Combat Swimmer (27 page)

Briggs welcomed me and apologized for dragging me across the country to go through the interview; he said he'd promised Lyons he would touch all the bases. We had a short conversation, which would probably have been even shorter if he hadn't felt bad about me being there in the first place. He asked me about my career, I gave him a synopsis, he asked how I got my Silver Star, I said something about being stupid but lucky, he laughed and said being lucky was better than being good. The interview ended, and Briggs said I'd receive my orders in a few days.

Maynard took me to the airport to catch an afternoon flight back to San Diego, and I got to my farewell party at Irish's house only two hours late.

 

I checked out of Special Warfare Group One on June 10 and hit the road to Norfolk. A few days before that, Dick had called to say he knew what had happened in Norfolk. Very nicely, he told me I shouldn't sell my house in San Diego (I hadn't intended to) or move Becky and the kids. (I hadn't intended to move anyone just yet; Kevin was staying to attend San Diego State University, while Becky and Anne would follow as soon as Becky got our house rented.) I thanked him appropriately for his interest in my welfare and said I'd see him about June 17.

Stopping only for food, gas, and sleep, I drove straight through from San Diego to the Joint Headquarters. There, I heard that Six was composed of good people and Dick had done a great job . . . But it was time for him to go. As one Army colonel put it, “Dick took the hill—now it's time for someone to come in and solidify the position.” As I learned later, more than half the hill remained to be taken.

I arrived at the gate outside the SEAL Six headquarters at about 1600 on Friday, June 17, 1983. Lieutenant Commander Pete Stevens, the Team's XO, brought me inside and introduced me to a few people. Men I'd worked with before came by the office and welcomed me. My old shipmates said they were really glad to see me. But Pete was the gladdest of all, it seemed. I found out why the next day; meanwhile, though, it turned out I had a party to attend, at a local watering hole. Dick had called and was sending his car to get Pete and me.

In a few minutes, Pete and I were in a gray Mercedes sedan, equipped with all the accoutrements of a police car, on our way to Virginia Beach. The party was in full swing, and the troops were anxious to meet me. Seems Dick had told them a lot about me and the men wanted to see for themselves.

At the bar, we found Dick ensconced in a rear booth with a group of longhaired men. He welcomed me aboard the command and told someone to get me a drink. I had a beer and looked around. Besides Dick, I recognized only Duke Leonard and one other young officer, whom I'd known from a distance when he was an enlisted man in UDT-21. Duke had been a young seaman in SEAL Team Two when I left in 1968. Now he was a lieutenant and one of the assault team leaders at Six.

It was an interesting evening, a good opportunity to meet some of the men in Six and to ask and answer questions. A few of the men made some insubordinate comments but I blamed that on the booze. Also, except for a few minutes before I relieved him, it proved to be the only “turnover” I was to have with Dick.

The next day Pete told me he'd about had it working for Marcinko. He'd tried to insert some discipline and integrity into the command, only to have Dick cut him off at the knees. Pete said Dick ran the place in a libertine style: anything the troops wanted was okay by him, and he routinely misled his superiors in the chain of command under the guise of OPSEC. If the officers attempted to assert themselves, Dick backed the enlisted. Pete went on: Dick insisted upon everyone drinking with him whenever he wanted and as long as he wanted. Pete was concerned about the readiness of the command; on exercises they seldom finished the entire scenario because as soon as things got tough, Dick would step in, abort the exercise, and take the troops drinking.

I listened but probably didn't hear as well as I should have. I knew Pete had extremely high operational standards. And I also knew exercises were meant to uncover flaws in training and tactics. Besides, I'd just come from the operational commander's headquarters, where everyone told me how great the command was in the field.

I should have paid more attention to Pete.

On Monday, June 20, 1983, I arrived at the command to begin the turnover and learned that Dick had left for Europe on Saturday, taking an officer and three enlisted with him, ostensibly to visit a counterpart unit in Italy for some training and familiarization.

Though I figured I didn't need Dick, I had no idea why he hadn't told me he was going. Maybe it had something to do with the real purpose of the trip—as I later learned, a last attempt to keep me from taking over. Vice Admiral Lyons was finishing up a Second Fleet exercise in Northern Europe, so Dick and the troops met him in Germany and provided him bodyguard services while he was out bar-hopping on liberty. Dick and his guys were all illegally carrying concealed weapons, and to make matters worse, Dick imposed upon a German “brother” unit to help by keeping them out of jail if they were caught.

Apparently Dick figured his services would give him some more chips with Lyons, so that when he took over OP-06 he would retain Dick and send me away to some cushy job. A couple of years later, the commander of the German unit told me it was one of the most distasteful things he'd ever had to do; he was embarrassed for Six. Two of the three men who accompanied Dick also told me they were embarrassed at being used in this way and embarrassed by how Dick had treated me. In fact, I heard the latter comment from about 99 percent of the troops during the three years I was in command.

On June 22, Maynard asked me to come see him and asked how things were going. I said, “Not bad.” I figured I owed some loyalty to my new command. I wasn't going to go into the details of the previous Friday night because my first day at the command convinced me that the behavior I saw then wasn't a fair sample of the command. I told Maynard there was nothing I couldn't handle. All the men needed was some good leadership and adult supervision, and I could provide both. We did, however, discuss the events that transpired after I left the bar.

 

After Pete and I left, Dick had told his driver to drive him around Virginia Beach. At a stoplight, they rear-ended another car, driven by a “little old lady.” The accident did considerable damage to both cars, but fortunately no one was hurt. Dick had his car spirited off to a local Mercedes dealer for repairs.

Pete and I learned about the accident at the same time Monday morning. Normally the duty officer would have notified Pete at once, and Pete would have sent a standard SITREP—situation report—to the chain of command. In the military, the rule is clear and uncompromising: you report such events immediately, so the hierarchy doesn't hear about them from the news media. But Dick had ordered the duty officer to notify only the operations officer, Lieutenant Bill Davis, and specifically
not
to tell the XO or me. And he'd told the OPSO not to send any reports or tell anyone, including Pete and me. But Bill Davis, being a good officer, found he couldn't follow such an order; he came in first thing Monday and told Pete, who immediately sent the required reports and initiated an investigation.

Now Maynard told me that Vice Admiral Briggs had ordered him to take over that investigation. Apparently Briggs was angry that Dick had used one of the four Mercedeses “owned” by Six to go to the watering hole. Some background about these cars: Claiming that they were needed for operations, Dick had used “procurement” money to buy them in Germany, despite being told not to do so by both his operational and his administrative commanders. Then he shipped the cars to the U.S. in a “mission” C-141. Both chains of command investigated the incident but since no one knew what else to do with the American taxpayers' new vehicles, Six was allowed to retain them, and Dick was told not to do anything like that again. Actually, the purchase really was a good idea. All four vehicles were police configured, and two were off-road “Jeep” types that proved to be very useful in later mission planning. The real problem was, Dick used one of them, a gray sedan, as a personal vehicle, although Maynard told him not to. He argued that the command's high alert status required him to have an appropriately equipped vehicle with him at all times. Again, the argument had merit but he never took the time to send a proper request through the chain of command to CNO to get a waiver. And Maynard was in the hot seat with Briggs because it appeared he had no control over Dick.

The investigation lasted about three weeks. Dick wound up being taken to “captain's mast”—this is the lowest-level discipline system in the Navy, for minor offenses that don't warrant a court-martial—and getting a letter of reprimand from Maynard. Usually that's enough to end the career of a Navy officer. In the course of the investigation, Dick tried to blame the entire incident on his driver. I couldn't believe it. And when word leaked out to the troops, most of them were really pissed.

During our June 22 meeting, Maynard asked if I would be ready to relieve Dick by July 8. He was concerned that, if we didn't transfer the command by then, Dick might find a way to keep it from happening. I said that although I had found the job much more complex than I had imagined, I could take over that day, only I'd need his support if I uncovered any rats' nests. He said not to worry, and the change-of-command ceremony was scheduled for July 8.

Normally an outgoing CO spends a lot of time with his relief, explaining the nuances of the command. Dick and I met in his office on July 8, about ten minutes before the ceremony. He showed me the safe, the refrigerator, the gin, and the gin glasses, and that was it. The formal ceremony, before the assembled troops, took no more than twenty minutes. Usually, the officer immediately senior to the CO will tell all assembled how great a guy the outgoing CO is and how all should support the new guy so there will be a seamless transfer of responsibility. The operational commander spoke for about one minute, telling the command how great they were. Maynard said nothing. Dick spoke disconnectedly for a few minutes, but he did say that even though he didn't want to leave I was the best person to relieve him. I think he still believed Lyons would intervene and put him back in the saddle by October.

I was in command of Six—let the fun begin.

I
n 1983 the leftist, Cuban-backed government of Grenada, with the help of Cuban engineers, was hastily constructing an airfield at Point Salines; ostensibly, the airfield was intended for civil aviation, but it was capable of handling military aircraft. In the Cold War era, to have a military airfield built and supported by a country aligned with the Soviet Union was unacceptable to the United States.

On October 25, the U.S. military launched Operation Urgent Fury to rescue American medical students attending classes at the Grenadan Medical University just outside the capital, St. George's. To carry out that mission the forces were ordered to take over the island and rescue the former governor general, who was being held under house arrest by the new regime.

I'd been in command since July but most of my time had been spent trying to garner operational funding; the coffers had been depleted by my predecessor. On the Friday afternoon four days before Urgent Fury, I received an odd phone call from the chief of staff of the Joint Headquarters, who told me to be ready to come see him the next day for briefing on an operation. I asked my operations officer, Lieutenant Bill Davis, what was going on, but he said he didn't know. I had a feeling my first exposure to Joint Headquarters procedures might be a real operation.

The next morning I was eating breakfast in my kitchen when the phone rang and the chief of staff told me to get to a meeting at CINCLANT headquarters as fast as I could. This surprised me; Joint Headquarters normally took direction from the secretary of defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so having CINCLANT in the operational picture seemed strange. But what the hell—I was a new guy in the organization. I called Bill Davis and told him to meet me there.

Commander Dick “Andy” Anderson, a SEAL officer assigned to the operational commander's staff (and an old SEAL Team Two, Vietnam compatriot), was at the security station when I arrived. We went directly to a briefing room on the second deck. There was a buzz of activity. Army Lieutenant Colonel Dick Pack, from the Joint Headquarters operations division, told me briefly that JCS wanted us to “take down” an island in the Caribbean—Grenada. He said we would be working with CINCLANT; the commanding general (CG) of the Joint Headquarters had objected to that, but was overruled when CINCLANT convinced the chairman that because Grenada was in his area of responsibility he should be in charge. This was to be the first time the Joint Headquarters had ever conducted an actual operation and the departure from the planned chain of command proved to have a big impact on it.

Showing my keen geographic knowledge, I asked, “Where
is
Grenada?”

Pack pointed to a speck on the map, then explained that the CG wanted us to get an Air Force combat-control team into the Salines Point airfield that night or the next. They were to determine if the runways were clear so U.S. Army Rangers, tasked to seize the airfield, could land in C- 130s. If it were blocked they would have to parachute instead. He had to brief CINCLANT in five minutes and needed my concept of operations. Andy said there was some planning going on in the room behind us, so we joined in.

I asked what Navy ships were near Grenada and was shown the order of battle. There was a destroyer in port at an island just east of Grenada that also had a civilian airfield. I turned to Bill Davis and told him we'd simply throw our guys and the two-man combat-control team in a C-130 along with a couple of rubber boats and fly them to the airfield; from there, they could board the destroyer. The ship could then launch our people for the reconnaissance of the Grenadan airfield. It sounded simple and effective. Whatever gear the men needed to take would fit easily in the C-130, and they'd get there in a hurry. I told Bill to get on the secure phone and recall our standby assault team, then went to the briefing room and filled Pack in. The briefing had already begun, and I took a place off to the side.