‘It was a dumb operation,’ said U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Grant Telfer. ‘We had gone through the entire six-month deployment without having anyone wounded.’ Yet at the last minute, shortly before the members of Telfer’s Zulu Platoon of SEAL (sea-air-land) commandos were due to return home in January 1971, disaster struck. For five of the SEALs, the trip home would be delayed. Three of them, in fact, would be alive only through medical miracles. Telfer himself would be one of those miracle stories.

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Born in July 1941 in Seattle, Wash., Telfer grew up in that area, graduating from Seattle University Preparatory School and attending the Naval Academy. He did a lot of skiing at places such as Stevens Pass, near Seattle, went out for football (defensive guard) and was a strong swimmer. Telfer remembers that he often swam from Beaux Arts, on Lake Washington, to Mercer Island, a round trip of about two miles. Unlike many SEALs, he did no shooting or hunting as a youngster.

At the Naval Academy, Telfer spent much of his first year studying under a blanket with a flashlight in a dormitory. That experience probably contributed to reduced sight in his right eye, which resulted in his nickname, ‘Cyclops.’ His night vision was reduced to zero, which made shooting difficult unless he wore glasses.

During his SEAL training, Telfer found it next to impossible to fire at least one weapon used by the Viet Cong (VC)–the 57mm recoilless rifle–because of the location of its sight. Telfer could not fire such weapons without glasses, yet he was unable to use glasses in combat conditions because they might become smudged and affect his marksmanship or light could be reflected off the lenses and warn the enemy of his presence. It is a tribute to Telfer’s conscientiousness and dogged persistence that, in spite of his right eye, he insisted on running night operations.

At the end of January 1971, Telfer was not particularly happy with the latest operations of his platoon. He preferred to work at night, but all the operations that Zulu Platoon had participated in so far during that month had taken place during daylight. The SEALs had been supporting a civilian resettlement effort during the previous weeks.

During the last part of 1970, the South Vietnamese government had decided to resettle the citizens of An Xuyen province, located in the lightly inhabited and VC-terrorized region to the east of Nam Can, on the Ca Mau Peninsula. Telfer’s Zulu Platoon was based at Solid Anchor, a Navy Civil Engineer Corps base area on the site of badly damaged Nam Can. Zulu Platoon served as a security force to support the resettling of Vietnamese citizens into a new living complex near Nam Can. The Vietnamese government moved the people and their belongings during daylight hours, and the SEALs began to run a daylight pattern of operations in support of the resettlement.

Zulu Platoon carried out several operations using Navy transport helicopters to make daylight landings in an area known as ‘the plantation,’ east of Nam Can. The SEALs, along with Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and local forces, kept the VC guerrilla fighters from interfering with the removal of the citizens. Trained and conditioned as they were for clandestine missions, some members of Zulu Platoon grew uneasy about the openness of the operations. To the SEALs, it seemed that daylight helicopter landings were virtual advertisements for their operations. Telfer summarized their concern in understated fashion: ‘It is difficult to be clandestine in broad daylight.’

Zulu Platoon had run one of its routine resettlement support missions on January 28. Since they had met little opposition during their security patrols, the SEALs had developed a routine approach to the daylight sweeps. The platoon members had already packed most of their gear for the move back to the United States and were going through the period of their deployment known as the stand-down, or disengagement from serious operations. In a week, they hoped, everyone would be home.

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