What Bubba had done was perplexing to us all, and we took it badly. Like a suicide, it was a desperate, pointless thing to do. A few days after Bubba took off, a pair of FBI agents were sitting in my office. They both wore dark, narrow-lapeled suits and skinny neckties, oblivious to the fact that their clothing was retro hip. After debriefing me thoroughly on what Bubba knew, and formally revoking his security clearance, they asked where I thought he would try to go.
“Mexico?” one of them said.
“Think he’ll join a militia?” the other enthused.
I said, “Look for him at home.”
They did, and six months later, Bubba was arrested in his small West Tennessee hometown. His training could have allowed him to disappear, but he said he wanted to go home, and that was what he did. He was court-martialed, given a dishonorable discharge, and sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Brave, simple Bubba was our first casualty.
SEAL FOUR WAS SUDDENLY in the business of fighting drug trafficking—“combating narcoterrorism” was the term then in vogue—and it was in the interest of our betters to assemble a platoon and insert them at once into Latin America. Fifth Platoon was back in business, less Bubba, Tim, Stan, and Doc. Not that the head shed had any love for us. The requirement had come down from on high. No other platoons were available or considered deployable on short notice. At the time we were reconstituted, fully a quarter of the platoon was working in the cadre, and all were grizzled combat veterans. It had not been thought necessary to put us through a complete predeployment cycle.
To assume command of the Fifth, I had to extend at SEAL Four, signing on for an additional year. I had yet to hear from SEAL Team Six. I wanted the command, and I signed without heartburn. The Team was in a hurry to get out the door, and our workups were brief. We underwent an operational readiness examination in which we simulated a demolition raid on a nuclear-power facility, a caper we pulled off with considerable panache, and two weeks later, we parachuted off Cape Henry to rendezvous with the submarine U.S.S. Cavala for a ride to our new home, Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.
My 2IC was Ensign Greg Benham, a wisecracking New York–born Mustang who would go on to become the only SEAL-qualified trial attorney in the navy’s JAG Corps. Greg was a solid operator, and the lads took to him at once. Our new leading petty officer, Juan Morales, was a recent transfer from SEAL One. Juan was an enigma, with a master’s degree in art history and a New Jersey Golden Gloves rating. He asserted his authority quietly and soon joined our coterie of native Spanish speakers, quickly getting close to Rudi and Willito. The trio came to call themselves “los Bravos,” a tag the rest of the platoon soon mangled into “los Patos,” a considerably less flattering epithet, one indicative of sexual preference. We were to deploy without a chief petty officer, a highly unusual occurrence, but there was no one on earth who could fill Doc’s shoes, and the vacancy was not debilitating.
FORTY MILES SOUTH of Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, U.S.S. Cavala came to periscope depth, and Fifth Platoon prepared to leave the submarine. We assembled our equipment in the torpedo room and tromped up the skeletal steel ladder into the forward escape trunk. Crowded with pipes and valves, the space was spherical, perhaps eight or nine feet in diameter. At the bottom of the escape trunk was a hatch, its convex shape truncating the sphere. The lower hatch was shut and dogged. There was another hatch at the top of the chamber and it, too, slightly unbalanced what would have been a perfect sphere. The top hatch was shut and secured, and a pair of red chemlights dangled from a boot lace tied to one of the hatch dogs. Hunched into the escape trunk, I stood pressed up against five men, an outboard engine, and a rolled-up F-470 rubber boat. There was not an inch to move in.
When the overhead light flicked from white to red, the escape trunk became a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. Air screamed from valves in the overhead, and seawater quickly roiled to the level of our chests. My face was soon underwater, and a shoulder above me would keep me from getting my head in the bubble, the open space of air in the topmost section of the trunk. I found my regulator, pushed it into my mouth, and sucked at the sweet, desert-dry air from my scuba rig. I cleared my mask and peered around the trunk, now a world of swirling bubbles, legs, torsos, shoulders, and arms. The faces of three other men were visible in the red-lit water. As the trunk filled, the air pressure in the bubble equalized to sea pressure. Only two men, the trunk operator and his assistant, would have their heads dry in the bubble. The rest of us milled around in the flooded, densely packed space, sucking on our regulators, listening to the shriek of valves and the high-pitched voices of the trunk supervisors in the torpedo room below playing on underwater speakers in the chamber.
“Equalize to sea pressure,” the speakers crackled.
“Equalized to sea pressure, aye.”
The valves screamed and then fell silent. I pulled my legs and flippers under me and shoved as best I could through the men and equipment. A hatch low on the wall of the escape trunk popped open. It was through this middle hatch that we would exit the sub. The submarine was at a depth of forty feet, and the lower portal was equalized to sea pressure, the compressed air in the bubble above steady with that of the sea outside. In simple terms, the process was like turning a cup upside down and submerging it in a sink full of water: A pocket of air remains trapped in the top of the cup as it is pushed under.
Pulling open the hatch, I entered a dark tube a bit over a meter in diameter. This tube led to a final hatch where fresh torpedoes and missiles were loaded into the submarine when the ship was in port; technically, the space was the weapons handling tube. Leaving the spherical confines of the trunk, I pulled myself onto my back and maneuvered up and into the cylindrical space. As I exhaled, bubbles from my regulator wafted above me, boiling against the top of the tube. Rolling onto my side, I inched through the perfect blackness, careful not to bang my scuba bottle or dislodge the regulator from my mouth. I found the last hatch by feel, then I broke a chemlight. In its feeble green glow, I opened the hatch and felt the swirling of the open sea.
Tonight I would be the first man to leave the submarine. I was assigned as a rigger, and it was my job to attach a series of lines to the hull and conning tower to aid in the deployment of the swimmers and the launching of our boat. The rigging of a submarine is one of the few times SEALs deploy a man alone. Outside a submarine, at night, you are very alone.
I pushed myself through the second hatch, out of the pressure hull, and onto the deck of the sub. Forty feet above, the surface of the Caribbean shimmered in moonlight. As my eyes became accustomed to the scant light, I could see that the midocean water was incredibly clear, blue above and bluer still below, and the deck of the submarine spread away vast and black underneath me.
As I emerged I could feel the submarine surge forward. Like a shark, it needed to constantly move, and I could feel its power through the water. Almost three hundred feet aft, Cavalla’s propeller turned slowly, throbbing like a living thing. I pulled lines and snap links from a locker under the fairwater, the space between the pressure hull and the deck. The bubbles swept away from my regulator in a silver tumult.
The submarine came leisurely forward, and all I had to do was hover in the water as the convex deck rolled under me. The conning tower soon loomed above, sail planes gigantic and cruciform against the moonlit surface far above. As I rigged the line to the conning tower, I felt the water pressure change around me. Then I felt something almost like electricity. It was a force, a life energy; there is no other way to describe it. A long shadow passed over me, then another, and I looked up from my work and into the blue around me. Astounded, I watched a school of yellowfin tuna swim up and past the sail of the sub and close in all around me. The light of a full moon streamed through the water, and the sides of the huge fish showed silver. Small pulses of their three-foot tails were enough to keep them perfectly on station. I was astonished that they would come so close to me.
I pulled myself down the line
that I had rigged, a tangent from the bow of the sub to the top of the conning tower. I hung on the line by my fists, and my body wavered in the current like a flag on a lanyard. As I was pulled along by the sub, the school swam close beside me. I blinked and reminded myself that if I let go of the line, I would be swept away and quite possibly lost forever. In the water, bioluminescent plankton trailed behind the fish like a cascade of stars. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life, and I remember that it was silver above, cobalt beneath, and this vision still recurs in my dreams.
I turned, still hanging on the line, and flashed an okay to the video camera mounted on the conning tower. Watched in main control, the message was passed to the escape trunk, and the remaining men soon emerged from the hatch. As the other divers joined me on deck, the school of yellowfin veered away, maintaining a tight formation. Soon they were lost in the blue.
The F-470 was muscled through the weapons handling tube, and likewise the motor. The boat was clipped to a line and buoy, the engine screwed onto the transom, and then a lanyard was pulled, initiating two big bottles of CO2. In a huge storm of bubbles, the boat rocketed for the surface. Gasoline bladders were removed from the locker below the fairwater, clipped to the ascent-descent line, and allowed to float to the surface by their own buoyancy. In a short while, six men and their equipment had locked out of the submarine, swum up the line, and pulled themselves into the boat.
The last man to emerge handed me a kit bag. In it were my weapon, ammunition, and web gear. Two divers, also riggers, remained floating above the deck of the sub. I clipped the kit bag to my belt and removed the scuba bottle from my back. The closer of the riggers swam forward and took the tank. I drew a final deep breath from the regulator and tilted my chin at the surface, forty feet above. Our inflatable boat was a black archlike shape against the moonlight.
I gave the riggers a thumbs-up, removed the regulator from my mouth, and blew a stream of bubbles from my lips. I swam slowly up and toward the boat, careful to ascend only as fast as the smallest bubbles around me. I continued to exhale strongly as the air in my lungs expanded. I exhaled all the way to the surface, the volume in my lungs seemingly inexhaustible. This was a trick of physics. The amount of air filling my lungs forty feet down was nearly twice the amount my lungs could hold on the surface. If I were to stop exhaling, the air in my body cavities would expand to twice its volume, bursting my lungs, embolizing my blood vessels, and killing me in a matter of seconds. A definite pain in the ass, and a calamity that could befall me if I was incredibly stupid. I made it to the boat without turning myself inside out, and pulled myself up and in.
I joined the last boat crew to be deployed from the submarine. As I tossed my face mask into the bottom of the boat, I could hear the puttering of the outboard motor. The surface somehow seemed blacker than it had underwater. I squinted in the moonlight. The Zodiac was still attached to the buoy, and the boat was slowly being pulled along, up and over the rolling swell, still tethered to the leviathan below. Behind the Zodiac, Cavala’s attack periscope jutted from the water, hissing as it moved through the swells. I quickly unzipped my kit bag, readied my weapon, and slipped into my combat vest. This I did in the dark, and mostly by rote. With me was boat crew Four of Fifth Platoon. Rather, boat crew Four of Fifth Platoon, reconstituted. I could make out no faces, but I knew the men in the boat with me. Rudi was there, seeming muy cubano even in the dark, and Surfer Dave was at the tiller. Juan Morales was in the bow. As I zipped my combat vest up over my wet cammies, I gave Dave a nod. He turned and flashed an infrared light at the periscope. In response, the attack scope dipped twice, and in the bow of the Zodiac, Juan pulled at a quick release.
The Zodiac separated from the buoy, and Dave put the helm over. We puttered down the slope of a moonlit swell as the periscope moved past us, retracting straight down and slipping below the surface. The buoy was dragged under with a small gurgle as the submarine passed below.
The Zodiac headed west as the moon set, making a passage twenty miles over the horizon to Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. It was a stunning, beautiful night. To the north, the tourist hell of Saint Thomas was a yellow smudge of light on the horizon. I filled my lungs with warm ocean air. I had been a week on the submarine, an odd, fluorescent-lit trip from wintry Norfolk, and I was delighted to again be on the open sea, and happy to be with the lads.
We settled into the special warfare compound aboard the naval station at Roosevelt Roads. Western Puerto Rico is beautiful, the surf is good, and the deployment was a slice of paradise. We were attached to Naval Special Warfare Unit Four as the Caribbean contingency platoon. Grenada had recently been chastised, the Cubans were for the most part back in their box, and the Carib was quiet.
Our original mandate was counternarcotics operations. To that end, we sent out MTTs, mobile training teams, providing military advisers to several wobbly Latin American countries. Our client list read like a who’s who of the world’s cocaine-producing nations. We taught the usual, operations from sea, reconnaissance and surveillance, patrolling, special ops, sabotage, and the rudiments of how to plan, compartmentalize, and coordinate an operation.
The degree to which our clients applied these lessons against narcotics traffickers depended on factors beyond our control. In the Southern Hemisphere, the devil dances with several partners: corrupt and authoritarian central governments, drug dealers, guerrillas, and vicious right-wing paramilitaries. Narco dollars bought politicians on all sides, and truth and justice were in perennially short supply. We would train elite units of a country’s army or national police forces, and just as soon as they went operational, they would be compromised, sold out, or disbanded by politicians and general officers on the payroll of drug lords. We did little good. I wrote reports back to Little Creek saying we were essentially wasting our time. I may or may not have been listened to, but gradually, we were withdrawn from the counternarcotics business. There were other fish to fry.
In the mid-1980s, America’s pissing contest with Nicaragua continued, and the United States was deeply into training, supplying, and motivating the Contras. These efforts were focused along the Coco River in Honduras and the emerging boomtown of Puerto Lempira. It was not long after we’d settled into Roosevelt Roads that I became a frequent flier—a commuter to the covert war in Central America.
* * *
SHARP-DRESSED MEN
MY CAREER AS military adviser was served up in slices. I remember it now as sort of a slide show. I led a number of small detachments from Puerto Rico into Central America, mostly to Honduras but occasionally to other places. We’d parachute in, spend a few weeks in the bush, operating from jungle hammocks or some flyblown little pueblo, complete a training syllabus, and then be withdrawn. Our curriculum depended on the audience. For units of the Honduran army, it was frequently the basics: drill, infantry, and squad tactics. For Contra units with number designations and CIA paramilitary chaperones, our lessons were often highly technical: maritime sabotage, stalking and tracking, and the employment of spotters and snipers.
We rarely operated over a week before getting withdrawn or moved to a different location. Our perception was that we were on a very tight leash. The host nations were keenly aware of how many Americans were in country, where they went, and how long they stayed. Our hitches were usually followed by a debrief and a drunken weekend in Tegucigalpa, Panama City, or San Salvador. Then it was back to Puerto Rico, where we’d wait again for the phone to ring.
Anyone who served in Central America in the 1980s will probably agree with me that in the field, no matter how far “south” Americans were deployed, we generally felt safe. It was in the cities, during the periods we were supposed to rest and recoup, that we were in the most danger. In the field we could depend on camouflage and stealth. In the cities the more Anglo of our number stood out like circus freaks. To be obviously a norteamericano was to be a target.
Paranoia, we used to say, is total awareness. That was never
more true than when we were at leisure in Tegucigalpa. Vigilance was our mantra, and it extended to the smallest things. Like eating. There is an art to selecting a seat in a Central American restaurant, especially if you are six-three, have red hair and freckles, and look like a gringo consejero militar, or military adviser. When selecting a restaurant in a country undergoing a civil war, one must consider architecture, location, and ballistics. Cuisine and atmosphere are also factors, but they are secondary. It’s best to patronize only establishments recommended by fellow military advisers or spooky types from the embassy. The object is to find joints where the owners are at least open-minded on the subject of Americans. As more operators rotate through a tour, each pushes the envelope of safety and cuisine, trying and surviving a greater number of eateries. By the time I returned to Central America, there were about two dozen of these places in each capital city.
We avoided any place with the word “American” in its name, a case in point being Bobby’s American Bar in Athens, which has been bombed at least three times in my lifetime. Also to be avoided were fancy restaurants in swank international hotels, as they are expensive and generally patronized by members of the indigenous plutocracy, who are targets too.
Sometimes the threat level was minuscule, sometimes it was considerable, and it varied in its source. There is always a background level of extremely violent crime in such places, and Americans are targets of opportunity. I did not take that personally. The criminals were mostly amateurs, and in their lack of sophistication there was a modicum of safety. There was also political violence to consider, which I took more seriously. The threat came primarily from the left but not infrequently from the right—acts of terrorism and provocation, respectively, but the result was the same. All of us made dining arrangements with great care.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 32
