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Night Fighter

Page 7

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;


  Elinor and Linda Jean followed me to the East Coast and the Norfolk area while I continued pursuing unconventional training in Army Chemical Warfare and Underwater EOD (Explosives Ordnance Disposal). The schools weren’t that demanding, certainly nothing like UDT. About like a nine-to-five job. I savored home-cooked meals and evenings spent on the carpet playing little games with my daughter. Elinor seemed … seemed almost happy.

  “Bill, you’re preoccupied,” she would say whenever I became too involved in study and work. “You’re home now. Let’s enjoy being a family and together.”

  Sometimes guilt for not being totally involved with family almost ate out my heart. I damned me for that seductive salt air in my nostrils, for the wandering bug Dad planted in my genes, for my warrior mentality. I seemed to be always planning the next step forward in my preoccupation with the idea of sea commandos.

  Several times Elinor caught me on the phone with Reynolds or Joisey or one of my other like-minded Frogman buddies. She would frown disapprovingly over my end of the conversation: “Army Special Forces is expanding. They’re way ahead of us in many areas. We have to train with the Army, learn from them if we ever expect to seize the Golden Fleece.”

  Guerrillas and unconventional warfare, already as old as history, were rapidly returning since the end of World War II as the predominant form of armed conflict in the world. The development of nuclear weapons and missiles with which to deliver them made conventional war not only prohibitive in terms of money and resources but also unthinkable because of its destructive power. Conventional war in the twentieth century was being priced off the market.

  David of the Old Testament waged an unconventional campaign against King Saul. Two centuries before Christ, Rome fought drawn-out unconventional wars in Spain and North Africa. Jewish freedom fighters at the time of Jesus used irregular tactics against occupying Romans. Fabian Maximus drove Hannibal out of Italy with guerrilla strategies. Vikings launched commando-style raids from rivers and seas. Spaniards coined the word “guerrilla” during their fight against Napoleon, a term that means “little war.” Lawrence of Arabia employed unconventional warriors.

  Most armies have recruited guerrillas in some form to patrol, reconnoiter, and skirmish for their main forces. They were particularly significant in the settling of the New World.

  The New World was a vast, dangerous, almost trackless wilderness populated by often-hostile natives who avoided the “stand-up” fight. Settlers constructed defensive forts and blockhouses on the frontier, to which they fled during Indian uprisings, while buckskin-clad Colonists called “Rangers” patrolled between the strongholds and operated behind lines to demoralize and defeat hostiles.

  Robert Rogers, a backwoodsman from New Hampshire, took command of four companies of Rangers in 1756 during the French and Indian War. His use of “Indian tactics” on long-range patrols against French positions made him the most feared and respected man in the territories.

  Following the “shot heard ’round the world” that initiated the American Revolution, British Army planners employed Loyalist partisans in an effort to suppress the uprising. As a counterstrategy, American General Horatio Gates ordered Colonel Francis Marion to form Rangers and disrupt British supply lines in the Williamsburg region. Using classic guerrilla tactics, Marion, known as “the Swamp Fox,” conducted lightning raids against the Brits while depending upon local settlers for intelligence, supplies, cover, and reinforcements.

  The Swamp Fox harassed the British and their Tory allies until the end of the war, keeping “the whole country in continued alarm,” as British Colonel Banastre Tarleton put it, “so that regular troops were everywhere necessary.”

  So-called “Indian tactics” also prevailed as America’s “Manifest Destiny” pushed west and bumped up against guerrilla fighters like the Navajo, Apache, Sioux, and Cheyenne. Kit Carson took on the Navajo and Apache by using their own machinations against them. In the late 1830s, Captain Jack Hays and fifteen Texas Rangers in a “special operations force” routed more than eighty Comanche by utilizing specialized training and special equipment like the revolver.

  Some 428 units during the American Civil War were irregulars officially or unofficially known as Rangers. Mosby’s Rangers, a battalion of Confederate partisan cavalry, disrupted Union communications and supply lines in Virginia. John Mosby’s mission statement well applied to guerrillas operating in the twentieth century: “Harassing their rear … to destroy supply trains, to break up the means of conveying intelligence, and thus isolating an army from its base. … It is just as legitimate to fight an enemy in the rear as in the front.”

  Although the Union considered Confederate raiders “unsoldierly guerrillas hiding among civilians,” General Ulysses Grant nonetheless countered with unconventional forces of his own. In preparing to move against Vicksburg, he dispatched Colonel Benjamin Grierson into Mississippi to destroy whatever he could, much as Merrill’s Marauders were to do in Burma during World War II.

  Even in the static trenches of World War I, France had their special operators. “Trench raiders” on both sides stripped down to basics and went over the side in forays against opposing trenches to gather intelligence, capture prisoners, and terrorize the enemy.

  The twentieth century from World War I on was an era of almost continuous conflict. Guerrilla warfare scorched the earth in Europe, Asia, and Africa. British experience fighting unconventional forces in its colonies led to the birth of special operations units such as SOE (Special Operation Executive) and SAS (Special Air Services), which in turn influenced the emergence of such units as UDTs, OSS, and the various other guerrilla-type outfits of World War II.

  History supplied the basis upon which to continue building.

  One night I was on the floor wrestling with Linda Jean. That girl was going to be a tomboy. Elinor answered the phone.

  “It’s for you, Bill. It’s Commander Doug Fane.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I ACCEPTED COMMANDER FANE’S OFFER to return to Naval Amphibious Base Coronado as his operations officer for COMUDU-One. My duties included coordinating all UDT operations in the Pacific, whether in training or in real-world situations. Elinor, baby Linda Jean, and I packed up the Ford station wagon and headed west. Elinor was happy to be returning to California; at least she would be near her folks.

  Red Dog Fane, now forty-five years old and one of the elders of UDT, was crusty, stubborn, and hard to get along with. He knew only one way: “My way. So follow or get the hell out of the way.”

  Truth be known, I was sometimes as obstinate as he. We were bound to butt heads like two rowdy walruses on an ice floe, as we tested theories and ideas and slammed them off each other.

  Fane’s determination had saved UDT from the military drawdowns following both World War II and Korea, while he struggled to expand the naval special warfare mission, but he and I frequently disagreed over how far that mission should go. He held that although ops on sea, land, and air were viable for our Frogs, such activities should be confined to within sight and smell of salt air in the way our true amphibious counterparts on ponds kept to their lily pads and murky banks. We should restrict our commando work to within the high water mark that was the UDT boundary in World War II.

  “It’s all right to go landward to blow up something or assassinate some asshole,” Fane argued in our continued ongoing discussions on the future of Navy counterinsurgency. “But then get your butt out of there and back to water. That’s where we originated and that’s where we’re most effective. It’s not our business to engage in shooting wars. We got the Marines and the dogfaces for that. Let them get their asses shot off. We got bigger fish to fry.”

  I was just as adamant that the Navy should be more than about boats and planes and blasting landing sites for jarheads.

  “UW will become the major instrument of warfare in the nuclear age,” I offered. “If we expect to get our piece of it, we have to do more than paddle around in the surf like tadpoles. A
rmy Special Forces is not confined to land. They’re training in diving and boats while at the same time developing techniques to work and train guerrillas inside the enemy’s own territory. I don’t want the Navy to have just a piece of the pie—”

  “You want the whole pie—”

  “At least the biggest part of it.”

  We knew we were bucking the system. High-ranking brass of the “old military,” both Army and Navy, harbored a stiff aversion to the use of underhanded, clandestine methods that had little in common with tried-and-true ideas of chivalry and the military code of honor. “Snake eaters,” in their opinion, were somehow not quite respectable.

  Although Commander Fane and I might disagree, not so much on methodology as on goals, I retained great respect and awe for the legendary Frogman and his reputation. His life had been one hell of an adventure. Other sailors accused him of sometimes being more guts than sense.

  Born in Scotland in 1909, which made him eighteen years older than me and a generation ahead, he went to sea in his mid-twenties and quickly rose to command merchant ships. He emigrated to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Navy shortly before Pearl Harbor.

  I heard a tale of how he served aboard an ammo supply ship in the Pacific that was transferring cans of powder to the USS Pennington, a battle wagon. Friction ignited a can of powder being rolled across the deck. Crewmen panicked and ran for their lives before the powder exploded, some of them even jumping overboard.

  Fane turned a fire hose on the can and washed it over the side. It hung up in rigging on the ship’s outer hull where it smoldered on the brink of exploding, which might have chain-detonated the magazines and sunk the ship. Fane was unwilling to abandon the vessel to its fate. He jumped and climbed down to the smoking canister and kicked it into the sea. Just in time.

  Fane and I might have differed on how far to take UDTs from the seashore, but we were in unison on the nature and makeup of men and officers who served on the teams.

  “UDTs are the despair of most conventional Navy officers,” Fane preached. “There is no place for epaulets on a wet, sunburned shoulder, but there is plenty of room for mutual confidence and genuine discipline when officer and enlisted alike know that the other will get every man back—or drown trying.”

  Fane and I worked tirelessly to prove wrong the higher brass who thought the concept of naval special forces had outlived its usefulness after the war and should therefore be abandoned. Our teams were constantly on the move, training, staying ready and edged.

  Frogs conducted underwater surveys for the construction of Distant Early Warning (DEW) lines across the northern reaches of Alaska and Canada, in water so cold it would have frozen solid if not for its salt content. UDT swimmers accompanied the first nuclear submarines to dive in the Arctic Sea. Lieutenant Commander Robert Terry swam over a quarter mile underneath the Arctic ice cap.

  “It was like a cathedral under there, sun shining through the ice in rays of blue like through a diamond,” he reported.

  A pair of UDT buddies in Arctic training spotted an Eskimo village on the shoreline and decided to make an impromptu visit. In insulated dry suits, face masks, caps, fins and gloves, all in black, they surface-swam through water and slid belly-down across ice floes in order to reach it. A problem developed when Eskimos saw the black-skinned monsters with huge webbed feet approaching in what they interpreted to be a hostile manner. They opened fire in self-defense while shrieking women and children fled. Bullets zipped past. The demon-beasts sprang to their webbed feet and began shouting and waving their arms.

  “No! No! Stop shooting. We’re people too!”

  China had splintered into two nations at the end of World War II. Mao Tse-tung’s communists retained the mainland; Nationalist China led by Chiang Kai-shek fled to several small islands off the coast. In 1955, the Nationalists, under repeated threats from the mainland, abandoned their Tachen Islands to fortify the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The U.S. Seventh Fleet escorted the evacuation.

  Commander Fane remained aboard a gunship in the harbor with a UDT detachment to provide overwatch while I went ashore with another team and a boatload of explosives to blow up fortifications and munition stockpiles on the islands to prevent their falling into communist hands. Mao must have felt the concussion in Beijing.

  Fane and I logged our share of hours in the water as we pressed on with techniques and scientific experiments to test swimmer limits in mixed-gas deep-diving systems and the use of underwater propulsion vehicles. Even when I wasn’t gallivanting off to China or the Arctic or some other remote or godforsaken nook of the world, my days started as early as 0400 and sometimes went over until midnight or after. I kissed my wife and daughter good morning while they were still in bed and I was on my way out the door.

  “Sorry, honey. Don’t have time for breakfast. Lots of work to do. Don’t wait up for me tonight. Red Dog and I have a meeting with COMPHIBPAC to go over some ops—”

  “Bill, you never seem to have time for us—”

  “Ah, now, baby, give me some slack—”

  “Will you think about getting out of the Navy and taking the other job?”

  A large San Diego corporation had offered me “the other job,” an executive position, if I resigned my commission in the Navy and entered “real life” in the civilian sector. A hefty raise came with the job, plus a lot of other perks the Navy could never provide. We’d also be living near Elinor’s folks, could actually buy a house and settle down.

  I had thirty days to think it over and make a decision. I promised Elinor I would. And I did. I thought about it a lot during my daily runs on the beach to keep in shape, while diving to re-qualify with all the new equipment coming in, or while having a quick sandwich for lunch at my desk in time to attend a meeting with team leaders or some Pentagon puke from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted to know what Frogmen did anyhow.

  What with the secret exercises and commando training Fane and I sponsored for our guys with the regular Navy, the Army, the Marines, anywhere we could obtain it anywhere in the world, we were not surprised when the Chief of Naval Operations called.

  “My God!” Admiral Arleigh Burke exclaimed. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Several years now, sir.”

  “Keep at it,” he replied to our surprise. “Any problems, you call me.”

  Admiral Burke was a key supporter of unconventional warfare. But even the CNO could not block peacetime cutbacks and defunding. UDT-22 was decommissioned on the East Coast due to personnel shortages and its men reassigned to UDT-21. The West Coast decommissioned UDT-13 and split the men between its two remaining West Coast teams. That left three teams in Navy SpecOps while Army Special Forces continued to expand.

  Commander Fane went to the CNO while I listened in on an extension phone. “Sir, it takes time to train specialized men like UDTs. If we have another war, we won’t have the capacity to handle our mission.”

  “My hands are tied, Doug. The White House is gearing everything toward a mech face-off in Europe with the Soviets and a possible nuclear showdown. We start exchanging nukes, and it won’t last a week before the world is blown to hell. We won’t need special forces for that.”

  “That’s why the nation needs us now more than ever. To stop the nuking before it begins.”

  “I understand, Doug. They’ll come crying to us to do something when the shit hits the proverbial fan in some rat hole like Korea or Indochina. In the meantime—”

  “—we sit on the pot and wait.”

  The conversation ended. Red-faced, Fane barged into my office.

  “You heard that shit, Bone?”

  I nodded somberly.

  “Damned pencil-dicked paper pushers in Washington!” he raved. “Bone, get your ass up. It’s Friday. I could use a night in Tijuana.”

  Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, was Red Dog’s favorite watering hole. We occasionally drove down to the crazy little city after work to unwind at a joint
on the drag called Feliz Sombrero that featured brown-skinned strippers and quart mugs of even browner beer. Usually, the atmosphere of female skin and suds lifted our spirits higher than a rapture of the deep. Tonight, however, Fane was in such a bad mood that he kept getting louder and more obnoxious. I dragged him out of the bar before he kidnapped one of the girls or got us into a fight with a tough-looking Mex with a knife scar down the side of his face. I tossed him into the car for the drive home.

  “I could have kicked that greaser’s butt, Bone. Now, I should kick your butt instead.”

  Commander Fane was my superior and my mentor. I held him in high regard as both a man and an officer. He was just having a bad night.

  “Bone, you’re a fucking candy ass. I don’t care how big you are, you’re a ‘yes man’ with no guts.”

  Tijuana beer was doing the talking through leftover rage from his conversation with the CNO. I saw him to his front door and turned to leave. He grabbed my arm.

  “I’m not finished with you yet, Lieutenant.”

  A man had his breaking point, his pride. I slowly turned to face him. As I did I unleashed a straight right to his jaw. Definitely the Tijuana beer talking or I wouldn’t have done it. The legendary Frogman sat down hard on his top doorstep, dazed.

  “Good night, sir,” I said.

  Striking a superior officer, no matter the provocation, was a serious offense. Friend or not, he would surely have me court-martialed. That meant the end of my UDT career, if I weren’t kicked out of the Navy altogether. My long-nurtured dream of helping create a true Navy special operations outfit was about to go up in smoke.

  Elinor seemed less than disappointed about developments. “It’s not the end of the world, Bill,” she exulted. “You have a good job waiting for you. All you have to do is take it. We can have a real family life. Your daughter is growing up and hardly knows what you look like.”

  Perhaps she was right. Maybe it was fate that I get out of the Navy and settle down like ordinary people. The strain my career placed on her and our marriage had approached the breaking point more than once. Over half the men I knew in UDT were divorced at least once; Fane was working on his third marriage. Elinor often bitched that she was my second wife; my first wife was Navy UDT.

 

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