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

by Orr Kelly

  As it turned out, four SEALs, manning an observation post in a cavelike bunker on the coast just south of the Kuwait border, suddenly found themselves involved in the first ground combat of the war on the night of 31 January. By this time, the great air assault on Iraq had been underway for nearly two weeks, but action on the ground had been limited to sporadic artillery duels.

  The early evening was almost eerily quiet—too quiet. And then about ten o’clock, the men heard the ominous sounds of heavy machinery—tanks—moving toward them just above the border.

  Suddenly the desert, already bright with moonlight, lit up under the glare of a series of illumination grenades, one right over their heads. A tank rolled up onto the berm 150 yards away and opened fire. The Iraqis knew the Americans were there, but they didn’t know exactly where. The SEALs wisely decided not to help the enemy’s aim by opening fire. The SEALs had heavy machine guns and 40mm grenades, but they were no match for the guns of a tank.

  Their first thought—natural to SEALs—was to head for the water. But when they saw a marine vehicle pass by safely, they decided to make a run for it south across the desert in their jeeplike HMMWV. They were the last Americans to leave the border area. Until the last minute, when they took down the antenna for their satellite communications system, they radioed reports on the movement of the Iraqi forces. As they sped south toward Khafji, they saw air force antitank planes attack. “The A-10s just ate them up,” said one of the SEALs.

  The SEALs paused in Khafji to make sure all the U.S. units had been able to pull back from the border, and then sped on south to their main base on the coast.

  After a fierce fight, Saudi forces, assisted by U.S. Marines and allied aircraft, drove the surviving members of the invading force back across the border.

  For Capt. Ray Smith, commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group One, the assignment as commander of Naval Special Warfare Task Group, Central, in Saudi Arabia, was both a special opportunity and a special challenge. A 1967 graduate of Annapolis, Smith had commanded an Underwater Demolition Team platoon, but he had missed the opportunity to command a SEAL platoon in combat during the Vietnam War. In the Persian Gulf War, he was on-scene commander of a multiplatoon task force, the first such unit to be sent overseas in the history of the SEALs, and the largest deployment of SEALs since the Vietnam War.

  It was also the first time the SEALs had been called upon to serve as an integral part of a much larger force involved in a major conventional war, and this would pose special challenges for Smith.

  In their introduction to combat, in Vietnam, the SEALs had, to a considerable degree, fought their own little war, largely independent of the bigger operations going on around them. In Grenada, they had been part of a hasty, relatively small-scale operation involving poorly coordinated army, navy, air force, and marine units. Panama had been a major special operations forces action in which the SEALs played out specific, long-planned parts. None of these provided a clear guide to what the SEALs should be expected to do in the Gulf or precisely how they should do it in coordination with the much larger forces involved.

  The decisions Smith made, and the performance of his SEALs, would help define the future course of naval special warfare. The challenge facing him was to demonstrate that his very small and very specialized force, trained primarily for low-intensity, unconventional warfare, could make a difference in a big, conventional war.

  When the Iraqi forces crossed the border, Smith was given seventy-two hours to pick his force, select his equipment, load everyone and everything in three C-5 and three C-141 aircraft, and take off for the war zone.

  By any measure, the force under Smith’s command was a tiny part of the overall effort. At the peak, the American force in the Gulf area totalled more than 540,000 troops, of whom some 9,000 were part of the Special Operations Command. Smith’s force numbered a scant 260, including special boat units and support personnel. Of these, only 60 men—four platoons—wore the SEAL insignia. Four more SEAL platoons were afloat with the navy-marine amphibious force—two platoons in the Persian Gulf and two more in the Mediterranean and, later, the Red Sea. SEALs routinely accompany the amphibious force, and these four platoons were not part of Smith’s special task group.

  The naval special warfare contingent was small even in comparison with the SEAL community of some two thousand men. Understandably, many of the SEALs who remained at home—especially those on the East Coast, who played little part in the operation—were unhappy at being left behind.

  The East Coast SEALs thought Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the overall commander, was to blame. Gossip had it that Schwarzkopf didn’t like any special operations forces, especially the SEALs. According to the good news-bad news story circulating in Little Creek, the army Special Forces arrived in Saudi Arabia and told Schwarzkopf, “The bad news is, we’re here. The good news is, we didn’t bring the SEALs.”

  Members of Smith’s small contingent got no hint from the army high command that they were unwelcome. They were called in early, which is essential if special operations forces are to be most effective. And they were favored with their choice of shore bases, first at a recreation area known as Half Moon Bay, just south of Dhahran, and later at Ras al-Mishab, a short distance south of the Kuwaiti border. Smith established his headquarters at Ras al-Gar, near Jubail, about seventy-five miles to the north of Dhahran. If they were not welcome, they could have found themselves in tents out in the desert, with plenty of sand but no water.

  Smith could have made himself popular by fielding a significantly larger force. But both the rules by which he guided his operations and the nature of the war itself placed a limit on the number of SEALs involved.

  Smith laid out five guidelines, which he called his concepts of employment:

  1. High probability of success.

  2. Maritime environment.

  3. In support of commander-in-chief, central command components.

  4. Contribute to overall effort.

  5. Single-platoon/squad-level operations.

  Perhaps the most significant, in view of the SEALs’ experience in Panama, was the last. In this war, the SEALs went back to their traditional small-unit role. There would be none of the multiplatoon operations of the kind that had led to disaster at Paitilla.

  “I wanted to do what we do well, and I wanted to make sure my boss knew what we could do,” Smith says. When the SEALs arrived, no one, including Smith, knew quite how the SEALs would fit into this big conventional war. Smith looked for ways to be useful—as a maritime force, in support primarily of the navy and marines, and in small-unit operations.

  Perhaps surprisingly, the SEALs found themselves focusing on tasks that would have been familiar to the Underwater Demolition Teams of the 1950s, or even of World War II. Left off the agenda were some of the most important skills they had practiced from the midseventies on in an effort to make themselves useful, not just in amphibious operations, but to the fleet as a whole.

  For years, SEALs have practiced sneaking ashore in hostile territory to place beacons to guide bombers to their targets, or to actually mark the targets with laser beams. They have also put a good deal of effort into working their way close enough to enemy targets so they could radio back reports on bomb damage within minutes after bombs had fallen and the planes had streaked away.

  Another of their specialties is to attack enemy targets directly, leaving their calling card, in the form of a packet of explosives and a timer, on the bottom of a ship, the base of a bridge, or a key component of a power plant.

  In the Gulf War, the SEALs did not get the opportunity to try out any of these specialties.

  A major reason was the revolution in technology that has transformed the battlefield. Tomahawk cruise missiles and highly accurate bombers were able to destroy targets that, in earlier days, might have been assigned to the SEALs. And satellites and the cameras of reconnaissance planes, in many cases, provided fast, accurate reports on bomb damage, making it less important for
SEALs to go in and eyeball the target.

  Another reason not to send SEALs on these specialized missions was the intense concentration of enemy forces along the Kuwaiti coastline, the maritime environment where the SEALs, rather than other special operations units, would be expected to operate. By one estimate, Saddam Hussein had clustered sixty thousand troops along a twenty-five-mile stretch near the coast. One officer who considered the possibilities concluded it would have been “lunatic” to send SEALs into such an intensely hostile environment.

  Offshore, the SEALs provided a host of valuable services. They jumped from helicopters to attach explosives or towing lines to enemy mines and destroyed twenty-five of them. They flew daily on helicopters assigned to rescue allied fliers and, on one occasion, they arrived within minutes after an air force F-16 pilot splashed into the sea and helped him to safety.

  They captured an oil platform being used by the Iraqis as a military base and took twenty-three prisoners of war. They also seized Qarah Island, the first Kuwaiti land to be recaptured by the allied forces.

  Working with the special boat units, they spent hours patrolling the gulf in search of Iraqi patrol craft. Later, operating at night in their little rubber Zodiac boats, they slowly cruised off the coast of Kuwait, watching for any sign of Iraqi naval activity. Lying low in the water and moving so slowly that they made no wake, they were virtually invisible. On a number of occasions, they spotted Iraqi patrol boats, radioed their position, and then moved away. If the frogmen in their vulnerable rubber boats had been spotted, a few bullets would have ended the war for them. But they were never detected, at least partially because the Iraqi crews were so busy searching the sky for allied planes rather than looking down at the dark waters.

  All of these operations were useful, but in the overall scheme of things they were hardly of the type to make any real difference in the outcome of the war.

  As the ground war was about to begin, however, the SEALs were given the opportunity to demonstrate how a handful of well-trained men can have an impact on larger events totally out of proportion to their numbers.

  As part of the buildup, the United States assembled a powerful amphibious fleet in the northern reaches of the Gulf, with seventeen thousand marines poised for an amphibious landing in Kuwait. As viewed from the bunkers of Baghdad, such an operation made a good deal of sense militarily. Saddam Hussein and his commanders expected a frontal assault on their heavily fortified positions in Kuwait, rather than the end run to the west that Schwarzkopf actually carried out. If the allies had followed Hussein’s game plan, an amphibious landing would have given the Iraqi forces a lot of trouble, and they had to be concerned about it.

  The allies fed Hussein’s fears by putting on an elaborate dress rehearsal for a landing, with the press invited to report on the preparations.

  In early January, SEALs began making nightly studies of the Kuwaiti coastline, looking for the best invasion beaches. Instead of going in during the day, as their predecessors had done in World War II, they did their work at night, using night-vision devices to pierce the darkness. Each night, they spent several hours in their Zodiacs watching the shore. Then, three-man teams swam in close to the beach and floated there quietly for several more hours, studying the lay of the land, trying to pick out defensive fortifications and watching for signs of movement by the Iraqi forces.

  Their reports were not encouraging. Most of the Kuwaiti shore was dotted with buildings. As soon as the marines landed, they would find themselves in a kind of urban warfare, forced to work their way between buildings. Each street or alley or gap between buildings was a potential killing zone.

  Finally, the SEALs found one stretch of about a mile and a half with few buildings. Open fields lay just beyond the beach. Physically, it was a perfect site for an amphibious landing—if the Iraqis had not come to the same conclusion and equipped it with elaborate defenses.

  For several nights, the SEALs concentrated on this one stretch of beach, first watching from their Zodiac boats and then swimming in closer to get a better look.

  The word went back up the chain of command to Smith, then to SOCCENT (Special Operations Command, Central) and finally to Schwarzkopf’s headquarters. The SEALs were let in on one of the most important secrets of the war: there would be no amphibious landing, but there would be an elaborate deception. The SEALs drew up a plan to fool the Iraqis, and then they waited. Most of them knew no more about when, or if, the ground offensive would begin than television viewers back home. Finally, they got the word. The deception operation would be carried out early on the morning of 24 February, just before the ground war began.

  Lt. Tom Deitz, an Annapolis graduate who had been detached from SEAL Team Five, where he was a platoon commander, to take part in the Gulf War, was put in charge of the SEAL portion of the operation. Deitz had never heard of the Beach Jumpers—the navy men who specialized in deception operations in the years following World War II—but his plan read like a page out of their book. Late on the night of 23 February, Deitz and fourteen other members of his platoon left their base at Ras al-Mishab and sped north in two Fountain-class high-speed patrol boats.

  It was about a forty-mile trip, reminiscent of the forays against the north by Vietnamese sailing out of Da Nang nearly thirty years before. Often the water was so rough that the SEALs returned from such speedboat rides black and blue. But the water was smooth and silky this night. The only danger was the possibility of collision with a mine. Everyone tried not to think about that.

  For several days, the “invasion” beach had been hammered by frequent air strikes and barrages of naval gunfire. But on the night of the deception operation, the defenders were puzzled by a strange, even eery, silence. Neither guns nor bombs disturbed the stillness.

  As the patrol boats idled offshore, the fifteen SEALs slid their three Zodiacs into the water and then climbed aboard and moved quietly toward the enemy beach.

  At about five hundred yards from the shore, Deitz and five other men slipped into the water. Although when the SEALs first arrived in the war zone in August the water in the Gulf was a steamy ninety-two degrees—warm enough to worry about heat exhaustion—it had dropped to a chilly fifty-three degrees by February. The SEALs wore wet suits, gloves, and tight-fitting helmets to prevent the loss of heat through the head, with booties under their fins. They did without face masks because of the chance that reflected glare might give them away. They wore no underwater breathing gear, but each man carried a three-minute SCUBA bottle in case he had to swim underwater to evade enemy gunfire.

  Except for protection against the cold, they could have been mistaken for the naked warriors of World War II.

  In Deitz’s planning, the choice of the nine men who remained behind in the Zodiacs was as important as the five he took with him to the beach. In each boat he had a “gear-head,” who could keep the engine running no matter what, and an expert communicator. Also left behind were several senior petty officers, men who could be relied on to make the right decisions if anything went wrong.

  As they swam toward the beach, each of the swimmers pushed a twenty-pound haversack of C-4 explosive, fitted with a small flotation bag, in front of him. Dangerous as it might seem to swim toward an enemy beach hugging a bundle of explosives to your chest, that was not one of the SEALs’ worries. The C-4 would not explode if hit by a bullet and might even provide some protection.

  The men were also able to rest their weapons on top of the haversacks, making it easier to swim. Three of the frogmen were armed with HK MP-5 submachine guns and three with M-16 rifles fitted with M-203 grenade launchers. Each man had his favorite brand of knife strapped to his leg just above the ankle. Some carried the standard-issue K-bar knife. Deitz had a knife he had bought at a diving shop in San Diego. “The knife was just if we got tangled on something,” Deitz says. “It was not for slitting throats. That’s what you have a gun for.”

  The men swam toward the beach in a horizontal line, about twenty feet apar
t. When they reached the point where the water was about six feet deep, they floated quietly and watched the shore. Then, seeing no signs of activity, they spread out until, with about fifty yards between each of them, they covered about an eighth of a mile.

  It was a dark, moonless night, and the sea was as still as a mountain lake, with the water lapping gently on the beach. The SEALs deflated the air bladders and deposited their haversacks of explosives on the sand near the water’s edge. The bags were heavy enough to remain in place without being buried or fastened down. A few minutes before eleven P.M., each of the men pulled the pins on two timers attached to his haversack. The timers were set to go off at intervals beginning at one A.M.

  Unlike Carley, who insisted on a special type of timer when he was planning the attack on the Panamanian patrol boat, Deitz was comfortable with the standard military-issue timer. In 1987, when doubts were raised about its reliability, he had conducted a series of tests, setting off some forty clocks at different depths. They all went off precisely on time, and Deitz felt very confident using them in a real-world operation—but not so confident that he didn’t insist on placing two timers on each bag of explosives. The SEALs always want a backup. They reason that “two is one; one is none.”

  With the timers set, the SEALs swam back out to their Zodiacs and then rejoined their two patrol boats about seven miles offshore. Meanwhile, two more patrol boats had been lurking about two miles from the beach. At about twelve thirty A.M., they began raking the dugouts and other fortifications along the beach with fire from their .50-cal. machine guns and 40mm mortars.