The ripples from my publicity tour, incidentally, lasted longer than I expected. First, after the Male piece came out, no one called me Mr. Rick anymore. I was either Demo or Dick or Demo Dick. The second afterlife I only discovered much later. It turned out that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese read Male magazine, too.
When I returned to Little Creek, I convinced SEAL Team Two’s commander, Squirrelly Earley, to assign me a second stint in Vietnam. As a lieutenant, junior grade, I was eligible to command my own platoon. I’d been a junior-junior ensign the first time around, and although Fred Kochey had given me free rein most of the time, I hadn’t been able to get as down and dirty as I’d wanted. Moreover, I believed that if I was given a full platoon, I could use the larger, 14-man unit to push the parameters of Navy SpecWar further than they’d ever been pushed before—although I certainly didn’t say that to anyone in the command structure.
It took me about two weeks of constant lobbying, but after some requisite squirreling, Skipper Earley finally gave me the Eighth Platoon. I thought of it as an early Christmas present—sort of like electric trains for adults.
My desire for a second combat tour did not go over well on the home front. Between SEAL training, my six-month stint in Vietnam, plus a three-week extension at Binh Thuy to help indoctrinate the new SEALs and my public-relations tour, I’d been gone almost a full year. Now I was about to go out again and who knew when I’d be back. I was a stranger to my kids, and to my wife. But the fact was, I wanted to go, I was used to getting what I wanted, and for better or worse, Kathy had signed on as a Navy wife.
I’m sure it was tough on her, but she was no different from thousands of other Navy wives who lived within the one hundred square miles or so that made up Virginia Beach and Norfolk. Every family sending someone overseas had to put up with separation and inconvenience.
Besides, our male-female roles were much more well defined in the late sixties than they are today. Back then, Kathy’s job was taking care of the kids; mine was taking care of the guys. I’d discovered in the field that when you’re crawling through a rice paddy in the middle of the night surrounded by people who want to kill you, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about home and hearth. In fact, you don’t spend any time at all thinking about those things—because if you don’t concentrate on killing the enemy, he will kill you first. So far as I was concerned back then, my home life was less important than my job. Period. I realize that to say those things today may sound unfeeling, callous, and unenlightened. Well, maybe I was unfeeling, callous, and unenlightened. But that’s the way most of us SEALs behaved. And in truth, I felt closer to the men with whom I served than I did to my wife and kids. We’d been through more together than most husbands and wives go through hi a lifetime.
I set about training Eighth Platoon with a vengeance. I was determined to hit the ground running when we got to Vietnam, and I wanted to prepare the men for what they’d find. I pushed them to the limit. I took them to Panama so they’d get used to working in a tropical climate, letting the Army’s Latin American Special Forces trainers do their “De hungle ees your frien’ ” number. Then I volunteered my platoon as the aggressor force during some Green Beret training sessions. I was gratified to see that we knocked the crap out of the Army. We played all kinds of head games on them: snuck up at night and tied them up in their hammocks. Stole their food and weapons. Took their wallets out of their fatigues and wrote nasty letters to their wives and sweethearts. A couple of Special Forces officers accused us of not playing fair.
“Tell that to the VC when you’re sitting on the Cambodian border,” I answered. “Just walk into the jungle with your fingers crossed and shout ‘finnsies.’ They’ll pay attention. They just love to play fair. Every VC I’ve ever killed carried a leather-bound copy of the Marquis of Queensbery rules right next to his picture of Ho Chi Minh.”
Rules? I broke a lot of them during training. But I was more concerned about making the situation realistic for the men than I was about not bruising some officer’s ego. Despite regulations, for example, I emphasized live-fire sessions that simulated the sorts of situations I’d encountered in Vietnam, not the safe, easy exercises that don’t prepare you to get shot at. When we walked the trails at Camp Pickett or Fort A.P. Hill, we did so with our weapons locked and loaded—just like walking the trails in Vietnam. I remembered how badly Second Platoon had done firing at towed targets, so we spent weeks practicing, until we could hit what we aimed at—day or night. We worked on infiltration and extraction techniques over and over, until we could move quickly and quietly into an ambush, because I’d discovered under fire that those were the times a unit was most vulnerable.
I taught the men of Eighth Platoon to hone their instincts, and to react instantly. “Never assume anything,” I kept saying. “Not even when you feel most safe and secure.”
I preached unit integrity endlessly. And we practiced what I preached. We ate and drank and partied as a group. We’d bust up bars in the Virginia Beach area, and when we’d finished taking on all comers, we’d set about demolishing each other. It was an unconventional rite of initiation for these fourteen men, who’d trained as warriors but—with a couple of exceptions—hadn’t been bloodied yet in battle. And the way I went about preparing them would stay with me: I’d use it again when I commanded SEAL Team Two, and I’d use it to fuse SEAL Team Six as well.
What I did back in 1967 I did by the seat of my pants. But my instincts were good. The endless contact got the platoon thinking as a unit. Each man became comfortable with the others, while the rough edges and annoying habits were worn away by the day-in, day-out rubbing of bodies and personalities. We began to think like a family; to put the group’s needs above our own personal desires.
Drinking was an important element of the fusion process. It was more than just aimless, macho-bullshit partying, or frat-house chugalugging. I’ve always been a believer in the phrase in vino veritas. Five or six hours of hard partying after a 12-hour day of rough training allowed me to see how my guys would act when they were wrecked, almost out of control and weird—and how well they’d do the next morning, when they were nursing throbbing heads and bloodshot eyes—but still had to swim six or seven miles, run ten, or shoot to qualify. Fact is, you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles his alcohol.
The bar time was a social accelerator, too. The more they drank together, the more they had their backs up against each other and took on the world, the closer they bonded. I’ve never believed a man should have to drink alcohol to prove himself, but I do believe that a unit as small and as tightly knit as a SEAL platoon should party together on a regular—even a nightly—basis, to achieve the kind of fusion only after-hours camaraderie can develop. This unique form of unit-integrity development worked. By late November, I had fourteen tough motherfuckers; men who would—and did— drink each other’s piss, who I was certain would hunt and kill with the best of them.
It was a first-class group that set out in early December 1967 for a two-week odyssey that would end at Binh Thuy, Republic of Vietnam. We stopped in California for a few days of R&Rand I knew that the platoon’s training was complete when we rode down to Tijuana for two solid days of partying, and most of the men chose to infiltrate their way back to the States instead of coming through the normal border crossings.
My number two was Lieutenant ( j.g.) Frank G. Boyce, aka Gordy, a little fireplug of a guy. Gordy was a real pocket rocket: arrogant, intense, cantankerous, mouthy—everything I liked in a man. He was a reserve officer, younger than I, who came from old New England money—his father was a pal of Ellsworth Bunker’s, the tall, white-haired, patrician American ambassador to Vietnam. But Gordy never let the wealth or the background bother him. In fact, Gordy was so crazy he was freaky. He didn’t drink, for example. But he could get as absolutely shit-faced on tap water or Coca-Cola as if he’d had a case of beer. He was an incontrovertible walking, one-man frat party.
Then there was Harry Hump
hries. Harry was a fellow Jersey boy, a big, strapping, dark-haired mick lad of six feet and two hundred pounds. Best of all, he was a real renegade. He came from a wealthy Irish family in Jersey City and had gone to Rutgers. But college life hadn’t provided enough excitement, so he’d enlisted in the Navy and gone through UDT training. When I first knew him, he was in the Fourth Platoon of UDT Team 22. By the time I’d done my first tour in Vietnam and come home, Harry’s hitch had expired. He was back in Jersey City, dragooned into the family fat-processing business by his mother. To me, rendering lard seemed like a waste of his real talents.
Still, the conditions under which he was wasting away were plush. He’d traded enlisted-man’s housing for the Humphries family compound, a square block of Jersey City surrounded by a ten-foot wall. Inside, behind wrought-iron gates—kind of like the estate in The Godfather—were seven almost identical red-brick houses. Harry’d been given one, where he lived with his wife, Pat, a former model whom he’d met on St. Thomas, and one young child. Cushy.
Jersey City wasn’t too far from New Brunswick, so on a trip to see my own in-laws I dropped in on the Humphries household. Harry and I went out for a couple of cold ones and got caught up.
After a few beers, Harry let me know he was bored processing lard and suet. “I wish I’d stayed in the Teams, Dick. By now I’d have been deployed to Vietnam like you.”
I played it cool. I told Harry how much fun I’d had on my first tour. I told him what Bravo had done and what games we’d been able to play. “I’m gonna go back, too. Take my own platoon.”
“No shit. That’s great, Dick.”
“Great? Hell, Har, it’s gonna be a vacation. Excitement, fun. Life in the mud. Get shot at. Shoot Japs. Good shit.”
Humphries held his glass in front of his nose and looked through the beer into the bar mirror. I knew what he was thinking. I set the hook. “You’re right—too bad you left. We could have had some real fun together.”
He nodded. “That’s a roger.” He sipped his beer. “Y’know, I haven’t been gone that long—I could make up my quals easily, if you could get me into SEALs.”
“Why the hell would you want to trade what you got for an enlisted-man’s billet?”
“Cause I’m in the goddamn fat-processing business, Dick, and I don’t wanna be.”
I put my beer on the bar. “Tell you what—you want to reenlist, I can probably get you into SEALs. You’re parachute and dive qualified. The rest of it we can do in a couple of months.”
He thought about that for a few minutes. A self-satisfied smile crept across his face. “You know Pat’s gonna kill me,” he said.
“Nah.”
“Wanna bet? She loves the fact I’m in business. She loves the compound—especially now that she’s pregnant with our second baby. We’ve got everything we want—and what’s she gonna get in Virginia Beach—a tract house? A mobile home?”
“She’ll get used to it.”
“Wrong. She may do it, but she’ll never get used to it.” He sipped at his beer. “And my family’s gonna shit when they learn I wanna quit.”
I hit him on the shoulder. Hard. “Quit?”
“The business.”
I hit him again. “Screw the business. When you’re forty, you can do business. You’re what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven years old? Have some fun. Hop and pop. Shoot and loot. Then—then you come back, and you wear gray flannel suits for the rest of your life, and nobody argues with you.”
I drained my beer, called for another round, and offered him the rim of my glass. “Come on, Harry—here’s to the reason you joined the Teams in the first place: to be a hunter.”
I didn’t have to do much convincing because Harry’d made up his own mind long before we went out for those beers. But you couldn’t have convinced his wife or mother that his reenlistment wasn’t completely and totally my fault. It was the elder Mrs. Humphries who was most upset. By the time Harry and Pat moved south to Virginia Beach, Pat’d had the new baby. Harry’s mom came with them to take care of the infant while they found a place to live (and yes, they ended up in tract housing).
The last time I saw her, she shook a dirty diaper in my face and screamed like a wrinkled Irish banshee. “Damn you, damn you to hell, Richard Marcinko. You got my boy to reenlist, and now you’re taking him to Vietnam, where he could get killed, and you’re leaving us holding these!” I looked at Harry, and the relieved smile in his eyes told me, “Better her than us.”
My corpsman was Doc Nixon. He was a SEAL Two plank owner—one of the original East Coast SEALs. His first name was Guy and his middle name was Richard, but I can’t remember anyone ever calling him anything but Doc. He was a brooding, blue-eyed warrior. A real slave to his dick, too—a dangerous man with the women.
Number one Stoner man was Ron Rodger, who knew what to expect from me because he’d been part of Bravo Squad on my previous tour. Eagle Gallagher and Patches Watson were also going back to Vietnam, but they’d been assigned to Seventh Platoon this time. Rodger, however, got to come with me. That made me happy. The son of a bitch was a good fighter. His punches still snapped when he hit you—and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do if asked.
Then there was Louis Kucinski—another SEAL Two plank owner. I called him Hoss, or Ski. He was an archetypal, big, jug-eared Polack bosun’s mate: strong, and silent. His face was as rough and pockmarked as if it had just been sandblasted. And smart—Hoss never had to be told anything twice. Seldom, in fact, did Hoss have to be told anything even once.
Kucinski was married to a beautiful, long-haired tiny mosquito of a woman named Tiger, who loved him so utterly and completely she would try to beat the crap out of him regularly when they’d had a few beers. She’d flail away, and he’d just laugh and laugh and pick her up and kiss the hell out of her.
Frank Scollise was a short, asthmatically thin chain-smoker from Blacksburg, Virginia, a hardscrabble two-horse town in the Appalachian foothills about twenty-five miles due west of Roanoke. He was our mountain man—the hunter who made sure we had squirrel or venison to eat every time we went on maneuvers at Camp Pickett or Fort A.P. Hill, and he brewed our morning coffee with both eggshell and a dirty sock in the pot. He was a tiny guy—no more than 140 pounds or so soaking wet—with a heavy beard that needed shaving two or three times a day. In fact, he looked like a miner because no matter how many times we’d throw him in the shower or whatever body of water we happened to be around, he’d still have a gray, sooty pall to his skin. You could leave him in the sun for weeks and he’d still be sickly looking.
I called him Slow Frank because that’s the way he moved—lackadaisical. Never so fast that he’d cause any breeze in his wake. He was an old-fashioned sailor. He usually kept bourbon in his canteen, and an unfiltered cigarette always hung from the corner of his mouth. Scollise was subject to a constant, jarring smoker’s cough that he somehow managed to muffle whenever we were out on patrol. He hated swimming, but I couldn’t have wanted a better man with a blowtorch—or a rifle.
Freddie Toothman was a Panamanian, a dark-skinned, easygoing, Spanish-speaking giant of a guy who turned out to be gifted at working with the Vietnamese. Maybe it was the similarity of temperament, maybe it was the fun of staging anti-VC hits. Whatever the case, he found true happiness leading raids staged by the PRU, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units made up of VC defectors, as part of the Phoenix program.
Number two Stoner man Clarence Risher was the platoon’s James Dean. A lanky, curly-haired young rebel with a kind of sloe-eyed charm, he’d grown up on a series of military bases where his father, a Marine lieutenant colonel, had served. Risher was the youngest man in the platoon—not chronologically, but in the way he behaved. He was quiet and moody and given to petulance when he didn’t get what he wanted. He was mischievous, but not in the roughhouse way most of the old guys from the UDT teams were. Frank Scollise or Ron Rodger, for example, would throw you up against a wall and pound the shit out of you when they wanted to have some fun.
Risher was more into verbal stuff—the adolescent give-and-take of the schoolyard that always seemed to degenerate into “I dare you” and “I double-dare you.”
I always felt that SEALs shouldn’t be into that sort of juvenile game, and it concerned me. What worried me about Risher came through most clearly when he drank. He was a happy drunk. But after a few beers he’d always seem to drift into a monologue about Colonel Daddy. After a while it got like a soap opera. He’d joined the Navy because Daddy was a Marine. He was an enlisted man because Daddy’d somehow convinced him he wasn’t good enough to become an officer. He’d become a SEAL because it was the best way he could show Daddy that he was a man, too.
Just before we left for Vietnam, Risher got himself married. Not because he was desperately in love, or because he was afraid of losing the girl. He did it because somehow he felt it was the thing to do. But juvenile or not, Risher was also talented with the Stoner machine gun. He was big—over six feet—and strong—190 pounds or so—and he could carry almost half his weight in ammo. The kid may have been an immature pain in the butt, but he always pulled his share.
Dennis Drady was another old-time dirtbag. He was the platoon’s resident yenta—the mother-hen pain in the ass—who habitually nagged us until we’d beat the crap out of him. “Did you bring enough ammo?” he’d ask Hoss. “Did you remember to clean the machine guns this morning?” he’d badger Ron Rodger or Clarence Risher. “Did you get fresh intel?” he’d query me.
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