US Navy SEALs

Origins

The SEALs, for Sea, Air, Land, were commissioned in January 1962 after President John F. Kennedy pushed the services to build unconventional warfare forces. Their bloodline is older. In 1943 the Navy formed Naval Combat Demolition Units, and later Underwater Demolition Teams, to clear obstacles from invasion beaches. At Omaha and Utah beaches during the Normandy Landings, demolition men blew gaps in the German obstacles under heavy fire and took severe losses. In the Pacific, UDT swimmers scouted and cleared beaches from Saipan and Guam to the Battle of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, often under fire and nearly naked, armed with swim fins, a knife and explosives. The first two SEAL teams, One and Two, were built largely from UDT men.

Organization & Training

SEALs belong to Naval Special Warfare Command, which since 1987 has been part of US Special Operations Command. The teams are divided into platoons, and a platoon can be split into small squads for patrols and raids. Special boat crews carry them on many missions. The selection course, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, or BUD/S, at Coronado, California, is the most famous ordeal in the American military. Its Hell Week of cold water, running and almost no sleep ends many candidates' hopes, and anyone who wants to quit rings a brass bell. Only a minority of each class graduates. After BUD/S come parachute school and months of further training before a new man joins a team. In 1980, after the failed Iran hostage rescue, the Navy formed a dedicated counterterrorist unit, SEAL Team Six, today's DEVGRU.

Weapons & Equipment

In Vietnam SEALs were given unusual freedom to choose their weapons. They carried the Swedish Carl Gustaf m/45 submachine gun, the M16 Rifle and its short versions, the Ithaca 37 pump shotgun for point men, the M60 Machine Gun and the M79 Grenade Launcher. From the 1980s the HK MP5 served for close work, and in 1989 the SEALs adopted the SIG P226 as the Mk 25. In the wars after 2001 the HK416 became a standard rifle of the teams.

Notable Actions

Vietnam built the SEAL reputation in the Mekong Delta's mud. Small direct-action squads ambushed, snatched prisoners and hunted Viet Cong leaders at night, so effectively that the enemy reportedly called them "the men with green faces", after their camouflage paint. (See Vietnam War.) SEALs lost men in Grenada in 1983 and at Paitilla airfield in Panama in 1989, and served in the Gulf War. In Afghanistan in 2005, during Operation Red Wings, three men of a four-man SEAL reconnaissance team were killed, and a helicopter bringing SEALs and Army aviators to rescue them was shot down, killing all sixteen aboard. In 2009 SEAL snipers rescued Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates. On 2 May 2011, during Operation Neptune Spear, SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Legacy

The bin Laden raid made the SEALs the most publicly famous special operations force on earth, a mixed blessing the community itself debates, as memoirs and films followed. The core remains the UDT inheritance: comfort in the water that no other force matches, and the standing conviction that "the only easy day was yesterday." (See Global War on Terror.)

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