Combat Swimmer (22 page)

En route to the knoll we had identified a place for a helo MEDEVAC site. About a hundred meters back down the trail. It was the side of a bomb crater—there were no flat spots anywhere. I called for a helo. The voice on the other end of the radio told me one was thirty minutes away from our position. Clay Grady and Doc O'Bryan volunteered to carry Joe to the bomb crater. He was still conscious and joking with the guys about how stupid it was for him to have stepped on a marked booby trap, so I was hopeful that he'd live.

Clay and Doc maneuvered Joe back through the booby traps to the crater. The helo came in, balancing one skid on the side of the crater, and Joe, Andy, and Drew's interpreter were put aboard. The helo literally fell off the side of the mountain to gain airspeed. Fire erupted from below and behind us. Green tracers went zinging by the helo as it lost altitude, and I thought it had been hit. It sailed toward the rice paddies below. Just as I thought it would hit the ground, the helo straightened out and raced across the paddies like a low-flying hawk.

I realized I had pushed too far. It was unlikely we were going to be able to fight our way to the cave without taking significant casualties. Worse, Drew received a radio message from the PRUs we had stationed in the first village off the north side of the mountain just in case we needed help. They'd detected a battalion-sized Vietcong force hurrying toward Nui Coto from the Cambodian border. That was probably why we hadn't been attacked: the VC on the mountain were waiting for reinforcements. The PRU chief said he would hold the village but that we really ought to get off the mountain—now. Drew and I agreed. We decided to head quickly down through a narrow pass on the north side of the mountain that we had passed on the way to the knoll. It would be risky in daylight, but after weighing the alternatives I decided rapid movement was better than going the long way around. The bottom of the ravinelike pass emptied out into rice paddies about 2,000 meters from the village where the remainder of the PRUs were located. I told the Mike Force captain the plan, and he asked to come with us.

We called for an Army Cobra helicopter fire team to cover our descent. The Cobras had just been introduced to the delta, and this was the first time they'd supported any of our operations. When they came in view overhead, we started down the pass. One of my guys and one of the PRUs took the point.

The pass was narrow, and the walls offered natural cover for anyone wishing to lob grenades on us from above. We kept the Cobras tightly overhead. Two-thirds of the way down the pass, the PRU on the point tripped a grenade booby trap. Fortunately, my guys reacted fast enough to avoid injury. When the grenade went off, I thought it had been thrown down on us. I contacted the Cobras and told them to start giving us fire support. They started “wagon-wheeling” and putting down fire on the tops of the walls of the pass.

But the PRU couldn't walk and was losing blood. Doc O'Bryan patched him up, Drew slung him over his back, and we continued down through the pass out into the rice paddy, with the Cobras keeping up a steady stream of covering fire.

As we reached the rice paddy, Drew staggered under the weight of the wounded man, so he and I alternated carrying him as we ran. (Fortunately, this was not the rainy season so the paddy was relatively dry.) Halfway to the village I heard rounds overhead—then, a split second later, the unmistakable sound of a heavy-caliber machine gun, from probably a Chinese 12.7mm, from somewhere on the mountain. I remember thinking, “What next?” The Cobras bought us enough time to reach the tree line at the village, where we linked up with the rest of the PRUs. They were really glad to see us. They were getting nervous about the reported battalion and wanted to get out of there before dark.

We were all exhausted, but our troubles weren't over yet. The Mike Force captain came to me and said his Cambodians were about to mutiny. He wanted to disarm them. Would I help? The Cambodians were sprawled on the ground talking, so I had my guys quietly surround them and hold them under guard while the captain and his NCO took their weapons. They were apparently planning to capture the two Mike Force Americans and turn them over to the VC battalion approaching from Cambodia, as a “token of goodwill.” When all the weapons were collected, we left the disarmed Cambodians to come up with another token and boarded the PRU trucks for the ride back to Chau Doc.

Back at the villa, I learned that Joe had been worse off than we thought. With massive internal injuries, he had died on the operating table aboard a hospital ship in the Bassac River. He was the only guy I lost in my two tours, and I felt like shit. Being aggressive was one thing, but I had pushed too far on this one.

Back at Binh Thuy the next day, Art Price said our battle on Nui Coto had really stirred up a hornet's nest at IV Corps Headquarters. The commanding general had read my after-action report and wanted to see me as soon as possible. We got in Art's jeep and headed for Can Tho.

Outside the general's office we met a very nervous Army officer, the IV Corps G-2 (intelligence officer), whose reporting was being called into question by the results of our operation. The operations officer, a personable Army colonel with whom I'd worked before, gave Art and me a quick brief. Then I repeated for the general what I had written in my after-action report. He asked a couple of questions, one of which was “What the hell were you SEALs doing on Nui Coto?”

I let Art handle that one. He said he'd personally endorsed the operation because we were going after the weapons the VC were using to shoot up his PBRs. This was a bit of an overkill response as it turned out—the general just laughed and said it was a good thing we'd gone because he now had an accurate picture of the area. We exchanged a few more pleasantries about Army and Navy matters and left.

A few days later, the operations officer called to tell me what happened afterward. The minute we walked out of the office, the general was on the radio to the colonel who'd been in charge of the Vietnamese ranger operation on Nui Coto, telling him to report to IV Corps Headquarters ASAP. When he arrived, the general asked him to explain the differences between his reporting and mine (and Drew's). Apparently, instead of just fessing up, or even saying that the situation had changed in the two weeks between operations, the colonel tried to bullshit. He complained that Drew and I, a sergeant and a Navy lieutenant, were not to be believed over an Army colonel. Wrong answer. The general fired him, telling him to proceed immediately to Saigon and await orders. By the time the operations officer called me, the colonel was already back in the States pushing paper.

Nui Coto was a viper's nest. We'd made the IV Corps commander realize that, providing the information he really needed to deal with Nui Coto and its strategic place in the VC resupply effort. When IV Corps finally decided to act, it became a regiment-sized operation, and it took them a week of heavy fighting to gain control of the mountain.

I'd learned a valuable lesson on this mission: SEALs need to stay near water. I remembered that for the rest of my career.

I
n late August 1968 the 9th Platoon and Lieutenant Dick Anderson finished their six-month tours and left Vietnam. I became the officer-in-charge of Detachment Alpha.

Now that I was handling the three platoons from SEAL Two, I decided I'd try to find more gainful employment for our young tigers. Bill Early and I had talked about it, and we decided that one of the more strategic things we could do, without making the Saigon staffies too nervous, was to make life difficult for the enemy in the coastal Secret Zones. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the commander of naval forces in Vietnam (COMNAVFORV), also wanted the VC and NVA to feel uncomfortable in their “safe havens.” NAVFORV wanted to run sustained operations in the Zones, and since I'd spent time in the Long Tuan Secret Zone during my first tour, I was asked for advice. Although there still wasn't much intelligence to operate on, I gave them a plan: give me a couple of naval gunfire support ships, and I'd take two SEAL platoons and create hate and discontent in the Secret Zones.

NAVFORV liked this, so they assigned the U.S.S.
Weiss
to us as a platform from which to conduct our operations. Like the
Ruchamkin,
on which I'd deployed for the Dominican Republic crisis in 1965,
Weiss
was an old World War II APD. It had plenty of room for two SEAL platoons and two of our LSSCs.

The LSSC had been introduced in-country in June 1968, the result of a crash project begun during my first tour. In May 1967, engineers had come to us in Binh Thuy and asked us to describe the best boat to support our operations in the delta. Then they went back to the States, designing, building, and testing the LSSC in less than a year. A squad-sized boat, with two inboard Ford Interceptor gasoline engines and twin out drives, it had ceramic armor on the interior and mounts for machine guns and grenade launchers. It ran about thirty knots with a load of SEALs, and its modified planing hull was seaworthy enough to allow us to use it along the coast. It was a good boat to support the types of operations we envisioned. We could launch over the horizon and have enough sea-keeping capability and speed to get the squads to a launch point on the coast. The LSSC could also come up the canals and rivers that emptied into the South China Sea.

We kicked off Operation Bold Dragon on October 5, 1968, with two platoons—one from SEAL Team One and one from Team Two. It was the first time we had ever done an operation together. I decided we'd maximize the assets we had and run squad-sized missions every night, weather and the enemy permitting.

Weiss
's commanding officer was a senior mustang lieutenant commander and one of the best ship handlers I'd seen. COMNAVFORV had designated me task group commander; the captain told me he was there to support me and, although I was very junior to him, that I was the expert and he'd do whatever I said as long as it wouldn't endanger his ship. I couldn't have asked for more. He told me his combat information center (CIC) gang was good at handling gunfire-support ships and aircraft and that his deck force had removed their boats and modified the davits—cranes—needed for the LSSC. They were a can-do outfit.

The operations officer, Lieutenant Grant Telfer, and I got together and started planning. I saw immediately that Grant knew what he was doing, and I decided my going ashore with one of the squads would be no problem. Once our operations started, Grant stayed in CIC as long as we had troops in the field, sleeping on a cot and having all his meals brought to him. (He must have liked what he saw in our operations, because after his tour on the
Weiss,
he applied for and went through BUDS training. He was almost a lieutenant commander when he graduated and took a platoon to Vietnam. Grant later worked for me when I was the operations officer for Naval Inshore Warfare Command Pacific.)

We picked up the SEAL Team One Vinh Long platoon and went to sea to rendezvous with the two gunfire-support ships. I wanted to brief them in person on our operations. The U.S.S.
Dupont,
a Norfolk-based ship, was the senior of the two. Both ships had been on the northern gun line, where they'd been providing long-range, indirect fire support for the Marines in I Corps. They were experienced shooters but their targets up north had been well beyond the Marines' lines, so damage assessment had been vague. They were looking forward to providing direct, close-in gunfire support for us.

I decided to have the Vinh Long platoon concentrate on the Vinh Long and Binh Dai Secret Zones, while the Binh Thuy platoon took the Long Tuan. The two areas were about equal in size. Our platoon would kick off the operations, and I'd lead the first mission. One of the officers in the Binh Thuy platoon had accidentally wounded himself on a previous mission, so I took over his squad.

On one of the missions, I decided to insert at the mouth of one of the canals emptying into the South China Sea. We'd patrol up the canal to see what we could find, then establish an ambush site about a kilometer in, where the canal joined another canal running from the Bassac to the Vinh Long River. This looked like a good place for interdicting any traffic between the two rivers.

We loaded an LSSC and headed for the beach, some fifteen miles away. I stopped the boat just off the small surf zone, and we swam in, but stayed in the water observing the area for about fifteen minutes. After seeing no activity, we waded over to the canal and started moving inland. Canals afforded the best way to move in the Secret Zones. If I'd thought we could get away with using a sampan, I would have done it. Wading along the bank, we could conceal our movement.

Staying in the canal also meant we left no tracks going across the beach. On a previous mission I had mistakenly concluded the VC didn't use beach patrols, so we'd walked from the surf to the dune line, hurriedly brushing our footprints as we'd been taught in UDT basic training. Ten minutes later we sat in the dunes watching two VC puzzle over what the marks meant. They must have figured them out, because about an hour later we heard H & I mortar fire landing in the dunes.

When we'd gotten about 500 meters up the canal, I heard a sampan coming our way. I got the patrol out of the water, and we set up an ambush facing the canal. Soon we saw a sampan and two people with weapons cruising slowly toward the sea. Slung over my back was a recently developed, silenced M-16 for taking out sentries. It used special down-loaded ammunition; the round's speed stayed subsonic in order to eliminate the ballistic crack. That made the weapon really quiet; a
phft
was the only sound you heard when the rifle fired. But because the bullets were down-loaded, they didn't expel enough gas to move the bolt back automatically to load another round. To get another round in the chamber you had to operate the bolt manually. To keep quiet you had to do it slowly; otherwise you got the same clanging or clacking sound you normally heard when an M-16 bolt went back and forth. I decided to test our new weapon on the two VC.