Inside SEAL Team Six (11 page)

On the designated afternoon, I was escorted into a room where Commander Gormly and four intimidating plank owners (founding members) from ST-6 were sitting. They started going through my records and firing questions.

I felt I was ready, because I’d been giving ST-1 everything I had. Not only was I rated the top corpsman at the command and the top performer in my platoon, I was also very gung ho about joining ST-6.

The guy interviewed before me was a big, tough biker named Rocky. When Gormly asked him if he’d even seen combat, Rocky said he’d answered, “I see it every weekend at the bars in Imperial Beach.”

Rocky wasn’t chosen, but I was. I had been waiting for this day, and it was here.

My captain protested. “You’re not taking Doc Mann, are you?”

Gormly responded, “We can take anyone we want.”

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When I arrived at ST-6, based in Dam Neck, Virginia, in November of 1985,
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And they weren’t happy.

The Boeing 727 flight from Athens to Rome had been hijacked by two Hezbollah Shiite terrorists armed with pistols and grenades and redirected to Beirut, Lebanon. In a bid to force airport officials to refuel the plane, the terrorists grabbed twenty-four-year-old U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem from his seat, pushed him toward the cockpit door, bound him with rope, then proceeded to torture and then beat him beyond recognition. When a battered, bleeding Stethem refused to plead to the tower through a transmitter to send a fuel truck, one of the hijackers shot him in the head and dumped his body on the tarmac.

What’s not generally known is that a SEAL Team Six operator had the hijacker in his sights but was never given the order to shoot. Other ST-6
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The standoff ended two weeks later when the remaining passengers were set free in exchange for the release of over seven hundred Shiite prisoners in Israel.

Both of Stethem’s brothers became Navy SEALs.

Later, when the pilot of Flight 847 was asked for his impression of Robert Stethem, he answered, “He was the bravest man I’ve ever seen in my life.” Stethem was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for bravery, and the Navy’s thirteenth Aegis destroyer was christened the USS
Stethem
and commissioned in 1995.

Soon after the TWA Flight 847 hijacking, ST-6 prepared to raid the
Achille Lauro,
an Italian cruise ship that had been commandeered by four heavily armed Palestine Liberation Front terrorists off the coast of Egypt on October 7, 1985. While President Reagan was considering whether to disable the ship or launch a full-scale rescue op, the terrorists murdered an elderly Jewish passenger named Leon Klinghoffer and tossed his body overboard.

After two days of negotiation, the hijackers agreed to abandon the liner in exchange for safe conduct to Tunisia. But President Reagan was determined to bring them to justice, and he ordered F-14 Tomcats to intercept the Egyptian airliner the hijackers were traveling on and then direct it to the U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella, in Sicily. SEAL Team Six waited there to take the hijackers into custody, but Italian authorities insisted on arresting the terrorists themselves.

When I reached ST-6
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ST-6
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ST-6
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Back in March of 1979, the New Jewel Republic, led by Maurice Bishop, had overthrown the newly independent government of the small Caribbean island and established a socialist regime called the People’s Revolutionary Government; it was allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba, thereby raising the concern of officials in Washington.

On October 12, 1983, a hard-line faction of the Central Committee led by Bernard Coard seized control of the government. Over the next several days, Bishop and many of his supporters were killed, and the country was placed under martial law.

President Ronald Reagan, alarmed by Coard’s hard-line Marxism and concerned about the welfare of nearly a thousand U.S. medical students in Grenada, launched an invasion of the island, code-named Operation Urgent Fury.

Right from the start, commandos from ST-6 ran into problems. Their first mission: to secure the airfield at Port Salinas, emplace beacons, and wait for an airdrop of Army Rangers. But one of the two C-130 cargo planes carrying the SEALs veered off course, then got caught in a storm. Four of the eight SEALs that made the drop were blown out to sea and drowned.

The SEALs’ next mission was to secure Governor-General Paul Scoon and his family. But as the ST-6 commandos fast-roped onto the grounds of the governor’s mansion, they took fire. My buddy Rich H. was hit in the elbow.

He shouted, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!”

Bobby L., who later served as our ST-6 free-fall instructor, responded, “What the hell do you think is supposed to happen in war?”

The SEALs moved Governor-General Scoon and his family to a safe part of the house. Then the mansion came under fire from men armed with AK-47s and RPGs and wearing Cuban uniforms.

Meanwhile, two assault teams from ST-6 sent to secure Grenada’s only radio station were met by Soviet-made BTR-60 armored personnel carriers and truckloads of armed Grenadan soldiers. Facing overwhelming firepower, the SEALs decided to destroy the radio transmitter and head to the water following a preplanned escape route. That’s when a round from an enemy AK-47 hit one of our officers, Kim E., in the arm and shredded his triceps muscle.

Grenada proved to be a tough baptism by fire for ST-6.

Informal post-ops and hot washes were still being discussed around the command when I arrived. Many of the operators were recognized for the show of great bravery. But as happens in battle, the team had also made mistakes, and they were determined not to repeat them.

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ST-6
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Even the PTs were harder. We did weekly long swims, long runs, obstacle courses, sessions in the weight room, and, usually on Friday mornings, what was known as a Monster Mash—three to five hours of insane nonstop paddling, running, swimming, O-course drills, as well as carrying simulated wounded men and stopping at various stations to shoot at targets, assemble weapons, put together the radios, and establish comms with HQ.

The days of static-line jumps were over. Bobby L., the tough, Vietnam-era Texan vet who had fast-roped into the governor’s compound with Rich H. in Grenada, taught us free fall, HALO (high-altitude, low-opening), and HAHO (high-altitude, high-opening).

He walked up with a beer in his hand and growled in a deep voice, “If there are any of you assholes here who don’t know how to free-fall, you’re gonna learn to pack and jump by morning.”

And he meant it. Those of us who already knew how to free-fall helped the guys who didn’t.

We trained in HALO and HAHO, jumping at night in full stacks. Our team would do a mass exit at 17,999 feet, and each jumper would count somewhere between four and eight seconds before pulling.

Much more tactical than the jumping we did at ST-1!

We planned our jumps so we hit the ground at nautical twilight. That way no one on the ground could spot us coming.

Sometimes, we’d be under canopy for forty-five minutes or more. Passing through thick cloud cover was dangerous, because if another jumper happened to drift off his compass bearing and came at you in the whiteout, the two of you could hit each other at a combined force of over two hundred miles an hour.

So we kept track of one another. Each of us always knew how many jumpers were supposed to be in front and how many were behind. We’d spot the low man, ensure no one else was coming in for approach, flare our canopies, and try to land within twenty-five meters of one another.

Once you landed, you buried your parachute in the dirt. Then you’d get your op gear in order, form a 360-degree security perimeter, receive any last-minute communications, get in patrol formation, and start moving toward the target or the objective. This all took place in less than ten minutes.

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most of our over-18,000-foot jumps in either Australia or Germany because the allowable ceiling for skydivers was much higher there.

In Germany we jumped at 22,000, 24,000, and 26,000 feet, and we worked our way up to do a 30,000-foot team jump, which would have set a world record as the highest mass-exit full-military-team HAHO.

At the higher altitudes, the jumper would typically pass through three levels of clouds. He’d exit the aircraft, do his four- to eight-second count while staying on bearing, deploy his main canopy, and watch everyone disappear in a haze that would quickly turn completely white. After that he’d enter a patch of clear sky before sinking into clouds again. Once he fell through the third level of clouds, he’d finally see land.

The jumper and the rest of the stack would do their best to stay in formation and on bearing through the clouds and land within thirty seconds of one another.

The higher the jump, the further away from the target we would exit the aircraft, depending on the direction and velocity of the wind. The advantage of jumping at such high altitude is that the enemy doesn’t hear or see the aircraft.

But jumping that high changed the game.

Once airborne in the plane but before we jumped, each of us would do a half hour of breathing from an oxygen tank to flush the nitrogen out of the body. Then we’d disconnect our oxygen lines from the large aircraft O
₂
tanks and connect them to the smaller tanks on our gear.

We received a thirty-minute warning, which was followed by a six-minute warning, a three-minute warning, a one-minute warning, a thirty-second warning, and then standby. Then each of us jumped a split second apart, staying flat and stable, each jumper keeping his eyes on the jumper below. If the guy below pulled early, the jumper above didn’t want to free-fall into his canopy, because that would kill them both. Because of the two-hundred-mile-an-hour speeds, our oxygen masks would sometimes blow off our faces. So we had to duct-tape the masks to our helmets minutes before exiting the aircraft.

We were falling much faster than on the typical twelve-thousand-foot jumps. And because of the added speed and air pressure, guys were hurting their necks and straining their backs when they deployed their chutes. We joked that there were boot prints on the backs of our helmets, because the shock of opening at those altitudes and exit speeds was so violent that the jumper’s back arched to the point where his boots kicked the back of his head.