by Orr Kelly
Maguire: We had another mile and a half and we only had twenty-five minutes to make it in. You still need 100 percent and my battery was starting to run low. Chuck was swimming and I was sort of drafting on him. He was breaking the tension in the water and I was kind of tucked into him. It was not like we were just kick-stroking and gliding. We had to stroke on out. So after six hours in the water now, we have to swim all out at our best to make the window.
At six o’clock the window closes out and off he goes. We have to go into the E&E net. That was not kidding. We had to go ashore to an emergency shore rendezvous, contact agents. And then go into a net. Which would have been played out in the exercise. It would probably have put us in the net for two or three days, as opposed to linking up with the fishing boat and just go below decks. So there was a real incentive to make it to that damn boat.
We got to the boat. I think we just about caught it, just at the end of the window. It was a fishing boat with a [German] swimmer for the bona fides. And we had a chem light underneath the fishing boat. We had to go back on bag [oxygen] and swim underneath the boat and make sure it was our boat. And then we came up to the side of the boat and gave the bona fides, challenge and reply, and then they took us down below decks. We had to make sure it was the right boat because it was in the wrong place.
Williams: You get the wrong fishing boat and this guy is sitting there saying, “Who are you?”
Maguire: With marine radio. You have just put some charges on somebody’s ship. So you want to make sure you’ve got the right guy.
As soon as we gave the bona fides, it was immediately, “Come on in.” They took us below deck, in a void below deck, and covered us on up and hid us down there, in case the boat was searched. So we came on board and our other American swim pair was there and the one German swim pair that aborted the op [because of a torn life jacket]. They just hovered in the area for about three or four hours until the extraction vessel came. It was just prudent. Your life jacket is your safety equipment. You didn’t want to go messing around getting into extremis without your safety equipment. That was the right move for those guys. And the other [German] guys ended up with hypothermia. One of them wound up in the hospital.
Williams: That one pair, I think it was Uve who ran down and got help at the harbor. By the time that happened, we were clear of the harbor.
Maguire: Again, too, if you have a bad initial leg … They just had trouble finding the mouth of the harbor. It was pitch-black. We just had good luck, I guess.
What happened to the other American swimmers?
Maguire: That was Ron Pierce and Caleb Esmoil. Caleb was a seaman and Ron was an E-6.
Williams: They had gotten in the harbor and then Ron had a problem with his rebreather and got sick. All of us knew the only place in the harbor you could come up. The place where they came up was the place where we came up to take our peek for the target of opportunity. It was a pier facility with about a foot of headroom from the water to underneath. They went way back under, twenty or thirty feet. From all the photos and the Germans who knew the harbor, that was the only place you could come up. Everybody knew if you had a problem that’s where you were going to go to. So when they had the problem, that’s where they went. They got under there about the same time we were. We never ran into them.
To avoid making a noise that might alert the guards, when Pierce became nauseous, he ducked his head under the water, threw up, and then came up for air.
That’s when they looked out in the harbor and saw all the ships were gone. There was a captain’s gig on the first pier and a fleet salvage tug. We took the tug because that was the most feasible target. And since they were sick, they saw the captain’s gig, only maybe sixty yards away. And they swam over and hit that. And then they went back and Ron got sick some more.
And they had to make a decision whether they could swim and dive out of the harbor. They couldn’t dive out. There was a ladder and they went over to the ladder, took their Draegers off, and ditched them on that ladder.
And they actually exited the water in the harbor right there stealthily and E&E-ed across the base over the fence out to the beach and open water.
Maguire: It was blacked out, so with a wet suit and a camouflaged face, it went in their favor. They were just about invisible.
Williams: The Germans’ harbor defense was one, to get the ships out to sea and, two, to black it out. They figured if you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t hit it. But if you do find it, it becomes our favor because it’s so dark there’s lots of darkness to hide in. So Ron and Caleb were able to get out of there without being detected.
Maguire: They went through that whole base.
Williams: Lying in flower beds, letting guards walk by. They were belly crawling and sneaking all over this base to get back to the beach area to get out to open water to make it back to the boat. They probably covered about a mile on base.
Maguire: On a military installation. It was pretty sporty.
Williams: Especially a military installation that had brought an extra hundred men on base.
Maguire: When we all got to the fishing boat, the Kampf swimmers were trying to take good care of us. We were tired and dehydrated. They had these liter bottles of beer for us and chocolate. Which were the two last things I wanted. No clothes for us. Right now, we’re getting cold. The fishing boat is not heated. We’ve been in the water now for over six hours. It was beautiful German beer, dark German beer, but it was not too appetizing. We tried to stay tactical, stay below decks, and stay covered up. They finally brought us back into Eckernförde, the city where the Kampf swimmers are located. It is a large German naval base, about a thirty-minute drive from Kiel on the Baltic.
Williams: The thing I remember in the debrief was those guys sneaking across that base. These Germans couldn’t believe that these guys … Like the CO of the harbor defense, he called them liars in the debrief.
He said, “There’s no way you got out in that harbor and made it across my base and got out that way.”
And they said to him, “Well, you can go back in your harbor and you can retrieve our Draegers for us because they’re on that ladder.”
And they went back and picked the Draegers up and said, “Well, they didn’t dive out of here.” That was what convinced everybody. They were right where they said they were.
The French diver, Mr. d’Avout, who was helping us in training, was one of the mission coordinators. In the debrief, he was in the back, beaming.
Maguire: Just like a proud parent. No doubt about it, we were fish. But we owed the whole thing to d’Avout.
What was the reaction of the German swimmers when you made it and they didn’t?
Maguire: They were happy for us, I think. We were a team—an eight-man team.
Was this your most memorable swim?
Williams: Not mine.
Maguire: Oh, I don’t know. Probably the only one we can tell you about.
You’ve been places you can’t tell me about?
Maguire: That’s what we do for a living. The country pays us well, gives us good stuff. And our country uses us. Our commander in chief and our admiral put a lot of faith in us. They believe we can do it and we never let them down.
PART SIX
SEALS FROM THE SKIES
CHAPTER
36
A Shocking Takeoff
During World War II, the underwater demolition teams and the naval combat demolition units worked in or close to the water. After the war, they began experimenting with helicopters and a few of them made parachute jumps. By the mid-1950s, as they expanded their capability to function as commandos, more and more of them took jump training. By the time the SEALs were formed in 1962, parachuting was one of their standard skills.
Often, the frogmen have been the pioneers in developing new techniques. In the following interviews, five frogmen—and one wife of a veteran SEAL—tell of their experiences in jumping out of airplanes and, in several instances, b
eing plucked from the ground and hoisted into an airplane.
Norman Olson was a pioneer in the use of parachutes by navy frogmen in the 1950s, before the creation of the SEALs. He later founded the SEAL demonstration parachuting teams, the Chuting Stars on the East Coast and the Leap Frogs on the West Coast. This is his account of his involvement in parachute work:
I took the first detachment that went to jump school from Little Creek. They had sent one guy, to go through jump training and evaluate it. This was in 1956.
I was selected to be the officer in charge. There was one other officer and twelve men. We went all through jump master training.
I brought a dry suit and German Draeger. We made test jumps from the thirty-four-foot tower to see the impact on the scuba gear. The test was to see how the closed-circuit scuba, which has a bag, could withstand pressure.
We came back to Little Creek and did a lot of testing in the pool.
Then in 1958, a bunch of us made a deal with the [army] Special Forces to train some of their guys in scuba if they would teach us advanced chuting.
Eventually, almost everybody on the East Coast was qualified, so when the SEALs came in [in 1962], most people were well qualified in jumping.
I went to advanced HALO school. When I came back, I got very active in sport parachuting, really enjoying it. I’ve got about twenty-three hundred parachute jumps. A master chief and I, we’d go out every weekend and we thought we could put a demo team together.
We were out at Coronado then and we’d go off on weekends all through southern California and Arizona, putting on demonstrations. Everything we had, we stole. We had no support. We called it the UDT/SEAL parachute team and that became the Leap Frogs on the West Coast.
When I moved back to the East Coast, I started another team and it eventually became the Chuting Stars.
Those teams developed the most qualified chutists we had.
Did you ever have any problems parachuting?
I had several malfunctions—three of them. When you go for eight hundred jumps or so, you start knowing you’re going to get one some time. I finally got it and got it over with. It was sort of a relief, in a sense.
You have a problem with the main parachute, you get rid of it, and use your reserve. It’s not that big a thing. You’re trained well and you react very fast.
At the time it’s happening, you see the whole world flashing before you and it seems like forever, but people on the ground say, wow, I never saw anybody activate a reserve chute so damn fast.
I did a lot of sports parachuting and went to the national competitions, representing the navy, two years in a row. I was in on all the all-navy and all-military records for formations—the number of people they put together.
I had a malfunction during a demonstration at one of the SEAL reunions and everybody still remembers it. My wife was there. I was going out with five guys and I was the center of this formation and they were going to build this thing around me. At a certain altitude, they would break away and I would continue to take it down from the center so their parachutes would be open and I would be going down, for added effect.
It was a very windy day so we were way out [from the grandstand] to compensate for the wind. When you look at them out there, at a distance, as compared with up close, they look much closer to the ground. There was a tree line. I was coming down and I activated my parachute and I had a malfunction. Of all times.
The crowd is going “Pull!” And all this stuff. And my wife is watching.
I was lower than I should have been, probably a thousand feet from the ground. So I dumped the main parachute and went to the reserve. I ended up in a tree. They dug me out of the tree and I was so pissed off.
We got back to the drop zone and I said, “Let’s get another parachute and go right now. Because if I don’t go now, it’s never going to happen.”
You also did the Fulton sky hook recovery, didn’t you?
[The sky hook, invented by Robert E. Fulton Jr., is a system for picking up men from the ground or water. A plane drops a nylon line and a balloon. One or two men fasten themselves to the line, inflate the balloon, and release it. The pilot hooks the line with a special attachment on the front of the plane and the men are reeled in through a hatch in the plane.]
Yeah, we did it off Coronado. A night pickup. Peter Slimpa and I. We’re in the water and the plane came over and dropped the bundles. They dropped them way the hell off and we had to swim to them. We got there, got the stuff open, put on the harness.
There are these three humongous bottles. One guy had to hold the dirigible while the other puts the gas in. I’m holding it. We got about one and a half bottles in and it wants to go up.
I say, “Pete, I’m losing it!”
He jumps over and punches his thumb in it and it sort of falls over us.
The boat comes over with Fulton. He says, “What happened?”
We say, “Something’s wrong here.” We wouldn’t admit we punched a hole in it.
He says, “I’ve never seen anything like this happen before.” They lug it onto the boat and they patch it up. Meanwhile, they pick up the other guys.
We let this balloon up finally. I was sitting in the front. Pete is tied to an umbilical cord to me and I’m tied to the dirigible. They have strobe lights. The balloon goes up about five hundred feet and about a hundred feet below this are the strobe lights the plane focuses in on. You have a power pack for the lights.
As I see the plane coming in, my feet are dangling over the side. I turn the switch on and I get this shock. I was leaping all around. We turn the thing off, the plane aborts, Fulton comes over. He says, “What’s the matter?”
“Something’s wrong with the power.”
He says, “We’ve got to get the dirigible down.”
This goddamn thing is five hundred feet in the air. We’re pulling this mother down. Each of us lost about twenty pounds. We pull it down, he does some adjusting. We let it up again.
I say to Peter, “If this happens again, screw it, we’re going! Because as soon as that plane hits the cable all the juice will be gone. I’ll take whatever is necessary.”
It happened again. I said, “Screw it, Pete, we’re going this time.”
What does it feel like to be picked up?
It happens so fast! It’s like somebody grabbed you by the top of the head, and whup, you’re up there.
But you’re being pulled in slowly. It took about nineteen minutes. While they were pulling us up, I had some thoughts about when Fox was killed.
The pickup occurred a short time after Photographer’s Mate Third Class James Earl Fox was killed on 24 June 1964 when the nylon line snapped as he was about to be pulled into a plane after being lifted from a boat near the SEAL base at Little Creek, Virginia.
You get up under the fuselage and they have to shift that gear so you can get inside. And you put your hands in that manhole and you think, “If it goes, I can hold.” But no way, you’re not going to hold. And finally they get you in there.
CHAPTER
37
“I Started to Black Out”
Although his primary assignment was as a medical corpsman, Robert P. “Doc” Clark also specialized in parachuting and teaching other SEALs to jump. He told about that part of his career in an interview:
You know who Dick Marcinko is? Well Rick and I were both second class together. We were in UDT Twenty-two in the Buzzard Platoon. Eventually he ended up as my commanding officer in SEAL Team TWO. I was in charge of the medical department from 1974 to 1976.
I walked into his office—we were friends and we still are friends. I said, “Skipper, I need another job. I’m just bored of doing this medical stuff.”
He said, “Well, Doc, what do you want to do?”
I said, “Just put me in another department. I can run it.”
He said, “Well, you’re a big sky diver. You go down and run my air ops.”
So for two years I was the air ops officer at
SEAL Team TWO. That was great. I got to teach a lot of guys skydiving. And I had a great time.
We used to teach guys about cutting away if they had a malfunction in a free fall. I taught this for years and years. I had one malfunction in twenty-some years of free fall. My reaction was automatic, the minute I looked up. I had what they call a cigarette roll. My lines were all wrapped up.
I was jumping a Paracommander at the time. I tried to work my risers and get an air channel up into the parachute. I had a wrist altimeter on. I was kind of looking at that, too, to see where I was falling. It just came into my head in a matter of a second, at most. I had reached down. I had pulled down on my capewells, got rid of my main chute, came in, and pulled my reserve. [A capewell is a fastener that permits a chutist to release his parachute quickly, either after a malfunction in the air or immediately after landing.]
It was nothing I had to think about. It was just automatic. I had taught it for so many years. The same is true of the medical training. We just automatically react. And that’s because of repetition in our training. I believe in repetition. That’s how you get good at what you are.
You’re a hospital corpsman. How did you learn to run air ops?
When I was in UDT, I convinced the CO and the XO to send me to HALO school at Fort Bragg. That was in ’66 or ’67. I had made thirty-seven static line jumps—what we call rope jumps. But I had seen a lot of jumps where the guys were free-falling. And I thought, boy that is exciting!
I didn’t have the money to become a free faller at the sports parachute club. I convinced them the reason to send me to HALO school is, if you have a mission where you have to free fall, you don’t have any medics who are free fall qualified.
They said, “Guess you’re right.”
I had four parachutes of my own. We were jumping what we called “rags” back in those days. We were sewing them up on a sewing machine, putting different modifications in them. We made modifications, put them in the bag, took them up, and jumped them. The whole rig probably wasn’t worth twenty-five dollars.
