by Orr Kelly
The next morning, I was going to go aboard that ship and say, “Hey, this guy right here was my squad leader.”
So I got my dress uniform because I wanted to look the part. And lo and behold, when I went down there, the ship had already slipped away. It was like John, you know, slipping in and then gone again during the night.
CHAPTER
14
A Narrow Escape
On the night of 13 March 1968, Lt. Robert W. Petersen and members of his 7th Platoon of SEAL Team TWO left My Tho in the South Vietnamese delta in two boats. Their goal was to patrol through an area where intelligence reports indicated a prisoner of war camp might be hidden under the cover of triple canopy jungle.
What happened that night demonstrates how quickly a small unit of SEALs can get into deep trouble when they stumble onto a much larger force. It also demonstrates how SEALs, relying on training and teamwork, can extricate themselves from such a desperate situation while inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy.
About 2200 hours, they left the boat, worked their way through thick underbrush bordering the stream, spread out, and began patrolling across a dry rice paddy toward the jungle, visible in the moonlight about a mile in from the river.
As they approached the tree line, Petersen took half the platoon and moved off to the right. Lieutenant Ronald E. Yeaw, the assistant platoon commander, took the remaining members of the platoon, an oversized squad of six SEALs and three Vietnamese. The plan was for the two squads to patrol away from each other until they were about fifteen hundred yards apart and then move into the jungle to see what was there. Yeaw describes the operation:
We walked forty-five minutes or so along the edge of the tree line. We saw what looked like firing pits: little spider holes at ground level in the underbrush. We got what we thought was sufficient separation and headed in, very slowly. We weren’t going any more than one hundred yards every half hour or so, sweeping back and forth, walking very slowly.
Then we saw a hootch here and another large rectangular hootch over here. This is probably 0300. It’s double, triple canopy with pretty thick underbrush. We’re peering from behind the bushes. We can see two distinct structures. It looked pretty much like a POW camp, not that I’d been to one.
Three SEALs went in this door [indicating the larger structure]. Two SEALs—myself and [ICC Robert T. “Eagle Bob”] Gallagher—and the interpreter went in this hut [indicating the smaller structure]. We kept one SEAL back here on rear security with a couple of Vietnamese.
Gallagher and I push the door aside. There’s a bed there, bed there, bed here, and bed here. Four beds.
I go in, to my right. I have my pistol and a red lens flashlight. Once we get in, we kind of hesitate, kind of pause. We haven’t been heard, haven’t been seen. You want to keep surprise as long as you can, only break it when you know what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.
Once inside, it got darker. Right here are AK-47s [automatic rifles] leaning against the side of the hootch. I showed them to Gallagher. We knew we were in a bad guy’s house. These four beds had mosquito nets. If they’re going to keep prisoners, they’re not going to keep them with mosquito nets.
What I did, I had the red lens flashlight and the pistol. Went to this bed, lifted the mosquito net, saw the two Vietnamese people, and shot them. There were eight people. Two in each bed. Gallagher was shooting there [to Yeaw’s left] with his Ml6. I heard shooting next door—automatic weapons.
I turned. Gallagher had shot people here [on the left]. I turned to start firing on these other people. The next thing, somebody bumps into me. We wakened them up and they wanted to get out of there. So somebody bumped into me. I beat him on the head with my pistol and fired. But I saw somebody run out the door.
There was more firing going on. Gallagher was doing some more firing. I ran across. There was another opening. I stood in the doorway, one foot in the hootch. By this time I had put my pistol away and had my AR-15 [rifle] back out. I was looking to see if I could see anybody running away.
I couldn’t see anybody. What catches my eye is a flash of light right about in the center of the hootch. I remember it like yesterday. I saw a light, heard an explosion, and the smell of gunpowder. A fragmentation grenade went off right in the center of the hootch. Gallagher was yelling he’d been hit.
I knew something had happened in here but I wasn’t sure what it was. I thought a grenade had gone off but I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t any panic. Everything was quiet and calm, no problem. I felt a little slight pain in the center of my back. I was more concerned with where this person was who had left.
I took a step to go back inside the compound. Next thing I knew I was chest deep in water. There was this canal. I was down here in the goddamn canal. What had happened is, I passed out. I had taken a step with my left foot. I’ve got grenade wounds in my left foot, thigh, back. What hurt me the most, something went right through my ankle. I had been pretty well stitched up the left side. But it was the foot that caused the problem. I had taken a step with that foot and just passed out.
I had no idea I had a problem. None. Absolutely none. I remember turning to go back in the hootch and then I’m in the water.
I’m at the bank here. One of these guys comes over, looks at me, says, “What the hell you doing down there?” I don’t know. I crawl out, no problem. Crawl up, get up on my knees. I go to stand up and fall down. I have no idea what the problem is. I’m getting pissed now. I get on my knees, go to stand up, get about halfway up, and fall down. Hook Tuure comes over. He’s got a bullet someplace but he can walk.
He says, “Let me help you.”
I say, “All I know is I can’t stand up. I don’t think I’m hit but I can’t stand up.”
He grabs my arm, puts my arm around his neck. One of the nicks [from the grenade] was right in my armpit. When he picked that arm up, I thought the whole world was coming out of my arm. It took a razor thin wound and just opened it up.
It hurt to the point I pulled my arm back.
I said, “Hook, I don’t know what’s wrong. Go find Gallagher [the senior petty officer] and tell him he’s got it. I’ll get myself out of here. I don’t need any help.”
We were starting to get organized. By this time, the patrol was ready to move out. I’m still trying to stand up. We have everybody accounted for. There was a lot of firing from other aspects of the tree line. The VC were reconning by fire. There were rifles going off all around us, hoping we would return fire. Mike Boynton had something in his back but he could walk. He carried the interpreter, who was badly hurt. Mike got the Silver Star for this.
Gallagher was hurt on the right side but he could walk. I could not support myself on both feet so I used my weapon as a crutch. I told Gallagher to get us out of here but I don’t need any help. What followed was half an hour or forty-five minutes of getting us about five hundred meters out through this dense jungle. By this time, it was 4 or 4:15 A.M. and the sun would soon be coming up. The object was to get out and set up a helo landing zone. There was a lot of firing going on.
Before we hit this hootch, I called Lieutenant Petersen, who had the other squad. He said they hadn’t found anything and were moving out to their helicopter landing zone. So while we’re doing our thing, his squad is moving toward their helo LZ. The goal is to be out before sunrise. The spot report filed after the operation says Petersen’s squad encountered and silently killed two VC. It continues:
Heard many voices to east. Evaded north being followed by approx fifty VC. Set perimeter…. Called for Sea Wolf cover and slick extraction. Engaged approx twenty VC approaching from east. … Extracted by slick following Sea Wolf strike.
We moved through the underbrush without talking, without firing, in good order. We got to the clearing. There was a hootch there. The point man went out and cleared the hootch. We set up in the hootch. The VC hadn’t seen us but there was a lot of firing.
We later figured a 550- to 600-man main force rei
nforced battalion had stopped in this area for the night. I think we hit a main sleeping area.
With Yeaw hobbling along using his rifle as a crutch, Gallagher, who had also been wounded by the grenade, took charge of the withdrawal and found a site for the helicopters to land. While Yeaw and Tuure worked the radios, Gallagher organized the tiny defense force to protect the landing zone. For his performance that day, he was awarded the highest navy award, the Navy Cross.
The other SEALs were picking off guys as they were running up to get us. We killed fifteen or sixteen ourselves. We were set up inside this hootch. Hook Tuure, the radioman, couldn’t get the boats to tell them we were ready for extraction. The radio wouldn’t work. The VC were still firing but didn’t know where we were. It seemed like ten or fifteen minutes before we established radio contact with the boats on the river. We relayed them the situation and they called for helo support. Gave them the sitrep: five wounded, need immediate medevac and gunship support.
I took a morphine shot because I was starting to get some pain every time I stepped on this foot. Not a lot of pain. Then the helicopters came, probably fifteen or twenty minutes later. It was light by that time. The gunships shot up the tree line, about one hundred yards away. Two helos took the other squad. The VC were shooting at the helos. The helos were shooting back.
The army medevac said, “I ain’t coming down to pick you up; there’s too much firing.”
The Sea Wolf [navy helicopter] told the medevac: We’ll provide you with cover. But you’re going down there. You either land your helicopter or we’re going to shoot you down.
That’s close to what he said. I didn’t hear that firsthand.
There was a lot of shooting. The VC were beginning to get their act together. I made contact with the medevac. He said to throw a flare.
By this time the VC could see us. We took a few rounds, but not many. I’m not sure how bad it was. If they’re shooting at you, you can’t tell they’re shooting at you. Unless you get hit. You can’t hear very much except the sound of the helicopters.
The medevac says, “Okay, we’re going to come down but we’re only going to send one bird.”
So shit, they only send one helicopter for nine people. Normally the helos only take six. But I figured, we’ve got three Vietnamese. They count less than half the weight of an American SEAL.
The bottom line is, the helicopter settled down. We got the interpreter on, the other guys scrambled on, I scrambled on, in front between the pilot and copilot. We had two other guys. They were returning fire, they were firing back out. And then the helicopter lifts off, gets about a foot off the ground. I tell him to set the bird back down. We don’t have everybody. It takes a while to get nine guys into a one-sided helicopter.
He set the helicopter down, finally, got it back down. The other two guys jumped on. The helicopter takes off. And man, the max RPM light is flashing and the helicopter is shuddering. I mean, it’s one of these, “I think I can, I think I can. Thump, thump, thump.” It finally started picking up. Meanwhile the helicopters were shooting pretty close. The door gunner from the other medevac bird is making passes with his M60.
We landed at Dong Tam, the army medevac facility. They put me on a stretcher and we went into the building. I sat up on the bed. This nurse is asking me questions, like what is your name and what is your blood type. Meanwhile somebody starts cutting off my boot. He cuts away my boot. Last thing I can remember is looking over and seeing more blood than I ever—you know, he took that boot out, the sock was totally red. Boom, I passed out. Just fell over and woke up the next morning.
Reconstructing it, what had happened, near as we can tell, is somebody from one of the beds or someone we hadn’t seen went out the door. I remember standing there at the door and looking down. Right outside the door there was an aboveground bunker. The person who went out the door, best we can figure, went in the bunker, grabbed a grenade, just pulled the pin, and kind of threw it inside the center of the hootch.
That would explain where the grenade came from and why I couldn’t see anybody outside. There was a canal next to it, with a bank going down. I had taken a step, passed out, and somehow rolled into the water. Hitting the water had wakened me up. But I have absolutely no memory of how I got from here down there.
Petersen got together with some SEALs and led an army company into this area later and found two-hundred-plus bunkers that had been recently lived in. From other information, we estimated between 550 and 600 people. We basically got in without them seeing us—and back out. Between our nine-man group and seven or eight in the other patrol, we got somewhere between thirty and thirty-six by body count, another twenty-plus killed by SEALs probable, and unknown number killed by helos.
We figured they took somewhat of a hit that night. We think the helos did a lot more damage than we’ll ever know. You don’t fire 2.75-inch rockets—fifteen or twenty of them—into an area like that without doing some damage.
With a small unit like that, you can go from being very mobile and very good to being very immobile and very vulnerable.
I know there were five [out of nine] of us bleeding, some of us hurt pretty bad. I was hurt pretty bad. Tuure had taken one or two in the leg. I’d say we were in serious trouble.
When you sit back and reflect, you say, we were lucky to get out of there. Well luck had nothing to do with it. It was total ability and total skill, discipline and total reliance on the other person. It was a result of having been in very difficult situations in the past, whether in training or in actual operations. Everybody pulled together and did their part, didn’t become a part of the problem if they didn’t have to be. As much as they could, they became part of the solution. I wasn’t going to become part of the problem in getting out of there and I could become part of the solution in directing fire and that kind of stuff.
Gallagher was hospitalized in Vietnam and returned home with the platoon a few weeks later. Yeaw was evacuated to Tokyo and then to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital.
I was in Philadelphia about a month. Mentally, that was the worst part. Once the cast came off, I would go down to do physical therapy a couple times a week. I was doing physical therapy with guys who were missing legs, missing arms. You’d sit there with a guy who had half his leg missing, or whole leg, or a leg and an arm. I had all my parts. All I needed was to get my muscle back in shape and I’m looking over at this guy and he’s exercising his stump.
It was early July by the time I got back to the team, still on crutches. I got back in shape and was back in Vietnam in February ’69. There were other ops, but nowhere near as uptight or with as good results as we got that night.
CHAPTER
15
First Blood for Squad 2-Bravo
The action on the night of 13 March 1967 was a routine ambush, virtually indistinguishable from the thousands of others the SEALs ran in Vietnam. Depending on the source, reports say as few as one and as many as three Vietnamese were killed. None of the six Americans in SEAL Team TWO, 2d Platoon, Squad 2-Bravo, was injured.
And yet the events of that night have become among the most controversial in the more than thirty years the SEALs have been in existence.
The basic facts are undisputed: the squad led by then-Ens. Richard Marcinko left its base near Can Tho in a new, heavily armored LCM-8 or Mike boat. They went ashore in an area along the Bassac River known to be a transit point for the Viet Cong. It was their first land combat operation and they were eager to make contact. They set up an ambush, fired upon a sampan, killing its occupant, or occupants, and were picked up about ten minutes later by a small STAB—SEAL team assault boat—which took them to the larger boat.
The SEALs then went to the aid of a South Vietnamese outpost under attack by the Viet Cong and, firing from offshore, helped prevent it from being overrun.
Shortly after the operation, Marcinko accused another officer, then-Lt. Larry Bailey, of failing to support his squad when it got in trouble—in effect charging Baile
y with cowardice. The two men had a heated exchange, although their accounts differ on where and when it took place.
The incident probably would have faded away if Marcinko had not revived his charges against Bailey in a book, Rogue Warrior, published in 1992.
In 1980, Marcinko founded the antiterrorist SEAL Team SIX. He later set up a unit called Red Cell to test security at naval installations. In 1990, he was accused and convicted of conspiracy, bribery, conflict of interest, and making false claims against the government and served more than a year in a federal prison. It was while he was in prison that he wrote his controversial best-selling biography.
In his book, Marcinko says he initiated the ambush when “one Vietnamese in black pajamas, no hat, no visible gun; an Asian gondolier,” came toward the hidden Americans. They all let loose with thirty-round magazines. The Stoner machine gunner fired 150 rounds. Whoever was in the sampan was blown to bits. All the SEALs found in the boat was a small cloth pouch and a watch.
Then, Marcinko says, the water around him started kicking up and one of his men shouted, “Automatic fire …” Another man [ICC Robert T. Gallagher], he says, reported, “They’re coming from the back side, Mr. Rick.” Marcinko says he radioed for help but got no answer.
For eight or ten minutes, he says, they took fire until a STAB showed up. “We moved down the bank, shouting for covering fire as we slithered, ducked, and rolled our way through the jungle underbrush, as VC bullets sliced the leaves just over our heads or dug divots too close for comfort as we scrambled toward the STAB.”
Bailey, Marcinko says, had gone off in the larger Mike boat chasing a sampan instead of backing up the squad when it got in trouble. When he and his squad boarded the Mike boat, Marcinko says he confronted Bailey, grabbing him by the shirt, and banging him against the bulkhead until Bailey slumped to a sitting position and remained there with his eyes unfocused.