by Couch, Dick
My platoon was working out of a base called Solid Anchor, the only Navy-controlled area of operations in Vietnam. Solid Anchor was located in the southern portion of An Xuien Province. If Florida were Vietnam, it was the area at the southern tip, just below and west of Miami. Most of the territory was controlled by local-force Viet Cong guerrillas with an occasional company-sized North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit moving through the area. A SEAL command history from that time described the environment like this: “exposure to almost impenetrable mangrove swamps, mud, tidal flats, prolonged immersions in water, and infestations of crocodiles, snakes, and other tropical animals, insects, and diseases, in conjunction with enemy booby-traps, punji stakes, and direct contact, have become a matter of routine on patrols, ambushes, and listening post operations.” It was miserable, but it was equally miserable for our enemy.
Our faces were smeared with olive green and black paint, and we wore blue jeans. In contrast to standard-issue Navy “cammies,” which when wet made noise as your legs scraped together, blue jeans were quiet when moist. Like typical SEALs on a mission, we were bristling with grenades and ammunition. I carried the SEALs’ favorite weapon in Vietnam, a Stoner 63A machine gun with a short, 15.7-inch barrel. It was a limited-edition firearm that only the SEALs used routinely. We liked it because it was light, accurate, and reasonably reliable if you kept it clean. It was an early version of the modern-day SAW, or squad automatic weapon. With adjustment, you could get the Stoner up to 800 or 900 5.56 rounds per minute. It was “our gun.” Two SEALs in a SEAL squad usually carried Stoner machine guns and one SEAL, a modified, short-barreled M60 machine gun that was tricked out with a flex-feed tray for fire-suppressing 7.62 rounds. The other SEALs carried M16 rifles or CAR15s with M203 grenade launchers underneath them.
This was our maiden solo mission, and it was the first operation I ever led. I did, however, have some excellent preparation for my first op. Just before we deployed to Vietnam, we had two months of intensive “cadre training” at SEAL Team One’s base at Coronado. This training was conducted by team SEALs who had recently returned from Vietnam. They drilled us on what to expect, how to move, and what to watch out for in this unique world of jungle combat. They taught us what we needed to know to go to Vietnam—and nothing else. You can train in simulated situations all you want, but there’s nothing like timely input from people who have just been there. Training in the SEAL teams back then was all about squad-sized operations in Vietnam. We did very little parachuting, diving, or anything else. It was all about going to Vietnam.
While most of us in Whiskey Platoon were green, we were blessed with a veteran petty officer first class named Walt Gustavel. Walt, or Gus as he was known at Team One, was on his fifth rotation to Vietnam. He was the institutional knowledge of Whiskey Platoon. It was Gus who developed the intelligence that surfaced this POW camp and found a local fisherman guide who could take us there. His skill in working with the local Vietnamese villagers and village chiefs made this mission happen.
This was not a raid that was gamed out far in advance or planned in detail. It was a pickup operation, and we had to move quickly. Gus had learned of this suspected POW camp in talking with a Vietnamese scout and two captured VC irregulars. His rapport with a local village chief produced our guide. He came to me with the information and said this fisherman could lead us to the camp.
“If this guy is telling us the truth, and I think he is,” declared Gus as we huddled around a map of the AO in our Solid Anchor hooch, “There’s a good chance we can get in there. Here’s the camp’s location. If we go in tonight, we can set up and surprise them at daylight.” The suspected POW site was about twenty-six miles west of our base at Solid Anchor. It was just off a large, shallow bay called Square Bay and down a canal that meandered south from the bay. The information that Gus had come by was what today’s SEALs call “actionable intelligence,” and we had to move as fast as we could. POW camps were known to be moved often.
In a few hours, we worked up an operational plan and alerted other American forces in the area about the operation. We put together an extraction plan with boats and helicopters to support the mission. At 10:00 P.M. our team of seven SEALs and five Vietnamese piled into a motorized, thirty-six-foot Medium SEAL Support Craft, or MSSC, to cross Square Bay after dark and anchor near the river entrance. Accompanying the MSSC was a smaller, twenty-six-foot LSSC (Light SEAL Support Craft) and three sampans. We then transferred into the three sampans we were towing so we could make a quiet approach on the camp.
We had planned to move slowly and strike at first light, but we got lost; somehow, we had paddled down the wrong river. On learning of our mistake we quickly retraced our route, found the right canal entrance one hundred meters from the first, and softly paddled on to the target.
The South Vietnamese Kit Carson Scouts who were assigned to our platoon were a tremendous resource. The force was named after the legendary Western frontiersman and scout, and its members were drawn from former Viet Cong fighters who rallied to our side by a sanctioned amnesty program. In Vietnamese, they were called Hi Chánh Viên, which roughly translates to “members who have returned to the righteous side.” SEAL platoons often operated with a half dozen or more Kit Carson Scouts. They lived with us and when in the field, they often walked on point or very close to the SEAL point man. They were officially in the South Vietnamese Army, but we paid them in cash with bonus payments for operational success. In our barracks hooch, I slept in a top bunk and one of my scouts slept in the lower bed. That’s how much we trusted them.
When patrolling in hostile territory, SEALs were always concerned with booby traps, “small IEDs” before they were known as such. When a scout refused to walk down a trail and recommended an alternate route to the objective, we were only too glad to take his advice. The scouts slept, ate, and fought alongside the SEALs—we considered them brother warriors. They were an invaluable source of area knowledge and local intelligence.
In addition to our training, Walt Gustavel, and the Kit Carson Scouts, we were blessed with the Seawolves. The Seawolves were helicopter gunships from the Navy’s HAL (Helicopter Assault, Light)–3 squadron. Flown by U.S. Navy pilots, they were always prepared to go into harm’s way for SEALs who were on the ground. For this operation, they were standing off, ready for our signal to fly in and support us when we assaulted the POW camp. The Seawolf pilots were superb. “I don’t know a single SEAL who operated in Vietnam and wasn’t saved by those guys at least once,” wrote veteran Vietnam-era SEAL leader Robert Gormly. “They were the best helo crews I’d ever seen. Land-based throughout the Delta and aboard LSTs (amphibious support vessels anchored at the mouths of rivers), they’d fly anywhere, any time, to support us. Night or day, good weather or bad, they were there. I can’t tell you the number of times I could feel the heat from their rockets as they passed over our heads toward the enemy. Often Seawolf fire teams made dry runs on the enemy after they had expended all their ordnance in order to give our guys a chance to break contact and get the hell out. And they were just as likely to land and pick up our guys if things got really serious.” SEAL veteran Tom Hawkins added, “The SEALs and the Seawolves became a natural component of each other and the SEALs set up a lot of operations with the Seawolves’ support in mind. The Seawolves sometimes became Medevac helicopters. The SEALs would get in contact, the Seawolves would scramble, get out and lay down gunfire, lay down rockets, and even land to get some of the guys if they were wounded. Fabulous, fabulous organization. Great warriors, great pilots.” Today, SEALs have the Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Squadron, the “Nightstalkers,” but back then we had the Seawolves.
Closing on the suspected POW campsite, we quietly paddled our three sampans up to a ramshackle guard post. One of the scouts slipped into the guard shack and silently captured two enemy sentries. Through my interpreter, I asked one, “Where’s the POW camp?” He refused to answer. I placed my Ka-Bar field knife at his throat and asked again. Still nothing
. Now what? One of my Kit Carson Scouts offered to help, and I was delighted to step aside. The Scout bent down and addressed the Viet Cong guard in Vietnamese: “You know who I am, and what I will do if you don’t talk.”
Suddenly, the guard gave up the exact location: “The camp you want is one hundred meters farther down the canal.” We gagged both sentries, stowed them in the third sampan, and continued gliding south on the narrow canal. But now that our target was coming into sight and dawn was breaking, I had a huge problem. Our radio was dead. I could not contact our primary support platform, the Medium SEAL Support Craft (MSSC) north of us in Square Bay.
“We are about to engage; we are about to engage!” I transmitted, hoping someone might hear me.
We had traveled outside radio range, and I had no radio contact with the support helicopters and boats. And I was scared. Today our troops in the field have individual radio headsets, secure channels, multiple backups, and satellite links for reliable communications. In Vietnam, however, we were practically in the World War II transistor age. One radioman per squad carried a heavy, old radio pack. In the dense foliage in which we operated, they were terribly unreliable.
I had no idea of the size of the guard force at our suspected POW camp. If we attacked without gunship support and were pushed back by a superior Viet Cong force, it would be extremely dangerous, not only for us but for the POWs. They could be caught in the middle of the exchange or withdrawn deep into enemy-held territory. It would be impossible to follow them. POWs are essentially hostages, subject to immediate execution by their captors at any time. If they move, you follow with great caution. In previous rescue operations, American forces acted on what seemed to be good intelligence and launched fast-reaction raids on possible POW sites, only to find the locations deserted, and in some cases, the cooking fires still warm.
But there were some shining successes in freeing Vietnamese prisoners in the South, and the U.S. Navy SEALs were often the agents of salvation. On the night of August 30, 1968, a South Vietnamese force led by an American SEAL stormed a POW compound in the Mekong Delta and liberated forty-eight prisoners. That October, a combined SEAL/South Vietnamese force inserted on Con Coc Island, seventy-seven miles southwest of Saigon, and freed twenty-four Vietnamese prisoners. On the very same day, a similar SEAL-led force freed another twenty-six Vietnamese prisoners at another location.
And on August 21, 1970, a SEAL team under the command of Louis Boink conducted a complex daylight raid on a POW camp. This action involved U.S. naval gunfire, Australian bombers, U.S. helicopter gunships, and a beach assault by Boink’s SEAL team and a Vietnamese Regional Forces platoon. They found an empty compound. The guards had forced the prisoners to evacuate and flee.
As SEAL historian T. L. Bosiljevac related, the operation ended miraculously: “For two hours, the SEALs remained in hot pursuit through the swamp, following a trail of clothing and abandoned equipment. At 1245 they discovered twenty-eight Vietnamese prisoners whose guards had fled for their lives.”
But not all recovery operations of that era were successful. On November 21, 1970, a joint U.S. Army–Air Force team raided a North Vietnamese POW compound at Son Tay, near the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, only to find the camp empty of Americans. They had been relocated to another site a full four months earlier.
It was but a day following the Son Tay raid that my small SEAL force glided on a narrow canal to the edge of another suspected enemy POW camp. With my radio down, I was on the verge of aborting the mission. It was a tough call, but I felt we had come too far to turn back this close to the camp.
We were new to Vietnam, but we were aware of the Viet Cong’s reputation for combat skill and ferocity, and we had a healthy respect for it. As SEAL Vietnam veteran Jack Rowell put it, “Charlie [the Vietnamese communist fighters] was no enemy to fool with or take lightly. Charlie was very professional and acted like an animal all at the same time. We could be sly in the Teams, but Charlie was downright sneaky. He would operate on hardly anything, little support and almost no fire support he couldn’t carry with him in the Delta. But the VC were as tough and deadly an enemy as you could face. The VC were a lot like we were back in the days of the revolutionary war.”
I passed the word along to my SEAL element: “Prepare to assault.” As I said this, I was fiddling around with one of my pop-up signal flares, which was now my only means of communication. My top priority was to get that pop flare up into the sky to signal my MSSC support boat out in Square Bay that we needed help. He would call in the Seawolves and once those choppers were overhead, I’d have an airborne relay to restore radio communications.
It’s hard to put into words the emotions I felt as a SEAL leader coming up to that camp. I had a mission, I had a time frame, it was starting to get light, and I didn’t quite know what I was going to get into. I had no radio communications. My mind was trying to sort everything out. I was very much trying to see the big picture and do the right thing. All emotion and all fear were pushed out by two overpowering thoughts: “What am I going to do? What’s the right thing to do?”
Crouching in the boat, I fumbled the signal flare and dropped it. It made a loud metallic clank on the floor of the sampan, like dropping an empty beer can on your back porch. Then the first shots were fired.
All hell broke loose. My Kit Carson Scouts broke from the canal bank, running and shooting in the direction of the camp. My SEALs followed them. I recovered the flare and sent it skyward, praying that the boat would spot it. The Viet Cong guards opened fire at us, and tracer rounds flew in all directions; ours were red and theirs were green.
It happened very, very quickly. It was a thirty-second gunfight. Our South Vietnamese scouts went on full automatic fire, dumped their magazines, and ran around trying to wrestle their new magazines into their weapons. The SEALs with M-60s and the Stoners were putting out a shattering volume of fire, but the SEAL riflemen were looking for targets. They didn’t see too many because the bad guys shot and then they ran into the jungle. The Viet Cong guards probably figured we were a company-sized force, so they just took off. I did not fire my weapon, as I was trying to coordinate the attack and figure out what was going on and what to do next.
In less than a minute, we had overrun the camp and the shooting stopped.
In a bizarre scene straight from a Hollywood movie set, there were the POWs—a total of nineteen military-aged Vietnamese men, in four locked bamboo cages, each holding about five human beings inside. No Americans.
We stood still at the center of the POW camp, temporarily frozen by the unreality of the scene. The prisoners were in their twenties to forties, wearing T-shirts and baggy shorts, each barefoot and very thin and visibly malnourished. They were all smiles at their impending liberation, but on balance they were very stoic about it. They were subdued, probably from exhaustion and hunger, or perhaps it was just pragmatism in the face of a long war. We seemed to be much happier about this whole thing than they were.
I had a radio in one hand and a gun in the other, and my mind raced with questions. Are the VC regrouping to counterattack us? How fast can we get out of here? Where are the helicopters? Should I put up another flare? Where are the boats? Are there any more threats in the camp? Did we get all the bad guys or are some hiding? What’s next, what’s next?
“Get out on perimeter,” I told my SEALs. “We’ve got to protect these guys and get the hell out of here. We’ve got to get ready to move.” It was critical that we get out fast, since we had to leave by a narrow, twelve-foot-wide canal, and the VC knew it. We didn’t want to give them time to set up an ambush.
We set up a security perimeter and took stock of the camp. We learned that there had been about twenty guards. Through the interpreter I told the POWs to sit down and be quiet. The Kit Carson Scouts were starting to look through the crude hooches trying to find money. They were big looters.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” said a SEAL from inside one of the hooches, “we found all kinds of shit here, docu
ments, dossiers, ledgers, and folders.” The VC were very good at keeping records. “Fine,” I said, “pack it up and let’s get ready to go.” We scooped up all the stuff we could get our hands on and quickly prepared the documents for transport.
By now I had continuous helicopter support overhead and my radio could reach the crews. The crew of the MSSC saw my flare, and had called in a section of Seawolf gunships. Then the smaller of the SEAL support craft, the LSSC, made its way two thousand meters down the canal to our position. The officer-in-charge of my Special Boat Unit One detachment was a terrific fellow named Bob Natter, who arrived on the LSSC. Bob and I were classmates and company mates at the Naval Academy and had been fast friends since our plebe-midshipmen days. It was nice to have a good buddy guarding your back. Bob would later retire as a four-star admiral, but back then he was a special operations small-craft officer who supported SEALs.
When Bob and his boat reached the camp, we realized we had a problem; we now had more people than the boat could carry. In addition to the eleven of us who came in by sampan, we had nineteen ex-POWs and a mother and daughter who had been made to do camp chores by the now-departed Viet Cong. And there were the two captured Viet Cong sentries.
We decided that we’d evacuate the Vietnamese by air and the SEALs by water. Fortunately, we’d anticipated this and had a chain saw stashed in Bob’s LSSC. We cranked it up and got busy cutting down trees and brush to create a zone for the transport helos. The Huey slicks were able to hover low over the mangrove stumps and ferry out the freed prisoners. It took three lifts to get everyone out. As my SEALs and I evacuated in the crowded but armored LSSC we took precautions against a VC ambush on the way out. The Seawolf helicopters plastered both banks of the canal with fire from their .50-caliber door guns.
