capt. Maynard Weyers recalls a session with a top aide to the secretary of the navy in about 1986. Funds available for research were abruptly increased from about $6 million a year to $23 million.
“In the old days, we were really sucking hind tit,” Weyers says. “Since that time, it has been a new world as far as money is concerned.”
The number of SEAL platoons was rapidly expanded. At the beginning of the 1980s, there were twenty platoons of SEALs, with one team on each coast, plus SEAL Team Six with its specialized mission.
By the end of the decade the naval special warfare community was completing its expansion to more than two thousand SEALs and sixty platoons—more than double the size of the SEAL force in Vietnam—with three conventional SEAL teams and one swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) team on each coast. The teams were also much bigger than the original SEAL units. At full strength, they numbered 30 officers and 180 enlisted men, compared with the 10 officers and 50 enlisted men in the first two teams in 1962.
It was in the final days of the decade that the Special Operations Command and the expanded SEAL community got their next test in combat, a test that would cause the SEALs once again to reexamine their proper role.
CHAPTER
13
Target: Manuel Noriega
FOR A MILITARY PLANNER, GRENADA AND PANAMA WERE similar. Both are small countries easily accessible from the water. Both had small military forces that were no match for the firepower of the United States but were still capable of inflicting heavy casualties. In both cases, there was a strong motive to cause as little damage as possible to the lives and property of the overwhelmingly friendly citizens.
But there was one major difference between Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, and Just Cause, the invasion of Panama in December 1989.
In Grenada, the emphasis was on the word urgent. The entire operation was a spur-of-the-moment action, with no time to gather intelligence, no time to plan in detail, no time to rehearse.
In the case of Panama, American military men actually visited the targets they were assigned and gathered their own intelligence. Platoons from SEAL Team Four rotated in and out of Panama so members of the team were intimately familiar with potential targets. All of the special operations forces had been brought together under a single Special Operations Command. Careful planning began more than a year before the actual invasion, and elaborate rehearsals of many aspects of the operation were held in conditions as similar to those in Panama as possible. The planning for Panama was given the code name of Blue Spoon.
Planning was already well advanced when Comdr. Norm Carley, by then commander of SEAL Team Two, one of the East Coast teams based at Little Creek, was asked if some of his men could take part in the operation. Up until that point, the major responsibility for the SEALs’ involvement in the action rested with Team Four, which is also based in Li
ttle Creek but focuses most of its attention on the Caribbean and Latin America. Team Two, in contrast, trains primarily for work in Northern Europe, operating out of a base at Machrihanish, in the north of Scotland.
Carley promptly agreed to lend his support to the Panama operation. But he laid down some strict conditions. He would not put his men under the command of another team. He insisted that, if they took part, they would be given their own piece of the action and that they would plan and carry it out with their own officers and men. Carley understood that the SEALs all have the same basic training and doctrine. But he also was well aware that the teams had developed their own slightly different methods of operation, and he felt it would be dangerous to mix platoons from two teams on a mission.
Team Two was thus given its own assignment: to put out of action as many as three Panama Defense Force gunboats in the hours immediately before the invasion began. This left Team Four free to concentrate its planning and rehearsals on what was emerging as an increasingly difficult assignment at Paitilla Airfield. Both jobs involved targets in or near Panama City, at the southern, or Pacific, end of the canal.
When Carley took over Team Two’s piece of the action, he looked over the preliminary planning that had already been done. What he saw caused him some serious concern. He began adapting the plans to take advantage of the special skills of the SEALs and minimize the dangers to his men. In effect, he said: Tell me what you want done but don’t tell me how to do it; let me find the best way.
One alternative in the early plans called for the SEALs to board the vessels, kill or capture the crew members, and take over the boats. Carley told the army officers in overall charge of planning for the operation that he could do that, but it could get some of his men killed or wounded. A better plan, he said, was to send swimmers in to attach explosives under the boats and blow them up. He emphasized something that those who are not combat swimmers find hard to grasp: his men would be safer underwater.