“You know the Chief of Naval Operations. It would be a plush, prestigious assignment for you.”
“I’m not on the admiral track. If I’m lucky I might make captain before my twenty are up. If I don’t, it won’t matter that much.”
“But you can’t be a SEAL for ten more years, can you?”
“My knees wouldn’t hold out for that long. We lose more good men with worn-out knees than any other physical problem. But I might be able to move up in the operations end.”
He held her then, and she made soft noises in her throat that he knew meant she was content, happy at least for the moment. She stirred, and looked up. Then she put one of his hands over her breasts.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t bug you about moving on from the SEALs to another job in the Navy. But I guess I am. I’ll say it once more and then not again. I truly hope you will move on from the SEALs soon before you get yourself killed or smashed up, and find a nice safe shore job where we can be together.”
She looked at him seriously, then reached out and kissed him so gently on the lips he barely felt it. “Now, please make love to me again, and again, and again. I don’t plan on getting much sleep tonight.”
He opened the sides of her robe and kissed her breasts.
9
Wednesday, 14 February
Naval Special Warfare Section
Coronado, California
At slightly after 0800 the Third Platoon took to the water of the Pacific Ocean just off the BUD/S training area. They wore full black wet suits with their desert-pattern cammies over them. They had their complete combat-ready vests, weapons, Drager LAR V rebreathers, and fins.
Murdock told them before they left it would be a twelve-mile swim.
No heroics, no surprise attacks from the depths by SEAL instructors, just a conditioning swim out and back. Most of it would be underwater.
Murdock put Ed Dewitt at the lead. They would follow a compass heading from the sand in front of BUD/S o-course straight across to Zuniga Point at the southernmost landfall of North Island Naval Air Station. It was exactly six miles across the inward sweep of the Pacific there. This course had been used by the SEALs many times in training.
Ed Dewitt dropped down to fifteen feet below the surface, set up his attack board on the right azimuth, and kicked out. The attack board is a molded plastic device with two handgrips and a bubble compass in the center. It also has a depth gauge and cyalume chemical lights regulated with a twist knob for the amount of light needed to read the instruments.
The SEALs were paired by their six-to-eight-foot buddy lines, and strung out in a file behind Dewitt. The usual routine was to stay close enough to the swimmers ahead to be able to see them. That kept the platoon from being spread out too far. There were no radio communications in the wet.
Murdock and Joe Lampedusa swam at the tail of the string, and became the rear guard. Murdock had told Dewitt to stop halfway through the swim and he’d take the lead. He wanted Jaybird to set the pace for training.
They were a mile into the swim when Murdock saw a shape coming up to his right. He looked closer, and saw the white flash of the belly of a large animal. He stared through the shimmering water, and the creature turned and swam directly toward him. It stopped a dozen feet away, and studied him from large curious eyes.
It was a Pacific dolphin, smaller than the ones that perform at Sea World, but just as curious. He knew these mammals traveled in pods or groups, so he stared around. He found a dozen moving up behind him, and then they flowed around him, and next to the line of SEALS. He could see them going to the surface and jumping, then returning time and again to inspect these strange-looking creatures that had invaded their territory. He figured there must be a hundred in the pod.
Then before Murdock could turn and look, something nudged him from behind. He glanced back, and found a four-foot dolphin smiling at him with big eyes.
This wasn’t the TV Flipper; this was a wild sea creature. Murdock put out one gloved hand, and the dolphin backed off, then came forward.
Murdock touched the side of the creature, rubbed along its back.
Then, on some unheard signal, the dolphin turned and jetted away.
The rest of them must have gone with him. Murdock looked over at Lampedusa, who gave him a thumbs-up. He stared forward to see the pair of SEALs they had been following, but the pair was out of sight.
Murdock checked his wrist compass, turned slightly, and gave a tug on the buddy line. He and Lampedusa swam forward twice as fast as they had been, and in thirty strokes saw the kicking feet of a pair of SEALs ahead of them.
They all surfaced at the three-mile point, and the first thing Murdock heard was about the dolphins.
“Must have been a hundred of them,” Dewitt said. “They played around, jumped and dove, one hit our buddy line and almost tore it off me. Amazing.”
Everyone had something to say about the dolphins. Two of the men had touched the creatures.
“Man, they are fast,” Jaybird said. “I bet they can swim thirty knots.”
When the talk quieted down, Murdock got things moving again.
“Everyone all right? Any complaints?” None surfaced. “Okay, Jaybird and I’ll take the lead, First Squad behind us. Ed, play catch-up at the tail end. Let’s move, we’ve got a lot of swimming to do.”
Murdock gave Jaybird the attack board. “You’ve got the con, Jaybird. Let’s motor over the last three miles to the point.”
Jaybird put his mouthpiece back in, and dove. Murdock caught up with him, and tied him to the buddy line. They leveled out at fifteen feet under the choppy Pacific, and Jaybird angled them along the right bearing for the point.
SEALs swim at a given pace. Every man can tell by the number of strokes he takes underwater how far he’s traveled. The distance is usually off by no more than ten yards over half a mile. That’s part of the reason for these continuous retraining and conditioning swims.
Underwater positioning, even in murky harbor water, had been of vital importance in missions past, and would be in future assignments.
Jaybird motioned upward to Murdock, and they came to the surface.
They were about thirty yards off the tip of Zuniga Point. “Low tide, so more of it’s exposed,” Jaybird said.
They waited for the rest of the SEALs to surface, then treaded water for another few minutes.
“Let’s go home,” Murdock said. “Mahanani, you’re our Second Squad tracker, I want you on the attack board and lead out. Team up with Jaybird and I’ll take your buddy-line partner.”
They were over halfway back to the starting point when Murdock saw in the clear water twenty feet to one side a solitary cruising shark.
He checked it out, pulled the buddy cord, and pointed to it. Fred Washington nodded that he saw the shark.
Murdock watched it. He knew sharks were curious, and this was a blue, not known for having a vicious streak. The shark moved closer and closer to this strange thing in the water. In its tiny brain, the shark must have had only one purpose, to find out if this flailing, unstreamlined creature was good to eat.
It moved closer. Murdock had been up close before with sharks. On one exercise they had baited two sharks up to a boat, and gone overboard to see how the blue sharks reacted.
Now the blue came closer. Murdock figured it was no more than four feet long. Everything looks much larger underwater. The dark eyes seemed to be checking out this strange swimmer. It nosed closer until it was less than three feet from Murdock. He stopped swimming. The shark came closer.
Murdock struck out through the water as hard as he could with his fist, and slammed it into the nose of the shark Just over its closed mouth. The shark jolted backward, turned, and swam away.
Washington gave a jerk on the buddy line and a thumbs-up; then they went back to swimming for home.
Twenty minutes later on the beach across from the BUD/S o-course, Washington told the others about the shark. By that time it had grown to eig
ht feet long and its mouth was wide open ready to take off Murdock’s leg.
“You actually punched a shark in the nose, Commander?” Joe Douglas asked.
“It’s a common way to treat blue sharks around here. Most of them aren’t vicious, but they are curious as hell. A good slap on the nose and they’ll cut and swim away fast. Now that the nature hike is over, how did you like the swim?”
“Just a warm-up, Skipper,” Ching said. “When are we going on a long swim, like out to the Coronado Islands and back?”
“Ching, you’re going soft,” Jaybird called. “That’s only fourteen miles round trip. How about we swim from here up to Oceanside and back?
That would be about an eighty-miler.”
The men hooted him down.
“You go, Jaybird,” Doc Ellsworth said. “I’ll pace you in a kayak.”
Murdock got control again. “You’ll get wet enough in the next four days to satisfy most of you frog-hoppers. Now, have some chow, and report back at the o-course at thirteen-thirty. Move out.”
As Murdock ate his noon meal, he kept trying to figure out a way to show Ardith just how important to him the Navy and the SEALs were. He figured she knew that the SEALs were formed out of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams that were put together during World War II. They were assembled first as the Naval Combat Demolition Units to clear mines and underwater obstacles from harbors and beaches where military landings were planned.
They quickly became the UDTs, and worked in the Pacific clearing and charting beaches on Kwajalein, Saipan, Leyte, and Okinawa before the Marine amphibious invasions.
There was little need for UDTs in Korea, but they did work on the Inchon harbor, and did some behind-the-lines demolition work. This soon developed into a companion group called the Special Operation Teams for land or water use. From that, the SEALs were formed, the name indicating that they could function from and on the Sea, strike from the Air, or come in by Land.
President John E Kennedy pushed for a stronger unconventional war capability in 1961. Then, on January 1, 1962, SEAL Team One and SEAL Team Two were formed. The SEALs had an expanded role after that.
They were tasked to do reconnaissance, take on covert missions against any and all enemies, to destroy bridges, harbors, ports, and other strategic targets. Their first mission was to work out tactics for these missions, develop training for completing them, and select and train with weapons to help them do the job.
From there the SEALs were ready for Vietnam; then they went in at Grenada and Panama and during Desert Storm. Weapons, tactics, and personnel changed over the years, but the mission remained the same. To do an attack on a given enemy quickly, often silently, with sudden overwhelming firepower, and to pull out with as few casualties as possible.
Now the SEALs were a part of the Naval Special Warfare Command.
Group One was located in Coronado, where SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven were headquartered. Group Two was in Little Creek, Virginia, where SEAL Teams Two, Four, and Eight were situated.
Murdock pushed the rest of his food away, and headed for the quarterdeck. Maybe he should have Master Chief Mackenzie talk to Ardith. He snorted. Oh, hell, yes, that would sink him in a rush.
There had to be a way. He had five more days to find it, and to make Ardith understand.
The SEAL mystique was a hundred times more than the “brotherhood” of a college fraternity. It was much more than blood brothers who took a blood pledge. In combat most of them had bled for the others on the team, for the mission, for the cause, for the SEALS.
The officers were unlike those in any other service or component of any military unit in the world. The officers took the grunge training the same way the other SEAL recruits did. The officer might be a lieutenant (j. g.) or a full lieutenant, but he took his bars off during training, had sand kicked in his face, and was tormented physically and mentally the same as the other tadpoles.
Every officer in a SEAL unit had been through the same rigorous training as the lowest-ranked man in the team. The only difference in training was that the officers were expected to score ten percent higher than the enlisted men in every test.
This type of no-officer-country ethic formed a bond so close between officers and their men that they would kill for each other, and often had to on a combat mission.
Murdock shook his head. How did he tell all this to Ardith, and make her understand? How could he do that, and not wind up making her hate the Navy in general, and the SEALs in particular?
“Commander, the men are on the o-course and ready to go,” Jaybird said to Murdock, breaking into his thoughts.
“Yes, Jaybird, good. You have the two stopwatches and the clipboard with you?”
“Right here, Commander. Are you all right? You seemed to be a thousand miles away.”
“Yes, Jaybird. I’m fine. Let’s go and do the damn course, and see if we can break some personal bests.”
10
Wednesday, 14 February
Naval Special Warfare Section
Coronado, California
Murdock stared at the o-course at the far end of the SEALs complex built along the blue of the Pacific Ocean. He’d heard it called the toughest obstacle course in the world. He figured the description must be right.
He had Jaybird put the men in combat-formation sequence to run the course. The better each man knew where he fit into the combat formation, the better. The First Squad ran it first, then the Second Squad.
“Combat formation,” Murdock called. “You know the routine. You’ll leave at thirty-second intervals, and we record your time when you hit the finish line. Move them out, Jaybird.”
The o-course was put together to toughen and strengthen the SEAL candidates. During the first phase of training, the BUD/S candidates must complete the o-course in fifteen minutes. By the time they are finished with their training, those who make it all the way through must complete the course in ten minutes. Most SEALs finish the training doing the course in six to eight minutes. The current record for the route was 4:25. It would be broken soon.
Murdock watched the men. The eighteen-foot-long parallel bars with rungs between them weren’t hard for them anymore. Mostly a matter of technique. Then came the two stump jumps. Next the seven-foot low wall to climb, and the eleven-foot high wall with a rope to help you climb up.
Then the men worked under the barbed-wire crawl for thirty feet where the space between ground and barbed wire comes close to six inches. The cargo net climb looks easy, if you stay near the side, and make your legs do most of the work. No problem, except it’s fifty feet up, and then fifty feet down the other side.
The balance logs roll when stepped on, and then comes the log stack, a pyramid of logs cabled together four feet high that you run up and down with your hands behind your head.
The rope transfer looks easy. Climb a rope up twelve feet, reach out, grab a steel ring, swing to a rope on the other side, and slide down. The trick is catching the ring. Some men have a tough time doing it.
Murdock walked into the course watching the men. He’d do the course when the last man had started. He had a personal best of 6:14 he wanted to beat.
The double hurdle is the toughest on the lot. One log hurdle is five feet off the ground. You jump up and belly flop on it, lift yourself to your feet on top, and jump to the next hurdle, ten feet high and four feet away. You have to stand on it, then drop to the ground.
The problems increase: the sixty-foot rope bridge, another log stack, a five-story slide for life down a rope, a swinging rope, then another wall, a balance beam, a five-foot inclined wall, and a twelve-foot-high climbing wall with one-inch-wide cleats to grip and stand on as you climb up one side and down the other.
When the SEALs finished the course they got their time from Jaybird, then did twenty push-ups.
Murdock slid into place at the end of the line, and took his run through the course. He passed one man, but tried not to notice. He pushed hard, and came
to the last hurdle thinking he had a great time.
“Six-eighteen,” Ed Dewitt said, reading the watch for Murdock. Ed had taken over so Jaybird could get in his turn on the o-course. All times were recorded on the clipboard after the man’s name.
Murdock did his twenty push-ups, all the time wondering how he was going to convince Ardith that he had to stay in the SEALS. Maybe Ed Dewitt’s woman could help. She seemed content with Ed doing his job.
It might be worth a try. They could set up dinner out tomorrow night.
Or maybe just an informal after-dinner at his place.
Jaybird had sent the First Squad on a two-mile run through the soft sand along the Silver Strand toward Imperial Beach to the south. The Second Squad left as soon as the last man was through the o-course.
Murdock led them out, and they met the first group coming back. Jaybird talked with Murdock a moment, and grinned.
By the time Murdock had his team back at the Grinder, the court between the SEAL buildings where many physical exercises and drills were conducted, Jaybird had checked out three IBSS. He had the men carrying two of them on their heads toward the surf.
Murdock and the Second Squad grabbed the third inflatable boat, and raced the First Squad to the water. At the edge they stopped.
“Launching in these four-foot swells should be good practice,” Murdock said. “Have a small storm moving onshore from the south, that’s why we have the four-foot seas. Great for you surfers, if you had the time. Let’s go out beyond the breakers, then make three runs in surfing the swells if we can. Just don’t dump the boat. If any team dumps the boat, you get a ten-mile run. No combat gear on, no weapons, should be a piece of cake. We’ll each do three in and out from the sand. Let’s do it.”
For this exercise there were six men in one IBS and five in each of the other two. The semi-rigid inflatable boats were much the same boats they used in combat situations, except these had no motors, just SEALs with paddles.
Pacific Siege sts-8 Page 12
