Sea Stories

by William H. Mcraven

  Steward waved his hand. “Follow me!”

  The blades were only three feet off the water, turning at a blinding speed, trying to get all the torque they could to lift the drowning aircraft out of the water. Without hesitation I dove out the side door, driving my body as deep underwater as I could. The neoprene wet suit top was incredibly buoyant and fought my efforts to get deeper.

  Dig, dig! I yelled in my brain. Kicking as hard as I could, I stroked underwater, knowing that if I came up too soon the blades would decapitate me. Above me I could see the shadows of the blades, whop, whop, whop, as they tried to grab air.

  Deeper, deeper, deeper! You have to get deeper. I was losing my breath fighting the wet suit. Finally, I could see the shadow of the rotors behind me and I surfaced a good twenty meters beyond the tip of the blades. Everywhere beside me my men were popping up, and once again, I looked around for a thumbs-up and counted heads. We had all made it out safely.

  “Mr. Mac! Mr. Mac!” Lubin, who was about ten yards ahead of me, was frantically waving his hands, urging me to look over my shoulder. Like some maniacal out-of-control machine, the helo was moving in our direction, the blades beating just above the water, and the pilots couldn’t control it.

  “Holy shit!” I turned and began stroking as fast I could. Churning the water around me, I clawed as hard as I could to gain some distance between the helo and me. Within a few moments the helo turned back away from the clump of swimmers and we were out of danger. Minutes later a small safety boat picked us up out of the bay and returned us to the shore.

  The parents who were attending the final exercise rushed toward the safety boat, hugging their sons as they disembarked and wondering what their boys had gotten into. The rest of us were laughing. We had responded well under pressure and we were giddy with pride. An hour later the pilot, with a fully flooded fuselage, managed to maneuver the helicopter to the beach and the crew got out unharmed.

  “One hell of a way to end your training,” Faketty said to me.

  “Well,” I replied. “Let’s just hope it’s not an indication of things to come.”

  We all boarded the bus, headed back to the barracks, and two days later thirty-three men from Class 95 graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training. I could never have imagined that thirty-six years after graduation I would still be a frogman, having served longer than any other SEAL on active duty. And that our final evolution at BUD/S was in fact an indication of many things to come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE HAND OF GOD?

  SUBIC BAY NAVAL STATION, PHILIPPINES

  1981

  The point man took a knee. Behind him the squad of SEALs immediately stopped, each man taking up a security position along the narrow jungle path. It was hot. It was humid. The mosquitoes swarmed. The sounds of night life in the tropics chirped and cawed and buzzed, and the giant palms with their outstretched fronds seemed to inhale and exhale with every gust of evening breeze.

  Peering through an AN/PVS-2 Starlight Scope, the point man scanned the opening in front of him. One hundred yards away, three men, guns carried at low port, paced before a small thatched two-room hut.

  Time was getting short. The SEAL squad was hours behind their intended schedule. Two days earlier, they had been inserted into the jungle by helicopter and linked up with a Negrito scout. The Negritoes, pygmy-like natives who lived in the rain forest, were the world’s greatest trackers. Indigenous to this part of the Philippines, they knew every break in the mountain, every clean watering hole, and, most important, every path through the triple canopy jungle.

  Five days earlier, Colonel Bernard B. Brause, commander of the Marine barracks at Subic Bay Naval Station, had been kidnapped on his way home from work. The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), an Islamic terrorist group, had claimed credit. They issued statements threatening to kill Brause unless five of their compatriots were released by the end of the week. SEALs from SEAL Team One, stationed at Naval Special Warfare Unit One (NSWU-1) in Subic, had been given the mission to rescue the colonel. Intelligence indicated that the terrorists were going to move Brause at daybreak. One hour away.

  Sliding back into the jungle, the point man and the SEAL platoon commander huddled under a small green poncho. Pulling out a red-lens flashlight and a map, the point man began to brief the platoon commander. The basic mission was unchanged. The guards were as expected. The SEAL snipers would engage the guards. If the intelligence was right, the hostage would be inside, guarded by another two men. But once the snipers fired the first rounds, all hell would break loose. The remaining SEALs would rush the building, clear the rooms, and rescue the hostage. Simple…

  Crawling on their bellies, their M-14s laid across their arms, two SEALs, their faces streaked with green-and-black camouflage, emerged from the tree line. Behind them the other men crouched down low, ready to move at the first shot.

  Breathing deeply, the first sniper peered through the grainy green scope, trying to put his crosshairs on the guard farthest from the hut. The night was so dark that what little ambient light existed was useless. Sweat dripped from his forehead, stinging his eyes and obscuring the front lens of the scope.

  Suddenly, shots rang out. The guard at the far end of the shack had spotted the SEALs and began to yell, firing erratically in the direction of the jungle.

  “Fire, fire, fire!” came the call from the SEAL platoon commander.

  From the tree line, the SEALs opened up on full automatic, rushing the small shack, leapfrogging forward in pairs to maintain the volume of fire.

  “Move, move!” screamed one of the SEALs.

  Diving underneath the shack, one guard began shooting wildly at the oncoming SEALs. “Kill the hostage! Kill the hostage!” he yelled in broken English.

  From inside the shack, a burst of automatic fire rang out. Running full speed, the point man crashed through the door.

  On the other side, two men, guns raised, immediately opened fire on the SEAL, the flash from their AK-47s sending blinding light throughout the small hooch.

  “You’re fucking dead!” said one of the “terrorists.”

  The point man lowered his rifle and shook his head. “Shit.”

  From the other end of the jungle opening, I watched as the training exercise unfolded. The mission was a disaster. The SEALs were late in arriving to the target. They had been compromised in the tree line, and once the shooting started, they failed to move quickly enough to rescue the “hostage.”

  It had been a long couple of weeks and this hostage rescue training mission was the culmination of Special Warfare Exercise 1981, or SPECWAREX 81. As the Naval Special Warfare Unit One assistant training officer, my job had been to help plan this particular scenario, arrange the opposition force, coordinate the logistics, and escort our VIP “hostage,” Colonel Barney Brause.

  Brause was the senior Marine officer at Subic Bay Naval Station. The station had been used as an American naval base for almost a hundred years and had a long and sometimes salacious history of taking care of Marines and sailors. The city of Olongapo was just outside the main gate. With over a thousand bars and four thousand Filipino “hostesses,” Olongapo was made for weary sailors and Marines coming off long deployments.

  As the commander of the Marine barracks, Brause was in charge of both the Marine combat contingent in Subic and the Office of the Provost Marshal, which served as the local law enforcement agency. Brause himself was a combat-tested Marine. A former member of the famed 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, he had served as an advisor to the Vietnamese reconnaissance units. He was a tough, rugged, no-nonsense Marine.

  On base, the SEALs and the Marines had not always gotten along. Fights out in Olongapo were a daily occurrence. Invariably one of my SEALs ended up in the overnight brig, having served notice that we were “tougher than the Marines.” I recruited Brause to play our hostage in hopes of building some rapport with the senior Marine, while at the same time showcasing just how capable the Navy SEALs were
at hostage rescue. Clearly, this was not going as planned.

  Brause lifted himself off the plywood floor of the makeshift hut. “Well, that was fun!” he said casually.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I responded. “The SEALs were compromised as they approached the target and the bad guys opened up on them.”

  Brause straightened up, tucked in his shirt, and smiled at me. “Well, at least the OPFOR played it straight. I’ve been on these exercises before where the assault force never loses. It’s way too canned. This was good. Hopefully your guys will learn something from their mistakes.”

  I was somewhat taken aback. I had expected Brause to crow about how badly we screwed up. As a young officer, watching the colonel deal with an awkward situation was a learning moment for me.

  “Hey, Mac, don’t worry,” he said, slapping my arm. “I’ve been on dozens of training and real-world missions that didn’t work out half as well. Your guys will be fine.

  “Okay,” he said with authority. “What’s next? Where do we go from here?”

  “Well, sir. The plan calls for us to link up with the allies and then do a vehicle extraction to Cubi airfield. We have two MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft due to land in about twenty minutes. The SEALs are all getting on the first aircraft, but you and I are on the second bird with our foreign partners.”

  SPECWAREX was a joint, combined exercise that, in addition to the Navy SEALs, included Special Forces from the Army Green Berets, the Australian Special Air Service and New Zealand Special Air Service, and Filipino SEALs. The SEALs involved in the hostage rescue mission were tasked with handing off Colonel Brause to our allies.

  I looked at my watch. It was 0400. The planes were due to land at 0430 and then conduct three hours of low-level flying through the mountains and over the water. We were way behind schedule, and I suspected that after the training was over, the colonel still had a long day ahead of him.

  I looked at my watch again. “Sir,” I said, trying to be respectful of his time. “Why don’t we call it a night? We aren’t scheduled to do anything other than ride in the back of the bird, and I know it’s been a long day for you.”

  One.

  Brause looked at me somewhat disappointed. “Mac, look. I intend to play this all the way through. If the SOF guys are going to ride around for hours, so will I.”

  Exactly what I expected.

  “Roger, sir. Let’s get moving, then.”

  I nodded to the point man and we continued the scenario.

  Outside, the SEALs formed a security perimeter and Brause was moved into the center of the circle. The corpsman did a cursory check to ensure the “hostage” didn’t need immediate medical care. Satisfied that Brause was well enough to walk, the platoon began moving back into the jungle. After a short patrol through the thick underbrush, we came to a small opening and linked up with the New Zealand SAS and our other allied partners. Waiting in the opening was our ride out of the jungle: several World War II–style jeeps and a couple of large four-by-four trucks that could hold all the troops.

  “Hey, mate!” came the whispered voice of the Kiwi warrant officer. “I hear the rescue was a fucking goat rope.”

  The SEAL platoon commander dropped his head a bit and acknowledged the obvious.

  “What the fuck do you want us to do from here?”

  I drew close and said in a low voice, “Follow through with the plan. The birds are due to arrive in thirty minutes. The SEALs will board the first aircraft and you guys are on chalk two.”

  “Right-oh,” he said, turning to his sergeant. “Rally the boys and let’s get moving.”

  The SEALs passed off the colonel to the Kiwi warrant officer and then the entire force boarded the vehicles for the short ride out of the jungle. I hopped in the truck with the colonel and squeezed in between him and a Filipino SEAL.

  Inside the truck the heat was oppressive, made worse by the fact that we lowered the canvas flap to hide our presence. Sweat poured down my face and I could barely see through the thick cloud of mosquitoes that had followed us into the bed of the truck. Beside me, Brause, wearing his Marine camouflage utilities, seemed unperturbed by either the heat or the bugs.

  The convoy commander stopped momentarily to check his bearings. Looking at my map through a red-lens flashlight, I realized we were within a few hundred yards of the airfield. I took a quick sip from my canteen and offered the colonel a drink.

  It was almost 0415. The two C-130s were due to arrive exactly at 0430.

  Minutes later, we broke through the jungle and onto a hard-packed road at the far end of the runway. Everyone jumped out of their vehicles and immediately took up security positions. The Filipino SEAL, who had been sitting beside us, grabbed the colonel and moved him to the center of the semicircle, ensuring that our VIP was well protected. I followed closely behind.

  We were on the top of a small hill that provided a clear view of the entire Cubi Naval Air Station. Cubi was colocated with Subic Naval Base and served as the main airfield for the Pacific Fleet in the South China Sea. The runway sat on a long peninsula that jutted out into Subic Bay. Across the bay was Green Beach, a large swath of sand and jungle that served as the main training area for deployed Marines. Beyond the beach rose the mountains that protected the bay from the monsoon storms that ravaged the Pacific during the summer, and far in the distance lay the bustling town of Subic Bay with its twinkling lights and hundreds of fishing boats.

  The night was quiet now. There was no movement and the insects seemed to have retreated back into the jungle. I could hear the faint voice of an Aussie radioman talking on his PRC-25 with the crew of the MC-130. Murmurs. More murmurs.

  “Pssst. Pssst.”

  Someone was motioning to me in the dark. I moved to the outer circle.

  “What?” I whispered to the New Zealand officer.

  “The Hercs are running late,” he said.

  “Shit.” I looked at my watch. “How late?”

  “They say another five minutes.”

  “Okay. Nothing we can do but wait.”

  I returned to the center of the formation. “Colonel. The birds are running a few minutes behind schedule. They should be on the ground in about five.”

  He nodded without saying a word.

  Five became ten and ten became fifteen. I turned to the colonel again.

  “Sir. Are you sure you don’t want to forgo the last part of this exercise?”

  There wasn’t an immediate response. I could tell he was now starting to think about my offer.

  “No,” he said somewhat reluctantly. “Let’s see it through.”

  Two.

  Fifteen minutes later the muffled rumbling of a four-engine C-130 could be heard in the distance.

  “Inbound.” The word spread throughout the force.

  Getting to our feet, the colonel, the Filipino SEAL, and I fell in behind the Kiwi formation. The moon had fallen behind the crest of the mountains and it was pitch black. If not for the dim lights of Subic Bay, the commandos would have been almost invisible.

  The sound of the engines grew louder, but the MC-130s were still undetectable against the night sky. Thirty minutes earlier, the two aircraft from the 1st Special Operations Squadron at nearby Clark Air Base had departed for the short hop to Cubi. Flying at 180 knots, just above the rice paddies north of Subic, they would bank west, come in between the mountains, and then, using their advanced avionics, conduct a blacked-out landing in less than three thousand feet onto Cubi airfield. There was something unnatural about a large cargo plane with a giant wingspan maneuvering so deftly in the sky.

  “Here they come!” said the Kiwi, his voice rising with a sense of anticipation.

  The two aircrafts’ outlines were almost imperceptible. I craned my head trying to locate the birds with my ears. The screech of the wheels and the roar of the engines announced their arrival, and we began to move off the small hill toward the runway. The SEALs were already out of the jungle moving toward “chalk one”—the first ai
rcraft.

  It was about two hundred yards to the ramp of the second aircraft, and now everyone was running at a double-time pace. As the birds turned on the tarmac to line up for their quick takeoff, two crewmen exited off the ramp and, using red-lens flashlights, signaled the approaching forces.

  I looked over at the colonel and could see that the past several days were starting to take their toll on him. He hadn’t slept in days. He was dehydrated from his time in the jungle and probably hadn’t eaten a decent meal in the past forty-eight hours. The next three hours were not going to help matters. We would take off from Cubi and immediately rocket upward to avoid “enemy” gunfire. Then the two MC-130s would head west toward the mountains behind Green Beach. Once there, we would begin hours of low-level flying up and down, up and down, up and down, and up and down, thousands of feet of changing elevation. After the first few minutes of up-and-down flying, the back of the plane would be filled with the putrid smell of vomit, which would cause more vomiting, but the up and down would not stop. To me, flying in the back of a Combat Talon doing low-level terrain following was one of the most exhilarating experiences in special operations. However, not everyone shared my enthusiasm.

  Heat from the engines blasted across my face and the noise of the props made any real communication impossible. As we started to board the airplane I grabbed the colonel one final time. It was 0500.

  Pointing to my watch, I yelled over the noise, “0500!”

  The Green Berets and allied commandos were boarding behind us.

  The colonel grabbed my wrist and looked at the time. I knew that Brause would board the plane unless I gave him a reason not to. The whole point of asking him to be our “hostage” was to build rapport between the SEALs and the Marine leadership. Somehow I didn’t think low-level flying for an additional three hours was going to help my cause.