Red Cell

by Richard Marcinko

  He’d built his own defense-oriented business, designing guidance systems for Navy missiles, and made it prosper by doing it the old-fashioned way—sweat and blood. He had a wife he’d married while he was a grad student, and three grown kids—all doctors. I told him I should be so lucky. My kids are in their twenties, but they haven’t grown up yet. Maybe someday.

  Me, I’d taken the Navy route—a high-school dropout who joined at seventeen to escape reform school. I became a Frogman because I wanted to kick ass and take names. Then, because of incessant prodding by my first sea daddy, that wonderfully profane, delightfully obscene Underwater Demolition Team platoon chief named Ev Barrett, whose voice I always heard in my brain during times of stress, I got my high-school GED, went to Officer Candidate School, and was commissioned. Then I became a SEAL. And then it was more than twenty years of shooting and looting, hopping and popping, raping, pillaging, and burning. I served as an attaché in Cambodia, where I body-surfed on the Mekong River under Khmer Rouge fire. I commanded SEAL Team Two. I earned a college degree, and even an MA from Auburn.

  And then, in 1980, I was ordered to build the Navy’s answer to Delta Force, SEAL Team Six. I retired ten years later, the subject of a $60-million investigation. Twenty-three months after that I was indicted by the Department of Justice, suffered through two criminal trials, and ultimately did a year in a federal pen.

  They investigated me at about the same time they were investigating Ollie North. They got him for shredding paper. They got me for shredding people.

  I had more fun doing my shredding than Ollie did doing his.

  But enough about me. What makes you tick, Joe?

  Well, he said, he was fifty-eight, his kids were grown, and he wanted to work not for them, but for himself He was a small businessman in a world of multinational corporations and defense cutbacks, but the challenge suited him, and he wanted to win. That sounded good to me. So why, I asked, did he feel he needed protection?

  He explained that he was making his bread and butter designing telemetry systems for a new Navy missile project. But that his soul belonged to a new project: he’d gone ass over teakettle in hock to buy an Italian company that built toroidal-hulled diesel minisubs, appropriately named Focas, or seals. Focas were small, maneuverable craft that could carry eight to twenty-five people and were especially effective for SEAL operations. But so far, the Navy had rejected anything to do with Andrews’s sub, refusing even to evaluate it. If it was diesel, he was told, the Navy wasn’t interested.

  That made perfect sense to me. I’d found it out in 1974, when, as the commanding officer of SEAL Team Two, I’d tried to get the Navy to buy a sub remarkably similar to the Foca—a twelve-man dry sub for CALOW, or Coastal And Limited-Objective Warfare use. I was turned down back then, just like Joe was being goatfucked now, because of an internal dispute between Surface Force, which funds and controls SEALs, and Submarine Force, which funds and controls submarines.

  I could write reams on the subject, but the bottom line is that Surface Force can’t buy subs, and Sub Force won’t buy diesels.

  It meant Joe was getting screwed by a system so inflexible, narrow-minded, and rigid that even if he’d had a perfect vehicle, the Navy would reject it. So far, he said, he’d poured more than 2 million of his own dollars into the Foca. He’d hocked his house and taken bank loans. But the payoff would be worth it. If the Navy bought twenty-five Focas at $4.5 million each, he’d gross over $110 million and net more than half.

  That’s big bucks, Joe.

  “Bet your ass, Dick.” About the only hope he had left, he continued, was to hire a lobbyist to take his case directly to the top echelons of the Pentagon—the offices he hadn’t been able to crack on his own.

  So, I asked, what’s stopping you?

  The fee. Joe explained that there was only one man in town who could convince Sub Force to buy a diesel sub. That was Grant Griffith—the former SECDEF. But he charged $1,500 an hour, with a two-hundred-hour minimum up front. “That’s a third of a million dollars, Dick—I don’t have it.”

  That name made my ears prick up. If this guy wanted to be represented by Griffith, I was interested in sticking to him like glue. Especially since he was building the exact kind of underwater vehicle countries like North Korea could use to smuggle nuclear materials.

  I asked about the death threat, and how he’d gotten to me.

  “I got to you because I talked to a friend of mine at DIA and asked if he knew anybody I could call.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “What’s his job?”

  “He handles Spec Ops stuff.”

  “What branch?”

  Joe looked at me and smiled. “Can’t say, Dick. If I did, you’d know exactly who I was talking about—and he wants to stay out of it. But he told me that if I wanted the best, then I’d hire you. He says the Navy railroaded you.”

  Well, I knew fifty guys like that at DIA—from Air Force weenies like my old pal Tony Mercaldi to SEALs I’d schooled at Team Six to Army assholes I’d cross-trained with at various times in my career. And as for the fact that the Navy screwed me—I agreed with that sentiment wholeheartedly. “Okay—let’s say I’m not being set up here. Why do you think you need protection in the first place?”

  “Cluster bombs,” Joe said.

  That made no sense at all. I called for another triple Bombay, my third since he’d arrived. Joe sipped his original diet Coke and explained. He was involved in a new design for the cluster bombs used by Navy Air, making them more efficient, by which, of course, he meant more deadly. At one stage, the work involved animals—research on wounds—and it had somehow attracted the attention of a bunch of animal rights activists. It had all begun suddenly, about the same time I’d been in Japan. One day everything was normal. The next, Joe’s tires had been slashed, his car spray-painted, and a dozen obscene phone calls left on his answering machine. Two days later, he’d received the first of a dozen threatening notes—he brought them to show me—complete with snapshots of him going to work. It was enough to make him very nervous.

  “What about the cops?”

  “They say if something happens they’ll take action.”

  Of course. What had I been thinking? I perused the pictures and documents. He wasn’t just another paranoid CEO who wanted to look important. He’d actually been threatened. We got down to the nitty-gritty over grilled swordfish. He didn’t balk when I ordered a nice, flinty white Graves to go with the fish. He even had a glass. Okay, half a glass.

  By the end of the evening, I’d agreed to help. By working for Joe, I could learn more about Griffith’s modus operandi and get paid at the same time. When I got back to the manor I faxed Tosho, requesting any info he had on ANT, and nutshelling Joe Andrews’s situation. Six hours later, I received a one-line memo from Tokyo: “Clips you sent are total bullshit. Get real. We have nada on ANT. Keep head down. Luv & kisses, Tosh.”

  You know how when your car develops a tic and you take it to a mechanic, there’s no way the tic will surface? Well, as of the minute I went to work for Joe Andrews, there were no further threats against his life. I even tried letting him go out alone, making him an inviting target while I trailed at a discreet distance.

  On Wednesday morning Joe climbed into my car and displayed an envelope.

  “Good news,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “An invitation.” He was like a kid, pushing the envelope on me. “Read it, read it, read it.”

  The envelope was expensive—the thick kind of cotton rag paper you can’t find at Office Depot. I slid the heavy, hand-lettered card out and fingered it.

  “Read, Dick.”

  “Okay, already. Geez.”

  *

  Allied National Technologies, Inc.

  Is Invited

  To Send a Team

  To Participate in

  The Fifth Annual Combat Simulation

  Friday, Novem
ber 22

  The Hustings

  Upperville, Virginia

  *

  I recognized the address. It was the horse-country retreat belonging to Grant Griffith. I knew about The Hustings because I’d been doing beaucoup homework. Grant McKendrick Griffith had been Lyndon Johnson’s thirty-seven-year-old Secretary of Defense back in the late sixties, and a military adviser to all the Republican and Democratic administrations since. He was always being interviewed on “Nightline” and CNN and the Sunday-morning talk shows—a tall, distinguished, somewhat reptilian-looking asshole with thick eyebrows and prematurely white hair who wore gray pinstripes, spoke in measured tones, and used polysyllabic legal-babble instead of English. I thought of him as a FMR. Those are the letters on the TV screen, explaining that he was a FMR secretary of defense or a FMR Reagan adviser or a FMR member of the such-and-such commission for the nonpartisan study of pigeon entrails.

  Griffith was part of the permanent Washington establishment—one of those lawyer/lobbyists like Robert Strauss or Clark Clifford or Leonard Garment who make their millions no matter who’s in power.

  I also knew that once a year, Griffith ran a war game on his estate in horse country. He invited ten teams. The winner got a trophy. It sounded like so much bullshit—like Soldier of Fortune wannabe stuff.

  “So, what’s the big deal?”

  “I told you the night we met I’d love to get Griffith to represent us, but his fees are too rich. He wouldn’t even talk to us. And now—here’s an invitation to his home.”

  I wondered about that. I wasn’t going to say anything to Joe, but there were too many coincidences going on here. On the one hand, I don’t believe in coincidences. On the other, a foot in the door is a foot in the door. “Didn’t you tell me that if the Foca deal goes through you’d net more than fifty million bucks?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then use the war game.”

  “Huh?”

  “The invite gets you in the door. You take Griffith aside. You tell him if he represents you, you’ll give him fifty percent of the profit—that works out to about twenty-five mil, right?”

  “Ask him to work on a contingency basis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d never thought of that.” Joe scratched his chin. “You think he’d bite?”

  “For that kind of money? Who wouldn’t.”

  “But what about the game?”

  Game, shmame. “What about it?”

  “Wouldn’t we have to do well to impress Griffith?”

  That brought me to a full stop. Joe was probably right. Well, nothing was impossible. “You ever do this sort of thing before?”

  He shook his head. “Not since I was a Cub Scout.”

  “And the people you’ll be bringing with you?”

  “Geez, Dick, I don’t know. A couple of ‘em were in the Navy.”

  “How long before we have to play soldier?”

  He glanced at the invitation. “We’re supposed to show up at The Hustings two weeks from this Friday.”

  I threw the car into gear and swung into traffic—Brer Rabbit Marcinko was being tossed into the fucking brier patch one more time. “Joe,” I said, “welcome to boot camp.”

  Chapter 4

  I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN creating a battle-ready special-ops force is unit integrity. Unit integrity means your men think and act in concert, each supporting the others, not as a disparate bunch of no-loads, each out for himself. Unit integrity also means they’ll die for each other if the need arises. Unit integrity is the emotional, physical, and psychological epoxy that holds SEAL boat crews, Marine Recon platoons, and Special Forces A-teams together. In John Wayne war movies, the Duke always makes a speech to his grunts or pilots or sailors about what they’re fighting for. But in real life, pilgrim, men do not fight to the death because somebody’s just mouthed off about abstruse values like freedom or liberty or democracy versus the Red menace, or because they’ve gotta defend their country against narcotraficantes or Abu Nidal—inspired terrorism.

  Real men fight for their buddies: for their squad or for their platoon. But hardening that man-to-man epoxy—the bonding process that builds unit integrity—can take weeks and months, months of training, working, hanging out, and, yes, even fighting together until the kinks have been loosened and your guys start thinking like a big collective sphincter, not a bunch of singular assholes.

  For SEALs, unit integrity training starts in BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, when pairs of tadpole Frogmen are literally tied together as swim buddies on their first day and stay lashed as a team for the next six months. When they become real SEALs, the inculcation continues during combat training.

  When I formed SEAL Team Six in 1980, we ate, slept, drank, and fought together for eighteen weeks without stopping, cramming a year’s worth of training into less than five months of intensive, high-pressure exercises. My men shot more, jumped more, climbed more, and trained harder than any unit in the history of the U.S. military.

  When we were at home, our days began at 0-Dark Hundred with PT. When we were on the road, we’d begin with predawn assault exercises or parachute jumps. At home or on the road, the day usually ended way past midnight at a bar, some friendly saloon where my ninety SEAL Six rogues drank their Coors, downed tequila shots, ogled the lovely ladies, and argued the issues of the day, a combination of activities that often resulted in their beating the shit out of each other—unless outsiders offered differing opinions or objected to the ogles, in which case my beamish boys would turn on the unfortunate commentators and reduce them to sausage. The result of all those self-inflicted bruises, lacerations, contusions, and bloody noses was a unit filled with men who’d drink each other’s piss—that was how close they became.

  My current problem was to give Joe’s dweebs a combination of BUD/S course and SEAL Team Six inculcation in less than a week, in order to build them into something that resembled a unit. I knew that when it came to the war game, I’d be the one doing the heavy lifting, so believe me, I wasn’t shooting for integrity—I just wanted to keep them from stepping all over themselves.

  The list of tasks they had to learn was formidable. They needed basic outfitting, land navigation, patrolling, ambushing and counterambushing, concealment, camouflage, survival, food preparation, weapons tactics, marksmanship, tracking, first aid, night movement, and some consideration of cold-weather training. At least I didn’t have to worry about sleeping accommodations—there’d be no time for sleeping.

  Okay, so I was faced with what you might consider an impossible task: turning four no-load, pus-nuts, engineering-dweeb dip-shits into a finely tuned fighting machine. Well, fuck you—I don’t accept the word impossible. But to accomplish my mission, I knew I’d have to break them down into basic animals, then give them a common goal. That wouldn’t be hard. I’d faced more difficult challenges and broken down more impregnable personalities.

  Besides, I had a plan: Mother (fucker) Marcinko’s Basic ERA Technique. My version of ERA is to treat everyone alike: just like shit.

  The breakdown would be done at Rogue Manor. I told Joe to pass the word that for seven days everyone would be incommunicado, so leave the cellular phones at home. Isolation and concentration were the keys. The area around the Manor—two hundred acres of opaque woods, complete with cold streams, mucky bogs, and even a couple of small lakes—is enough quiet space to help wreak a quick transformation of civilized creature into killer animal. I have neighbors, of course, a few hundred yards away, but the thick forest between houses acts as a terrific buffer.

  As for the common goal, I’d motivate the dweebs to think collectively by force of my shy, retiring, introverted personality. They’d all pull together toward something that could be defined in two words: “Get Marcinko.”

  I gave Joe a shopping list that must have made his local army-and-navy store think Christmas had come early. The team needed all the basics: camouflage fatigues, boo
ts, sweat band/scarves, gloves, handkerchiefs, lighters (or waterproof matches), notebooks, pencils, watches, compasses, spoons, can openers, penlights, field knives, space blankets, emergency rations, canteens, insect repellents, camouflage makeup sticks, medical kits, spare socks, heat tabs, toilet paper, individual cammo netting, as well as any personal medicine they felt they might need or consume on a regular basis.

  Weapons and ammo would be addressed after I saw who was going to survive the basic bushman’s course. My goal was 100 percent.

  I scheduled arrival for 0800 Monday, and being scientific nerds, they all pulled their Volvos into the driveway within seconds of each other. Joe made the introductions. Dweeb One was David Fisher, a sallow-skinned, four-eyed electronics maven with a Cal Tech Ph.D.—an abbreviation that, as we all know, means “piled higher and deeper”—who parted his hair in the middle and had a big cowlick. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Dagwood Bumstead—which is what I named him.

  Engineer Number Two was Norman James, who was actually wearing a three-piece suit and black wing tips. I asked sarcastically why he’d left the tie at home, and he said in a serious tone of voice that he’d left it at home because he was coming to the country. I dubbed him Normal.

  Bringing up the rear was Francis Albert Schivione, a short, bearded guinea with curly salt-and-pepper hair and a thick Baltimore accent. He was yclept Crabcakes.

  I fed them coffee and doughnuts and told them to get dressed in combat clothes. Half an hour later they reappeared on my front porch looking like something out of “McHale’s Navy.” Shit—I was living in the middle of a fucking sitcom.

  I smiled at them. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  They all answered politely.

  It was wake-up time. “Fuck you all,” I said in my best Ev Barrett growl.

  That opened their eyes.

  “That’s right—fuck you. You know why? Because you’re a bunch of worthless motherfucking cocicsucking shit-for-brains pencil-dicked no-load dip-shits. I don’t give a shit about pee-haich-fucking-dees, or where you went to school. Because this isn’t a fucking office—it’s the real world, where you get cold and wet. Here, success is judged by how well I think you’re doing, not how well you write memos or keep your files alphabetized. This is boot camp, assholes. Know what that means? It means, if you don’t camp well, I’ll give you a boot—right up your ass.”