ON THE OTHER SIDE OF AMERICA, ALONG the Pacific Ocean where the Navy trains its special forces, commandos explain that the mission of the elite SEALs is, quite simply, to make the enemy wish he were someplace else.
How do they do it? ”I could tell you, but then I`d have to kill you,”
is the response. So don`t ask.
”Our basic mission includes reconnaissance-the sneak and peek-as well as clandestine insertion into enemy territory, observation of enemy movements, placing laser-target beacons and calling in naval gunfire,” explains Rear Adm. George Worthington, the Navy`s senior SEAL, giving the textbook definition of the mission of his service`s special forces.
Navy officials admit that the SEALs look for a younger man than do the Army Green Berets, who, because of cultural requirements and the emphasis on the advisory and nation-building role, need maturity and an expanded world view.
”We anticipate to be deployed in unilateral situations. We need a younger warrior who, despite the conditions of cold, hunger or number of bad guys, can get it done,” says Capt. Tom Lawson, commander of the Naval Special Warfare Center outside San Diego in Coronado.
In fact, 65 percent of the enlisted men who arrive for basic underwater demolition and SEAL training, called BUD/S, are direct from boot camp. Only half of them will ever reach commencement day 25 weeks later, the highest dropout rate for any military training program.
Because BUD/S training is ”the toughest offered by the U.S. military,”
Lawson says, there is no disgrace in dropping out. A candidate need only walk to the center of the campus courtyard and ring the ship`s bell that is the public signal of a trainee`s departure from BUD/S.
Capt. Mike Jukoski, who formerly commanded the Naval Special Warfare Unit in the Philippines and now serves as a division director at the Pentagon, recalls an incident in BUD/S training when his class was ordered on a long-distance swim off Puerto Rico.
”The first leg was a 2.4-mile swim around Dog Island, but nobody told us that the tide would change when we were halfway around,” Jukoski says. ”We entered the water, and we were making time and thinking: `Boy, are we getting away with murder today. This is going to be so easy.` But at the halfway point, the tide changed, and I remember crying inside my face mask because I was making no headway. I was swimming with all I had for about two hours, and all I could do was stay even with this one rock because of the current. The instructors knew. They teach you to deal with adversity.
”It`s a maturity thing,” Jukoski continues. ”You get to the point where you can`t stand it anymore. You feel you`re getting beaten with a 2-by- 4. You think it`s going to last forever and you don`t think you can last an hour. But all you have to do is last that hour. And if you can`t last that hour, then last just 10 minutes. If you can`t last 10 minutes, then last one minute-and then another one minute and just one more minute after that and then just one more. . . .”
Former SEALs argue that today`s Navy commando doesn`t have it as tough as the old days, and they might be right. One current SEAL instructor confided that the Navy ”can`t afford another Mirecki,” referring to Airman Lee Mirecki, who suffered ”fear-induced heart failure” before drowning in a pool during rescue training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, according to court-martial testimony.
But these same former SEALs argue that the rigorous, sometimes controversial training creates not government assassins but military professionals eminently qualified to serve America even after they leave the service.
”What I took with me is the knowledge that I can go wherever I want and be whatever I want to be, and if I am not there today, then I have the ability to change it,” says Stanley Antrim, a former underwater demolitions instructor who currently is supervisor of pools and beaches for the City of Coronado.
Jokes Adm. Worthington, the top SEAL: ”If I can tie knots in explosives beneath 30 feet of water, well, I don`t have problems with my shoelaces in the morning.” He says former SEAL colleagues have gone on to be investment bankers, treasure hunters and doctors in rural Appalachia.
Public interest in special forces is bound to be piqued now that ”Navy SEALs,” starring Charlie Sheen, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (”Scandal”) and Michael Biehn (”The Abyss”), has been released. The Pentagon hopes the film will do for naval special forces what ”Top Gun” did for naval aviators.
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ON GRADUATION DAY FOR ONE recent BUD/S class, the six officers who started with the class made it to commencement, but of the 57 enlisted men, only 30 made it to graduation.
”You have joined the ranks of the most elite fighting force in military history,” says the commencement speaker, Navy Capt. Joseph DeNigro, commander of the North Island Naval Air Station. ”And I hail you for it. And envy you for it. And bless you for it.”
DeNigro quotes the cinema classic ”Red River” in saying that there are three times in a man`s life when he has the right to howl at the moon: on his wedding night, when his first child is born ”and when he finishes a job he was crazy to start to begin with.”
Minutes later, Lt. Kayle Newkirk Watson III, the senior officer of the BUD/S class, breaks ranks, leaps from the stage and does something he might have been tempted to do-might even have yearned to do-but resisted doing for six months.
He rings the ship`s bell in the courtyard, for he is no longer a BUD/S trainee. He is a SEAL.
Did he howl at the moon that night? Don`t ask.
IN THE HALLWAYS OF THE WORLD`S LARGEST office building, military personnel in Army green, Air Force blue and Navy white surge down the hallways carrying documents and dreams. The civilian employees at the Defense Department favor a standard uniform too, most often business suits of blue or gray.
Seth Cropsey sits in his Pentagon office, contemplating this image and its illustrative symbolism.
”People here wear the uniform, and that word `uniform` is not only a noun, it`s an adjective too. There is a sameness. Now, that is totally at odds with the idea of `special.` That`s our problem in this building. In an organization that is hierarchical, and where uniform is not only a noun but an adjective, the idea of our `specialness` is bound for hiccupping.”
This concept and its inherent rub are fundamental to Cropsey, a Chicago native who serves as the Defense Department`s No. 2 official on issues of unconventional military actions and combat operations short of all-out war.
(His exact title is a mouthful for any bureaucratic roster: principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.)
He is subordinate to a handful of civilian Pentagon officials in this field of growing presidential interest, and countless military officers wear braids, bars and stars above Cropsey`s rank of lieutenant in the United States Naval Reserve. But none of them speak with more heartfelt intensity in arguing the case for America`s special forces.
”Whether or not the hoped-for changes in the Soviet Union take place, we are looking at a world in which the idea of conflict is undergoing fundamental change,” Cropsey says in explaining the growing interest in low-intensity conflict and the renewed Defense Department willingness to accept special-operations forces into the club of arms.
The drive to renew special-operations capabilities can be dated to a law passed by Congress in 1986 and amplified in 1987 and 1988 that established the U.S. Special Operations Command, consolidated special-operations funding in one account and ordered the Pentagon to create the office of the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. That post is held by James Locher, a former staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
U.S. Rep. Earl Hutto (D-Fla.), a champion of these forces, says the brilliance of the bill predicted that the more likely form of battle in future years will be that of low-intensity conflict and that the more likely need of military power will be in the form of special operations.
This change has been brought about by an ebbing of the Cold War and by the diffusion of power, as the two superpowers themselves become vulnerable to international terrorism with its tools of hostage-taking and random violence and to Third World despots who are increasingly gaining access to chemical-and potentially nuclear-weapons.
Concepts aside, the real goal of the legislation ”was to get the attention of the Armed Services and tell them not to short-change special forces any longer,” Hutto says.
Special forces are to receive about 1 percent of the Pentagon`s $295 billion budget for 1991, according to Gen. Lindsay, the special operations commander-in-chief, ”and the government gets an excellent return on that investment.”
Previous years witnessed ”a roller-coaster ride” in special-operations funding, with those troops receiving ”mostly hand-me-downs from the strategic and conventional forces,” Lindsay says. He believes times have changed.
Unlike the rest of the American armed forces, the end strength of U.S. special-operations forces is to rise in 1991, from 38,000 to 40,000 troops.
The operations command is scheduled to receive new MC-130 Combat Talons, the specially outfitted, long-range transport planes, as well as additional AC-130 Spectres, the awesome flying gunboat that took a mere 10 minutes to flatten Noriega`s military-command headquarters in Panama City. Additions to the command`s fleet of MH-53 Pavelow and MH-47 Echo helicopters are planned, although Lindsay still worries about a lack of speedy aircraft for getting troops in and getting them back out again over distances beyond 750 miles. This lack of lift capability is blamed for the catastrophe at Desert One during the Iran hostage-rescue mission.
As the special-operations budget is, for the first time, consolidated into one account, Lindsay`s command will take over research and development responsibilities for the one-of-a-kind weapons used by the shadow warriors in each of the Armed Services.
Lindsay says he hopes to develop compact, lightweight equipment for quick transmission of encoded messages as well as tiny gliders or sailplanes straight from the Batman comics for safer, more accurate infiltration.
Although the parachute reflects 1930s technology, Green Beret specialists such as Maj. Al Charters are stretching its capabilities to the limit through advanced free-fall training. Included in this training are high-altitude jumps that call for the soldier to drop to chillingly low levels before pulling the rip cord, ensuring almost complete stealth before landing in a target zone.
At the other end of the spectrum, Charters said, are high-altitude openings. One mission put soldiers out of a plane at high altitude over Great Britain and asked them to immediately open their parachutes and then float completely across the English Channel onto the Continent beneath their open canopies.
”It`s just another way to get to work,” Charters says.
Getting to work for the Navy SEALs presents problems of the opposite extreme. Although the rubber boat with paddle is a SEAL trademark, these elite units also have sci-fi miniature submarines. The Navy also has converted several (the number is secret) SSN 637s, the Sturgeon-class attack sub commissioned by the Navy from 1967 to 1975, to carry and deploy larger numbers of SEALs over long distances.
In addition, SEALs are assigned the most modern underwater breathing gear, including the German-made Draeger, a rig whose closed-circuit system allows divers to breathe for four hours without ever releasing telltale bubbles. Also in the inventory is the Mark 15, a scuba system that allows SEALs to work for six hours at a depth of 180 feet. The newest firearm of choice for these amphibious commandos is the MP5, a 9-mm submachine gun made by Heckler & Koch, a German manufacturer, that can operate after being submerged for long periods.
While special-operations forces have traditionally been the first to come to mind when low-intensity conflict is mentioned, the military`s best thinkers are now rewriting doctrine to more clearly define the mission of these soldiers. They use the newest buzzword, ”continuum” of conflict.
Army Maj. Wayne Kirkbride, an analyst at the Army-Air Force Center for Low Intensity Conflict at Langley Air Force Base, Va., said the Pentagon defines low-intensity conflict ”not as a kind of war. It is an environment. It includes all military action above peaceful competition but below fully declared, traditional conventional war.”
Maj. William Council, chief of doctrine development at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center, argues that the deft application of special-operations forces anywhere in the military spectrum-from peacetime competition to all-out war-can bring conflict to an end without raising the level of violence any further.
”Traditional troops used in conventional fashion drive up the violence in order to drive the situation back to peace,” he says, citing the example of Panama, which already was in conflict before the American invasion brought war and then quiescence there.
”If you introduce us early enough and give us enough assets, we can turn it around in less time and with less of a chance of driving the situation up the continuum of violence,” he says.
All the conflicts of the last decade were low-intensity and utilized special forces, from the British defense of the Falklands to international peacekeeping in Beirut, from the U.S. invasion of Grenada to the invasion of Panama.
The matter is particularly timely as special forces spearhead assistance to Latin American nations combating narcotics in President Bush`s anti-drug initiative. But the specter of special forces as the vanguard of the failed attempt to pacify Vietnam lingers, along with the horrific image of charred U.S. servicemen in the Iranian desert after the botched attempt by Delta Force to rescue American hostages.
”I don`t think it`s a question of being unprepared,” Cropsey says in reviewing the cyclical nature of Pentagon support for special operations.
”For the last few years we have been focusing on special-operations forces, and they are being revitalized. Our people are identifiably real warriors, have good equipment and good leadership, and there is no doubt in the minds of anyone who knows them that they can do what is asked of them. That is not the issue.
”The question is: Are we prepared up here?” Cropsey says, tapping the side of his head with a finger. ”Are we prepared to use them and use them properly? That is the fundamental issue now.”
