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

by Orr Kelly

  “As the teams got larger, we were getting people in who were untested in the operational arena,” Mountz explains. “We had to develop something to some degree artificial to tell if this person is capable of doing the job. These are people to whom the U.S. government is looking to do the hardest mission. It is scary to bring a person in for a mission and not know if he can do it. These guys are absolutely professionals in everything they do. They are the best in the world at any task they take on, be it parachuting, diving, shooting. They do a nasty, nasty job, a job most people don’t want to do and are glad they don’t have to.”

  Although not a SEAL himself, Mountz participated in many of their activities, including parachuting. He remained at Team Six for five years and became an unabashed admirer of the SEALs he knew there.

  But others in the SEAL community worried about the type of personalities that might be attracted to the team. This is how one veteran SEAL officer who had an opportunity to observe Team Six over a period of years put his concerns:

  You get a bunch of people, smart, strong, aggressive, and you require them to kill other people. You are requiring guys to do some really tough things. They are going to go in and find that terrorists are women, terrorists are children, anybody. You’re up close. This is very personal. The psychologist looks at whether you can blow a hole in a man two feet away and watch his brains come out the other side of his head—and do it.

  You give them this training. I’m talking about concentrating year after year on parachuting, making guns, sniper shooting, scaling mountains, swimming, diving. You give them all this training and require them to kill people, not from a hundred yards away, not from two hundred yards away, not from thirty thousand feet with a bomb, but from three feet away.

  Can you imagine that group of people together? All of a sudden in that group of 150 or 200 men, who are so highly trained, all keyed up and required to do such hazardous things, you are going to find some amoral people. They’re there because they’re smart and aggressive and they have no morals. You have guys who have no morals, will do anything. That’s how you get a reputation for being really bad.

  But the great majority are really dedicated, straight, hard working people. The reason the amoral man doesn’t get away with more is that a lot of people watch him. He is controlled. But you are going to find that kind of person when you have a group of people required to perform what these people are required to perform.

  Many SEALs say Marcinko skimmed the cream of the SEAL community, taking the very best from each platoon. But one officer told friends he was startled when Marcinko visited his unit. Although reluctant to lose his top performers, he pulled the personnel files of the very best at each pay grade and had them on the desk when the commander of the new team arrived. Marcinko glanced quickly through the folders, brusquely brushed them aside, and demanded to be taken to the records room. There, the officer later recounted, he went through the files and “uniformly, he pulled out the scum.”

  Those chosen for service in Team Six certainly considered themselves the creme de la creme, the elite of the elite. Among other SEALs, they were regarded with a mixture of resentment and envy. And they quickly picked up a nickname—“the Jedi”—from the Jedi warriors of the motion picture, Star Wars.

  An officer in another SEAL unit reflects the mixed feelings about the team: “They are nobody, Six. Those guys are a paramilitary fitness club. That place is just a mess.”

  But then, almost in the same breath, he adds, “SEALs [in the other teams] aren’t number one anymore. Those guys go first. They get all the assets and all the training. The rest of you guys are sort of second-string jayvee. Those Six guys have a lot of experience. They do a lot of high-speed stuff. We drive up to Camp A. P. Hill to do a training mission. In their training, their beepers go off, they fly to Germany, and do a full-profile op. That’s an op! Those guys come as close to the cutting edge as they can without shooting each other. They have so much money thrown at them, and they’re really well trained.”

  And what would this officer like to do next? Join Team Six.

  Even Marcinko’s most outspoken detractors are forced to acknowledge his accomplishment in creating this new command with little guidance about what exactly he was expected to do. He had to recruit a hundred men or more, acquire everything from typewriters to exotic weapons, train his men in antiterrorism and hostage rescue—something nobody knew much about at the time—and even find a place to set up shop.

  At first, the team made room at Little Creek, the East Coast SEAL headquarters. It was later moved to another naval installation in Virginia.

  The new team was formally commissioned on 1 October 1980. On 31 December, Marcinko declared his command mission capable. To create, in three months, a new military unit prepared to carry out an unfamiliar assignment, even with the benefit of the preliminary work done by Mob Six, was a remarkable achievement.

  Team Six was not just another SEAL team with a special mission. In many ways, it really was a new kind of SEAL team.

  Instead of operating in platoon-size or smaller units, the members of Team Six are trained to work in much larger units. They practice operating in assault groups—called color teams—of thirty to forty men and, if the hostage rescue situation calls for it, multiple color teams.

  They are trained to board a ship at sea or an oil platform, by climbing aboard from the sea or parachuting from the sky. When the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked in the Mediterranean Sea near Egypt on 7 October 1985, members of SEAL Team Six hurried to the scene. Their assignment was to board the ship and kill or capture the terrorists who had taken it over. Before they could go into action, the hostages were released. Later, when an Egyptian airliner carrying the terrorists was forced by American fighters to land at an Italian airfield, the SEALs almost got into a shooting scrape with the Italians.

  One officer who had watched the earlier formation of the army’s Delta Force was in a position to compare the two units. “Inside of a year,” he says, “Marcinko had Team Six as good as Delta. I saw them competing. They could crack an airplane. They could do anything Delta could do, at least as well.”

  Capt. Ronald K. (“Ron”) Bell, who had an opportunity to observe Team Six when he served as commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, says, “Marcinko accomplished some very significant things in standing up the team. They are extremely capable. If I were a hostage and had to pick someone to rescue me, I’d pick Six. I would pick Six over Delta, the Germans, the Israelis, or anybody. SAS [British Special Air Service], anybody.”

  Tom Hawkins, now a retired commander, recalls envying the money available to Team Six. “It gets a significant portion of the special operations budget, and it should,” he says. “I can say that, having been in charge of a team always looking for money. I would look at those guys and they never lacked for money. I used to get pissed off about it. But as I got into more senior positions, I saw that it was tax dollars well spent, in my view.”

  Team Six eventually grew into what the navy calls a major command, headed by a captain, rather than a commander. It also was given a new cover name to distance it from problems that occurred during the Marcinko era. SEALs still tend to refer to it as Six, or simply the Jedi.

  The training for members of the team is extremely demanding, involving constant travel. Tom Mountz recalls being asked once how long he had lived in the Norfolk area. He replied, “Five years.” His wife broke in to correct him: “No, I’ve lived here five years. You’ve lived here one year.” He figured he had been on the road 80 percent of the time. Members of the team joke that they work only half a day: twelve hours.

  It is not surprising that men who work so hard also play hard. And that, as it turned out, meant trouble.

  Because they might have to infiltrate into an area in preparation for a rescue attempt, members of the team dressed casually and wore their hair and beards any way that suited them. They also used first names, regardless of rank. This made sense because no one
wants to be addressed as “lieutenant” or “sir” in the midst of a take-down situation.

  This combination of casual dress, fraternization among officers and enlisted men, and hard partying soon made the members of Team Six a familiar and recognizable sight on the streets of Virginia Beach, the resort town closest to Little Creek. According to one story, two men wearing beepers were in a bar and introduced themselves to two young ladies. “I’m Doctor Jones from Detroit and this is my friend, Mr. Smith,” said one. “He’s in insurance.” The girls sized them up and responded in unison, “Oh, you’re from Six!”

  Their op-sec—operational security—left a good deal to be desired.

  Members of the team liked to congregate at the Raven, a bar and restaurant on Atlantic Avenue, one of the two main streets paralleling the ocean in Virginia Beach. There they drank, fought, broke glass, and even, on occasion, ate glass. The trick is to grind the glass into dust between your teeth before swallowing it. Members of the team were arrested for everything from public intoxication and fighting to child molestation.

  Everyone familiar with the team agrees that most of the trouble was caused by a very small percentage of its members. But they were not brought under control, and a major reason may be Marcinko’s own reputation for partying and hard drinking. One officer who served under Marcinko in Team Six says, “The man liked to drink. To be with him, you had to drink—to be in the ‘in’ crowd. I drink when I want to drink. This went against the grain.”

  Often, Marcinko conducted interviews with men being considered for the team in a bar. Mountz, who doesn’t drink, says Marcinko offered him a beer when he came for an interview at seven A.M. and, when he declined, told him he might not fit in.

  “I do have a capacity to drink,” Marcinko wrote in a letter to the author. “Especially gin (Bombay). Team members (East Coast) weaned on Rum/Coke at St. Thomas during annual winter training. I polished these skills in attaché training and converted to gin. Gin is powerful but my safest drink—consume more. It demoralizes the opponent drinking mixed drinks or slurring while I casually rant and rave. I do play ‘head games.’ I use booze as a tool.”

  Carley, who understood that his job as executive officer of the team was to keep his boss out of trouble, says he never recalls an occasion when Marcinko’s drinking interfered with his performance. Often, he says, Marcinko could break down the reserve of the younger sailors by sharing a beer or two with them. But he also says that Marcinko’s drinking may have proved a bad example for some members of the team.

  The off-duty behavior of team members became so notorious that it came to the attention of top admirals at the nearby Norfolk Naval Base. Officers at the SEALs’ headquarters at Little Creek were ordered to clean things up, even if it involved firing Marcinko.

  Comdr. Jack Schropp, who was on the staff at Little Creek, found himself in a position where he was responsible for checking out the rumors about the behavior of the Team Six men that came to him from junior officers and enlisted men. He called in an outside investigator, a captain from SURFLANT, the Atlantic fleet surface command.

  “When I complained,” Schropp says, “I was told to keep quiet because of national security. National security, hah! Marcinko was causing me more trouble than Abu Nidal.”

  Senior officers were also troubled by a series of accidents during the team’s training. One man lost an eye when hit by a rubber bullet. Another was killed during a live-fire exercise when the man behind him stumbled and cranked off a round as they entered a “kill house.” A third was severely crippled as a result of a parachute accident. Several other men died. Details of these accidents are shrouded in the secrecy that surrounds all Team Six activities, so it is not possible to determine whether they should have been avoided or whether they were an unavoidable by-product of the dangerous, realistic training done constantly by members of the team. Marcinko says simply, “People died. We worked hard and fast.”

  When Maynard Weyers, then a captain, took over as commander of Group Two in 1982, he found a black book, a big three-ring binder, filled with information about problems with Team Six. An admiral at SURFLANT told him, “That is one area you’ve got to clean up.”

  But the problem was complicated by the fact that Team Six did not really belong to the navy. While it looked to the navy for administrative support, it was under the operational control of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Part of the command structure set up by the Joint Chiefs to deal with the hostage problem, JSOC was headquartered at an army fort, commanded by an army general, and generally army-oriented. Marcinko thus had two bosses, and his navy bosses felt he tended to play them off against each other.

  Weyers won’t even use the name of the operational command that Marcinko reported to, but he says, “Of course Dick, with his personality, if he couldn’t get the thing he wanted from one guy, he’s going to go the other way. That happened a lot.”

  Spending by SEAL Team Six probably paled in comparison with that of the army’s bigger Delta Force, which managed to acquire the fuselage of a large airliner and erect a multistory building for use in hostage-rescue practice. But by the hand-to-mouth standards most SEALs were accustomed to, Team Six did very well for itself. Perhaps too well. As part of its equipment, the team acquired three large Mercedes Benz sedans. The team could drive its Mercedeses onto a special air force plane, fly to a distant country, and hit the ground ready to roll.

  But the autos were too nice to sit idle. Team members took to using them as liberty cars on nighttime drinking forays. That went on until the night that one of the cars was involved in an accident.

  The result was that Marcinko was subjected to a disciplinary proceeding known as a captain’s mast and received a letter of reprimand and an unsatisfactory fitness report. Everyone knew that a commanding officer with such a blot on his record had reached the end of his naval career. Weyers sent an aide to have the fitness report screened by navy lawyers to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, that there weren’t any loopholes.

  A short time later, in July 1983, Marcinko was replaced as commander of the team by Comdr. Robert Gormly, who had also won a Silver Star in Vietnam. Marcinko had had three years in the job but didn’t want to leave such an exciting command. Other SEALs felt Marcinko resented being replaced and failed to give Gormly a good turnover. Marcinko describes himself and Gormly as “competitive peers” from Vietnam and adds, “No strain, other than two egomaniacs walking through life. All SEALs have a degree of egomania.”

  One disgruntled enlisted man who had been a close associate of Marcinko left soon after Gormly’s arrival. He later recalled the situation: “Morale was at an all time low as of that summer.… It was awkward down there.… Captain Gormly had checked on board. Everything had changed, becoming more of a military organization.… There was a lot of turmoil with the transition. And Captain Gormly instituted a lot of military regulations. And rules that were in effect, he just started enforcing them. And it changed the complexion of the unit as well as the capability of the unit.”

  Others there at the time say morale among most of the SEALs remained good, and they deny that the capability of the unit suffered. But there was no question that there was change and some turmoil.

  Marcinko found himself in Washington waiting to begin classes at the National War College. But world events intervened to save him from being put out to academic pasture.

  On 23 October 1983, 241 marines and sailors were killed when a truck loaded with TNT exploded at the entrance to their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Vice Adm. J. A. (“Ace”) Lyons, Jr., was vice chief of naval operations for plans, policy, and operations at the time. Like everyone in the military community, he was shocked at the loss of life. He decided to do something to prevent a repetition of the tragedy.

  “Our people had been schooled since World War II that you’re going to take the first hit,” Lyons says. “Well, the first hit with a terrorist, you ain’t going to get a chance to come about.
”

  He proposed the creation of a special team to test security at key naval installations. The goal was not only to find lapses in security but to raise the awareness of the entire navy to the threat of sneak attack by terrorists. He described the plan in a memo to the chief of naval operations:

  I have established the Red Terrorist Cell under the code of OP-06D. This cell will plan terrorist attacks against U.S. naval ships and installations worldwide. They will identify the vulnerabilities of the targets and plan the attacks within the known capabilities, ethnic characteristics of the terrorist factions and the political objectives of the sovereign states involved. In conjunction with the attack scenario, this group will also recommend actions which can be taken which will either inhibit or so complicate any planned terrorist actions that they will not occur.

  Lyons looked around for someone to run this special team and he spotted Dick Marcinko, “sitting on his ditty bag,” waiting to begin classes. “It looked like we could take his unique talent and put it to work for the navy,” Lyons says.

  Lyons and Marcinko had known each other for a number of years and had hit it off together. Lyons had become the younger man’s mentor, his “sea daddy.” When Marcinko told off superior officers and got away with it, it was because he had a bigger admiral on his side.

  “As I’ve always told people, if you’re going to war and you have to have somebody at your side protecting your six, then Dick Marcinko is your man,” Lyons says. “Dick Marcinko would go out and do unusual things for the betterment of his men, not for Dick Marcinko’s sake, but to get equipment to help his men. Did he always go through channels? No. Did he get the job done? Yes. Did he have people who resented him? Of course. When you break rice bowls, that’s what happens. You understand that, but you get on and get the job done.”

  As an early test of the concept, Lyons and the vice CNO asked the commander of the Charleston Navy Base whether he was satisfied with his security arrangements. He assured them there was no problem. Marcinko and an enlisted man were dispatched to South Carolina to check out the base security.