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Brave Men, Dark Waters

The Untold Story of the Navy SEALs

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Who Are We?

Shortly after midnight on the morning of 20 December 1989, Golf Platoon of SEAL Team Four, in a special tactical formation that bristled with guns, dashed up the runway of Paitilla Airfield, in a heavily populated section of Panama City, Panama. Within five minutes the SEALs, panting under as much as 110 pounds of rifles, machine guns, ammunition, radios, and other equipment, dropped to the ground about thirty yards in front of two hangars. One of them contained their target: the Lear jet belonging to Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega.

With the city lights behind them, the seventeen SEALs made perfect targets for any ambushes hastily arranged by the small group of Panamanians defending the airfield—and they knew it.

Hugging the earth so tightly that it felt as though their buttons were making dents in the runway, they peered into the darkness with their night-vision scopes. Inside the hangars they could make out the forms of armed men crouching behind oil barrels and metal doors. It was impossible to tell how many there were or where they all were.

The SEALs couldn't hide and they couldn't retreat. They opened fire.

The Panamanians responded with a hail of bullets from their automatic rifles. That first barrage may have come from as few as two men, hiding in the darkness behind cement-filled oil drums. But it was devastating. Using disciplined fire control, the Panamanians fired low so their bullets struck the tarmac, sending pieces of shrapnel and bits of asphalt bouncing up into the bodies of the nine men in the squad—code named Golf One—on the right of the SEAL formation.

The fire was so intense that eight of the nine men in Golf One fell wounded or dead. Lt. (jg) Thomas W. ("Tom") Casey, the squad commander, shouted a frantic radio message—"We've got heavy wounded!"—as he continued to fire to protect his troops. Miraculously, he was not hit. But he did not immediately realize he was the only member of his squad alive and unwounded because several of the wounded men continued to fire until they were hit again or were unable to reload their weapons.

On the left, the eight men of Golf Two shifted their fire to cover the hard-hit men of Golf One, even though this left them exposed to fire from the hangar in front of them. Two men from Golf Two scampered over to help their comrades. Within moments, one of them fell dead with a bullet in the head.

In response to the radio calls from the platoon under fire, members of one squad of a second platoon—Bravo—dashed forward to fill in the gap between the two squads lying in front of the hangars. Their commander, Lt. (jg) John P. Connors, was hit but continued to advance. Then, as he exposed himself to fire a grenade into the hangar, he was hit again and killed.

In those few moments, SEAL Team Four lost three men dead. Another died of his wounds a short time later. Ironically, he might have been saved if there had not been a delay of an hour—the "Golden Hour"—in dispatching a medevac helicopter to evacuate the wounded SEALs. Nine more men fell to the hostile fire, some of them grievously wounded.

The combat losses at Paitilla Airfield—four dead and nine wounded—made that brief action the deadliest for the SEALs in the nearly thirty years since the Sea, Air, Land teams were formed. In a decade of fighting in Vietnam, the worst single day of combat was 7 April 1967, when three men were killed in an enemy ambush.

Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama, involved the largest, most varied use of SEALs since the Vietnam War. Days before the attack began, members of one SEAL team began stalking Noriega. During the assault, members of SEAL Team Two carried out a classic operation in which they swam in under enemy fire to disable a Panamanian gunboat with small mines.

The operation in Panama was the first carried out by SEALs since they had come under the control of the new, army-dominated Special Operations Command. It was also the first test of the lessons learned seven years earlier when the SEALs lost four men dead and a number more wounded in the U.S. invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada.

The debacle at Paitilla set off a bitter controversy within the SEAL community. Sickened by the loss of life, veterans of combat in the jungles of Vietnam angrily criticized the leadership and the planning for the assault on the airfield. They were particularly disturbed by the fact that SEALs, accustomed to working in units of no more than sixteen men, and often in clusters of two or three, were sent into combat in an assault involving more than three platoons. To them, the seizure of the airfield seemed more suitable for an army Ranger battalion than for a group of SEALs.

In a scathing letter sent up through the chain of command, one senior officer put it this way: "Our leaders sent to omany troops ... when it was absolutely unnecessary in order to achieve our objective. These leaders must be held accountable and not allowed to lead our fine young SEALs into such unwarranted and costly scenarios again...."

The criticism stopped well short, however, of maligning the actions and the heroism of the enlisted men and junior officers on the ground at the airfield. Once the shooting started, they conducted themselves superbly. As one of them said, "If we had been on the other side, no one would have survived."

For the SEALs, Panama—and Paitilla in particular—was a moment of truth, forcing them to think more intensely than ever before about the role they should prepare to play in the future in the nation's defense.

Should they continue to plan and train to operate in small, elite units, as they had in Vietnam? Or was Paitilla the portent of a future in which SEALs would regularly operate in larger units, becoming maritime commandos of as many as 150 men?

Should they plan to operate within a few miles, or even yards, of the water, relying on their swimming ability and their tiny SEAL delivery vehicles? Or should they be prepared to fly or parachute deep in enemy-held territory, far from the seas?

Should they operate primarily in support of the fleet? Or should they be prepared to take on a wide variety of other assignments laid on by the "green machine," the army commanders of the Special Operations Command?

Truly, Paitilla forced the SEALs to confront their own future, to ask themselves: What makes us special? What is our true role?

In essence, they had to ask themselves: Who are we?

This was not an easy question to answer. But it was not an unfamiliar question. Ever since the early days of World War II, the SEALs and their predecessors, the fabled frogmen, have been struggling to define themselves, to answer that question: Who are we?

Bloody Waters—Tarawa and Normandy

When marines of the 2d Marine Division clambered into their amphibious tractors on the morning of 20 November 1943, they were already in deep trouble.

The big battlewagons of the navy's Fifth Fleet had hammered Betio, the larger of the two islands in the Tarawa atoll, until little more than the stubs of palm trees was visible above the flat surface. Still, the Japanese artillery answered back so fiercely that the transport ships carrying the marines were forced to back off from the landing beaches.

For the first wave, this meant an agonizingly long seven-mile voyage, wallowing at four knots in their amtracs—box-shaped personnel carriers with tracks like a tractor's, sealed against the seas and equipped with a propeller so they could "swim" ashore.

As the amtracs waddled up onto the beach they would speed up to fifteen miles an hour, according to the plan, and cut through the Japanese beach defenses. Then, coming quickly behind them would be thousands more marines to sweep down the little island—only two miles long and less than half a mile across at the widest.

The first wave met unexpectedly furious resistance at the shoreline despite a bombardment that the navy had promised would obliterate the defenses. That might not have been so bad except for what happened next.

As the landing ships carrying tanks and the follow-on wave of marines reached the coral reef surrounding the island, they ran aground. Instead of delivering the marines ashore with barely a drop of water on their boots, they were forced to discharge men and machines to wade ashore as best they could.

Tanks lurched off the coral shelf and groped toward shore. Many of them dropped into holes in the ocean floor and sank, drowning their crews. Many of the heavily laden marines met the same fate. Others were cut down by the murderous fire from the shore.

At one point that morning, a candid report was radioed back to Pearl Harbor: "Situation in doubt."

On that November morning, the United States had been at war with Japan for a few days short of two years. But the battle of Tarawa was also an important beginning. It was the first step in the navy's plan to hop from island to island northwest across the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands. Each island captured would provide a base from which land-based aircraft could reach out and pave the way for the next hop. A failure at Tarawa would not only deny the United States the use of a crucial airfield but also cast in doubt the whole strategy of island-hopping on to the next little Tarawa-like atoll ... and the next ... and the next.

Eventually, after three days of brutal combat, the marines prevailed. Of the nearly 5,000 in the Japanese garrison, only 1 officer, 16 enlisted men and 129 Korean laborers were captured alive. But the marines had lost 1,027 dead and another 2,292 wounded out of the invading force of 16,800 men. Adm. Chester Nimitz, the overall commander, flew in to find bulldozers scraping out mass graves for the thousands of dead. He likened the scene to Ypres, one of the worst battles during the bloody trench warfare of World War I.

What had gone wrong?

Before the battle, planes swept over the invasion beaches taking split-image photographs. Naval officers carefully studied the shore through powerful telescopes. A submarine circled the islands, taking soundings and photographing fortifications. Former residents of the island, fishermen, and veteran merchant seamen were sought out and interviewed. At high tide, they agreed, there should be four to five feet of water over the coral reef, plenty of room for the landing ships to carry their cargoes of men and equipment ashore.

But there was one catch: at neap tide—the time of the month when the difference between between high and low tide is the least—the winds sometimes caused the level of the water to rise and fall unpredictably, often several times within a few hours. November 20 was the time of the neap tide, and the water level fell just as the second wave of marines reached the coral reef.

But what if men had actually gone in in advance of the first wave and looked at that coral barrier, measuring the depth of the water and scouting for gaps where the landing craft could skim across into the lagoon? What if they had gone in with explosives and actually cut a hole through the coral so there would be no doubt about the ability of the second wave to reach the shore intact?

Almost immediately after the battle, Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner, the amphibious fleet commander, sent out an urgent order for the creation of special teams of men trained to scout out enemy beaches, remove natural and man-made obstacles, and guide the invading forces ashore. With a whole series of island landings still to be accomplished, the need for such forces was of the highest priority.

In SEAL legend, the battle of Tarawa is counted as the date for the birth of their predecessors, the Underwater Demolition Teams.

Actually, training of such units had begun before Tarawa and a few of them had actually seen combat in the early days of World War II. To military planners, it should have been apparent at the very beginning of U.S. involvement in the war that the fighting would involve many amphibious landings and that specialized units would be needed to help get the marines and soldiers ashore.

By the time the United States entered the war, the Germans controlled almost all the European continent, from the northern tip of Norway to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to deep in the Soviet Union. In North Africa, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps threatened the tenuous British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal.

In the Pacific, the Japanese controlled large sections of China and had swept south to capture the Philippines, Indochina, Singapore, and the islands north of Australia.

Nowhere except in North Africa did the U.S. and its allies have even a tiny foothold. It was obvious that, if they were to come to grips with the Axis powers, they would have to land troops across many beaches against fierce opposition.

Except for a handful of marines, few in the U.S. military had much experience in amphibious operations. What they did know was not encouraging.

They were all disturbed by the memory of one of the worst disasters in recent military history: the Allies' attempt, early in World War I, to gain control of the Dardanelles, the channel which marks the boundary between Europe and Asia. Control of the waterway would permit shipping to reach the Black Sea ports of Russia, allied with Britain and France against Germany, and cut Germany off from its ally, Turkey.

The plan called for a series of coordinated amphibious landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which forms the European side of the channel, by forces gathered from throughout the British Empire. French forces were assigned to land on the Asian side of the channel. Advancing up both sides of the Dardanelles, the Allied forces would knock out the forts whose guns controlled shipping through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara and on through the Bosporus into the Black Sea.

In the predawn darkness of 25 April 1915, some four thousand Australian and New Zealand troops, jammed together in small boats, were towed into position on the northwestern side of the peninsula. They then rowed themselves ashore. What happened to them is every amphibious planner's nightmare. The boats came ashore well to the north of where they should have been. One unit was confronted with a steep hillside, but the men succeeded in fighting their way to the top. Another unit was even less fortunate. It landed at the base of a line of almost sheer cliffs and was trapped on the beach. A third unit ran into such heavy machine-gun fire that it could not even get ashore.

During the day, thousands more troops landed on the narrow strip of sand at Anzac Cove and tried to fight their way inland. They quickly outnumbered the defending Turkish force, but the confusion resulting from landing in the wrong place, with no open routes away from the beach, left the Anzac forces at a serious disadvantage. By the end of the day there were twenty thousand men ashore, huddled in holes dug in the sand or on the sheer sides of cliffs and fighting for their lives.

For the next seven months, the Australians and New Zealanders, the British at the tip of the peninsula and the French on the Asian coast, fought bitterly to take the forts overlooking the Dardanelles. Eventually, there were ninety-five thousand men ashore and the call went out for another ninety-five thousand. Thousands were killed and wounded. All of the men suffered horribly from disease, clouds of large green flies, a slimy blanket of maggots at the bottom of their trenches, heat, shortage of water and food, and lack of medical care.

Finally, the politicians called it quits. The only real triumph of the entire operation was the surreptitious withdrawal of the landing force while in contact with the enemy. Rifles were rigged to fire sporadically. Explosive charges simulated artillery blasts. Quietly, the men rowed out to sea. The Turks were astounded to find that the beaches, littered with military equipment, held no enemy soldiers. They had all slipped silently away in the night.

The price the allies had paid for this ill-advised adventure in amphibious warfare was appalling: 265,000 casualties, including 46,000 dead. Turkish casualties probably totalled some 300,000, of which about a third were deaths.

The battle of Gallipoli was not an encouraging precedent for those planning multiple amphibious operations. But it was a perfect lesson in pitfalls to be avoided.

First, it is absolutely essential to learn as much as possible about the physical characteristics of the beach—to make a hydrographic survey. What are the tides? How steep is the beach? How firm is the sand? Will landing craft run into submerged rocks or coral reefs?

Then there is the question of the enemy's defenses. Where are his guns? How many troops does he have, and where are they? How far away in distance and time are his reserves? Has he placed obstacles in the water or on the beach that will have to be cleared? Are there mines in the beach area?

Once the landing area is chosen, the assault force must be directed to the right place at the right time. In a well-planned attack, every soldier or marine knows where he is supposed to go and what he is supposed to do. One unit takes out this pillbox, another assaults a line of foxholes. Still others move in with explosives to silence the enemy's guns. Someone has to lead the way, guiding the landing craft to their assigned targets.

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Excerpted from Brave Men, Dark Waters by Orr Kelly. Copyright © 1992 Orr Kelly. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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