Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  We were on the USS Wasp about 390 miles east of Cape Kennedy in the Atlantic. We got a radio message from McDivitt. He says, “Don’t forget, I want to be recovered in a hurry.”

  We had practiced and practiced with a JG helicopter pilot. The day of the big event, the commander comes out and says, “I’m going to fly this.”

  He doesn’t know anything about all the techniques we had worked out. The big problem was how the rotor wash was going to blow the capsule and the flotation collar. These two guys would jump first. I’d go third.

  I was hollering, “Go! Go!” Telling my guys to jump.

  The helicopter pilot heard me and thought it was the crew chief telling him to get out of the area and took off. I jumped. It was twenty or twenty-five feet, from a moving helicopter, with a single tank on my back. I went ass over teakettle. Fortunately, the only thing that happened was I ran a tooth through my lip. You can get hurt real bad jumping out of a helicopter, and some guys have.

  We jumped in the water, inflated the [flotation] collar, and got the astronauts out.

  First, we had to find a wrench attached to the capsule and use it to unlock the door. The astronauts were eager to get out. They were trying to open it from the inside. One of them had a broken face plate on his mask and he was sick.

  When we looked inside, it was the first time we had ever seen the inside of a real capsule. We’d always practiced with a dummy boilerplate capsule. We had been taught where to find things. But they had not put the ejection mechanism on “safe.” If we had pulled the wrong lever when we were helping them out, it would have ejected these two astronauts in the ejection seat. If it had gone off, the astronauts, and probably a couple of us, would have been killed.

  We helped McDivitt out and then White came out by himself and bounced off the collar into the raft. We could just imagine losing an astronaut in eight thousand feet of water.

  We stayed with the capsule while the carrier approached from about sixty miles away. We had been out there about an hour and we couldn’t get the door closed on the thing. When the carrier came, that was the hairiest part. We were nervous when they were trying to pick up the capsule because the carrier drifted down toward us and there was no way to get away. We thought we might have to swim under the carrier, but we might not have enough air. On the pickup of Gus Grissom and John Young [Gemini III], one frogman had to swim under the capsule to get out of the way.

  When I got back on the carrier, I was really tired. We had to wear wet suits because the chemicals from the retrorockets, in the water, might be corrosive to the skin. I would much rather jump in just wearing trunks.

  A messenger came to my room—I was a JG—and said the admiral would like you to come up for dinner. I didn’t know where his cabin was. I didn’t have any whites. Had to borrow some whites. Maybe I should have worn my wet suit.

  I got up there real early. There was a marine guard and I told him I was there to see the admiral. He let me in.

  I got to watch pictures of the first walk in space with White and McDivitt. It was really exciting. They both wrote me personal letters. One is on the wall there.

  I said I had enjoyed this and I mentioned that my wedding anniversary was the next day. They made arrangements to have a C-2 [small transport plane] pick me up and make sure I got back.

  NASA just had lots of money in those days. These collars we put around the capsule, they cost ten thousand dollars or something. We’d say we used up a couple of CO2 capsules and they’d give us a whole new collar.

  The space program was big news in those days. They sent me up to New York to be interviewed by Mike Wallace.

  They asked me to wear my wet suit. But it’s summer—110 degrees. I tell them I can’t do that.

  I report to CBS. Mike Wallace says, “Hey Martin, is there anything you don’t want to talk about on the air?”

  I said, “Yeah, when I opened that door, one of the astronauts had cracked his face plate and was sick. I don’t want to talk about anything that’s medical.”

  First question, “When you opened that capsule …” I felt like I’d really been had.

  They kept calling down, asking me to come talk about the next one, the next one. The guys are starting to go off to Vietnam and here I am getting orders for New York television.

  One funny thing: The Gemini IV capsule is at the Air and Space Museum in Washington. The heat shield on the forward end of the capsule has some strange marks. The scientists puzzled over them. I could have told them they were scratches I made with my weight belt.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Alone in the Mid-Atlantic

  From 1964 to 1966, Christopher O. “Chris” Bent served as a member of UDT Twenty-one. More than two decades later, he recalled one of his most challenging experiences in an article written for Fire In The Hole, the newsletter of the UDT/SEAL Museum Association. Here is his account of what it was like to be alone, at night, in the mid-Atlantic, two thousand miles from land:

  It was mid-February in 1966 when a small detachment from UDT Twenty-one was assigned to recover the first flight of the Apollo spacecraft (AS-201), to be launched from Cape Kennedy atop the newly developed mighty Saturn Booster. This would be unmanned, suborbital, otherwise a full-scale test with the recovery scheduled north of Ascension Island—just south of the equator, midway between Brazil and Africa. (Check map—this place is nowhere!)

  We weren’t all that excited as our egos were sufficiently stimulated from just having done the Gemini VI recoveries in December, and this assignment would keep us from joining the rest of the team in St. Thomas [the frogmen’s winter training base in the Caribbean].

  In any case, two weeks later aboard the USS Wasp, rain or shine we are the only personnel allowed to jog the flight deck and we do so with glee. Most of our time is spent studying this new three-man spacecraft which had a much larger “sail area” than the two-man Gemini, which floated on its side.

  The upright Apollo silhouette presented a lot of surface to the wind, which made it drift much faster than we could swim. Rule One was to always exit the helicopter downwind so the spacecraft would drift to you. Smart, eh? The problem then became one of slowing the spacecraft down so you could work on it by attaching the flotation collar and then the support raft, all of which had to be dropped downwind and swum over. This could proceed relatively smoothly if there were no waves. Who ever heard of waves two thousand miles from shore?

  The dubious honor of being in charge had its moments. It was necessary to develop night recovery techniques for contingency Plan Delta. Of course, my team felt I was eminently qualified for this command responsibility and that my mother would be so much prouder than their mothers.

  So, a day later I singularly exited the helo into the pitch-black. With wet suits, fins, and SCUBA it is a momentary free fall quickly embraced by five-foot seas and infinite anonymity. The difficulty with all this was that the horizon-less seas provided the pilot with no visual references; moreover, his altimeters were nonfunctional under thirty feet.

  He could easily get too close and clip a wave or even worse (for us) drop a swimmer above ten feet, who, if wearing a tank, could rotate in the air and suffer serious injury on impact. Out with me came a parachute I was to attach and deploy as a sea anchor to the oncoming practice spacecraft, which was set adrift by the USS Wasp earlier, radio and light beacons armed.

  The water was crystal clear, which added some comfort to the general eeriness. The helo’s lights were intermittently screwing up my night vision. While trying to wave him off, I realized our ability to communicate was zero and I was really alone.

  Oh, great!

  So, back to work. I swam (thank God for duckfeet) to the approaching spacecraft, attached the parachute, and deployed it. However, it just drifted like a blob, billowing out as imagination would have it. I was down about ten to fifteen feet trying to arrange the canopy to inflate when suddenly I saw something off to the side, emerging from the darkness.

  My
mind says, B-I-G S-H-A-R-K and I A-M A-L-O-N-E! It’s five miles deep and swimming to Africa gives the shark a slight edge.

  Meanwhile, the helo pilot is probably eating Oreos and dozing on autohover or something.

  My mouth was getting dry, causing the possibility of real fear. “What the————can I do?”

  Well, until this moment, as you are reading, no one has known that I turned and swam right into that white parachute canopy and pulled it completely around me until only a face mask, two big eyeballs, and bubbles could finally witness a grotesque and menacing parachute deployment bag swim by.…

  Oh, by the way, the actual recovery of the first Apollo spacecraft was performed flawlessly two days later.

  Mother was proud.

  CHAPTER

  8

  First Men from the Moon

  Michel “Mike” Bennett, who retired as a boatswain’s mate senior chief in 1990 after a quarter century in UDT and SEAL teams, was involved in three astronaut pickups, either as backup or on the prime crew. His participation in the recovery of the first men from the moon, the crew of Apollo 11, gave him a brief moment of fame. But in some ways his role in the backup crew for the Apollo 14 recovery is more memorable.

  Bennett, who now works for a security firm in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, recalled those days in an interview:

  We were on the USS Hornet, in the Pacific, five hundred miles south of American Samoa, getting ready to recover the Apollo 14 crew. We’d practice. The ship would drop the boilerplate [a mock-up of the space capsule] off. This one day, like three days before the burn-in, we were getting ready to practice.

  The Hornet was moving at a pretty good clip when they put the boilerplate in the water. The elevator [used to lift aircraft to the flight deck] was lowered, with a ladder hanging down.

  They wanted us to crawl down the Jacob’s ladder into the water but that would put us right up close to the ship. We wanted to jump off that elevator. The elevator captain says, “No, you can’t do that. You have to ask the bos’n.”

  He was up on the main deck. I went in, took the elevator up. We’re in our jumpin’-in-the-water gear, fins and stuff, but no tanks. I asked him, “Hey, can we jump off the elevator so we can catch up with the boilerplate?”

  He says, “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  By that time, they turned the boilerplate loose and it was drifting on. I hollered, “Go!” The other guys jumped off the elevator. By the time I got back down, it would have been way aft. I would have had a mile or so to swim. So I jumped off the flight deck.

  I heard the bos’n say, “You can’t…”

  How far were you from the water?

  About eighty or ninety feet.

  Anyway, just as I went off, I saw a wire from the flight deck, one of the antennas sticking out. I thought, oh shit, I’m going to hit it. I hit something and my arm was flailing back. When I flailed back, my watch—this Rolex they had issued us—came off.

  And man, I hit the water and boom, my head hurt. Oh, Jesus.

  By that time, the ship took a turn to come back to look at the boilerplate. I’m swimming and my head’s hurting, boom, boom, boom.

  I had a strobe light attached to my life jacket. When I hit the water, I brought my head down and it hit me right up here [points to his right forehead]. In the salt water that cut bleeds real big. As I come up to the boilerplate, one of the guys looks down and his eyes are this big.

  I say, “Oh, man! I hit that wire when I went off.”

  He said, “Holy cow!”

  I just knew I’d hit my nose. My whole face was numb. I just knew my nose was ripped off. I looked down and I had blood all over me. I thought my whole face was torn off. I reached up and felt and it was still there.

  He said, “Man, you’ve got a little cut over your eye.”

  Just as the ship came by, I see two marines on deck with M16s. They were there for shark shooters. And here I was bleeding.

  The day Apollo 14 came down, I was in the backup crew. We were out in the helicopter and it was maxed out. We were flying at seventeen thousand feet so we could see the burn-in.

  We started getting odd vibrations.

  The crew tells us, “Buckle up. We’re going in to the ship.”

  I’m sitting at the door, enjoying the scenery. I was on the outboard side as we came to the ship. The wheel on my side just barely made it onto the hangar deck and the rotor blade stops—whrr, whrr.

  They say, “Get off! Get off!”

  We’re in full wet suits and had our tanks on.

  I took my seat belt off and ran out.

  What happened is, he was losing hydraulics and the rotor blades were locking up and he just made it to the ship before the rotor blades locked up. Or else we would have, boom, gone down into the water.

  This was Apollo 14. Were you on other pickups?

  I was on Apollo 10, and on 11 I was the first guy in the water. The Encyclopedia Britannica shows a picture of a helicopter, the command module, and a guy jumping. That guy is me. It says we are SEALs. But that’s wrong. We were UDT Eleven.

  The first guy in the water puts the sea anchor on. [The sea anchor is similar to a parachute and is deployed to drag in the water and prevent the capsule from being pushed along by the wind.] He snaps it on to a lifting lug just below the door. He looks in the door and gets a thumbs-up from the astronauts. Then he goes down and looks at the anchor, makes sure it’s deployed.

  Then he calls in the flotation device. Once the guy in the water calls them in, two more jump in. Now there are three guys. You run this cable around, hook it on the back side—no, you start from the back side and run it around. The bag is folded so when you bring it around each side, there is a continuous cable so it unrolls.

  The third guy is down underneath there making sure it unrolls correctly. The air temperature is 105 degrees and the water temperature is about 82. You’re in a full wet suit, mask, and twin 90s [air tanks]. Plus you’ve got a little bit of chop. You want about a foot chop. It helps rock the command module so you can get the collar around.

  By the time you get it around, your arms are just so heavy. You’re tired.

  You pull it together, lock it, and then snap on O2 bottles to fill it up. Then you call in the boat. They throw the boat—two boats—to you. One is a swimmer boat, one a recovery boat, for the astronauts. You fasten one on either side of the door.

  The Apollo 11 astronauts were the first men to set foot on the moon. Scientists worried that they might bring some unknown disease or life-form back from outer space. An elaborate procedure was established in which the astronauts were decontaminated and then sealed in an isolation chamber during the supposed incubation period of any bugs they might have brought back. The frogmen were responsible for the first phase of this process.

  Then you call in the BIG [biological isolation garment] swimmer, the biological decontamination swimmer. He has a Betadine solution that he washes everything with. He washes the command module before he opens the door. Then he opens the door, throws a bag of BIG suits in, and closes the door.

  Then the astronauts put on their suits. We trail a boat off. We’re hanging on the boat upwind. If we get downwind, we have to go into isolation with the astronauts.

  As the astronauts come out, he [the BIG swimmer] Washes them down because of this green mung from the moon.

  Once they are washed down, they’re sitting in their boat. The ship takes off. We sit there for an hour while the Betadine solution works. The ship is four miles away, just at the horizon, while you’re sitting in the water. They come back and pick up the astronauts. We uncouple the boat they were in and sink it. Then we stab and sink our boat. Then we get picked up.

  The hookup man rides the command module until the crane comes over the side. He hooks it up on the lifting sling. Then he comes off, gets the Jacob’s ladder, and crawls up.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Unlucky Thirteen

  Even the most unsuperstitious engineers and mana
gers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration might have been forgiven a momentary twinge of anxiety as preparations progressed toward the third manned landing on the moon in the spring of 1970.

  Up to that point, the Apollo moon-landing program had gone remarkably smoothly, moving almost flawlessly from the early unmanned tests of the spacecraft to manned earth orbit. And then had come the first flight around the moon by Apollo 8, the test of the lunar lander by Apollo 9 and 10, culminating in the historic landing on the moon by two Apollo 11 astronauts on 16 July 1969.

  A second successful venture to the surface of the moon was made by Apollo 12.

  And next would come Apollo 13. Unlucky thirteen? Many people consider thirteen a uniquely unlucky number. But unlike the builders of a skyscraper, who often simply leave out the “unlucky” thirteenth floor, there was no way for NASA to get around the fact that thirteen comes after twelve and before fourteen.

  Instead of ignoring the superstition or trying to find a way around it, the NASA managers put up a brave front—perhaps somewhat like a small boy whistling as he passes a graveyard at night.

  They scheduled the launch for 1:13 P.M. Houston time—that’s 1313 the way the military keeps time. And, to aid in the recovery of the returning space capsule, they chose UDT Thirteen.

  Looking back later, James A. Lovell Jr., the command pilot on Apollo 13, pinpointed a series of omens that perhaps should have warned of trouble ahead.

  At the last minute, the command module pilot who had trained for the voyage for two years was removed from the crew because he had been exposed to German measles. His replacement, from the backup crew, had only two days of training with the other two members of the prime crew before liftoff.

  There were troubles, too, with one helium tank, which seemed to be improperly insulated, and an oxygen tank, which had been installed in Apollo 13 after it had been removed from Apollo 11 for repairs—and had been dropped.

  If anyone had misgivings, they were not enough to delay the flight. Apollo 13 took off from the Kennedy Space Center on schedule at 1313 Houston time on 11 April 1970. About five minutes after liftoff, the crew felt a small vibration. Then one of the engines shut down two minutes early. This meant other engines had to burn longer than planned to put the spacecraft into the proper orbit around the earth.