Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  Instead of going to Weiss, I told the coxswain to go to Dupont.

  When we came alongside, the CO leaned out over the bridge and told us all to come on board. We tied the LSSC to a boat painter and I led our contingent of field-dirty SEALs up the ladder. Most of the ship’s company seemed to be on deck.

  The executive officer (XO) and the gun boss met me as I came over the rail. I’d never seen grins like theirs. The crew members started cheering and pounding my guys on the back as they came over the rail behind me. They were so exuberant, I thought they were going to knock us back over the side.

  I was a little embarrassed by all this attention. I’d only meant to come over and thank the ship in person for pulling our asses out of the fire. I didn’t feel like a hero at the time, more like a fool for staying ashore too long and giving the VC a chance to set up on us.

  I followed the XO to the wardroom. The CO was there, and he started pumping my hand and slapping me on the back as I gave him a quick-and-dirty on our mission. They hadn’t realized we were in such a predicament. He said it was the finest day in the history of the ship, and the first time they’d fired for troops actually engaged in combat. I thanked him for his incredibly accurate fire and told him I’d never seen anything as beautiful as all those bodies being blown into the air.

  I showed him on the map exactly where the rounds had impacted and where we’d been. He started shaking his head; we were about 150 meters from the impact point and only a hundred meters north of the gun target line. It was definitely a “danger close” situation. If the Dupont’s gunners had been just a little less accurate, we might have been the ones blown to pieces.

  I told them that, judging both from the body parts I’d seen from the boat as we were leaving and from how many men seemed to be firing at us, I figured they’d probably killed about twenty-five VC. The gun boss was ecstatic—it was the first time they’d been credited with a fairly accurate body count.

  Aboard Weiss, I got the other squad leaders together and went over what happened. I told them we’d have to be more alert, particularly during insertions, because chances were the word would spread fast that Americans were operating along the coast.

  The mission got a lot of good press at NAVFORV—we’d killed VC and continued our campaign of harassing them in their safe areas. Zumwalt sent a BZ message (Navy code for “Well done”) to me as the task group commander.

  In the two weeks we operated along the coast, we accomplished the main purpose of Bold Dragon: to unsettle and harass the enemy in areas he thought were under his exclusive control. In the overall scheme of SEAL operations in my two tours, Bold Dragon contributed as much to the larger war effort as anything we did. Plus, we’d established a task group commanded by a SEAL officer. It was the first time that had been done in Vietnam, or anywhere else to my knowledge. The fact that I was junior to all the commanding officers in the task group also spoke volumes. It was clear recognition on the part of COMNAVFORV that the experts needed to be in charge. Unfortunately, the lesson wasn’t learned; on other operations I did later, the idea of allowing Special Operations Force commanders to run their operations without having to bend to the demands of conventional commanders didn’t fly.

  On November 6, 1968, I said good-bye to Vietnam. At the time I planned to come back as soon as I could. My CO Ted Lyon and I had gotten into a small pissing contest over who would take my place as OIC of Detachment Alpha. I didn’t think the officer he’d picked to relieve me was qualified; he’d been a failure in UDT-21 and left it for duty on a ship. When SEAL Two needed officers for our Vietnam operations, he’d been ordered in, he didn’t volunteer. I offered to take a thirty-day leave in Little Creek and then return to Vietnam for another six-month tour as OIC; the SEAL Team One Detachment OIC agreed to cover for me during the leave, and Art Price approved the plan. But Ted said no, and he won—he was the CO. Still, I figured I could talk him into sending me back.

  On my way through Saigon I debriefed Bill Early over numerous beers, then went to Tan Son Nhut to catch my flight back to the States. When I got back to Little Creek and I walked in to the Team, the petty officer standing quarterdeck watch said, “You again, asshole.” I said something like “F—off and stand a taut watch, slipknot.” Then we laughed and hugged each other, and he said he was glad I was back in one piece this time. We all loved each other in SEAL Two in those days, and the troops treated officers with such respect! The truth is, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The troops respected officers who were “operators,” and I truly loved the troops. There wasn’t a better group of men anywhere.

  The watch told me the XO had left word that I was to come see him as soon as I got back.

  When I went in to see Jake Rhinebolt, the door to the CO’s office was closed. Jake gave me a cup of coffee and I gave him a quick rundown, telling him I’d go into more detail when I briefed the CO. Jake started looking a little uncomfortable. The CO, he said, was awfully busy getting ready for an MTT (military training team) that SEAL Two had been told to provide somewhere. This was strange. Bill Early had personally debriefed each officer returning from Vietnam, and he’d drop anything else he was working on to do it. But Ted was different. I told Jake, “No sweat, I’ll wait here until he has time to see me.” He kept looking nervous. He told me to go home and start leave. I just looked at him. I couldn’t believe the CO of SEAL Team Two didn’t want to see his returning-from-combat detachment officer-in-charge. I figured I’d pissed him off more than I’d realized when I argued with him over my replacement. I was just a young, gunslinging lieutenant. Ted was the CO. What did I know? (Sure enough, I never did get called in to debrief Ted.)

  Before I left his office, I told Jake to put me down to go back as the next OIC. He said Ted had already picked someone else. Then I asked what I would be doing around the Team, expecting Jake to tell me I was going to be the operations officer, number three in the chain of command. He said that Ted had told him to follow seniority strictly in making assignments. There were three other lieutenants senior to me, and even though I had more combat experience than any of them, there was nothing he could do. He said I’d probably be the assistant operations or training officer. I just looked at him, shook my head, and walked out.

  I’d come from a place where I’d commanded a task group, because I was the most qualified, to a place where experience and qualification didn’t seem to matter. There was no way I was going to work for a CO who thought like a staff officer, not an operator. Also, I wasn’t going to work as an assistant for any combat-avoiding officer. Two of the three lieutenants senior to me were late arrivals from UDT, having stayed in their old commands as long as they could to avoid going to Vietnam. I thought any UDT officer who didn’t want to go to combat ought to stop drawing a paycheck. The third lieutenant had been an abject failure in Vietnam and was getting out of the Navy. I made a snap decision: it was time for me to leave SEAL Team Two.

  I went into the administrative office, called the UDT/SEAL officer detailer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and asked what he had available for me on the East Coast. I didn’t want to go to SEAL One, because there I would have been a very junior lieutenant. And I was still a reserve officer, with roots in the East.

  I’d called at a good time. The detailer was looking for someone to relieve the executive officer of UDT-22. I took the job and signed an extension-of-active-duty letter about ten minutes later. I figured I could spend a tour as XO, extend again, and then come back to SEAL Two when the leadership changed. I still hadn’t decided to make a career out of the Navy, but I was having such a good time in Vietnam I wanted to go back.

  I checked into UDT-22 in December 1968. Becky was glad that I’d be out of the war zone for a while. Though I didn’t know it then, I would never go back to Vietnam.

  17

  VIETNAM: A SEAL’S PERSPECTIVE

  I have mixed thoughts about my time in Vietnam. On the one hand, I consider it the defining period of my life; because I’d been successfu
l as a SEAL in combat, I decided to make the Navy a career. But my satisfaction is tempered by a major frustration: SEALs were never employed to their full potential.

  The military hierarchy in Vietnam completely failed to understand the SEAL capability. “Bing” West, a RAND analyst who spent a few days with me in 1968 observing our operations, put it best: “SEALs were a tactic in search of a strategy.” That remained true from the time SEAL platoons started operating in Vietnam, in 1966, until the bitter end.

  For the most part, we were relegated to the Navy river patrol forces. SEALs killed considerable numbers of the enemy, and obtained locally important intelligence. A lot of our men were wounded, but surprisingly few were killed. The latter statistic I attribute to training and the fact that we called our own shots—we simply didn’t operate where or when we didn’t want to.

  In my view, we should have been conducting high risk-high gain operations. Instead of chasing VC who harassed the river patrol forces, we could have been applied to such vexing problems as freeing American prisoners of war. I realize national policy, such as it was, barred U.S. ground forces from North Vietnam—but had we been given a chance, we would have developed executable plans. Plus, we could have been searching for and freeing Americans captured in South Vietnam before they could be transported to the North.

  As it was, in the Mekong Delta we did what seemed to be the next best thing: targeting VC prisoner camps in our areas. But that proved to be a frustrating effort, not because of the VC but because of our own insufferable military bureaucracy in Saigon. I learned that the best way to find and liberate prisoners in the delta was to develop local intelligence sources and react quickly to good information. But an organization called the Joint Resolution Center stifled that modus operandi.

  For example, in 1968 it was common knowledge in the intelligence community that the VC were holding American prisoners in mobile camps. These were prisoners the VC didn’t want to send to North Vietnam, because the southerners increased their status by having their own prisoners to flaunt. Anyway, for whatever reasons, Americans were being held in the delta. We had fairly reliable information about Americans being held near the Cambodian border, in an area called the Plain of Reeds. I amassed enough information on one such location to launch what would have been a successful recovery operation—had I not needed helicopter support from the Army. When I asked for that support, an Army colonel from the Joint Resolution Center showed up and told me, “Step aside, Lieutenant, I’m taking over.” He had a bad plan, it fell apart in the rehearsal, and they never attempted the mission.

  The SEAL experience in Vietnam was a microcosm of the larger U.S. military experience. We killed and captured a lot of Communists but never focused on the real problem. The United States fought the wrong kind of war. We were doomed to failure as early as 1964, when political leaders, on the advice of military leaders, decided to increase by an order of magnitude the number of conventional forces in Vietnam and commit ourselves to a war of attrition. President John F. Kennedy had recognized the potential quagmire in Vietnam and insisted that our involvement reflect the situation’s overriding political-military aspects. He saw the conflict as one that could not be resolved by overwhelming military technology, but that might be thwarted by properly applied pressure using “unconventional” military force.

  As a young lieutenant in Vietnam, I admit I wasn’t much smarter than those who saw the solution in search-and-destroy missions. But after a while I realized that the best way to hurt the enemy was to cut off the heads of the political cadres who ran the show. The way to make a difference was not to set ambushes in free-fire zones, but to attack the VC infrastructure. Done early, on the scale of the much-lambasted Phoenix program, that might have changed the outcome of the war. We were fighting an ideology. Killing young men and women who had been forced, by terrorist means, into serving their Communist masters wasn’t going to defeat the ideology. The only way to do that was to kill or capture the ones spreading the “idea.”

  America lost the Vietnam War before I ever got there. Should the U.S. have become involved at all? Our motives were pure within the context of the time; we couldn’t have done otherwise. There was no doubt that Soviet communism sought to establish its domination over the countries of the world. The only way to do that was to defeat its antithesis—the forces of democracy. That was the picture painted by the leaders of the Communist world in Moscow, and that was the canvas American leaders saw in the 1950s and early 1960s. To argue now that our position then was morally bankrupt is to ignore the realities of those times. What was bankrupt was the failure on the part of our military and political leadership to admit that by 1965 the situation in Vietnam could not be reversed by a massive influx of U.S. military forces. Our military leaders refused to understand that they were facing a political-military situation.

  The key to the struggle lay in the South—the Mekong Delta. The Communists knew they had to win there in order to bring down the Saigon government. And the key to victory was the elaborate political infrastructure of dedicated Communists. A direct invasion from the North would have undermined the Communists’ position that the struggle emanated from within the South and was being waged by South Vietnamese simply trying to overthrow the corrupt government in Saigon. But to keep the fight going long enough, there had to be an influx of fighters from the North. The Vietcong infrastructure in the South was the mechanism by which that infiltration was carried out. It was the infrastructure that picked up the troops coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and successfully moved them into the delta to merge with the local Vietcong main force units. And it held the effort together after the Vietcong main force units were virtually wiped out during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

  The Communist movement in the South was much like a giant lizard. Its head was the small group of dedicated Communists who formed the political infrastructure. Its tail was the military force. Each time we hacked off a portion of the tail and proclaimed that we had seriously damaged the creature, the head of the lizard grew more tail. Our strategy all along should have been to go after the head. But our military was not keen on fighting anything but another military force, and as long as the Vietcong could give us a main force unit to kick every now and then we’d ignore the real problem. While we were busy searching and destroying with large U.S. military forces, the political infrastructure was busy setting us up, building the network that eventually paved the way for the takeover of Saigon. The vast majority of Vietcong military units were not made up of the dedicated, fearless fighters portrayed in our news media. Most people in the Mekong Delta were apolitical; they just wanted to be left alone to grow their crops and survive. The Vietcong infrastructure, through coercion and terror, filled its ranks with these average people. Eliminate the infrastructure and there would have been no Vietcong military force.

  The Communist strategy for the war was simple—keep fighting until enough political pressure built up in America to get out of the war. Ho Chi Minh and his advisers in Moscow were students of the American way of war. They knew that we liked to enter a war only as a last resort and then commit ourselves to a total military victory, as we had done in two previous world wars. The Communist leaders knew that if they could prolong the war we’d eventually tire and go home—that was one lesson of Korea. Some in the U.S. military did understand the situation and attempted to point us down the right path. But the mainstream military structure couldn’t accept any course that didn’t include the core of the U.S. military structure—conventional forces. If any of our leaders had read and understood Bernard Fall’s 1963 book about the French experience in Vietnam, Street Without Joy, they would have seen the error of the conventional strategy.

  The correct course of action came too late and with too few resources to have an effect. It was the much-maligned Phoenix program. One of its objectives was to do away with the Vietcong political structure, particularly in the Mekong Delta. In the delta the strategy worked well considering its late start. The P
hoenix Program went after the head of the lizard.

  But our political and military leaders chose to wage a war of attrition, thinking that sooner or later the other side would run out of fighters and give up. This bogus strategy allowed the Communists to win. They managed to create 58,000 body bags filled with brave young Americans. With no discernible end in sight, our country lost the will to continue the fight. Communists also did a masterly job of working on the folks back home through our news media, which correctly pointed out the futility of killing enough Communists to make them quit. Other Americans with less-honorable intentions aided the Communist cause. The Vietnam War split our country. It gave certain U.S. citizens a platform to actively attempt to bring down our form of government, while being glorified by our news media for “doing the right thing.” The picture of Jane Fonda posing with a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun crew after they had just shot down U.S. airmen doing their duty, is indelibly etched in my mind. No amount of apologizing on her part will ever convince me she wasn’t providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

  Escaping military service became vogue. In all previous wars, draft dodgers had been prosecuted. This time, draft dodgers fleeing to Canada were excused because they objected to war. I object to war. Many people object to war, but in the past they served, they didn’t run. In December 1966 I encountered a former college fraternity brother at a party. He told me, proudly, that he’d conjured up a “hardship” reason to avoid the draft because he didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I was furious. I had recently visited a friend in the Portsmouth naval hospital who had been shot down flying an A-6 over Hanoi, and I was on my way to Vietnam. Becky grabbed me as I was about to hit my “brother.” Fortunately, she only decreased the force of my punch. If I’d run into the guy a year later, after my first tour, I would have ripped his head off.