by Orr Kelly
Command Master Chief Herbert H. Haskin, of SDV Team Two, in Little Creek, was one of two SDV operators taking part in the test. He and another SEAL positioned themselves in a boat offshore. The plan was for the helicopter to pick up the SDV, carry it across the base, and deposit it in the water. The two SEALs would then climb aboard, submerge, and fly away.
As the CH-46 helicopter pulled the SDV free from the water of Little Creek Cove, it began to swing. The two SEALs offshore could see the helicopter and its ungainly load moving toward them. Suddenly, just as the helicopter passed over a picnic area at the nineteenth hole of the base golf course, the SDV broke loose, fell across a sidewalk, and broke open like a cantaloupe. Batteries spewed sparks. High-pressure air bottles ricocheted around the area. The two SEALs drove their boat onto the shore and ran to the scene.
“We were over there in five minutes or less,” Haskin recalls. “At the picnic tables, the people were still frozen. These people had not moved. Their mouths were open, half-chewed food hanging out of their mouths.”
No one was injured, but the SDV was a mess. They found parts as far as two hundred yards away. The lesson learned, Haskin reports wryly, is that “the boat is not dropable.”
Through all the experiments with helicopters, airplanes, and surface ships, it was always fairly obvious that the best way to get an SDV to the war was by submarine. That way it could be brought in as surreptitiously and as close to shore as possible.
When the Grayback became available in the 1960s, it made an almost perfect match for the SDV. Although the ship still remained a part of the submarine force, it was assigned to work full-time with the frogmen, offering plenty of opportunity for training. But the Grayback provided only a limited capability. The original plan had been to adapt another older sub, the Growler, as an SDV carrier and assign it to the East Coast, while the Grayback remained in the Pacific. But money ran out before the second sub could be modified and put into service in the Atlantic.
Submarines, of course, have only a limited lifetime, and the navy was forced to think about a successor to the Grayback. There were no more subs with a big hangar deck that could be modified to transport SDVs. The solution was the development of what is called a dry-deck shelter (DDS). A big metal cylinder, it is designed to be bolted to the upper deck of a submarine and connected to the interior of the sub by a watertight hatch. The DDS is nine feet wide and divided into three sections: a hangar area capable of holding one SDV, a transfer chamber for moving in and out of the sub, and a decompression chamber.
Two submarines designed to carry the original Polaris submarine-launched intercontinental missiles were taken out of the strategic submarine force and converted to carry the dry-deck shelters. They are the USS John Marshall, home-ported at Norfolk, near Little Creek, and the USS Sam Houston, home-ported at Pearl Harbor. They are big boats—410 feet long and 7,880 tons submerged—capable of carrying a full platoon of SEALs plus a platoon of specially trained sailors who operate the DDS. When they carried missiles, they were known as boomers. Now, the sailors call them slow-attack boats or spook boats.
The only complaint the SEALs have is that the Marshall and the Houston are not always available. Often they unbolt the DDS and go off to operate as attack boats with the fleet. As a result, the SEALs don’t get as much training time as they would like.
Unfortunately, both subs are at the end of their service life. The only choice to replace them seems to be conversion of several fast-attack “long boats” of the Sturgeon class to carry the shelters. But those subs are much smaller—292 feet long and only 4,640 tons displacement. Members of the SDV teams say those boats are not a good answer to their needs. The boats don’t have enough room for the SEALs and all their equipment, they can’t take the SEALs on a long deployment, and they are difficult to control at the slow speeds required for SDV operations. But modified fast-attack boats may be the best the SEALs will get.
Well before they began using SDVs in regular operations, the UDT and SEAL team members had often worked closely with the submarine force. They were trained to lock out of and lock back into a submerged submarine. On a number of occasions in Vietnam, UDT members carried out difficult beach reconnaissance missions and even fought battles ashore after locking out of subs. They also adapted the method Fulton had worked out for the recovery of surface swimmers—the method the navy promptly forgot. After finishing an operation, swimmers get into their rubber boats with a line between them. Then the sub snags the line with its periscope and carefully tows the boats far enough out to sea so the sub can surface and take the swimmers aboard.
All of their experience in swimming and submarine operations, however, did not prepare the frogmen for the physical demands of working with an SDV. When the navy began thinking about SDV operations of six hours’ duration, no one knew whether men were capable of remaining underwater that long, let alone whether they could carry out their assigned tasks.
The first concern, although not the only one, was the loss of heat during long submersion in cold water. A free-swimming SEAL might spend a couple of hours underwater on a mission and during that time he is physically active, generating heat. A man in an SDV, on the other hand, may spend eight or more hours underwater, much of the time sitting or lying passively in his little craft, generating little heat. He is also likely to go deeper and stay longer than the free-swimming SEAL.
Capt. Edward Thalman of the Navy Diving Center at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, explains that a wet suit of the type worn by sport divers is made of foam neoprene that insulates the swimmer by surrounding his body with little bubbles of gas. If he goes to sixty feet, the gas becomes compressed and he loses heat at about the same rate he would without a wet suit. But the suit makes his skin feel fairly comfortable, and he does not realize his core temperature is dropping, perhaps dangerously. A number of SEALs have done their part for science by diving after having swallowed transistorized thermometers and while wearing rectal thermometers so the doctors could monitor their internal temperature.
The loss of heat can result in death. But long before that point is reached, a swimmer in cold water may lose the ability to carry out his mission. Of particular concern is the loss of heat in the hands. The muscles that provide strength in the hand are in the forearm, with tendons connected to the fingers. But the fingers also have their own little muscles that stabilize the joints, with major muscles at the base of the thumb. If these muscles in the hand become too cold, manual dexterity is lost. It is virtually impossible to tie a knot, use a knife, or operate a zipper.
One partial solution to this problem is to fit the swimmer with something like the gloves worn by skiers, covered with a big, waterproof outer glove that is removed only when there is work to be done. Research is also under way on heated gloves. But heating the diver’s entire body poses a much more difficult problem. That would require a large amount of energy, enough to drain an automobile battery every forty minutes. And it might not help that much because, as a heated garment increased the diver’s skin temperature, his body would slack off on its production of heat.
Members of SDV teams spend long hours under the water, as much as a thousand hours a year, the equivalent of six full weeks. And because of this long exposure to cold water, they suffer permanent physical changes. After a while, an SDV operator notices that he gets cold quicker than other people. His fingers quickly turn blue. In effect, his body says, “Oh, oh, here it comes again,” and begins to shut down.
Water temperature limits the usefulness of the SDVs. They cannot be used in areas of the world where the water is extremely cold. But in training missions, they have operated in water so cold that, on return from an operation, the men inside had to wait until someone outside chipped away the ice before they could emerge.
As the doctors had a chance to study these men spending such long periods of time underwater, they also discovered other physical changes that had not been apparent in their studies of divers who remain submerged
for much shorter periods of time.
On land, gravity pulls blood down into a person’s legs. But swimming underwater, a person is in a state of near-weightlessness, much like an astronaut. Without the pull of gravity, more blood finds its way to the chest. In the upper chamber of the heart is a little sensor that detects the amount of blood in the body. The sensor mistakenly interprets the unusual flow of blood to the chest as an indication of an overall increase in blood volume. It releases a hormone that serves as a messenger to the kidneys, ordering them to start dumping fluid.
“Almost as soon as you get in the water, you start urinating,” Thalman says. The cold also stimulates the urge to urinate, and the salt water causes dehydration. The result is a serious loss of body fluid and a drop in blood pressure.
In a period of eight hours in the water, a swimmer may lose 17 percent of his blood volume, as much as two quarts. When he tries to do some work, his heart has to work harder to get the blood to his muscles. Instead of 120 beats a minute, it may race at 160 beats to get the same job done.
The danger is that a diver might ride his SDV for several hours, swim up on a hostile shore, stand up, and faint because his blood pressure has dropped so low. Actually, he probably wouldn’t pass out, but he would be unable to perform as much physical activity as he would normally be able to do.
A new underwater breathing device now under development will have a full face mask that will permit a diver to drink liquids while under the water. But this is not really a solution, Thalman says, because the added liquid will be quickly dumped by the kidneys. One possible solution is to have the swimmers replace the lost liquid shortly before they go ashore on a mission. Thought has also been given to the use of some form of medication to regulate urine production, but the doctors worry about possible side effects on a person going into a combat situation.
One of the most difficult problems for the experts in medicine and physiology is to overcome the SEALs’ deeply ingrained belief that they can do anything. No matter what happens, they believe, they can tough it out. But when they embark on missions that may keep them underwater for many hours and then require them to carry out demanding assignments ashore, the physical limits may prove insurmountable. Dehydration can sap the strength of the toughest SEAL, and cold can even kill him.
Dr. Thomas J. Doubt, of the Hyperbaric Medicine Program Center at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, says, “SEALs have a can-do attitude about things. Virtually nothing is perceived as too dangerous, too hard, too difficult. They say, ‘You want that done? We’ll do it.’ I preach to them like you would to a professional football team. I tell them a 5 or 10 percent difference in performance makes a big difference for the elite athlete. And I say that, in three days, I can change anyone’s performance noticeably by what I have them eat and do.”
Doubt’s basic approach is the same as that used by marathon runners: carbohydrate loading in the few days before the race, or combat mission. But SEALs, he says, work so hard preparing for an operation that they don’t find time to prepare themselves by eating properly. And when they are confined to a submarine, they tend to overeat with foods that build fat rather than the carbohydrates that can be called upon for energy during a mission.
Haskin, the veteran SDV operator, agrees that performance would be improved if some admiral would order the SEALs to pay as much attention to nutrition as they do to preparing their equipment for an operation. But then he expresses the gut feeling of a SEAL:
“These people say, ‘I could improve your performance.’ A lot of times the people they are using are divers or non-SEALs. A SEAL is a SEAL. There’s nothing like that in the world. If you’re a SEAL, it amazes people how you can do things. I agree on what they say about food, and I think it should come out in black and white. But on the other hand, I’m one of the poorest examples. I’ll go out on an eight- to twelve-hour op. I won’t eat breakfast. I’ll drink a Coke or soda, I’ll eat a couple of candy bars, and I’ll be out there for twelve hours. I’ll come back, and I’ll be hungry. If there is any decline in my abilities, it doesn’t show. Either I’m above their standard, so even if I lose 15 percent I’m still above the standard. Or the figures are off. I relate that to the SEALs. I learned a long time ago, if I set my mind to it, I can do it.”
He referred to a visit, the day before, to an explosive-test range on a chilly, overcast spring day. “You saw my hands out there. They were blue. But you saw me cutting fuze, tying knots. My hands were cold to the point I couldn’t feel them. It is an attitude in the mind. I have had a lot of shrinks test me. There’s a group of people who can do things they shouldn’t be able to do. That’s what makes us cost-effective.”
Largely out of concern over the limitations imposed by cold water, leaders of the navy special warfare community have finally overcome their long reluctance to consider using dry boats. Work is now underway on development of the advanced SEAL delivery system or ASDS, a mini-submarine in which the SEALs would be freed from wearing all their protective gear and would be protected from the cold.
The members of the two SDV teams are probably justified in thinking of themselves as, in a sense, super-SEALs. They not only have their own little boats, but they wear the special Mark 15 mixed-gas underwater breathing apparatus, and they get more training than other SEALs. They also get more money—$300 a month dive pay, compared to $175 for other SEALs, and $110 a month “pro pay,” the incentive money given to those who volunteer for jobs that are hard to staff. Other SEALs only receive half as much pro pay.
“I feel the SDV is the future of naval special warfare,” Haskin says. “The ability to do things very few people can do is very satisfying to me. I can do what they can do. They can’t do what I can do.”
In the future, much of the emphasis in the use of SDVs will probably be on mine warfare. Today’s SDVs are capable of carrying mines much larger than the limpets carried by a free-swimming diver.
“Mine warfare, that’s the future,” says Gator Parks, now an engineering technician at the navy’s research center in Panama City, Florida. “I’m not opposed to putting things under a ship. Big, big things that will ruin their dock, too. I’ve always resented the fact that I might have to go under a ship with a little limpet mine that’s not going to do anything but piss them off. If I go in there, I want them to know I’ve been there.”
CHAPTER
10
The Lieutenant (jg) Says No
THE SEALS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A TINY PART OF THE NAVY. And the officers in charge of their platoons have almost always been heavily outranked by almost everyone, from admirals on down. To protect their own men, who are very skilled but can also be very vulnerable, low-ranking SEALs have, on a number of occasions, been forced to stand up to senior officers, no matter how many stars on their shoulders, and explain what it is that SEALs do and don’t do.
In the spring of 1975, Comdr. R. T. (“Tom”) Coulter found himself in just that position. He was a lieutenant junior grade commanding a platoon of SEAL Team One at Subic Bay in the Philippines.
American prestige was at a low point. In the fall of 1974, with impeachment proceedings moving forward on Capitol Hill, President Nixon had resigned, to be succeeded by Gerald Ford. The new president’s approval rating plummeted after he granted an unconditional pardon to his predecessor.
On 29 April 1975, the remnants of U.S. forces withdrew ignominiously from the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon. And then, two weeks later, on 12 May 1975, an American-owned ship, the 10,485-ton Mayaguez, was seized while sailing through the Sea of Thailand sixty miles off the Cambodian coast. The thirty-nine members of the crew were spirited away in a Cambodian gunboat.
Ford and his two key advisers, secretary of state Henry Kissinger and secretary of defense James Schlesinger, were outraged. The last thing they needed was this kind of affront to the nation’s battered self-esteem. But they also saw the incident as an opportunity to demonstrate that the United States was not to be toyed with by pip-squeak
Third-World countries.
By chance, the carrier USS Coral Sea was in the area, on the way to Australia. Rear Adm. R. T. Coogan, commander of Carrier Task Force 73, was ordered to retrieve the ship and the crew.
Pilots reported spotting the Mayaguez anchored near Tang Island, thirty-four miles off the coast. The supposition was that the ship’s crew members were being held captive on the island.
A hurried meeting was convened at the U.S. Naval Base at Subic Bay, to begin planning for a rescue operation. There was intense pressure from Washington to do something, and to do it fast.
Coulter recalls that initial meeting: “Our original question was, ‘Who says they are on the island in the first place?’ Nobody answered that. We said our first course of action should be to go in and do strategic reconnaissance and see that they’re on there.”
But instead of sending a few SEALs in to size up the situation, the decision was made to send in the marines to retrieve both the ship and the captives. From the Philippines and Okinawa, eleven hundred marines were flown to a base in Thailand about an hour and a half’s flying time from the island. The move was made without getting permission from the Thais, and they were furious.
On 14 May, two days after the ship had been seized, eleven big CH-53 helicopters took off from the Thai base at U-Tapao and headed for the scene. Three of the helos lowered their marines to the deck of an American destroyer escort. Their job was to board and search the Mayaguez. While the remaining choppers headed for the broad beach at the eastern end of Tang Island, the first group of marines sprayed the Mayaguez with tear gas and then climbed aboard. They found hot food on the table in the mess, but the ship had been abandoned by its captors. The ship was recovered relatively undamaged, without a shot fired.
The plan called for the remainder of the marines—about one hundred of them—to sweep across the island, a C-shaped, jungle-covered, six-square-mile scrap of land, searching for the crew members. They were assured that they would meet little, if any, opposition. As the choppers approached the island, it became brutally apparent that that particular bit of intelligence was badly off the mark. They came under intense machine-gun fire. One helicopter crashed on the beach. Another went down just offshore. A third belly flopped into the sea.
