Former DEVGRU (SEAL Team 6) operator Matt Bissonnette and the "killer dolphins."
One of the wildest SEAL training stories from Matt Bissonnette’s book “No Hero," was one of his first missions as a new SEAL.
In the freezing, pitch black waters off Alaska, young Matt Bissonnete and his teammates from SEAL Team 5 were running a combat swimmer exercise. Utilizing Drager rebreathers, their mission was to proceed under the water, undetected, and place a tracking device on an "enemy" ship a good distance away.
Besides the freezing water and darkness, one of the scariest aspects of this mission was the trained bottlenose dolphins. These highly intelligent marine mammals, part of the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, are conditioned to detect, mark, and even aggressively engage threats underwater.
The US Navy brought two of these dolphins in for the mission. One was freely swimming in the area, trained to attack divers and force them to surface. The other was in an enclosure near the ship, trained to ring a bell above its pen to alert the crew of underwater threats.
In the book, Bissonnette described the tension of swimming in the dark, knowing at any moment one of these powerful animals could slam into you like a torpedo. Luckily, they were able to complete the mission undetected, as one dolphin decided to chase a school of fish, and the other simply kept ringing the bell because it was hungry.
After the mission was completed, Matt and his team went back to their hotel rooms (left photo), glad to be away from the cold, the dark, and the dolphins.