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

by Orr Kelly

  We closed the canopy. Rick Brown dove the boat and lined it up on course and headed back to the pier. The test was over.

  We’re down about twenty feet and going maybe four knots. It feels good to be down there after being banged around on the surface.

  Frank and Rick are in the front seats and I’m right behind, leaning forward between them. We’re all talking on the intercom in the SDV. [The SEALs’ masks have a built-in microphone connected to the craft’s intercom system.] Fetzko tells this joke. It had to do with the female anatomy. I’m not going to repeat it for you, but it’s one of the funniest jokes I’ve ever heard and we’re laughing like hell underwater. It can be very boring in an SDV during a long transit.

  Frank is watching the OAS [obstacle avoidance sonar].

  Right after he tells the joke, he says, “Rick, I’ve got this line going across the OAS. Have you seen that before?”

  These guys are trained to alternate jobs.

  Rick’s going, “Oh, yeah, I see that every time I come in here. That’s that sandbar that goes across right where the point is.”

  Frank goes, “Oh, okay.”

  And then ten seconds later, ka-whoom! We have hit something major.

  As soon as we hit, Rick and Frank did everything correctly. They shut down the screw, checked everything.

  It got real quiet. It’s almost pitch-black except for a little bit of light from the instrument panel. And the water inside the SDV is getting real cloudy, with all this muddy debris flying around in the boat.

  It is a surrealistic sight, made even more eerie by the view from the full-face mask, which created a tunnel-like view—like a small television screen—because the sides of the face mask’s lens were intentionally scraped to a dull finish to allow the penetration of light but to prevent distorted peripheral vision.

  We don’t know what we’ve hit. Rick tries to maneuver in every direction but the boat doesn’t move. We’re stuck.

  Rick says, “Whatever we’ve hit, we can’t move forward or back out.”

  As a prospective CO, I watched two very cool guys do exactly what needed to be done.

  Rick shut down the screw again. We don’t want to use up our batteries.

  There was no panic, but you could feel the adrenaline, the anxiety. We size up the situation: we are trapped under the water; no one knows where we are; we can’t break loose from whatever we have hit.

  It stays quiet for a very long moment. No one seems ready to speak, not really knowing what to say. It is clearly an unusual and unexpected event. We check to insure that none of us is injured. Then we discuss our situation, still disbelieving our predicament.

  Again it gets very still. Each of us is uneasy but no one admits to it. We’re all trying to think what we can do to get out of this mess. I look at my watch. It’s a little after ten o’clock, with a long night ahead. I calculate that, with the breathing gas left in our Mark 15s and the compressed air we have in the boat, we don’t have enough life support to get us to daylight. My West Virginia math tells me that I’m dead before sunrise.

  Rick says, “Let’s get the canopy open and we can swim to the surface.”

  When we crashed, I saw the console [instrument panel] being pushed back. It was like a slow-motion movie and for some reason I was focused on the center of the console and the canopy handle. I didn’t realize what that meant at the time. But now I look and I see what’s happened. In those days, we had a single canopy with a U-shaped handle right up in front. When we crashed, the console came back with great force and locked into the canopy handle. We try, but the canopy won’t open.

  I say, “We’re going to have to pry it open.”

  We take turns prying and banging at it, trying to make a hole big enough to squeeze through. We really tried everything we could do to get that canopy pried back and it wasn’t working. We worked at it for some considerable period of time. For awhile, Rick and I tried to pry the canopy inward to make a hole large enough to get out.

  We’re working really hard. But then we have to force ourselves to stop and rest. When you breathe a closed-circuit rebreather, you cannot overwork the rig. You can’t get yourself out of breath. You’ll overbreathe and pass out from CO2 poisoning and we’ve got plenty of problems without that. We’re sitting there trying to breathe normally. We all have our own thoughts, but we keep them to ourselves.

  What are we going to do?

  Maybe we could communicate with the guys back at the base and tell them to come help us. But we’re not sure where we are. First we have to try to figure out what we hit.

  We decided we had probably gotten off course and hit the old sunken barge. Everybody knew it was there. When BUD/S training was still conducted on the East Coast, the trainees used to go dive on the barge, near a little island off the enlisted beach.

  We tried communicating on the underwater telephone but the test was for the UHF radio. No one was monitoring us. After awhile, when we were overdue, we could hear them trying to call us on the underwater telephone and we were trying to call them, too. But they couldn’t hear us.

  By now, we had been there for more than an hour. We still have air for a while longer. But we’ve tried everything. We can’t get the canopy open. We can’t call for help. We figure that when we hit the barge, if that’s what it is, these little bow planes on the SDV caught in the metal of the barge, holding us like a hook. The bow planes are designed to break away, but we figure they are still holding us.

  Rick says, “The only thing I can think of now is to try to break those bow planes off.”

  He started doing what you would do in your car if you were stuck in the sand. He started rocking the boat: fast forward, fast reverse.

  The power to turn the screw in the SDV comes from this big bank of batteries. We can only keep trying to break free as long as the batteries last. We decided we were just going to do that until the batteries went dead. We didn’t have any choice. We had tried everything else. We were basically down there on our own.

  He went forward-reverse, forward-reverse, forward-reverse, forward-reverse. The boat vibrates from the screw trying to move it, but it doesn’t budge. I don’t know how long this went on. It seemed like forever. Frank and I can’t do anything to help. We just sit there.

  And then, something gives. The boat moves. Just a little bit forward. A little back. We can feel it starting to move. Then it goes way back. It breaks free and pops up to the surface. Our ears feel the relief of pressure as we go up.

  Now we are afloat on the surface. But with an SDV, this means only the very top is awash on the surface, while the remainder is under the water and very difficult for anyone to see. Normally, this is a tactical advantage, but tonight no advantage at all.

  But, at least we know we now have a chance to be found. We are adrift in the choppy, dark tropical ocean, being splashed around in a steady rock-and-roll motion. We cannot see because our compartment is enclosed by the black skin of the boat, lighted only from the soft green glow of our instrumentation panel. Our instruments are no help since we don’t know where we are. If we got under way, we could steer away from rescue.

  We’re still in serious trouble. We’re trapped inside this little black boat. We have no buoys, no lights. And we’re being carried down Vieques Channel, wherever the currents carry us.

  Actually, we are not much better off than when we were jammed in the barge, because we are still slave to our breathing apparatus. We are now only three inches from fresh air, but we are blocked from it by the jammed canopy.

  Rick Brown and I continued trying to get the canopy off. Frank got on the radio to try to raise someone, anyone. It was our last remaining chance—unless we could pry the canopy open.

  Theoretically, the canopy had to be open to raise the UHF radio antenna. It had not been tried before, but we hoped that it would work in the down position. It did. Suddenly, Frank made contact with the guys on the pier. We could hear the shouting and cheering in the background.

  We
were alive, but not yet found. We told them we were adrift on the surface, thought we had rammed and been captured inside the old Vieques water barge. That would give them a starting reference for search. Everyone knows our situation, knows we must be found before our breathing gas is exhausted.

  They had already gone out searching for us but they didn’t know where to look and we weren’t sure where we were. We were like a small black log adrift in a large black ocean. We could do nothing but rest in place, and breathe very slowly to save our remaining gas. After some time, in the distance, we could hear the search party shouting out to us.

  We could not shout back because of our full-face masks. Sometimes they would seem to be very near us, other times at a far-off distance. Immediately, we got on the UHF radio and told the people on the pier that we could hear the shouts from the search party, that they were close to us, to keep searching.

  Finally, [PO1] Bobby Putnam, who was the diving supervisor for this operation, thought he saw us and shined a spotlight from the patrol boat in our direction. At last, we heard him yell, “I see the boat.”

  He quickly pulled his Boston Whaler beside us. We couldn’t talk to him, but we could hear him giving directions to the crew of the boat to maneuver toward us.

  As soon as they got close enough, he jumped into the water fully clothed. I remember him sticking his light through the section of the canopy that Rick and I had bent up like the half-opened top on a tin can.

  The glare from that flashlight was one of the most welcome things I have ever seen in my life.

  We still couldn’t get out of the boat so they took it under tow, with us still inside. I remember how Bobby hung on to the boat as they towed us all the way back to the dry dock recovery area.

  When Rick put his mask directly against the canopy, he was able to talk to Bobby along the way.

  We had no idea where we were. As we proceeded under tow, the people on the pier began telling us over the UHF what would happen at the recovery point. Finally, they maneuvered us alongside a floating barge in the protected water of the old dry dock. We could hear a lot of activity and see the glare of floodlights penetrating the cracks of the canopy, and through the hole that we had pried.

  Then, while safely captured alongside the floating barge (how ironic, a barge), they were able to pry the jammed canopy far enough open for us to escape through the area of our makeshift hole. To do this, we had to go one at a time: take a final lung full of breathing gas, ditch our MK 15 UBA and full-face mask inside the boat, and quickly squeeze through the small hole and to the surface.

  Bobby Putman was still in the water outside the SDV, helping to pry open the hole for our escape. We rallied around Bobby and then swam together to the barge, guided by safety swimmers along the way.

  We climbed up the ladder with assistance from the guys who had gathered there. A crowd of some size had come to assist in the search, and now to watch the recovery procedure. Once on the barge, we just stood there among our teammates, laughed, shook hands, and reveled in the familiar smell of the fresh, warm tropical air.

  We learned from that. The SDV was redesigned to have a dual sliding canopy: a canopy over the pilot and one over the navigator to operate independently, and also a breakaway canopy. It was redesigned so if you stood up with some force you could pop the canopy off.

  The next day was a Saturday and we had the day off, so we went out to do some lobster diving, and on the way back we dove down to the barge, which was pretty well rusted away.

  We found one of the SDV’s bow planes and the OAS window, so we knew for sure that’s where we had been, I kept that bow plane and took it home with me, since it could not be repaired. Shortly after I took command of the team, I asked one of the team’s corpsmen, HM1 Michael “Doc” Sabino, to draw me a cartoon on the bow plane as a memento, which he did.

  Sabino was an artist of some fame around the team at the time, because he had designed the SDV team logo, which is still used by the command today. Doc was about to get out of the navy and return to his home in St. Thomas and I wanted to capture his talent before he left. He drew a picture of the SDV headed at full speed toward the underwater barge, depicting conversation between myself, Rick, and Frank. I keep it as a treasured memento to this day.

  It certainly was a night to remember.

  CHAPTER

  29

  One of Our Dolphins [SDVs] Is Missing

  Even in the best-run navy, things sometimes go embarrassingly wrong. But, with luck, everything turns out all right in the end.

  Captain William “Billy” Hamilton, now in charge of development of the navy’s next-generation SDV, and Mike Bennett, recently retired, recall two such incidents. Hamilton well remembers the day Little Bit went AWOL:

  I went to Naval Special Warfare Group One in Coronado in 1980 as officer in charge of the marine mammal program. The navy had three marine mammal programs, one with sea lions and two using Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins.

  Were you in charge of all three?

  I was in charge of all three. I did that for two and a half years. We did a lot of harbor defense-type exercises, all up and down the West and East Coasts. I was a department head on the group staff, something called the undersea systems division. I had about fifty people. At that time the underwater demolition teams were 110 to 120 people. So my unit was half the size of a UDT. But my budget was twice as big as a UDT.

  What did your marine mammals do?

  At the time all that stuff was classified secret But a lot of it has been in the open press since and confirmed by the navy public affairs people.

  In a general sense, the unclassified program was the sea lions. It was called “quickfind.” It has the same name today. We used them to find the electronics package from tests of missiles and other ordnance.

  When they have quality assurance tests, they need to recover the electronics package. Before firing it, they attach a pinger to it.

  Let’s say it goes down in three hundred feet of water off San Clemente Island, which is where we do some of this stuff. If you use hard-hat divers, they need an overhead surface support platform—a ship.

  We can take a rubber boat with these sea lions, which we work with all the time. We put them in the water near where it went in. They’ll hear the pinger. They put a little attachment in their mouth, dive down, and attach it on the piece of ordnance. It has a line attached to it and you just pull it back up.

  We also do that off Port Hueneme, the Pacific missile test range. They drop practice mines. You might drop twenty practice mines in one hundred feet of water. If you were to use divers, because of the depth and the time, you would burn up dive pairs pretty quickly. You can send these animals down, which don’t breathe down there, obviously, and pick up all the practice mines in a couple of hours. It’s a real cost saver.

  The dolphin program had to do with some mine counter-measures. It was a defense mechanism against swimmer attacks against ships.

  How did they do that?

  I don’t think I’ll get into the specifics of that. They did have them over in Bahrain during the Gulf War. They did the harbor defense in Bahrain. That’s been in the open press.

  They used them to find mines?

  Yeah, to find mines.

  How do they find mines?

  They echo locate. The dolphins put out a pinging noise. They can discriminate. You teach them what a minelike object sounds like. They’re smart enough to discriminate.

  What do they do when they find it?

  They use their echo-locating skills to find things under the water and then there are ways we have to take care of the mine from there.

  One report is that you would have a dolphin go out and run into a swimmer and blow them both up. Is that what happens?

  No, that is not what happens. The animals, in the performance of their mission, are not harmed. It probably does not have to be said that if you’re in a mined environment and a mine goes off, anything in that area is subject to shock waves
or whatever. The animals do breathe air and they have voids in their bodies, such as chest cavities. The overpressure will certainly impact them. But the cartilage in the chest is a lot more flexible than that in a human so they can take a lot more shock.

  With a diver, if you drop concussion grenades over the side, you bust a guy’s ear drums and he gets disoriented. He doesn’t know which direction is up. It is very difficult for a diver if you lose your orientation, to be able to successfully conduct a ship attack.

  The same thing could harm an animal. But in the performance of their mission, they do not get harmed.

  Have you had any unusual experiences working with these animals?

  We took a group of the dolphins to Mayport, Florida, one year for a big annual exercise that CINCLANTFLT [Commander, Atlantic Fleet] conducts. They had blue-water warfare at sea and antisubmarine warfare and it culminated in a large amphibious landing.

  Our portion of it was supporting a harbor breakout of ships from Mayport, where the aircraft carriers and some of the smaller ships are homeported.

  What is harbor breakout?

  You make sure that the enemy has not planted mines in the area—no mines in the lanes where our ships are going to go out.

  These are Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins. When we train with them, we’re in San Diego or Hawaii. Now they’re back in their home territory, the Atlantic. This was in the spring, March-April time frame. It is also the time when the animals come into heat. They call it rutting.

  We had both male and female animals. Not surprisingly, they had their own personalities. The males are always very highstrung and the females are less aggressive, usually more dependable, more consistent.

  We had this one female we were out working with. Her name was Little Bit. And this herd of wild bottle-nosed dolphins goes by. We’ve had experience with this before. Usually our animals will hear all this noise and stuff and they’ll see them out there. Typically, they’ll run out in that direction and then come right back. They were fairly dependable. But at that time of year it was tough to control some of them. You felt like you wanted to write them up under the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] for being AWOL, but you couldn’t do that.