Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces
Page 36
Vercessi, George, 224, 311
Viet Cong, 115, 122, 130, 131, 133, 137, 145, 147, 152, 154, 155; cruelty, 139–40
Vietnam, SEALs’ worst single day in combat in, 2
Vietnam War, 248, 274, 292
Vietnamese, 279
Vietnamization, 166
Virgin Islands, 75, 85
Virginia Beach, 218
Viribus Unitus, 181
VJ-day, 47
Waimanalo, 28
Walking track shoes, 246
Walsh, George, 111, 303
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 264
Warren, Capt. Harry S. (“Sandy”), 87
Water temperature, 44
Watkins, Adm. James, 225
Watson, Charles, 148, 155, 306
Watson, James D. (“Patches”), 135, 159, 304
Wet suit, 104
Weyers, Maynard, 73, 122, 127, 131–32, 219, 228, 249, 300, 304, 311
White Elephant, 117
White House, 208, 225, 238, 287
Wilbur, John S., Jr., 148, 161, 162–63, 306
Williams, Harry R. (“Lump Lump”), 112–13
Winter, Albert, W., 105, 109, 140, 158, 301
Wonsan (North Korean port), 82
World War II, 182, 284
Worthington, Rear Adm. George, 211, 269, 310, 314
X-craft, 55, 185, 186
Zodiac boats, 277, 278, 280, 288, 290
Zumwalt, Adm. Elmo R., 147, 150, 151, 305
Never Fight Fair!
For the brave men who go where others dare not go
and do what others dare not do and for those among
them who have given their lives for their country.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction SEALs: What Makes Them Tick?
PART 1 THE EARLY DAYS
Chapter 1 MacArthur’s Frogmen
Chapter 2 UDT Sixteen—A Bum Rap?
Chapter 3 Fishnets in Korea
Chapter 4 The Iceberg Caper
Chapter 5 Big War in a Small Place
PART 2 THE GLORY DAYS
Chapter 6 Welcome Back for Gemini
Chapter 7 Alone in the Mid-Atlantic
Chapter 8 First Men from the Moon
Chapter 9 Unlucky Thirteen
PART 3 FROGMEN IN VIETNAM
Chapter 10 Good Fun in North Vietnam
Chapter 11 Operation Jackstay
Chapter 12 “Heaviest Load I’ve Ever Carried”
PART 4 THE SEALs’ WAR
Chapter 13 A Greek Tragedy
Chapter 14 A Narrow Escape
Chapter 15 First Blood for Squad 2-Bravo
Chapter 16 The Bullfrog
Chapter 17 More VC than You’ll Ever Want
Chapter 18 “My Worst Disaster”
Chapter 19 The Sting
Chapter 20 Like a Shooting Gallery
Chapter 21 “Everything Is Written Down”
Chapter 22 Blowing Bunkers
Chapter 23 “Something’s Happened to Mike”
Chapter 24 “I Don’t Want You Operating …”
Chapter 25 They Called It Bright Light
Chapter 26 A Taste for Ears
Chapter 27 “Vous les Américains Sont Pires que les Français”
PART 5 SEALs UNDER THE SEAS
Chapter 28 “Dead Before Sunrise”
Chapter 29 One of Our Dolphins (SDVs) Is Missing
Chapter 30 Blocking Haiphong Harbor
Chapter 31 Operation Thunderhead
Chapter 32 “An Electrical Shock …”
Chapter 33 Target: Libya
Chapter 34 Shadowing the Achille Lauro
Chapter 35 A World-Class Swim
PART 6 SEALs FROM THE SKIES
Chapter 36 A Shocking Takeoff
Chapter 37 “I Started to Black Out”
Chapter 38 “Your Adrenaline Pumps”
Chapter 39 “I’m Going to Jump”
Chapter 40 “I Hated Every One …”
Chapter 41 When Your Eyes Freeze Shut
PART 7 SEALs IN ACTION
Chapter 42 Jump into a Dark Sea
Chapter 43 A Beautiful Day to Go to War
PART 8 THE INNOVATORS
Chapter 44 Birth of the STAB
Chapter 45 Dogs on Patrol
Chapter 46 What Do You Wear to War?
Chapter 47 SEALs: A New Generation
Chapter 48 Letting Go
Image Gallery
Glossary
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
When I began research on Brave Men, Dark Waters, my history of navy special warfare—the frogmen—I naively gave the book the subtitle The Untold Story of the Navy SEALs.
As I quickly learned, there is no single untold story of the SEALs or of their predecessors. Instead, there are many more stories than there are frogmen.
You cannot devote your career to swimming onto enemy beaches, climbing in and out of submarines under water, navigating through dark seas in tiny SEAL delivery vehicles (SDV), or jumping out of airplanes into the dark and cold six or eight miles in the air without having some stories to tell.
Often, what SEALs do in training or in exercises is just as challenging and almost as dangerous as what they do in combat. It will be difficult for anyone to read the chapter, “A World-Class Swim,” describing going in and out of a submarine through the torpedo tubes, or “Dead Before Sunrise,” in which one of the survivors describes being trapped underwater in a wrecked SDV, without getting a severe, if vicarious, case of claustrophobia.
Many stories still remain untold except perhaps when frogmen gather and exchange reminiscences among themselves. Some of them are stories men would rather forget or have deliberately held in. Many of them are classified secret and will remain that way. Sometimes, it is simply that no one asks.
These, then, are some of the stories SEALs tell. I met with many of them with my tape recorder running. I then transcribed the tapes and edited the transcripts into the stories that appear in this volume. In many cases, those with whom I spoke turned out to be excellent storytellers. Their accounts flowed smoothly from tape to paper. In other cases, I edited the transcripts to make the stories easier for the reader to follow. In some cases, several men gave slightly different versions of the same event. In every case these are the words of the men themselves, although I have limited the degree of profanity and obscenity to about the level you might read in your daily newspaper.
In a few chapters, I have not used the names of those who spoke with me. In other cases, in fairness, I have left out the names of some of those referred to critically by those telling the stories. If there is hyperbole in the telling of these stories, I am sure the reader will recognize it as such.
SEALs, like members of any military organization, use many acronyms in talking about their work. I have inserted parenthetical explanations for terms and phrases that may not be familiar to the reader the first time they are used and have also provided a glossary of terms.
For those readers not familiar with the history of naval special warfare, it should be noted that the American frogmen first operated in World War II. A training base was set up at Fort Pierce, Florida, in 1943 to train naval combat demolition units (NCDU) to clear obstacles during the Normandy invasion in Europe, and many of those men died in the operation in June 1944. At Omaha Beach, 31 died and 60 more were wounded, 52 percent of the 175 men involved. At Utah Beach, the toll was much lower—4 killed and 11 wounded.
Many of those trained at Fort Pierce were sent to the Pacific, where they went through another training session in a base on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Known as underwater demolition teams (UDT), they paved the way as American forces made their island-hopping way toward Japan. As noted in chapter 1, a small group of men was assigned to work under Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the southwest Pacific and they continued to use the NCDU designation. Also considered part of the frogman fraternity are those who served in the World War II Sc
outs and Raiders, with a mobile support team or special boat unit, in a SEAL delivery vehicle team, or as part of a naval special warfare staff or unit.
The SEALs (for sea, air, land) were formed from the UDT veterans in 1962. They were trained not so much for clearing obstacles along the shoreline, the specialty of the UDT units, as for land combat. The SEALs almost immediately became involved in what was then a small-scale counterinsurgency war in Vietnam and remained for a decade as the American role grew into a major involvement.
In 1983, the distinction between the work of the UDT units and the SEALs had become so slight that the underwater demolition teams were converted into SEAL teams.
The SEAL headquarters is now in Coronado, California, with teams based there and at Little Creek and Dam Neck, Virginia. They routinely operate overseas, often in exercises with special operations forces of other nations. The Naval Special Warfare Command is a part of the larger U.S. Special Operations Command, based at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
Those interviewed for this book, with the few exceptions noted above, are identified as their stories are introduced. I am grateful to all of them for taking the time to share their stories with me and with my readers.
I would also like to thank those who have been helpful in getting me together with other SEALs: Robert P. Clark and Thomas Hawkins in Virginia Beach, Virginia; Norman Olson in Panama City, Florida; and Maynard Weyers in Alexandria, Virginia. Thanks are also due to RAdm. Raymond C. Smith Jr., commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command; his deputy, Capt. Timothy Holden; Comdr. Glen King, director of public affairs for the command; and especially his stalwart aide, JO1 Mike Hayden.
I am especially thankful to Capt. Ronald E. Yeaw, who saved the records kept by the SEAL team TWO platoons in Vietnam just as they were about to be burned and permitted me to use them to establish dates of operations and the names of those involved. Unfortunately, the similar records kept by the SEAL Team ONE platoons were apparently discarded during a housecleaning at Coronado some years ago.
Maynard Weyers, who retired as a captain after serving as commodore of Naval Special Warfare Command Group Two, in Little Creek, Virginia, and Comdr. James Eugene “Gene” Wardrobe, a member of the staff at Coronado, read the manuscript of the book, double-checking for errors, and I am grateful for their help.
This book would not have been possible without the patient understanding of my wife, Mary; the guidance provided by my agent, Mike Hamilburg, and the professional expertise of my editor, Bob Tate, and his colleagues at Presidio Press.
INTRODUCTION
SEALs: What Makes Them Tick?
The idea for the title for this volume—Never Fight Fair!—came to me as I was reading comments by several SEALs in Full Mission Profile, the professional bulletin of Naval Special Warfare. In a list of “operator principles,” Lt. Comdr. T. L. Bosiljevac, then executive officer of SEAL Team EIGHT, wrote, “There is no such thing as a fair fight. Never plan a fair operation.” And in another issue, Comdr. Larry W. Simmons, then commander of SEAL Team FIVE, wrote, “Be SNEAKY, STEALTHY and do the UNEXPECTED.”
Because SEALs often operate in units as small as half a dozen men, and sometimes smaller, they must always plan to have the advantage against any adversary. If the enemy expects attack tomorrow, hit him tonight. If he expects you to come by sea, arrive by parachute. If he watches for you in a helicopter, arrive as a tourist in an airliner. If he expects hand-to-hand combat or a knife fight, shoot him. If he expects you to fight by some set of rules, throw the rule book away.
This is not to say that SEALs are outlaws, except perhaps for an occasional rogue warrior. They are a highly disciplined force, and they abide by the rules of engagement set down by higher authorities and the internationally recognized laws of warfare. But within those limits, they can be expected to do whatever they can think of to tilt the outcome of any encounter in their favor.
SEALs, as I learned from talking to many of them, are different from other fighting men and different, in fact, from most other men.
During interviews for this book, two veteran SEALs, Capt. Ronald E. “Ron” Yeaw, and Command Master Chief Hershel Davis, each drawing on his own experiences, reflected on those differences—what it is that makes a SEAL different from other human beings.
When Ron Yeaw went to war as assistant commander of a SEAL Team TWO platoon in Vietnam in 1967, he was an idealistic young man who fought to defend freedom and to save South Vietnam from communism. He was wounded and medevaced after putting in five months of his six-month deployment.
He went back again for a second tour as a platoon commander. This time, it was “because I really enjoyed what I was doing and hadn’t gotten a full deployment the first time.” He returned once more as officer in charge of all the SEAL Team TWO platoons in country and brought the last three platoons home with him as part of the U.S. withdrawal in 1971. Few SEAL officers spent as much time in the war zone as he did.
Later, he served as commanding officer of SEAL Team SIX, the elite special unit set up in 1980 to deal with terrorists and carry out the most difficult hostage-rescue operations.
During his career, he has had a rare opportunity to observe SEALs in action in a variety of roles, from death-defying peacetime exercises to actual combat, where death was a constant danger.
During an interview in his office at the Pentagon, where he is presently stationed, Captain Yeaw drew on his experience to reflect on what makes a SEAL different from other mortals:
A lot of words have been written about training, but nothing that really gets into: Who are these guys? And what makes them tick? Particularly at SIX [SEAL Team SIX] and I think in the other teams, you really see it in the enlisted and junior officers. There’s ah—these guys, all they want to do is be assigned a mission.
That’s what the military is for, to go play war. If you’ve got a war going on, the name of the game is to get involved in it. Which is the standard response of SEALs. To be a young guy in a SEAL team—you’ve got no business there if that’s not what you want to do.
They really, really, really want to go into life-threatening, extremely dangerous situations. They want to go up to Father Death and look him right square in the face and give him a knockout punch in the eye. Father Death will rise again—he must, so they again can meet him in a true test of spirit, will, skill, determination, and guts.
They want to go to the Grim Reaper, get right up next to him and punch him out—do it three or four times a day. That’s what they really want to do. And the whole unit is like that, because of what you have to go through to get into the SEALs and stay there, what you have to endure mentally and psychologically. If you really don’t want to do that, then you’re going to get weeded out. Our training attempts to simulate combat through a variety of techniques, whether sleep deprivation or food deprivation or sheer misery. That whole process is not just to simulate hardship in combat, it’s to see who is willing to absorb all that and keep going.
The standard line is, if you gave the SEAL operators a standard psychology test to see if they’re normal, they’d all flunk. The real essence is overcoming the challenge, doing what—not so much doing what very few other people can do; that is a reality—the guys don’t do this because nobody else can do it. It’s their psyche. It’s their makeup. They feed on this. Whether it’s parachute jumping or locking out of a submarine. [SEALs go in and out of a submerged submarine through a chamber originally designed to permit crew members to escape. The chamber, or lock, permits a safe transition from the sea-level pressure inside the vessel to the heavier pressure under the ocean water and keeps water from getting into the submarine.] They enjoy putting themselves in situations where, if it weren’t for their individual mental stability, physical prowess, and dependence on one another, they wouldn’t make it.
I’ve been around it for twenty-eight years and I’m not really sure I can put my finger on it. A psychiatrist or a psychologist would probably put it in book terms, but that would lose
the essence. I had a psychologist there at SIX and there had been one before. I’m not sure those guys had a clue what was really going on. These guys got their psychology out of a book. The SEALs are different psychologically and they’re proud of it. They have ways of looking at things and ways of putting things in perspective for themselves that would cause “normal” people to throw up their hands.
This psyche of the SEAL does a couple of things. It bonds team members together. It destroys marriages. It fractures relationships, in some cases, between SEALs and their sons or daughters if, for example, the son doesn’t measure up.
You ask yourself what comes first, the chicken or the egg. I think the individual starts out with a desire to do something different. And then he gets into training and that reaches parts of his mind that tell him, no, this is nuts, but yeah, I really want to do this.
And then you get on a team where you can share this with a lot of other people who have this same motivation and then it really starts to feed and build. You go through these experiences of a night free fall and get this feeling that is off the top of the chart. It satisfies the hidden need—the itch that needs to be scratched, that you never really could put your finger on before. It feeds the SEALs’ psyches to overcome the ultimate challenge, which is, of course, the challenge to your life. Overcoming that challenge provides the ultimate high and the ultimate satisfaction.
It doesn’t require medals and award citations and demonstrations of public support. It doesn’t require pats on the back. It ends with the accomplishment of that personal need of overcoming this extreme danger and then being able to share that with the other folks who have overcome the same challenge. The experience of being with the team, just looking at each other and saying, “We did that! And we beat it!” But once that’s over, it’s over.
Then you move on to the next one. “What are we going to do tomorrow? Let’s cook up something so we can kick ass tomorrow.” The average person is going to look at them and say, “These guys are crazy.”
This is not necessarily what it takes to become a SEAL. But this is what a guy becomes. It starts as an individual desire. Then he learns the kind of situations he can get in that tap whatever portions of his brain and his gut and his heart need to be tapped for these things to come out and to get this sense of satisfaction. Then he gets in with a group and the shared experience and the camaraderie just feed it.