Rogue Warrior rw-1

by Richard Marcinko

  We used them, but to be honest, they weren’t going to be much help to us. For exercises in the States they were fine.

  But overseas, it’s hard to find spare parts for Eagles Besides in the regions of the world we’d be playing, just driving an American car gets you undue attention. So, using a couple of contacts I had in Bonn, I finagled two customized, armored Mercedes 500-series sedans, and four Mercedes jeeps for $160,000, a discount of more than 60 percent. From the outside, the sedans looked like the big cars common to Europe, the Middle East, and all through the Americas. But on the inside they’d been customized for the German counterterror unit, GSG-9—with hidden firing ports, ram bumpers, concealed police-type lights, sirens, and communications packages. The jeeps had roof turrets and other goodies.

  — Ted went ballistic. But I shoved the Mercedes down his throat, closed his mouth, worked his jaws, and made him swallow.

  In between bouts with Ted I’d drop in on my men as they progressed through the training cycle. By mid-October, everyone had qualified in HALO — High Altitude, Low Opening — parachute work (even Command Master Chief Mac, who had to be dragged off the C-130’s ramp on his first jump).

  We’d also begun working on fast-roping, which was a way of putting six men on the deck from a height of sixty feet in less than four seconds.

  The ropes we used were British — a reverse-weave, soft, twisted nylon line, which allowed us to brake ourselves with our hands. Unlike rappelling, which uses a line attached to a safety belt, fast-roping was simply a controlled fall. If, for example, we wanted to fast-rope onto the fantail of a moving ship, our chopper would make its approach at wave-top level from the rear so as to escape detection. Its sound would be masked by the ship. Then, at the last moment, the chopper would quickly rise or “flare” above the stern, hover as two ropes were kicked out and six men went down them, then perform a rapid turn and disappear.

  The technique calls for split-second timing and first-rate flying. The chopper pilot must compensate for the weight shift as the lines are tossed and the men throw themselves onto them. He also has to move with the ocean swells. A five-foot sea can mean a nasty ten-foot drop at the end of the rope if the pilot screws up.

  Shooting exercises were progressing, too: the Team was getting more and more accurate by the day. At first, I’d been able to hold my own with any of the men at Six- Now, it was me who’d end up buying the beer after a couple of hours on the range. The seven-man boat crews were shooting so much now — in the range of three thousand rounds per man per week — that some of the Berettas developed fissure cracks beneath the receivers and had to be modified so extensively by the manufacturer that SEAL Team Six in essence had custom-made pistols.

  Not everything went smoothly. We had our first training fatality at Eglin. It happened during a live-fire, room-clearing exercise, and the victim was Six’s one Chinese American SEAL, a youngster I’ll call Donnie Lee.

  In a remote comer of Eglin we built a series of four-byfour posts with canvas stretched between them to simulate rooms. The rooms, which could be configured any way we wanted them — big, small, rectangular, square, trapezoidal— also had doorposts and plywood doors. Inside the canvas walls, silhouette targets representing hostage-takers and their hostages would be set up. The object of the exercise was for pairs of SEALs to go into the rooms and “clear” them, killing the bad guys without harming the hostages. The drill was a common one for hostage-rescue teams. Indeed, Charlie Beckwith had used much the same technique in training Delta some years previously,

  The goal was to build your shooters’ speed and hone their intuition. An operator who can distinguish a good guy from a bad guy in a second is of no use whatsoever. Civilians can tell good guys from bad guys in about eight-tenths of a second.

  CT operators must act in hundredth-of-a-second increments — and their decisions have to be made both instinctively and correctly.

  Hostage rescue is also a painstakingly choreographed exercise. Split-second moves have been rehearsed for months in almost every possible combination, so that if A happens, then the operators react instinctively with B- On this particular day, we’d begun by working with revolvers. This is significant, because we carried our .357s uncocked and fired them doubleaction.

  After a break, the teams switched to Berettas. These are double-action semiautomatic pistols. For room-clearing, we carried them with a live round in the chamber and the hammer back, which made them into single-action guns. The amount of pressure needed to fire a pistol single action is significantly less than in double-action mode. Additionally, we reversed the order in which the men went through the door. Normally, a pair of SEALs would always hit the door in the same sequence. But sometimes we reversed them on purpose — because, in real life, Mr. Murphy’s law applies. We wanted to be ready for what can go wrong — because it will, indeed, go wrong.

  Donnie had been backup man all morning. Now he was first through the door. As his partner, whom 111 call Jake, followed, Jake stumbled, lurched forward, and squeezed off one round into Donnie Lee’s back.

  The wound wasn’t fatal, and he was taken to the base hospital quickly. I arrived just after they’d wheeled him into the operating room. Donnie was a good kid — a little green, but his instincts were okay. He had a ready smile, and he’d do anything you asked him to do. What upset me so much about this screwup was that it had been done to him, not by him. Thoroughly depressed, I sat on institutional furniture holding a paper cup of vending-machine coffee and waited until the doctor came out to give me a verdict. It was optimistic. I was somewhat relieved.

  After two days or so, we moved Donnie to a Navy hospital — where the doctors insisted on opening him up once again. After that second operation, the kid took a turn for the worse — who wouldn’t have, after being slit open from stem to stem twice in a week. I was still upset about the accident, but had conditioned myself to accept the fact that SEAL Six would take fatalities during training. But I kept my word to the men: before twenty-four hours had elapsed, Donnie Lee’s partner, Jake, was no longer a member of SEAL Team Six. In fact, Jake was no longer even a SEAL. I had him transferred to another branch of the Navy altogether. He had committed the ultimate SEAL sin — he had injured his swim buddy. If we had been on an actual operation, I don’t think Jake would have survived it.

  We flew Donnie Lee’s mother in from Hawaii. The situation was toughest on her. She had no idea what Donnie had been doing and couldn’t understand how he’d gotten hurt. What made it worse was that I couldn’t tell her anything.

  “How was he injured?” Mrs. Lee would ask again and again.

  “In training.”

  “What kind of training?” ‘:

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I just can’t say.”

  After about a week, Donnie developed a bad staph infection. Then he went comatose. Every day, I’d spend a couple of hours at the hospital, watching the kid on his respirator. I S took to yelling at him. “Get the fuck up, Donnie,” I’d shout. Often, as I did that, he’d twitch. Mrs. Lee would get all excited. “He hears you — he hears you,” she’d tell me.

  She was a mommy: right until the end, she never gave up.

  Donnie’s death didn’t interrupt the pace or intensity of our training schedule. I couldn’t allow it to. In the real world, you don’t stop and suck your thumb and talk and talk and talk. Not when there’s a mission in front of you. All those Hollywood movies where some kid dies in training and his best friend goes into a funk and can’t fly (Top Gun comes to mind) or do his job are utter bullshit.

  If my men couldn’t hack it, they knew they’d be gone. Not in months or in weeks or in days — but in hours or minutes.

  You don’t give second chances in elite units; you don’t coddle your men or spend a lot of time playing touchie-feelie with them. That’s why they’re elite units in the first place. Men volunteer for Delta Force or SEAL Team Six because they want to do things no one else has ever done. They do not volunteer for medals or glory or attab
oys. They volunteer because they want to push themselves beyond any range of experiences they’ve known before — and either succeed or die trying. That is not hyperbole. That is simple fact.

  So, death or no death, we kept working. It was important not to stop. I wanted SEAL Six to push the edge of the envelope — to be able to hit the enemy’s back door in a way ‘, no one had ever done it before. I broke the team into two sections — Blue and Gold — and while Blue drove to Louisiana and practiced climbing oil rigs in the Gulf, Gold flew to Arizona, where I rented thirty miles of airspace, and we started HAHO — High Altitude, High Opening — jump exercises.

  The technique made sense to me. You’re a bad guy. You hear a plane. You look up. A bunch of pus-nuts asshole SEALs are dropping in on you. So you wax them as they float down. Fuck the phoques. But with HAHO, the plane is flying at thirty thousand feet, and maybe twenty miles away. You never see it. You never hear it. And then all of a sudden, it’s “April fool, motherfucker, your ass is grass.”

  We began using our chutes as parasails; we bought minibottles of oxygen to keep us from blacking out, strapped lights to our helmets, and compasses to our wrists. We jumped at night from C-141 StarLifters flying so high that, without the compasses, we couldn’t tell the lights of Phoenix from the lights of Tucson. During a day HAHO exercise, one of my better jumpers, a guy I’ll call Nestle, malfunctioned at about twenty thousand feet- He tried to cut away — that is, release his bad chute, free-fall a couple of thousand feet, and then deploy his backup. He did the cutaway successfully, but his backup chute malfunctioned, too,

  The death was listed as a sport-chute accident at the private facility from where we’d taken off, and Nestle’s body was taken to the morgue- Then, within hours, a local reporter started asking questions about the forty or so “sport jumpers” who were renting an entire airpark and jumping out of big black birds that had no markings. That was us. I wasn’t even on site, but Trailer Court and another of my fast-thinking officers spent a tense day. They ended up kidnapping Nestle’s body from the local morgue and getting it to a military installation before the authorities and the press caught up with them. SEAL Six was not in a position to be questioned by anybody.

  By the time I showed up, Gold Team had already resumed its HAHO training. The men knew they couldn’t afford to break stride — so they didn’t. Their quiet, fierce determination to go on made me proud — which is a simple way of saying a complex thing.

  Let me explain. As a SEAL, you don’t spend a lot of time philosophizing about what you do. Like the ad says, you Just Do It. But those of us who have been SEALs know what “doing it” means — we know about playing with pain. We know that death is always a very real possibility. Those are facts of life. But we do not dwell on them.

  Sports broadcasters — especially those who do NFL games — spend a lot of time talking about how players play through broken bones, or sprained or dislocated joints. The players themselves don’t do a lot of talking. They just grit iheir teeth and hit the line. That’s the way SEALs are, too.

  With HAHO and HALO jumps under our belts, I began to ask how else we could hit bad guys through the back door.

  It occurred to me that a covert insertion could be performed effectively by jumping out of a commercial jet. All you need to do is get the jet moved off its scheduled course for a few minutes because of “engine trouble” or “cabin pressure malfunction.”

  For example: say we’ve been assigned to infiltrate Libya and blow up a chemical-weapons plant Qaddafi says doesn’t exist, or hit a training camp deep in the Libyan desert and take out two dozen Abu Nidal terrorists. Solution: we commandeer — with the assistance of the local government, of course — a scheduled Egyptair or Royal Air Maroc flight that passes through Libyan airspace in the vicinity of the facility we want to visit. The authorities send the passengers away but get the plane off the ground on schedule — with us on board instead. Once it approaches the target area, the pilot calls in a flight irregularity and drops the plane from, say, thirty-nine thousand to about thirty-two thousand feet for a few minutes, and veers somewhere between fifty and a hundred miles off course. At the right moment, Six goes out the door. Then the pilot radios that everything’s been fixed and resumes his course. Meanwhile, we parasail another forty miles, land, form up, hit the plant or kill the terrorists, then exfiltrate quietly. Doom on you, Muammar.

  No one in the military had ever done that sort of thing before. So I leased us a 727 and wo pilots from Braniff Airlines, and with Horseface in the copilots seat, we flew over rural Arizona and practiced flinging ourselves out of the plane.

  These exercises were no fun for Dickie, either, I’d made a commitment to the men that they’d never be asked to do anything I wouldn’t do first. “I won’t order you to fuck any-body I wouldn’t fuck, and I’m not gonna order you to go anywhere I won’t go,” is how I put it. So I threw myself out of planes with Gold team, revived myself with Bombay and Ben-Gay, flew to Louisiana, and went oil-ng climbing with the Blues. Then I’d crawl back to Little Creek, where Ted Lyon used me as his personal punching bag.

  He wasn’t the only one. The secrecy surrounding Six affected my home life more than any other job I’d ever had.

  Kathy couldn’t enjoy any of the perks or social bonuses a CO’s wife usually enjoys, such as being near the top of the base’s peeking order, enjoying the deference of the younger wives, and a lot of increased visibility. I was top secret. I was on the road. Not only was she cut out of the normal office gossip, but she was alone most of the time. When I’d commanded SEAL Team Two I’d been on the road a lot, too.

  But back then, she’d been able to share her troubles with other young mothers. Now she was older than most of the officers’ wives, our kids were teenagers — and didn’t need her as much — and she neither knew what I was doing nor was able to talk about the little bit she might have guessed at.

  The bottom line is that our relationship suffered.

  We fought about everything. We grew apart. The house was a place to drop my bags, do the laundry, and stay a couple of nights. It wasn’t a home. But I wasn’t about to let my personal life affect my command. You can’t let your feelings for your wife and kids intrude on getting the job done — if you do, you can get careless, and carelessness on my part could have caused fatalities.

  It’s not that marriages can’t and don’t survive the incredible stress commands such as SEAL Team Six place on commanding officers. Charlie Beckwith and his wife, Katharine, managed to get through the formation and deployment of Delta Force just fine. Paul Henley’s marriage survived the formation of Six. But weak marriages, as mine had become, are probably doomed. And to be honest about it, 1 wasn’t, at that time, a very caring husband at all.

  I realize I gave my wife a hard time. I know I gave the Navy Excedrin Headache Number Six. The very fact that SEAL Team Six was a covert unit caused problems sufficient to give any admin officer a head of prematurely gray hair.

  Officially, SEAL Team Six didn’t even exist. I may have been a commanding officer, but I didn’t have a command. I was on the books as the director of a civilian research facility in the Tidewater area, about thirty miles from Norfolk. Second, Six traveled almost 100 percent of the time. No Navy unit had ever spent so much of its time on the road — staying, for the most part, at civilian facilities. We used — and abused — rental cars, new commercial (smuggling our weapons on board), and booked ourselves into hotels and motels without benefit of military ID. We may have trained at Eglin, but we stayed at half a dozen motels in the area instead of at the base itself- The pencil-pusher dip-dunks whined. I told them to shove their complaints.

  SEAL Team Six logistics became an administrative and bookkeeping nightmare. Imagine trying to keep track of roughly eighty guys, traveling twenty-nine days per month under assumed identities. There were huge numbers of receipts, piles of vouchers, and wads of claims to be audited.

  The confusion was compounded by the fact thai we dealt mostly in
cash, so as not to leave a paper trail (we were, after ali, allegedly a covert unit). And when we traveled on military orders, we used fake IDs, nonexistent unit insignias, and signed receipts with all sorts of names — none of them ours.

  Those sorts of things probably gave Navy bean-counters a permanent case of the hives. I knew from personal experience they gave Ted Lyon Excedrin Headache Number Six.

  Even when we didn’t go commercial, we’d give the Navy problems. The Air Force was just beginning to deploy the gargantuan C-5A transport back then, and the giant plane could take the entire team and all our equipment in one load, whereas C-130 or C-141 travel required multiple aircraft, and we all had to amve at the same time — unit integrity, remember? We practiced load-ins half a dozen times, then commandeered a C-5A and had the Air Force fly us to Louisiana, where we landed at a Naval Reserve station just outside New Orleans.

  We didn’t bother with advance warning or “permission to land, sir.” The base found out about us when our C-5A— and it is a big goddamn plane — dropped in, taxied to a stop, the front end opened up, and more than half a dozen cars and trucks filled with long-haired dirtbags waving automatic weapons came pouring out, and drove right through the gate without so much as a hi-de-ho.

  There was, of course, one asshole officer who ran down the tarmac to greet us and sign us in.

  He huffed and he puffed and he waved his clipboard frantically. “Who are you? Where did you come from? Who said you could land here? Where are you going?”

  I blew him a kiss, showed him some of the fake IDs I’d created, signed Dwight David Eisenhower’s name to his paperwork, and told him to bug off- “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” Then I put the pedal to the metal and disappeared. Somehow, word of our visit got back to Little Creek I created a cover for Six, Freeport Marine Corporation.

  There were business cards and letterhead, and we demanded the corporate discount when we checked into Holiday Inns and signed out rental cars. I made friends with a Louisiana State Police commander named Billy Poe, who ran the LSP SWAT team. Billy got us tags and driver’s licenses, so we could switch the Virginia plates on the cars we new down from Little Creek and check into hotels and motels with proper Louisiana ID. It may have been okay with the Cajuns for us to do what we did — but the Navy didn’t like it at ali.