Brave Men, Dark Waters by Orr Kelly

Author:Orr Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497645639
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER

9

The Super SEALs

IN THE EARLY MORNING DARKNESS OF 6 JUNE 1972, LT. MEL-vin S. (“Spence”) Dry stepped from a helicopter and plummeted into the Gulf of Tonkin near the North Vietnamese city of Thanh Hoa.

The twenty-six-year-old officer fell at least thirty-five feet and hit the water so hard that his neck was broken. He became the last SEAL fatality of the Vietnamese war, almost six years after Billy Machen became the first SEAL to lose his life in that long conflict.

Dry was a key participant in Operation Thunderhead, a bold but badly bungled effort to assist the escape of as many as five Americans from a North Vietnamese prison camp near Hanoi. The operation, long cloaked in secrecy, marked the first use in combat by U.S. forces of tiny swimmer (later, SEAL) delivery vehicles (SDVs).

The operation was set in motion when the prisoners managed to send out word that they planned to break out of the prison, steal a small boat, and make their way down the Red River into the Gulf of Tonkin. This meant that, if everything went smoothly, they would emerge from the sprawling Red River Delta somewhere along a fifty-mile stretch of coastline, running from just above Thanh Hoa north to a point slightly below the big port of Haiphong, sometime between 29 May and 19 June.

Aboard the USS Long Beach, command center for the operation, plans were made for helicopter patrols that would cover the entire area two to four times a day, looking for a boat with a red or yellow cloth flying from its mast, the signal the prisoners had selected to enable the rescuers to pick them out of all the boat traffic in the delta and along the coast.

Just north of Thanh Hoa, however, the coastline swings in, almost due west, and then curves south, with several islands a short distance off the shore. This meant that the helicopter searching for the escapees could come under cross fire from the island and the mainland each time it ran this five-square-mile gauntlet.

This is where the SEALs came in.

They agreed to send two men in to hide on one of the little islands and, through their binoculars, watch the boats moving along the coast for the red or yellow signal. This would provide complete coverage of the area where the men were expected to emerge into the gulf without adding to the danger to the helicopter and its crew.

But sneaking the SEALs onto the island posed a problem. If they tried to come in so close to the Vietnamese mainland by helicopter, surface boat, or even parachute, they were likely to be detected. The decision was made to try something the U.S. Navy had never done before in a combat situation: bring them in close to shore in a submarine and then send them the rest of the way in an SDV.

The skipper of the USS Grayback met with planners of the operation in the Philippines and told them he could do the job.

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