Good point. I a just thinking out loud. I am sure our people make plenty of mistakes, but this just seemed too stupid. Our people are not stupid. The skipper was a Naval Academy guy. Generally, they are not stupid.
The simplest answer is the best one....and that is they were there dropping off or picking up. Or, at Travis said, the whole thing is a lie.
They were NOT dropping off, or picking up. These were just ten random sailors assigned to the bottom-rung of USN boats, the Riverine Squadron. They were created to replace the USCG who had been doing duty watching river inlets and ports in our areas of interest in the Persian Gulf.
It’s SWCC that supports the SEALs, not RS. That’s why there was even a lady sailor on board. Just pick ten random sailors off a ship, put them on boats, that is RS.
SWCC is part of NavSpecWar, they support the SEALs. These RS guys were just on a routine transit/redeployment between Kuwait and Bahrain. Those boats have a crew of five, and that is what was on each boat: the normal crew, no troops, no spooks, no SEALs.
Even if they were dropping off some spooks or SEALs (NOT their mission, NOT their training) they would have had more than five on the boats. Even when SWCC is tasked to insert SEALs, some SEALs are still on the boat for comms and other support.
This theory would have a tiny air of plausibility if they had had more than five crew on the boats. They didn’t. They even had their PASSPORTS with them, because they were on a routine inter-national redeployment. On “cover ops,” you do NOT bring your fracking PASSPORTS!!!