Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  The biggest fuss came when he went out on the open market and bought 132 of the new AR-15 rifles. The AR-15 was a lightweight automatic that evolved into the M-16 rifle, which became the standard for American infantry. But at that time, no one else used it, and the military had no support system or spare parts for the new rifle. Actually, Hamilton had arranged for the AR-15 to be issued to the SEALs. But Boehm had moved faster than the paperwork, and he was in trouble once more.

  J. H. (“Hoot”) Andrews, a senior petty officer and highly competent storekeeper who had been drafted away from the submarine service to take charge of acquiring equipment for the new team, recalls, “I told Roy, ‘This is serious!’ I thought he was going to jail on that one.”

  Boehm might well have been court-martialed had it not been for a visit to Little Creek by President Kennedy. The president fell into conversation with A. D. Clark, a member of the team who was displaying their new equipment, including the new lightweight rifle. The president asked how the men liked the rifle and in typical SEAL fashion, Clark told him, “As far as I’m concerned, you can take all the rest of this garbage and jam it. This is what we want. And my boss is about to get a court-martial for open-purchasing this.”

  A few days later, Clark received an autographed photo from President Kennedy. And, as if by magic, the troubles that threatened Boehm disappeared.

  Boehm had arranged for half of the new rifles to be sent to the new West Coast team, where Lt. David Del Giudice, former executive officer of UDT Twelve, was the first commanding officer. Del Giudice, a veteran UDT officer, was in on much of the early planning for the new SEAL teams. He became heavily involved in the preparations in the latter part of 1961 but found much still to be done. When he took over as commanding officer, all he had was a small office in the UDT headquarters on the Strand south of Coronado, on the edge of the beach just across the street from the Pacific amphibious headquarters. He found an old warehouse on the amphibious base and took it over as his headquarters. Then he requisitioned an old building that had been used by the base fire department for drying hoses. The SEALs converted it into a parachute loft.

  One of Del Giudice’s concerns was to determine the various types of weapons the SEALs should carry. He was surprised later when he visited the Pentagon and came across a list of the weapons that Mary Miles’s guerrilla units had used behind the Japanese lines in China nearly twenty years earlier. Although the weapons themselves were different, the firepower was similar to what the SEALs had settled on. “He invented and we reinvented,” Del Giudice says.

  Despite the powerful support they had from the president and top navy officials, the SEALs were not exactly rolling in money. It wasn’t like the hand-to-mouth existence of the UDTs, but those were still lean days.

  “I won’t say we lived out of salvage, but we certainly used salvage to the maximum amount allowed by the rules,” Del Giudice says. The SEALs closely monitored the salvage depots, where surplus material was collected, and made sure they got first crack at anything they could use. An old compressor, for example, would be signed out of salvage, modified, and then used to fill SCUBA bottles.

  The East Coast SEALs already had a venerable tradition of carrying their raids on salvaged goods to the extreme. Henry S. (“Bud”) Thrift, who served as air-operations officer for both UDT Twenty-one, and SEAL Team Two in the midsixties and early seventies, recalls that the men were so eager to parachute that they would go out on their own time to practice jumping. But the navy could not afford very many chutes. This meant a man had to take time after each jump to repack his chute. If he had several chutes, he could get in more jumps in the time the plane was available.

  “We couldn’t buy parachutes; we didn’t have any money,” Thrift says. “We would go to salvage—the place in supply where things [go] that are out of date, or not good, or have done their tour, or were turned in to be sold as scrap or destroyed. We would get parachutes out of salvage, their ten-year life expectancy over, and repair ’em. And that’s what we were free-falling with.”

  The SEALs also complained that the chutes provided by the navy were the standard military version that was difficult to steer. They decided to make modifications on their own.

  William (“Bill”) Bruhmuller, a plank owner, or original member, of SEAL Team Two, was introduced to the use of salvaged chutes as a member of an underwater demolition team in the late fifties.

  “We would take these chutes and mark them with a Magic Marker, take scissors and cut it out, whatever modifications we wanted to make,” Bruhmuller says. Cutting holes in seven of the twenty-eight gores in a typical circular military chute made it into a reasonable copy of the more sophisticated chutes then coming into use by sport jumpers. The modifications permitted a forward speed of four or five knots and made the chutes steerable.

  But cutting the holes and then carefully hemming them on a sewing machine was a time-consuming process. The frogmen soon realized that if they marked the hole and then ran a hot soldering iron down the line, they could cut out a section of the chute and anneal the nylon at the same time.

  “We could get four or five jumps before they started tearing,” Thrift says.

  “What did we know?” Bruhmuller says. “We could have killed ourselves. But we didn’t—at least not because of that. We still followed the basic procedures and tried to be as safe as we could be, with a salvaged parachute.”

  Even with the modifications, the chutes used by the SEALs in those early days were a far cry from the flying mattress chutes they use today. It is now possible to jump from a high-flying plane and land fifty miles away. Jumping over England, flying across the Channel and coming down in France is not considered a serious challenge.

  The forward speed of today’s chutes is also much higher, as much as twenty-five miles an hour—so fast that, as Thrift says, “you can kill yourself even on a good landing if you’re not careful.” But SEALs are trained to land safely by spilling air from the chute to halt the forward momentum just before they touch down.

  By the time the SEAL teams were formed in 1962, many of the UDT members had a good deal of experience in jumping, although much of it had been done on their own time and at their own expense. Their first jumps were done in the classic pattern developed by the army’s paratroops. The jumpers lined up in the plane, marched in lock step to the door, turned, grasped the sides of the door and thrust themselves into space. A static line automatically opened each chute as soon as the jumper was clear of the plane. After the first few jumps, this began to seem pretty tame to the frogmen. Soon they made a game of the departure from the plane. Bud Thrift tells how they dove out the door and tried to slap the engine nacelle before falling away from the plane.

  Then came the challenge of the free-fall, in which the chutist delays opening his chute for many thousands of feet. Added to this was the challenge of jumping in a group into the vast expanse of earth and sky revealed when the huge rear door of a C-130 transport plane is opened—much more frightening than shuffling up to the small side door, where the long drop is visible only at the last moment.

  Many of the SEALs found a night jump less intimidating than a day jump. But jumping in a group at night posed its special problems: How do you keep track of each other? One solution was for the jumpers to spray themselves with patches of fluorescent paint. But the paint loses its glow after about ten minutes. Then someone suggested using the paint just before the jump. That was not a good idea; suddenly released from a pressurized can at ten thousand feet, the pain coated not only the jumpers but everything else in the plane.

  For the SEALs, one of the most critical questions was how to land safely in the water. Members of navy air crews are, of course, taught how to parachute into the water from a disabled plane. But an air crew member is weighted down only by his survival vest and a life raft, which dangles below him. A SEAL, on the other hand, may be encumbered by hundreds of pounds of gear: swim fins, underwater breathing system, weapons, ammunition, radios, raft, food
, and water. He may even have to carry a special device for disposing of human waste so he will leave no trace of his visit to enemy territory. When a heavily-muscled SEAL, weighing about 180 pounds, steps out into the night at five hundred feet above the water, the weight of his equipment, added to that of his body, may well total four hundred pounds.

  Bill Bruhmuller was one of a team of SEALs assigned to the naval air test center at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. Day after day—and night after night—they parachuted into Chesapeake Bay, learning when and how to release the equipment package dangling below the chutist, how to release the chute at the right moment, and how to find the equipment package and get everything into a rubber boat. The biggest problem, particularly at night, Bruhmuller found, was how to get rid of the chute and avoid being dragged through the water. Even in the daytime, it is difficult to estimate the distance to the surface and safely release the chute just before splashing in. At night it is virtually impossible. Bruhmuller and the other members of the team found that if a jumper enters the water with the chute still attached, he should grasp the harness and roll onto his back as quickly as possible so he can reach the chute-release buttons. Being dragged facedown can be fatal.

  The test team also worked out the guidelines for weather conditions. It is possible, they found, to jump safely into heavy seas, but the wind speed is critical. Normally, they concluded, a jump should not be made if the wind speed is greater than fifteen knots. On a critical mission, the jump might still go ahead with winds up to eighteen knots.

  As the SEALs gradually acquired more and more skill as parachutists, they formed their own parachute demonstration teams—the Leap Frogs on the West Coast and the Chuting Stars, which has since been disbanded, on the East.

  The chutists found that, no matter how high they jumped or what kind of spectacular displays they put on by trailing smoke as they fell, the spectators were unimpressed if the SEALs didn’t land right in front of them. Thus, they began to stress “relative work,” in which the men jump from relatively low altitudes and maneuver their chutes so close they actually touch.

  In one maneuver, called stacking, one chutist sits on the top of another man’s canopy. In another, called the biplane, one chutist swings in and stands on the other man’s shoulders, with the two chutes appearing joined together.

  Pierre Ponson, a retired command master chief and veteran member of the Chuting Stars, says the two maneuvers are quite safe, but the transition from one to the other must be done very carefully and at sufficient altitude to allow for problems.

  Such a problem occurred on 16 September 1980 during a demonstration at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Ponson said he had just landed when he heard a shout and looked up. Two men were trying to transition from a stack to a biplane when the upper man inadvertently cut loose from his chute. He grabbed at the other man’s chute, and it collapsed. Both men, Hull Technicians Third Class Paul P. Kelly and Richard Doheny, fell about four hundred feet to the ground and were killed.

  When the two first SEAL teams were formed, their training was adapted directly from the training of the World War II UDT members at Fort Pierce and Maui. Of course the training has been extensively modified to take into account the new missions of the SEALs. In making the modifications, the navy borrowed heavily and unabashedly from the training course developed by the army’s green beret Special Forces. Training for all would-be SEALs is now conducted at a single training center in Coronado, but the course is basically the same as those developed separately by the two original teams.

  Before a man becomes a full-fledged SEAL, he goes through a rigorous six-month course, followed by another six months of on-the-job training with a team. This full year of training is the toughest, most demanding required of any military unit in the world. It is not unusual for half of those who begin the six-month course to drop out before they finish. In the midseventies, one class set a record. Thirty-seven men were there at the start, and none of them finished.

  Even before the trainee begins the course, he undergoes four to six weeks of physical training and indoctrination. The six-month course itself is broken down into three phases.

  The first phase is nine weeks long, continuing the physical conditioning. The pace of the regular two-mile swims in the surf and the four-mile runs along the beach is steadily increased. While guests at the stately old Hotel del Coronado sip their after-dinner drinks, cold, wet SEAL trainees practice riding in through the crashing surf in rubber boats to land on a cluster of rocks just south of the hotel. One trick is to clamber onto the rocks in the moment between breakers and then use the rock itself for shelter as the next wave comes crashing in. A man caught between wave and rock can easily break an arm or leg.

  During that first phase, a man endures a level of physical activity he has never experienced before unless he has participated in the decathlon. The men run in soft and hard sand and on hard surfaces in boots or tennis shoes. They are constantly wet. They suffer from inflamed tendons, twisted knees, and falls on the obstacle course.

  The biggest problem is the stress fracture, a hairline crack in a bone. The trainees are particularly susceptible to such fractures because they are at an age, in their late teens or early twenties, when their bones are still not mature.

  “Running on sand does all kinds of crazy things to the body,” says Lt. Scott Flinn, a physician who monitors the health of the trainees. “A stress fracture is most common in the tibia [the shinbone] or the femur [or thighbone, the large leg bone above the knee] and the foot. It is very painful and it can be severe. It can go to a complete fracture. A man will be running down the beach and the bone will snap and come popping through his leg in a compound fracture.”

  Despite the pain, trainees are so reluctant to be dropped from training or “rolled back” to another class that they sometimes keep going until a bone snaps.

  The sixth week of the first phase of training is a hallowed SEAL tradition: Hell Week. The nonstop ordeal of running, swimming, rowing, and wallowing in the mud is limited only by the instructors’ fiendish imaginations.

  “Hell Week is a completely different thing [from the earlier training],” Flinn says. “It is interesting to see it from the medical standpoint. The goal there is to push the student further than he thought his limits were and make him realize he can do more than he thought. We encounter a lot of medical injuries, problems along the way that would normally hold them back.”

  Each day during Hell Week, the students are examined one by one. Often they are given antibiotics and pain medicine and released to continue the ordeal with ailments that would normally send them to the sick bay.

  “We see trauma, broken bones. We see severe infections like pneumonia and abscesses. Little cuts get infected. We let them go until they’re ready to break and then pull them out. If they’re holding up their boat crew, we may have to pull them out, but generally we don’t have to,” Flinn says.

  A key part of the Hell Week ordeal is deliberately contrived sleep deprivation. The men are scheduled for two hours of sleep each night, but they seldom get more than forty-five minutes to an hour of intermittent sleep, often in the sand or mud or even in the surf. One instructor used to delight in gathering the trainees in a circle on the sand after hours of strenuous activity and turning on a radio with soft music. Just as they began to drift off, he would shout, “Okay, on your feet. Into the water.”

  Hell Week usually begins on Sunday. By Tuesday night, Flinn says, the men are running on autopilot, and it is not uncommon for them to begin to hallucinate. They will see men or strange animals rising up out of the sea, firmly convinced that they exist.

  In the early days at Fort Pierce, Hell Week was the first week, and it was a quick and dirty way of screening out those who might not finish the course. Today when a trainee goes into Hell Week, he has had a couple of months to build his stamina. This change recognizes that Hell Week, for all its physical demands, is basically a test of a man’s mental and emotional makeup rath
er than his physical condition. He learns what it takes to keep going when his own internal fuel gauge screams “empty!” The test thus takes into account that the demands upon a SEAL are basically different from those on most other military men. A soldier who tires can always sit beside the road. But a SEAL who locks out of a submarine on a mission has to keep going until the job is done. And he must continue to use his head no matter how tired he is. On a combat mission, a SEAL may well find his fingers so cold he can’t use them and have to find some other way to finish his task.

  SEALs are all volunteers and, at any time, they can volunteer back out again. Most of those who drop out—or are dropped because of a physical problem, like a broken bone—do so in the grueling first weeks of training or during Hell Week. Until recently, there was a bell in the courtyard of the training center in Coronado. If a man wanted out, all he had to do was ring the bell. Or, if the bell wasn’t handy, he could simply say, “I DOR (Drop on Request).” In early 1990, several important changes were made. The bell was removed because of the fear in the navy’s training command that its presence might intimidate a man into doing something dangerous against his better judgment. And now if a man wants to quit, he is counseled by several layers of petty and commissioned officers to make sure he really wants to drop out.

  Officials at the training base say the changes are a reasonable way of avoiding injury, on the one hand, or needlessly losing men who could, if they continued, become valuable members of the SEAL community. Privately, many SEALs complain that the training has been softened under unrelenting pressure from higher naval authorities to cut down the failure rate at a time when the demand for SEALs is growing.

  The men who make it through Hell Week are given a few days of light duty to recuperate from their ordeal. In the final three weeks of the first phase, they learn the basic UDT skills: how to survey a beach and prepare a chart of its contours.