CHAPTER TEN

SEA DUTY, WAR, AND long separations lurked in the shadows of every Navy marriage. After Korea, for the first time since we were wed, Elinor and I and toddler daughter Linda Jean lived under the same roof for a period of more than a few days or weeks at a time. I tried, honestly tried, to live the conventional life—wife, family, Ford station wagon in the garage, mortgage.

Elinor and Linda Jean followed me to the East Coast and the Norfolk area while I continued pursuing unconventional training in Army Chemical Warfare and Underwater EOD (Explosives Ordnance Disposal). The schools weren’t that demanding, certainly nothing like UDT. About like a nine-to-five job. I savored home-cooked meals and evenings spent on the carpet playing little games with my daughter. Elinor seemed … seemed almost happy.

“Bill, you’re preoccupied,” she would say whenever I became too involved in study and work. “You’re home now. Let’s enjoy being a family and together.”

Sometimes guilt for not being totally involved with family almost ate out my heart. I damned me for that seductive salt air in my nostrils, for the wandering bug Dad planted in my genes, for my warrior mentality. I seemed to be always planning the next step forward in my preoccupation with the idea of sea commandos.

Several times Elinor caught me on the phone with Reynolds or Joisey or one of my other like-minded Frogman buddies. She would frown disapprovingly over my end of the conversation: “Army Special Forces is expanding. They’re way ahead of us in many areas. We have to train with the Army, learn from them if we ever expect to seize the Golden Fleece.”

Guerrillas and unconventional warfare, already as old as history, were rapidly returning since the end of World War II as the predominant form of armed conflict in the world. The development of nuclear weapons and missiles with which to deliver them made conventional war not only prohibitive in terms of money and resources but also unthinkable because of its destructive power. Conventional war in the twentieth century was being priced off the market.

David of the Old Testament waged an unconventional campaign against King Saul. Two centuries before Christ, Rome fought drawn-out unconventional wars in Spain and North Africa. Jewish freedom fighters at the time of Jesus used irregular tactics against occupying Romans. Fabian Maximus drove Hannibal out of Italy with guerrilla strategies. Vikings launched commando-style raids from rivers and seas. Spaniards coined the word “guerrilla” during their fight against Napoleon, a term that means “little war.” Lawrence of Arabia employed unconventional warriors.

Most armies have recruited guerrillas in some form to patrol, reconnoiter, and skirmish for their main forces. They were particularly significant in the settling of the New World.

The New World was a vast, dangerous, almost trackless wilderness populated by often-hostile natives who avoided the “stand-up” fight. Settlers constructed defensive forts and blockhouses on the frontier, to which they fled during Indian uprisings, while buckskin-clad Colonists called “Rangers” patrolled between the strongholds and operated behind lines to demoralize and defeat hostiles.

Robert Rogers, a backwoodsman from New Hampshire, took command of four companies of Rangers in 1756 during the French and Indian War. His use of “Indian tactics” on long-range patrols against French positions made him the most feared and respected man in the territories.

Following the “shot heard ’round the world” that initiated the American Revolution, British Army planners employed Loyalist partisans in an effort to suppress the uprising. As a counterstrategy, American General Horatio Gates ordered Colonel Francis Marion to form Rangers and disrupt British supply lines in the Williamsburg region. Using classic guerrilla tactics, Marion, known as “the Swamp Fox,” conducted lightning raids against the Brits while depending upon local settlers for intelligence, supplies, cover, and reinforcements.

The Swamp Fox harassed the British and their Tory allies until the end of the war, keeping “the whole country in continued alarm,” as British Colonel Banastre Tarleton put it, “so that regular troops were everywhere necessary.”

So-called “Indian tactics” also prevailed as America’s “Manifest Destiny” pushed west and bumped up against guerrilla fighters like the Navajo, Apache, Sioux, and Cheyenne. Kit Carson took on the Navajo and Apache by using their own machinations against them. In the late 1830s, Captain Jack Hays and fifteen Texas Rangers in a “special operations force” routed more than eighty Comanche by utilizing specialized training and special equipment like the revolver.

Some 428 units during the American Civil War were irregulars officially or unofficially known as Rangers. Mosby’s Rangers, a battalion of Confederate partisan cavalry, disrupted Union communications and supply lines in Virginia. John Mosby’s mission statement well applied to guerrillas operating in the twentieth century: “Harassing their rear … to destroy supply trains, to break up the means of conveying intelligence, and thus isolating an army from its base. … It is just as legitimate to fight an enemy in the rear as in the front.”

Although the Union considered Confederate raiders “unsoldierly guerrillas hiding among civilians,” General Ulysses Grant nonetheless countered with unconventional forces of his own. In preparing to move against Vicksburg, he dispatched Colonel Benjamin Grierson into Mississippi to destroy whatever he could, much as Merrill’s Marauders were to do in Burma during World War II.

Even in the static trenches of World War I, France had their special operators. “Trench raiders” on both sides stripped down to basics and went over the side in forays against opposing trenches to gather intelligence, capture prisoners, and terrorize the enemy.

The twentieth century from World War I on was an era of almost continuous conflict. Guerrilla warfare scorched the earth in Europe, Asia, and Africa. British experience fighting unconventional forces in its colonies led to the birth of special operations units such as SOE (Special Operation Executive) and SAS (Special Air Services), which in turn influenced the emergence of such units as UDTs, OSS, and the various other guerrilla-type outfits of World War II.

History supplied the basis upon which to continue building.

One night I was on the floor wrestling with Linda Jean. That girl was going to be a tomboy. Elinor answered the phone.

“It’s for you, Bill. It’s Commander Doug Fane.”