Part 1 - "Uncovering the SEAL TEAM Overlooked in Vietnam: Their Tragic Story Revealed."

foreign [Music] [Music] x-ray Batoon had the Unlucky honor of being the worst shot up platoon to serve in Vietnam we had four of the team members killed the rest of us are wounded two to three times each my dad worked in oilfield in 62 he went overseas working uh on a long two-year contract well when that contract was up he came back to the States told Mom that he was leaving Nigeria and going into Algeria North Africa and that her and the boys could go yeah the only problem with that the uh the schools only went up to like the eighth grade I was in high school my older brother was about to go off to college so me and the older brother stayed in Liberty but prior to that mama was a was a nurse my I have an older brother and a couple of younger brothers but I was the one that was chosen for housework and Mama would get up early and I'd put the brothers on the school bus to go to school and make sure they had their lunches with them and clean the house when I got home from school and one Saturday a movie came on and it was a movie about the United States Navy Richard Widmark starred in it I was about 13 at the time so I didn't clean the house that morning mama was little ticked off when she got home so I hadn't done a dang thing but I pointed that TV and I told her that's what I was going to do so she left me alone to let me finish watching the movie that day I had a first cousin killed in Vietnam in 67. probably after nine months after that my parents were back here in the states for a visit and we can hung out with mom and dad but I was gone all day long so when I showed up that afternoon mom wouldn't know where I was I told her I had gone to Houston and joined the United States Navy and she slapped me harder than I had ever been slapped in my life so I went off to the Navy mom and dad went back to Africa I went to boot camp in San Diego went to an a school in San Diego Then I checked into the Navy's underwater demolition trained and uh that's where I met your so-called Uncle Dave Perry for the first time uh Dave was enrolled in class 52. I got enrolled in class 52. I got medically backed up to class 54. and uh graduated with class 54. but Dave and I had remained friends that hope through the time even up to today's date and at that time Navy Frogman and seals had two separate roles from each other to get in the Seal team the instructors at training picked who they thought wouldn't want to go to Seal Team and then we were asked if we wanted to go to the underwater demolition teams are going to CLT and about seven of the guys out of my class were asked to go to Seal Team and all seven of us did Mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family most everybody had been in the Navy we're all of our feelings felt so that's where I went three days far was The Graduate training to become a Navy frogman I got a telephone call from an uncle that my mother had been killed in a car wreck in Africa so instead of graduating with my class I flew home to a funeral service in Liberty and then flew back to Colorado California probably eight nine ten days later and met up with the rest of my guys from my class that that went to Seal Team One and class 54 when I got him enrolled into it there was not quite 400 of us that started that class and we graduated a little bit over 50. and uh I remember the first day I ever walked into the training unit I walked into the front door there was a chief his name was Chief Jones I can't remember what Jones's first name was and I had a little tummy that I've always had Jeep going stuck his fist about eight or nine inches up inside my stomach and looked at me and said well Butterball you won't be here long will you and uh so I fooled him I stayed did what I needed to do and uh I never was a Olympic runner and then the training units back then the instructors would cut six or eight guys that were the last six or seven or eight guys in a run and I would always be the first one they would cut or the last one that start with the last guy and worked forward so they would work up to me and that's where to get cut and uh so we would have to run an extra on the beach the instructor that did this for all the time his name was Vincent Oliveira and Vincent but regularly tab rope around each of us tied to the bumper of his Jeep and pull us up and down the beach I know one particular day this one guy tripping failed Oliver screaming at him he tripped and fail and he tripped and failed he tripped and failed Oliveira told him he said if you fall one more time I'll run it over you well we didn't make it probably 20 more yards and this kid fell again he threw his arm straight up there and he just screamed blood over me Oliveira and uh one of the other boys I went through training with was no morally Jimenez while it was a with a Spanish descent everybody loved Wally Wally's dead now got a natural causes a number of years ago but we had the obstacle course that had to be if I am two or three times a week under a certain given time period and they have what they call a slide for life on it and this telephone pole must have went 40 foot up in the air in the Rope stretched way out to another telephone pole that was probably only 30 foot in the air and you would either lay out laid out on the rope and slide to the other one are you a hand crawl to the other end of the Rope the instructors would stay on the ground if they rocks at you well they knocked Wally off the slide for Life two or three different times that day and I'm gonna say at least four and the last time he told him he said his arms were killing him he needed to go to the uh to the doctor their own Basin aloe vera told him you got two choices he said right after the slide for life we got a Four Mile Run he said now you can go on this Four Mile Run then go to the doctor or you can quit now and go to the doctor so Molly went on the Four Mile Run went to the doctor there on the naval Airfield Base and he came back with both arms in a cast and he got rolled back a couple of classes and and eventually finished out of the training and he and while he stayed in the underwater demolition teams one of the things we used to do with it would go down near the Tijuana border and it was like walking through a sewer patch down there and which swim in the mud would play in the mud you couldn't tell who anybody was because they'd make you dive head first and swim through the mud somehow busted my lip at one one of the days down there it's busted pretty good and Oliver screamed he was bleeding I said me he said who's me I said majors he said come up here majors so I got out of the mud I walked up from the bank where he was standing and he knocked me flat on my butt with bogor and told me to lay there he said open your mouth out my mouth and he filled my mouth full of sand he said it'll quit bleeding here in a minute and you know they're a lot of horror stories about goes on the training and uh believe it or not a lot of them are true stories you know you remember going through it and you remember the first couple of days and then after that you become oblivious to what went on back then you got very very little time to fall asleep okay six and a half days worth of crap it was night we were in our ibs's which is a small rubber boat be about seven of us in the boat three guys on each side paddling and one guy acting as the rudder in the back and the boats would stay pretty close to each other so that the instructors could keep an eye on us in the dark and I remember one of the guys he said anybody got change from her and this is like day four or day five and no sleep he said anybody got change for a dollar and we were all just sucking chains for a dollar he says there's a Coke machine over there and I need to get a Coke so he just stood up and walked right out of the boat into the base and he was definitely a hallucinating when that when hell week was actually over the instructors I was married at the time so the instructors would call the wives of the girlfriends and tell them they could come pick us up and the the ladies knew exactly where the compound was what it looked like and where the little parking lot was so one of the instructors told me to go over and lay down on the grass right next to the asphalt parking lot and my wife when I finally did wake up she said she'd been sitting there four hours I wasn't probably six seven feet from the car and by that time your body is swelling up with what what they call it a potatoes back then or whatever you want to call it and she could not even recognize that that was me laying on the ground it lack of sleep and and all you were doing was running swimming running swimming and you just your body just started off as bad as it could and that's what happened yeah but there was either right under or right over 300 that quit in my training class so they would uh right there on the edge of the training base they'd have to pile a little bunch of sand up like a grave and put the helmet on it and so we got to watch that little graveyard grow and grow and grow and grow there's no ring the bell I quit cold water is what made a majority of the people quit the Pacific Ocean is cold and when you go through a winter class without a wetsuit and you just got a pair of fins on and swim trunks and you're swimming in it are one of the things they used to love to do didn't make us interlock our arms with each other and we would sit this deep in the ocean for hours and just shiver and shake and that's where the guys would quit they just couldn't handle the cold and the instructors would always bring a couple of active duty seals in to help them monitor all of us and Richard Solano was one of them that came in Richard got killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam James Gould was one of the others that came over he also got killed in the same helicopter crash that Solano got killed in but when they showed up and and they'd only been in teams maybe a year year and a half this time so they knew what hell weeks were like and uh they would keep their pockets full of Almond Joys and other little bits of candy so when the instructors wasn't looking they would slip us candy to eat and during during hell week we ate four meals a day the chow hall would open up and I mean we ate four large healthy meals a day and they'd give you about five minutes to eat yeah oh yeah a lot of us go to sleep eating back then I don't know how this today but uh died was either the third second or the third phase of training and you spend a lot of time in the water back then we were swimming with the devil hose regulators which had mouthpiece in and it had two hoses that went back to the to your air tanks and uh Oliveira loved me because I'd gone to secretarial school as a maybe yeoman so he told me his Titus wave I was a man as a secretary instead of a woman and so that caused me to get picked up quite a bit we'd get we'd be in the boat fixing to dive into the uh San Diego Bay and Oliver come over and tell me to open up my mouth and at all times he had a large water tuned back in his mouth he would take it out of his mouth tell me to open my mouth and he'd put that water tobacco in my mouth he said as soon as this dive's over I want my tobacco back and you better have it in your mouth so every time you take a breath you're sucking down the air and the water tobacco is moving and as you exhale it's moving and he was serious but I got out of the water he wanted his water tobacco back last things you do one of your big runs was a 16 mile run from a chill team from one's headquarters down to the Tijuana Mexican border aloe vera ran it backwards out around us all with a bot water to back in his mouth touching us the whole time it wasn't dark it was black yeah and at night there's a little phosphorus Critters in the water and so as you're swimming on a night swim it's like sparkling like a lightning bugs lightening up under water and again pretty eerie but it's really good looking too the other thing that Oliver would do to me if he didn't give me a water tobacco to put in my mouth say on a three mile compass swim he would take my face mask away from me and when we did accomplish course there'd be two of us and he had a tack board that had Compass hooked into it and everything and you already knew where you were going and the distances you were supposed to go and it would take say 30 to 40 minutes to an hour to do one of the compass limbs I do it I did a lot of them with no face masks the pool is good because you that they're teaching you how to survive and whether your ankles get tied together and your hands get tied together and you got to tread water for the next 30 40 minutes and you're just thinking bouncing off the bottom of the pool coming back to get a breath air slowly sink back down and come up but the worst one was when you had to save an active drowning victim Chief Allen was one of the instructors and chief Allen was a big man he was in the pool as my active drowning victim that I had to get in the pool bring him to the edge of the pool and get him out of the pool now he dang near drowned me that day and to my best of her collection I did get him over to the edge of the pool but it was me who got picked up and put out of the pool you'd be in pool dive gear territory or four instructors could be underwater in dive gear let's swim up behind you and they would actually turn your valves off to where you wasn't getting any Oxygen you had to be able to reach back there turn it back on they would take your mouthpiece out you'd have to to clear it get it back in they would jerk your face mask off so underwater you're having to put your face back Mass back on get all the water out of it and continue swimming while they're continually harassing you the whole time one of these guys that uh I went through training with judgment was his name that could hold his breath right at five minutes he had been a an Olympic swimmer and he could just go down lay on the bottom of the pool and stay there forever and I you know I'd be pushing a minute and a half and then I want to get out when I got back from burying my mother I was immediately checked into uh x-ray platoon and they were probably already at that time seven or eight guys picked out for it Lieutenant Michael Collins was the officer in charge he was a Naval Academy graduate our second officer in charge was not an officer he was an e-9 Navy chief that he was fixing to make his seventh combat tour to Vietnam as a Navy SEAL the next guy under him had done six tours of Vietnam this was going to be his seventh and two or three of the other guys had already done one or two tours and there weren't but like four of us it's actually going to be our first tour Duty in Vietnam actually Batoon had the unlucky honor of being the worst shot up platoon to serve in Vietnam we had four of the team members killed they were only 14 of us so Forbes killed the rest of us are wounded two to three times each when we got to Vietnam well Mr priority even going to Vietnam we'd go to nowland California steel team had a great training base on the Salton Sea had a vehicle Village there and the salt scene was real large with different tributaries coming in out it was so our boats could operate in the tributaries and we could actually work in an environment very similar to a thick Mangrove jungle whether it was the grass we were in the brushes we were in or the bamboo that grew up in and along the lake but it was a good training place there was a bar there at an island on the Salton Sea the name of it was the look of the Irish Cove every sealed platoon up to this point would spend time in and out of the Luck of the Irish couple they had different photographs of different sealed platoons hanging on the walls eight by ten photographs from some larger building Maxine I don't remember the last name were the owners of the bar after we got shot up so bad x-ray platoon was the last syllable tune to get its photographs hung up inside that bar we flew out of North Island which is just right down the road Seal Team and uh we all mustard Frank beaumar was the chief he was second in charge we stowed our gear we wives and girlfriends were there to say goodbye Frank monar was there with his two daughters his wife and his two daughters his wife's name was Nora his oldest daughter was named Nora Noah at that time was somewhere about 20 22 months old the younger daughter I can't remember her name she was still a an infant when we flew out and she had been born with a hole in her heart when Frank got killed he was buried at The Point Loma Cemetery it was Rosecrans National Cemetery and right about a year later the baby daughter had died from heart problems and she's buried on top of her dad they're at Rosecrans Cemetery so on one side it's got Frank's inscription and on the other side of the tombstone it's got his lovers we packed up got on that plane made a trip to Hawaii the plane stopped in Hawaii their roommate stops it and I I can't tell you the exact order but we stopped at Midway wake Guam the Philippines and then on into Vietnam we were in Vietnam maybe a week when we finally got all of our gear unpacked down at Ben tree been Trey was probably 60 miles from Saigon the war was one of the main breakouts of the war originally was in quinoa province betrayed with the capital city of the province we got stationed on a army base maybe 150 army guys only did it the most and then 14 of US Navy Seals like I said this this army base was almost right downtown been Trey so when we got there first thing we did boss told us to get our weapons ready to meet him on the banks of the river and we're on a very large tributary off the Mekong River where this base set and my boss doesn't tell the Army he doesn't call the South Vietnamese Police Department which wasn't but about three blocks from us and we just go down and we stand on the river banks and 14 of us with all of these very good automatic weapons and we just download into the river to make Sanctuary all of our weapons were working just a few minutes later here's the white mice that's what do we call the police people not only did the Dwight my show up but here comes the Army Major who was in charge of this army base wanting to know what in the world was going on he tried to implement us also in the mustering every morning just like the army guys does and that just wouldn't float with the way we worked so he insisted that Lieutenant Collins have us muster every morning on the grinder with his troops so we mustered on the grinder one time every one of us butt naked and that ceased any requirements for us to muster anymore we met our boat guys in Vietnam we we had not met them up to this point you know we knew what kind of boats would be operating out of but we did not know what cruise would be there and it was the same for the boat crew half of them didn't realize what Navy Seals were they just got assigned to boat units for one it sent to Vietnam and met us and we went to operate all 14 of us plus three or four the boat crew went out on our big boat on a night trip up and down some of the tributaries around uh bin tray the uh boat was powered by a large engines that were in silent compartments on jet jacuzzi ducts now standing close up to it you could actually hear the motors running when it was on step you could hear the boat running but not near what you actually think one of these boats noise could make and it had canopy on it a tarp canopy over it the 14 of us could stay covered under the tarp it really did not have any any armor plating uh protection around it except where the coxin actually sit and drove the boat it would go up one small tributary and hear a little noise and the next thing we know we're hearing crap bounce off of the tarpoleans rolling into the river bank and grenades are going off so we back out and got back down to base none of us were hurt we never actually saw the enemy uh one of the seals that I was operating with this was going to be his second trip to Vietnam his first name was Maury this scared the crap out of Maury so he went into the boss's office and said he quit send him back to the States so Maury got sent back to the States and kicked out a Seal Team he was born and raised and came up probably he had been involved with the NBA the NBA accidentally killed his parents and it upset our tremendously he switched sides and started working with Navy Seals he was like God does he knew Kim white Province like the back of his hand so when we went into the woods he was always walking Point even in front of our Point man I would be five six seven yards in front of our Point man and it was just a supremely fantastic relationship we had with him uh we all loved him close to Christmas time we were getting packages from home and uh I even slept in the same Barracks that we slept in had his rack in the right close to mine and uh I'd gotten a whole bunch of Christmas boxes a week or two for Christmas and came in I was sitting in the middle by bed opening my Christmas presents and he he was having a good time it did not upset me if he were alive today and I knew where he was he'd be living in my house that's how much I thought of him and how much the other guys thought of him uh Garden Clinic several of us have tried to trace him down over the last 20 years but we haven't had any any results in doing it there were four secret zones in Vietnam one of them was down by us in our Province it was called the tanfu secret Zone a secret Zone was an area set aside by our government they deemed there wasn't anybody there except bad guys we did not have to follow their Rules of Engagement in the secret Zone according to how it was set up there were bad guys and we saw them we could shoot them and we spent a lot of time in the tanfu secret Zone on one of our first daylight operations which we did not do very many of them we went in canned food we wanted to get a good first-hand look at an area that we would be operating in at night all 14 of us went in the woods plus ah we walked all day long in tanfu we saw hundreds upon hundreds of footprints we never saw a living soul in a couple of days later once we were back at base the boss and I had picked up a chew Hoy at the chuhoy center that we were going to run some Intel with and see if we couldn't work up a decent operation in tanfu well when they brought him into the our office area we had a large map of Ben tree and Kim watt Province on the wall and he just started running his fingers down through the area of the tanfu secret on and just Jackie Jackie Jack and Jack and jacking it uh finally stopped him and told us what the chuhoy was saying he said that we walked real close to a battalion a North Vietnamese soldiers they saw us we did not see them they did not open fire up on us because they knew in their minds that 14 guys would not come in to that area by themselves and so what they thought they thought we were a large Point element for a battalion or division sized Army movement they tried to get out of our path they left a couple of the guys that followed us all day to see what we were doing this true hallway was one of the guys that followed us uh all day long so we were just lucky we didn't get our butts handed to us that day North Vietnamese had a bounty out on anybody that could kill the Navy SEAL and depending on who you were whether you were a young Navy SEAL operating in Vietnam or a few have done five or six seven tours in Vietnam and we're good at your job these bounties ran anywhere from ten to fifty thousand dollars on each one of us that they could kill and prove who we were so we we did have a valued Market on our head in Vietnam Harold got killed and his older brother was a Navy SEAL his older brother's name was Sam Sam was a three or four or five classes before for us so Sam had already made several trips to Vietnam this was Harold's first trip he was 19 years old bald-headed had a few Manchu if you went to guess his age you to put him at 30 35 years old that's just how Harold looked and Harold's mind he was five foot eight 190 pounds of Twisted steel and sex appeal and uh the day Harold got killed we got caught in a real bad ambush and they had us pinned down for probably an hour they opened up on us from almost directly in front of us and we suppressed that fire they opened up on us from the right side and we suppressed that fire they opened up on us behind us and we suppressed that fire and they opened up on the left of us and we suppressed that fire and during the initial Outburst of the shooting Harold took around in the upper part of his right leg it came out below us growing it went into his left leg hit the pelvic bone and bounced into his abdomen and Harold bled to death within probably 20 seconds at the most so we're getting shot at the boss and I are working on Harold we couldn't really find except the one spot in the hip where the thing went in so we did a little bit of heart massage on him and but all we're getting is the gurgling of the massive amount of blood that's uh in his abdomen Craig got shot in the leg Clarence bets got shot up severely that night also and the only way we ever got out of the ambush is before we ran out of ammunition the boss got us all ready we gathered our dead our wounded and we charged the Ambush back toward the river to where our boat was waiting on us they shot at us the whole way back to the boat one of the boat crewmen named Gene Hicks we called him Buddha he knew that we were in a bad fire fight because the boat wasn't too far away they could hear what was going on he knew that the firefight had gone on long enough that we were just about to be out of ammunition he grabbed an M16 and came off that boat with a whole bunch of ammunition looking for us and luckily we actually ran to him ran into him he probably only gotten about a hundred yards toward us from the boat as we lifted Herald to put him up on the uh about the boat we lifted him up feet first and the boat crew grabbed him and pulled him up and as his head flopped over and it landed on my shoulder and out of the bloodness abdomen poured down the front of me and sitting in the boat that night I went and got back in the boat and I had Harold so hey Ed rushed it in my lap and uh then when I the Vietnamese got work with us he spoke a little bit of broken English and he said Harold did I said yes I he said Harold good man he bought me to lunch yesterday now prior to to me sitting down and putting Harold flap ahead in my lap we as we got on the boat we started returning fire back into the end of the Woods and they got the boat turned around and I don't really remember exactly what set me off with the guy man in the uh twin 50 that was on the starboard side of the boat but I remember throwing him away from the gun I grabbed it and I just started blasting into the jungle with it and uh when they when cheap bets he was what they call a plank owner Seal Team he was one of the original seals ever to be commissioned as a Navy SEAL and uh I don't remember exactly which tour duty this was either his sixth seventh right two or even for Clarence uh his leg had been so shot up the time he healed he was medically discharged from the Navy and the leg that got severely shot up was about two inches shorter at that point trig took around through the ankle he stayed in country and stayed off the ankle for about a week and then went back to work with us

Channel: True Stories from the Vietnam War

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Length: 37min 42sec (2262 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022