Operation Thunderhead (27 page)

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy recognized that the world had changed greatly, and the styles of conflict had changed with it. The days of huge armies conducting great campaigns of fire and movement were limited in the world of possible nuclear annihilation. In the early years of his administration, President Kennedy knew that wars would increasingly be fought in the shadows. Many of the conflicts of the future would be wars fought by guerrilla armies. Men would hide in the darkness, to strike and bleed an enemy, and then return to the shadows to wait for their next opportunity.

It would take a new kind of American fighting man to take on these new enemies, to fight the war against them in their own arena. The new fighting forces envisioned by a young president would be counterguerrilla units, and each branch of the military would have their own groups of these special-operations soldiers. For the United States Navy, these men would be the SEALs.

Organized in 1962, the SEALs were commissioned as two teams: SEAL Team One on the West Coast at Coronado, California, and SEAL Team Two on the East Coast at Little Creek, Virginia, and named for the three environments in which they would operate: the sea, air, and land. The men of the SEAL Teams were recruited directly from the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs).

Created during World War II to chart and attack the obstacles on enemy-held beaches, the men of the UDTs became known to the public as the Navy Frogmen after the war. The men of the UDTs were among the fittest and most extensively trained troops in the U.S. Navy. From their ranks, volunteers were accepted into the new SEAL Teams. As SEALs, the men learned counterguerrilla warfare, airborne (parachute) insertions, land combat, and what it would take to fight in any environment on the planet. They would fight an unseen enemy on their own turf, wherever that turf might be.

In 1966, the first direct action platoons of Navy SEALs were deployed into South Vietnam. Working in the swamps, jungles, canals, streams, and rivers of South Vietnam and particularly the wet morass of the Rung Sat Special Zone (RSSZ) outside of Saigon, the SEALs started taking back the night from the Viet Cong. Within a year of their first combat deployments into Vietnam, direct action platoons from both SEAL Teams One and Two were fighting a counterguerrilla war, and they were fighting it very well.

The primary enemy forces in South Vietnam were initially the Communist guerrilla army of the Viet Cong (VC). Working to overthrow the government of South Vietnam and unite the country under the Communist leadership in Hanoi, the Viet Cong were a difficult enemy to come to direct grips with. Very rarely would they take on the U.S. military in an open battle. The leadership of the VC and their masters up in North Vietnam recognized that directly fighting the strength of the United States and their supported allies of South Vietnam was only a way to ensure the destruction of the Communist cause. Instead, the VC fought from ambush, attack small units when and where they could. Strike and withdraw into hiding. And the jungles and swamps of South Vietnam, particularly the Rung Sat and rich farmland of the Mekong Delta, offered unlimited hiding places. They chose when and where to fight, and would withdraw to safety when threatened. It would take forces that could go into the difficult areas and demonstrate to the Viet Cong that no place would remain safe for them.

In spite of the very secret nature of the units during the 1960s, the exploits of the Navy SEALs in Vietnam quickly became something of a legend, both among the American military and public back home, as well as in the huts and jungle camps of the Viet Cong. Called “the men in green faces” by the enemy for their extensive camouflage makeup, the SEALs made the Viet Cong terrified of the night. Instead of being able to move in the dark, travel the canals and waterways of South Vietnam almost at will, the Viet Cong were now facing men who would silently appear and attack, then fade back into the shadows and black waters.

Very quickly, the SEALs became masters of the night ambush. A group of SEALs would remain hidden in the darkness, sometimes submerged in muddy water up to their noses, waiting for an enemy force to pass down a known trail or waterway. The sudden blaze of gunfire from a SEAL unit would overwhelm an enemy force, surprised by the lethal rain just appearing out of the night. Intelligence materials were gathered up from the bodies, survivors would be gathered up as prisoners, and the SEALs would withdraw from an area.

Becoming absolute masters at hiding in whatever terrain they might be operating in, the SEALs could remain undetected in an area for as long as necessary. Observation and listing posts along known or suspected enemy routes could be manned by SEALs for extended times. Even a SEAL platoon or squad might stay in a single spot for up to forty-eight hours just to observe. If a target appeared, the SEALs could strike suddenly even after two days of hiding in the mud, snatch up an enemy, and withdraw just as unseen as when they arrived.

A platoon of SEALs eventually became fourteen men led by two officers. The platoons were further broken down into two squads of eight SEALs each, each squad being a pair of four-man fire teams. No SEAL worked alone. This was a lesson solidly implanted in every SEAL and UDT operator during the earliest training experiences in training. Every teammate had a swim buddy, and a swim buddy was never left behind.

The actions of the Navy SEALs had already been felt in North Vietnam even before the direct-action platoons entered combat. In the mid- and early 1960s, the SEALs operated mobile training teams (MTTs), which helped teach and advise South Vietnamese naval commandos how to conduct operations against North Vietnam. Working from U.S.-supplied armed high-speed boats called “Nasty” boats, the South Vietnamese naval commandos conducted raids along the North Vietnamese coast, ripping up shore installations with gunfire and planting explosive charges. They learned some of the waters off North Vietnam and the capabilities of the North Vietnamese Navy. The SEAL advisers who worked with the Nasty boats also learned these lessons, and reported them up the chain to higher commands.

The SEALs amassed a long list of successes during their operations in South Vietnam. They also had their losses, teammates killed during the five years of direct-action missions against the Communists. Though each man lost was a heavy blow to the SEAL Teams, the enemy paid an even heavier price for each operator loss. Conservative estimates have more that two hundred enemy personnel killed for each of the forty-nine SEAL and UDT operators killed in Vietnam. The actual number of enemy soldiers taken out by the men of the teams could be very much higher. In all of their hundreds of operations against the enemy in Southeast Asia, not one operator was ever left behind. In spite of their working deep in enemy-controlled areas on operations where they were often outnumbered, a SEAL was never taken prisoner.

Within a year of the SEALs putting platoons into Vietnam they were conducting a very special type of mission. As individuals and as a group SEALs considered the most important mission to be the rescue of Americans POWs. In South Vietnam, it was the Viet Cong who held POWs, both from the American forces as well as those of the South Vietnamese military. These prisoners were sometimes captured in combat when cut off from their units. Some were targeted for kidnapping by the Viet Cong and others just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However they were captured, prisoners being held by the Viet Cong were often kept in horrible conditions, even worse than those inflicted on POWs in North Vietnam. It wasn't that the Viet Cong tortured their prisoners to a greater extent than their Communist brothers in the North; it was that the conditions in the jungle prison camps were primitive at best.

Prisoners in the hands of the Viet Cong suffered badly from disease, exposure, malnutrition, and exhaustion. To keep their prisoners from the hands of possible rescuers, the Viet Cong moved them about from camp to camp at almost a moment's notice. There was a wide network of temporary prison camps set up all through some of the most inhospitable areas of South Vietnamese jungles and marshes. Both American and Vietnamese prisoners would get moved about almost at random, usually bound and hobbled in some way and always under close guard. For these reasons, combined with the severe abuse and neglect they suffered at the hands of the Viet Cong, more POWs disappeared or died while in captivity in the South than their brethren in North Vietnam.

All of the American forces would do anything they could to rescue POWs. For the Navy SEALs, the desire to rescue prisoners held by the enemy was taken as almost a personal vendetta against the Viet Cong. With their deeply ingrained philosophy of the importance of the group above the individual, and to never leave anyone behind, the SEALs would feel it necessary to drop everything when the information became available on where prisoners might be held. The possibility of liberating American POWs caused the SEALs to bring all of their considerable skills and resources to the mission.

During the years SEALs had been operating in South Vietnam, they developed their own sources of intelligence, their own means of evaluating that information, and the ability to rapidly act on it. This gave the SEAL units a speed of reaction that was much faster than any of the traditional military organizations. On one occasion in August 1970, a prisoner who had escaped the Viet Cong was able to give specific, timely information on the location and manning of the prison camp where he had been held. This was the kind of information that the SEALs were quickly able to react to, especially when the unit was being run by a very competent and aggressive officer.

On mid-morning, August 22, 1970, Lieutenant Louis Boink of SEAL Team Two, 6th Platoon, moved his men out on a raid on the reported VC POW camp. Boink had organized a major operation in a very short time, bringing in an Australian aircraft bomber group, Navy assets to provide gunfire support from offshore, Army helicopter units, the Navy Seawolves and their helicopter gunships, and a regional company of South Vietnamese into a coordinated effort to take down the POW camp with minimal casualties.

While the Australian B-57 bombers began an air raid on a jungle and canal area to block the Viet Cong's movement, the SEALs moved in. Having inserted by helicopter nearly four miles from the location of the camp to avoid detection, the SEALs rapidly moved across very rugged terrain to get into position prior to the Australian air strike. A quick shot fired by the SEALs took out a Viet Cong guard as he headed into a bunker. U.S. Army helicopter gunships opened fire, sending 2.75-inch high-explosive rockets blasting into the jungle to the north and west of the camp. The jungle erupted with high explosives and spinning bits of steel fragmentation as the bombers and the gunships left the Viet Cong with only a small avenue of escape. In the terrible confusion of the attacks, the hope was that the Viet Cong guards would not have time to open fire on the POWs and might just run for their lives.

Following the lead of the escaped POW who guided them to the camp, the SEALs tore through the area looking for POWs but found nothing. The trail the Viet Cong had left through the jungle in their near-panicked withdrawal from the camp was relatively easy to follow. The helicopter gunships, particularly those of the Navy Seawolves, came in for close-air support of the SEALs on the ground. Accurate naval gunfire from the five-inch guns of the USS
Sutherland
offshore also kept the pressure on the fleeing Viet Cong. Though the maelstrom of fire, the SEALs kept chasing the enemy, always keeping the pressure on and watching for the slightest chance of rescuing prisoners who might be left behind or make a break for it themselves in the confusion.

Moving rapidly through the swampland all around the area, the SEALs chased the Viet Cong for more than two hours. Finally, the men of 6th Platoon came upon a group of twenty-eight Vietnamese prisoners who had finally been abandoned by their Viet Cong captors. On-call helicopter transport was quickly brought in to evacuate the prisoners, some of whom were suffering from malnourishment and abuse at the hands of their captors. In spite of the success of a very complicated and nearly perfectly executed operation, the SEALs felt some of the bitter taste of failure. In the stunned and then joyous group of Vietnamese prisoners, there had been no American POWs found.

The possibility of rescuing American prisoners held by the Viet Cong was considered so important it was specifically addressed by all of the United States intelligence agencies. Material relating to the location of prisoners of war would come under the code name Bright Light. That material would be given expedited handling and quickly put in the hands of direct-action units such as the SEALs. Priorities were set up so that assets would be placed at the disposal of Bright Light operations so that no time would be lost in trying to react to information. The location of POWs and Viet Cong prisoner camps was information that had a very short shelf life. Good, solid intelligence had to be acted on quickly and competently to give a mission the best chance of rescuing POWs.

In the swampy Mekong Delta provinces of South Vietnam, intelligence officers often asked to have a SEAL detachment made available to them for action on Bright Light missions. There were a number of raids on suspected prisoner camps. On several missions, a number of South Vietnamese prisoners were liberated, some of whom had been prisoners of the Viet Cong for years. But the main prize so desired by the SEALs and the people they worked with, the rescue of American POWs, always seemed just out of reach. During the early years of the 1970s, as U.S. involvement in direct combat operations was ending, some of the last SEAL detachments deployed to Vietnam were intended to help conduct POW rescue operations. Other combat operations continued, but became the missions of the South Vietnamese rather than American units.

Detachments of SEALs remained active in the Southeast Asia area, though not necessarily in Vietnam. Mobile training teams of SEALs conducted operations with members of the Thai special operations units. There were also SEAL training operations being conducted out of Subic Bay in the Philippines, a base for the United States Navy since the end of World War II. Along with the SEALs at Subic were detachments from the UDTs stationed at Coronado in California.