by Orr Kelly
My first malfunction, jump number 297, I remember it well. We were making a daytime jump into a drop zone overseas. A lot of times in your training jumps you take off and jump right there at the airport. This particular jump, from where we were taking off, we were transiting to another drop zone and jumping in. You have to set your altimeter accordingly. If that drop zone is five hundred feet higher, you have to adjust your altimeter to that drop zone altitude.
We had a mass of people—a large group of jumpers, about sixty people—so we tried to stagger the openings to the experience level of the jumper. Less experienced jumpers would open at 3, 000 feet, the middle group at 2, 500 feet, and the experienced level at 2, 000 feet. I jumped out of the bird and there were people all over the place. I was in the experienced level. So I said, “I’m getting out of here.” So I just pointed straight down and dove for the bottom to get out of the way.
Being young and cocky, of course, I took it down to about 1, 800 feet and then deployed my parachute. It malfunctioned. So I played with it a little bit and finally cut it away about 1, 300 feet, which is way too low. The reserve came out and it wasn’t looking real good. I played with it for just a second, pulled on the risers to get it inflated, reached up and pulled my toggles, and landed, just about that quick.
It was almost a jump into the party. It was the end of the trip, the end of training. We set up and had a party there. Bob Schamberger [Senior Chief Engineman Robert Schamberger, who died in a parachute mishap during the Grenada invasion of 1983] came over and handed me a beer, right there.
He said they were kind of worried about me.
I asked, “What’s the concern?”
He said, “Look at your altimeter!”
My altimeter still read 500 feet. Through some miscommunication, we had adjusted our altimeters the wrong way. So I didn’t even pull until 1, 300 feet. That was pretty low. I cut away [the main chute] around 800 feet so I pulled the reserve at 700 feet or so. [At that point, he was probably only about four seconds from impact.]
For that jump, I should have pulled my main at 2, 000 feet and probably would have cut away around 1, 800 feet. Everybody pulled low but only one guy was hurt. He broke his ankle or arm when he landed in a bunch of cow shit and slipped.
Have there been fatalities in your chute training?
No. We’ve had a few who got hurt. There was one fatality but it wasn’t related to training. Occasionally there’s an entanglement. Some guys have had to land together, on one chute. These are techniques we’ve developed. You can’t tell them exactly what to do. If you go through another guy’s lines, the top jumper can cut away and get his reserve deployed. The lower jumper has to deal with what he has. His chute might be all screwed up. If they entangle and the bottom jumper panics and cuts away, he might tangle up that upper jumper and it’s over then. The biggest thing we teach is communication: recognize, analyze, and react. You can talk to each other or communicate by radio. Even in a free fall, as instructors, we can talk to the students.
We teach what’s called accelerated free fall or AFF. On your first jumps, the instructor actually goes out holding onto the student. You take a grip on his harness and up on his shoulder and you exit with the student. You help him stable out. We have hand signals. If I want his legs to move, I give him this signal. We have them practice touching the rip cord so they know where that is. It just makes those first couple of jumps a lot smoother rather than just throwing him out of the airplane and letting him flail for himself.
The instructor’s right there. In the event of an emergency, the instructor can pull for the student. The AFF training is a civilian, rather than a military, rating and it is a real hard rating to get. I have all my instructors AFF trained. When our student first goes out of the airplane, the instructor is right there with him. We progress him up. We continue to go out with him on the exit and then we let him go but we stay right with him.
The instructor stays until the student pulls, then clears the distance and he pulls. On the first couple of jumps we have the student follow us in under canopy so we can show him where the wind line [the way the wind is blowing] is and the proper approach to the target.
We teach them to land into the wind. You might have eighteen knots forward speed under canopy. If I have six or eight knots of ground wind, by turning into the wind I’m down to ten to twelve knots. Then you pull your toggles to stall and flare [a sudden pull on the lines to dump air from the parachute as the chutist reaches the ground], bleeding off all the airspeed right as you touch down.
At night, it depends on the experience of the jumper. We tell them to come in with half to three-quarter brakes. Be prepared to do a PLF—parachute landing fall. We set up lights for the landing pattern. I usually try to land right near a light so I can see the ground. When we jump equipment, I lower the equipment. Then I bring it in until I hear the equipment hit and then do a dynamic flare.
When the student can land on his own, the instructor will fall down almost to the bottom, about 2, 000 feet, mainly because we’ve got to get down, get our chutes packed, grab our next student, and go back up. We’ll make eight jumps a day during the initial part of the training.
Then we let them start exiting on their own and flying. They tend to progress a lot faster. The way we used to teach, the instructor would go with him. But if the student is flipping and spinning he doesn’t really learn anything. He’s looking straight down to make sure the ground is there instead of at the instructor.
We have a school at El Centro, with a classroom building and berthing. The students come for four weeks and make an average of thirty-five to forty jumps. We start with basic free fall and they have twelve jumps to pass the first test. We lose a few of them. They can’t pass that test. Then we throw in equipment. We start jumping at night. We bring in oxygen and take them up to a night, combat equipment, oxygen jump. That’s the level we try to get them to. Once we get that accomplished, we talk about grouping and free fall. An instructor might have five students and he’ll go out as the leader and teach them advanced techniques. Then we get into the HAHO, flying formations under canopy.
In training, about the time the trainees are all nice and cocky—they’ve done this thirty to forty times and they’re all laid back in their seats—we do an emergency bailout. The pilot turns on the bells and whistles. The instructors jump up, start running around, throw the side door open. We get them out. Then the instructors jump out and have fun. I enjoy it.
I enjoy the teaching. You meet a kid the first day. You hold his hand on the first few jumps. A few weeks later you see this kid with full combat equipment, on oxygen, he’s doing real good, landing right on the target. It’s a real good feeling.
PART SEVEN
SEALs IN ACTION
CHAPTER
42
Jump into a Dark Sea
In October 1983, the prime minister of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada was killed after being toppled from power in a leftist coup. President Reagan, concerned for the safety of a group of American medical students studying on the island, ordered a hastily organized invasion of Grenada.
U.S. special operations forces, including the new anti-terrorist SEAL Team SIX, were picked to lead the way. One group was assigned to parachute into the sea near the Point Salines airfield and go ashore to prepare for a landing there by army Rangers. Four SEALs were lost at sea in that nighttime drop. Engineman Master Chief Johnny Walker tells of his role in that phase of the invasion:
I was on the Grenada jump—jump master in the lead bird.
Sometimes in the team area, you can tell if something is up, the way people are moving. But on Friday afternoon [21 October] we all went on normal liberty. We had a wedding to go to the next day. The next morning [Saturday] the beepers went off and everything went pretty quick from there.
There wasn’t a lot of time to brief everybody on who was where and what was going on. Our job was to get there and take orders when we got there. We had two birds involved
, two different groups. [The SEALs took off from Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, in two four-engine C-130 air force transport planes on Sunday, 23 October 1983.]
The jump was actually pretty strange. It was set up as more of an administrative jump, a daylight jump. We weren’t in any particular threat area because we were pretty far off the coast. I went up to the pilots and asked them the approximate flight time to the drop so I could plan on telling my boys to suit up. I think they gave me something around three hours. [Walker recalls there were about fourteen SEALs divided between the two aircraft.]
I got the guys suited up and was ready for the aircraft to start giving me time warnings. We didn’t get any time warnings so I went back up to the pilots to ask and they said it was going to be another couple of hours. So I got the guys undressed and we had them take their parachutes off. We waited for the aircraft to give us time warnings.
The weather report we got was the seas were calm, the winds were calm. When we did finally start getting our time warnings, we got everybody suited up. When the ramp opened up, I noticed it was pitch-black outside. We couldn’t see a thing.
I grabbed a flashlight off the air crewman and tried to stick it on the boat. [Each plane carried a fiberglass Boston Whaler loaded with equipment, to be dropped with a cargo chute.] We had no lights rigged anywhere. We were told it was going to be a daylight drop.
The boat left the bird and we jumped behind it. When we hit the water, the seas were large and the wind was very strong. We weren’t prepared for this at all. We had all done water jumps before. But we didn’t know we were jumping into high seas. I don’t know whether we would have done anything different knowing the conditions, but it might have been nice to know.
My jump, I got out, had a couple of twists. We were supposed to be around fifteen hundred feet. I think it was a lot lower than that. I got out of the line twists and shortly after that I hit the water. Hard! I never turned my parachute into the wind because I didn’t have time.
I ripped a lot of equipment I had on my body, ripped it off. We were jumping with full equipment, our combat equipment—load-bearing harness, magazines, canteens, first aid kit. Most of the guys had their rifles. I was the 60 [M60 machine gun] gunner at the time so my 60 was in the boat.
When I hit the water, my fins got ripped off, some of the pouches I had on my load-bearing equipment got ripped off. The parachute never deflated. It remained inflated and started dragging me through the water, almost from wave to wave, dragging me facedown, swallowing water rapidly. I reached up and grabbed the lines of the parachute and started dragging them in, trying to collapse the parachute. I remember, I knew I was on my last second there. The parachute collapsed.
You felt like you were drowning?
Oh, yeah, because I couldn’t get any air. It was just forcing water into my mouth. And I had a lot of the lines all around me. I just set there for a brief second, almost in awe of what had just happened. Then the parachute started to reinflate. But I had time to get to my knife and start cutting lines and got enough of them cut so it didn’t start dragging me again. The knife that I used to cut myself free with had just been bought for me as a pseudobirthday present from [Quartermaster First Class] Kevin Lundberg, one of the guys who died on that jump. He and I were best friends.
I just started swimming in the direction I thought the boat might be. Obviously, the light I had clipped on the boat had come off. I was groping in the dark, trying to call out for other people.
How high were the seas and wind?
Say the waves were six to eight and the wind at least twenty knots.
Would you normally not jump under those conditions?
Actually, for a combat jump, we probably would have. But the guys would have been more prepared as far as what to do when they hit the water.
You’re all alone?
I just swam in the direction I thought the boat might be. I lost my bearings. There was a ship down there. They were there to assist as necessary. I knew my job was to find the rest of my group, find the boat, and get on with the mission.
I could see the ship; it had lights on it. I swam around for an unknown amount of time. The ship was moving around a little bit. I was worn out from swimming so I headed toward the ship. As I got close to it, I heard someone fire three shots. My instinct was, everyone’s on the boat except me and they’re looking for me. So I swam in the direction of the shots I heard. I was still pretty worn out from swimming with all those clothes on [camouflage greens, boots, and a life vest, but no fins] so I decided to head for the ship and get to safety.
Right as I got to the ship I ran into one other jumper out there. They had a cargo net rigged over the bow and we climbed up. We were the last two to be recovered that night. Which means somebody was alive, one of those four guys, was alive until the last minute because we questioned everybody and it wasn’t anybody who was on the ship who fired the three rounds. Someone was alive until almost the very end.
Everyone had recovered back to the ship from both drops when I got there. One boat was recovered and one was lost. We put a group together—eight or ten of us, enough to fill one boat. We got some weapons from the ship and ammunition, that were lost in the other boat, and launched out for the mission.
We were right there, almost to the island—we could see the island, see the lights of the city—and we got spotted by a patrol boat. Well, not spotted; I think they may have heard the motors, saw the white water from our wake, something like that. We came off the throttles to slow down, almost dead in the water, and of course we lost an engine then. [The boat was powered by two outboard motors. They had a tendency to quit running if the throttle was pulled back too far.] We never really got that engine back.
Were there air force people with you?
Yes, we had some CCT with us. [CCT stands for combat control team, an air force unit that controls air traffic under combat conditions.] They were on the ship waiting for us. I’m not sure how they got to the ship.
What was the original plan?
We were going to get in our boats, go over and pick up the CCT guys, and head in to the island and take a look at the runway where the actual landing was going to happen, to see if the runway was clear and if it would hold a 141 [C-141 jet transport]. Our job was to take them in, get them to the runway so they could make a determination if 141s could land, if they hadn’t strung wire across the runway. Basically, our job was to take them in, get them to the runway, and provide security for them.
Once we lost the engine, we decided to go back to the ship and regroup. We got picked up next morning about first light. They came in and dropped two more boats for us. We made an attempt the second night. We went in that night with two boats and all the people we could get together.
The SEALs jumped into the sea Sunday night and made their first attempt to reach the island during that night. They returned to the ship Monday morning and made their second attempt Monday night.
On the way in, we lost another boat. The engines went down on it. We transferred as many people as we could. Idling around, circling around, we lost the other boat. The boats were old and tired. We were just in the process of acquiring new boats.
Did you get close to shore the second time? Did you see the airdrop by the Rangers?
Close, but not close enough to swim in. We were in the boats, dead in the water. We watched the birds come over. They were coming over us and starting to drop over the island. We finally got communications and the ship came and found us and recovered us. That was the end of the war for us.
We stayed on the ship that day, that night. The ship was right off the coast then, pretty much off the harbor. We watched one of the helos get shot down, I think it was a Cobra. They [the Grenadians] had patrol boats but they weren’t a big threat.
Other members of SEAL Team SIX were embattled ashore. One unit was trapped at the governor-general’s mansion, on a hill overlooking the city of St. George, where they had gone to rescue the governor-general, S
ir Paul Scoon. Another unit, whose assignment was to take control of a radio transmitter, became involved in a furious firefight with Grenadians armed with heavy weapons and armored personnel carriers.
We recovered some people from the radio station. The SEALs naturally headed for the water. Some swam out to the ship, probably a couple of miles. A couple of them stole a small boat and came out that way. There were helos in the area that we had some SEALs on. They recovered guys out of the water.
From the ship, the SEALs could see and hear, on the radio, the air force AC-130 Spectre gunships supporting the members of Team SIX trapped at the governor’s mansion. The battle at the radio station occurred so quickly that the SEALs had to escape to the sea before the gunships could come to their aid.
The Spectre gunships, we could hear them talking to the guys and the support the Spectre was giving them, which was excellent.
I remember listening on the radio. One of them [Spectres] was running out of fuel. There was going to be a delay between when he had to leave to go back and get fuel and the bird to come in and relieve him, to take up support. I remember the pilot feathering some engines to save fuel so there wouldn’t be that lapse, for fear that if there was that lapse, the guys at the governor’s mansion would have been overrun. Those guys did a hell of a job. [When the fighting died down, members of SEAL Team SIX all reported to the airfield ashore.]
We gathered up our whole team, put ’em on a bird, and sent them home.
Of the people on your plane, how many didn’t make it?
It’s been so long. I think it was two, maybe three. I’m trying to remember where Kenny Butcher [Machinist Mate First Class Kenneth Butcher] was. I know Lundberg was on the other bird, I think Butcher was on it too. I had [Senior Chief Engineman Robert] Schamberger and [Hull Technician First Class Stephen] Morris on my bird.