I let the truck pass down to the tree I knew marked the end of my squad. The jeep came on, and when it was just even with me, I rocked the safety back on my M-16 to auto and squeezed a long burst into the passenger window. Instantly, my squad opened fire, and the truck and jeep were exposed in strobing muzzle blasts, overlit and blinking like the red carpet at a Hollywood premiere. The noise was astounding, a tearing convulsion of exploding rifles and machine guns. Immediately, the bullets tore sparks from the metal bodies of the vehicles, and I could see from the hits that fire was concentrated on the cab of the jeep and the high canvas-covered bed of the truck, the places where the people were. Torn by fire, the truck slowed slightly. The jeep remained on the road and collided into the high rear bumper of the slowing truck. Then bullets from the second squad jagged through the two vehicles, the noise of their fire redoubling the astounding din of the ambush.
I reached forward on my weapon, closing my hand over the tube of the M-203 grenade launcher under the barrel of my rifle. I aimed down over the carrying handle on the M-16, nearly point-blank at the hood of the jeep. I pulled the trigger, and a 40-millimeter grenade popped from the tube. The grenade tore the canvas roof from the vehicle, blasting it to rags, and the jeep bucked and jumped backward, spinning ass first and coming to rest on its side, one headlight blown out and the other pointing crazily into the sky. The fusillade continued, its volume a perfect roar, each man of the two squads conscious to slow or speed up shooting as others reloaded or resumed firing. From the bottom of the L, a second set of explosions ripped the killing ground. Two armor-piercing grenades slammed into the front of the truck. The first round smashed the radiator and sent the hood sailing up into the trees above our heads. The second grenade punched through the shattered windshield and detonated in the truck’s cab, blowing open both doors and starting an orange fire inside. Now ablaze, the truck lurched to a stop, half on and half off the two-track.
Perhaps forty seconds had elapsed since we began firing, and the noise and the torrent of bullets had remained almost constant, a testament to fire discipline.
I rolled onto my side and lifted the claymore clackers. I dropped the wire safety catches and squeezed them simultaneously. The night exploded into deafening red flashes as the antipersonnel mines blew up by the roadside. Hundreds of steel balls were sprayed from each claymore, riddling the vehicles, tearing through the ditches, and ripping the tires from the jeep. The mines reached every place bullets could not. There was no place in the kill box not torn by steel or touched by fire.
The detonation of the mines was the signal for the second squad to shift fire, and they now aimed off the road, behind the vehicles and toward the inside of the turn. I stood and pushed my foot down on the men to my right and left. To yell in the overwhelming din would be futile. In the light of the burning truck, I signaled my squad to advance on line. Shooting from the hip, the first squad moved toward the road. Anyone fleeing would cross the two-track and stumble into the barrage laid down by the second squad. I watched as tracers ripped through the woods across from us—waist-high, banging through trees, denying cover, refuge, or escape. We reached the burning vehicles and saw no movement from the truck or the jeep.
Standing in the road, I thumbed a flare into my grenade launcher, aimed the weapon straight up, and pulled the trigger. The illumination round sailed into the sky, dragging behind it a shower of sparks. A flare ignited under a silk parachute and drifted down, casting a stark light over the wreckage. I shouted, “Cease fire,” and the command was repeated up and down the line. The shooting stopped as though someone had thrown a switch. My ears rang; the night was perfectly, eerily still. The crickets, night birds, and seemingly even the rain had been silenced by the horrific noise of the ambush. For a long moment there was only the hissing of the flare drifting down from the sky.
The second squad materialized from their hiding places, and in the lurching light of the flare, I could see the gas tubes of their rifles glowing red hot through the vent holes. In the crazily pointed headlights, the men emerged, faces painted green and black and their eyes wide, almost yellow, jacked up, adrenaline-hyped, and perfectly helter-skelter. Someone grunted, “Yeah, man, I got some,” like a redneck at a Molly Hatchet concert.
I looked around as I shoved a fresh mag into my rifle. The attack had been flawless, and the ruin of the vehicles was complete. The jeep was now upside down, the truck was burning off the side of the road, and almost every square foot of both was shot through by bullets or perforated by the deadly shrapnel of claymores.
I said, “Set security. Search team in.” Two pairs of men came forward to count and search the dead, while the rest of the squads arrayed themselves up and down the road, reloading weapons, taking cover, ready to meet any of the gallant enemy attracted by the sounds of our ambush.
Then headlights snapped on up and down the road. I could see men standing in their glow, one lighting a cigarette. Not enemy but friendlies. They were members of the training department of SEAL Team Four. Our ambush had been a final evolution in advanced operator training, or AOT—the highly realistic scenarios that SEAL platoons go through before deployment. The members of the cadre (and that’s what they were called, “cadres”) watched the ambushed vehicles as we searched them. They had watched everything, our setup, our attack, and now they were clocking what was called “time on target.” I bent down on hands and knees and looked into the upside-down jeep. There was a mannequin behind the steering wheel, the dummy head of a woman shot through the face by a 5.56-millimeter bullet. On the ground under the passenger seat was a cheap plastic briefcase stuffed with papers and maps. I dragged this free as my radio operator pulled the mannequin out of the jeep and laid it on the road.
The truck and the jeep had both been “driven” by dummies: Rather, the jeep had been towed behind the truck by a twenty-foot shot of chain. The road on this specially designed ambush range was tracked a foot deep; the wheels of both the truck and jeep rolled in wood-sided tracks cut into the road. The truck had been placed in first gear and allowed to creep forward on idle. Both vehicles contained only mannequins and paper silhouettes. Until the grenades smashed into them, the vehicles could only roll down the middle of the road, stuck like slot cars.
I handed the briefcase off to a shooter as one of the cadre shined a light into the back of the truck, then under and into the upside-down seats of the jeep. He was making sure each mannequin or silhouette had at least one bullet hole in it. Clean targets and untouched dummies were expected to be shot again, point-blank. These were called “security rounds.”
Within two minutes both vehicles had been searched, all items of intelligence value had been gathered up, unwounded targets had been shot, and several of the mannequins were planted with pressure-sensitive booby traps, rude surprises for anyone sent to recover the bodies. This trick, placing booby traps under the dead, had been learned from the Viet Cong.
The squads collapsed onto the ambush site, formed a column, and we departed as the rain fell and the burning truck gushed smoke into the black night. Forty minutes later, we were extracted by helicopter and landed in the SEAL compound at a U.S. Army reservation somewhere deep in the hills of central Virginia. There we were debriefed, cleaned our weapons, and drank beer as the sun came up on the last day of sixteen solid weeks of training. I remember on this cold spring morning, I was beginning to feel like a real SEAL.
I WOULD NOT ARRIVE at SEAL Team Four until early December 1981. After graduation from BUD/S, I was one of several officers from 114 held at the Naval Amphibious Base, Coronado—the navy term is “stashed”—and we were once again to be guinea pigs. This time we were to be put through a new academic program intended to make us better special warfare officers. I was in a hurry to get to my new command, but in plain truth, as BUD/S graduates, we were of little use to anyone. We weren’t even SEALs yet; we were 1180s, probationary naval special warfare officers. Tadpoles. Six months of BUD/S had succeeded only in making us physically invincib
le morons, and we had only touched on the skills and knowledge we would require to operate as SEALs. We were soon to get a glimpse of exactly how much we didn’t know.
Monday morning following graduation, I was assigned TAD, temporary additional duty, to the naval amphibious school across the road from BUD/S. For the next two months, eight hours a day, I would study special operations planning and political warfare. The political warfare curriculum had previously been entitled “counterinsurgency studies,” and the name was changed, apparently, when a San Diego reporter got ahold of the amphibious school’s catalog and wrote an article comparing the program to the army’s infamous School of the Americas. Political warfare was going to be a BUD/S of the brain, our lecturers promised us. The coursework came on fast and furious, and the assigned reading was voluminous. All of it was fascinating.
On the first morning of class, an instructor wrote two Japanese Kenji characters on the board, “Bunbu Itchi.” It was a maxim of the Samurai, translating roughly to “pen and sword in accord.” We were here to learn that fighting harder meant fighting smarter. Before we became pilgrims, we would be students.
We were assigned to read sociological works on peasant societies: Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, and the impenetrable Das Kapital—the book and the Idea possibly the biggest shams ever perpetrated against mankind. If we were not made into good communists, we were at least made conversant in dialectical materialism. Our instructors were careful to make us understand the motivation of communist insurgencies and to see the armed struggle as progressively inspired. Whether or not we agreed with the process or the result, our enemies were trying to build a better life. Marxism we dismissed as an unworkable and oppressive mechanism of governance, but it was seen as a vital tool of sociological and historical analysis. The people we were fighting really believed this shit. In order to defeat them, we had to understand what made them fight.
We read books on guerrilla warfare by its master practitioners, Mao Tse-tung, Lin Biao, and Che Guevara. We wrote commentaries on articles by Ho Chi Minh and military treatises by General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the North Vietnamese army. We studied the phased attacks of the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Our instructors, several of whom had fought in Tet, observed that the Pyrrhic attacks of the Viet Cong were encouraged by the North Vietnamese. Tet was a military defeat for the North, but it was the Viet Cong who died, and that was the intended result: The cynical goal of the North was the reduction of the Viet Cong. Tet was intended to liquidate the VC, the North’s subordinate and less ideologically reliable partners. Our instructors were frank about American failures in Vietnam. The American Phoenix Program, which effectively decapitated Viet Cong leadership, actually played in to North Vietnamese hands. The inability of American leadership to discern what was happening on the ground was also discussed bluntly. America didn’t just lose the war in Southeast Asia; we actually helped the North Vietnamese win it. Any doubt that the Viet Cong were allies of the NVA was put to the lie after the fall of Saigon, when tens of thousands of Viet Cong fighters, cadres, and intellectuals were rounded up by the North and sent to reeducation camps.
Our studies eventually brought us closer to home. Latin America can probably be considered the world’s testing lab for political warfare, and we devoted weeks to the causes and effects of La Revolución. We were introduced to Catholic revolution theology and the economic ramifications of oligarchy in Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, Colombia, and Nicaragua. We studied the operations of Pancho Villa in Mexico and Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua. We examined Peru’s ongoing tragedy, a Maoist insurgency in a virulent modern guise, the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. The revolution in Cuba made concrete the power of the Idea. Only eleven men survived Fidel Castro’s initial landing on the west coast of the island. In four years Castro succeeded in taking down the best-armed military dictatorship in Latin America: no mean feat. In his triumph we were made to see that revolution was what these guys did. And they did it well.
Central America was then heating up, and we were brought up to speed on the burgeoning rebellion in El Salvador. Later, one of our instructors, SEAL commander Al Shoffelberger, would be assassinated on the streets of San Salvador. We read The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella; we took him at his word that he was answering Che Guevara’s call to lay many Vietnams at the feet of Uncle Sam. What is now called narcoterrorism was then only an emerging trend. We studied the organization and methodology of the Medellín and Cali drug cartels. Examined in detail were several assassinations and bombings credited to the druggies and their emerging alliance with FARC, Fuezera Armas Revolucionario de Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Terrorism, we were taught, was a tactic, a facet of a greater purpose, not a strategy or an end in itself. Terrorism is warfare waged by the powerless against the innocent. It is in the nature of asymmetrical conflict that terrorist acts are provocations, whether the deed is a hand grenade in a market square or the destruction of the World Trade Center. The acts are outrageous, bloody, and violent because they are meant to shock. Terrorist acts are to be seen as armed propaganda, pinpricks intended to resonate far beyond their military significance. Every act of terror is intended to have political consequences. In every case, calculated atrocities extract a disproportionate response from the oppressor. The enemy has different names: Yankee Imperialist, Neocolonialist, Capitalist Exploiter, Infidel, or Great Satan. We were reminded that the Perennial Foe was us. Terrorism, the instructors drilled into us, must always be examined in the context of politics; Trotsky said it best: “Terrorism is political theater.”
Again we studied the masters. We absorbed selected passages by Marx, Lenin, and Mao on the dynamics and political utility of terrorism. Middle Eastern terrorist organizations were investigated, including Black September and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in all its aliases and guises. We examined several European terrorist organizations, all of them then thriving: Bader Meinhof, the Red Army Faction, the Basque ETA, and the Italian Red Brigades. Each, we were told, was either under the operational control of the Soviet KGB or had links for logistical support. Why would the KGB back such nihilistic and obviously criminal gangs? Orthodox Marxism taught that violence was the only legitimate mechanism of political change. And this dictum had permeated the world’s struggles of liberation. In geographical areas of strategic interest, wars of liberation were proxy struggles between East and West, one puppet fighting another, and it was all about power. This was the Great Game. If we understood that, we would understand the process.
Having been made familiar with the causes and types of revolution, we were introduced to the triad of their remedy: tactical action, psychological warfare, and civil affairs. These ongoing and overlapping spheres translated roughly to: kick their asses; convince the world you’re doing wonderful things; and quietly right the political and economic wrongs that sent the guerrillas into the hills in the first place. These processes would later coalesce into a term and methodology called “nation building.”
Our final three weeks were spent in the special warfare operation planning course, a ball-buster of logistics, planning, and paperwork. Almost any operation you could think of had already been conducted, planned, or studied in detail, and we were introduced to the library of naval warfare publications for special operations. The NWPs were cookbooks for a variety of missions we had carried out in our “war” on San Clemente Island: sneaking and peeking, hijacking, kidnapping, bombing, and assassination. Of course, the military likes to euphemize, and these dirty tricks were individually called such prosaic terms as “reconnaissance and surveillance,” “vessel board,” “seizure and search,” “personnel interdiction,” “actions against command infrastructure,” and “maritime sabotage.” The missions were studied under the rubric “operations other than war.”
We prepared detailed time-action-location studies, called “phase diagrams,” of famous special operations. Chief among
these was the Norwegian partisan raid on the Norsk Hydro heavy-water plant at Telemark during World War II. This op, a classic in the annals of unconventional warfare, is arguably the one operation that denied Nazi Germany the atomic bomb. We studied Allied defeats as well as successes, looking at Operation Eiche (Oak), the SS commando raid that liberated Mussolini; and the war history of the Italian 10th Light Flotilla in the Mediterranean—minisub and human-torpedo attacks that sank 86,000 tons of Allied warships and 130,000 tons of merchant shipping. We applied phased diagrams to the present and the past. Our class received a classified debrief on the American special operations debacle at Desert One. Code-named Operation Eagle Claw, the events at Desert One became a synonym for catastrophe. A top-secret attempt by the United States to free fifty-three American hostages held in Tehran, the rescue party was cobbled together from army, air force, and navy units. On the night of April 25, 1980, eight rescuers were killed and four seriously injured in a fiery collision at a desert refueling position. The wreckage of a C-130 and several helicopters were left in the Iranian desert as the operation was aborted and the hostage rescue teams hastily withdrawn. The embassy hostages were to remain in Iranian custody until January 21, 1981. The operation was a political and military disaster of the first order. The lessons of Desert One were these: First, everything that can go wrong will go wrong—plan for mistakes; second, it is not sufficient that the men survive the plan—the plan must also survive the blunders of men.
We were taught how to assemble a mission backward, starting at the successful completion of an operation and working in retrograde to identify critical nodes. We learned how to plan contingencies, to coordinate joint and combined operations, and to conduct a full mission profile: tasking, planning, rehearsal, insertion, infiltration, reconnaissance, actions at the objective, exfiltration, extraction, and debriefing.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 6
