One Perfect Op

by Dennis Chalker

  During one of our training evolutions, we were doing room entries down at Eglin Air Base. A wooden framework had been built where we could put up cloth walls and change the setup quickly and easily. For a room entry, you are right up behind the man in front of you, weapons locked and loaded. With the go signal, you move fast and hard. It’s the only way to get the job done, clearing a room of bad guys while keeping any hostages safe.

  There wasn’t any body armor available then. It wasn’t that we couldn’t get any, it was just that no one made any we could climb in. During that training evolution it had rained, which it so often does in Florida, and the ground was wet around our cheesecloth building. On one room entry, Lee Chuey was the first man through the door and his shooting partner was right behind him to back him up. But Lee slipped on the mud and fell backward, hitting his partner. His partner had made the mistake of leaving his finger on the trigger of his weapon. The gun discharged, striking Lee in the back.

  Our corpsmen were right there with us, and they immediately began treating Lee. When Scham said we needed a backboard, Doc Holliday and I just ran into one of the few plywood walls. Smashing down the wall and ripping a board free, we had our backboard. Lee was in the truck and on his way to the hospital as quickly as we could get him on his way.

  In spite of herculean efforts on the part of the medical staff and Lee himself, we lost him a few days later. That loss hit the Skipper hard, partly because SEAL Team Six lost two men that day. Lee’s partner had made a simple mistake, but it couldn’t be allowed to happen again. He was shipped out of the Team within a day, and he left the SEALs as well and went back to the Navy to finish out his hitch. And that too made us a little less.

  We learned a hard lesson that day, but we had to get up and continue with the mission. Safety procedures were tightened as much as they could be. But we still had to train live, the way we were going to fight. Constant trigger control was the only way we could conduct these operations and still come out intact on the other side.

  Our battery of weapons increased constantly at Six as we adopted new ones and disposed of those that didn’t work for us. Our accuracy standards were high. After our first practices with pistols, we started shooting at smaller and smaller targets. Finally we were using vertically oriented three-by-five-inch cards taped to a standard silhouette, one at the head and one at the chest, as our targets. The cards covered what we considered the most vital spots, the spinal column and central brain, for a one-shot stop. All your rounds had to hit the cards or they weren’t considered hits.

  There were also standards for drawing your sidearm from the holster. You had seconds to pull your weapon, aim, and punch out two rounds, what was called a “double-tap.” And both rounds had to hit either the chest card or the head card. You had more or less time to draw and shoot depending on distance. From the close (seven-yard) line, you had three seconds from “Go” to “Cease fire!”

  For our first set of shooting standards, we used the Practical Pistol Competition (PPC) rules. These were soon modified to fit our shooting situations. But on the PPC scale, we all had to shoot to at least the “expert” level.

  The changes we made to the standards centered on accelerated pairs, firing two rounds very quickly and accurately. Double-tapping the trigger was the best way to be sure of immobilizing a target with a pistol-caliber weapon. It was two rounds fired on the same sight picture as fast as you could pull the trigger.

  This standard was developed when we were using the Smith & Wesson revolvers. We started out with the heavy-barreled four-inch Model 66, a .357 magnum revolver made entirely of stainless steel. The revolvers would drain water fast if we came in on a swim, and they fired a powerful slug. Since we were going against terrorists, we didn’t have to follow the Geneva and Hague Conventions in terms of ammunition. That meant we could fire the most effective ammunition available. So our revolvers were loaded with jacketed hollowpoints that would expand on impact.

  Soon we switched to the Smith & Wesson Model 686 revolver, also stainless steel but slightly larger than the Model 66 and with a heavier barrel. The Model 686 had been developed for the demands of competitive shooters and police who were doing the same kinds of shooting we were.

  Back in Echo Platoon, we had used accurized M1911A1 .45 automatics as our mission handguns. These were very accurate versions of the same pistol that had been used by the U.S. government since before World War I. The M1911A1 put out a big fat bullet that tended to stop a target fast. But the military was moving away from the .45 automatic, and ammunition started getting hard for us to locate. Also, the weapons would rust up with all the exposure we gave them to saltwater. When we moved over to Six, the .45 wasn’t even considered.

  The M1911A1 loaded from a magazine, which was a much faster system than the six-round cylinder on our revolvers. To speed up our reloading, we used speedloaders that held six rounds lined up to go quickly into the weapons. We looked like a bunch of banditos when we were geared up for ship boarding, with our revolvers and twelve or so speedloaders in pockets around our belts, plus a spare revolver strapped on someplace else as a backup.

  We used the pistols as our primary weapons at the start because our shoulder weapons hadn’t arrived yet. Our first submachine gun was the MAC M10 Ingram, a short, stubby weapon with a very short sliding stock that fired at a very high cyclic rate. But the M10s were too short to be practical as room entry weapons. We had picked them because of their size, and the fact that a number of terrorist groups were using them. If they were good enough for the bad guys, we thought, they should be good enough for us. They weren’t.

  Besides being too short and cycling too fast for accurate fire, the M10s couldn’t take the environment we operated in. Coming up from the water, our M10s often jammed from sand or dirt. We had suppressors available for some of our M10s, but they didn’t help in the accuracy or shoulder-firing of the little weapon.

  The Heckler and Koch (H&K) MP5 family of submachine guns became our weapons of choice when they started arriving in the early 1980s. You could start with the MP5 in the high or low ready position, with the gun held up or down, and get it to your shoulder fast. Since the MP5 fired from the closed-bolt position, it was very accurate and you could keep all your rounds on target.

  We had different kinds of slings and ways of holding the weapon for different situations. If you were wearing a gas mask, you could push the MP5 out against the sling, making a tension arrangement that increased the accuracy of your fire. If there wasn’t a mask in the way, you could pull the MP5 tightly against your shoulder and fire it like a rifle instead of holding the trigger down and putting out rounds on full automatic.

  With the MP5 set on full automatic fire, we trained our trigger control until we could fire and release the trigger for just one shot. If the situation got bad enough, all you had to do was hold the trigger back for the weapon to fire its ammunition at a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute.

  Later on, after our first combat operations, I designed my own sling to carry all my shoulder-fired weapons. I had problems with all the different issue slings we used in combat and training. They could pull a gas mask off, get in the way when you were going through a small space, and not keep the weapon handy enough if you had to drop it to have your hands free.

  Working on a chest harness idea, I developed a sling that held the weapon on your chest with a single quick-release hook. The sling strapped on like a harness, and you could adjust where you wanted the weapon to hang. If you needed to dump the weapon, pulling the release let it go immediately. Reattaching it was almost as fast.

  When I finally retired from the Navy, I patented my sling and use it in my training today. Metro Tactical Products, a company I have with my partners, Doug and Amy Kingery and Tim McGee, markets the sling commercially. Doug and Tim are both former SWAT officers I met while in California. Our sling was even used by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film The End of Days.

  With the adoption of the MP5 as our shoul
der weapon, we switched sidearms so that we could use the same ammunition for both. The military was testing the Beretta Model 92 for possible adoption. We also picked up the weapon and used it for a number of years. The final model adopted, the Beretta Model 92-F, came about in part from our suggested modifications. In fact the F in the designation stands for a Teammate, Chuck Fellers.

  There were some problems with the Beretta during our training: the slides cracked, and a couple of SEALs were slightly injured. The military and Beretta addressed the problem, and now the pistol works fine for them. Six didn’t want any more difficulties, though, and switched to the SIG Model P226. Now all the SEAL Teams use that handgun as well as the MP5s.

  We had a variety of different MP5 models to choose from according to the mission and our own tastes. Some of the guys liked the fixed stock standard model, while others, myself included, preferred the folding stock version. My favorite MP5 model was the very short K model. The K model was really little more than a machine pistol, it was so short. And that version had no stock. Later a folding stock was made for the MP5K and I used that version a great deal.

  As the lead climber, I liked the compact size of the K model MP5. When what became known as the PDW (personal defense weapon) stock arrived for the MP5K, I found it very accurate but still compact enough for my climbing. The last style of MP5 we had was called the SD model, with an integral suppressor. Some of the guys really liked the suppressed MP5 for its quiet operation. But the barrel and suppressor combination slowed the bullet to below the speed of sound and it lost a lot of its punch on delivery.

  We also had carbine versions of the M16A1 for shoulder weapons early on at Six. But with our emphasis on shipboard operations, the danger of ricochets from the 5.56mm bullet was considered too great. The 9mm MP5s were our main shipboard assault weapons. For ground operations, the M16A1 carbine, what we still called the CAR 15, was our preferred weapon. Later, the M4 carbine was adopted by all the Special Operations units, and we got a lot of use out of that weapon.

  Shotguns were used for room clearing and entries. The breachers—the men who opened the doors—packed 12-gauge pump action Remington 870s. These weapons could be used to blow out a lock or the hinge points of a door to open it for assault. The shotguns had short barrels, sometimes only fourteen inches long, and pistol grips taken from Remington Police folding shotgun stocks.

  Before we used shotgun breaching to open doors, explosive breaching was our primary means of entry. A breaching charge involved putting standard detcord on a board covered with epifoam (a kind of Styrofoam) and then coating it with grease. The grease would hold the charge to a door, and the detcord would have enough explosive power to cut through most doors, both wood and light metal. The blast would create a big fireball and knock a hole though the door, if it didn’t take it off the hinges. When the blast went off, in we would go.

  Of course, it was best to wait until after the blasts.

  During one simultaneous entry exercise, the countdown was given and the charges fired. Only one charge didn’t go off. Johnny Johnson, who was behind the breacher, thought both charges had fired and stood up just as the second charge went off. The blast stunned him into paralysis. The rest of the squad went around him and completed the exercise. When we took a look at Johnny a moment later, he was still just standing there, swaying a little. The blast had blown all his hair back, and the black grease covered everything from the top of his head to the middle of his chest.

  Johnny looked just like a parody of the old Buckwheat character. That is to say, with his face black, his hair fuzzed and greased, he really didn’t look too good. When we asked him how he was, all he could say was “Fuck!” The exercise was suspended for a moment while we took care of our Teammate—and stopped laughing so hard.

  CHAPTER 11

  A MOVE, SOME BOATS, AND SOME TIME IN THE WATER

  Our training facilities grew in complexity and sophistication. Ranges were developed, room clearing and shooting facilities improved, and finally, after a year or so at Little Creek, our own headquarters were ready, and we left the little compound behind SEAL Team Two.

  When we finally moved out of the old barracks to the new buildings about thirty miles away, none of us actually wanted a plank from any of those buildings. But we did take something with us from that site. There used to be a stump behind the buildings at our old compound that Schamberger would take you to when he wanted to talk to you privately. “Gather round the stump,” he would say, and then he’d talk to you with one foot resting on that chunk of wood. When the command moved, we dug that stump up and took it with us. It finally ended up with a plaque on it that listed all the plankowners of SEAL Team Six.

  By this time our heavy training schedule was taking a toll on our equipment. The Boston Whalers we were using had double hulls made of fiberglass. The fill between the hulls was Styrofoam. The boats were just about unsinkable, and we used them hard. The squad coxswains maintained their assigned boats, and they were rinsed out after every operation or exercise.

  One time when the hulls were being hosed out, the guys noticed little white balls of Styrofoam coming out the drain hole along with the water. This was more than a little odd, so the hulls were checked for internal damage. Nothing showed much on the outside inspection of the boats, but X rays of the hull showed a big problem inside.

  The constant pounding our Whalers took during exercises had shattered the Styrofoam filling. No longer a solid mass, the filler was turning into separate little beads of material, which were leaking out of the hulls. Some of the boats were little more than two fiberglass shells with nothing but air between them.

  We had given the boats a rough go of it, but not any more of a rough time than we took ourselves when we operated in them. On the West Coast in Echo Platoon, we had padded the inside of the whole boat, especially the bow. The guys at Six had watched us pad up our boats back when we first started working in them. They started by giving us a hard time, laughing at what we were doing. After a few underways, they found out why. Ronnie Newhou was the one who really learned the hard way when he fell and broke his nose against the side of the boat during training. So it wasn’t very long before all our boats were padded.

  We had a rough time in our Boston Whalers, but that just came with the job. When they started cracking up, we had to move on to bigger and faster boats. The Whalers with their outboard engines just weren’t up to going some fifty miles or more out to sea and crashing through the big waves.

  We worked with the makers of a lot of our equipment to get exactly what we wanted. The folks who made the Boston Whalers told us the boats could withstand what we wanted them to, but we had learned differently. They had also told us you couldn’t flip their boat; they were wrong.

  In Florida during a training exercise, we hit some heavy seas coming away from the shore. We had put seats in the boats for long transits, with heavy aviator-type harnesses to hold us in. To speed up the harness release, we had put golf balls on the latches. Now you could hit a latch quickly with either hand in very wet conditions and get out of the seat with all your gear on. The seats also had shock absorbers to suck up some of the beating.

  On this exercise, I was up front on the right side. Pooster was behind me and Doc Holliday was on the other side. Rhino was to the rear and Gearhart was the coxswain. We hit that wave and went straight up. When we came straight back down, the stern went several feet under water. Looking behind me, all I could see of some of my Teammates were lips sticking up from the water, sucking air like a bunch of goldfish.

  The boat didn’t flip all the way over, and the bow did crash back down. Now we had a hull full of water to deal with. And when you stuck those outboard motors of ours under water like that, they didn’t like it very much. So the motor crapped out on us. We ended up towing a lot of boats after incidents like that.

  Before we put those modified seats in the Whalers, we had run them on ops without any way to secure ourselves into the boat. The coxswain and
his assistant were the only two on the craft who had seats. Even with the seats, the coxswains did a lot of their work standing up so that their legs could absorb some of the shock of hitting the waves.

  Coming back in on one exercise, I was acting as the assistant coxswain on our boat. We had been following a work boat, staying in its lee, with the rest of our squad having an easy ride on the bigger boat.

  Senator turned from his coxswain’s position and told me the bulbs on the gas tanks had to be pumped to keep the outboards running. I had gone to the stern of the boat to work the tanks when the work boat we were following suddenly turned. To keep his position behind the work boat, Senator also made a hard left turn. Oil on the deck made it slippery. The sudden turn caught me by surprise and I slid across the deck, hit the low gunwale, and flipped out of the boat.

  We were about twenty miles out to sea at the time. The guys on the fantail of the work boat were waving at Senator, trying to get him to turn around. He just waved back and the boats kept getting farther and farther away from me. “Holy shit,” I thought to myself, “I’m lost now.” And I started out on a long swim for my life.

  Finally Senator turned around and saw I wasn’t there. Spinning his boat around, he started back looking for me. The work boat would have turned around eventually, but I was very glad to see that Whaler coming back for me.

  Now that they could see I was going to be all right, the guys on the work boat started laughing at the situation. When I slid across and hit the gunwale, I did a really great somersault before hitting the water. This was, of course, considered hilarious by all my Teammates who had witnessed it.