Navy Seals by Couch Dick & Doyle William

Author:Couch, Dick & Doyle, William
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062336620
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

“THE GROUND WAR STARTS at 0400 hours,” said Lieutenant Tom Dietz. “Let’s go in and blow the shit out of the beach!”

In the early morning hours of February 24, 1991, hours before the first Gulf War began, a small team of U.S. Navy frogmen from SEAL Team Five’s Foxtrot Platoon pulled off an audacious stunt at Iraqi-held Kuwait’s Mina Saud beach that may have helped save thousands of Iraqi and American troops from dying in the desert.

In one of the cleverest “head fakes” of modern warfare, they tricked Iraqi troops into thinking a massive amphibious assault by seventeen thousand U.S. Marines was being launched in the dark waters off Kuwait. But the Iraqis had no idea that instead of two U.S. Marine divisions, they were facing only fifteen lightly armed Navy SEALs carrying 160 pounds of C-4 explosives, machine guns, and grenade launchers.

The Persian Gulf was familiar territory for the SEALs. In the late 1980s they performed a number of operations to help protect international shipping in the oil-rich region during the Iran-Iraq War, including capturing oil platforms and intercepting ships in “visit, board, search, and seizure” operations. But when American military planners prepared to enforce UN Security Council resolutions and liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in early 1991, the SEALs were almost nowhere to be seen in the order of battle. “We didn’t have a major role” in the war, said Captain Walter S. Pullar III, a SEAL and commander of Naval Special Warfare Group Three. “We weren’t part of the strategic picture. We were part of the tactical picture—a small one.”

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Allied commander, was said to favor conventional forces over special operations units like the SEALs. Newsweek magazine reported, “The movies might glamorize secret commandos like . . . the Navy SEALs, but to an old foot soldier like Schwarzkopf they were nothing but trouble—weirdos and ‘snake-eaters’ who had to be rescued by the regular grunts when their harebrained operations went awry.” The SEALs, however, were eager to pitch in, and they came up with a potentially brilliant idea to help kick off the Allied ground invasion scheduled to launch in the early morning hours of February 24. Schwarzkopf listened to the plan, and approved it.

At about 10:15 P.M. on February 23, platoon commander Lieutenant Tom Dietz and his fifteen SEALs quietly approached Mina Saud beach in Iraqi-held Kuwait in three eighteen-foot rubber Zodiac 450 Combat Rubber Raiding Craft or CRRCs, stopping less than a thousand yards off the beach. The SEALs knew the target well, having secretly scouted the area in reconnaissance missions on two previous nights. The ground war was scheduled to begin in less than six hours, and what the SEALs were about to attempt could significantly affect the outcome. From intelligence reports and his own observations, Dietz understood there to be as many as 2,500 Iraqi troops dug into bunkers around the area.

A highly choreographed sequence of maneuvers now unfolded, all designed to fake Saddam Hussein and his generals into

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