Seal Team Seven

Foreword

Created by Presidential order in 1962, the U.S. Navy SEAL (SEa-Air-Land) Teams are today among the foremost elite special-operations forces in the world. During the war in Vietnam there were two Teams, SEAL One and SEAL Two, each composed of a number of fourteen-man platoons, the basic SEAL operational element.

During the 1980s, the Reagan Administration recognized that the changing face of modern warfare demanded a greater emphasis on special forces and covert operations, and the Teams were expanded accordingly. By 1990, the number of Teams had grown to seven. SEAL Teams One, Three, and Five were headquartered at Coronado, California, under the auspices of Naval Special Warfare Group One, for deployment to the Pacific and the Far East. SEAL Teams Two, Four, and Eight were located at Little Creek, Virginia, under NAVSPECWARGRU-Two for deployment to the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. SEAL Six, commissioned in November 1980 as the Navy's covert anti-terrorist unit, was listed under NAVSPECWARGRU-Two for administrative purposes only; in practice it answered directly to the U.S. Special Operations Command — which includes the Army's Delta Force and the Air Force's First and Seventh Special Operations Squadrons — and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For reasons of both security and politics, the SEALs' TO undergoes periodic revision. As of this date and to the best of the author's knowledge, however, SEAL Team Seven is completely fictitious. It was the author's decision to employ a fictional unit in order to show as many of the missions and activities of modern SEALs as possible, including operations that in real life might have been undertaken by Group One, Group Two, or SEAL Six.

Keith Douglass

August 1993