He looked up at me, his eyes all scrunched up, his nostrils flared, and his lips contorted in a sneer. “‘Nine: In other words, Marcinko will not fucking breathe unless I say it is all right to breathe.’” He slid the paper back into his desk. “Now—you got that, Dickhead?”
Sure I got it. And there’s a Santa Claus. And Elvis is still alive. “Loud and clear, Pinky. Loud and clear.”
I worked for countless assholes like Pinky when I was in Vietnam, inflexible, small-minded officers with pea-brains, who refused to see how SEALs could be utilized imaginatively. Instead of using us as the tip of the tactical spear to terrorize and disorient the enemy, they assigned us brief supporting roles for their slow, blundering, ineffective armadas of riverine craft—SpecWar spear carriers whose mission was badly conceived and ill-defined.
The reason behind their incredible lack of vision was that they had all been trained as ship drivers, aviators, or nuclear submariners, not as lean, mean, badass jungle fighters. They thought of war in the conventional way—a static affair in which the lines don’t shift very much; in which one side attacks the other with huge numbers of men to take territory.
But as we all know now—and a few of us knew back then—Vietnam was an unconventional war. It wasn’t about territory and huge armies facing off the way it had been done since the Assyrians. Vietnam was a brutal jungle war largely waged by small groups of highly motivated insurgents backed up by large numbers of highly motivated troops. To succeed, you had to hit the enemy the way he hit you: get in, beat the shit out of him, and get the hell out before he knew what had happened. Most of the naval officers with whom I worked just didn’t get it.
Why? Some of them were stupid. Others were cowards. Others were bean-counters who led from behind their desks. Still others were ticket punchers—staff pukes who needed six months in a combat zone to further their careers. The most dangerous believed they were the twentieth century’s answer to von Clausewitz. They designed missions guaranteed to provide 80 to 90 percent casualties to the American forces involved, while doing Mr. Victor Charlie little or no damage whatsoever.
I developed an effective technique for dealing with them all. It was called UNODIR. Whenever I took my men out hunting, I filed my ops plans—as ordered—with the task force HQ. My messages always had the same theme: UNODIR (UNless Otherwise DIRected), they began, “I’m going to go out in the boonies and kill a bunch of Victor Charlies as brutally as I can. To do this, I’m going to commandeer a PBR [Patrol Boat/River], grab as much ammo and ordnance as me and my men can carry, and head off into the boonies. When we’ve run out of ammo and hostile bodies, we’ll be back. Love & kisses, Demo Dick Marcinko, LT, USN.”
Then I’d give my UNODIR message to the communications shack and order the radioman to send it half an hour after we’d left.
Of course, the assholes back at HQ would try to reach me and countermand my ops plan. Guess what? For some reason, every time they tried, my radio was turned off. Well, we’d been ordered to maintain radio silence out in the bush, and I was just following normal procedures. After about two months of UNODIR missions, the assholes left me alone and I was able to kill Victor Charlie in peace.
So, Pinky’s list did not intimidate me. There were ways to get around it. What bothered me more was the schedule—we had to keep up Red Cell’s normal schedule, as well as perform the covert missions that were the real reason I’d been shanghaied back to duty.
For example, he wanted to turn me loose on the Navy Yard. Why? Why detail the Cell to do a bunch of stupid exercises when the national security was being buggered by a bunch of Kimchis?
Besides, the Navy Yard is where NIS headquarters is located. It’s where the CNO has his office. It seemed to me that if there was one place Pinky wouldn’t want Demo Dick Marcinko, Shark-Man of the Delta, sticking his big Slovak nose, it was the Navy Yard.
That was on the one hand. On the other hand, Pinky was one of the dumbest assholes I’d ever come across. Maybe he just didn’t care where I growled and prowled—maybe he figured I’d pull my punches if I was going up against NIS. Maybe he figured they’d catch me and throw me in the brig—and he’d be rid of me once and for all.
Fat fucking chance.
Chapter 11
LESS THAN A DAY AFTER I’D BEEN SHANGHAIED BY CNO, I MET with my new unit at Shooter McGee’s, the bar on Duke Street East in Alexandria that served as the unofficial headquarters for the original Red Cell. It seemed fitting. Shooter’s is where we used to stand in the parking lot and watch Snake and Pooster the Rooster race up the outside of a seven-story apartment building to the penthouse Pooster shared with Snake and his gorgeous wife, Miss Kitty.
But that was then. Snake, Pooster, Trailer Court, the Gold Dust Twins Larry and Frank, Ho-Ho-Ho—all of Red Cell’s plank owners, which is Navy talk for the men who originally form a unit—they were all gone now. Some had retired. Others had been retired. And still others, fortunately for me, were in senior SpecWar slots and scattered all over the world—my own, personal fifth column of master chiefs.
The current Red Cell, then, was composed of second-and third-generation rogue warriors, kids who’d been through BUD/S in the mid-eighties, child-warriors who were only babies—seamen second-and third-class petty officers—when I created SEAL Team Six back in 1980. I’d selected a couple of the most precocious of these tadpoles for Six during my last months as CO. When I created Red Cell in 1985, I’d shanghaied a few of these gifted Froglets for the unit.
Now, most of these “kids” were first-class chief petty officers and junior chiefs; others had earned their senior-grade petty officer’s stripes. They were platoon leaders now, passing on what they’d been taught to a new generation of Frogs. But it wasn’t easy.
As the CO of SEAL Team Two I had about one hundred and fifty men under my command. There were less than three hundred active SEALs nationwide back then—Team One in Coronado, and Two at Little Creek—and I knew every SEAL in America by name. Today, there are thousands of SEALs in more than half a dozen SEAL teams. Indeed, SEAL Team Six, supposedly the most elite of all SEAL units, is bigger than SEAL Two was when I commanded it in the mid-seventies. That dramatic growth has meant more money, more opportunities, and a higher profile for SpecWar, especially in these days of Pentagon cutbacks. But it has also meant more bureaucracy. More layers of management. More conventional thinking applied to unconventional warfare.
Worst of all, hordes of unqualified officers—admin pukes like Pinky, intel weenies, and Academy-educated ticket punchers—are elbowing their way into Navy SpecWar because of the rapid advancement potential, the increased visibility, and the larger budgets. The officers they displace are operators—the hunters who don’t give a damn about anything but getting the job done.
SpecWar’s rapid growth has also led to paralysis—and worse, it has led to endemic butt-covering. Today, for example, there is such a convoluted chain of command that SpecWar units—which were designed as quick-reaction teams—cannot in fact react quickly. There are so many “May I?” ’s that have to get asked, so many forms to be signed, so many rules of engagement that have to be explained, that the bad guys escape before the SEALs are wheels up.
Please, your three-starred sanctity, may I receive your blessing to go after Abu Nidal, who just assassinated our ambassador in London, then raped and eviscerated his wife and children?
Of course, my Froggish son. But first you must sign for each and every bullet you requisition. Also, here’s another form—this one guarantees you won’t kill anybody. Killing deeply offends the ACLU, NOW, and the hundreds of Hollywood liberals who spend time in Washington when they’re not making violence-filled movies.
Please initial this. It’s an affidavit saying you agree to take a legal adviser on your mission, so he can inform the bad guys of their rights before you do anything. The pink form is your request for a political cadre who’ll make sure none of your sailors uses language or gestures that might offend some minority or pressure group whil
e doing the nation’s business. After all, we don’t want any gay-bashing or other politically incorrect actions in our Navy.
The green form—sign on the dotted line please—ensures that you won’t ding up any of our equipment. Policy guidance regulations state that the Navy doesn’t care whether your equipment works or not, just so long as it looks good and it remains on your unit inventory sheet as an operational asset.
Another thing: we can’t have bad press. So, my roguish killer, you must take a media adviser with you, too—just sign this contract here, and date it. That way you’re committed to hold a press conference on CNN explaining each and every move you’re going to make, one hour before you attack.
Now, finally, please put your John Hancock on this one last pledge statement.
What is it, your flag-rank panjandrumcy?
It ’s a sworn attestation that you are doing this on your own. This operation was your idea—no one else’s. It says that if you fail, you agree to fall on your sword.
Ah, good. Now, then, just prick your finger and add your initial in blood by this last clause, too.
What’s that, your gold-braided worshipness?
It’s the ultimate contingency rider, my hairy-assed child. It says that if your mission succeeds—which is exceedingly unlikely because of all the strictures we’ve hung on you—and you and your men become heroes, which would greatly astonish us because that would glorify warriors (and the one thing our new Navy does not want to do is glorify warriors), then you go straight back to your cage, and I get to take all the credit.
In its heyday, in the late eighties, Red Cell comprised roughly three dozen shooters, each with a specialty such as lock picking, mountain climbing, or long-range sniping. Now, after five years of nickel-and-diming, the unit had been cut back to the bare bones—eight men. Leadership was nonexistent. Money was tight.
Why? Because the Navy was protecting itself from a perceived threat—and I don’t mean terrorism. The system didn’t see Red Cell as a positive force, to be used to solve its real-world problems. The system saw it as a liability.
Example: Commodore Rat Shit is in charge of Naval Station Echo. If Red Cell infiltrates Echo easily, the commodore will be embarrassed. Not because he might be responsible for the deaths of scores, perhaps even hundreds of his men in the event of a real-life attack, but because his failure to keep the Cell out will become a part of his next fitness report. Bad fitness reports mean no promotions. In this world of downsizing, no promotion means early retirement.
Therefore, Commodore Rat Shit makes sure that Red Cell does not infiltrate his station. He makes them wear hats and shirts that say BAD GUY in big bold letters. He takes an active hand writing the scenarios.
Guess what? Surprise!—Rat Shit’s security force wins the exercise. The fact that his installation is not prepared for a real-world terrorist threat doesn’t concern him. The important thing is that his ass has been covered. His fitrep will be outstanding. His promotion is assured.
So these days, if you believed the fitreps, Red Cell was made up of misfits, iconoclasts, and renegades. The admiral to whom the unit reported was Pinky Prescott. He hated Red Cell because it had been created by yours truly, and he took it out on the men every chance he got. Slowly, their numbers, like the days of December, dwindled down to a precious few.
There was, then, a single SEAL squad—eight men—gathered around the end of the bar sucking down Coors Light when I walked out of the afternoon rain into the smoke-tinged atmosphere of Shooter’s.
The unit may have been small, but so far as I’m concerned, the sailors Pinky saw as malcontented, troublemaking scum were representative to me of the best that Navy SpecWar can offer. They’re Warriors—dirtbags, grunts, shooters, hunters—who will do the job no matter what it takes, no matter how dirty they have to get to do it.
The platoon chief’s name is—well, I’ll call him Nasty Nicky Grundle. Nasty is about the size of an NFL linebacker, and twice as mean. The gargantuan California surfer received his handle in Panama, where he’d been a part of SEAL Team Two’s attack on the Panamanian gunboat Presidente Porras, a twin-diesel job about one hundred and fifty feet long tied up in Balboa Harbor.
Nicky was responsible for designing the C-4 explosive charges that he and another SEAL attached to the boat, after swimming half a mile with them. The “recipe” called for half a pound of C-4. Nick used two pounds in each charge. The resulting explosions blew two three-ton diesel engines one hundred and fifty yards down the harbor. SEAL Two’s CO, Comdr. Norm Carley, who led the underwater attack—the first underwater assault on a warship since World War II, incidentally—told Grundle, “That was real nasty, Nick,” and the name stuck.
I liked the fact that Nicky could be nasty. But what I liked even more was his dedication. I’d selected Nick for SEAL Team Six even though he was a youngster because of his size and his aggressiveness. I didn’t know how much heart he had—but he proved it to me. Three months after he’d come aboard we went out on a HALO—that’s High Altitude, Low Opening—night jump exercise out of Marana, Arizona. That night, one of the newest men in the platoon, a shit-for-brains radio operator, screwed up. Nick went after him, free-falling to just under four thousand feet before he caught up with the asshole, took hold of him in midair, and untangled the fouled-up chute so it would deploy.
Then it was Nicky’s turn to get down safely. Of course, with his having just saved one man’s life, it was time for the ever-popular Mr. Murphy to make a guest appearance. Nicky pushed off and free-fell right to the edge of the low-altitude envelope before he deployed his chute. But in the darkness, he flew straight into a triple line of high-voltage lines. He tucked over the first, but couldn’t clear the others. So he cut away at sixty-five feet and dropped face-first into the desert.
The fall—think of it as jumping face-first off a seven-story building onto a pile of rocks, because that’s exactly what it was—would have killed most people. Not Nick. When I found him, he was trying to walk back to the assembly point. The whole right side of his face was gone. Every nerve had been severed. His right eye had been popped back right inside the skull and they thought he’d lose it.
But Nicky’s a tough puppy. He not only survived his ordeal, he was back on duty within six months. The doc allowed him to make his first jump less than one hundred days after he was back; ten days after he jumped, he requalified as a diver. His vision is perfect; so is the rest of him. Of course, these days he sets off the metal detectors at every airport he goes through, since the whole right side of his face is made of titanium. But that hasn’t stopped him. In fact, it’s actually improved his looks.
Sitting next to Nasty was Duck Foot Dewey. Allen Dewey was a short, barrel-chested farmboy from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He grew up hunting Canadian goose, deer, rabbit, squirrel, duck, and anything else that could be cooked and eaten, on his father’s seventy acres of soybeans and corn. He must have been affected by the low rumble of explosions coming from Aberdeen Proving Ground, directly across the bay, because at seventeen, he up and joined the Navy.
Even as a SEAL the kid was an irrepressible hunter. In fact, since he’s based less than four hours from home these days, Duck Foot makes the drive virtually every weekend, grabs his shotgun, and heads for the woods or the ponds. The SEALs he serves with always eat well because their freezers are stocked with an unending stream of mallard and Muscovy ducks, Canadian geese, and venison sausage.
I hadn’t worked with Duck Foot, but he came highly recommended. All that sneaking and peeking in the woods made him a stealthy son of a bitch, and he’d won his spurs in Iraq, where he’d been attached to SEAL Team Five. Duck Foot’s assignment was to infiltrate Kuwait City and bring communications equipment such as cellular phones and video cameras, intelligence materials, and ordnance for booby traps to the Kuwaiti resistance. He made more than two dozen trips in and out without being seen. In fact, Duck Foot is the only petty officer third class who holds the Exalted Order of the Eastern Star,
the highest military decoration the Amir of Kuwait can bestow.
Next to Duck Foot stood Cherry Enders. Cherry was the youngest sailor who’d ever been selected for SEAL Team Six—he was six weeks past nineteen at the time. But he had language skills—he spoke gutter Spanish with almost no accent and could make do in French and Arabic. Don’t ask how he had acquired the skills, although the joke was that he’d spent his childhood in whorehouses. A big, rangy kid with ham-sized hands and a round, innocent face, he grew up fast at Six. Now he was a master chief who’d led platoons in Grenada and Panama.
Cherry was the senior enlisted man during SEAL Team Six’s covert foray into Haiti in December 1991. Back then, twelve of deposed president Aristide’s family and political allies were brought out during an operation codenamed Raw Deal.
Acting on orders created by an Executive Intelligence Finding typed at the White House and signed by Pres. George Bush, SEAL Team Six’s Green Team traveled clandestinely to the Navy Station at Guantánamo, Cuba. From there, they dropped out of a plane onto Navassa Island, an American protectorate thirty miles off Cap Carcasse, on Haiti’s westernmost tip. There, two Mark III Mod-4 Blue Lightning boats had been prepositioned by naval SpecWar units. The BLs—1,500-hp chase boats that had been confiscated from drug dealers and given to the Navy—had been brought on a tramp steamer from Naples, Florida, and secured and camouflaged on the uninhabited island.
Aristide’s people were waiting by prearrangement in a small Haitian fishing village called Dame Marie, on the north side of Cap Carcasse. The SEALs landed at night in small rubber boats, found the Haitians, brought them back to the swift boats, and exfiltrated, covering 125 miles of open sea to Guantánamo in just over three hours.
The operation remained secret for almost nine months. It was leaked to San Diego Union reporter Greg Vistica—the guy who broke the Tailhook story—during the 1992 budget fight, by a disgruntled West Coast SpecWar captain who hoped that Congress, which had not been notified about Raw Deal, would cut the SEAL Team Six budget.
Red Cell Page 17
