by Couch, Dick
As the sun came up, soldiers from the pro-Marxist Grenadian People’s Revolutionary Army and militia launched a rolling wave of attacks on the governor general’s compound with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and Soviet-made BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. “We were constantly under attack from the arsenal of arms and ammunition in the [nearby] Prime Minister’s residence,” remembered Sir Scoon. “For the next twenty-six hours, the dining room was our dormitory without food, without water, and without the necessities for a comfortable rest. In fact, there was no sleep during the long and perilous night that followed the dismal and dreadful day. As the sounds of gunfire resounded in our ears, the portraits of members of the Royal Family past and present looked down solemnly upon us as we quietly and humbly lay on the bare hard wooden floor.”
At one point, a pro-Marxist Grenadian police official got a call through to the house and told Mrs. Scoon he would send some of his troops over to “protect” them. The quick-thinking Mrs. Scoon sweetly turned him down, explaining that he needn’t bother, since they were already being guarded by “a large number of extremely well-armed men.” As the battle intensified, Mrs. Scoon broke down and wept. “Suppose we were to die?” she asked. “Is it really worth it?” Her husband replied that “if it was the Lord’s will that we should die, then I truly believed that we would be dying for the sake of our country in which common humanity, love, and freedom would hopefully prevail thereafter.”
“I don’t care if I die now,” said a nearby Grenadian police corporal who was loyal to Scoon and stayed by his side during the ordeal. “I am happy that these people [the SEALs] have come to our rescue. They should have come long before now.” His words were punctuated by an incoming explosion that struck a bay window in the next room. “The Commander of the SEALs performed superbly throughout the siege,” explained Sir Scoon years later. “He was never too far from my wife and me and his ever-watchful eye over us helped to embolden our spirit. He appeared not to be ruffled. From time to time he would enquire about our health, always reassuring us that all would be well.”
Without their SATCOM satellite radios, the SEALs had only limited-range MX-360 handheld radios with a short battery life, and they had to patch together a tenuous radio relay system through nearby U.S. Army radio posts to call for air support. Suddenly a trio of Soviet-made Grenadian BTR-60 armored personnel carriers appeared ready to storm up to the residence. “I got real worried,” recalled SEAL commander Gormly, who at this point was coordinating support for his team from the USS Guam. “We had enough men in the mansion to resist a good-sized infantry force, but they didn’t have the weapons to deal with BTR-60 APCs.” He summoned an Air Force AC-130 gunship to fly over the mansion. “The BTRs were now inside the gate, headed slowly for the house, as if they weren’t sure what to do,” Gormly wrote. “The first one got nailed by 20mm Vulcan cannons from the AC130 just as he was swinging his turret toward the mansion. The next two were hit immediately afterward.”
Once the BTRs were destroyed, Gormly radioed to Leonard that he would keep an AC-130 constantly overhead for protection, and a reinforced U.S. Marine company would make an amphibious landing that night and patrol to the mansion by early the next morning to relieve the SEALs. Leonard replied with a laconic “No sweat.” Gormly later wrote, “At this point I was really proud of Duke. He had seen action in Vietnam and had been decorated for bravery, but in this situation he’d been more than brave—he’d been smart and cool.”
When the Marines finally arrived at the mansion on the morning of October 26, the SEALs had only a few rounds of ammunition left. Scoon, a courtly, highly distinguished civil servant, made a point of thanking the SEALs, who were, he said, “perfect gentlemen.” From his first interactions with the SEALs onward through the difficult ordeal that followed, Scoon said he knew he and his wife would be safe.
Days after the invasion of Grenada, in an appearance on Meet the Press, then–Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey candidly summarized the episode: “We planned the operation in a very short period of time—in about 48 hours. We planned it with insufficient intelligence for the type of operation we wanted to conduct. As a result we probably used more force than we needed to do the job, but the operation went reasonably well.” General Colin Powell, then assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, saw some hollowness in the victory, saying, “The operation demonstrated how far cooperation among the services still had to go. The invasion of Grenada succeeded, but it was a sloppy success.”
Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel John T. Carney Jr., a veteran of the failed Desert One operation in Iran, analyzed the operation with much more brutal candor: “We achieved our mission, but took heavy casualties. Nineteen men were killed in action and 123 wounded. The enemy was a hastily organized force of about 50 Cuban military advisers, over 700 Cuban construction workers, and one thousand two hundred members of Grenada’s People’s Revolutionary Army. Many of the casualties were from friendly fire. To this day, I doubt that any one person knows how ineptly Urgent Fury was planned and executed. However, the operation proved a defining moment for special operations, for it led directly to the creation, by Congressional mandate [the Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986], three years later, of the U.S. Special Operations Command.”
However controversial the overall operation was, at least one Grenadian insider saw the invasion as a symbolic first domino in the imminent global collapse of Soviet Marxism. “It is in Grenada that the fall of communism began,” wrote Sir Paul Scoon. “Since then the world saw the dramatic dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the gale force wind of change which knocked down the prevailing political system in the Soviet Union and opened up the way for democracy and personal liberty.” Grenada, he asserted, “could justifiably claim to be the first country to have escaped from communist domination and immediately revert to democracy and freedom.” Although some nations condemned the invasion at the time, many Grenadians welcomed the Americans as liberators and agents of stability, and the invasion is today celebrated in Grenada every October twenty-fifth as a national holiday, called Thanksgiving Day. The SEALs and their fellow American military personnel helped return Grenada to a constitutional democracy.
The success of the SEAL mission to rescue Governor General Scoon was critical to bringing the whole invasion to a fairly quick, successful conclusion, since Scoon represented the last vestige of legality and continuity to the island’s government. It was Scoon, safely delivered from danger by the SEALs, who soon ordered the People’s Revolutionary Army to lay down its weapons, and it was Scoon who rapidly assembled a new government, ushering in an era of stability that endures on the island to this day.
For the U.S. Navy SEALs, Grenada was a story of triumph and tragedy, of lessons learned, and of characteristic courage under fire.
One SEAL veteran of Grenada had this to say of the tough lessons learned from the operation: “I think we learned a lot about ourselves. We were living for a long time on our Vietnam legacy. As we tried to break free of the whole stigma of Vietnam we became a little overconfident in our ability. We had guys who were tremendous operators and we had great resources that we’d never had before. But we had a lot of hubris that was nearly our undoing. We thought we were so good that we put together this marvelous force and we had all these great tactics, training, techniques and equipment, but Grenada brought us down a notch. We were lucky that it did, because it told us this stuff is harder than you think. The irony is that in Grenada we went back to fighting the kind of war we fought in Vietnam, and we weren’t very damn good at it. No matter how good you think you are, some Third World guy with a gun can take you out in a heartbeat. Here we were the premier force in the world, and we saw a ragtag bunch of Grenadians surround us at the radio station and nearly take us all out. It was a wake-up call, and it was a good thing. It was a horrible lesson because we lost people, but in terms of the growing up in the real world it was very valuable.”
ON THE NIGHT OF Oc
tober 10, 1985, two years after the Grenada operation, a force of eighty-three U.S. Navy SEALs, led by Grenada veteran Robert Gormly, faced off against some 1,600 Italian troops and military police on the tarmac of the NATO base at Sigonella, Sicily.
In an unusual twist of history, the troops of two allied NATO nations were in a guns-drawn showdown with each other, as Italian and American diplomats and military officials frantically negotiated over who would take custody of five terrorists, who had been forced to land at the NATO base.
The SEALs had surrounded an EgyptAir Boeing 737 airliner containing the pro-Palestinian terrorists who had hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. They seized the ship for three days, holding four hundred passengers and crew hostage. During the siege, the terrorists shot and killed the wheelchair-bound sixty-nine-year-old Leon Klinghoffer and pushed his body overboard. After several days of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the ship and surrender to the Egyptians in exchange for safe passage to aircraft passage to Tunisia. En route, American warplanes forced the plane to land at Sigonella on the orders of President Ronald Reagan, and the SEALs were preparing to storm it and capture the terrorists.
The SEALs faced overwhelming odds, but Bob Gormly, their commander on the ground, was confident. They had sealed off their target, the jet, and the terrorists were inside it. “No problem—the 737 isn’t going anywhere,” Gormly said by radio to another American. He had sent Bob “Bobby Lew” Lewis, a trusted Grenada veteran SEAL, to block the front of the 737 with a truck. Bobby Lew assured Gormly, “Don’t sweat it, Skipper.”
The Italians were furious. “I could understand how they felt,” remembered Gormly. “Suppose the Italians landed unannounced at one of our airfields and held our forces at gunpoint. We’d be pissed too.”
“Hey, boss, you’d better get over here, the Italians are about to assault my position,” said Gormly’s executive officer, who was stationed in a blocking position with several other SEALs at the base of the aircraft’s stairs. A furious Italian officer declared that he and his men were boarding the plane. Gormly refused to allow the boarding until an agreement was reached. They stared each other down until the Italian agreed not to force his way onto the aircraft. When Gormly heard a loud “bang” as Italian armored vehicles approached, he immediately thought “shot fired.” Then SEAL Bobby Lew Lewis radioed that he shouldn’t worry, it was an engine backfire.
After a five-hour standoff, an agreement was reached that resolved the crisis, with the Italians taking custody of four of the terrorists and eventually convicting and imprisoning them. The mastermind, the infamous terrorist known as Abu Abbas, was allowed to escape by the Italians. He made his way to Baghdad, where he was captured by American forces in 2003. He died in American custody the following year. According to Gormly, his SEAL team was awarded the Joint Meritorious Unit Award for their actions at Sigonella. The Achille Lauro episode and the SEALs’ participation in the multinational peacekeeping force in Lebanon in the early 1980s were vivid introductions to the conflicts and terrorism endemic to the Middle East. In the years ahead, this theater of conflict would increasingly dominate the destiny of the U.S. Navy SEALs, and it was a challenge for which the SEALs would prove ideally prepared.
IN 1989, A YOUNG U.S. Navy SEAL was taken captive as a de facto POW, along with his own wife. What happened to them next helped convince the president of the United States to order the full-scale invasion of another nation by nearly twenty-six thousand combat troops.
It was six years after the Grenada invasion when SEAL Teams were called into another Caribbean operation—this time in Panama. Their mission was to topple and capture dictator Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States, and was also accused of endangering some thirty-five thousand Americans living in Panama, who were being increasingly harassed by Noriega’s security forces.
What few knew was that it was the Panamanian Defense Forces’ treatment of the wife of a Navy SEAL and her husband stationed in Panama that would help spur President George H. W. Bush to unleash the actual invasion of that nation.
It was just before Christmas 1989 when the wife of SEAL Lieutenant Adam Curtis came to Panama to visit her husband. “We were going to go out to dinner and celebrate our reunion and went to downtown Panama City,” Curtis explained to us. “We finished dinner in early evening. It was dark and I realized I was going into a bad part of town. I was not very far from the Bridge of the Americas to get back to base. So my plan was at the next intersection, I’ll take a right-hand turn and I’ll be back on base in under five minutes. At the next right-hand turn, the next intersection was a roadblock, so we got stopped there. I told my wife that this was going to take a while. They’re going to ask us a whole bunch of questions then they’re going to get somebody with a higher rank, and he’s going to ask more questions and eventually the second or third or fourth guy up will let us go when he decides we’ve been harassed enough.” As they were being questioned, Panamanian forces opened fire on another car containing several American military officers, and Marine First Lieutenant Robert Paz was dead by the time they reached the hospital.
Now, instead of being released, Navy SEAL Adam Curtis and his twenty-two-year-old wife were seized and brought to a police station, then to a Panamanian military base for interrogation. The couple was soon face-to-face with a man who seemed to be a commander. Curtis recalled the scene vividly: “My wife and I were on a bench against the wall. He [the officer] stood right in front of me and I was waiting for the set of questions that I’m pretty sure were coming, and instead he just hauled off and belted me in the chin, and kicked me in the groin. Then he pulled his Browning 9 mm from his shirt and put it right in my nose. So my wife was getting a little upset at this point. I was a little worried. I should mention he was stumbling drunk. So I had a drunk with a pistol pointed at me, not a real comfortable feeling.
“They blindfolded and handcuffed us,” Curtis recalled. “That was a trying moment for my wife. Blindfolding us, they were wrapping my head with medical tape. She thought they were doing it to hold my head together when they shot me. They were taping my head and she was thinking that it’s because they’re about to blow it off with a machine gun, and she started to scream. It’s the only time that she really lost it. There was a soldier nearby who told her in Spanish, Shut up! Then she had a feeling as if she heard the voice of God saying Be quiet, I got it. After that she was very calm and peaceful the whole night and she just felt God’s presence the whole way.
“Once they separated us,” Curtis continued, “they threatened my wife with a lot of very lewd things and thankfully didn’t do any of them, but they made her life pretty miserable. I was blindfolded, my hands were behind my back, and so they kept asking me question after question. They were starting to focus on things that I know I can’t tell them. I was clearly in a POW-type situation now. But every time I either refused, or didn’t give them an answer, or if I gave them an answer they didn’t like, they kicked me in the groin, beat on my feet with a hammer, [and] if they really didn’t like it, then they’d rifle butt me in the head.”
“We think you’re a spy!” the captors declared. “You’re planning something! We think you’re CIA, you’re Special Forces! If you don’t answer we’re going to kill you.”
“This is a military guy’s worst nightmare—to be a prisoner,” Curtis admitted, “until someone adds into your nightmare that they’ve got your wife in the other room. I had a mantra going in my head and it was, ‘Stay in the game, Curtis, stay in the game.’ Was it from SEAL training? That’s definitely part of it. I’m a man of faith and that was a prayer for me. I had to shove away any idea of what they might be doing to my wife. It’s still painful to think what might have happened. I felt terrible about it happening to my new young bride, believe me. Particularly for the young guy who gets lost coming back from dinner. So she doesn’t always trust my directions.
“Then they took me outside blindfolded,” the forme
r SEAL told us, “put me up against a wall and said, Okay, now we really are gonna kill you. I could hear they had other people around. I started hearing bolts cycle on AK-47s, the whole ready, aim, click thing.” Still, Curtis refused to talk.
After several terrible hours as prisoners, the SEAL and his wife were released. But for President George H. W. Bush, it was the last of many straws. Days later, he launched “Operation Just Cause” to depose Manuel Noriega, an operation that had been in the planning stages for several months. At the White House, Bush announced publicly in his characteristically fractured syntax, “Look, if an American Marine is killed, if they kill an American Marine—that’s real bad. And if they threaten and brutalize the wife of an American citizen, sexually threatening the lieutenant’s wife while kicking him in the groin over and over again, then, [Soviet leader] Mr. Gorbachev, please understand, this president is going to do something about it!”
“My wife is my hero,” Adam Curtis told us a quarter century after their ordeal. “She’s a tough lady. We had been married a year and a half at this point so she had a sense of the things I didn’t tell people naturally [as a SEAL]. She was amazing through the whole thing. She had a pretty good bump on her head from rough treatment but she was in good shape. We had some challenges after the fact that were pretty tough for both of us, particularly for her. Now we can see it was clearly PTSD. We couldn’t spell those letters at that point. We didn’t get counseling. We were very young and just not informed at all. But throughout the whole thing she was just amazing and when the chips were down in the middle of it she truly just did everything she needed to do. She kept her wits about her, said the right things. She was my hero. My wife was a junior in college when I married her at twenty-one so at that point she was twenty-two. She didn’t have the stress inoculation that you get in SEAL training, though she had been around the world a bit as a Navy brat. She’s pretty sharp and pretty tough so by the grace of God she knew naturally what not to say.”
