—JSOC was well organized and trained for hostage-rescue operations. JSOC units had special equipment, support assets, and best of all, their own secure communications network. MURPHY: JSOC units couldn’t talk to the conventional Task Force commander (afloat), or to the Marines.
—SEAL Team Six was assigned an air-sea rendezvous with a U.S. naval man-of-war off Grenada. MURPHY: no one told the pilot he wasn’t over target when he signaled the drop. No one advised the SEALs that there were heavy surface winds and high waves. No one checked to see whether or not the ship was in the proper location.
The result was that four highly trained members of my SEAL Team Six family drowned at sea. They weren’t killed in action. In fact, what made their deaths criminal was that they didn’t get a chance to kill anyone at all. They jumped with more than a hundred pounds of equipment into 12-foot seas and drowned. There is no fucking justice in this world. I briefed SECNAV Lehman on their deaths. I told him about Bob Shamberger, a SEAL Team Six plank owner. He was a chief, a team leader, a real father to his crew. He burped their babies, bailed them out of jail, helped them with personal and professional problems, and he died because of Murphy. And I told him about Kodiak, who’d just become a father. The kid was proud as a peacock that there was now an heir apparent, another future SEAL Six member. He, too, was dead at Murphy’s hands. Two other shooters died with them. Four SEAL Six warriors now stand an eternal watch on the ocean floor, waiting for that next recall to muster for another war.
—Local island governments were advised of the pending action in advance, despite the fact that it was common knowledge that most of the island governments had been penetrated for years by the DGl—Cuban intelligence. Se…or Murphy got the word early and told the Cubans on Grenada, so they were ready for the gringos.
—The CIA didn’t have dedicated full-time agents or operatives on Grenada. But Christians in Action knew what to do. Murphy saw to it that the clandestine ops planning was taken over by a couple of veterans of the goatfucked Desert One operation—Lieutenant Colonel Dick Gadd, who had retired, and active USAF colonel Bob Dutton (both of whom would later go on to greater glory as part of the Iran-contra scandal).
Mr. Common Sense says, “The last time these guys tried to put an op together, it didn’t work.”
Murphy says, “Not to worry—they can handle it.”
Mr. Common Sense says, “But they’re Air Force officers and the Cubans are on the ground.”
Murphy says, “Whaddya, whaddya—I told ya, they can handle it.”
—On the primary airborne assault, the lead StarLifter, with armed-to-the-teeth KATN Rangers on board, screwed up its approach because the plane’s CARP—Computerized Airborne Release Point—system malfunctioned. So Plane No. 1 circled, and the Rangers in the second C-141 jumped first. MURPHY: the second plane was filled with the clerks and jerks—the Ranger support company, whose weapons probably weren’t even loaded.
—An Air Force general in charge of the delivery of the chopper support elements for Delta and SEALs apparently decided that he shouldn’t violate the noise abatement restrictions on an adjacent island and leave before dawn. He didn’t want to wake anybody up. Besides, the general probably figured, that way the SpecWarriors could assault their targets in broad daylight and see them better. The results, which Murphy loved, included large numbers of WIAs and damaged choppers.
—SEALs assaulted, and successfully took over, the island’s radio station. After neutralizing the enemy-held site they radioed that their mission was complete, and where were the troops to whom they’d turn the facility over?
Troops? You want someone to come out and actually take possession of your objective? Sorry, Lieutenant, that’s not part of the plan. Why don’t you and your men disengage and get back to your ships.
And how should we do that, sir?
Why not swim, Lieutenant?
And that’s exactly what they fucking did.
Even after the island had been secured, Mr. Murphy didn’t quit. Somehow, he tricked the Task Force commander, Vice Admiral Joe Metcalf, into trying to ship home too many war souvenir AK-47 automatic rifles. Disclosure of Metcalf’s gaffe in the press cost him his fourth star and forced him into premature retirement.
As I scored it for SECNAV Lehman, the primary victor in Operation Just Cause was Se…or Murphy. Even though the medical students were freed without casualties, four SEALs died for no reason at all, command and control was a complete fiasco, the shooters from Delta and SEAL Team Six had been used as shock troops instead of surgical SpecWarriors, scores of casualties had been sustained through carelessness and stupidity, and the Air Force had functioned more like a trade union of elevator operators than a combat force of pilots. It was enough to make me sick.
Early in 1984, I was summoned to Ace’s cabin. “You know what really gave me headaches at Second Fleet?” he asked.
“Visiting congressmen?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Dick. I’m talking real headache material.”
“No, sir.”
“All right, I’ll tell you. It was the fact that the Navy, as an institution, is so focused on the Soviet threat that we don’t take the time or energy to deal with other, perhaps equally dangerous, potential adversaries.”
I nodded. I hadn’t been CO of SEAL Team Six for the past three years for nothing. “Terrorism.”
“Bright boy.” He drummed his knuckles on his desk. “We’re a peacetime Navy, Dick, and we think like a peacetime Navy. That makes for liabilities when it comes to dealing with terrorism. The Germans, the Italians, the French, the Brits—they all deal with terrorism on a daily basis. The British Navy doesn’t just study the Soviet threat—it considers the IRA threat as well. The French have to worry about Basque terrorists and Direct Action. The Germans—Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof. Italians? Red Brigades. Meanwhile, we just go blithely along. Then all of a sudden the shit hits the fan—some asshole blows up the embassy in Beirut, or we get intelligence that the Iranians are going to target the Sixth Fleet with kamikaze drones or remote-controlled boats, and we go ape shit, because we’re not prepared.”
“Well, Admiral,” I said, “one of the biggest problems I faced at Six was convincing the goddamn chain of command that counterterror was something the Navy needed.”
“What was the usual reaction?”
“A lot of smoke and mirrors. Most COs were more concerned with my playing on their turf than they were about whether or not their HQ was going to be blown up by some raghead. It was as bad as Vietnam. You know, me and my platoon would show up at some Special Forces camp way out in the boonies, and the goddamn CO would start bellyaching about the fact that we were eating his rations and using his potable water, and God forbid we needed any bullets or frags. It was like, ‘Are we fighting the same enemy, or what?’”
“Precisely.” A wry smile came over Ace’s face. “That is exactly the problem.”
He stood up and began to pace. “The system,” he said, “tends to be static, unmovable, inflexible. That is dangerous. We, as commanders, tend to react, instead of initiate. That, too, is dangerous. Why dangerous? Because those conditions lead to complacency. And complacency is the worst fucking enemy the military can ever have.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“You bet your ass ‘aye-aye, sir.’” Ace put both hands palm down on his desk and leaned forward, a proud preacher behind his lectern. “The bottom line, my boy, is that we’re not prepared. The Navy is not fucking prepared. The Navy has thirty fucking manuals about community fucking relations, but not a single fucking piece of paper about what to do if we’re faced with the possibility of a suicide bomber, or a remote-controlled speedboat filled with Semtex. We stamp millions of papers Top Fucking Secret, but our most sensitive installations are open to attack twenty-four hours a day.”
I began to see his point.
“Look,” Ace continued, just beginning to hit his stride, “who’s in charge of Navy security? Bureaucrats. Dip-shit idiots.
They think of everything passively. ‘How many locks do you have?’ ‘How many feet of chain do you use to secure your back gate every night?’ ‘How many checklists do you have?’ That’s no goddamn way to conduct security, Dick.”
He pounded his desk. “You can’t lead people to change their thinking about terrorism—you have to push them. That’s why I want to shake up the whole system. That’s why I want to rattle the Navy’s cage like it’s never been rattled before. I want our base commanders to see how goddamn vulnerable they really are. I want to stick it to them—and have ’em learn from the experience, learn something they won’t put in a file drawer and forget. I want an end to all the goddamn complacency. This threat is real. I know it. You know it. And it’s about time they knew it, too.”
He looked at me with the same ecstatic, sinister expression master chiefs get when they’re plotting some new and malevolently insidious way to play mind games on unsuspecting officers. “Go write me a goddamn memo. Design me a unit to test the Navy’s vulnerabilities against terrorists. Come back with it next month. Now, get the hell out of here and go to work.”
I called it Red Cell, although it was formally on the books as OP-06D. It was originally classified somewhere above top secret. There were fourteen plank owners in the unit, three officers and eleven enlisted men—one platoon, two boat crews, seven pairs of swim buddies. It was a classic SEAL design.
Thirteen of us were from SEAL Team Six. The sole outsider was a baby-faced, red-haired New York Irish dirtbag named Steve Hartman, who’d won two Silver Stars on classified missions in Laos and North Vietnam as a Force Recon Marine. Hartman wasn’t an operator in the formal, SpecWar definition of the word—he was neither Special Forces nor a SEAL. He was, however, an evil-minded mother whose talents included lock-picking, motorcycle racing, parachuting, and saloon brawling. He had black belts in three different forms of karate, and he’d had ample opportunity to put them all to good use.
Hartman was the only one of us except me who’d ever eaten raw monkey brain. He also had a Mark-1-Mod-Zero New Yorker’s smart mouth, which he’d acquired in the proper way: sitting at his maternal grandmother’s knee. Grandma Noel ran a cop’s saloon in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens where they know how to bend an elbow. She kept a baseball bat behind the bar—and could use it.
You had to like Hartman. He may not have been a SEAL, but he spoke Marine, which meant he swore like a chief, and he’d been stationed on nuclear subs. That meant he could always take point—after all, he was the one who glowed in the dark. Best of all, since we maintained the old SEAL Six tradition of shooting for beers and lunch, he became (until his marksmanship improved, which took about a month) a constant source of food and drink for the rest of the men.
From Six, I stole Lieutenant Commander Duke as Red Cell’s XO, and Lieutenant Trailer Court. I would have liked Paul Henley along for the ride, but he’d been assigned elsewhere and wasn’t available. The enlisteds included Pooster the Rooster, Baby Rich, Horseface, Snake, Cheeks, Ho-HoHo, Gold Dust Twins Frank and Larry, a guy I called Minkster, a wiseass known as Artie F, and my favorite corpsmancum-weapons-expert. Doc Tremblay. They didn’t have to be coaxed very hard to come play with me, either. Bob Gormly had turned Six into a bureaucracy. There were fewer hours training and more spent doing paperwork, getting haircuts, and playing touch football. The CO frowned on the Team’s drinking and partying the way the guys were used to doing. Snake wanted to wear earrings again. Baby Rich, who thought all officers were assholes, complained loudly about all the paperwork. Word came back that if he was unhappy he could leave. He left—and floated right into my arms. The others heard I was putting a new unit together and drifted in, one by one—Daddy, Daddy, can I play, too?
It was a classic case of the ships deserting the sinking rat.
Besides, I had the perfect job for my favorite dirtbags. After almost a year of preparation, staffing memos, and bureaucratic infighting, I was able to assemble my troops and say the secret words: “We’re gonna be terrorists.” For these nonconformist warriors, it was the perfect assignment: except for maintaining their SEAL qualifications in diving, parachuting, and demolition, we were on our own. There was no formal training cycle, no organized program. Each man was responsible for keeping himself fit and capable.
My personal situation was sweet, too. Regardless of the H’s and I’s on my fitreps, I’d finally been frocked for captain in February 1985. My record—over which there was some controversy—was scrutinized by Ace Lyons’s legal aide, Captain Morris Sinor. Sinor spent hundreds of hours over virtually five months examining my fitreps, balancing out my pluses and minuses. In his view (and despite intense, antagonistic lobbying by the East and West Coast SpecWar commodores, as well as a large contingent of captains and one- and twostar admirals I’d wrangled with) I’d earned the right to be promoted. Ace, going by the book, sent Sinor’s findings to Admiral Ron Hays, the vice chief of naval operations, who, after his staff concurred with Sinor’s findings, approved my promotion. Later, Ace would tell me, “Dick, this is probably the one time in the past few years when the system absolutely worked to your benefit.” He wasn’t far from wrong, either.
Temporary or not, I was a four-striper. And I had clout: I worked for Ace Lyons, and—through him—for the CNO. I interpreted that to mean that I took no orders and brooked no shit from anyone else. Full of myself—as immortal as before Risher’s death—I felt my unit was immune to the apparatchiks, the bean counters, and that virulent strain of assholia that affected much of the Navy. So far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a one-, two-, three-, or four-star admiral except the CNO who could lay a glove on us. My friends accused me of living in a fantasy world—which suited me just fine.
Red Cell was assigned to the Pentagon, but our real headquarters was a bar on Duke Street East called Shooter McGee’s, where the platoon assembled almost nightly to drink, brawl, and play head games with each other. There was little else to do: by 1985 my wife and I had separated. It was the right decision. Kathy and I had grown apart. We didn’t have anything in common anymore. I was focused entirely on my work, which meant I traveled most of the time. When I finally went home to Virginia Beach—Kathy had refused to make another move to Washington—I preferred the company of other SEALs to my wife’s companionship, so I’d find excuses to come home late and leave early. I spent a lot of time at the half dozen Virginia Beach bars where SEALs hung out. Indeed, dinner at the Marcinko household—the few times I was around—was eaten in awkward, painful silence. Our being together was so abysmal that Kathy probably welcomed my absences. The kids were grown and could accept the rift.
We talked it over, and I moved out. She kept the house in Virginia Beach and saw all our old friends. I moved into a studio apartment in Old Town Alexandria and began a bachelor’s existence. The place was small, but it was convenient to the Pentagon—and to our informal HQ at Shooter’s. Snake and his wife, Kitty, even rented an apartment directly across Duke Street from Shooter’s, a two-bedroom penthouse, which they shared with Pooster the Rooster. Most nights, Pooster and Snake would scale the outside of the building to get home. The climb often became a race on which the rest of us would bet as we watched them scramble from the Shooter McGee parking lot. If Snake and Pooster were coming home at what Kitty determined was an unacceptable hour—which was often—she’d increase the level of difficulty by locking the terrace doors, which forced them to hang outside by their fingers while they jimmied the windows. When that happened, volunteers would sometimes make the climb to help out the hapless SEALs.
If Shooter’s was Red Cell’s HQ, the world was our playground. We could act like real terrorists: travel incognito, smuggle our weapons aboard commercial flights, scope out the targets before we struck, then buy the materials for our bombs at hardware stores or steal what we needed from Navy bases, improvise the demolition charges, and build the bombs ourselves. Finally, when we were ready, we’d phone a series of threats to the installation and stage our strikes
. (Playing terrorists is nothing new for Frogmen. The very first class of them, at Ft. Pierce, Florida, in 1943—they were called S&Rs, or Scouts and Raiders, back then—staged a “graduation” infiltration exercise in which they kidnaped the admiral in charge of the Seventh Naval District Headquarters in Miami. And that was during a full wartime alert!)
Occasionally we would use military transportation to get to our target. But for the most part, we’d be like Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s revolutionary guerrillas, “moving through the masses like a fish through water.” In fact, one of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Watkins’s major concerns was whether or not we could carry enough equipment with us on civilian aircraft. There was no need for him to worry. I proved it late one autumn afternoon. I had just returned from Los Angeles, where I’d been doing a quick security survey, and Ace ordered me to get myself up to the CNO’s cabin double time.
I appeared in my jeans, workshirt, blazer, and running shoes and was ushered inside immediately. Admiral Watkins was sitting behind his desk. Ace sat facing him.
I saluted. “Sir?”
Watkins looked up at me. “I’m concerned about your OP06/Delta group flying on commercial airlines, Captain. The new security arrangements at most airports would preclude your being able to move the Cell efficiently, especially as Ace tells me you’ll be carrying weapons and equipment.”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Admiral”—I reached into the crotch of my jeans, retrieved a loaded, snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver, and laid it on the CNO’s desk. “It so happens I just now flew commercial from L.A….” Now, I removed my belt. Concealed in the buckle was a three-inch dagger. “And I was carrying”—from my back pocket I produced a pair of handcuffs—“all of this.” I slipped a collapsible, spring-loaded sap from my jacket. It joined the pile of goodies on the desk.
ROGUE WARRIOR® Page 37
