“I’ll check on it and get back to you in a couple of days. buddy,” Stallion told me.
A few days later he called with good news: Norwegian Cruise Lines was willing to loan us a Love Boat that was sailing empty between Jacksonville and Miami. Stallion said the ship’s crew was willing to double as “passengers,” his FBI agents would rote-play the bad guys — a valuable lesson for them — and Six could be the cavalry.
We put together a full-scale operation, tracking the liner as it left Jacksonville and sailed into the southbound shipping lanes, listening in as the “terrorists” hit — the crew broadcasting a fake distress calt and the terrorists grabbing the radio to state their demands. We set up a command-and-control unit, blanketed the area with discreet observation craft (we know they were discreet because Stallion’s FBI guys looked for us but never saw us), and when we were ready, we did an intercept.
I was in the command chopper, supervising the boat crew that was to fast-rope onto the Love Boat’s fantaü, watching the action out the aft hatchway. I had communications that allowed me to speak, like the voice of God, into the earphones of all the players simultaneously. Paul, who had a new radio handle, PV, testimony to his Prince Valiant haircut, was in charge of six Boston whalers. Gunners in one of the whalers and snipers in two small choppers would pick off any of the FBI tangos who saw us coming. We’d kill them before they could warn their pals or wax the hostages-
We hit the ship at 2200, when visibility was best for us (we had night-vision devices) and worst for the terrorists (they didn’t). Everything was planned down to the second. Every man knew his job. What no one remembered was that we were not alone on our mission: Mr. Murphy and his insidious law had also come along for the ride. Unless we were both careful and lucky, we were about to enter the TARFU Zone.
Okay, class, let’s see how the phoques get rucked. I watched aghast as my small sniper choppers staged a near-collision because the pilots weren’t talking to each other properly. I saw PV’s boats approaching from the wrong angle — goddamn tangos picked them up right away. Then the Blackhawk I rode in flared above the Love Boat’s fantaü too soon, and my Katzenjammer Kidz went over the rails before the snipers were in position to protect them.
Katrinka fix, “Screw it.” I threw off the headset, grabbed the thick nylon line, and went over the side myself- Just as I hit the rope, the Blackhawk put its nose up and began to swerve away from Ihe ship. Shut.
Mr. Murphy giggled. “Marcinko, you pus-nuts dip-dunk asshole geek: the goddamn chopper pilots saw six men go— they have no idea you’re on the rope, too.”
I looked down. There was deck below me, but not much of it anymore. I let go and fell the final twelve feet or so, bouncing ass over teakettle. I hit the deck on a swell, and as the stern fell. I slid toward the gunwales, my feet pedaling furiously to no avail. It was like sliding down a goddamn bowling alley.
“You shit-for-brains,” gloated Mr. Murphy. “This is a cruise ship — it has waxed decks.”
Mr. Murphy was right: we’d never thought about waxed decks. Navy ships don’t have waxed decks.
We’d lost the element of surprise, so the “terrorists” were ready for us, too, and put up a big firefight. The question of who killed who was not a problem, as we’d loaded up with special Canadian training ammo — Simmunition FX cartridges filled with fluorescent red marking compound — so when someone was hit we’d know they’d been shot. The red dye also helped tell us whether all our target work with those three-by-five cards had been worthwhile.
Once we engaged, the situation improved. The SEALs moved in their prechoreographed “dances,” clearing cabins and staterooms, rescuing hostages, and zapping bad guys.
They looked like lethal demons as they swarmed over the ship in their tigerstripe-and-biack fatigues, balaclava hoods, gloves and blacked-out faces. Our communications systems worked, so we knew where everybody was, and what each team was doing. Our shooting was on the money — better by far than that of the FBI “terrorists.” So despite the fact that we “lost” three SEALs, we wasted all the bad guys with wellplaced kill shots. So far as I was concerned, three casualties was an acceptable rate for a first-time exercise.
We learned a lot from our Love Boat cruise. For example, while we’d killed all the bad guys who were shooting at us, we didn’t have enough people on board to interrogate all the passengers and make sure there were no terrorist “sleepers” still around. There weren’t even enough SEALs to secure Ihe ship, much less deal with wounded hostages and interview hysterical passengers, all at the same time. I realized that if we ever did this one for real, SEAL Six would have to be bolstered by Delta, or the FBI.
After the exercise, Stallion and I did a walk-through to review where things had gone right, and where they’d gone wrong. He, for example, was concerned that SEAL Six hadn’t preserved evidence, but moved everything around. “You can’t do that, buddy,” he insisted. “If you’re gonna bring the boat back to U.S. territorial waters, the investigation’s gotta follow Department of Justice guidelines, otherwise the scumbags walk.”
“If they’re alive.”
Stallion smiled. “Gotcha.”
Still, the fact remained that if we took down a ship in international waters and we were ordered to bring some of the terrorists back alive, we’d have to be pristine about the way we went about our jobs and handled both evidence and suspects. I made note and had the men memorize the Miranda warnings — although it was doubtful we’d ever utter them aloud. The only warning I wanted to give a terrorist was,
“April fool, motherfucker.”
In time, the “cry wolf factor became something of a problem. Our training exercises were complicated by a number of false alarms in which we were scrambled by JSOC, then stood down. Once it was a plane hijacking. Another time it was a terrorist attack. Another time it was a pair of crazy Cubans.
It got so that I’d assemble everybody and make a speech telling them this was it and we were going out to kick fucking ass and take fucking names, and fuck all terrorists and fuck all communists, and tuck the whole fucking world except for SEAL Team fucking Six. I’d really get myself worked up.
Then Prince Valiant would stand up and say, “What the CO really meant to say was. -.,” and he’d interpret my ranting and raving and explain that all we had were preliminary indications, and nothing had been decided yet, and so on and so forth, and stop me from chewing the carpet and making a damn fool out of myself. It got so bad that I’d call JSOC to complain about their goddamn yanking us back again and again. I didn’t want any more exercises. I wanted Bravo Squad’s first night on the river at Juliet Crossing. I wanted Ilo-Ho Island. I wanted Eighth Platoon at Chau Doc-1 wanted SEAL Team Six to go out and kill us a bunch of Japs.
We wouldn’t be doing any of our killing in Iran, either. A back-door deal had been made, and even as Jimmy Carter flew back to Plains, Georgia, on Inauguration Day, 1981, the fifty-three American hostages were being released by their Shüte terrorist captors. So much for our original mission as a part of a second hostage-rescue attempt. That left us our counterterror role.
I thought our time had finally arrived later in January 1981 when the Macheteros, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization, blew up a bunch of planes near San Juan. I got word from JSOC about a stolen nuclear device and a maritime environment — Vieques Island, where I’d trained as a Frogman. The situation looked good. All the signs were there: fresh intelligence from NSA; a real-time scramble and loadout — and a 56-man mass HAHO night jump and ten-mile para-glide onto our objective, something no unit had ever accomplished before.
We scrambled. We went. But Vieques, too, turned out to be yet another dry hump. An exercise — what they called a full mission profile.
It occurred to me, as Paul and I sat at the Fraternal Order Bar the day after we flew homeJrom Puerto Rico, that it might be gratifying for the men, if ultimately unrewarding for our careers, to stage a live-fire hit on JSOC headquarters.
Paul drained
his beer and called for another round. “Don’t worry, boss — we’ll get lucky soon.”
Chapter 20
It took a long time before SEAL Team Six got lucky.
Despite repeated presidential rhetoric about terrorists being able to run but not hide, there were hundreds of terror incidents between October 1980, when SEAL Team Six was formed, and July of 1983, when 1 gave up my command— and the U.S. did little to interdict any of them. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the men, or the ability, to do the job. Moreover, SEAL Team Six could launch a preemptive strike against terrorists if there was hard intelligence an American target was about to be hit. The fact that there were so many attacks and no action by Six toid me that either our intel apparatus was screwed up beyond repair and incapable of developing the hot information necessary to deploy a first strike, or the administration didn’l have the guts, or the will, to act.
Additionally, Ronald Reagan saw terrorism through his own ideological prism, instead of viewing it through the warrior’s clear glass. He viewed terror as a byproduct of the EastWest struggle, another form of surrogate warfare waged by the Soviets against the West, not as the far more sinister struggles of anarchy against order, of culture against culture,
ROOUE WARRIOR of sociopaths against society — which would outlast the Cold War. He was mistaken.
So SEAL Team Six trained and rehearsed and drilled — all balls to the wall. But we did no actual counterterror. We played on trains and planes and automobiles. We drove up to Washington, D-C., and practiced rescuing hostages from a subway train — the nation’s capital allowed Delta and Six to play in the city’s new metro system after it had shut down one night. We visited Atlanta and assaulted various types of aircraft at Eastern Airlines’ hub facilities. We commandeered a raceway in California and spent weeks perfecting stuntdriving techniques — every trick from bootlegger’s turns to controlled head-on crashes.
We went to mountaineering school — the men got so good at climbing things that when we checked into hotels and I told them to go to their rooms, they often did so by scaling the outsides of the buildings. The Team traveled to Germany for joint exercises with General Ricky Wegener’s GSG-9 commandos. We played war games and strategized with the Brits and the French and the Italians. But we didn’t do a single thing for real,
Four of my boat crews (remember, there are two boat crews to a platoon. You will see this material again) spent six months in Egypt, where they taught some of President Mubarak’s Army Rangers a few basic CT techniques. The sessions were only moderately successful. No matter how hard we tried, it was almost impossible to teach the Egyptians about specialized operations. Their capabilities were — to be tremendously kind — crude. Even though we worked with the most elite of their Rangers, we found their marksmanship unsatisfactory, their physical condition second-rate, and their motivation nonexistent.
One reason for these flaws was Egypt’s military caste system- In Egypt — as in most Third World countries — enlisted men, who were basically peasants, were treated like slaves, while officers, many of whom were political appointees, were treated like princes. Often, the officers wouldn’t even bother to show up for training — figuring that when it came to the crunch, the enlisted men, not them, would do the fighting.
The concept of officers leading from the front was unknown; the phrase unit integrity didn’t translate from SEAL into Arabic.
I decided to motivate the officers in my own subtle fashion — by slapping a few captains and lieutenants around in front of their men when they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do the work properly. That got the officers’ attention. It also caused a couple of migraine headaches at the Presidential Palace, which rocketed the U.S. embassy- I was asked politely but firmly to desist slam-dunking Egyptians. I desisted. (I should have been allowed to continue my strong-arm methods, because at least they were working. As it happened, neither we, nor any of the other Special Ops units that visited Cairo to tutor, assist, inculcate, train, or educate, would do the Egyptian military much good. When it finally came to the crunch in 1985, and Egyptian “commandos” rushed a hijacked Egyptair plane in Malta, they killed fifty-seven of the passengerhostages and destroyed the plane while trying to rescue it, as American Special Ops advisers watched in horror.)
Looking back on it now, my mood was probably not improved by the fact that I’d sustained a stress fracture of my right leg during a HAHO jump just before we deployed to Cairo. The whole leg was somewhat tender, and the Egyptians, who had a hard time controlling small boats under the best of circumstances, kept knocking my bad leg with their gunwales almost every time we rehearsed water-based infiltrations and extractions. Paul wanted me to see a doctor. I refused — I could hve with the pain, and I was worried that, once I checked into a medical facility, the doctors might rule me unfit to jump, swim, and shoot with my Team. No jumping, swimming, or shooting meant no commanding — and I was not about to relinquish SEAL Team Six before we’d completed a real CT mission. So I suffered in silence, although my vile temper often betrayed my nasty physical condition.
There were a number of black-and-blue Egyptian Army officers who could vouch for it.
On the positive side, our six months in Egypt gave us the opportunity to leam a little bit about the Arab mentality— at least the Egyptian Arab mentality- It was also a chance to sneak and peek at the ships in the Suez Canal, and to work on harbor assaults against actual hostile targets — unsuspecting foreign shipping at Port Said or Suez. All our findings went into dossiers. Who knew if we’d ever have to operate in Egypt covertly, or whether or not Egypt would stay friendly to the U.S. Besides, SEAL Team Six was on a diplomatic mission — and as I’d learned at the Defense Intelligence School back in the seventies, all military diplomats are spies — so, while we taught our students, we also built up our operational files and tactical data bases. And while we played, we watched as the Israelis and the Soviets played intelligence tag with us, trying to figure out what the hell a bunch of Navy assholes were doing in Egypt besides teaching Egyptians to swim and climb anchor chains.
Because of our international role, we trained with CT units all over the world. It was likely that, if we ever got called up for real, we’d be coordinating our actions with a foreign force, and the more we’d worked together in the past, the more comfortable the shooters felt with each other, the easier it would be when hostage lives were on the line. I respected them all — the British SAS, the French GIGN, the Italian GIS, the Norwegian Special Ops combat swimmers; they were all first-rate. But The unit to which we probably felt closest was Germany’s Grenzschutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9). It was commanded by a lean, mean’s.o.b. of a brigadier general named Utrich Wegener. GSG-9 had seen-action in Mogadishu, Somalia, where it had rescued ninety-one passengers and crew of a hijacked Lufthansa 737 in October 1977. In 1979, elements of the unit flew to Saudi Arabia, where Shüte fundamentalists had taken hostages in the Great Mosque in Mecca.
Wegener, then a colonel, advised the Saudis on tactics, although it was the GIGN, not GSG-9, that finally assaulted the site.
I’d gotten to know Wegener in 1979. He’d come to Washington to brief the JCS on counterterror operations, and I’d watched as he entered the briefing room ramrod straight, his Border Guard uniform impeccable, his confident, self-assured body language silently shouting, “I knew what had to be done — and I fucking did it‘” The Joint Chiefs had been transfixed by his presentation. So was I — after twenty minutes of listening to Hen- Oberst Wegener I was ready to goose-step through a brick wall and volunteer for his unit myself. Later, I’d wangled my way onto the guest list of one of the IHO (in honor of) parties hosted by various generals and assistant secretaries and met another Ulrich Wegener altogether.
This happy warrior called himself Ricky, not colonel. He was a sociable, sophisticated officer who held his wineglass correctly and charmed the panty hose off generals’ wives.
Later, when I’d managed to convince him to visit some of the Washington area’s better sa
loons, I discovered that he loved pounding his cowboy boots on the 9oor while listening to country music, told jokes on himself, drank SEAL-like quantities of beer (complaining loudly that it was too light in character compared mit der gutt schtuff in Deutschland), and was eminently down-home approachable. He and I spent our allnighter touring bars from Old Town Alexandria to Georgetown and promising each other it was love at first sight. By the time we shared double portions of ham and eggs, home fries, and good strong coffee, we not only still respected each other by dawn’s early light, but we’d exchanged secret handshakes and decoder rings and vowed that, if we were ever given the opportunity to have a meaningful relationship together in the future, we’d do it.
Which is how, in November of 1982,1 found myself in the middle of the frigid-as-a-witch’s-tit North Sea, clinging to the rail inside the fart-filled pilothouse of a seagoing German Navy tugboat at oh-dark hundred, more than thirty miles from the closest land, watching as 20-foot waves crashed over the bow, slapping my SEALs and Ricky’s commandos silly as they tried to make sure the six Boston whalers we’d lashed to the deck weren’t washed overboard along with forty-two happy warriors — a joint SEAL Six-GSG-9 strike force bound for Oil Rig B/44, fifty-eight miles northwest of Sylt Island, off the coast of Denmark. On board the rig (which would come to be known in the course of this morning’s enterprise as the Dirty Name, in memory of the obscenely difficult, excruciatingly painful obstacle course that almost killed me during my UDT training), West German soldiers, playing the role of both hostages and terrorists, were waiting for us. Our goal was to assault the target under cover of darkness, wax the “terrorists,” and free the “hostages.”
Piece of cake, right? SEAL Team Six had assaulted oil rigs before. We’d trained in the Gulf of Mexico and off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, Australia, where we’d developed effective climbing techniques and choreographed the best ways in which to take down the huge, skeletal structures. Piece of cake. Tonight was no balmy Gulf of Mexico water.
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