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

by Orr Kelly

  All he wants is to be able to display his skill on the battlefield. You can train only so much. And you can train as realistically as you want. You can try and add realism. But there is only one arena to really get the ultimate and that’s when you’re going against somebody who can shoot back at you. That’s what every SEAL seeks.

  I’ve talked a lot about the individual and his open and hidden motivations. There are also pressures on a SEAL from his platoon mates. In more cases than not, the individual requires those pressures, and it is those pressures which keep him going by justifying his actions.

  For example, group loyalty is extremely strong in the teams. You are either in or you are out. If you are in, you must act in the stereotyped way and support the platoon norms and mores. The environment is rough and unforgiving. It is better to die than look bad or lose. It’s all for one and one for all. If you aren’t in XYZ Platoon, you are shit!

  Most in the organization have these pressures and they stay because of them. They want them, they need them. They require the approval, respect, and support of their small, select group. When your life will (not may) someday depend on the performance of the guy next to you in the line of march, HALO [high altitude, low opening parachute jump] formation, ambush path, lockout chamber, or vertical board and search team, you need to know that he will sacrifice himself for the group if need be. That he will accomplish the mission without regard for his personal safety. This is personal, very personal. Either you have it or you don’t.

  If you ever got down and had a real discussion with them [guys on active duty] they would scare you. I’ve been in discussion with some of them when I was in the teams, and it started to scare me a little bit. All this guy wants to do is go into combat, as though nothing else in the world matters.

  This is what they are at the entry level, the first eight to ten years. Then time in the teams increases, other aspects of their lives start to open up: they get married, have kids, start relating with other people outside their own platoons. As they get older, some of this focus starts to erode. They don’t remain as sharp or combat ready as they were. They get into positions of responsibility and cannot maintain the daily rigors of SEAL platoon readiness training. Instead of going to the rifle range or going jumping, they’ve got to do paperwork. There is a natural regression over time away from combat.

  This is truer of the officers than the enlisted and it is very individualistic. Some put the training aside quickly and easily. Others hang on for as long as they can. You never really lose the desire to maintain great physical shape. It is just too ingrained, and does too many positive things for you.

  The family puts a lot of pressure on. But what comes across loud and clear is duty first, family second. It takes a special woman to put up with what is nonverbally expected. A guy doesn’t sit down with his girlfriend, fiancée, or newly married wife and say, “This is what I expect of you. By the way, I can leave at any time and not tell you where I am going or when I’m coming back and I just expect you to take care of the kids, the yard, the bills, and the house. I’ll come back when I can and then I’ll say, ‘Well, I’m going to go again.’”

  SEALs aren’t the most brilliant in the military. Maybe the nuclear submariners are. But these guys are the sharpest. They have a mental agility and an ability to get right through to the bottom line, right now. They are not good for a lot of talk or a lot of fluff. They will get right down to it.

  These guys are different from other people. They’re not your average military. They’re not your average human being. They’re SEALs.

  Hershel Davis retired in the fall of 1993 after twenty-eight years in the navy, eighteen of them in the senior enlisted rank of master chief. He served in Vietnam as a member of SEAL Team TWO in 1969. A tall, broad-shouldered man who sports a wide, ferocious-looking mustache with its tips neatly twirled, Davis still speaks with the strong midwestern accent of his native Missouri.

  You want a description of Hershel Davis? He’s loud and obnoxious and likes to jump and shoot. I love it. Jumping’s my first love, shooting my second love.

  If I was going to stand up and volunteer for something, I’d volunteer for most of the jumping and most of the shootin’. And swimming. I fancy myself as a frogman. I prefer the title “frogman.” There are a lot of SEALs in the navy but damn few frogmen.

  This is a high-speed, high-adrenaline, very exciting life when it’s just the normal, everyday routine. It can scare the shit out of you. You brush old Death, sometimes, on a daily basis. You see the old Grim Reaper over there and he’s grinnin’ and taking a swipe at you with that big scythe but he’s missed me, thank God. I don’t seek after him but it does come with the territory. Every time you leave the ramp of an airplane in the middle of the night on a jump or you get in the water for a ship attack, you don’t know if you’re going to come out unscathed.

  If you don’t have a reputation as an operator, you don’t have a reputation. The assets are those boys out there going in harm’s way. The assets are those boys putting their fins on in the dark of night in the Gulf of Thailand with all the goddamn sea snakes. The assets are the boys going out with the tiger sharks charging over the reefs at you.

  We were some bad son of a bitches. That’s a fact of life. I will be eternally grateful, as long as I live, to the men who trained me. You cannot take Judeo-Christian principles into a goddang war when you’re fighting atheistic, cold-blooded butchering bastards. You cannot. It’s easy to sit back here and say this and that and the other thing and talk about atrocities and shit. But when you go in that field and you’re behind enemy lines and you’re outnumbered three hundred or four hundred to one, you better be one bad dude. You don’t waste no time giving quarter and being a nice guy. If you’re not badder than the bad guys, you lose. I ain’t going to tell you no more than that.

  They were terrified of us. That’s why we were called “the men with green faces.” They considered us evil spirits. They were afraid of us. They would not make contact with us if they could help it. Unless they had us outnumbered a zillion to one. Every time they tangled with us, they got their ass handed to them.

  I was just so proud to be a part of that. I was a Stoner machine gunner in Bravo Squad. Joe Shit the ragman is who I was. I just shot my machine gun until it broke, sometimes. And then I’d try to fix it.

  SEALs are gunslingers. That’s what we do. SEALs are trained to hurt folks and blow things up. That’s what we do. And if you don’t like guns, what the sam hill are you doing in a SEAL team?

  We still have SEALs just as bad as we’ve ever had. We’re a mirror image of the civilian population. Every shittin’ thing that exists in the civilian population that’s not good exists in a SEAL team—certainly to a lesser degree because of our screening process. We still get a lot of turkeys. You bet your sweep bippy. We’ve had murderers, rapists, robbers. For a long time we had Jesus freaks. Bible thumpers. They thought I was the devil. Told me I was possessed.

  If you can’t accept the responsibility for taking a human life, if you’ve got to kneel down and pray on it—you’ve got to get all that done way before. I pray. I pray to the Lord to protect me and I pray that every time I fire a shot I kill something. If he would just bless me with those two things—which he has so far.

  Those are the kinds of things a man should be interested in. If you are a navy SEAL, you should be in pursuit of harm’s way. Avidly pursuing harm’s way. If there’s something going on in the world and there’s going to be SEALs there, by God I want to be one of them.

  PART ONE

  THE EARLY DAYS

  CHAPTER

  1

  MacArthur’s Frogmen

  William L. “Bill” Dawson, retired after a twenty-five-year career as a fireman in the District of Columbia, now lives in the quiet little town of La Plata a few miles south of Washington, D.C. For two years during World War II, Dawson was one of a tiny group of sailors who helped pave the way for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s campaign northward thro
ugh the western Pacific toward his return to the Philippines.

  While the fabled underwater demolition teams—the “naked warriors”—grew dramatically in size until they were able to put a thousand men in the water in preparation for the landings on Okinawa and were ready to send even more if an invasion of the main Japanese islands had been necessary, the units in which Dawson served totalled a mere dozen men, under the command of Lt. Francis Riley “Frank” Kaine, who became a leader in naval special warfare into the Vietnam War era.

  Dawson was seventeen years old when he enlisted in the navy on 14 April 1943 in his hometown of Washington, D.C. While most of the millions of Americans who enlisted or were drafted to serve during World War II signed on for “the duration plus six months,” Dawson enlisted for a “minority cruise”—agreeing to serve until he was twenty-one years old.

  From the date of his enlistment until his arrival back in Honolulu after nearly two years in the South Pacific, Dawson kept a carefully printed log of his travels. Here is the story of his experience, a view of war from the vantage point of a young and very junior enlisted man, interspersed with entries from his diary:

  I joined the navy on April 14, 1943, when I was seventeen, for a minority cruise. You get out when you’re twenty-one. I was waiting at Bainbridge, Maryland, to go to submarine school when two officers gave a speech about a new outfit. Another fellow and I figured this was a chance to get out of there [waiting to go to sub school].

  We went up to volunteer but they told us the place was closed. They had over five hundred applicants. So we went around back, piled up some crates, climbed in the window, and got at the end of the line. We filled out the applications. The officer asked us a bunch of questions.

  One question I asked was, “Is there any chance of getting in submarines after I take this training?” He didn’t think so. Well, that’s come to pass. The SEALs operate out of submarines all the time now.

  They picked forty-two men out of the five hundred that applied and we were two of them.

  There were thirty-six Seabees and forty-two of us navy men from Bainbridge, with officers from the Mine Disposal School in Washington, D.C., along with Commander Kauffman.

  Draper L. Kauffman, an Annapolis graduate who served with both the French and British in the early days of World War II, before the U.S. became involved, established a bomb disposal school in Washington, D.C., in 1942 and, in June 1943, set up another school at Fort Pierce, Florida, to train members of what became naval combat demolition units and underwater demolition teams.

  We went to Fort Pierce in July 1943 and went through training in July and August. We had quite a training. Commander Kauffman trained right along with us when he wasn’t in Washington. The men liked him pretty well.

  Down there in Florida, they weeded out some of the men in training. Many a time I wanted to lie down and cry but the sand flies and mosquitoes wouldn’t let me. Lots of times when we were swimming, the sea nettles were so bad we were pulling guys out of the water. I was a lifeguard on one of the rubber boats. Guys were screaming. They were great big, hard jellyfish, thousands of them. We didn’t have any rubber suits or any equipment.

  Originally, we came out of Fort Pierce with five men and an officer. Quite a few of the men I trained with in the first class at Fort Pierce went to Normandy. Three units in our group stayed and went to Europe. We were lucky to go to the Pacific.

  We went to California and were sent to different places. Lieutenant Kaine was our officer. Our two units—Units Two and Three—stayed together and they sent us to the southwest Pacific. [Dawson’s diary lists the members of Unit Two, commanded by Kaine, as himself, William J. Armstrong, Alan H. Pierce, Dillard J. Williams, and Jonny N. Wilhide. Members of Unit Three, commanded by Lt. Lloyd G. Anderson, were Cornelius C. DeVries, Harrison G. Eskridge, Edward A. Messall, Sam Pandopony, and James D. Sandy.]

  We went all through New Guinea, the Philippine Islands, and Borneo and made twelve different operations. Some of the other units went to different parts of the Pacific and merged with the UDT teams. They had eighty men and fifteen officers. We stayed individual units—five men and an officer, a total of twelve men. I don’t know of any others that stayed individual units.

  It’s funny, now the SEALs are back to operating in squads. [A SEAL team is made up often platoons of sixteen men, divided into two squads of eight men. However, for certain operations, larger units are employed.]

  We were called naval combat demolition units. We never became underwater demolition teams.

  We went directly to the Pacific from California. We boarded ship on November 3, 1943, at Port Hueneme with two hundred tons of TNT on board. We left Hueneme on the Frank C. Emerson, a Liberty ship. We crossed the equator, crossed the international date line, and arrived in Brisbane [Australia] on December 26.

  I didn’t keep track [in the diary] of the various jobs we did because everything was top secret. But I have all the dates of where we went and when we went.

  When we left Australia, we went to Milne Bay [New Guinea]. We were under a marine colonel who sent us on a thirty-six-mile hike through the jungles to keep us in training.

  The first operation we went on was in the Admiralty Islands [in the South Pacific north of New Guinea]. We went ashore with the army and slept in foxholes for a night or two. We lined the foxholes with bangalore torpedoes, if you want to believe that, to keep the sand from coming in on us. We had what we called “Washing Machine Charlie,” who used to come over every night, same time, right on schedule, and drop a couple of bombs. We used to kid, if he hit us, we’d wave as we passed over the States.

  Dawson made the following succinct diary entry:

  April 22. Arrived at Aitape, saw plenty of action.

  Then we went over to the harbor and blasted a coral reef out of the channel coming in to the big harbor there. We had to knock the top off the coral reef so the deeper drafted ships could get in.

  We were diving in about twenty feet of water with shallow diving gear.

  What kind?

  We had training at Fort Pierce with the Momsen lung, which was used for escaping from a submarine. When we went overseas, we had rebreathers.

  The rebreathers were a canvas rig that came down over your head, front, and back, with a full face mask. It was a self-contained breathing apparatus. It had a tank of oxygen and a tank of lime. The lime would help repurify the air. You would give yourself a shot of oxygen every so often as you needed it. We could stay down half an hour, three quarters of an hour, depending on how hard you were breathing.

  We also had a mask and hand pump. They could pump air to you from the surface. We used those a couple of times.

  We used the rebreathers for diving on those coral reefs in the Admiralty Islands. The coral reef dropped off to sixty fathoms on both sides. Looking down, it got pretty dark down there. The current, coming in and out of the inlet, would kind of move you over to the edge once in a while. It would shake you up a little bit.

  We were using a lot of bangalore torpedoes, in boxes. And the rubber hose. We used that to more or less blow everything even. We set like four tons a shot. We’d get these boxes laid on the coral reef and we could step from box to box to keep from sinking into the coral.

  A couple of times, I must have been getting low on oxygen, I thought I saw different things under the water, like coral snakes and rays swimming around. But I couldn’t swear to it.

  Did you see sharks when swimming with lungs?

  Not too much. But there were sharks in the water. We threw grenades and everything else trying to run them off. In the water, you could see a hundred feet. It was beautiful, with the coral reef and the tropical fish. When we got to the Philippines, it started getting murky and hard to see.

  I never worried too much about what was in the water, for some reason. We knew there were sharks and octopus and stingrays or manta rays, because we’d see ’em. I never gave too much thought about sharks bothering us. We were very fortunate.


  We were swimming off the side of the ship one day. The current was pretty swift. This officer came out and had a pretty blue elastic bathing suit on.

  I said, “Why don’t you go in?”

  He said, “I can’t swim.”

  I said, “Hell, don’t worry about it. We’ll pull you out.”

  He dove over and he couldn’t swim a stroke. I looked at this other fellow and we both went in at the same time, one on each side. We had a hell of a time getting back to the ship with that current. We got him out and he never so much as thanked us. I don’t know what the hell he was thinking about but he took us at our word.

  One of our shots didn’t go off one day. We went out in the rubber boat. I was one of the better divers, the swimmers. So they gave me the job of making a straight dive with a rope line to go down and wrap the rope around the explosive hose so we could pull it up and recap it. Well, just before I went off the boat, this sea snake came by. He was as big around as the rubber hose and half as long. They were thirty-foot sections if I remember right. He was about half as long as that hose. I looked at that snake and the guys looked at me and I looked at them. Well, I went off and got it done, but I wasn’t feeling too easy about it.

  We laid our explosive on the coral reef and blew two or three shots in the couple—two or three—days we were out there.

  We killed a mess of jewfish [a name given to several species of very large fish found in warm seas]. The first blast we set off, we killed a small one. We took it in to the army. They told us they would take all of them we could get because they were good eating.

  So we set off about a four-ton blast. And we killed about a dozen of these jewfish. I understand they are deep sea fish. They looked like a regular scale fish that someone had stuck an air hose in and blew them up. We took three of them in to the beach, lowered the ramp on the landing craft, and pulled them in.