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

by Orr Kelly

  Operation Jackstay, as it was called, was hailed at the time as a successful assault on the Viet Cong forces operating near the mouth of the Saigon River, harassing shipping trying to reach the South Vietnamese capital. Norman Olson, who later retired from the navy as a captain, was the commander of UDT Eleven at the time. This is his account of Operation Jackstay:

  I had UDT Team Eleven, in Subic Bay. I had just flown out and I got to Subic and my whole goddamn team was gone.

  “Where the hell are they?”

  Well, they said they were on a special mission down in Vietnam.

  I said, “Well goddamn it, I’ve got to get there.”

  So they flew me over there, got me in a helicopter and they dropped me onto this APD. And my whole goddamn team was on this thing.

  The goddamn ship was almost capsizing from the people on board. They had drawn in just about every rubber boat, every Boston Whaler they could find. When I flew in to this thing, I’m looking down at the ship and there must have been a hundred of these boats and stuff all around the ship. It looked like a mother duck with all these little ducklings all over the place.

  I got on board. There were outboard motors completely surrounding every one of the gun tubs. People are cleaning weapons. And I’m going, holy shit, what is going on? It was about noontime. I walk in the wardroom and it was like a reunion. John Callahan, my XO [executive officer]. Bill Early is there. He’s an adviser. Jim Barnes has his [SEAL] detachment. All these guys.

  I say, “What the hell’s happening?”

  Everybody was sort of dancing around the answer. The only one I could trust, Jim Barnes, had been in country operating in the Rung Sat. So I went up to the forward troop compartment.

  I said, “Jim, come on up here. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

  And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you, as far as I’m concerned, it’s so ill conceived I’m not going to participate in it.”

  He had the advantage. He was working for Naval Support Activity Saigon. He didn’t work for the amphibious group.

  He said, “I’m not going to go in with you guys.”

  I said, “Thanks a lot, Jim. You’re the sons of bitches who have all the training and you’ve got all the gear and you’re not going to go.”

  And he says, “You’re absolutely right. I think it’s a poor operation. We’re not going to play in that game tonight.”

  I said, “Well, I don’t have a choice.”

  This is when they were going to do one of the first amphibious operations in that area. I can’t remember the name of it. I thought I would never forget the goddamn name.

  Jackstay?

  Jackstay! It was a horrible experience. We got put in—you’ve got to understand in those days the UDTs had no SEAL training whatsoever. The SEALs had had small-arms training and did all this land warfare stuff. The UDTs by and large didn’t do that. We had no good weapons. We had some M16s. We had M1s. We had a few shotguns. We had .38-caliber revolvers.

  We were supposed to be put into this river as a blocking force. Which essentially means you put us on one side of the land between the rivers. The amphibious force was to land, flush the VC out, and push ’em into us and we were supposed to take ’em out.

  Jesus Christ!

  So I got there and said, “Who conceived this goddamn operation?”

  Well, it was too late. We were going to go.

  This was a very ill conceived operation. It turned out we were all allegedly heroes as a result of it. But our whole team could have been wiped out. We weren’t trained for that. The irony of this was that [another UDT officer] had been assigned to the PhibGru staff in WestPac. And he conceived this. He was something of a loose cannon.

  Everybody is out there milling around on the fantail. There is going to be three or four people in each of these boats.

  So I get back there and I said, “How about getting me a weapon?”

  [The staff officer who planned the operation] says, “What do you want a weapon for?”

  I said, “There’s no way that team is going in there without me being there. I’m not trying to be a hero but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to send them into such a screwed-up operation as this and I’m not going to be there.”

  So he says, “Well, you’re a married man.”

  I says, “You should have thought about that before you dreamed up this.”

  I had an M16. I hadn’t been checked out on this thing. I’m getting checked out on the fantail. They give me a .38 [caliber pistol]. Now these .38s had been in the teams in World War II. The holster of a .38 is sewed to a pad that goes on the web belt. So I got this thing on my side.

  And we go in. And when I think back on what a screwed-up operation … [The staff officer] is in a Mike boat in front of us. [A Mike boat is a medium landing craft, used for river operations and beach assaults.] And it’s like the mother duck leading us into this river. This is about four o’clock in the afternoon.

  We had this Mike boat here and all the little rubber ducklings were behind him. His master plan was, he would stand in the Mike boat and he would point and then the first boat would pull off and go into this ambush position.

  This was a known VC haven and we were out there like it was another day in Coronado.

  We had radios but they didn’t work because the canopy, the coverage in that area, was so thick.

  But he said, “Well, the plan is, one of you guys, when you get in there, will shinny up a tree and put (we had these blue and gold T-shirts) the gold on top of the canopy so if we have to bring helicopters in, we will know where all these ambush positions are.”

  Well, shit, this stuff is so thick you can hardly move in it, this mangrove. So anyway, he goes in and drops us all off. I’m with three or four other guys. We land, the boat springs back. We have to crawl through all this crap and we set up this position. And I’m sitting in a damn tree or whatever the hell it was. All of a sudden I hear a “plop.” It’s all mud on the bottom. And I look down and there is my .38 in the holster, sitting in the mud.

  How the hell did that happen? It had dry-rotted, over the years it had been in storage, that sewn portion had dry-rotted. And the goddamn holster, here I am in this position and the .38 laying … so I struggle down. Took me about half an hour to get down there and pick the goddamn thing up. I picked up the gun, stuck it in my belt. I’m going, oh, oh, this is a bad goddamn sign.

  So we were all strung out. We sat in there all goddamn night. The amphibious landing was to come in this way. We had our people in these positions all along the bank. But the VC knew we were in there. And they’d set up over here and they were firing. They had heavy machine guns. They were firing over here to try to draw fire. Now thank God, our people had sense enough not to fire back.

  I think we were all scared shitless, frankly. We didn’t have a clue as to what would happen. One group had four shotguns. This river was a sizeable river. However, as the night went on, the tide went out, and there was no goddamn water in this river.

  And one group, Mike Troy, who was a double gold medal winner in the Japanese Olympics, swimming—he was an ensign, and he had three other guys. They had the four shotguns.

  We ended up in the middle of a major exfiltration route for the VC. So the VC are shooting, trying to draw fire, and they’re moving across the river. I mean, there is no water. If there is water it’s probably about waist high. So Mike takes his guys and he slides them into the water and they sat in the water all night. They could have touched these people walking by them. And they let ’em get the hell through.

  The next morning, the funny stories started coming out. It was bizarre. There was some shooting and I guess they killed a couple of people. We were the only ones that had any body count and I’m not sure it was valid. So this great amphibious landing that came in and flushed these people out, we were the only ones who saw a shot fired in anger.

  Then, the next morning, here we are, we all got through the night, the sun is rising and [the sta
ff officer] is in this frigging Mike boat again and he’s tooling through and as he gets to each ambush site, he waves ’em on.

  And here we are, we troop in behind him again and we’re tooling up the river. What a time to hit us! I’m saying, my whole team could have been annihilated.

  The bottom line to this is, it was horrible planning. Now we had to do it. We were obliged to do it.

  When we finally got to the ship, I said, okay. I had enough gunner’s mates and guys who knew enough about weapons. I said I’m going to restructure this and Jim Barnes said he was going to participate and we broke it into three or four groups. I felt reasonably qualified.

  We had a marine recon group that I felt was pretty good. And out of the UDTs, I put about three groups together I felt were capable. We compiled all the weapons. We got the best weapons for them, the best mix and match that we could find.

  For the next three or four days, our people went in and set up ambush sites all along the river, basically under Jim Barnes’s guidance because he knew the river pretty well.

  We found a weapons factory and a hospital, a rest camp. We went in there. Our mission was to blow the whole thing up, which we did. When we fired those shots, it was like being on Jell-O, the whole ground is sort of mud held together by tree limbs. When you fired these shots, the goddamn thing was just like standing on a plate of Jell-O.

  Another UDT veteran recalls participating in an operation in the delta area east of Saigon in the mid-60s. He says he thinks it was Operation Jackstay but he is not sure. He tells of his experience on a nighttime reconnaissance:

  We did a recon on Blue Beach just before the invasion. That’s where they squeezed them down on the peninsula. We did recon on one beach, made a lot of noise, let them know we were there, and then we went around and did a secret recon on another beach.

  That’s when [my swim buddy] got caught in a fishnet. This kid came out in this little boat to see what was wrong with his fishnet. And of course when he got out there, I was trying to help [my swim buddy] get loose as quick as possible.

  And I was running out of air. And there that little boat was. So we both came up on either side of the boat and we grabbed him and pulled him down, him and the boat both, and kept him down and wrapped him in the net. By that time, [my swim buddy] got free and we went on back out. We left the kid and his boat both wrapped up in that net underwater.

  CHAPTER

  12

  “Heaviest Load I’ve Ever Carried’

  Sometimes, the UDT frogmen were assigned to carry out land combat operations very similar to those normally associated with the SEALs. Often, they were the less glamorous jobs, carrying heavy loads of powder or blowing bunkers, but still in danger of running into heavily armed Viet Cong units. One former member of a UDT team vividly recalls one such sweep:

  We weren’t supposed to have ammo on the plane, but we did. When we landed at Tan Son Nhut, we were loaded. They sent us out to blow bunkers along these rivers where people were getting ambushed. We went out with these Vietnamese—really, montagnards. I swear I will never do that again. They carried cigarettes in their ammo pouches. They didn’t give a damn.

  This was more like a SEAL than a UDT operation?

  Yeah. It was a neat operation. I wanted to go out on it. Once I got out on it, I thought how stupid I was to be there. Because I was carrying powder. Everywhere I went I carried powder. That’s why I wear these things [indicates hearing aid].

  There were three rivers. One of the other UDT guys was on one river with a lieutenant. Another guy was on the second river and I was on the third with an army sergeant. We started out on a four-day op to sweep down the rivers, blowing bunkers. By the second day, we had lost comm with the forces on either side and we had no air support and had gotten to a point where they were going to resupply us.

  That night, we were on the forks of a river. It was my twenty-fifth birthday and I remarked to the sergeant that, for my birthday, I get one kill and a drink of water.

  Just before dark [the night before the resupply] boats kept coming across. First, there was one boat with one guy in it. This was about twenty-five yards away from us.

  Viet Cong?

  Yeah. We were out with montagnards. The army brought the montagnards down to do these sweeps. We had to keep them in check to keep from shooting the first boat. We wanted the big boat.

  The sergeant had this M79 grenade launcher.

  He says: “Can you shoot this thing?”

  Being a cocky young frogman, I said, “I can shoot the wings off a gnat with that.”

  He handed it to me.

  He said, “We’re going to initiate the ambush on your shot.”

  About that time, a boat came out, turned, and went on down the stream.

  He said, “The next one. There should be two people in that boat. You take the first one. I’ll take the second.”

  When that boat came out, there was a big guy standing up, rowing the boat. There was a guy in a blue uniform sitting down behind him.

  He says, “You take the guy standing up.”

  I took the M79 and did a John Wayne. You know, licked my thumb on the sight, then I flipped the sight down and just held it where I figured it should be and pulled the trigger. Boom. I watched the round go out, thought, oh, God, it’s going so high. The M79 is just like a shotgun. You break it down, put in the round—the golden apple—close it. It goes so slow. I watched it go way up to the apex. It seemed like a hundred feet above that guy. I figured, oh, man, you stupid shit. And all of a sudden that big guy that was standing up just exploded. Boom. I … holy shit, I hit him! Just then a mass of fire was going downrange. I handed that thing back to the sergeant.

  He’s impressed. He says, “You want to carry that thing?”

  I said, “No, no.” That was the luckiest shot in the world. I couldn’t do that again in a thousand years.

  That night was real scary. I put up a little Vietnamese hammock waist high, which was stupid. Because all the shooting starts at waist high. I’m laying there. I’m tired. This was the aftereffect of the ambush.

  I kept thinking: If we get in a fight, I’m going to die because I’m waist high.

  But I was too tired to move out of the hammock. And then my butt started getting wet. I felt out there, the river was up and I’m laying in the river.

  I kept hearing babies crying and women talking. Moaning. All night.

  That morning, I saw we were at a fork of the river, where two rivers came together and went on together. My hammock laid so I had a field of fire down the river. Just as it started to lighten up, a boat came down. The water was receding. There were three guys. I had my weapon across my stomach.

  About that time the machine guns open up and just cut ’em down. Then it stopped. I started easing out of my hammock. I heard a guy going splash, splash. I told him to stop and there was no more splashing. When it came up light, across on the bank was this guy just mangled into the mud.

  The boat we had hit earlier came floating down and was caught on a limb. We searched that boat. The guy was an NVA regular. By that time, he was just a mass of flies. The body of the guy I had hit had fallen over in the river.

  We moved on to the clearing where we were supposed to get water. I noticed at the back of the clearing, about fifty to sixty yards away in the saw grass, a guy carrying an M60 machine gun. I thought the other platoon was doing a sweep.

  The sergeant says, “They should be up front or alongside us.”

  As the helos come in, they say the woods are swarming with people. That was VC out there. So we moved on down the river at a ruddy great knot—as fast as we could go. We weren’t supposed to be picked up till next day.

  We met up with another group of our guys and found a cache. There was a uniform factory, a drug store, sleeping quarters, and four or five buildings, in this swamp.

  A fight ensued there. I got there as the firefight was abating. We captured some women and fifteen kids and an old man. The old man had be
en hit in the leg and the bone was broke, sticking out. Everybody who had been shooting was gone. They got away. A kid was hit, had his forehead gone. Sometimes innocents get killed in war.

  Was he dead?

  Yeah, nothing but nerves jerking.

  Then we made a race to the pickup point. I was carrying a backpack. We had three women, fifteen kids.

  The old man, we couldn’t bring him out. The one that was shot, we couldn’t bring him out. We had to leave him. And we had to finish off the old man. That was my first time. It wasn’t rage. I don’t know whether it was fear, or what.

  I had to kill him.

  Why?

  We couldn’t take him and he was in pain. He had been shot through the leg. We didn’t know whether the femoral artery was nicked, but we couldn’t stop the bleeding and we had to move on. And the pig. Oh, Jesus. They had a little pigpen, like a little five-foot pen, on stilts. And this huge pig is in there. And he was hit. And he was screaming.

  As they were moving out, I stayed back to take care of the old man. To show you how the mind works, I knew I was going to do it with a knife. But I took out my medical kit and I gave him morphine, the whole morphine syringe. And then I turned him around. I guess the morphine was taking effect. And that’s when I stabbed him. When I did, he jumped and that scared me. And I stuck him again. I was hitting him so hard I was causing him to jump because I was scared.

  And then I took off.

  Why didn’t you shoot him?

  I don’t know. I have no idea. I have no idea. That’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me that. I didn’t think we were supposed to do that. I couldn’t stand the screaming of the pig. I shot him with my .38—no, 9mm. And we moved on.

  Did you have any discussion about what to do about the old man?

  No. We hardly ever talked, the army sergeant and I. Well, we talked, but not about what to do.