Welcome to the War: The Brutal First Days Every SEAL Faced in Vietnam
Welcome to the War: The Brutal First Days Every SEAL Faced in Vietnam
It’s 2:00 in the morning and you’re submerged up to your chest in black water. The mud pulls at your boots with every step and the mangrove closes over your head like a low roof. There are six of them. Maybe seven. Without supporting artillery. Without a wall of allied rifles at your back. Only the men breathing beside you and the miles of enemy territory between your squad and the boat.
You are a United States Navy SEAL, one of the best-trained men in this entire war. And out here, in a place the Vietnamese call the Forest of Killers, none of that guarantees you’ll make it home. Nha Be, February 1966 . A small detachment of SEAL Team One disembarks from a boat into the Rung Sat Special Zone and the direct action war for the SEALs begins in earnest.
The men who did it were new to this. The teams themselves were new to the war. The Navy had created SEAL Team 1 and SEAL Team 2 just four years earlier, in 1962. According to the Defense Media Network, the first SEAL Team 1 personnel arrived in South Vietnam in March of that year, and their first job was to teach rather than fight.
They trained South Vietnamese commandos in diving, demolitions, and attacks. So the man who ventured into Rung Sat in 1966 was a volunteer for two reasons. He had asked for this. He had survived training designed from scratch to eliminate the common man in him, and he arrived believing he was as prepared as a human being could be.
That belief was not arrogance. It was something earned. The program that produced him was designed to make most of the men who tried it fail, in the cold surf, the salt and the sleeplessness, until only the few tenacious ones remained standing. He had already survived the worst that his own navy could throw at a man.
What I had not yet encountered was the swamp. They were the best-trained men in the theater of operations. At least that was supposed to be what kept them alive. Because the terrain itself was the first enemy. And he didn’t care how many times you had completed the obstacle course. The United States Naval Institute , writing in its Proceedings magazine in April 1968, described the Rung Sat Special Zone as about 1,000 square kilometers of mangroves located on both sides of the Long Tau River.
The only deep-water channel leading to the port of Saigon. The name, the same article pointed out, translates as the forest of the assassins. This was not a jungle as most people imagine it . It was a tidal zone. Twice a day the water rose and fell. Thus, a channel you crawled through at low tide became a chest-deep river a few hours later.
HistoryNet, in its account of the fighting there, describes waters that reached a man’s chest at high tide, crisscrossed by narrow mud streams and dikes. Add to that the heat, the leeches that clung to you in the dark, the rot that devoured your feet after days in the damp, and the mud that trapped a boot like cement .
That was the office to which a new SEAL reported. Stay in that water long enough and it would begin to unravel the body from the feet up, with the skin softening and cracking in a way the doctor knew all too well. Nothing in that place was made for a human being to remain there. The SEALs remained, for hours on end, standing still as the tide rose to their chests.
And this is the part that the recruitment posters never mentioned. The Presidential Unit Citation later awarded to SEAL Team One describes a six-man fire team lying in mud and waist-deep water just to keep a field of fire clear. Imagine that. Carefully selected elite volunteers spending a night motionless in the mud waiting for an enemy born on that terrain.
The way they fought made that isolation even more acute. The Naval History and Heritage Command clearly states that the SEALs routinely operated in six-man units conducting ambushes, reconnaissance patrols, and special intelligence missions. The UDT SEAL Museum adds that, in mid- 1968, platoons were formed with two squads of six men each and that most missions in Vietnam were squad-sized.
Each platoon was assigned its own portion of the war and, to a large extent, ran it on its own. Transported in and out by small boat crews. One of his strangest jobs was to bring the enemy back alive, snatching prisoners from the darkness to interrogate them. And they chose the night to do it. Working deep within the enemy’s own backyard, where a single broken branch or a cough could turn a silent ambush into a close-quarters fight against a force that outnumbered them many times over.
They arrived by boat, sometimes slipping along the side into the current long before the target, so that the engine would never give them away. There’s an old saying that in Vietnam, the night belonged to the enemy. In the streams where the SEALs hunted, that gradually ceased to be true. They made direct contact only on a fraction of their patrols, which meant that most nights were long, wet, motionless waits that led nowhere.
And a few rare ones were the violent opposite of nothingness. So the fear that a new SEAL carried with him in those early days was strange. He wasn’t afraid of being unprepared, because he was as ready as any other man in the war. What I felt in my chest was quieter and harder to name. Every hour of that brutal training had pushed him to his limit.
And the swamp on the other side didn’t care how high that limit was. And the record fully supports that fear . This is where the story takes a turn that no one expects. The first SEAL to die in Vietnam was killed before that direct action detachment reached Rung Sat. His name was Commander Robert Fay. According to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and confirmed by the memorial wall at the Fort Pierce Museum.
Fay died on October 28, 1965 from enemy fire during an attack near Da Nang while serving in an advisory capacity. He was 41 years old. The teams had barely started and they had already buried a man. Then came the loss that hurt the most. Petty Officer Billy Matchen of Gilmer, Texas, of SEAL Team 1, Golf Detachment. On August 19, 1966, on a reconnaissance patrol in Rung Sat, Matchen was in the vanguard when he saw that his squad had fallen straight into a Viet Cong ambush.
The official Navy report, published by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, records that Naval Special Warfare suffered its first combat casualty that day, southeast of Nha Be. What that flat sentence omits is what he actually did. Matchen opened fire prematurely, on purpose, triggering the trap before his companions walked deeper into the firing zone.
He drew the shots towards himself so that the men behind him could take cover and live. He was the first SEAL killed in a combat mission in Vietnam, and he died buying the lives of his squad. He wouldn’t be the last man that swamp took, but he was the first to fall in an operation. And the teams carried their name forward for the rest of the war.
If the elite were untouchable , none of that would have happened. But it happened anyway. Something quick before we venture deeper into the swamp . If the hidden side of this war is what keeps you watching, the men who operated where the paperwork is silent, then maybe you’ll want what I’ve been creating off-camera. I put years of research on covert warfare into an e-book about the MACV SOG, the joint special operations unit to which several of these same SEALs were assigned.
It’s the side of Vietnam that never made the evening news, documented in exactly the same way as this video. The link is in the description, at truevietnamdocs.com. Now, let’s go back to the men in the mud. A new SEAL, a new team, and a swamp that had already proven it could kill even the best. What the first operations taught those men made their arrival seem almost friendly.
Gary Stubblefield, an officer with SEAL Team One stationed in the Mekong Delta in 1970, wrote in his memoirs that in his platoon’s first two operations, they were ambushed both times. He discovered that information was being leaked through allied units before leaving the base and solved it by concealing the route until the moment of crossing the gate.
His first missions in the country were compromised before they even began. We even have one of these arrivals written in the handwriting of a SEAL. Daryl Young, 19 , landed on Tan Son Nhut in the early morning of June 29, 1970. One of 14 men assigned to SEAL Team One, Golf Detachment, Juliet Platoon. In his memoirs, Young records that of those 14 men, only five had previously served in Vietnam.
Which means that more than half of the peloton was about to experience the Delta for the first time. During the next 6 months, those 14 men would carry out more than 100 missions and return home without losing a single member. Each of them had started out as a stranger in that place. Sewage. To hear what those early days really felt like, listen to the veteran SEAL on screen describe his platoon registration and deployment to the southern tip of the Delta.
So isolated that his team chose targets by throwing a dart at a map. So you go through basic training, register with your platoon, and then it’s time to go on deployment. Where are they flying from? Are they flying from North Island? Yes, we flew from North Island and in my first platoon, we flew to Cam Ranh Bay and then took helicopters to a place called New Nam Can, the southernmost part of South Vietnam, next to a place called U Minh Forest.
And did they carry out relief operations with the men from the other platoons that were there? No relief operations? We did n’t do them back then. In fact, most of our operations were dartboard operations. Have you ever heard of them? No. It’s when you put a map behind you, choose one of the men in the platoon, and throw a dart backward .
Wherever the dart lands, that’s where you’re going to go. No narrative can replace the voice of someone who was there. Now, the story told online about these men has been distorted into something that the historical record does not support. And correcting it is the main purpose of this channel. You’ve probably seen the claim that the SEALs in Vietnam had a kill ratio of 100 to 1, or even 200 to 1, making them the deadliest unit in the war.
That figure comes from content farms and recycled clip channels , not from any primary source. The UDT SEAL National Navy Museum states that, over approximately 6 years of intense engagement, the SEALs were responsible for some 600 Viet Cong confirmed killed, plus another 300 who almost certainly died. Another Navy history exhibit puts the figure at 4,000 enemies killed or captured.
And note that this is a different measure. Dead or captured, not a body count. Two credible sources. Two honest figures. None of them is folklore , which only fits best in a miniature. The nickname, however, is real. And it’s worth saying it correctly. That same museum confirms that the Viet Cong called them the green-faced men because of the camouflage paint they used.
And it reports that rewards were offered for their heads. The reward comes to us through the museum’s own account. More than because of a captured enemy record. Which is how we quote it. But going from being feared to being the most feared unit in the entire war is the kind of unfalsifiable twist that this channel leaves out. They were feared.
And that ‘s enough. And it turns out that’s also true. And then there’s the quietest myth of all, which is simply how many of these men actually existed. Retired Navy diver Steve Waterman, quoted by CBS News, said it best. There were approximately 500 SEALs who operated in Vietnam. And he had met all 20,000 of them.
He mocked the fake veterans and fabricated war stories that still cling to this unit. 500 men did the actual work, and the internet manufactured the rest. So, when a video with no sources gives you an accurate kill count and a legend about demonic gods, that’s your cue to close the tab. The truth carries more weight than any legend anyway.
The UDT SEAL National Navy Museum records 46 SEALs killed in Vietnam. The Naval History and Heritage Command puts the number at 48. Either way, out of the barely 500 men who served in the country, it’s a brutal part of a small brotherhood. Even the most decorated survivors paid with their own flesh. Lieutenant Bob Kerry earned the Medal of Honor for an action on Hon Tre Island in March 1969 and lost part of his leg in doing so, according to his Medal of Honor citation.
Thomas Norris was shot in the head during a subsequent rescue. Michael Thornton was injured while dragging Norris out of the sea. The men whose names we still pronounce aloud are those who bled the most for them. So, imagine that new SEAL once again. Two in the morning, with black water up to my chest in the killer’s forest .
Six men around him and the boat a lifetime away. Only now you know what he knew. That every hour of training had pushed him to the limit of something that training could never fully cover. And that this mud had already killed men exactly like him. That’s the real terror of the early days. It belonged to the best-prepared man in the war, standing in that black water, finally understanding that ready and safe were never the same word.
If this is the kind of story you want told directly, with sources and corrected rather than exaggerated, subscribe and stay. Next time, we’ll enter the war fought by tanks, block by block, through the ruins of a city called Hue. Until then, he continues to question the legends. The truth is almost always the best story.
