by Orr Kelly
One time I was out walking on the point and I had actually walked by—the rest of the patrol was back on the tree line and I had gone out to scout an area. The dog was also working out there. The handler, he could give signals and move that dog.
Apparently I had walked by somebody. But when this guy made a move in the bush, the dog picked up his trail and went in behind him and that dog was on him, boom, just like that.
Did the dog grab him?
He wasn’t one of these dogs trained to grab a person by the arm and watch him. There’s no contest when you have a 110-pound shepherd and a 120-pound Vietnamese. The dog will win. I think that guy was dead before he hit the ground.
On another occasion, he saved me when he alerted on a booby trap that we probably wouldn’t have seen. There were many other occasions when he picked up booby traps.
He later got killed.
I wasn’t there when he was killed. They were running a scouting operation for another marine company. They had forced this recon officer to do something that was against his nature. He had been up and down this trail three or four times. The lieutenant had been wounded the day before and they ordered him up there again.
King took the most of a claymore. It was a command-detonated thing and the dog was right on top of it when it fired off. The mine messed up the whole patrol but the majority of the shot hit the dog. In his last action, he saved some people.
CHAPTER
46
What Do You Wear to War?
One thing most military people never have to worry about is what to wear. Someone decides on the uniform of the day and that’s it. But the SEALs are different They have a long tradition of adapting both their clothing and weapons to the demands of the job they are given.
But, among the SEALs there are still vigorous differences of opinion on what the well-dressed frogman wears to war. Three veterans of the war in Vietnam told about their own preferences.
Command Master Chief Rudy Boesch, who arrived in Vietnam right after the Tet offensive of 1968, takes the most conventional approach:
Some of the guys wore Levis. But, to begin with, you’re always wet. You put a pair of Levis on and get ’em wet and try to bend your leg. You can’t do it. You lose all your flexibility.
Nobody in our platoon wore Levis. We wore the regular jungle greens. That’s the best clothes we had. Everybody wore boots. We just ain’t used to walking around barefoot. You’re stumbling over stumps, bumping into trees. It’s dark out there at night; real dark.
We’d come in off the river at night. It would look just black. We’d plow into the trees with a Mike boat or a PBR, go right into the trees until the boat hit land and then we’d jump off. As soon as we jumped off, we’d get right down in case the boats had to shoot, in case somebody was in there. And then we’d just lay there for half an hour or an hour. We wouldn’t move. The boat would back off and leave and we’d just stay there and listen, make sure nobody’s around or heard us. If we thought we were compromised, we’d call the boat right back in and leave.
Some SEALs said they went barefoot because, if they encountered a wire attached to a booby trap, they could feel it.
If you feel it, it’s too late.
Bo Burwell was one of those who had a different answer to the question of what to wear:
What did you wear?
Lots of times I wore camouflage outfits. But they made so much noise, and the mosquitoes could bite through them. I started carrying blue jeans with me. I’d wear those for operations. The huge pockets [in the clothing issued by the navy], whenever you came up out of the water, they made so much noise. And when your legs rub together, it makes noise.
I’ll demonstrate. [He rubbed his legs together.] At night, that noise right there, you can hear that seventy-five meters away. You can hear a sound and you can point right back at it. You can go by something and without even looking, you can put your finger right back on it.
A lot of times they would shoot at sound. That right there could get you killed. Moving out there at nighttime, the quieter you can move, the better off you are.
And that’s the reason a lot of us went barefoot. I’ve done a lot of barefoot work. If we got into briars and stuff, I had shoes—coral shoes—I could put on. I carried one in each hip pocket.
For walking on the point and moving in and out through mud, you couldn’t hardly beat going barefoot because of the quietness you could move with. You never make a sound, hardly. If the ground has been dug out, you can feel the soft areas where there might be a booby trap or a mine.
I carried blue jeans with a big heavy set of suspenders to hold them up. I wore them kind of tight. And then I wore one of the blue and gold shirts, a heavy T-shirt.
I carried my machine-gun ammunition in belts, usually about a thousand rounds, and then I had one of these camouflaged vests that I wore over that ammunition. I’m sure you’ve seen the famous picture of the guy with the bandanna on his head and the belts of ammunition. Why in the world camouflage yourself if you’re going out there with this big mirror? I’m sure that was probably for picture purposes. That man in the picture, Tom Keith, was a top-notch performer.
Did you wear underclothes?
No. Why? You’re going to be wet all the time anyway. I didn’t wear anything that I didn’t need. And underclothing was just something that kept you wet and gave you jock itch.
What about panty hose?
I know of some people who did that to keep the leeches off. I’ve been eaten up by the leeches up in the mountains. Of course you have a different leech up there than in the wetlands. I had thirty-one leeches on one leg one time, when we were sitting in an ambush. You could put insect repellent on them and they would drop right off.
They were bad up north. They weren’t as big as the water leeches and they were a brown color instead of the blue.
Leeches, they would give you an uncomfortable feeling. I’ve been sitting in ambushes and you could feel those things getting on you. Of course in an ambush you don’t even blink an eye. If you start swatting mosquitoes or fighting leeches, a guy out there may not know just what you are. But once you swat, he knows. He might have you right in his sniper’s scope.
There were other things there that bothered me a lot more than the leeches and mosquitoes. I kind of tuned them out.
In the Rung Sat, you would be sitting out there and you would see all this trash because of the swiftness of the water and all of a sudden you see this log going this way [indicating upstream].
They had those crocs there. They lose quite a few people to crocs in the delta region each year. In fact we had a West Coast guy attacked by a croc. And he whipped it.
One of our groups shot one of them. It was sixteen-eighteen feet long. Big. They definitely demanded respect.
If you saw one coming, at that time you stop worrying about what’s that over there and you keep your gun on this thing in case it turns toward you.
There were other things over there. I’ve been stalked by tigers around Khe Sanh and the A Shau Valley region. [Where he operated as a medical corpsman with marine units.] Wild boar was another thing that was very difficult.
Another thing we had to worry about down in the southern region was dogs and geese. They were one of the best early warning systems that made it difficult to sneak up on people. And believe it or not, hogs. They’re more intelligent than a dog, I guess. I have actually seen hogs go in the house and wake people up. You’re sitting there watching with binoculars and you can’t believe what you’re seeing. This thing actually alerted them.
Those geese, they did double duty. They eat the larva of certain insects that would damage the rice crops and if you get a goose excited, you never had so much noise in your life. They’ll tell everybody in the world where you’re at.
Thomas Holmes, another medical corpsman, had an unpleasant experience that resulted in a quick change in what he wore on patrol:
We used to wear Levis with the button front. I liked Lev
is better because they were thicker material. They fit better than the baggy fatigues and you didn’t always have this shh shh shh [rubbing sound].
They had pockets, but you usually wore your equipment up high anyway, rather than trying to reach down when you were in the water. It was also harder for mosquitoes to bite through that than the other material.
Some SEALs said they didn’t wear jeans because they were uncomfortable when they got wet.
I think it depended on the type of operations and the duration. Ours were half a day to a day, as opposed to some that might be in the jungle for a long time.
In the UDT and SEAL teams back then, you just didn’t wear skivvies. So here we are operating with Levis. And that’s when leeches got in and nailed my crotch.
On one evolution we were working with OV-10s and Sea Wolves. We were going on a skirmish line through a hootch complex to another hootch complex and then we were going to extract. And, being the radio operator, I was working two Wolves and two OV-10s.
They were all circling. This was at night and they all had the same lights. You couldn’t tell a plane from a helicopter.
We had gone through one hootch complex and were moving to the next one. Well, there was a third hootch complex and our air assets were looking at two different ones than we were looking at.
We called for a strafing run to hose them down before we assaulted them. The OV-10s were working one area and the Wolves were working another and the assets were getting screwed up. We’re all coming on line. Everybody is looking forward and figuring we’re going to watch this show, like being at the movies. And all of a sudden it opens up behind us.
How far?
We were a safe distance. We had let them know we were leaving our first objective and moving toward the second. So we were in between the hootch complexes.
We were basically walking through a swamp up to these guys. That’s when the leeches got me. As we patrolled in, they nailed me and it was pretty painful. At first I thought it was a snake that got me. I pulled it away.
On extraction, I asked if anybody had any mosquito repellent. I had been giving lectures on leech bites, never having had one. My first reaction was to do what I had been teaching.
Rick Nepper, he was one of these guys, if you wanted something, he would have it. If you needed a kitchen sink, he would have it. Good old Nepper whips out a whole bottle.
I ripped open my Levis and just hosed them down. I pulled like three of them off. I had two right on the penis and three right at the head of the scrotum. I’ve got pictures of it. It looks like a claymore went off in my lap.
After I ripped it open and hosed it down, it’s like a cartoon where you see the road runner and the coyote and the coyote realizes he’s done something really stupid? That’s when it was instant flame.
You thought the insect repellent would get rid of them?
Well, it did. They flat came off. But it got me, too.
Rick Nepper, he was on his second tour and he used to wear panty hose. He said they would keep the leeches off and we all razzed him. But after that experience, that’s when I went to panty hose. The leeches were actually coming in between the buttons.
Did the panty hose prevent them from getting in?
I guess so. I didn’t have any more problems.
CHAPTER
47
SEALs: A New Generation
SEALs gained their first—and lasting—fame in Vietnam. But most of those who served in SEAL Teams ONE and TWO in that decade-long baptism of fire have now retired, and a new generation is learning how to fight in new places: Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia—wherever the nation needs a small, hard-hitting commando force trained to strike from the sea.
In January 1991, “Joe Baxter,” a twenty-one-year-old hospitalman third class, was part of a unit from SEAL Team ONE assigned to Naval Special Warfare Task Group Central, stationed at Ras al-Mishab in Saudi Arabia, about forty miles south of the border with Iraqi-occupied Kuwait.
When Baxter (he asked that his real name not be used because he might later be involved in secret SEAL operations) returned home to Coronado, he enrolled in an English class at the local community college. As a class assignment, he wrote the following account of his introduction to war as one of the new generation of SEALs in the first U.S. land combat operation of the Persian Gulf War on 31 January 1991:
I jumped from the top rack onto the cold linoleum floor in a fearful panic. My heart was pounding against my chest. I instinctively reached for my weapon, inspected it to make sure both my CAR 15 assault rifle and the attached M203 grenade launcher were loaded. I slung the multipurpose weapon over my shoulder before putting on my gas mask and boots. I didn’t have to check my Sig Sauer 9mm pistol; it was loaded on my hip as it had been for the past three months.
The high-pitched scream of the missile raid siren was deafening as my three roommates and I scrambled out our door and into the barracks hallway. We made it outside and into the underground bunker in less than a minute and a half. I grabbed the handheld Motorola radio and listened to the watch officer relay his missile sightings from his observation post on top of the one-hundred-foot grain silo.
“Five missiles incoming. Estimate thirty seconds to impact … five, four, three, two …” The watch officer took cover before they hit. The explosions were close. The bunker walls were buffeted as the pressure from the blast inflated my lungs as if they were balloons about to burst. The explosions were so loud they hurt my ears even with my hands cupped tightly over them. The Iraqi missiles hit closer every time. This time, a missile exploded only fifty yards from the grain silo. There won’t be many volunteers for the next watch up there!
The morning following the attack of the loud-but-not-so-accurate rockets, the four of us left for the border. We were excited and ready. The whole idea of war was new to us, and we were thrilled to be living this adventure. My fire team had the next three-day shift on the border, and I was looking forward to it. Even though we would be closer to the enemy, it was more peaceful there. At the border, the menacing missiles only streak overhead like toy bottle rockets as they make their way toward the targets farther south.
Upon arrival at the sand-swept border station, we relieved our buddies in Fire Team Four. They looked tired and worn but said things had been quiet, except for the usual radio warnings of a possible raid by Iraqi assault forces. We joked about the Iraqi troops not knowing the difference between an assault force and a herd of camels. Then we warned our buddies to wear ear plugs when they went to sleep that night. They thanked us and gave us the finger as they drove south in one of two humvees we named our battle wagons, due to the .50-caliber machine gun they each sported. [The high-mobility, multipurpose, wheeled vehicle—abbreviated HMMWV and familiarly called the humvee—is an all-terrain vehicle, successor to the jeep.]
For the next three nights we would trade off sleeping, two at a time, to keep a twenty-four-hour vigil on the border zone nearest the Persian Gulf. We would notify the southerly bases of those pesky bottle rockets headed in their direction and attempt to call in air support to destroy the mobile launchers. We also reported any enemy movement in our area of responsibility, which usually consisted of a few truck convoys and the monotonous ritual of the Iraqi guards across the border praying to Allah five times a day.
It was the third night of our rotation on the border. Things were heating up at other border stations. Several marines were killed a few kilometers inland where two Iraqis posed as defectors and then signaled approximately fifty men to ambush the unsuspecting marines. Nightly bouts of ineffective small-arms fire were the norm for inland border stations, but our station on the coast had remained calm.
We were all awake that last night, talking about how bored we were, when a mortar flare suddenly illuminated the border station nearest us. I was peering through binoculars at the other station when I suddenly realized our station was illuminated. I looked up and saw a mortar flare slowly parachuting down, casting odd, dancing
shadows all around.
“Hey, Tony, what the hell is going on?” I whispered to our sniper.
“I don’t know, Doc. Maybe we should pack up some of this gear just in case.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right. I’ll get ready to go.”
Suddenly we heard the rumble of tracked vehicles, traveling at high speeds, closing in on us from the north. We all instinctively dove to the ground, a result of endless training. As I hit the ground, the Iraqis opened fire. I found an Iraqi armored personnel carrier in the crosshairs of my M203 grenade launcher. Tony grabbed a handheld antitank missile and took aim. Wayne and Joey did the same.
My safety was off, and I was ready to fire. But I didn’t. None of us did. Orange tracers as big as beer bottles were zipping right over our heads, but we knew [the Iraqis] couldn’t see our camouflaged Bodies. If we fired back, it was sure to bring a hail of devastating fire directly into us.
I knew at that point we were going to attempt to slip out of this situation as fast as we could. I crawled up to the radio to notify our base that the Iraqis had decided to pay Saudi Arabia a visit, but I couldn’t reach anyone on my first two tries, and I wasn’t about to wait around for someone to answer. My buddies were on their hands and knees already gathering our gear. We had enough gear for an entire platoon and only four guys to load it. I disconnected the radio from the eight-foot high-gain antenna as bullets continued to whiz over my head. I quickly crawled toward the humvee with the radio in one hand and two antitank missiles in the other. We couldn’t leave anything for the Iraqis.
My buddies were waiting for me in the hum vee. Tony was in the driver’s seat and I jumped in next to him, yelling at him to go! He slammed his foot on the gas pedal and sent the humvee bouncing over a twenty-foot sand dune. We kept the lights off, hoping the Iraqis wouldn’t see us attempting to escape. We were all screaming at Tony, telling him which way to go, and he was screaming at us, telling us to shut the hell up.