A SEAL before the glam and glitter

Vet recalls a ‘thrilling life'

There was no Gore-Tex, no night vision goggles, no Predator drones, no "rules of engagement," no GPS and no glamorous TV shows when Mike Sands, of Columbia Falls, was a Navy SEAL in the late 1960s.

They wore Levi jeans because the denim was tough. His helmet was a sock hat. His gun wasn't a high-tech rifle with a lightweight composite stock. It was an M-60 machine gun they "modified" to cut it down from 28 pounds to 18.

He has a photo of himself holding the gun, with strings of ammo lace over his shoulders. He looks like he's ready to kill something.

Sands spent two tours in Vietnam, somehow surviving a fierce firefight when his 10-man unit came upon a North Vietnamese Army unit with more than 100. They were in a rice paddy with stubble no more than a few inches above the ground when the shooting started.

It was pitch black except when the tracer bullets whizzed overhead. Mortars exploded to the left and right. The Vietnamese had green tracer bullets. The Americans red.

"And it looked likeChristmas," he said. "It got real intense real fast. You wanted to be an earthworm."

The unit called in chopper support as they fought, and the helicopters shot a few missiles into the NVA. The sky lit up like daylight. The unit ran back to their boat, in a canal about 500 yards away, taking fire as they went. A mortar exploded where they had just been, and the blast knocked some guys down, but no Americans lost their lives.

Unlike the movies, tracers don't go "zing zing" Sands said in an interview last week. "They sound like popcorn," he said.

Sands graduated from Columbia Falls High School in 1966. His father, Bob Sands, was a Navy chief who spent 22 years in the service.

Sands told the recruiter to get him in the Navy as fast as he could. He was 14 days from being drafted when he decided to enlist. It was a Friday. The recruiter first told him it would be six months, but he called back later that day.

"You're leaving Sunday," the recruiter told him.

After boot camp, Sands saw a Navy film promoting its underwater demolition team.

"That's what I want to do," he thought to himself.

He signed up and went through the intense training. There were only 250 members on each coast.

Sands recalled a chief petty officer named Olivera, a full-blooded Cherokee who smoked cigars and chewed tobacco. You didn't want to fall behind, Sands said.

"He'd blow smoke in your face and tell you to get in line," Sands recalled. "It was brutal."

After a tour in Vietnam with the demolition team, Sands learned the Navy was looking for SEAL volunteers and he signed up. He took more training and became a SEAL - which stands for Sea Air and Land Teams - and went back to Vietnam for another tour. He doesn't regret a moment of it.

"They teach you things about yourself that the normal person never has to learn," Sands said.

He doesn't begrudge today's units. It was just different back then. Today's Navy SEALs have better equipment and many are college graduates. They're more electronic savvy.

"We didn't have that stuff," he said. "We were ground-pounding sailors ... We didn't have rules of engagement. Our rules were to come home alive."

After four years, Sands left the Navy. He wanted to sign back up, but his wife Cheryl talked him out of it. He didn't talk about it for years. No one knew he had been a SEAL.

The war doesn't haunt him like it did some, Sands said, and he credits the SEAL training he had. The training did have one impact, however - he hates to lose. He's brutally honest, and he's driven.

In civilian life, those qualities can get you fired from your job. And Sands has had plenty of jobs. He worked at the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. three separate times (but fired just once, as a teen when he was a janitor; the last time he was laid off when the plant closed).

He worked as an underwater diver for years, sold used cars and dabbled in real estate. He worked in construction and now, at 64, he's an artist. Sands creates fantastic murals of wildlife scenes completely out of hand-cut pieces of wood. In 2013, he'll have a show of his works in Phoenix, Ariz. He says he owes his life to his wife, Cheryl. He also has a son, Mike and a daughter, Tina, and several grandchildren.

Sands doesn't think much of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're not going to be victories, and they aren't worth the lives lost. He said he's heard the same rhetoric in those two wars he heard in Vietnam, about winning "the hearts and minds" of the countries. It's not going to happen.

"We're not going to change their way of life," he said.

Once in awhile, Sands visits Google Earth online and looks at Vietnam. The country hasn't changed, he noted. He doesn't wish war on anyone, he says. It's not glorious.

"It's nasty," he said.

Still, his life experience was worth it, he said.

"I've lived a thrilling life," he said. "I've done things people would pay big bucks to do."