OPERATIONS OTHER THAN WAR

I DON’T KNOW how the Casino got its name. Glitzy it was not. The parking lot was dirt—sand, actually—the building was one story, with a low, slightly pitched roof; white vinyl siding was peeled back in several places, and in a few other spots the black tar paper under the siding was pulled back as well, exposing termite-gnawed plywood. Tucked under a span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel in the Chick’s Beach section of Norfolk, the Casino looked more like a shipwreck than a bar. It had a cultivated air of disrepute, like a permanent crime scene. Even the address was a goof: 169 Pleasure House Road. A neon sign was wired to the frame of the only window, advertising PBR ON TAP, and the letter “A” blinked on and off in a random, short-circuited kind of way. It was not the sort of joint that you just wandered into. It looked too dangerous to be entered casually. There was always some serious iron parked outside, Harleys, sidecar-packing BMWs and Triumphs, four-by-four pickup trucks with rifle racks and mud flaps. The transportation in the lot perfectly announced the Casino’s demographic: Navy SEALs, bikers, and beer alcoholics of the lowest order.

The interior decoration could be described as “early demolition.” The ceiling bowed low over an unevenly poured concrete floor. The bar was made of Formica and Sheetrock, and the several pool tables were angled haphazardly about the middle of the room, pulled away from serious leaks in the roof. Behind the bar were plaques from each of the East Coast SEAL Teams, Two and Four, as well as SDV (SEAL delivery vehicle) Team Two and Underwater Demolition Teams Twenty-one and Twenty-two.

The first time I stepped inside, two rednecks were in a hair-pulling, eye-gouging fight on and under one of the pool tables. Normally, a fight can be counted on to jack up a bar, and it isn’t long until the other patrons discover or invent some reason to join in. Again, the Casino confounded. As the rednecks beat each other senseless, a bar full of SEALs ignored them completely. No one even swiveled a stool when one dude smashed the other through the door of the ladies’ room. When the victor dragged the loser to the front door, the bartender calmly reached under the Formica, pulled out a big .357 Magnum, and pointed it at the panting, disconsolate redneck.

“Don’t get no fuckin’ ideas of comin’ back in here with a gun, neither,” he said evenly.

“You ain’t gonna ban me, are ya?” the loser asked.

“You lost yer privileges for a week,” the bartender answered. “Now git!”

And like that, it was over. Somebody dropped a quarter in the jukebox and played “Pressure Drop” by Toots & the Maytals. Irie, mon, cool running. It was just another night down at the Casino. I loved the place.

It was in this decorous atmosphere that I was wetted down after receiving my Navy SEAL designator, 1130, in the late spring of 1982. Rick James and I picked up our designations as naval special warfare officers on the same day, three months early, and we got our pins for different reasons. Rick got his because he was a squared-away operator and a great American. I may be the only SEAL in the history of naval special warfare to get his pin for turning down a mission.

Following my triumph over the Green Berets, I was returned to the Ops Department. My work was pretty much the same, messages and reports, except now I was deemed to be of some utility to the defense of the United States of America. In a word, I was deployable. Usable. Having survived the worst that John Jaeger could throw at me, I confidently expected to soon receive my badge and get assigned to an operational platoon. SEAL platoons are commanded by one officer, and his assistant, the second officer, labors under the much less august moniker of 2IC, or second in charge. It was to this modest station that I hoped to be appointed, and I was keen to get on with it. Once I was slotted for a platoon, I was made available for detachments and odd jobs, mostly tasks beneath the dignity of a platoon in the throes of predeployment training. Sometimes the jobs were shitty, like administrative beach surveys, pier and piling demolition, or worse, harbor searches; and sometimes they were primo.

My first independent assignment was a piece of cake with shit frosting. It would be the first and one of the few times I’d decline to do my duty, or at least my duty as someone else saw it. In late April I was tasked to lead a six-man detachment on temporary assignment to NASA. It was to be a “space junk” operation, a mission SEALs inherited from their Underwater Demolition Team forebearers. During the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs, UDT frogmen recovered space capsules at sea after splashdown. When the UDTs were phased out, the SEAL Teams inherited the job. Although the space shuttle has replaced manned capsules, the Teams are still periodically called on to recover odd items dropped into the ocean, deliberately or accidentally, by NASA.

No one in the operations office would tell us specifically what the op would entail, and our orders said only to “report to the National Aeronautic and Space Administration at the Kennedy Space Center for temporary additional duty to include parachuting and the demolition of explosives.” One of the petty officers in the detachment, Gibby, had pulled the operation before; or rather, he had trained for it.

“The mission was scrubbed when they aborted the launch,” he said.

“The launch of what?” I asked.

“A Trident missile.”

We drew equipment and flew a C-141 down to the air force station at Cape Canaveral. During the flight down, Gibby told me that his previous detachment had trained to conduct the at-sea recovery of a Trident ballistic missile booster section. The Trident was then America’s latest submarine-launched ICBM, a big honker of a missile that packed up to eight thermonuclear warheads, individually targeted H-bombs called MIRVs, or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles. The Trident had a range in excess of four thousand nautical miles, and each missile was capable of dropping its MIRVs within a hundred meters of their assigned targets. I understand that’s pretty much a direct hit when you’re using H-bombs, and an amazing technical achievement considering the missile was fired underwater, exited the atmosphere, attained orbital velocities, reentered the atmosphere, and dropped straight down the chimney of its target. The ultimate bummer. A new Trident variant was undergoing testing, and we were to be a small part of the effort.

We arrived, checked in to a very downmarket hotel in Cocoa Beach, and settled in for some Florida sunshine. The following day, Gibby and I attended a kickoff meeting at NASA. The conference table was filled with alpha geeks straight out of Revenge of the Nerds. Much of the meeting was as incomprehensible to us as rocket science, but the gist was that a Trident C-4 was to be launched from an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine off Cape Canaveral. That missile, without its apocalyptic warhead, was to be targeted on an empty stretch of ocean in the North Atlantic. As the missile attained escape velocity, it would jettison a booster section, and our job would be to recover the first stage of the rocket motor after it was shed from the missile. The splashdown of the spent motor was computed to occur somewhere north of the Abacos Islands in the northern Bahamas. During the briefing, we were referred to as “the guys with the big necks.”

We spent the next week training in a small cove near the space center. A crane would drop a large cylindrical mock-up of the first stage into the water, and we’d jump in and practice attaching a flotation collar to the motor. Once the motor section was buoyant, it was to be recovered by a range support ship from the Military Sealift Command. We were to be deployed and recovered from a long-range MH-53 Pave Low special operations helicopter. The op could not have been more straightforward, and the only complication we faced in training came in the form of a ten-foot alligator that always showed up in the cove when the flotation collar was being inflated. Much to our consternation, the crane operator, a regular Florida Cracker, tossed marshmallows to the big reptile as we worked. I guessed this was by way of a diversion, and we could only hope the alligator wouldn’t consider the treats as an appetizer. Thanks in part to the gator, we got the collar put on in record time.

We trained and then we waited. The launch was postponed several times, and we hung out on Cocoa Beach, went to bars, and picked up women, telling them we were astronauts in training. Finally, we loaded out and were flown from Patrick Air Force Base to Air Force Station Grand Bahama Island. We cooled our heels and rigged the helicopter to water-drop an F-470 Zodiac inflatable raiding boat, a package we called a “soft duck.”

We launched at dawn the following morning to be in position at the south end of the impact zone in time for what was scheduled to be an 0700 launch. Our part of the operation was by far the simplest. Besides the submarine, which had the relatively uncomplicated task of firing the missile, there were NASA helicopters detailed to film the launch, land tracking stations to plot the missile’s trajectory, and a pair of navy P-3 patrol planes that would sow the splashdown area with sonobuoys so the impact could be pinpointed for us to recover the motor.

The morning got off to a bad start when a Russian “fishing vessel” appeared four miles off Cape Canaveral and took up station within the submarine’s launch area. This innocent trawler bristled with antennae and communications equipment; it was in fact a Vishnya-class AGI, a Russian intelligence ship equipped to monitor the launch. The launch was delayed half an hour, then another half an hour when one of the P-3s patrolling the first-stage impact area reported a second Russian trawler loitering in the vicinity of the splashdown point. Both of the trawlers were in international waters, and there was nothing to be done except marvel at the alacrity of the intrepid Russian fishermen. It was obvious that they had our number, and I wondered at the time why no one seemed to make a big deal of it. We flew around in circles north of the Bahamas as the submarine was shifted slightly closer to the cape, and the decision was made, somewhere, to just fire the missile and let the Russians watch.

We had been airborne for nearly two hours when the launch at last occurred. We saw nothing and heard little until it was reported that the booster section had impacted well north of the recovery zone—nearly a hundred miles from the place we were orbiting. The Pave Low was immediately directed north, and in the helicopter we readied for the water drop. We sprinted north at 150 knots, and the P-3s reported that the trawlers were converging on the drop point as well. The AGI off Cape Canaveral would not be a factor, but the second trawler was under twenty-five miles from the place the booster had splashed down. I did some quick math. The trawlers could not be expected to make any better than 15 knots, which would put the Canaveral boat six hours away from the motor section, but the closer trawler was an hour and forty minutes from the impact spot. At 150 knots, we could expect to be in the area of the splashdown in forty minutes, plus the time it would take to find the motor, not insignificant given that the sections had floated barely three feet above the surface during our practice recoveries. This was quickly turning into a race. The Military Sealift Command ship that would take aboard the motor section was a full fifty miles south of the point of impact. Clearly, we could expect no help from her.

Mr. Murphy had been active all morning, and as we closed in on the motor, he got busy with our end of the operation. The pilot was an air force bird colonel, and he called me up to the cockpit when we were about fifteen minutes out. “You guys ready to jump?” he asked.

I told him we were.

“We’ve got a little complication on this end,” he said.

“How little?” I asked. I watched the copilot look away.

“We’re getting a little low on fuel. We’ll be able to insert you, but we won’t have enough to hang around until the recovery ship gets there.”

This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Is there another helicopter?”

“Just us,” he said breezily. “I figure we can put you in and head back to Grand Bahama to refuel.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“We’ll come back and pick you up.”

That was the plan? This may have been my first rodeo, but I wasn’t going to bite. Nonetheless, I had to be careful, or at least I thought I did; only later would I learn how to deal with air force colonels. For now I had to tread lightly but firmly. I was an ensign and he was a full colonel, but his big idea was a man killer.

“How are you going to find us?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“We’ll mark the position on the GPS.”

I was rapidly becoming aware of the difference between the air force and the navy. “Look, Colonel,” I said, “I can’t put my guys in the water unless you stay with us.”

“Why not?”

“Because the impact point is in the Gulf Stream. There’s a three-knot current running north. You might mark the position, but we’ll be miles away from there by the time you get back.”

“You have a boat, right?”

“That boat’s small and black.”

“We’ll find you,” he said with a bit of a sniff.

“Nothing personal, sir, but I don’t think you can. I’m not going to put my guys in the big ocean, tethered to a damaged motor section that might sink, and hope that we’ll be found after a brief search.”

He was pissed. And so was I. I thought I was kissing my SEAL career good-bye, except I wasn’t even a SEAL yet. Here I was calling bullshit on an operation, and not just any op—I was calling bullshit on my first independent assignment.

“You’re aware that a Russian ship is closing in on the motor?” he asked.

“Yes sir. That’s another reason I don’t want to get left out there.” He gave me a “What are you afraid of?” sort of sneer. I continued as evenly as I could. “Six guys in an inflatable boat won’t be able to stop the Russians if they want to take the motor.”

“You have weapons?” he asked, still looking at me like I was his daughter’s prom date.

“Pistols.”

“We’re out here to recover the motor section,” he said.

“I can’t risk my team and hope you find us.”

There was a long pause. The helicopter’s engines droned and the rotors pounded.

“How long can you stay on target?” I asked.

“Thirty-five minutes, max,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what. You get us to the motor section, and I’ll put a swim pair in. We’ll sink it with a couple of socks of C-4.”

He gulped. “You’re going to destroy it?”

“You want the Russians to get it?” I asked.

Just like a movie, at that moment the trawler came into view, hull down on the horizon, heading north. It was another Russian AGI, beat up and rusty. We flew past it. Everybody on the flight deck knew that all the Russians had to do was track us on radar and we’d lead them right to the motor section.

The colonel continued to look pissed. “I don’t know why you’re refusing to deploy.”

“It isn’t safe,” I said. “Call range control and tell them I’m offering to sink the motor.”

“I’m going to tell them you’re refusing to go in.”

“Mention that I’ve got no water, no food, and six signal flares,” I said. “I’m not jumping into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and hoping someone can find me again.”

I went back into the troop compartment and sat on the boat. I felt like my party was over, but Gibby gave me a thumbs-up. He’d listened to our discussion on his headset. He bent close and yelled into my ear, “Fuck ’em. You did the right thing.”

I hoped so, but I had a bad feeling about explaining this one back at the Team area. Five minutes later, the crew chief came up and yelled into my ear, “Range control wants to know if you can guarantee that this thing sinks.”

“We’ll blow the shit out of it,” I said.

The crew chief spoke into his headset, listened, and then bent toward me again. “Okay, you guys are a go.”

We readied the charges, three socks of C-4 plastic explosive. The socks were olive-drab canvas sleeves, a foot long and three inches wide, each containing a two-pound rectangular-shaped ribbon of C-4. Sewn onto the outside of each sock was a three-foot piece of cotton line, a bit thicker than clothesline. At the other end of the sock was a flat metal hook into which the line could be fitted and cinched tight. The arrangement permitted the line to be looped around the target and pulled snug, ensuring good contact and more bang for the buck. The bottom of each sock had a small hole punched through the canvas to permit the insertion of a det-cord booster or blasting cap into the explosive. Without a blasting cap or other high explosive to initiate, the C-4 would not go off. By itself, C-4 is an incredibly stable explosive, meaning that it is not likely to be accidentally detonated. Although I’ve never seen it myself, it is widely said that you can shoot a block of C-4 with a bullet and it won’t go off. Definitely something I would not try at home.

The crew chief watched with some concern as I crimped blasting caps onto three sections of time fuse and screwed M-60 underwater fuse igniters onto each firing train.

“You guys know what you’re doing, right?” he asked.

“Sure,” Gibby answered. “We watched Mission: Impossible.”

We arrived at the splashdown coordinates and started a search pattern. It took an additional twenty-five minutes to find the motor section, floating sideways like a tree stump. Gibby tucked the C-4 into his wet-suit top, and I stuffed the time fuse, blasting caps, and fuse igniters into mine. C-4 might be incredibly stable, but it was standard procedure to separate the explosives and the initiators during a jump, even a small jump like a swimmer cast. The trawler was closing in on us as we prepared to jump off the ramp. Spray kicked up from the rolling swells as the Pave Low sank into a twenty-foot hover.

“Pilot says you have seven minutes,” the crew chief yelled as we stepped up to the ramp. Seven minutes was not much time to swim, set the charges, and get recovered by the helicopter. I wished we were taking the colonel with us.

Gibby jumped first, disappearing off the ramp and into the swirling spray blown up from the downdraft. I followed, stepping off the ramp and crossing my arms against my chest to further cushion the blasting caps. As I fell the two stories to the water, I straightened my legs and pointed my swim fins in preparation for impact. I splashed into the incline of a rolling swell, surfaced, turned, and flashed a thumbs-up to the helicopter. As Gibby and I swam for the first stage of the missile, the helicopter moved off slowly.

The motor section was a bit over six feet in diameter and maybe twelve feet long. Basically, its shape was that of a beer can with a short funnel stuck to its end. There were some void spaces and guidance equipment in the lower sections, just enough for it to have retained buoyancy, and the cylinder was slightly flattened from impact. Much of the first stage was made of carbon fiber, Kevlar, and in places where the motor’s housing had fractured, carbon filaments spread out from the cylinder like a fine mat of dense blond hair. These Kevlar strands were extremely strong, and we had to avoid being snagged lest the motor section go down and drag us with it.

Waves surged over the first stage as we tried to find places to affix the charges. Gibby dove underwater and applied the socks to the lower sections of the motor housing, tying them tight against the base of the rocket nozzle and what was left of the steering actuators. As he cinched the explosives, I grabbed a lungful of air and dove down. I slipped blasting caps and fuses into the end of each sock, straightening the loops of time fuse and making sure the fuse igniters were screwed tightly.

As we were heaved to the top of a swell, we caught sight of the trawler. She was bow on and coming at us as fast as she could, her forepeak plowing down and through the rolling waves. The trawler was less than a thousand yards off when I bundled the three fuse igniters into my fist and simultaneously pulled the lanyards. The M-60s popped loudly, and I caught a whiff of cordite as the fuses started to burn within their waterproof plastic sheaths. There was maybe five minutes per fuse, but they’d burn at different rates, depending on water pressure and a host of variables that I no longer gave a shit about.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” I shouted to Gibby.

We put on the power and swam 150 meters from the booster section. It wasn’t far enough to keep us clear of the blast, but it was as far as I thought we could go and still get aboard the helicopter. I raised my right hand over my head and clenched my fist, the SEAL hand signal for “I am ready to be extracted.” Gibby put both his fists over his head and crossed them, the hand signal for “Extract me immediately.”

The helicopter came on, and a wire caving ladder dropped from a hatch on its belly. The Pave Low settled to an altitude of about fifteen feet and flew at us, dragging the ladder in the water. I took a position fifty feet behind Gibby. The downblast from the rotors put out near-hurricane-force gusts; the tops were torn from the swells and slashed our faces and eyes. As the spray swept over me, I watched Gibby catch one of the rungs of the ladder in the crook of his elbow—classic frogman technique—and he started to climb up hand over hand.

Soon he was up and through the hatch, and the helicopter was directly over me. The downgusts diminished sharply as the fuselage blocked out the sun. I caught the ladder and climbed. As I came away from the surface of the water, the trawler was closer than ever, and I could see a pair of her crew standing on her port bridge wing, pointing binoculars.

As I pulled myself through the hatch, one of the air force crewmen fired a flare off the stern ramp of the Pave Low. Dragging a ribbon of smoke, a red star cluster snaked into the water a hundred yards in front of the trawler. They got the idea, I think; the Russian vessel turned sharply to starboard as the helicopter climbed. Half a minute later, two loud thumps were audible over the roar of the engines. I made it to a window in time to see a pair of white geysers falling back to the surface of the water. Five seconds later, the final charge went off, throwing pieces of motor housing into the sky. Ripped stem to stern, the first stage sank tail first and disappeared in a whirl of bubbles.

We flew back to the cape. Our presence was not required at the NASA debrief. We returned to our crummy hotel and spent the evening drinking lugubriously at a joint called Big Daddy’s. The following afternoon we were cold-shouldered as we loaded out and flew another C-141 back to Norfolk. It was late evening when we arrived back at the Team area. I cut the guys loose, then sat down to write what I was certain would be my first and last operational summary. I then went to the Casino, arriving a little past midnight, and tied one on. As the jukebox played reggae, I watched a couple of lesbians shoot pool and drank like the soon-to-be unemployed.

Before officer’s call the following morning, the XO called me into his office. I gave my report and told him the story. He listened, his face showing nothing. When he finished reading the report, he asked if I wanted to add anything. I first thought to say nothing—“No excuse, sir” was the stock answer—but dread got the better of me. I said that given the circumstances, I’d made the best call I could. I said that I had been respectful to the colonel, even if he was a moron, and that I was sorry if I had done the wrong thing. The XO shook his head and told me to get out of his office. Later that afternoon, Mike Boynton came into ops and told me to clean out my desk. My heart froze; then he said, “You just got reassigned, sir. You’re the new assistant commander of Fifth Platoon.”

“You’re shitting me” was all I could think of to say.

“I wouldn’t shit you, sir.” The master chief grinned. “You’re my favorite turd.”

I was somebody’s favorite turd. It was true: I’d been released from bondage in the operations shop and chopped to a newly forming line platoon. I’d apparently made the right call out there in mid-Atlantic. As far as the captain and the XO were concerned, tethering the Zodiac to a sinking missile motor and expecting the air force to return and find us was a bullshit idea. Although the mission was recovery, I had been prepared on short notice to destroy the missile section and had denied the Russians material intelligence. In short, I did okay.

As Master Chief Boynton put it, “You showed good judgment, sir. And it ain’t like ensigns are necessarily known for that.”

Not only was I made operational, but two days later, Rick and I were unceremoniously given our Budweisers. We spent a couple hundred bucks at the Casino, got every frogman on the East Coast a cold one, and I had a headache for days.

We were Navy SEALs at last.

FOR A WEEK OR TWO, Fifth Platoon was my temporary command. Rather, I acted as its commander. Operating out of a connex box in the back forty of SEAL Team Four, the Fifth was a provisional outfit, a skeleton of a platoon. Frank, my neighbor from San Diego, was slated to assume command after he finished Spanish-language school in Monterey, California. Before he arrived there was a lot to be done; we had yet to receive any equipment, any men, and in the first weeks we were a paper outfit—a name, basically—and that was about it.

Frank, an Annapolis graduate, had been commissioned a year before I joined the navy. Had I accepted my appointment out of high school, we would have been classmates. Frank had majored in naval architecture and graduated in the top ten of his class, considerably higher than I might have expected to place. I am hardly technically inclined, and I doubt I would have acquitted myself in the rigors of an engineering education. While I dallied in graduate school, Frank chose to serve two years on a minesweeper in San Diego, waiting for a slot in BUD/S. It was thought at the time that naval special warfare was a career path unworthy of an Annapolis man. As a penance for even attempting to become a SEAL, Frank had to earn a surface warfare designator. Although a minesweeper was on the bottom of the warship totem pole, Frank knew the wardroom of an oceangoing mine hunter is small, and no officer is superfluous. In those two years Frank served as first lieutenant and damage control assistant. He earned his water wings in half the usual time and put in his chit to transfer across the bay to Coronado and BUD/S. A natural, he assumed the mantle of 113’s class leader when the officer in charge broke his spine. It can’t be said that the job was a picnic. Of the 105 students who started 113, thirteen graduated. These men later became famous as the 13 of 113. To the surprise of no one, Frank was the honor graduate.

Fifth Platoon was to be Frank’s first command, and it had to be built from scratch—equipment and personnel assembled from the ground up, and the operators trained from square one. Our two seniormost operators were Stan and Tim, both ten-year veterans. In the weeks before Frank returned, these two proved their worth as scroungers, making the deals and steals that are frequently necessary in the military just to get the tools you need to do your job. At this, they excelled, and we were soon well and even abundantly equipped, if not fully manned.

The remainder of the platoon, ten operators, was to be taken in a single draft from BUD/S Class 117. This was unusual and not necessarily a good thing. All of them were fresh from Coronado and Fort Benning, and not one had been through Senior Chief Jaeger’s AOT program. They were young, in superb shape, and extremely motivated. They knew one another well and worked together reliably; that was the upside. The downside was they didn’t know their asses from their elbows.

Only four men out of the sixteen assigned to Fifth Platoon were rated as fully qualified SEALs. I considered myself qualified but hardly knowledgeable. As the platoon assembled, I saw that we would be short on experience. As Frank settled into command, we were informed that the Fifth was immediately to begin predeployment training, or PDT. PDT is normally undertaken after all operators have gone through advanced operator training. We were not to have that luxury. We were expected to form our own cadre and undertake the AOT curriculum as we prepared for the ORE, or operational readiness exam. Any training shortfalls would soon become apparent to our superiors, and to other people as well. Fifth Platoon was slated to deploy to Honduras and serve in the capacity of a mobile training team, military advisers, on the Honduras-Nicaragua border.

We settled in and worked our asses off. PDT was a well-scripted series of evolutions, and the additional work of AOT had to be crammed around and on top of an already full schedule. The bulk of the extra training would fall to Stan and Tim and our newly arrived chief petty officer, Doc Jones. If Frank and I were expecting our chief, the seniormost enlisted man, to provide some adult leadership, we were to be disappointed. Well, if not disappointed, then disconcerted.

Our platoon chief actually wasn’t even a chief yet. Hospitalman First Class Jack “Doc” Jones was a chief selectee, meaning he hadn’t assumed the rank and title of a navy chief petty officer. Strangest of all, Doc was not even a BUD/S graduate. You might ask what a corpsman, a medic, was doing in an operational SEAL platoon in the first place. Doc might not have been to BUD/S, but he was a SEAL, a damn good one, and a Vietnam combat veteran.

In the throes of that late unpleasantness between the Vietnams, the navy found it impossible to get hospital corpsmen through BUD/S in sufficient numbers. So they asked for volunteers to attend an abbreviated special operations technicians’ course. SOT was hardly eight weeks long, and all the corpsmen had time to do was learn one end of an M-16 from another, how to scuba dive, and how to spell “SEAL.” The graduates were then sent to Vietnam to join operational SEAL platoons and serve as medics. Well, not just medics. In the Teams, our corpsmen are armed, and patrol, jump, dive, and do demo just like everyone else. In short, they operate.

In Vietnam, SOT graduates were expected to fight Charlie and take care of wounded SEALs. Some lived and some died, and those corpsmen who survived a six-month combat deployment with an operational SEAL platoon received their Budweisers and earned the naval education code 5326, combat swimmer. Doc Jones was an SOT graduate and a freaking character even among a community of characters.

He would later prove to be one of the bravest men I have ever known. That could hardly be guessed at first look. Physically, he bore a striking resemblance to the actor Peter Falk, the guy who plays Columbo, and Doc had it down, rumpled clothes, wandering eye, and all. He was a short, compact man, and his reddish complexion and dark eyes sometimes made him look like a sturdy Portuguese fisherman. Doc was in fact a nearly full-blooded Cherokee Indian.

Initially, a few of the things Frank and I heard about Doc made us wonder about his sanity. As an SOT graduate, he had not attended jump school, but when he got back to his team stateside, he wanted to jump, so he followed a platoon out onto the drop zone and picked up a parachute. Using the ploy “Hey, could you help me buckle this,” he was assisted by his platoon mates into the parachute. No one guessed that he had no idea how to put on a parachute, and no one could have guessed that he had zero idea how to operate one once he got out of the airplane. Doc sat calmly through the jumpmaster’s briefing, then got in line and boarded the aircraft. Once inside the plane, he had his rig inspected by the jumpmaster just like everyone else. He hooked up his static line like everyone else, and then he jumped. Mercifully, the parachute gods smiled. Doc made ten water jumps and had legitimately earned his gold navy parachute wings before it was discovered that he never attended jump school. He was sent packing down to Fort Benning, and the story followed him throughout the navy.

Doc would soon have an opportunity to show off his aerial prowess. We jumped again into Fort A. P. Hill and ran live fire and demolition exercises against mobile and static targets. We jelled as an operational unit, and Doc became the growling, ass-kicking spark plug of the entire outfit. He addressed the men individually as “cock breath” and collectively as “you fucking idiots.” To Frank, Doc was deferential, calling him mostly “Boss.” As the 2IC, or second in charge, I was fair game. Doc called me “Diawi,” Vietnamese for “lieutenant,” and a bit of a jab when applied to guys like me who were in grade school during much of Vietnam. There was nothing Doc wouldn’t do, and few things he couldn’t do better and faster than men half his age. He was one of the best I ever worked with; certainly he was the bravest, and the best platoon chief I ever had. We needed him. Our work-ups were everything AOT was, and more; there were specific missions we had to train for: recons, direct action, air ops, and boat work. Doc was the driving force through it all. He would repeatedly tell me, “You know, Mr. Pfarrer, it’s not the little things that are going to kill you. It’s the fucking BIG things.”

Much of the training was out of the area, but there was the occasional weeknight and weekend at home. We worked hard and played harder. Friday nights, Frank and I would put on our working winter blue uniforms and make dramatic entrances into the Oceana officers’ club at 2300 hours, fashionably late and resplendent in our tridents and gold navy jump wings. The place would be jumping, filled to the rafters with women invited for one purpose.

At the O club you picked your poison; new wave played in one room and disco in another. We partied hard, danced, and flirted, and were as charming as possible. Lisa was slowly evaporating from my heart, and in her place there was a poisonous void. What interest I had in women was strictly transactional, and though I did my best each night to find someone to come home with me, I rarely cared what happened afterward. Sex was solace and release.

In hindsight, I can say that our job—the Teams, the secrecy, the clannishness—was gradually separating us from society. We were a group apart, and that separation would become more severe as my career progressed. I would bed any woman who let me, and I took and gave back almost nothing. I was unknowable, unlovable, and on my way to becoming fully encapsulated. Not antisocial—feral. As a potential boyfriend, I was the worst possible type: self-absorbed, smugly self-confident, and nursing a life-changing wound.

There were a few women who I remember very well. One, I can say with some embarrassment, I remember specifically for my own cruelty. Another I remember for my own credulous foolishness. I dated a navy nurse, a lieutenant commander though she was only a year older than I was. I was an O-1, and she was an O-4, a dating arrangement not encouraged in today’s action navy. Her name was Megan, and she was funny, smart, and blond, a delightful pixie of a woman. She had the most incredible freckles, and we had an absolutely torrid affair. We made love like bunnies with rabies, and over the course of a few wonderful months, Megan fell in love. I remained aloof. I deployed frequently. Sometimes I told her I was going away, and sometimes I did not. My inconsiderate behavior concerned and hurt her. She would have no idea where I’d gone or when I’d be back, and my teammates could give her no information. The end came when I got back from a three-week deployment and did not even call her. I ran into her in a parking lot on the base and said only “Hi.” I was ashamed when she broke down and cried as we spoke.

I felt sick as I drove home. I wondered what was happening to me. Why had I hurt her? Why had I let her hurt herself? I took no joy in it. She was a fine, loving person, and I was being an asshole. What was it in me that made me treat a good person this way? Some innate cruelty? Was it because Lisa had hurt me? For a guy with a psychology degree, I had a remarkable lack of insight. Too ashamed to face myself and not enough of a man to face Megan, I just moved on. I was without scruple or compunction, and apparently, now I was even without mercy. An iceberg drifting, waiting to claim another ship.

I started to go out with an athletic Virginia-born chemist named Jenny. She played semipro tennis, and I think she saw in me at first something that was dangerous and attractive. In that she may have been right, but for the wrong reasons. I was not nearly as wild as she was. Jenny was a danger junkie, and it turned out I was only a nuisance.

Through a hot summer, Jenny and I slept together several nights a week, and there were uniforms in her closets and sundresses in mine. I loved her laugh, and the little-girl way she looked when she woke up. I loved the womanly way she kissed me. I cared a lot for Jenny. I enjoyed her when we were together and looked forward to seeing her when we were apart. I was naive enough to think that the things I revealed to her, the big plans, the boyish selfishness, and the burgeoning egomania, could ever really be attractive to anyone.

Falling in love with her made me less dangerous. On the night I was preparing to tell Jenny that I loved her, she told me that she thought it was time we started seeing other people. She held me while she said this. In her dismissal of me, she was calm and polite, and her reasons were well presented and avoided direct insults. As she let me down, I remember thinking two things. I was glad that she’d spoken first, since I’d have felt even more stupid had I just told her that I loved her. My second thought was even more selfish: I remember thinking that this was probably a really bad time for this to be happening to me.

In the coming week Jenny and I were to attend a formal dining-in at the special warfare group. For me, attendance was mandatory, and before the hammer fell, Jenny had agreed to be my date. Rather than leaving me to go alone, she graciously put on an evening gown and went with me. The night was strained. We smiled though the agonizing black-tie affair—I was ner-vous and awkward, and the evening was made infinitely worse when I got drunk off my ass, drove her home, and begged her to reconsider. I asked for another chance. I asked to spend the night. On all grounds, and now with even better reasons, she declined politely. She suggested I come back Monday so we could talk. I agreed and staggered back to my car.

But I didn’t come back on Monday. I went to Panama instead.

Two days after I’d made an ass out of myself, Fifth Platoon was parachuted into the Gulf of Panama, and we established a forward operating base on an island in the Archipelago de las Perlas. Our mission was to again play OPFOR, opposing forces, this time in a joint American-Panamanian military exercise called Kindle Liberty. This was seven years before America would depose Manuel Noriega, and relations with the Panamanians were cordial, if a bit tense at the top. Also deployed to Las Perlas were the XO, a group from the operations office, and a scratch operational force from the cadre, including John Jaeger. We were to conduct a series of across-the-beach operations against the canal and its infrastructure. Our missions were intended to assess the response of U.S. Army and the PDF, the Panama defense forces. It would be their job to protect the canal and our job to try to break it.

Somewhere in Washington the decision was taken that our operations were to be conducted with units of the Gardia Nacional, Manuel Noriega’s personal gang of thugs. A group of ten comandos joined us in Las Perlas and were integrated into our platoons. What they learned would serve them well and do us little good. In a macabre twist of fate, our same Team, SEAL Team Four, would suffer cruelly in the coming invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, in December 1989. A SEAL platoon sent to Patilla Airfield to disable Noriega’s Learjet would be ambushed and sustain four killed and a number wounded. I am probably not the first person to wonder if the Gardias we trained at Las Perlas were the same men who waited for the SEALs on the runway at Patilla.

That disagreeable evening was far in the future, and to us unknowable, if not unimaginable. Not one of us on the island thought our collaboration was a good idea, but we followed orders, and the Panamanians keenly attended our planning and accompanied us as we ran successful ops against the Gatun Locks, the Summit electrical substation, key pumping facilities, and the liquid-oxygen storage tanks on Howard Air Force Base. The only operation from which they were excluded was the capture and simulated sinking of U.S.S. Spiegel Grove as she transited the canal. This operation, carried out by all SEAL Team Four elements, was the crowning evolution of the exercise. For obvious reasons, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of a warship takedown, but my assault element operated with John Jaeger’s, and the action cemented our friendship.

A few days later, we were cooling our heels in the departure lounge at Howard Air Force Base, waiting for an airplane. Our flight was delayed twice, and finally, Senior Chief Jaeger wandered over and sat down next to me.

“Hey, Mr. Pfarrer.” He had a sly look on his face, and I knew it meant he wanted something. Probably permission for something he’d already done or would soon do anyway.

“How’s about I let the lads go across the street to the enlisted club and have a few beers, or so, before we get on the plane?”

I knew the guys would get as drunk as they could as fast as they could, and that might be a problem. The one thing guaranteeing their good behavior was the fact that no one, including me, had much money. I’d parachuted in with a fortune, fifty bucks, and I doubted all the lads together had even half that much.

“Sure, Senior Chief,” I said. “Tell ’em to keep it within the pale of acceptable human conduct.”

The guys clomped across the street. John Jaeger grinned, and for a while we sat together in an empty departure lounge.

“Hey, sir?”

“Yes, Senior Chief?”

“You got any money, or so?”

“I’ve got a little,” I said.

“How’s about you and me slide on over to the club and have a couple of cold pops? Or so.”

Now would come a major episode in my education as a junior officer. The E club was for enlisted men. Officers had their own clubs, and chief petty officers had chiefs’ clubs. Neither the senior chief nor I was supposed to drink at an enlisted club.

I sat there quietly and thought about this, and John looked at me like I was a moron. “Let’s go,” he said. He stood and removed the golden anchors from the collars of his cammies. Before I could think better of it, I stood and took off the gold bars that marked me as an ensign. I’d been in the jungle for the better part of two weeks, and I was thirsty. Without our rank devices, we were transformed instantly from an E-8 and an O-1 to a pair of E-1 no-count snuffies, slick-sleeves, military nonentities. I followed John across the street and into the dark, smoky confines of the club.

The joint was wound up. ZZ Top was playing. Pushed up against the bar was the most explosive mixture of men known to mankind. At one end were about twenty marines, recon dudes with high-and-tight haircuts; in the middle were the SEALs; and on the far end were about an equal number of Green Berets. All had played in the exercise, and the SEALs had operated against both groups. I sipped my beer like a Baptist. The insults were already flying, along with small items: rolled-up napkins, twist tops from beer bottles, and the occasional drink thrown whole. I knew it was only a matter of time until the place exploded. The senior chief and I would be doubly damned if it did. We would be dinged first for not stopping the riot from happening, and then we would be gigged for being here in the first place.

An empty shot glass bounced off the bar in front of John.

“Getting a little hairy in here, or so,” he said calmly.

I was just about to say “Let’s get the hell out of here” when John picked up the glass from the bar. He stood on his bar stool and banged the glass off his beer mug. Ding ding ding ding.

“All right, you assholes,” he bellowed, “pipe down!” The crowd quieted a little. The senior chief yelled again. “I’m telling you assholes to shut the fuck up! AT EASE!”

The bar quieted. It was a sullen, tense silence, and every eye in the place was on John, balanced on his bar stool. I wanted the world to open up and swallow me, but the senior chief was in his glory. He stepped onto the bar and walked its entire length.

“All right,” he growled. “Who’s the roughest, toughest motherfucker in the bar?”

A gigantic Green Beret stood up. This guy was six-five and looked about 250. “I am,” he said.

John looked him over. “You’re the toughest motherfucker in this bar?”

“That’s what I said, old man,” the Green Beret answered.

“Good,” John said. “You take over. I gotta take a piss.”

The place exploded in laughter, the tension broken forever. John jumped down off the bar and gave me a wink. It was an epic stunt, and one I have never had the courage to repeat. I’d just watched a master in action.

FRIDAY WAS NEW YEAR’S EVE, and I’d been operational for a year and a half. Holiday leave had been granted in two sections: Half the command received a week off at Christmas, and the other half was allowed liberty the week of New Year’s. I’d taken neither this year. I was a bachelor, and although I would have liked to see my parents back in Mississippi, I’d been able to get home for a weekend at Thanksgiving. I volunteered to take the watch on Christmas Eve and again during the New Year’s leave section. The duty was easy, and apart from the two nights I spent in the Team area, it was like another week off. I was happy to let the guys who had families spend time at home.

I’d been invited to a New Year’s party by a pilot friend who flew for the Red Wolves, an aviator with the redoubtable name of Wilbur. The bash was to be at Wilbur’s house, on the north end of Virginia Beach, a neighborhood to which I am still partial. Wilbur’s crowd was mostly airdales, and they called themselves the Fifty-eighth Street Beach Bullies. I was delighted to be invited, as I did not think a punch-up at the Casino would be the best way to start my year.

Wilbur’s place was on the sand, a ramshackle three-story 1920s vintage beach palace. The wind was blowing hard and cold off the surf when I arrived. It was crowded and warm inside. I stashed my coat, thanked the host, and somebody mixed me a very large drink. A woman I didn’t know came up, kissed me, and gave me a pointed hat that said BETTER LUCK NEXT YEAR.

Three minutes later, I ran into the woman I would later marry.

Margot Attman was blond, striking, six feet tall, and always had a wry smile crinkling the corner of her mouth. She looked vaguely like Faye Dunaway. Where the movie star seemed ephemeral, Margot was athletic and direct. She had a biting wit. When I first saw her, she was standing against a door leading out to the porch, one foot on the ground, the other tucked back, almost under her thigh. Her legs were extraordinarily long. She held a drink in one hand and had her other thumbed through a belt loop, like a cowboy. Her head was down, and her blue eyes were half closed; she was listening to, or ignoring, a small, balding man telling her a joke.

Our eyes met as I walked past. I am hardly a pickup artist, but as soon as the bald man walked off, I walked over.

“Thank God,” she said. “They invited somebody tall.”

I was smitten.

We talked and danced, and her friends watched us and asked one another who I was. Margot played them, and played me as well. She told her friend Wanda that I was her stepbrother. She told someone else I was her pool boy.

She was a teacher from upstate New York, in the country between Buffalo and Niagara. Her father was the postmaster of a small town called Hamlin. She asked what I did in the navy, and I said I was an astronaut. When pressed, I admitted that I was actually only a payload specialist.

“I just work the big arm,” I said.

“Bullshit,” she said. “Wilbur says you’re a SEAL and I should keep away from you.”

“Wilbur is a dangerous man,” I said. “I’ve flown with him.”

At midnight she said, “Come over here and kiss me.”

I stood where I was. I said finally, “Come over here. I’m worth it.”

She did, and I pulled her close, and I kissed her long and deeply, and when I let her up for air, I kissed the front of her throat twice. Lightly. And then I whispered into her ear, “When I kiss ’em, they stay kissed.” It was the corniest line I knew, and it made her laugh brightly.

We left her car parked where it was and drove in mine to her place, a bungalow on the beach maybe a dozen blocks south. We were buzzed and happy and glad to be alone. I had come recently from the tropics; my skin was red, and I delighted in the cold wind that ripped into me. My heart was pounding as we climbed the wooden stairs to her apartment; inside, it was cool and drafty. I lit a fire, and she literally said she was going to slip into something more comfortable. I laughed and poured her a drink.

The wind blew in great gusts, and the little house occasionally shook as huge waves thundered down on the sand. In a few moments Margot came out of the bedroom nude, and the fire played on her skin.

“I forgot my pajamas,” she said.

My eyes rolled over her hungrily. Her body was long, her breasts perfect and round. She had the light traces of a suntan marking out a bikini line. I took her into my arms. We went to bed and made love all night.

We were not apart much after that evening. I was deployed often, but Margot was always there when I got back, always droll, always unimpressed with the SEAL Team bullshit. And always her body was mine, and she would sleep in my arms, warm in my arms, and I started slowly and inexorably to need her in my life.

I am sorry to say that I wish I had been able to love her better.