by Orr Kelly
This one particular day, I guess Little Bit, who was one of our better animals, decided she wasn’t going to work with us. She was going to go stick with the herd. We looked and looked and looked and went all up and down the coast.
I finally had to call my boss, who was Bob Gormly, in Coronado. He was the chief staff officer and [Comdr. Cathal] Irish Flynn was the commodore. I had to tell my boss I had lost one of my animals. These are animals that had been in captivity for ten or twelve years. The navy had put a lot of time and effort into training them. If you added up all that time and effort, easily these were million dollar animals. We only had four of them and they were hard to replace.
A couple or three days later we’re out in the same area working the other animals and our little animal shows up. She was bruised and cut and she had been bitten. She had been running with the wild herd. But because she was a stranger to the herd, she was not accepted.
I guess she got hungry or something and decided to come back. We saw her coming. We had these Boston Whalers with the side cut out with a kind of gym mat which they beached themselves on. All we had to do was slow the boat down and she jumped right on board without having to be cued to come in. She just wanted to come home. She was hungry and tired. She was happy to be back home.
You said it was rutting season. Did she come back pregnant?
No, she didn’t. It didn’t turn out that way. I’ll tell you I worried about that one. Every time you put them out in the open ocean they can do whatever they want.
Bennett recalls a similar incident. This time, the loss involved an inanimate object, an SDV:
Let me tell you about the time we lost an SDV in Glorietta Bay. [Glorietta Bay is the body of water adjoining the amphibious base at Coronado.] At the time, the boats belonged to an SDV platoon of an underwater demolition team.
Tommy Bracken and James C. “Momma” Cousins had made a successful run and were coming back in. You bring the SDV out of the water up onto a trailer, just like any other boat.
When you’re practicing with an SDV, you have an antenna with a little red flag on it. As they were getting ready to bring the SDV out of the water, Tommy unscrewed the whip antenna and Cousins went over to the trailer.
He got himself positioned and says, “Okay, bring her up.”
Tom says, “I don’t have the boat.”
Cousins says, “You’ve got the antenna in your hand.”
Tommy holds up the antenna. There is no boat attached. They both splash into the water looking for the boat. But the boat is headed out of the bay.
What happened was that the SDV has a little round rheostat as a forward and reverse switch. One of them, as he got out with his fins on, hit the switch and put it in full reverse.
The skipper was Captain LeMoyne. [Then-Lt. Comdr. Irve C. “Chuck” LeMoyne, who has since become an admiral.] He called the whole team in. All leave and liberty was canceled. This was around an Easter holiday.
The skipper called all of the team into the briefing room. We got the diving locker to pump up bottles. We were going to dive until we found that boat. Everybody was going to dive. The sick, lame, and lazy would fill bottles. Everyone else was in the water.
We did some frantic diving but we couldn’t find the boat. In Glorietta Bay, you couldn’t see much more than four feet.
Then we found tracks of the boat on the bottom, where it had gone scooting along the bottom in full reverse. It would hit a little bump and circle around and cross its path.
Robert Clendenning and I were tracking the boat. Everyplace the tracks crossed, we’d put a little flag in.
We dove all that day, all that night, and into the second day. We had flags all over the place. About ten or eleven o’clock in the morning on the second day, we had turned and were coming on a straight line.
We heard an M80 go off. That was the recall signal. An M80 is like a cherry bomb, an inch long, half an inch around. We stuck a stake in, put a life jacket on it.
Bill Wright had a handheld sonar. He was hollering, “Here it is.”
We were only fifteen or twenty feet from it. It was full of mud. The little holes it has on the side to let water out were taking in mud big-time when it was going backward. It was heavy. We had to pump it up to bring it to the surface.
CHAPTER
30
Blocking Haiphong Harbor
For years, the navy’s frogmen have had an often tempestuous love-hate relationship with the submarine force. They would seem to have been made for each other. Both operate under the sea. And both base their effectiveness, and their survival, on stealth.
But, for the SEALs, life aboard a submarine is often crowded, uncomfortable, and boring. Once they venture out into the ocean, their assignments are cold and often dangerous.
The submariners worry about the SEALs bringing aboard fuel for their boats and explosives, even when it is stored outside the hull. And working with the frogmen requires precise control of a barely moving submarine and involves the constant danger that their presence will be compromised.
With the end of the Cold War, the submariners have become much more amenable to working with the SEALs, seeing this as one way to make themselves useful and justify their existence. Frogmen from SEAL Team EIGHT, based in Little Creek, Virginia, recently conducted exercises with the USS Flying Fish off Puerto Rico, practicing the launch of two rubber boats perched on the horizontal sail attached to the submarine’s conning tower.
This renewed interest in SEAL-submarine cooperation reminds some SEAL and UDT veterans of a kind of golden age in the 1960s and 1970s when a few submarines—among them the Grayback, Tunny, and Perch—spent weeks at a time working with the frogmen in many exercises and a few daring real-life adventures.
One of the leading figures during that time was the late Capt. Fred T. Berry, a Naval Academy graduate and veteran submarine commander. Two men who worked closely with Berry in those days are Maynard Weyers, a retired captain, and James L. “Gator” Parks (see chapter 2). Weyers recalls a practice exercise off the California coast and preparations for a daring operation in Vietnam:
This was probably 1964 or 1965. Captain Berry had a submarine squadron on the West Coast and they were continually working toward something—some kind of real-world operation.
For one of these exercises, an individual from the CIA, a navy nurse, and I traveled out to San Clemente Island. For the exercise scenario, I was a sensitive foreign official defecting from an enemy island nation to the U.S. The nurse was to be my mistress and the CIA guy her brother. This exercise was observed by Captain Berry and was to test the entire system—submarine and SEALs.
We were on the island and the submarine was supposed to make contact and recover me. The SEALs locked out of the submarine and I signaled them in, using infrared signals. They came in in two boats. They were expecting to pick up just me and were rather surprised when they found this woman, her simulated “baby” and her “brother.”
I said, “I’m not leaving unless my mistress and her brother can go along.”
They’d go off and whisper and then we’d talk some more. They finally agreed to take the three of us and the baby. Then I told them I had my heirlooms. We had two big footlockers full of rocks to simulate the heirlooms. I told them I’m not going without my stuff.
Finally, they say, “Okay, we’ll take you three in this boat and the footlockers in the other one.”
It was dark out there. We got in the boat and left. But they tricked us and those heirlooms never made it off the beach.
They paddled us back out. The gradient there drops off sharply so the submarine could come in real close. But they couldn’t lock my mistress and her brother and the baby into the sub underwater. So they came by, we threw a rope around the periscope and they dragged us out to sea so the radar wouldn’t pick them up when they surfaced.
When they got out far enough, we pulled away, the submarine surfaced, and we got aboard. The CO and the crew didn’t know what to do: a woman ab
oard a submarine! And my mistress is playing the role to the hilt. The baby has to have milk. So she has the corpsman heating milk.
They set us up with staterooms in officers’ country.
Being a healthy American boy and to add to the confusion, I said, “I want my mistress in with me.”
Captain Berry has been watching all this with some amusement. But he says, “Now wait a minute …”
While they’re warming the milk and worrying about the staterooms, it turns out the brother is a bad guy. He had brought on a shaving kit and his shaving cream tube is full of C-4 [plastic explosive]. He says he’s put the charge somewhere on the sub and that they must sail into the enemy harbor and surrender. However, the sub crew and the SEALs did a quick search and were able to locate and disarm the charge.
Those are the kinds of exercises we were doing. I think they were preparing for a real pickup of someone somewhere but they didn’t tell us the details.
Captain Berry was the same person who was in charge of a plan to sink a submarine to block the channel into Haiphong Harbor. Since he had worked extensively with SEALs, he knew many of the people and their capabilities. He handpicked the people he wanted for this operation. They had a special boat made up for us. The plan was that they’d take the sub in with a small crew, sink it, and we’d pick them up and get them out of there.
I was in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life. I figured if anything went wrong, I’d have to work my way all the way down the coast to South Vietnam.
The whole operation was so secret that even those involved were told only what they needed to know. While Weyers prepared for his part of the plan, Parks was working on another phase of the same operation. His story starts many years earlier:
At the time the French got out after Dien Bien Phu, we took shiploads of Vietnamese out of Haiphong. We ran up that river. [In 1954 the French suffered a devastating defeat by the Viet Minh, as the Vietnamese force was known. The country was subsequently partitioned at the seventeenth parallel, setting off an exodus of Vietnamese allied with the French to the new South Vietnam.]
I almost got up that river again. During the war, we had a job that would have had us run SDVs up that river. It didn’t come off but it was a very interesting scheme. It could have worked. We were going to take a submarine and sink it.
Captain Berry was in charge. We were great friends. He had been in the submarine business as long as we had been playing with SDVs. He had the foresight to see that was going to be a viable weapons system, eventually.
There were SDVs Involved?
You bet there were. We were going to have two of them on the deck of that submarine. Also, we were going to do a reconnaissance before the sub went in.
You were going to sink that sub?
Yes sir, we were going to sink it right in the channel. We were going to take the people off in the SDVs. We were going to scuttle the ship, come topside, take the four men that were going to be running the submarine off, and go out and meet up with the SAR [search and rescue helicopter]. There were changes from putting SDVs on the deck to not putting them on deck. At the end, they were going to put them on the deck.
Sinking that sub would stop shipping for a year before they got that out of the channel. What happened, really, I think we would have done it, but the State Department got cold feet when Bucher got captured up in Korea—the Pueblo. Never been able to like him very much since then. [On 23 January 1968, the USS Pueblo, a disguised merchant ship under the command of Comdr. Lloyd M. Bucher, was captured, along with her crew, by the North Koreans while eavesdropping on North Korean radar and radio transmissions.]
Were you in SEAL Team ONE?
I had been in SEAL Team ONE and I had gone to the SpecWar [Naval Special Warfare Command] staff for this job.
Was Maynard Weyers involved?
Yeah, Maynard had the boat. He was going to run the surface boat. Him and Frank Flynn were going to be the boat drivers. They were the backup, actually, if something happened to the SDVs. They were going to get us anyway, when we came out beyond the antiaircraft range. Yeah, Maynard wasn’t too swift about that.
We were actually on station to do the first reconnaissance, to get some photographs of the buoys and see how wide the channel was and how deep, of course. We were actually on station when Bucher got captured.
The old sub we were going to sink was waiting at Subic. We went up in the Tonkin Gulf in the Tunny [the USS Tunny, a submarine configured to carry two SDVs]. We were going to do a recon first [in the SDVs] to make sure if we sank this thing in the middle of the channel it was going to do some good.
That was a good plan and it was workable and it was going to work, probably without getting many, if anybody, killed, except maybe Maynard if he had come in in that boat.
That reconnaissance was the first phase of it and that was as far as it got. Then they wanted to take us up off Korea. So then our ten-knot submarine made a run for Korea. We went all the way from Vietnam.
I understand the North Koreans had a couple of submarines there the Russians had given them. They were to be the target. The plan was, we were going to fill one SDV up with explosives and leave it under the North Korean subs and take the other and rendezvous with the first one and take the people out. That was the plan. We were going to blow up two submarines.
But that too never got too far along. I don’t think anybody was ever too serious about it.
Unfortunately, none of those things came to pass. I spent my whole life in those stupid little black boats and never did get to do anything real-world.
CHAPTER
31
Operation Thunderhead
In the spring of 1972, SEAL Team ONE sent a unit—the Naval Special Warfare Western Pacific Detachment—to Okinawa to act as the contingency platoon for the Seventh Fleet. This was a first step toward a peacetime routine after the SEALs’ long involvement in the Vietnam War. But while the U.S. participation in the war was shrinking, one major concern remained: the fate of the Americans held captive by North Vietnam.
Philip Martin was the senior petty officer in the platoon and was soon to be promoted to the rank of warrant officer. A veteran of combat operations as both a member of the UDT and SEALs, Martin had a peculiarly appropriate nickname for a frogman, earned when he was a boy in the Hawaiian Islands. Because he was so at home in the water, the other boys called him Moki—Hawaiian for shark.
When the SEALs arrived in Okinawa, they immediately plunged into a strenuous training routine, involving everything from submarine operations to mountain climbing. But, as Martin and a few other members of the unit were soon to learn, their training was not just routine. Something was up. This is Martin’s story of his part in Operation Thunderhead, one of the most daring—and, for many years, most secret—military exploits of the Vietnam War:
We went to Okinawa to be the contingency platoon for the fleet. We were to train there and be available for any ops that came up. So we trained on Okinawa for a few weeks and we went to Korea and did some cold water ops. Then we went to Subic [the major U.S. naval base in the Philippines].
We kept going back to Subic to work on the Grayback because the Grayback at that time had the two Regulus hangars, the wet side hangar and the dry side hangar. [A diesel-powered submarine, the USS Grayback had originally been designed to carry Regulus missiles in two large hangars on the deck. When the Regulus was superseded by the Polaris missile, the Grayback was converted for use by the frogmen.]
And they had the SDV, the latest model SDV. Mark 7, Mod 6. We called it the Six Boat. [The SDV was a four-man SEAL delivery vehicle.] We tried to stay away from the Grayback. We knew it was going to be wet and cold and you can’t get away from the water. But we kept going back and doing SDV ops. Something was planned, something was coming up.
After a couple of months of that, we went to Korea to do some mountain climbing. We were halfway through the marine climbing school there when we got this message, this secret message, to get back t
o Okinawa. So we fly back to Okinawa and right there at the pier is the Grayback waiting for us.
We go aboard and there is a full SDV team aboard. [At that time, the SDVs were operated by the UDT and the SEALs rode along as passengers.] And when we get to sea, we get some briefings. We learned later it was to be an operation to possibly recover some POWs and it was going to be off the coast of Vietnam, near Haiphong.
The U.S. had received information that a small group of Americans hoped to escape from a North Vietnamese prison camp and make their way in a small boat down to the coast. Operation Thunderhead was the name given to the plan to have SEALs make contact with the escapees and help them to safety aboard an American ship standing by offshore.
We were briefed very little and not the whole platoon. It was just the two guys who were going to be involved in the first SDV, myself and Spence [Lt. Melvin Spence Dry]. And [Lt.] John Lutz and Edwards [Fireman Tom Edwards. Lutz and Edwards were the UDT operators of the SDV]. And the only people on the Grayback who were briefed were the CO, the operations officer, and the diving officer. It was so compartmentalized that everybody only knew what they were going to do themselves.
[Lt. Comdr.] Maynard Weyers was the officer in charge of the detachment, [to which a SEAL platoon and a UDT platoon were assigned] but he wasn’t told what we were doing. Even when we came back and gave him the after-action report, he just kind of shook his head.
We didn’t know exactly where we were going except perhaps the guys in the CIC [combat information center]. It’s funny. I got a message just before I left that I had made warrant officer. It was going to be effective the first of June. On the first of June, in the midst of all these secret briefings, they baked a cake and cleared the wardroom out and all the officers stood around and welcomed me to the officer corps of the navy.