by Scott McEwen
The following afternoon, on October 15, 1973, Thornton and Norris were side by side in the White House. As President Richard Nixon put the blue sash holding the gold medal around Thornton’s neck, the president asked: “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Sir,” Thornton said, “if you could break this medal in half, the other half belongs to the man beside me.”1
He meant Norris.
Thornton would later get his wish, although his medal was never broken in half. Norris was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Gerald R. Ford on March 6, 1976, for rescuing the two downed pilots in 1972.
Thornton was asked many times: why did he do it? He always gave an answer similar to the one he gave the Norfolk Virginian Pilot newspaper: “We loved, and we gave, and we understood each other—that’s what SEAL teams are about.… We would have given our lives for each other.”
Thornton’s case remains the only time in the twentieth century that one Medal of Honor winner saved another.
* * *
A Medal of Honor winner can always get a meeting. In 1979, Norris went to see FBI director William H. Webster.
Norris hoped to persuade the FBI director to let him join the Bureau, despite his war injuries. Webster was a tough-minded man, a former federal judge who stared down several mafia dons in his New York courtroom. His refusal to knuckle under the pressure from the mob and its lawyers brought him to prominence and led President Jimmy Carter to appoint him to run the FBI. Webster considered the risks: the potential news story saying a decorated SEAL was unfit for the FBI versus putting a man in the line of fire who might not be capable of performing his duties. At length, Webster told him that if he passed all the tests, like any other FBI special agent, the Bureau would accept him. It was a tough but fair decision.
Norris passed the tests and would go on to serve twenty years as a special agent. A building is named for Norris at the SEAL base in Coronado.
* * *
With the end of the Vietnam War, Thornton was sent to be a senior instructor at the SEAL training base at Coronado, an island in San Diego Bay. This is where BUD/S happens.
The world’s most fearsome training program begins in a small compound of two-story buildings ringed by chain-link fence. It borders the famous Victorian-style Hotel Del Coronado. From its stately porches, guests can casually sip their cappuccinos while watching SEALs struggle in the surf below. The ease of civilian life is clearly visible to the salt-and-sand-starched SEALs as they struggle to attach a line to wet rocks or run in the sand with heavy logs on their shoulders.
Don Zub attended BUD/S in 1975, as part of class 91. This was where he met Thornton.
In Zub’s day there was a significant cultural divide in the SEALs between the Vietnam veterans, like Thornton, and the “new guys.” During the war, civilian society pivoted away from the traditional ideals of self-sacrifice, patience, and forbearance, values essential for military service. Self-discipline eased into a “let it all hang out” attitude. Many SEALs of Thornton’s generation found the changes unnerving. The riots, assassinations, and bombings, prompted by calls for a radical new society, only confirmed their suspicions. So the veteran instructors beat out any vestige of this thinking in their recruits. When they said “the only easy day was yesterday,” it was initially meant as a challenge to the drift of American society. At the receiving end, the recruits didn’t like it much. “There was some tension,” Zub admits.
Virtually all of the instructors were Vietnam veterans, like Thornton. They were hard men who had been hardened by war. “They saw a lot of their brothers die,” Zub said. “They did stuff that they couldn’t get away with today. They were very professional, at the extreme end of professional. The deadly end.”
Their professionalism and their hardness showed itself in unusual ways. One day Zub and several other SEALs were taking cold showers to condition themselves for training in the cold waters of the Pacific. One instructor ripped open the shower curtain and kicked Zub in the balls. He doubled over in pain. The instructor barked: “If I kicked you in the balls ten times, would the eleventh time feel any different?”
The instructor’s point was that shivering in a cold shower would not prepare you for the rigors of cold-water training. The way he illustrated that lesson, which would be a criminal offense today, was never forgotten.
* * *
The Emerson rig is a bubble-rebreather made in France. The specially made device lets U.S. Navy SEALs dive up to thirty-two feet underwater and swim undetected beneath the waves. But the device requires considerable training to avoid drowning. Zub and his fellow SEALs began a series of training sessions—called “evolutions”—with the Emerson rig in 1976. They practiced in a pool, then in a nearby bay. Then they practiced using it in the bay at night. Each practice drill was more taxing than the last. Finally, in May 1976, the day came to use the Emerson rig in the ever-dangerous ocean.
SEAL Team One stood on the beach on Coronado Island that morning, watching the wild eight-foot waves roar against the rocks and feeling the wind lash their faces. “There is no way that we are diving today,” Zub told his teammates.
They were silent. Would their instructors actually send them into the stormy seas? Would their Vietnam-hardened instructors be that crazy? Everyone wondered, but no one dared to ask.
The suspense didn’t last long. The men were lined up in groups of two, swim buddies side by side. (SEALs in training are always divided into teams of two, called “swim buddies.”) The water was cold. The currents were unpredictable, strong and strange.
Zub and his swim buddy survived through strategy: they put extra lead weights in the pockets of their rebreathing vests. The weight drove them deeper into the water and kept them out of the wild waves raging above them. But it came at a price. They had to work hard to stop from sinking to a depth of thirty-two feet, which would kill them. Anything higher than ten feet, where the waves would smash them onto knife-edged rocks, might also kill them. They were trying to swim a path between perils.
Not every pair of SEALs followed Zub’s strategy. Others took their chances in the waves. The gamble didn’t pay off for all of them.
When Zub crawled out of the surf, he could see the instructors anxiously running up and down the beach. Worry was written on their faces.
One of the unweighted SEALs had separated from his swim buddy and was caught in a claw of angry waves. His body washed onto the shore, helpless and motionless, like driftwood.
Zub saw one of the instructors repeatedly perform CPR. But it was no use. The man was dead.
That night at dinner, the SEALs were quiet. But their instructors were not. Each instructor, including Thornton, stood behind a table of SEALs, whispering over and over the dead man’s name. “They were rubbing it in that he had died,” Zub said.
Each sailor knew the dead man well. They had trained with him, ate with him, slept near him. Some had met his parents, who came from a tough section of East Los Angeles. The men were taking the loss hard, and the instructors were making it harder.
The instructors were teaching a brutal but necessary lesson: In training and in combat, your teammates will die. You had better get used to it. The instructors themselves had seen their friends die in the fast-moving waters, dark jungles, and sun-cooked rice paddies of South Vietnam. They knew that if the trainees could not accept the human cost of combat, they would be useless as fighting men.
And they also knew that SEALs find it easier to accept the possibility of losing their own lives than the risk of losing teammates. It was the loss of friends and teammates that they would have to learn how to handle.
What was the purpose? Zub sums it up: “What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” But, still, Zub didn’t like it very much.
Yet Thornton’s hardened imprint was passed onto Zub and the others. It helped make them SEALs.
* * *
In Zub’s days there was an incredible rivalry between the SEALs based on the East Coast and those
based on the West Coast. Each had a nasty nickname for the teams of the other coast. It was “East Coast pukes” versus “Hollywood SEALs.” Over the years, the nicknames have faded and the rivalry reduced. But it remains.
The intense rivalry was there because there was no war and no mission to unite the brotherhood.
But that was about to change. A self-described “rogue warrior” and a bearded mullah were about to utterly change the Navy SEALs.
CHAPTER 2
The Violent Birth of SEAL Team Six
“You get a mission and they say: ‘What’s the probability of success?’ Who gives a shit? If I win, I win. If I lose, I’m dead. Take your statistics and jam it. It’s my ass on the line, not yours.”
—Lt. Cmdr. Richard Marcinko, founder of SEAL Team Six
In a windowless room in the E-ring of the Pentagon, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Marcinko was in charge of briefing the Chief of Naval operations on intelligence and terrorism. Yet nothing prepared him for the news coming across the television monitors on November 4, 1979.
An armed mob, mostly masked or hooded, had surged into the U.S. embassy compound in Tehran, Iran’s capital city, and taken some fifty-two American diplomats and U.S. Marines hostage, including the Acting Ambassador, Bruce Laingen. A national nightmare had begun.
* * *
The attackers had gathered during dawn prayers at a nearby university, and by bus, taxi, and private car, they had filtered to Ferdowsi Avenue, outside the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
By 6:30 a.m. there were more than three hundred members of a front group calling itself Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line. The “imam” in the group’s name was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the bearded religious dictator who, months earlier, had overthrown the democratic pro-American government that had replaced the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Khomeini had destroyed Iran’s embryonic democracy and now he wanted to humiliate and vanquish America. In his sermons, he said that it was Allah’s will.
The militants’ plan was designed to use America’s virtues against her. Women college students would take the lead because, they believed, U.S. Marines were less likely to stop them, let alone frisk them. Thus, the student who cut the chain on the U.S. embassy’s front gates was a woman with bolt cutters hidden under her chador, a flowing Islamic robe meant to signal modesty and submission. Boldly, she snapped through the chains, and the front gates creaked open. She led hundreds of veiled women through gates.
Hundreds of “students” poured through, each with printed signs on lanyards around their necks. The signs, in English, read: “Don’t be afraid. We just want to set-in.” The printer had a poor translator. They meant “sit-in,” a popular 1970s protest strategy. The term was designed to be reassuring and familiar, and to put the mob in the same context as American civil rights and antiwar protestors. They didn’t mean any harm, the women leaders said in good English, they just wanted to protest American policies and go home. They were lying.
Behind the wall of women came bearded young men, first with clubs and then with guns.
* * *
By the time Marcinko saw the television images, the Iranian radicals were besieging the main building. Dozens of Americans were surrounded by hundreds of armed radicals.
The embassy grounds were nearly a city block long and included four major buildings, in the style of Eisenhower-era public high schools, as well as a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a computer facility. The upper windows offered a view of the sunburned brick slums and white wastes of the Dasht-e Kavir salt desert. Every one, inside and outside, knew it was just a matter of time before the radicals got in.
As the radicals tugged at the bars over the windows and repeatedly rammed the front doors, inside the chancery, diplomats began to realize that it was not another protest—the embassy had been briefly invaded months earlier in February 1979—but something more sinister. The diplomats began to burn sensitive intelligence files. Others made desperate phone calls to high-ranking Iranian officials and to Washington. In both capitals, the officials who actually answered the phone said that they were powerless to help.
Marcinko sat in on several secure high-level briefings that day. Each new development disturbed him. The U.S. Marines at the front gates were ordered not to load their weapons, so they fled. Phone calls to Tehran’s chief of police went unreturned. A police patrol, located near the embassy motor pool, refused to help—they knew that the radicals had more political clout in the new revolutionary government than they did. The prime minister was refusing to take calls from the acting U.S. ambassador or from Washington. The entire might of the Iranian government seemed to be behind the embassy takeover.
Marcinko listened as all of the short-term diplomatic options died away.
Then he followed the admirals, the generals, and other senior officers into a room with a television screen. It showed live images from Tehran. At first, he just saw a mob of nearly one thousand people pushing and shoving. Then he saw the Americans being shoved along. They had been beaten and bruised and blindfolded.
They were hostages now.
Fifty-two American civilians, many on their first overseas assignment, were now at the mercy of zealots who believed that they were subhuman unbelievers. The radicals believed that these Americans should be used as impersonally as chess pieces, a game that the Persians had invented many centuries earlier.
The Carter administration, Marcinko was told, was using every mechanism of international law to free the hostages. He knew it was hopeless. Invading embassies as well as kidnapping and torturing diplomats were red-letter violations of international law, the norms of every civilized nation. If the Iranian revolutionaries were willing to do that, no treaty fine print would awe them.
Silently Marcinko waited. In time, he believed, President Carter would ask for a covert military option. The former SEAL commando hoped to be a part of that mission somehow, someway. He would get his wish.
After all, Marcinko thought, in the bitter winter of 1979, the president and the nation faced a fundamental choice: Kill the hostage takers or let the hostages die.
For him, that wouldn’t be a hard call.
* * *
Richard Marcinko was born on Thanksgiving Day, 1940, in a coal-mining town in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. His family were Czechs who had crossed the ocean to coax coal from the Pennsylvania rock in humid, dark tunnels. Aboveground they said little and drank much. “Life was simple and life was hard,” he said.
During Marcinko’s high school years, his parents split up. His mother worked as a Sears department store clerk, and she moved the shattered family into public housing. Meanwhile, his father rented a room over a bar called Yusko’s. There were few happy endings in Carbon County.
Young Marcinko was falling apart, too. By 1958, Marcinko—a class cutter and serial seducer—had dropped out of high school. He had to do something, he knew, or his life would spiral down to meaninglessness. He didn’t want to end up on skid row or in jail. When President Dwight Eisenhower sent the U.S. Marines to Lebanon in 1958, he was inspired and tried to enlist. The Marine recruiter told him to finish high school first. Marcinko didn’t want to do that. He was afraid the fighting would end before he got to Lebanon. A few months later, in September 1958, he decided to try the U.S. Navy. The recruiter tested and accepted him.
After basic training at the U.S. Navy’s Great Lakes facility, Marcinko studied to become a radioman and accepted a temporary assignment to a Naval base at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. There, he saw a movie that changed his life.
It was called The Frogmen, starring Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews. It dramatically told the story of the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) fighting the Japanese in World War II. He had heard his calling and seen his future. He wanted to be “Demolition Dick, Shark Man of the Navy.”
But how could an ordinary radioman get into this elite team?
* * *
As he completed radio school in Norfolk, Virginia, he learned that the
home of the UDT was nearby. He applied, passed the tests, and was accepted. His future seemed bright and assured.
It was a false victory. Shortly after his acceptance, Marcinko got into a fistfight with another sailor and broke his hand. The injury (and perhaps its cause) disqualified him. He had to go back to “Big Navy” and a life as an enlisted flunky. He hated it.
He filed paperwork, pleaded with officers, and did his job. He waited impatiently for years. Finally, in 1961, he received orders to go UDT training.
His immediate superior signed his transfer to UDT training just to get rid of him. “Sea duty would be too easy for you, Marcinko. I’m going to send you where they’ll knock all of this aggressive shit right out of you.”
Marcinko didn’t care why he was going, only where. He was finally on his way to the place where Shark Men are made.
* * *
Marcinko arrived at the Navy base at Little Creek, Virginia, on June 21, 1961. He was an official member of UDT class 26. If he failed, he would be sent back to the regular Navy—a punishing alternative, in his estimation.
Marcinko’s chances were not great. Only one out of every five students made it to graduation day. All around him, Marcinko watched as hard, experienced men—former U.S. Army Green Berets and Rangers—failed or quit. But Marcinko was determined. He knew that he would likely never get another chance. He worked through fear, physical injury, harsh verbal abuse, deep, ice-cold waters, and the ever-present nagging gnaw of fatigue. The more the tape in his head screamed Quit! the more Marcinko fought back. He made it. He graduated and joined the U.S. Navy elite Underwater Demolition Teams. (The forerunners of the SEALs were merged into this elite unit. UDTs would be phased out in 1983.)
He soon distinguished himself as a hard-working, hard-drinking enlisted man. He was considered a “true frog”—a classic UDT man. Soon, several officers and senior enlisted men suggested that Marcinko apply for Officer Candidate School. Could a high school dropout be an officer? At first, he resisted the idea. The goal seemed too far away, too improbable. Yet by December 1965, he graduated from Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. He was close to where his dream began and farther along than he ever thought he would get. He was commissioned as an ensign and assigned to a destroyer.
