I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Page 8

  The second night we were there, we snuck out and climbed up to the top of their water tower with a can of spray paint, and painted “SEAL Team One” on the side. They had to send a bunch of army guys up the next day to paint over it. We had our orders from the old-timers. We were there to cause trouble. We’d rather face the army guys than have to face the guys back on Silver Strand Beach, the navy amphibious base.

  After our graduation from jump school, the same black-hat sergeant who had talked to us that first night lined everybody up, army and navy, and announced: “All army personnel are restricted to base until Monday when you leave. All navy personnel: You’re due to fly out Sunday. In the meantime, get off our base.” In other words, we got to go into town! They didn’t want us on base causing trouble, so they restricted the army guys to their own base and sent us out! They got grounded; we got freedom!

  The first thing that I did that night was grab my friend Pat Carter and tell him to put on his dress blues. Usually we went out in civilian clothes, and that’s how everybody else was going out that night. But I said, “Trust me. Put on your dress blues. This is a fuckin’ army town. They ain’t seen no navy here.” So we got into our dress blues.

  We had more girls hanging around with us that night than you can possibly imagine. One woman came running out of a bar when she saw us: “I haven’t seen an anchor clanker in twenty-five years!” We came back to the barracks at two in the morning, driven in by three or four girls. All our SEAL buddies saw us come in loaded down with girls. The next night, there were twenty-five navy guys out there in their dress blues!

  After jump school, I went to SERE School (Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion—POW School). Then I went to what is called SEAL Cadre, which is a school for advanced guerrilla warfare. At SEAL Cadre, you go out to Niland, California, and spend seven weeks doing nothing but running operations, or ops. You learn how to do everything from demolition raids to assassinations, ambushes, and kidnappings. Every guy in the unit had to learn the whole operation; everyone had to know every facet, including how to lead an op. At that time, we did it all in the context of jungle warfare, because our mission was Vietnam.

  One night we were out running ops on a river. There were two crews of us, and we were supposed to “blow up” two bridges on this river that none of us had ever been on before. As we were making our way down the river in pitch-blackness, we started to notice a sound that kept getting louder and louder. It sounded like rushing water. By the time we realized what it was, it was too late to do anything about it. In the dark, we couldn’t make out the huge dam that lay right in front of us until we were going over it.

  Rick Dees, in the front of the boat, managed to grab on to something to keep from going over. He got to shore and signaled the other boat to let them know what was happening. They saw him and made it safely to shore. I was already over the edge and falling. I tried to grab on to the wall of the dam, but I couldn’t get a hold on anything. I got a brief, crazy vision of myself as a cat in a cartoon, leaving claw marks all the way down.

  I fell to the bottom of the dam and landed in a huge, churning mass of white water. The current was so strong it tossed me around and around like I was a pebble in a washing machine. It just kept spinning me around and sucking me down, and wouldn’t let me up for air. There was absolutely nothing I could do. I was helpless against the water’s power. As I think about it now, I can still feel how my lungs burned from holding my breath.

  As my body was lurching and reeling under the swirling current, I started to accept that I was going to die. I was trying to decide whether I’d rather let my breath out and drown or just keep holding it until I passed out. I decided I’d rather just hold my breath. Once I’d made up my mind how I was going to die, I started feeling sorry for my mom and dad. I had a very clear vision of the two of them bending over my casket, crying. Then, suddenly, my feet scraped the river bottom, and I shot up to the surface. After a few breaths, I broke clear of the washingmachine effect at the foot of the dam. I was the last one out of the water and the longest one under.

  That was the first time I really began to think that there was a force guiding my life that was bigger than coincidence. One of us should have died on the river that night. Statistically, somebody shouldn’t have made it. If you think about where I ended up after I got to the bottom of that dam, it really should have been me. But for whatever reason, I lived. It made me think.

  That accident should never have happened. In a real ops situation, there would have been reconnaissance done on that entire river area, and we would have been told about the dam. Somebody screwed up, and it almost cost me my life. Later, they tried to send a dive team in to retrieve our weapons, but they had to pull out because the current was too strong. Our weapons are probably still at the bottom of that dam.

  There finally came a time when all the training was done. I graduated from SEAL Cadre on a Wednesday, and the following Monday morning I was scheduled to be deployed overseas. I had hardly more than a weekend before I would find out what it was like to put my training to use in a real-life war. So, of course, I quickly came up with a productive way to fill the time. My buddy Ray Holly took me aside and said, “You know what we oughtta do? We oughtta go to Reno, Nevada. Prostitution is legal there.”

  I didn’t believe him at first, but he swore he wasn’t kidding. So we flew out there, hooked up with a buddy, and rented a car. We started out trying to gamble in the casinos at Tahoe, but as soon as we started winning, they checked our IDs, found out we weren’t twenty-one, and kicked us out. They wouldn’t even let us have the money we’d won. So we thought, “What the hell. Let’s go check out the ranches.”

  Now remember, I was really still just a kid. I was still five years away from meeting Terry and getting married. This was all new to me. I hadn’t been overseas yet. We were scheduled to be deployed to a part of the world where there was a war going on. For all I knew, I could be dead pretty soon, so I wanted to have as much fun and do as much living as possible while I still could. This was long before AIDS, before casual sex could mean death.

  The Starlight Ranch and the Moonlight Ranch were out in the middle of the desert. You pull up to this gate alongside a huge cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. There’s an intercom there, and you hit the buzzer. The madam answers, and if you can convince her you’re not with the Hell’s Angels, she’ll buzz you in.

  So we were buzzed in, and we walked into the parlor. The madam said, “Girls, we have visitors.” Out came six or eight girls who looked just like Playboy playmates. Incredible. You go down the line, they each tell you their name, and you pick out the one you want. In those days it was cheap—ten to fifteen bucks. So we each picked out a lady and did our thing, then we went back to town and catted around a while. Then, early the next morning, we decided to go to another ranch.

  At this second ranch, I picked out one girl because she was wearing these cool-looking rectangular hippie glasses. I don’t remember her name. But as we went back into the room, she couldn’t take her eyes off my belt. At SEAL Cadre, we’d been shooting Stoner machine guns. In the evenings I had linked together about twenty feet of empty shell casements and was wearing some of them as a belt around my jeans. She said, “I want that belt.”

  I grinned at her. “Oh yeah?”

  “What’ll it take?” she asked. “How much do you want for it?”

  I didn’t tell her I had twenty more feet back in the barracks, and could make a dozen more belts just like it anytime I wanted. “Why don’t you make me an offer?”

  She said, “Well, how about a trick and ten dollars?” I’m probably one of the only people in the world who’s gone into a Nevada ranch and been paid. I used that ten dollars to go to another one.

  Afterward, I asked her the same question she probably got from every guy: how a nice girl got to be doing what she was doing. She said, “I love sex. Plus, I can make ten times here what I could make anywhere else. I can retire in a few years.” When she fou
nd out that I was about to go overseas, she gave me her business card and told me to write to her if I ever got lonely.

  We kept in touch my first trip overseas. I’d get a letter from her saying, “Dear Jim, I’m writing to you between tricks . . .” Whenever I got a letter from her, I held it up for the guys to see and said, “Hey! I got a letter from my Nevada hooker!” When I told her I was planning to buy a Harley-Davidson when I got back from overseas, she wrote, “Come by and pick me up. We’ll take off for a while.” But I never did. By the time I got back to the States, I’d lost track of her. I kind of regret that. I never saw her again.

  On Monday, we were shipped overseas. We spent a few days on a god-awful flight that I could handle only because I was nineteen and didn’t know what I was getting myself into. We finally got into the base at Subic in the Philippines, got assigned to our platoons, and were scattered to the four winds.

  I spent a total of seventeen months in Southeast Asia during my two tours. I spent time in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand, Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines. I was lucky, though. I got in at the tail end of the war. We were already in withdrawal mode by the time I got there, so there wasn’t much to do. We were already facing what they were calling “peace with honor.” We did a bit of surveillance and reconnaissance work in case the marines were called in. They mainly used us as a bargaining chip to get the Vietnamese to the negotiating table.

  I loved being overseas for one reason: I was an adult there. Back home, I was still considered a child: In most places I couldn’t walk into a bar and buy a drink; I couldn’t even vote. I consider that a great hypocrisy, that I could be required to die for my country, but my country wouldn’t even show me the respect of treating me as an adult. That double standard was what caused the hippie rebellion: the hypocrisy that forced kids to go die in a war when those same kids weren’t even allowed to vote against the people who sent them over there.

  One of the most traumatic things I ever faced was coming back from nine months overseas. I had been back five days, and I went in to my executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Bruce Dyer, and requested to be sent overseas again. He told me, “You can’t. You’ve got to be stateside for at least nine months. And why on earth would you want to go back?”

  I said, “Because over there I’m an adult. Over there I’m treated like an adult; no one’s questioning me. Over here, I’m a child. I’d rather be back over there.”

  I loved the Philippines. I was stationed at Subic, and I loved going into Olongapo. It was more like the Wild West than any other place on Earth. In Olongapo, there’s a one-mile stretch of road that has 350 bars and 10,000 girls on it every night. Think what that meant to a nineteen-year-old navy guy! At various bars you had your pick of rock ’n’ roll, country and western, you name it. There was one bar that was nothing but transvestites. It was a decadent city. To the kid I was then, it was paradise.

  Anything went in Olongapo. The SEALs have a proud tradition of doing without the unnecessary conveniences in life such as underwear. On any given night at a bar in Olongapo, one of us might hop up on a table and yell, “Skivvy check!” We’d all jump up and drop our trousers to prove we weren’t wearing any. To this day, I still honor that tradition most of the time. The day I was sworn in as governor, there was some concern that someone might yell for a skivvy check in the middle of my inaugural speech.

  The value system was so different overseas that when I came back stateside, I had a difficult time relating to American women. When a girl went with you in Olongapo, there was no question about what you were going to do. In the States, you had to wine ’em and dine ’em. At that point in my life, I was barely out of my teens; I wasn’t into wining and dining. The libido was still in charge. A lot of my buddies felt that way too. Many of them got around the awkwardness they felt with American women by marrying Filipino girls.

  It truly was like the frontier. They warned us never to get into a vehicle unless we were with another American. I usually stuck to that rule, but there was one night when I was drunk, stranded, and trying to get back to base. I flagged down a jeepney (a converted World War II jeep, many of which were decorated with tassels and religious icons) and was glad to see that although there were three or four Filipinos inside, there was also one American guy. I got in, but I dozed off along the way. The next thing I knew, the American guy was gone, and the Filipinos had all drawn knives and were demanding my watch.

  Now, this wasn’t just an ordinary watch. This was a custom Rolex Submariner waterproof dive watch with the SEAL trident on it. We all had these watches, and we wore them as a symbol of our unity. I was looking at a choice between death and giving up that watch, and I had a split second to think. I did a nosedive out of the moving jeepney, landed parachute-style on the ground, and rolled into the bushes. I had to walk the rest of the way back to Subic, but I kept my watch.

  But that was why we loved it. It was wild, decadent, unpredictable. In one bar, they had a pond with a live alligator. For a peso, you could buy a baby duck to feed to it. One night I was out with my friend George Hudak, and we were drunker than hell. He bought one of the ducks and said, “To hell with feeding the alligator!” He popped the baby duck into his own mouth. He was missing a tooth in front, and I could see one little webbed foot flailing around in the gap between his teeth.

  This is the kind of thing you get when you live life on the edge. A SEAL will defy death at least twice a week, whether it’s jumping out of an airplane, rappelling out of a helicopter, or swimming through the water at night with explosives strapped to his back. When you get that kind of familiarity with death, barriers go down. The things you’re expected to do in combat situations are so far beyond the pale, anything less seems insignificant.

  I don’t like what happened later in the navy’s Tailhook scandal; I think what those officers did was wrong. But I understand why it happened. When you get a force of that many hundreds of warriors together, there’s bound to be trouble. We’re responsible for making them what they are. You just can’t bring them back into civilization and expect that everything that was drilled into them is going to go away.

  When you’re dealing with death face-to-face, there are no rules. It’s all about survival. After that, bad behavior doesn’t affect you all that much. If the public thought Tailhook was bad, imagine what they’d think of any given night in Olongapo! That’s the mistake those young officers made: They brought Olongapo back with them to Las Vegas, and it got out of hand.

  War isn’t civilized. War is failure. It’s the ultimate result of a breakdown in public policy, and soldiers are the machines that handle that breakdown. In warfare, you’re taught to do whatever you have to to stay alive. Can you imagine bringing that mindset into a party?

  When you become a SEAL, you have to accept the fact that eventually your job might require you to take a life. How do you justify that? It goes against everything you’re taught. It goes against all religion. It goes against all common sense. When you put yourself so far beyond all things civilized that you’re prepared to kill, how serious does it seem to grab a woman by her breasts?

  When Demi Moore was doing the movie G.I. Jane, about the first woman to become a Navy SEAL, she wanted to come to one of our reunions to see what it was like. But when she actually got there and was face-to-face with the real thing, she was scared to death. They messed with her, just to shock her. One of them yelled, “Hey, Demi! This movie better be good, or we’re gonna hunt you down!”

  They reacted that way because she was going to portray herself as one of us, even though she’d never been through BUD/S; she’d never done the things the rest of us had done to earn our trident. In effect, they were saying to her, “You wanna dance to the music, let’s see if you can pay the fiddler.” We’re a proud organization. If anyone tries to pretend they’re a SEAL, God help them. You have to earn the right to be a SEAL warrior.

  I don’t talk about what I did over there. I never have yet, to anybody. Because when we r
eturned from overseas after my first deployment, we were brought into a room by my commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert Peterson, and he gave us direct orders never to talk about what we had seen and done over there. This was right at the time of the My Lai massacre trial, when the press was trying to dig up whatever they could from anyone who had been there. I’ve held to that order all these years. I stuck with it when questions about my Vietnam experience were raised during my campaign, and I will continue to honor it. Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.

  C H A P T E R 5

  “THE BODY”

  My second tour of duty overseas was quieter than my first. By then the war was over for the SEALs, so I was sent straight back to the Philippines just in case things started up again. There was nothing to do except to stay in practice and to have fun. Sad to say, any time a war ends, the military suddenly turns chickenshit. The military is really only at its best when it has a mission. Without a war to keep them occupied, the various branches of the military all have a tendency to get more and more obsessive about boot polishing and hair length. When my second tour was done, I decided I was done with the navy.

  I was never tempted to make a career out of the navy, even though at that time they were offering SEALs $10,000 bonuses to stay in. That was a pretty big chunk of cash to stick in your pocket, especially in 1973. When I got back stateside, Bruce Dyer, my executive officer, called me into his office and said, “Well, Janos. You’re a good operator. What’ll it take to keep you in?”

  I said, “You want the truth, Mr. Dyer? Fifty thousand and the rank of commander.” I wanted to be one higher than him.

  He said, “You can’t get that!”

  And I said, “You asked!” What’s amazing is that today I’m a two-star admiral! That’s the rank the navy gave me for my victory as governor. Bruce Dyer was here for my inauguration. He had to salute me.

  I was waiting for my official discharge from the navy to come through. I still hadn’t set a particular course for my life. My plans only extended as far as buying a Harley and traveling around California. So for a while I lived free and easy and became a part of the incredible scene that was the early seventies in America.