Anyone who discovered the SEALs or otherwise endangered the mission was to be killed as quietly as possible. Hearing the selector switches of his teammates' silenced MP5s click from “safe” to “fire” and feeling their backs move against his own, Hall remembered their orders. Thanks to four years of high school French, Hall understood well enough when one of the fishermen whispered, “Homme, qu’est-ce que tu fais dans l’eau?” (“Man, what are you doing in the water?”) in a lazy blend of French and Creole. In the kind of pitch blackness only offered by the sea on a moonless foggy night, one of the enemy dugouts drifted close enough to sense the presence of Hall’s three-man element.

Once freed, Hall and two other SEALs swam to chest-deep water before being surrounded by several dugouts manned by Haitian civilians tasked with locating and reporting exactly this type of activity. Hall closed in to assist his struggling swim buddy, miraculously freeing him while remaining unseen by the two Haitians in the boat. Hall’s US Navy SEAL Team EIGHT was tasked with conducting detailed reconnaissance of several Haitian beachheads to ensure the safe landing of an impending US Marine Corps invading force.Īpproximately 200 yards in, Hall’s swim buddy became entangled on a submerged fishing net that was being pulled in by an unseen dugout canoe. After a military coup in 1991 ousted Haiti’s first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Clinton-led United States initiated Operation Uphold Democracy in 1994, a military and diplomatic intervention intended to restore order and democracy to the embattled island nation. Hall and swim buddy, just before the Haiti operation.Ī fortuitous low-lying fog hung over the water at the insertion point, making their approach virtually undetectable. As he began finning, open fires burned suspiciously on the proposed invasion beaches, their faint glimmer visible in the eyes of the two other SEALs finning away to Hall’s right and left. While warm, the water was acrid, stinking of ammonia and decomposition. Wearing little more than woodland cammies, a Boonie hat, and a modified hunting life jacket, Hall glanced at the luminescent display of his Luminox watch and slipped quietly into the temperate waters of the Caribbean Sea.

One thousand yards of open ocean undulated gently between US Navy SEAL David Hall and the dim lights of the Haitian shoreline.

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