A SEAL's Tudor, Lost in Vietnam the Night He Nearly Died

Stripped From His Arm During Emergency Treatment in Vietnam, a SEAL Team ONE Tudor Submariner Resurfaces 49 Years Later

At Watches of Espionage, we are sometimes critical of vintage watch dealers looking to buy low and sell high at all costs. We understand and respect the business-is-business rationale, but in our community, watches often represent more than the sum of their parts or a potential hammer price at Christie’s. There are, however, a few members of the vintage watch community out there who are doing it right, searching for incredible watches while valuing the stories that come with them just as much.

Tim Bender (@tjbender) is one of those dealers, and he has chronicled a few of these personal histories in his Fresh to Market series. A few months ago, Tim tracked down the Rolex GMT-Master reference 1675 worn by a US Army Special Forces captain named Steven G. Torborg in an iconic photo taken in Vietnam. Rather than ringing up the auction houses or posting it online with an insane markup looking to cash in on the provenance, Tim connected with @detemporeliber, a Special Forces veteran who later became a passionate watch collector. They struck a deal, and a significant watch stayed within the SF community.

US Army Special Forces Captain Steven G. Torborg wearing a Rolex GMT-Master 1675 in Vietnam.

Sometimes, even after doing all of the detective work, Tim doesn’t manage to come away with the watch. Sometimes, all you get is an incredible story and maybe a new friend. This is one of those stories. This time, Tim's search led him to Ben Beall, a former SEAL Team ONE officer whose Tudor Submariner vanished the night he was nearly killed in Vietnam and resurfaced 49 years later thanks to a teammate who never knew what he'd been carrying. Tim never bought the watch. He walked away with the story instead.

THE Watch

Fresh to Market — Case No. 005

LT Ben Beall, SEAL Team ONE, Mike Platoon, Vietnam, 1968

The UDT-SEAL Association was about to run a piece in The Blast, its quarterly magazine. A watch, issued to a frogman in 1966. Lost the night he nearly died. Found again 49 years later, by accident, by a former teammate who had no idea what he'd been carrying.

I had a name and a town. That was enough. I got to work.

The search came back with one result. Same name. Same small town in Colorado. A business website with a contact form. Had to be a son.

I was walking the aisles at Safeway when I decided to call. Right there in the aisle, I picked up the phone and told him I wanted the watch if it was ever for sale, but that even if it wasn't, the story deserved to be documented. He listened. Then he passed my information along to his father.

By the time I got home, the email was waiting.

"Tim, you contacted my son, also Ben Beall. He forwarded your email. Where did you hear the story of THE Watch? I always thought that someone in the hospital in Bien Hoa lifted it. Tony Freedley, even though we had had many times together after Vietnam, never said anything about visiting me in the hospital. I was out of it."

He attached photos. And a video.

"Even though it has only been in my drawer, you will see the second hand moving."

Ben Beall grew up in Philadelphia, the son of two Mississippi natives who had come north to find work. As a boy, he made trips back to visit his grandparents and saw what he has only ever called "a different place." Separate water fountains. Shanty towns across the tracks. His family had people cooking their dinner and didn't know their names. They were simply the help.

He was too young then to have a word for what he was seeing. The word came later, at Notre Dame, studying political science, when those pictures came back with their full weight. The Civil Rights Movement was tearing through the country. Birmingham. The March on Washington. The Civil Rights Act. Selma. It was on the streets, on the news, in the papers, impossible to ignore. But for Ben it wasn't abstract. He had seen it as a boy. He had been close enough to touch it.

His father suggested he sign up for ROTC. Ben did. He was commissioned as an ensign and assigned to the USS Weiss, a converted destroyer escort that carried Underwater Demolition Teams out of Subic Bay. He was in charge of the boats, running the UDT men out on their missions. He'd watch them go, and he knew he wanted in.

He applied for UDT training and was accepted. In November 1966, he graduated with Class 39 into UDT-11, based out of Coronado. Along with his fins, his knife, and his gear, the Navy issued him a watch. A Tudor Submariner, reference 7928. It went on his wrist, and over the next two years it became a part of him.

1966 Tudor Ref. 7928, Serial 568xxx, on a NATO strap sent to Ben by my friend Skip Powell after he heard the story.

Ben has a phrase for the men he served alongside: silent warriors.

He means it. He ran for Routt County Commissioner, the county that includes Steamboat Springs, and served two four-year terms. Through both, he told voters only that he was a Navy veteran. Nothing more. His own wife and two sons still don't know all of what he did and saw over there. Before this conversation, he had spoken publicly about his service once, when a local veterans center asked him for a brief history of his time in the Navy. That was it.

Over several months and many hours of conversation, I learned where the edges were. The moment anything operational came up, the door closed. Politely. But it closed. He knows this kind of silence has mostly gone out of fashion. These days it seems every SEAL has a book or a podcast, and politicians run on their service like a line on a resume. Ben has never talked that way about what he did, and this piece follows his lead.

With UDT-11, Ben deployed to Subic Bay in the Philippines for a six-month rotation. The mission: survey the beaches around the DMZ. Potential landing zones for the Marines. The team left Subic Bay aboard a submarine and slipped into Vietnamese waters unseen. At the drop point, they launched their rubber boats and paddled for the beach in total darkness.

All of it in silence.

Once they reached the beach, they posted sentries. Ben stayed in the water, running the survey. A quiet night. A peaceful stretch of coastline. Nothing moving.

Then gunshots rang out.

Every one of them knew immediately. Compromised. Enemy contact. This is it.

It wasn't. One of their own had been startled by a water buffalo in the dark and opened fire. Ben doesn't remember the man's name anymore. He does remember that the man got a lot of shit for it. Nearly sixty years later, there's still a grin underneath the story when he tells it.

"That's the everyday stuff," he told me. "You hear about the battles. You don't hear about shooting at water buffalo."

In 1967 the commander of UDT-11 volunteered him, in Ben's words, for SEAL Team ONE. He accepted, extended his service to four years, and went back into training. Jungle warfare. Desert. Parachutes. Then command of Mike Platoon.

Mike Platoon on a training exercise near Suisun Slough, California, before deploying to Vietnam. Jamie Brierton (far left), Walter Pope (second from left), Ben Beall (center), Jimmy Ako (on the ground). (Photo Credit: True Magazine, May 1968.)

By then the watch was more than equipment.

"It glowed in the dark. It was a reassuring friend on ambush late at night in the middle of some muddy place with the sounds of darkness."

February 1968. Mike Platoon left Coronado for Vietnam.

They set up at Nha Be, on the Saigon River south of Saigon. The waterways were essentially Viet Cong territory. The waterways were their supply lines, their movement routes, their lifelines. Their mission was to stop the Viet Cong from harassing shipping bound up the river for Saigon. This area was known as the Rung Sat Special Zone. At night, Mike Platoon owned its waterways.

They planned their own missions, ran their own intelligence, and operated largely on their own terms.

"We would have a mission every other night probably," Ben told me. "There was a lot of work involved in finding out what the place looked like, what people were telling you, and then trying to be safe. That was always something. You didn't want anybody to get hurt."

Navy river patrol boats moored at Can Tho, Mekong Delta, circa 1968.

After about a month, Mike Platoon transferred to Can Tho. They arrived in the middle of the Tet Offensive. The bridge across the Mekong was burning. Mike Platoon moved in to help defend the town, living on a barge in the middle of the river alongside the Navy's PBR gunboats. The job there was to disrupt Viet Cong and North Vietnamese operations against the local population. Leaders, tax collectors, meetings. Intelligence from the CIA and Vietnamese contacts.

Every other night. Into the dark. Back before dawn. Then again.

Before Ben would tell anyone about the watch, he wanted three names said first.

BM1 Walter Glenn Pope (left). Died April 29, 1968. Age 34.

Walter Pope was Mike Platoon's leading petty officer. He died on a training mission shortly after Mike Platoon arrived in country, a joint exercise with Tony Freedley's platoon, which had been there a couple of months already. Walter was carrying a Stoner 5.56 light machine gun, which was new to the military at the time. They were in a river boat heading to an insertion point. They hit a wake and the gun discharged.

Without hesitation, Pope jumped on the gun to protect his men and ultimately took several rounds in his abdomen and his chest. It was later found that the Stoner's safety mechanism had a design flaw that could work loose from the vibration of the boat itself. Pope had just had a son a few weeks prior. He was Ben's man. Ben was responsible for him.

SFP2 David Eugene "Skinner" Devine. Died May 5, 1968. Age 26.

David "Skinner" Devine was next, an M-60 gunner. On the night of May 5, on an insertion, the platoon planned to swim to a bank and set up an ambush. Devine went in wearing two life jackets, extra flotation to offset the weight of the gun. He went under and drowned before he reached the shore. Also Ben's man. Also his responsibility.

CS1 Donnie Lee Patrick. Died May 14, 1968. Age 30.

Donnie Patrick had become the platoon's leading petty officer after Walter Pope was killed. He was the platoon's M-79 man. May 14, 1968, was his last mission.

None of them to enemy fire. A faulty safety. An overloaded swim. All three on the same river.

"These Mike Platoon members were all great people and team members." Ben wanted that said plainly, before anything else.

He is matter-of-fact about their deaths. "It's not something that has really weighed me down," he said. "It was just part of the action, part of my job. They happened."

But he doesn't leave it there.

"You could actually say in some way that those deaths were failures on my part," he told me. "Which I've had to live with." Then, quietly: "Maybe we shouldn't have been in that spot. Maybe I should have put the guys closer to the beach."

Was it his leadership? His planning? The belief that they could do whatever it takes? He has never fully answered those questions. He carries them the way he carried everything else out of Vietnam: quietly, and without resolution.

Before any of what happened on May 14, 1968, there was a night on the barge.

The Mekong moving dark and slow beneath them. Men lying in their bunks. The sounds of the river. The sounds of the jungle beyond it.

Ben and Jamie Brierton, his assistant officer, talked generally about the war. What are we doing here? What are we accomplishing? They were operating in free fire zones. Entering villages. Identifying who counted as the enemy and taking them down. In the dark. On someone else's intelligence. Hoping they had it right. Villagers, most of them, just trying to live their lives.

They wouldn't get their answer that night. They had to get back to planning their next mission.

War is not a video game. It is not glamorous. It is a dangerous business. Ben wants that on the record.

The Ham Luong River, a branch of the Mekong, between Cho Lach and Ben Tre. Walter Pope, David Devine, and Donnie Patrick all died on this river in the Spring of 1968. Present-day satellite imagery: Google Earth.

THE Night. May 14, 1968. Ben’s Last Mission.

Four miles southeast of Cho Lach, Mike Platoon moved toward the bank of the Ham Luong the way they always did. Quietly. No unnecessary movement. No unnecessary sound.

There was intelligence that a Viet Cong tax collector was operating in a village a mile inland. Mike Platoon was going in to handle it.

I had to ask. Kill or capture?

He smirked. "Quién sabe."

Who knows.

The motors cut. The boat moved silently to its insertion point.

Ako, the point man, dressed in black pajamas, off first. Ben next, headed for the tree line. He jumped into the mud. Took a few steps.

All he remembers is a bright flash of white light behind him, and him crying out. He was hit. That is the last thing he remembers from that night.

He was evacuated by boat, then helicopter, along with Jamie Brierton and two others, to a hospital at Bien Hoa.

Donnie Patrick was dead before the boat left the beach.

Ben woke up days later with bandages wrapped around both legs and both arms.

"In some ways I was lucky," he told me. "I had jumped off the boat, and I was bent over following my point man. So the explosion got my buttocks, arms, and my legs."

Nerve damage to his extremities that has never fully healed. To this day, he still can't push his right foot down, and he still has pieces of shrapnel in him.

The nurse at Bien Hoa told him it was M-79 shrapnel. He had no reason to doubt her.

When he woke up, he noticed his Tudor Submariner was gone.

You never took off your watch. He asked the nurses. It was nowhere to be found.

He resigned himself to the idea that someone in the hospital had taken it. He let it go. There was nothing else to do.

A long year of recovery followed. Okinawa. Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. Operation after operation. A discharge, in the end, with 80 percent disability.

Ben was awarded the Bronze Star with “V” for valor.

Ben came home but didn't stay long. He kicked around San Diego for a while, living near Imperial Beach. He and a buddy dabbled in real estate, without much success. Nothing was clicking. He knew there was something else out there for him. There always had been. Then he left.

He made his way south through Mexico and Central America. In Panama he boarded an Air Force plane to Santiago, Chile, where he had shipped his skis ahead. Worked a couple of months at a ski resort in La Parva. He crossed the Andes, down the Amazon and met up with a college friend in Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. His friend looked over at a woman on the beach and thought that was Janis Joplin. Turned out it was. They spent the next two weeks with her. Joplin would be dead by October. A heroin overdose at twenty-seven.

I asked if this was some sort of escape. "It was just doing something," he said.

After six months in Africa, up the Great North Road and into Mali, he boarded a train toward the Sahara. He reached for the door. For a second, someone else looked back. "I saw myself as a Black African," he told me. He didn't recognize himself anymore. He knew it was time to go home.

Ben (center) at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, 1970.

He settled in Steamboat Springs in 1973. Became a carpenter, then a contractor. He built a beautiful life for himself. He and his wife Millie raised two sons. Ben served two terms as county commissioner. Later, well into their sixties, he and Millie joined the Peace Corps, serving in Bolivia and Costa Rica.

His sons grew up in the same house as this man and never heard what Mike Platoon did in the field.

As a father myself, I had to ask: was the silence to protect them or to protect himself? He didn't go there. "They probably knew we were running ambushes," he said. "But why would you want to tell the bad things? Who wants to tell how many people you killed? That doesn't make any sense."

He has turned THE Night over in his mind for nearly 60 years. How could he not?

He did not hear or see anything from the tree line or the beach before the explosion. Nothing from the direction of the enemy. An M-79 round has to travel a certain distance before it arms. He has never been able to reconcile how one could have gone off close enough to hit him and kill Donnie, who was the one carrying the grenades.

In 1991, at the 25th reunion of UDT Training Class 39 in Coronado, Ben raised it with the other men who had been there that night. No one remembered seeing or hearing anything suspicious from the beach. Some of them had arrived at the same conclusion Ben had quietly been circling for over twenty years. That one of Donnie's own grenades had gone off by accident.

It is not an answer. It is a possibility a group of old friends arrived at together, decades later, still trying to understand a night none of them has ever fully let go of.

It's Never Just a Watch 

January 2017. Ben and Millie, on a road trip up the West Coast in a rented Cruise America van. In San Francisco, old friends from UDT and SEAL Team days gathered for lunch at the Cliff House, overlooking the Pacific. Among them was Tony Freedley, a friend going back to UDT-11, the same man whose platoon had been with Mike Platoon the afternoon Walter Pope was killed.

In 1968, Tony had gone up to Bien Hoa to see Ben in the hospital. Ben was out of it, tubes everywhere. A nurse pulled Tony aside with a small bag and told him to take it, or Ben's things would be lost or stolen. Tony didn't want to, but he took it anyway. Put it away with his own gear and forgot it was there.

In the summer of 2016, sorting through storage, he found it again. Most of what was inside had rotted with age. The watch was still there. It had stopped running, so he had gotten it serviced.

At the Cliff House, he set it down in front of Ben.

"I know it has taken me 49 years to get your watch back to you," he said. "But here it is, in good working order."

"I was totally blown away," Ben told me. This watch had been such a part of him. More than a uniform. Tony had been carrying it the whole time. He just hadn't known it.

"Even though it wasn't a present," Ben said, "it was better."

The Cliff House, January 2017, the day Ben got his watch back. Left to right: Scott Patton (UDT-11), John Gulick (SEAL Team ONE), Ben Beall, Tony Freedley (SEAL Team ONE).

He put it on and wore it home. Then it went into a dresser drawer, where it stayed for the better part of a decade.

Ben mentioned to his family that I had called, asking whether he'd ever consider selling it. That's when his son, the same son I'd reached from the aisle at Safeway, asked if he could have it instead. Something to remember his father by.

"My whole body kind of glowed," Ben told me. He gave his son the watch.

In September 2026, I flew to Colorado and drove to Steamboat Springs. Ben welcomed me into the log home he built himself and showed me around. We went through his old photos and what he'd kept from the war. Over beers by a lake, we talked about his life, his legacy. That evening we had dinner with Millie, his son, and his grandkids, and I stayed the night.

Ben is my friend now.

Ben Beall at home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, September 2026.

He's 82. He lives on seven acres on a ridge in Routt County, among the ponderosa pines.

I asked him what he still wanted to accomplish before he left this earth. He paused. Then, almost to himself:"I love trees. I plant trees sometimes, and I go around and look at my trees I planted. Those trees will probably be the thing that somebody looks at someday."

Ben with his grandchildren, Routt County, Colorado.

His son wears the watch every day now. Not as a reminder of May 14, 1968. As a reminder of the man his father chose to be on the other side of it.

Ben Beall IV and his son, Ben Beall V, Steamboat Springs, Colorado, September 2026.

About the Author: Tim Bender writes Fresh to Market, an oral history series documenting significant watches and the people who wore them. After nearly a decade in the vintage watch market, he founded Collected to bring collectors the safeguards they always deserved. 

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