Storming a beach? It's how SEALs celebrate

VIRGINIA BEACH

What started in J.C. "Tip" Tipton's garage 40 years ago has morphed into one of the best live-action shows in town. Trouble is, it's not open to the public.

Tipton was the first president of the UDT-SEAL Association, a support group for members and veterans of the Navy's underwater demolition and sea-air-land commando teams.

The group has been celebrating its 40th anniversary this weekend during its annual East Coast reunion at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, where 4,000 active and retired SEALs, their families and guests saw a dramatic display of the clandestine warriors' skills and equipment Saturday.

Watching from bleachers on the beach, the crowd cheered as SEALs shimmied down a rope from a hovering helicopter to the strains of the "Mission: Impossible" theme, then clambered back onto the rope and dangled from it as the chopper carried them away.

Minutes later, a shot rang out from the beach and a stuffed dummy, its head wrapped in a checkered scarf, blew apart. Then a pair of SEAL snipers in painted faces and fringed ghillie suits - camouflaged with straw, netting and long rope braids - emerged from the sand where they had been hiding for hours, waiting for their moment.

Next, an eight-man SEAL squad stormed a small structure on the beach and brought a dark-robed figure out to one of two waiting Humvees, which then sped off, guns blazing, as two helicopters streaked low overhead.

The closing act was six jumpers from the Navy's San Diego-based Leap Frogs parachute team, who jumped from a chopper 5,000 feet up, streaming colored smoke from their heels, to a pinpoint landing on the beach.

The event has become an effective recruiting and retention tool for the Navy, said Capt. Charles Wolf, commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group 4.

"It's like the Fourth of July," he said. "It never disappoints."

The four-day reunion, which concludes today, also featured golf, skeet and tennis tournaments, several running and swimming events, and a beach beer bash.

One recognizable face in the crowd Saturday was that of Richard Phillips, the cargo ship captain held hostage by pirates off the coast of Somalia in April. He was freed when SEAL snipers, operating from the Norfolk-based destroyer Bainbridge, killed three of his captors.

That incident was one of the rare times when the SEALs' secretive operations became public.

Phillips declined to be interviewed.

The SEALs trace their heritage to the underwater combat and demolition teams of World War II - the "naked warriors" of pre-wetsuit days who covered themselves in grease or Vaseline to ward off the cold.

The SEALs were organized as an official branch of the Navy in 1962. Tipton, a retired chief torpedo man, and his fellow organizers of the SEAL as sociation are Vietnam War-era vets.

Jack Lynch, a retired lieutenant and the current president of the group, said the reunions are therapeutic.

"It offers these guys a place to come back and tell their stories and vent their anxieties," Lynch said. "They're mending."

Tipton added: "And the stories get better every year."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com