שימו לב לכמות ההרוגים במלחמת ויאטנם - 48 סילס ועוד 12 צוללנים . לאחרונה עברו סך חללי היחידה במלחמות בעירק ואפגניסטן את סף ה-60 , כאשר במחצית השנה האחרונה לבדה נהרגו 3 לוחמים באפגניסטן, ועל כך באשכול אחר
Seals: 50 years and counting
While SEALs were created for Cold War–centric contingencies, it was Vietnam that was to define them. The first SEALs arrived in South Vietnam in late 1962 as advisers. SEAL Team One began regular deployments a year later. Early on, the SEALs worked closely with the CIA out of Da Nang, assisting the agency in preparing agents to slip into North Vietnam on covert missions. Specifically, the SEALs trained South Vietnamese commandos in maritime infiltration techniques so they could enter the North from the sea. So the first mission in Vietnam was a true unconventional-warfare activity—training locals to fight the enemy on his own ground. But those efforts were largely unsuccessful. It soon became apparent to the CIA that there was little hope in generating any meaningful local resistance in North Vietnam. Conversely, the North Vietnamese were highly successful in launching an insurgency in the South, which should have told us something. With the landing of the Marines in 1965 and the escalation that followed, the role of American combatants—and the SEALs—became more one of direct-action combat than of unconventional warfare.
With the exception of an ongoing advisory effort, the SEALs began operating in squads and platoons in a direct-action role in Rung Sat Special Zone—a Viet Cong–infested mangrove swamp between Saigon and the South China Sea. Fourteen- to sixteen-man SEAL platoons began combat rotations into the Rung Sat in 1965 and were soon operating from other riverine bases around the lower Mekong Delta. From 1965 through 1972, as platoons from SEAL Teams One and Two conducted direct-action operations against the Viet Cong, the combined strength of the teams grew to close to 400 active SEALs, but there were seldom more than 120 SEALs in Vietnam at any one time.
Most often, SEALs worked for a conventional Army, Navy, or Marine ground-force commander. Early on in the Mekong region, SEALs learned that the key to successful operations was good intelligence. Veteran SEAL petty officers became quite adept at ferreting out information from the local sources. They set up networks and paid informants. For the most part, they had not been trained for that; those intelligence-collection skills were learned on the job to better accomplish the mission. And good intelligence led to good missions. Operationally, SEALs were often assisted by Boat Support Unit One (West Coast) and Two (East Coast), the forerunners of today’s Special Boat Teams. On many a SEAL mission, the boat-support sailors would take SEAL elements close to the objective, whence the SEALs would make the final journey to the target in sampans—moving through the night as the Viet Cong did. These missions were developed and launched as unilateral direct-action operations, but SEALs seldom went on a mission without a local guide or a small contingent of Vietnamese scouts.
SEAL platoons often operated with a half dozen or more scouts called Kit Carsons—former Viet Cong who had defected under a sanctioned amnesty program. The scouts provided local knowledge—and local intelligence. They lived with the SEALs, and when in the field, they often walked on point or very close to the SEAL point man. When patrolling in hostile territory, SEALs were always concerned with booby traps—small IEDs before they were known as such. When a scout refused to walk down a trail and recommended an alternate route to the objective, the SEALs were only too glad to follow his advice.
Most SEAL operations in Vietnam, not unlike present-day SEAL operations in Afghanistan, targeted insurgents. Back then, it was the Viet Cong. The most successful operations were a result of locally developed intelligence on a specific target—an arms cache, an enemy base camp, or a senior Viet Cong leader. As with SEAL operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam-era SEALs operated from relatively secure bases that were under the control of a conventional sector commander. Most operations were conducted at night in enemy-controlled territory, but SEALs then, like now, stood ready for a quick-reaction mission to rescue a downed pilot or a POW.
In the final tally, 48 SEALs lost their lives in Vietnam and more than 200 were wounded. Estimates of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese (NVA) soldiers killed by SEAL operations run as high a 2,000. (The UDTs also deployed to Vietnam but not in the numbers of SEALs. While their combat roles were mainly restricted to reconnaissance and demolition duties, they suffered12 killed and about 40 wounded.) Three SEALs were awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. To date, two SEALs—one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan—have received the same honor, both posthumously.
There were, however, SEAL advisers who conducted business in classic Army Special Forces “by, with, and through” manner. One such enterprise was the Vietnamese SEAL program, the Lien Doc Nguoi Nhia (LDNNs), meaning, literally, “soldiers who fight under the sea.” Those brave South Vietnamese soldiers, when properly trained and led, could be very effective. LDNNs were involved in two of the actions where SEALs were awarded the Medal of Honor, and one LDNN was awarded the Navy Cross, the only non-American to receive our nation’s second-highest decoration in the Vietnam War. Today he lives in the United States and is treated as a respected alumnus of the SEAL community.
Perhaps the most successful SEAL operations in Vietnam were conducted by the SEALs who worked with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, the PRUs. The PRU program was a CIA-sponsored effort that later became part of the secret Phoenix Program. The PRUs drew their fighters from Vietnamese rural villages and the Nung, tribesmen of Chinese origin who lived in Vietnam. The villagers and tribesmen agreed to fight on the side of the South Vietnamese government so long as they could fight as a unit and their pay was controlled by the CIA. The CIA paid and they fought. Navy SEALs, along with Army Special Forces soldiers and Marines, served as PRU advisers. In the case of the SEALs, there were anywhere from 60 to 120 Nungs for every SEAL adviser or pair of advisers. It was lonely duty for a SEAL, sometimes living day-in-day-out with those rough men in their home villages, with only an interpreter for communication.
PRU advisers were always chosen from among veteran SEALs. The PRUs operated in 14 of the 16 provinces in IV Corps—the southern military region of South Vietnam. After being formed in 1967, PRUs and their American advisers killed more than 20,000 Viet Cong and NVA and took thousands of prisoners. Postwar North Vietnamese records confirm that the PRUs were the deadliest and most effective force fielded in South Vietnam.
During the decade of SEAL deployment rotations to Vietnam, the operational focus and training within the SEAL teams was all about Southeast Asia. Tactics, weapons, and equipment were designed and developed around direct-action operations in a jungle environment. The SEALs’ mission-preparation and predeployment training was exclusively built around combat in Vietnam. Yet, within certain constraints, the SEALs had a free hand in choosing which missions they would undertake. With that latitude comes a great deal of responsibility. Today in Afghanistan, platoon officers, platoon chiefs, and task-unit commanders have that same latitude and responsibility. While it leads to operational success, it also means those combat leaders must make these life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. It means that they have to balance the importance of the mission against the risk to their men—not easy then and no easier now.
In its first ten years of existence, the life of a Navy SEAL was one of continuous combat rotations to Vietnam. Officers might get in two or three combat tours, but enlisted SEALs went back time and again. In spite of the broad unconventional-warfare portfolio handed the SEALs, their training and deployments were all about operations in Vietnam. In short, SEALs became very good jungle fighters and little else. They maintained minimum qualifications in diving and parachuting, but seldom practiced those in an operational scenario. During the late 1970s and early ’80s, operating budgets were tight. UDTs and SEAL teams shrank to pre-Vietnam levels in the number of personnel, if not the team structure; there remained four underwater demolition teams and two SEAL teams. A fifth UDT had been commissioned in the summer of 1968 for duty in Vietnam, but it was decommissioned in the summer of 1971. There was even talk of disbanding the SEALs and the UDTs altogether. Today there are more than 2,000 operational SEALs; at the height of the Vietnam War there were just under 450.
While the SEALs endured continuous deployment rotations to Vietnam—rotations similar to those experienced by SEALs in Iraq and Afghanistan—the UDTs continued to evolve underwater, focusing much of their time and energy on combat-swimmer operations and the complex business of operating wet mini-submersibles from parent nuclear submarines. Those operations became so specialized and all-encompassing that in 1984, two of the four remaining UDTs were converted to SEAL teams and the other two became SEAL delivery-vehicle teams or SDV Teams. The new SDV teams were manned by fully mission-capable SEALs, but they specialized in underwater and over-the-beach operations. With the conversion of the UDTs and the growth of the SEALs, the current disposition of SEAL/SDV teams is as follows: SEAL Teams One, Three, Five, and Seven are based in Coronado. SEAL Teams Two, Four, Eight, and Ten are located in the Norfolk, Virginia, area. SDV Team One is in Hawaii. There are two reserve SEAL teams, Seventeen and Eighteen.
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19-08-2009, 19:46
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