Combat Swimmer (28 page)

When Pack explained how I planned to put our people on the destroyer, the CINC objected: he didn't want us tipping our hand by using military aircraft. Someone in the audience asked why we didn't jump the men in, so I spoke up: we could; at-sea jumps were routine for SEALs. But since we had Air Force people involved, I'd rather keep it simple. At that point, Pack introduced me to the crowd and I said I'd continue working on the problem. I knew the Joint Headquarters had access to “civilianized” military aircraft and I figured it would be easy to get one on short notice. We also had direct access to other civilianized aircraft, smaller than I thought we'd need but easier to arrange.

Bill and I drove back to our headquarters, planning en route. Back at Six, Pete Stevens had everyone we needed on board. The standby team was in and getting their gear ready. I got everyone together and went over the plan. It seemed simple and would require only about six of our guys.

With Master Chief Billy Acklin, my senior enlisted man and air operations expert, Bill Davis and I left immediately for the Joint Headquarters, some 200 miles away. The place was hopping; the Army colonel who was the operations chief told me to be prepared to brief the CG in thirty minutes. Meanwhile, though, Billy Acklin told me the navigation equipment on the small civilianized plane needed parts and wouldn't be ready for another week. The operations chief put his guys to work getting another, larger civilianized plane.

After I briefed the CG, he said he'd gotten permission from CINCLANT to put our people in the next night. “And by the way,” he said, “you've got some more missions.” My other assault teams would be on standby at Salines airfield for expected rescues and direct-action missions—raids.

At 1800 on October 22, we learned the commanding general had to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 0700 the next morning. Our standby team and some members of another assault team arrived around 2000 and began the struggle to come up with good plans amid a flurry of activity. Davis, Acklin, and I went from pillar to post seeking intelligence to help us. It was at this point that I learned of the Cuban “engineers”—who were probably military advisers.

The civilianized aircraft was to arrive at midnight to pick up our reconnaissance team. Acklin and I went to the airport at 2300 to see the guys off. So far so good.

Back at the command center, things had changed dramatically. The CG, having thus far restricted our operations to the western end of the island, where all the important targets were located, now wanted to take a look at a second airfield on Grenada's eastern end. He wanted another combat-control team in there the next night, because the guys we had just launched couldn't reconnoiter both.

We huddled with the combat-control planners, who finally suggested we “rubber-duck” people in. I asked when they had last dropped inflatable rubber boats (used by all SEAL Teams as their basic insertion craft) by parachute at sea. They said never. Our guys had never done a rubber-duck drop either, but they
had
dropped our Boston Whalers, which had been in SEAL Team Six since the command was formed. Bill and I both believed it would be no sweat to drop our Whalers near the destroyer during the day. This was also a good way for me to get down there to take over. Like all SEALs, I wanted to get to the action, and the two reconnaissance operations were all we had going. I told the standby team leader to get my gear packed in one of our boats.

Then plans changed again: we'd been taken off the standby mode and were going to have some real targets. The CG told me to get with the Army component commander and divide up the targets.

The colonel and I looked at the target list. Our two units were to liberate political prisoners and rescue the governor general. The politicals were in a prison that looked very formidable—a good job for the Army, I thought, and he agreed. We'd handle the governor general as well as another target, the Radio Grenada broadcast station, located near the sea at Beausejour, about seven miles north of the governor general's mansion. Also, I said we'd plan for two other targets at the eastern end of the island that the general wanted covered.

We were to seize the governor general's mansion and the radio station and hold both targets for about four hours, until we were relieved by elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, who were to land at Salines airfield soon after it was under Joint Headquarters control. They would transport the governor general to the radio station so he could broadcast to the world that the U.S. presence in Grenada was legal and desired by the legal government.

The Whalers were rigged for parachuting. We planned to drop them to the destroyer about 1600 the next day at a point about forty miles northeast of Grenada, well away from the airfields but also on the opposite side of the island from the routes used by local merchant ships. I didn't want to risk being seen by them.

By now it was becoming clear to me that I wasn't going to be able to jump; I'd have to stay at the Joint Headquarters to plan the other missions. But because the mission was so important, I would go with the assault team to rescue the governor general and establish my command post at his mansion. The boat-drop team was ready and the planes were being loaded. They pulled my gear out of the boat and, after a brief delay in loading because of power failure on the base, the C-130s took off. I told the men to do good.

 

On October 23, while the CG was at the Pentagon briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they learned that the Marine barracks at Beirut Airport had been bombed.

Up till now, the Marines had not been involved in Urgent Fury; the initial assault was a Joint Headquarters show, with the 82nd Airborne Division and other forces coming in after. But now that the Marines had been bloodied in Beirut, they wanted an active role. Politics took over and the island was divided down the middle, with the Joint Headquarters retaining the southwestern part and the Marines given the go-ahead to make an amphibious landing at the smaller airfield in the northeast. The chain of command changed as well. Instead of reporting directly to CINCLANT as the task force commander, our commanding general was made subordinate to a joint task force commanded by a Navy admiral, who would now be the on-scene commander for the entire operation. This was a dramatic change to make only hours before we were supposed to launch. And there would be more.

The Joint Headquarters had planned for an 0200 H-hour on October 25. SEALs were trained and equipped to operate at night, under the cover of darkness. All our tactics were based on that. The problem was, the Marines, like most conventional military forces in those days, weren't trained very well for night helo operations. So they wanted a daylight H-hour. After much gnashing of teeth and our CG threatening to pull us out, H-hour was set at 0500—first light—to accommodate the coordinated assault. At least we'd have
some
darkness as we approached our targets.

Finally, the new command structure dictated new targeting. We lost two targets we had been planning for at the eastern end of Grenada. And, though I didn't learn it until the next day, the Marines didn't want us doing a reconnaissance at Perles, the smaller airfield, which was in their OPAREA.

 

Bill Davis and I went to the Joint Headquarters Tactical Operations Center at 1600, October 23, to get news of the boat drop, scheduled for 1600. But 1600 came and went—no drop. Bill learned the drop had been rescheduled for 1800 because the planes had to fly a longer, circuitous route to avoid detection. The air planners said not to worry because there would still be plenty of daylight at 1800.

At 1800 we listened on the SATCOM radio as the planes reported their drop runs. Normally, the two planes would approach the drop zone (the destroyer) in tandem formation from downwind, with the trail plane just above the lead. Both would turn into the wind on final heading to drop the boats and jumpers right next to the destroyer. My guys on the ship sent a radio report that they were ready and the weather was okay. The planes turned final and dropped. Then things went to shit.

First, it wasn't daylight. It was pitch dark, with no moon. Urgent Fury had been planned on “local” time. Eastern Daylight Time was the same as Atlantic Standard Time, which applies in Grenada. That is, it
was
the same, until 0200 of the day we launched the reconnaissance team: the Atlantic time zone didn't observe daylight saving time. When we “fell back,” they stayed the same. Instead of an easy daylight drop my men had to do a more complicated night drop. I didn't know it at the time, but SEAL Six had never done a night boat drop—or
any
night water parachuting, for that matter.

Second, the trailing C-130 missed its turn point and dropped our men some two miles away. The destroyer's pickup party had to split into two groups and the ship had to maneuver accordingly. (In the aftermath, the Air Force couldn't really explain why the second plane had gone astray, except that the pilot had made an error. The real problem was that the C- 130 crews, though well trained, were not familiar with water drops.)

Third, the jump took place in the middle of a rain squall that apparently came out of nowhere. Such squalls are not unusual in the Caribbean but, for some reason, no one noticed the shift in weather until it was too late.

Alone, night drop and the separation of the two groups might not have made a difference, but the squall combined with them did. Four of my men died. To this day I don't know for sure what happened to them. We never found their bodies. I can only surmise that the four men couldn't get rid of their canopies, were dragged through the water facedown, and drowned. In a matter of minutes the weight of the chutes would have dragged the bodies to the bottom. All the gear was rigged for a daylight drop, so no strobe lights were attached to the jumpers or the boats. A jumper with a problem would have had to solve it himself, because no one could see him. Strangely, the four lost men came from the plane that dropped next to the ship.

Four good SEALs drowned, and one of the two pickup boats capsized, apparently also because of the squall. I was devastated. I blamed myself (and still do) because I hadn't done something to prevent it. We searched for hours but couldn't find the missing men. When it was time to start the insertion to the airfield, I had to tell Lieutenant “Pat,” the assault team leader, to stop looking and go. A larger air search began the next morning and continued during daylight for three more days. Though they located the capsized boat the next day, they never found my men. And in the aftermath I learned of the Marines' decision that we wouldn't be doing a reconnaissance at Perles. The additional shooters need never have left Norfolk.

Pat, some of his men, and the Air Force combat-control team departed the destroyer for Salines airfield in the one good boat. Encountering a ship with a spotlight, they assumed it was one of the two patrol craft in the Grenadan “Navy” and took evasive action, which slowed them down. (Later, we learned that it hadn't been a patrol boat at all but a U.S. Navy ship conducting electronic intelligence. Because of secrecy, the Joint Headquarters wasn't informed of its presence.)

Pat's boat started taking on water. It was getting late and Pat rightly judged that he couldn't get to the airfield in the dark. He didn't want to run the risk of being spotted and giving away the larger operation, so he decided to return to the destroyer. They had time to do the operation the next night and still get the information back well prior to H-hour. Meanwhile, since SOP called for operating the whalers in pairs, we dropped a second one to him the next day.

At this point I still wasn't concerned about the Salines mission. I figured that with two boats, unreliable though they were turning out to be, Pat would get the combat-control team to the target. But then the first boat, being towed behind the destroyer because it had no way of lifting the Whaler on board, capsized in the heavy seas. So that night, instead of two boats, the men were back to one. Wary of what they still thought was a patrol boat operating near their target area, Pat had the destroyer move to the south side of the island. They launched, and Pat decided to go to a small island just off the south side of the airfield. There he planned to load his personnel into a rubber boat for the short transit to the airfield. But again they encountered heavy weather; the Whaler took on water, flooding one of the engines, and the Air Force lieutenant colonel decided it was in no condition to proceed. Pat, being a good SEAL and at home in the water, felt they could continue but the lieutenant colonel was adamant. They finally returned to the destroyer.

At 0500 on October 25 the rangers parachuted into Salines. It turned out that they would have had to jump anyway, because the Cuban “engineers” had blocked the runway with a bulldozer, but that didn't lessen the embarrassment and depression I felt. We hadn't completed the mission, and we'd lost four good men in the process. The damn boats weren't capable of doing what we needed to get done—they weren't seaworthy.

 

Meanwhile, back at the command center, confusion continued to reign. While attending a meeting at CINCLANT, the commanding general had met a U.S. State Department representative who showed him a three-week-old hour-by-hour plan for taking the island. Approved by the White House, it assigned target priorities different from those we had established. I fought off the target changes, but I didn't win on another issue.

The commanding general called me aside to tell me the State Department representative would be in the command center within the hour and I had to meet with him.

“Why?”

“Because he's going with you to the governor general's house,” the CG replied.

I protested vigorously. The general told me to figure it out and walked away. He'd made the same argument at higher headquarters earlier, to no avail; the White House-approved plan called for our State Department to hold the governor general's hand to make sure his radio broadcast said all the right things.