Vietnam: So you really have to be concerned about more than just getting through it yourself?

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Walsh: Nowhere in the teams do you ever see the letter I. Nowhere.

Vietnam: Tell me about Lieutenant Pechacek, who inspired you so much.

Walsh: I saw him only a few times. I haven’t seen him again since 1970. All I know is he lives in San Antonio. Here’s a guy who, by all rights, should have died. They were ambushed, and his brains were blown out of his head. They scooped up his brains off the deck, put them back in his head, and just taped it up. They thought he was dead and kept right on going. After it was all over they discovered he was still alive! Well, they brought him in a wheelchair to the swimming pool at the UDT school while our class was there. It was his therapy. They picked him up and threw him into the pool. He’s got rubber bands for legs, a neck as thick as a telephone pole, and arms like a gorilla. He instantly sensed that this was a class going through hell week, so he swam down to our area. We were all just standing there lined up at the pool, and he started looking at everybody. There was a glow in his eyes, like fire, and I’ll never forget that. As he was swimming, he stopped right in front of me. I must have looked like I was either ready to quit, cry or crawl. He just stared at me and hollered: ‘Hoo-ya!’ I knew right then there was no stopping me. I thought to myself, this guy’s still acting like he’s a warrior. He was a very strong man and nothing has killed his spirit. That’s a high point of my life that I carry with me to this day.

Vietnam: Sounds like a tough guy.

Walsh: He is. That’s the kind of grit it takes to become a SEAL. Sometimes it isn’t just the physical aspect that pulls you through, it’s your mental makeup. That stays with you the rest of your life. I knew that toughness was in me all along. You have to have it in you to start with. The training just brings it out of you, and then you can develop it. You either have it or you don’t. I just had an iron will. When I went in I wasn’t that confident that I could go through the course. All I had was my will and my determination. I had already determined that I would rather die than fail. That’s how I approached it. My confidence grew as I went in the teams. I was 120 pounds and 5-foot-4. The instructors would look at me and say, ‘What’s a little piss ant like you gonna do.’ Sometimes the instructors would just glare at me, and I’d give them my crazy look. It was the only defense I really had.

Vietnam: In your book you mentioned that at any one time during the Vietnam War, there were only anywhere from six to 14 SEAL platoons in-country.

Walsh: I don’t think we ever reached 14; I think we had six. We never had more than 350 people in the country at any one time.

Vietnam: So it’s a very small community. Everyone gets to know everybody pretty much.

Walsh: Yes. Our biggest benefactor during the war was General William Westmoreland. He wanted 500 SEALs in Vietnam. If he could have got 500 SEALs Westmoreland felt he could have stalemated the war.

Vietnam: That seems like a tall order. Just 500?

Walsh: A lot of SEALs were going into the Phoenix Program (a CIA-sponsored program designed to identify members of the VC and either capture or kill them). Then the Phoenix Program got politicized. No one did it like we did. We were taking all the SEAL platoons and the South Vietnamese police PRU (Provisional Reconnaissance Unit) intelligence-gathering capabilities and putting all that together working with the Naval Intelligence Liason officers that were headquartered in the provinces. I’m telling you, that worked. If you read Stanley Karnow’s book Vietnam: A History, you’ll see that at the end of the war the Viet Cong were saying, ‘What really hurt us was that Phoenix Program.’ It worked.

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