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

by Orr Kelly

  I saw no reason this boat could not have the firepower of a destroyer plus the versatility of a high-performance craft.

  We came up with a twenty-foot six-inch trimaran about seven feet wide. It was a good platform. Eventually we had twin 150-hp Mercs on it—Quicksilver racing units. We sent our guys to Mercury outboard motor school to learn to hot-tune these Quicksilver units.

  The boat, fully loaded, would get up on the step in about five seconds and she’d do about eighty miles an hour with a full load.

  It could be configured in many configurations. I kept the problem items down to a minimum. We didn’t have any onboard computers. We didn’t have any exotic electronics. It was just pure bones. The boat could carry fifteen or sixteen guys but the crew consisted of a maximum of three people—coxswain, gunner, and what I called the backup man in case one of us gets hit.

  We had a flat area six feet by fourteen or fifteen feet. Off to the right side as you look forward we had a little cocoon the coxswain got into and it was a kevlar [armor] cocoon to fend off light fire.

  The boat had ten gun positions, pintel mounts. If you had two M60s [machine guns] on each side they could be moved into any position you wanted. Literally, you could have ten guns.

  For our main battery, we had configured it so we could actually put six 106mm recoilless rifles on the boat, firing forward. And they could fire all at once. The idea was, if we had to sink shipping at the pier, we’d act like an old PT boat and fire those 106 recoilless.

  Now the 106 recoilless has the firepower of a five-inch gun. So we literally had more firepower than a destroyer on this twenty-foot boat.

  We needed a fire aiming system. In order to be on target, what I designed was, we had two .30 caliber fixed mounted and bore-sighted machine guns. They fired by a foot lever. The recoilless fired by another foot lever. The .30 calibers fired full tracer. They were bore sighted at five hundred yards or whatever else we wanted. So when the tracers were on target, the 106s were on target.

  The coxswain controlled the speed of the boat with his right hand, steered the boat with his left, and fired the .30 calibers or the 106s with his right or left foot.

  You aimed the boat by steering left or right and you played the ups and downs of the waves. That twenty-foot boat was bouncing all over the place so it took some training. We took it out and tested it and you could get real good with it. It was just a matter of timing, of training.

  One of the problems we had is that the 106 round was going to pass eighteen inches from the coxswain’s head. We had plenty of information on what happens when you’re behind a recoilless. But we had no information on what happens when you’re in front of a recoilless.

  So we took it down to Dam Neck [a naval installation south of Virginia Beach, Virginia] to do some testing. We weren’t exactly a test lab. We were doing it all by the seat of our pants. We took a tin can, a C-ration can. We stretched a condom over it to kind of simulate an ear drum. We put it in the place of the coxswain’s head and we fired the recoilless. It blew that condom right to shreds.

  We figured we had a problem. We didn’t have the technology. We didn’t have the time. We didn’t have the knowledge. So I just got in the coxswain’s seat, put a football helmet on, or a motorcycle helmet, and I fired. And we found out there was no problem whatsoever for the coxswain.

  In the center of the boat at that time we had a .50 caliber [heavy machine gun]. The .50 caliber was more of a problem than the 106. The .50 caliber had a hard crack to it. So you could feel it on your ears.

  The coxswain had a helmet with a boom mike and earphones connected to the radio system. The radio was nothing more than our backpack radio. The whole idea of the boat was, if you took a hit and the radio got shot, another backpack could be put in.

  If the boat got a hole in it, it was a one-hour patch with fiberglass. If the engine stopped, take it off, put a new one on. If you want to dick with it, do it later. I used to tell guys to take the engine off and throw it in the river. We didn’t have time to work on them when you could get new engines for three thousand dollars.

  Another innovation we had was a minigun—a 7.62mm minigun. We were the first boat to have one. I literally stole the minigun from a firm out of Washington. I was told by a navy commander if I took that gun he’d court-martial me. We got the gun, through legal ways, but we stole it.

  We had the first minigun in the world mounted on a boat. The gun would fire two thousand to four thousand rounds a minute.

  Another thing we had: we designed a wire cutter on the front of the boat. One of the dangers I felt was that they could string wire across the stream and it would decapitate you if you were going at high speed and hit that wire. But we never encountered any wire.

  The boat was parachute deployable. You kick out the boat with all the gear on board and then the guys go out. We actually knew we could parachute the boat with a crew in it.

  We had also designed to do a LOLEX, a low-level extraction, of the boat. [This is a tactic in which a cargo plane flies close to the surface and a load is dropped out the cargo hatch as the plane flies on.] There was no reason we couldn’t have LOLEXed that boat onto the water with a crew in it. It is not one of those things you want to practice. You practice it with dummies. But when you have to, you do it.

  The boat could do 100 to 150 mph and be okay. We never went that fast. So to LOLEX it at one hundred or ninety knots was well within its capability. It would be like going over a wave. There would be seatbelts. I would have been willing to do it.

  Another thing we tested was a helo lift. We were doing one test over Little Creek [the naval amphibious base near Virginia Beach, Virginia]. The helicopter was at about one thousand feet. The boat started fish-tailing. The pilot got panicky and he pickled the boat.

  As it fell, it got forward lift and she started flying. It was falling but also moving at a high rate of speed horizontally. It flew in and almost made a perfect landing in the parking lot. But the engine caught a car and she went nose down and destroyed about five or six cars. The boat stayed together so well we eventually used it as a target boat in some of our other testing.

  One thing we worried about was, the Viet Cong had B-40 rockets with armor-piercing antitank rounds. We had hightech armor plate that could be bolted inside the boat. One of the things I inadvertently came up with and didn’t realize was, this gave us the first stand-off system for armor-piercing rounds.

  What I came up with inadvertently was what ended up on all the armored vehicles. And that was a stand-off or triggering shield. If the round hit us, it would trigger on the fiberglass. The armor plate on the inside would catch all the shrapnel. Because it was triggered six inches away from the armor plate, the whole effect of the shell was defeated.

  We took a boat to Dam Neck, put six silhouette targets in it, and we fired rounds at it from recoilless rifles. It was concluded that any injuries sustained in the boat would be from flying debris, not from the round itself.

  We took ten STABs to Vietnam. We used them every day and never sustained one injury in the STABs. We had many people shoot B-40s at the boat but never hit it. It was a dot out there when she was running high speed. In fact, except for one occasion, we never even got hit at all. I had the rare opportunity of being there the only occasion where we did take fire.

  We were making insertions off a river. I think it was the Mekong. We had put the teams in. It was about seven or eight o’clock the next morning. I got a call on the radio. We had a team in trouble.

  They said, “We’re surrounded. We’re taking automatic fire. Get us out.”

  We were tied up to a landing ship, out on booms. You walk out on the boom and then down a rope into the boat.

  We scrambled. We ran out the boom, down the rope, and kicked it in the ass. I was the coxswain. We’re doing seventy or eighty miles an hour, just that quick. We had two M60s, plus the .30 calibers out front.

  So I was hauling ass downriver and I was talking to Rick Trani [Lt. Frederick
E. Trani] with my boom mike. Rick got killed later. Actually, he didn’t get killed. He died of an improper transfusion, wrong blood. He was a new officer on the scene. He had his crew in and he was in trouble.

  So coming downriver, I said to Rick, “Give me a flare so I can find you.”

  “Okay, here it comes!”

  I could hear it. It’s one of those you bang and they fire.

  He says, “Shit!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The goddamn thing hit a palm tree. It didn’t clear the area.”

  “Give me another flare.”

  Bang, he popped another.

  “Son of a bitch, it hit the damn palm tree again.”

  So just at that point I saw the water alive with live rounds.

  So I says, “Never mind, Rick, I got you spotted.”

  What was happening was, he was backing up to the river and the enemy was unloading on him and the bullets were coming through the jungle and into the river.

  Wait a minute. I know what I had on board. Besides my two crew members I had a reserve officer who was a combat artist. He had been put on a couple of months of active duty to come over and do artwork on Vietnam. Well he had a .45 strapped to him.

  I kicked the STAB in the ass, made a ninety-degree turn right into the embankment. I had my M60 machine gun laying down fire left and right. And Rick’s crew came over the bow and into the boat.

  The combat artist, he was unloading his .45 into the jungle. He was having a ball.

  We got everybody on board, kicked the thing around, put it up on its tail, knocked it down, and headed back upriver.

  I turned around to see how everybody was. Across the stern of the boat there was a stitch of machine-gun bullets on the inside of the stern. They walked across the stern and right up onto one engine, went through the cover, hit the flywheel, and just died in the engine. It didn’t stop the engine. Those bullet holes were like six or eight inches apart. The bullets had to have come over the bow and had to have come over when we had all the people on board. Not one person got hit. I mean, bullets had to be going between legs, under arms, over shoulders. I mean, it was an absolute miracle nobody got hit.

  We had some tricks we would do with the STAB boat.

  The Viet Cong would put a sentinel at the mouth of a tributary. A boat like a PBR [patrol boat, river] would come up the river and then turn into a tributary. All the tributaries, for the most part, were one way. You couldn’t go up and come out somewhere else.

  So the Viet Cong would put a sentry on the tributary, hidden. When the boat went by, he would beat the tom toms, literally, and they would set an ambush where the boat had to come back downriver.

  One of my favorite tricks, using the STAB, was to have a Huey [UH-1 helicopter] lift us. Now a Huey could lift the boat and that was part of the design.

  It would lift the boat, fully loaded with the crew in it, and they would set us in up a tributary.

  Then we would come downriver. Here is a situation where no boat went upriver so there was no alert. And our motors were quiet. The motors were so quiet that, on night insertions when we were idling in, we used to keep a guy back there with one hand on each engine so he could tell the coxswain if either of them shut down. Sometimes those big engines would just shut down and you wouldn’t know. That’s how quiet they were.

  We would come downriver and we could catch the Viet Cong sunbathing, swimming, bullshitting, playing cards, all on the riverbanks. Of course with the miniguns and the M60s we just cleaned clock, real quick. And then we’d haul ass.

  CHAPTER

  45

  Dogs on Patrol

  The SEALs’ innovations extended beyond inanimate objects. One of their most intriguing experiments was the use of dogs in Vietnam. Bill Bruhmuller pioneered the use of dogs by SEAL Team TWO and Bo Burwell, who later served with the team in the delta, valued the use of dogs on patrols in the northern part of South Vietnam.

  Bruhmuller tells how the SEALs found the dogs a mixed blessing:

  When we first went to Vietnam, we didn’t know the terrain or anything like that. I got the idea that maybe having a scout dog would be a pretty good idea. We heard about the army using them to get success. Our CO, who was Bill Early, agreed to give it a try.

  Because time was so short, the only place we could go for training was the Norfolk Police Department. The trainer was a super guy in the department named Bob Bouchard, who was later killed on a night surveillance. They said sure, they would be glad to take us in, but the only training they could give was attack training and a little bit of surveillance.

  They gave me a dog, Prince was his name. He was a good dog, very alert, very aggressive, very easily handled. Prince was a perfect SEAL. He could work hard and he could play hard. He was just one of those dogs that, at the end of the day, he could turn it off. And at eight o’clock in the morning he would go back to work again.

  We went through about a six-week training period. When we completed the training, Prince graduated number one. I graduated number two. He was smarter than me.

  We brought him back to the team and took him over to Vietnam. We did use him a couple of times, but what we found out in the delta was that it just really made trying to perform your own mission and trying to control the dog, too, very difficult. They needed a little better territory than the territory we were operating in.

  But he was great on ambushes. That dog would just lay right there next to you. He would alert five minutes before anybody even came into view.

  Some movement or some noise would alert him. He would just look in that direction and you knew someone was coming that way.

  There just weren’t that many missions we could take him on. But we thought there was still a place for dogs. They just needed to be better trained. So when we came back to the States we did a report on the thing.

  Prince was turned over to another handler. That was the beauty of this particular dog. Most attack dogs or dogs of that sort, you can’t transfer handlers. But Prince was just that kind of a personality. He could transfer over to another guy. He transferred over to Mike Bailey. Mike took him down to official military training and then took him in country.

  That time, the dog did an excellent job. He was wounded once. He saved their platoon on numerous occasions by alerting.

  Mike was telling me, one time they took a break and let the dog take a break, just like people do. Prince wandered off a little way and he came back. He was playing with something. He always liked to play with a ball. He came back and he was throwing this hand grenade around. The guys were just scattering!

  Someone got it away from him and Prince took off again and came back with another one. They decided maybe this dog has found something. So they followed him and he went right back and they found a large cache of enemy weapons. So Prince had done his job in that respect.

  There was one other story on him up in I Corps [the northernmost military area in South Vietnam]. The SEALs were running a point element for a marine group. Mike was at the point. The dog alerted to a couple of sand dunes.

  Mike said to the marine in charge, “The dog is alerting to something over here. Hard to tell what it is but we need to go around this way.”

  The marines elected not to do so. But the SEALs went the other way. The marines all got ambushed.

  We ended up with four or five dogs. We parachuted with them, in a harness underneath the reserve chute. The dogs weren’t all that crazy about parachuting. When I jumped with Prince, I had to muzzle him.

  He would pretty well go anywhere I wanted to go. But he wasn’t too cool on jumping out of airplanes. He never really raised hell about it. He was an unusual dog. You could keep him calm. All you had to do was talk to him. Prince would stay calm.

  This wasn’t going to be his lifestyle, jumping out of airplanes, but it seemed that he accepted it as part of the job. We were still together. He had that confidence in me. If I was doing it, it would be all right.

  When you ju
mped, did he squirm?

  Not too much. When I jumped I would try to hold my hands close to his neck and his hind quarters and try to concentrate on jumping and scratching at the same time. He’d squirm a little bit but not much. Once we got out of the blast of the plane and the parachute was open, it was easy to calm him down.

  How did you land?

  You’d try to do a good PLF [parachute landing fall] so you didn’t hurt the dog. We later rigged up a harness where you could lower the dog down so he would land before you did. You could release him. The dog wouldn’t run off. He would stay right there.

  It was all trial and error, test and evaluation of our own ideas.

  Some of the after action reports indicate you had trouble with another dog.

  There was one dog that was really spastic. He wasn’t very big but he was very skittish, very unpredictable. He would never stay calm on ambush. That was the biggest thing you wanted. If you used a dog for an alert on ambush, you wanted to make absolutely sure he was not going to start barking or start-jumping around.

  And when the shooting started, you wanted to make sure he would stay calm. This one dog just wouldn’t do that. You had to play with the dog to try to control him. He wanted to get out of there. It wasn’t the handler’s fault. It was just his personality.

  Before he began operating with SEALs in the south, Bo Burwell was a hospital corpsman who operated with marine reconnaissance units in the northern part of Vietnam. His experience using dogs was much more encouraging than that of Bruhmuller and others in the delta:

  The dogs weren’t that effective down south. We used dogs with the recon unit and they were so much more effective up there. Down south, if you got into deep mud, you’d end up carrying that dog. Another way they could help you was with the smell. And if something’s been underwater, they’re not going to be able to track it.

  But up north I have seen these dogs, if the wind was blowing right, I have seen them alert on a signal literally a mile away. You could see the people there. And you would see him zoom in on it.

  One dog saved my life on two occasions. His name was King—service number K9–37. He was probably the prima donna of the dogs. That dog was so good, I used to let him curl right up next to me at night. He would never bark or growl. But you would feel him move and you could see where he was looking and know where the threat was at.