For President Reagan, there had been competitions among the Teams and then the SEALs to see who would get to run with him. With President Bush, it was much the same—more volunteers than there were slots available. Whole platoons wanted to go on these runs. Names had to be drawn out of a hat like a lottery, or you gave the assignments as a reward. When President Clinton came to Coronado late in my tenure as command master chief of the training center, things were a little different.
A call from the force master chief up at WarCom came in for me requesting the names of two SEAL volunteers from each command to run with the president when he came to the area in a few weeks. I didn’t think there would be any problem with this; I didn’t particularly like the man, but he was our commander in chief. Apparently, though, a whole lot of the rest of the community also didn’t particularly care for the leader of the present administration.
When I put out the call for volunteers at Morning Quarters, it was several weeks before the president would arrive in the area. There were no immediate volunteers to run with our commander in chief. I didn’t give this a lot of thought, but it soon became more of a problem.
Every day at Morning Quarters, I would put out the request for volunteers to the instructors and the SEALs under my command. And every morning the only answer that came back was seagull cries and some pounding surf noises. This soon became the big joke of Morning Quarters. I would put out the request for volunteers and then listen to the ocean for a few minutes.
Time was going by and I didn’t have any names to send up to WarCom. There wasn’t any way I was going to assign one of my men to do what was just some publicity work if they didn’t want to. Eventually it was only a few days before the names had to be turned in. This couldn’t be a last-minute thing; names had to be given to the Secret Service well in advance of the president’s arrival.
The WarCom master chief called down to me and told me he needed two people. “Look,” I said, “I can’t force anybody. I just can’t do that. If I can’t get any volunteers, I will be one of the runners, and I’m sure I can get one of the officers or another chief to volunteer to go with me.”
Finally it was the day of the deadline when I had to turn in two names, and it looked like I was going to be one of them. Then another part of my job as command master chief came up. There were two young second phase instructors who had messed up pretty badly. They had been late to arrive at work and an evolution had to start without them. When I heard about this situation, I told the chief in charge of that phase not to deal with it himself but to bring these two men down to my office.
“Look,” I told the two instructors once they were in front of me. “You two messed up. So I’m going to give you a choice. You can run with the president, or you can come in Friday and Saturday this weekend, and Friday and Saturday next weekend, and have the duty.”
Having the duty meant they would both be up most of the night and be responsible for securing the area and making sure everything went right during the weekend. Not the most fun job in the Navy but one that gets done every day. The weekend was only a few days away, though, and these two young SEALs probably already had liberty plans put together.
“The run with President Clinton is this Saturday,” I continued, like they didn’t know this already. “If you go on that run, it will clear the record and you will not have to pull any additional duty for your little infraction.”
I figured I was covered, only things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, at least not right away. Both instructors just answered, “Forget about it!” and left my office.
It wasn’t long before one of the pair thought about what he had to do and came back to talk with me.
“Master Chief,” he asked, “both weekends with the duty?”
“Yes, this weekend and next weekend. Or you can do one Saturday on a run.”
Looking around a little, like he was trying to see if anyone was looking, the instructor decided that running with the president was the lesser of the two punishments.
“Okay, I’ll run,” he said.
And I had my first volunteer. It was much later in the day when the second instructor showed up at my office.
“Master Chief,” he asked, “if I run I won’t have to stand the duty?”
“That’s right,” I answered him.
“And the duty is for both Fridays and Saturdays?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, but I have one request.”
“What’s that?” I asked a little puzzled.
“I don’t want to be running next to him, because I don’t want my picture in any papers.”
Personally, I understood this and thought it was pretty funny, but I didn’t let the instructor know that. “I have no control over that. But seriously, I doubt it.”
So I called up to WarCom. “Hey Jim, I have my two volunteers for the run.”
Laughing, the master chief asked me how I had come up with them. I said, “Let’s just say I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
So the two SEALs ran with President Clinton on that Saturday and that was the end of the story. I retired from the community before that particular situation came up again. Stories were coming out of Washington on a weekly basis about another “personal situation” of the president’s, and he didn’t command a lot of respect in the military community—at least not around the Teams, in this command master chief’s opinion.
CHAPTER 33
THE LONG WALK AND THE LONGER PARTY
I had arrived at the training command when Class 192 or 193 was just getting started. By my second year there, I had a pretty good handle on how to deal with some of the problems a class could have. Motivation of the students was one of my primary jobs. Each man had to pull himself through the training. But I was given the chance to talk to each class. This was an important part of my assignment as the command master chief and one I took very seriously.
Near the end of my first year at the command, my centennial class, Class 201, was set to begin Hell Week. One hundred BUD/S classes had trained and graduated since my class, Class 101, had left the grinder back in September 1978.
Tom Rewierts was the warrant officer in charge of first phase training then; Joe Hawes was one of the instructors; and Joe Gowart was the senior chief of the phase. Right before Hell Week, the fifth week of training, most classes were well motivated. Normally, I would talk to the class, tell them a little about what they might expect and what would be waiting for them on the other side. Just kind of pump them up a little bit more and maybe give some of the students the extra push that might get them past a bad spot.
The trouble was, my centennial class wasn’t doing very well. Bluntly, it was acting like a piece of shit. The student leadership wasn’t clicking into place and doing its job. And the class didn’t have much time left to get its act together.
“We’ve really got problems with this class,” Tom Rewierts said to me. “Man, I hate to tell you. They just seem not to have any motivation at all.”
This was a new situation for me, and I decided to come up with a new strategy to address the problem. It was an entirely different approach than my normal motivation speech.
There was just a week to go before Class 201 would face Hell Week. Before facing the students in the classroom, I made a few arrangements with the first phase instructors. After I went into the room and onto the stage, I wanted all the staff to gradually fill in behind me. The students would have no way of knowing that this setup was any different from the usual one.
When I entered the room, the class stood to attention and the class leader called out “Master Chief Chalker!” The students followed quickly with a loud “Hoo yah, Master Chief Chalker!” This had been an established procedure all during training whenever a group of students first saw an instructor. But there seemed to be just the slightest lack of enthusiasm in their class “Hoo yah.”
I was wearing my khaki uniform that day, complete with all my ribbons and decorations. I had alwa
ys been proud of my uniform, and as a master chief I always tried to set an example for how to look and act at all times. What these students didn’t know yet was that a set of ribbons can cost a lot of money, and I had just put a brand-new set on my khakis. Now I was going to play a different game with their heads.
“Just sit the fuck down!” I snarled suddenly. Then I started to unbutton my shirt. “Look,” I said to the crowded room, “I’ve tried talking to you as a command master chief here. But things just don’t seem to be working.”
As I walked back and forth on the stage, I took my shirt off and started crumpling it up in my hands. “Now I’m going to talk to you as a Team guy.” And with that, I threw my uniform shirt, with my brand-new set of decorations, across the room and into a wall, just beating the hell out of it.
I started laying into the class about Teamwork and just what it meant to be a SEAL and a member of the Teams. I pointed out just what a piece of shit they were, how they weren’t pulling together. I told them they couldn’t make it individually through the week they would be facing soon, let alone through the whole training course. They had to work as a Team. Each man had to give everything he had and then give even more for the Teammates standing next to him.
Going flat out, I listed each of their faults as future members of the Teams. Finally I challenged them personally: “I don’t care if one of you, two of you, five of you, or all of you come up here on the stage and get it on with me if you don’t like what I’m saying.”
Starting at the top with the class leader, I moved down through the ranks, giving each one of them a fair share of grief. This wasn’t what they had expected, and I had the rock solid attention of everyone in the room, including the instructors.
When I finished giving them my motivational lecture, telling them just what it took to be in the Teams and what we were looking for in men, I told them that none of them really deserved to be there. I snarled about how they didn’t have the Teamwork, they didn’t have the leadership, and if they didn’t start pulling together now, they weren’t going to make it much further as a class.
Some of the instructors were just staring at me by this time. You don’t normally motivate men by telling them what a bunch of shits they are. The class as a whole was staring at me intently, and a few of the instructors were looking at me with a more stunned expression, their mouths wide open.
I wrapped up and prepared to leave the room. When they got up to Hoo yah me, I told them to sit the fuck back down, that they didn’t deserve to Hoo yah anyone, they hadn’t earned that right yet. And I stormed off the stage, leaving a room full of stares and silence behind me.
Back in the first phase office, most of the instructors filtered in behind me. They thought I was really pissed. I had practically peeled the paint off the classroom walls during my tirade. As they looked at me, I turned around with a big grin on and said, “Well, do you think I got the point across?”
“Damn, Denny,” Dod Coots said, “I heard a couple of those guys whispering how they would sure hate to meet the master chief in a back alley in that kind of a mood.”
“Why do you think I had all of you up on stage with me?” I asked. “If they took me up on that challenge, I figure I could have handled maybe five of them. The rest of you guys would have had to back me up.”
That was the one and only time I pulled something like that on a class. But it was my centennial class, and I felt they needed an extra push. Within a week they had gotten their act together and did a 180-degree turnaround. They were motivated, and off they went.
One of the students had jumped up after I left the classroom and bellowed out, “The master chief’s right!” and then he started berating his classmates. It wasn’t long before they were all pretty pissed off themselves, and it was that anger that helped get them to pull together. It just took a hard shove to get them moving on their own.
I had left my uniform shirt crumpled where it had fallen. While we were in the office, one of the instructors asked me if they should go back and get it. I told him to wait until the students had left. Finally one of the instructors went in and brought my shirt down to my office. As I had suspected, my enthusiasm had gotten the better of me, and I had to replace some of the ribbons. At fifty to sixty bucks a set, I didn’t want to play that particular game with a lot of classes.
It wasn’t too long after that class went through that it was time for me to retire from the service. My last class “Hoo yah” was going to ring out across the grinder. If I had pushed it, I could have stayed active several more years. But my twenty years in the Navy were up, and if I left now I could look forward to a new career on the outside.
A lot of my earlier commanding officers had already retired and were doing well on the outside. Dick Marcinko was the man I had always considered the Skipper. He was the one who had chosen me to join SEAL Team Six and then Red Cell. As the man responsible for the greater part of my career, he was someone I wanted to have standing at my side when I was piped ashore for the last time.
It was an honor to have the Skipper beside me at my retirement ceremony. He had gone through a lot from the Navy and the officer community in the Teams when he left. Outside of reunions, he hadn’t been on a military installation in any kind of official capacity in years. But he was the man I wanted to help see me off, and I wasn’t going to allow the politics of the higher ranks in the Navy to keep that from happening.
The Skipper had ruffled a lot of feathers when he ran SEAL Team Six and then Red Cell. He had been hounded out of the service by higher ranking leaders who had a greater interest in the politics of the moment and their own appearance than in accomplishing the mission. His successes in the civilian world after his Navy career really rankled some. He was without question the man I wanted at my retirement in an official capacity. If my request had been turned down, it would have hurt. But there were a lot of other places I could go to be with my shipmates.
Jim Gerarden, Captain McGuire, and especially my commander at the time, Captain Joe Yarborough, knew what I wanted to do at my retirement and helped me get it done. Admiral Tom Richards understood my loyalty and approved my retirement ceremony plans. There were some last-minute arguments, but with Captain Yarborough at my side, they were cleared away. It was a very proud moment when I stood on that stage set up in the grinder at the Special Warfare Training Command, the American flag hanging down as our backdrop, and Commander Richard Marcinko, USN (Ret.) was piped aboard with all proper courtesies.
The retirement of a career SEAL isn’t just for him. It’s a time-honored Naval tradition that is also for his family and his command. Standing with your friends and Teammates, you feel a great honor, and more than a little sadness. Sometimes I wonder if all the ceremony, traditions, specific actions, and responses aren’t to keep you from thinking too much about what is actually going on. You’re retiring from the Navy, and even more, you’re leaving the active Teams.
That last walk, when you are piped ashore for the last time, led by your family, in front of your friends and Teammates, is a long one. Flanked by sideboys, you walk off the stage in what seems like slow motion. The boatswain’s pipes are sounded to signal your leaving, and then you’re done. This was it. I would no longer be wearing an active uniform or operating beside these individuals, my Teammates, my brothers. An old life was over and a new one was to begin—as soon as the retirement party was over.
My conversations and handshakes after the retirement ceremony were a pleasure, but it still had an unreal feeling about it. Pictures were taken with my friends, and I had almost an entire police SWAT team there that I had been working with and helping to train as the director of operations of GSGI (Global Studies Group International) along with Harry Humphries. Good close friends such as Ernie and Mary Emerson, Brian Bush, Harry and Katharine Humphries, Bill and Elizabeth Adkins, Bruce and Margaret Sheldon, and others were there. Military uniforms, police uniforms, civilian suits, dresses, and street clothes all mixed together, swirling around
the grinder. Then it was on to McP’s Pub for the real party.
Greg McPartlin was a corpsman and a Teammate who operated with SEAL Team One in Vietnam. He’s since opened up McP’s Irish Pub in Coronado, up the road from the SEAL compound. It’s a second home to a number of past and present Teammates, and we took the place over for my retirement. My parents were there, along with my sisters and other relatives. Two of my old family friends, Mark and Tim Robinson, were there. I wish Don, their older brother, could have been there that day as he had been an inspiration to me as I was growing up.
My former skipper Bob Gormly was there along with a number of folks I never expected to make the trip to Southern California just for my retirement. Gifts for Kitty and myself showed up in large numbers, and I began to feel overwhelmed. Doug Kingery and Tim McGee from the Bell Gardens SWAT team, my partners at Metro Tactical Products, were there in uniform, as was Bill Murphy, also in his dress blue Huntington Beach police uniform. We had more cops at my party than the entire Coronado Police Department had on their rolls. Members of the U.S. Border Patrol and other agencies enjoyed the good times on McP’s patio that afternoon and well into the evening. Weapons were given to me as gifts but they were sent home in a van prior to the drinks coming out in volume.
Greg McPartlin and his manager, Scotty, said later that we went through more kegs at that party than any other retirement they had ever hosted. My dad had a great time, along with everyone else. It’s like a little family there at McP’s, one I enjoy a lot. My mug up there on the rack is number 55A; Kitty has 55B.
Everything has to end sometime. And my retirement was a great way to end my time in the service. I still stay active with my friends in the SEAL community and elsewhere. Dennis “Snake” Chalker, Inc., is doing training all over the world, and the adventures haven’t stopped. They’ve just changed sponsors. I even have a website now at www.snake-chalker.com. I guess everyone has to be dragged into the modern world eventually.
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