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

by Orr Kelly

  With so little time left before the carefully coordinated invasion was to begin, it is probably unrealistic to expect any of the SEAL commanders—Sandoz back at Rodman, or McGrath or Toohey in their boats—to have successfully resisted this change in plans, as Coulter had resisted orders he knew would get him and his men killed. Within minutes, the SEALs landed and established a half-moon-shaped beachhead on the runway.

  Normally, two or three men would have been sent ahead to scout out the situation. But they felt a sense of urgency. Radio intercepts indicated Noriega might be heading for Paitilla. The Americans interpreted this as meaning he was going to the airfield. Actually, he was on his way to the Paitilla section of the city, where he later turned up, rather than to the airfield with the same name.

  As planned, Golf Platoon, divided into squads code named Golf One and Golf Two, led the way up the runway. They had about twelve hundred to fourteen hundred yards to go, roughly three-quarters of a mile. Following about two hundred yards behind were two other platoons, Bravo on the left and Delta on the right. When the lead platoon was only about a quarter of the way up the runway, the war suddenly erupted. The SEALs could see tracers arcing all over the city. All chance of surprise was gone, and they felt terribly exposed. Up ahead, outlined against the lights of the city, they could see men running. But because of the curvature of the land, they could only see the figures from the waist up. It was impossible to tell whether they were carrying weapons. Under the rules of engagement, the SEALs did not have to wait to be fired upon. If they were opposed by men with weapons, they could shoot. But they couldn’t be sure whether the men were armed, so they held their fire and continued up the runway.

  Golf One and Two stopped just in front of the hangar containing Noriega’s jet. Golf One, commanded by Lt. Tom Casey, was on the right. Golf Two, commanded by Lt. (jg) Mike Phillips, was on the left. The plan was for Casey’s squad to remain in position while Phillips and his men dashed into the hangar and disabled the plane by slashing its tires.

  But as the SEALs peered into the dark interior of the hangar, that plan was abruptly abandoned. With their night-vision scopes, they could see a number of armed men in the building, hiding behind barrels and heavy metal doors. They had walked into a deadly ambush.

  The SEALs opened fire. But their bullets bounced off the barrels and doors of the hangar. For them, there was no protection as the Panamanians responded. SEALs with long combat experience shudder when they picture the scene: the Americans caught in the open at a range of only thirty yards from a well-protected foe.

  Casey shouted that he had heavy wounded. Phillips switched the aim of his squad to provide a curtain of fire in front of Golf One. At that point, standard procedure called for the SEALs to pull back, carrying their wounded and dead with them. But there was no way the few men remaining uninjured could cover their withdrawal and carry their stricken colleagues. Phillips radioed for backup from Bravo Platoon, about two hundred yards to his left rear.

  He also sent two of his men over to help Casey. They groped from one man to another in the dark, finding one after another wounded or dead. Of the nine men in the squad, Casey was the only one not hit and still able to shoot. They set about dragging the wounded men behind Golf Two’s position so the men still firing could protect the wounded with their own bodies. It was a hellish experience. The rescuers couldn’t see where the men were wounded or how badly. All of the SEALs were still weighted down by many pounds of gear, so it was hard work just to drag the wounded. And the bullets continued to fly. As he dragged one of the injured men, Chief Petty Officer Donald L. McFaul, one of the most experienced men in the platoon, was hit in the head and killed. There were now two SEALs dead and a number hit so badly they were out of action.

  In the midst of the firefight, Lt. Connors and his squad from Bravo Platoon stormed up the runway to take up a position between the two squads of the lead platoon. By rights, Connors should not have been there. He had been under treatment for a tropical disease at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington when he heard his unit had been ordered to Panama. He talked his way out of the hospital and reported in at Little Creek just in time to board the plane for Panama.

  As the squad from Bravo Platoon came on the scene, Connors and one of his men were hit, but not badly wounded. The original rules of engagement limited the SEALs to small-arms fire, but the bullets from their 5.56mm and 7.62mm weapons were bouncing off the hiding places of the Panamanians. They decided to shoot back with 40mm grenades. The so-called forty mike-mike grenades can be fired from an adapter attached to an M-16 rifle. As Connors raised up to fire a grenade, he was hit once more and killed.

  Toohey had set up his command position partway up the runway. An officer listening in on the satellite communications back at Fort Bragg was amazed how calm Toohey sounded as he talked to an army general circling overhead.

  “I could hear everything Pat Toohey said,” he recalled. “I could hear he said he had two KIA [killed in action], three KIA. Seven WIA. Need a helicopter. Just as calm as he could be. The general asked if he wanted to withdraw over the beach to the water. He said, ‘Sir, my orders were to seize the airfield and hold it until relieved and those remain my intentions, over.’ Just as calm.… Pat Toohey is a guy who excites a lot of emotion.… But what I heard in those radio transmissions bespoke a very brave man.”

  As the firefight continued, Toohey moved all of the remaining SEALs forward and formed a large circle, with the wounded and dead in the center and all guns pointing outward. With the arrival of the additional SEALs, the firing, which had gone on for about fifteen minutes, finally stopped.

  During the entire fight, the men on the ground could hear a four-engined air force AC-130 gunship, with its awesome arsenal, including a 105mm gun, circling overhead. The SEALs had even brought two air force combat control team technicians with them to make sure they could call for instant help if they needed it. But throughout the fight, the technicians got no response from the fliers. They finally radioed back to Howard Air Force Base and asked for a new plane with a radio that worked. But by that time, it was too late.

  Whether additional firepower from the AC-130 would have made a major difference is doubtful, since the bulk of the SEAL casualties occurred in the first few moments of the firefight.

  The medevac helicopters were also too late to save the life of one of the badly wounded SEALs. Although the helicopters were only five minutes’ flying time away, there was a mixup in orders, and it was an hour before they arrived. By that time, a fourth man had bled to death.

  In the original plan, the team was to have been relieved at dawn by soldiers of the 82d Airborne Division. The SEALs pulled back down the runway, formed a new perimeter, and waited. But the soldiers didn’t arrive. the SEALs ended up remaining on the airfield for some thirty-seven hours, through the day after the battle, through the next night, and into the following day.

  At dawn, it became apparent that the Panamanian defenders had fled during the night, probably immediately after the firefight, taking their dead and wounded with them. The SEALs heard a few shots that may have been from snipers, but they had no further contact with Panamanian forces.

  Finally, a 250-man force of army Rangers descended in their helicopters to relieve the navy men. During the long wait, the SEALs had only MREs (meals, ready-to-eat). As it became clear that there were no hostile forces in the vicinity, they began moving about the airfield. They eyed a candy machine in one of the hangars and hesitated, aware of the rules against causing damage. Finally, they broke it open and helped themselves to the candy. Their hesitation seemed almost ludicrous when the army’s big troop-carrying helicopters landed and the hurricanelike wind from their rotors flipped over every plane still standing on the airfield.

  Even long after the shooting stopped, the SEALs remained unsure how many Panamanians were involved in the ambush. During the fight, the SEALs counted what appeared to be four bodies in the hangar and estimated they may have been oppose
d by ten to twenty men. If that estimate is correct, the intelligence on which the SEALs had based their planning—that they would probably face some twenty defenders—was pretty close to the mark.

  What apparently happened was that the Panamanians detected the SEALs either coming ashore or advancing up the runway and had time to pull back into the hangar to set up a hastily arranged ambush. Probably only two or three sharpshooters, firing from the protection of fifty-five-gallon barrels filled with cement, stuck it out through the entire firefight. And they were the ones who probably accounted for all, or most, of the American casualties. The heavy SEAL losses led to a report, repeated in an official analysis by the House Armed Services Committee, that the frogmen had been overpowered by armored personnel carriers that happened on the scene. But that was not true; they were never attacked by APCs.

  When the SEALs counted their losses, there were four men dead and nine wounded, more than they had ever lost in a single engagement in the nearly three decades of their existence. The dead were Connors, McFaul, and Petty Officers Christian Tilghman and Isaac G. Rodriguez. Rodriguez might have survived if the medevac helicopters had arrived during the “Golden Hour” after he was wounded.

  Word of the losses at Paitilla sent a wave of sorrow and anger through the SEAL community. It was clear that something had gone badly wrong. But because details of the action remained classified, it was not clear exactly what had gone wrong or who was responsible. Was it unrealistic rules of engagement that came from the army, or perhaps even from the Department of State? Was it the failure of senior SEALs to insist that the mission be tailored to their style of warfare? Was it the fact that more than three platoons were involved? Or was it just the vagaries of war? Admiral LeMoyne, who by that time was on the staff of the Special Operations Command, took that position.

  “My reading of Panama,” LeMoyne says, “is that we had a mission that was appropriate to us, we trained, prepared to do it, and we went in and did it. We performed it. I would like to have done it without suffering those casualties. We were not able to do that. I attribute that to the vagaries, the uncertainties of warfare. After the SEALs got hit, hit very hard, the end result was they stayed right on the target, they overcame the opposition, they accomplished what they were sent there to do and did that very well.”

  But Comdr. Gary Stubblefield, former commander of SEAL Team Three, a West Coast team that was not involved in Panama, took a much more critical view. A Vietnam veteran and a respected combat “operator,” Stubblefield was within days of retirement. He wrote a stinging letter addressed to his superiors through the chain of command on 7 January 1990. Titled “Accountability in the Field,” it said:

  Throughout the history of Naval Special Warfare, the community personnel have gained a well-deserved reputation for being able to enter a unique niche in combat environments, do a respectable job and walk away from the situation with little or no friendly casualties. In the eyes of many, Panama has shattered that record by creating more casualties per capita than typical ground troops by a multithousand factor. Most tend to blame this upon the infusion of “army green mentality” being forced upon our navy doctrine and further enhanced by the belief that “special operations forces” are typically given the toughest job in today’s combat scenarios.

  This is simply not correct. From the earliest days of training, up through actual operational scenarios, we have always been taught that we plan and operate “to win.” The old adages that we live to fight another day and that we are not trained to charge bunkers has always been part of our heritage. However, there appears to be a new philosophy developing within our own ranks, particularly among those leaders who have never actually been involved in many special operations or combat situations. It is that we have become an expendable force; that we are tougher, better trained and therefore take on the worst combat scenarios which we don’t send common soldiers against. Quite the opposite is true. Because we are better trained and more conditioned to react positively under difficult situations, it is precisely the reason we plan and execute our missions more carefully to preserve these “high value personnel.”

  Review of the airfield operation, even to the most casual observer, without the benefit of back-briefs, reveals that our leadership delivered the SEALs on the ground into an unfair role and created a situation which, under the conditions given, could only create casualties. The objective, no matter how stated, was to prevent General Noriega from using the airfield for evacuating the country. This could easily have been accomplished with a small number of SEALs using some of the advanced weapons and technology we have been spending large amounts of money to develop and procure over the past two decades.

  Instead, our leaders sent too many troops, who are not accustomed to working in larger numbers, against the defended position when it was absolutely unnecessary in order to achieve our objective. These leaders must be held accountable and not allowed to lead our fine young SEALs into such unwarranted and costly scenarios again rather than given praise for a job well done.

  Finally, we must learn from these costly mistakes and design into future training and preparation of all special warfare personnel that most objectives have the ability to be accomplished without loss of life if the planning and execution are based on firm common sense and then weighed against the value of our personnel whom we have spent so many hours and dollars preparing to carry out Naval Special Warfare operations.

  Stubblefield’s immediate superior, Capt. Raymond C. Smith, Jr., commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group One, thought the letter made a lot of sense. He gave it a positive endorsement and sent it along to Admiral Worthington, commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, and thus the senior SEAL commander.

  By that time, Stubblefield had retired, but Worthington called him in anyway.

  “I get awfully tired of arguing with some of the old SEALs that weren’t there,” Worthington says. “I brought one of the retirees [Stubblefield] in, sat him down and told him, ‘you don’t know anything about the intelligence that went into this, yet you’re writing letters to everybody saying how fouled up it was.’ Now I got a case of the ass about that. The op was good. SEALs weren’t the only people killed. More people on the other side died than SEALs died.”

  But wasn’t the multiplatoon nature of the operation a departure from SEAL doctrine?

  “My answer to that is, so what?” Worthington says. “They were given a military job, they were Americans, they were trained, the most healthy group of people down there. Why can’t they do that? Not a single SEAL, even in planning, stood up and said, ‘that’s not our doctrine.’ Well, change the doctrine.”

  One suspicion among many SEALs is that the Paitilla action was permitted to become so large because it gave many SEALs the opportunity to participate in combat and win a medal. When Just Cause was over, medals—more than forty of them—were lavishly bestowed upon the SEALs involved.

  One veteran SEAL officer expressed his concern over the temptation to involve more men than are actually needed: “We tend to want to get everyone involved, whether or not their help is needed. It gives them ‘experience’—experience dying, being wounded, being scared shitless, being shot at. SEALs get mad if they are left out. I say, ‘I don’t give a shit if you never get shot at. If I don’t need you, you can stay at the base camp.’”

  After the Paitilla operation, this same officer was sent off on another mission with strict orders from Sandoz, the overall SEAL commander in Panama: “Don’t get another SEAL killed!”

  SEALs carried out a number of other small, specialized actions both before and after the main event in Panama. Members of SEAL Team Six were among the special operations forces who went in early in an unsuccessful effort to find and seize Noriega. And members of Carley’s SEAL Team Two, along with other SEALs, checked out a series of islands where Panamanian forces could have been hiding out. These operations were conducted without running into opposition.

  For the special ope
rations forces involved, Panama was a larger, far better coordinated, and more successful operation than their participation in the Grenada invasion six years earlier. In addition to about 500 navy men, including the SEALs, there were some 2,850 soldiers and 800 air force personnel. Two and two-thirds battalions of Rangers jumped into the Rio Hato area, and another battalion jumped in at the Torrijos Tucanmen airfield. The army’s antiterrorist Delta Force stormed a prison just before the major attack was launched and rescued an American who reportedly worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The dangerous nature of the assignments given to the special operations forces is indicated by their heavy casualties: 11 killed and 129 wounded.

  The overall invasion was so successful that army Lt. Gen. Carl Stiner, the commander, boasted that there had been no lessons to be learned. To many SEALs, it seemed obvious that there were lessons that should be learned. Whether the SEALs were capable of learning those lessons was another question. Although it could not be foreseen at the time, another test for the Special Operations Command—and for the SEALs—was just over the horizon.

  CHAPTER

  14

  To the Persian Gulf—and Beyond

  SADDAM HUSSEIN’S IRAQI FORCES INVADED KUWAIT ON 2 August 1990. Nine days later, a contingent of 105 West Coast SEALs and support personnel were on the ground in Saudi Arabia, setting up a base on the coast south of Dhahran.

  Between the SEALs and the Iraqi army were two hundred miles of sand—and not much else. It would be weeks before sizable marine and army airborne units arrived to begin a buildup of forces powerful enough to prevent the Iraqis from sweeping south into Saudi Arabia.

  In those first dangerous weeks, the SEALs were virtually the only American fighting men standing between Saddam Hussein and further conquest. Desert Shield at that time was a very fragile defensive array, indeed. For the SEALs, the first order of business was not to plan how to resist an Iraqi drive to the south. SEALs don’t throw themselves in the path of columns of armor or massed infantry. Their first priority was to plan how to get away of the assault continued.