The crew helped him board the vessel, and he went on the op.
Noriega’s yacht was at least forty feet long with quarters for at least eight, ocean fishing rods and reels, and a wine cellar. We pulled up within fifty meters and observed the vessel with our .50-cals locked, loaded, and aimed at the craft. We had no idea how many people were aboard or if the yacht had been booby-trapped with explosives.
Our Spanish speaker got on the horn and announced that those onboard had thirty seconds to surrender before we blew their boat out of the water. About ten seconds later a hatch to the lower deck opened, and a guy stuck his arm out and waved a white T-shirt.
I was the first to board with my M16. Three other SBU-26 guys followed me. I saw a group of eight Panamanian SEALs hiding in the cabin and motioned for them to drop their weapons and come out.
Through our Spanish speaker, I ordered them to strip down. Since there were so many of them and the deck was small, I directed them to stack on top of one another, head to toe.
When one of the Panamanians refused, Johnny Koenig yelled to our Spanish speaker, “Tell him to strip down now, or we’ll shoot him!” The Panamanian complied. We tie-tied them and hauled them back to Rodman, where we made a makeshift prisoner compound out of barbed wire. We’d cleared the yacht, and before the night was over we captured around two hundred PDF enemy soldiers.
At around midnight (eleven hours after the launch of the invasion) we approached within five hundred meters of another enemy vessel with our weapons ready. When we moved within two hundred meters, the interpreter yelled in Spanish, “Come out, or we’re going to blow you out of the water!”
Everyone was off safety, fingers on triggers. The captain said, “Let’s move a little closer.” We pulled to within fifty meters, going bow to broadside. I was thinking, This is insane! We’re getting too close. A firefight between the two crews is going to be brutal.
We were so close we could almost smell them. Suddenly a hand holding a little white handkerchief emerged from one of the cabin windows, and we gave a collective sigh of relief.
We captured another dozen armed PDF soldiers.
Little by little we gained control of the Panama Canal—blocking boats from entering, and stopping boats on the canal and searching for arms and enemy personnel. Meanwhile, U.S. Army and Marine battalions supported by airpower attacked the PDF’s central headquarters (La Comandancia) in downtown Panama City and seized Fort Amador from the PDF in a nighttime air assault.
At some point during the night we exchanged fire with half a dozen PDF soldiers along the shore and tore them up pretty bad. We put the bodies in body bags, but when we returned to Rodman, nobody knew where to put them. So we decided to stash the bodies in the meat locker at the Rodman Enlisted Club with the steaks, hamburgers, fruits, and vegetables.
I found this somewhat disturbing because I ate lunch there almost every day.
When the U.S. military documentation people arrived a couple of days later, they asked me to open two of the body bags and turn the bodies over so they could photograph the faces. These particular bodies had been riddled with bullets. When I pulled one of them from the side to flip it over, the top half pulled away and separated from the bottom. It left me with a very unpleasant image that I’ll never forget.
A couple of days after we invaded, we were ordered to report to the Caribbean side of the canal, where the U.S. Army had attacked a Panamanian fishing boat and killed everyone aboard.
We arrived at around noon of a steamy hot day about twenty-four hours after the engagement.
An explosive ordnance disposal team had already searched the fishing boat for explosives but hadn’t removed the remains of the boat captain and six PDF soldiers, who were rotting in the sun. The smell, as you can imagine, was disgusting.
We had orders to clean up the sixty-foot vessel and tow it into harbor. The captain of the boat had been shot in the head with a large-caliber round. All that was left of his head was a small portion of his Afro. Maggots were in the process of eating away what was left of his brains. Behind him, against the cabin wall, was a large smear of blood.
I used this later when I trained guys in CQB. Since the captain had been standing next to a metal wall, it was easy to see that rounds had skipped off the flat surface and hit him. So stand away from hard surfaces during combat.
I said to the command master chief, the warrant officer, and the six SBU-26 guys who were with us, “Body remains, throw overboard. Marijuana, coke, or any drugs, just place it all in a pile. Anything that looks like it could be intel, put it over here.”
We threw some loose marijuana in the water, and we watched the fish devour it.