DIRTY BOAT GUYS: AN EXPANSIVE HISTORY OF NAVY SWCC
April 16, 2023Matt Fratus
In 1970, along the outskirts of the Song Cau Lon River in Vietnam, a small, platoon-sized element of Navy SEALs had moments to spare. They’d expended all of their ammunition fighting off a North Vietnamese Army engagement minutes earlier and were sprinting toward the water for extraction.
The commandos, now down to only hand grenades, hoped to see backup waiting for them in the canal. The frogmen reached the water’s edge as a medium SEAL Support Craft flipped around like a speedboat to collect them before the boat laid down a wall of cover fire so they could climb aboard.
Kirby Horrell, a SEAL on the mission, told Coffee or Die what the extraction was like from his perspective. “Whit, [the driver], pivoted the boat — so now there was a minigun looking at those [NVA] guys,” he said. “That minigun goes Wooaaaaah, and we’re hanging on the boat anywhere we can to get the hell out of there.”
The gunboats of Vietnam that routinely rescued SEALs from certain death aren’t as well known as the commandos they protected. Today, the Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, or SWCC (pronounced Swick), are often called the U.S. Navy’s “best kept secret.” Their legacy, though lesser known but no less important, dates back to the Beach Jumpers and PT Boats of World War II.
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