CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

COMMANDER DICK MARCINKO DESIGNED and trained the best group of warriors in the nation’s history. Still, I wasn’t shocked when he was relieved of command and chopped over to the operational control of the CNO at the Pentagon in July 1983 with a fourth-floor office down the corridor from mine. Marcinko admitted himself that he was an obnoxious sonofabitch who rubbed just about everyone he came in contact with the wrong way. He had pissed off, threatened, alienated, provoked, offended, and screwed with SpecWar commanders on both coasts. Now he was paying the price for it by sitting on his ass behind a desk.

He and I were both confined to offices in a crowded corner of the Navy Command Center, a bustling series of rooms where lower ranking officers—lower than admiral, that is—kept track of naval movements and crisis incidents worldwide. One day in September 1983, Marcinko and I entered a SCIF to find a group of intel types gathered around a nautical chart on the wall. Marcinko bulled his way into the center of it and in his smirking boom of a voice inquired, “Hey, guys. What country are we losing today?”

“Grenada,” someone said.

It seemed people moved in and out of the Pentagon more often than deck swabbies changed their skivvies. Admiral Hayward retired and Admiral James D. Watkins replaced him as CNO. Through him, I already knew the United States was about four days away from overrunning the island nation of Grenada with the most massive invasion force since the Inchon landing more than thirty years ago.

I accepted that with my age and rank I had to be content with studying, evaluating, and preparing actions to be carried out by younger SpecWar fighters. Marcinko, on the other hand, seemed desperate. He had spent much of his life preparing to lead a unit like SEAL Team Six into combat. He cultivated the team, built it—and now he was sidelined. He appealed to his old friend and sea daddy, Vice Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons Jr., now deputy chief of naval operations.

“I’m fucked!” he groaned. “Anything is better than sitting in a windowless room and listening to reports coming in over the radio. Sir, I know damned well I’m better’n anybody else you can get at leading men into a fight.”

Lyons assigned him to the secretary of Navy as his briefer.

“Cocksuckers,” Dick bellyached to me. “You and me, Bone, we started all this shit with SEALs and Team Six and CT. So what do they do? They bend us over and fuck us. So here we sit it out like a couple of old whores.”

Grenada was the southernmost island of the Grenadine chain, only ninety miles north of South America. Great Britain managed the island until 1974, when its citizens won independence within the British Commonwealth. The first prime minister, Eric Gairy, proved corrupt and heavy-handed, whereupon he was overthrown by the Marxist New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop.

Bishop proved worse than Gairy. As new prime minister, he imposed an oppressive communist dictatorship enforced by a People’s Revolutionary Army (PRA). Soviet Premier Khrushchev recognized the advantages of Grenada’s strategic location within the American sphere. Although only 130 square miles in size, it was ideally positioned as an aircraft fueling base and as a supply depot and training center for guerrillas and terrorist groups throughout the Caribbean and southward. Castro, who supplied the Soviet premier with much of the Marxist muscle in Africa and Latin America, moved Cuban forces onto the island.

In 1983, Prime Minister Bishop fell out of favor with his colleagues. Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, also a communist, ousted Bishop from office on October 14, 1983, with the aid of other so-called politburo members.

Six days later, a mob in the capital, St. George’s, tried to forcibly free Bishop and other members of his former government. At Coard’s orders, the PRA opened fire and killed more than fifty people, wounding many more. Coard ordered the PRA to take Bishop and four of his ministers and three of his supporters to nearby Fort Rupert and shoot them. Afterwards, he imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew on the entire island.

An estimated one thousand Americans, of whom six hundred were students at St. George’s University Medical School, found themselves trapped on the island. President Reagan had previously proclaimed that no American would be abandoned to a foreign power. The United States was also concerned in this Cold War era about the construction of a nine-thousand-foot runway on the island capable of accommodating strategic bombers from the Soviet Union.

In Washington, the National Security Council ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare a military plan to rescue U.S. citizens in Grenada. President Reagan expanded the mission. It would now take over the island and rescue former governor general Sir Paul Scoon, who was being held under house arrest. Scoon seemed receptive to denouncing communism and installing a democratic government.

“Well,” President Reagan rationalized, “if we’ve got to go there, we might as well do all that needs to be done.”

Joint Task Force 120, code-named Operation Urgent Fury, assembled under the overall command of Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf. It was a curious juxtaposition of conventional forces and special warfare units from the Army, Navy, and Air Force. It would be carried out in complete secrecy.