SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (6 page)

JSOC quickly moved to coordinate the special mission units of the U.S. military. Funding was increased for Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team Six, and Task Force 160—the aviation component of America’s premier counterterrorism operators. These outfits, all black programs, were manned by handpicked volunteers. JSOC’s budget, manning, command structure, and even the location of its bases and headquarters remain classified. JSOC’s mission and mandate are global; it is the United States’ principal weapon against terrorism. One of its unofficial mottos is “Anywhere, anytime.”

Screening for SEAL Team Six, Delta, and TF-160 is competitive and by invitation only. Only the best SEAL operators, soldiers, and combat aircrew are allowed to even
inquire
about the program. After a lengthy interview process, the most experienced and highly regarded operators are allowed to undergo rigorous “selection courses”—punishing training regimes that winnow out all but the most proficient, accomplished, and dedicated.

The military had a name for the operators at SEAL Team Six and Delta. They were called “Jedis.”

TEAM JEDI

IN 1980, SEAL TEAM SIX WAS FORMED
by Dick Marcinko, then the operations officer of SEAL Team Two. America’s premier counterterrorism unit started as a single platoon from SEAL Team Two. Volunteers were told they were being trained as a “maritime intercept” unit. On the organizational charts, Marcinko’s outfit was first called “Sixth Platoon.” The name was changed in a couple of months to “Mobility Six.” This was soon shortened to Mob Six—“Mob” being short for “mobility” and a not-so-subtle acknowledgment of the power Marcinko was accumulating. His methods owed a lot to
The Godfather,
and Dick Marcinko was nothing if not an empire builder. In a short time he parlayed seventeen guys into a global counterterrorism conglomerate.

Marcinko was in the right place at the right time. Delta Force had just fallen on its sword. The debacle at Desert One forced military planners to rethink the idea of placing all their counterterrorism eggs in a single, Army basket. The SEAL Teams had an unparalleled reputation as counterinsurgency operators in Vietnam. Marcinko had completed a tour at the Pentagon as the Navy’s counterterrorism action officer. There, he had worked the E ring, buttonholing admirals and lining up support. He sold the chief of naval operations, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, on creating a mission-specific Navy counterterrorism team, handpicked from the best SEALs in the business. Marcinko was given the go-ahead and a thick checkbook.

When Marcinko returned to the operational teams at Little Creek, Virginia, he was a lieutenant commander—too junior to skipper a SEAL Team, and too senior to command a mere platoon. So he wrote his own job description, expanded his mandate, and started stepping on toes. Officially assigned as the operations officer at SEAL Two, Marcinko managed to fob off this job and take over the day-to-day operation of Mob Six. He built SEAL Team Six from the ground up, picking the best operators from the other teams, and laying his hands on the best weapons and equipment, regardless of where they were made. Marcinko was a master at working the margins of the Pentagon’s growing “black” counterterrorism budget. He made sure that every dime spent on Delta Force was matched by money sent to Mob Six. He soon had the cash, and a working team, but then came the delicate question of who, exactly, was giving him orders.

Marcinko pulled every string he could find to get his nascent command attached to JSOC, and not the Naval Special Warfare Group at Little Creek. This was a textbook example of insubordination, but somehow, Marcinko got away with it. With breathtaking audacity, he had not only short-circuited his own commanding officer at SEAL Team Two, but also the commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Two and a pair of do-nothing SEAL Team admirals who could only blink and sputter in fury.

JSOC was a creation of the U.S. Army. Its commanders and most of its senior officers were Army. There were a few Air Force guys around, but they were almost irrelevant, as the new outfit also created a stand-alone, Army-based aviation component called Task Force 160. Marcinko, at times charming, always opportunistic, and occasionally ruthless, managed to wheedle his way into the graces of the JSOC commander, Major General Richard Scholtes. Selling the Navy had been easy—pretty much a matter of Go Navy, Beat Army. To the generals in his path, Marcinko played down Six’s land-based mandate, concentrating on operations at sea and across the beach. Marcinko told the general that if he wanted an organization with global reach, he needed SEALs. Seventy-one percent of the world’s surface was ocean. Delta Force could take the land and SEAL Team Six could handle the water. It seemed like a fairly rational idea. Marcinko had his swim fin in the door. The rest is history.

Within the Teams, there were whispers that Marcinko had sold out and gone Army. Mostly, this assessment was to be heard from officers whom Marcinko did not invite into the new unit. Mob Six was officially commissioned as a SEAL Team in 1981. It was Marcinko himself who picked the number six to confuse the enemy. At the time there were only two SEAL Teams, SEAL One in Coronado, and SEAL Two at Little Creek. Six is also the number given in Navy radio traffic for the leader of a squadron. Marcinko was staking a claim that his would be the best Team in Naval Special Warfare.

He had driven a political wedge between himself and Naval Special Warfare Group Two, the command staff in charge of the East Coast SEAL Teams. Seeing how there was no love lost, Marcinko now added a little physical distance as well. Since World War II, East Coast Naval Special Warfare units had been based on the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, a sleepy suburb of Virginia Beach. Marcinko picked out a stretch of forest at a disused Naval communication station close to the North Carolina border and wrote a check for a new building. “Hell,” he said, “make it a couple of buildings.”

Marcinko built an iron curtain around his new kingdom. Sequestering himself on the new base, he went so far as to tell the operators of SEAL Team Six not to associate with their brethren across town. The “find new playmates” rule didn’t make him many friends among his former colleagues, and “the secret mission” of Six was the worst kept secret in the SEALs. But that’s just the way Marcinko wanted it—he was building brand recognition.

The mission of Six was easily guessed at—maritime and coastal targets all over the world—but not much else about the command was general knowledge. SEAL Team Six, like Delta, was on a constant war footing. Within a very short period the entire Team would be ready to deploy and fight anywhere in the world. SEAL Team Six was, and is, on the highest alert level of any unit in the U.S. military.

In creating SEAL Team Six, Marcinko made enemies on all sides. Other teams resented Six’s unlimited budget and the brain drain of their best operators. Not that Six had to spend much on recruitment. Marcinko made sure, however, to keep his bread buttered with Admiral Hayward, chief of Naval Operations, and for a while that made him, and Team Six, untouchable.

On June 2, 1982, Admiral Hayward did as all four-star admirals and chiefs of Naval Operations must do: he retired. Marcinko had lost his top cover, and the knives came out.

With no allies left in the SEAL community, Marcinko was rotated out of command and replaced by Captain Bob Gormly, an experienced, capable officer. In taking over SEAL Six, Gormly faced an uphill battle. Marcinko had thrown a tantrum when his two-year command slot was not extended. In an act that endeared him to no one, Marcinko split for Europe on the day Bob Gormly assumed command. Skipping the change of command ceremony was an unforgivable breach of Naval etiquette and put the final nail in the coffin of Dick Marcinko’s reputation. Even his die-hard stalwarts were put off. SEAL Team Six, like its creator, was acquiring a reputation as the cantankerous diva of Naval Special Warfare.

There were whispers at the other Teams that Six was “All show, no go.” Single-handedly, Bob Gormly set out to make Six live up to its operational mandate. Tall, taciturn Bob Gormly had grown up in Virginia Beach. His first association with the Teams was with a couple of surfers he met riding the waves at Rudee Inlet. Gormly thought they might be military. They didn’t seem to work normal hours. They were pretty good on their boards, they obviously loved the ocean, and eventually Gormly asked one of them what they did.

“We’re in the Navy,” came back the standard reply.

“What part of the Navy?” he asked.

“The Atlantic part…”

This went on for a couple of weeks, until, at last, someone gave the kid the right answer. They were members of the UDT, the Underwater Demolition Teams. When Bob asked what they did, one of the surfers said, “We’re the guys who jump into the water to rescue space capsules.”

Gormly was hooked.

After college, he tried out for BUD/S and made it. Before transferring to Six, Gormly had a long and storied career in Naval Special Warfare. He had conducted beach recons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and led a team of swimmer scouts during America’s brief invasion of the Dominican Republic. He made several tours in Vietnam, earned a chest full of medals and a reputation as a no-nonsense professional.

In a lot of ways, Bob Gormly was the antithesis of Dick Marcinko. It was Bob Gormly more than any other officer who made Team Six what it is today. Team Six under Marcinko had been a faux meritocracy married to a sycophantic sort of personality cult. Marcinko had come up through the ranks, a Mustang, and although he was the captain of the team, he had scant respect for other commissioned officers. Starting in the days of Mob Six, Marcinko had kept alive a spirit of devotion to himself—but he did so by deliberately undercutting the other officers in the Team. He was in the habit of replacing his assault group commanders without warning, and firing them immediately if they conflicted with his senior chief petty officers or himself. Although this system prided itself on collegiality, it brokered no dissent. There was one tactical opinion, and that was Marcinko’s. This “you’re the boss” arrangement prompted devotion, but it also brought out the worst of deadly “group think,” a sort of collective megalomania, where a Team begins to think that they are too good to fail.

It is one of the fundamental strengths of the SEAL Teams that individual operators contribute to the execution of the mission, and to the planning cycle as well. People are in the SEAL Teams because they’re good at what they do. Gormly brought the Team back together, welding both officers and enlisted operators into a cohesive combat-ready unit. It was Bob Gormly who led SEAL Team Six into the command’s baptism of fire.

SEAL Team Six was originally set up with three operational entities, two operational teams, and a training cadre. In theory, one team would be deployed, one team would be in training, and one team would be on stand down, or what came to be called “schools/deployment.” By the time of the Grenada Operation, the terrorism business was booming. It was soon found necessary to expand the assault teams to three (and later four) operational units, and a full-time training unit, called Green Team.

Though they were trained, manned, and equipped identically, each assault element at SEAL Team Six has a unique and distinct character and ethos. For purposes of command and control, the assault elements are color coded, but are most often referred to by their nicknames. One crew is the Pirates, the Bones Men, and wear a patch featuring the Jolly Roger. A second crew is nicknamed after the trident-tailed lion they wear as a recognition patch. The third operational team has gone by the call sign Apache, or Arapahoe, and are subsequently known as the Red Men.

SEAL Team Six has the jack, and it shows. The gear issued to its operators is the top of the line, and the best of everything. Every operator has a cage, his own personal space, warehouse, and dominion. There are few pieces of equipment held in common—everything is issued to, and signed for, by individual operators. Each operator’s cage looks like an Aladdin’s cave of spec ops gear, an astonishing amount of stuff: Scuba gear, parachutes, climbing harnesses, crampons and ropes, carabiners, lock picks, survival kits, Nomex flight suits, custom wetsuits, and dozens of different combat uniforms. Each operator maintains his own personal arsenal.

For special operations, most shooters prefer some variant of the M-4 carbine, though SCAR rifles and customized M-14 sniping variants are not unknown. The M-4 is the workhorse of the SEALs. It is a modular system that allows operators to “dial in” their weapon for mission-specific tasks. An ingenious rail system allows shooters to place laser illuminators, rifle scopes, flashlights, and holographic sights as necessary for long-range desert patrol or close-quarters combat. A deadly 40 mm grenade launcher can be snapped onto the weapon—making it a piece of pocket artillery firing lethal and sublethal munitions out to eight hundred yards.

Most SEALs also keep at least one tricked-out Kalashnikov AK-47. Favored for its go-anywhere ruggedness and jam-proof reliability, the AK is also the weapon used most often by terrorists. SEALs will often “one up” the bad guys, fitting the venerable AK with modular rails, so that it may carry the high-tech lasers and holographic sites that the SEALs prefer. These are placed in low-profile mounts so the AK retains its characteristic “bad guy” shape. The surprise comes when the SEALs open fire. The laser designators and holographic weapon sites extend the AK’s effective range by several hundred yards—a critical distance in a firefight.

As an “all-star” outfit, individual operators are given a lot of leeway as to the weapons they carry. For close-in, silenced work, the MP5 machine pistol, the SD, is still a favorite. A variant of the MP5 machine pistol, the SD has a built-in silencer and fires subsonic, hollow-point ammunition. For longer ranges, some prefer the Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifle, a behemoth of a long gun that fires 7.62 mm ammo out to beyond eight hundred yards. Also common are highly modified M-60 machine guns and SAWs (squad automatic weapons), often carried with feed trays and backpack-mounted ammunition systems that allow an operator to carry as many as one thousand rounds. Pistols are another discretionary item. In the armory one can still find the occasional stainless steel Smith & Wesson model 686 .357 magnum (for water work), and a variety of Glock, Ruger, Beretta, and SIG Sauer pistols. For concealed carry, every operator is issued a blue-steel Walther PPK, just like James Bond.