CAPE FEAR RIVER, N.C. — The sailors hide under a tree. It’s black as ink beneath the leaves, despite a bright moon.
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They’ve nosed their riverine assault craft up on the bank with another boat, while two more creep back from a ferry crossing up ahead. Those two boats just put a squad of heavily armed sailors ashore to intercept gun-smuggling “insurgents.”
The Navy ground combat element went in shooting, but it’s quiet now both ashore and afloat, the loud diesel motors shut off.
Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Neath Williams keeps a weather eye from under the tree.
“We’re just hanging out here,” he said. “We don’t want to be in the middle of the river.”
He stands aboard a dark green assault craft, gripping an M-240 machine gun. His medical kit and backboard are stashed under the gun.
Williams has been in the Navy for seven years, but he’s spent it all with Fleet Marine Force. He went into Iraq in 2003 with the Marine invasion forces as a member of a shock trauma platoon.
He’s in good enough shape to seriously consider Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, but now he’s in Riverine Squadron 1, headquartered at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Va. It’s his first actual Navy assignment, and he couldn’t be happier.
“I like this group. Everyone wants to be here. That makes it worthwhile,” he said in the darkness. “We’re all on the same sheet of music. I’m with a whole bunch of guys who want to be riverines.”
That’s what they call themselves — “riverines,” not “dirt sailors” or “devil squids.”
They came from all over the fleet — off destroyers, from the Seabees, out of the gators and small boat units. Two of the 225 sailors in the squadron came right from boot camp, and the brown-water Navy is the first Navy they’ll know.
They don’t look like Marines and they don’t look like soldiers. They look like sailors in camouflage utilities armed with carbines and machine guns. And they think they’ve found the coolest job in the Navy.
As former fleet sailor Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Bruce Diette put it, “I volunteered for this duty. I think this is the best thing the Navy has going on right now.”
Taking care of business
Riverine Squadron 1 is the newest combat unit in the Navy. It’s part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, a new type of command formed specifically as a naval force for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other operations. It puts the new riverine unit, Seabees, explosive ordnance disposal, divers, coastal warfare squadrons and expeditionary logistics under a command that can put forces up inland waterways, through the river deltas and on the green littoral sea, whether it’s for expeditionary combat or humanitarian relief.
And the fact that a dozen sailors armed like an infantry squad are now shooting up a ferry crossing in North Carolina just upriver shows the Navy has jumped in with both feet.
The disembarked sailors have found their “insurgents” and it’s time for them to come out. The diesels roar, the boats maneuver and blank machine gun fire flashes and thuds.
As the boats carrying the ground force speed by, gunners behind the .50-caliber machine guns fore and aft on Williams’ boat start thumping out covering fire. Soon, the corpsman joins in with his M-240. He clearly enjoys the work.
“We’re pretty much ready for whatever they throw at us,” Williams said later. “By the time we’re done with training, I know we’ll be able to take care of business.”
Changing the sailor ‘mind-set’
Williams is gung-ho, but whether the squadron’s sailors are ready to go to Iraq in the spring will be up to the Marines who have trained them.
This past summer, the squadron went through Marine infantry training at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and now the unit is under a cadre of combat veterans who are teaching the sailors how to operate on rivers.
Although the Navy had a strong riverine force in Vietnam, its brown-water force atrophied in the years following the war. The remaining expertise resided with special warfare units who support SEALs. In recent years, conventional river operations were left to a Marine small craft company. But after operating up and down the Euphrates River in Iraq for two years, that unit was disestablished in 2005 under Marine force restructuring. The riverborne Marines in Iraq now are reserve provisional units that will be relieved by the Navy squadron this spring.
For the Marine training cadre getting the Navy riverines spooled up, the biggest lesson they’ve tried to impart is “a sense of urgency.”
In the most diplomatic ways possible, the combat veterans talk about changing the sailor “mind-set.”
Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Scudder is the senior staff noncommissioned officer for the Marine detachment of the joint Special Missions Training Center at Camp Lejeune.
A former reconnaissance Marine and infantry platoon leader with two Iraq tours, Scudder puts the sailors into situations where they need to make decisions quickly. Every sailor has to be able to man every spot on the boat, and no task can be put off for later.
“Things need to be done right away. It’s not, ‘Hey, we’ll get around to the boat later.’ It’s not lackadaisical. You don’t go back and play Xbox or anything like that,” he said.
Scudder has seen the sailors evolve since they’ve been under Marine training.
“Marines are brought up one way. The Navy is brought up another,” he said. “There’s a lot of good ones, a good mentality and a good sense of what they’re getting themselves into. They’ll find out exactly when they get there.”
He means it.
After one training evolution that involved two boat crew casualties and a broken boat, Scudder scolds the sailors for being hesitant while under fire.
“Violence,” he tells them. “You need to understand. Shoot. Shoot. You have the weapons. Use the damn things.”
One of Scudder’s trainers put it succinctly while waiting to ambush the sailors from the riverbank.
Cpl. Jackson Wilson was a coxswain on a Marine riverine boat during the second push into Fallujah in November 2004. It was a bloody battle, and the enemy fought hard. His crew went through thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Because a boat is a fat target on a river, “make sure you do what you’re told to do, and do it quick — real quick,” he said. “You need to gain fire superiority immediately.”
When it comes to operating in a small boat crew in combat, he said to remember one thing: “immediate obedience to direct orders.”
Keeping the mission straight
Lt. Cmdr. Mike Egan, executive officer of Riverine Squadron 1, comes from the EOD community. He began his Navy career 25 years ago as an electronics technician on the submarine Tinosa.
The command has three boat detachments of 50 sailors each and a headquarters element with 75 sailors. Within the boat crews are sailors with extra maritime interdiction training; they make up the ground combat element.
Egan said there’s still some debate over how much the riverines will go ashore, but the riverine mission is clearly for the Navy.
“The Navy’s focus is always on the water. The Marine focus is always on the ground. As long as we always keep that straight, there won’t be any mission creep that we really need to be concerned about.”
As the first squadron gets ready for a six- to nine-month deployment in Iraq, a second squadron is being manned and a third will follow. After going through the same training, Riverine Squadron 2 will take over for the first squadron in Iraq.
But Egan said his guys will have more work when they get back.
“There are already missions and requirements for us in different parts of the world, like South America and Indonesia, anywhere you can imagine that has extensive waterways.”
High speed, low drag
Egan’s sailors feel fortunate to be riverines.
It’s a Saturday morning and Diette, the senior chief boatswain’s mate, just got off a mission where he was the patrol navigator. When the Marine opposing forces ambushed the sailors, Diette and the patrol leader were “killed.” The cadre also “disabled” a boat that had lashed up for towing.
Before this, Diette was the leading chief petty officer of the deck division on the destroyer Howard. Under Marine training, he’s seen more flexibility for “free thinking” and more responsibility for young sailors.
He’s learning how to call in artillery and air support. He’s watching his young sailors learn and grow and work toward an expeditionary warfare qualification.
He loves it.
“It’s real high-speed, low-drag. All I know is, I was lucky,” he said. “I’m working with motivated sailors who will not give up in any situation.”
According to Diette, one aspect of riverines that differs from his fleet experience is that his E-3s manning belt-fed machine guns have weapons release authority, and they’re expected to use it.
“A lot of people are not really going to understand that when they read it or hear it, but I would invite them to come and get on the boat and run a mission and see how much goes on with 20 guys to really understand it.”
One of those young sailors is Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Michael Huggins. He’s 19, right out of boot camp, and now, he’s a riverine bow gunner.
When he was the only one of 80 in his recruit division to get orders for the riverine squadron, no one could tell him what it was.
Now he’s living and working with four other sailors — his boat crew — and it’s the Navy he knows.
“Everybody tells me how lucky I am,” he said. “I am looking forward to staying in the Navy as long as I am doing this.”
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