by Orr Kelly
What happened to those four men?
It’s just speculation that they drowned from being drug in the water. One guy survived right to the very end. No telling. It could have been sharks, for all we know. We never found them.
CHAPTER
43
A Beautiful Day to Go to War
Lieutenant Bobby McNabb, now assigned to a SEAL team at Little Creek, was an E-6, a midlevel enlisted man, and a member of SEAL Team SIX at the time of the Grenada invasion in October 1983. This is his account of the team’s baptism by fire:
I was having breakfast with my wife and kids—I’m thinking it was a Saturday or Sunday—and I remember the beeper going off.
I thought, “Damnit, another drill. I’ll be back later.”
Shoot, I came back two weeks later. She was kind of used to it. She was broke in already. We just didn’t come back. But they [the wives] had figured it out, what was going on. In reality, she thought we were going to Beirut because, a week or so before Grenada was the Beirut bombing. [Actually, the bombing of a marine barracks in Beirut, in which 237 Americans were killed, occurred on Sunday, 23 October. The members of SEAL Team SIX had been called to duty the previous day.]
The wives, they get together. When everybody takes off, at first they don’t think about it. The beeper goes off, you go in to work. They wait around until the afternoon to see if the boys are just getting together to have a beer. Marcinko [Richard Marcinko, who had just been relieved as commander of SEAL Team SIX] was notorious for that. He wanted somebody to come over and watch football. But by the afternoon, the wives would start calling to find out who’s gone and who’s not.
Before you know it, they say, whoa, all these guys are gone! Then they all get together over at somebody’s house and gab with each other and then keep the net going until people start returning. Well, after the first night when nobody returns and there’s no word from anybody, they kind of start thinking something’s up. Then they started watching the news and here everything’s on Beirut. One and one equals four and so they say, “They’re going to Beirut.”
The OpSec [operational security] was pretty good, until the news came out with the four guys drowning.
Hell, in ’83, nobody knew where Grenada was.
We’re all going, “Where the hell is Grenada?”
I said, “I think it’s a Caribbean island.”
So I got some aeronautical charts I had because I was a pilot. [McNabb dropped out of the navy in 1978 and qualified to fly both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters before returning to the service and joining SEAL Team SIX in 1980.]
I said, “Well, here it is. It’s down by Barbados.”
It was so comical. During one of the initial briefings, I’m trying to be the dutiful type guy and ask the right questions. In charge of our little group was [Lt. Wellington] “Duke” Leonard.
And I go, “Duke, what kind of uniforms have they got?”
He goes, “I don’t know.”
“What kind of weapons do they have?”
“Well … I don’t know.”
“How many are there going to be?”
He holds up this yellow piece of legal pad with chicken scratches on it and says, “This is all we’ve got.”
We all started laughing. We said, “Well, there’s no sense asking any more questions.” We realized right away that the intel was not what it was supposed to be.
I remember hearing Duke’s famous line, “Oh, they’ll probably just throw their guns down.” Well, when we landed, they sure as hell weren’t throwing their guns down.
We were told, there’s like six APCs [armored personnel carriers] on the whole island. From my vantage point I must have counted twenty going by us. Six! They must be going around us in circles. It was a hell of a lot more than six.
After our initial stop at Barbados, we flew to Grenada and fast-roped in at the back of the governor’s mansion. [The assignment for these SEALs was to land at the mansion of Governor-general Sir Paul Scoon, on a hill overlooking the city of St. Georges, to protect him, his wife, and aides.]
We were crammed in the back of the helo en route to Grenada. We had just crossed over land. We were maybe twenty minutes out at that time. The crewman, I remember him tapping me on the shoulder and having the feed-tray open on the 60 [M60 machine gun] on the door of the HH-60 helo, the Blackhawk. He’s standing there with a belt of ammo in one hand, shrugging his shoulders. Oh, great, he doesn’t know how to load the gun.
I’ve got all my belted ammo around me, my gun sitting like this. [In his lap.] I had to hand my gun to someone else, push everyone out of the way so I could turn around and get up and load the gun for him. It turns out they were short of crewmen and he was another pilot and didn’t know how to load the gun. I found that out afterward. God only knows if he used it.
When we were flying in, I was up on ICS [intercom] with the pilots. I remember hearing on an AM transmitter, that they were well aware we were coming.
“The Americans are coming. Get your arms.”
That had a sort of disheartening note to it. We—the SEALs—wanted to do the op at night but were unable to because it had to coincide with the marine landing, which had to be in the daytime. At least this is what I understood.
Actually, it worked out kind of well, due to the hard time finding the house. We had flown over the house and had to circle back to fastrope in. It would have been extremely difficult finding it at night.
On the way in, the helo took sixty-three rounds. One of the pilots and two SEALs in the back were hit. That was the helo that had to be taken out to the Wasp. They had to put a fire hose in the exhaust side of the engine to get it shut down. They couldn’t shut the helo down.
The guy who was flying it was a warrant officer—an ex-Ranger. He just sat there while we were getting shot up and made sure we could all get out before he moved. We wound up getting shot at by a quad .51 [caliber machine gun], which was back behind the mansion. We had a hard time finding a place to fast-rope so we had to hover looking for a place, all the time getting shot at. It was kind of bad from that perspective. It couldn’t have been any worse.
The helicopter carried two ninety-foot ropes. The SEALs, wearing heavy leather gloves, grabbed the rope with their hands and slid down as though it were a flexible fireman’s pole, about a second apart.
With all that shooting, we were just trying to get the hell out of the helo.
I was to be the last guy of our squad to exit the helo. The worst part of it was there was a guy in front of me, [Lt.] John Koenig, the officer in charge of our group. The guy in front of him, [Petty Officer] Larry Jackson, had got his MX radio caught on the fuel bladder webbing in the back of the helo. So Jackson’s holding the rope and trying to get out. Koenig is trying to push him out. I’m trying to push out Koenig and Jackson and the helo is getting shot to hell.
So I said, “Screw this!” I just put my shoulder into Koenig and drove him and Larry out. Finally his MX radio broke off his web belt. Larry went out, John went out, and I just leaped out. I think we just got our ninety-foot fast ropes and there was about three foot of rope on the ground. I was doing about 100 miles an hour down the rope and landed on top of Koenig, knocked the dog shit out of Koenig. John still swears I did it deliberately.
I was weighing 215 and carrying a thousand rounds of 7.62 and an HK-21 [German-made machine gun] and a 9mm pistol as backup. I had a total of 135 pounds of gear on. We knew we weren’t moving far so all I carried was bullets and guns. We just had a couple of canteens of water. No food or things like that.
Gormly [Comdr. Robert Gormly, who had taken over as commander of SEAL Team SIX from Richard Marcinko a short time before] was still in the helo. The plan was he would land after everything was secure. The problem was the helo was so shot up and it had to be used to medevac the copilot, who was shot in the leg and the face. So Gormly never actually made it in to the mansion. The next time I saw Gormly was when we got back to the airfield a day or two later.
The securing of the house was relatively uneventful. There were a couple of good shoot-outs but nothing of super significance. I got into one shoot-out when two Cubans or Grenadians jumped out of the bush about twenty yards away and started shooting at me. I was surprised and pissed that they were shooting at me. So I opened up with my HK. Three- to four-round bursts, bullshit! I shot about seventy-five to one hundred rounds. It was just like the Predator movie.
We spread out around the house about ten or twenty yards apart and about twenty-five yards away from the house. It was a real pretty place. Beautiful view. There was a hedgerow I kind of cut out and sat in the shade. It was a beautiful October day, a nice comfortable temperature. You couldn’t ask for a better day to go to war. If it had been August, it would have been miserable. It would have been 110 degrees.
Did you have any food?
We anticipated it would be only a few hours. I figured, hell, I’m not going to starve. We didn’t think about it until a day or so later. Then we were powerful hungry. Our biggest worry was batteries for the radios.
During the first day, one of our guys pissed me off. A bad guy shot an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] over the top of us. It hit the house and blew up.
Our guy says, “I saw him right over there, probably about a hundred yards away.”
“Well, why didn’t you shoot him?”
“Well, he was a hundred yards. I didn’t figure I could hit him.”
Hit him? Hell, I could hit him with a pistol that far.
Most of us stayed in the perimeter during our entire time there. We didn’t have anyplace to go. One guy was the relieving watch. He’d come out and you’d go in the house and take a combat nap for an hour.
Duke Leonard, the funniest thing I recall, was he called in a 105 strike 360 degrees around the house, twenty-five meters out, from an AC-130. He’s up six to ten grand. [Six thousand to ten thousand feet.]
I’m listening on my radio and I hear Duke pass, “Yeah, call in a 105 strike 360 degrees around the house.” I look back to the house. I’m about from here to where that lady is from the house [indicating a woman walking by].
I go, “Hell, I’m twenty-five meters from the house. Holy shit!”
I recall lying down. You could hear the bullets start to go around the house. I was along the driveway in the hedgerow. The branches [from nearby trees] are falling down right around me. So I’m lying down behind a little curb, scared shitless. Well, real concerned. And then I thought, boy are you stupid. They’re shooting from above. What are you going to do? So I sat up. I figured at least I’ll give less of a target for the plane.
Duke still swears to this day that they were shooting the 105 and I still argue with him. I later talked to the pilot who got the call and he said he wouldn’t shoot the 105 that close to U.S. troops. What he did shoot was the 20mm. He zipped it around the house for what seemed like an hour but was probably thirty to sixty seconds.
What Duke was hearing was the 40mm shooting back up from the APCs that had surrounded us, trying to hit the Spectre.
There was one [APC] on my side [of the mansion] less than from here to the road, a hundred yards, seventy-five yards. Later that night, we called in a 20mm strike on him and oh, man, it was eerie.
Needless to say, no one got hit from our side. They did kill something like twenty-three guys later that day on the other side. There were a bunch of guys trying to come up and we called in an AC-130 strike on them. They smoked ’em. They must have shot three thousand rounds of 20mm at them. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard how those things shoot—20mm? God, they’re brutal. It just went on and on and on. I’m going, man, I’m glad I’m not on the receiving end of that.
That was in the daytime. The only night shoot I saw was when we called in a strike on an APC on my side. He was probably fifty to seventy-five yards away. He wasn’t shooting at us. He was trying to hit the plane. You could hear the plane, kind of see it outlined up there. The plane shot the 20mm at him. Every time one of those rounds hit they kind of give off a spark. Well, he was hitting dead on top of the APC. The Spectre hit the APC so many times it had a hellish glow over the top of it. You could see the bodies getting blown about. Oh, man, it was brutal. They really messed that thing up. It was pretty good from my perspective. I thought it was neat.
There was always something going on. That first morning, the one marine Cobra that got shot down and landed on the beach? Oh, if you want to talk about a heroic job of landing, find that guy. I ran into him a couple of years later and he had a helacious story about how he flew that thing.
The marines are notorious at doing everything doctrinal, follow the book, no variations.
The Cobras were making strafing runs at this building. I remember watching them flying in, always the same pattern. And then they’d do a 360 and come back. They were just doing a donut. I watched the Cobra get hit and head for the shore. As the helo flew over the top of us, I heard this sickening sound. Being a helo pilot, I thought, boy, he’s been hit bad. He was doing an auto rotation heading toward the shore. The helo caught fire after he landed. Then we heard what sounded like a huge firefight, but it was the helo caught fire and all the rounds started cooking off. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have enough people to send and help.
[Petty Officer] Timmy Prusack was there with us. Real funny guy. The most jovial SEAL you’ll ever meet. When the bad guys were coming at us, Timmy came around to each of the positions. He’s a big, barrel-chested guy. One of those jovial laughs, ho, ho, ho. He comes up, goes, “Bobby, there’s twenty-five guys coming from the other side, ho, ho, ho.” I go, “Oh, great, Timmy.”
I figured we were going to get overrun. So I took another hundred rounds and linked it up to the machine gun.
“Thanks a lot, Timmy. Thanks for telling me.”
Did the soldiers ever attack you?
They never were given the opportunity because Spectre took them out prior to getting to our position.
One of the biggest problems we had was communications. A lot of that was just lack of equipment. Bob Gormly had the comm guy in our helo. But because the helo didn’t land, the radioman who had the UHF/SatCom radio never made it. We didn’t own all the radios we had wanted or needed. We still had comm, but only with MXs, so we didn’t have the ability to talk directly to the Spectre. The comm link had to go back to the airfield, down to the marines, and they would call in the strike. We had our own AC-130—sometimes two—overhead most of the time. Except one time, they both took off because they were running out of fuel. Also, those guys were flying like thirty hours straight. They were ordered to land and get some sleep.
Under the original plan, the SEALs would secure the mansion and they, along with Scoon, his wife, and aides, would be taken out by helicopter. But the heavy firing prevented the helicopters from coming in. The SEALs thus remained at the mansion all day Tuesday and Tuesday night, growing increasingly worried about their dwindling ammunition supply. Finally, on Wednesday morning, a marine company reached the SEAL perimeter.
The marines came to our outer perimeter. It was kinda anticlimactic. We just took the people down to the soccer field and flew to the airfield.
PART EIGHT
THE INNOVATORS
CHAPTER
44
Birth of the STAB
SEALs and the UDT before them have always prided themselves on their ability to improvise and, often, innovate, creating new pieces of equipment to meet their special needs.
In 1966, after having served in Vietnam, Lt. Roy Boehm, who had been the first commander of SEAL Team TWO, developed an ingenious sensor system for keeping track of the movement of Viet Cong units in the Vietnam delta.
At that time, the U.S. military, in great secrecy, had begun using sensors that could detect the movement of enemy forces. Some of the sensors detected sounds. Others detected reverberations in the earth. Some even “smelled” the scent given off by the human body. But the information the SEALs received from these senso
rs often came too late to be of use. Boehm wanted real-time intelligence.
Working in California’s Sacramento Delta, an area somewhat similar to parts of Vietnam, he set up two sensor vans with a long antenna carried aloft by a balloon. When a sensor detected movement, the signal would be picked up by one van and flashed to screens in the neighboring van.
Two sets of vans were sent to Vietnam and, Boehm says, quickly proved their worth—even if the $1.5 million cost was double his budget.
Boehm’s one concern was that the Viet Gong would defeat the system by shooting down the balloons. He concluded that they didn’t shoot them down because they came to rely on the balloons as a navigation aid themselves.
Another major contribution was made by Jack Macione. He tells how he developed the STAB (SEAL team assault boat), that proved a mainstay of SEAL operations in Vietnam:
Before the Cuba crisis, we had bought these trimaran hulls—a commercial hull called a Tricat. We were going to stand in this thing and fire 3.55-inch rockets.
After the Cuba mission was canceled, I went to the skipper.
I said, “Hey, the way this is envisioned, it is going to be insanity. We’re going to kill more of our own people with back blasts than the guys we’re shooting at. I’ve got the design ability. What I’d like to do is grab a couple of guys and we’ll put together a prototype and come up with a good SEAL team boat.”
At that time and right to this day there is a void in boats between the rubber boat and the MSSC [thirty-six-foot medium SEAL support craft used in Vietnam] or whatever the hell they are using today.
What I envisioned was a lightweight, outboard-driven boat that would be helicopter-transportable and could go in the back of a C-130.
You could pick it up and move it. Certainly the crew could move it off a sandbar.
It would be very versatile. It would be a package boat, come as a kit. You would configure the boat in a matter of minutes or an hour or so for your mission configuration.