I stood up in front of the TV set with Barbara and cheered. Ronald Reagan would have made a hell of a SEAL.
Commander Richard Marcinko settled for a lesser mission as the team’s first—recovery of a stolen nuclear device from a clandestine terrorist training camp on Vieques Island in the Caribbean, seven miles due east of Puerto Rico. Alerted by JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, Marcinko had his team ready to go within hours. Each man carried a beeper. When it went off, he had four hours to show up at a prearranged location with all his equipment.
A terrorist group known as Macheteros—“machete wielders”—had broken into a National Guard airfield outside San Juan, where they took a hostage along with a pallet load of equipment that included a nuclear weapon. They evaded police dragnets, roadblocks, and SWATs and disappeared. U.S. intel assets tracked them to Vieques.
Macheteros were a small, well-financed, tightly organized guerrilla force of ultranationalists who vowed to wage war against “U.S. colonialist imperialism.” Active since 1978, they received training courtesy of the Soviet KGB and had staged a number of lethal attacks resulting in the shooting of half a dozen Puerto Rican policemen, the murder of two U.S. sailors, and the wounding of three other American military personnel in separate ambushes.
The attack on the National Guard armory made front-page news—minus reference to the nuclear device—as Marcinko and a team of fifty-six operators arrived by HH-53 helicopters at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Never had Marcinko coordinated so many elements at once—a clandestine insertion via a massed night HAHO (high-altitude, high-opening) parachute jump into hostile territory, a target takedown, snatching the hostage and the nuke, and a synchronized extraction by choppers from a hot landing zone. Executing the plan successfully called for intricate timing.
The C-130 with Team Six detachments aboard went wheels-up from Eglin at 2:00 p.m. for the six-hour flight to the island. Marcinko was a detail man when it came to planning and executing a plan. On the flight he checked preloaded magazines for the team’s Beretta and H&K submachine guns. To his astonishment he noticed that the weight of the rounds seemed considerably lighter than the custom loads he helped design.
He removed one of the cartridges and noticed it was a compound bullet. A training round. This was just another fake JSOC exercise, a full-mission training profile based on a real incident to make team members think they were playing for keeps. Although Macheteros, as reported in news accounts, really had attacked the National Guard armory, the rest of the scenario was pure bullshit.
Marcinko’s first reaction was to go ape over the charade. Why hadn’t he been informed it was a war game? But, then, on second thought, he understood. What better way to test an outfit than to let it think it was actually going into combat? He kept his mouth shut and went along with it.
Out over the Caribbean, 8:00 p.m., ten miles off the coast of the island and over ten thousand feet above it, Marcinko and his fifty-six SEAL CTs jumped out both doors of the C-130 into the black wind. Remarkable how quickly jumpers can exit an aircraft. They “flew” their square chutes over the Caribbean for ten miles and landed almost silently in the clearing a SR-71 Blackbird flying at twenty-eight thousand feet overhead had picked out for them.
OPFOR (opposing forces) at the terrorist site were Americans also equipped with blank ammunition. Everything went down smoothly. SEAL Team Six flew three thousand miles, put out four SEAL platoons in a high altitude–high opening night jump, parasailed ten miles to the objective, landed in a single cluster on a DZ no bigger than a couple of football fields, assembled, took down the bad guys, rescued a hostage, and snatched back a nuke without the loss of a single SEAL.
The scenario was so realistic, with everyone playing his part, that the SEALs’ only surprise came when Marcinko informed them that the mission had been a training exercise, the team’s certification exam. This was the first time the CTs had practiced all the risky skills of their profession in a real-time, full-tilt war game. So they had busted their asses for a game?
“The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat,” goes an old military axiom.
Marcinko received a message from JSOC. “You did wonderfully—better than we expected. The Joint Chiefs are impressed.”
SEAL Team Six’s next mission—all missions after that—would be for real. The nation’s newest counterterrorist unit, brother to Delta Force, was certified and ready for action.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
COMMANDER DICK MARCINKO DESIGNED and trained the best group of warriors in the nation’s history. Still, I wasn’t shocked when he was relieved of command and chopped over to the operational control of the CNO at the Pentagon in July 1983 with a fourth-floor office down the corridor from mine. Marcinko admitted himself that he was an obnoxious sonofabitch who rubbed just about everyone he came in contact with the wrong way. He had pissed off, threatened, alienated, provoked, offended, and screwed with SpecWar commanders on both coasts. Now he was paying the price for it by sitting on his ass behind a desk.
He and I were both confined to offices in a crowded corner of the Navy Command Center, a bustling series of rooms where lower ranking officers—lower than admiral, that is—kept track of naval movements and crisis incidents worldwide. One day in September 1983, Marcinko and I entered a SCIF to find a group of intel types gathered around a nautical chart on the wall. Marcinko bulled his way into the center of it and in his smirking boom of a voice inquired, “Hey, guys. What country are we losing today?”
“Grenada,” someone said.
It seemed people moved in and out of the Pentagon more often than deck swabbies changed their skivvies. Admiral Hayward retired and Admiral James D. Watkins replaced him as CNO. Through him, I already knew the United States was about four days away from overrunning the island nation of Grenada with the most massive invasion force since the Inchon landing more than thirty years ago.
I accepted that with my age and rank I had to be content with studying, evaluating, and preparing actions to be carried out by younger SpecWar fighters. Marcinko, on the other hand, seemed desperate. He had spent much of his life preparing to lead a unit like SEAL Team Six into combat. He cultivated the team, built it—and now he was sidelined. He appealed to his old friend and sea daddy, Vice Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons Jr., now deputy chief of naval operations.
“I’m fucked!” he groaned. “Anything is better than sitting in a windowless room and listening to reports coming in over the radio. Sir, I know damned well I’m better’n anybody else you can get at leading men into a fight.”
Lyons assigned him to the secretary of Navy as his briefer.
“Cocksuckers,” Dick bellyached to me. “You and me, Bone, we started all this shit with SEALs and Team Six and CT. So what do they do? They bend us over and fuck us. So here we sit it out like a couple of old whores.”
Grenada was the southernmost island of the Grenadine chain, only ninety miles north of South America. Great Britain managed the island until 1974, when its citizens won independence within the British Commonwealth. The first prime minister, Eric Gairy, proved corrupt and heavy-handed, whereupon he was overthrown by the Marxist New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop.
Bishop proved worse than Gairy. As new prime minister, he imposed an oppressive communist dictatorship enforced by a People’s Revolutionary Army (PRA). Soviet Premier Khrushchev recognized the advantages of Grenada’s strategic location within the American sphere. Although only 130 square miles in size, it was ideally positioned as an aircraft fueling base and as a supply depot and training center for guerrillas and terrorist groups throughout the Caribbean and southward. Castro, who supplied the Soviet premier with much of the Marxist muscle in Africa and Latin America, moved Cuban forces onto the island.
In 1983, Prime Minister Bishop fell out of favor with his colleagues. Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, also a communist, ousted Bishop from office on October 14, 1983, with the aid of other so-called politburo membe
rs.
Six days later, a mob in the capital, St. George’s, tried to forcibly free Bishop and other members of his former government. At Coard’s orders, the PRA opened fire and killed more than fifty people, wounding many more. Coard ordered the PRA to take Bishop and four of his ministers and three of his supporters to nearby Fort Rupert and shoot them. Afterwards, he imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew on the entire island.
An estimated one thousand Americans, of whom six hundred were students at St. George’s University Medical School, found themselves trapped on the island. President Reagan had previously proclaimed that no American would be abandoned to a foreign power. The United States was also concerned in this Cold War era about the construction of a nine-thousand-foot runway on the island capable of accommodating strategic bombers from the Soviet Union.
In Washington, the National Security Council ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare a military plan to rescue U.S. citizens in Grenada. President Reagan expanded the mission. It would now take over the island and rescue former governor general Sir Paul Scoon, who was being held under house arrest. Scoon seemed receptive to denouncing communism and installing a democratic government.
“Well,” President Reagan rationalized, “if we’ve got to go there, we might as well do all that needs to be done.”
Joint Task Force 120, code-named Operation Urgent Fury, assembled under the overall command of Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf. It was a curious juxtaposition of conventional forces and special warfare units from the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It would be carried out in complete secrecy.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
THE GRENADA LANDING FORCE consisted of thirteen ships, hundreds of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and more than seven thousand men. All four services operated together for the first time since the Vietnam War. Special Operations forces—Navy SEALs, Army’s Delta Force, and two Ranger Battalions—would bear the brunt of the fighting.
The general plan called for Marines to make an amphibious landing to seize the northern half of the island while Rangers and elements of the 82nd Airborne secured the southern half by parachuting or airlanding onto the airfield at Point Salinas. SEALs and Delta Force were assigned four crucial missions, beginning on the night of October 23.
A pair of MC-130 Combat Talon deep-penetration transports flew south separately in radio silence for almost seven hours. Aboard were sixteen SEALs from Teams Four and Six, eight on each aircraft. As evening approached, the Talons linked up and descended to a radar-evading six hundred feet above the Caribbean Sea. SEALs prepared to parachute-drop a pair of blunt-nosed Fiberglass Boston Whaler assault boats with 175hp outboard engines.
Plans called for the SEALs to use the boats to pick up a four-man Air Force Combat Control Team from the destroyer USS Clifton Sprague, then transport the zoomies ashore to emplace radio beacons at the Port Salinas airfield to guide in C-130s at dawn to airdrop Rangers.
Darkness had fallen by the time the SEAL planes arrived at their destination. Winds gusted at twenty-five knots and the seas were six to eight feet, conditions that ordinarily precluded parachute ops. C-130 tailgates opened. Men kicked out the boats and followed them into the blackness, jumping with static lines at this low altitude, each jumper laden with nearly one hundred pounds of weapons, ammunition, and other gear.
Chief Engineman Johnny Walker hit the water so hard it ripped off much of his equipment. Wind re-inflated his parachute and dragged him skipping across the waves, nearly drowning him before he managed to cut free. He found himself separated in the darkness from the boats and his teammates.
Other SEALs were not that fortunate. Four of the sixteen—Machinist Mate Kenneth Butcher, Quartermaster Kevin Lundberg, Hull Tech Stephen Leroy Morris, Engineman Robert Schamberger—vanished in the pitch-black night to become the operation’s first casualties. One of the boats was lost.
Survivors found each other and the remaining Whaler and regrouped on the destroyer with the Air Force team and set out to complete the mission. Bad luck continued to follow them. They spotted a Grenadian patrol boat approaching on their way to the island and cut power. Seawater swamped the overloaded little Whaler. The motor refused to start again and the boat drifted out to sea on a strong outbound tide. Its occupants were rescued several hours later. Rangers would have to make their combat jump on the airfield unassisted by radio beacons.
* * *
In the meantime that same Monday night, the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit dispatched a SEAL element led by Lieutenant Michael Walsh to scout beaches for the Marines’ landing on the island’s northern end. SEALs conducted a World War II UDT-type hydrographic survey and discovered that reefs offshore made the landing unapproachable except by very shallow-draft boats. Undetected, they beached their rubber boats in a driving rainstorm and found themselves within listening distance of a Grenadian work party digging defensive emplacements.
They slipped back to sea and reported their findings. Navy Task Force Commander Admiral Joseph Metcalf changed plans. Instead of making the amphib assault, Marines would be helicoptered to land at Pearls Airport and nearby Grenville.
Marines began choppering ashore at 5:20 a.m., Tuesday, October 24, in coordination with Rangers paradropping onto Point Salinas in the south. Cuban troops guarding the airport opened fire on the Rangers, who responded and dropped two dozen Cubans dead, then rounded up and took 661 prisoners. Eight Rangers died in the brief battle. By 11:00 a.m. the Salinas airport was secured. C-130s and helicopters began landing gun jeeps and 82nd Airborne troopers.
* * *
Gunfire at Point Salinas still sputtered when an eight-man SEAL detachment from Team Four landed in a rubber boat around the coast and north of the airport. Its mission was to capture the Beausejour radio station and keep it off the air until U.S. forces took over.
Radio Free Grenada was a 75,000-watt transmitter capable of blanketing a large area of the Caribbean. Built from Soviet-supplied equipment, it sat on a hill overlooking St. George’s less than a mile east of the sea. About a hundred yards southeast of the station, a north-south highway bridged a river, beyond which lay a settlement suburb of St. George’s.
Only a handful of PRA soldiers guarded the transmitter. They surrendered to the SEALs. Lieutenant Donald K. Erskine prepared his swimmers to hold the radio against counterattack and sent a two man security team to the road north of the station. It used an M-60 machine gun and a light antitank weapon (LAW) to ambush a truck filled with militiamen, killing five, wounding several others, and scattering the remainder.
Shortly thereafter, an enemy reaction force of infantry led by a Soviet BTR-60 armored personnel carrier roared up from nearby Fort Frederick to exchange fire with the defenders at the radio station. A SEAL slapped a rocket into the BTR’s turret, disabling its guns. Other militia with automatic weapons continued to advance in overwhelming numbers. Four SEALs, including Lieutenant Erskine, suffered non-life-threatening wounds.
Realizing that defending the station was hopeless, Erskine destroyed the transmitter and he and his men made a dash for the sea. They hid out until dark, then swam out toward the invasion fleet until helicopters spotted their strobe lights and hoisted them to safety.
* * *
SEAL Team Six, under Commander Robert Gormly, who had replaced Marcinko, drew the mission to rescue Governor General Sir Paul Scoon and his staff from house arrest at Government House on the outskirts of St. George’s.
Shortly after dawn following the Ranger paradrop at Point Salinas, two Black Hawk helicopters piloted by Night Stalkers, as members of the 160th SOAR were called, lifted off with Commander Gormly and his twenty-three-man force and streaked for Government House. They intended to insert SEALs in two elements inside high walls that enclosed the residence: one element in the front yard, the other in the backyard.
As the choppers circled, trying to locate the house in dense tropical forest, they began receiving withering machine-gun fire. The chopper at the rear of the house took the hardest hit. The thirteen
SEALs aboard it managed to fast-rope to the lawn. Commander Gormly, who had the team radio, was unable to get out of the Black Hawk. That meant the detachment on the ground had no commo with the tactical operations center.
Intense fire drove the second helicopter and its SEALs back to the fleet.
That left the rescue mission up to thirteen SEALs and Lieutenant John Koenig in the backyard. They fought their way across the lawn and into the mansion, where they found Scoon, his wife, and nine staff members hiding in the basement. Unable to fly the freed hostages to safety as planned, Koenig set up defensive perimeters inside the house and on the grounds outside and prepared to hold out until relief arrived. The loss of the radio put them out of touch with the rest of the invasion force.
Fortunately, the residence was located on a hilltop, which provided SEALs excellent fields of fire across the lawn. The siege raged throughout the day with intermittent attacks by Grenadian forces. A SEAL sniper picked off a number of attackers while moving from window to window upstairs.
The PRA commander called up three armored personnel carriers (APCs). Inside the mansion, to team member Lieutenant Bill Davis’s surprise, he discovered the little nation’s landline telephone system still worked. He dialed Rangers at the Salinas airfield and asked for gunship protection.
Anti-aircraft emplacements from Cuban military headquarters at Fort Frederick shot down two of the Sea Cobras that responded to Davis’s request. Shortly thereafter, an AC-130 Spectre gunship from the Air Force’s Eighth Special Operations Squadron arrived over target. It possessed more firepower than a tank—a battery of 20mm Vulcan and 40mm Bofors cannon, even a 105mm howitzer capable of firing as many as eight forty-pound explosive shells per minute.
Its massive firepower destroyed an APC and laid down a curtain of fire against attackers. A laconic radio transmission from the C-130 reported the number of enemy dead and wounded: “I see twenty flappers and kickers and seven runners.”
Night Fighter Page 26
