The plan depended mostly on timing. Tactically, the operation was simplicity itself. After nightfall, one boat crew would circle the hilltop and find a well-covered firing position to the south of the camp. The balance of the two squads would approach from the east. On signal, the four-man group would open fire. The second group would wait until the camp reacted and started shooting back at the four men to the south. Then the larger group would open fire and assault through the camp. Anyone retreating before the second attack would be driven back into a cross fire laid down by the first boat crew. Once in the compound, we would do a smash-and-grab job, destroying everything we could not carry away. The helicopters would then appear overhead, drop the SPIE rigs to us, we’d hook up, and be lifted out.
We were in position soon after full dark. The camp was outlined in the glow of two fires. There were two or three lean-tos, and a large tarp hung over a folding camp table. Sleeping arrangements seemed to be a few jungle hammocks positioned around the larger of the two fires. The camp looked pretty squared away. Around the fire farthest from where I lay pressed down behind a log was a group gathered in conference. Above the other fire, the unfortunate pig rotated on a spit. The smell of pork wafted down to us. I checked my watch—in fifteen minutes the extraction window would open, and the Red Wolves would be standing by. My stomach growled loudly. In almost three days I had eaten only a can of cling peaches and a handful of trail mix.
I was strangely calm and suddenly very aware that this was a game. Our weapons were loaded with blanks; in our assault no one would be killed or even hurt. The hard part of this operation was over. Our test was to find the camp and spring on it. Now would come the pretend ambush, the mock attack. All I needed to do to win was initiate the attack and make as big a demonstration as I could. We were here to send a message, make an impression.
Luck stayed with us. As we watched, the group around the fire gathered their weapons and mounted out in patrol order. Two pairs of men with AK-47s put the partisans into a column formation. I knew the men with the Russian rifles were SF students. Their motley charges bunched up and were led away into the darkness. They headed downhill, between the diversionary shooting pair and our main group. I considered ambushing this group as they passed but decided against it.
The squad passed close, rustling loudly in the leaf clutter. The first of the group walked within ten yards of me. I had no apprehension that they would find us. The patrol had been walked into the forest directly from the campfire. I knew they would have no night vision, I knew their faces would still be flushed, their ears still snapping with the crackle of firewood and their noses full of pig smoke. They had been led directly from camp into the clammy fist of the night, and that was exactly the kind of mistake a new patrol leader would make. As they shuffled past our ambush position, I knew they were deaf and blind.
I heard the SF patrol crunch away; now and then a canteen or magazine would rattle or someone would cough. They were louder than a troop of apes. Ten men had left the camp, which meant that two SF and four partisans remained in the compound. We were sixteen shooters total, enough of an advantage, but surprise also favored us. I waited an additional twenty minutes, until the SF patrol would be too far away to interfere with our attack. Although I knew that the Green Berets would be able to quickly return to the hilltop, running through the dark, thick forest, I expected the partisans could not. At any rate, it was probably not likely that the departed SF troopers would split off from their charges. If they left the partisans to respond to our attack, they’d spend the next week and a half looking for them.
I keyed the radio handset, breaking squelch twice. My signal was answered by three clicks: The boat crew to the south would fire at their discretion. Ten seconds later, they opened up. The first response of the camp was to stand there, puzzled. Then one of the AK-47s returned fire; then the other. Even though the AKs fired blanks, huge white tongues of fire belched from their muzzles. Two of the partisans hit the deck. Only one started to shoot back—and his M-16 jammed after a few rounds. All of them, SF and partisans alike, were now facing south. The SF guys put down a steady stream of fire, and in twenty seconds both AKs ran out of ammunition.
As they struggled to change magazines, the remaining boat crews opened fire. Even shooting blanks, the squads put down a withering barrage. We lobbed artillery simulators into the camp. They went off with crashing white explosions. The booms echoed from the hills, and I could only imagine what the four SF troopers were thinking off in the woods. They’d know immediately that their base camp was under attack, and they’d almost certainly know that they had walked right past the attackers. We threw a dozen more artillery sims, then I fired a flare. The first boat crew shifted fire behind the camp, and the squad stood and charged, shooting as we came on. The SF guys did the right thing—they ran.
Two partisans followed the SF guys, skipping away into the night, ripping through branches, bouncing off trees, and stumbling down the hill. As we entered the camp, the remaining two partisans just stood there stupidly and put their hands in the air.
The point man ripped off a long burst at their feet. “Lay down, assholes,” he said, “you’re dead.” The two partisans were shoved to the ground.
I looked around. We were in the camp and the proud owners of a barbecued pig. I yelled, “Time on target,” and the lads set about kicking down lean-tos, flipping over tables, rifling through backpacks, and stuffing every piece of paper they could find down the front of their uniform blouses. I called in the Red Wolves, and within a few minutes a helicopter was overhead. The SPIE rigs were tossed out, and the first squad hooked up and were lifted straight up into the night.
Then it was our turn. The second helicopter hovered in over the camp. This bird came in lower, and its rotor blast scattered everything we had already flipped over. Pine needles swirled, tarps and poncho liners and sleeping hammocks lifted up and blew away. As the lads snapped into the SPIE rig, Baby Zee went down the rope, checking that carabiners were closed and locked. I snapped into the last loop, and Baby Zee clipped in next to me.
I flashed a thumbs-up to the helo, and the crew chief answered by pointing straight up. The head of the rope went up first, each of us moving slowly forward as the man ahead was lifted from the ground. I was next to the campfire, close to the pig. Its eyes were closed, and the spit went through its mouth and out its backside. In front of me, Baby Zee was lifted from the ground, and I felt my climbing harness take the strain as the rope tightened. From out of the darkness, Baby Zee yelled down, “Hey, I would’ve given you extra points if you’d taken the pig.”
As my feet sang over the fire, I reached down and gave the pig a kick. The spit broke, and the big hog dropped into the coals. Sparks from the fire swarmed around us as we were lifted up and through the trees, and then the helicopter gathered speed and we were dragged away into the night.
Connected to the helicopter by the SPIE rig, we were soaring through darkness, and I hooted like a banshee. Above me, the squad was strung out, arms spread, the wind howling around us. The forest ripped past below, an infinite carpet of black. I looked down between my legs as the campfires faded in the distance. The helicopters were headed for the second star from the right, and we were flying, spinning free and wild as Pan and his Lost Boys.
* * *
OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR
I DON’T KNOW how the Casino got its name. Glitzy it was not. The parking lot was dirt—sand, actually—the building was one story, with a low, slightly pitched roof; white vinyl siding was peeled back in several places, and in a few other spots the black tar paper under the siding was pulled back as well, exposing termite-gnawed plywood. Tucked under a span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in the Chick’s Beach section of Norfolk, the Casino looked more like a shipwreck than a bar. It had a cultivated air of disrepute, like a permanent crime scene. Even the address was a goof: 169 Pleasure House Road. A neon sign was wired to the frame of the only window, advertising PBR ON TAP, and the letter “A” blinked o
n and off in a random, short-circuited kind of way. It was not the sort of joint that you just wandered into. It looked too dangerous to be entered casually. There was always some serious iron parked outside, Harleys, sidecar-packing BMWs and Triumphs, four-by-four pickup trucks with rifle racks and mud flaps. The transportation in the lot perfectly announced the Casino’s demographic: Navy SEALs, bikers, and beer alcoholics of the lowest order.
The interior decoration could be described as “early demolition.” The ceiling bowed low over an unevenly poured concrete floor. The bar was made of Formica and Sheetrock, and the several pool tables were angled haphazardly about the middle of the room, pulled away from serious leaks in the roof. Behind the bar were plaques from each of the East Coast SEAL Teams, Two and Four, as well as SDV (SEAL delivery vehicle) Team Two and Underwater Demolition Teams Twenty-one and Twenty-two.
The first time I stepped inside, two rednecks were in a hair-pulling, eye-gouging fight on and under one of the pool tables. Normally, a fight can be counted on to jack up a bar, and it isn’t long until the other patrons discover or invent some reason to join in. Again, the Casino confounded. As the rednecks beat each other senseless, a bar full of SEALs ignored them completely. No one even swiveled a stool when one dude smashed the other through the door of the ladies’ room. When the victor dragged the loser to the front door, the bartender calmly reached under the Formica, pulled out a big .357 Magnum, and pointed it at the panting, disconsolate redneck.
“Don’t get no fuckin’ ideas of comin’ back in here with a gun, neither,” he said evenly.
“You ain’t gonna ban me, are ya?” the loser asked.
“You lost yer privileges for a week,” the bartender answered. “Now git!”
And like that, it was over. Somebody dropped a quarter in the jukebox and played “Pressure Drop” by Toots & the Maytals. Irie, mon, cool running. It was just another night down at the Casino. I loved the place.
It was in this decorous atmosphere that I was wetted down after receiving my Navy SEAL designator, 1130, in the late spring of 1982. Rick James and I picked up our designations as naval special warfare officers on the same day, three months early, and we got our pins for different reasons. Rick got his because he was a squared-away operator and a great American. I may be the only SEAL in the history of naval special warfare to get his pin for turning down a mission.
Following my triumph over the Green Berets, I was returned to the Ops Department. My work was pretty much the same, messages and reports, except now I was deemed to be of some utility to the defense of the United States of America. In a word, I was deployable. Usable. Having survived the worst that John Jaeger could throw at me, I confidently expected to soon receive my badge and get assigned to an operational platoon. SEAL platoons are commanded by one officer, and his assistant, the second officer, labors under the much less august moniker of 2IC, or second in charge. It was to this modest station that I hoped to be appointed, and I was keen to get on with it. Once I was slotted for a platoon, I was made available for detachments and odd jobs, mostly tasks beneath the dignity of a platoon in the throes of predeployment training. Sometimes the jobs were shitty, like administrative beach surveys, pier and piling demolition, or worse, harbor searches; and sometimes they were primo.
My first independent assignment was a piece of cake with shit frosting. It would be the first and one of the few times I’d decline to do my duty, or at least my duty as someone else saw it. In late April I was tasked to lead a six-man detachment on temporary assignment to NASA. It was to be a “space junk” operation, a mission SEALs inherited from their Underwater Demolition Team forebearers. During the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs, UDT frogmen recovered space capsules at sea after splashdown. When the UDTs were phased out, the SEAL Teams inherited the job. Although the space shuttle has replaced manned capsules, the Teams are still periodically called on to recover odd items dropped into the ocean, deliberately or accidentally, by NASA.
No one in the operations office would tell us specifically what the op would entail, and our orders said only to “report to the National Aeronautic and Space Administration at the Kennedy Space Center for temporary additional duty to include parachuting and the demolition of explosives.” One of the petty officers in the detachment, Gibby, had pulled the operation before; or rather, he had trained for it.
“The mission was scrubbed when they aborted the launch,” he said.
“The launch of what?” I asked.
“A Trident missile.”
We drew equipment and flew a C-141 down to the air force station at Cape Canaveral. During the flight down, Gibby told me that his previous detachment had trained to conduct the at-sea recovery of a Trident ballistic missile booster section. The Trident was then America’s latest submarine-launched ICBM, a big honker of a missile that packed up to eight thermonuclear warheads, individually targeted H-bombs called MIRVs, or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles. The Trident had a range in excess of four thousand nautical miles, and each missile was capable of dropping its MIRVs within a hundred meters of their assigned targets. I understand that’s pretty much a direct hit when you’re using H-bombs, and an amazing technical achievement considering the missile was fired underwater, exited the atmosphere, attained orbital velocities, reentered the atmosphere, and dropped straight down the chimney of its target. The ultimate bummer. A new Trident variant was undergoing testing, and we were to be a small part of the effort.
We arrived, checked in to a very downmarket hotel in Cocoa Beach, and settled in for some Florida sunshine. The following day, Gibby and I attended a kickoff meeting at NASA. The conference table was filled with alpha geeks straight out of Revenge of the Nerds. Much of the meeting was as incomprehensible to us as rocket science, but the gist was that a Trident C-4 was to be launched from an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine off Cape Canaveral. That missile, without its apocalyptic warhead, was to be targeted on an empty stretch of ocean in the North Atlantic. As the missile attained escape velocity, it would jettison a booster section, and our job would be to recover the first stage of the rocket motor after it was shed from the missile. The splashdown of the spent motor was computed to occur somewhere north of the Abacos Islands in the northern Bahamas. During the briefing, we were referred to as “the guys with the big necks.”
We spent the next week training in a small cove near the space center. A crane would drop a large cylindrical mock-up of the first stage into the water, and we’d jump in and practice attaching a flotation collar to the motor. Once the motor section was buoyant, it was to be recovered by a range support ship from the Military Sealift Command. We were to be deployed and recovered from a long-range MH-53 Pave Low special operations helicopter. The op could not have been more straightforward, and the only complication we faced in training came in the form of a ten-foot alligator that always showed up in the cove when the flotation collar was being inflated. Much to our consternation, the crane operator, a regular Florida Cracker, tossed marshmallows to the big reptile as we worked. I guessed this was by way of a diversion, and we could only hope the alligator wouldn’t consider the treats as an appetizer. Thanks in part to the gator, we got the collar put on in record time.
We trained and then we waited. The launch was postponed several times, and we hung out on Cocoa Beach, went to bars, and picked up women, telling them we were astronauts in training. Finally, we loaded out and were flown from Patrick Air Force Base to Air Force Station Grand Bahama Island. We cooled our heels and rigged the helicopter to water-drop an F-470 Zodiac inflatable raiding boat, a package we called a “soft duck.”
We launched at dawn the following morning to be in position at the south end of the impact zone in time for what was scheduled to be an 0700 launch. Our part of the operation was by far the simplest. Besides the submarine, which had the relatively uncomplicated task of firing the missile, there were NASA helicopters detailed to film the launch, land tracking stations to plot the missile’s trajec
tory, and a pair of navy P-3 patrol planes that would sow the splashdown area with sonobuoys so the impact could be pinpointed for us to recover the motor.
The morning got off to a bad start when a Russian “fishing vessel” appeared four miles off Cape Canaveral and took up station within the submarine’s launch area. This innocent trawler bristled with antennae and communications equipment; it was in fact a Vishnya-class AGI, a Russian intelligence ship equipped to monitor the launch. The launch was delayed half an hour, then another half an hour when one of the P-3s patrolling the first-stage impact area reported a second Russian trawler loitering in the vicinity of the splashdown point. Both of the trawlers were in international waters, and there was nothing to be done except marvel at the alacrity of the intrepid Russian fishermen. It was obvious that they had our number, and I wondered at the time why no one seemed to make a big deal of it. We flew around in circles north of the Bahamas as the submarine was shifted slightly closer to the cape, and the decision was made, somewhere, to just fire the missile and let the Russians watch.
We had been airborne for nearly two hours when the launch at last occurred. We saw nothing and heard little until it was reported that the booster section had impacted well north of the recovery zone—nearly a hundred miles from the place we were orbiting. The Pave Low was immediately directed north, and in the helicopter we readied for the water drop. We sprinted north at 150 knots, and the P-3s reported that the trawlers were converging on the drop point as well. The AGI off Cape Canaveral would not be a factor, but the second trawler was under twenty-five miles from the place the booster had splashed down. I did some quick math. The trawlers could not be expected to make any better than 15 knots, which would put the Canaveral boat six hours away from the motor section, but the closer trawler was an hour and forty minutes from the impact spot. At 150 knots, we could expect to be in the area of the splashdown in forty minutes, plus the time it would take to find the motor, not insignificant given that the sections had floated barely three feet above the surface during our practice recoveries. This was quickly turning into a race. The Military Sealift Command ship that would take aboard the motor section was a full fifty miles south of the point of impact. Clearly, we could expect no help from her.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 10
