For Those in Peril: Taking the Fate of the Lost SEALs Personally

The mid-January headlines announcing, with some unavoidable mystery, that two U.S. Navy SEALs from Coronado, California-based SEAL Team 3 had gone missing in the Gulf of Aden on the night of January 11 were distressing to see. As I began writing a first take, I was hoping an alert would come saying they’d been found and rescued. Despite the mythical status the SEAL teams have acquired over time (especially in recent years), they still bleed and die. In this case, the two sailors clearly faced a lonely fate in the temperate but hardly welcoming waters of the Gulf of Aden.

After a wide-ranging seach and rescue of eleven days by ships from U.S. (including Coast Guard elements), Japan and Spain continuously searched more than 21,000 square miles encompassing the Arabian Sea, the Navy on January 21 announced that the mission had become one of (to this date -unavailing) recovery.

The Navy’s account of the fatal Vessel Boarding Search and Seizure operation would report that the target was later-recovered armaments carried aboard an unnamed dhow (a near-primitive wooden sailboat rigged with triangular sails) that was approached by the SEALS from the Expeditionary Sea Base ship USS Lewis B. Puller in a night boarding raid that also deployed helicopters and drones.

According to U.S. officials, the mishap arose as Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Christopher J. Chambers began boarding the boat, he toppled from a caving ladder, falling into a gap the waves had created between the vessel and the SEALs’ combatant craft. As he went under, Navy Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class Nathan Gage Ingram jumped into the gap to try to save him, according to U.S. officials familiar with what happened.

I took this sad news their plight personally for reasons I’ll describe below. But first, some context was available the known facts are these, as reported by the U.S. Central Command and further detailed in the knowledgeable site The War Zone.
The U.S. military released photos of lethal gear captured in the incident — an anti-ship cruise missile and ballistic missile components, as well as sensors, The action came in a week marked by similar patrolling as Yemen’s Houthis — once again designated by the U.S. as terrorists — have been launching an array of anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as drones. These actions are separate from but not unrelated to the war in Gaza and other Iran-stoked conflicts in the region bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
It’s a world news event I absorbed personally even beyond the concern any American might feel, as I vividly recall having witnessed an impressive training exercise featuring a platoon of SEALS from Virginia-based SEAL Team 4 enact the very mission the endangered pair’s squad had been conducting — a VBSS, or Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure.

This day out in 1999 as the sole reporter present (accompanied by ace photographer Rick Rickman) was an unfiltered chance to see some of the nation’s most elite warriors at work. It came via an assignment from Men’s Journal, for whom I’d previously written up a cruise in a boomer submarine off Hawaii, to depict the training of a SEAL. By contrast to certain other articles (and documentaries) that have detailed the well-known BUD/S selection phase (Basic Underwater Demolition, SEAL) this was a deeper dive, into some of the hands-on tactical training that determines how, and if, the younger recruits are fully accepted and indoctrinated into the community. Not until passing the SQT (SEAL Qualification Training) phase does a Hell Week graduate stand before his new teammates and have his Trident pounded into his chest.
Having observed the program’s brutal challenges, including the properly named Hell Week, at the Naval Special Warfare Command training base at Coronado, I flew East to spend time at the sprawling Little Creek complex -–mostly with Team 4, but also with Team 2 — in a pair of quite arduous evolutions testing and teaching their prospective team members.

One operation was a night helo mission for which a couple squads of SEALs were ferried from an air station to a spot a half-mile out in the choppy ocean waves; they slipped out the chopper’s tail ramp in quick succession — moonlit silhouettes hitting the drink to meet up with a similarly dropped inflatable Zodiac. I would also visit the facility housing the undersea-ready SEAL Delivery Vehicles, where Navy boat drivers were spooling up on techniques for ferrying seals from one platform to another. (E.g., “locking out” of claustrophobic submarine torpedo chutes to board the SDV for a frigid, lengthy sub-surface ride to a target.)

But the main attraction was the VBSS. I watched from up close on a bustling deck as the young team aspirants (again, still being judged by peers-to-be, still with the possibility of washing out ) swarmed a rusting hulk of a ship moored in about a quarter-mile from the banks of the mud-brown James River.

Of course that swarming is more easily plotted than executed. And the very boarding sequence now being blamed for the ill luck of the missing SEALs certainly appeared challenging. The caving ladders that several reports say were deployed are devised to be light and strong — a 32-foot ladder can support around a thousand pounds of ascending operators — but their 6” wide tubular aluminum `steps’, linked by steelwire cable, look and feel flimsy, seeming strikingly unsuited for the task.
Even more daunting is the supposed ladder-setting scheme. For some boardings, there are large claw-like grapples that can be flung over a ship’s railing — leaving the still-daunting task of hand and foot placement on wriggling rungs where there is little clearance. In the Virginia evolution, I saw the sailors strugglingly tread water with their feet while extending telescoping metal poles upwards to hoist pencil-thin tubing — bent double into grappling hooks and no longer than a crooked finger — that rest on the metal welds that run the length of many ships’ hulls. These protuberances are about the width of a nickel — thus what dodgily secures this perilous arrangement is the weight of the ascending climbers.

Having seen the already arduous climb from the lulling waters of the James, one could barely imagine making such an ascent out of surging Gulf waters, from the deck of a rocking small craft next to the target vessel. It could all go wrong in a heartbeat.
For the SEALs’ Gulf op, it’s plain to see how the op went dramatically sideways. And either because thrashing seas and nighttime chaos meant no one fully witnessed it — or feasibly for good reasons of operational secrecy — little info emerged at first.

This gap in knowledge led to a post from veteran Pentagon reporter Seymoure Hersh, subtitled, “What really happened in the Gulf of Aden”. In addition to reporting that a third SEAL was critically injured, he stated that “It was a mission that never should have been ordered, and when everything went wrong, it was covered up with a series of lies. He also cited a New York Times account that the third sailor had also sought to board, but also fell, fortuitously landing in the speedboat.

Detailing what he saw as overzealousness both by the multi-service command tram on board the Puller and certain interests in the dfefense community, Hersh quoted a special ops source , a retired Navy officer, with years of experience in special operations, who told him, “The waves are going up and down eight feet and more and you do not board a ship in heavy seas.” It remains to be seen if critiques and even consequences will land on the ships’s command group, and the mostly unpublicized squabbling will continue between Hersh and some (including in his Comments section) who dispute his reporting. But the training evolution I watched on the sprawling, stable ship’s deck on the deck above the slow-rolling Virginia river began with men of various ranks and ages speedily kitting up for a mock gunfight. They were slung with various weapons and “battle rattle”, with some donning wet suits for a plunge in the river to be followed by a trip up the caving ladders. It seemed the group had been rousted with scanty nutrition, as several of them were busy jacking open cans of tuna and hurriedly downing the contents, spooning busily with a bent, sharp-edged lid folded in half.

There was a distinct element of playful, testosterone-laden theater. The officers stood by, some with a faintly sarcastic smirk. All were real-life warfighters: this one had been in shoot-outs in downtown Panama, and recalled some sporty fast-roping scares; another had seen small wars in Africa. The newbies mostly flashed hopeful smiles — aiming to show they might be loose and ready under fire when the real thing came along on some foreign seaway. One lad paused after stripping to his skivvies, danced three steps on the steel deck, and flung himself over the rail, landing an extended front flip into the water forty-odd feet below. He and some of the other young SEAL aspirants made their way onboard by speed-crawling up the slick, hefty anchor chain. The more veteran frogmen were mostly deployed as a hidden, supposedly hostile force within the ship’s passageways and blind turns. The entire group’s compact weapons — mainly M4 carbines — were rigged to spit out only “sim” (simulation) rounds, also known as lipstick rounds. One lieutenant tracked and trapped on the bridge and accosted by an eager posse of newbies, met with a fair few of the loads (made of wax) that can indeed sting as they leave a welt. “I do hate getting shot in the back,” he confided once he’d been eliminated by force of numbers.

Visible in subtle ways was the teams-wide ethos of “Keep it simple, sir”, by which practice the more experienced enlisted men, especially those with the history and enhanced rank of warrant officer, are empowered to discreetly alter or even scotch the schemes of the younger, less tested officers. There is a proud, long- institutionalized system whereby any arriving SEAL on a team is obliged to pick out a “sea daddy” — a more veteran hand who can mentor and inspire him and also check any wayward impulses.

While doing my training piece I interviewed a much-traveled and battle-tested SEAL (a sometime leading figure in the famous Team Six, or DevGru), who was among an outmanned platoon deployed to fast-rope in to guard the mansion of the governor-general of Grenada, then under threat from a rebel force. Crouched in some shrubbery on the periphery of the property, he and his sea daddy (a Vietnam-era vet) came under threat from a trio of Cuban military advisors who’d deployed on the island in support of the rebels. He and a shooting partner used M-60 automatic rifles to end that threat, but clearly more hostiles were on the way. “This sh*t,” the senior SEAL said, “isn’t for us. It’s for the Rangers.” That observation came not long before a Ranger quick reaction force — more numerous and with heavier weaponry — arrived to even up the incipient battle.

The SEAL who told me the story remembered his first day arriving at the team quarterdeck to behold his future sea daddy. Though SEALs are selected for their rigor and relentlessness rather than size, he has the dimensions of an NFL tight end. He would have been forgiven for thinking himself an elite stud warrior for having simply graduated BUDs and a couple of specialized combat-centric schools, but his greeting from the veteran — a “silverback’ — as they’re often dubbed — was to this effect: “Well, missy, what use do you think you’re gonna be around here?”

More topical to this week’s event, and deeply stitched into the practical and even spiritual fabric of every SEAL platoon, is the shared support of a swim buddy, a fellow “pipe hitter” or “sled dog” who will go to any length to stay in the game to enable, defend and face any hell that may arise while never leaving his buddy’s side. This tradition outranks, in some cases, sheer practicality and/or self-preservation.
Thus the report of two sailors lost in high seas in unfriendly territory. Any certainly as to how planning their boarding mission went wrong must await potentially classified reports from the scene. One certain thing is that any forthcoming search and surveillance tactics the Navy and our allies may deploy will be closely thought through and scrutinized, but the takeaway that reverberates for me is that any SEALs involved will execute it with their reliably sincere and bold operational zeal.