Operation Thunderhead (36 page)

The situation did not sit well with Hetzell, though he didn't immediately voice his concerns. He did point out to the officers in the compartment that he was trained in communications. He also felt that he and his men could do whatever had to be done in order to maintain contact with the sub. Then he had some pointed questions for the chief.

The man wanted to go on a SEAL operation. Did he know how to clear a Stoner when it had a spinback? Did he know where Reeves kept his medical kit? How about where Knudson carried his pop flares?

It was pointed out that each of the men in the platoon had the answers to those questions. If one man was wounded in the dark, he knew where to reach on his teammate right next to him to get what he needed to stay alive. The platoon had trained so long with each other that they knew how each other moved in the dark, how any man would react in an ambush, enemy contact, or breaking enemy contact. And the final question asked of the chief: Just how far could he swim? If they picked up more defectors than they had room for in the boat, some of the SEALs were going to swim back to the submarine. Could the chief do that?

With his face fallen, the chief admitted that he couldn't answer any of the questions.

One of the SEALs finally asked point-blank if the reason the chief was supposed to go along on the operation was because they didn't have an officer to go on the op.

“Yes,” was the blunt answer from the intelligence officer.

The officers were not very happy that there wasn't a SEAL-QUALIFIED officer to go out on the mission. But all of the other officers, both UDT and SEAL, had yet to return to the
Grayback
. It was pointed out to the officers that of the four men, three were cadre instructors in the teams and the fourth man had been on numerous combat operations—including a POW rescue operation that released nineteen South Vietnamese prisoners, but that specific information wasn't known to Hetzell and the others at the time.

The point was made that the men who were going on the mission as it stood were the men who had actually trained the two platoon officers, Dry and Conger. The experience was there to conduct the mission; that wasn't a question.

It was during this meeting that Tim Reeves, who considered himself something of a linguist, asked a question that should have received a direct response. He was concerned about what language he should refresh on so as to be ready to communicate with any defectors. But he could not get an answer to his question. And the intelligence officer on board the
Grayback
who was overseeing the mission still wasn't going to tell any of the SEALs that the primary language they could expect to run into was English.

The platoon members going on the operation were told that the defectors would signal with a red or yellow cloth or red light. No other details were forthcoming as to just who the defectors might be, or which country they would be coming from. This lack of information did not sit well with the SEALs, but there was nothing they could do about it.

All the officers said was that they would think about the mission plan and the men had their permission to return to their compartment.

A few hours later, the submarine suddenly moved away from the area. It had been sitting on the bottom in sixty-five feet of water about four thousand yards off the mouth of the Red River. None of the SEALs knew at the time why the submarine moved away so quickly. What was learned later was that was the time when Dry, Martin, Edwards, and Lutz were dropped in from the helicopter. They had no way of knowing the Dry had been killed on impact and that the first SDV group had found itself swimming with the passengers and crew of the second abandoned SDV.

The
Grayback
had signaled in plain back to the Long Beach—“Do not drop package. Hammerhead coming out of the Hourglass.”

It was suspected that a North Vietnamese PT boat had left the nearby base and was moving in the direction of the
Grayback
's resting place. The submarine had to move for its own protection and they had no way of knowing that the “package” had already been dropped, or that the second SDV had been abandoned.

Then the submarine stopped and bottomed again. It was about three or four hours after that when a new danger made itself known.

A sound inside the steel hull of the submarine concerned everyone on board—it was the noise made by steel chains being dragged across the bow planes of the boat while she rested on the bottom. It was an old method of detecting submarines in shallow water, dragging chains and grappling hooks behind surface boats. And it was very much the kind of technology that might be employed by the North Vietnamese.

The SEALs were all up in their compartment when the scraping sound was suddenly heard. The sound was distinctive and unmistakable, as each individual link of a chain seemed to clank as it was dragged across the bow planes. Then there was a soft, double-click sound. While the rest of the platoon wondered what might have been going on, one of the men spoke in a very sarcastic manner, “Oh great, a limpet mine.”

There was a sound-powered phone that connected the compartment to the rest of ship and Hetzell wanted someone to be called up from the crew who knew how to open the outside hatch on the wet side of the hangar. There was a way to manually open the hatch by working a hydraulic pump by hand, but none of the SEALs in the compartment knew how to do it.

When the crewman came up into the compartment, he wanted to know what it was the SEALs intended to do. There was no real plan, it was just that the men did not intend to die in a steel pipe if they had any other choice. For men to whom the sea is a second home, they had another choice: They would suit up and fight it out on the surface with whoever was attacking the submarine.

The SEALs broke out their weapons and put on their bathing trunks, what they called their “blue-and-golds” for the blue cloth and gold trident. Over their trunks went their web gear and inflatable UDT vests. The weapons were locked and loaded and the men stood by. If the submarine was actively attacked, the SEALs would exit the boat and swim up to the surface. There, they would rain serious fire down on any small boats that might be in the area. The men didn't want to just drown down on the bottom with the sub; they would rather go out fighting on the surface. They knew it couldn't be a large craft that was dragging the chains; they would have heard the engines, but a PT boat or even a sampan would find they had hooked a fighting fish on the end of their chains.

Then the submarine suddenly took off again. It lifted up from the bottom and hauled out of the area at its best speed. None of the SEALs knew what had happened, but it seemed that the danger had passed. They would not be fighting it out on the surface. The gear came off and the weapons were unloaded. Stoner light machine guns, M60 machine guns, M16s, and forty-millimeter grenade launchers all went back into their respective storage containers. If it had come to a battle on the surface, the SEALs would have given a good accounting of themselves. But the chains might have been nothing more deadly than a local shrimper running his nets across the bottom. Discovery of the submarine by even a simple fisherman could mean disaster, so they had left the area.

It was hours later that suddenly the men from both of the SDVs came into the compartment. Moki Martin, Bob Conger, Lutz, McConnell, and the rest were back. It was then that the rest of the platoon learned about the loss of Mr. Dry, and just what had happened to the SDVs.

On the
Long Beach
with Edwards receiving the medical attention he required and Dry secured for his last trip back to the States, the rest of the SEALs and UDT operators wanted nothing more than to return to the
Grayback
. The submarine reported that it would send a rubber boat over to the
Long Beach
to pick up the men after dark. Hours passed by as the men waited. Finally, a Z-bird came up from the darkness to the tall steel sides of the
Long Beach
. It was the missing boat from the
Grayback
. The delay had been due to an outboard motor that had failed. The intelligence officer on board the
Grayback
had insisted that the fifteen-horsepower silenced motor be used on the rubber boat without informing the rest of the SEALs on board as to just what was going on. And the motor had remained just as dependable as it had proven to be at Subic.

The men from the submarine turned down offers to get the outboard repaired by the facilities on the
Long Beach
. They climbed into the craft, picked up paddles, and began stroking out into the darkness, rendezvousing with the sub as she lay in the darkness.

The involvement of the
Grayback
with Operation Thunderhead was over. The helicopters continued their search patterns over the planned time of the mission, but there wouldn't be any signal spotted from escaped POWs. There was a false alarm raised by the spotting of a yellow flag, but it turned out to be nothing more than a local boat.

One more incident during the mission of the
Grayback
took place to help keep the mission memorable. It was 6:15 A.M. on Friday, June 9, when the orders rang out across the deck of the
Harold E. Holt
. The ship had spotted what had to be an enemy submarine operating among the ships of the Seventh Fleet. The radar of the
Holt
had picked up the snorkel of the sub as it ran on its diesel engines. The transmission from the
Holt
rang out across the radio net. “Stone Face” (
Holt
) had a submarine spotted at three-five-zero-five and they were taking it under fire. With that announcement, the five-inch gun of the
Holt
launched its first round, right at the USS
Grayback
. Several rounds were fired at the submarine before a desperate order to cease fire was issued from the
Long Beach
.

On board the
Grayback
, Captain Chamberlain had finally turned in after a very long thirty-six hours on watch. At about 6:00 A.M., he turned the con over to his executive officer and went to his cabin in near exhaustion. It wasn't more than a few minutes after he had laid his head down on his bunk that the first shell screamed overhead and smashed down into the ocean. Though the heavy projectile had missed the submarine, the blast of high explosives reverberated throughout the hull of boat. With his feet hitting the deck even before he was fully awake, Captain Chamberlain rushed to the control room. Rapidly issuing orders, Chamberlain had communications established with the
Long Beach
even as more rounds came down from the
Holt
's gun. If it came down to it, Chamberlain was not ready to give up his ship. He had one of the submarine's torpedo tubes made ready for firing. But he never had to fire that shot. The incoming fire from the
Holt
ceased as the
Long Beach
issued orders. The
Grayback
was once more able to continue on its way out of the area.

It wasn't until that evening that a message came in from the
Grayback
at the scheduled time. There was a great deal of relief from everyone involved with Operation Thunderhead when they learned that the unique submarine was completely unscathed. Chamberlain mentioned the poor marksmanship of the
Holt
and added that if the incident repeated itself, he would be obliged to fire back!

It seemed that even the trip back to Subic Bay wasn't going to be without incident once the
Grayback
left the Gulf of Tonkin waters. Due to the characteristics of a diesel-electric boat, the submarine could make much better speed on the surface that she could while submerged. It was while traveling on the surface that the
Grayback
ran into a force that she couldn't battle, only endure—Typhoon Ora.

In spite of the waves forcing the sub to roll on the surface, she continued under diesel power to charge up her batteries and make best speed toward Subic. Down in their compartment, the SEALs remained in their bunks and continued their journey as passengers. To help pass the time, the SEALs had taken their turn at mess duty, washing dishes and doing cleanup as so many sailors had done before them. The food on the cruise out had been everything the Submarine Force was known for. The fresh food having run out some time back, the meals on the return trip were not quite up to the same level as the earlier ones, but the SEALs had other things on their minds than eating. And when they passed through the typhoon, some of the SEALs wanted to do anything else but eat.

There was a complete investigation on the operation and the loss of a fine and promising SEAL officer. It was later determined that Lieutenant Melvin Spence Dry had died on impact during the cast from the helicopter. The situation of altitude and speed may have added to his impact, but what had killed the officer was a broken neck from hitting something floating in the water. It had just been one of the things that can happen to a SEAL conducting the kind of dangerous operations that they do. Spence Dry was the last SEAL killed in action during the Vietnam War. But due to the highly classified nature of Operation Thunderhead, he would not receive official recognition of that fact. Even his family, his father a retired Navy captain, would be told that Dry had been killed in an operational accident while working from the
Grayback
. They would not learn the truth for years following the incident.

 

 

Though they never operate with the intention of receiving rewards or decorations, there was some disappointment in the lack of recognition of the SEALs' involvement in Operation Thunderhead. The bravery and dedication to service and commitment shown by the men of the SEALs and the UDT operators during the difficult mission speak for themselves. It took nearly thirty-six years for the mission to finally be publicly and officially recognized by the Navy. On February 25, 2008, Memorial Hall of the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, hosted an awards ceremony for Lieutenant Melvin S. Dry. The award citation reads: