We were sent on swims from Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, to Vieques Island, seven miles to the east. (We called Roosevelt Roads “Roosy Roads.” The “Roads” stood for “Retired On Active-Duty Sailors,” in honor of those who were lucky enough to pull permanent duty there.) The phrase Did the earth move for you? took on a whole new meaning during our stay in St. Thomas and Puerto Rico. We explored the fine art of placing bangalore torpedoes so they’d blow gaping holes in concertina-wire defense perimeters. We practiced destroying concrete pillboxes with satchel charges. We developed the knack of blasting a landing-craft channel through a reef. I discovered the joys of dynamite, nitro, and plastique and managed to keep all ten fingers attached to my hands while I did. We were instructed in the basics of AquaLung diving, and we used the German-made Draeger bubbleless, self-contained apparatus for the first time.
And we swam. Oh, did we swim. One of our jovial instructors, a good-natured, wise-ass LT (jg) from New England named Aliotti, gave us extra swims on Saturdays to keep us away from the bad influences of demon rum and wanton women. Worse, he’d make us tow a bladderlike sea anchor while he and a date lounged on a raft and watched us struggle. The better to make us strong and virile Frogmen, he’d say when we complained.
It didn’t take long for us to become totally comfortable in the water; we learned to deal with the unexpected (it’s a mess, for example, when you get a bloody nose fifteen fathoms down from popped sinuses. The inside of your mask fills up, and you wonder whether or not to purge the blood because there are barracudas and moray eels and sharks in the water close by. You purge anyway. And you survive). So we blew things up and we swam, and we shot .45-caliber grease guns and .38-caliber pistols—the weapons of choice for the UDT in those days—and we got tan from the sun.
But mostly we partied. We showed off our bodies by sporting water-buffalo sandals, shorts, and tight polo shirts whenever we meandered into Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St. Thomas—which was virtually every night. Mac met a lady from New York who designed jewelry; I reconnoitered a schoolteacher from New Jersey. The four of us would hit the clubs at about nine and dance and drink rum and Coke until about one, then move on to the beach or the girls’ houses for a unique form of heterosexual PT, which could. I guess, be called “concentrated horizontal hip thrusts,” done in rapid succession. At about five we’d wake up and jog back to the sub base at the edge of Charlotte Amalie, grab a few quick breaths of pure oxygen for energy, and then go straight to calisthenics. We had to: if we missed the morning exercise, we wouldn’t get liberty at night. And God forbid that we’d miss a single nocturnal foray.
After our first taste of tropical bliss, it was back to the real world—Little Creek—where we participated in what were called Zulu 5 Oscar exercises. That was the E&E stuff—evade and escape—where we learned how to swim up to ships, attach limpet mines to their hulls, and get away undetected. I also got adept at swimming under ferryboats during E&E. The sailors’ role in the Z/5/O exercise was to catch us doing the dirty deed. They hardly ever did.
In October 1961, I was assigned to UDT-21, based out of Little Creek; finally a full-fledged Frogman. To be honest I was only a junior Frogman, with no real Frogman specialties. I hadn’t qualified as a diver yet or received jump training. But none of that mattered to me. It was like living a dream. The Navy fed me, clothed me, gave me wonderful toys to play with, and when I wasn’t swimming or blowing things up, I could go out drinking with my buddies and beat the crap out of people in bars. Not that we’d start anything, but somehow, the biggest Marines and sailors would always pick fights with us. Maybe it was our tapered uniforms with the illegal detailing sewn on the insides of the blouse cuffs. Maybe it was our attitude. We had a very aggressive attitude. That’s an understatement. Whatever the case, we seemed always to be getting into fights. Better, we always seemed to be getting into fights—and winning. It’s a great confidence builder.
Dive qualifications came first. I went back to St. Thomas for six weeks of langostino, warm water, hot women, and rum. At the end of the session I was tanned, fit, well rested, and sporting the “Big Watch/Little Pecker” stainless-steel Tudor diving watch that they gave you after you qualified.
Next came parachuting. I was detailed to Ft. Benning, Georgia, for airborne training. I went as a member of the Zoo Platoon. Zoo because it included a Rabbit (as in John Francis), a Byrd, and a Fox, and we were all party animals engaged on a constant hunt for beaver and pussy.
Once I was qualified I discovered I liked jumping so much I began to skydive on weekends, experimenting with the thennew “flat” parachutes. At UDT, we did only static-line jumps—wearing old-fashioned, regulation 35-foot parabolic parachutes. In the trade, it is called rope jumping. I have always thought of it as the monkey-on-a-string technique.
I was fascinated by the newer, 28-foot flat chutes. At that time, they were used mainly as pilots’ emergency chutes, but I believed they had real possibilities in combat situations. Their design made them more controllable than the 35-foot rope jumpers. They became even more maneuverable after we’d cut a new design of holes in the chute and added extra toggle lines so we could actually steer ourselves in the air.
I also liked the idea of pulling my own rip cord instead of jumping from a static line that did all the work. That meant I could free-fall. The thought of free-falling was wonderful. Doing it was even better. The freedom of flying through the sky, soundless, wind whistling past your body, was like nothing I’d ever done before. It was the same sense of freedom I felt underwater, but floating five or ten thousand feet in the air was even better: here I could breathe and see everything for miles. I’d go up as many times as I could, jumping from higher and higher altitudes, and allowing myself to fall closer and closer to the ground before I “pulled,” or opened, my chute. I took grief from the instructors, but I figured that in combat you’re less of a target free-falling than you are drifting lazily. So why open at five thousand feet and let some enemy platoon turn you into a bull’s-eye, when you can open at five hundred and stay alive?
I learned how to pack and rig chutes. I got myself a sport “flat,” which I modified to make more maneuverable. I bought whatever books on skydiving I could find and studied the intricacies of plotting a jump so that you land exactly where you want to, despite thermals, downdrafts, wind shear, and the thousands of other little variables that can cause cracked bones or broken skulls.
Despite the fact that we had to become jump-qualified, there was no intensive parachuting program at any of the UDT teams in the fifties and sixties: all the jump training was run by the Army. In fact, traveling back and forth for one lousy practice jump could take all day. There were no facilities near Little Creek, so we’d have to convince one of the pilots from Langley Air Force Base—across Norfolk Bay—to fly us to Fort Lee, one hundred miles west in Petersburg, Virginia, or about the same distance northeast to Fort A.P. Hill, where there were approved drop zones. Finding pilots wasn’t difficult, as all the USAF “bus drivers”—transport pilots—had to qualify regularly in CARP, which stands for Computerized Airborne Release Point flying.
CARP, if pilots do it right, drops the 82nd Airborne right onto its predetermined target. If pilots do it wrong, you get Grenada, where drop zones were missed, timing went awry, and paratroopers were put in jeopardy. Most of the time, pilots do it wrong.
Anyway, we’d fly up to Ft. Lee or Ft. A.P. Hill, do a single jump, then like ET, we’d call home and wait for a bus from Little Creek to come pick us up. Much of the time we did our waiting in one establishment or another that served liquid refreshments. Sometimes we’d receive visitors, gentleman callers in Army khaki, who—after the proper pleasantries had been exchanged—we would mash into paste.
During my first year or so as a Frogman I had a pair of unique experiences. One was that I got married. The lucky lady was Kathy Black, who I’d tried so hard to toss into the Livingston Avenue pool back in New Brunswick the summer of 1958. We’d dated since then. I’d
seen her whenever I went home on a visit, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. In the early sixties you didn’t shack up—not if you were from a good Catholic family (or even, like me, from a bad Catholic family). So we made our relationship formal.
She said she’d be willing to put up with the long periods I’d be away from home; I really liked her, and we made a nice-looking couple. We didn’t have a lavish ceremony, but a nice one. Then we went on a brief honeymoon, Kathy got pregnant, and I left for a six-month Mediterranean cruise. Typical Navy marriage.
The second thing that happened to me was that I became a lab animal. It was poetic justice. What do you find in science labs? Rats, monkeys, and frogs, right? So what more perfect animal to test a new airborne retrieval system than a Frogman.
It was called the Fulton Skyhook Recovery System, and I volunteered as a guinea frog on a TAD, or Temporary Additional Duty (I’ve always thought of it as Traveling Around Drunk), that took me from St. Thomas to Panama City, Florida. Skyhook was designed to recover special-forces operators or CIA agents from behind enemy lines, snatch VIPs effectively and covertly, or retrieve (tranquilized) hostile prisoners captured by our forces.
The principle was simple. The snatchee climbs into a bunny suit, which is a reinforced, one-piece, hooded jumpsuit, into which is constructed a heavy nylon harness, radio cable, and a microphone in the hood. The harness snaps onto a bungeecord rope about eight hundred feet long, which is in turn attached to a helium balloon floated from a tether.
Then a low-flying aircraft equipped with outriggers and sweeper bars comes in at about 130 knots or so and snags the line below the balloon. The line is locked automatically onto a winch through the use of explosive charges. Then—depending on the kind of plane that’s doing the snatch—the snatchee gets reeled in, either through a hatch in the belly or up a tail ramp, and it’s aloha, bon voyage, and sayonara.
The system had been tested mostly on sandbags, although twenty-two human lab-rats—company reps and Army special forces operators—had also participated. I was the Navy’s first volunteer, and the first pickup to be attempted without any emergency-parachute backup system.
I showed up at an airfield near Panama City, changed into the bunny suit, strapped in, hunkered down, held my knees, and watched as the plane, a Navy Grumman S-2 Tracker, banked in and came straight toward me at about five hundred feet.
It passed overhead and caught the line tethered to the balloon. I felt the line go, took about a step and a half, and then—shiiiit, talk about your standing starts!
I felt as if I were riding at the end of a huge rubber band at 130 knots. I must have absorbed six g’s—snapped into the air like a cartoon character whose hundred-yard arms can’t hold on to a window ledge or tree limb.
The ground went bye-bye. The line pulled me higher than the aircraft—I went way above horizontal—and then I started to fall.
It occurred to me at that instant that maybe I should have worn a chute. I mean, what goes through the monkey’s brain is something like, “Okay, I’ve been twanged. So here I am on my back, and I’m moving forward at 120 knots or so. But am I moving because I’m being pulled, or did the line break and I’m moving on my own—and about to go splat?”
The only way to find out was to see for myself. So I did a scissors kick and body-rolled onto my stomach.
Terrific. Now, by craning my neck into the wind, I could see the plane—and the line—and I knew I was okay. I tried to call the crew, but my roll had broken the radio cable and the microphone was useless. So I decided to have some fun.
I threw a hump—rolling my shoulders forward and dragging my hands, which is what you do in a parachute free-fall to move yourself laterally—and brought my body level with the top of the fuselage. Then, by finning my hands at my sides, I discovered I could break left and right.
I began to water-ski behind the Tracker, cutting through the prop wash to port and starboard. I tried waving at the pilots, but discovered, as I later put in my report, that activating any of my extremities too dramatically led to turbulent repercussions—in plain English, if I moved too much, I’d start to corkscrew. It was not a pleasant sensation.
So I spent the next fifteen minutes banking lazily left and right, while the air crew reeled me in, wondering what the hell was going on out there.
When I got close, I rolled over on my back again, reached down, grabbed my ankles, and tucked tight into a ball. That action brought me down so I swung like a pendulum and allowed them to winch me up into the Tracker’s belly more easily.
My head came level with the deck. I reached up and hoisted myself through the hatch, grinning at the visibly uptight crew chief who ran the winch. “Morning, Chief.”
“What the hell’s been going on out there, sailor? Goddamn cable’s been seesawing all the hell over the place. We thought you were unconscious, hurt—broken up.”
“Just water-skiing, Chief.”
“Don’t you b.s. me, you shit-for-brains, numb-nutted asshole.”
“Okay, you got me dead to rights, Chief. I wasn’t waterskiing.”
He smiled triumphantly.
“Screw you—I was bodysurfing.”
When we landed, I briefed a bunch of officers and company reps about what had happened, and what I thought of the system. I didn’t tell them about the aerial waterskiing, although I did suggest that if the snatchee was to be nonparachute-qualified, it would be better if his arms were pinioned, so he couldn’t suffer turbulent repercussions.
One of the officers, a full captain, took me aside afterward and told me he thought I’d done a professional brief. He complimented me on my speaking ability and added that I obviously had initiative.
“Why don’t you apply to Officer Candidate School, Marcinko?” he asked. He explained that the Navy annually took fifty enlisted-men candidates in something called the OIP, or Officer Integration Program, and I appeared to be exactly the sort they were looking for. “I’d be glad to write a letter of recommendation for you.”
“Well, sir,” I told him, “fact is, I’m not sure that OCS is for me. Right now, I’d rather be a chief in the teams than CNO of the whole goddamn Navy.”
“How come?”
“You know chiefs, sir—they can get things done. They control the real power in the Navy. Nothing moves unless a chief says so—including admirals.”
“You could get things done as an officer.”
“I’m not so sure, sir.”
“Why, Marcinko?”
“Hell, sir, first of all I’m a high-school dropout, and there are all these Academy-grad officers I’d have to contend with, so I’m at a disadvantage from the beginning, you know. So what would I have to look forward to? Probably a junior officer on some ship somewhere. And frankly, to be a juniorgrade fleet puke—begging your pardon, sir—overseeing some raggedy-ass sailors, well, it’s just better for me in the teams. We swim. We dive. We jump—we stay active.”
He chewed on his pipe some and nodded the way officers nod when they’ve just switched off all systems. “Well, you be sure to let me know if you ever change your mind.”
Chapter 5
ULTIMATELY, I DID CHANGE MY MIND ABOUT APPLYING TO Officer’s Candidate School. But it had less to do with some captain writing me a recommendation than with a salty chief petty officer named Everett E. Barrett. Barrett was an EOD—Explosives Ordnance Disposal specialist—and a GM/G (Gunner’s Mate/Guns) who’d just made chief when I was assigned to the Second Platoon of UDT-21. The Secondto-None Platoon, we used to call it.
If ever I had a sea daddy, it was Ev Barrett. Talk about typecasting. Barrett was the perfect movie version of a chief petty officer—he would have been played by somebody like Ward Bond, if William Holden didn’t grab the part first.
I thought of him as an older guy, although he was probably only in his late thirties when I met him: a wiry, gray-eyed, sharp-featured man about five feet ten, with white-wall haircut—very short—and missing the ring finger on his left hand f
rom playing with one too many explosive devices. He had a gravelly, bullfrog voice that preceded him by about fifteen seconds (you always heard Ev Barrett before you saw him), and he growled undeleted expletives in nonending strings and ingenious combinations—all in a New Englander’s flat-voweled accent. The term curses like a sailor had probably been coined about Everett E. Barrett.
He wasn’t an educated man—not formally educated, at least. He read exactingly and spelled phonetically. That’s as in F-O-N-E-T-I-K-L-E-E. And more than once I caught him reading us a new regulation with the paper upside down. But upside down or no, he’d look it over and then go nose to nose with some poor LT (jg) and recite a bunch of official-sounding paragraphs. Confronted by Barren’s performance, most officers would habitually buckle slightly at the knees, say, “Yeah, sure. Chief, anything you say,” and that would be that. Barrett knew how to scare the bejesus out of officers.
Oh, but he was good. He scared the bejesus out of not just officers but all of us—me included. During my first Caribbean cruise in UDT-21, the radio on one of our boats went out just before we started amphibious maneuvers. I may have been a radioman, but I was no electronics technician. That didn’t matter to Barrett.
“Marcinko, you bleeping motherblanker, get your blankety-blanking scrawny blanking ass over here,” he growled at me.
I got my blankety-blanking scrawny blanking ass in gear. One did when Barrett summoned.
“You will blankety-blank have that blankety-blank blanking radio blankety-blankety-blank bleeping blanking fixed by the time we bleeping climb into the blanking boat tomorrow, or I will bleeping kick your blankety-blank-blank-bleeping blanking ass into blanking next blanking week.”
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