Free Combat Swimmer by Robert A. Gormly Page A

with him. Sadly, he was killed in a truck accident in 1971. I’ve buried too many good SEALs, and his funeral was the hardest.
    My leading petty officer was Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bill Garnett, “Mr. Squared Away.” I’ve never met anyone more organized than Bill. He was also a super operator and, as the second senior enlisted in our squad, the perfect complement to Jess. Bill made sure things got done. He could foresee problems and solve them before they became problems. He was rock-solid dependable, and there was none better under fire. Bill would go on to have a long and distinguished career as a SEAL.
    Our “doctor” was Hospital Corpsman First Class Fred (Doc) McCarty, a great field medic and diving corpsman. We’d break ’em, he’d fix ’em. Fred was a Navy First Class Diver, and he had attended many corpsman schools before he came to SEAL Two. He also had a great sense of humor and always seemed to say the right thing when we got in trouble. All SEAL Two corpsmen I saw during the Vietnam era were good, but Fred was the best.
    Petty Officer Second Class Charlie Bump was my point man—the first man in the line of patrol—and a superb operator. Long—six feet tall—and lanky—he weighed about 150 (soaking wet)—he could go through mud better than anyone I’ve seen. He looked like a water bug leading us through difficult terrain. We called him “Mr. Steady,” and thanks to his sixth sense in the field, he kept us out of trouble. On a subsequent tour, he was awarded the Silver Star for leading an operation to free American POWs reputed to be held in the U Minh Forest. Charlie infiltrated the camp with four men, killed a guard, and called in a helo-borne force. They freed about a hundred Vietnamese but just missed the Americans, who’d been moved by the VC only hours before.
    Petty Officer Second Class Pierre Birtz was the youngest in the squad and pound for pound the strongest SEAL I have ever seen. He could carry a lot of bullets, so I made him our automatic-weapons man. Of French-Canadian descent, Pierre was the squad dissenter, always “going on record” to make a point. We loved him. His secondary function was to keep me awake on ambushes—he never failed, because he never slept in the field.
    I can’t imagine being around a better group of people. I cut my fighting teeth with them.
    Â 
    We decided that the best way to get started was to take our detachment away from the home fires for some concentrated training. We went to Camp Picket, an Army Reserve training post about forty miles southwest of Richmond, Virginia, that had everything we needed to get started—weapons and demolition ranges and plenty of woods where we could work on our patrolling techniques.
    Jake set up good training problems. He assigned each of the four squads different operating areas; there, we disappeared to set up our base camps. Only Jake knew where all of them were. Each squad was also given a “secret” radio frequency that Jake used to pass us mission orders and set up resupplies. We also each had an emergency frequency, which Jake monitored twenty-four hours a day.
    He’d pit one squad against another, usually not telling either group that it had company. We’d be assigned reconnaissance or raid missions, usually five or ten kilometers away from our base camps. Patrolling to and from the targets gave us plenty of opportunities to establish our standard operating procedures and get to know each other, until we came to think of ourselves as one entity rather than six individuals.
    After we set up our base camps, we called Jake on the PRC-25 (a rugged, man-portable VHF radio that became our primary means of communicating in Vietnam) to give him the eight-digit grid coordinates for our base camp. Jess suggested it might not be good for Jake to know exactly where we were, and I agreed. So I made a “mistake” on