Books by Charles W. Sasser
NONFICTION:
The Walking Dead (with Craig Roberts)
One Shot-One Kill (with Craig Roberts)
Homicide
Shoot to Kill
Always a Warrior
In Cold Blood: Oklahoma’s Most Notorious Murders
Last American Heroes (with Michael Sasser)
Smoke Jumpers
First SEAL (with Roy Boehm)
At Large
Fire Cops (with Michael Sasser)
Doc: Platoon Medic (with Daniel E. Evans)
Arctic Homestead (with Norma Cobb)
Taking Fire (with Ron Alexander)
Raider
Encyclopedia of Navy SEALs
Magic Steps to Writing Success
Hill 488 (with Ray Hildreth)
Crosshairs on The Kill Zone (with Craig Roberts)
Going Bonkers: The Wacky World of Cultural Madness
Patton’s Panthers
God in The Foxhole
Devoted to Fishing: Devotionals For Fishermen
None Left Behind
Predator (with Matt Martin)
The Sniper Anthology
Back in The Fight (with Joe Kapacziewski)
Two Fronts, One War
FICTION:
No Gentle Streets
The 100th Kill
Operation No Man’s Land (as Mike Martell)
Liberty City
Detachment Delta: Punitive Strike
Detachment Delta: Operation Iron Weed
Detachment Delta: Operation Deep Steel
Detachment Delta: Operation Aces Wild
Detachment Delta: Operation Cold Dawn
Dark Planet
OSS Commando: Final Options
OSS Commando: Hitler’s A-Bomb
The Shoebox: Letters for The Seasons (with Nancy Shoemaker)
No Longer Lost
War Chaser
The Return
A Thousand Years of Darkness
Sanctuary
The Foreworld Saga: Bloodaxe
Shadow Mountain
Copyright © 2016 by William H. Hamilton Jr. and Charles W. Sasser
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hamilton, William H., Jr., 1927- author. | Sasser, Charles W., author.
Title: Night fighter : an insider’s story of special ops from Korea to Seal Team Six / Captain William H. Hamilton Jr., USN and Charles W. Sasser.
Description: New York, NY : Arcade Publishing, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016029663 (print) | LCCN 2016035170 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-62872-680-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-62872-683-1 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Special operations (Military science)—United States—History. | Special forces (Military science)—United States—History.
Classification: LCC UA34.S64 H356 2016 (print) | LCC UA34.S64 (ebook) | DDC 359.9/84 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029663
Cover photo: iStock
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to
the American warriors of Navy, Army,
and Air Force Special Forces.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
AS A PROFESSIONAL WRITER, I am privileged to help bring to life the remarkable story of retired U.S. Navy Captain William H. Hamilton Jr. Now eighty-eight years old with a mane of white hair and striking blue eyes, he still bears on his six-four frame the broad shoulders and lean profile of the man declared to be the “father of Navy SEALs.”
It was Hamilton more than any other single figure in U.S. military history who not only forged the Navy SEALs but also stamped his indelible brand upon U.S. special operations forces and upon modern counterterrorism efforts. From the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from chasing Che Guevara to thwarting Fidel Castro, from the deltas of Vietnam to the intrigues of European capitals, from the Iran hostage crisis to Nicaragua and the Middle East, Captain Hamilton lived the history of the late twentieth century, a period of action and adventure in one of the most vital and dangerous eras of the American experience. His incomparable career spanned tours as a combat fighter pilot in Korea; commander of ships on covert assignments; missions with Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) and SEALs; top secret assignments with the CIA in Africa, Latin America, and Europe; experiments for the exploration of space and for unorthodox new methods of counter-subversion, such as the training of dolphins; advisor on security for SDI (President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, “Star Wars”); Pentagon consultant, and advisor for U.S. counterterrorism strategies.
He felt it his inexorable duty to help build the most effective and feared unconventional military organization ever conceived. His story unfolds behind the scenes and in the shadows as the United States takes the concept of unconventional warfare and molds it into the one force in the world capable of combating terrorists, international criminals, and tyrants on their own turf—a story that continues today with the rise of ISIS in the Middle East and the chilling prospect of a nuclear World War III.
The information in this book is based upon a variety of sources: interviews with Captain Hamilton and his wife Barbara; personal observations and the recorded observations of witnesses; official U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, and government documents; personal diaries and autobiographies; and newspapers and other published accounts. In addition, I drew upon my own thirteen-year experiences in U.S. Army Special Forces (the Green Berets) and on friendships and associations with those in the SpecOps community such as Commander Roy Boehm, an old friend and the “First SEAL”; Command Sergeant Major Galen Kittleson of the 7th Special Forces Group; Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, Marine sniper during the Vietnam War; Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle; Army Ranger Joseph Kapacziewski; Marine Colonel Craig Roberts; Army chopper pilot Colonel Ron Alexander; Marine Silver Star recipient Ray Hildreth; and many others during my twenty-nine-year military career (active duty and reserve) in both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army. A special thanks goes to Rudy Enders, the former CIA agent who directed me to this project. These special men enriched my life and added to my own understanding of Special Operations, unconventional warfare, and counterterrorism.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the following authors and their published works, from which I also drew in co-writing this book: The Hunt for Bin Laden by Robin Moore; Terrorism by John Pynchon Holms with Tom Burke; Special Forces by Tom Clancy and John Grisham; First SEAL by Roy Boehm and Charles W. Sasser; Counterterrorism in Modern Warfare by Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian; Delta Force by Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox; Guerrilla Strategies by Gerard Chaliand; Encyclopedia of Navy SEALs by Charles W. Sasser; SEAL Team Six by Howard E. Wasdin and Stephen Templin; Bay of Pigs by Peter Wyden; Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kenne
dy; Pieces of the Game by Colonel Charles W. Scott; Killer Elite by Michael Smith; 60th Anniversary of Special Forces, where I drew in particular on my chapter, “The History of Special Forces”; Combat Swimmer by Captain Robert A. Gormly; The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden by Jacob Gleam; No Easy Day by Mark Owen; Shadow Warrior by Felix I. Rodriguez and John Weisman; Requiem in the Tropics by Jack Cox; An American Life by Ronald Reagan; Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story by Dick Couch and William Doyle; Rogue Warrior by Richard Marcinko and John Weisman; Shadow Warriors by General Carl Stiner and Tony Koltz; Iran-Contra Affair by The New York Times; and Brave Men Dark Waters by Orr Kelly.
Actual names are used throughout except in those rare instances where names were lost due to either lack of memory or lack of documentation, where privacy is requested, or where public identification would serve no useful purpose and might cause embarrassment.
In various instances dialogue and scenes have necessarily been re-created. Time has a tendency to erode memories in some areas and selectively enhance it in others. Where re-creation occurs, we strive to match personalities with the situation and the action while maintaining factual content. The recounting of some events may not correspond precisely with the memories of all involved. In addition, all data has been filtered through the authors. We must therefore apologize to anyone omitted, neglected, or somehow slighted in the preparation of this book. We take responsibility for such errors and ask to be forgiven for them.
While we may have made interpretational mistakes, we are assured that the content of this book is accurate to the spirit and reality of all the brave men who participated in the events described in it. Our objective was to present a true account of one man’s selfless duty to country and to his fellow warriors.
CHARLES W. SASSER
PREFACE
I’M EIGHTY-FOUR YEARS OLD and no longer able to run the missions. It’s May 2, 2011. I received a telephone call from a contact at the Pentagon. Some people from the old days still remember me.
“Bone,” the caller said. “You’re going to want to be in on this. Stay by the phone. I’ll call back and let you know how it comes out.”
“Bone” is a nickname from a different time. It started at Bullis School, where I played football. I don’t recall exactly, but “Bone,” I think, is a contraction of “Hambone” or “Bone Crusher.” I was a big kid and I hit hard and often.
I’m waiting. Waiting for that call back. Wondering what the hell my guys have got themselves into this time. I know one thing, always. You can depend on them, depend on them to kick ass and get a job done. I helped make them that way.
* * *
Halfway around the globe, twin Blackhawk helicopters—“stealth” versions with sharp “Transformer” angles to deflect enemy radar—slide over the crests of the Sarban Hills and ride black after-midnight downdrafts toward a scattering of lights flung across the bowl-like Orash Valley. Abbottabad, Pakistan.
“Three minutes!”
The alert warning crackles through the two troop compartments. Two dozen U.S. Navy SEALs from DEVGRU (Special Warfare Development Group, better known as SEAL Team Six) grip weapons, adjust night vision goggles, check equipment. They tap each other on the shoulders or helmets and receive a muted “hoo-yah” in response. They have trained and rehearsed for this special mission these past weeks using mock-up compounds back in the States and then at the staging area on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
“Go” had been ordered by highest authority, the president of the United States. Within the next hour, if everything goes according to plan, al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist, with a $25 million bounty on his head, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack on America, sought by a dozen other countries for international crimes, will be reaching room temperature.
Chief Petty Officer Robert “Rob” O’Neill, thirty-four, is a member of the “kill” element. Like every other SEAL on the mission, he is a seasoned veteran who served two previous combat tours in Iraq and participated in more than four hundred missions, including the rescue of the hijacked crew of the Maersk Alabama from Somali pirates in 2009.
“The more we trained on it,” O’Neill would say later, “the more we realized … this is going to be a one-way mission. We’re going to go and we’re not coming back. We’re going to die when the house blows up … when he blows up.”
SEALs expect the house to be possibly wired with explosives.
“Or,” O’Neill said, “we are going to be there too long and we’ll get arrested by the Pakistanis and we’re going to spend the rest of our short lives in a Pakistan prison. [But] it’s worth it to kill him. He’s going to die with us.”
* * *
My phone jangles inside a residence in a gated community at Virginia Beach even as the airborne element of Trident Spear streaks out of Pakistan with bin Laden’s bullet-mangled corpse aboard. It’s the call I’m expecting.
“Bone,” a voice says. “Bone, your SEALs did it. They did it!”
CHAPTER ONE
MEMORIAL STADIUM AT THE U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, erupted with throaty cheering as eight hundred newly graduated midshipmen sprang to our uniformed feet and flung hats—covers, in Navy parlance—high into the air. It was a tradition at the academy; tradition in the U.S. Navy is a tradition itself. The storm of caps caught the June sun above Chesapeake Bay like a roiling summer cloud.
Midshipmen hats rained back to earth to be claimed by younger siblings, girlfriends, and proud parents, who snatched them joyfully out of the air for keepsakes or, in the case of younger siblings, for the traditional dollar or two tucked into their linings. Warren S. Parr Jr. and I made our way toward the stands where his family had joined mine and were all on their feet with the rest of the noisy stadium. At twenty-one years old, I was probably topped out to my max height at six-four, which meant I towered over most of my peers in the graduating class of 1949.
My roommate Parr was several inches shorter, with eyes almost black, an aftershave shadow he had to scrape down to blood in order to pass inspection, and a perpetual mocking grin. Twenty-six years earlier, my dad and Parr’s had undergone this same rite of passage when they graduated from Annapolis. Hamilton Sr. and Parr Sr. had been roommates in 1923. Old blocks and chips, Parr Jr. called us.
Commodore William Hamilton Sr. was a pioneering naval aviator and a squadron commander in the South Pacific prior to and at the beginning of World War II. He was pulling a command tour at Fleet Air Wing in London when Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s aviator son, Joe Jr., was shot down in a bombing mission over Germany. It was Dad’s duty to inform the ambassador of his son’s disappearance. Dad was still in England when the dropping of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.
In the stands someone had caught the cap with my name in it. I had tossed it in the direction of my little brother, Frank, who was sixteen. He finally ended up with it after an exchange of prisoners. As Parr Jr. and I made our way toward our families, I tried to consider what Dad might be thinking were he able to be here today.
Three things I had grown up with, being the son of a seafaring man—war, the sea, and Dad’s frozen seawater countenance. The Navy had made us a gypsy family. I barely got settled in one school when the old man got orders for somewhere else. Even before I reached high school, I attended grammar schools in Coronado, Norfolk, Long Beach, Jacksonville, and Cristobel in the Canal Zone.
I completed my last two years of high school at Greenbrier Military Academy, a boarding school in Lewisburg, West Virginia. It was the longest period I had ever spent at any one school.
“Where do you want to attend college?” my old man had asked.
I didn’t have to think about it. The old man had already made up my mind for me. “Annapolis, the Naval Academy,” I said.
Dad nodded solemnly the way he did. Mom looked concerned. “Are you sure that’s what you want to do, honey?”
All through my growing up, Dad was that stern stranger who seemed to pop up f
rom time to time between sea duty. He was a good man, I knew that, even perhaps a great man. But it was Marjorie, my mom, who reared us kids, who taught me how to swim, how to cook, reviewed our report cards, and dished out punishment when rambunctious boys deserved it.
More than Frank, I took after Dad in looks and temperament. When I made up my mind about something, I was bound to do it, come hell or high water.
“Yeah, Mom. I’m going to Annapolis.”
I graduated Greenbrier at sixteen, too young for Annapolis. Dad sent me to a one-year Naval Academy prep school at Bullis in Silver Springs, Maryland, where I chased girls, played football, earned my “Bone” nickname, and generally got into mischief. The only thing that saved me was good grades and Mom’s urging school officials to “crack down” on me.
I left Bullis for the Naval Academy in 1945, just as Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were committing suicide in a Berlin bunker and nuclear tests were being conducted in Nevada preparatory to dropping “the Bomb” on Japan.
“There will always be wars and rumors of wars,” Dad predicted. It was in the Bible. “A military career is always a good bet. Wars will be different but also the same—only getting more brutal with time and technology.”
That stuck with me—the part about wars getting more brutal with time. Perhaps even to the point that technology like the atom bomb would wipe out humankind.
Somewhere along the way between childhood and early youth, I developed a fascination with the emergence of what was known as “guerrilla warfare.” Perhaps the old man planted the seed with his talk about Tito’s guerrillas in Yugoslavia, American major Bob Lapham, who led guerrillas against the Japanese in the Philippines, General Wingate’s exploits in Burma.…
“Men will have their wars,” Dad said. “But we don’t have to wipe out whole cities and kill everybody back two generations in doing it. What we can do is choose up sides and send guerrillas out to some godforsaken place nobody wants anyhow and let them kill each other off for us.”
“Like Roman gladiators?” I said.
“And may the best men win.”
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