by Orr Kelly
So the captain of the base asks us if we can go out and blow it up. There’s not much in the demolition manuals on ice demolition. You’d be lucky to find a page and a half.
We got a rubber boat and we put three or four hundred pounds of explosives in it. We started paddling out to this berg. The whole base showed up to watch this happen. The berg was beautiful. It had two big pinnacles, with a natural bridge of ice connecting them.
This thing is big, a city block. And it was dangerous. These things will float around, they’ll melt, the water density will change, and they’ll roll over.
As we were coming up to the berg a piece the size of Wisconsin breaks off of it and this frigging ten-foot wave comes at us.
So finally we get up on the berg, right under the natural bridge. We put two or three hundred pounds of explosives in place. We back off, we fire the damn thing electrically. There’s a big explosion, a lot of fire. We go back. There’s a little hole I couldn’t even lie in, it was so shallow.
So we take forty pounds each. We dive down sixty feet. It had bottomed out but there was a two-foot space underneath. It was rolling. It could squash you like a bug.
I motion: We’ve got to get the explosives in there. So my dive buddy is like this: big eyes. We put the explosives in as far as we can. We actually got them in maybe thirty feet. It was hairy.
We swam back out, got up on our rubber boat, and backed off. We fire the charge. We sit there. Nothing happens.
Then the berg crumbles and breaks apart. These people on shore all cheer.
While we were there, we saw there was a ridge between this village and the sea. The only time the people could get their boats in or out was at high tide. I was sitting on that ridge. The ice breaker was about a hundred yards away. Their Fathometer was off the scale. It was something like two thousand fathoms. That ridge was the top of a mountain.
We blew a slot about ten feet wide in that ridge. That meant these Eskimos could take their boats out anytime they wanted to. Their whole lives changed. They could get their boats in and out.
Well, if you’re really, really good to an Eskimo, he’ll give you his wife. But if you’re incredibly good, he’ll give you his dogs. All they wanted to do was give us their dogs. We didn’t take them and they were offended. I believe somewhere in Eskimo lore, we’re now in it.
CHAPTER
5
Big War in a Small Place
In April 1965, President Lyndon Johnson sent the army’s 82d Airborne Division and U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic to help quell a rebellion against the government of the small Caribbean nation. A small unit of the newly formed SEALs, under the command of Lt. “Blackjack” Macione, accompanied them. Macione’s story of the Dominican Republic operation begins shortly before members of SEAL Team TWO left their base in Little Creek, Virginia:
I was thumbing through a Popular Mechanics magazine and I saw this passive night vision scope, supposedly being tested at Aberdeen [the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground north of Baltimore]. I called Aberdeen and asked if we could try it for a few days. They were more than happy to get it into the hands of an operator.
We took it to the drive-in movie, looked in other people’s cars. It was phenomenal. I grabbed the Starlight Scope and off we went to the Dominican Republic.
There were government forces on one side, rebels on the other. The United Nations—predominantly the U.S.—had run a corridor between them. It was only a couple of blocks wide. We were supposed to keep the two forces apart.
The rebels were sandbagging in weapons during the day and hiding them near shutters and cupolas on buildings in the town. Some of the Americans were on rooftops at night, having a cigarette and walking around. The rebels would go up where they had hidden the weapons and fire off some shots. If I remember right, they had killed three and put the eye out on a fourth.
So the area commander asked if I could do something about it. I said, “Funny you should mention it but we’ve got a brand-new thing that might do it.”
So Bruhmuller [BM1 William N. Bruhmuller II] or another guy was doing the shooting and I was doing the spotting. We had zeroed in on a cupola that was out maybe one hundred yards. Every night, almost at midnight, someone had fired off random shots and done the damage they did. We took a peek at that cupola and almost at the stroke of midnight the shutters opened up and there was a guy standing with his rifle. And whoever fired, that guy died of surprise. He also died of a bullet in the head. It was pitch-black—pitch-black—and he nailed him.
We were holed up in an automotive place, a new car showroom. We found a manikin and rigged him up on the roof with a set of pulleys and pulled him across the roof all night. If they took any shots, we’d nail the guy with the Starlight Scope. No more problems.
Another time we’re camped in the jungle in a big tent. The Special Forces like to sleep in a pup tent on the ground. The hell with that. We took a case of K-bar knives. They’ll get you anything.
I think it was Rudy Boesch [for many years the command master chief of SEAL Team TWO and higher commands]—I said, “Take a case of K-bars and get us some creature comforts.”
Rudy comes back. He’s got racks, mattresses, sheets, bookcases. He’s got an air conditioner, a reefer, tables, folding chairs, television, generator. So we set our tent up. It’s like a room at the Ramada. These Special Forces guys were coming over, doing a triple take. Then they’d come over and want to sit.
Another funny incident. A guy named [Mike] Boynton. There’s a handful of guys I would take into combat with me. Boynton was one of them. Pierre Birtz, [Richard J.] “Hook” Tuure, Bob Gallagher. Yeah, those guys right there. If I had to pick a handful, that would be it. Cool fellows. Nice fellows to have around.
We were preparing for that radio station mission. [An assignment to blow up a radio station.] We had gone to a CIA briefing and they wanted to be sure we were nonattributable.
I said, “Look, I’ve got a guy who has a goddamn tattoo on his arm. I think it says ‘God bless America.’ ”
The CIA guy says, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it.”
It’s like midnight, we’re in a tent in the middle of the jungle. You hear the sound of the jungle and the hissing of the Coleman lanterns. We’re getting sterilized clothing [with no marks to link it to the U.S.]. This Special Forces sergeant has all the clothing stacked out on the table and we’re going down the line. The roar of the silence is only interrupted by this sergeant asking, us answering—one-word conversations. Hat? 9½.
So I’m walking behind Boynton. He’s six feet two or more, weighed 220. Big guy. The sergeant is asking him sizes. Hat. 10½ large. Shirt? 54 extra wide. Pants? 62 extra long.
So he says, “Shoes?”
And Boynton says, “5½.”
The whole tent stopped. We’re off to be killed and the whole tent stops.
This grizzly sergeant looks over the counter at his feet. He looks up at Boynton and says, “You fall down a lot?”
Suddenly, up shows an army Special Forces corpsman. The guy was in white. Here we are in the middle of the jungle, everybody in cammo, black face and here’s this guy with the white smock.
He says, “Lieutenant Macione?”
I says, “Yes?”
“I understand you’ve got a guy with a tattoo on?”
“Yeah. Boynton, come here.”
The guy says, “Roll up your sleeve.”
I says, “Roll up your sleeve, Boynton.”
He rolls up his sleeve.
The guy takes a can of ether spray, sprays his tattoo, takes his scalpel, goes choo, choo, choo choo, and pulls the tattoo right off.
Boynton is like, “What the f————”
Another funny story:
A Cuban ship had docked—or Russian ship. It had docked and was unloading arms to the rebels. The 82d Airborne had a howitzer set up. They put a round or two right through the bridge of the ship. Well, the ship broke loose and caught fire. And then it kind of smoldered and fl
oated out into the bay.
Their commander or the CIA, I can’t remember who it was, asked me if we could send a couple of guys out to search the ship. Myself and a guy named Bump [AO2 Charles Bump], we swam out to the ship, me and him. The only thing we had on were our swimming trunks and our fins and our M16s.
We no sooner get up on the ship than we start taking automatic weapons fire from the rebel side of the house. So we just had to keep the ship’s bulkhead between us and them. The 105 [mm howitzer shell] had gone right through the bridge and all we saw was just bones. It had burned them to a crisp. I picked up a belt buckle—I want to say it was Cuban—and kept it as a souvenir.
We couldn’t find anything. We couldn’t find any arms. There was some beer but we couldn’t find any ammo or anything. Whether they had taken it all off or it was never there, I don’t know. Anyways, the ship shouldn’t have been there. It was in a bad area.
The ship had begun to leak bunker fuel, fuel oil. When that fuel hits salt water it gets like monkey shit. Clotty and sticky and black. We had to swim a quarter or half a mile. When we came out of the water, the rebels were shooting at us. I had my squad on the breakwater firing back, just so we could get out of the water safely. This was broad daylight, maybe eleven o’clock in the morning.
We came out of the water; bullets were jumping all around us. I got behind a rock. I fired two shots. Couldn’t see anything, just to shoot. And the third round jammed. I ejected it, slammed another one home, and fired and it exploded. I felt shit go by me like that—whizzz. With such force it blew the bottom right out of the magazine and flattened the rounds—flat sides on them. The bolt had exploded in the casing of the weapon and locked itself in. Later, I took that weapon back to Colt to see what had happened. They said they plug the barrels all the time and shoot and it blows the plug out.
Another guy who was in my platoon, he started laughing like hell. It turns out, in the rush, I had grabbed his weapon. It was his weapon that blew up.
We’re caked with this oil and it sticks to you like snot. It’s hot. It’s sweaty. Bump and I, we go back to the 82d compound. The only thing we’ve got to get this shit off is gasoline. Here we are rubbing each other down with gasoline. It’s hot and it’s burning and we’ve just been shot at and I’m not in the greatest of moods.
I’m on one knee, bare ass as can be, rubbing this shit off me. Burning, my skin coming off.
I hear, off to the side, this squeaky little voice saying, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
I turn and first thing I see is shiny black jump boots. Impeccable. Starched and pressed fatigue pants. Shiny brass belt buckle, and this pure snowy white T-shirt. Little baby face with a cap on top of his head and he’s got this butter bar on, a second lieutenant, 82d Airborne. Little kid.
I’m bare ass. He’s in uniform.
I said, “Get the hell out of here.”
He was like a little bantam hen. His feathers bristle up. “Do you know who you’re talking to? You’re talking to …”
I’m still on my knees. I say, “Better than that, do you know who you’re talking to?”
A look comes over his face that says, Wait a minute. This guy is bare ass. He doesn’t have any rank on. Who the hell am I talking to?
So I said—I think I called myself commander—I said, “You get in a lean and rest right now. You start doing pushups until I tell you to stop.”
We get ourselves washed off. This grizzly old sergeant is standing over there laughing. This guy’s pumping away. He must have done two hundred push-ups.
I told this sergeant, “You turn him loose when you’re ready.”
He says, “Aye, aye, sir.”
You mentioned plans for an attack on a radio station. Was that called off?
No, it wasn’t. I’m concerned about going further with it. I’m going to deny I told you. This never happened.
The plan executed as follows:
We took two personnel carriers, rubber-tired vehicles. They were nonattributable [to the U.S.] vehicles. Dominican National Guard vehicles. Myself, one other guy. I don’t remember who it was. This was the middle of the night, three o’clock in the morning.
We had six hundred pounds of high explosives in the first vehicle. We had a squad in the second one.
We drove up to the building, right through the front door, like store-front windows, into the lobby. We had forty-second fuses. We pulled the fuses, jumped into the second vehicle, and hauled ass.
The charge went off and blew the bottom floor out of the building. The building came down—a ten-story building or something like that. That took care of the radio station.
One other job wasn’t any fun at all. We had to search the sewers. Covering everything were cockroaches as big as your thumb. We had to tape up our legs and wrists and necks and go in, with mosquito netting over you.
The cockroaches just crawling all over you. It was the toughest thing my guys ever did, where I thought I was going to lose ’em. It was crunchy, crunchy.
William Bruhmuller was one of the senior enlisted men in SEAL Team TWO during the Dominican Republic deployment. He recalls a strange little war:
If I remember correctly, we were on one side of the river and the bad guys were on the other side. Without too much effort, we could have walked through that ten-block area they had and corralled them—gotten the whole thing over with in the morning.
But that wasn’t going to happen. We had destroyers. We had aircraft carriers. This was going to be a major battle. It was the only war we had going at the time. Everybody wanted to get involved in the thing.
Anyway, we convinced them to let us move downtown so we could at least observe enemy movements and maybe even do some penetration into their compounds or their areas. The rule was, you could not fire unless you were fired at. I mean, because there were so many civilians.
At noontime the whistle would blow—the dog is protecting the sheep and the wolf is trying to get them and the whistle blows at noontime and they all go to lunch together. Same situation. At noontime down there, it would be like a time-out. All the bad guys would jump over the barbed wire, have rice compliments of the government, and then go back to the war in the afternoon.
Being the instigators that we are, we got downtown and took the Starlight Scopes with us. We moved into a warehouse that had been an appliance and automobile sales place. They sold refrigerators and cars and TVs. Once we get in, we try to decide what to do. Well, we had to draw some fire.
So Macione said, “Let’s make a couple of manikins up.”
We got this stuff all together. We had snipers with Starlight Scopes looking out there, trying to find a target of opportunity. And these other couple of guys had these manikins on little dollies and we would roll them back and forth so we might be able to draw some fire. And if we could draw some fire, all hell would break loose.
Jack Macione tells how you used the Starlight Scope to shoot a man in the darkness.
I remember the roof and the manikin thing. I do remember shooting at someone. I got a chance to shoot at a couple of people. I think I did. I think we had to do that a couple of nights.
I’ve never shot anybody with the Starlight Scope. All I did was observe or spot somebody or somebody would spot for me. He would move the Starlight Scope real slowly. He would say, “I see something on that tall building,” and try to give you some description and zero you in on it.
Once you zero in on it, with your night vision, you start to see some movement. I think that’s what happened that night. I think we had seen somebody the night before. The rooftop had a sort of an entry, where you come up through this stairwell and out on the roof. I believe that’s what it was like. I also believe that was a suspected case where they had a .50-caliber position. That was one of the points of interest.
In fact, later on, we took a recoilless rifle. Yes. I did shoot a guy up there. This was probably three or four days later. We observed them moving a .50 caliber up on the roof. And I recall
this because we were able to see this during the daylight hours, people coming up through that little door area, obviously with ammunition, putting it up on the roof. We watched them load this sucker all day long. Obviously they were going to do something that night. It looked like they were setting up a position for a .50-caliber machine gun.
So we took a recoilless rifle and let them get all set up, even let them test fire a few rounds, and then with one shot we blew them right off the roof. Yeah, I did shoot that guy.
PAST TWO
THE GLORY DAYS
CHAPTER
6
Welcome Back for Gemini
During the 1960s and 1970s, as American astronauts reached for, and finally landed on, the moon, the navy’s underwater demolition teams played a vital role in the nation’s space program.
While the more glamorous SEALs sometimes got the credit, the recovery of the space capsules of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs was always done by the UDT frogmen.
For men whose routine heroics—and plain hard work—usually went unheralded, those were the glory days. They saw themselves on television, in the pages of Life magazine, even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. One group was flown to Chicago on a private jet for a ticker tape parade through the city’s downtown area.
Martin Every was a young frogman in the mid-60s. Every, whose son is now a member of SEAL Team EIGHT, recalled those days during an interview in his office in Northern Virginia:
I was operations officer for UDT Twenty-one in 1965 when they decided to put UDT people on the astronaut pickups after they had lost a capsule. They made me the training officer for the recoveries.
Other members of the team took the Gemini III [the first manned test of the two-man Gemini spacecraft crewed by Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young].
I took Gemini IV [7 June 1965]. That was the one with McDivitt and White [James A. McDivitt and Edward W. White II]. They had done the first American space walk [a twenty-minute excursion by White]. The other guys in my pickup team were [Petty Officers] Neil G. Dow and Everett W. Owl.