Chapter 8
The Fucking New Guy
SEAL TEAM ONE ALPHA Platoon:
Bottom right to left: Greg McPartlin, Jonah Benanti, Dave Langlois, Jim Ritter.
Top left to right: Ensign Bill Moody, Terry Jenkins, Jim Loeding, John Mitchell,
X.T. Cossee, Ric Schroeder, Wayne Bohannan., Mike Kearns, Frank Richardson,
LT Dick Flanagan
—Greg McPartlin Collection—
From the Hornet, I flew to Barbers Point, Hawaii, and from there on to North Island. The flight gave me a lot of time to think. I was finally going to meet my platoon. But I did not look forward to that meeting. I knew the men of Alpha Platoon had been in pre-deployment training in Niland for several weeks, and had been working together as a fighting team for more than three months. These guys would be tight as blood brothers. Unlike the Marines and most other branches of the service, SEALs always trained together and always deployed together as a platoon. It increased their effectiveness because they always knew what their teammates were thinking.
I knew from experience that newcomers to any established platoon were usually viewed as interlopers, useless deadwood, or worse. In my first tour, I often thought of any newbie that way, mostly because the new guy was usually the next man I had to put in a body bag. We called them FNG’s, or, if they were straight out of training, “cherries.” But this time, I was the outsider. I was about to go from being one of the lesser heroes of the Apollo Mission to being the “Fucking New Guy.”
Landing at North Island, I stopped at Coronado long enough to requisition a six by six truck, then began the drive to Niland. I finally arrived on July 31st. Niland was a rugged, sparse, training camp established near the Salton Sea primarily to prepare SEAL platoons for their work in Vietnam. Coronado could be warm, but the heat on the island was sweltering. As I followed the road to the camp, I passed some unusual structures off to the side. It was a cluster of Vietnamese-style hooches. Apparently the camp came complete with its own mock VC village and jungle. I discovered after traveling a little farther that it also came with something much more important—a bar. I made a note to check out the latter at my earliest opportunity.
I stopped near a group of tough looking men that had to be Alpha Platoon. My platoon. The outside temperature hovered around 114 degrees, but as I climbed out of the truck to meet them, I suddenly felt as if I had just stepped into a freezer. Twelve sets of cold eyes fastened their frigid gaze on me as if I was some kind of rancid meat.
A wiry-built man with short dark hair sat at a table shaded by a tarp doing some paperwork. He looked to be thirty-something, with well-chiseled features, and had an air of command. I guessed he was Dick Flanagan, the Officer In Charge of Alpha Platoon. Despite his rank, he wore only flip-flops, a bathing suit and a fresh white T-shirt. I immediately felt overdressed, still wearing the green fatigues and jump boots I had donned on the Hornet. I stepped up to the table and stood there, sweating and feeling as out of place as a whore in church. The rest of the guys lounged nearby, casually cleaning their weapons while giving me the “the look.” They were obviously seasoned pros—all dirty and cocky and ready for anything. I knew my ass was grass if I said the wrong thing to any of them, so I silently handed Lt. Flanagan my orders. He gave me the once over with sharp eyes that seemed to look right through me, then took the papers I offered. I stood there while he lit up a Pall Mall and slowly opened the envelope with his K-bar knife.
“Well, what do we have here?” he all but sneered, “A young pecker-checker right fresh from the fleet.”
I gave him a puzzled glance and swore to myself I would try and grow a beard to look older. I had been told I looked more like an extra from Leave it to Beaver than a Navy SEAL, but that had not been a real problem before this.
“Hey. Dick-smith!” A slight, blond fellow called out, using yet another derogatory term for a corpsman, “Are you here to give us our short arms inspection?”
I recognized the popular colloquial phrase for examinations for sexual diseases, but was unsure, since they certainly knew why I was there, why they were saying that to me.
“He still looks wet behind the ears.” quipped fellow sporting sunshades “We should send this ‘cherry’ back to his boat until he dries off a little.”
The Lieutenant, ignoring the comments, began reading my orders and invited me to sit down and have a smoke. I took the chair, but declined the smoke. A few minutes later he called a powerfully built dark haired guy over, and introduced him as his Leading Petty Officer, Wayne Bohannan.
“Boh,” he said, “this is Doc McPartlin. They sent him out here to be our platoon corpsman.”
I started to shake his hand, but he just stared into my eyes with a look of disgust, and turned away. This kind of treatment had gone way beyond the hazing I expected for being the new guy. “Hey, nice to meet you too!” I snapped.
He spun around, grabbed my hand in a bone-crushing handshake and attempted to jerk me up to his face. I immediately recognized the tactic. My brother Jeff, the toughest son of a bitch I ever knew, used to do that a lot and taught me how to defend against it. I pushed my hand as far into the handshake as I could, while squeezing his fingers and pushing down as hard as I could to try to force him down onto his knee. It was a standoff. He didn’t budge, and neither did I.
Face to face, he glared into my eyes, and snarled in an unmistakable southern Florida drawl. “Just who the hell do you think you are? And what the fuck do you think you are doing here with my platoon!”
“Hey, I didn’t ask for this job!” Something was definitely not right here. In my experience Corpsman were always treated well—with good reason. We controlled the shot records, no small thing in a country as fraught with disease as Vietnam. Not to mention that when a man goes down wounded and yells for ‘Doc’, he definitely doesn’t want the guy who holds his life in his hands to be his enemy.
“Mr. Flanagan.” I released Bohannan’s hand and turned angrily to the Lieutenant, “Is there a problem here?”
“You’re damn right there is!” he said, fire in his eyes as he rose from his seat to face me. “We are a little more than two months away from deploying to Vietnam, and they send us the one thing we don’t need—some nonqualified smartass fleet corpsman fresh off the boat to replace Doc Curl. Curl was bad enough, but now we’re expected to risk our lives to protect your sorry ass on operations ’cause you won’t know what the hell you are doing.”
“Why don’t you review my service record before ripping off my head and shitting down my neck?” I met his fire with my own. He glared at me, but I stood my ground, lit up a Marlboro, and watched as Lt. Flanagan slowly picked up my orders again and read my service jacket.
I knew what he would find there:
Recruit Master at Arms Great Lakes R.O.T.C. Number 2 in his class, Hospital Corpsman, A-School, Great Lakes Illinois. Number one of forty-five students Field Medical School, Camp LeJeune, North Carolina. 3rd Force Recon, Field Hospital Corpsman, Republic of Vietnam, Number 2 in his class, U.S. Navy Underwater Swimmer School Special Operation Technician designated number 8492, Key West Florida. U.S. Navy free fall parachute school, Lake Hurst, New Jersey, authorized to wear gold free fall jump wings. UDT-21 UDT-22 Roosey Roads, Puerto Rico, and Little Creek, VA. TAD UDT-11 APOLLO 11 recovery team. PCS orders SEAL team One, July 30, 1969.
After a moment Flanagan sat down and began to laugh. The others looked on in confusion. “Well, looks like the brass doesn’t hate us after all. This Doc’s no ‘Cherry’. He’s already been In Country once before.” He then proceeded to read my record out loud to the rest of the platoon.
When he finished, Bohannan walked up, gave me a Coke, and slapped me on the back with enough force to rattle my teeth. “Doc, don’t ever give me cause to hurt you again.” He grabbed me in a bear hug calculated to break ribs. “Welcome to Alpha Platoon. Now get your gear off the truck and get changed. You look like you are sweating bullets!”
I gladly ran to do as he ordered, feeling that the ice had thawed. Now I had nothing to prove, except to myself.
But not all the guys of Alpha Platoon were satisfied by my past record. That evening, after getting my gear stowed away and checking in with the base Doctor, I headed for the bar I had spotted on the way in. It was a little place called the Hi-Ho club. The décor was early negligence, but it had booze and a couple of pool tables, so I thought I could make it home. Some of the guys from my platoon were already there. Wayne Bohannan greeted me warmly and started introducing me around. Ensign Bill Moody, second in command of the platoon and in charge of the second squad, was tall, slim and very fit. He had a square jaw and slightly cleft chin that gave him a face reminiscent of a classic superhero from the comics. He was just leaving the bar to go finish some paperwork, but it was obvious as he shook my hand, that this SEAL would rather be out in the field than in any office.
“Sometimes I think Mr. Moody don’t believe Hell Week is over.” Boh admitted when he had left. “He loves to get us all out of racks at 5AM. Says it keeps us sharp.”
A muscular man with dark gentle eyes came over to introduce himself as Frank Richardson. “But you can call me ‘Preacher’.”
“Yeah, Preacher here not only watches our backs, he keeps a close eye on our souls as well. But don’t kid yourself; he can bring down the wrath of God when it’s necessary!”
Preacher looked somewhat self-conscious at that description, but gave me a genuinely warm smile and firm handshake. I got the definite impression that this wasn’t really where he wanted to be.
A short stocky bulldog of a man in a buzz-cut stuck his head in the door and Boh took the opportunity to introduce me to Dave Langlois, alpha squad’s sixty-gunner. He had the face of an innocent kid, but the heart of a banjo playing redneck. He definitely looked like a man who would have no trouble at all humping a heavy M-60 machine gun. He was followed closely by, Jonah Benanti his Bravo squad counterpart, who was wearing sunshades like some kind of rock star.
“I don’t think he ever takes those off except to sleep.” Boh joked. “And maybe not even then. You’ll like him. He’s also a Midwest boy. A good wop, as you call ’em.”
The fair-haired guy who had yelled at me earlier was Jim Ritter. His earlier animosity had been replaced by an apologetic smile. “Sorry about this afternoon, Doc. We thought you were a cherry—or that you were like Doc Curl.”
X.T. Cossee, whose long nose, protruding ears, and curly dark hair gave him an exotic mid-eastern look, concurred. “Yeah. We didn’t realize they’d sent us a real medic.”
This sentiment was repeated often as I was introduced to John Mitchell, Terry Jenkins, Mike Kearns, and Jim Loeding. None of them seemed to have high opinions of corpsmen. I was beginning to realize that my predecessor had not been a typical corpsman, at least not the corpsmen I knew, and that I may have had Doc Curl to thank for my chilly reception.
“So Boh, what did happen to your first corpsman?”
“We really don’t like to talk about it much.”
“Well, I would really like to know what kind of an act I have to follow.”
Boh’s dark eyes reflected storm clouds for a moment. “He got busted for pot, but I know he was also doing harder stuff. They’re probably going to drum him out of the Teams, and probably out of the service entirely.”
Now I understood the depths of the platoon’s resentment. Drugs might have been commonplace in the rest of the service, but anything that altered our ability to think fast and move faster was a serious liability for SEALs. And anyone who did drugs was a liability to his teammates—especially if they depended on him for their life. Alcohol was usually the closest thing to a drug most SEALs would risk, and even then only when not in a combat situation.
“So we are stuck with a damn pecker-checker after all.” The surly voice came from a dark-haired guy of medium height and build shooting pool on the far table. “Well, I hope he’s on someone else’s squad, ‘cause I don’t want to go into the bush with a nonqual dick-smith who thinks he’s a SEAL. Better we take care of ourselves than risk our lives taking care of him.”
“Ric Schroeder. Radioman.” Boh supplied. “Ignore him.”
“So what’s his problem?”
“He thinks that anyone who didn’t go through BUD/S and Hell Week isn’t really a SEAL and doesn’t belong here. Doc Curl did a lot to prove him right.”
“Hey, I would have gone if they’d have let me.”
“Doesn’t matter. Unfortunately there’s a lot of guys that feel that way. If you didn’t go through it, you’re not an operator until you prove you are.” He lowered his voice. “It don’t help that Ric almost didn’t make it through himself.”
I wondered how many of the guys still felt that way. I was fairly sure I could have gotten through BUD/S. Joe Kazmar had said as much. But to these guys, actions were what mattered. I was going to have to work really hard to prove myself as an operator.
“I wonder how long until this one craps out. Do you think it will be before or after one of us gets hurt?” Schroeder continued.
“So you good for a game?” I asked, indicating the open pool table. I wanted to do something to keep myself from taking the loudmouth Schroeder apart.
“Sure. Loser buys the beer.”
I tried to concentrate on my game and ignore Mr. Schroeder, but he kept putting out a load of garbage calculated to make Mother Teresa boil. This is one of the guys I’m going to have at my back in the bush? My grip tightened on my pool cue until my knuckles were white. I kept playing, but started to miss shots. Apparently my lack of reaction got to Schroeder. He came up close behind me to be certain I heard him.
“This bar’s only for real SEALs. Jesus Christ, don’t we have enough to contend with without having to baby-sit?”
That was the last straw. I had had enough. I slammed the butt of my pool cue backwards, nailing Ric right in the crotch. As he went down I spun around and got a good grip on his head, holding him in place with two fistfuls of brown hair.
“Do you really want your pretty face smashed on my knee?” I asked pleasantly, “Or is that —” I edged my foot toward his groin and had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch—“real enough for you?”
From his awkward kneeling position, his face only inches away from my knee, Ric indicated in a very small, breathy voice that he did not think my continuing along those lines was a very good idea.
I released him and turned to see the rest of the guys trying to suppress their laughter.
“You’re alright, Doc.” Boh said, thumping me again.
After a moment, Ric climbed up off the floor and shook my hand.
“I guess I was wrong, Doc,” he wheezed. “With moves like that, you’ve definitely got a head start on becoming an operator.”
Despite our rocky beginning, Ric Schroeder and I grew to be very close over the next several weeks of training. We discovered we had a lot in common. Like me, he was an Illinois boy who had been raised Catholic, and was still trying to recover from it. Ric was only four years older than I was, but he knew everything. He had a quick smile, a quick tongue, and a quicker left hook.
During training it was normal for the radioman and the corpsman to spend time together, because we were the ones who had to deal with specialized equipment above and beyond the usual ordinance carried by the rest of the team. But Ric became more than a comrade in arms; he became my new big brother.
We were split up into two squads, with Ric, Boh, and myself assigned to Alpha Squad under Lt. Flanagan. “Radical Dick” they called him. I soon learned why when he started screaming orders at us during an exercise. I actually enjoyed the challenge of the training, and could hold my own in most things—at least until we got to the firing range. I could sneak and track and do PT with the best of them, but on the range I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Ric tried to help me, but my improvement was slight, even with his coaching.
But the LT had a solution. He and the instructors ended up issuing me a Stoner M63A as my primary weapon. The powerful little machine gun gave me much more firepower than the weapons normally carried by a corpsman. And if any targets came into range, I didn’t have to have good aim. I just had to pull the trigger and hose them down with bullets.
By the time we returned from Niland to San Diego around the first of September, I was still the new guy, and probably would be until we hit combat, but now I felt more like their little brother. I hadn’t been there at the beginning, but they wouldn’t dream of going without me.