To me, a Purple Heart is not a badge of honor. To be blunt about it, I’ve always considered them enemy marksmanship medals and I’m happy not to have ever “won” one.
So, my philosophy in battle has always been to kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me and to use whatever it takes. Never did I give Charlie an even break. I shot from ambush. I used superior firepower. I never engaged in handto-hand combat unless there was absolutely no alternative— to me, the combat knife should be a tool, not a weapon. All the whiz-bang, knife-fighting, karate/judo/kung-fu b.s. you see in the Rambo-Jambo shoot-‘em-up movies is just that: bullshit.
The real-life rules of war are simple and effective: stay at arm’s length whenever possible and shoot the shit out of the enemy before he sees you. So the fact that seven of us had just made bloody hamburger out of five undernourished, unsuspecting, unarmed Vietnamese didn’t strike me as ruthless, immoral, or unfair. All my SEALs were still alive; and there were five fewer of the enemy.
We made our way west, using the canal as cover. About five hundred yards from the VC hootches, we hit another score: sampans. There must have been half a dozen of them, rafted together and moored to the bank. There was no sign of life, but we advanced cautiously, three SEALs approaching underwater to flank the VC boats, then coming up close and slipping over the gunwales only after we’d done a thorough check for booby traps.
The sampans were empty. We sank them and moved out as quickly as we could. Not fifty yards down the canal Patches Watson held his hand high. He waved me forward-
“Mr. Rick—”
I saw it. “Jesus.” Across the five-yard width of the canal a trip wire lay suspended, almost as invisible as a single strand of spiderweb. We backed off. “Let’s track it.”
Patches and I headed toward opposite banks. I followed the strand as it led up the berm, through a hedge of thorn bushes, and up to a thick tree trunk, where it was attached to a shaped charge.
The bastards — they were good, I whistled for Eagle Gallagher. Brave’s EOD expert. Slowly, Eagle disarmed the charge, then we all moved forward again. Ten yards up the canal we discovered another series of booby traps. This time, the VC had laid charges in the canal itself and run both trip wires and hand detonators through the heavy overgrowth that ran right down to the water. Goddamn — if we’d come in through the front door, we’d have been chopped to bits. No wonder the VC at the way station weren’t worried.
I was sweating profusely, so I sank back into the canal to cool myself off, taking hold of an overhanging limb to steady myself. Another lesson learned. We’d taken the back door by default. Maybe in the future we should spend more time looking for back doors when we came calling on Mr. Charlie.
Absently, I glanced up at the branch I was grasping so I could shift my band and pull myself forward. Three inches from my right knuckle, a viper’s head rested on the limb, its distinctive fleur-de-lis pattern visible against the dark tree bark.
Oh, shit. Dickie’d had a rough day in the jungle. There’d been a lot of mud. A grenade bounced back at me. I’d almost blown myself up on booby traps. Now, here was a snake that could kill in less than ten seconds.
The viper’s hooded eyes and mine made contact. Mine said,
“You son of a bitch, if you don’t screw with me, I won’t screw with you.”
Slowly, slowly, slowly, I slid deeper into the water, and. -. just… let… my… fingers… slip… away. Two feet downstream, safely out of range, I pointed at the branch.
“Viper — there.”
A chop from Jim Finley’s machete cut the foot-long snake in half. He smilingly offered me the still-moving tenderloin portion. “Hungry, Mr. Rick?”
It took us another two hours to work our way to the mouth of the canal. We could have moved faster, but I was nervous about booby traps — not to mention vipers. Moreover, we were also slowed by the weight of the VC bounty — AKs, medical supplies, documents, notebooks, diaries, and other records.
It was almost evening by the time I radioed the STAB to extract us. We rendezvoused with the Mike boat, climbed aboard, and headed back upriver, exhausted and exhilarated.
We had good cause to be both. We’d spent the entire day on this operation and gone where no Americans had ever gone before.
Bravo’s excursion to Ilo-Ilo Island would be called “the most successful SEAL operation in the Delta” by the U.S.
Navy. For leading it, I won the first of my four Bronze Stars, as well as a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, from the ARVN.
It had been a long evening and morning of my Seventh Day. We dozed on the way back to My Tho. The wrathful God of SEALs finally allowed his lethal children to rest. I dreamt of warm women and cold beer.
Chapter 10
I arrived back in the States from my first Vietnam tour with mixed emotions. I felt positive about the way my squad had performed. We’d become a totally integrated unit — thinking and acting as one — protecting each other against both the Vietnamese enemy and the American bureaucracy. I was happy that although I’d brought them home with dents and scratches, no one had been seriously wounded.
I was elated that each member of Bravo Squad would receive decorations for what he’d done in Vietnam. I was also happy with my own progress. I’d proved myself in battle — and was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, shortly after my return stateside.
The medals and commendation reports were the outward evidence of something more seminal. I now believed in myself as a leader. My instincts about combat had turned out to be solid and largely reliable. Moreover, I’d been able to discover ways to beat the system we’d been saddled with, or at least make it work in our favor.
On the down side, I was turned off by the high level of mismanagement and addle-brained thinking that seemed to pervade our effort in Vietnam. All too often, we SEALs were sent out to war by small-minded naval officers who hadn’t a clue about our capabilities, or any idea how to use them. So they employed us the same way they employed their regular troops. That may work if you’ve got a battalion of unmotivated grunts. It doesn’t when you’re fielding small, deadly units of highly trained men who can think for themselves and who take pride in showing initiative.
I saw both the best and the worst of my fellow officers in Vietnam. On the plus side, there were guys like Fred Kochey, who’d lead his men to hell and back if there was a chance of intercepting a VC convoy or sinking a bunch of sampansThen there were the others — the cowards, who sent their men to do the things they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do themselves.
And the bureaucrats, who busied themselves in paperwork instead of leading their men into the field, then put themselves in for Silver Stars because they heard the sound of gunfire one day. And the thieves — officers who just plain stole their commendations.
I remember one pus-nuts captain (he called himself Eagle, but he was a real turkey) who stole an enlisted man’s Silver Star — he actually commandeered the bloody medal itself— because Lyndon Johnson was coming to Cam Ranh Bay and he wanted the president to pin it on him.
Had the captain been in combat? Let’s put it this way: he rode in a PBR every six or seven days. The rest of the time he shuffled paper. Had he been shot at? Maybe — once or twice. Not like the enlisted man, a chief who commanded a PBR and who had been in the thick of it for monfhs. But it was the chief who got screwed. Sure, he eventually got his medal, but the president should have pinned it on him, not on the tunic of some self-important turd.
That kind of behavior when it came to medals was typicalI’d almost been court-martialed by Hank Mustin because of Bravo Squad’s first night out on the river — the night I called in a Spooky, we shot up the free-fire island, and came home without a single round of ammo left in our weapons. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the brig: it turned out that by dumb luck, Bravo had interrupted what Navy Intelligence later described as a major North Vietnamese crossing.
We’d blundered into the middle of it, and by shee
r chance we’d given the enemy a royal screwing.
Guess who got himself put in for a Bronze Star, for what now was called the first successful SEAL operation in the Delta?
Lieutenant Commander Hank Mustin did. Never mind that his contribution to the evening’s festivities had been less than zero. So. when I got back to the States early in June, I took myself over to the Awards Section at the main Navy building in Washington, D.C., and complained about it.
I don’t know whether or not they ever pulled Mustin’s Bronze Slar — all I wanted was to go on record with my personal objection. But one thing was sure: from the looks I got, no ensign had ever come in to object about a lieutenant commander’s medal before.
In Vietnam, I’d developed a reputation as a renegade, a maverick, a loner. Some of it was deserved — I’ve always had a hard time taking orders from people I don’t respect, and I let them know it. My fitreps — fitness reports — from 1967 reflect my iconoclast’s attitude. I was judged “Outstanding—
One out of 100“ in such areas as Imagination, Industry, Initiative, Force (”the positive and enthusiastic manner in which he fulfills his responsibilities“), and Professional Knowledge.
But I was rated only “Exceptional” in the areas of Reliability, Personal Behavior, and Cooperation.
Now, “Exceptional” may sound good, but — as I was told at the time — it doesn’t help smooth the old career track very much. And the areas in which I was graded lowest were those areas that rankled my superiors the most. My personal behavior was aggressive and abrasive. I swore like a sailor. I wasn’t above using my hands on people if they pissed me off.
I was cooperative when I believed it would do my men some good. but I wasn’t shy about telling people to screw off, no matter how many stripes they wore on their sleeves. And I was reliable in the following order: to my squad, to my platoon, and to SEAL Team Two. Those were my priorities.
Outsiders were on their own, so far as I was concerned.
So those fitreps were an honest reflection of who I was in those days. As an enlisted man, I’d hated the bureaucracy but wasn’t able to do much about it. That’s why I’d always wanted to become a chief. So far as I was concerned, chiefs, not officers, ran the Navy. That’s why I told the captain who’d wanted me to go to OCS I’d rather be a chief in the Teams than an admiral. Still, as an ensign, I’d hoped I could change the system — move it just an iota. I discovered differently.
Indeed, as an ensign I was subject to even more bean counters and paper pushers than I had been faced with as an enlisted man. As a UDT sailor, I had Chief Barrett to protect me from officers’ stupidity. As an officer, I had to deal with my colleagues’ chronic assholia on a daily — even hourly— basis.
In the field, for example, we’d be out for two, even three days at a time on patrol, and no one in Bravo would complain.
But it seemed whenever we had to make a trip to the local personnel command center for something or other, the foureyed, smarmy apparatchiks who manned the desks would shunt me or my men off to the side while they took their scheduled coffee break, and God help you if you asked for ten extra seconds of their time.
Now, Bravo was a combat unit — and we looked the part.
I grew to resent the smirks and sneering that greeted us when we walked into some office without pressed fatigues, or flawlessly rolled shirtsleeves. And more than once I got into trouble for pulling some officious son of a bitch over the counter by his lapels and ordering him to answer my sailor’s damn question, or to help us fill out the goddamn forms — right now this minute — or suffer broken bones or worse.
Then there was the caste system. At one point early in 1967, Patches Watson and I were up in Saigon chasing down some gear, and we decided it would be nice to grab ourselves a real American steak and a cold brew or two. So up we marched to the closest eating facility — it turned out to be an Officers’ Club — and walked in the door.
There was an MP on duty. He looked at my ensign’s tabs and nodded. But he put a hand on Patches’ chest. That was a dangerous thing to do.
“Sorry, sir,” he said to me, “officers only.”
I grabbed Patches before he did bodily harm. Then we went out the door and around the comer. We were wearing green fatigues and Marine Corps cover, so I took my ensign’s bars, put one vertically in the center of my cap and one on Patches’ cap, just like Marine lieutenants wear their bars. Then we walked back inside, threw the MP a salute, and had our steaks.
Screw the regulations: I’ve always felt if a man’s good enough to die with, then he should be good enough to eat with. Many of my fellow officers, however, feel differently.
That’s their prerogative. Just don’t ask me to serve with them.
I may not have been able to deal with the bureaucracy, but it certainly dealt with me. Late in June 1967, just two weeks after I got home, I was assigned to go on a public relations tour. SEALs always had been a top-secret unit. In Vietnam, we didn’t even wear name patches. Instead, we were given numbers — mine was 635. Now, all of a gudden, the Navy decided it wanted to publicize its own Special Forces troops.
We were given no reason for the abrupt about-face, although scuttlebutt had it that the CNO was sick and tired of reading about the Army’s Green Berets- Whatever the cause, I was detailed to a PR tour, explaining what SEALs were, how we operated, and what we’d done in Vietnam. The high point was a trip to New York City, where I gave newspaper interviews and demonstrated SEAL weapons aboard a ship in New York harbor and the next morning found my name and my picture in the New York Daily News. The writer, columnist Sidney Fields, said I had “Hollywood good looks.” (I always thought Fields should have won a Pulitzer for that column.)
One bit of fallout to my fifteen minutes of stardom was— five months later — finding my name on the cover of Male magazine. I couldn’t believe what I read when I opened it up. It was an atrociously written piece of fiction that had me jumping out of a plane at twenty-five thousand feet above the Mekong Delta carrying a 57mm recoilless rifle! The headline read: “Lt- ‘Demo Dick’ Mardnko — the Navy’s Deadliest Viet Nam Shark-Man.” The article’s author had never interviewed me. He purloined some of his material from the New York Daily News profile — and must have made up the rest.
The ripples from my publicity tour, incidentally, lasted longer than I expected. First, after the Male piece came out, no one called me Mr. Rick anymore. I was either Demo or Dick or Demo Dick. The second afterlife 1 only discovered much later. It turned out that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese read Male magazine, too.
When I returned to Little Creek, I convinced SEAL Team Two’s commander, Squirrelly Earley, to assign me a second stint in Vietnam. As a lieutenant, junior grade, I was eligible to command my own platoon. I’d been a junior-Junior ensign the first time around, and although Fred Kochey had given me free rein most of the time, I hadn’i been able to get as down and dirty as I’d wanted. Moreover, I believed that if I was given a full platoon, I could use the larger, 14-man unit to push the parameters of Navy SpecWar further than they’d ever been pushed before — although I certainly didn’t say that to anyone in the command structure.
It took me about two weeks of constant lobbying, but after some requisite squirreling, Skipper Earley finally gave me the Eighth Platoon. I thought of it as an early Christmas present — sort of like electric trains for adults.
My desire for a second combat lour did not go over well on the home front. Between SEAL training, my six-month stint in Vietnam > plus a three-week extension at Binh Thuy to help indoctrinate the new SEALs and my public-relations tour, I’d been gone almost a full year. Now I was about to go out again and who knew when I’d be back. I was a stranger to my kids, and to my wife. But the fact was, I wanted to go, I was used to getting what I wanted, and for better or worse, Kathy had signed on as a Navy wife.
I’m sure it was tough on her, but she was no different from thousands of other Navy wives who lived within the one hundred square
miles or so that made up Virginia Beach and Norfolk. Every family sending someone overseas had to put up with separation and inconvenience. ‘
Besides, our male-female roles were much more well defined in the late sixties than they are today. Back then, Kathy’s job was taking care of the kids; mine was taking care of the guys. I’d discovered in the field that when you’re crawling through a rice paddy in the middle of the night surrounded by people who want to kill you, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about home and hearth. In fact, you don’t spend any time at all thinking about those things — because if you don’t concentrate on killing the enemy, he will kill you first. So far as I was concerned back then, my home life was less important than my job. Period. I realize that to say those things today may sound unfeeling, callous, and unenlightened. Well, maybe I was unfeeling, callous, and unenlightened. But that’s the way most of us SEALs behaved. And in truth, I felt closer to the men with whom I served than I did to my wife and kids. We’d been through more together than most husbands and wives go through in a lifetime,
I set about training Eighth Platoon with a vengeance. I was determined to hit the ground running when we got to Vietnam, and I wanted to prepare the men for what they’d find.
I pushed them to the limit. I took them to Panama so they’d get used to working in a tropical climate, letting the Army’s Latin American Special Forces trainers do their “De hungle ees your frien‘ ” number. Then I volunteered my platoon as the aggressor force during some Green Beret training sessions. I was gratified to see that we knocked the crap out of the Army. We played ail kinds of head games on them: snuck up at night and tied them up in their hammocks. Stole their food and weapons. Took their wallets out of their fatigues and wrote nasty letters to their wives and sweethearts. A couple of Special Forces officers accused us of not playing fair.
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