Dick Marcinko wasn’t well known to the West Coast Teams at that time. He had a long list of accomplishments as an operator in Vietnam, and he had been the commanding officer of SEAL Team Two from July 1974 to July 1976, but I didn’t know him very well, a situation that was going to change drastically and soon.
At the screening interview, Dick Marcinko looked a lot like I remembered him but with longer hair and a mustache. He had a hard-charging style that he liked to use to keep you off balance. And his eyes held you with that hard, solid gaze so many of the old-school SEALs had.
The interview was not quite what I had been expecting. Dick had his new executive officer, Norm Carly, with him and they were conducting interviews in the SEAL Team One XO’s (Executive Officer’s) office. All of us hopefuls were waiting outside the office trying to look our best to make a good first impression.
From my Army days I knew how to spit-shine a pair of boots properly and had spent some time getting my uniform squared away. Going into that office was the first of my many adventures with the man I would come to call Skipper.
Walking in, I was told to have a seat. So I sat down. Dick was sitting behind the desk in civilian clothes. Those hard eyes of his immediately centered on mine and remained locked on their target for the duration of the interview. Then the questions came. Dick has a fast, staccato way of talking when he wants to keep you thinking. You never really get a chance to say much, and when he does give you a moment to respond, you’re too shell-shocked to take advantage of it.
“What you doing?” he asked.
Before I could answer, he continued, “Who you fucking, what you fucking?”
“Excuse me?” I asked, a little stunned.
“I said, ‘Who you fucking, what you fucking?’ ” and he continued just as quickly. “You used to be in the Army.” He leaned forward and looked over the front edge of the desk at my boots. “Yup, must have been in the Army.”
Norm just sat there looking at me as I underwent this weird set of questions. None of the interviews I had gone through in the Army or the Navy had prepared me for this.
“Here’s the deal,” Dick continued. “You’re going to get your own rigs [parachute and diving]. You’ll have your own weapons. You think you’ll be working three hundred sixty-five days a year? Bullshit, you’ll be working four hundred sixty-five days. You’ll be going here and doing this. You’ll be going there and fucking that. It’ll be move, move, move, high speed, high speed. Any questions?”
“Ahhh, no sir,” I managed to say.
“Then get the fuck out of here.”
Whoa, I was out of the door before I had time to take much more than a breath. And you couldn’t tell your waiting Teammates what to expect, not that they would have believed it anyway. Pooster and Faydog looked at me expectantly, and I just said, “Whoa!”
During the interview, I had managed to ask a few questions, like where we were going to be stationed. The answer was a straight one. We were going to be on the East Coast, but Marcinko doubted we would be seeing much of it. I wondered when we would find out who had made the cut, and he told me, “You’ll find out when I’m fucking ready to tell you.”
All in all, I thought the interview had gone rather well.
When my friends came out from their interviews, they had pretty much the same opinion I did. It looked like a wild ride coming up if it was anything like these interviews.
But the Old Man had come in with a pretty good idea of just who he wanted for the new Team. Our records had been screened closely, and he had probably gotten some insight into each of us from the command and the officers and leaders we had worked under. But everyone who wanted into the new unit was anxious for the next two weeks until the lists for orders came out.
SEAL Team Six wasn’t commissioned yet and wouldn’t be until much later in the year. But it was going to be a dedicated command with the mission of conducting counterterrorist operations for the Navy as a whole and being the point unit for all U.S. counterterrorist ops in a marine environment. It was a great expansion of the mission already being performed by Echo Platoon on the West Coast and Mob Six on the East. We were the contingent of men from Echo Platoon, and Mob Six would be absorbed into SEAL Team Six as well.
During the summer of 1980, the hostage crisis in Iran was still going on, and Mob Six was involved in the planned rescue operation. Even while we were building up SEAL Team Six prior to its commissioning, the Iranian hostage rescue was a constant contingency operation. If a follow-up to Operation EAGLE CLAW, the aborted rescue of the Iranian hostages, went down, one of our missions would be to go in and take out the radar installations near the coast of Iran. But that mission never materialized. Instead we worked hard to create the new SEAL unit.
The Old Man had a set of conditions he used as a guide to put together his new unit. The Team had to be up and running quickly, so he didn’t have a lot of time for the more traditional problems with a new command. Mostly young single men were chosen to keep family problems to a minimum. We were going to work and train harder than we ever had before.
It felt good to see my name on that list. Stinger had made it too, and he was the only married man that I could see on the sheet. We got our orders to report to the East Coast and had a chunk of time to do it in. Several of us decided to make a caravan across the country, stopping along the way as we saw fit.
We hooked up Stinger’s car to the back of a Ryder truck over behind SEAL Team One’s building. Faydog, Pooster, Stinger, Purdue, and myself were packed and ready. Dog was driving his old ’55 Chevy truck. Pooster had a Jeep and was going to take Purdue with him. Stinger and I were driving the rental truck and pulling the car. Stinger’s intention was to get settled on the East Coast and then bring his wife out there. It was going to be a new job and a new place to live. We were excited and looking forward to what was coming but not expecting anything in particular. Back in BUD/S we had all learned not to worry about the future. You just dealt with what you had right in front of you. And for us right then, in front of us was a coast-to-coast road trip.
We hit the road and left the West Coast behind. It would be a few years before I was stationed there again.
CHAPTER 8
SEAL TEAM SIX, 465 DAYS A YEAR
Our caravan arrived in Little Creek, Virginia, in late August 1980 after traveling on a whole lot of road. We checked in to our new company area right behind SEAL Team Two: two really unimpressive old World War II wooden barracks that looked like something used by the Boy Scouts. Apparently one of the buildings had actually been used by the base Cub Scout troop before we arrived. It was a busy few weeks as gear started pouring in, and that stuff looked like it belonged to the most lethal bunch of Boy Scouts you ever saw. We hadn’t been commissioned as a Team yet, and there was a lot of work to do before we could go operational.
We started training almost right away. The men were broken down into two assault groups, one and two. The assault groups were further broken down into platoons and then squads. As the regular SEAL Teams had swimmer pairs, we had shooting partners to keep the two-man unit idea intact. Each squad would run a single boat for operations.
The Team area was actually on part of the SEAL Team Two compound, separated from them and the rest of the base by a chain-link fence. Inside that little compound we had to keep all ten of our boats on their trailers. There wasn’t much room.
Our admin building was a small hut with no real room inside. We had Conex boxes for each squad’s issue, but those quickly filled up as our gear came in. Conex (container, express) boxes are heavy steel cubes, about eight feet square, with a door on one side that can be securely locked. Common in the military, a Conex box can be packed, sealed, and moved as a whole on military transport.
By this time, Purdue, Stinger, and I had rented an apartment where we could live off base. Except for our weapons, the apartment became the place where we kept most of our gear. Even for a bachelor pad, it was sparsely furnished. There was one futon as a bed, a
nd whoever got home first used it. The rest of us just crashed as we could. The one bedroom was where we kept all our gear.
As our gear showed up, we started doing some local training. One assault group would go to a training site, like Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia, for shooting, while the other group did their training someplace nearby. Our basic operational plan had two levels of alert status. One group would be on standby. If they were recalled, they had to be at our headquarters with all their gear very quickly. Within a few hours of the original recall, a full assault group could be on its way anywhere in the world.
The other assault group would be on a longer recall so that they could attend training farther away from Little Creek. Even so, if a recall went out, the group on training had less than a day to get back to the base.
In November 1980, SEAL Team Six was officially commissioned. We didn’t have much of a ceremony, but we did stand an inspection. The relaxed grooming standards we had held to in Echo Platoon were even more relaxed at Six. We might have to join any population in the world in a very short time, and it was a whole lot easier to cut or trim hair than it was to grow it on a moment’s notice. Also, we always wore civilian clothes in and around the base and at training sites. SEAL Team Six was a secret, covert operation and we weren’t going to advertise it by having long hair and wearing Navy uniforms.
A lot of our training took us to different places, and most of the time we had to travel there on civilian transport. Our relaxed grooming standards let us blend in with the civilians on those trips. If we did stand out, it was because we looked like a professional football team due to our general level of physical fitness. Even that we tried to hide, covering our muscle with baggy clothing.
But the Army general in charge of all of the Special Operations Forces wanted to see his newest unit. We arrived on post in our usual civilian clothes and changed into our uniforms inside the admin building. It was full dress uniforms including all decorations and regalia. This meant the officers had to wear swords, which made us look like a bunch of pirates.
But our uniforms were spotless, our buildings clean, and our long hair, mustaches, and occasional beard combed. When the general came in our front door, he was a bit surprised by our doorman. The last SEAL officer on active duty to hold the Medal of Honor was the one to greet the general. He was also the only man who had gotten a haircut for the inspection. As per military protocol, the general saluted our lieutenant, as the holder of the Medal.
Purdue and I had made second class petty officer, but we still felt pretty funny standing there in our Navy Blues—what we called our “Cracker Jacks” because the outfit was the kind pictured on the candy box. The general thought we were all a bit of a sight as well. But he continued on his tour through our very limited facilities and left knowing we could do the job we were assigned.
The relaxed grooming standards caused us some trouble with the rest of the Teams, however, both UDT and SEAL. There may have been a little jealousy as well. I’ve been told that back when the SEAL Teams were first commissioned, there was the same trouble from the UDTs about the new Teams. The new guys seemed to have all the best toys and went on the neatest training. The UDTs were told that the SEALs were the same brothers to them they had always been, just with a different mission, and eventually things settled down. The same held true between SEAL Team Six and the rest of the community.
Our modified grooming standards also made for some fun during a demonstration we did for a Navy admiral. We had to do these demonstrations every now and then for the brass and politicians to show just what we could do that none of the other Special Operations Forces were trained for. We were going to do an underway takedown of a target ship in front of an audience that would be on the ship itself.
It was a stormy night when we approached the target ship. The Skipper was standing with the brass on board when we came out of the waters of Chesapeake Bay. With our boat being tossed about on the waves, the spray in the air, and it just being dark as hell, I couldn’t see the spot I was trying to hit on the ship. This was an important demonstration, with all the brass on board watching us, but they couldn’t see what was going on in the water. All they knew was that we were going to show up on board while the ship was still moving.
For a while I watched the ship, standing in our boat and keeping my balance as we were tossed in all directions. With my knees bent to absorb some of the punishing shock of the waves, I was going to have to make my best guess about how to secure to the ship. Then Mother Nature took a hand.
A sudden flash of lightning illuminated the ship, and my target. With one try, our caving ladder was secured and the squad clambered up to the deck far above us. When we assembled on the deck, we had impressed everyone who was watching, including the Old Man, who acted like this was an everyday occurrence. Then the admiral asked to see us.
As the Old Man explained our situation, the admiral asked to see the man who had caught the ship. The whole squad was standing there in our full equipment, including black uniforms and balaclavas covering our faces. Only our eyes showed. When the Old Man told me to step forward and unmask, I did. And then all the hair that had been stuffed up under my hood fell out.
“Good God, son!” the admiral exclaimed. “Are you in this Navy?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” I answered proudly.
Then the whole squad uncovered. With the admiral staring at us, the Old Man explained the reason behind our long hair, mustaches, and beards. The admiral understood, but I don’t think he ever quite got over seeing what had climbed up onto the deck of his ship.
The relaxed grooming standards were something we earned by working some of the longest, hardest hours of any military unit. We could easily go thirteen or fifteen days at a time, training straight through with long hours each day. Then we might get a day or two off. Officially, that first year we all got half a day off for Christmas. The second year we got half a day off for Thanksgiving and another half day for Christmas. That was about it.
The Old Man had a very short time to establish an operational unit and get it on line and mission-ready. The Army had established the same kind of counterterrorist team, but they had taken several years to get their unit up and running. The Skipper didn’t have that kind of time. What he did was pick out people he could trust and then depend on them. While we did the nuts-and-bolts work of getting ready to operate—learning the skills, gathering the equipment, and training with each other—the Skipper was working twice as hard at his job as we were at ours.
The XO stayed with us in Little Creek to manage the situation on-site. Meanwhile the Skipper spent a lot of his time going from place to place, especially to Washington, D.C., trying to make sure we were keeping everyone happy in the command chain. A tremendous amount of work had to be done to create the first new SEAL Team commissioned since 1962, and a lot of that work involved meeting people and doing the politics. But whenever he could, he was right there with us on the range, pulling triggers, jumping, climbing, and doing what he loved—operating.
We were his unit. He treated us as individuals when the situation called for it, but he always looked at us as a Team. That was the ideal he was striving for. And it was what we wanted as well. You couldn’t work for a man that driven and not pick up some of his enthusiasm for the job at hand. We all became close, a small unit of men with a single purpose: to defend the country we all loved from a new enemy, terrorism.
There were a few of the guys who didn’t like the constant training. The Skipper put an end to the bitching in his own style. He put out what was referred to in the Navy as a “Captain’s Call” to speak to all of us at once. Since we didn’t have a building big enough to hold all of us in our compound, the Skipper held our meeting in the base theater.
“You don’t have to like this,” he told us from the stage. “You don’t have to like that. But you will do it because that’s what you get fucking paid to do! If you don’t want to do it, you can walk out the door.”
His speech
wasn’t much longer than that. The situation didn’t call for a lot of words. Anyone who thought we were working too hard, moving too fast, or not getting enough time off was invited to leave. There wasn’t any bell to ring like at BUD/S. You didn’t have to say anything. All you had to do was get up out of your seat and leave. Like everything in the Teams, you volunteered in, and you could volunteer out.
No one walked out the door. The grumbling about the pace of our training stopped after the Skipper’s little speech. The point had been made about what we were trying to do and how we were going to do it. Our continuous training was to get us up to snuff fast. Our standards had to be high in order to complete our mission properly. We trained hard and fast to meet those standards, and we kept up that level of training to maintain our standards.
How the Skipper picked the people he chose to make his Team, I didn’t know. I do know that I was glad to be among them. That first muster of men were the plank owners of SEAL Team Six. In the Navy, each man in the original crew of a commissioned ship is considered to own a plank from the deck of that ship. That’s where the term plank owner came from. And it was a proud and exciting thing to be a plank owner in our new Team.
The Skipper took care of his people, officer and enlisted. He was on your side and would always back you up. If he couldn’t be there himself, he would see to it that the help you needed was there.
I got into trouble with the local cops one night shortly before my assault group was to leave on a training mission. Each squad had a panel truck to transport a boat and trailer and to pack full of gear for an alert. These were civilian-style trucks without Navy plates or government colors. There wasn’t any room for us to leave the vehicles in the compound, so each truck had a designated driver who took it home every day. Drivers were also responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the vehicles, since we couldn’t take them to the base motor pool. I was one of the designated drivers.
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