Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  We sat in our perimeter for about twenty minutes, listening for activity around us; then I gave the word to move out. Dick Cyrus was my point man. In the field, he was a lot like my old point man Charlie Bump. Five nine, weighing about 150 pounds, he had dark brown hair and a smirk that was born of his natural cockiness. He was a super operator, another guy who couldn’t get enough time in the field. He’d have been out every night if he could. Dick was from Norfolk, Virginia, and I used to tell him he was the second-best SEAL from the Tidewater area (I was the only other one). I was second in line, with the National Police officer right behind me. Next in line behind the cop was my radioman, Clay Grady, carrying a PRC-25 and an M-16. I always kept the radioman near me in case we got in trouble, since I usually ended up directing helo fire if we needed it. At about five feet ten inches tall and 190 pounds, Clay was a very solid guy, but so low-key you had to keep looking to be sure he was there. The rest of the men spread out behind in a file, as far apart as visibility would allow. SOP was not to lose sight of the man in front of you. Ken McDonald brought up the rear with his M-60 machine gun. Ken was a squad-leading petty officer, a very good operator and a quiet man. The rest of us carried M-16 variants, M-79 grenade launchers, or the over-and-under M-16-40mm grenade launcher known as the XM-148.

  We crossed two rice paddies and their boundary tree lines without incident. Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, many SEALs preferred to travel in the middle of rice paddies. People, dogs, and geese lived in tree lines, and it was unusual to go any distance through the trees without encountering one or all of the three.

  We moved quickly through the paddies and very cautiously through the two tree lines we had to penetrate. As I’ve mentioned, Vietnamese always leave a candle burning in their hootches overnight while they sleep. I think it’s to keep evil spirits away. The candles helped us to avoid populated areas; then, when we got to our objective, the candles would help us find the hootches. In a sense, we were the evil spirits, being drawn to the candle light.

  As we passed through the tree lines, we could hear sleep sounds in the hootches we passed. Hacking and coughing were the norm. The Vietnamese made so much noise in their sleep, we could have joined the symphony unnoticed. Yet if we banged a rifle barrel against an ammunition pouch, they would wake up in an instant.

  Past the second tree line I turned the patrol to enter the larger canal that would take us to the target area. We moved along the bank, as usual. We were in a tidal region near the South China Sea, where tidal ranges could run six to ten feet. You might enter a canal at low tide with the canal bank five feet over your head, and find yourself unable to move in the incredible delta mud. Three hours later you could be swimming along, even with the bank. Tonight, conditions were good. We were moving on an ebb tide. Wading and swimming to the objective, we hugged the shadows of the brush above us. We all wore the standard UDT life vest, partly inflated to compensate for the weight of the equipment we carried. All remained quiet. The only noise was the sucking of the mud as the water receded around us.

  I began to pick up the smells of the target area about 0430. I wanted to hit the target at first light, about 0515, and hold reveille on the bad guys. About a hundred meters from the target, I stopped the patrol. No noise from the hootches or anywhere above us along the canal bank. Dick and I moved slowly forward to reconnoiter. Dick had great operational sense. He knew when to push and when to back off; you couldn’t teach that.

  We slipped through the water until we were right outside the hootch area. It was still night, and there was almost no illumination. We listened. Just above me was what looked like a short pier. I had moved under it without really seeing it. Whatever it was, it offered good cover.

  Then I heard someone walking toward us. I squeezed Dick’s shoulder. He bobbed his head, acknowledging he’d heard the movement too. We hunkered down in the water and waited to see what was going to happen. Whoever it was approached along the canal bank. We’d seen no sign of any sentries, but that wasn’t unusual in our operations. We usually went into areas where the VC felt so secure they didn’t post sentries. Still, I wasn’t sure about whoever was approaching. Had we made some noise apart from the normal night noise? I was sure we hadn’t. Had one of the men behind me made a noise I couldn’t hear in the water?

  All these things went through my mind as the person got nearer. It appeared he was heading right for us. Now we couldn’t move—he’d see or hear us. I slipped my knife from its sheath at the top of my equipment harness. Dick did the same. We didn’t need to talk. We’d rehearsed the procedure. Whoever was closest to the person grabbed, and the other one killed. But we weren’t in the best position to do that, so I wanted to remain undetected. No matter what you see in the movies, a silent knife kill requires perfect positioning: a quick slash of the vocal cords followed by a perfect knife strike in the upper spine. Even then the victim may gurgle loudly enough to disturb sleepers through the ambient night sounds. I didn’t want to try a knife kill unless we absolutely had to.

  The person moved right onto the “pier.” I could no longer see him, and he couldn’t see us, so I relaxed a little. I heard what sounded like rustling clothes and heavy breathing. What the hell was he doing? It reminded me of the time I had slipped into a hootch and heard, before I saw, some VC screwing his wife. Listening intently, I heard a loud plop, and water splashed my face. The plop was quickly followed by a loud fart.

  The structure above us wasn’t a boat slip, it was a crapper, and I was right in the line of fire. In front of me, Dick was struggling not to laugh, while all I could do was keep from looking up and hope for the best. After an eternity, the VC got up and left.

  Dick and I moved farther down the canal to see if we could get a look at the target. We saw no activity and heard nothing other than our friend getting resettled in his rack. In front were two hootches, larger than the standard family hootch, and behind them two more, slightly smaller. There were probably more behind those, but we couldn’t see. Our friend had gone into one of those directly in front of us. It was starting to get light. I left Dick in place and slipped through the water back to the rest of the platoon.

  The cop was certain the two larger hootches housed the VC we were after. We moved ahead to where Dick was, and prepared to get out of the canal. We had to move slowly and let the water drain out of our gear.

  I didn’t have to go over the plan or make any changes: things were about as we had expected. My objective on this mission, in addition to killing bad guys, was to take prisoners. If our intelligence was close to being correct, we should be able to snatch someone fairly high up in the local VC infrastructure.

  I found it was better to take VC prisoners and interrogate them than to kill them in a firefight. We usually got information upon which we built future missions, and occasionally we could turn a guy and have him lead us to his former comrades. This was risky, but we kept informers isolated until we used them, and often, we could act so fast, his comrades hadn’t yet changed their routine. My policy was to keep the “turnee” just in front of me on the patrol, and at the slightest hint he was leading us into a trap he was history.

  We climbed silently out of the water and stayed prone while Ed Bowen and Doc O’Bryan moved to cover our rear. Quartermaster Third Class E. C. “Ed” Bowen was, without a doubt, one of the best operators I’ve been in the field with. Quiet and wiry, under fire he was cooler than cool. He was my main Stoner man. He slept with his machine gun, as most successful Stoner men did in those days. And he did talk—on full automatic.

  Hospital Corpsman First Class Charles “Doc” O’Bryan was our medic, but he wasn’t a SEAL, since in those days medics were not allowed to go through UDT basic training. Our corpsmen were some of our best operators, and they had to kill in self-defense all the time. Doc O’Bryan was great in the field, but when I got to the platoon he was badly out of shape: at about six feet tall, he weighed over 220, and too much of that was fat. On one of our first missions I threatene
d to leave him behind if he didn’t keep up with the platoon. He quit smoking and got in shape, and we never had another problem.

  Slowly, the men took their positions. Ed and Doc would stay to our left and right rear, moving with us as we went to the hootches. The rest of us broke into two-man teams for the hootch entries. Dick and I headed for the largest of the first two. The other men moved quickly to the rest. Ed and Doc came up just in front of Dick and me, so they had clear fields of fire over the rest of the complex.

  At the front entrance of our target, I could hear snoring within. Perfect. As each entry team approached its assigned target, I heard no other sounds. I burst through the entrance and shifted left. Dick was immediately behind me, moving right. Nothing stirred. Sleeping pallets were laid out, but no one was in them. Where had the snorer gone? The noise must have been coming from the hootch just behind ours. Dick and I were looking at each other when I heard a commotion from that other hootch. One of my guys yelled, “Lai dai” (“Stop, come here”). Dick and I charged back outside. As I cleared the doorway, I heard an AK-47 open up on full automatic, followed immediately by an M-16 on single-shot fire. I thought, “Oh shit, here we go.” So much for taking prisoners.

  Two VC carrying weapons ran out of one of the rear hootches, about twenty-five meters away. As they stopped to fire, I raised my M-16 and got them in my sights just in time to see them nearly cut in half by some of my men. I yelled for the guys to start sweeping the complex. Ed was at five o’clock behind me, about five meters away, but Doc had gone just behind the hootch at my one o’clock, about ten meters away—not where he was supposed to be. I later found out he had moved up because he couldn’t see the hootches well enough from where I’d told him to go—good call on his part.

  As I started down the hootch line, a VC broke through the wall of the hootch to the right of Doc and threw something at him, hitting him on the left cheek. Doc went down like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer. I saw no weapons in the gook’s hands as he headed blindly toward me.

  Things started moving in slow motion. I saw what had hit Doc—an M- 26 fragmentation grenade. After ricocheting off Doc, it was now rolling toward me. I kicked the grenade toward the hootch Dick and I had just searched. For some reason, I dismissed the grenade as a threat. Instead I concentrated on the guy, who was racing toward me, unarmed. I turned to butt-stroke him with my M-16—I hadn’t given up on taking prisoners. Dick was moving toward Doc at my ten o’clock. When the VC was three meters from me, I could see he was scared and running on automatic. Thinking, “This is going to be easy,” I swung my right arm forward, aiming the butt of my rifle directly at his face.

  The guy stopped dead in his tracks. At the same moment, I heard Ed’s Stoner open up. It happened so fast I almost fell on my face as the butt of my M-16 passed where the VC’s chin should have been. Ed had taken him right out from under me. I yelled, “Holy shit, Ed, what the hell are you doing?” I didn’t expect an answer, and I didn’t get one. He, Dick, and I ran forward, toward the firefight.

  The fight was over almost as fast as it had begun. I reached Chuck Newell just as he called, “Cease fire.” He’d set security to our front, and I turned to assess the situation. Doc was on his feet, taking over rear security. Ed moved back and did the same. The area was as quiet as it had been when we got there. I decided we owned the turf and told Chuck to have the men start searching to see what we could find. We found and captured four men hiding in the hootches.

  Chuck and Ken McDonald had killed three guys running from the last hootch in line, one of whom had had his AK-47, on full automatic, firing over his shoulder as he ran. Then they took some fire from the tree line behind the hootches. Apparently there had been a sentry, but he had been stationed to the rear of the complex.

  The cop said an old woman they found in one of the other hootches told him the meeting had been held late the night before, but that all participants had spent the night in the complex. The cadre I was after had been sleeping in the hootch Dick and I entered. She didn’t know where he was now. He had probably gotten up early and left; maybe he was the guy who’d almost dumped on me. The woman also told the cop that there was a large group of soldiers in a hamlet about 500 meters to our rear. The cop was scared and said we ought to pull out.

  I told Chuck to continue the search, then called Clay over, got on the radio, and told the boat officer on the LCPL to scramble our Seawolves. They’d have been pissed if I hadn’t gotten them overhead, and if the woman had told the truth, we might need them.

  I also told the boat officer to send the LSSC downriver and position it well northeast of our extraction point—closer but not so close it would give away my intentions to any VC force on the small island. Then I sent Ed and Doc back to the canal to establish security on our intended line of withdrawal. Doc said he was okay, though he had a huge welt on his left cheek, and the left side of his face was so swollen he looked as if he’d just gone a few rounds with Muhammad Ali. Chuck told me the grenade that hit Doc was a dud. The pin had been pulled, but it didn’t detonate—luck. They’d found four dead VC, the three he and Ken had greased and the one Ed had nailed. The hootch search had revealed two weapons, some M-26 grenades, several containers full of 7.62 short ammo, and various documents. The cop took a quick look at those and found that they were lists of supplies, weapons, and people. He thought they might also reveal the location of the matériel. Stuffing the documents in his butt pack, Chuck allowed as how we’d been in the complex for about thirty minutes and it might be time to move out. Clay told me the Seawolf leader had checked in on our net; the helos were about ten minutes away. I gave the word to move out.

  Dick and I went up to the canal, while Chuck went back to get Ken. It was now daylight; we crossed the small canal running north beside the complex and turned left toward the main river. There was no trail, but moving just inside the canal bank proved easy and it gave us cover. When the Seawolves came overhead, I called them to ask what they saw behind us. The team leader said it was all clear, but they’d keep looking. I told them to stay over the hootch complex. I didn’t want them over us because we couldn’t hear a thing through the noise of their rotating blades.

  I heard the swoosh of rockets leaving one of the birds, and the Seawolf team leader came up on the radio to tell us they had spotted movement in the trees about 300 meters behind the hootch complex. So the old woman had probably been telling the truth about the proximity of the enemy troops. With the helos around, though, I wasn’t worried.

  We were about 200 meters from the river when Dick stopped us. There were some irrigation ditches ahead, and he wanted to take a look before we crossed. I told him to go ahead, but I kept the patrol moving slowly forward. When Dick gave me the all-clear, we picked up the pace.

  We’d crossed three ditches and were about fifty meters from the river when I heard an M-16 fire just behind me. I turned to see the cop pointing excitedly down at the dike by the last ditch. A bloody foot poked out from under the dike: one of our guys had shot a VC hiding in a concealed bunker. I told Clay to get the Seawolves overhead, and Chuck dragged the guy out of the bunker, pulling him to his feet in front of us. The VC never uttered a sound. His left foot had been nearly blown away, but he was in shock.

  Doc threw him on the ground and started doing corpsman magic. Our corpsmen never ceased to amaze me. When someone got wounded, they seemed to go into overdrive. Doc had the guy patched up in thirty seconds, gave him a shot of morphine, and pronounced him fit for travel. Chuck held the VC’s arms in front of him, cuffed him with plastic “tieties,” then handed his CAR-15 to Doc and threw the VC over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. We found three more males hiding in the bunker, took them into custody, and headed for the river.

  We reached the extraction point five minutes later. I set a perimeter and told Clay to get the LSSC over to pick us up. We sat there looking at our prisoners, and I wondered if the rest of the VC nearby would be stupid enough to follow us with a Seawolf fire team ov
erhead and our little battleship now about 200 meters offshore. They weren’t.

  I was the last to board the LSSC, just after Ken. I always boarded after everyone else, probably out of some misplaced macho desire to be the last off the beach.

  The wounded prisoner, accompanied by Chuck, the cop, and one more man, went by LSSC to the Vietnamese hospital in Can Tho. I told Chuck not to turn the guy over to the National Police until after we’d had a chance to interrogate him back in Binh Thuy.

  Next order of business: I called Ed over. “What were you thinking when you cut loose on that guy?”

  “Protecting your ass, boss.” He had simply reacted—he’d seen the guy throw a grenade and hit Doc, and he figured the best thing to do was kill him before he got to me. I wasn’t about to argue with that logic.

  “Good job, Ed, but next time try to shoot a little sooner.”

  I reflected on what we’d accomplished. We’d done well, reaching the objective without being detected. The men had been aggressive and decisive. We’d killed four VC, captured eight, policed up a few weapons and some documents, and not gotten anyone seriously hurt. Doc O’Bryan’s pride hurt more than his face, although we later learned the grenade had fractured his left cheekbone. I expected we’d get some useful intelligence from the prisoners. The troops were feeling good, and that was very important to me. All in all, a satisfying operation.

  13

  GOT THEM RIGHT WHERE WE WANT THEM: BAC LIEU

  Toward the end of June 1968 I started picking up reports that the enemy was planning another large operation near Saigon. There seemed to be an increase in troop traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Since the Tet Offensive had depleted the VC of anything larger than company-sized units, they needed to bring regular NVA troops from the North in order to launch a large operation. We’d been picking off VC along the coastal “Secret Zones,” and I figured we ought to do something to welcome the NVA to our part of the delta.