Combat Swimmer (23 page)

Fred McCarty whispered that he'd like to do the honors. He was an old squad mate from my first Vietnam tour, and I owed him the opportunity. I gave him the weapon, and when the sampan came within fifteen meters of us I signaled him to fire. No reaction from the boat. Fred must have missed, even though the rifle's front sight was coated with illumination paint so the shooter could see it come on target.

He carefully moved the bolt back and forth, putting the next round in the chamber, sighted the rifle again, and fired. This time I saw one of the VC grab his side and mutter something to his buddy. Neither of them appeared to realize that they had come under fire by a highly trained SEAL squad and their state-of-the-art weaponry.

Fred loaded another round and fired. The other VC grabbed his chest and looked down. Both of them just kept standing in the sampan. Neither one made a motion that would indicate that he knew what was happening.

I'd seen enough. Signaling to the squad to hold fire, I opened up with my M-16. The two VC were launched over the side. I fired just two three-round bursts, and the air was quiet again in less than five seconds. After listening awhile for any VC reaction, I decided to continue up the canal. But before leaving, I told all the guys to go ahead and get the laughs out of their systems. They thought Fred had flat missed the VC, but I knew better. The rounds were so weak they had no killing power. That was the problem with a truly silenced weapon: you had to make a head shot to do any damage.

We set up an ambush at the point I'd picked in advance. After four hours, when we'd heard nothing, I decided to push off, cross the canal, and patrol back to the beach north of the canal we had inserted on. We moved uneventfully through the mangroves and reached the sandy area, 500 meters inland from the water, about 0400.

In the middle of the dunes, the point man stopped and signaled “danger front.” With me crouched beside him, he pointed to a group of three dugout shelters in the dune line. I hadn't seen anything like them before. Candles were burning inside the dugouts, so they were inhabited. The structures appeared to be reinforced with wooden beams. They would be virtually invisible from above. We moved forward and set up a defensive perimeter. The point man and I went to the closest shelter and looked inside. A woman and a child were asleep on a mat. In the next one, we again saw women and children asleep. No men were to be seen.

It would soon be daylight, but I didn't want to pass up this area. I decided we'd hold reveille and see what happened. Shelter by shelter, we pulled the people out. Still no sign of any males. When we finished, ten people stood in front of us. I told the troops to look around. I didn't like the fact that there were no men in what should have been a secure area for the VC. The women were very nervous, but I figured they'd never seen any “round-eyes,” at least none as ferocious-looking as us, in our cammies and war paint.

One of the guys signaled he'd found something: elaborate bunker works constructed along the dune line. I crawled to the top of the dune and looked out to sea. Exploring the bunker works, we found the VC had dug trenches connecting all the bunkers and reinforced them with wooden beams and mud. All the bunkers—they were about 200 meters from the water—had firing slits overlooking the beach. I was surprised at the effort that had gone into their construction. It was as if they'd been built with the expectation that someday they'd be needed to repel an amphibious landing.

It was nearly sunrise. I picked up the radio handset and called the LSSC to come get us, telling them to hustle. We'd stayed longer than I'd intended, and I wanted to be out before it got daylight. I was still worried about the absence of men. Not only did my sixth sense warn me we were being watched, but the bunker line seemed to go on forever, and we hadn't had time to search it all. One of the guys reported finding a recently extinguished cigarette butt in one of the bunkers. That made me certain we weren't the only armed men in the area.

And after getting over their initial shock, the women had become unusually belligerent. One of my semi-Vietnamese-speaking SEALs said he'd overheard one of them tell another that the men would be back soon to kill us. I called
Dupont
on the radio, told them where we were, and gave them the reference point to the bunkers to our south. The ship called back in about ten minutes, saying they were in a good position to shoot. By this time, it was light enough to see the LSSC clearly—it was on its way, about a thousand meters offshore. I signaled with my flashlight.

I got the squad moving toward the water. We were about fifty meters away when all hell broke loose—heavy automatic-weapons fire from the bunkers in the dunes to our south. We hit the deck returning fire, but we were in a bad position. We had no cover, and even though the guys were putting effective fire into the bunker line, I knew we weren't bothering the VC, as well protected as they were.

Rounds were hitting all around. Rifle-fired grenades, automatic weapons—the whole nine yards. Sand was being blown into our eyes by the rounds hitting near us. We were in a bad spot out in the open, but we were close to the water and our boat was on the way. Miraculously, no one appeared to have been hit yet.

I'd crawled over to the radioman right away, and now I called
Dupont
to tell them to fire on the bunkers. The radio crackled, “Shot—out”: they'd fired a salvo. Yelling to the guys, “Hunker down—incoming!” I watched the dune line, the radio handset at my mouth, ready to correct fire as necessary.

A fraction of a second later, the shells, sounding like small freight trains, flew over us. The dune line erupted. I heard a tremendous explosion, and bodies flew about a hundred feet into the air, along with sand and debris from the bunkers. The whole line of dunes to my left just disappeared. I couldn't believe my eyes: a dead-center hit. In the sudden quiet, I told the ship, “Cease fire—target eliminated.” In disbelief,
Dupont
's gun boss asked me to verify that order.

None of us had been hit. We headed for the boat, which lay just beyond the surf shooting everything it had into the dunes, giving us cover as we waded out.

In the boat, I grabbed a set of binoculars. Body parts and weapons lay scattered where the bunker line had been. Suddenly, a round cracked over our heads and then another. Apparently some fool thought he could still turn the day for Uncle Ho. I called for another salvo from the ship and watched it tear into what was left of the dunes. The firing stopped. On a notion I told them to fire another salvo, this time 200 meters inland. I figured that might hit any VC bugging out of the area. I sent another few salvos north and south, too, as we headed to sea.

Instead of going to
Weiss,
I told the coxswain to go to
Dupont.

When we came alongside, the CO leaned out over the bridge and told us all to come on board. We tied the LSSC to a boat painter and I led our contingent of field-dirty SEALs up the ladder. Most of the ship's company seemed to be on deck.

The executive officer (XO) and the gun boss met me as I came over the rail. I'd never seen grins like theirs. The crew members started cheering and pounding my guys on the back as they came over the rail behind me. They were so exuberant, I thought they were going to knock us back over the side.

I was a little embarrassed by all this attention. I'd only meant to come over and thank the ship in person for pulling our asses out of the fire. I didn't feel like a hero at the time, more like a fool for staying ashore too long and giving the VC a chance to set up on us.

I followed the XO to the wardroom. The CO was there, and he started pumping my hand and slapping me on the back as I gave him a quick-and-dirty on our mission. They hadn't realized we were in such a predicament. He said it was the finest day in the history of the ship, and the first time they'd fired for troops actually engaged in combat. I thanked him for his incredibly accurate fire and told him I'd never seen anything as beautiful as all those bodies being blown into the air.

I showed him on the map exactly where the rounds had impacted and where we'd been. He started shaking his head; we were about 150 meters from the impact point and only a hundred meters north of the gun target line. It was definitely a “danger close” situation. If the
Dupont
's gunners had been just a little less accurate, we might have been the ones blown to pieces.

I told them that, judging both from the body parts I'd seen from the boat as we were leaving and from how many men seemed to be firing at us, I figured they'd probably killed about twenty-five VC. The gun boss was ecstatic—it was the first time they'd been credited with a fairly accurate body count.

Aboard
Weiss,
I got the other squad leaders together and went over what happened. I told them we'd have to be more alert, particularly during insertions, because chances were the word would spread fast that Americans were operating along the coast.

The mission got a lot of good press at NAVFORV—we'd killed VC and continued our campaign of harassing them in their safe areas. Zumwalt sent a BZ message (Navy code for “Well done”) to me as the task group commander.

In the two weeks we operated along the coast, we accomplished the main purpose of Bold Dragon: to unsettle and harass the enemy in areas he thought were under his exclusive control. In the overall scheme of SEAL operations in my two tours, Bold Dragon contributed as much to the larger war effort as anything we did. Plus, we'd established a task group commanded by a SEAL officer. It was the first time that had been done in Vietnam, or anywhere else to my knowledge. The fact that I was junior to all the commanding officers in the task group also spoke volumes. It was clear recognition on the part of COMNAVFORV that the experts needed to be in charge. Unfortunately, the lesson wasn't learned; on other operations I did later, the idea of allowing Special Operations Force commanders to run their operations without having to bend to the demands of conventional commanders didn't fly.

 

On November 6, 1968, I said good-bye to Vietnam. At the time I planned to come back as soon as I could. My CO Ted Lyon and I had gotten into a small pissing contest over who would take my place as OIC of Detachment Alpha. I didn't think the officer he'd picked to relieve me was qualified; he'd been a failure in UDT-21 and left it for duty on a ship. When SEAL Two needed officers for our Vietnam operations, he'd been ordered in, he didn't volunteer. I offered to take a thirty-day leave in Little Creek and then return to Vietnam for another six-month tour as OIC; the SEAL Team One Detachment OIC agreed to cover for me during the leave, and Art Price approved the plan. But Ted said no, and he won—he was the CO. Still, I figured I could talk him into sending me back.

On my way through Saigon I debriefed Bill Early over numerous beers, then went to Tan Son Nhut to catch my flight back to the States. When I got back to Little Creek and I walked in to the Team, the petty officer standing quarterdeck watch said, “You again, asshole.” I said something like “F—off and stand a taut watch, slipknot.” Then we laughed and hugged each other, and he said he was glad I was back in one piece this time. We all loved each other in SEAL Two in those days, and the troops treated officers with such respect! The truth is, I wouldn't have had it any other way. The troops respected officers who were “operators,” and I truly loved the troops. There wasn't a better group of men anywhere.

The watch told me the XO had left word that I was to come see him as soon as I got back.

When I went in to see Jake Rhinebolt, the door to the CO's office was closed. Jake gave me a cup of coffee and I gave him a quick rundown, telling him I'd go into more detail when I briefed the CO. Jake started looking a little uncomfortable. The CO, he said, was awfully busy getting ready for an MTT (military training team) that SEAL Two had been told to provide somewhere. This was strange. Bill Early had personally debriefed each officer returning from Vietnam, and he'd drop anything else he was working on to do it. But Ted was different. I told Jake, “No sweat, I'll wait here until he has time to see me.” He kept looking nervous. He told me to go home and start leave. I just looked at him. I couldn't believe the CO of SEAL Team Two didn't want to see his returning-from-combat detachment officer-in-charge. I figured I'd pissed him off more than I'd realized when I argued with him over my replacement. I was just a young, gunslinging lieutenant. Ted was the CO. What did I know? (Sure enough, I never did get called in to debrief Ted.)

Before I left his office, I told Jake to put me down to go back as the next OIC. He said Ted had already picked someone else. Then I asked what I would be doing around the Team, expecting Jake to tell me I was going to be the operations officer, number three in the chain of command. He said that Ted had told him to follow seniority strictly in making assignments. There were three other lieutenants senior to me, and even though I had more combat experience than any of them, there was nothing he could do. He said I'd probably be the assistant operations or training officer. I just looked at him, shook my head, and walked out.

I'd come from a place where I'd commanded a task group, because I was the most qualified, to a place where experience and qualification didn't seem to matter. There was no way I was going to work for a CO who thought like a staff officer, not an operator. Also, I wasn't going to work as an assistant for any combat-avoiding officer. Two of the three lieutenants senior to me were late arrivals from UDT, having stayed in their old commands as long as they could to avoid going to Vietnam. I thought any UDT officer who didn't want to go to combat ought to stop drawing a paycheck. The third lieutenant had been an abject failure in Vietnam and was getting out of the Navy. I made a snap decision: it was time for me to leave SEAL Team Two.