Combat Swimmer

by Robert A. Gormly

  On June 22, Maynard asked me to come see him and asked how things were going. I said, “Not bad.” I figured I owed some loyalty to my new command. I wasn’t going to go into the details of the previous Friday night because my first day at the command convinced me that the behavior I saw then wasn’t a fair sample of the command. I told Maynard there was nothing I couldn’t handle. All the men needed was some good leadership and adult supervision, and I could provide both. We did, however, discuss the events that transpired after I left the bar.

  After Pete and I left, Dick had told his driver to drive him around Virginia Beach. At a stoplight, they rear-ended another car, driven by a “little old lady.” The accident did considerable damage to both cars, but fortunately no one was hurt. Dick had his car spirited off to a local Mercedes dealer for repairs.

  Pete and I learned about the accident at the same time Monday morning. Normally the duty officer would have notified Pete at once, and Pete would have sent a standard SITREP—situation report—to the chain of command. In the military, the rule is clear and uncompromising: you report such events immediately, so the hierarchy doesn’t hear about them from the news media. But Dick had ordered the duty officer to notify only the operations officer, Lieutenant Bill Davis, and specifically not to tell the XO or me. And he’d told the OPSO not to send any reports or tell anyone, including Pete and me. But Bill Davis, being a good officer, found he couldn’t follow such an order; he came in first thing Monday and told Pete, who immediately sent the required reports and initiated an investigation.

  Now Maynard told me that Vice Admiral Briggs had ordered him to take over that investigation. Apparently Briggs was angry that Dick had used one of the four Mercedeses “owned” by Six to go to the watering hole. Some background about these cars: Claiming that they were needed for operations, Dick had used “procurement” money to buy them in Germany, despite being told not to do so by both his operational and his administrative commanders. Then he shipped the cars to the U.S. in a “mission” C-141. Both chains of command investigated the incident but since no one knew what else to do with the American taxpayers’ new vehicles, Six was allowed to retain them, and Dick was told not to do anything like that again. Actually, the purchase really was a good idea. All four vehicles were police configured, and two were off-road “Jeep” types that proved to be very useful in later mission planning. The real problem was, Dick used one of them, a gray sedan, as a personal vehicle, although Maynard told him not to. He argued that the command’s high alert status required him to have an appropriately equipped vehicle with him at all times. Again, the argument had merit but he never took the time to send a proper request through the chain of command to CNO to get a waiver. And Maynard was in the hot seat with Briggs because it appeared he had no control over Dick.

  The investigation lasted about three weeks. Dick wound up being taken to “captain’s mast”—this is the lowest-level discipline system in the Navy, for minor offenses that don’t warrant a court-martial—and getting a letter of reprimand from Maynard. Usually that’s enough to end the career of a Navy officer. In the course of the investigation, Dick tried to blame the entire incident on his driver. I couldn’t believe it. And when word leaked out to the troops, most of them were really pissed.

  During our June 22 meeting, Maynard asked if I would be ready to relieve Dick by July 8. He was concerned that, if we didn’t transfer the command by then, Dick might find a way to keep it from happening. I said that although I had found the job much more complex than I had imagined, I could take over that day, only I’d need his support if I uncovered any rats’ nests. He said not to worry, and the change-of-command ceremony was scheduled for July 8.

  Normally an outgoing CO spends a lot of time with his relief, explaining the nuances of the command. Dick and I met in his office on July 8, about ten minutes before the ceremony. He showed me the safe, the refrigerator, the gin, and the gin glasses, and that was it. The formal ceremony, before the assembled troops, took no more than twenty minutes. Usually, the officer immediately senior to the CO will tell all assembled how great a guy the outgoing CO is and how all should support the new guy so there will be a seamless transfer of responsibility. The operational commander spoke for about one minute, telling the command how great they were. Maynard said nothing. Dick spoke disconnectedly for a few minutes, but he did say that even though he didn’t want to leave I was the best person to relieve him. I think he still believed Lyons would intervene and put him back in the saddle by October.

  I was in command of Six—let the fun begin.

  19

  ONE MORE CLOSE CALL: URGENT FURY

  In 1983 the leftist, Cuban-backed government of Grenada, with the help of Cuban engineers, was hastily constructing an airfield at Point Salines; ostensibly, the airfield was intended for civil aviation, but it was capable of handling military aircraft. In the Cold War era, to have a military airfield built and supported by a country aligned with the Soviet Union was unacceptable to the United States.

  On October 25, the U.S. military launched Operation Urgent Fury to rescue American medical students attending classes at the Grenadan Medical University just outside the capital, St. George’s. To carry out that mission the forces were ordered to take over the island and rescue the former governor general, who was being held under house arrest by the new regime.

  I’d been in command since July but most of my time had been spent trying to garner operational funding; the coffers had been depleted by my predecessor. On the Friday afternoon four days before Urgent Fury, I received an odd phone call from the chief of staff of the Joint Headquarters, who told me to be ready to come see him the next day for briefing on an operation. I asked my operations officer, Lieutenant Bill Davis, what was going on, but he said he didn’t know. I had a feeling my first exposure to Joint Headquarters procedures might be a real operation.

  The next morning I was eating breakfast in my kitchen when the phone rang and the chief of staff told me to get to a meeting at CINCLANT headquarters as fast as I could. This surprised me; Joint Headquarters normally took direction from the secretary of defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so having CINCLANT in the operational picture seemed strange. But what the hell—I was a new guy in the organization. I called Bill Davis and told him to meet me there.

  Commander Dick “Andy” Anderson, a SEAL officer assigned to the operational commander’s staff (and an old SEAL Team Two, Vietnam compatriot), was at the security station when I arrived. We went directly to a briefing room on the second deck. There was a buzz of activity. Army Lieutenant Colonel Dick Pack, from the Joint Headquarters operations division, told me briefly that JCS wanted us to “take down” an island in the Caribbean—Grenada. He said we would be working with CINCLANT; the commanding general (CG) of the Joint Headquarters had objected to that, but was overruled when CINCLANT convinced the chairman that because Grenada was in his area of responsibility he should be in charge. This was to be the first time the Joint Headquarters had ever conducted an actual operation and the departure from the planned chain of command proved to have a big impact on it.

  Showing my keen geographic knowledge, I asked, “Where is Grenada?”

  Pack pointed to a speck on the map, then explained that the CG wanted us to get an Air Force combat-control team into the Salines Point airfield that night or the next. They were to determine if the runways were clear so U.S. Army Rangers, tasked to seize the airfield, could land in C- 130s. If it were blocked they would have to parachute instead. He had to brief CINCLANT in five minutes and needed my concept of operations. Andy said there was some planning going on in the room behind us, so we joined in.

  I asked what Navy ships were near Grenada and was shown the order of battle. There was a destroyer in port at an island just east of Grenada that also had a civilian airfield. I turned to Bill Davis and told him we’d simply throw our guys and the two-man combat-control team in a C-130 along with a couple of rubber boats and fly them to the a
irfield; from there, they could board the destroyer. The ship could then launch our people for the reconnaissance of the Grenadan airfield. It sounded simple and effective. Whatever gear the men needed to take would fit easily in the C-130, and they’d get there in a hurry. I told Bill to get on the secure phone and recall our standby assault team, then went to the briefing room and filled Pack in. The briefing had already begun, and I took a place off to the side.

  When Pack explained how I planned to put our people on the destroyer, the CINC objected: he didn’t want us tipping our hand by using military aircraft. Someone in the audience asked why we didn’t jump the men in, so I spoke up: we could; at-sea jumps were routine for SEALs. But since we had Air Force people involved, I’d rather keep it simple. At that point, Pack introduced me to the crowd and I said I’d continue working on the problem. I knew the Joint Headquarters had access to “civilianized” military aircraft and I figured it would be easy to get one on short notice. We also had direct access to other civilianized aircraft, smaller than I thought we’d need but easier to arrange.

  Bill and I drove back to our headquarters, planning en route. Back at Six, Pete Stevens had everyone we needed on board. The standby team was in and getting their gear ready. I got everyone together and went over the plan. It seemed simple and would require only about six of our guys.

  With Master Chief Billy Acklin, my senior enlisted man and air operations expert, Bill Davis and I left immediately for the Joint Headquarters, some 200 miles away. The place was hopping; the Army colonel who was the operations chief told me to be prepared to brief the CG in thirty minutes. Meanwhile, though, Billy Acklin told me the navigation equipment on the small civilianized plane needed parts and wouldn’t be ready for another week. The operations chief put his guys to work getting another, larger civilianized plane.

  After I briefed the CG, he said he’d gotten permission from CINCLANT to put our people in the next night. “And by the way,” he said, “you’ve got some more missions.” My other assault teams would be on standby at Salines airfield for expected rescues and direct-action missions—raids.

  At 1800 on October 22, we learned the commanding general had to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 0700 the next morning. Our standby team and some members of another assault team arrived around 2000 and began the struggle to come up with good plans amid a flurry of activity. Davis, Acklin, and I went from pillar to post seeking intelligence to help us. It was at this point that I learned of the Cuban “engineers”—who were probably military advisers.

  The civilianized aircraft was to arrive at midnight to pick up our reconnaissance team. Acklin and I went to the airport at 2300 to see the guys off. So far so good.

  Back at the command center, things had changed dramatically. The CG, having thus far restricted our operations to the western end of the island, where all the important targets were located, now wanted to take a look at a second airfield on Grenada’s eastern end. He wanted another combat-control team in there the next night, because the guys we had just launched couldn’t reconnoiter both.

  We huddled with the combat-control planners, who finally suggested we “rubber-duck” people in. I asked when they had last dropped inflatable rubber boats (used by all SEAL Teams as their basic insertion craft) by parachute at sea. They said never. Our guys had never done a rubber-duck drop either, but they had dropped our Boston Whalers, which had been in SEAL Team Six since the command was formed. Bill and I both believed it would be no sweat to drop our Whalers near the destroyer during the day. This was also a good way for me to get down there to take over. Like all SEALs, I wanted to get to the action, and the two reconnaissance operations were all we had going. I told the standby team leader to get my gear packed in one of our boats.

  Then plans changed again: we’d been taken off the standby mode and were going to have some real targets. The CG told me to get with the Army component commander and divide up the targets.

  The colonel and I looked at the target list. Our two units were to liberate political prisoners and rescue the governor general. The politicals were in a prison that looked very formidable—a good job for the Army, I thought, and he agreed. We’d handle the governor general as well as another target, the Radio Grenada broadcast station, located near the sea at Beausejour, about seven miles north of the governor general’s mansion. Also, I said we’d plan for two other targets at the eastern end of the island that the general wanted covered.

  We were to seize the governor general’s mansion and the radio station and hold both targets for about four hours, until we were relieved by elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, who were to land at Salines airfield soon after it was under Joint Headquarters control. They would transport the governor general to the radio station so he could broadcast to the world that the U.S. presence in Grenada was legal and desired by the legal government.

  The Whalers were rigged for parachuting. We planned to drop them to the destroyer about 1600 the next day at a point about forty miles northeast of Grenada, well away from the airfields but also on the opposite side of the island from the routes used by local merchant ships. I didn’t want to risk being seen by them.

  By now it was becoming clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to jump; I’d have to stay at the Joint Headquarters to plan the other missions. But because the mission was so important, I would go with the assault team to rescue the governor general and establish my command post at his mansion. The boat-drop team was ready and the planes were being loaded. They pulled my gear out of the boat and, after a brief delay in loading because of power failure on the base, the C-130s took off. I told the men to do good.

  On October 23, while the CG was at the Pentagon briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they learned that the Marine barracks at Beirut Airport had been bombed.

  Up till now, the Marines had not been involved in Urgent Fury; the initial assault was a Joint Headquarters show, with the 82nd Airborne Division and other forces coming in after. But now that the Marines had been bloodied in Beirut, they wanted an active role. Politics took over and the island was divided down the middle, with the Joint Headquarters retaining the southwestern part and the Marines given the go-ahead to make an amphibious landing at the smaller airfield in the northeast. The chain of command changed as well. Instead of reporting directly to CINCLANT as the task force commander, our commanding general was made subordinate to a joint task force commanded by a Navy admiral, who would now be the on-scene commander for the entire operation. This was a dramatic change to make only hours before we were supposed to launch. And there would be more.

  The Joint Headquarters had planned for an 0200 H-hour on October 25. SEALs were trained and equipped to operate at night, under the cover of darkness. All our tactics were based on that. The problem was, the Marines, like most conventional military forces in those days, weren’t trained very well for night helo operations. So they wanted a daylight H-hour. After much gnashing of teeth and our CG threatening to pull us out, H-hour was set at 0500—first light—to accommodate the coordinated assault. At least we’d have some darkness as we approached our targets.

  Finally, the new command structure dictated new targeting. We lost two targets we had been planning for at the eastern end of Grenada. And, though I didn’t learn it until the next day, the Marines didn’t want us doing a reconnaissance at Perles, the smaller airfield, which was in their OPAREA.

  Bill Davis and I went to the Joint Headquarters Tactical Operations Center at 1600, October 23, to get news of the boat drop, scheduled for 1600. But 1600 came and went—no drop. Bill learned the drop had been rescheduled for 1800 because the planes had to fly a longer, circuitous route to avoid detection. The air planners said not to worry because there would still be plenty of daylight at 1800.

  At 1800 we listened on the SATCOM radio as the planes reported their drop runs. Normally, the two planes would approach the drop zone (the destroyer) in tandem formation from downwind, with the trail plane just above the lead. Both would turn
into the wind on final heading to drop the boats and jumpers right next to the destroyer. My guys on the ship sent a radio report that they were ready and the weather was okay. The planes turned final and dropped. Then things went to shit.

  First, it wasn’t daylight. It was pitch dark, with no moon. Urgent Fury had been planned on “local” time. Eastern Daylight Time was the same as Atlantic Standard Time, which applies in Grenada. That is, it was the same, until 0200 of the day we launched the reconnaissance team: the Atlantic time zone didn’t observe daylight saving time. When we “fell back,” they stayed the same. Instead of an easy daylight drop my men had to do a more complicated night drop. I didn’t know it at the time, but SEAL Six had never done a night boat drop—or any night water parachuting, for that matter.

  Second, the trailing C-130 missed its turn point and dropped our men some two miles away. The destroyer’s pickup party had to split into two groups and the ship had to maneuver accordingly. (In the aftermath, the Air Force couldn’t really explain why the second plane had gone astray, except that the pilot had made an error. The real problem was that the C- 130 crews, though well trained, were not familiar with water drops.)

  Third, the jump took place in the middle of a rain squall that apparently came out of nowhere. Such squalls are not unusual in the Caribbean but, for some reason, no one noticed the shift in weather until it was too late.

  Alone, night drop and the separation of the two groups might not have made a difference, but the squall combined with them did. Four of my men died. To this day I don’t know for sure what happened to them. We never found their bodies. I can only surmise that the four men couldn’t get rid of their canopies, were dragged through the water facedown, and drowned. In a matter of minutes the weight of the chutes would have dragged the bodies to the bottom. All the gear was rigged for a daylight drop, so no strobe lights were attached to the jumpers or the boats. A jumper with a problem would have had to solve it himself, because no one could see him. Strangely, the four lost men came from the plane that dropped next to the ship.