by Don Mann
I remembered that when I was a prison guard one of the inmates had smeared feces all over himself and came out with his arms held wide. And all of us had backed off. Sounded like a plan.
So I stole all the car keys and locked them in one of the cars. I kept the keys to one car, but not mine. I figured that when they came for me and I ran, they would think I was planning to escape in my car. This way I would misdirect them. Besides, since I’d be covered with shit, I didn’t want to get it all over the upholstery of my own rental car.
I said to one of my buddies, “Pass the word that no one’s going to want to get near me. If they do, they’ll regret it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
During break, the guys started to approach me. I was sitting on the ground in my flight suit, my plastic baggie filled with feces beside me. The plan was perfect, but the guys beat me to the punch.
Just as I was preparing to smear the shit all over my flight suit, one of the guys came up behind me and got me in a choke hold. I came to duct-taped to a medical backboard in the trunk of a car that was traveling down dirt roads at fifty miles an hour, the trunk’s lid banging down on my stretcher. Just before they closed the trunk, the guys had stood over me pouring hot sauce down my nose and mouth. And that was just the beginning. They got me good.
Kim and I had been together since she was a teenager back in Rhode Island. She had driven with me to BUD/S and stayed with me through my three years in California, where we married in 1982. Now we were living in Virginia Beach in a house we’d bought.
She was a wonderful person and I loved her, but I didn’t give her the time she deserved. She wanted a life together. Instead, I was an adrenaline junkie, addicted to the high energy and action of SEALs.
One night I returned at two in the morning from a dive trip to Puerto Rico and found no one home. So I knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked if she knew where Kim was. She said no.
As I turned to go back home, I heard my neighbor talking on the phone. I heard her say, “Kim, you’d better think quick. Don’s home.”
About thirty minutes later, a car pulled up and Kim and this guy named Pat came into our house.
I watched them enter, thinking, What do I do now? What do I do?
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach, but I realized that it was my own damn fault. I’d been living for the moment. Having fun. Thinking of no one but myself. Sadly, we divorced. Kim later remarried and had two boys. I still wish her the best.
I tried to pick up the emotional pieces and move on. The first months were rough. Then, at the end of 1989, ST-6 sent me to language school in Monterey, California. My German teacher was a petite, blue-eyed beauty named Shannon Bailey.
We called her Frau Bailey. She referred to me as Herr Mann.
All of us were crazy about our sexy German teacher—especially me. The attraction was mutual. Even though Frau Bailey wasn’t supposed to fraternize with students, the two of us started going for long rides together on my ’85 Softail Harley. She introduced me to her beautiful three-year-old daughter, Chonie.
We dated and fell in love. But neither of us knew that the military action I had been craving would soon arrive.
Chapter Eleven
Panama
General Noriega’s reckless threats and attacks upon Americans in Panama created an imminent danger to the 35,000 American citizens in Panama. As President, I have no higher obligation than to safeguard the lives of American citizens.
—President George H. W. Bush announcing Operation Just Cause, December 20, 1989
Panama is a narrow neck of tropical land populated by 3.5 million people and intersected by one of the most important strategic waterways in the world—the Panama Canal. Back in the late 1980s it was run by a short, pugnacious military dictator named General Manuel Noriega. Noriega had been the right-hand man of General Omar Torrijos, who assumed power in a military coup in 1968 and instituted a number of progressive political, economic, and social reforms, including initiating massive coverage of social security services and expanding public education that transformed the country.
When General Torrijos died in a helicopter crash in 1981, General Noriega seized control of the country and expanded the role of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) until they dominated Panamanian political life. Noriega, who had operated as a CIA asset, bought the loyalty of PDF officers and their cronies with revenues from drug smuggling and money laundering.
Under Noriega’s rule, Panama became the major trans-shipment site for illegal drugs from South America bound for the United States. While elements in the PDF prospered, Noriega’s regime grew increasingly repressive, and hundreds of political opponents of his regime were tortured and killed; hundreds more were forced into exile.
Political demonstrations against the regime were met with violence. A popular vocal critic named Hugo Spadafora was pulled off a bus by Noriega’s men at the Costa Rican border. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
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Several days later Spadafora’s badly tortured, decapitated body was found wrapped in a U.S. Postal Service mailbag.
In 1987, alarmed by the growing criminality of the Noriega regime and angry about a PDF-directed attack on the U.S. embassy in Panama City, President Ronald Reagan froze U.S. military and economic assistance to Panama.
A year later, General Manuel Antonio Noriega was accused of drug trafficking, by federal juries in Tampa and Miami. In May of 1989, Noriega launched a new round of political repression after he was accused of trying to steal the recent national election. President George H. W. Bush protested loudly, demanding that Noriega end political repression and drug trafficking, and expressing concern about the secure functioning of the Panama Canal, which was vital to U.S. shipping and regional security.
Sometime in early 1989, the CIA, Naval Special Warfare, and other government and military units began to collect intel in Panama for a possible op to arrest Noriega and remove him from power.
I arrived there in November of 1989, shortly after a coup led by Panama’s Major Moises Giroldi had been violently crushed by Noriega’s troops. The moment I landed, I felt the tension in the air. I had heard the stories about Noriega’s out-of-control cocaine parties and about him throwing people out of planes.
I was stationed with a handful of other operators from ST-6 at Rodman Naval Station, which bordered the west side of the Panama Canal. We were there to assist Special Boat Unit 26 (SBU-26) with coastal and riverine operations. I also had orders to serve as SBU-26’s training officer and to establish and run the Navy Special Warfare jungle training and the Central and South American MEDCAP program.
Rodman Naval Station was less than a mile away from the beautiful 5,425-foot cantilever Bridge of the Americas that spans the canal and links Central and South America.
On the night of December 16, 1989, I was driven in an armored vehicle to the airport to meet my girlfriend, Shannon, who was flying in to spend Christmas with me. Accompanying me wa
s a young SEAL lieutenant also assigned to SBU-26, Adam Curtis, whose wife, Bonnie, was coming in on the same flight—a very rare occasion for any of us, especially in a hot zone.
The tension at the airport was palpable. You could see the anxiety about a possible U.S. military action in people’s eyes.
After the plane carrying the women landed, Adam informed me that he was taking his wife out to dinner.
I said, “Be careful, it’s getting bad out there. Shannon and I are going back to the base.”
Adam Curtis and Bonnie dined at a local restaurant and were on the way back to his barracks when they were stopped at a PDF checkpoint. They were questioned and their car was searched.
Adam later stated, “While we were there, another group of Americans came to the roadblock, three Army guys and a Marine—all officers. They felt threatened, they gunned it through the roadblock, and five PDF soldiers turned and fired at the car. The officer in the back, an Army lieutenant named [Robert] Paz, was killed.”
Adam Curtis and Bonnie were pulled out of their car and taken to a detention center, where they were interrogated and tortured. PDF goons hammered Adam’s feet in one room while his wife was fondled and sexually harassed in another.
The next morning at muster, Adam wasn’t there.
The captain turned to me and asked, “Where’s Lieutenant Curtis?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Last time I saw him was last night at the airport.”
According to various sources, President George H. W. Bush made the final decision to invade Panama after hearing about the murder of Lieutenant Robert Paz and the detention and torture of the Curtises.
By Sunday, December 20, assault units from Navy SEAL Teams Two, Four, and Six had infiltrated the country. At around midnight, Norman Carley, task unit commander for SEAL Team Two and former executive officer to ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ at ST-6, and four SEAL divers were aboard a CRRC in a stand of mangroves, waiting to attach a limpet mine to the Presidente Porras patrol boat.
“The commander of the whole operation, General [Carl] Steiner, thought that the operation had been compromised, and he moved up the time to execute the operation by a half hour,” Carley recalled. “But the clocks and safety and arming devices on the explosives were already set.”
As a firefight broke out nearby and grenades were falling in the water, SEAL diver Randy B. attached a limpet mine to the hull of the Presidente Porras. At 0100, a large blast shook the walls of buildings across Panama City. It was the first time SEALs successfully executed a limpet attack on an enemy ship of battle.
I was in base housing at Fort Amador, which was about four miles from Rodman, when Shannon and I heard an AC-130 gunship firing rounds at a target in Panama City. I telephoned work and they said, “Get in here immediately!”
I grabbed my gear and weapon and started running as fast as I could toward Rodman Naval Station. I was so excited!
A U.S. Army jeep speeding down the road saw me running and stopped. An MP asked at gunpoint, “Where the hell are you going?”
“My name is Chief Mann and I am on my way to Rodman. I need a ride.”
They rushed me to Rodman. Minutes later I was on a river patrol boat with six guys from SBU-26. SBU-26 was commanded by a Navy lieutenant commander, Mike Fitzgerald, a tough Vietnam-era SEAL with more riverine experience than anybody else on the teams. The unit was made up of a headquarters element and ten patrol boat light detachments. Each detachment consisted of two boats with crews.
Our first frag order of the night was to confirm the reported sniper fire that was coming from the Bridge of the Americas.
We fired up the PRB (patrol river boat), basically a beefed-up Boston whaler armed with MK-19s and twin .50s, and approached the bridge. As soon as we emerged from the shadows, we started taking fire. The snipers had the advantage of concealment and elevation. With rounds ripping into the water around us, we trained our twin mounted .50-caliber machine guns on the snipers. They ducked behind some metal beams and fled.
At the same time a few miles away, SEALs from ST-4 were coming ashore in small inflatable boats near the Punta Paitilla airfield. Their mission was to seize the small civilian airfield and disable Noriega’s Learjet so he couldn’t escape. But the element of surprise had been eliminated because of the explosion on the Presidente Porras. Also, the runway was well lit by landing lights, and the AC-130 Spectre gunship that was assigned to provide air cover was unable to launch.
Those weren’t the only problems the SEALs encountered. They had been told that the airstrip wasn’t guarded. But the intel was wrong.
SEAL Dennis Hansen, a lieutenant at the time, was the platoon officer in charge. “As we advanced, I heard yelling,” Hansen remembered. “The plan was to tell the Panamanian security guards to go away. This seemed to work well until we got to Noriega’s plane hangar. There, a gunfight broke out after a brief exchange of words. The platoon adjacent to mine was directly in front of the hangar. They were to disable the plane. About half of the platoon was wounded. I sent my assistant officer in charge and his squad to support the platoon that was in contact. They took effective fire also, killing my AOIC and wounding a couple of other men.”
Four SEALs died in the firefight: Lieutenant John Connors, my good friend; Chief Engineman Donald McFaul; Boatswain’s Mate First Class Chris Tilghman; and Torpedoman’s Mate Second Class Isaac Rodriguez III.
A very good buddy of mine, Carlos Moleda, was shot in the chest and leg. Another teammate, Mike P., thought Carlos was dead and used his body as a shield as he returned fire.
I was with Mike when he apologized. He said, “Sorry, Carlos, but I thought you were dead and I couldn't get low enough, and needed anything in front of me to block me from the incoming fire.”
Fortunately, Carlos survived. Even though he never recovered use of his body from his sternum down, Carlos went on to compete in several Ironman and ultra-distance athletic events in his wheelchair, and he has won many!
Years later, while I was training with Carlos at Fort Story, Virginia, I saw him racing down a steep hill on his wheelchair bike at close to thirty miles an hour when his foot slipped off the footrest. I watched as his limp foot scraped down the road. When I ran over to Carlos to check on him, his foot was a bloody mess. He shrugged and said, “I guess that’s going to take a while to heal.” It took over a year.
Carlos is still competing in the world’s most challenging events with the use of just his arms and shoulders.
Our next assignment was to capture Noriega’s yacht, which was docked on the south side of the canal. The SBU-26 executive officer, Johnny Koenig, who could out-PT, outswim, and outrun most SEALs who were twenty years younger, received the order and wanted to accompany us.
The general in charge ordered him to stay.
Meanwhile, our patrol boat had almost finished backing away from the pier and was turning right. Johnny hung up the phone, ran down the pier, jumped in the water in full uniform, web gear, and weapon, and swam to the boat. Johnny wasn’t going to let anybody tell him that he couldn’t go into battle with his men.
The crew helped him board the vessel, and he went on the op.
Noriega’s yacht was at least forty feet long with quarters for at least eight, ocean fishing rods and reels, and a wine cellar. We pulled up within fifty meters and observed the vessel with our .50-cals locked, loaded, and aimed at the craft. We had no idea how many people were aboard or if the yacht had been booby-trapped with explosives.
Our Spanish speaker got on the horn and announced that those onboard had thirty seconds to surrender before we blew their boat out of the water. About ten seconds later a hatch to the lower deck opened, and a guy stuck his arm out and waved a white T-shirt.
I was the first to board with my M16. Three other SBU-26 guys followed me. I saw a group of eight Panamanian SEALs hiding in the cabin and motioned for them to drop their weapons and come out.
&n
bsp; Through our Spanish speaker, I ordered them to strip down. Since there were so many of them and the deck was small, I directed them to stack on top of one another, head to toe.
When one of the Panamanians refused, Johnny Koenig yelled to our Spanish speaker, “Tell him to strip down now, or we’ll shoot him!” The Panamanian complied. We tie-tied them and hauled them back to Rodman, where we made a makeshift prisoner compound out of barbed wire. We’d cleared the yacht, and before the night was over we captured around two hundred PDF enemy soldiers.
At around midnight (eleven hours after the launch of the invasion) we approached within five hundred meters of another enemy vessel with our weapons ready. When we moved within two hundred meters, the interpreter yelled in Spanish, “Come out, or we’re going to blow you out of the water!”
Everyone was off safety, fingers on triggers. The captain said, “Let’s move a little closer.” We pulled to within fifty meters, going bow to broadside. I was thinking, This is insane! We’re getting too close. A firefight between the two crews is going to be brutal.
We were so close we could almost smell them. Suddenly a hand holding a little white handkerchief emerged from one of the cabin windows, and we gave a collective sigh of relief.
We captured another dozen armed PDF soldiers.
Little by little we gained control of the Panama Canal—blocking boats from entering, and stopping boats on the canal and searching for arms and enemy personnel. Meanwhile, U.S. Army and Marine battalions supported by airpower attacked the PDF’s central headquarters (La Comandancia) in downtown Panama City and seized Fort Amador from the PDF in a nighttime air assault.
At some point during the night we exchanged fire with half a dozen PDF soldiers along the shore and tore them up pretty bad. We put the bodies in body bags, but when we returned to Rodman, nobody knew where to put them. So we decided to stash the bodies in the meat locker at the Rodman Enlisted Club with the steaks, hamburgers, fruits, and vegetables.
