An interrogation was coming up for me next, that was one thing I was sure of. The other thing I was sure of was the amount of harassment I was going to receive from my Teammates when I got back to Red Cell. Back at the station, the questions were as I had expected: Who are you? What were you doing? Who are the rest of your people and where are they now?
The only thing I knew about the rest of my team’s location was that they weren’t with me at the security station. There was no way I was going to tell these guys anything. My capture hadn’t been part of the scenario, and I didn’t have a false story to tell them. When I was searched, all I had on me was my Red Cell credentials, so I told them, “You know who I am. Yeah, I’m Red Cell. You got a Red Cell guy.”
“Okay,” the interrogator said. “What were you doing?”
So I started playing the game with them. Giving them some of the answers they could expect from a terrorist. The only other thing I had been sure about proved to be the case later on. When I was released and turned back over to Red Cell to continue the operations, I caught hell from everyone. Messing with the interrogator had been fun, but the other guys never let me hear the end of letting myself get caught.
Chances are my jumping into the pit and getting caught helped the others get away. I had provided a distraction at a critical moment. But the simple fact was I had screwed up and wasn’t about to do that again. Plus I had been banged up pretty badly when I hit the rocklike bottom of that pit.
But I wasn’t the only one to be embarrassed by the Red Cell operations at New London. One of the ops was against the Submariner’s A-School right there on the base. At this school, mostly new recruits into the Navy, fresh out of boot camp, were taught their submariner’s rating. We were going to make the school building the site of our hostage/barricade situation.
The classroom we took down was on the second deck of one of the administrative buildings. We penetrated the facility, worked our way to the second-deck classroom, and took the entire room full of students prisoner, as well as effectively taking control of the building. We released the administrative personnel from the building. What we were going to do was use the students as our hostages for the day.
The scenario was only planned to last about six to eight hours, but we had something a little different in mind for the students. Using a modified Mutt and Jeff technique, we were going to try and lure one or more of the students over to our side as part of the exercise. Our side was the aggrieved terrorists from the People’s Republic of Whatever, defending the downtrodden of our small country against the overwhelming military might of the Imperialist United States.
The class was all male, so that made some of our actions easy. We talked to the students, and they all behaved well during the first hour or so. They all minded their training and didn’t give anything out to us. To increase the pressure on them we had them take their clothes off, leaving them in just their underwear and T-shirts. Then we made them sit in the fetal position by their desks. Their situation was uncomfortable, but that was about all.
In Red Cell, and much of the rest of the military, certain personnel were put through High Risk Survival School. All of us had taken the standard E & E schooling, but the high risk course was different. During that training, you learned how to avoid drawing attention to yourself during interrogation and how to survive that interrogation if you were noticed anyway.
That school also taught us how to avoid the Stockholm syndrome, where people in a very high-stress situation started to side with their captors. This had happened more than once during terrorist incidents. The syndrome could result in the hostages voluntarily shielding the terrorist with their own bodies when the counterterrorist forces made a forced entry. This was something we were going to test out in a small way on our new subjects.
With the students there on the floor, we began talking to them about ourselves, our position, our cause, and why we were operating against the New London base. We went on about how the United States didn’t have the right to hold all this nuclear power and certainly not to use it to threaten the rest of the world. The way of life the United States was trying to foist onto the rest of the world by holding the big nuclear stick was alien to most of the Third World to begin with.
We were trying to use the confusion and stress of the moment to get any of the students we could to side with us. Our arguments made some sense, especially if you didn’t give the other person time to think about it. Knobber was really persuasive in his arguments. He had this one kid starting to waver, so he pulled him over to the side of the room and kept talking to him in a quiet, earnest tone.
Pretty soon Knobber started really turning it on and subtly pressuring the kid. We had sandwiches with us, so Knobber offered the kid one. He ate and was more comfortable than his classmates on the floor, while Knobber continued talking one-on-one with him. Gradually the kid was moving over to our side. Now he was told he could put his clothes back on.
“Hey, come on down with us and see what’s going on,” we told him, and took him down to the main administrative office where the rest of the team was conducting negotiations with the security force. The kid relaxed further, and Knobber started asking him about his school and what he thought of the Navy so far, all the usual things that each new recruit had an opinion on or a bitch about.
Because of National security restraints centering on nuclear submarines, we didn’t ask the kid anything about what he had been learning or had been taught so far. There was no need for us to ask anything on that level of classification anyway. What we got was the story of the kid’s home town, his mom and dad, why he had enlisted in the Navy and volunteered for submarines. We talked about his assignment to classified duty on submarines and what he thought of that.
The kid was opening up to Knobber. That was obvious to all of us. So we kept the kid with us the whole time, and he didn’t suffer any more of the indignities we were piling on his classmates.
We had one other person with us besides the student. There had been a civilian female staff member who hadn’t wanted to leave with the rest of the staff. She had a Ph.D. and was a psychologist, as I remember. She wanted to have the experience of being in a hostage situation to get some firsthand knowledge of the pressures and stress it put on a prisoner. We agreed to let her remain for the scenario and join in as she could.
When security came up to the outside of the building, we used our female volunteer to help drive them off. Holding the woman very securely by the ankles and with a safety line tied to her waist, we hung her out one of the second-story windows, shaking her a little and threatening to drop her if security didn’t back off. The woman was in absolutely no danger at any time during our short standoff, but the situation shook her up a little.
When we pulled her back in, she had gained some of the experience she wanted, and she didn’t like it. Her eyes were huge. “Wow” was about the only word she could say for a moment. “I never want to do that again,” she finally said. “Don’t do that again.”
It was obvious that she had gotten good exposure to a hostage’s situation. “Just hanging out of that window,” she continued, “even though I knew you had me, I didn’t like that feeling.”
But we had pulled her back in, and security had backed off. They never did do an entry on even the first floor of the building; we simply didn’t allow that to happen. But before the problem ceased, we had one other situation to deal with.
We took the kid who had been with us back up to the classroom and started talking to the class as a whole.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “First of all, we have to give you a lot of credit. The problem’s almost over now. And you should look at yourselves. You’re hungry, you’re tired, and you’re sweaty. You’re just sitting there in your underwear. And look at this guy. The whole time, he had food, was dressed, he feels good. But I’m going to tell you guys something. You should know that you did a good job. This guy, he’s a fucking traitor!”
And we walked out of the
room.
The whole class was stunned for a moment. We went out the door and stood where we could look through a window at them. Our turncoat was standing alone up in the front of the room with the rest of the class on their feet. We could see several of the students yelling at him, and then they all started to close in on him. That’s when we came back into the room and took control. We told the students to get their clothes back on and get ready to leave.
Those students had been just about ready to kill that guy. And all he done was fall victim to the Stockholm syndrome. This had happened in the real world and was a legitimate concern for security forces in working these kinds of scenarios.
After we talked about the problem during the debriefing with the base and security forces, what had happened came out in the open. I don’t know if that kid continued on in that highly classified submariner’s school, but I believe he moved on to another position in the U.S. Navy fleet. We hadn’t planned on being so successful in swinging someone over to our side in what was really such a short time. But we had, and it had made a good point, big time.
What if that guy, or another like him, had talked? And what if he had continued his training to the point where he did have a lot of classified information? He had talked to us a lot. Even in our simple scenario, he had told us a great deal without a lot of coercion. It had been a good example of some of the strange things that can happen to a hostage in a terrorist action.
Not all of our time in New England was taken up with our operations against the sub base at New London. We had proved the vulnerabilities of the base and explained ways it could be made more secure. Some of the guys, including the Skipper, had taken a rented boat up the Thames, flying the Soviet flag, and approached the sub pens. There weren’t any procedures in place to stop anyone from doing what they did. So the Skipper’s boat continued its little tour, filming the subs at their piers and moving along the river.
Two of the guys from the video crew had family nearby in Massachusetts. They had both been officers in the Teams and wanted to show us a good time while we were in their area. The whole bunch of us went up to a small bay where we could have a lobster feast right there on the water. This was a true frogman’s way of having a good time and something we all looked forward to after a hard week chasing around the sub base.
To make things even more interesting, we were going to have a small work boat available to us so that we could spend some time on the water while the food was cooking. The feast was going to be catered; we didn’t have any work to do; so we all hit the water in the boat and set out to sea.
There was beer aplenty on board the work boat. Though the sanitary facilities weren’t much—a bucket in the pilot house—pissing over the gunwales isn’t very hard for Navy men. We all noticed the little rowboat that was being towed along behind us. The conversation turned to SEAL subjects, and it wasn’t very long before it was suggested we do cast and recoveries from the boats.
With that suggestion, a couple of us jumped in the water and climbed into the rowboat. As we chugged along, guys would cast off by rolling over the side of the work boat and we would recover them as the rowboat passed. We didn’t have a rubber snare, but a strong arm worked well enough. Of course, when I scooped up the Skipper, it may be that my arm slipped around his neck a little. But he was still breathing, and it was all good clean wet fun.
The boat finally took us back in and it was time to eat. The caterers had brought out folding tables and white tablecloths right there on the beach. Lobster, crab, other seafoods, and veggies were all there for the eating. The local families came down and joined in the fun. Though some of what we called fun may not have been what they expected.
We were all sitting around the tables or on the beach, a nice fire going, eating and enjoying ourselves. Truck had been walking along the beach and found a dead seagull somewhere. Bringing the carcass back to the party, he tossed it to Sundance, saying, “Here, I brought something for you.”
Sundance grabbed the seagull out of the air and proceeded to bite the head off it. That guy will eat anything. But not being satisfied with his seagull head, Sundance tossed it away, and it landed right on my plate. I was enjoying what I already had and didn’t want any beach kill, so I just picked up the seagull head and tossed it away.
Whatever the families thought of us, they kept it to themselves. But we did get some stares for a while there. I think they were wondering just what kind of people they had fallen in with. But it was all right, and the party continued on into the evening. Besides, no one could find an old whale carcass to feed to Sundance.
As it came time to go, we loaded the folding chairs into our van for the trip back. We were taking one of the guy’s families back to their place and then dropping the chairs off. I was driving and Pooster was sitting up front with me. The rest of the family and some of the guys were sitting in the back of the van with the chairs stacked on top of the seats all around them. The road back to the parking lot was a little curvy, and I may have used some of the driving techniques I had learned back in our defensive driving course. But no one got hurt when I stopped and the chairs just slid around.
Later we hooked up with some other old Teammates in the area and had an impromptu bash with some of their local friends. As the evening went on, somebody poured Seven-Up on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, making it nice and slippery. Then we tried our hand at break dancing, finally diving onto the floor and sliding into the cupboards. And that wasn’t just a few of us; we all tried our hand at the slip and slide.
The partying went on well into the night, and we all crashed in place sometime in the early morning hours. The next day, one of the local guys was missing. He couldn’t be found anywhere, although the vehicle was still where we had left it. Finally someone noticed that the trapdoor to the attic was open. When we looked up there, we found Bobby Mitchell, one of our old Teammates, comfortably curled up in a bunch of pink fiberglass insulation. We were all a little hung over, but Mitchell felt the worst of all of us when he got up and started to itch.
CHAPTER 22
BACK TO THE PHILIPPINES
One of Red Cell’s first overseas trips was to Subic Bay in the Philippines and the huge U.S. Navy base there. It was a good trip for us and a major overseas deployment and exercise series. A DC-9 was assigned to us for the duration of the operations and we used it to move the unit and our gear. We flew into Subic with the base already knowing we were coming in to test their security. The Philippines had their own local terrorist threats in the form of the New People’s Army (NPA), among other organizations. The NPA had taken credit for killing three Navy officers near Subic Bay back in 1974.
Not everything we did at Subic or in the Philippines was as serious as the real-world terrorists they had on the islands. One of the procedures we had come up with for Red Cell was to check into hotels separately or in very small groups under assumed names. This would help keep local security and law enforcement groups from finding us right away as we conducted our operations. It turned out to have a side benefit.
This one hotel we were staying at had a nice little lounge with a gambling establishment. Purdue managed to really piss off the girl behind the desk at the gambling hall. We never did learn the details of what it was all about, but the girl had the hotel roster and was shouting at Purdue that he wouldn’t get away with whatever it was he had done. “That’s okay, Mickey,” she shouted at Purdue’s back as she looked up from the roster. “I have your name, Mickey Mouse.” I believe he gave his home town as a place near Anaheim, California, as well.
Before we began our serious operations at Subic Bay, we conducted a tour of the area, going over to the SEAL detachment (det) there and meeting with the guys from the Teams. Cheeks, an old friend of ours, was one of the officers in charge and he gave us a warm welcome. A number of our old Teammates were around, and the det community in general was a good one.
We settled in with the SEAL det for several days while we conducted training with t
he security forces at and around the base. The security force there had a number of trained dogs that they could even allow into the jungles to track down individuals and groups. Most of these dogs were rottweilers, big, powerful dogs that you really wouldn’t want on your case if they weren’t happy with you.
One night the security people asked us if we would work with them in a building-clearing exercise. They wanted to see what the dogs would do going into a strange building and tracking down people hidden there. I think Knobber was the only one willing to act as the bait in this little exercise. He put on this heavily padded training suit that the dogs could dig their teeth into without doing any real damage to the person inside.
Knobber went into the building and placed some IEDs, just to test the dogs out fully. The building was a very controlled environment, and handlers would be in there with the dogs, so the situation should be a safe one. But if you’ve ever seen a fully grown rottweiler with a real mad on, you’d wonder just how good that padded suit was. I wasn’t too crazy about putting that suit on, so I just stood and watched.
The exercise went well enough. The dogs found their man, and Knobber found out that a male rottweiler can crush down with something like fifteen hundred pounds of pressure in those jaws. Padding or not, it was still like having your arm clamped in a large, pointy-edged vise. That, and the breed has very strong neck and shoulder muscles, so they can twist you around hard. Afterward, Knobber said the dogs had been a little rough and he didn’t care to repeat the experience. So the score came out to something like rottweilers 1, Red Cell 0.
The security people also wanted the dogs to track us through the jungle. My only response to that suggestion was that if I had one of those dogs on my trail, I was taking a live weapon with me. If that dog came near me, I was going to shoot it. The security people thought I was overreacting, but they quit suggesting that exercise.
If I ever planned to go on an operation where I would need to take a dog out, I would carry a suppressed weapon. There was a reason one of the first SEAL suppressed weapons back in the Vietnam days was called a Hush-Puppy. The intent of that pistol was to take out guard dogs silently. For myself, a suppressed Mark II Ruger .22 automatic was the weapon of choice for such actions. If I was unarmed and had to take out a dog, I would try to gut it as it came at me. If I could, I would grab its upper jaw to control its teeth. Of course, with some dogs (and rottweilers come to mind), you’d most likely pull back your hand missing a few fingers.
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