by Orr Kelly
I hear this, “Get your foot out of my face!”
I reached over and there’s this foot and the toes are pointing down. Someone is floating in the water with their toes down, which means he’s on his stomach. I reach over and grab him and pull him real quickly and flip him over and it’s Spence Dry. He was floating all that time, at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half, floating on his face. I figured, if anything, he might have drowned. I thought I could see blood in the moonlight. There was something dark coming out of his nose. [A subsequent navy investigation determined that Dry died from a broken neck suffered in his drop from the helicopter.]
We kept swimming. I knew the current would, if anything, be pushing us between the mainland and the island. So we kept swimming, kept swimming, kept hearing all these boats starting up.
I figure, it’s dark and I can swim. I’m going to shoot what I can and then haul ass.
I hear these people, these people in this little swimmer pool. Someone says, “It looks like they’re going to capture us. Let’s get rid of our weapons now.”
I say, “No, don’t get rid of your weapons now. Hold onto them.”
They say, “Oh no, if we get captured …”
They’re talking capture, you know? It really kind of pissed me off.
We just kept swimming and kept swimming. And finally at seven o’clock in the morning come these helicopters, just as planned. These guys ain’t going to change for our benefit and rightly so. The plan was, swim to sea. If you can swim, swim to sea.
We get on the radio. They say, “We’ve got you now.”
So the two helicopters come toward us and I see the helicopters about five hundred-six hundred yards away make a turn away from us, a 90-degree turn, and stop and hover. What the hell are they doing that for? They started picking up a guy in the water.
Well, here’s Sam Birkey. They picked up Sam. Then they come over to us. Birkey, he sticks his head out the door and smiles at us. So we get picked up. They pick up Dry first and they pick up Edwards. Then they pick us up.
Did you find out what happened to the second SDV and Sam Birkey?
Yeah, I talked to McConnell and McGrath. Apparently there was a problem with communication signals on the Grayback.
The SDV is relatively light when it comes out of the wet deck so the swimmers can pick it up and bring it out. The Grayback crew actually does that for you. Some of the UDT guys also helped because it was a real big important op.
Then they put water in tanks on the SDV as ballast. That balances the SDV so you can maneuver it. We had signals. You point your finger down, you need more water, more ballast. Or, you point it up, it means take some ballast out. Hold your finger across and that’s it: we’ve got enough ballast to take off. They do it by increments of water, trying to get this thing neutrally buoyant or slightly heavy.
I feel, and this is my own personal opinion, that there was too much miscommunication on the deck when they were getting ready to send that second SDV off. They were too heavy. So they’re telling them to take increments out.
Well, the pilot is the very first guy and then the SEAL passenger and then there’s the next compartment with the other SEAL and the navigator. The two guys in back— including the navigator—face the rear and there’s a big tank in between.
The only way you talk is the hydrophones we had or you get out and punch the guy in the mouth to get his attention. The communication between the Grayback crew and that pilot and navigator was not clear. Instead of taking water out, they were adding more and more water.
Finally, the decision was made, get this boat off the deck. Somebody made that decision.
I talked to the divers later and they said, “Goddamn, Moki, that sucker was heavy.”
They picked it up and they shoved it off the side and it went straight down to the bottom. The crew tried to power the boat up but it was too heavy. It just went nose down and set there. Then they tried to get water out and they couldn’t get the thing deballasted. They couldn’t bring it up. They tried for fifteen or twenty minutes.
McConnell, the navigator, gets out and he goes up front and tries to help. They couldn’t get it up.
They make the decision to abandon the SDV and go back to the Grayback. Well, they’d drifted some. They couldn’t find the Grayback even though they must have been close. They even thought the Grayback might have bumped the SDV at one time but they weren’t sure.
I’m finding this all out later.
They decided to go to the surface and the communication McConnell made to Birkey when he got out and went up front was not clear. Birkey heard, “I’m going to check on what’s going on. I’ll be right back.” Well, he didn’t come back.
Birkey is in the back compartment. He’s on boat air and boat air is eight hours. So Birkey says he waited fifteen or twenty minutes and nothing happened. So he gets out. You have a bailout tank, a little single-cylinder tank that you take with you and he bails out. And he goes up to the front and there’s nobody there. So now what the hell’s going on? So he said he waited there five or ten minutes, being faithful. Nothing happens.
Finally, he goes to the surface. All this time the eddies from the river and the ocean currents send people in different directions, but keep them in the same general area. That’s why the helicopter went to pick him up first and then they picked us up.
Was the SDV in danger of having the Grayback roll and smash it?
I believe that could have happened. Because the Grayback would every now and then rise real slowly because it was sitting on the bottom. And, as I learned later, they didn’t want to just sit on the bottom because that might cause structural damage. So they were basically just slightly negative and they would rise up and move, not a lot, not so you would notice it much. We spent nearly two months on the Grayback. You could feel it move. If the SDV went right off the side and lay there, the Grayback could conceivably come up and land on it.
Anyway, they pick us all up and we all go back to the Long Beach. We had a debriefing there and I tell them we were too high and too fast. I estimate our height to be in excess of forty feet—and that four seconds I counted meant we could have fallen something like a hundred feet. I could have counted fast, but I didn’t. I’ve got 850 sky dives. I know when you’re falling how fast you go the first few seconds.
I don’t blame the pilot or the helicopter crew at all. He told me later on that he was using instruments to try to get his height off the water. You know, it’s hard to read off choppy water. That’s why you have to depend on somebody at the door. You have to know, if you’re too high, there’s no sense putting them out because you’re only going to get someone hurt.
But there was the whole romanticism of that whole operation. Everybody wanted to get it going. Everybody wanted to get something done. It’s June of 1972 and everybody’s thinking POW liberation.
It would have been a classic SEAL operation: to go into the enemy’s front yard, not his backyard, and try to recover some American prisoners of war.
The op sounded good. We all got caught up with it. But I still believe there’s no reason for anybody to get hurt or get killed.
Later, the pilot says, “I had you down to twenty feet; I had you lower than that.”
I said, “No you didn’t. Let me tell you how hard Edwards hit the water. He hit kind of chest first. He hit so hard he blew holes out the back of his wet suit. The air that was trapped there just blew out the back of his wet suit. I had part of my web gear just ripped off the side of my body because I hit so hard. I still managed to hold onto my gun and my fins. Everybody hit way too hard.”
What happened after you got back to the Long Beach?
We spent three or four days on the Long Beach. We were walking around with new dungarees. They knew who we were.
Then the Grayback sent a rubber boat for us. That was another screwed-up operation. They pick us up about one o’clock in the morning. It was one of those big boats, like a Zodiac. The motor broke down so a
ll of us end up having to paddle the thing back to the Grayback.
We paddled forever. We finally got on board and sort of licked our wounds and packed our gear.
We had a memorial service for Spence Dry at Subic. Almost the entire Grayback crew was there. To have a submarine crew not to go in town on liberty and come to a memorial service, that was asking a lot.
Later the thing that bothered me was that Spence Dry’s father kept writing to me. And I couldn’t answer him because it was still secret. He wrote me off and on. He even had Spence’s old girlfriend come and see me one time and she gave me his address. He was a retired navy captain, a boat commander, submarine squadron commander, well respected in the submarine force. I was still afraid to tell him. I wrote him one letter and told him we were doing what we were trained to do and had it come off …
He wanted to know how he died. He wanted to know how high the helicopter was. He wanted to know the Grayback’s role. Could he have hit the snorkel? Later, I got another letter from him, that he had moved to Florida. I kept it for a long time and I finally decided to write him a letter and tell him as much as I can. And this letter came back. From the letters, he sounded very brokenhearted and I would be, too.
CHAPTER
32
“An Electrical Shock …”
After his participation in Operation Thunderhead, Moki Martin spent three years on destroyers in the fleet before returning to the SEALs as an instructor at Coronado. He advanced from warrant officer to lieutenant junior grade and served in SDV units in Coronado and the Philippine Islands.
In 1982, he was SDV, maintenance and diving officer for Naval Special Warfare Group One in Coronado and an avid competitor in the triathlon—the grueling test of endurance that involves running, bicycling, and swimming long distances.
He had survived combat in Vietnam, jumping into the Tonkin Gulf off the port of Haiphong, and the constant dangers of life as a SEAL. And then, one peaceful morning, his life changed dramatically. Moki Martin continues his story:
In October 1982, I was in training for the triathlon. I rode my bike every day, early in the morning, from Coronado to Imperial Beach and back.
I was on my way down to Imperial Beach about 6:25 in the morning. I saw this bike rider coming right at me. I was going with the traffic. He was going against traffic. I was probably going maybe twenty-five miles an hour, which was reasonably fast. There aren’t many curves on that road but there was one curve there and I happened to be on one side and the guy was on the other side so I didn’t see him until the last minute.
From what I saw of him, he was up on his pedals, standing up, looking at the ocean. He was a seventeen-year-old kid looking for surf. He didn’t see me. I yelled at him. He didn’t see me.
I tried to avoid him, to go around in the street. As I turned to go out in the street, he turned into me and we had a head-on collision.
An electrical shock went through my whole body and I knew something was wrong.
I had damaged my spinal cord at the C-5 level and become a quadriplegic.
As I learned, the first twenty-four-hour period is critical—if you can get the nerves to stop killing themselves.
Fortunately, I was the diving officer for the group. Within four hours, the diving doctor came to me and. said, “I read this thing about hyperbaric treatment, where you put someone in an oxygen-rich environment under pressure. It superoxygenates the blood and the oxygen in the blood minimizes the damage.”
This basically heals things from the inside out. The Russians had been doing that since the late ’40s. Even though it hadn’t been accepted by the navy, he said, “Let’s put him in the treatment.” [In the chamber used for decompression of divers.]
Well, I went there. I did hour-and-a-half treatments twice a day for ten days. And then after that ten-day treatment, they sent me to the Veterans Administration and they said, “We don’t use that method. We have the hyperbaric chamber, the only one in the system, but we use it for burn treatment.”
Our doctor goes up there and he convinces them to give me two more ten-day treatments.
Basically, I think it stopped the damage from the inside out. The outside of your spinal cord is the upper part of your body. And as you get to the inside, it’s your tailbone, legs, internal organs. It healed it from the inside out.
I’m now known as an incomplete quad. I’m like an upside-down paraplegic. I can actually walk but I can’t use my arms or hands. I can move my legs. I can actually ride a bike, a three-wheeler, anyway, and I attribute that—not to the common belief that my injury would have killed the average man—but to the fact that I began that treatment within four hours of my injury.
I’m a firm believer in hyperbaric treatment. Between that and steroids, that’s the future for treatment of spinal cord injury. It has to be done in hours. None of this, let him lay here and put him in one of those striker bed frames.
My internal systems work a lot better—not 100 percent, but a lot better because of that treatment—thanks to Naval Special Warfare and the diving doctor—and there’s nobody in this world who can convince me differently. I know a lot of quadriplegics and they are just amazed that I have this.
After a year in rehabilitation, Martin went back to college and earned a degree in fine arts. He has gained enough dexterity with his hands that he is able to draw and paint and embark on a new career as an artist. He also organized and manages the annual Superfrog Triathlon competition held annually at the North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado.
CHAPTER
33
Target: Libya
In the fall of 1987, press reports told how SEALs, operating from submarines, had staged a series of raids on the coast of Libya, blowing up electrical power and telephone poles. And, to confuse the Libyans, the reports said, the SEALs had used explosives of Soviet and Israeli manufacture and had left behind a collection of disinformation clues—such items as Israeli and Syrian cigarette butts and American facial tissue.
SEALs at Little Creek, who almost certainly would have been involved in such secret operations, laughed. They had not set foot on Libyan soil. But they also recalled plans for even more daring forays against Libyan targets.
In the early 1980s, U.S. intelligence received reports that Col. Mu’ammar Qaddafi, the Libyan ruler, had dispatched a team of hit men to the United States with orders to assassinate President Reagan and other American leaders.
The information was later learned to be false. But, at the time, it was taken very seriously, with heightened security at the White House and stepped-up protection for the president and other officials.
A small group of SEALs was hurriedly called to a secure intelligence building at the Norfolk Navy Base. They were ordered to draw up plans to destroy two diesel-powered submarines that had been supplied to Libya by the Soviet Union. The U.S. wanted to send a message to Qaddafi, but they wanted it to be nonattributable.
The SEALs were given free access to aerial and satellite photos of the harbor where the submarines were anchored. They spent hours leaning over the photos with magnifying glasses and special loupes of the kind used by jewelers. They saw the two submarines and, nearby, a white boat. They asked what it was. They were told it was Qaddafi’s personal yacht.
It was a frustrating night. Photos taken from a high-flying plane or a satellite, while technically impressive, weren’t detailed enough to plan a SEAL operation where the frogmen would actually have to come in contact with the target.
“Planes and satellites can’t tell you shit about what’s on the ground. We weren’t getting anything to plan a SEAL mission,” says one of those involved.
They worked through the night and came up with six options—none of them very good. The options included two operations using SDVs and four non-SDV operations.
There were a number of difficulties. The only submarine capable of delivering an SDV was the Grayback, but it was in the Pacific and its top speed was only five knots. It would take too long to
bring it to the Mediterranean.
Another problem was that the navy had no limpet mine that had been tested to be sure it would take down a submarine on the surface. The antisub mines they had were designed to sink a submerged sub. They had the LAM—the Mark 5 limpet assembly modular—designed to sink a surface ship. But it was big and heavy, a tough job for the strongest swimmer to push or pull to the target.
If the SEALs went in by rubber boat from a sub, they would have to go over or around a long jetty and pull or push their limpets to the subs. Then they would have the problem of getting away again.
Still another complication was that the weapons they had were not nonattributable. If the SEALs sank the subs, the Libyans might dive down to inspect the wreckage and find parts of the explosive devices that would identify them as American.
The team worked through the night. About 8:00 A.M., they presented their proposals to the commander of the surface fleet, Atlantic.
Despite the lack of a submarine, the SEALs’ recommended plan was to use an SDV rather than attempt a swimmer attack. They proposed that the U.S. acquire a foreign flag merchant ship and put the SDV aboard. Then the ship would feign engine trouble, ask permission to enter the Libyan harbor, and limp toward the harbor.
This would be done at night. If the Libyans sent out helicopters to inspect the ship, they could not see much. As the ship came within range, the SDV would be lowered into the water. The SEALs would enter the harbor, place their limpets on the two subs, set the timer, and then go back out to sea. There, they would be met by a submerged fast attack submarine. They would climb out of the SDV, sink it, and lock into the submarine.
The plans included sinking Qaddafi’s yacht, as well as the submarines. This caused serious objections: What if he was on it? What if he was killed? What if he was injured? What if there were other people on the yacht? The SEALs thought those were all pluses, but higher authorities disagreed.
Qaddafi, it was assumed, would blame the Americans and they would deny it. He would know the U.S. had done it but be unable to prove it. The U.S. would know he knew who did it and would get the message.