Combat Swimmer (7 page)

UDTs and SEALs had done a few low-risk operations during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but not since the Korean War had the Teams seen combat. We were all apprehensive but eager. We had trained for the real thing, and we wanted a chance to do it.

The
Ruchamkin
could do about twenty-three knots, and we were ahead of the rest of the force when we reached the operations area. We were ready to do a beach reconnaissance just outside the port of Haina on the southern coast, but instead, the
Ruchamkin
got orders to go into port, evacuate the U.S. citizens who had gathered there, take them to Puerto Rico, and return at best speed for an anticipated amphibious landing.

Intelligence about the situation was sketchy, but we thought (correctly) that friendly forces controlled the port. The
Ruchamkin
's CO decided to put part of our platoon on our Landing Craft Personnel Large (LCPL), a thirty-six-foot steel-hulled craft that was the standard UDT boat in 1965. He ordered the boat to proceed into port ahead of the ship to provide security and line handlers when the ship reached its berth.

Both Bill and I wanted to be in charge of the line-handling party, but Gerry decided to lead it himself. We tied up on schedule, quickly loaded as many people as we could, and set sail for San Juan. The transit was a bit rough, so not only were we sailing “out of harm's way” when we all wanted to be in on the action, but also our ship was covered with puke. We off-loaded our human cargo as fast as we could and set sail back to the Dominican Republic.

At about 0300 we received notice that the Marine amphibious force was going to land without us first doing a hydrographic reconnaissance of the landing beach. The assault craft were to proceed to the beach single file in order to avoid mines or any other obstacles. We were really disappointed that they could do the landing without our reconnaissance, but it turned out to be a safe operation. We arrived late that morning and did a reconnaissance of the 2,000-yard-wide landing beach to ensure that any follow-on landings would have no problems. My platoon was not authorized to carry weapons, since the Marines already ashore were supposed to provide the firepower. I couldn't understand the “no weapons” order, but at least we got the chance to do something. As it turned out, the only injuries we sustained were healthy sunburns from being in the water all day.

The following morning, we got another mission. This one looked interesting: a day reconnaissance on a small beach just south of the main airport, east of Santo Domingo. The group planners were thinking of using the spot as an evacuation point if needed. They couldn't tell us if the area was under friendly control, so we were to take weapons but not shoot unless shot at. They couldn't provide a gunfire support ship, so we'd be on our own.

Thanks to engine problems we didn't reach the area until well after 1500, about two hours behind schedule. Our plan was to put four swimmers in the water about a thousand meters off the beach. They would swim in to take soundings and sand cores. Because I'd bitched so much about not being allowed to go on the port-entry operation, and also because I was one of the best swimmers in the platoon, Gerry let me take the team in.

Four of us left the boat and swam slowly toward the beach. The water was warm, so we wore just swim trunks and UDT life jackets. A K-Bar knife attached to a web belt, plus fins and face masks, completed our “combat load.” We carried lead lines to check the water depth and plastic slates to record the information. Every twenty-five yards we stopped, formed up in a line, let our twenty-one-foot lead lines descend toward the bottom, and wrote the depth on our swimmer slates. Then we'd continue to the next stop point. As we got closer to the beach, the pucker factor went up. We didn't know if there were any rebel forces waiting for us, and in those days UDT swimmers didn't carry weapons in the water because they weren't reliable enough after getting wet to be of any use. So except for the K-Bars, our only defense was our ability to swim fast until our boat provided fire support.

As we approached, we swam lower and lower in the water until just the top half of our face masks was above the surface. I peered anxiously at the top of a low berm that ran along the beach, about ten yards from the water's edge. Low scrub hid from our view anything more than fifteen yards from the water. That meant we were blind, but anyone in the scrub could easily see us, four nicely suntanned targets. Seeing no movement, I signaled to my men to move the final fifty yards to the beach so we could get vital sand samples for analysis. We slithered our way to the beach to fill our sample bottles, making only slight ripples in the blue Caribbean water.

We were almost to the water's edge when a movement in the bushes caught my eye. I looked closer and saw a head and a rifle bobbing up and down as a man came up the back of the berm. As his head cleared the top we made eye contact, and he yelled in surprise and disappeared. I didn't even need to tell my men to head to sea—they had seen the soldier, too.

Just as we cleared the surf zone—with about ten feet of water between us and the coral heads on the bottom—I saw about five men with weapons come over the berm, shouting excitedly in Spanish and pointing in our direction. They aimed their weapons at us. I'd seen enough. I signaled to my men to dive and swim seaward.

If the soldiers started shooting, we'd be hard to hit on the surface. Underwater, the rounds wouldn't penetrate more than a couple of feet. We'd rehearsed this emergency escape procedure many times. The average frogman in those days could hold his breath about two minutes in normal diving conditions. We weren't in a normal situation, though, and I figured adrenaline rush and muscle effort were going to sap our oxygen as we hauled ass out of there. I wanted to gain as much distance as possible before I had to surface for a breath.

Underwater, everything was quiet. I expected to see the bubbly tracks of bullets seeking us out, but I didn't see anything as I kicked furiously toward our boat. When my lungs were about to explode I rose to the surface, rolled over on my back to put my mouth just above the water, and got a deep lungful of precious air. I wasn't up there more than five seconds.

As I rolled back on my stomach and headed for the bottom, I looked right and left. To my right, two of my men were headed back down as well. The man on my left was on his way up. I watched as he did the breathing maneuver, expecting to see bullets hitting the water around him. Since he was the last to go up, I figured he'd draw fire, the other three of us having gotten their attention. But he rolled back toward the bottom. Nothing. We'd covered about a hundred yards on our first dive, and each dive after that would be shorter as we built up an oxygen debt. I figured if we got another hundred yards out we'd be safe.

As I neared the bottom, I heard the unmistakable whine of our boat's engine headed in our direction. I kept kicking and had covered about seventy-five yards when my lungs started burning and my vision began to tunnel: carbon dioxide was building up in my system. This time, instead of going quickly to the surface, breathing, and heading right for the bottom, I decided to take a peek at the beach.

Slowing my ascent just below the surface, I turned to face the beach, exhaled, tilted my head back to expose only my mouth, and slowly drifted above the surface. I gulped a breath of air and tilted my head forward so I could focus through my face mask.

I was at the bottom of a small swell. I let myself ride up with the motion of the wave. As I reached the crest, I saw the berm appear over the top of the next swell. Not a soul was to be seen. I waited on the surface until each man came up and looked around. We all must have had the same idea—not surprising, given our training. I signaled the man to my left, and we swam to join the other two.

I looked shoreward again but still didn't see anything. Our boat was on its way at full speed, men at the .30-caliber machine guns. Others were at the gunwales with M-3 “grease guns,” .45-caliber submachine guns capable of killing anything at twenty-five meters. Obviously, the grease guns weren't a threat to anyone on the beach, but they made the men feel better and, I must admit, I liked seeing that hardware rushing to our aid.

Gerry was leaning over the port side, looking for us. I waved, and the boat swerved in our direction. As it got within fifty yards, the coxswain went to full reverse and turned starboard side to the beach, giving the .30-caliber weapons a clear line of fire. We dove and swam toward the boat. As I passed under it, I saw the propeller was not turning—standard procedure when divers are near.

Surfacing just on the port side, I looked down and saw my men coming to the surface right under me. When they were all next to me, I told them to climb into the rubber boat Gerry had put over the side to help us get into the landing craft. Then I pulled myself out of the water and low-crawled in just behind Gerry.

He was more excited than we were. He had been watching us through binoculars when he first saw the five armed men, apparently before I did. Gerry had started yelling to me, but realized there was no way I'd hear him, so he immediately ordered the boat toward the beach and told the machine-gunners to stand by to fire. Under our rules of engagement—the orders fighting men receive before going into a potential combat situation—we couldn't fire unless fired at. As it turned out, the armed men jumped down behind the berm when they saw our boat, and Gerry never saw them come out again.

All of us were breathing hard. We were pumped—we'd just become “combat swimmers.” With the adrenaline starting to wear off, we all realized how vulnerable swimmers are in broad daylight. I was proud of the men, and I told them so. They did exactly what they'd been trained to do. Our preplanned emergency procedures had worked. I remember thinking I never again wanted to swim to a hostile beach without some means of self-defense. Even our .38-caliber revolvers would have been better than nothing. (A revolver works fairly well after being exposed to salt water—all you have to do is make sure the barrel is clear before firing.) Later, when UDTs began doing missions in Vietnam, each swimmer was armed, usually with an M-16 rifle.

By voice radio we reported to our superiors; then, sitting about a thousand meters off the beach, we waited for a reply. About an hour later we were told to head for another beach farther east, and run our boat into it to see if there were any obstacles. Gerry and Bill and I just looked at one another and shrugged.

We didn't get to the new beach until well after dark. Since we hadn't gotten any sand samples on our first reconnaissance, we decided to take the boat in and put people over the side at the beach, under cover of the boat's .30-caliber machine guns. We approached the beach cautiously and got the samples and departed without incident.

It turned out the guys on the first beach had been friendlies. They thought we were part of a Dominican UDT that had defected to the rebels earlier in the day, and the only reason they didn't fire was that we submerged before they could shoot and they were afraid of our boat offshore. I felt a little foolish, but as I was to learn later in Vietnam, friendly fire is just as deadly as hostile fire.

U.S. Army forces stayed in the Dominican Republic for some time. We left in May 1965, our routine deployment finished.

 

A year after our Dominican Republic adventure, Dave Schaible and I were sitting on the porch of our barracks at the UDT-SEAL training facility in Charlotte Amalie, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the late-afternoon sun we were sipping rum and Cokes, feeling good about what we'd accomplished in the six weeks we'd been there. The Team was finishing a very successful training period in which we'd written the book on submerged reconnaissance. By this time I was a platoon commander and scheduled to take my men on a six-month Mediterranean cruise starting in June 1966. I had other ideas, though. I wanted to become a SEAL.

“Captain,” I said to Dave, “I want to go to SEAL Team Two in March instead of taking the platoon to the Mediterranean in June.”

“Gormly,” he replied, “that's the dumbest thing you've ever said.”

Well, that was his opinion, but I think it was one of the smartest.

In December 1965, the Navy River Patrol Force CTF-116 was established in the Mekong Delta. Using thirty-two-foot fiberglass river patrol boats, they sought to gain control of the main rivers in the vast delta and contribute to the “pacification” effort against the Vietcong. SEAL platoons started operating in 1966. Based in Nha Be, SEAL Team One established a superb record, interdicting Vietcong sappers who attempted to ambush vessels in the main Saigon shipping channel. Deploying for four months at a time, SEAL personnel in the Rung Sat set a tempo of operations that few units in the war could match. After four months platoons rotated back to their base in Coronado, California, to rest, recuperate, and reconstitute, usually for no more than five consecutive months. Then the men went back to Vietnam to pick up where they had left off—killing Vietcong. SEAL One was so successful that SEAL Team Two was offered the chance to expand SEAL operations into the southern Mekong Delta region.

In 1966, U.S. military strength in Vietnam more than doubled, from 180,000 at the beginning of the year to 385,000 by the end. Yet the U.S. Navy was the only American force represented in the Mekong Delta when SEAL Team Two platoons arrived at Binh Thuy in late January 1967. We were full of piss and vinegar, ready to win the war. Fire one!

I
wanted to join SEAL Two, both for the sake of a change and because Vietnam was heating up; I figured SEAL Team Two was the best way for me to get there. (SEAL One, based in California, offered a better chance of going to Vietnam, but I didn't want to break my ties to Virginia Beach.) In those days, the mid-1960s, you didn't get to join a SEAL Team just because you wanted to. Fortunately, the commanding officer, Lieutenant Tom Tarbox, okayed me.