USA. Marine. Sea Air Land Teams. - Navy Seals: their untold story

FOOTNOTE

A notable earlier naval combat operation occurred in September 1942, when a small team of handpicked Navy salvage divers led by Lieutenant Mark Starkweather was put through a cram course in demolition and commando-raiding techniques and then sent across the Atlantic to spearhead Operation TORCH, the Allied invasion of North Africa. The team disabled a massive cable-and-net barrier blocking the Wadi Sebou River in Morocco, enabling shipborne U.S. Army troops to capture the strategic Port Lyautey airdrome, and earning a Navy Cross for each of the demolition team members.

According to SEAL historian Tom Hawkins, The term frogmen originates with the British, who were (except for the Italians) the first combat divers. They wore protective dress made from green rubber and were hence labeled frogmen in the British press. Once the UDTs adopted the underwater capabilities of the OSS Maritime Units after the war... they too began exploring protective dress for thermal protection. They were not really called Frogmen until after Korea, and they hated the term initially, but soon learned that it made them very popular in books, magazines, and movies. Also, see the end of this book for Hawkinss detailed account of the World War II ancestor-legacy units of the U.S. Navy SEALs, including the Naval Combat Demolition Units (NCDUs), Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs), Amphibious Scouts and Raiders (S&R), Special Mission Naval Demolition Unit, Naval Demolition Project, Special Services Unit One (SSU-1), Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO), and Office of Strategic Services Maritime Unit.

Mark Adkin, author of a definitive history on the Grenada invasion, criticized this mission on pages 174175 of his book Urgent Fury (1989), asserting that the SEALs target was a long-range transmitter used primarily by the Bishop government for broadcasts throughout the Caribbean, while the key Radio Free Grenada transmitter used to transmit inside the country itself was at another location on the island. In other words, incomplete intelligence led the SEALs to a target that was not critical to the success of the invasion.

Publishers note: The DoDs Office of Security Review requested the redaction of further references in this book to NSWs Development Group, to which the authors have complied.

Adapted from the NSW Command brochure: http://www.public.navy.mil/nsw/news/Documents/ETHOS/Brochure.pdf.

NONFICTION

The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228

The U.S. Armed Forces Nuclear-Chemical-Biological Survival Manual

The Finishing School: Earning the Navy SEAL Trident

Down Range: Navy SEALs in the War on Terror

Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior

The Sheriff of Ramadi: Navy SEALs and the Winning of al-Anbar

A Tactical Ethic: Moral Conduct in the Insurgent Battlespace

Sua Sponte: The Forging of a Modern American Ranger

Always Faithful, Always Forward: The Forging of a Special Operations Marine

FICTION

SEAL Team One

Pressure Point

Silent Descent

Rising Wind

The Mercenary Option

Covert Action

Act of Valor (Novelization)

OpCenter: Out of the Ashes

Act of Revenge

Inside the Oval Office: The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton

An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962

A Soldiers Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq

A Mission From God (with James Meredith )

American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms (with Chris Kyle)

Portions of chapters six and seven previously appeared in Dick Couchs books Down Range and The Sheriff of Ramadi.

NAVY SEALS . Copyright 2014 by Dick Couch and William Doyle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-233660-6

EPub Edition NOVEMBER 2014 ISBN 9780062336620

14 15 16 17 18 OV / RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity.

My Nation expects me to be physically

harder and mentally stronger than my enemies.

If knocked down, I will get back up, every time.

I will draw on every remaining ounce of

strength to protect my teammates

and to accomplish the mission.

I am never out of the fight.

FROM THE SEAL ETHOS

You are not alive unless you are living on the edge.

And living on the edge like these swimmers and the rest of those men, you are alive. I mean, you are alive.

I think that was the most fun I had in my life.

WALTER MESS, WORLD WAR II

OSS MARITIME UNIT OPERATIVE

Its just the way we were, the teams and the men, the camaraderie, it lives with you forever. I mean, you never forget your buddy. You never forget your shipmate. You never forget the team. You never forget the operations.

Thats what comes back, memories of all of the good times and the bad times, but always the good times.

Im very proud and happy to have been part of the military, part of the SEALs, part of special warfare and if I was a younger man I would still love to be back in there with them.

RETIRED LIEUTENANT JOSEPH DIMARTINO (USN RET.)

D-DAY VETERAN AND ORIGINAL MEMBER OF SEAL TEAM TWO

They just vanished. They came out of darkness and disappeared back into it. I mean, its incredible.

JESSICA BUCHANAN, AID WORKER

RESCUED BY SEALS IN SOMALIA

We must remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who has training in the severest school.

THUCYDIDES

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And I said, Here am I. Send me!

ISAIAH 6:8

by William Doyle

This book is a battle history of the U.S. Navy SEALs from their origins through today. Based in large part on interviews with more than one hundred former Naval Special Warfare members, it is our effort to tell the story of a remarkable elite fighting force and its ancestors, a group of warriors who have contributed directly to critical moments in American military history from the landings at D-Day and battles in the Pacific, through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the battles against international terrorism.

I learned military history from my father, in a lifetime of conversations about his experiences in the South Pacific during World War II as a U.S. Army intelligence and military police sergeant.

He survived Japanese air raids, helped protect General Douglas MacArthur in the jungle of New Guinea, rode on PT boats, and suffered from tropical diseases that brought him to the edge of death on several occasions. He met hundreds of people whom he found utterly fascinating, including GIs and sailors from every corner of the United States, highly proper British officers and beautiful Australian nurses, native islanders who seemed to have stepped out of the Stone Age, and a friendly Japanese POW who spoke fluent English and had served as a conductor on a Tokyo trolley car before the war.