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

by Orr Kelly

  The officer said, “If you get in a firelight, he’s the kind of guy you want to have. He’s fearless.”

  I was always against that. I always argued against indiscriminate killing.

  Later, much later, a year later. We were back in the States. We were all mustered one day at lunchtime out here in the grinder [mustering area at the SEAL compound in Corona-do]. And a young lady was brought by the CO. She came down the line and she picked this guy out. He had raped her during lunch up here on the beach. They sent the guy to prison.

  The new officers were aggressive and we started running ops again. We were contacted by a Green Beret who was an adviser to fifty ruff puffs [Vietnamese regional force soldiers] operating out of Cho Lach.

  He told us there was a tax collector operating right here [near the village] and he had a twenty-five-man security force. The problem was that the market was over here [on the main river]. The people from this town couldn’t get their goods to market past this tax collector and his twenty-five men. He also was a pretty evil guy. He even took young women and girls and turned them over to his men to rape. The Green Beret had had several firefights with them but couldn’t whip their ass. So nobody knew how to take this guy on.

  My wife was expecting a baby and I kiddingly told these two new officers that I could figure out a way to get this guy. To get the morale up from the previous devastation, they put it out to the whole platoon: whoever can figure out how to kill this tax collector will get two weeks R&R anywhere in the world.

  I submitted my plan and my plan won. And what we did was, we rented two good-sized junks from the town and had them put large amounts of vegetables and fruit on board, loaded them up like we were going to market. And we had a squad in each one of these junks, hidden. I was on the lead junk and I was sitting back on the stern and I would give the signal to fire. I did not want to fool around with this guy. I said I would initiate when I saw this tax collector. When he came out, I would initiate with a LAAW [light antiarmor weapon] rocket and that would be the signal to fire.

  Also, I had coordinated with the Sea Wolves, four gunships, to be orbiting about two miles away, out of audible range. I had briefed them where this twenty-five-man security force was. I also had coordinated with the river patrol to have four PBRs with mortars standing by down the river. And I had also briefed them where the twenty-five-man force was. On the night before it was to happen, the Green Beret, we had him take his fifty popular forces and go up there and come around from behind and set up an ambush directly across from where the tax collector operated on the canal. So we had fifty backup reinforcements on the opposite bank.

  The plan was to go up this Cho Lach canal, connecting the Ham Long and the Mekong Rivers. When I saw the tax collector, I would initiate a LAAW rocket. Our junks would ferry these fifty popular forces over here. We’d land them and put out a skirmish line perpendicular to the river and when we made contact with this twenty-five-man security force we would have the helicopters come in and strafe ’em and we’d have the riverboats mortar them, too. And if that didn’t take this guy out, I didn’t know what would.

  I was an E-6 and I planned that whole op. It went off like a movie. We got up there and we were all dressed up in black pajamas. We had the conical straw hats on our heads. This tax collector came out with two bodyguards. He was leaning up against a tree smoking a cigarette, with his rifle cradled in his arms. He waved us to come over to be taxed. When I got perpendicular to him, I pushed the hat back. I had the LAAW rocket sitting right on my shoulder. He was about forty meters away. I hit him with the rocket in the chest. He disintegrated. [In SEAL legend, the rocket also vaporized a large amount of money being carried by the tax collector. But Wardrobe says he has no idea whether the man was carrying any money.]

  My guys in the lead boat jumped up with M60 machine guns and shot the two bodyguards. And the plan went into effect.

  We ferried the fifty ruff puffs over, got ’em out in their skirmish line. They advanced on the coconut grove where the twenty-five-man security force was. We got in a hell of a firefight. I called the helicopter gunships in. The boats came in as planned and fired their mortars. We killed them all. And that night the town, the liberated town, threw a huge feast for us. The mayor came and publicly thanked me and our whole platoon. It was one of the better ops. I was an enlisted man. They gave me a little authority and I went nuts.

  I have always loved planning. I saw so many officers that weren’t very good at organization and didn’t plan their ops carefully. I’m a perfectionist. That’s the quality of the operation I saw us able to do rather than just walk around and shoot people that may or may not be VC. I couldn’t understand how people could live with themselves. The tax collector and his security force were concrete enemy. Not only was the tax collector a VC, but he was evil. He needed killing. And I got to go home two weeks early, for my daughter’s birth.

  CHAPTER

  17

  More VC than You’ll Ever Want

  Even though Wardrobe finished his first tour in Vietnam with a satisfyingly successful operation, he returned to Coronado deeply troubled by his perceptions of the failure of leadership by some SEAL officers and, even more, by what he had seen as indiscriminate killing. He continues his account:

  I had formed my own code of what was right and wrong, even though I only had a ninth grade education. I wanted out. I wanted to get out of the navy. I was unhappy with the government of the U.S. The country was taking tremendous casualties, but we weren’t winning the war.

  I told my commanding officer, Capt. Dave Schaible, I was going to be a California highway patrolman. “Uncle Dave” convinced me I had the potential to become a warrant officer. If I would reenlist and be a SEAL instructor, he said he would do everything to make me a warrant officer. He also pointed out that the salary was much better than that of a highway patrolman.

  So I stayed in and became an instructor in SEAL basic. They still had SEAL basic indoctrination then. I became sort of the Don Quixote of SEAL Team ONE. During my classes, I told people that they did not have to kill indiscriminately—that our boys in a SEAL team, we were so well trained that we had so much advantage, with the night, our stealth, the element of surprise. The average SEAL got a year to a year and a half of training before he ever deployed to Vietnam.

  I told them, “You are in fact, in reality, the baddest in the valley. You are the baddest guy in there. If you’re hiding on a trail and these guys come by there and there’s only one or two of them, why do you have to shoot ’em? A guy alive is much more valuable than a guy dead.”

  They had rewards for getting various levels of Viet Cong infrastructure—VCI. I asked, “Well, how do we know whether someone was high ranking or not when he’s dead and the Vietnamese who had fingered him are gone with his money?” I was told, “Wardrobe, shut up.” I was tired of being told to shut up. Where was the truth? I felt like a vigilante instead of a professional. It bothered me bad. I didn’t want any part of it.

  Two new officers had been working up to go to Vietnam, but had had a few problems getting along with their chief. They were Lt. Sandy Prouty, Naval Academy graduate, and Ens. Roger Clapp. Both were good officers.

  I had them come to my house for breakfast. I said, “Here’s the ground rules. If I go over with you, we’re going to collect intelligence. We’re going to operate on hard intel. We’re going to pride ourselves on the quality and detail of our briefings to our enlisted men. We’re going to make every effort possible to bring everybody home. And most of all, there will be no indiscriminate killing. If you guys can’t handle that, I don’t want any part of it.”

  I refused to go back over there until these officers and I reached an agreement that we weren’t going to have any indiscriminate killing, even if we were in a free-fire zone. They accepted my terms so I went with them on that second trip.

  The commander of naval forces in Vietnam assigned us at a coast guard base near Vung Tau [on the coast east of Saigon]. It was the R&
R center for all the Americans and, reportedly, all the VC. Right on the beach. The war machine over there by then had declared that area—all mangrove, part of the Rung Sat Special Zone—a free-fire zone.

  The platoon we relieved had reported high-to-moderate body counts. I did some snooping around and found that platoon was one of those platoons that had made the conscious decision that if there were people in that free-fire zone, they shot them.

  In the next month, we went on thirty-one operations. We never fired a shot because I wouldn’t allow it. Every night, I would look through the Starlight Scope or the binoculars. I would make a decision.

  We had a lot of young guys and they were anxious for their first taste of blood, if you will. So I had a lot of morale problems begin to develop because they wanted to get into a good fight. So one night, to prove my point, we saw nothing. So we shot up the water in front of us and did what we called a false extraction, called the boats like we had hit something, made a lot of noise, lot of shooting, had the boats pretend they had extracted us, and then they left.

  We remained behind. And sure enough, it worked. Here came four sampans. We were trying to get these guys the fight they wanted. I looked through the binoculars and talked it over with a Vietnamese SEAL. And we came to the conclusion they were civilians again. That they were just fishermen. So we lai day-ed ’em, to come over where we were or we’d blow them out of the water. And I showed this to my men. In the lead boat there was an old man and a young boy. They both had their ID cards. And I showed my men. I told this old man to point to the day it was issued, on this card. And the guy pointed to his name. The guy couldn’t even read.

  So I said, “See what I mean? These guys have ID cards, we drop leaflets, the propaganda helicopters go over with their loudspeakers. These people can’t read. Look at their nets.”

  They had little quantities of fish. Some of the more paranoid guys argued, well, they’re going to give those fish to the VC. So what? I showed ’em. Look at their faces. These are real human beings. You want to kill these guys? Look at the boy’s face. And that helped.

  On our first thirty-one operations, we never fired a shot. And on every one of those ops we could have killed a lot of people. But in my estimation, all these curfew violators in these free-fire zones were nothing more than fishermen trying to stay alive.

  So Prouty and Clapp, realizing that if this continued, we’d have a mutiny, went to Saigon and saw Admiral Zumwalt’s staff and begged for a reassignment to a hot area. The reassignment they gave us was Seafloat. There were more VC down there than you’ll ever want. They said, you want action? It was as far south as you can go in the Camau peninsula.

  On our first operation we were surrounded by two companies of VC. We were almost killed.

  That first op was a real rude awakening. We went after a medical cache. We went in by helicopter, not quite a whole platoon. More like ten guys. We found the cache. We had picked up a couple of VC suspects. We were trying to get out of the area. We started receiving a lot of heavy fire and the helicopter gunships above said there were two companies and they were encircling us and we were in a lot of trouble.

  We had known there was a local company. But not that another company had come down from the U Minh forest. A helo—a slick [a transport helicopter rather than a gunship]—came in to get us out. But the helo couldn’t lift off with the prisoners and a whole cargo net of medical supplies, tons of it. So I jumped out of the helo and Prouty jumped out. The radioman jumped out. And an automatic weapons guy.

  Four of us remained behind. The helicopter lifted off. We were in a real jam.

  Lieutenant Prouty asked, “What do you think?”

  I said, “I think we are in big trouble.”

  We were getting a lot of fire but they couldn’t see us because we were in a high, grassy area. And then—I never saw anything like it—a dark storm moved in. It started raining, torrentially. Visibility became almost zero. It was like God was protecting us. We were out of smoke, we were almost out of bullets. I was getting low on grenades.

  [Lieutenant Ted] Grabowski had been listening to all this back at Seafloat. Even before we realized we were in trouble, Grabowski is a smart guy and had sensed we were in more trouble than we realized. Grabowski had scrambled Black Ponies [OV-10 Bronco fixed-wing planes] out of Binh Thuy. He also had coordinated with the Vietnamese Air Force for two old Sabre jets. We got Black Ponies. They came in and dropped their loads. The Sea Wolves made six hot turnarounds. They completely gassed and loaded ordnance six times. That’s how fierce that battle was. And finally the Sabre jets came in dropping five-hundred-pound bombs on these guys and it still didn’t slow them down.

  Prouty asked me, “What do you think we ought to do?”

  I said, “Looks like we’re going to have to sneak out of here and run for the river and try to E&E [escape and evade] down the river.”

  Prouty was back on the radio talking to the Sea Wolf pilot.

  The pilot said, “I’m out of bullets, we can’t see you anymore. The storm’s bad. We’re taking heavy fire. I’m almost out of gas. I’m going to have to leave you guys. I’m sorry but it looks that way.”

  Prouty says, “Okay, no problem, we’ll be okay.”

  There was something in Prouty’s voice. This guy said to Prouty, “Sandy, is that you?”

  He said, “Yeah, it’s me. Sandy Prouty, Naval Academy, class of…” whatever. And the Sea Wolf pilot—they were buddies. And the Sea Wolf pilot said, “I’m not leaving one of my classmates behind.”

  So instead of leaving, he dumped all his ordnance.

  He said, “I think I’ve got a pretty good idea where you are. I’m going to punch through the cloud and hope I don’t run into a coconut tree. I’ll give it one last chance to see if I can get you guys out.”

  And I’ll tell you, it was as if God guided this ship through the cloud because he punched through and he was like thirty feet from us. And bullets were flying and hitting the helicopter. He took rounds right through the rotor housing, but it didn’t stop him.

  Finally, he lifted off. I was the last one to get in. I was standing on the skids. We heard bullets whinging all around us, but not one of us got hit. It was some kind of miracle. The VC must have been really angry.

  Everybody had been crowded around radios in the whole area and they were listening to this operation go down. And there had been silence after they heard the pilot saying, “I’m coming in to get you, Sandy.”

  Well, when I got in the helicopter, the first thing I did was, I put the helmet on—I was really elated and happy to be alive—and I said to the pilot, “Sir, would you like me to suck your dick now or when we get back to Seafloat?”

  What I didn’t know is that everyone was listening. Word had spread all through the Camau peninsula: There’s a real good SEAL op going on. They told me later. There was this awful silence. No one knew if we were captured or what. And the next thing they hear is Wardrobe making that obscene remark. Everyone laughed, cheered, and popped cans of beer.

  That bird was out of gas, on empty. The big red “master caution” light was on but somehow he got high enough so when the engine stopped, we could autorotate down in the middle of a rice paddy about eight miles away—far enough away so they didn’t have time to come and get us. The pilot called on the radio to have support helos bring us some gas. They came and dropped fifty-gallon drums. We siphoned it into the helicopter and it brought us back.

  Yeah, we had asked to go to an area where there was more action and real VC and they gave it to us.

  CHAPTER

  18

  “My Woist Disaster”

  Wardrobe continues his account of his second tour of duty with SEAL Team ONE, Mike Platoon, operating out of Seafloat in the Camau peninsula in Vietnam:

  We had problems sometimes with army pilots inserting us with helicopters. Most were warrant officers. There were two kinds of army helo pilots. There were idiots that would take any chance whatsoever or they were comple
te cowards and they would land you a hundred yards from where you wanted to go, hoping not to take any fire. There never seemed to be any in between. Ha! They were either real cowboys or really reluctant warriors.

  There was another tax collector, who had been confiscating sampans from the local populace and selling them to villages in other areas. We had heard there would be this big meeting of four or five district VCI with a province level chief to turn over the monthly funds. We knew where they were meeting. I wanted to hit the guy. But I needed to find a pilot who was gutsy enough to take me right into the enemy compound, no matter what. Right to the meeting. Not land me a hundred yards away in a rice paddy. Because I wanted to jump out of the helicopter, bust in the door, and clean these guys out.

  One morning over breakfast I was complaining to a fellow SEAL friend, Frank Flynn. He was advisor to a Kit Carson outfit [scout units made up of former Viet Cong]. I didn’t know there was an army captain helicopter pilot sitting behind having breakfast. He had overheard my remarks.

  He said, “I’m you’re man. I’m fearless.”

  I said, “Yeah, you’re either a hot dog or you’re a phony.”

  He said, “I am very good at what I do.”

  I said, “Okay, I want to get these people real bad so I’ll give you a try.”

  I showed the guy on the map where the VC meeting place was. He wanted to do a high visual recon, flying the flight path of the daily mail helo so the VC wouldn’t be alerted and suspicious. I said okay. He checked it out and told me he could do it.

  The target was a big building—a hootch but bigger than usual. It had a bunker in the back. I told him I wanted him to hover the helo over the left rear corner so we could jump out from the skids. That would give us fields of fire so we wouldn’t be shooting ourselves.

  He said, “No problem.”

  I said, “It’s pretty tight getting in there. You’ve got a lot of coconut trees surrounding the hootch.”