One Perfect Op

by Dennis Chalker

  Harry had worked with Dick during the Vietnam War and was known as a tough operator. He was living in Huntington Beach with his wife, Katharine. It must have been a bit of a shock to Kath at the start, when all those rental cars pulled up to their condominium and all those guys piled out. Being normal SEALs, we included a wide range of personality types: Some of the guys were very polite, asking after Kath’s health and saying how nice it was for them to allow us the use of their home. Other guys said hello and then asked where the food was.

  It was a sign of the Humphries’ hospitality that they took it all in stride and welcomed us warmly. In the years since, they have become very good friends and I still look forward to seeing them. Their home made an excellent staging area for us, being only a short distance from our target site. Harry also had forty-three-foot sailboat and a good knowledge of the local area. From his boat we were able to launch some swimmer missions and do reconnaissance from the sea side of our target. But before all of that took place, we still had our new volunteers to check out.

  Bullet had a pretty good idea of how to test the guys. He pulled me into his plan, and at 4:00 A.M., we woke our volunteers for a little morning PT. We went down to the Bolsa Chica State Beach for our workouts. In good SEAL style, we wanted a little cold Pacific water nearby.

  Putting our volunteers in life jackets, we ran them through the surf zone, up and down the beach, and worked out in the sand and the wet. We did this several mornings in a row, not to drain them out but to be sure they had what it took to operate with us. They kept up fairly well, although they weren’t terribly happy about it.

  We had two major ops planned for Seal Beach, one of which was a hit on a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) storage facility. For the operation, a team of us along with our two volunteers and a cameraman were dropped off at night on the side of Highway 405, which passed by the naval weapons station. We were going to let our two volunteers do the hit itself while the rest of us went along to make sure nothing went wrong and that the rules of engagement weren’t violated.

  Moving through a soybean field near the site, we were still about half a mile out from our target. We didn’t know if the Navy had placed any sensors in the area. Farmers were working the fields around us, so we figured we had a pretty clear path to at least get up to the site. There was a tower overlooking the fields, and we didn’t know if the guards had NVDs so we had to remain as stealthy as possible.

  We penetrated as closely as we could, intending to let the new guys go into the site. Once they were in, we were going to let them know what it was like to E & E from a secure area. We had our special Red Cell wrist rocket “grenade launchers” with sponge-wrapped M80 firecrackers to start the festivities.

  Our volunteers had gotten close enough to the target that we had proved we could penetrate the area. The bang and flash of our taking the facility perimeter under fire was the signal for our new members to begin their E & E. When the fireworks started, things got exciting up on the perimeter quickly. The new guys were able to pull out without incident, and we all regrouped at a spot we had chosen earlier.

  Our next operation was going to be a much harder infiltration. Out along the Pacific Coast Highway there was an inlet that ships would move through to load or unload at our target site. Nearby was a large bird sanctuary that was like a huge marshland. We penetrated during low tide, right off the road.

  We had to swim our new people part of the way in to the target, but the swim wasn’t in water—it was in mud. Every good SEAL and frogman knows it’s better to crawl than to try and walk when you get into deep mud. But we walked in.

  That was a long, dragging, exhausting walk, which is exactly why we did it, to put the pressure on our new guys. The canal we were going through was only about four feet wide and had some shallow water above all the mud. Our new volunteers were inflating their life jackets before they would get into the canal. Bullet said, “We haven’t got time for that,” and we both walked through the mud, showing them how it was done. They followed us along on a grueling three-hour penetration to the site. Normally, following that path in would have taken Bullet and me about an hour. But then everyone has to learn what they can and cannot do.

  Finally we got to the target, a storage facility near some trap and skeet ranges. Our camera guys, both ex-SEALs, met us at the site. Those guys were very good and we had full confidence that they wouldn’t compromise us or give the operation away. The camera crew would patrol right along with us, and they had many of the same skills we had.

  One of the cameramen was already at the trap range where he had arranged to meet us. Now we were going to assault the target itself. We let the new guys do a clean hit on the site, setting their IED charges and then returning to where we waited for them. On the way out, one of the new men started complaining that his knee was bothering him.

  “Okay,” I said. “You go along with the camera guy. He’s going to leave another way, but he’s waiting until after we’ve escaped before he moves.”

  This was good news to the guy with the bad knee and he readily agreed. As we were moving along, the other new guy started complaining that his ankle was bothering him.

  This was a bit much, but I told him to join his partner. The thing was, I said it in something less than complimentary terms. I was pissed and it showed. So the other man joined his partner, and Bullet and I left them behind.

  “Come on, Bullet,” I said after the other man had left.

  “There’s a road right here,” Bullet said, so we followed a much easier path out. The dirt road led off to a gate in the fence surrounding the site. We jumped the gate and were at our rendezvous point in something like fifteen minutes.

  It was about four or five in the morning, right before sunrise. Harry Humphries and the Old Man were waiting for us, complete with a cooler of beer. They knew it was going to be a rough op and were ready to welcome us out in proper form.

  The cameraman had seen us start taking the road and he knew what we were doing. The rendezvous point was off the base, at a little pulloff near a bridge. He drove his vehicle to where Harry and Dick were waiting, getting to them well before we showed up. The fact that our new guys were drinking the beer before we had arrived pissed me off. Both Bullet and I told the guys to enjoy the drink and to get ready for our morning PT.

  There had been other operations going on with the rest of Red Cell at Seal Beach, not all of which had the same good results we had. On a hostage scenario that I wasn’t involved in, Butch and Knobber took the local security chief as their prisoner. By this time we no longer had the lawyer along with us on our operations. That had been one of the cutbacks when the admiral we worked under changed positions.

  During the hostage scenario, the security chief, a civilian, was undergoing the same interrogation and stress situation we had put so many others through during our exercises. Knobber was doing the good guy and Butch was the bad guy on the Mutt and Jeff routine. Personally, I didn’t particularly care for this security chief. He just struck me as having a bad attitude.

  At any rate, he later claimed that Red Cell had abused him severely and that he had suffered long-term difficulties because of the event. Now Red Cell was under scrutiny because we had a civilian complaint. The funny thing was nothing out of the ordinary appeared on the tapes we did of the incident, and this was hardly the only time we had used the Mutt and Jeff routine to induce stress. In addition, later tapes of the debriefing showed this same “abused” guard laughing and joking around with us.

  But the damage to our reputation had been done. The Navy settled the suit out of court. Butch Cassidy finally left Red Cell and the Navy, in part because of the pressure brought on the unit by that lawsuit. It severely curtailed our operations for a long time and began a series of investigations that put everything Red Cell did under a microscope.

  Before things had hit the fan, we had another change that wouldn’t do Red Cell a lot of good in the long run. Admiral Ace Lyons was going through a standard
change of command. Since he would no longer hold the 06 position, as OP-06D, we would no longer be under his supervision. Admiral Lyons had been one of the movers and creators of Red Cell who saw its necessity for the betterment of the Navy as a whole. To accomplish that task, he accepted the complaints of other commanders who thought Red Cell was doing nothing more than making them look bad.

  Vice Admiral Jones had been an anti–submarine warfare aviator. As the new 06, he didn’t have a background that included unconventional operations such as those conducted by Red Cell. He expected to run a tight ship with the commands underneath him. And Red Cell didn’t really fit into those plans. But we still had some operations ahead of us.

  CHAPTER 25

  AND IN THE OTHER DIRECTION

  In October we went to Italy to conduct operations against one of our Naval air stations there. Italy had more than its share of terrorist problems. Its home-grown Red Brigade had splintered into several other groups by the time Red Cell arrived in 1985, and just the year before, these groups had declared their opposition to NATO as well as the Italian government.

  So our operations had a harder edge than at some other Navy installations. Much like in the Philippines, there had been threats directed at U.S. servicemen in Italy, though not to the same extent as in other countries. The main base Red Cell was going to test was the Sigonella Naval Air Station located on the western side of central Sicily.

  Sigonella is both an Italian and an American base in one. The Navy air station rents space from the Italian military. There are two separate naval air stations, Sigonella NAS I and NAS II, separated by about ten miles. While on Sicily, we also took a tour and commented on where the Navy ships come in and moor at the Augusta Bay Port Facility on the eastern shore of the island.

  Red Cell was staying at NAS I, north of NAS II, where the personnel support facilities were located. NAS I had been the original base back in the early seventies, but the newer, and much larger, NAS II was where the runways, air terminals, operations, and various commands were located. So we would stage out of NAS I and perform our operations against NAS II.

  We spent part of our time in Catania, the nearest Sicilian city to Sigonella. The Skipper had spent some time in Italy on his first hitch in the Navy, when he was an enlisted man, before he joined the Teams. He wanted to show the guys some of the local color, including the food and drink. That was where Red Cell was introduced to grappa, a rough local brandy.

  We were all eating supper at a local place with the Skipper ordering for all of us. Pooster and I weren’t feeling too adventurous food-wise; we had drunk or eaten something that didn’t agree with us. So both of us just had a light pasta dish. The rest of the guys were digging into a local delicacy, the specialty of the house, that the Skipper had ordered.

  All the guys were chowing down and enjoying the food. Finally one of them asked the matron of the place just what the dish they were eating was. My pasta looked real good after the answer came back.

  What it was called in Italian, I can’t remember. What the special translated to in English was “bull’s cock.”

  Knobber had been eating away, chewing at a mouthful of the dish, when the answer came. It was funnier than hell to watch his jaws gradually moving slower and slower. I think just about all of them, including the Skipper, were finished with their meal.

  After that memorable dish, the Skipper ordered a round of grappa for everyone. This was one of the roughest drinks I had ever tasted. Back when I was a kid, I had chewed a blade of hay every now and then on the farm; that was the taste of my childhood that I could compare to grappa. It had an earthy taste, like hay mixed with dirt, only cut with window cleaner. I didn’t much care for it, and not a whole hell of a lot stayed down.

  But the old Team standby, a good run the next day, helped me get over the local cuisine. The surrounding countryside was beautiful, hilly and covered with vineyards and fields. Protecting their vineyards were the old local Sicilians, carrying their traditional Luparas, what we would call a sawed-off shotgun. In spite of being the rough-tough members of Red Cell, we pretty much stayed on the roads during our runs.

  Another local sight we visited was Mount Etna, an active volcano. Every now and then, Etna burps a bit, just to remind everyone nearby who the local landlord really is. Sitting in a local eatery at the foot of Mount Etna, we were having some drinks and food—not the local special this time—and talking to the guys who ran the place. They told us about these Japanese tourists who had come up to see Mount Etna a while earlier.

  The tour guides had vehicles that they would take up the sides of Etna, but only so far. You could get good pictures and see the sights, but the locals wouldn’t go any closer to the crater than this marked-off safe area. The Japanese tourists had wanted to see more than the guides were willing to show them. So, leaving the locals behind, these tourists walked up to the edge of the crater. They should have listened to the local guides. Etna picked that time to roll over a bit and belch, frying the visitors where they stood.

  We didn’t know if that story was just local folklore to keep the tourists in line or if it had really happened. What we did decide to do was listen to the people who had lived near this active volcano most of their lives. The restaurant was as close as I wanted to get to the open crater of a volcano. Snake had no desire to be cooked in Mother Nature’s barbecue.

  When we came back from our trip to Etna, our mission had changed. We ceased operations immediately when we received news that the Achille Lauro cruise ship had been hijacked by terrorists in the Mediterranean some twelve hundred miles east of us. The base was on standby alert to support any actions by the United States against the terrorists.

  By October 10, the crisis on the ship had ended and the terrorists had boarded an Egyptian Air Boeing 737 for a flight from Egypt to wherever they wanted to go. President Reagan didn’t like this situation, especially after it had been confirmed that a U.S. citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, who was in a wheelchair at the time, had been killed by the terrorists. He gave the Sixth Fleet the go order, and U.S. Navy F-16 fighters met the 737 in the air and convinced it to follow their directions to a NATO air base. The 737 landed at Sigonella, taxiing over to the Italian side of the base. The political situation being what it was, the Italians were allowed to take the terrorists into custody, effectively ending the affair for the time being.

  A short time later, we ran into a number of our Teammates from SEAL Team Six who were also at Sigonella. We got together with some of the guys, swapped some stories, and had a drink or two. They were doing well, and we congratulated each other on the jobs we were accomplishing. Soon afterward, our Italian missions drew to a close and we returned to the States.

  In May I had a big change in my life with Kitty when our first child, my daughter Kacy, was born. Dick Marcinko had a medical technician we called Gundoc, who was also a fully trained diver, EOD man, small arms specialist, and corpsman, who worked with us and helped maintain medical support for Red Cell at the Bethesda medical center. The Skipper’s foresight helped a lot when Kitty had trouble with her pregnancy.

  Immediately Gundoc got her into Bethesda where she had some of the finest care available. She was sent to the VIP area, where security can be kept tight and the rooms are private and reasonably plush. Things went well enough, and in late May, our package was delivered.

  Kacy Chalker was a breech birth, so Kitty was pretty much out of it. I was in the delivery room with her and got to watch the surgery. On May 26, 1986, Snake the warrior went away for a while. In his place was plain old Denny Chalker with a smile on his face as he held his firstborn child. Kacy was a joy, and still is now that she has grown into a graceful, beautiful young woman. She takes after her mother in all the best ways. And makes her dad wonder just which breed of attack dog to get and how many land mines it will take to properly secure the house against young suitors. A big rottweiler and twelve sounds good.

  But my job in the Navy and Red Cell took me away from my new family a
lot in those days. Kacy grew up occasionally wondering who that big hairy visitor was. A career in the Navy has a price that is paid in time taken from a man’s family life. And that price is highest in the Teams.

  CHAPTER 26

  THOSE ARE BIG LIZARDS

  The big Naval reservation on the Cooper River in Charleston, South Carolina, held a large sub base along with a number of other important Naval assets. Swampland bordered much of the base. Nearby, across the river to the north, was the Francis Marion National Forest. This gave a lot of easy access to the base for our Red Cell penetrations, although the base itself was pretty secure.

  We did two simultaneous ops during this exercise, one a barricade situation where we took over a building. To do my job, I rented a motorcycle, a Yamaha 400 dirt bike. There were only two ways I was going to be able to get onto the base, and they both involved crossing a large tract of land. The method I chose was to go to a wilderness part of the base and slip through the woods at night, pushing the bike through about fifty yards of thickets. Going up a small hill, I could then cut through the fence, get my bike on the base, and close up the fence behind me.

  The other option I considered was to follow the two miles of railroad track that ran out of the base and through some of the surrounding swampland. In spite of having to push the bike through the brush, my entrance choice was the much more comfortable and drier one. My main concern about the railroad track was that I hadn’t scouted it out during the day. If I was moving along it in the dark on the dirt bike and a tie was missing, I would be crashing in a hurry. Also, if a train had come along while I was on the track, my only option would have been to jump into the swamp.

  Normally, getting wet doesn’t mean much to a SEAL, though we are well aware of the value of being warm and dry. But getting into that swamp water didn’t just mean getting wet; you could also meet the other security force on the outside of the base. It was gator season when we staged our operations at Charleston, and you could hear those big bull gators bellowing all over that swamp.