ROGUE WARRIOR®

by Richard Marcinko

  “Aye blanking aye, Chief.” Now. I didn’t know a transistor from a resistor, or a filter from a tube. But I broke out the schematics and worked all night, and the next morning, somehow—I still don’t know what I did—I got the damn radio fixed and working.

  Not that I was worried about Barren’s kicking my ass into next week—although the chief was perfectly capable of punting it straight ahead about forty-eight hours. It was just that he had this uncanny ability to challenge people successfully to do more than they thought they could do.

  Whenever someone said to Ev Barrett, “But Chief, that’s impossible,” Barrett would look him up and look him down and say, “Just bleeping do it and shut the bleep up.”

  Barrett took hold of me like a groin-trained watchdog grabs a burglar by the nuts—and he just wouldn’t let go. It was always, “Marcinko, you bleeper-blanker, do this,” and, “Marcinko, you worthless blankety-blanking blankerblanker, get your bleeping butt in bleeping gear.” When we were detailed to Vieques Island for maneuvers and slept in tents on the beach, he’d make us police the area and rake the sand twice a day. Vieques had always been considered vacation time for UDT platoons. You dove for conch and langostino and drank beer and rum and lazed on the beach and worked on your tan.

  Not under Ev Barrett you didn’t. He made me take the platoon’s empty beer cans, fill them with sand, and build little patio walls in front of the tents. He designed (and we built) palm-frond patio roofs and beer-bottle wind chimes. At one point he sat the platoon down and taught us how to make palm-frond hats because he thought we weren’t being kept busy enough.

  Frogmen making palm-frond hats? Ah, but to Barrett, making blanking palm-frond hats meant we had to climb the tallest blanker-blanking palm trees to get the tenderest, greenest, most lush blanking palm fronds on the whole blanking island. No detrital fronds for Ev Barrett. And in case you’ve never done it, climbing a 45-foot palm tree is work.

  Thing about it was, I didn’t mind the hazing and the yelling and the constant attention at all. I learned early on that the more Barrett ragged you, the more he thought of you. So he kicked my butt until I passed my high-school equivalency exam. And he made sure I went through advanced jump training. And he honed my administrative skills by making me type all his blanking platoon reports. And he finally coaxed and cajoled and bullied and domineered and strong-armed me until I took the Officer’s Candidate School qualification test—and passed.

  When we were back at Little Creek, he’d bring me home for dinner, and I’d sit around all night with Barrett and his wife, Della, drinking beer and listening to his stories about the old Navy. Why he adopted me—because that’s exactly what he did—I still don’t know. I wasn’t the first sailor he’d taken under his wing and I wasn’t the last. But I’m glad he did, because he probably spent more time with me between 1961 and 1965, in both UDT-21 and then UDT-22 (a new unit formed in 1963, where Barren’s Second-to-None Platoon was transferred en masse), than my father had all my life. And frankly, if you were a rowdy youngster in your early twenties (and I was), and you were looking for a positive male rolemodel (and I probably was), you could do a hell of a lot worse than Everett E. Barren, UDT, CPO, EOD, GM/G.

  And rowdy I was. When Second Platoon deployed on cruises, for example, it fell to me and a friend to clear the enlisted men’s mess deck.

  A little explanation is in order here. On board a ship, there is a rigid caste system. Officers live in Officer Country, where enlisted pukes don’t blanking go without a good reason. Chiefs normally have their own goat locker—their own galley and mess—and the rest of the ship’s company ate on the mess decks. That left us, and the Marines, at the bottom of the bilge. We were classified as troops, not as a part of the ship’s company, and therefore were subject to trickle-down amenities. We ate last. We showered last. We shit last. And in time of emergency we’d die first.

  But UDT platoons are tight little cliques. We bunked together, shared duties together, swam in pairs, and we wanted to eat as a group, not have to walk into the mess deck and squeeze ourselves in singly among strange sailors or (worse) Marines.

  I was known as The Geek back then. Geek because I was geeky enough to spit shine the soles of my boots as well as the uppers. My buddy Dan Zmuda, real name Zmudadelinski, alias Mud, and I devised a method by which to clear out enough sailors from the mess deck so Second Platoon could eat together at the same table.

  The technique we developed was simple and effective. First, we’d walk into the mess and fill our trays to overflowing with food. Everything from soup to nuts on the same tray. Then I’d sit down in the midst of a group of clean, neat, wellmannered sailors and bid them hello.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” I would say, nodding politely.

  Then Mud would drop onto an adjacent chair with a thud. “Hi, tablemates,” he’d add, genteel as a yeoman.

  The cordial greeting would be offset by Mud’s physical appearance. He was built like a fireplug, and just as solid, and he kind of permanently tilted into the wind. His round, bulldog jaw jutted defiantly, his big Slavic nose (broken in any number of fights) was slightly askew. The rest of his Polack face looked as if it’d been sandblasted. Even when he smiled, his eyes could develop this wonderful wild look—the sort of “watch carefully, folks, here it comes” grin favored by Hulk Hogan just before he trashes Andre the Giant.

  The mascot of the Underwater Demolition Teams is a malevolent frog named Freddie. He wears a Dixie-cup sailor’s cap at a rakish angle. The stub of a stogie is chomped firmly in the corner of his mouth. He carries a lit stick of dynamite in his right hand and a mad glint in his eyes. Mud developed the same look, and most sailors found it downright unsettling. He was perfectly cast to play Huntz Hall to my Leo Gorcey.

  Then Mud, who habitually ate dessert before he ate his entrèe, would take a knife from someone else’s tray, smear a thick layer of ice cream—flavor unimportant—on top of his Salisbury steak, add half a bottle of A.1. sauce, and begin to eat. Mud ate very quickly—and without benefit of utensils. It was a replay of the Hell Week mess hall—except Mud and I were the only ones at the table who had been through Hell Week.

  I would always begin my meal with peas. I ate them by sucking them through my nose. After the first couple of snorts, I’d look around and smack my lips. “Mmmmmm. Great!”

  If there were no peas that day, there was usually spaghetti. I sucked spaghetti through my nose, too, although I found if the marinara sauce was too spicy my eyes would water.

  If subtlety didn’t work, we’d get gross.

  “Coffee, Mr. Mud?” I’d ask.

  “By all means, Mr. Geek.”

  “Cream?”

  “No thank you, Mr. Geek.”

  “Sugar?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Honker?” I’d clear my nose into his cup.

  “Delightful.” And he’d drink it down in a gulp.

  We discovered that after about three days of these performances, word would spread. By the end of the first week at sea, all Mud and I would have to do would be to walk into the mess hall, load our trays, and head for a table. It would clear before we even sat down.

  When Barrett heard what Mud and I were doing, he went bonkers. “Goddammit, Marcinko,” he growled, “I can’t leave you blanking alone for five blanking minutes before you blankety-blank get your blankety-blank blanking butt in blanking trouble a-blanking-gain.” In addition to the sore ears, Mud and I also received extra duty. That was Barrett’s unique way of saying thank-you for the performances that allowed the platoon to eat together. Mud and I suffered in silence. We knew why he’d done it: if he hadn’t, he would have taken grief in the chiefs’ goat locker, so to keep the peace he reamed us out.

  I got word I’d been accepted to OCS just after I left on a six-monther to the Mediterranean aboard the USSRushmore, a WWII-vintage LSD, or Landing Ship/Dock, that had originally been built for the Royal Navy. It was quite a farewell cruise. I had all the normal platoon work
to do: reconning the beaches prior to amphibious exercises, practicing EOD demolition, and taking part in the Z/5/O evade and escape drills that were a part of UDT-22’s ongoing training. Then there was the scut work: typing Barrett’s reports and memos, servicing the equipment, and maintaining my UDT diving and parachute qualifications.

  On top of everything else I began spending more and more time in Officer Country, watching how they acted, how they did their work, how they lived in their wardroom. From time to time I’d get up to the bridge, where the captain of our LSD, Captain B. B. Witham, even allowed me to drive once or twice after Barren passed on the word I’d been accepted to Organized Chicken Shit, which is how OCS is known in the fleet. A chain-smoking New Englander, Skipper Witham made sure I was instructed in the rudiments of officerdom. He even knew enough about me to address me correctly—as Seaman Geek.

  Of course, now that I was about to become an officer and a gentleman, Mr. Mud and I gave up our regular mess-deck performances entirely. It had been a great act, but even great acts have to close sometime. Besides, who wants to be called Ensign Geek?

  Not that I assumed the cloak of total respectability either. Whenever we landed at Naples for supplies, for example, I’d take the wheel of the truck we were assigned. My logic was simple: I was going to become a ship driver; driving is driving; why not get all the practice I could? Naples is a hilly city, and! there are long tunnels with pedestrian sidewalks running next to the traffic lanes (only fools walked those narrow tunnel sidewalks, as Neapolitans compare with the wild men of Beirut when it comes to driving).

  Now, since we had wheels, we could take the time to make one or two stops for social beverages on the way to the supply depot, which would normally put us behind schedule. I often took it upon myself to make up the lost time by putting two wheels of the two-ton stake-bed truck up on the sidewalk and grazing the tunnel walls to pass slow-moving traffic. This technique made neither the chief, nor the eight Frogmen riding in the back nor the fleet motor pool, very happy.

  Barrett tried to correct my driving style in his characteristically amiable manner, explaining to me pedantically that bleeping motherblanker trucks weren’t bleeping made for driving on side-blanking-walks.

  I nodded and kept driving. “Roger, Chief, gotcha.”

  Gotcha, indeed.

  I “got” Barrett one last time the week before I left for OCS. We were scheduled for a parachute jump. I’d already attracted Captain Witham’s unhappy attention by pulling low—waiting until I was under a thousand feet to pull the rip cord. Witham felt more secure when he could watch us open our chutes through binoculars. The thought of a HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) jump made him sweat. I was determined to make him lose eight pounds of water weight.

  My last jump was a water jump just off the starboard side of the LSD. The masthead on an LSD is 138 feet above the deck. I told the platoon I was going to pull so low I’d be level with the masthead when the chute deployed. In fact, I told everybody I could find that I was going to come in at 138 feet—with two notable exceptions: Skipper Witham, and Ev Barrett. I even had a guy named Bob Clark standing by on deck with a 16mm sound movie camera.

  We went up, climbed to altitude, reached the zone, and jumped. When I saw the film later, it was wonderful. There are all these chutes opening, way high. And then there’s me. Falling. Falling. Falling.

  As the camera follows me closer to the water, you can hear Barren’s voice unmistakably clear on the sound track: “You asshole. You fucking asshole. You fucking dipshit asshole. Pull the fucking goddamn cord. Marcinko, you motherfucking cocksucking cuntbreath shit-eating turd-faced dipshit pencildicked pus-nuts shit-for-brains asshole geek, pull the fucking cord!”

  I know when to take a hint, so I pulled the cord. I’d rigged the chute for a low deployment. It flared instantly. I had time for one oscillation of opening shock, at which point I came even with the masthead, and then—splash—I hit the water.

  I went under, wriggled out of my harness, and came up laughing.

  Barrett and B. B. Witham did not find the stunt amusing.

  The skipper didn’t wait until I came aboard. “Marcinko—read my lips. You’re fucking grounded,” he called on the bullhorn.

  Barrett decided I needed a new asshole, so he reamed me one on the spot.

  About a week later I left for the States.

  The day before I left, Chief Barrett called me up to the goat locker and sat me down. He found a couple of cans of beer, opened them both, and passed one to me. “Dick,” he said, “I think you’re gonna do all right. You’re gonna make a good officer—if you don’t screw around too much, and if you take things serious.”

  “Thanks, Chief. I will.”

  He nodded. “I know. You’re a good boy. Hard worker. Tough. That’s good, too. You’re gonna need all that when you go up against all them fuckin’ Academy pukes.” He pulled at the beer. “Course, the Academy pukes don’t know much about fuckin’ pulling level with the fuckin’ masthead, do they?”

  We both laughed.

  “But there’s something …”

  “You name it. Chief.”

  “Look,” he said, “you’ve learned a lot of stuff now. And you’re gonna learn a lot more.”

  I nodded. “Yeah?”

  “So I want you to promise me something. I want your word that what you learn, you’ll pass on.”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t certain what he was getting at.

  “You’re wondering what the fuck I’m saying, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Dick, it shouldn’t matter whether you work with a guy once or whether you serve with him for years—you gotta treat him the same. You gotta help him do his job. Like I helped you—now it’s gonna be your turn to pass it on.” He drained his beer. “I want your word.”

  I looked at him. The man was absolutely serious.

  “You got it, Chief.”

  He nodded and cracked a half-smile. “Think of it as Barrett’s First Law of the Sea—because what it is, is the Navy way, Dick.”

  I was naive in those days; I believed him. No—that’s not quite true. Back then, Ev Barrett’s Law was the Navy way.

  Chapter 6

  I BREEZED THROUGH OCS AT NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, graduating in December 1965 as an ensign. I didn’t do well because I was smarter than the others with whom I entered, but because I’d been in the Navy for over seven years, more than three of them with the fleet, and I knew how the system worked. When the instructors—chiefs, mostly—would say, during their lectures, “You’ll see this again,” I wrote what they were saying down because I knew it would reappear on tests. I knew to do it because that’s how chiefs worked. When we had inspections, I made sure my bunk was so tight a quarter would jump a foot off the top sheet and the room was as spit polished as the soles of my shoes (I hadn’t been The Geek for nothing). When we drilled, I marched as if I were a member of the drill team. When we shot, I’d score an unending series of tens.

  I realized very early on that none of the officers or chiefs who taught us, drilled us, harassed us, and inspected us could come close to giving me the kind of intimidation I’d survived during UDT Hell Week. So I did my job, took whatever they gave me to do, completed it without complaining, and cruised through OCS as if it were summer camp. The guys at fleet had been right: OCSdid stand for Organized Chicken Shit.

  Fact is, if the character played by Richard Gere in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman had been a Frogman, he’d have ended up cleaning Lou Gossett’s clock before the end of the first day. Frogmen eat drill sergeants for hors d’oeuvres. They also know how to take harassment and still do the job without complaining.

  When I was selected a section leader, then battalion commander of my OCS training class, I took Ev Barrett’s Law to heart. I helped the class runts through the physical segments of training; I showed the bookworms how weapons worked; and I taught those whose grades were low to listen for the key words you’ll see this material again before they
wrote anything down. One hundred percent of my section graduated OCS. Others suffered a fair number of dropouts—one even had a suicide. At graduation, former Seaman Geek received the class leadership award along with his ensign’s bars. My wife, Kathy, pregnant with our second child, looked on proudly.

  After OCS I was assigned to a small destroyer, the Joseph K. Taussig, as a snipe, or engineering officer, whose domain was the fireroom, where the ship’s boilers are located. I was certainly the first fireroom officer aboard the Taussig who ever conducted his own hull inspections—I did my own diving—and who wore green fatigues while crawling over, under, around, and through the whole boiler and propulsion system before I signed off that any specific work had been done.

  The six months aboard the Taussig were an essential transition period for me. Now, I lived in Officer Country and ate in the wardroom—but the only things really different about me were the single-bar tabs on my collar, my tan uniform, and the fact that many of the enlisted men called me Mr. Rick—which I thought preferable to being referred to as Mr. Dick.

  Ensign or no, I still thought like an enlisted man. And that helped when it came to doing my job. I’d heard all the enlisted men’s excuses before because I’d used ’em myself. I knew how to tell good chiefs from bad ones. I knew from the day I was commissioned I couldn’t adopt the Academy-grad leadership style, which is often detached, cool, and aloof, toward my men because I’m not a detached, cool, or aloof kind of guy. On the other hand, I wasn’t an enlisted man anymore, either, and I had to learn to lead—even if leading meant making tough choices.

  So the Taussig became my laboratory. I tried to see how I could use the Navy’s system to my benefit, and where I could adapt it. Somewhat to my surprise I discovered that leading is not easy. It takes the same sort of confidence you need to jump out of a plane to order a man to do something that may prove fatal to him—and have him carry out the order instantaneously and without question.