ROGUE WARRIOR, by Richard Marcinko with John Weisman (Arrow, $60).
WHEN the British SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980, it not only let the cat out of the bag with regard to its clandestine existence, but also unleashed a monster.
Suddenly, counter-terrorism was the in-thing. Special forces around the world began to ring with such gung-ho catch-cries as bash and dash, hit and split, sneak and peak, shoot and loot and a dozen other poetic variations.
''Chargin' '' Charlie Beckwith, an American officer who did a tour with 22 SAS, went back to the US and started up the American Army's Delta Force, whose public debut during the aborted attempt to rescue the US Embassy hostages from Teheran was a horror story.
The US Navy set up its version of Delta Force, a unit known as SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) Team Six, whose unofficial motto is: W.G.M.A.T.A.T.S: ''We get more A** Than a Toilet Seat.'' Its inaugural commanding officer was equally unconventional - a cussing, bristling, biting, ornery anti-authority commander named Richard Marcinko, but nicknamed ''Demo Dick'', ''Geek'' and ''Sharkman'', who once flummoxed the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong by patrolling the Mekong Delta in bare feet, thus deliberately leaving confounding ''Yeti-like'' footprints.
This unconventional warrior's catch-cry is: ''The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat,'' which is roughly similar to another famous old military saying: ''Don't die for your country, let the enemy die for it.'' The good commander had other unorthodox career highlights as well. He endeared himself to the Cambodian Navy when, as the military attache to the US Embassy in Phnom Penh, he obliged the whims of his Cambodian hosts by swallowing the poison sac of a highly venomous cobra at a cobra feast. The after-effects, those that he can remember, were rather pyrotechnic.
