One Perfect Op Read online

  Pooh! Spat that pacifier right back into my face. So much for the great big SEAL impressing the baby. But she did remain quiet for the rest of the swim.

  Getting to the boat, I climbed aboard, careful to protect the child. The mother had already been placed in the bottom of the boat and I lay down next to her. We had brought light quilted poncho liners for just this purpose, and they were placed across the mother and myself so that both she and the baby would be protected from the elements.

  As the boats fired up and headed out to sea, life became a little more interesting for Senior Chief Chalker, specially trained SEAL baby-sitter. The child became fascinated with my mustache. Here I was lying in the bottom of a rubber boat speeding through unfriendly waters with an M4 strapped across my back, a bandanna on over my hair, and my face all cammied up with black cosmetic. And now I had this small child on my chest absolutely determined to stick her finger up my nose or pull my mustache off.

  Hey, even for a SEAL, having your mustache pulled can make your eyes water. And if I pushed the kid’s fingers away, she might start to cry. Offering the pacifier just got it spat back at me again. What? Do these things come in flavors and I brought the wrong one? Everything I did just made the child more irritable. I wasn’t about the let her go in case something happened and we had to swim. Giving in to the inevitable, I surrendered my mustache for the cause, thinking Hell Week never prepared me for this!

  Then the mother put her head on my shoulder, close to the baby, and things quieted down. The ride back was very smooth. With the wind now at our back, we were moving with the sea. The baby went to sleep, and even the water spray stayed off us. Very quickly, it seemed, the ship loomed up and we were pulling alongside for recovery.

  We had traveled only about half the distance we had covered on the trip in. The Navy ship had actually come into the harbor to pick us up and minimize our trip back out. Operating under complete blackout procedures, not a single light showing anywhere on the vessel, the big ship was nothing more than a large dark shadow on the sea. A particularly welcome shadow.

  Hooking up to one of the lowered safety lines, I climbed up the caving ladder—a thin rope ladder made of cables and rods—hanging down along the hull. Additional lines with harnesses were attached for the parents. My teammates would follow the civilians up the lines and watch out for them. But with only the baby to be concerned about, I was quickly able to board the ship.

  One of the SEALs on deck popped a chemlight (a soft plastic tube that glows when activated) and handed it to the baby. Wide-eyed, she held the dim light in her two pudgy hands, making ooooh sounds. The soft green glow barely illuminated the child’s face on the deck of that darkened ship. Not another light was showing except the stars.

  Some of the ship’s medical personnel were waiting on deck for us and made kind of a mistake with me and the kid. “We’ll take the baby now,” someone said as they reached out for the child.

  “You take your fucking hands off that baby!” I growled with no small amount of menace in my voice. “This baby’s mine until we get to the medical room, and that’s where I’ll turn her over to her mother.”

  When he turned to one of the other SEALs on deck for support, the guy was told, “We’ll see you in the medical room. Escort us. Other than that, keep your hands to yourself.”

  The other personnel were told in no uncertain terms to leave us alone and take us to the medical room. The plan was for us to move through the darkened passageways of the ship with the family and baby secured. Once in the medical room, we could have lights and the “cargo” would be turned over. That was what had been decided, and nothing was going to be suddenly changed by some self-important, overeager type.

  The situation now clear, we moved through the ship, and once secured in a sealed room, I handed the baby back to a grateful mother. With our people officially turned over to higher authority, it was back to the fantail of the ship for me and my Teammates.

  Inside our room, we downstaged from the operation. Stripping off our weapons and equipment, we cleaned up a bit and switched back to more normal uniforms. Our weapons and gear secured, we had other things to attend to. I hadn’t showered yet; my face was still mostly blacked up, and I had that unique SEAL aroma of sea, salt, sweat, and rubber hanging around me. But no one noticed that as we headed to the chief’s mess to eat and attend the little party that was waiting for us there. Everyone had a little toast to give for a successful operation. For myself, I lifted my glass and said: “To one perfect op, not one shot fired.”

  And all my fellow SEALs agreed.

  CHAPTER 2

  HOME AND HEARTH

  Back when I was a kid, one of the things I always liked doing was playing Army. What I loved most of all was being able to sneak up on my playmates or campsites out in the woods without being spotted. We made forts out of wood and other scraps, like kids do. I would sneak up on the “enemy” position and scout out their organization.

  The big thing in our game was to be stealthy, long before that word had anything to do with exotic aircraft. You had to be able to move without being seen by the other side and without making any noise that would give you away. Not being able to do that tended to lose the game for your side. Maybe that early stealth training is what inclined me toward the service when I graduated from high school.

  When I was growing up, I was one of the smaller, lighter kids in my age group. People were always telling me that I was too small to do something, like play football. In fact, I was able to play football and other rough sports. The lack of weight hurt me, but I had the heart to make up for it.

  It was that desire to overcome, the bet-on-the-underdog mentality, that helped me gather accomplishments that I otherwise wouldn’t have. That didn’t mean I liked being the lightest one my age around. That was what got me into body building. I built up my weight, and my strength, as I got older.

  Growing up in Ohio, I was the second oldest in a family of five children and the only boy in the bunch. Maybe that’s another thing that helped get me started wanting to see the underdog win: besides my dad, I was the only male in the family. I had one elder sister, Charleen, who was about a year and a half older than me. Then there were my three younger sisters, with about seven years between our ages: Cherylann, Roseann, and Darleen. It may be that my dad encouraged some of my sports pursuits to help increase the masculinity levels in the house.

  We had a good family, and I enjoyed my family life growing up. My father, Harrison “Chuck” Chalker, worked hard as a milkman to support his family. I remember him getting up at three or four in the morning and coming home at five or six at night. In bed by nine or ten, he got up the next day to do it all again. In spite of his heavy work schedule, my dad found the time to take me to Little League baseball and do all the other things that came up as I grew older.

  My mom was great to us, and I can attest to the fact that she kept us in line. When I was fifteen, for some reason I thought she wouldn’t strike me anymore. She went to slap me for something I had done and I blocked her hand. “Man, I’ve got this nailed,” I thought to myself. The arrogance of youth. I couldn’t have been more wrong. At the supper table, as I was taking a bite of potatoes, Dad started to ask me how my day was, but just then, I managed to get struck by lightning. As the shock wore off and the room stopped spinning, I vaguely remembered seeing my dad’s rock-hard fist flying at me right before time stopped for a moment. As I lay back where I had landed on the floor, tears coming to my eyes, I asked, “What was that for?”

  “Now sit up and eat your dinner, boy,” my father said sternly. “And if you ever do that to your mother again, I’ll do worse.”

  Dad wasn’t a real big believer in the new methods of child rearing that were coming into vogue back then. He didn’t have to make his point very often, but he usually didn’t have to repeat himself either. Getting knocked down wasn’t fun, but listening to all my sisters giggling was a lot worse.

  Our ethnic background was what you mi
ght called “mixed.” My dad is English and German Dutch. My grandmother had some Mennonite and some Cherokee Indian. On my mom’s side we’re Bohemian, a term I remember well from my childhood. So all in all, we’re good old American mutt. The bunch of us were all raised Catholic, and I attended Immaculate Conception Grade School.

  After nine years of Catholic school, I moved into public school from the ninth grade until my graduation. I wasn’t the best student in the school. All my sisters were honor roll students, valedictorians of their classes, slightly greater achievers scholastically than I was. I was lucky to get through as well as I did. In my senior year, I had to take Government over again. For some reason, the teacher for that course during my junior year thought my referring to him as a fat pig was cause to fail me.

  I got into sports more heavily in high school. During my sophomore year, I was on the wrestling team. I may have been skinny, but I didn’t give up very easily. No matter what pain was dished out to me during a bout, I got right up and came back. And I was fairly tall for my weight, which gave me a good reach.

  One night my mom and dad were out and while I was sitting in the living room watching TV, my sister and her boyfriend came home. “Don’t you think it’s about time you went to bed?” Charleen asked/told me.

  Heck, I was a sophomore, a man of the world, and knew what was what. “No. If you two want to make out, why don’t you just get into the back of the car?”

  That started off a bout of shouting between my sister and myself. Her boyfriend decided to get involved somewhere along the line and told me I shouldn’t talk to my sister that way. What I remember about how things turned out centered on my picking him up and dumping him upside down on the coffee table. That broke the table, put him on the floor, and damned near sent Charleen into hysterics. The full nelson I then put on him may have been a bit much. But that wrestling stuff really worked.

  My parents came home shortly thereafter. I was standing in the hallway near my bedroom door when my sister went crying up to my mother. Dad came back to where I was, and he just drilled me right in the chest. I went flying back, right through my bedroom door, and decided that since I was already there, staying in my room for the night might be a good idea. At least that’s what I did after I got up off the floor and caught my breath.

  To this day my sister may not know this, but later, after the family got her boyfriend away, my dad came back to my room. “Oh man, it’s not over yet,” I thought to myself. “Well, I did break the table.”

  When my dad came into my room, he shut my badly cracked door behind him. “Are you all right?” he asked with real concern in his voice.

  “Damn, Dad. Yeah, I am. Why?”

  “Well, it’s your sister’s boyfriend—I had to make it look good, but you’re okay, right?”

  This physical acting bit isn’t something I ever wanted to get into later. My father could make things look, and feel, a bit too real. But he was secretly glad that I upheld my sister’s honor, or was just being a jerk for the right reasons, whichever works.

  After high school I made the decision that I was going to pay for my own college education, and the easiest way to do that was to enlist. That wasn’t the most popular option in the country at that time. The draft was still going on in early 1972, the year of my graduation (it ended before that year was over). But I was seventeen and had made up my mind.

  At least I had made up my mind about where I was going after high school. In those days, I didn’t really know what I wanted for my life. What I did want was to get away from home for a while, travel a bit, and serve my country at the same time. I admired and had a lot of respect for Charleen’s boyfriend at the time, Ron Arbaugh. He had been an Army Special Forces officer, and it was due in part to his influence that I decided to go into the Army.

  CHAPTER 3

  FIRST STOP, THE ARMY

  It was a really interesting time in the United States, from the late sixties and into the seventies, when it seemed every young person was protesting against the draft, the Army, and the military in general.

  Direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was ending. The troops were all coming home. When I enlisted, I didn’t give any real thought to the possibility of going to Vietnam and seeing any actual fighting. I wanted to do some growing up, and I wanted to travel. The service was a way to do both. If I had to head over to Southeast Asia, that was just a chance I’d have to take. It came with the job.

  Right before I left for basic training, the incident at Kent State University took place. Students were killed by National Guardsmen who had overstepped their authority in trying to control student rioting and protests. There was a lot of protesting at Kent State, in Ohio, and throughout the country. That incident at Kent State seemed to drive morale in the country to rock bottom, and any faith in the government and the military was pretty well gone, especially with the younger crowd. But I was already enlisted in the Army and couldn’t have turned back even if I wanted to.

  My family wasn’t too thrilled with my decision to join the service, especially my father, who was a Korean War vet. My dad asked me, “What do you want to do, go out there and just shoot somebody?”

  “No, Dad, I just want to go out and grow up.”

  He wasn’t happy with what I wanted to do. But he respected my decision to do it.

  Enlisting in the Army was an education. Basic training wasn’t exactly Boy Scout camp with guns, but neither was it the most physically demanding thing I had done up until then. I was in a lot better physical shape than many of the other trainees, and the discipline was little more than what I had put myself through in high school sports.

  Morale in the Army was different from what I had been told. Vietnam hadn’t wound down completely yet, but the draft was over and it was an all-volunteer Army. All the men who were entering the service were there because they wanted to be, or at least thought they did. There were a few in basic and later who changed their minds about wanting a life in the service. But that had more to do with discipline and personal commitment than anything else.

  After basic, I went on to AIT (Advanced Infantry Training) and from there to Fort Benning, Georgia, and Airborne (jump school). Ron, my eldest sister’s boyfriend and later husband, had told me a lot about what he had done in the Army. So my immediate military objective was to try for Special Forces. The way into SF was through the Airborne, and that sent me on to jump school.

  Jump school wasn’t that bad for me. The instructors, what we called the Black Hats, were all E-6 and above, senior NCOs (noncommissioned officers) who really knew their stuff. Many of them were veterans of the Vietnam War. They were strict and hard on us, but it was a generally applied kind of abuse and we all took our lumps in turn. Of course, if you had an Airborne tattoo of any kind, they gave you extra special attention to make sure you earned the right to wear it. Or wished you had never had it done in the first place. That was at least one mistake I didn’t make.

  Physically it was demanding, a lot more so than it is today. The amount of PT (physical training) was intended to build you up enough so that when you hit the ground, you landed on muscle and not bone. The “lateral drift apparatus” let you slide down a wire to build up speed and then practice those PLFs, or parachute landing falls. Going into the sawdust pit and rolling out your PLFs managed to get you a mouthful of dirt. The 34-foot tower was where you learned your counting: one one thousand, two one thousand . . . , to teach you the delay to when you were supposed to feel your parachute opening.

  But it was the 250-foot tower that first gave you a feeling of height and a taste of what parachuting might be like. The rig hauls you up the tower under an open parachute and then drops you. The instructors shout up instructions through a bullhorn, telling you to slip left or right, pull on the risers, and cause the parachute to move to the side.

  When I went up on my first tower drop, it wasn’t too bad. You get hauled up in the air and there’s nothing under your feet. Looking down, the ground goes away fas
t. You feel some excitement, anticipating the drop and trying to remember everything you’ve been taught about controlling the chute and especially the landing. And there’s a little fear. It is a long way down to the ground, and you notice how the weight of your body strains down on the parachute harness. Some people give a little thought to just how strong the buckles are that keep you in the harness, but I wasn’t one of them. You’re really too busy just trying to get everything right to worry about what might happen that you don’t have any control over.

  The instructors shouted at me to slip left, and I was on the right. I landed softly, and the instructor was right up in my face quickly. He told me that I had failed due to not following instructions. You only got one fail out of three tower drops. But my other two drops went fine, and I stayed in the course.

  When it finally came time for us to jump from an aircraft, we were weathered out. The plane couldn’t take off, and we had to wait for three days. Nothing like getting all geared up and waiting in the pews for hours, only to be told your jump has been canceled. Nothing I had experienced in the service up to then was worse than that waiting for hours just to be told we weren’t going after all. Eventually we managed to get our five jumps in fast, three from a C-130 and two from a C-141.

  That first jump was much the same for everyone, I learned later. You just don’t know what to expect. A lot of thoughts go through your head, including “What am I doing here?” You think about your life up to that point and what may be waiting up the line for you. But there aren’t any thoughts about death. Mostly, thoughts about what might go wrong center on reviewing your emergency cutaway procedures. You’re trying to be one of the best in the Army, and that honor keeps other thoughts at bay.

  The first jump was amazing. Standing in the door, I was a bit nervous. There were butterflies in my stomach for all five of my Benning jumps. But I went out the door, and from there on, you don’t have a lot of choice about which direction you’re going.