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

by Orr Kelly

  “He wasn’t doing this job because he hated Americans. He was doing it because he feared for his life. He was caught between two countries. He had no choice,” Bruhmuller says.

  After the crushing defeat suffered by the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive, life became bitterly hard for the survivors. They were ordered to grow their own food and fend for themselves. It was at this point that Mister, with a wife ill with tuberculosis and a sick child, decided to sell intelligence for money.

  As each interrogation session ended, the results were flashed to Washington. There, analysts came to a startling conclusion: Mister was not only a top VC official, he was the number one man, in charge of all VC operations in the delta. Curiously, because of the contorted enemy command structure, the man himself didn’t realize his own importance. But the information he provided laid bare the VC strategy, giving forewarning of attacks. A citation later issued to Bruhmuller said his intelligence coup “was responsible for saving thousands of American and South Vietnamese lives.”

  As the timeliness and quality of their intelligence improved, the SEALs found they were able to penetrate deep into Viet Cong sanctuaries where more conventional forces didn’t know enough, or didn’t dare, to go. Charlie Watson tells of one such foray into a VC enclave. The VC felt so secure that they had erected a huge archway at each end of the village, with a large VC flag nailed to each arch. Everyone was afraid to approach the village, but the SEALs sneaked through the brush and broke in through the back of one hooch.

  “It was unreal,” Watson says. “It was a jewelry store.”

  The SEALs erupted into the main street and found a row of stores lining the boulevard.

  “We went down the street and burned the place,” he says. “There was a feed store with fuel. We’d take the fuel, throw it in a store, shoot with a gun or throw in a flare, and burn the whole thing. There was a Vietnamese with us, one of the recon people. He’s gesturing at this building. I can’t understand. I gestured and said, ‘Burn the goddamn place.’ When we got to the boat, Ming, our interpreter, had watches all up his arm. Ming told me the recon guy, whatever his name is, said you really screwed up. He said it was a bank. There was an ungodly amount of money in it. And it was all burned. Hell, we could have had Ho Chi Minh parties every day for the rest of our tour.”

  Often, the SEALs found, it was not only the quality of the intelligence they gathered but also the speed with which they responded to it that counted.

  In March 1969, two VC defectors showed up in the coastal city of Nha Trang with startling information. They said they had come from a tiny island in Nha Trang Bay. There, they said, the VC had a secret base, from which they sent out sapper teams to attack U.S. and South Vietnamese targets, and an intelligence unit that controlled a network of spies within the city. The defectors warned that they would soon be missed. If a surprise attack on the site was to have any chance of success in capturing key officials and getting the names of members of the spy network, it would have to be done almost immediately. The two men assured them they would find only a few lightly armed men.

  Lt. (jg) Joseph R. (“Bob”) Kerrey, a member of SEAL Team One, set out in the predawn darkness of 14 March to attack the site. With him were six other SEALs, the two VC defectors, and a South Vietnamese frogman. The men were dropped near the island from a small boat and managed to get ashore undetected. The first challenge was to scale a sheer 350-foot cliff in the darkness, without ropes. This put them above and behind the enemy camp, the direction from which an attack would seem least likely. Stealthily, they worked their way down the other side of the rock face until they spotted a group of enemy soldiers.

  Kerrey assigned half his team to keep an eye on the soldiers. He and the other members of the team took off their boots and set out to check the rest of the camp. Suddenly, Kerrey and his men were spotted and came under heavy fire. The enemy soldiers were much more heavily armed than they had been led to believe. Kerrey didn’t even see the grenade that flew through the darkness and went off at his feet. The lower portion of his right leg was torn apart, and he was thrown violently backward onto jagged rocks.

  Despite his wounds, Kerrey called in fire from the other SEAL unit, surprising the VC in a withering cross fire. Seven VC soldiers died in the next few moments. Under Kerrey’s direction, the SEALs took control of the camp and called in helicopters to carry him out along with the enemy prisoners.

  For his heroism, Kerrey became the first SEAL to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. The citation signed by President Nixon says, “The havoc wrought to the enemy by this very successful mission cannot be overestimated. The enemy who were captured provided critical intelligence to the allied effort.”

  Kerrey’s right leg was so badly mangled that doctors were forced to amputate below the knee. After a painful period of rehabilitation, he was fitted with a prosthesis that permitted him to resume a full range of normal activities—and some not so normal.

  Chuck LeMoyne recalls seeing Kerrey shortly after he was wounded and finding him determined that the loss of his leg would not be a devastating impediment.

  “I had a free-fall parachute and a couple of other pieces of equipment,” LeMoyne says. “My new enterprise was surfing. I sold Bob the parachute so I could buy a surfboard. My wife thought we were both crazy. She thought Bob was crazy for wanting to jump out of an airplane with a missing leg. And that I was worse than crazy for selling him the parachute.”

  Kerrey went on to become governor of Nebraska, then to represent the state as a Democratic senator in Washington, and to seek the presidency.

  As the quality of their intelligence and the speed with which they reacted to it improved, the SEALs found they spent less time sitting in long, boring, fruitless ambushes and more in operations where they killed or, better yet, captured enemy leaders. But with this came a growing sense of frustration. Everyone knew Cambodia was being used as a sanctuary by the enemy, and yet the SEALs were, for the most part, forbidden to cross the line.

  Al Winter, who served in Vietnam with Team One in the latter part of 1968 and early 1969, says he had gray hair when he returned to Coronado.

  “I was quite disillusioned with what we were doing over there, setting up ambushes and killing people,” Winter says. “It wasn’t exactly my idea of a fun thing to do. Let’s say the war was not the war I thought it was. A lot of people felt that way.”

  Winter confronted Comdr. D. L. (“Dave”) Schaible, who had led SEALs during their early involvement in the southern part of Vietnam and who was then commander of Team One. “I said, ‘I don’t mind going back, but let us go across the borders, let us do something that’s going to help the war and not just entertain us.’

  “I said to Schaible, ‘Let us cross the border.’ We were doing it illegally. That was happening. I didn’t like that, either. We were doing good things, but it was against the rules for fighting that war. We were breaking the rules. I had guys in my platoon who said we ought to do more of it because now we were getting into the good things. And we could do it because we were well trained and we could move at night.”

  Winter says he did cross the border on occasion. But he describes himself as cautious, always careful to brief senior officers before an operation. Others, he said, were at the opposite extreme, carrying out operations and then talking about it afterward.

  “I felt I was putting my ass, my guys, on the line. And if we got caught, we were doing something that wasn’t sanctioned,” Winter says. Winter felt that Schaible, who has since died, tended to agree with him. After opening himself up to his skipper, Winter might have found himself quarantined with the antiwar disease. He did not return for a second tour in Vietnam. Instead, Schaible told him he needed a gray-haired guy to represent him in Washington and sent him off to the Pentagon.

  Because SEAL operations in Cambodia were both secret and illegal, it is still unclear today how often they occurred. Most often, such operations seem to have been illicit, although winked at by higher autho
rities. But sometimes they were carried out with official approval.

  Jim Watson tells of one such operation that was carefully planned and authorized by higher authorities. He crossed into Cambodia, captured two men, and brought them back for questioning. He later received a commendation for the operation. What the commendation fails to mention is that the action took place in Cambodia and that the two men captured were Chinese intelligence officers. When the State Department heard about this foray into a country with which the United States was not at war and the capture of two citizens of a third country, there were demands that the SEAL responsible be court-martialled. Watson was spirited away from his base of operations, and an admiral told him, “Watson, we’re going to have to hide you!” He was hidden until the storm blew over—and then quietly commended for the operation.

  The ambiguity about crossing into Cambodia continued until April 1970, when U.S. forces crossed the border in a massive sweep designed to disrupt the North Vietnamese command and supply bases, at least long enough to permit the withdrawal of American forces and the turnover of responsibility for the conduct of the war to the South Vietnamese.

  While the question of operating in Cambodia remained a sensitive subject until the assault in 1970, officially sanctioned penetrations into Laos and parts of North Vietnam were carried out regularly by SEALs operating out of Da Nang under the control of the Studies and Observations Group, the military unit which was responsible for the secret aspects of the war.

  On a typical mission, the SEALs would fly to the large base at Nakhon Phanom, on the Thai border with Laos, where the United States had set up a major electronic monitoring system to process information provided by sensors scattered along the border between North and South Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos.

  From Nakhon Phanom, four or five SEALs would fly by helicopter to a “cool” place where the sensors indicated no enemy activity. Often, this was forty or fifty kilometers from the trail. The men worked their way through the jungle until they were three hundred or four hundred feet from the trail and quietly set up camp. They were equipped with powerful binoculars, to which a 35mm camera was attached. Special film permitted them to take pictures at night. They were careful to stay far enough back in the foliage that there would be no glint of sunlight on the lenses.

  For several days, they would lie there quietly, counting and photographing traffic on the trail. Sometimes, the North Vietnamese would camp nearby. The SEALs held their breath for fear someone scouting for firewood would stumble on their position.

  After several days, the SEALs carefully policed up their campsite so there would be no sign they had been there. Then they moved off to await the arrival of a helicopter to pluck them from the jungle. The helicopter crew dropped a probe shaped like a large dart down through the jungle canopy. Two metal arms folded down to form a seat. One after the other, the men straddled the probe and were reeled in by the chopper. The last man always ended up a little bruised and battered because, as he was being winched up, the pilot broke from the hover and headed for home.

  Throughout the war, most of the SEALs operated in their own detachments. But a number of them were also assigned, often alone, to work with special South Vietnamese units. SEALs of Team One took credit for pioneering this kind of operation on an informal basis. The combination was a valuable one. The Vietnamese knew the language, the people, and the land. The SEALs were able to contribute the technology of modern warfare: helicopters, good communications, and a sophisticated logistics system.

  John Wilbur first heard of these operations when a chief petty officer from Team One dropped by his headquarters. Up to that point, he had felt a good deal of frustration, “just wandering around in a foreign country at night with guns.”

  “We would often stumble around, try to collide with a contact target, have a firefight, try to kill a bunch of people, and then get out well before dawn. We were without any Seeing Eye dog at all. We didn’t know what the sounds were. We didn’t know which parts of the hamlets were trouble and which were not trouble. We didn’t know which barking dog was going to alert who,” Wilbur says. “The idea of working with knowledgeable, relatively well-trained counter-guerrilla-type personnel was of tremendous benefit to us.”

  Late in 1967, a special SEAL unit—Detachment Bravo, or Det Bravo—was formed to work with what came to be known as the South Vietnamese Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU). Det Bravo reported to a cover organization that was actually an arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of his enthusiasm for combining the talents of the SEALs and the PRU, John Wilbur was put in charge of Det Bravo. In effect he commanded a platoon, but his men were spread all over the delta, with one man assigned as an adviser to each PRU outfit in each of the sixteen provinces.

  For a young lieutenant jaygee, it was a very exciting assignment. It was not until later that Wilbur realized he was at the center of an intense power struggle between the two SEAL teams.

  “This led to some sustained and eventually rather extreme internecine tensions and jealousies between SEAL One and SEAL Two,” Wilbur recalls. “SEAL One thought they were the progenitor of this advisory proposal, and they coveted this as a SEAL One exclusively controlled assignment. All this was totally unknown to me, much to my later chagrin and some misfortune. This reveals how special, small, elite units got very involved in their self-imagery and internal competition.”

  Later, when Wilbur earned a law degree and became a prosecutor, he recognized the same kind of “fratricidal hostilities” between various law-enforcement groups.

  As the commander of the PRU advisers, Wilbur had the opportunity to travel throughout the delta and to go on operations with the various units. They ranged in size and quality from a ragtag group of 30 to “really impressive, disciplined and capable companies of maybe 60 to 120 men.” Wilbur found the best of them “as good a fighting unit as any that existed in Vietnam during the war.”

  On one of the operations in which he accompanied a PRU outfit, Wilbur had an extraordinary experience. He and five other men, four PRUs and an interpreter, set out in two sampans to attack what their intelligence told them would be a meeting of key Viet Cong leaders. It was a dark night, and much of the delta area was flooded. A few dikes could be made out as dim shadows above the dark waters. Occasionally they saw a hamlet looming up like a tiny island.

  About a quarter of a mile from the target, they halted and went over their plans. The men in one sampan would attack the target while the others moved around to the other side as a blocking force. And then, out of the darkness came another sampan carrying two farmers. To make sure the farmers would not alert the VC, they were ordered to come along. Wilbur climbed over into their sampan and the three craft moved silently toward the target.

  There was just enough light for Wilbur to make out a small shape huddled in the bottom of the sampan. It was a very frightened little boy, no more than three years old. According to the revised plan, the other two sampans would carry out the original attack scheme while Wilbur, with the farmers and the child, would follow them in.

  Somehow, in the darkness, Wilbur and his little group arrived at the target first. They were in a marshy area at the edge of a muddy little island about the size of half a football field containing two small hooches.

  “I had no idea what would happen,” Wilbur says. “I didn’t dare make any sound to abort the attack. I got out, clutched the little boy, and went up the embankment. The other sampan, the attack group, made a rush. There was screaming. Shots were fired. I crouched, trying to be out of the fire. Two armed men rushed out of the hut right at myself and this little tiny child. I had a Swedish K [a lightweight 9mm grease gun from the CIA arsenal] at the time. I got off a fumbling burst. Then I stood up, backed up and fell, clutching the child, into the marsh.”

  The water was about four feet deep.

  “My total concern was on making sure the child was all right. I had a terrible fear he was going to drown. I flailed, go
t hold of him, and crawled up on the embankment. I checked the child. He didn’t cry; he didn’t do anything. I looked down into his face, and he simply stared up at me. He was like a little Buddha.”

  Wilbur could see the body of one of the two men he had shot at. He was sure he had wounded the other man, but he had gotten away. Wilbur put down the child and ventured about two hundred yards out into the marsh looking for the other man. Suddenly, he realized the “idiocy and stupidity of wandering around in a marsh after somebody with a gun without knowing where he was,” and turned back.

  The raiders had missed, by a day, the regional VC tax collector, but they did find a pile of documents. The child, frightened but unharmed, was reunited with the two farmers. The attack had alerted the local VC reaction force, and the raiders had to scramble to get away.

  “We really had to paddle our ass off for the balance of the morning,” Wilbur recalls. But he found the whole experience, where one American had been able to penetrate into an area where he would otherwise have been hopelessly lost, “fascinating, exhilarating, and intoxicating.”

  Wilbur was wounded during the Tet offensive, and Lt. (later Rear Adm.) Chuck LeMoyne, a member of SEAL Team One, was assigned to monitor the PRU program in the delta from January to September 1968. In the critical months after the Tet offensive, the PRUs had the job of mounting a systematic attack on the VC infrastructure. It was their task to identify, locate, and capture leaders of the VC. At that time, the PRU operated in fourteen of the sixteen provinces in the delta, and SEALs were advisers in twelve of those fourteen.

  When LeMoyne arrived in Can Tho to take on his duties, he found a policy that tended to encourage killing the VC rather than capturing them. But this was counterproductive. Far better to capture people and, if possible, get them to work for you.

  “When you’re running a combat operation,” LeMoyne says, “it’s easy to talk about capturing someone, but it is a lot easier to talk about than to do. We learned as we went along. When I first got there, we were paying a bounty on weapons. We found we were getting a lot of weapons but not nearly as many prisoners as we would like. The reason was, it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a weapon from someone you have shot than from someone who is alive and kicking. The economic-man principle was alive and well in Vietnam. The PRU would say, ‘There’s a weapon. I’m going to get a bounty for the weapon. Bang, you’re dead. Now I have a weapon.’ We didn’t really care about the weapon—certainly we did, but it was the individual we wanted, and we wanted them alive. Because captured members of the infrastructure could give you more information about other members of the infrastructure. Some of them would surrender and become hoi chanhs [working for the South Vietnamese]. We could put them back to work. We couldn’t stop paying the bounty on the weapons, once we’d started, but we started paying a larger bounty for prisoners by order of importance. Capture rates went way up. It was remarkable. We were capturing, in the delta, a thousand to twelve hundred VCI [Viet Cong infrastructure (personnel)] monthly.”