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3
Takedowns
G
UN
R
EADY
“W
ake up. We got a tanker.”
I roused myself from the side of the boat where I’d been
catching some rest despite the cold wind and choppy waters. I was
soaked from the spray. Despite the fact that I was a new guy on my
first deployment, I’d already mastered the art of sleeping in all sorts
of conditions—an unheralded but critical SEAL skill.
An oil tanker loomed ahead. A helicopter had spotted it trying to
sneak down the Gulf after loading up illegally in Iraq. Our job was
to get aboard her, inspect her papers, and if, as suspected, she was
violating the U.N. sanctions, turn her over to the Marines or other
authorities for processing.
I scrambled to get ready. Our RHIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat,
used for a variety of SEAL tasks) looked like a cross between a
rubber life raft and an open speedboat with two monster motors in
the back. Thirty-six feet long, it held eight SEALs and hit upward of
forty-five knots on a calm sea.
The exhaust from the twin motors wafted over the boat, mixing
with the spray as we gathered speed. We were hauling at a good
pace, riding the wake of the tanker where radar couldn’t pick us
up. I went to work, taking a long pole from the deck of the boat.
Our speed dropped as our RHIB cut alongside the tanker, until we
were just about matching its pace. The Iranian ship’s engines pulsed
in the water, so loud our own motors were drowned out.
As we pushed alongside the tanker, I extended the pole upward,
trying to angle the grappling hook at the top onto the ship’s rail.
Once the hook caught, I jerked the pole down.
Gotcha.
A bungee cord connected the hook to the pole. A steel cable
ladder was connected to the hook. Someone grabbed hold of the
bottom and held it while the lead man began climbing up the side of
the ship.
A loaded oil tanker can sit fairly low in the water, so low, in fact,
that you sometimes can just grab the rail and hop over. That wasn’t
the case here—the railing was quite a bit higher than our little boat.
I’m not a fan of heights, but as long as I didn’t think too much about
what I was doing, I was fine.
The ladder rocked with the ship and the wind; I pulled myself
upward as quickly as I could go, my muscles remembering all those
pull-ups in BUD/S. By the time I reached the deck, the lead guys
were already headed toward the wheelhouse and bridge of the ship.
I ran to catch up.
Suddenly the tanker began gaining speed. The captain, belatedly
realizing he was being boarded, was trying to head for Iranian
waters. If he reached them, we’d have to jump off—our orders
strictly forbade taking any ship outside of international waters.
I caught up to the head of the team just as they reached the door
to the bridge. One of the crew got there at roughly the same time,
and tried to lock it. He wasn’t fast enough, or strong enough—one
of the boarding party threw himself against the door and bashed it
open.
I ran through, gun ready.
We’d done dozens of these operations over the past few days,
and rarely had anyone even hinted of resistance. But the captain of
this ship had some fight in him, and even though he was unarmed, he
wasn’t ready to surrender.
He made a run at me.
Pretty stupid. First of all, I’m not only bigger than him, but I was
wearing full body armor. Not to mention the fact that I had a
submachine gun in my hand.
I took the muzzle of my gun and struck the idiot in his chest. He
went right down.
Somehow, I managed to slip as well. My elbow flew out and
landed straight on his face.
A couple of times.
That pretty much took the fight out of him. I rolled him over and
cuffed him.
B
oarding and searching ships—officially known as VBSS, for
Visit, Board, Search, Seize—is a standard SEAL mission. While
the “regular” Navy has specially trained sailors to handle the job in
peacetime, we’re trained to handle the searches in places where
resistance is likely. And in the lead-up to war during the winter of
2002–03, that meant the Persian Gulf off Iraq. The U.N. later
estimated that, in violation of international sanctions, billions of
dollars of oil and other items were smuggled out of Iraq and into the
pockets of Saddam’s regime.
Smuggling took all sorts of forms. You’d find oil being carried in
wheat carriers, hidden in barrels. More commonly, tankers took on
thousands and thousands of gallons in excess of what they were
permitted in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program.
It wasn’t just oil. One of the biggest contraband shipments we
came across that winter were dates. Apparently they could fetch a
decent price on the world market.
I
t was during those first months of my first deployment that I
became acquainted with the Polish
Wojskowa Formacja
Specjalna GROM im. Cichociemnych Spadochroniarzy Armii
Krajowej
—Special Military Formation GROM of the Dark and
Silent Parachutists of the Polish Army—better known as GROM.
They’re the Polish version of the Special Forces, with an excellent
reputation in special operations, and they worked on the takedowns
with us.
Generally, we worked off a big ship, which we used as kind of a
floating home port for our RHIBs. Half of the platoon would go out
for one twenty-four-hour period. We would sail to a designated
spot and drift in the night, waiting. With luck, a helo or a ship would
radio intel about a ship coming out of Iraq sailing pretty low in the
water. Anything that had a cargo would be boarded and inspected.
We’d go out and take it down.
A few times we worked with an Mk-V boat. The Mk-V is a
special operations craft that some people have compared to World
War II–era PT boats. The craft looks like an armored speedboat,
and its job is to get SEALs into harm’s way as quickly as possible.
Built out of aluminum, it can haul serious ass—the boats are said to
hit sixty-five knots. But what we liked about them were their flat
decks behind the superstructure. Ordinarily, we would load two
Zodiacs back there. But since the Zodiacs weren’t needed, the
whole company would board from the RHIBs and stretch out to
grab some sleep until ships were spotted. That beat leaning across
the seat or twisting yourself around to rest on the gunwale.
Taking down ships in the Gulf quickly became routine. We could
take dozens in a night. But our biggest takedown didn’t come off
Iraq; it was some fifteen hundred miles away, off the coast of
Africa.
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