Operation Thunderhead (35 page)

As the fuel situation in the helicopter started to grow serious, Dry took up a helmet and communicated directly with the pilot. As far as he could tell, the bird was moving too fast and at too high an altitude for a safe insertion. There was a 15-to-20-knot tailwind pushing the helicopter and throwing off the instrument readings for the pilot. At one point, the pilot dropped the bird so low to the water that the tail section of the hull was actually in the water. The crew chief screamed into the microphone, warning the pilot of the situation before the helicopter swamped and went down.

The situation was growing critical. At his position in the door, Martin could not see the telltale spray that would be kicked up by the helicopter if they were at the right altitude. Dry was saying very little, his face set in grim determination. The last thing he said to Martin was “We've got to get back to
Grayback
.”

Now the helicopter crew finally made out a flashing light and knew it must be the
Grayback
. No longer trusting his automatic equipment, the pilot made a manual approach for the drop. When he was in position, he called out the signal “Drop, drop, drop.” It was dark and the wind was blowing hard at the tail of the helicopter as Martin looked out the hatch. He could just make out the salt spray kicked up by the helicopter on the dark water below them. It looked much farther away than he was comfortable with. But the search-and-rescue swimmer who was a member of the crew had a number of water jumps to his credit. He trusted his pilot and gave Dry the signal to jump by slapping him on the shoulder.

The final decision was his, but Dry knew how important it was for the mission to return to the
Grayback
. He and Martin were the two most experienced SEALs on the operation. And the current information they had was vital; the launch time of the second, and last, SDV had to be changed. Without hesitating, he stepped off into the darkness and plunged to the seas below.

The other three members of the team immediately followed their officer out on the cast. The last man off the bird was Martin, and he remembered counting the seconds as he fell toward the water. Instead of the one or two seconds he should have been able to say before impacting with the surface, he made it to three before cursing just before impact.

The strike against the water was very hard, as the helicopter was moving much faster than the twenty knots it was supposed to be going. The tailwind had pushed the bird to almost twice the maximum speed for a safe cast. And Martin figured they had been at least double, maybe triple, the maximum safe altitude when he exited the bird. The impact with the water was stunning and Martin was badly shaken up by it. So was John Lutz, who had injured his back and knee. Lutz was the first member of their team whom Martin came across as he started to call out and swim about the insertion point. He had managed to retain his swim fins after the impact, along with his web gear and Swedish K submachine gun. Putting on the fins, Martin was able to move about in the water as he searched.

The next man Martin came across was Edwards. The man's moaning drew the attention of the SEAL as he was swimming in the darkness. Edwards was floating facedown when he was found by Martin and had to be flipped over to keep him from drowning. After inflating the other man's life vest, Martin could see that he was badly hurt. But there was nothing that could be done for him as the men floated in the ocean.

Visibility in the choppy seas was maybe ten feet or less. In spite of repeated calls into the darkness, there was no answer from Dry. As the least injured man and best able to swim, Martin gathered Lutz and Edwards together as they continued the search for Dry. Then they spotted the flashing lights that had drawn the helicopter pilot to signal the drop. It wasn't the infrared beacon of the
Grayback
; it was the emergency strobes of the second SDV crew and passengers.

As they found out later, the second SDV was launched at an earlier hour than the previous night's. Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert Conger and Petty Officer Sam Birky were going to be the SEALs conducting the observation post. Lieutenant (j.g.) Tom McGrath and Seaman Steve McConnell were the UDT operators who had been the crew of the second SDV. Conger, McGrath, and McConnell were floating in the water, and both Dry and now Birky were missing. The mission had gone downhill at a thundering gallop. Martin was becoming more than a little disgusted with the situation.

The men were all floating together as they heard the engines of what could have been North Vietnamese patrol boats starting up in the distance. They couldn't have been more than two thousand yards from shore—not a very comfortable distance from enemy territory. The weight of the Swedish K hanging down from Martin had been of little reassurance. But against an enemy patrol boat, it would do little or nothing.

The water was home to the SEALs and frogmen of the UDT. It hid them, protected them, and they were all more than used to it. The other thing they had all learned from the first days of training was that you never left a teammate behind. And now Martin and the others had the missing Lieutenant Dry and Petty Officer Birky weighing heavily on their minds.

They had been in the water for hours when one of the men complained about someone sticking their foot in his face. It wasn't one of the swimmers in the group; the foot belonged to Spence Dry, floating facedown in the ocean. Pulling the body up to himself and flipping it over, Martin could see that Dry was dead. There appeared to be blood on his nose and face, but there wasn't anything they could do for their officer. The men inflated Dry's life vest and kept his body with them.

The group of men kept swimming all through the night. It was about 5:00 A.M. when they managed to raise the
Long Beach
on their waterproof radios. At 7:00 A.M., the welcome sight of an SAR helicopter coming in over the horizon greeted the weary eyes of the swimmers. Then the bird went down to the surface and hovered, some distance away from them all. Were they going to have to swim over to get picked up?

Then the men in the water could see that the helicopter was picking somebody up from the surface: Sam Birky. Everyone who had gone into the water, whether from the
Grayback
or the helicopter, had been found. Edwards was badly injured and Lutz wasn't much better. But both men was still alive, which was more than could be said for their officer. With Towers again on their pickup bird, the men were winched up from the sea and taken to the
Long Beach
.

Dry and Edwards were moved onto the aircraft carrier
Kitty Hawk
, which had much better treatment facilities. On board the
Long Beach
, the remaining SEALs and UDT operators were debriefed about what had gone so wrong in the operation.

The second SDV had been launched early to give the maximum amount of darkness for the men once they got to the island. If there had been a mechanical or electrical problem with the first SDV, they could recover the men from the island and at least some of them could return to the
Grayback
.

The crew of the
Grayback
were working to help launch the second SDV in the dark water and operating against a fairly heavy current. The sub was moving slightly, and the deck crew indicated the SDV should put on more and more ballast. The plan was to keep the SDV within homing beacon range of the
Grayback
during the launch so that the small craft could turn back to the submarine if it ran into difficulty. The problem wasn't one of currents this time. Instead, the SDV was overweight, and when launched it immediately foundered and sank to the bottom.

Struggling with the sunken SDV, the crew and one of the SEALs worked hard to try and get the boat under way. The
Grayback
was nearby but unseen in the darkness. The men all knew that the big boat was only slightly buoyant so that it wasn't resting hard on the bottom. At any moment, the submarines could come crashing down on them in the darkness. Taking a final breath of air, the men abandoned the SDV and made a free ascent to the surface as the current drove them past the hull of the
Grayback
and out to the open sea.

Waiting in the back of the SDV, Birky was separated from the rest of the men as they worked on the boat. He remained in the rear compartment, breathing boat air as the minutes ticked by. Finally, he left the compartment and moved forward, breathing from a little bail-out bottle each man had for just such a purpose. Surprised to find no one at the SDV but himself, Birky made his ascent to the surface. The SDV remained abandoned on the floor of the gulf.

The SEALs and UDT operators on board the
Grayback
knew that something had gone very wrong with the SDV launch. The sound of the pinger, the sonar device on board the SDV, kept banging away close to the side of the big submarine. Inside the steel hull, the men could hear the pinger, and it just kept going, never sounding as if it were moving away. It was obvious that something had malfunctioned, but no one knew what.

It was sometime earlier that day, while Dry, Martin, and the rest were still on board the
Long Beach
, that the remaining leading petty officer of Alfa platoon, Rick Hetzell, was called to the submarine's wardroom for a briefing. John Chamberlain was waiting in the wardroom along with several other men, including the intelligence officer who was wearing a sterile Navy officer's uniform—one without any identifying insignia. They had called for the next-in-command of the SEAL platoon, and that was Rick Hetzell. He knew the situation was a serious one as soon as he entered the compartment.

The officers told Hetzell that they wanted him to pick out some of his men and prepare for an insertion. They would be the next unit to go in to the island after the SDV had launched. He was to go in to the beach and pick up some indigenous personnel. The insertion would be done with a rubber boat. That was just about all of the information that he was given. But it was enough.

Going back up into the SEALs' compartment, Hetzell chose his men. Having trained as a swimmer-scout for the operation, Tim Reeves was one of the men to go; so were Eric Knudson and Doug Hertsic, one of the UDT operators aboard who had been assigned as an SDV driver. Doug had transferred over to the UDT from SEAL Team One within the last year and Hetzell knew him well. Since there wasn't another SDV available, neither Hertsic nor Scotty Shaw, who was an SDV navigator in UDT Eleven, had an active assignment.

After working up an operations order (op-order) for the mission, Hetzell took the other men into the diving locker for some privacy and briefed them on the mission. Then he asked if anyone had any suggestions to add to the op-order in case they ran into any problems or contingencies on the mission. That was the way things were brain-stormed within the teams; the had been polished over years of actions in South Vietnam and ensured that all possible scenarios had been covered. In this case, everyone in the dive locker agreed that it sounded like a good plan, so they were done.

The basic plan was a simple one: Four men would take the Z-bird with the twenty-five-horsepower Mercury outboard motor on it. They would go in to the island and stop about two hundred yards off the coast. At that point, Tim Reeves would swim in to check out the area. If the beach zone was safe, the men would paddle the boat in for continued silence rather than use the outboard motor. They would park the boat and wait for the indigenous personnel to show up. Once contact was made, the personnel would be picked up and extracted back to the submarine.

In his original wardroom briefing, Hetzell had been told to expect from two to four indigenous personnel to show up for evacuation. If it were just two people recovered, there wouldn't be any trouble fitting all of them on board the rubber boat. If it were four people, Hetzell and Reeves would give up their places and swim back to the submarine. That was just the way it was: a simple and straightforward plan. But trouble began when the officers returned to the wardroom.

Once Hetzell and his chosen team arrived at the wardroom, he was immediately questioned as to just who the other men were. The answer was that they were the men going on the op. It was immediately questioned as to just how much information Hetzell had given to the rest of the men. When he told the officers that he had fully briefed the men, the reaction was unexpected.

The officers were angry that Hetzell had breached security when he informed his men. That was unacceptable to the SEAL and he said plainly that it was how they operated in the teams. Everyone had to be on the same page for an operation; it was how they worked and it had proven successful. The officers reluctantly agreed.

Once everyone was seated in the wardroom, Hetzell went over his warning order for the benefit of the officers and asked for changes. One of those changes involved the use of the fifteen-horsepower silent engine on the rubber boat in place of the more powerful Mercury. The intelligence officer was adamant that the silent engine be used. Finally, Hetzell told him that the motor just didn't work, that it had never worked, and he had never seen one of them run for more than fifteen minutes before breaking down.

The officer mumbled a concern that the other motor would be picked up more easily on radar. Hetzell countered that they would all be picked up on radar anyway so the rubber boat might as well be moving when it happened. As far as Hetzell was concerned, the only reason for using the silent motor was that the name sounded cool. The only reason that it was silent was because it wouldn't run, and that it might immediately sink to the bottom when it was tossed overboard.

There was another man in the wardroom who had not been there during the earlier briefing. The new man was the diving locker chief for the boat. The officers wanted the chief to go along on the mission because he knew how to communicate with the boat. And the chief stated that he wanted to go on a SEAL operation.