Rogue Warrior

Chapter 1

It was a big first step — nineteen thousand feet between the soles of my boots and the scrubby jungle — but I didn’t have time to think about that. The green light was on and the jumpmaster was pointing vaguely in my direction, so I blew a polite kiss at him and went out for a walk — took a stroll off the deep end of the C-130’s greasy ramp and dove into the nighttime sky. Just the way I’d done it more than a thousand times before.

The ice-cold slipstream punched at me as the blacked-out plane disappeared overhead. I looked down. Nothing. Almost four miles to the ground — too far to see anything yet, or for anyone down there to have heard the plane.

I looked around me. Zippo. What had I expected? To see my men? That would be impossible, too, of course. We were showing no lights, carried nothing reflective, and were all dressed in dark camouflage tigerstripes, invisible in the blackness above our objective, Vieques Island, in the Caribbean far below.

I clenched my fist and tucked my elbow in silent triumph.

Yes! Right on! The first eight seconds of this operation had gone absolutely perfectly. So far, we were ahead of the curve.

I checked the altimeter on my wrist then pulled the rip cord.I sensed my chute slip out of the backpack and felt it separate.

I was yanked skyward by the harness in the bungee-cord way you’re always bounced by a chute. Then all of a sudden I veered sharply to my right and began to spiral wildly, uncontrollably, toward the ground.

So much for perfection. I looked up. One of the cells of my sky-blue silk canopy had collapsed in the crosswind. I tugged on the guidelines to shake it out and fill the chute with air, but couldn’t make it happen.

It didn’t help that I was carrying almost a hundred pounds of equipment strapped to a specially built combat vest or attached to my fatigues. The weight was a problem in the thin air during HAHO — high altitude, high opening — jumps.

Most of what I carried was lethal. There was my customized Beretta 92-SF in its thigh holster, along with eleven clips of ammo—165 rounds of hollow-point Hydra-Slick, custommade hot loads that could literally blow a man’s head off.

Hanging from a strap attached to my shoulder was a specially modified HK — Heckler & Koch — MP5 submachine gun and 600 rounds of jacketed hollow-point in 30-round magazines.

Then there were the other goodies: flash-bang grenades and thunder-strips to disorient bad guys; strobes and light-sticks for guiding choppers into a drop zone. Wire snips for cutting through fences. And I carried a selection of the miniaturized communications stuff we’d developed — strapped to my waist was a secure Motorola walkie-talkie (it came with lip mikes and earpieces so we could talk and listen to each other while moving. No Secret Service whispering into our shirt cuffs for us).

In the upper right-hand pocket of my combat vest was a satellite transceiver, a SATCOM unit about the same size as a cellular phone- On it I could talk to my boss. Brigadier General Dick Scholtes, who ran the Joint Special Operations Command, back at his Ops Center at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, as clearly as if I were in the next room instead of almost two thousand miles down the road.

I laughed out loud. Maybe I should punch up Scholtes now.

“Hey, General, I’m calling about this little momentary snag that’s developed. Dickie’s about to go squish.”

Another two air cells in the parasail collapsed and the chute folded in half. Okay, so it screwed up. No problem. I’d rehearsed this move maybe eighty, a hundred times during practice jumps. I did a cutaway, jettisoned the faulty canopy, then yesumed free-fall. Fifteen thousand feet and cruising.

Five seconds later I yanked the cord on my second chute. it started to open nicely. Then it developed a fissure, folded in half, and collapsed just like number one, and the crazy corkscrewing began all over again.

I didn’t have any more backups.

I tore at the lines with both hands to open the parasail to its full width, screaming profanities into space.

It came to me in the absolutely clear way things come to dying men that I had been the thirteenth jumper to exit the C-130. This was a bad joke on Dickie. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. Down there — where I was about to splatter myself into strawberry-colored goo — were, according to what we’d been told, thirty to forty armed terrorists, a hostage, and a hijacked nuclear weapon.

This clandestine airborne assault was the culmination of five months of bone-wrenching, take-it-to-the-limit training — eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I was spiraling wildly in the blackness because the U.S. Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had chosen me to design, build, equip, train, and lead what I now believed to be theunost effective and highly secret counterterror force in the worlds — SEAL Team Six.

Admiral Thomas Hayward, the chief of naval operations, gave me the order to create the unit himself, not ninety days after our disastrous April 1980 rescue attempt of the American hostages held in Tehran.

What the CNO had said to me was unequivocal: “Dick, you will not fail.”

I took his words to heart. SEAL Team Six trained harder than any unit had ever trained before, waiting for the opportunity to show the skeptical bureaucrat-sailors and dipdunk bean-counters prevalent in Washington that it was possible for the U.S. Navy to fight back effectively against terrorists. I had cut more than a few corners and stepped on a shoe store full of toes carrying out Admiral Hayward’s order.

And I hadn’t failed — until now, it seemed. Was it now all going to come to this? Dickie gets slam-dunked and misses all the fun while the rest of the guys get to kick ass and take names?

No way. I was only forty — far too young to die. I yanked on the guides again. No fucking way I was going to buy it.

Not like this. Not because my outrageously expensive, personally selected, ingeniously modified, packed-by-my-ownloving-hands, goddamn rucking parachute didn’t work.

I dragged at the lines with as much force as I could muster.

Finally, the two far right-hand celts filled with air and I began a controlled descent, spiraling in lazy circles as I hung in the harness, sweating, and tried to figure out where the hell I was.

Where I was, was about three miles out over the ocean, the speed of the C-130 and the free-fall having carried me way off my original flight path. I could see beach below, so I checked my compass and altimeter and changed course, parasailing back toward the prearranged 300-square-yard landing zone, a little airstrip cut into the rough countryside about half a mile from where the terrorists were holed up.

We’d chosen it as our assembly point from an ultra-hignresolution NSA satellite photo that had been faxed to us during our flight down from Norfolk.

I was at eleven thousand feet now, and by my best guesstimate I had about ten miles before touchdown. I watched the breakers wash ashore more than two miles beneath my feet, phosphorescent white crescents moving in rippling, parallel lines. Beyond the sea was the jungle. It was, as I knew from the intel pictures, scrubby jungle, the kind common to much of the Caribbean and Latin America. Not rain forest, thank God, with its treacherous high canopy of trees that made parachute landings a bitch. If it’d been rain forest we’d have had to jump way offshore and land on a narrow strip of beach, or come in by sea, swimming from a mother ship, an innocent-looking, apparently civilian vessel that passed far off the coast, or landing in specially modified IBSs — rubberized infiatables that, along with us, were dropped by ships or lownying planes.

I looked up. No stars. No moon. The chute was now working perfectly, and from the way the wind was blowing, I knew I’d make the landing zone easily-1 had a twenty-minute glide ahead of me, and I decided to sit back and enjoy the ride.

I figured I could. Surprise would certainly still be on our side. AH the intelligence we’d received during our flight from the States indicated the bad guys wouldn’t be expecting us.

Not so soon. That’s what made SEAL Team Six so special.

We were unique; a small, highly mobile, quick-reaction team trained to do one job: kill terrorists and rescue hostages, and do it better than anybody in the world. Nobody could move as fast as we could. No other unit could come out of the water, or the sky, with equal ease.

Delta Force, the Army’s hostage-rescue unit originally commanded by my old colleague and sometime rival Colonel Charlie Beckwith, was good. But it was also big — more than two hundred operators — and it was cumbersome as a bloody elephant to move. My entire unit numbered only ninety, and we traveled light. We had to go that way: often, we had to swim to our objective with everything we’d need in tow.

Tonight, fifty-six SEAL Six jumpers parachuted off the ramps of two C-130s that had taken off from Norfolk, Virginia, six and a half hours previously. If my chute was the only one that had screwed up, they’d all be on final approach to the LZ by now, gliding into circular formations of seven, then dropping onto the ground by quickly pulling up, or flaring, just before their feet touched. It kept you from being dragged by your chute and making a furrow with your face.

Normally I’d have been a part of the pattern, but I’d been unavoidably detained and wanted to get onto the ground fast, so I flew a straight approach into the LZ. As I came in, I could hear ambient canopy nutter ail around me, and I knew the team was S-turning to eat up ground speed, then corkscrew circling and landing Just as we’d trained to do. As for me, I came in fast and high — I didn’t brake as I was supposed to, never flared, and took out a small tree at the end of the overgrown runway. I never even saw it coming. I was at maybe fifteen feet or so and then— blam— took the trunk smack in the face.

It was a good hurt. The kind that made me feel I was alive.

I left the canopy up in the foliage, hit the deck, and started to assemble the teams.

We did a fast count. I was ecstatic. Every man had made the LZ with equipment intact. I called JSOC — the Joint Spe’t dal Operations Command — on the SATCOM and reported we were fifty-six out of fifty-six on the ground and were about to move.

Paul Henley, my XO — Six’s executive officer, who I’d nicknamed PV because of his Prince Valiant haircut — and I formed the teams into four prearranged assault groups.

I punched Paul on the upper arm. “Let’s go hunting.”

Following our NSA maps, we moved off silently into the jungle to the southwest, single file, weapons at the ready. We functioned entirely through hand signals, the way I’d done in Vietnam more than a decade earlier. Our moves were choreographed into a deadly sort of ballet — pas de mart — we’d worked on for months. No one spoke. No one had to. By now, PV and I thought alike. He’d been the first man I’d chosen for Six, a bright, energetic, capable young SEAL officer who could Jump and shoot and party with the best of them.

Moreover, unlike me, he was an Academy grad, which gave Six some cachet with the bean counters. The Navy’s caste system has the reputation of being about as rigid as any in the world. The first thing most Navy officers do when they meet you is look at your hands to see whether or not you’re wearing a Naval Academy class ring- If you do, then you’re a part of the club. If you don’t, then you’re an untouchable.

I was the original untouchable. The only things I wore on my knuckles were scars. But I loved my work and was uncommonly good at it, and in a few rare cases — mine included— the Navy establishment rewards ability almost as nicely as it does jewelry.

I checked my watch. Twenty-one seventeen. Two minutes behind the schedule I kept in my head.

We’d gotten the word to move twenty-seven hours beforehand. It came from JSOC. The first info was pretty sketchy: a Puerto Rican terrorist group called the Macheteros, or “machete wielders,” had broken onto the National Guard airfield just outside San Juan and destroyed $40 million worth of planes and equipment. That much of the story would make it into the newspapers.

What wouldn’t be reported, according to JSOC, was that during the attack the Macheteros — we commonly referred to terrorists in the radio phonetic term as Ts, or tangos — took a hostage, and a pallet load of equipment. Including, it was believed, a nuclear weapon. No one was sure. Don’t ask how no one could be sure whether or not an A-bomb was missing.

This was the United States Air Force after all — home of $600 toilet seats and $200 pliers.

Anyway, the Macheteros, I was told, had managed lo evade police dragnets, roadblocks, and SWAT teams and disappear.

Except that U.S. intelligence tracked them to Vieques, a small island due east of Puerto Rico, where they had a clandestine training camp. That was where they were now.

I knew Vieques Island. I’d trained there as a member of Underwater Demolition Team 21 two decades ago. It seemed somehow incongruous that a bunch of tangos would choose for their clandestine base an island that normally crawled with U.S. military personnel.

Moreover, we’d had so many false alarms, I was suspicious that this scramble was just another cry-wolf operational drill, or another framing exercise to be done in “real time,” known as a full mission profile. Indeed, we’d been scrambled by Dick Scholtes before, only to find out while we were in the air on the way to the “target” that we were part of some goatfuck war game JSOC had based on a real incident, to make us think we were playing for keeps.

Game or not, I was willing toplay along. We had never performed a massed night jump over-a hostile target. We’d also never coordinated so many elements at once — clandestine insertion, taking down the target, snatching a hostage and a nuke, and synchronizing an extraction from a hot landing zone was as complicated a series of tasks as SEAL Team Six had been required to perform in its short history.

The call-up had gone right according to schedule. Each man at Six carried a beeper at all times. When it went off, he had four hours to show up at a prearranged location with his equipment.

During the initial hours, while the crews were assembling, PV and I called in my ops boss, Marko, and Six’s master chief petty officer, Big Mac, and we began putting together our basic strategy. That’s the way it worked at Six. Officers, petty officers (Navy noncoms), and enlisted all had a say in what went on, although I made the ultimate aye-or-nay decision on everything.

We realized from the start that a seaborne operation was out of the question because it would have taken too long to land from a mother ship. That meant we’d be launching an air strike. And given the location of the terrorist camp, it would be easier to go straight in than drop us eight or ten miles offshore with our boats.

The first intelligence we received came from a guy I’ll call Pepperman, a former Marine lieutenant colonel who was working special ops assistance at the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, out of a room five or six stories beiow ground. That basement room was the hub for covert and clandestine operations all over the world, and my old friend Pepperman sat there like a balding Buddha, watching and listening as things went down.

Pepperman — I called him that because he grew his own incredibly hot Thai peppers in the backyard of his suburban Maryland home, a culinary holdover from his special ops days behind the lines in Southeast Asia — was one of those wonderful, ex-military scavengers who could get you anything, anytime. In Vietnam he’d probably been the type who could lay his hands on a bottle of Chivas or a case of beer even though he was six days into a ten-day long-range patrol behind the Green Line in Cambodia. Now, he was in the code-wordsecret classified-information business, and there wasn’t much he couldn’t come up with, you were a friend in need — and if you had the proper clearances, which I did.

He immediately supplied us with the kind of info that allowed me to outline our basic strategy: a thumbnail of who the bad guys were, their history, modus operandi, and basic political and military objectives. It didn’t take long to reach the bottom line; these people weren’t nice.

The Macheteros had been active since 1978. They were a small, well-financed, tightly organized guerrilla force of ultranationalists- Their objective was to wage a terrorist war against what they called “U.S. colonialist imperialism” in the broadside “communiques” they distributed following dozens of attacks. They’d received training in Eastern Europe courtesy of the KGB — and they’d learned their deadly lessons well. The Macheteros had staged a number of lethal, effective attacks. Half a dozen Puerto Rican policemen had been shot, and in the fourteen months before the current raid, they’d murdered two U.S. sailors and wounded three other American military personnel in separate ambushes.

About an hour into the planning, my jumpmaster, a boatswain’s mate I called Gold Dust Frank, showed up. I gave him a quick rundown of what was going on. Then he and PV, who had been a member of the Navy’s parachute team, began to work out the intricacies of a 56-man clandestine jump and a ten-nautical-mile glide, given the approximate load each man would be carrying, the topography of Vieques Island, and the sort of landing zone we’d be dropping into.

Another pair of SEAL Six petty officers, Horserace and Fingers, showed up. They were my top demolition experts, and they started to assemble the explosive bundles necessary to take down an armed installation. Except they had a question or two I couldn’t answer.

Like: “How thick are the doors, Skipper? And are they wood or metal?”

“What am I, a goddamn clairvoyant?” I punched up the all-knowing Pepperman in his NSA basement.

“Pepperman, Dickie here. Can you give us an info dump on door thickness and material?”

He laughed out loud. “That’s always Delta’s first question, Marcinko, you dipshit asshole. What’s the matter, can’t you be original?”

I loved it when he talked like that. “Screw you, shit-forbrains.” I asked him to fax us a quick flick of the target area — the terrorist camp — so Horserace could determine the approximate size of a charge that would breach the door without blowing up the hostage inside. Meanwhile, Fingers (he was-called that because he’d lost a couple doing demolition work) began building the other explosive charges — the ones we’d use to destroy the nuclear device if it couldn’t be brought out with us.

“I got a Blackbird working, Dick,” Pepperman said. That was good. It meant he’d already scrambled an SR-71 spy plane and its cameras were snap-snap-snapping away from 85,000 feet. At that height the bird was invisible to the normal eye — even to most binoculars. We’d have pictures in a couple of hours at most. “And we’ll start getting full imagery in seven, eight hours,” Pepperman continued.

“Full imagery” was the stuff from one of the KH-11—for Keyhole-11—spy satellites that NSA operated in conjunction with the CIA and the military. “Sounds good. Keep me posted, cockbreath.” I rang off before he could insult me back.

Our communications maven — I called him Ameche, after Don Ameche, who played Alexander Graham Bell in the thirties movie — reported for work. He began getting the SATCOM relays up and working. We don’t like to go through the operator in SEAL Team Six; we’re much more a directdial outfit. Our portable phones were called PSC-1 manpacks, which in Navyspeak translates as Portable Satellite Communications terminals.

PV and I worked the phones, negotiating with the Air Force to set the pickup time so Six, the hostage, and the nuke could alt be exfiltrated by HH-53 choppers flown from the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, located on the western edge of the Eglin Air Force Base complex in Florida. Coordination was important: the four HH-53s had to be refueled in flight by a pair of MC-130E Combat Talon aircraft; moreover, they couldn’t arrive too early because they’d give our position away. If they kept us waiting, they’d leave us vulnerable in hostile — potentially deadly — territory. Once airborne, they’d sprint us from Vieques to a friendly airfield on the main island, about eleven minutes away. There, we’d rendezvous with a C-141 StarLifter out of Charleston, South Carolina, which would in turn move us and our packages back to CONUS — the CONtinental United States.

The team started to arrive midevening; guys drifting in from all over the Virginia Beach area. We looked like a bunch of dirtbags. The Navy called it “modified grooming standards.”

I called it ponytails, earrings, beards, and Fu Manchu mustaches, biker’s jackets, tank tops, and T-shirts.

The guys’ cars and pickup trucks were crammed to overflowing with gear, covered with tarps or canvas. I’d bought them the best of everything, from mountaineering equipment to Draeger bubbleless underwater breathing apparatus. And until we were able to build each team member his own personal equipment cage, they had to bring everything with them each time there was a call-up. Who knew where we’d be going,

We went wheels up at 1400 hours. The guys looked tired but ready as they settled as comfortably as they could in the canvas cargo sling seats that ran up and down the sides of the C-130’s fuselage, or sacked out on the cargo pads that lay strewn on the greasy floor. Our shrink, Mike the Psych, wandered up and down, making sure nobody got too apprehensive. We’d learned from Delta that an SOB — Shrink On Board — was a good idea. First, you didn’t want a guy who’d go bonkers on you jumping with the team. Mike knew these men — if he sensed there might be a problem, I trusted him to let me know immediately.

Once we got airborne, I’d formulate our final plans based on the information and pictures that would start arriving on our scrambled fax machines. PV and I were on separate aircraft, but we could talk on secure phones and share information, or consult with Dick Scholtes at Ft. Bragg or call Pepperman in his Maryland basement for advice if we needed to.

I climbed the ladder to the cockpit and peered through the windshield, watching the sky darken. Pretty soon we’d refuel, a pair of KC-135 tankers lumbering above us at four hundred knots while the pilots nudged our C-130s up to the trailing file! drogues, plugged up, and sucked gas. Absentmindedly, I dropped the clip out of my Beretta and popped a round into my palm. The clip — in fact, every “round of ammunition carried tonight by SEAL Team Six — came from a special section of the base ammo lockers. It had been preloaded into magazines for our Berettas and HK submachine guns. Its release had been authorized by JSOC Just prior to our departure.

Something was awry. The weight was wrong — lighter than the custom load I’d helped design. I dragged my fingernail across the dull lead hollow-point and left a track. It was a compound bullet — a goddamn training round. They were sending us on another pus-nuts exercise — a full mission profile.

Goddammit — the Macheteros were real enough, why the hell not let us take ‘em on? We’d designed a good mission, based on real intelligence — and were executing it according to the numbers. Why the hell didn’t they let us do what we’d been trained to do? A decade and a half ago, in Vietnam, I’d learned firsthand what SEALs did best: hunt men and kill them. But even in Vietnam, the system kept me from hunting and killing as many of the enemy as I would have liked. Since Vietnam, no one had given me the chance to do that job again — until I’d been ordered to create this team of men whose only job, I was promised, would be Ihe hunting and killing of other men.

Now the system was at it again- We were ready. Capable.

Deadly. Why the hell weren’t we being used? I’d never considered SEALs strategic weapons — expensive systems that you keep in your arsenal as deterrents, but don’t use. SEALs are tactical. We want to be sent on missions. We wanted to shoot and loot, hop and pop — do all the wonderful, deadly things that SEALs are supposed to do.

I’d begun to believe we were finally getting our chance.

The bullet in my palm told me otherwise.

Furious, I started for the secure radio to call Paul and tell him this was just another in the series of games our command structure was playing on us. Halfway down the ladder I stopped. Dickie had a better idea. I’d play out this little charade as if I didn’t know any better and turn it into my own war game.

I probably had more unanswered questions than JSOC anyway. Like, how would my men perform during this complicated series of tasks? They were all good — but which ones would become great under the pressure of keeping to a tight combat schedule? Would any of them realize we weren’t doing this for real — and if they did, what would their reactions be?

I wanted to leam which of them I could order to do a job — even though it might mean their deaths. Being cannon fodder was part of the assignment. Every man who’d volunteered for SEAL Team Six knew he was expendable — from me, right down to the youngest kid on the team. This was an opportunity to test that resolve — to see which ones would play for keeps, and which ones would, at the last instant, hold back.

That’s what SEAL Team Six was all about, anyway — playing for keeps. Oh, sure, the goddamn technology of war was almost beyond comprehension — and it wasn’t just airrefueling or high-tech satellites either, anymore, but microburst transmitters and stealth aircraft and hundreds of billions of dollars invested in technotoys — laser-guided, shoulderfired missiles, computer-assisted antitank guns, “smart” bombs, and a whole collection of weapons that the assholes in the Pentagon were quick to tell you could think for themselves.

Today you could sit in a fighter, press a missile launch button, and kill an enemy twenty, thirty, forty miles over the horizon, watching his plane explode on a TV screen, Just like the video games my kids played.

And yet, what it really came down to, after all the bullshit and the computers and the video, was the very basic question embodied by the bullet in my hand. Could one of my men look another human being in the eyes, then pull the trigger and kill that person without hesitating for an instant?

In Vietnam, I’d discovered who could kill and who couldn’t in combat. But that was fifteen years ago, and less than half of SEAL Team Six had ever been in combat. So there was only one way to find out who’d pull the trigger, and who’d freeze — which was to play this thing out and see who did his job and who didn’t. War, after all, is not Nintendo. War is not about technology or toys. War is about killing.

Chapter 2

Ensign Indian Jew, the point man, signaled. He was half Yakima and half Brooklyn, hence the momker. I used to kid him about growing up spearing and smoking salmon up on the Columbia River — but never being able to find any bagels or cream cheese.

I squinted in the darkness, barely able to pick him out against the foliage in his tigerstripes and camouflage war paint.

But I’d seen him put his hand up, palm flat. Now he was clenching his fist. Enemy ahead. I moved up the line slow and easy, the MP5 in my hand. We’d covered about six hundred yards, making a hell of a lot more of a racket than I wanted to. If the bad guys had pickets out or they’d deployed electronic sensors, they’d surely know about us. That was something we hadn’t had a chance to work on — moving in large groups. Usually, SEALs operated in squads of seven, or in 14-man platoons. Frankly, I was uncomfortable at having to move so many men in one group because of the noise. But it couldn’t be helped. I felt lucky we hadn’t been observed so far.

I drew abreast of Jew and knelt next to him. He was one of the best I had — a former enlisted man whose capacity to learn fast was boundless. Jew epitomized the future of Navy Special Warfare — SpecWar in Navyspeak. He was big, smart, tough, too handsome for his own good, and ingeniously adroit When it came to the deadly arts.

I pulled my NV out. I took a look. The blackness became oscilloscope green; the foliage turned dark against the brightness. Two hundred feet ahead I could see a chain-link fence about eight feet high with a yard of barbed wire coiled on top. Beyond were two warehouses, as well as three other low, barracklike buildings. There were no lights- So much the better. The grounds were unkempt — a lot of cover for us to move behind. It looked just like the satellite picture that was folded in my pocket.

I mimed a man with a rifle to Jew. Any sentries?

He shook his head. No.

I gave him thumbs-up. I pointed at him. I snipped the air with index and middle finger. I mimed peering out.

He nodded. He’d cut through the wire and do a fast sneak and peek. We’d wait.

He slithered forward, moving with a slow, practiced crawl until he melted into the underbrush. Like so many of my guys he was perfectly at home in the jungle. He was too young to have served in Vietnam, but he’d adapted well to SEAL training in Panama and Florida and was-one of the best scouts the unit had.

That he was an ensign didn’t matter. In Six, officers and men were interchangeable. No caste system for us.

I edged back and signaled the men to drop. They disappeared into the darkness. I lay. back and stared at the sky, listening for anything out of the ordinary. I perceived nothing.

The silence was good. You could hear the jungle’s natural sounds — insects, birds, whatever, resuming their normal activities. I smashed something small and winged and sharp that had decided to take up residence on my eariobe. Moments passed.

Jew came back. “Nothing, Skipper,” he whispered. “A second perimeter line of wire fences by the barracks there.”

He pointed to the southwest. “And the warehouses east of the barracks, just like on the picture. I heard some noise— maybe they’re having a few cold ones.”

I punched him with my elbow. “Nice job.” I took a recon photo from my pocket. I motioned to PV and an officer I called Lieutenant Cheeks because his jowly face looked like a squirrel hoarding acorns. The three of us huddled over the picture as I illuminated it with a red-lensed pencil light. I showed them what I wanted done. They nodded and gave me thumbs-up.

I circled wagons with my index finger. “Let’s go to work.”

We would move in four 14-man platoons. PV would go south with two of them, work around the perimeter, and cut through the fence closest to the barracks. He’d lead one of his platoons and hit the storage area, where we believed the hostage to be. The other — Cheeks‘—would neutralize the barracks.

I’d take down the warehouse where the nuke was, with my platoon. The last platoon, split into two seven-man boat crews, would act as flankers. They’d sweep up any bad guys who got between us and the gate. As we withdrew, they’d join up with Cheeks platoon as the blocking force, shielding our escape north and east, back to the LZ.

I pulled the headset onto my head, securing it with a lightweight knit cap. Then I fitted the earpiece snugly inside my left ear, adjusted the filament microphone so it sat on my beard just below my lower lip, ran the wire down the back of my neck, passed it through a slit in the shirt, and plugged it into the Motorola, I pressed the transmit button for an instant and tsk-tsked twice into the mike — radio-talk for affirmative. I heard PV do the same thing. Then I heard Cheeks and Jew. We were all on line and ready to go. And if the bad guys had scanners on, we hadn’t given them very much to scan. At least not yet.

I swept my arm left, then right. The SEALs moved into the shadows. I moved forward, following the path Jew had left me, until I came to the chain-link fence. I found the slit he’d made, took my snips and enlarged it slightly, then puüed myself through.

Once on the other side I slipped behind some scrub, took out my night-vision glasses, and secured the strap tightly around the back of my head. I didn’t wear them all the time because they tend to narrow your field of vision when you’re moving. And they made me slightly top-heavy, but now, when I needed to see inside a darkened building, they’d give me a terrific advantage.

I had a look around. All clear. I moved out, the MP5 cradled in my arms as I scrunched across the ground, moving silently from tree to tree to take the best advantage I could of the natural cover. Scanned the perimeter. Clear — nothing.

No muzzles pointing from any of the roofs. No signs of life at all. I liked that.

Fifty feet from the warehouse I nicked the MP5’s safety downward to full fire, rose into a semicrouch and ran to the eander-block wall.

The building was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet by sixty, topped by corrugated metal roofing that sat on exposed metal trusses, which allowed air flow in the tropical heat. Back and front entrances were heavy, fifteen-foot-wide, sliding, segmented metal doors that sat in tracks. On the side was a twostep, roofed porch and a metal, windowed door that led to some sort of office. There was light inside. On each side of the door were windows. In the left-hand one a rusting air conditioner wheezed and dripped water slowly, steadily, into a sizable puddle. That told me it had been turned on for some time.

I worked my way around the back end of the warehouse and snuck a look. It was all clear,‘t-did a 360. Nothing. This was like stealing — no, this was better than stealing. I slowly edged up to the big, tracked door, moving a fraction of an inch at a time so as to make no noise. There was a small space between the segments, and sucking ground like a snail, I approached slowly, slowly, and had a look-see. For all I knew the Ts inside had NV glasses, too, and I didn’t want ’cm screwing with me.

I let my eyes get accustomed to the interior. It looked quiet enough. The place was empty except for some 50-gallon drums piled along the wall to my left, and what looked like a threequarter-ton Army truck parked close to the tracked doors opposite where I was. There was a scaffolding around the outer wall perhaps ten feet up, six or seven feet below the ventilation break where the walls stopped and the roof began.

Sitting on a wood pallet close to a door under which a crack of light escaped was a wooden crate about the same size a 2,000-pound bomb came packed in. That had to be the nuke.

Something was… not right. It was too quiet. I crushed my face into the hard ground to get a better look. It was impossible they’d leave the jewels unprotected, unless they didn’t know what they’d taken.

No way. It was a trap. Had to be a trap. I waited. Plotted.

Schemed. Laughed silently at these assholes. It was a game of patience. It all came down to patience; would I move first, or would they.

I knew they were in there. I could sense ‘em. Almost smell ’em. I controlled my breathing, slowed my whole system down the same way I’d done when I’d learned I could sit on the bottom of Norfolk harbor for three and a half minutes at a stretch during UDT training.

Oh, the fucking instructors — they loved me when I ran that game on ‘em.

During E&E — evade and escape — training, they’d make us play hide-and-seek. They’d dump us in the water and then put boats out to search for us. It was like shooting fish in a barrel — you can’t swim fast enough to get away from boats with lights, and you gotta surface to breathe. To make it more interesting (and to give us some added incentive), the instructors usually pounded the crap out of you when they caught you, and they were tough sons of bitches, too.

So I cheated. That’s what E&E’s supposed to be about, anyway. I lost ‘em by swimming like a bat out of hell until I was just off the slip of the Kiptopeake-Norfolk ferry — on the far side, so the ferry would come between them and me.

Timing was everything. I waited until the ferry got real close, then made a lot of noise in the water. When they caught me in the lights, I dove. I swam underwater about thirty yards to the slip and sucked mud while the ferryboat docked, sitting on the bottom holding on to a filthy, greasy piling with the big screw churning eight feet above my head chunka-chunkachunka. Then I came out of the water, checked to see if the instructors were anywhere close. They weren’t. So I chucked my mask and fins, climbed up over the port side of the stem onto the ferry, stole a set of mechanic’s overalls out of a locker, and walked right out onto the dock. Nobody noticed I was barefoot.

I studied them as they crisscrossed the harbor, searching for me for about half an hour. Then I ambled off the slip, bought a quart of beer with some change I found in the coveralls, came back, and drank almost all of it dockside. Then, when I was good and ready, I whistled and waved ‘em over.

I let them watch as I drained the last of the beer and tossed the bottle into the harbor. Oh, they loved me for that. I don’t know what made ‘em madder — that I got away, or that I bought beer and didn’t share it.

Something moved. Behind the drums. Something back there. I waited. Looked intently at the truck. Something there, too. One or two in the back, muzzles protruding just over the back gate. M16s probably. Combat-scoped? Maybe.

Just inside the door I heard a scrape-scraping. Just a little something — the shifting of a foot or a rifie butt on the door.

I froze. No breathing. Chunka-chunka-chunka. Wait the sons of bitches out.

Only after some minutes did I withdraw the way I’d come, silently, inch by inch, careful not to leave tracks behind. I made my way around the side of the warehouse, did another 360. It was still clear. I slid myself along the wall to the window with the air conditioner, went under it, around the two-step porch, removed my goggles, and let my eyes adjust to the night again. Then I peered inside.

A middle-aged man with dark skin, dressed in a bulky, short-sleeved sweatshirt and greasy, khaki trousers sat behind a desk facing me. He was wearing wraparound plastic shooter’s goggles — a giveaway that this was Memorex, not real— and he wrote intently in a spiral notebook with the stub of ‘ an old pencil, his thick lips moving as he formed the words.

A bottle of Bud sat sweating at his left elbow. A blue steel .45 automatic lay next to it. He looked up from the page, ran a hand over thinning, kinky, salt-and-pepper hair. A broad face. A nose that had been broken too many times. Slit, yellowed eyes. Maybe fifty-five or so. Powerful, workingman’s ‘ hands that were obviously uncomfortable with the pencil.

I dropped back down onto my haunches and withdrew to „. the underbrusb cover where I’d left the platoon. I briefed the squad leaders about the ambush. Everybody had night-vision equipment. They’d hit the doors simultaneously, working op‘ posing fields of fire so they wouldn’t shoot each other. One Squad would go left and high, working the truck and catwalk, the other would mirror — left and low, taking down the oil drums and opposite catwalk. I’d take down the guy in the office and come out by the nuke.

I pressed the Motorola’s remote transmit button that was cHpped to my vest. The radio could be used either in an onoff mode, or switched to continual transmission. “One set.”

I whispered.

I heard PV’s voice. “Two set.” The hostage snatch team was in position.

Cheeks checked in. “Three set.” Barracks sweepers were ready.

“Four set.” Jew’s blocking force was primed.

I looked at my watch. We’d been on the ground for fortyseven minutes. The operation was scheduled to last ninety, so our four choppers were already in the air, being refueled, and just under three-quarters of an hour away from touchdown. That gave us a shm, but acceptable, margin for error.

I turned the Motorola on. “Six minutes. Then go.” Plenty of time to set up.

I gave hand signals and watched the squads move out. They knew their jobs. Each had become a superb shooter over the past five months. We didn’t train with regulation targets at SEAL Team Six. We used three-by-five-inch index cards pasted onto silhouettes. You had to be able to hit the card with a double-tap — that is, two shots in rapid succession— whether you were coming out of the water with the stainless Smith & Wesson .357 magnum pistol, or breaking through the hatch of a hijacked airplane with the Beretta.

Right-handed, left-handed, one-handed, two-handed, we shot in every conceivable manner. In fact, I didn’t care how my guys shot, just so long as they hit tight, man-killing groups every single time. No concentrating on fancy angles or head shots. Those techniques are what you see in movies, not Six.

We used heavy loads that would knock terrorisis down no matter where we hit them. Head, chest, arm, leg — it didn’t matter. In sniping — at ranges of six hundred and eight hundred yards — we were still a little behind the curve. But overall, my shooters were better than any in the world today, including Delta’s much publicized pistoleros.

I knew PV was in position. Six of his shooters would take out the bad guys holding the hostage; the others would clear any remaining terrorists. He had two medics with him in case the hostage was injured or hurt. Cheeks’ two squads would tiose the barracks if the tangos inside got restless. My guys bad a somewhat tougher job. They’d have to set up and blow die doors, then hit the ambushers in the dark, while I took out the guy in the office. After that we’d have to figure out a way to move the nuke back to the LZ — or render it unusable.

The digital timer on my watch was running. It showed one minute forty seconds elapsed. I was Just under the air conditioner now, cool water dripping onto my shoulder. It felt fpod. My mind’s eye had a picture of the tango behind the desk. I’d catch him in the chest. The Beretta was in my hand, ready. In my earpiece I could hear PV, Cheeks, and Indian-Jew’s breathing on the open lines. They could probably hear me,too.

A minute fifty. Four minutes, ten seconds to contact.

Suddenly automatic weapons fire broke out to the southwest. At the same time I heard PV’s voice: “Shit — early contact, early contact — everybody go.”

There was no time to lose. I rose, swiveled, and kicked the door just below the handle.

It burst inward. The dark man in the sweatshirt was already Standing, pistol in his hand, as I came through low, Beretta in a two-handed grip. Before he could react I hit him with half a dozen shots in the chest. I fired so quickly the 9mm sounded like a submachine gun.

The loads punched him back against the wall. His .45 went flying. A dark stain spread from the center of his chest. I ejected the clip and slapped a spare, from a mag-holder taped to my right wrist, into the Beretta’s rubber-clad grip.

I looked up as I heard two explosions in rapid succession behind the office. The other two squads had initiated.

I grabbed the spiral notebook and did a cursory search for documents. There were three manila files in a desk drawer and I took them, too, rolling them and stuffing them into the cargo pocket of my fatigues. I hit the office lights to get my eyes ready for the NV goggles. I took out the SATCOM and told JSOC we’d initiated contact early, and to expedite the snatch. Four minutes may not seem like a lot of time, but on a hot LZ it’s an eternity.

I strapped my NV on and slid through the door into the warehouse, Beretta in my right hand. In my earpiece came the sound of heavy automatic weapons fire, followed by Cheeks’ raspy voice, “Well, get the mothers, already!”

The front and back doors had been blown open, and smoke grenades were filling the warehouse with opaque, white fog.

I could hear my guys working the room and the staccato buzzsaw brrrrrp of return fire from M16s.

It was easy to tell who was who. The SEALs fired their MP5s in controlled, three-shot bursts. The bad guys were letting whole mags go at once.

I crawled to the pallet and reached left-handed into my vest for an atomic detection device. There was movement behind me, and it wasn’t one of us. I swiveled and fired at a shadow in the smoke, then rolled back toward the pallet.

The indicator told me whatever was in the crate was nuclear.

I heard PV’s voice in my ear. “Hostage clear. Alive and well.”

“Okay. Cheeks?”

“Call you back.”

“Jew?”

“A-okay.”

From my left I heard the Alpha squad leader, Fingers, shouting, “Alpha side clear.”

There was another long M16 burst from the far side of the warehouse, then six shots in rapid succession from a Beretta, then silence. Gold Dust Larry, Brave’s squad leader, called out, “Bravo side clear.”

I pulled off the night-vision goggles and stowed them.

“Anybody down?”

“Not us, boss.”

“pv?”

“Nope.”

“Cheeks?”

“No.”

“Jew?”

“Ain’t seen no action yet. Skipper.”

“You won’t be disappointed.” I looked at the timer. Seven minutes, ten seconds.

I pulled SATCOM from my vest. “Six — all sites clear. Hostage and package under control. Nobody down but bad guys.”

That was because we were all firing blanks — but even so, it was damned good work by my guys. I stood up and secured my Berelta, windmilling my arms in the opaque, white smoke that still obscured much of the warehouse. “Anybody see a fan to get this smoke outta here? Let’s get on it.” I slapped the wood crate and called over to Gold Dust Larry, “Somebody get the three-quarter started. Let’s get this goddamn thing loaded and moving.”

“Aye-aye, Skipper.”

“pv—”

“Boss?”

“ETA to the LZ?”

“The hostage is pretty shaky. We’re gonna have to carry him out. Tangos were working him over when we arrived— nothing serious, just harassment, but he’s not used to it. I’ll be ready to up and out in six, seven minutes.”

“Ten-four. Cheeks?”

“I’m getting some hostile action here. I’ll withdraw clean in four to five minutes. We got a shitload of intel, Skipper.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” I heard a satisfying roar as Gold Dust Larry revved the truck’s engine. “Gotta go. See you at the LZ.”

The smoke was finally clearing out of the warehouse.

“Somebody find a couple of two-by-fours or pieces of pipe.

Let’s get this thing moved.“

I checked the Casio again. Elapsed time: sixty-three minutes. Twenty-seven minutes until the choppers touched down.

God, how time flies when you’re having fun.

We slid three rails under the crate. Four men to a rail, and two to stand guard. I showed them the atomic particle counter. They watched as the indicator moved into the red zone. “This shit is radioactive, so any numb-nuts dumb enough to drop it is gonna suffer. On three, heave and up.”

It was like the weightpile, but easier. The average Six bench press was just under four hundred pounds. It wasn’t going to take twelve of us to lift a 2,500-pound container, but I wanted everyone to have a piece of the action.

I watched them load while I checked the recon photo in my pocket. I’d marked an escape route with crayon. That was a stupid thing to do. What if I ate a bullet and the bad guys pulled the map out of my pocket? I rubbed the photo on my fatigues until I’d obliterated the red line, I knew where the hell we were going.

Gold Dust Larry rolled the balaclava hood down onto his neck, revealing a crooked, gritty smile on his mustached face as he held the truck on course- I hung off the passenger-side running board and navigated. As we came to the gate, I saw Horserace, who’d just cut the locks. As he waved us through, I heard firing from the barracks area. “Just keep moving.”

It took us a little over ten minutes to make the LZ where we’d touched down. We parked the truck at the side of the old runway, set up a perimeter, and waited. About five minutes later PVs platoon arrived, he and one of the petty officers supporting a thin, gray-haired man well past middle age, in a filthy white shirt and stained gray trousers, and a pair of heavy-framed eyeglasses worn with an elastic band to keep them on his head. I went over to him and shook his hand.

“You all right, sir?”

He nodded. “A bit shaky, Commander.”

The accent was pure Deutschland. I wondered where they’d found him. It didn’t matter. I role-played as if I didn’t know we were all following a script. “German?”

“Yes- Thank you for coming for me.”

I did an exaggerated Three Musketeers bow. “Commander Otto Von Piffle at your service,” I said in a passable Otto Preminger accent. “It vass mein pleasure to koming to der rescue because zay heff vays of making you talk, you know.”

The hostage’s eyes went wide.

PV spoke a burst of rapid-fire German. He’d learned the language during a 26-month stint with the Kampfschwimmerkompanie — the combat swimmers who were the West German equivalent of SEALs. The hostage laughed.

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him, ‘What the commander meant to say,is that he’s glad you’re okay.’ Then I added that you’re not as stupid or ugly as you might appear at first sight.”

PVs two squads reinforced the perimeter. The watch said nine minutes until the choppers arrived. Cheeks and his two squads showed up moving at a trot. Four or five of the SEALs carried boxes on their shoulders.

“Intel goodies,” Cheeks said. “All sorts of stuff — plans, maps, receipts. And diagrams — bases in Puerto Rico and on the mainland, too. The DIA dip-dunks’ll have a field day with it all.”

I threw an exaggerated salute at Cheeks. “I do love it so when you make the dip-dunks happy, Lieutenant. It keeps ‘em off my back.”

Cheeks returned the gesture. “You’re welcome, sweet cakes.”

Automatic weapons fire from the rear. “Let’s be careful out there,” I shouted. “No time to start losing people now.”

I’d been about to light the flares to guide the choppers in, but it didn’t make sense to tell whoever was shooting at us precisely where we were.

I saw Jew emerge from the scrub at the far end of the clearing. I waved him over.

“Jew, what’s up?”

“They must have had more people than we knew about— or some of those guys we shot Just got up and walked away.

We’re taking fire.“

The kid was good. He was right about the tangos just walking away — except he just didn’t know it. I gave him a concerned look. “Anybody hurt?”

Jew nodded. “Two — nothing serious. One sprained ankle on the path, one ran into a thom bush in the dark.”

“Just keep the tangos out of our hair until the choppers get here.”

“Aye-aye, Skipper.” Jew melted back into the jungle.

It was time to illuminate the LZ. We set out six white strobes and three red ones. To guide the choppers in on final approach we had neon-green light-sticks.

The firing got closer. I looked skyward anxiously- The goddamn Air Force was probably taking a coffee break- That’s how they worked — like union bus-drivers — most of the time.

Six or seven hours of flight time (not to exceed this or that altitude, of course), and then it was bye-bye for a didy change, a nap, and a cup of cocoa.

We could run for a week with no sleep, then do a 35,000foot-jump hop-and-pop exercise, pick ourselves up, and do it all over again. Not fly-boys. I checked my watch. They were now late.

I called JSOC. “Where the hell are our choppers?”

“They’re on the way. Relax.”

“Relax?” Who the hell were these idiots, anyway? I put the German under the truck and hunkered down with PV. It seemed tike an eternity until we heard the sound of rotorsThey’d kept us waiting eighteen minutes. On a hot LZ, you can lose your entire force in eighteen minutes.

The quartet of choppers, their long refueling nozzles projecting from the noses of the aircraft like knights’ lances, circled the LZ lazily to pick the spots where they’d set down.

Unbelievably, they were doing an admin — administrative— approach. That is, they were landing as if they were coming into a runway at an Air Force base. To them, this was only an exercise — so why the hell should they put themselves out?

Assholes — I’d kill the sons of bitches after we got out of here.

I shook my light-stick at them to drop quickly. This was supposed to be a hot LZ- They were supposed to fly as if there were ground fire. Their job was to come in, drop their ramps, scoop us up, and get the hell out. I waved my arms like a madman. The pilots were oblivious. They settled in as if they were landing on the White House lawn — and started to cut their engines.

“No no no no no. Keep ‘em revved up. Move it,” I screamed, windmilling my light-stick. I pointed PV toward the nearest chopper, which was dropping its aft ramp. “Get the hostage on board.” I watched while PV and his crew hustled the German up the ramp. That was fourteen plus one.

I ran the light-stick in a circle at the pilot. “Get the hell outta here.”

He gave me a thumbs-up. The six rotors started up again, the jet turbines reached full thrust, and he lifted off. Three to go. Cheeks was loading the intel in one bird while my platoon ran the nuke into the second. As soon as they’d strapped it down, I tossed Alpha squad aboard and waved the chopper into the air. That was two. Twenty-one SEALs airborne.

I stuck my head into the third chopper’s forward hatch and screamed at the pilot- “Rev it up — I’ll tell you when to go.”

I ran to Cheeks’ position on the perimeter and pointed toward the chopper. “Get the strobes and the chutes and take my Bravo squad, then get the hell out of here. I’ll ride with Jew.”

“Affirmative.” He got his guys working. One group collected the lights and heaved them onto the chopper while the other retrieved our chutes from the underbrush where we’d concealed them and threw the piles of silk up the ramp, past Cheeks, who stood at the top, his HK pointing skyward, waving men on, counting. “Let’s get moving.”

When I saw they were all loaded and aboard, I pointed at the pilot. “Go!”

Another twenty SEALs gone. That left Jew’s fourteen— and me.

I shouted for Jew into the Motorola mike. No answer, “Jew, goddammit—” I realized I’d pulled the plug out of its socket.

I fixed it and shouted his name again.

“Coming, Dickie.”

I waited as Jew’s platoon emerged from the darkness, running in leapfrog pattern, their route punctuated by short bursts from the MP5s. I grabbed a couple of them by the vests and threw them toward the chopper. Jew and I were last on board.

As the ramp shut, we gave the LZ a good burst of submachinegun fire. “Move it!” I shouted to the crew chief.

Then we were airborne. Mission perfect. Rehearsal or not, I was one happy goddamn SEAL CO. I checked my watch.

I slammed my palm into Jew’s chest, knocking him ass over teakettle into a startled Air Force master sergeant. I perused my SEALs. “You guys are wonderful.” h.

I could see the C-141 StarLifter’s huge, black fuselage as we banked into the air base on the main island. I hoped the flight crew had some cold beer on board — we were going to need it. The first of the choppers was already on the ground, disgorging SEALs and the hostage. The second and third were just settling in. I felt so good I forgot about putting the chopper pilots in the hospital for their 18-minute delay and admin approaches back at Vieques.

We set down. I was first off, hitting the ground before the ramp did. I ran to the StarLifter. Yeah — there was beer on board. Terrific — we were going to party on the way home. I loped over to PV and Cheeks and slapped them on the back.

I assembled my troops. “Great job. Terrific. Fuck you all very much, you merry murdering cockbreath shit-for-brains assholes.”

Oh, I was full of myself. But justifiably, goddammit. Justifiably. Exercise or not — what we’d done tonight had never, ever, been done before by a military unit. We’d ftown three thousand goddamn miles, inserted four SEAL platoons in a clandestine, high-altitude, high-opening, mass, night jump, parasailed ten miles to our objective, landed in a single group on a drop zone no bigger than a couple of football fields, assembled, taken down a bunch of bad guys, rescued a hostage, snatched back a nuke, and hadn’t lost a single SEAL in ‘the process.

This is what we’d groomed ourselves for; why we’d busted our asses. We’d practiced each risky element — shooting, jumping, parasailing, clandestine infiltration, hostage snatch, and extraction — separately. But we’d never put all of them together before; never run a real-time, full-tilt boogie war game until tonight.

The German came toward me. “You and your men did very well,” he said.

“Thank you. I’m proud of them.”

“You should be.”

I started to say something else when a Beetle Bailey Army colonel in starched fatigues and half-inch-thick glasses marched across the tarmac. “Commander Mardnko?”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“I have a message for you to call Joint Special Operations Command.”

“Sure.” I took the SATCOM from my vest and punched up JSOC.

“It’s Marcinko.” I waited. A familiar voice came on the line.

“Dick.”

“Sir—”

“You did wonderfully — better than we expected. The Joint Chiefs are impressed.”

I liked that. There had been some real skepticism at the Joint Chiefs about whether or not we’d been ready for a mission. Unlike Delta, which was based on the British SAS and went through an SAS-like administrative certification process, I had refused to let my men be graded by outsiders.

My argument was simple: what we were training to do hadn’t ever been done before. So how the hell would some four-star, pencil-dicked Pentagon paper-pusher know whether or not we were good at it?

My conclusion was, they wouldn’t. What I’d told the chain of command in no uncertain terms was, “Thank you very much, sirs, but I’ll certify SEAL Team Six myself.”

But it wasn’t to be. The command structure can — and had — imposed its will on us, no matter how I felt- The Vieques exercise was ample evidence of that. The voice in my ear continued, “Dick, this has been a first-rate exerdse. I think you and your troops need a couple of days off while we analyze and evaluate.”

Analyze and evaluate. Those bureaucratic syllables made me cnnge. Ever since Vietnam, even the military’s vocabulary had shifted from martial to managerial in tone. Goddammit — we didn’t need managers, we needed leaders, warriors, hunters. Instead, we got accountants. It seemed that every time I’d get prowling and growling some three-star asshole would slip a choke-leash around my neck and give it a yank to show he could make me heel. Well, it was time to growl back. Throw a shit fit. Chew the carpet. Play crazy. I owed it to my men. Shit — I owed it to myself. I raised my voice to let them hear as I shouted into the mouthpiece. “Exercise?

Analyze? Evaluate? What the fuck. General? Over.“

He played his role well, too. “1 couldn’t say anything until now, Dick. It was imposed by the Joint Chiefs on me.” He paused. “And you did great. Six is certified. You’re in business — as of right now.”

“Well, thank you for that valuable information, sir. I’m sure my men will appredate your opinion.” I wondered whether he caught the irony in my voice. Surreptitiously, I flicked the transmit button on the SATCOM to off and covered it with my hand. Then I continued my “conversation.”

PV, Cheeks, and Jew drifted closer as my voice grew louder and more disturbed. “You did what? You switched ammunition on us in the armory?”

I shouted into the dead SATCOM, “Sir, this was a goatfuck. Goddammit — you can’t hang up on—”

The Beetle Bailey colonel was peering into the fuselage of my C-141. He turned toward me. “Commander, you have beer in there — that’s against regulations-”

I started toward him. “Hey, Colonel — how’d you like a new asshole?”

PV tackled me and grabbed my combat vest with both hands, slowing me down like a sea anchor. He’s five inches shorter than I am, but he was a boxer at the Academy and he’s a tough little scrapper. “Lighten up, Dick.” He turned to the colonel. “I think it’s better if you leave us alone right now, sir. We’re all just a Uttle worked up, and it could be, ah, dangerous for you to stay around.”

Paul’s heels were dragging on the tarmac. The colonel saw the look of mayhem in my eyes as I pulled my XO toward him, and he beat a hasty retreat.

Paul let go. “He’s not worth it, Dick.”

“Screw you.”

Cheeks and Jew slammed me on the back. “Hey, Skipper.”

Jew said, “about the Joint Chiefs and all that crap — chill out.

It’s okay. We knew.“

“Knew what?”

“That it was a full mission profile,” said PV.

“Had to be an exercise,” said Cheeks. “No casualties. Lots of firing and no scratches. Plus — the tangos wore shooting glasses — every one of them.”

I was smiling inside. I’d picked these men because I believed they were smart. Goddammit, they were smart. “So why didn’t any of you numb-nuts say anything?”

“I remembered the sign every SEAL sees the day he begins his training,” PV said- “The one that reads, ‘The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.’ Besides, we’d never put it all together before, boss — seemed like a good idea to play it out and see if it worked.”

He was right of course. I wheeled toward the C-141. “Let’s get moving.”

PV punched me on the arm, hard enough to hurt. “Ayeaye, boss.” He pointed his index finger in the air and drew circles with it. “Come on, guys — load up. Let’s go get drunk.”

He was right. Screw ‘em all. It was time to get drunk and go home.

Chapter 3

Going home is not something I’ve ever been very good at. I certainly didn’t do it much as a youngster. I was born on Thanksgiving Day, 1940, in my grandmother Justine Pavlik’s house in Lansford, Pennsylvania, a tiny mining town in Carbon County — appropriate, isn’t it? — just east of Coaldale and Hometown. For the uninitiated, that’s about half an hour northwest of Allentown, and a lifetime from Philadelphia. My father, George, and mother, Emilie Teresa Pavlik Marcinko, never made it as far as the hospital delivery room. Typical.

I’m Czech on both sides. My mother is short and Slavic looking. My father was big — just under six feet — dark, brooding, and had a nasty temper- All the men in the family — and virtually every male in Lansford as well — were miners. They were bom, they worked the mines, they died. Life was simple and life was hard, and I guess some of them might have wanted to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but most were too poor to buy boots.

We lived on top of the hill, just around the corner from Kanuch’s, where we got our groceries and Old Man Kanuch would lick the thick pencil stub before he wrote down what we’d taken in his ledger book. He’d keep a tab and collect from us on payday. It would probably have been cheaper to shop at the A & P six blocks away, but hardly anybody did.

You went where you were known.

If I’m ornery, and there are those who think I am, I probably got it from my maternal grandfather. Joe Pavlik was a cantankerous, short, barrel-chested, shot-and-a-beer, harddrinking son of a bitch with a square face, and Leonid Brezhnev eyebrows, who worked the mines all his life and never, complained about it once. I don’t remember him ever corn-… plaining about anything. He was a real hell-raiser — one of those archetypal tough guys you see in working-class bars, with big, wide, labor-toughened hands that look as if they H were designed to go around old-fashioned beer glasses.“

I was always independent. I had my own paper route by fi the age of five. At seven, I was taking off for a day at a time, g, running through the mile-long Lehigh Railroad tunnel to swim in the Hauto reservoir. You could get there by going through the old Lansford water tunnel, too, but there were huge rats living in the water tunnel, and besides, it was farther up the mountain. So I took the shortcut — and my chances — with the H trains. I got nailed a few times. The first time the steam locomotive bore down on me I thought I’d die. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes tightly, hugging the wet stone tunnel wall as car after car after car went by ka-chang-ka- JI“ chang about a foot from my nose. My dad, George, beat the crap out of me after I told him what I’d done. Thereafter, whenever I used the railroad tunnel, I kept my mouth shut.

Neither of my parents was big on education. My dad prob- | ably dropped out of school around eighth grade; my mother may have gotten as far as ninth or tenth. Neither of them ever put any emphasis on book learning, so school was something I never took very seriously. I was much more interested in having fun — or making money.

Fun, before I discovered women, consisted of swimming at Hauto and summer vacations in the Catskill Mountains — the Jewish Alps — where my uncle Frank and aunt Helen had a boardinghouse. Money was always a problem. The mines closed down when I was in the seventh grade. and after several months of just scraping by, my father finally found work as a welder in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We moved to New Brunswick in 1952. I went through real culture shock. Lans-ford was a town of maybe four thousand, mostly Czech. In New Brunswick, there were Poles, Hungarians, Irish, Jews, blacks, and Hispanics. That took some getting used to, with the result that I both gave and received more than my fair share of welts and bruises on the walk between school and the small basement apartment we could afford.

Life around the house was not pleasant. My mother’s brother moved in with us — three adults and two kids (by then I had a brother) crammed in a three-room apartment. When my parents fought, which was often, my mother’s brother would take her side. The result was that my father spent less and less time at home. My younger brother, Joey, who was nine or ten at the time, was close to my mother, so he stayed around the house with her. Me, I couldn’t stand the place.

So I went off on my own, returning only to sleep or do what little homework I did.

I escaped by working as a pin-setter in a bowling alley, doing whatever odd Jobs I could find — even by serving seven A.M. Sunday mass as an altar boy. On the days I decided to show up, I went to St. Ladislaus Hungarian Catholic School, where like generations of students before me, I had my knuckles rapped by nuns netting wicked rulers. But I never liked classes very much. I cruised through school on autodrive, much more concerned with earning-pocket money than A’s or B’s.

During my sophomore year, for example, I worked sixty hours a week at a luncheonette called Gussy’s, just off the Rutgers campus. During the summer vacation I worked there a hundred and twenty hours a week — from five A.M. until ten at night, seven days a week. The hours were long but the money was great: a dollar an hour, off the books. That was a real windfall for a 15-year-old in 1955.

Besides, Gussy — his full name was Salvatore Puleio Augustino, but I can’t remember anyone ever using it — treated me like his own family. He took me upstairs, where his father, Old Man Sal, lived, and filled me with pasta and sauce, and sausages and chicken and huge platters of vegetables sauteed in olive oil and garlic, instead of my having to eat meat loaf or Salisbury steak off the luncheonette steam table. Old Man Sal let me watch as he made wine in the basement, and I developed a real taste for Chianti. I even picked up enough Italian to get by at the dinner table, which Sal’s old man just loved. Gussy made a real Czech guinea out of me.

Because I had a lot of money in my jeans for a teenager, I even bought a car, a chrome-yellow 1954 Mercury convertible, as soon as I was old enough to get my driver’s license — the day after my seventeenth birthday.

Things were made even more interesting because Gussy’s was a hangout for many of the Rutgers fraternity guys, some of whom adopted me as a kind of mascot. I spent a fair amount of time in the Rutgers Greek houses, which ultimately turned out to be a great and enlightening experience. The exposure helped smooth a few of my roughest edges. When most of the kids from backgrounds similar to mine were sporting pegged trousers and motorcycle jackets, and styled their hair tike Elvis or Dion, I dressed in button-down shirts, chinos, and Harris tweed sports coats. I learned how to drink beer at an early age, and — more important — how to handle it, too.

My fraternity friends also instructed me in some of the finer points involved in the constant search for meaningful female companionship.

The inculcation worked. The summer between my sophomore and junior years — I was fifteen — I met a beautiful and sophisticated young student teacher named Lucette at one of the fraternity parties. We hit it off right away. She was a French major, and I spoke my pidgin Italian, and we clicked.

I was big for my age and always had cash in my wallet, and I talked and dressed like I went to Rutgers and acted like I owned the goddamn fraternity house, so she never realized I was a high-school kid.

She found out the hard way. With what the inscrutable Orientals might call a dose of Real Bad Karma, she was assigned to teach a third-year high-school French class in September and saw my beaming face in the third row. Zut alors!

By the time I was seventeen I’d gone through a bunch of changes. My parents split up. My mother took a job at Sears, and we — she, my younger brother, and I — moved into public housing. My father rented a furnished room over a Slovak bar called Yusko’s, just a few doors down from the luncheonette where I worked. He’d spend a lot of time there and I’d drop by Yusko’s to visit. The place could have been transplanted from Lansford, with its pickled pig’s feet in big jars, and hard-boiled eggs sitting in bowls, and three or four guys who looked like Joe Pavlik sitting on the barstools from ten in the morning until closing time, drinking steadily and chainsmoking Camels. My old man was happy there because it reminded him of home. George Marcinko never got used to New Brunswick.

Meanwhile, I was spending less and less time in school— cutting classes regularly — and more and more of my time with a young Italian woman who was married to a guy twentyseven years her senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping, which I was all too willing to provide. I quit Gussy’s and went to work as a counterman at a Greek place in the heart of New Brunswick. The money was good — about $200 a week including tips, for about half the time I’d been spending at Gussy’s. Moreover, the chefs were willing to teach me some rudimentary cooking and baking skills, so I saw the job as a way to learn a trade. That was a first for me. I’d never really considered what I’d do with my life.

I finally quit school altogether. As I would refer to it some years later in official-sounding language, I “voluntarily disenrolled” in February 1958. Continuing Just didn’t seem to make any sense. The classes all seemed to be b.s. anyway.

And who needed a high-school diploma? There was money to be made, and women to be hustled, and you could drive down to the shore and lie on the beach, for a couple of days at a time — I didn’t need an education for any of that. So I split.

I also tried to join the military. When President Eisenhower sent Marines to Lebanon, I volunteered. I liked their dress blues and their swords. So I went down to the Marine recruiter, walked in, and probably said something asinine like,

“Well, friend, I’d kind of like to go shoot a few bad guys.

Where’s my rifle, where’s the ammo, and when can I leave?“

And the recruiting sergeant most likely restrained himself from reducing me to a pile of rubble and said, “Look, sonny, you gotta go to boot camp before we let you kick any ass, and besides, you’re underage and you haven’t finished high school. So why not get your diploma, and then we’ll talk.”

Well, I knew for damn sure that by the time I did all that, the Marines would have the Lebanese problem solved without say help. So I walked away and had a lovely summer on the beach, and I worked on a serious, class-A, surfer-grade tan and got laid a lot. I also spent some time trying to toss a good-looking neighborhood girl named Kathryn Ann Black off the three-meter board of the Livmgston Avenue swimming pool (off the board and into the sack). We dated most of the summer, when I wasn’t catting around with other women, and discovered that we liked each other. We must have: despite my proclivity toward outside activities, I kept coming back. There was something out of the ordinary there.

Then in September, after I’d had my fun, and Kathy went back to school, I walked into a Navy recruiting office, volunteered tor service, and after taking a battery of tests, was accepted for duty. Oh, if they’d only known.

On October 15, 1958, I reported to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. For some inexplicable reason, I felt better about walking through the gates of that camp than I’d ever felt going anywhere in my life before.

I was the perfect MARK-ONE, MOD-ZERO sailormat’s military jargon for the most basic model. Talk about gung ho — I even spit shined the soles of my boots. I was the one asshole in a hundred who actually believed the chiefs when they told us, “He who shines only half a shoe is only half a man.”

There’d been a cabdriver I’d gotten to know in New Brunswick — Joe something or other. He’d been a sailor, and he gave me his old Blue Jacket’s Manual, which I’d read by the time I was sixteen or so. He’d taught me how to roll and tie a Navy neckerchief, as well as a bunch of other Navy procedures, so by the time I got to boot camp, 1 was already ahead of the curve. I volunteered for everything — from the football squad to the drill team — and was even made the acting athletic petty officer for a couple of weeks. There was an incredible amount of b.s. involved in the training, but overall, it seemed like a good deal: I gave the Navy a full day’s work, and it gave me a full day’s pay — and I even had some fun in the process. I really liked the swimming and the shooting and the marching. The book stuff they could keep.

After Christmas I qualified for radioman training. But there were no openings at the school- Instead, I took a temporary assignment to Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where I helped teach swimming to naval aviators during their survival training.

Then, one night in Rhode Island, I went to the movies and saw a terrific flick called The Frogmen, with Richard Widmark and Dana Andrews. It was the story of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams in action in the Pacific during World War II. Lots of action. Lots of heroism. Lots of songs. Like the “Marine Hymn” with new words:

From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli, We will fight our country’s battles—

Right behind the UDT!

I walked outside afterward and thought, hey — I could do that. I mean, I was a reasonably aggressive sort of person;

I’d wanted to join the Marines. So the prospect of “Demolition Dick, Tough-Guy Shark Man of the Navy” was a lot more satisfying than “Fingers Marcinko, Pencil-Pushing Teletype Operator.”

The Demo Dick/Fingers Marcinko identity crisis climaxed a few weeks later when I was finally transferred to radio school in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk, it turned out, is just a stone’s throw from the Underwater Demolition Teams, which were based out of the amphibious base at Little Creek, across the harbor. I saw radiomen close up. I saw Frogmen close up.

No contest.

The answer was simple: let’s bag this radio crap and go straight to Frogman. So I visited the UDT command and told them what I wanted to do. The news they gave me was like the Marines all over again. I couldn’t become a Frogman until I had a permanent assignment. They didn’t take applicants from temporary commands — and radio school was a temp.

Good-bye, Demo Dick; hello, Fingers Marcinko.

It would take me almost two years to get back to Little Creek. My odyssey meandered through Dahlgren, Virginia, where the Navy ran a space surveillance center to track Sputniks, and Naples, Italy, where I worked as a Teletype clerk at the Naval Support Activity Station.

After five months at Dahlgren I applied for UDT training-1 made it through the first step, which in those days consisted of being sent to the Navy Yard in Washington, where they put me in one of those old-fashioned canvas diving suits with the hard-hat helmet and thick air hoses, and dropped me into the Anacostia River to see whether or not I had claustrophobia.

I passed the claustrophobia test and was just about to leave for UDT training when I broke my hand slamming it against something hard — the side of a very stupid sailor’s head. It wasn’t my fault. He should have ducked. Good-bye, UDT.

Hello, Naples.

Naples turned out to be more fun than I’d expected, even though the job sucked. I realized that I was not cut out to be a Teletype operator. The job was a dead end: it required no imagination or ingenuity. Worse, my watch-mate drove me crazy. He was a real sniveler, a pug-nosed, acne-faced momma’s boy named Harold who picked his ears all day and complained about everything. I called him The Whiner. Harold’s sea daddy was the chief petty officer who ran the Corn Center, a self-important’s.o.b. black guy in his mid-forties named White, who acted as if he were royalty. Between the two of them, I plotted murder. No jury in the world would have convicted me.

On the other hand, Naples was terrific. I worked and lived in the same apartment house in the middle of the city, not on the naval base. So unlike a lot of sailors in Italy, I actually got to see the natives. The Italian I’d learned from Old Man Gussy got me by. And while my hand healed, I jogged through the Neapolitan hills, lifted weights, did calisthenics and swam.

But I was still a shore-duty, pencil-pushing Teletype operator. And there was still this little voice inside me that kept saying, “UDT, UDT,” louder and louder. The question was, how to get there.

I had one immense problem to overcome: my commanding officer. How immense? Two hundred pounds. And the ugliest female I’d ever set eyes on in my life. I called her. the Big Female Ugly Commander, or Big FUC for short. Big FUC was also a rule-book creature, and she was shorthaoded, a combination that made it impossible for me to leave (I’d made the mistake of signing on for a one-year extension of my assignment in Naples — hoping to transfer to UDT as soon as possible). To Big FUC, a year meant 365 days. Transfer was not a word in her lexicon.

Ultimately, I forced her hand. The next time The Whiner pissed me off, I tossed his typewriter out the window. I would have stopped there, but the little son of a bitch just wouldn’t let up—“I’m going to put you on report and tell Chief White what a bad person you are.”

Something in me snapped, and I busted his face wide open.

He was in sick bay for a month. That set the chief off. He was an extra large — six two or so, two hundred pounds— about the same size as my father. He grabbed my ass and hauled me off to the bathroom by the belt and the scruff of my neck and shoved me up against the tile.

“I ought to beat the shit out of you.”

I was in the mood for anything at that point. “Hey, Chief, if you’re feeling frisky, let’s have at it.”

He grabbed me with his big ham hands. I stepped between em and gave him a knee in the balls. He went down like a bag of cement. He struggled to his feet, came at me again, and I slammed him in the gut — I’d learned my lesson about hitting sailors in the head the hard way — clinched him up close so he couldn’t do much, and kneed his groin as if I were stretching wall-to-wall carpet onto a tackless batten, lifting him five, six inches in the air with each pop. When his eyes rolled back, I dropped him on the deck.

He lay there sucking air for a while. Then he rolled onto his knees, crawled on all fours to the toilet, and was sick. “I’ll get you,” he wheezed at me. “You’re gonna be outta here.”

Oh, please, oh, please, Br’er Bear, toss dis rabbit into de briar patch.

So the next day, after he’d cleaned himself up, he hauled me in front of Big FUC. Think of a cross between Jabba the Hutt and Roseanne Ban- stuffed carelessly into a tight, white uniform. Big FUC read me the riot act. It was full of “The chief wants you out of here” and “I should toss you in the brig.” But they were all empty threats. She couldn’t bring me up on charges because it was the chief who’d laid his hands on me first — that would cost him his job. Maybe I’d take a demotion or a couple of demerits, but so what?

Anyway, I was anticipating the bitch. I had two transfer request chits in my hand. I gave her the first. “I’ll tell you what, Commander — here’s a request for transfer to any goddamn ship that pulls into port. I don’t care if it’s the USS Lollipop. Then I gave her the other. ”This one’s a transfer to UDT training- I don’t give a damn which one you do.“

She called me back two days later. “Sea duty would be too easy for you, Marcinko. I’m gonna send you where they’ll knock all this aggressive shit right out of you.” Big FUC put her fat cheeks and all six chins up close to my face and sneered,

“You’re going Stateside, to UDT training — immediately!”

And people say there is no God.

Chapter 4

Little Creek, Virginia, is a masochist’s dream. It’s the place where the Navy used to take large groups of mean, aggressive, self-confident, ass-kicking, extrovert volunteer sailors and turn them into small groups of mean, aggressive, self-confident, ass-kicking, extrovert UDT animals during sixteen glorious weeks of torture, madness, and mayhem. I walked through the main gate at Little Creek on June 21,

1961, alongside a skinny little son of a bitch named Ken MacDonald. He was a wiry, 135-pound petty officer second class with the remnants of a Brit accent, whose straight hair was so long he held it in place with a bobby pin. He took one look at me, shook his head morosely, and said, “Mate, you ain’t never gonna make it.”

I never stopped walking. I just smiled sweetly at him and said, “Screw you, you little faggot ” Of course, since we checked in together, they made MacDonatd and me swim buddies. We were virtually inseparable the entire UDT training cycle and have remained close friends ever since.

And what an amusing, diverting cycle it was- One hundred and twenty-one of us started it together as members of UDT Class 26. Twenty-four survived—20 percent. Many of those who washed out were so-called SpecWar experts: Green Berets and Army Rangers who wanted to get some maritime training. We also lost most of the officers — they just couldn’t take it.

Me? I found it perversely enjoyable — most of it- Today, SEAL training (UDT was phased out in 1983) takes six months. It’s called BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, and it includes parachute work, demolition, and diving we never learned during our 16-week UDT sessions thirty years ago.

I breezed through the first four weeks. I’d worked out regularly in Naples, so the PT (Physical Training — calisthenics and running) and swimming came easily for me, although the sailors who’d come from the fleet were ragged by the end of the first week because they were so out of shape. They ran the hell out of us. Every day we’d cover a five- or six-mile course that included a series of old landing craft on the beach.

You’d vault the gunwales — an eight-foot jump, drop six feet down, clamber across, struggle up, over, down, and keep going.

Down behind the rifle range was a big sand dune the instructors called Mount Suribachi. They’d run us up and they’d run us down a dozen times or so. When it rained, they’d run us through the mud. When it was dry, they’d run us through the surf. Remember how those Olympic runners looked in the opening shots of Chariots of Fire, all clean and white and shimmery running along the beach? Well, we looked nothing like that at all. We wore green fatigues, heavy “boondocker” boots, red-painted steel pot helmets, and kapok life vests that weighed eight pounds dry and twenty-eight pounds wet, and the instructors always managed to keep them wet.

The instructors, it should be said in their favor, ran with us. Most of them were real Methuselahs — old guys in their mid- to late thirties. I remember one, a flyweight named John Parish. He smoked a pipe as he ran the beaches, or up and down Mount Suribachi. When he’d gone through the bowl of tobacco, he’d flip it upside down and chew on the stem, never losing a step. You learn to hate people like that.

There was no diving involved at first, except for some basic fins-and-face-mask shallow-water stuff. Mostly we were getting accustomed to working in a water environment, learning life-saving techniques, and being instructed in the rudimentary procedures for beach reconnaissance and clearing a beach for an amphibious assault. But we swam a lot. That is an understatement. You swam and you swam right over de dam.

We did day swims, night swims — warm weather, cold weather, it didn’t matter.

You do not test the water with your toe if you want to be a Frogman.

One night Mac and I were out on a night reconnaissance exercise. We were rolled off an LCPL–Landing Craft/PersonneL — in the Chesapeake Bay, a thousand meters off Little Creek. It’s an interesting insertion technique. Lashed to the LCPL on the offshore side (so it’s invisible to anyone watching from the beach) is an IBS — Inflatable Boat: Small.

You roll over the gunwales of the LCPL onto the IBS, hit it, bounce/roll into the water, and go under. The enemy on shore sees only what appears to be a patrolling landing craft, almost two-thirds of a mile out to sea. The Frogmen, who understand the principle of dramatic irony, know better-

Our objective that night was to identify the correct beach, infiltrate, mark the beach, then swim back the thousand meters into the bay, where we’d be picked up by the LCPL again.

(Another interesting technique. You swim out beyond where the boat will pass you and wait. Now, as the LCPL sweeps by at about ten knots, there are Frogmen in the IBS. They are equipped with SNAREs, horse-collar-like devices with which a fast-moving boat can pick up swimmers in the water.

You put out your arm, and — slam — you’re whipped aboard.

If the Frogman doing the SNARing doesn’t like you, he may SNARE your neck instead of your arm, which smarts as you are whipped aboard. That is an understatement.)

I knew Mac was feisty, but exactly how feisty I didn’t leam until that night. The water was thick with jellyfish, and MacDonald caught quite a few of them across his face mask.

The stings brought him to the surface, gasping, more than a few times. By the time we reached the beach he was definitely uncomfortable — I could see dozens of stings on his face and neck.

Just before we left the beach, I called, “Time out,” to one of the instructors — Mac was in pain, and I thought he needed attention.

“Go to hell you goddamn Polack.”

“Come on, man, you’ve got welts all over your face. You’re stung bad.”

“Bugger off, Marcinko.”

MacDonald staggered back into the water and we swam our thousand yards through the jellyfish again. By the time the IBS snared us he was in a mild state of shock. But he wouldn’t quit. He never stopped swimming. It was exactly the sort of tenacity the instructors looked for. Their goal was to build endurance, strength, and a feeling for working as a swim pair — the most basic “Team” portion of UDT. Both the U — underwater — and the D — demolition — would come later, if we made it through the first few weeks.

For a group of sailors I thought we used a lot of wood in training. Wood? you ask. Logs. Big logs. Long logs. Heavy logs- We ran the beaches carrying them over our heads. We vaulted over piles of them. And they were used to build the especially nasty Little Creek Amphibious Base obstacle course, which we lovingly called The Dirty Name.

The Dirty Name was a series of logs of various heights and diameters embedded in the ground. The goal was to progress from one to the next without falling or touching the ground, The logs were spaced ingeniously, so that if you could jump high enough to the next one, you found you couldn’t quite jump far enough; when you could jump far enough to achieve the next log, it seemed impossible to go as high as necessary.

For the instructors, it was a way of discovering which of us were motivated enough to summon that extra energy or adrenaline that allowed us to complete the course. For us, the motivation lay in trying to get from one log to the next without breaking our necks or tegs, or jumping short and laying ourselves open on the splintery edges of the logs.

The instructors also encouraged competition between each of the boat crews. We’d race each other in swimming relays, boat races, and land runs. Unlike SEAL platoons, which have fourteen men, Underwater Demolition Teams were composed of 20-man platoons. The reason for twenty is because that was the number of men needed to do a 1,000-yard stringline reconnaissance of a USMC-battalion-sized landing beach.

The 20-man platoon was devised when the first UDT teams were assembled at Fort Pierce, Florida, in the summer of 1943; they continued until 1983, when Frogmen were finally phased out and everyone became a SEAL.

SEALs are leaner: a SEAL platoon consists of two sevenman boat crews — each containing six enlisteds and an officer.

The reason behind this number is that one of the most basic SEAL modes of transportation, the IBS, holds seven people and their combat gear. IBSs can be dropped out of planes like rubber duckies or launched underwater from submarines, so they are convenient for surreptitious or covert operations.

Other basic forms of SEAL transportation include the STAB, or SEAL Tactical Assault Boat, which is a 28-foot fiberglass boat powered by twin 110-horsepower Mercury engines and armed with .50-caliber machine guns and other deadly goodies; Boston whalers, 16-foot craft that we found useful in SEAL Team Six; and LCMs, or 45-foot Landing Craft/Mediums — Mike boats — which could be armed with mortars and were helpful in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, the lowest common denominator of transport, the IBS, and the basic SEAL boat-crew unit, the sevenman squad, are elements that have never changed since ‘t SEALs were commissioned in 1961; they’re still in use in ’i SEAL.Team Six. Remember these numbers. You will see them again. h-

The Sunday our fifth week began — brought a perceptible change of mood around the barracks. MacDonald and I usually spent our Sundays lying out on the beach and drinking beer. But this day was different. We stayed in, watching as a couple of the guys who’d been through the course before but had dropped out for one reason or another shaved their heads, then applied red dye.

“I wonder what the hell they know that we don’t,” I said to Ken.

We found out shortly after midnight. We were rolled out of the sack by instructors blowing whistles and pounding on us with paddles, and we didn’t sleep more than two hours a night for the next six days. Welcome to Hell Week — 1 had a problem with Hell Week: I’d developed a case of the runs. In today’s Navy that would probably be enough to get me excused. Not in 1961. They stopped for nothing. The solution was speed: I discovered as they ran me up and down the beach that if I ran fast enough, the smell of what ran down my leg and into my boot got left behind for the next boat crew to enjoy.

The instructors gave us each a gift for Hell Week. Each crew was presented with an IBL–Inflatable Boat: Large— for the duration. We’d use it in our daily ‘ Round- the-Worid Cruises.“ Oh, were they fun. We’d begin with the IBLs on our heads — the short guys piling a number-ten can on their helmets so they’d bear their share of the weight — while the instructors rode inside, beating on us with a paddle for motivation. We’d run, dump the boats in a series of drainage ditches that ran through the huge base, paddle across, pick the boats up, and run some more, from Gate 5 to the Main Gate to the Mud Flats two miles away, launch the boats into the harbor, and paddle out through the ferry channel onto a course that ran parallel to the Chesapeake Bay beaches. We’d row for a while, then buck the currents shoreward, land, pick up our beloved IBLs and instructors, and run past gawking tourists, taking the beach all the way back to Little Creek— a distance of about twenty-one miles as the Frogman swims, runs, limps, and crawls. It paid to win those races, too. The first boat crew to finish got to rest before the next evolution.

The last guys in got to partake in a unique bit of fun and games called The Circus. The Circus was PT until someone quit. You could quit by turning in your red helmet, collapsing, or dying. Dying was easiest — it was the only way you wouldn’t be harassed by the instructors anymore.

The harassment was constant. If you fell asleep, they’d pour water on you. On the few occasions we went for chow at the mess hall, we’d have to leave guards with the IBLs, otherwise the instructors would deflate them (and we’d have to blow them up manually). So we’d rush in, a messy, loud, obnoxious group of filthy, grubby, foul-smelling sailors, eat without the benefit of utensils — it’s probably where the expression stuffing your face was invented — and relieve the IBL guards so they could chow down and grab a few minutes rest before the whole painful cycle started all over again.

The instructors made sure that we were always wet or cold or tired or sore. By day three my feet were a mess: cracked nails, blisters that festered because of the sand and seawater, and splinter-filled hands from vaulting logs. Even my head was sore (we were expected to wear our red steel helmets all the time — about the second day I realized why those guys had dyed their heads red). We crawled through mud, surrounded by live charges that exploded yards from us. We were subjected to live fire as we ran the obstacle courses.

And every time we thought we’d run the last leg of a fivemile or eight-mile or ten-mile run, we’d be told to pick up the IBL and go at it again. Nobody died, and nobody went to the hospital, although there were lots of sprains and banged-up knees, elbows, necks, and shoulders.

The worst day was the final day, Friday. So-Solly Day, as in “So solly, sailor.” More Round-the-World Cruises, runs, an obstacle course enlivened by the biggest live charges yet, a hard swim, then a final turn around the beach in full fatigues, steel pot, and wet kapok life jacket. I’ve got a photo taken on So-Solly Day — I must’ve learned the lesson well because I’m right in front of the group, running alongside the instructor.

Saturday, the Commander, Amphibious Force Command, John S. McCain, came to give the roughly three dozen of us who’d survived Hell Week some encouragement. We took his words to heart. (He must have been inspirational at home, too. His son, John, now a U.S. senator from Arizona, was a POW in Hanoi from 1967 to 1973 where he proved his toughness and mettle under conditions tougher than any of those we ever suffered.)

We were an interesting group, those who made it throughWed been tempered by hardship; we were confident there was virtually no physical demand we couldn’t accomplish. The hot pain of our wounds became a warm glow of pride for not having quit. We had watched seven out of ten quit — and we had not. It was as if I’d suddenly been admitted to some exclusive club with its own secret handshake and decoder ring.

Because now, having passed the hazing and the initiation rites, I was going to Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, where I’d learn the secrets of the temple: the deepwater diving skills and demolition techniques that would make me a real Frogman.

As I looked around at those of us who’d survived, I realized something I’d carry with me for life. It was a simple truth, but a good one: never stereotype anyone. Never assume just by looking that someone is suited for anything. For example, there’s no physical prototype for a Frogman — or for a SEAL for that matter — although the stereotype is probably a big, heavily muscled guy in the Arnold Schwarzenegger mold.

I was built like a football player. But my swim buddy, Ken MacDonald, looked like a toothpick. What was true for UDT was true two decades later for the Navy’s most elite unit as well. SEAL Team Six’s Gold Dust Twins, Frank and Larry, stood only about five seven, Snake was about five ten, Indian Jew was about six feet, while Aussie Mick and Horserace were the size of large armoires. If they had anything in common at Six, it was huge chests and big arms developed after long sessions on the weight pile to achieve the immense upperbody strength we needed to climb ropes for clandestine seaborne assaults. But overall, non-Six SEALs come in all configurations. Under combat conditions, however, they are all equally deadly.

In UDT training class 26, we were all shapes and sizes, too.

And our personalities were as different as our physical types, Some of us, like moi, were loud — some might even say obnoxiously so — from time to time. If there was a bar open, you could find me there after-hours, partying until last call.

Others were quiet, introspective brooders who spent their offhours with books.

If I had to categorize those of us who made it through UDT training, I’d say the one thing that bound us al! together was that we were outsiders as opposed to ticket punchers. Some might call us social misfits, but that would be stretching the point. Sure, we were hell-raisers. We were aggressive and we liked to show it. God help the Marine or sailor who decided he’d show what a tough guy he was by taking on a Frogman, because we’d be killed before we’d let ourselves get beaten.

But beyond the aggressiveness, the showboating, the macho bullshit, we were all driven by something that pushed us further than others dared to go. We were mission oriented and would do what we had to do to achieve it. The instructors had managed to convince us — or maybe we did it to ourselves — that there was nothing we couldn’t do. The principles I teamed during Hell Week I’d use again and again over the next two and a half decades, to show the men I led there was nothing they couldn’t do. My men didn’t have to like everything they did — but they had to do it all.

We were a real wild bunch, those three dozen who made it through Hell Week. Lean and mean and confident as five-hundred-dollar hookers; precisely the sort of playful young tadpoles the U.S. taxpayers should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach how to blow up almost anything.

Which is exactly what happened next.

Imagine a place where there are unlimited women, a neverending supply of aged booze and fresh lobsters, and all the deadly toys you could ever want to play with.

Heaven, right? No. This place exists: it is called St. Thomas, and it is where we Hell Week survivors were sent for ten glorious weeks of training. f We actually did train. We were taught how to navigate ‘t, underwater, using only a compass, a plumb line, and a depth ’ gauge. It takes concentration because below the surface it’s easy to get disoriented. Once, Mac and I got good and lost — we’re lucky we didn’t drown ourselves. We took an incredible amount of grief from the training officers for our little escapade, but we also learned a valuable lesson: if you screw around, you can die. That thought really hadn’t occurred to me before.

We were sent on swims from Roosevelt Roads, Puerto „Rico, to Vieques Island, seven mites to the east. (We called: Roosevelt Roads “Roosy Roads.” The “Roads” stood for “Retired On Active-Duty Sailors,” in honor of those who were lucky enough to pull permanent duty there.) The phrase Did the earth move for you? took on a whole new meaning during our stay in St. Thomas and Puerto Rico. We explored the fine art of placing bangalore torpedoes so they’d blow gaping holes in concertina-wire defense perimeters. We practiced destroying concrete pillboxes with satchel charges. We developed the knack of blasting a landing-craft channel through a reef. I discovered the joys of dynamite, nitro, and plastique and managed to keep all ten fingers attached to my hands while I did. We were instructed in the basics of AquaLung diving, and we used the German-made Draeger bub“ bleless, self-contained apparatus for the first time.

And we swam. Oh, did we swim. One of our jovial instruc? tors, a good-natured, wise-ass LT (jg) from New England;£ named Aliotti, gave us extra swims on Saturdays to keep us away from the bad influences of demon rum and,wanton women. Worse, he’d make us tow a bladderlike sea anchor while he and a date lounged on a raft and watched us struggle.

The better to make us strong and virile Frogmen, he’d say when we complained.

It didn’t take long for us to become totally comfortable in the water; we learned to deal with the unexpected (it’s a mess, for example, when you get a bloody nose fifteen fathoms down from popped sinuses. The inside of your mask fills up, and you wonder whether or not to purge the blood because there are barracudas and moray eels and sharks in the water close by. You purge anyway. And you survive). So we blew things up and we swam, and we shot -45-caliber grease guns and -38-caliber pistols — the weapons of choice for the UDT in those days — and we got tan from the sun.

But mostly we partied. We showed off our bodies by sporting water-buffalo sandals, shorts, and tight polo shirts whenever we meandered into Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St.

Thomas — which was virtually every night. Mac met a lady from New York who designed jewelry; I reconnoitered a schoolteacher from New Jersey. The four of us would hit the clubs at about nine and dance and drink rum and Coke until about one, then move on to the beach or the girls’ houses for a unique form of heterosexual PT, which could, I guess, be called “concentrated horizontal hip thmsts,” done in rapid succession. At about five we’d wake up and jog back to the sub base at the edge of Charlotte Amalie, grab a few quick breaths of pure oxygen for energy, and then go straight to calisthenics. We had to: if we missed the morning exercise, we wouldn’t get liberty at night. And God forbid that we’d miss a single nocturnal foray.

After our first taste of tropical bliss, it was back to the real world — Little Creek — where we participated in what were called Zulu 5 Oscar exercises. That was the E&E stuff — evade and escape — where we learned how to swim up to ships, attach limpet mines to their hulls, and get away undetected.

I also got adept at swimming under ferryboats during E&E.

The sailors’ role in the Z/5/0 exercise was to catch us doing the dirty deed. They hardly ever did.

In October 1961, I was assigned to UDT-21, based out of Little Creek; finally a full-fledged Frogman. To be honest I was only a junior Frogman, with no real Frogman specialties.

I hadn’t qualified as a diver yet or received jump training.

But none of that mattered to me. It was like living a dream.

The Navy fed me, clothed me, gave me wonderful toys to play with, and when I wasn’t swimming or blowing things up, I could go out drinking with my buddies and beat the crap out of people in bars. Not that we’d start anything, but somehow, the biggest Marines and sailors would always pick fights with us. Maybe it was our tapered uniforms with the illegal detailing sewn on the insides of the blouse cuffs. Maybe it was our attitude. We had a very aggressive attitude. That’s an understatement. Whatever the case, we seemed always to be getting into fights. Better, we always seemed to be getting into fights — and winning. It’s a great confidence builder.

Dive qualifications came first. I went back to St. Thomas for six weeks of langostino, warm water, hot women, and rum. At the end of the session I was tanned, fit, well rested, and sporting the “Big Watch/Little Pecker” stainless-steel Tudor diving watch that they gave you after you qualified.

Next came parachuting. I was detailed to Ft. Benning, Georgia, for airborne training. I went as a member of the Zoo Platoon. Zoo because it included a Rabbit (as in John Francis), a Byrd, and a Fox, and we were all party animals engaged on a constant hunt for b&aver and pussy.

Once I was qualified I discovered I hked jumping so much I began to skydive on weekends, experimenting with the thennew “flat” parachutes. At UDT, we did only static-line jumps — wearing old-fashioned, regulation 35-foot parabolic parachutes. In the trade, it is called rope jumping. I have always thought of it as the monkey-on-a-string technique.

I was fascinated by the newer, 28-foot flat chutes. At that time, they were used mainly as pilots’ emergency chutes, but I believed they had real possibilities in combat situations.

Their design made them more controllable than the 35-foot rope Jumpers. They became even more maneuverable after we’d cut a new design of holes in the chute and added extra toggle lines so we could actually steer ourselves in the air.

I also liked the idea of pulling my own rip cord instead of jumping from a static line that did all the work. That meant I could free-fall. The thought of free-falling was wonderful.

Doing it was even better. The freedom of flying through the sky, soundless, wind whistling past your body, was like nothing I’d ever done before. It was the same sense of freedom I felt underwater, but floating five or ten thousand feet in the air was even better: here I could breathe and see everything for miles. I’d go up as many times as I could, jumping from higher and higher altitudes, and allowing myself to fall closer and closer to the ground before I “pulled,” or opened, my chute. I took grief from the instructors, but I figured that in combat you’re less of a target free-falling than you are drifting lazily. So why open at five thousand feet and let some enemy platoon turn you into a bull’s-eye, when you can open at five hundred and stay alive?

I learned how to pack and rig chutes. I got myself a sport “flat,” which I modified to make more maneuverable. I bought whatever books on skydiving I could find and studied the intricacies of plotting a jump so that you land exactly where you want to, despite thermals, downdrafts, wind shear, and the thousands of other little variables that can cause cracked bones or broken skulls.

Despite the fact that we had to become jump-qualified, there was no intensive parachuting program at any of the UDT teams in the fifties and sixties: al! the jump training was run by the Army. In fact, traveling back and forth for one lousy practice jump could take all day. There were no facilities near Little Creek, so we’d have to convince one of the pilots from Langley Air Force Base — across Norfolk Bay — to fly us to Fort Lee, one hundred miles west in Petersburg, Virginia, or about the same distance northeast to Fort A.P. Hill, where there were approved drop zones. Finding pilots wasn’t difficult, as all the USAF “bus drivers”—transport pilots — had to qualify regularly in CARP, which stands for Computerized Airborne Release Point flying-

CARP, if pilots do it right, drops the 82nd Airborne right onto its predetermined target. If pilots do it wrong, you get Grenada, where drop zones were missed, timing went awry, and paratroopers were put in jeopardy. Most of the time, pilots do it wrong.

Anyway, we’d fly up to Ft, Lee or Ft. A.P. Hill, do a single jump, then like ET, we’d call home and wait for a bus from Little Creek to come pick us up. Much of the time we did our waiting in one establishment or another that served liquid refreshments. Sometimes we’d receive visitors, gentleman callers in Army khaki, who — after the proper pleasantries had been exchanged — we would mash into paste.

During my first year or so as a Frogman I had a pair of I unique experiences. One was that I got married. The lucky lady was Kathy Black, who I’d tried so hard to toss into the Uvingston Avenue pool back in New Brunswick the summer of 1958. We’d dated since then. I’d seen her whenever I went home on a visit, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In the early sixties you didn’t shack up — not if you were from a good Catholic family (or even, like me, from a bad Catholic family). So we made our relationship format.

She said she’d be willing to put up with the long periods I’d be away from home; I really liked her, and we made a nice-looking couple. We didn’t have a lavish ceremony, but a nice one. Then we went on a brief honeymoon, Kathy got pregnant, and I left for a six-month Mediterranean cruise.

Typical Navy marriage.

„The second thing that happened to me was thai I became a lab animal. It was poetic justice. What do you find in science labs? Rats, monkeys, and frogs, right? So what more perfect animal to test a new airborne retrieval system than a Frogman.

It was called the Fulton Skyhosk Recovery System, and I volunteered as a guinea frog on a TAD, or Temporary Additional Duty (I’ve always thought of it as Traveling Around Drunk), that look me from St. Thomas to Panama City, Florida- Skyhook was designed to recover special-forces operators or CIA agents from behind enemy lines, snatch VIPs effectively and covertly, or retrieve (tranquilized) hostile prisoners: captured by our forces.

The principle was simple. The snatchee climbs into a bunny suit, which is a reinforced, one-piece, hooded jumpsuit, into which is constructed a heavy nylon harness, radio cable, and a microphone in the hood. The harness snaps onto a bungeecord rope about eight hundred feet long, which is in turn attached to a helium balloon floated from a tether.

Then a low-flying aircraft equipped with outriggers and sweeper bars comes in at about 130 knots or so and snags the line below the balloon. The line is locked automatically onto a winch through the use of explosive charges. Then — depending on the kind of plane that’s doing the snatch — the snatchee gets reeled in, either through a hatch in the belly or up a tail ramp, and it’s aloha, bon voyage, and sayonara.

The system had been tested mostly on sandbags, although twenty-two human lab-rats — company reps and Army special forces operators — had also participated. I was the Navy’s first volunteer, and the first pickup to be attempted without any emergency-parachute backup system.

I showed up at an airfield near Panama City, changed into the bunny suit, strapped in, hunkered down, held my knees, and watched as the plane, a Navy Grumman S-2 Tracker, banked in and came straight toward me at about five hundred feet.

It passed overhead and caught the line tethered to the balloon. I felt the line go, took about a step and a half, and then — shüüt, talk about your standing starts!

I felt as if I were riding at the end of a huge rubber band at 130 knots. I must have absorbed six g’s — snapped into the air like a cartoon character whose hundred-yard arms can’t hold on to a window ledge or tree limb.

The ground went bye-bye. The line pulled me higher than the aircraft — I went way above horizontal — and then I started to fall.

It occurred to me at that instant that maybe I should have worn a chute. I mean, what goes through the monkey’s brain is something like, “Okay, I’ve been twanged. So here I am on my back, and I’m moving forward at 120 knots or so. But am I moving because I’m being pulled, or did the line break and I’m moving on my own — and about to go splat?”

The only way to find out was to see for myseif. So I did a scissors kick and body-rolled onto my stomach.

Terrific. Now, by craning my neck into the wind, I could see the plane — and the line — and I knew I was okay. I tried to call the crew, but my roll had broken the radio cable and the microphone was useless. So I decided to have some fun.

I threw a hump — rolling my shoulders forward and dragging my hands, which is what you do in a parachute free-fall to move yourself laterally — and brought my body level with the top of the fuselage. Then, by finning my hands at my sides,

1 discovered I could break left and right.

I began to water-ski behind the Tracker, cutting through the prop wash to port and starboard. I tried waving at the pilots, but discovered, as I later put in my report, that activating any of my extremities too dramatically led to turbulent repercussions — in plain English, if I moved too much, I’d start to corkscrew. It was not a pleasant sensation.

So I spent the next fifteen minutes banking lazily left and right, while the air crew reeled me in, wondering what the hell was going on out there.

When I got close, I rolled over on my back again, reached down, grabbed my ankles, and tucked tight into a ball. That action brought me down so I swung like a pendulum and allowed them to winch me up into the Tracker’s belly more easily.

My head came level with the deck. I reached up and hoisted myself through the hatch, grinning at the visibly uptight crew chief who ran the winch. “Morning, Chief.”

“What the hell’s been going on out there, sailor? Goddamn cable’s been seesawing all the hell over the place. We thought you were unconscious, hurt — broken up.”

“Just water-skiing, Chief.”

“Don’t you b.s. me, you shit-for-brains, numb-nutted asshole.”

“Okay, you got me dead to rights, Chief. I wasn’t waterskiing.”!-

He smiled triumphantly.

“Screw you — I was bodysurfing.”

When we landed, I briefed a bunch of officers and company reps about what had happened, and what I thought of the system. I didn’t tell them about the aerial waterskiing, although I did suggest that if the snatchee was to be nonparachute-qualified, it would be better if his arms were pinioned, so he couldn’t suffer turbulent repercussions.

One of the officers, a full captain, took me aside afterward and told me he thought I’d done a professional brief. He complimented me on my speaking ability and added that I obviously had initiative.

“Why don’t you apply to Officer Candidate School, Marcinko?” he asked. He explained that the Navy annually took fifty enlisted-men candidates in something called the OIP, or Officer Integration Program, and I appeared to be exactly the sort they were looking for. “I’d be glad to write a letter of recommendation for you.”

“Well, sir,” I told him, “fact is, I’m not sure that OCS is for me. Right now, I’d rather be a chief in the teams than CNO of the whole goddamn Navy.”

“How come?”

“You know chiefs, sir — they can gel things done. They control the real power in the Navy. Nothing moves unless a chief says so — including admirals.”

“You could get things done as an officer.”

“I’m not so sure, sir.”

“Why, Marcinko?”

“Hell, sir, first of all I’m a high-school dropout, and there are all these Academy-grad officers I’d have to contend with, so I’m at a disadvantage from the beginning, you know. So what would I have to look forward to? Probably a junior officer on some ship somewhere. And frankly, to be a juniorgrade fleet puke — begging your pardon, sir — overseeing some raggedy-ass sailors, well, it’s just better for me in the teams.

We swim. We dive. We jump — we stay active.“

He chewed on his pipe some and nodded the way officers nod when they’ve Just switched off all systems. “Well, you be sure to let me know if you ever change your mind.”

Chapter 5

Ultimately, I did change my mind about applying to Officer’s Candidate School. But it had less to do with some captain writing me a recommendation than with a salty chief petty officer named Everett E.»Barrett. Barrett was an EOD — Explosives Ordnance Disposal specialist — and a GM/G (Gunner’s Mate/Guns) who’d]ust made chief when I was assigned to the Second Platoon of UDT-21. The Secondto-None Platoon, we used to call it.

If ever I had a sea daddy, it was Ev Barrett. Talk about typecasting. Barrett was the perfect movie version of a chief petty officer — he would have been played by somebody like Ward Bond, if William Holden didn’t grab the part first.

I thought of him as an older guy, although he was probably only in his late thirties when I met him: a wiry, gray-eyed, sharp-featured man about five feet ten, with white-wall haircut — very short — and missing the ring finger on his left hand from playing with one too many explosive devices. He had a gravelly, bullfrog voice that preceded him by about fifteen seconds (you always heard Ev Barrett before you saw him), and he growled undeleted expletives in nonending strings and ingenious combinations — all in a New Englander’s flat-voweled accent. The term curses like a sailor had probably been coined about Everett E. Barren. He wasn’t an educated man — not formally educated, at least- He read exactingly and spelled phonetically. That’s as in F-0-N-E-T-I-K-L-E-E. And more than once I caught him reading us a new regulation with the paper upside down. But upside down or no, he’d look it over and then go nose to nose with some poor LT (jg) and recite a bunch of official-sounding paragraphs. Confronted by Barren’s performance, most officers would habitually buckle slightly at the knees, say,

“Yeah, sure, Chief, anything you say,” and that would be that. Barrett knew how to scare the bejesus out of officers.

Oh, but he was good. He scared the bejesus out of not just officers but all of us — me included. During my first Caribbean cruise in UDT-21, the radio on one of our boats went out just before we started amphibious maneuvers. I may have been a radioman, but I was no electronics technician. That didn’t matter to Barren.

“Marcinko, you bleeping motherblanker, get your blankety-blanking scrawny blanking ass over here,” he growled at me.

I got my blankety-blanking scrawny blanking ass in gear.

One did when Barrett summoned.

“You will btankety-blank have that blankety-blank blanking radio blankety-blankety-blank bleeping blanking fixed by the time we bleeping climb into the blanking boat tomorrow, or I will bleeping kick your blankety-blank-blank-bleeping blanking ass into blanking next blanking week.”

“Aye blanking aye. Chief.” Now, I didn’t know a transistor from a resistor, or a filter from a tube. But I broke out the schematics and worked all night, and the next morning, somehow — I still don’t know what I did — I got the damn radio fixed and working.

Not that I was worried about Barren’s kicking my ass into next week — although the chief was perfectly capable of punting it straight ahead about forty-eight hours. It was just that he had this uncanny ability to challenge people successfully to do more than they thought they could do.

Whenever someone said to Ev Barrett, “But Chief, that’s impossible,” Barrett would look him up and look him down and say, “Just bleeping do it and shut the bleep up.”

Barrett took hold of me like a groin-trained watchdog grabs a burglar by the nuts — and he Just wouldn’t let go.

It was always, “Marcinko, you bleeper-blanker, do this,” and, “Marcinko, you worthless blankety-blanking blankerblanker, get your bleeping butt in bleeping gear.” When we were detailed to Vieques Island for maneuvers and slept in tents on the beach, he’d make us police the area and rake the sand twice a day.. Vieques had always been considered vacation time for UDT platoons. You dove for conch and langostino and drank beer and rum and lazed on the beach and worked on your tan.

Not under Ev Barrett you didn’t. He made me take the platoon’s empty beer cans, fill them with sand, and build little patio walls in front of the tents. He designed (and we built) palm-frond patio roofs and beer-bottle wind chimes. At one point he sat the platoon down and taught us how to make palm-frond hats because he thought we weren’t being kept busy enough.

Frogmen making palm-frond hats? Ah, but to Barren, making blanking palm-frond hats meant we had to climb the tallest blanker-blanking palm trees to get the tenderest, greenest, most lush blanking palm fronds on the whole blanking island.

No detrital fronds for Ev Barren. And in case you’ve never done it, climbing a 45-foot palm tree is work.

Thing about it was, I didn’t mind the hazing and the yelling and the constant attention at all. I learned early on that the more Barrett ragged you, the more he thought of you- So he kicked my butt until I passed my high-school equivalency exam. And he made sure I went through advanced jump training. And he honed my administrative skills by making me type all his blanking platoon reports. And he finally coaxed and cajoled and bullied and domineered and strong-armed me until I took the Officer’s Candidate School qualification test — and passed.

When we were back at Linie Creek, he’d bring me home tor dinner, and I’d sit around all night with Barren and his wife, Delia, drinking beer and listening to his stories about the old Navy. Why he adopted me — because that’s exactly what he did — I still don’t know. I wasn’t the first sailor he’d taken under his wing and I wasn’t the last. But I’m glad he did, because he probably spent more time with me between 1961 and 1965, in both UDT-21 and then UDT-22 (a new unit formed in 1963, where Barrett’s Second-to-None Platoon was transferred en masse), than my father had all my life. And frankly, if you were a rowdy youngster in your early twenties (and I was), and you were looking for a positive male rolemodel (and I probably was), you could do a hell of a lot worse than Everett E. Barrelt, UDT, CPO, EOD, GM/G.

And rowdy I was. When Second Platoon deployed on cruises, for example, it fell to me and a friend to clear the enlisted men’s mess deck.

A little explanation is in order here. On board a ship, there is a rigid caste system. Officers live in Officer Country, where enlisted pukes don’t blanking go without a good reason.

Chiefs normally have their own goat locker — their own galley and mess — and the rest of the ship’s company ate on the mess decks. That left us, and the Marines, at the bottom of the bilge. We were classified as troops, not as a part of the ship’s company, and therefore were subject to trickle-down amenities. We ate last. We showered last. We shit last. And in time of emergency we’d die firstBut UDT platoons are tight little cliques. We bunked together, shared duties together, swam in pairs, and we wanted to eal as a group, not have to walk into the mess deck and squeeze ourselves in singly among strange sailors or (worse)

Marines.

I was known as The Geek back then. Geek because I was geeky enough to spit shine the soles of my boots as well as the uppers. My buddy Dan Zmuda, real name Zmudadelinski, alias Mud, and I devised a method by which to clear out enough sailors from the mess deck so Second Platoon could eat together at the same table.

The technique we developed was simple and effective. First, we’d walk into the mess and fill our trays to overflowing with food- Everything from soup to nuts on the same tray. Then I’d sit down in the midst of a group of clean, neat, wellmannered sailors and bid them hello.

“Good day, gentlemen,” I would say, nodding politely.

Then Mud would drop onto an adjacent chair with a thud-

“Hi, tablemates,” he’d add, genteel as a yeoman.

The cordial greeting would be onset by Mud’s physical appearance. He was built like a fireplug, and just as solid,

and he kind of permanently tilted into the wind. His round, bulldog jaw jutted defiantly, his big Slavic nose (broken in any number of fights) was slightly askew- The rest of his Polack face looked as ifit’d been sandblasted. Even when he smiled, his eyes could develop this wonderful wild look — the sort of “watch carefully, folks, here it comes” grin favored by Hulk Hogan just before he trashes Andre the Giant.

The mascot of the Underwater Demolition Teams is a malevolent frog named Freddie. He wears a Dixie-cup sailor’s cap at a rakish angle. The stub of a stogie is chomped firmly in the corner of his mouth. He carries a lit stick of dynamite in his right hand and a mad glint in his eyes. Mud developed the same look, and most sailors found it downright unsettling.

He was perfectly cast to play Huntz Hall to my Leo Gorcey.

Then Mud, who habitually ate dessert before he ate his entree, would take a knife from someone elses tray, smear a thick layer of ice cream — flavor unimportant — on top of his Salisbury steak, add half a bottle of A.I. sauce, and begin to eat. Mud ate very quickly — and without benefit of utensilsIt was a replay of the Hell Week mess hall — except Mud and I were the only ones at the tabie who had been through Helt Week.

I would always begin my meal with peas. I ate them by sucking them through my nose. After the first couple of snorts, I’d look around and smack my lips. “Mmmmmm. Great!”

If there were no peas that day, there was usually spaghetti.

I sucked spaghetti through my nose, too, although I found if the marinara sauce was too spicy my eyes would water.

If subtlety didn’t work, we’d get gross.

“Coffee, Mr. Mud?” I’d ask.

“By all means, Mr. Geek.”

“Cream?”

“No thank you, Mr. Geek.”

“Sugar?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Honker?” I’d clear my nose into his cup.

“Delightful.” And he’d drink it down in a gulp.

We discovered that after about three days of these performances, word would spread. By the end of the first week at sea, all Mud and I would have to do would be to walk into the mess hall, load our trays, and head for a table. It would clear before we even sat down.

When Barrett heard what Mud and I were doing, he went bonkers. “Goddammit, Marcinko,” he growled, “I can’t leave you blanking alone for five blanking minutes before you blankety-blank get your blankety-blank blanking butt in blanking trouble a-blankmg-gain.” In addition to the sore ears. Mud and I also received extra duty. That was Barren’s unique way of saying thank-you for the performances that allowed the platoon to eat together. Mud and I suffered in silence. We knew why he’d done it: if he hadn’t, he would have taken grief in the chiefs’ goat locker, so to keep the peace he reamed us out.

I got word I’d been accepted to OCS just after I left on a six-monther to the Mediterranean aboard the USS Rushmore, a WWII-vintage LSD, or Landing Ship/Dock, that had originally been buill for the Royal Navy. It was quite a farewell cruise. I had all the normal platoon work to do; reconning the beaches prior to amphibious exercises, practicing EOD demolition, and taking part in the Z/5/0 evade and escape drills that were a part of UDT-22’s ongoing training. Then there was the scut work; typing Barren’s reports and memos, servicing the equipment, and maintaining my UDT diving and parachute qualifications.

On top of everything else I began spending more and more time in Officer Country, watching how they acted, how they did their work, how they lived in their wardroom. From time to time I’d get up to the bridge, where the captain of our LSD, Captain B. B. Witham, even allowed me to drive once or twice after Barrett passed on the word I’d been accepted to Organized Chicken Shit, which is how OCS is known in the fleet. A chain-smoking New Englander, Skipper Witham made sure I was instructed in the rudiments of officerdomHe even knew enough about me to address me correctly— as Seaman Geek.

Of course, now that I was about to become an officer and a gentleman, Mr. Mud and I gave up our regular mess-deck performances entirely. It had been a great act, but even great acts have to close sometime. Besides, who wants to be called Ensign Geek?

Not that I assumed the cloak of total respectability either.

Whenever we landed at Naples for supplies, for example, I’d take the wheel of the truck we were assigned. My logic was simple: I was going to become a ship driver; driving is driving; why not get all the practice I could? Naples is a hilly city, and there are long tunnels with pedestrian sidewalks running next to the traffic lanes (only fools walked those narrow tunnel sidewalks, as Neapolitans compare with the wild men of Beirut when it comes to driving).

Now, since we had wheels, we could take the time to make one or two stops for social beverages on the way to the supply depot, which would normally put us behind schedule-1 often took it upon myself to make up the lost time by putting two wheels of the two-ton stake-bed truck up on the sidewalk and grazing the tunnel walls to pass slow-moving traffic. This technique made neither the chief, nor the eight Frogmen riding in the back nor the fleet motor pool, very happy.

Barrett tried to correct my driving style in his characteristically amiable manner, explaining to me pedantically that bleeping motherblanker trucks weren’t bleeping made for driving on side-blanking-walks.

I nodded and kept driving. “Roger, Chief, gotcha.”

Gotcha, indeed.

I “got” Barrett one last time the week before I left for OCS. We were scheduled for a parachute jump. I’d already attracted Captain Witham’s unhappy attention by pulling low — waiting until I was under a thousand feel to pull the rip cord. Witham felt more secure when he could watch us open our chutes through binoculars. The thought of a HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) jump made him sweat. I was determined to make him lose eight pounds of water weight-

My last jump was a water jump just on the starboard side of the LSD. The masthead on an LSD is 138 feet above the deck. I told the platoon I was going to pull so low I’d be level with the masthead when the chute deployed. In fact, I told everybody I could find that I was going to come in at 138 feet — with two notable exceptions: Skipper Witham, and Ev Barrett. I even had a guy named Bob dark standing by on deck with a 16mm sound movie camera-

We went up, climbed to altitude, reached the zone, and jumped. When I saw the film later, it was wonderful. There are all these chutes opening, way high. And then there’s me, Falling. Falling. Falling.

As the camera follows me closer to the water, you can hear Barrett’s voice unmistakably clear on the sound track: “You asshole. You fucking asshole. You fucking dipshit asshole.

Pull the fucking goddamn cord. Marcinko, you motherfucking cocksucking cuntbreath shit-eating turd-iaced dipshit pencildicked pus-nuts shit-for-brains asshole geek, pull the fucking cord.

I know when to take a hint, so I pulled the cord. I’d rigged the chute for a low deployment. It flared instantly. I had time for one oscillation of opening shock, at which point I came even with the masthead, and then — splash — I hit the water.

I went under, wriggled out of my harness, and came up laughing.

Barren and B. B. Witham did not find the stunt amusing.

The skipper didn’t wait until I came aboard. “Marcinko— read my lips. You’re fucking grounded,” he called on the bullhorn.

Barrett decided I needed a new asshole, so he reamed me one on the spot.

About a week later I left for the States.

The day before I left. Chief Barren called me up to the goat locker and sat me down. He found a couple of cans of beer, opened them both, and passed one to me. “Dick,” he said, “I think you’re gonna do all right. You’re gonna make a good officer — if you don’t screw around too much, and if you take things serious.”

“Thanks, Chief. I will.”

He nodded. “I know. You’re a good boy. Hard worker.

Tough. That’s good, too. You’re gonna need all that when you go up against all them fuckin Academy pukes.“ He pulled at the beer. ”Course, the Academy pukes don’t know much about fuckin‘ pulling level with the fuckin masthead, do they?“

We both laughed.

“But there’s something…”

“You name it, Chief.”

“Look,” he said, “you’ve learned a lot of stuff now. And you’re gonna leam a lot more.”

I nodded. “Yeah?”

“So I want you to promise me something. I want your word that what you leam, you’ll pass on.”

“Sure.” I wasn’t certain what he was getting at.

“You’re wondering what the fuck I’m saying, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dick, it shouldn’t matter whether you work with a guy once or whether you serve with him for years — you gotta treat him the same. You gotta help him do his job. Like I helped you — now it’s gonna be your turn to pass it on.”

He drained his beer. “I want your word.”

I looked at him. The man was absolutely serious.

“You got it. Chief.”

He nodded and cracked a half-smile. “Think of it as Barren’s First Law of the Sea — because what it is, is the Navy way, Dick.”

I was naive in those days; I believed him. No — that’s not quite true. Back then, Ev Barren’s Law was the Navy way.

Chapter 6

I breezed through OCS at Newport, Rhode Island, graduating in December 1965 as an ensign. I didn’t do well because I was smarter than the others with whom I entered, but because I’d been in the Navy for over seven years, more than three of them with the fleet, and I knew how the system worked. When the instructors — chiefs, mostly — would say, during their lectures, “You’ll see this again,” I wrote what they were saying down because I knew it would reappear on tests. I knew to do it because that’s how chiefs worked. When we had inspections, I made sure my bunk was so tight a quarter would jump a foot off the top sheet and the room was as spit polished as the soles of my shoes (I hadn’t been The Geek for nothing). When we drilled, I marched as if I were a member of the drill team. When we shot, I’d score an unending series of tens.

I realized very early on that none of the officers or chiefs who taught us, drilled us, harassed us, and inspected us could come close to giving me the kind of intimidation I’d survived during UDT Hell Week. So I did my job, took whatever they gave me to do, completed it without complaining, and cruised through OCS as if it were summer camp- The guys at fleet had been right: OCS did stand for Organized Chicken Shit.

‘Fact is, if the character played by Richard Gere in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman had been a Frogman, he’d have ended up cleaning Lou Gossett’s clock before the end of the first day. Frogmen eat drill sergeants for hors d’oeuvres. They also know how to lake harassment and still do the job without complaining.

When I was selected a section leader, then battalion commander of my OCS training class, I took Ev Barretfs Law lo heart. I helped the class runts through the physical segments of training; I showed the bookworms how weapons worked; and I taught those whose grades were low to listen for the key words you’ll see this material again before they wrote anything down. One hundred percent of my section graduated OCS. Others suffered a fair number of dropouts — one even had a suicide. At graduation, former Seaman Geek received the class leadership award along with his ensign’s bars. My wife, Kathy, pregnant with our second child, looked on proudlyAfter OCS I was assigned to a small destroyer, the Joseph K. Taussig, as a snipe, or engineering officer, whose domain was the fireroom, where the ship’s boilers are located. I was certainly the first fireroom officer aboard the Taussig who ever conducted his own hull inspections — I did my own diving— and who wore green fatigues while pawling over, under, around, and through the whole boiler and propulsion system before I signed off that any specific work had been done.

The six months aboard the Taussig were an essential transition period for me. Now, I lived in Officer Country and ate in the wardroom — but the only things really different about me were the single-bar tabs on my collar, my tan uniform, and the fact that many of the enlisted men called me Mr.

Rick — which I thought preferable to being referred to as Mr.

Dick.

Ensign or no, I still thought like an enlisted man. And that helped when it came to doing my job. I’d heard all the enlisted men’s excuses before because I’d used ‘em myself. I knew how to tell good chiefs from bad ones. I knew from the day I was commissioned I couldn’t adopt the Academy-grad leadership style, which is often detached, cool, and aloof, toward my men because I’m not a detached, cool, or aloof kind of guy. On the other hand, I wasn’t an enlisted man anymore, either, and I had lo team to lead — even if leading meant making tough choices.

So the Taussig became my laboratory. I tried to see how I could use the Navy’s system to my benefit, and where I could adapt it. Somewhat to my surprise I discovered that leading is not easy. It takes the same sort of confidence you need lo jump out of a plane to order a man to do something that may prove fatal to him — and have him carry out the order instantaneously and without question.

On a more mundane level, leadership is learning how to make a decision, and then sticking by it even though you are heckled, nagged, pleaded with, and cajoled to change your mind. The first time I canceled my crew’s shore leave because there was work still to be done on the boilers was one of the toughest decisions I’d had to make to that point in my life.

Why? Because I had been a sailor, and I knew how much a night out meant to them.

My background gave me several advantages. I came to my job with a Frogman’s physical confidence — I knew, for example, that I could fight, swim, or parachute better than any man aboard the Taussig. Not to mention the fact that I could also turn anyone who tried to take me on into a pile of chopped liver. That made my life with the crew much easier,

The fact that I came from UDT also helped me establish a good working relationship with my fellow officers. Most knew what Frogmen could do and respected me for it, even if they had no desire to follow in my fin-prints. I also got along well with Earl Numbers, the Tawsig’s skipper, and my ratings were well above average.

But there was no real future for me as a ship driver and I knew it. There were far too many Academy grads ahead of me in line. In the Navy of the sixties, the Academy fraternity was very strong. A class ring was a talisman for success — and I was bare-knuckled. There was no aircraft carrier or guidedmissile frigate on my horizon — no USS Taussig even.

Still, when I received my ensign’s bars, I’d made a commitment to the Navy. It would, I decided, become my career.

What I would do, however, was another question. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I knew what I wanted — the question was how to achieve it.

What I wanted was to become a SEAL. I’d known about SEALs since the teams were first formed in 1962. I saw my first SEALs at Little Creek as soon as I got back from one of my first Caribbean cruises because Two’s headquarters was right across the soccer field from UDT-21. They certainly had a different took to them. First of all, they dressed sharp. They wore shiny, black Cochran jump boots, with their trousers Moused over the tops, while we Frogmen wore regular boondockers with untucked trousers. Some of the equipment Frogmen used dated back to World War II. SEALs got all the best war toys. And everything was new: new, deadly weapons; new, experimental equipment; even new, special-warfare operation techniques and strategies.

Best of all, they were always going off somewhere or other to train. Maybe it would be a month of parachuting or six weeks of jungle warfare or a session at arctic survival school — they were always on the move. Weapons schools, language schools, they were doing it all. And while I loved being a Frogman, I’d peer through the chain-link fence like a stagestruck kid on his first visit to Broadway, watching as the SEALs came and the SEALs went and vowing that somehow I, too, would someday become a SEAL. The opportunity arose because of Vietnam, when both SEAL teams underwent expansion, roughly doubling in siae.

The first American combat units arrived in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. On that day, elements of the Third Marine Regiment of the Third Marine Division landed on the beach near Da Nang. The leathernecks were greeted by a sign that read, “Welcome U.S. Marines — UDT-12.” Frogmen were among the first American military personnel to go to Vietnam.

SEALs came later. I was on the Taussig in February 1966 when I learned that the first detachment, from SEAL Team One in San Diego, had left for Vietnam. 1 felt strongly that with the West Coast in play, SEAL Team Two wouldn’t be far behind. So I pulled every string I could to get myself reassigned there.

What worked in my favor was that I was young — twentyfive at the time — gung ho, and an experienced Frogman.

There weren’t a whole lot of officers back then who met those qualifications. It took me three months of long-distance wangling, cajoling, coaxing, and threatening, but by May I’d gotten myself detailed back to Little Creek and assigned to SEAL Team Two as a squad leader.

Driving through Gate Five in June 1966, I returned the guard’s salute and thought about the first time I’d come to Little Creek, walking through the gate with Ken MacDonald.

“Mate, you ain’t never gonna make it” is what he’d said five years before. Well, we’d both made it. He was still with UDT-22, out on a cruise somewhere in the Med.

1 drove past UDT headquarters and parked in the visitors’ lot, slipped into a dress blouse and a pressed pair of khakis, locked the car, and walked into SEAL Team Two’s quarterdeck area.

Bill and Jake, two Frogmen I’d known in the teams, were reading the bulletin board. They turned as I walked in and saluted without looking at my face. I was just another asshole wearing a bar. Then they saw who it was.

“Goddamn — Geek!”

I reached out and grabbed them. “Hey, you sons of bitches.”

Bill looked me over. “So you defected to Officer Country.”

“Food’s better. And the women’re more genteel.” We all laughed. “What’s up?” I asked.

“We Just got back from language school,” Jake said. “Two weeks of Spanish, just in case the Vietcong take over Honduras. Hey, Dick, you comin‘ over here with us or you going back to 22?”

“Here. I told ‘em I wanted to kick ass and take names and they scuttled my desk and sent me where I belong.” I pointed toward the door marked XO. “Joe D in?”

“Yup.”

“I better go get squared away. See you guys later for a beer or something.”

Bill tossed me a sharp salute. “Aye-aye, Ensign Rick.” He cracked a smile, then broke into full-faced grin. “I don’t frigging believe it. You — an officer. Finally we’ve got someone who understands us.”

I turned and headed for the executive officer’s office. In a way they were right: I did understand them, and they knew I’d be around for a while; I wasn’t one of the usual SEAL officers who had a reserve commission, did one tour, and then quit. On the other hand I could see the pitfalls of coming back to Little Creek only ten months after I’d left.

In the minds of many with whom I’d be serving I’d still be The Geek, the guy who ate peas and spaghetti through his nose. I was still the uncontrollable E-5 Frogman who had the reputation of being an animal. I was let’s-drive-the-truck-onthe-sidewalk-through-the-tunnel-in-Naples Marcinko.

I knew I’d have to change their minds. I took a deep breath and walked through the XO’s door. Joe DiMartino rose to greet me.

“Dick — welcome aboard.”

“Thanks, Joe. Good to be here.”

He gave me a firm handshake and a pat on the back. He was easily ten years older than I, and a full lieutenant. Joe had seen action in Korea, and he’d been around during the Bay of Pigs, when the CIA had used Frogmen to help train some of the Cuban maritime assets before the abortive invasion. He was one of SEAL Team Two’s “plank owners”—those sixty officers and men who had been selected to form the initial unit back in January 1962.

DiMartino looked like his name. The boot of Italy was written all over his craggy face, from olive skin and dark eyes to an aquiline nose and uneven white teeth that showed when he smiled.

His uniform was anything but formal: khaki shorts and the blue-and-gold T-shirt in which SEALs did their morning FT.

“Is that the uniform of the day?”

Joe D nodded affirmatively. “Roger that. You’re overdressed, Marcinko.”

“I’ll remember tomorrow.”

“Coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Help yourself.”

I took a paper cup, filled it from an um that sat atop a twodrawer, olive-green file cabinet, and raised it in a steaming, silent toast in Joe’s direction. “What’s up?”

“The usual bullshit. We’re halfway through a training cycle, and you’re gonna have to play some catch-up. I’m planning to send you over to Bravo Squad at Second Platoon as soon as you finish your quals.”

“Roger that. How’s the CO?”

“TNT? He’s okay, but he’s overworked. He’d like to Jump and shoot, but the son of a bitch is buned under a ton of paperwork. Makes him prickly, but don’t take n personal. In fact we should get moving right now — see him before it gets too busy. He’s got some things to say to you.”

“Let’s go.”

We walked out into the corridor. The battleship-gray walls of the low building hadn’t been painted in some time, and the floors were scuffed and dirty. But there was a good, lived in feeling about the place. Moreover, it was both informal and low-key when it came to dress regs and spit and polish, which suited roe just fine.

Joe D rapped on the CO’s door. From inside came a distinct growl. “Come.”

We stepped inside and saluted. Lieutenant Commander Tom N. Tarbox lifted his short, bulky frame from behind his desk and returned the salutes. His nickname was TNT because he often became too hot to handle. He brooked no bullshit.

TNT sat me down and read me the gospel. He asked how my wife was doing. I told him she was due lo have our second child within the month. He nodded and ordered me to get Kathy squared away as soon as possible because families were a drain on an officer’s time if they weren’t settled down and comfortable. I’d be assigned to work in submersible operations — diving — until I satisfied all my SEAL qualifications.

I’d have to go to fire-support school, where I’d learn how to call in artillery strikes from offshore vessels. I’d be required to take language training — Spanish — and requalify in HALO — High Altitude, Low Opening — parachute work, and was that all a roger, Ensign Marcinko?

I’d have to become familiar quickly with SEAL weapons and tactics, and if I was out of shape, God help me because Tarbox demanded that his officers lead from the front, not from behind, and did I get each and every word of that, mister?

“Aye-aye, sir.”

He shook my hand, told me he was glad to have me aboard, and kicked us out. “I’ve got too much goddamn paperwork to deal with to play nursemaid. See you later at the Officers‘

Club for a beer. Ensign. Now haul ass.“

There’s a world of difference between UDT and SEALs.

As a Frogman I was a conventional wamor whose operational boundary was the high-water mark of whatever beach I was sent to reconnoiter. As a SEAL. my real work only began at the high-water mark — and then it continued inland for as far as I felt comfortable. I was no longer Just a Frogman, but an amphibious commando who could harass the enemy, cany out intricate ambushes that would confuse and terrorize adversaries, disrupt supply routes, snatch prisoners for interrogation, and help to train guerrillas.

In SpecWar parlance, when I became a SEAL, I became a force multiplier. The principle is simple: send me in with 6 SEALs and we will train 12 guerrillas, who will train 72 guerrillas, who will train 432, who will train 2,592—and soon you have a full-tilt resistance movement on your hands.

Another way of looking at it is that SpecWar operators like me can help a government out, or they can help a government out. It all depends on what kind of national policy you want to pursue. SEALs can’t make policy. That’s for the politicians to do. But if there is a policy that allows us to act, then we can throw ourselves into our deadly work with surprising ingenuity, passionate enthusiasm, and considerable diligence.

That’s what happened in September of 1966, when the Navy ordered a contingent from SEAL Team Two to be ready to leave for Vietnam shortly before Christmas.

I was coming back from a training’session in Puerto Rico with my squad — Bravo Squad of the Second Platoon — and we’d just flown into Norfolk Naval Air Station when I saw Two’s new CO, Lieutenant Commander Bill Earley, on the tarmac.

As we came down the ladder, he waved us over. Earley, a West Coast SEAL who’d already been nicknamed Squirrelly because of his habit of constantly fidgeting his six-foot-two frame whenever he sat down, gathered six of us officers in a tight circle around him and gave us the good news.

“We’re authorized for Vietnam. Two reduced platoons— twenty-five men in all,” he shouted over the 100-dedbel screams of unmumed Jet engines. “Twenty enlisteds — and five of you guys.”

I have never been the shy type. I didn’t wait for Squirrelly to finish another sentence. I grabbed him by his elbow and walked him down the ramp so I could pitch my case. He was taller than me, but I was stronger, and I had his arm and wasn’t going to let it go until he gave me the answer I wanted to hear-

To his credit, Earley didn’t laugh at me until he’d heard me oul. Then he swung out of my grasp, told me I was an obnoxious son of a bitch, that I shouldn’t shit a stutter, and that the con job hadn’t worked.

When he’d finished taking all the air out of my sails, he added, “Marcinko, the reason I’m going to send you to Vietnam has nothing to do with logic, or with the pitiful excuse for begging you just performed. I want to inflict you on those poor Vietnamese bastards for two reasons- First, it’ll deprive you of pussy. That’ll make you especially mean, which will result in a high number of VC casualties, and I’ll look good as a result- Second, you’re the most junior guy here — so you’re expendable — cannon fodder — if you step on a mine or get sniped, we don’t lose much experience, and I’ll still look good. So pack your bags.”

Until that moment, I had never seriously considered kissing another man.

The weeks between September and Christmas are still a blur. The platoon leader, who also ran Alfa Squad, was an LT named Fred Kochey. He and I had about eight weeks in which to take twelve individual SEALs and make us ail into a tough, effective, deadly combat unit.

My squad. Bravo, had real potential. Ron Rodger was part Indian, a strong young kid with a hell of a punch — when he hit you, it snapped. He carried the machine gun. When he hit you with that, you snapped. The utility man, Jim Finley, was the kind of guy who could go anywhere, walk into any foreign country and talk to people even though he didn’t speak a word of the language. We called him the Mayor because wherever we went, he’d be out pressing the flesh within minutes, just like a goddamn politician.

The radioman was Joe Camp, a real hustler, who doubled his salary playing poker. Bob Gallagher, the dark Irishman we called Eagle (because he was a bald, beady-eyed, competitive’s.o.b.), loved to bar brawl, shoot, and generally raise hell. My kind of guy. I made him assistant squad leader and assigned him to cover our rear. Jim Watson — Patches, because he liked to sew so many school patches on his uniform he looked like a walking Navy recruiting ad — was point man, Jim was one of Seal Two’s plank owners — an original SEAL.

It was right that he’d be the tip of the Bravo Squad spear.

We had no medic in Bravo Squad. I told the guys that was because Junior men didn’t die — only old guys, like Kochey’s antiques in Alfa, would need to be patched up.

Beneath the black humor lay reality. Indeed, my job would be to get Bravo Squad back in one piece. The key to staying alive would be team integrity. We practiced constantly, first at Camp Pickett, in Blackstone, Virginia, then at Camp Lejeune. North Carolina. The problems seemed endless. All the mundane tradecraft things I’d never thought much about now became huge tactical obstacles. How do five-and-one or tenand-two walk a trail? How do you look for booby traps? How do you use a point man — and what about rear security? Where in the squad does the radioman go? Or the machine gunner?

If there’s an ambush, who’ll break right and who’ll break left?

We constantly practiced our fields of fire because there are no safety regs when you’re walking with weapons locked and loaded on jungle trails. The asshole who stumbles and shoots his buddy in the back can cause a lot of damage- The solution is for everybody to know how everybody else is carrying his gun, and what portion of the clock his, weapon is responsible for. Point man, for example, can deal with a wider field of fire than fourth man, who can only shoot from two to fourthirty on the right, and from eight to ten o’clock on the left.

There were so many questions — and so little time to find the answers. What about the problem of right-handed shooters? Everybody in my squad was right-handed. That meant we all carried our weapons slung over the right shoulder pointed toward the left — so we were unprotected on one side. I decided that half of us were going to carry weapons southpaw-style.

On the plus side was our squad spirit. My guys were absolute renegades — ail they wanted was to take on bad odds.

I could put them on a ridge and feed them ammo and they’d melt their barrels before they’d give an inch. In fact, one of the toughest problems I had to face at first was keeping them from chasing the enemy and running into an ambush. Because if these Bravo Squad sons of bitches got fired on, they wanted revenge.

(Their aggressiveness would carry on to Vietnam, where all five of my men, Rodger, Finley, Watson, Camp, and Gallagher, would win the Bronze Star or Navy Commendation Medal on our first tour. Bob Gallagher went on to complete four Vietnam tours. On his third, although he was wounded so seriously he could hardly walk, he saved his squad— brought them all, including the squad leader, whom Gailagher carried, out to safety under heavy fire. For that escapade,

“Eagle” won the Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest military decoration.)

But spirit alone doesn’t keep anybody alive. We’d have to be able to kill the enemy before he killed us. This is more difficult than it sounds. I first realized how tough it was going to be at Camp Pickett — in the dead of a fall night. I was running a night-ambush, live-fire exercise. I’d strung us out into pairs along a ridgeline of dunes, forty yards above a simulated canal. The situation was supposed to resemble the Mekong Delta, where we would be assigned. But instead of a sampan filled with VC and supplies, we’d be shooting at a six-by-eight-foot piece of plywood towed behind a jeep.

We’d set up nice and quiet — we’d learned by now how to move without upsetting leaves and branches, and we’d moved quietly into our places and dug firing positions. Our weapons were locked and loaded. We lay in pairs, waiting for the “sampan” to come by. The woods returned to normal: the only sounds we heard were the birds and the bugs.

We were in full combat gear. Green uniforms, load-bearing vests full of 30-round magazines for the M16s we carried, double canteens — everything. All I could see were problems.

The green uniforms had to go. They provided no camouflage; we were always visible against the foliage. The vests had to be redesigned because they made too much noise — jinglejingle is not a good sound in the jungle-jungle. Our boots left gringo-sized footprints on the trails. Easy to follow if you were a VC looking for a Yankee to hurt. We did not want the VC walking a mile in our shoes.

I gave hand signals. “Enemy coming. Get ready.” The squad went down in their holes.

Now the jeep started to move. “Ready.”

I waited. “Now—‘

The ridgeline erupted as six 30-round magazines were expended in unison. I was blinded by the muzzle flashes and lost my target picture but kept shooting anyway. I ejected, thrust another 30-round mag in my M16, and blasted away.

So did everybody else.

“Shit — goddamn it, son of a bitch!” Gallagher’s voice came down the line, followed by Gallagher, who exploded out of his hole six feet straight into the air. He landed on top of his partner, Watson, and started throwing punches. “You asshole scumbag—‘

I ran up the line and pulled them apart. “What the—”

“It’s his fault, Mr. Rick.” Gallagher ripped his fatigue shirt off. His back was covered with ugly red blisters. “It’s Patches’ friggin‘ shell casings. The son of a bitch ejected them down my neck.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“You dipshit—”

I shook them by the scruffs of their necks. “Oh, this is just peachy. We are supposedly in the middle of a rucking ambush, and you shit-for-brains assholes are arguing about where your hot brass is going, while the fucking enemy is cutting your throats.”

I stomped off toward the jeep path to check the targets.

“This is no way to run a rucking war.”

What I discovered made me even more unhappy. There were six of us. We had each emptied two 30-round magazines at the six-by-eight target, which had been moving at a speed of five miles per hour, at a distance of 120 feet. We had fired 360 shots. There were precisely two bullet holes in the target.

The squad was summoned. I poked a ballpoint through each hole.

“So, this is what a highly trained, well-fucking-motivated squad of killers can do when it tries, right?” I growled in a passable Ev Barrett parody.

I let their perfidy sink in. I looked at the crestfallen faces.

“Didn’t you go to marksman’s school?” I put an index finger over Patches Watson’s heart. “Don’t you hang a fucking Expert Marksman’s Badge on that walking billboard you call a jumpsuit?”

He hung his head in shame. “Yes, sir, Ensign Rick.”

The Barren in me took over. “Well, it is not rucking good e-fucking-nuff for you to wear a motherfucking cocksucking dingle-fucking-dangle medal and shoot only two fucking holes in this motherfucking piece of plywood. Or do I have it all wrong, gentlemen?”

No answers.

“Boys,” I said softly, “those probs and stats don’t fuckin‘ excite me at all.”

Silence -

“Now, I’ll tell you something — we’re all at fault here. I mean, how many times did I hit the target? Okay, so we’ve got a prob to solve. Let’s solve it- Are we leading the target too much? Are we not leading it enough? I mean, what gives?”

We did what was necessary: we drilled again and again and again until we could shred the plywood target whether it was lowed at five miles an hour or fifteen. We practiced shooting in teams of two — remember swim buddies, and how I said you would see that material again? — from a confined space, like a camouflaged hole, or from behind trees. Each of us learned how to fire from close quarters without showering his neighbor with hot brass.

Our training continued from fall into eariy winter- For Halloween we visited the Vietcong village at Camp Lejeune, where Marines in black pajamas and cartoonish Asian accents carried AK-47s and tried to play trick or treat with us. Marines should never attempt war games with SEALs. We gave the bogus VC our own brand of So-Solly U.S. Mateen, boobytrapping their booby traps, playing hide-and-seek during their ambush exercises, and staging our own sneak attacks on their “secured” VC hamlet. It was all fun and games and playacting. We hiked. We camped. We shot the hell out of targets.

When we had time, we’d waltz into Virginia Beach for some full-contact bar-brawling.

A word or two here about that. I have always believed that being a SEAL, like being an NFL linebacker, requires a certain amount of aggressive, close physical contact with your fellow human beings. Some may disagree with me. But I find that there is something truly rewarding about putting your back up against the back of someone you trust with your life, and taking on all comers. Sure, you take a certain number of clings in the pursuit of these unruly activities. But in the long run, I believe the rewards outweigh the liabilities. And when, as an officer, my most important job is to build unit integrity, (here are few better ways in which to build it than late at night, in a bar, when it’s you and your five guys against the rest of the world.

Thus endeth the sermon.

Early in December, we trooped over to the infirmary and upgraded our inoculations. We were still nursing sore arms and butts when the base legal officer sat us down and drew up last wills and testaments for those of us going overseas.

Then the yeomen from BUPERS — the Bureau of Personnel — came and told us about supplemental insurance and death benefits we could sign up for, and we arranged to have our paychecks direct-deposited in our checking accounts.

This was a no-shitter. This was the real thing. My kids, Richie, who was three, and little Kathy — I called her Kat— who’d been born July 5, less than six months before, were too young to realize what was happening- But my wife, KathyAnn, knew, and she — like the other SEAL wives — was apprehensive. She got nervous whenever I jumped out of a plane or went out on a dive. She hadn’t cared for the fact that, as a SEAL, I’d been away for five of the preceding six months on training exercises. Now, the thought of my spending six months in Vietnam with angry, small, yellow people shooting at me did not make her happy at all. While I could comprehend her concerns, I couldn’t understand them. War was what I’d trained for since I’d Joined the teams, and nothing would keep me away from combat.

There were tears and sniffles and lots of kissing and hugging, and then just before Christmas, we SEALs climbed onto a C-130 Hercules loaded to the gills with equipment. Instead of seats there were long, greasy web canvas slings strung along the sides of the fuselage. In the wide center aisle were pallets swathed in cargo netting, piled high with all the deadly goodies SEALs need for six months of fun and games. This was a true no-frills flight. No seats. No seat belts. No tray-tables. No food. No stewardesses to plump pillows behind our heads. In fact, there were no heads, only a tube by the tail ramp where we could take a leak.

Over the next seven days, we meandered west so we could reach the East, while we tried to find somewhere to stretch out and grab some sleep. That is harder than it sounds. The C-130 is a loud aircraft — it helps if you wear earplugs — and it is an uncomfortable aircraft because there is nothing soft on which to lie down. We also, I remember thinking at the time, landed on every bloody rock in the Pacific to refuel.

Midway, Wake, Saipan, Guam, Philippines — we did ‘em all.

Then over the South China Sea, south of Saigon, and a long, lazy approach that finally took us over Vietnam itself.

I climbed up the ladder to the cockpit and looked through the windshield. I’d expected an endless panoply of lush, tropical jungle. Instead, it was dull green and mottled brown, with square-mile sections of moonlike craters pitting earth the color of dried blood.

“Where the hell’s the jungle?”

“Gone,” the pilot explained. “B-52 strikes. Defoliants.

Napalm.“

I pondered that. “Where are we landing?”

“Binh Thuy.”

“Big airfield?”

“Not so big. We always take rounds, too, so we’re gonna make a fast approach. Once we’re on the ground we like to move quick — so if you could get you and your stuff clear in a hurry, it’d be appreciated.”

“That’s a roger.” I scurried down the ladder and found Kochey. “Pilot says we’re dropping into a hot zone. What about locking and loading now?”

Kochey screwed his chin up and pondered. “The regs say we can’t do that. It bothers the Air Force.”

“I wonder if Charlie’s read the regs.”

Kochey pondered that for about half a second. Then he slammed me on the arm. “You’re right. Tell ‘em that anybody who wants to can lock and load.”

I gathered my squad and we pulled M16s and magazines out of our canvas hang-up bags. We slammed home 30-round mags. Then, when the Air Force crew wasn’t looking, we pulled the charging handles back — raaatchet-click! — and chambered rounds. Then we thumbed the M16 safeties to their horizontal ON position.

The Hercules was circling now, dipping its port wing as it dropped lower and lower. We could hear the hydraulic whine of flaps extending, then the rumble of landing gear, and then, ba-bump-ba-bump, we were on the tarmac and taxiing, and “the rear ramp was whining as it slowly lowered toward the ground. All thoughts of home vanished. My heart was pounding a steady kaboom-kaboom at a rate of about 120. Oh, this was going to be fun.

Chapter 7

It swelled warm and humid and nice and fresh and rusticalty pastoral, like pig dung. You know how when you climb off a plane there’s that first whiff of strange, new air that tells you everything at once about where you are? The first whiff that came through the lowered ramp made me think of Puerto Rico, and I knew instantly that I was going to like Vietnam a whole lot.

I looked around. There were sandbags, and there were revetments for aircraft. There were Hueys whomp-whompwhomping just above the tarmac. But there were also palm trees and rice paddies, and beyond the barbed wire and the minefields I could see farm hootches with chickens running in the yards and pigs rolling in the mud behind crude wood fences.

I stretched, raising my M16 over my head like a barbell, and sucked my lungs full of the beautifully humid, tropical, petroleum-iaced air. Yeah. Puerto Rico. Panama. The aroma was definitely Third World. Strangely, for someone — me— who had never spent much time in the Third World, it was eerily like coming home.

Within a couple of hours we had settled in at Tre Noc, about a mile away from the Binh Thuy air base. Tre Noc sits on the Bassac River, one of five major waterways that run through the Mekong Delta region. (From south to north they.are the Mekong, Bassac, Co Chien, Ham Luong, and My Tho rivers. Each one follows a generally west-to-east course running from Cambodia into the South China Sea.) The Navy had a PBR — Patrol Boat/River — headquarters on the river at Tre Noc; Task Force 116.

We’d been assigned to 116 to support riverine operations in the region, which had been given the appropriate-sounding code name Game Warden, Our assignment was to help the PBRs interdict VC supplies that were shuttled on sampans or portaged through the shallows by bearers. We would also intercept VC couriers, kill or capture ihem, and pass whatever information they were carrying to Navy Intelligence.

We drove the couple of kilometers from Binh Thuy to Tre Noc half expecting to see tents and slit latrines when we arrived. From the scuttlebutt we’d heard before we left, living conditions at riverine HQ were primitive.

No way. As we drove up, I could see concrete buildings, air conditioners sticking out of a few windows, a good-sized mess hall, a large dock and mechanical emplacement, and an HQ complex that, white it wasn’t Little Creek, was far better than anyone expected.

As soon as we pulled up, the four lieutenants — Jake Rhinebolt, Larry Bailey, Bob Gormly, arid Fred Kochey — and I left the two platoons outside and wandered into the steamy HQ of Task Force 116, which was commanded by a senior officer who bore the title of commodore. We checked our paperwork in, then walked down the hall and rapped on the door of the commodore’s office.

“Come.”

We walked into a room hazy from cigarette smoke. The commodore, a captain in a grimy tan shirt, sleeves rolled to the biceps, waved us in without looking.

We snapped offhanded salutes in his direction.

The commodore looked up. His eyes wandered in our direction, then they focused on me. “Holy shit. You still pulling low, Marcinko, you geek?”

B. B. Witham, the former captain of LSD-114, the USS Rushmore, where I’d done my final cruise as an enlisted Frogman, mashed his omnipresent cigarette into the sawed-off shell casing he used as an ashtray, jumped up, slammed me on the shoulder, and pumped my right arm vigorously. “Son of a bitch.”

Witham scrutinized the single-bar tabs on my collar. He reached out and touched them to make sure they were real.

The crow’s-feet around his eyes wrinkled into what I remembered as the New Englander’s weather-beaten smile. “I never would’ve believed you made it through OCS.”

Finally he took notice of the other four guys in the room, told them to stand at ease, and then slammed me on the chest good-naturedly. “This son of a bitch almost gave me a heart attack when he was an enlisted man and I commanded an LSD,” he explained, joyfully punching me in the arm.

“Shit, sir,” Rhinebolt, who was the senior SEAL, said earnestly, “he still does that. In training, he’d—”

“Good for Marcinko,” the commodore interrupted. “Read my lips. If there’s anything I like in an officer, it’s consistency.” He looked at me like a prodigal son. “Right, you geek asshole?”

What could I say. The man was a prince.

Then Witham sat us down and gave us the skinny about the quality of our lives in the foreseeable future. We’d live in one of the half dozen flat-roofed, one-story concrete buildings that were divvied up into four-man bunkrooms. We’d have a mess hall, showers — all the conveniences, even a hootch maid to keep our clothes clean. And she’d have her hands full, because Witham wanted to keep us busy. “You’re gonna be spending a lot of time in the mud, so I hope you don’t mind getting dirty.” Finally, he kicked us out, told us to get squared away in a couple of hours, and then he’d see us for a beer later.

B. B. Witham was given to understatement. It took almost a week to square everything away- The ammo had to be stored, the equipment sorted and laid out, and our weapons cleaned. I quickly became a fanatic on clean weapons because I realized the climate would start ruining ‘em within a few hours. Moisture, rust, mud, dust — we were constantly battling against them.

By the end of the third day I was getting restless. The quartet of lieutenants — Rhinebolt, Kochey, Bailey, and Gormly — had choppered north to the Rung Sat Special Zone, a killer, 600-square-mite mangrove swamp that ran from just southeast of Saigon to the South China Sea, to visit SEAL Team One and eyeball the way the war was being fought.

Their thought was to copy SEAL One’s technique — set up a static ambush and wait for the enemy to show up.

Meanwhile, Boy Ensign and his merry band of junior idiots were left behind. We were loo young to tag along, said the grown-ups.

“Get some rest,” Jake Rhinebolt told me. “Go play with your toys.”

So I sat and pouted and got some sun for about half a day.

That was a loser. I hadn’t come to sunbathe-1 visited the intel shop, where I asked the pigeon-entrails readers how the VC in the area operated, and where they were most likely to be found. That evening, the six SEAL pups of Bravo shared a case of beer and plotted. When adults go off and leave the children unattended, all sorts of unforeseen adventures can occur.

The next morning. Eagle and I sauntered down to the dock and sweet-talked ourselves aboard a PBR for the morning patrol. The PBR is a wonderful craft. It’s thirty-one feet long and runs on a Jacuzzi propulsion system, which means it has a shallow draft and it’s fast — like about twenty-eight or twenty-nine knots — and very maneuverable. They were armed with twin -50-caliber machine guns in the bow, riflefired 81mm mortars astern, and Honeywell 40mm Galling guns over the engine covers. The four- or five-man crews carried an assortment of Mios, M60 machine guns, as well as .45 automatics and an occasional -38. So — in addition to fast — the PBRs were deadly.

The crew cast off and we edged out into the opaque greenbrown water. It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and it was already more than ninety degrees. The humidity was fierce — you could almost see the air move if you chopped it with the edge of your hand. Over the engine growl I asked one of the deck crew if it was okay to stand by the conn, and receiving an affirmative nod, I clambered into the cockpit and sidled up next to the chief who had the wheel.

He was archetypal- He looked somewhere in his late thirties, with thinning, light-brown hair trimmed flattop above and white-wall on the sides. His ears stuck out like jug handles. A series of tattoos ran up his muscular forearms and disappeared under the smartly rolled sleeves of a weathered chambray work shirt. Most of the sailors who ran PBRs wore green or tan. Not this guy. He was an old-fashioned mother, and he wanted you to know it-

“Moming, Chief.”

He spun the wheel out and the boat moved into the current.

He applied a tittle more throttle now, moving us against the river. He kept his silence until we were well off the twin fingers of the dock. Then he ordered the gunners to clear their weapons. Finally he turned to me. “Morning… sir.” There was a thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three pause between the first and second words.

I looked at the green underbrush that overlapped the riverbank, now fifty yards away. “Nice day for a cruise. Chief.”

“If you say so… sir.” He turned away and shouted a blankety-blank command to one of his art-deck blanketyblanking crewmen.

I knew what he was thinking. Here was yet another gung ho, dipshit, puke ensign looking to punch his ticket, play a war game or two, and go home.

I waited until he turned back to the conn and ignored me for another ninety seconds. “Hey, fuck you. Chief.”

That got his attention. “Say what?”

“I said, ‘Hey, tuck you, Chief.’ I’m here to leam — so break me in. Oimme a dump. Gimme a real no-fucking-shitter.

What the motherfucking hell’s goin‘ on out here?“

He spun the wheel again, shifting us more into the middle of the channel. He cut the throttle so we were moving steadily but very slowly- He reached under his flak jacket, pulled a Lucky out of his chambray shirt pocket, tamped it on the back of his watch, lit it, sucked deeply, then exhaled through his nose.

“You’re a pus-nuts fucking smart-ass — sir.”

“That’s what they used to tell me in the teams.”

A quizzical wrinkle of eyebrow. “You from the teams?”

“UDT-21 and 22. Five years.”

“Where’d you do your cruises?”

I stuck my thumb back toward Tre Noc. “Last two were with ol‘ B. B. Witham himself in the Med — aboard the Rushmore.”

“The 114? No shit.”

“No shit.”

He turned his attention to the river, throttling down so that. the boat barely moved against the current. Like hovering a ‘chopper, it is a piloting move that takes training and expe’lience. He pointed starboard. “There’s a sandbar there.

You’ll want to watch it when you take your boats out.“

“Roger, Chief.”

“Cigarette?”

I shook my head.

“You ever do time in Naples?”

“Shit, Chief, every friggin‘ cruise. And before that I did a year there — worked as a radioman 1960-61.”

“What was your rating?”

“In Naples? E-3, Chief — a ‘designated striker.’ ”

He took a drag and exhaled a perfect smoke ring that hung in the humid air for what seemed an eternity. “I always liked ftickin‘ Naples. I did five years in Naples—’55 to ‘60. I got fat eating pasta and I got fuckin’ laid a lot — I lived with a fuckin‘ bella ragazza — and I messed with the fuckin’ officers.

It was a great fuckin‘ tour.“

“The ugliest fucking female officer I ever knew ran the motherfucking commo center in blanking Naples in 1960 and ‘61.”

“I heard about her. Two-hundred-fuckin‘-pounder.”

“I used to call her Big FUC — Big Female Ugly Commander.”

He half-cracked a smile but restrained himself from going any farther. “No shit.” He looked me over, up and down, just like Ev Barrett used to. He took another drag on his cigarette, exhaled, then flicked it — a perfect parabolic arc into the Bassac. He watched it hiss then disappear in the brown water. “What the tuck you say your name was, son?”

I smiled the smile of the newly blessed. “Marcinko, Chief.

Marcinko. But call me Rick.“

Officers seldom listen to enlisted men enough. I do. I’ve made a habit of it. And I’ve learned a lot. From my newfound sea-daddy chief on the PBR, for example, I learned that Char-lie had the habit of keying his ops to our PBR patrols. The officers at 116 had formatted the war. Operations were done by the book: constant and consistent. The result, the chief said, was that Charlie knew exactly how we operated.

What Charlie’d do is wait for a PBR to come by. Then he’d send a decoy — maybe a civilian, maybe a volunteer — across the river in a sampan or a raft- If the poor schnook got shot or captured, well, too bad. But Charlie had also surmised that, according to our official U.S. Navy method of operations, once an action was initiated, accomplished, and terminated, it was over — and the PBR would move on. After it chugged out of sight, the VC would mobilize their main supply convoys or troops or whatever and move across the nver.

Decoy ruses work best if you can set your clocks by the enemy’s operations, and the VC had been able to set theirs by the U.S. Navy. I was determined to change all that.

First, I had to see what kind of firepower I could assemble.

, About thirteen kilometers west of Tre Noc was a place called Juliet Crossing, which was a hotbed of VC activity. Just downriver from Juliet was a small island — maybe three hundred meters by one hundred meters. It was a free-fire zone: there were no friendlies anywhere on it.

The night after I’d taken the PBR cruise I took Bravo Squad and loaded up a pair ofSTABs — Seal Tactical Assault Boats.

STABs are fiberglass jobs with dua! 110-horsepower Mercury outboard engines. That’s fast. Amidships, there’s a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod. The forward gunwales have pintles for port and starboard M60 machine guns. We also carried shoulder-fired 57mm and 90mm recoilless rifles that fired both high-explosive and “beehive” rounds, which were filled with pellets and caused a lot of trauma if they hit someone.

We stowed enough ammo to sink the STABs by half a foot, then at about 1830 we went on a little pleasure cruise to Juliet Crossing. Patches Watson took the wheel of STAB One, and Bob Gallagher ran STAB Two about one hundred yards to my port fiank.

We’d almost reached Juliet when Galiagher called me on the radio. “Mr. Rick?”

“Roger, Eagle.”

“Look at the fish jumping behind us.”

I looked behind me. Sure enough, there was a school of small, phosphorescent fish breaking the calm, dark surface of the river. I looked again. “Shit, Eagle, those aren’t fish — it’s fucking automatic weapons fire.”

I slapped Patches on the shoulder. “Bring her around.” I watched as the bullets followed us, plink-plink-plink. We couldn’t hear anything because of the noise generated by our Meres. But Charlie was sure as shit shooting at us, and the firing had to be coming from the free-fire island.

We watched, transfixed, as bullets hit the water. Next to me stood a SEAL named Harry Mattingly, who’d come along for the ride. All of a sudden he screamed, “Oh, shit — I’ve been hit.”

I knocked him to the deck and looked. A ricochet had spun off the water and got him right between the eyes. He was bleeding like hell. But he was also okay — the wound was only superficial. His face had been less than a foot from mine— this shit was for real.

“You’re one lucky son of a bitch,” I said. “Get up and shoot back at ‘em.” Patches spun the wheel, Gallagher followed, and both f STABs headed for the far side of the river. I grabbed the radio mike. “I’ll follow you in. When he starts firing at you, I’ll spot the muzzle flashes and hit him with the recoilless.

For two hours we raked the island with everything we had, alternating Eagle’s STAB and mine as we charged in, expended ammo, and veered away. From the pitiful amount of fire being returned, I guessed there were no more than one or two VC out there. But numbers didn’t matter. What was important was that they’d shot at us, and we were returning fire.

At about twenty hundred I decided to call in aerial support.

I got on the radio and requested Spooky, the call sign for a Puff the Magic Dragon — a C-47 equipped with four Vulcan Galling guns that can each fire 6,300 rounds a minute.

“No can do without PROCOM — Vietnamese Provincial Commander — authorization, Silver Bullet,” said the Air Force voice on the radio.

Silver Bullet was me — it was the most grandiose radio “handle” I could come up with on the spur of the moment. Authorization? No prob. I simply got the PROCOM out of bed and asked for fire support. “I got a hoi one here, sir.”

“Who are you?”

I told him.

He groaned audibly. “You American assholes are always making trouble.” But he authorized my Spooky.

We watched as the plane floated one hundred meters above the island at about ninety knots. Even in the darkness we could see trees, bushes, and earth flying as the Vulcans raked the ground. Spooky made five slow, lethal passes and then wagged his wings, banked, and flew northward. I got him on the radio. “Thanks, guys. Silver Bullet over and out.”

I called Gallagher. “Not bad, huh?”

“Right on — Ensign Silver Bullet.” I could hear Eagle guffaw over the speaker. “Why didn’t you jusl call yourself Hot Cock?”

“I wouid have if I’d thought of it.” I swung my STAB to port. “Let’s go home.”

We’d had four hours of fun, and it was 2230 by now, high time for a few cold ones. “It’s Miller time,” I radioed Gallagher. We wheelied the STABs and hauled ass downriver like a goddamn twentieth-century armada. I couldn’t stop smiling. We’d shot off every frigging bultet we’d carried with us. and we stunk of cordite and sweat. We smelted like the warriors we’d always wanted to be. War was great!

The natural high lasted until we reached dockside. I saw him from the river, some yahoo asshole jumping up and down like a monkey on a leash, his mouth working in four-quarter time.

As we got closer, I picked him out. It was the OPS boss, a lieutenant commander named Hank Mustin. Now, I didn’t really know Mustin except by reputation. He was an Academy grad whose daddy and granddaddy were both admirals, all of which just impressed the shit out of little old arrogant me, right?

By the time we were within twenty yards I could hear him shouting over the throaty rumble of our twin Meres. “Who the fuck are you calling in an air op without my authorization?

Who gave you the goddamn authority to get the goddamn PROCOM out of his frigging bed? Who gave you permission to use this friggin‘ unit’s call sign?“

To be honest, I’d never given any of those questions any consideration at all. You waged war, and that was that. You didn’t put your hat in your hand and say, “May I?”

So I answered him back in kind. “Hey, you asshole, I came here to kick some rucking VC ass and take some rucking VC names — and that’s what I rucking did tonight. And if you don’t rucking like it, then fuck you and all your fucking kind, you sorry shit-for-brains cockbreath pencil-dick numb-nuts asshole.”

He got absolutely white-faced, screamed, “You are in trouble, mister,” and stomped off. I never gave the incident another thought, until the next afternoon.

Every day just after noon. Captain B. B. Witham used to lie in a hammock he’d strung alongside his commodore’s hootch, to read, smoke, sip coffee, and work on his tan. The day after our escapade he called me over as I passed by on my way to chow.

He plucked off the blue baseball cap that covered his thick, closely cropped, gray-blond hair, thumbed his sunglasses onto his forehead, and squinted at me. “Dick, you’re starting.” He reached for a cigarette, tit it, and blew smoke in my direction.

“You’re in trouble already.”

“Moi?”

“Out, toi, mon petit phoc.”

What the hell was he babbling? “What did I do?” I really didn’t know.

Witham traded the cigarette for a mug of coffee, sipped, returned the cup to an ammo-crate table, and picked up his Marlboro again. “Do the words Hank and Mustin mean anything to you?”

“Ah, so—”

Witham nibbed his coarse blond mustache in irritation.

“Don’t ‘ah so’ me. He could bloody well get you courtmartialed. He’s a senior officer. He’s got juice in WashingtonHe’s an Academy grad. And he’s not a bad guy — in fact, Ensign Geek, if you got to know him without his wanting to cut your balls off and fly ‘em from the frigging flagpole, he could become a real help to you.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“Don’t give me any of your ‘aye-aye’ horse-puckey either,

Dick. I’m serious when I say he can help you. Hank writes the ops plans.“

“So? Big deal.”

“You are the most arrogant’s.o.b. ensign I have ever met.”

Witham took a drag ofMarlboro. “Read my lips, Dick. He’s the one who’s designed the SEAL deployment out here.”

“But he ain’t a SEAL, sir. He’s some Academy twit who tells me, ”When you run into the enemy, you have to ask me,

“May I?” before you can fire one goddamn round.‘ “

“That’s not what he’s saying.”

“That’s how I read it.”

“You go and shoot up a free-fire zone without telling anyone- You get the PROCOM out of bed to give you fire support and authorize it using the 116 Task Force — of which I am the goddamn commodore — call sign. And you’re telling me that Hank Mustin is an asshole because he’s upset? Screw him, Dick — I’m upset.”

“We!! — maybe I got a little steamed last night.”

“Read my lips. Desist, desist, desist. You go around telling too many lieutenant commanders to go fuck themselves the way you did last night and they’re gonna fiy you out of here in shackles.”

“Okay, I got it. Wilco.”

Witham shook his head. “Good.” He paused and sipped his coffee. “Fact is, there has to be some sort of order to things around here, Dick.”

“I agree. But the way it looks to me, Skipper, everyone around here thinks very conventionally. You ride the boats, you listen to the chiefs. From what I hear, Charlie knows what we’re gonna do because we run everything by the book.”

“So?”

“So it’s time for a new book — something he hasn’t read yet.”

Witham shook his head. “We’ve got a new book. And Hank Mustin wrote it — SEALs will support riverine operations, and—”

“Skipper, we’re the ones who should have written our own plan. He sees SEALs as support units. Screw it. Skipper—

Hank Mustin may be a terrific guy, but what he’s designed is conventional, Academy Navy pus-nuts thinking. For chrissakes, Skipper, SEALs’re supposed to be unconventional.

That means not by the book.“ I waited while he sipped his coffee. ”I didn’t come here to sit and wait for Charlie to find me, Skipper. I want to kick Charlie’s ass on his own turf.

That’s unconventional.“

“Like you did last night?”

“Hey — last night was just a rehearsal. I wanted to give my guys some practice before we went out for real.”

Witham sighed. “I’ll tell you something, Dick. There’s no practice out here — no rehearsal. Every bloody day is for real.

You want to expend four hours’ worth of my ammo, then bring me back a VC prisoner or some intel or something else I can use.“

He was right. Dammit — he was right-

His tone softened. “Did you at least gel anything out there?”

“If there was anything on that island. Skipper, it wasn’t moving after we got done. We came home bone-dry. Not a round left — even in the M16s.”

“Boy, you do like living dangerously.” He shook his head.

“Look — stay out of Hank Mustin’s way for a couple of weeks.

I’ll smooth things over, and you’ll end up friends. But Jesus — what a way to start.“

He slid his sunglasses down, replaced the long-visored cap, and picked up his paperback. “Dismissed, Ensign Geek.”

Chapter 8

Bravo Squad didn’t see any action for about a week after my little escapade. I was the Junior man, and it was decided by the lieutenants that combat patrols would be assigned in order of seniority. Bravo had to wait until last, Finally, after what we considered an interminable lull, we got to go.

I’d obtained some intel about VC activity at Juliet Crossing, close to the free-fire island where we’d tested our firepower.

Now, Bravo would try its luck there again, this time in what I hoped would be a face-to-face confrontation with Mr. Charlie.

We planned a textbook riverine operation- “Consider this a KISS mission — Keep It Simple, Stupid,” I told my guys.

And indeed, the plan was so elementary it eould have been designed by Hank Mustin. We’d insert onto the westernmost tip of the free-fire island, which overlooked Juliet Crossing, a major north-south VC transverse point on the Bassac River.

There, we’d wait for a VC courier to show himself. We would ambush and kill him, recover whatever intelligence we could, bring it back to Skipper Witham, receive a pat on the head and an “attaboy,” then go find some cold beer and party.

The kitting was an important element for a couple of reasons. First, that’s what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never know whether you can kill someone until you do it. I wanted to make sure that each member of Bravo was up to ihe task. It could prove deadly to the squad if even one man was reticent- We left Tre Noc just after sundown, all of us in a single STAB. We’d blacked out our faces and hands and wore camouflage greens, jungle boots, soft caps, and web gear, and we carried one canteen, our assault knives, and lots and lots of bullets and grenades-

We were part of a miniflotilla. One of the SEAL Two lieutenants, Larry Bailey, took command of one Mike boat — an armored Landing Craft, Medium, or LCM — which held an 81-mike-mike (81mm mortar), plus pairs of M60 and .50caliber machine guns. A second Mike boat was commanded by a SEAL One officer on TAD from Rung Sat Zone. He was a pretty-boy bleach-blond California surfer I’ll call Lt.

Adam Henry. I didn’t like him. We were also Joined by one of 116’s PBRs, with its machine guns and 40mm Galling. If we got into trouble, Adam would play John Wayne — he’d shoot the hell out of Charlie, while the STAB would hit the shoreline and extract us in a hurry. Larry’s mission was to sniff and snuff out any VC crossing the river upstream.

As I think about it now, Larry would have been a better choice for the John Wayne role. A dark, lanky Texas boy with eyes like a cobra’s, he’d been the most aggressive of the lieutenants during our predeployment training. It was a foregone conclusion that Larry would be SEAL Team Two’s tiger in Vietnam.

The boats drew abreast of our target area. The STAB moved toward the island at six knots while the PBR and both Mike boats continued on a course upriver. Adam should not have gone along. The growls from their heavy engines and the STAB’S Meres would cover any noise made by our insertion, while the larger boats would also prevent any VC at Juliet Crossing, or serving as lookouts on the riverbank, from seeing us drop off the STAB. We were sixty yards south of the island, and Just east of the tip. I tapped Patches Watson.

He rolled over the far gunwale and dropped into the warm water. Now Ron Rodger went. Then me, Joe Camp, Jim Finley, and last. Eagle Gallagher.

The STAB continued upriver, disappearing into the darkness. Faces half out of the water, we dog-paddled slowly toward the island, moving as quietly as we could. Eight yards off the southern bank I dropped my feet down and was immediately sucked into ooze that covered my boots. I kicked free and dog-paddled again until my knees touched the muddy bottom.

I moved cautiously onto the bank, which was overgrown with vegetation, slid my M16 over my head, and flipped off the safety.

I waited. The lap of the water was interrupted by the sound of the other SEALs as they arrived one by one. I peered. We were all present and accounted for. I gave hand signals: move up the bank; spread into preassigned positions; set up the perimeter,

The drone of the boats was now quite distant. I shivered in the cool evening air. I would never have thought I’d shiver in Vietnam, but I was cold.

We crawled up the bank, moving mere inches at a time along the fifty-yard-wide tip of the island, until we’d set ourselves up in ambush position behind the stump of a downed tree. Four of us — Patches Watson, Camp the radioman, Ron Rodger with his Stoner machine gun, and I — separated into two pairs eight yards apart and scrutinized the southern shore of the river, a spit of sand and mud a hundred and fifty yards away, for any hint of movement. Jim Finley and Eagle Gallagher took rear guard, fifteen yards inland, and covered our butts.

By now I couldn’t hear the support boats at all, and I was suddenly overcome by an incredible sensation of aloneness.

Simultaneously, I was struck by a degree of paranoia I’d never known before. Shit — we were actually out in the jungle with live weapons and people who wanted to kill us. If this was a trap, if Charlie was laying for us — Jesus. I shook myself out of it. I blinked, squeezing my-eyes tight and then releasing, to control the hyper stage into which I was rocketing. I tried breathing-control exercises. They worked. 1 relaxed.

The dial on my watch read 2140. It’d taken us about twenty minutes to crawl through twenty-five yards of jungle scrub and river grass into our ambush position. So far, we’d been on station half an hour. The island had accepted our arrival and was alive again with the sounds of unknown critters that chirped and whistled and buzzed all around us. I found the ambient noise to be loud and decided it was accentuated by my alert condition.

We hadn’t spoken a word since we’d left the STAB. We didn’t have to.

I looked up. The sky was as clear as I’d ever seen it. The stars — millions of them — shone as brightly as if it were a crisp fall night in New England. The air had turned quite cool, and my teeth started to chatter. I forced my jaws together to stop.

How goddamn incongruous. To be cold in the tropical jungle.

I thought about Ev Barrett, and Mud, and pulling low on my last Med cruise. I thought about St. Thomas — rum and Coke and humping that wonderful, big-titted schoolteacher from New Jersey. I thought that maybe tomorrow I’d write a postcard to each of my kids. Souvenirs for them when they learned to read. I remembered how terrified I was the first time the freight train pinned me against the wall in the tunnel to Hauto when I was seven.

Then I heard it. Creak-creak.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I got goose bumps.

Creak-creak. Wood on wood. An oar in an oariock. Creakcreak. ‘’

From the sandspit opposite where we lay, the nose of a small sampan poked into the slow-moving river.

I raised my finger slowly. Wait. He’s 150 yards away. He’ll come closer. Don’t spoil it by going too soon. I held my breath. Not a hair on any of my guys moved, even though four weapons were following the sampan.

He came across slowly, slowly, agonizingly slowly. One Vietnamese in black pajamas, no hat, no visible gun; an Asian gondolier, his single oar stirring a creaky, steady “J” stroke against the Bassac’s sluggish current. He came right at us.

I let the first shot go when he was less than twenty feet away. The others fired so quickly after my round that the poor guy must have thought he was looking down one big 16inch barrel. Whatever he was thinking, it was the last thought he ever had. All of us hit him simultaneously with full 30round mags. But it was Ron Rodger’s Stoner that really did the damage — a hundred and fifty rounds of .223, every twentieth round a tracer.

“Let’s go.” I was up on my feet, scrambling for the bank.

I charged down to grab the VC’s body and empty what I could from the shredded sampan before it sank.

Patches was hot on my tail. Ron Rodger wasn’t far behind.

I sloshed through the water, my feet slicking in the mud.

The sampan began to slip into the water. It became a footrace.

I was swimming now.

“Come on.”

Patches and I reached the sampan first. I pulled myself over the gunwales. The inside of the boat was covered with blood, bone fragments, and shreds of black pajama. But it was empty except for a small cloth pouch, which I grabbed.

“Find him,” I shouted.

Patches dove. I followed. We came up empty. He’d probably been blown backward into the water by the Stoner. Shit.

We were dragging at the sampan when the water around my head started kicking up. From the bank, Joe Camp pointed. “Automatic fire — eleven o’clock.” He dropped to the ground and let a full mag of covering fire go over our heads. “Get your asses back to shore.”

Patches and I swam like hetl, dragging the sampan, and made it to the bank. We scrambled up and over, back into our firing positions, and I dove for the radio. The M16s and the Stoner didn’t have the range we needed. It was time to call in the cavalry — the PBR and Mike boat, which had .50caliber, the .57 recoilless, and mortars.

I grabbed the receiver from Joe Camp- I gave our call sign and coordinates. No answer. Only static. I tried again and again without success.

Eagle Gallagher’s urgent voice cut through the firefight.

“They’re coming from the back side, Mr. Rick.”

Were there VC on the island? 1 wasn’t about to take chances with my men. “Use grenades. Frags and WPs.” WPs were the white phosphorus kind that burned brightly. And God help anyone hit by one.

We took fire for maybe eight or ten minutes — an eternity — while I called and called for the PBR or Mike boat. Finally, one of the STABs showed up. We moved down the bank, shouting for covering fire as we slithered, ducked, and rolled our way through the Jungle underbrush, as VC bullets sliced the leaves just over our heads or dug divots too close for comfort as we scrambled toward the STAB. I jumped for the boat only to discover that there were already three PBR sailors in it, as well as the two-man crew. STABs are only supposed to hold nine. This one now held eleven, and it was heavy.

I waved my squad aboard. The STAB reversed its twin Meres and backed off the island — onto a sandbar. As the sailors fired over our heads. Patches, Finley, and I went over the side, floated the boat clear, reboarded, and hauled ass.

I was furious. That is an understatement. I wanted to kill somebody. “Where’s Henry’s Mike boat? Where’s the PBR?

What are these crewmen doing here?“

A sailor said, “Lieutenant Henry saw a sampan and gave chase. He didn’t think you’d have any problems so he took the two other boats and sent us back for you.”

Christ, he was supposed to be backing my mission up, not chasing VC sampans. If Charlie’d fielded a sizable contingent, Bravo Squad would be hamburger by now, thanks to Adam Henry. Goddamn it to hell. I checked my guys over to make sure we had all our fingers and toes, then looked up to notice we were heading away from Tre Noc, moving farther upriver.

I grabbed a sailor by the flak jacket. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Lieutenant Henry wants you.”

“Hey, my guys are cold and wet. Let’s turn this thing around.”

“No can do, sir.”

I considered the possibilities. Maybe Adam was in trouble and needed us to save his ass. It was unlikely, but not totally impossible. We sat hunkered on the deck and I steamed for fifteen minutes until we reached Henry’s Mike boat and tied up to its onshore side as it chugged steadily up the river. I clambered up and found Henry. “What the hell’s up, Adam?

You in trouble?“

He shook his head. “Nan — there’s an outpost under attack about two clicks from here. I want to go support it.”

“Screw that. I’m gonna take my guys and go home.”

He put a restraining hand on my web-gear suspenders. “No, Dick, I may need you. It’s better if you ride the Mike boat with me. The STAB is too small, and besides, it’s unarmored.”

I removed his hand delicately. “Look, schmuck, it is now almost iwenty-three hundred. My guys made their bones tonight — we got ourselves a VC courier, and we got him good.

Why not let us take our toys and go home. We don’t want to play with you right now.“

“Play?” His baby blues seemed to darken. “What the hell do you think this is, Marcinko — a game?”

“Hey, asshole, the only games that are being played right now are the ones you’re trying to run on me.”

“What the hell you mean by that?”

“I mean that you fuckin‘ left me hanging out there to dry.

You were supposed to be supporting me — not looking for your own goddamn VC to shoot at.“

“If things had really been bad enough, I’d have been there.”

“Really?”

“That’s a roger, Dick, and you know it.”

“I don’t know what you would or wouldn’t do.” I grabbed two handfuls of Henry’s shirt and brought us nose to nose.

“Listen, you dipshit pus-nuts pencil-dicked asshole scumbag, we took automatic weapons fire from two directions- Is that bad enough for you? The STAB you finally sent to snatch us was filled with frigging sight-seeing sailors — and we got stuck on a goddamn sandbar while Charlie made bang-bang at usIs that bad enough for you? I pleaded for covering fire and you were so goddamn far upriver you were out of goddamn radio range. Is that bad enough for you, you pussy?”

I shoved him up against the cockpit bulkhead, popping his back against the gray metal with every other syilabie. “I mean, old pal of mine, just how the fuck do you define ‘bad enough’?” He sagged into a sitting position and just stayed there, his eyes unfocused. I feil like breaking the son of a bitch’s neck. Instead, I retreated to the portion of the deck where my squad now was.

We watched, sodden, cold, and miserable, as Adam ordered the Mike boat into firing position. The incredible high we’d experienced only a few minutes before had totally evaporated. We’d been transformed from warriors into spectators by this insensitive, unproven asshole. He was trying to get himself a kill, but he was doing it at the expense of my men, and I didn’t like that one bit.

To add injury to insult, when he commenced firing, I saw that his red-hot .50-caliber machine gun casings were raining down on my STAB, with its open cockpit and exposed gas tanks. Worse, since the STAB had been moored to the onshore side of the Mike boat, it was being shot al by the bad guys. Mike boats are armored. STABs are fiberglass.

After about five minutes of Henry’s screwups, I’d had enough. “Come on, guys, we’re going home.”

We rolled over the side, unmindful of incoming fire, the Mike boat’s hot .50-caliber casings, and the water plumes made by VC mortar rounds. We jumped into the STAB.

Gallagher hit the starter, Jim Fintey and Patches Watson cut the tether lines, while Joe Camp and Ron Rodger laid down some covering fire.

I grabbed the wheel, peeled away, and put the pedal to the metal. The twin Meres slalomed us easily through the walerspouts of enemy fire. I veered sharply, cut the STAB’S sleek hull around the back of the Mike boat, and headed downriver at top speed. I could see Adam Henry’s face as we sped away.

He was shouting something at me, but it was impossible to hear anything over the roar of the Meres. I saluted him with my middle finger.

The following week. Bravo Squad and I bid a not-so-fond farewell to Tre Noc. Skipper Witham, no fool, realized I was going to kill Henry, or that Hank Mustin was going to have me carted off in chains to Leavenworth.

So it was decided that Marcinko’s Merry Band of Murdering Marauders would move forty kilometers northeast to My Tho.

There, the Navy kept a PBR flotilla on the river. And there, Commodore Witham decreed, safely out of Hank Mustin’s way, I could broaden the horizons of SEAL deployment on the Delta without the temptation to kill any of my fellow American officers with my bare hands in the process-

The senior man at My Tho turned out to be a terrific officer named Toole, a commander, who had never worked with SEALs before but had the good sense to leave me alone, just as long as I gave him results. Toole was an uncommon Navy boss, a lean, mean, caustic, wry curmudgeon whose aggres-siveness was a big bolster for Bravo’s morale at My Tho. He wore olive-drab jungle fatigues instead of an officer’s tan blouse and slacks. He trusted his chiefs. He’d prowl the PBRs and tinker with the .50-caliber guns. He’d actually go out to see what action was like.

Best of all, he didn’t second-guess me or set up parameters that confined us. He realized instinctively that SEALs are unconventional warriors and encouraged me to be as unconventional as I thought prudent and effective. Bravo was responsible for covering a 60-mile section of river, along with its innumerable canals, tributaries, bayous, brooks, streams, creeks, and ditches.

My Tho was more rustic than Tre Noc. The PBR dock was jerry-built — wood planks atop floating 50-gallon oil drums, attached to a pair of flimsy pilings. The offices, shops, and supply lockers were right alongside the river in Butler buildings — Tinkertoy structures of concrete slab and aluminum siding — or Quonset huts. Decidedly unfancy. We did, however, live well. Two blocks from the river was an old European-style hotel — it could have been transplanted from Hemingway’s Paris — where all the Americans slept. There were creaky fans suspended from high ceilings, louvered windows, and French furniture.

By now we’d grown accustomed to Vietnamese cooking, and although there was Western-style food both at the hotel and the Navy installation, we’d visit the innumerable vendors on our way to and from the river each day, tasting and experimenting. In fact, Jim Finley — the “Mayor”—somehow managed within hours of our arrival to slip away and discover the best dozen food hootches. By the time the rest of us found the time to get out and about, he guided us from stall to stall and we were greeted like long-lost family.

We started our patrols slowly, riding the river with the PBRs, talking to the chiefs, learning what Charlie’s routes were, when he crossed the river, where he staged his crossings, and why he was moving. Then came short patrols — night insertions like the one we did out of Tre Noc — and static ambushes. I called those patrols “Mustins” because that’s how Hank had envisaged SEAL deployment — as support for the full spectrum of riverine operations. But I wanted to go beyond Mustins, to “Mar-chinkos.”

“Mar-chinkos” entailed longer patrols — twelve, eighteen, even twenty hours in the Delta — and different tactics. Aggressive tactics. It made sense to me that the closer to the Delta Charlie got, the more alert he became. And why? Because that’s where the PBRs and Mike boats and SEALs were.

But when Charlie was still staging his convoys, three hundred, five hundred, seven hundred meters away from the river, he was relaxed — because he was on his own turf.

I knew instinctively that the earlier I could hit Charlie the more damage I’d cause. But I knew we couldn’t go balls to the wall quite yet. We were still green; still learning the ways of the jungle. So, like the first days of UDT training, I did nothing outrageous. Instead, I built the squad’s confidence with soft hits, patrols that were guaranteed to include VC kills without endangering Bravo. But each time we patrolled, I’d take us farther and farther up the canals. When Bravo was comfortable with the canals, we extended onto the dikes.

We began yards at a time, until we were comfortable moving a kilometer or two. We snatched our first prisoner — Patches Watson and Eagle Gallagher came up out of a bunch of reeds and almost gave the poor asshole a heart attack — and interrogated him before turning him over to the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which I normally referred to as Marvin the ARVN.

After about a month I started pushing the guys more. We’d insert at night, roll off a STAB, swim up a canal, clamber onto a dike or footpath, and set up an ambush three hundred or four hundred yards farther inland than Charlie ever expected us to be. As we became more confident, we moved farther and farther up-country from the river, running the dike trails over which VC couriers carried intelligence, and ambushing sampan convoys as they loaded the goods that had been carried down through Cambodia from Hanoi along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

We learned about intelligence, and what to look for. At first we left some of the VC’s personal stuff behind. Now I realized it was important source material, and we took everything we could get our hands on. Forget all those TV-movie scenes of the grunt who finds the picture of the dead VC’s kids and wife and goes to sentimental pieces as he realizes he’s just killed a fellow human being. Scenes like that are probably written by people who’ve never had shots fired at them in anger.

Fact is, Comrade Victor Charlie wanted us dead, deader, deadest. And if taking a cute snapshot or a letter from a VC corpse somehow helped us in the effort to gel him first, then too bad for Mr. Charlie, Mrs. Charlie, and ail the little Charlies.

1 also used to booby-trap our VC kills. The enemy often booby-trapped their own dead, so we did it to them, too. It made me feel good to hear an explosion after we’d left the area. One less Charlie to shoot at us — maybe more.

This probably sounds as if I were a cold, unfeeling, chilledout dude in Vietnam. Fact is, there’s very little time for introspection on the battlefield. We saw the enemy up close and personal on a daily basis, and we sometimes had to look him in the eyes as we killed him. It gives you a different perspective.

What you learn very quickly is that your men — your unit — are everything. Like a mafioso, you take an oath of blood with your men. You cherish them, nurture them, protect them. You keep their foibles to yourself. You must be completely loyal to them — and they will be the same to you.

I regard my first Vietnam lour as a sort of SpecWar Genesis, in which I was re-created out of the primal mud of the Delta and the purifying heat of our gunfire. In the beginning, I was a green ensign who’d spent his whole life talking about kicking ass and taking names, but had never done it.

Then came the evening and the morning of my First Day — the free-fire island, where I went to create noise and play with my toys.

The evening and the morning of my Second Day was the courier ambush, where 1 learned how to use the water and the land to my advantage, and how to kill my enemy.

The evening and the morning of my Third Day I learned to treasure the fruits of intelligence, and I began to harvest every scrap of paper so we could learn where Charlie’s head was at.

The evening and the morning of my Fourth Day I learned not to set patterns, and so I began to work both day and night patrols, selecting targets of opportunity instead of coming back to the same places again and again.

The evening and the morning of my Fifth Day I began to encourage our support systems to “Be fruitful and multiply.”

And verily, there were choppers and Spookies as well as Mike boats and PBRs, and they were good and they were deadly and they helped me kill my enemies.

The evening and the morning of my Sixth Day I began creating operations in my own image — expanding their range and their ferocity and their potency by weaving scores of disparate strands together. I began listening to Marvin the ARVN’s intelligence as well as our own; I began taking chuhoi — VC defectors — on patrols, watching how they moved on the trails and paying close attention to the way they talked to the locals, or looked for booby traps and hidden bunkers, so I could teach my SEALs how to copy their techniques.

In fact, the VC changed the way I looked at waging war.

Charlie was pretty good at war — I had to be better. So I stole what worked and discarded what didn’t. I revamped things as basic as the way we patrolled: from Charlie, for example, I learned to travel light. By the early spring of 1967 we were carrying one canteen instead of the regulation two, substituting bullets and grenades for the water weight. We took no food — there was no reason to leave garbage behind, and in any case we were never in the field long enough to require rations- We modified our field gear, leaving packs behind in favor of load-bearing vests, into which we punched holes so the pockets would drain both mud and water immediatelyWe took no changes of clothing, or ponchos. We slept in the open, camouflaging ourselves with whatever we had around us. Like the VC, we became guerrillas — living off the land instead of acting like invaders.

The techniques worked. Bravo was undinged, except for a few scrapes, bruises, and minor wounds. No serious casualties; no KlAs. As we became more familiar with the region, our deadly efficiency increased. That made me happy. It made Skipper Toole ecstatic.

And after I had teamed all of these things and was proficient in the art of stalking and killing, it was the evening and the morning of my Seventh Day.

According to the Bible, on the Seventh Day, God rested.

But for SEALs, the evening and the morning of the Seventh Day is the time to go out and annihilate the enemy. The God of SEALs, after all, is Yahweh — the Old Testament God— the tough, harsh, severe, vengeful, eye-for-an-eye desert deity; the God who said, “Go and smite Amaiek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not…”

Let me put it another way: we each have our own personal vision of the Supreme Being. In my mind. God is a UDT master chief petty officer. He sounds just like Ev Barren.

And he doesn’t give time off for good behavior.

The evening and the morning of my Seventh Day fell on May 18,1967, at the mouth of the Mekong Delta, on a thickly jungled piece of real estate called Ilo-Ilo Island.

Chapter 9

By mid-April, Fred Kochey and his Alfa Squad had left Tre Noc and joined me at My Tho. There was enough action for two squads, and Fred, like me, preferred an aggressive style of patrolling. By May we were within a couple of weeks of ending our tour, which meant no more patrols. Instead, our time would be spent packing equipment, some of which would be shipped back with us to Little Creek, while the rest would remain behind in containers for the next SEAL Team Two contingent.

I had mixed emotions about leaving. I considered my tour a success. Bravo had done roughly fifty patrols over our five and a half months in-country. We’d learned how to use the jungle to our advantage. We’d refined our techniques — the unit-integrity theme I’d preached during training had really taken root. Now we could move, think, and fight as one man.

But we hadn’t had a single operation that put everything we’d learned to the test. We’d harass Cbarüe; we’d take prisoners, shoot up sampans, burn his supplies. Sometimes we’d kill him — Bravo Squad had eighteen confirmed VC kills and five probables on the books by the time we left — and I believed the “probable” figure was at the very low end of the scale.

Yet we hadn’t run what I thought of as a major operation — something that really hurt Mr. Charlie bad. That was where llo-IIo Island came in.

I’d been hearing about Ilo-Ilo for months. There was nothing on it from the NILO — Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer — at My Tho, but then Naval Intelligence, which some people believe is an oxymoron, was usually about ninety days old when they finally got around to disseminating it at the squad level. It was always my sense that the Navy never felt intel could be as useful to field units as it was to admirals.

So, while the intel squirrels were great at collecting their factoid nuts, and analyzing what they had, and wrote briefing papers and memos by the ream, they hardly ever sent anything back our way. Which says something about the way the Navy fought wars, even then.

The problem with intelligence-gathering in those days (and to a great extent today as well) is that virtually ail military intelligence collection is geared toward supporting — and therefore reporting about — large units. And yet for a SEAL, even a 100-man company is a major overload if you run into one on a narrow jungle trail.

Despite the fad that the Navy didn’t know about Ilo-Ilo, its name kept cropping up elsewhere. Village chiefs from up and down the river mentioned it. VC prisoners talked about it. Chu-hoi gossiped about it. Marvin the ARVN’s intelligence gophers would chatter about it. Marvin believed it to be a >big VC R&R center, where Charlie would send his guys after they’d been harassing us. The chu-hoi thought it was a staging area for VC strikes north into the Rung Sat Zone, or the northeastern portion of the Mekong Delta. Whatever it was, I felt it was worth a trip to find out.

Ilo-Ilo sat in the mouth of the Delta, where the My Tho River ran into the South China Sea. A nutmeg-shaped island, it lay three-eighths of a mile from either shore. It wasn’t all that large — perhaps half a mile long and a thousand feet wide.

At its western tip was a big canal that ran eastward in a series of S-curves, cutting through some incredibly thick underbrush, until it finally seemed to peter out. On the opposite — easternmost — side, another series of smaller canals ran into the ocean. From the air, they looked like spiderwebs as they snaked north and south in random geometric patterns.

It seemed to me Ilo-Ilo was ideal real estate for a major VC encampment. It had the same trio of prerequisites as a good investment property anywhere in the world: location, location, and location. And best, it was virgin territory: there had never been an American operation there. I took my idea to Commander Toole. He approved a daytime operation. I told Fred Kochey about it, too.

“Sounds like fun. Rick. Mind if I come along for the ride?”

That was fine with me. I liked Kochey. Like me, he was a Pennsylvania boy. Unlike me, he was one of those perpetually calm, unflappable types- If the two of us ran three miles, I’d be sweating buckets when we finished; Kochey, a slightly built guy about six feet tall, would look as cool as when he’d stayted.

He was a methodical, thorough planner. Best of all, he was dependable in combat — in fact, combat was the only time Fred would actually get excited. “Sure — it’ll be fun to have you come play with us if you want. But you gotta bring your own toys.”

Ilo-Ilo was forty miles downriver from My Tho, too long a run for STABs. So early on the morning of May 18, we tied a STAB alongside our Mike boat, piled on as much ammo as we could carry without drowning, and chugged down the river at a steady eight knots.

The day was typical Vietnamese.Mekong Delta spring weather: ninety degrees, 100 percent humidity. In our tigerstripe camouflage and blackened faces we sweltered. The trip down the river took four, seemingly endless, hours. We arrived just before noon to a nasty surprise — huge quantities of Delta mud. As we neared Ilo-Ilo, the Mike boat almost ran aground on a series of sandbars clogging the channel- The problem was silt that had probably traveled all the way from Cambodia. But wherever it had come from, it was a definite bummer. It was impossible to make the head-on approach that had, from the map, appeared to be the most effective way of inserting onto the island.

When in doubt, improvise. So Bravo, Kochey, and I dropped into the STAB, and with the Mike boat chunkachunking offshore, we went round the back to see if there was another way in from the ocean side.

We rounded the southwest tip of the island, feinted a couple of times to confuse anybody who might have been watching, then rolled off the STAB on the offshore side and swam into the biggest of the canals. Even swimming, mud was a factor because the water was loaded with silt. It got worse as we moved forward, chest deep in the canal. The bottom was sticky as hot tar, making our progress slow — and worse, noisy.

The mud went everywhere: pockets, boots, guns, magazines. After an eighth of a mile in the canal we dragged ourselves up onto the bank, set up a defensive perimeter, and spent half an hour cleaning weapons. The silt was so bad we had to disassemble our Ml 6 30-round magazines and rinse the springs and followers clean. There was almost an inch of silt at the bottom of each mag — more than enough to make them totally unusable.

The temperature had risen to about one hundred. The men were already hitching. I could hear Eagle Gallagher muttering to Fred Kochey about crazy Mr. Rick, his screwed-up notions about patrols, and the quality of the mud in the canal. Patches Watson looked skyward and asked the Lord what he’d done to deserve this unhappy fate.

Ron Rodger played the God role: “Because you piss me off, my son,” he said in a booming basso profundo.

I’ve always believed a hitching sailor is a happy sailor, so I decided to make the men ecstatic by leaving the smaller canals. Instead, we’d blaze a trail through the thick, thombush underbrush toward the center of the island. There, I hoped to find the major canal and follow its meandering Scurves westward. If there were any VC on Ilo-Ilo — and I was convinced there were — they’d be adjacent to that main canal.

We moved out to the sounds of rumbling clouds and grumbling SBALs. Patches Watson took the point. After him, Ron Rodger and the Stoner machine gun. Then me, followed by Camp, Finley, Kochey, and Eagle Gallagher. We found a few trails, although they obviously hadn’t been used in some time. Still, we stayed away — no sense running into hostile strangers — and hacked a new path, spacing ourselves at fiveyard intervals, watching carefully for any sign of Mr. Charlie.

It was tough work, and we measured out progress in feet, not yards. The brunt was born by Patches Watson, who had the point. It was he who did the most cutting, chopping with his machete while simultaneously staying alert for trip wires, booby traps, and pungi pits.

Ilo-Ilo was different from any place I’d seen in Vietnam.

The vegetation was more like one of the Virginia or North Carolina coastal islands than Southeast Asian jungle. At the shoreline there were no palm trees; instead we found dense, tough saplings, thorn bushes, and heavy vines that had to be cut with machetes. As we progressed inland, it grew more tropical, with palms, big-leafed jungle plants, and the tall marsh grasses we were accustomed to in the Delta. Just before two P.M., it rained. The coolness was welcome — there was steam coming off us as the water cascaded down for about fifteen minutes, then eased to a drizzle. Finally, it stopped.

We didn’t.

Patches Watson held up his hand. I signaled for a break.

He slid his machete back into its sheath, made his way back up the line to where I hunkered, and sat down heavily, leaning on his CAR-15. His uniform had tripled in weight from the Delta water, rain, and perspiration.

“Mr. Rick?”

“Yo.”

“Screw this shit. I’ve had it.”

“You tired?”

“Tired? I’m bleeping ragged. There’s nothing here.”

“Says you?”

“Says the damn jungle, Mr. Rick — ioud and clear. This op is an Adam Henry goatfuck — we’re gonna come up dry. I can’t see six feet in front of me. Let’s go back to the boat.”

I shook my head. “I love you Patches, but you’re outta here. If you don’t think we’re gonna find anything, you ain’t gonna keep a sharp eye. We need a fresh man on point because there’s VC — somewhere. I can smell it.”

I waved at Camp. “Joe — take another minute, then relieve Patches.”

Camp nodded. We’d just gotten to our feet, and Camp hadn’t gone three meters, when his hand went up, signaling me forward.

I halted the column, then moved ahead to Camp’s position.

Camp pointed. I looked. It was a canal, perhaps ten feet wide.

On the far side was a good-sized bamboo hootch, built on stilts five or six feet off the ground to protect it from the tidal surges. Eureka. We’d hit pay dirt. I waved Patches Watson forward and pointed.

“Holy shit. Well, mud-suck me, Mr. Rick.”

“You said it, I didn’t.”

I gave hand signals. Two men flanked right, three of us took the center, and two flanked left. Moving silently, we slid through the low vegetation, over the bank, and down into the canal, submerged ourselves up to our necks, and dogpaddled across. We lay on our backs on the far side, protected by the natural roll of the four-foot benn. Our weapons were balanced on our chests.

I signaled to Gallagher and Patches. They went up the bank and scrambled toward the hootch. Seconds later they rolled back over the top and dropped into the canal, all excited.

Gallagher was absolutely ebullient: “It’s empty, Mr. Rick — but Charlie was there. He was there. Only a couple hours ago, too. There’s a cooking fire and it’s still warm.”

“Great.” I drew a circle in the air with my index finger.

We pulled ourselves up the bank, put out perimeter guards, and searched the hootch. There were big tins of medical equipment, some paperwork, and a few odds and ends. We took what we could carry and set fire to the rest. I got on the radio to the Mike boat.

“Bravo to Docksider.”

“This is Docksider.”

“We’re hitting pay dirt, so don’t you guys be sunbathing out there.”

“Roger Bravo. What’s your location?”

“We’re moving up the big canal toward the main exit.”

“Roger-roger, Bravo. We’ll be waiting.”

We divvied up the VC booty, stuffing it into the pockets of our fatigues. Then we started moving westward in the canai,.‘ taking it slow and easy. Moving in water was certainly easier than hacking our way through vegetation, but nowhere was it written that Charlie wouldn’t booby-trap canals the way he did Jungle paths, so we kept our eyes open. We moved in a crouch, protecting ourselves from being seen by using the water and the berm, which rose three to four feet, to mask our movements.

We hadn’t gone three hundred yards when we came around a sharp, leftward curve and the strong smell of smoke hit us.

It’s amazing how often in the Delta that would happen: we wouldn’t hear, see, or smell anything until we were right on top of it. It was as if the jungle were divided into rooms separated by invisible walls.

Patches signaled. “Enemy ahead.”

We moved inch by inch until we heard voices, then we crept even slower, keeping the canal bank between us and the sound of Vietnamese.

I slid my nose above the berm line. Not twenty yards away was a large clearing — maybe twenty by twenty-five meters— with three hootches on stilts and a good-sized cooking shed.

In front of the hootches, five VC in shorts and loose, black pajama tops were squatting in front of a fire, chattering tike Boy Scouts, while they watched a pot of something boiling away. Their AK-47s were leaning against the hootches, their sandals were off. Three of them were smoking.

In the distance, I could hear the growl of the Mike boat’s diesels. Charlie could hear it, too- But the sound did not concern him.

There had probably been hundreds of boats chugging past Ilo-Ilo, and never any unwelcome visitors. So Charlie was not worried. He hadn’t set out any recon. It wasn’t necessary:

Charlie knew he could read the Americans tike a book.

I dropped back down, hardly able to keep myself from smiling. We were about to write them a new chapter — with a surprise ending, so far as I was concerned.

Using hand signals I sent the squad on its way, and we spread out into firing positions. The canal took a horseshoe curve around the hootches, which meant two wonderful things for us tactically. First, it kept us out of sight while we took our time flanking the unsuspecting VC. Second, it gave us a natural killing zone because our expanded field of fire would catch the hootch area from three sides instead of straight on.

On my signal, we rolled our M16s and Stoner over the top of the berm and hit them with full automatic fire. It was going nicely when somebody — no one ever owned up to it later— decided to help things along by tossing a frag grenade.

The grenade bounced against a tree trunk and — almost in slow motion — caromed back toward us, bouncing and rolling inexorably closer and closer to our firing positions.

“Oh, shüüit—” Fred Kochey’s voice was loud and clear over the gunfire. “Grenaaaade — down!”

Seven men rolled back and dove underwater as one, chased by the concussion and deadly metal fragments.

I surfaced, coughing, spouting the brackish canal water like a statue. “Everybody okay?”

Nobody had been dinged. We held our fire. Jim Finiey peeked over the top of the canal. “They’re history.”

Patches and Eagle charged up the bank, followed by Kochey, me, and the rest. Patches rolled the bodies, both to see how we’d done and to make sure no one was playing possum.

We’d hit them well, with lots of head shots and upper-torso wounds. We grabbed the weapons. I gave them a quick onceover. They were Chicom AK-47s. I grabbed one and slung it over my shoulder and passed one each to Patches, Gallagher, and Kochey. AKs were rare. Then we searched the area thoroughly, grabbing everything we could find. I was euphoric.

What we’d come upon was exactly what I’d hoped we’d find: a major VC waystation; a pit stop for couriers as they made their way north and south, moving to and from Saigon, or west toward the Cambodian border. It was as big a VC camp as I’d ever seen.

Behind the hootches were a pair of camouflaged bunkers.

We blew them up with grenades. We took the cloth pouches the VC carried instead of wallets, and all the papers we could grab. We found a can of kerosene, splashed it over all the medical supplies and food, then set everything on fire.

We laid the VC in a neat row, so their pals would find them easily. Then we booby-trapped the corpses. April tool, Mr.

Charlie.

We also made a discovery. Outside the hootches were three pairs of what looked like rubber snowshoes, made of old tires and canvas. Ron Rodger found them and brought one of them over to me.

“What the hell’s this?”

I scratched my head. “You got me.”

Kochey fingered the goods. “Looks like a snowshoe.”

Eagle Gallagher nodded. “Mud shoes,” he said. He pointed at the VC corpses. “They don’t generally weigh but seventyfive pounds soaking wet. They wear these and walk on water — keep themselves out of the mud. Us big gringos in our goddamn boots sink like stones. Charlie glides”—he imitated someone ice-skating—“and leaves no tracks.”

Kochey nodded. “Sounds good to me.” He looked around.

“Dick?”

“Sneaky little bastards, aren’t they?” I looked at my watch:

1655. Almost five hours on the ground. “I think we should check out.”

“I don’t think we can carry any more souvenirs.”

“So let’s haul ass.” We formed up and went back into the canal, loaded with booty. We staggered the men — two shooters, then a souvenir carrier. It was time to be extra careful, too, because there was no way Charlie didn’t know he had visitors now.

I looked back at the five corpses. The sorry mothers never knew what the hell had hit them. Good — that’s the way it should be.

A point should be made here about the way Americans tend to regard the act of killing. Like most of my generation, I grew up on Western movies where the hero — Hopalong or Roy or Gene — chivalrously tosses his gun aside after the black-hatted villain runs out of bullets and subdues the bad guy with his bare fists.

That may work on celluloid, but not in real life. In real life you shoot the motherfucker and you kill him dead — whether or not he is armed; whether or not he is going for his gun; whether he looks dangerous or appears benign. That way, you stay alive and your men stay alive. Many of our senior officers do not believe this. They would rather that we got killed than our enemies did. That attitude is stupid and it is wrong.

In Vietnam, I witnessed targe numbers of senior officers who spent most of their time sitting behind desks, putting each other in for medals — and we’re talking Bronze Stars and Silver Stars here — because they rode a PBR or Mike boat once or twice. These were the same men who jumped all over me because my interrogation techniques could get a little rough — I wasn’t above manhandling VC or slapping them around to get information. Or got upset with me because I’d allow my merry marauders to make sausage out of two or three young, innocent-looking, unsuspecting VC. Well, I wasn’t about to worry about whether or not I was killing the VC properly (I wonder what improper killing is) because at least my guys and I were out in the boondocks killing ‘em, not sitting behind some desk back in a cozy bunker stroking our mules.

During the U.S. invasion of Panama, a U.S. Army sergeant waxed some Panamanian civilians—“civilians” who attacked U.S. soldiers at a roadblock with hand grenades. His officers rewarded him for probably saving his comrades’ lives by courtmartialing him. Not only did they destroy morale, but they did the sergeant a huge injustice. Fortunately, he was found innocent. But the chilling effect such actions have on combat troops cannot be underestimated.

Conversely, during the summer of 1990, an Israeli Navy lieutenant in charge of a patrol craft killed four Palestinian terrorists by machine-gunning them in the water after he’d sunk the rubber boat in which they were trying to infiltrate the Israeli coast. He justified his act by explaining that he didn’t know whether or not the Palestinians were concealing hand grenades that might have been used against his craft and his men. The lieutenant was promoted to captain on the spot by the commander of the Israeli Navy. The message sent loud and clear to young Israeli officers was the right one: you will be rewarded for putting the lives of your men above the lives of your enemies.

To me, a Purple Heart is not a badge of honor. To be blunt about it, I’ve always considered them enemy marksmanship medals and I’m happy not to have ever “won” one.

So, my philosophy in battle has always been to kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me and to use whatever it takes. Never did I give Charlie an even break. I shot from ambush. I used superior firepower. I never engaged in handto-hand combat unless there was absolutely no alternative— to me, the combat knife should be a tool, not a weapon. All the whiz-bang, knife-fighting, karate/judo/kung-fu b.s. you see in the Rambo-Jambo shoot-‘em-up movies is just that: bullshit.

The real-life rules of war are simple and effective: stay at arm’s length whenever possible and shoot the shit out of the enemy before he sees you. So the fact that seven of us had just made bloody hamburger out of five undernourished, unsuspecting, unarmed Vietnamese didn’t strike me as ruthless, immoral, or unfair. All my SEALs were still alive; and there were five fewer of the enemy.

We made our way west, using the canal as cover. About five hundred yards from the VC hootches, we hit another score: sampans. There must have been half a dozen of them, rafted together and moored to the bank. There was no sign of life, but we advanced cautiously, three SEALs approaching underwater to flank the VC boats, then coming up close and slipping over the gunwales only after we’d done a thorough check for booby traps.

The sampans were empty. We sank them and moved out as quickly as we could. Not fifty yards down the canal Patches Watson held his hand high. He waved me forward-

“Mr. Rick—”

I saw it. “Jesus.” Across the five-yard width of the canal a trip wire lay suspended, almost as invisible as a single strand of spiderweb. We backed off. “Let’s track it.”

Patches and I headed toward opposite banks. I followed the strand as it led up the berm, through a hedge of thorn bushes, and up to a thick tree trunk, where it was attached to a shaped charge.

The bastards — they were good, I whistled for Eagle Gallagher. Brave’s EOD expert. Slowly, Eagle disarmed the charge, then we all moved forward again. Ten yards up the canal we discovered another series of booby traps. This time, the VC had laid charges in the canal itself and run both trip wires and hand detonators through the heavy overgrowth that ran right down to the water. Goddamn — if we’d come in through the front door, we’d have been chopped to bits. No wonder the VC at the way station weren’t worried.

I was sweating profusely, so I sank back into the canal to cool myself off, taking hold of an overhanging limb to steady myself. Another lesson learned. We’d taken the back door by default. Maybe in the future we should spend more time looking for back doors when we came calling on Mr. Charlie.

Absently, I glanced up at the branch I was grasping so I could shift my band and pull myself forward. Three inches from my right knuckle, a viper’s head rested on the limb, its distinctive fleur-de-lis pattern visible against the dark tree bark.

Oh, shit. Dickie’d had a rough day in the jungle. There’d been a lot of mud. A grenade bounced back at me. I’d almost blown myself up on booby traps. Now, here was a snake that could kill in less than ten seconds.

The viper’s hooded eyes and mine made contact. Mine said,

“You son of a bitch, if you don’t screw with me, I won’t screw with you.”

Slowly, slowly, slowly, I slid deeper into the water, and. -. just… let… my… fingers… slip… away. Two feet downstream, safely out of range, I pointed at the branch.

“Viper — there.”

A chop from Jim Finley’s machete cut the foot-long snake in half. He smilingly offered me the still-moving tenderloin portion. “Hungry, Mr. Rick?”

It took us another two hours to work our way to the mouth of the canal. We could have moved faster, but I was nervous about booby traps — not to mention vipers. Moreover, we were also slowed by the weight of the VC bounty — AKs, medical supplies, documents, notebooks, diaries, and other records.

It was almost evening by the time I radioed the STAB to extract us. We rendezvoused with the Mike boat, climbed aboard, and headed back upriver, exhausted and exhilarated.

We had good cause to be both. We’d spent the entire day on this operation and gone where no Americans had ever gone before.

Bravo’s excursion to Ilo-Ilo Island would be called “the most successful SEAL operation in the Delta” by the U.S.

Navy. For leading it, I won the first of my four Bronze Stars, as well as a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star, from the ARVN.

It had been a long evening and morning of my Seventh Day. We dozed on the way back to My Tho. The wrathful God of SEALs finally allowed his lethal children to rest. I dreamt of warm women and cold beer.

Chapter 10

I arrived back in the States from my first Vietnam tour with mixed emotions. I felt positive about the way my squad had performed. We’d become a totally integrated unit — thinking and acting as one — protecting each other against both the Vietnamese enemy and the American bureaucracy. I was happy that although I’d brought them home with dents and scratches, no one had been seriously wounded.

I was elated that each member of Bravo Squad would receive decorations for what he’d done in Vietnam. I was also happy with my own progress. I’d proved myself in battle — and was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, shortly after my return stateside.

The medals and commendation reports were the outward evidence of something more seminal. I now believed in myself as a leader. My instincts about combat had turned out to be solid and largely reliable. Moreover, I’d been able to discover ways to beat the system we’d been saddled with, or at least make it work in our favor.

On the down side, I was turned off by the high level of mismanagement and addle-brained thinking that seemed to pervade our effort in Vietnam. All too often, we SEALs were sent out to war by small-minded naval officers who hadn’t a clue about our capabilities, or any idea how to use them. So they employed us the same way they employed their regular troops. That may work if you’ve got a battalion of unmotivated grunts. It doesn’t when you’re fielding small, deadly units of highly trained men who can think for themselves and who take pride in showing initiative.

I saw both the best and the worst of my fellow officers in Vietnam. On the plus side, there were guys like Fred Kochey, who’d lead his men to hell and back if there was a chance of intercepting a VC convoy or sinking a bunch of sampansThen there were the others — the cowards, who sent their men to do the things they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do themselves.

And the bureaucrats, who busied themselves in paperwork instead of leading their men into the field, then put themselves in for Silver Stars because they heard the sound of gunfire one day. And the thieves — officers who just plain stole their commendations.

I remember one pus-nuts captain (he called himself Eagle, but he was a real turkey) who stole an enlisted man’s Silver Star — he actually commandeered the bloody medal itself— because Lyndon Johnson was coming to Cam Ranh Bay and he wanted the president to pin it on him.

Had the captain been in combat? Let’s put it this way: he rode in a PBR every six or seven days. The rest of the time he shuffled paper. Had he been shot at? Maybe — once or twice. Not like the enlisted man, a chief who commanded a PBR and who had been in the thick of it for monfhs. But it was the chief who got screwed. Sure, he eventually got his medal, but the president should have pinned it on him, not on the tunic of some self-important turd.

That kind of behavior when it came to medals was typicalI’d almost been court-martialed by Hank Mustin because of Bravo Squad’s first night out on the river — the night I called in a Spooky, we shot up the free-fire island, and came home without a single round of ammo left in our weapons. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the brig: it turned out that by dumb luck, Bravo had interrupted what Navy Intelligence later described as a major North Vietnamese crossing.

We’d blundered into the middle of it, and by sheer chance we’d given the enemy a royal screwing.

Guess who got himself put in for a Bronze Star, for what now was called the first successful SEAL operation in the Delta?

Lieutenant Commander Hank Mustin did. Never mind that his contribution to the evening’s festivities had been less than zero. So. when I got back to the States early in June, I took myself over to the Awards Section at the main Navy building in Washington, D.C., and complained about it.

I don’t know whether or not they ever pulled Mustin’s Bronze Slar — all I wanted was to go on record with my personal objection. But one thing was sure: from the looks I got, no ensign had ever come in to object about a lieutenant commander’s medal before.

In Vietnam, I’d developed a reputation as a renegade, a maverick, a loner. Some of it was deserved — I’ve always had a hard time taking orders from people I don’t respect, and I let them know it. My fitreps — fitness reports — from 1967 reflect my iconoclast’s attitude. I was judged “Outstanding—

One out of 100“ in such areas as Imagination, Industry, Initiative, Force (”the positive and enthusiastic manner in which he fulfills his responsibilities“), and Professional Knowledge.

But I was rated only “Exceptional” in the areas of Reliability, Personal Behavior, and Cooperation.

Now, “Exceptional” may sound good, but — as I was told at the time — it doesn’t help smooth the old career track very much. And the areas in which I was graded lowest were those areas that rankled my superiors the most. My personal behavior was aggressive and abrasive. I swore like a sailor. I wasn’t above using my hands on people if they pissed me off.

I was cooperative when I believed it would do my men some good. but I wasn’t shy about telling people to screw off, no matter how many stripes they wore on their sleeves. And I was reliable in the following order: to my squad, to my platoon, and to SEAL Team Two. Those were my priorities.

Outsiders were on their own, so far as I was concerned.

So those fitreps were an honest reflection of who I was in those days. As an enlisted man, I’d hated the bureaucracy but wasn’t able to do much about it. That’s why I’d always wanted to become a chief. So far as I was concerned, chiefs, not officers, ran the Navy. That’s why I told the captain who’d wanted me to go to OCS I’d rather be a chief in the Teams than an admiral. Still, as an ensign, I’d hoped I could change the system — move it just an iota. I discovered differently.

Indeed, as an ensign I was subject to even more bean counters and paper pushers than I had been faced with as an enlisted man. As a UDT sailor, I had Chief Barrett to protect me from officers’ stupidity. As an officer, I had to deal with my colleagues’ chronic assholia on a daily — even hourly— basis.

In the field, for example, we’d be out for two, even three days at a time on patrol, and no one in Bravo would complain.

But it seemed whenever we had to make a trip to the local personnel command center for something or other, the foureyed, smarmy apparatchiks who manned the desks would shunt me or my men off to the side while they took their scheduled coffee break, and God help you if you asked for ten extra seconds of their time.

Now, Bravo was a combat unit — and we looked the part.

I grew to resent the smirks and sneering that greeted us when we walked into some office without pressed fatigues, or flawlessly rolled shirtsleeves. And more than once I got into trouble for pulling some officious son of a bitch over the counter by his lapels and ordering him to answer my sailor’s damn question, or to help us fill out the goddamn forms — right now this minute — or suffer broken bones or worse.

Then there was the caste system. At one point early in 1967, Patches Watson and I were up in Saigon chasing down some gear, and we decided it would be nice to grab ourselves a real American steak and a cold brew or two. So up we marched to the closest eating facility — it turned out to be an Officers’ Club — and walked in the door.

There was an MP on duty. He looked at my ensign’s tabs and nodded. But he put a hand on Patches’ chest. That was a dangerous thing to do.

“Sorry, sir,” he said to me, “officers only.”

I grabbed Patches before he did bodily harm. Then we went out the door and around the comer. We were wearing green fatigues and Marine Corps cover, so I took my ensign’s bars, put one vertically in the center of my cap and one on Patches’ cap, just like Marine lieutenants wear their bars. Then we walked back inside, threw the MP a salute, and had our steaks.

Screw the regulations: I’ve always felt if a man’s good enough to die with, then he should be good enough to eat with. Many of my fellow officers, however, feel differently.

That’s their prerogative. Just don’t ask me to serve with them.

I may not have been able to deal with the bureaucracy, but it certainly dealt with me. Late in June 1967, just two weeks after I got home, I was assigned to go on a public relations tour. SEALs always had been a top-secret unit. In Vietnam, we didn’t even wear name patches. Instead, we were given numbers — mine was 635. Now, all of a gudden, the Navy decided it wanted to publicize its own Special Forces troops.

We were given no reason for the abrupt about-face, although scuttlebutt had it that the CNO was sick and tired of reading about the Army’s Green Berets- Whatever the cause, I was detailed to a PR tour, explaining what SEALs were, how we operated, and what we’d done in Vietnam. The high point was a trip to New York City, where I gave newspaper interviews and demonstrated SEAL weapons aboard a ship in New York harbor and the next morning found my name and my picture in the New York Daily News. The writer, columnist Sidney Fields, said I had “Hollywood good looks.” (I always thought Fields should have won a Pulitzer for that column.)

One bit of fallout to my fifteen minutes of stardom was— five months later — finding my name on the cover of Male magazine. I couldn’t believe what I read when I opened it up. It was an atrociously written piece of fiction that had me jumping out of a plane at twenty-five thousand feet above the Mekong Delta carrying a 57mm recoilless rifle! The headline read: “Lt- ‘Demo Dick’ Mardnko — the Navy’s Deadliest Viet Nam Shark-Man.” The article’s author had never interviewed me. He purloined some of his material from the New York Daily News profile — and must have made up the rest.

The ripples from my publicity tour, incidentally, lasted longer than I expected. First, after the Male piece came out, no one called me Mr. Rick anymore. I was either Demo or Dick or Demo Dick. The second afterlife 1 only discovered much later. It turned out that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese read Male magazine, too.

When I returned to Little Creek, I convinced SEAL Team Two’s commander, Squirrelly Earley, to assign me a second stint in Vietnam. As a lieutenant, junior grade, I was eligible to command my own platoon. I’d been a junior-Junior ensign the first time around, and although Fred Kochey had given me free rein most of the time, I hadn’i been able to get as down and dirty as I’d wanted. Moreover, I believed that if I was given a full platoon, I could use the larger, 14-man unit to push the parameters of Navy SpecWar further than they’d ever been pushed before — although I certainly didn’t say that to anyone in the command structure.

It took me about two weeks of constant lobbying, but after some requisite squirreling, Skipper Earley finally gave me the Eighth Platoon. I thought of it as an early Christmas present — sort of like electric trains for adults.

My desire for a second combat lour did not go over well on the home front. Between SEAL training, my six-month stint in Vietnam > plus a three-week extension at Binh Thuy to help indoctrinate the new SEALs and my public-relations tour, I’d been gone almost a full year. Now I was about to go out again and who knew when I’d be back. I was a stranger to my kids, and to my wife. But the fact was, I wanted to go, I was used to getting what I wanted, and for better or worse, Kathy had signed on as a Navy wife.

I’m sure it was tough on her, but she was no different from thousands of other Navy wives who lived within the one hundred square miles or so that made up Virginia Beach and Norfolk. Every family sending someone overseas had to put up with separation and inconvenience. ‘

Besides, our male-female roles were much more well defined in the late sixties than they are today. Back then, Kathy’s job was taking care of the kids; mine was taking care of the guys. I’d discovered in the field that when you’re crawling through a rice paddy in the middle of the night surrounded by people who want to kill you, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about home and hearth. In fact, you don’t spend any time at all thinking about those things — because if you don’t concentrate on killing the enemy, he will kill you first. So far as I was concerned back then, my home life was less important than my job. Period. I realize that to say those things today may sound unfeeling, callous, and unenlightened. Well, maybe I was unfeeling, callous, and unenlightened. But that’s the way most of us SEALs behaved. And in truth, I felt closer to the men with whom I served than I did to my wife and kids. We’d been through more together than most husbands and wives go through in a lifetime,

I set about training Eighth Platoon with a vengeance. I was determined to hit the ground running when we got to Vietnam, and I wanted to prepare the men for what they’d find.

I pushed them to the limit. I took them to Panama so they’d get used to working in a tropical climate, letting the Army’s Latin American Special Forces trainers do their “De hungle ees your frien‘ ” number. Then I volunteered my platoon as the aggressor force during some Green Beret training sessions. I was gratified to see that we knocked the crap out of the Army. We played ail kinds of head games on them: snuck up at night and tied them up in their hammocks. Stole their food and weapons. Took their wallets out of their fatigues and wrote nasty letters to their wives and sweethearts. A couple of Special Forces officers accused us of not playing fair.

“Tell that to the VC when you’re sitting on the Cambodian border,” I answered. “Just walk into the jungle with your fingers crossed and shout ‘fmnsies.’ They’ll pay attention.

They just love to play fair. Every VC I’ve ever killed carried a leather-bound copy of the Marquis of Queensbery rules right next to his picture of Ho Chi Minh.“

Rules? I broke a lot of them during training. But I was more concerned about making the situation realistic for the men than I was about not bruising some officer’s ego. Despite regulations, for example, I emphasized live-fire sessions that simulated the sorts of situations I’d encountered in Vietnam, not the safe, easy exercises that don’t prepare you to get shot at. When we walked the trails at Camp Pickett or Fort A.P.

Hill, we did so with our weapons locked and loaded — just tike walking the trails in Vietnam. I remembered how badly Second Platoon had done firing at towed targets, so we spent weeks practicing, until we could hit what we aimed at — day or night. We worked on infiltration and extraction techniques over and over, until we could move quickly and quietly into an ambush, because I’d discovered under fire that those were the times a unit was most vulnerable.

I taught the men of Eighth Platoon to hone their instincts, and to react instantly. “Never assume anything,” I kept saying. “Not even when you feel most safe and secure.”

I preached unit integrity endlessly. And we practiced what I preached. We ate and drank and partied as a group. We’d bust up bars in the Virginia Beach area, and when we’d finished taking on all comers, we’d set about demolishing each other. It was an unconventional nte of initiation for these fourteen men, who’d trained as warriors but — with a couple of exceptions — hadn’t been bloodied yet in battle. And the way I went about preparing them would stay with me: I’d use it again when I commanded SEAL Team Two, and I’d use it to fuse SEAL Team Six as well.

What I did back in 1967 I did by the seat of my pants. But my instincts were good. The endless contact got the platoon thinking as a unit. Each roan became comfortable with the others, while the rough edges and annoying habits were worn away by the day-in, day-out rubbing of bodies and personalities. We began to think like a family; to put the group’s needs above our own personal desires.

Drinking was an important element of the fusion process.

It was more than just aimless, macho-bullshit partying, or frat-house chugalugging. I’ve always been a believer in the phrase in vino ventas. Five or six hours of hard partying after a 12-hour day of rough training allowed me to see how my guys would act when they were wrecked, almost out of control and weird — and how well they’d do the next morning, when they were nursing throbbing heads and bloodshot eyes — but still had to swim six or seven miles, run ten, or shoot to qualify.

Fact is, you can tell a tot about a man by the way he handles his alcohol.

The bar time was a social accelerator, too. The more they drank together, the more they had then- backs up against each other and took on the world, the closer they bonded. I’ve never believed a man should have to drink alcohol to prove himself, but I do believe that a unit as small and as tightly knit as a SEAL platoon should party together on a regular — even a nightly — basis, to achieve the kind of fusion only after-hours camaraderie can develop. This unique form of unit-integrity development worked. By late November, I had fourteen tough motherfuckers; men who would — and did— drink each other’s piss, who I was certain would hunt and kill with the best of them.

It was a first-class group that set out in early December 1967 for a two-week odyssey that would end at Bmh Thuy, Republic of Vietnam. We stopped in California for a few days of R&R, and I knew that the platoon’s training was complete when we rode down to Tijuana for two solid days of partying, and most of the men chose to infiltrate their way back to the States instead of coming through the normal border crossings.

My number two was Lieutenant (j.g.) Frank G. Boyce, aka Gordy, a little fireplug of a guy. Gordy was a real pocket rocket: arrogant, intense, cantankerous, mouthy — everything I liked in a man. He was a reserve officer, younger than I, who came from old New England money — his father was a pal of Ellsworth Bunker’s, the tall, white-haired, patrician American ambassador to Vietnam. But Gordy never let the wealth or the background bother him. In fact, Gordy was so crazy he was freaky. He didn’t drink, for example. But he could get as absolutely shit-faced on tap water or Coca-Cola as if he’d had a case of beer. He was an incontrovertible walking, one-man frat party.

Then there was Harry Humphries. Harry was a fellow Jersey boy, a big, strapping, dark-haired mick lad of six feet and two hundred pounds. Best of all, he was a real renegade. He came from a wealthy Irish family in Jersey City and had gone to Rutgers. But college life hadn’t provided enough excitement, so he’d enlisted in the Navy and gone through UDT training. When I first knew him, he was in the Fourth Platoon of UDT Team 22. By the time I’d done my first tour in Vietnam and come home, Harry’s hitch had expired. He was back in Jersey City, dragooned into the family fat-processing business by his mother. To me, rendering lard seemed like a waste of his real talents.

Still, the conditions under which he was wasting away were plush. He’d traded enlisted-man’s housing for the Humphries family compound, a square block of Jersey City surrounded by a ten-foot wall. Inside, behind wrought-iron gates — kind of like the estate in The Godfather — were seven almost identical red-brick houses. Hany’d been given one, where he lived with his wife, Pat, a former model whom he’d met on St.

Thomas, and one young child. Cushy.

Jersey City wasn’t too far from New Bmnswick, so on a trip to see my own in-laws I dropped in on the Humphries household. Harry and I went out for a couple of cold ones and got caught up.

After a few beers, Harry let me know he was bored processing lard and suet. “I wish I’d stayed in the Teams, Dick.

By now I’d have been deployed to Vietnam like you.“

I played it cool. I told Harry how much fun I’d had on my first tour. I told him what Bravo had done and what games we’d been able to play. “I’m gonna go back, too. Take my own platoon.”

“No shit. That’s great, Dick.”

“Great? Hell, Har, it’s gonna be a vacation. Excitement, fun. Life in the mud. Get shot at. Shoot Japs. Good shit.”

Humphries held his glass in front of his nose and looked through the beer into the bar mirror. I knew what he was thinking. I set the hook. “You’re right — too bad you left. We could have had some real fun together.”

He nodded. “That’s a roger.” He sipped his beer. “Y’know, I haven’t been gone that long — I could make up my quals easily, if you could get me into SEALs.”

“Why the hell would you want to trade what you got for an enlisted-man’s billet?”

“Cause I’m in the goddamn fat-processing business, Dick, and I don’t wanna be.”

I put my beer on the bar, “Tell you what — you want to reenlist, I can probably get you into SEALs. You’re parachute and dive qualified. The rest of it we can do in a couple of months.”

He thought about that for a few minutes. A self-satisfied smile crept across his face. “You know Pat’s gonna kill me,” he said.

“Nah.”

“Wanna bet? She loves the fact I’m in business. She loves the compound — especially now that she’s pregnant with our second baby. We’ve got everything we want — and what’s she gonna get in Virginia Beach — a tract house? A mobile home?”

“She’ll get used to it.”

“Wrong. She may do it, but she’ll never get used to it.”

He sipped at his beer. “And my family’s gonna shit when they learn I wanna quit.”

I hit him on the shoulder. Hard. “Quit?”

“The business.”

I hit him again. “Screw the business. When you’re forty, you can do business. You’re what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven years old? Have some fun. Hop and pop. Shoot and loot.

Then — then you come back, and you wear gray flannel suits for the rest of your life, and nobody argues with you.“

I drained my beer, called for another round, and offered him the rim of my glass. “Come on, Harry — here’s to the reason you joined the Teams in the first place: to be a hunter.”

I didn’t have to do much convincing because Harry’d made up his own mind long before we went out for those beers.

But you couldn’t have convinced his wife or mother that his reenlistment wasn’t completely and totally my fault. It was the elder Mrs. Humphries who was most upset. By the time Harry and Pat moved south to Virginia Beach, Pat’d had the new baby. Harry’s mom came with them to take care of the infant while they found a place to live (and yes, they ended up in tract housing).

The last time I saw her, she shook a dirty diaper in my face and screamed like a wrinkled Irish banshee. “Damn you, damn you to hell, Richard Marcinko. You got my boy to reenlist, and now you’re taking him to Vietnam, where he could get killed, and you’re leaving us holding these!” I looked at Harry, and the relieved smile in his eyes told me, “Better her than us.”

My corpsman was Doc Nixon. He was a SEAL Two plank owner — one of the original East Coast SEALs. His first name was Guy and his middle name was Richard, but I can’t remember anyone ever calling him anything but Doc. He was a brooding, blue-eyed warrior. A real slave to his dick, too — a dangerous man with the women.

Number one Stoner man was Ron Rodger, who knew what to expect from me because he’d been part of Bravo Squad on my previous tour. Eagle Gatlagher and Patches Watson were also going back to Vietnam, but they’d been assigned to Seventh Platoon this time. Rodger, however, got to come with me. That made me happy- The son of a bitch was a good fighter. His punches still snapped when he hit you — and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do if asked.

Then there was Louis Kucinski — another SEAL Two plank owner. I called him Hoss, or Ski. He was an archetypal, big, jug-eared Polack bosun’s mate; strong, and silent. His face was as rough and pockmarked as if it had just been sandblasted. And smart — Hoss never had to be told anything twice. Seldom, in fact, did Hoss have to be told anything even once.

Kucinski was married to a beautiful, long-haired tiny mosquito of a woman named Tiger, who loved him so utterly and completely she would try to beat the crap out of him regularly when they’d had a few beers. She’d flail away, and he’d just laugh and laugh and pick her up and kiss the hell out of her.

Frank Scollise was a short, asthmatically thin chain-smoker from Blacksburg, Virginia, a hardscrabble two-horse town in the Appalachian foothills about twenty-five miles due west of Roanoke. He was our mountain man — the hunter who made sure we had squirrel or venison to eat every time we went on maneuvers at Camp Pickett or Fort A.P. Hill, and he brewed our morning coffee with both eggshell and a dirty sock in the pot. He was a tiny guy — no more than 140 pounds or so soaking wet — with a heavy beard that needed shaving two or three times a day. In fact, he looked like a miner because no matter how many tiroes we’d throw him in the shower or whatever body of water we happened to be around, he’d still have a gray, sooty pall to his skin. You could leave him in the sun for weeks and he’d still be sickly looking.

I called him Slow Frank because that’s the way he moved — lackadaisical. Never so fast that he’d cause any breeze in his wake. He was an old-fashioned sailor. He usually kept bourbon in his canteen, and an unaltered cigarette always hung from the comer of his mouth. Scollise was subject to a constant, jarring smoker’s cough that he somehow managed to muffle whenever we were out on patrol. He hated swimming, but I couldn’t have wanted a better man with a blowtorch — or a rifle.

Freddie Toothman was a Panamanian, a dark-skinned, easygoing, Spanish-speaking giant of a guy who turned out to be gifted at working with the Vietnamese. Maybe it was the similarity of temperament, maybe it was the fun of staging anti-VC hits. Whatever the case, he found true happiness leading raids staged by the PRU, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units made up of VC defectors, as part of the Phoenix program.

Number two Stoner man Clarence Risher was the platoon’s James Dean. A lanky, curly-haired young rebel with a kind of sloe-eyed charm, he’d grown up on a series of military bases where his father, a Marine lieutenant colonel, had served. Risher was the youngest man in the platoon — not chronologically, but in the way he behaved. He was quiet and moody and given to petulance when he didn’t get what he wanted- He was mischievous, but not in the roughhouse way most of the old guys from the UDT teams were. Frank Scolüse or Ron Rodger, for example, would throw you up against a wall and pound the shit out of you when they wanted to have some fun. Risher was more into verbal stuff — the adolescent give-and-take of the schoolyard that always seemed to degenerate into “I dare you” and “I double-dare you.”

I always felt that SEALs shouldn’t be into that sort of juvenile game, and it concerned me. What worried me about Risher came through most clearly when he drank. He was a happy drunk. But after a few beers he’d always seem to drift into a monologue about Colonel Daddy. After a while it got like a soap opera. He’d joined the Navy because Daddy was a Marine. He was an enlisted man because Daddy’d somehow convinced him he wasn’t good enough to become an officer.

He’d become a SEAL because it was the best way he could show Daddy that he was a man, too.

Just before we left for Vietnam, Risher got himself married.

Not because he was desperately in love, or because he was afraid of losing the girl. He did it because somehow he felt it was the thing to do. But juvenile or not, Risher was also talented with the Stoner machine gun. He was big — over six feet — and strong—190 pounds or so — and he could carry almost half his weight in ammo. The kid may have been an immature pain in the butt, but he always pulled his share.

Dennis Drady was another old-time dirtbag. He was the platoon’s resident yenta — the mother-hen pain in the ass— who habitually nagged us until we’d beat the crap out of him.

“Did you bring enough ammo?” he’d ask Hoss. “Did you remember to clean the machine guns this morning?” he’d badger Ron Rodger or Clarence Risher. “Did you get fresh intel?” he’d query me.

Drady was a little guy whose long nose, smail, dark eyes, big, ratlike front teeth, and squished face gave him the ferretlike look of a malevolent rodent. The similarity was reinforced by mousy-brown straight hair, and his quick, almost Jumpy movements.

I kept repressing the urge to strangle him because he really was a nudge. On the other hand, without Dennis, we’d probably have forgotten our heads. He had a good brain for details.

He was a gifted and talented point man. And as for being a yenta, when we found ourselves thirty or forty clicks from friendly forces and discovered that we’d forgotten extra firing pins for the AK-47s, or we’d lost our roll of trip wire, it was most often Drady who’d reach into his pocket with a selfsatisfied smirk, come up with the missing item, and tell me,

“You mean you didn’t bring one of these, too, sir?9‘ He may have pronounced it ”sir,“ but he was spelling it ”cur.“ I loved it when he did that.

There were fourteen of us in all — each man better than the next — and the platoon’s stats showed it. We arrived at Binh Thuy on December 17, 1967; we left on June 20,1968. In the six months between, we conducted 107 combat patrols. We killed 165 VC that we could confirm, plus another 60 or so probables. We captured just under 100 Viet Cong, destroyed five tons of their rice and eleven tons of their medicine, grabbed bunches of weapons, grenades, explosives, and other lethal goodies, sank scores of sampans, and blew up more hootches, bunkers, and canal blockades than I care to remember.

We didn’t do it by sitting on our butts in static ambushes either. That was the passive tactic Hank Mustin had devised on my first tour. And the surfer-coot West Coast SEALs from Team One sitting up in the Rung Sat Zone were still dutifully going out every night and hunkenng down in the jungle, waiting for the VC to come along — and regularly getting themselves killed in large numbers as they did so.

That was the crux of the problem: the SEAL role in Vietnam had been formulated, designed, and was under the direction of non-SEALs. That was wrong. Vietnam was the first war in which SEALs fought. All the things we’d been trained to do, we were not being allowed to do. Why? The simple answer was because we were being commanded by officers who’d trained as ship drivers, aviators, or nuclear submariners, not as mean, iean, bad-ass jungle fighters. What we needed was brass-balled warriors. What we got was pus-nuts bureaucrats.

They thought of war in the conventional way, as a static affair in which the lines don’t shift very much. They thought of Vietnam as if it were Korea, or Europe in World War II — a war in which one side attacks the other, territory is taken, and the war is won. They had no concept of guerrilla operations; of wars being won or lost on the squad level. Worst of all, they wanted SEALs to be passive.

Not me. I wanted to go fucking hunting.