Things came to a head in the last days of 1980. Ted Lyon and I had had our fair share of run-ins — battles over everything from purchasing to the chain-of-command structure, and I’d won every one of them. He’d gotten even in the way he knew best: on paper. As the commodore of NAVSPECWARGRLJ TWO, Ted wrote my fitreps. The one he composed for the fall and winter of 1980 was a work of art.
“CDR Marcinko is an innovative gargorious [sic] officer who has accomplished a great deal in command of SEAL TEAM SIX” Ted wrote. But it worried him, he continued, that “Marcinko has, however, consistently displayed a trait which greatly concerns this reporting officer and our force commander; specifically he oflimes [sic] fails so observe the chain of command… The relationship that exists between CDR Marcinko’s fledgling command and others in special warfare could be described as ‘We’ll do as we wish,’ or ‘Who needs you.’ I believe this to be a direct reflection of the man in charge.
… CDR Marcinko must however conform to the Navy way and it is my intent that he do so.“
Now, Ted summoned me again to his office, called me onto the carpet I knew all too well, and gave me another of his opinions.
“Dick, the appearance of the men under your command is a disgrace to the Navy.”
I explained — patiently, I thought — that SEAL Team Six had been given permission to operate under modified grooming standards.
“There is modified, and there is unacceptable. Your team is unacceptable. I want you to gel them cleaned up.”
“And what about the civilian look they’re supposed to have, Ted? They’re supposed to be able to pass for blue-collar workers or students or—”
“Have them wear wigs,” he interrupted.
“That’s a great idea, Ted. Just one inspired notion. I can just see them free-falling from twenty-five thousand feet, unfurling their fucking wigs. Or — what about as they’re fastroping to pop through a window—‘ ’Scuse me, Mr. Terrorist, but I have to fix my wig before I can wax you.”
“Dick—”
“What kind of dip-dunk shit-for-brains asshole idea is that, Ted? These guys have to be able to infiltrate foreign airports, or go through fucking border checkpoints manned by secret fucking policemen — and you want them to wear goddamn wigs? Are you out of your rucking mind?”
He bristled. “I’m talking about maintaining some kind of discipline. Your people are out of control.” He frowned.
Something on his desk was askew. Gingerly, Ted slid a cup of sharpened pencils half an inch, restoring it to its assigned position. Then he got back to me. “Look, Dick, I’m not talking about white-walls here. But modified grooming standards means hair that touches the ears, not Fu Manchu mustaches and ponytails. Those styles are offensive to the Navy.
They make your men stand out too much. Which leads me to a second problem. I’m getting complaints from other commanders — they’re beginning to have difficulties with their own men. SEAL Team Six is a bad influence and it’s disrupting the whole base.“
“Too bad, Ted. I seem to recall that when I commanded SEAL Two, I had a hard-and-fast rule about no facial hair, and I made it stick. If the current CO can’t handle his men, it’s his prob, not mine.”
Ted rolled his eyes and dismissed me About a week later, I discovered he’d received a iong memo from SURFLANTs commander, Admiral J D. Johnson, complaining about Six’s grooming standards, and demanding that Ted do something about it. I couldn’t prove Ted engineered the admiral’s complaint, but I had a pretty good idea he was behind it.
Well, there were ways to deal with Commodore Lyon. One of the first lessons I’d teamed in Vietnam was, “Don’t wait for the enemy to come to you — take it to Ihe enemy.” Of course, Commodore Edward Lyon III wouldn’t know that tactic. He had never deployed to fight in Vietnam. Doom on you, Ted.
I called Brigadier General Richard Scholtes, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC— at Ft. Bragg. Scholtes was my true boss. Just as with Bill Crowe, I was on a first-name basis with Scholtes.
“General,” I said, “I’m taking a whole bunch of flak from our asshole commodore down here, Ted Lyon. What about coming up for a personnel inspection? You’re the operational commander, and if our hair’s too long or our area’s not policed, it’s up to you to teit me tostraighten up. not Ted.”
Scholtes agreed and said he’d show up the following Saturday at 0900 hours.
Normally, uniform inspections would be done on the parade ground. But because Six was a clandestine unit, we held ours inside one of the two chicken coops behind SEAL Team Two.
On Friday, the whole team policed the area — officers and enlisted men alike — raking up dead leaves and pinecones. I thought about adding an Ev Barrett border of beer cans to the walkways, but I decided that in this case, less would be more. Then we scrubbed down the chicken coops the best we could, although there wasn’t much we could do to improve on what was basically a shitty situation.
On Saturday at 0700 I assembled my entire command in Class-A dress blue uniforms and medals. The officers wore swords and white gloves. We were an impressive group: one of my chief petty officers, MikeyT, had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam. He wore it around his neck.
There were scores of other decorations, ranging from Silver and Bronze stars to various commendation medals, campaign awards, and Purple Hearts.
I’ve never been one for medals. In Vietnam, Drew Dix and Harry Humphries went out to rescue Maggie the Nurse and a bunch of other civilians during the battle of Chau Doc. The Army gave Drew a Medal of Honor for his actions that day;
I recommended Harry for a Bronze Star, although when I learned what the Army had done for Drew I upped it to a Silver Star. So far as I was concerned, Harry was just doing his job as a SEAL, and medals be damned. Others, however, are impressed by commendations. So, we all wore every medal we owned. I had the Team snap to attention a few times just to get their timing down. The metal clanging on their chests sounded like rucking glockenspiels. We went over a few details, then I slipped over to the chicken coop in which I had my workspace and waited for Dick Scholtes to show up. I wanted a few minutes with him alone.
Dick Scholtes wasn’t a Special Forces operator — in fact, although he’d graduated from SF school, he’d always refused to wear the blanket, the green beret. He was much more an old-fashioned soldier, a no-shit, gruff, grind-it-out conventional warrior who proudly wore his Eighty-second Airborne tie clasp and belt buckle whenever he dressed in civilian clothes. I’d always had the feeling that he’d been slightly disappointed at being given command of JSOC. He would have preferred to lead a parachute division. But if he was let down, we couldn’t tell it from his leadership, which was supportive and kick-ass in its style.
At precisely 0900, General Scholtes arrived from Ft. Bragg, his big chopper setting down on the main pad at Little Creek.
I sent one of my admin pukes to pick him up, explaining that I was in uniform and therefore couldn’t be seen on the base.
To get to our chicken coops he had to walk through the SEAL Team Two area, which had not been policed very well.
General Schottes took careful note, then walked through the front door of my HQ.
I saluted. “Sir.”
He returned the salute, eyebatling my uniform, sword, white gloves, Silver Star, four Bronze Stars, and Wolfman facial hair. “Nice beard, Dick. You always let your eyebrows grow down to your cheeks?”
“Only when I’m allowed to modify my grooming standards, or in the jungle, sir.”
He shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” He began to inspect his surroundings carefully, and his face screwed into a frown.
“No rugs — nothing for the floors?”
“Nope.”
“Nothing for the walls, either?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“These desks look like crap.”
“They are, General.”
“Jeez, Dick, what a shithouse. Is this all they could give you?”
> “I’m glad you noticed. This is the office I share with my XO, my ops boss, and my command master chief. If you’d Uke, I’ll take you to see the two heads. They both flush on command at least fifty percent of the time.”
“Pass on that,” Scholtes said. “You got any coffee?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So how’s it going — aside from the accommodations?”
“Good.” I poured him a mug and passed it over. “I don’t mind this crap because we’ll be moving to our permanent home base as soon as they finish building our facilities there.
Besides, General, we’re not here very much. If you look out at the backyard, there ain’t a single oil rig to climb or ship to board. And OPSEC doesn’t allow us to shinny the anchor chains down at the amphibious base. We go way out in the ocean to chase ships. We shoot in Florida, we jump in Arizona, and we climb in Louisiana. Besides, there’s too many SEALs around here. They know us, we know them — that makes it hard on everybody.“
“Agreed. And what about the chain-of-command bullshit?”
“I guess I’m just gonna have to live with it.”
Scholtes nodded in agreement. “Large organizations,” he said, “have trouble dealing with unprecedented efforts. They Kke going by the book. They live by a set of hard-and-fast rules. But in your case, Dick, there is no book. In SpecWar, there are no rules — or at least no rules that are comprehensible to anybody whose whole career has been spent thinking conventionally. Take Ted Lyon—”
“Do I have to?”
He laughed. “I think you’re stuck with him. Look, Ted probably views you the same way staff officers look at anything or anybody who’s out of the ordinary — as some rogue elephant trampling all over his turf. He deals with your requests the same way he handles memos about ordering more toilet paper or ballpoint pens. People like that have no vision— they can’t see why the mission you’ve been assigned gives you any priority. They want you to wait on line with the rest of the assholes.”
“1 understand that, sir — intellectually. But it’s becoming real hard to live with, day to day.”
“Roger that,” said Scholtes.
“Thing is. General, it’s all a bunch of goddamn dip-shit numb-nuts nit-picking, like this grooming-standards bullshit that brought you here today.” I told Scholtes about Ted’s suggestion that Six wear wigs.
“This guy sounds like a real tightass,” he said. “Look—
I’ll do what I can for you.“ He drained his coffee and stood up. ”Well, Dick, let’s get to it.“
We walked across the breezeway between the chicken coops. At the door, I called out, “Inspection party arriving.”
The door opened from the inside. Mikey T was holding it.
The general looked back at me over his shoulder. “You son of a bitch,” he said, a smile on his face. Then he saluted Mikey. Protocol says that all Medal of Honor winners get saluted. Mikey returned the salute, a big smile on his face.
From inside, I heard Paul call out, “Attention on deck!” and the sound of the Team coming together as one man — bang.
I stood by General Scholtes’s shoulder. “Sir,” I said, “we are ready for your inspection.”
So he moved up and down the lines, pausing by each man to inspect his medals and check out the grooming standards.
No one wore earrings or ponytails, and everyone’s hair was washed and combed. They didn’t look pretty, but they were presentable.
After eight or ten minutes, the general had seen enoughHe stood in front of the Team- “Have them stand at ease, Dick.”
I nodded to Paul. “Team — at ease.”
“I’m glad to be here,” Scholtes said. “Glad because I’m proud of you men — proud of how far you’ve come in so little time. Proud because you have dedicated yourselves to carrying out a tough mission, which I know you’ll carry out as ordered. And proud because you look to be in super shape.”
He cleared his throat- “I’m impressed by the medals you wear. It is obvious to me that you know your jobs and are good at them. I am saddened, though, at the conditions in which you live here. I will do my best to help your commanding officer rectify the situation.
“You gentlemen are building up an expertise that no one else in the world has — keep up the good work, and God bless you all.”
The following week, I was told about a rocket sent from General Scholtes to Admiral Johnson. The gist of the message was: Dear Admiral, I’m happy to report that I held a successful personnel inspection of SEAL Team Six. The men met my grooming standards, given the clandestine, worldwide mission they have been tasked to accomplish. I was, however, appalled by the conditions under which they have been forced to live at Little Creek. I was further horrified by the sorry state of the SEAL Team Two compound, through which I had to pass on my way to visit SEAL Team Six. The number of soda and beer cans, cigarette butts, and other detritus on the ground was shocking and was grave evidence that details are not being properly taken care of by-those in authority. It seems to me that instead of harassing SEAL Team Six, the administrative chain of command at NAVSPECWARGRU TWO under Commodore Edward Lyon HI could better spend its time taking care of matters that truly concern it. Strong message follows. Love, kisses, and fuck you very much, your pals at JSOC.
Doom on you again, Ted.
In between training cycles, Paul and I ran head games on our beloved little boys. We’d spend the day, for example, twenty-five miles out in the ocean, running through 12-foot waves in our Boston whalers, working on boarding techniques. Boarding a ship under way at, say, twenty knots was simple. All we had to do was run our boats up behind a big humongous ship without being seen, hook a steel ladder on a 30-foot pole to the stem, and climb up. Of course, the waves were slapping our Boston whalers around like crazy, the ladder was cold and slippery,‘and we had to be prepared to shoot anybody who peered over the fantail as we were boarding.
And if one of us slipped and fell, the propeüer, which was going whomp-whomp-whomp between our legs as we climbed, would grind the poor unfortunate into hamburger.
So far as I was concerned, such activities were a piece of cake — if the men did it, I humped my body up the rope or out the hatch or into the water, too. Still, for reasons I could never explain, the guys would get back to Little Creek exhausted from these cheery, playful 14-hour excursions. So, I’d excuse them from CO watch at the Fraternal Order Bar — a fancy way of saying I was going drinking with them— and let them go home to see their wives and girlfriends for a couple of hours while Paul and I had a few beers alone.
Then, when we could almost hear the sounds of fucking and sucking, we’d beep everybody and see how fast they’d scramble back to the base. The men hated me for it, but it was a way of keeping them sharp — seeing who’d show up and who’d turned off his beeper while he was getting laid; or who would forget his weapons or chutes.
After haif a dozen dry runs, the whole Team was pissed off at me for crying wolf when they thought they were entitled to a few hours of downtime. Too bad for them — the only way we’d get good at deploying in a hurry was to practice, practice, practice. They hitched and they moaned and they called me names even Ev Barrett never thought of. But they worked hard — and they stayed aboard. During my three years as CO of SEAL Team Six, the only men who left the unit were the ones 1 selected out. Despite the horrendous schedule, the lack of downtime, and the incredible pressure, my retention rate was 100 percent.
And we even had time for fun, every now and then. We took part in a shoot-off with Delta at Ft. Bragg and held our own. In fact, they selected their best shooters to compete, while I sent Paul and whoever else happened to be at Little Creek that week. Officially, the contest was a draw. But we won — and they knew it. The competition was good for both units because, in fact, there was no one else who came close to either of us.
Competition was natural: Delta was more than twice the size of SEAL Team Six, and Charlie and I had argued endlessly over everything from my unit�
�s size to the choice of weapons (Delta used the .45 automatic as its basic sidearm, while SEAL Six used 9mm and .357) to management and tactics. I believed Delta had been overly influenced by the formal administrative and training structures of the British SAS; Charlie thought SEAL Team Six had been unduly influenced by the Marx brothers. We agreed to disagree, and if the shooting competition proved nothing else, it was that my frenetic, chaotic training schedule was as effective as his more controlled and rigid one.
In one area, however, there was always total cooperation and complete agreement between Delta and Six: the units; shared crucial information about ordnance. Bullet loads, specialized ammo, breaching charges, flash-bang and concussion grenades — as soon as anyone from Six heard about anything new, they’d call Delta to see if it had been tried over at Ft.
Bragg. And the men from Delta would do the same with us.
Although we’d practiced boarding ships under way. Six had never staged a full-scale assault exercise on a civilian passenger liner that had been hijacked by terrorists. The scenario seemed logical to us (and also to the Palestine Liberation Front. The PLF, a terror group wuth ties to Iraq, Syria, and Ubya, would hijack the cruise ship Achille Lauro five years later). So I rang up a friend of mine I’ll call the Italian Stallion,’s who was the executive officer of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Stallion and I had met when he was a weapons instructor at the FBI Academy at Quantico. He became a part of the informal intelligence network I put together during my years at the Pentagon. A no-crap former Midwest police officer with a bodybuilder’s physique, a specialty in weapons, and a terrific sense of humor, Stallion and I had become fast friends quickly. Most of the FBI agents I’d ever met acted tike insurance agents. The Stallion was a weight lifter, a party animal — a real pussy hound — and a damn good shooter. If anybody knew where I could find a Love Boat for hire, it would be him.
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