Eyes on Target: Inside Stories From the Brotherhood of the U.S. Navy SEALs

by Scott McEwen

  Still, he wanted to become a SEAL. He pulled every string he could to get himself assigned to SEAL Team Two in Virginia Beach. By June 1966, with the Vietnam War devouring SEALs, Marcinko was back at Gate Five of the SEAL base at Little Creek. He was home.

  But not for long. After Christmas 1966, he was sent to Vietnam.

  * * *

  Thirteen kilometers west of Tra Noc, South Vietnam, Marcinko was leading a pair of SEAL Tactical Assault Boats (STABs) to ambush Vietcong in the spring of 1967. The night air was wet and phosphorescent fish jumped in the wake of their small boats.

  They surprised the Communists on a small river island. The SEALs’ opening salvo raised a hornet’s nest of well-organized opposition. Return fire was fast and accurate. AK-47 rounds sliced through the night air, sending up geysers of river water and punching small holes in boat hulls.

  The firefight was intense. The Vietcong were combat veterans: they were dug in, and they knew their deadly business.

  After two hours of heavy fire—tracer rounds arcing to and from concealed jungle positions—Marcinko radioed for an air strike.

  On duty was an AC-47, known as “Puff the Magic Dragon” for its lethal firepower that made enemies disappear. Its four Vulcan Gatling guns raked the enemy island. Leaves and dirt jumped into the air as the aircraft poured more than six thousand rounds per minute into the enemy stronghold.

  After a few minutes, the aircraft fire stopped—leaving only the rumble of the SEALs’ boat engines. Total victory.

  At least it seemed that way until Marcinko returned to base. A junior officer told Marcinko that he had violated protocol by calling in an air strike. Marcinko told him off. The next day, the commanding officer listed the rules he had broken. He had gone into combat without clearance, then called in an air strike without clearance.

  These were prerogatives of much more senior officers, not Marcinko himself. (Today SEAL officers can radio in air strikes, but forty years ago in Vietnam, air strikes were seen precisely as Napoleon saw artillery—a strategic decision to be made from a desk, not the field.)

  Marcinko’s insubordination was the start of a pattern. He was brilliant at securing hard-won battlefield victories and equally brilliant at enraging senior officers above him.

  In his mind: he cared about combat, they cared about careers.

  In theirs: Marcinko threatened the entire chain of command.

  It was a conflict that would dog Marcinko throughout his life—and it is a conflict that remains a part of the DNA of the U.S. Navy SEALs.

  * * *

  Marcinko’s first big authorized mission began on the night of May 18, 1967. The U.S. Navy would ultimately call it “the most successful SEAL operation in the Mekong Delta.”1

  During the Tet Offensive in 1968, Marcinko led his platoon in an operation in the town called Chau Doc. Disguised Vietcong had hitchhiked and walked into the town as revelers were preparing for South Vietnam’s New Year, known as “Tet.”

  It was a surprise attack. Once in position, they pulled out their weapons from their knapsacks and suitcases and started slaughtering civilians. They were organized, expertly led, and totally committed to their murderous mission.

  American nurses and schoolteachers fled to the city’s church and hospital. It was their Alamo, a temporary sanctuary that would fall if the cavalry didn’t arrive.

  Marcinko’s platoon was sent to rescue them.

  Chau Doc, a picturesque village a few days earlier, was now an apocalyptic ruin and open-air human slaughterhouse. Braving machine-gun blasts and mortar attacks, Marcinko led his team along stone walls sprayed with Communist graffiti. Tongues of flame licked up the wood-frame tiny French–style homes, and the wind blew oatmeal-colored ash onto the SEALs. Murdered civilians lay in groups. Whole families had been slain together. Dogs were shot dead at the ends of their leashes.

  Marcinko kept his men moving and firing. They knew the stakes. If they failed to break through to the trapped Americans, those well-meaning nurses and schoolteachers would be executed as had so many Vietnamese civilians.

  Leading from the front, Marcinko ran toward the church bell tower. He and his platoon arrived in time. They gathered up the survivors and led them to safety. For his bravery under fire, Marcinko earned his first Bronze Star.

  Ultimately, Marcinko would win four Bronze stars in Vietnam, as well as a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.

  * * *

  After two tours in Vietnam and a two-year stateside staff assignment, Marcinko was promoted to lieutenant commander and assigned to the office of the Naval Attaché in Cambodia in 1973. There he led covert operations against Communist rebels on the muddy rivers of Cambodia.2 His command of French grew strong enough to lead Cambodia’s phoc, or amphibious fighters, on nighttime raids. He delighted in jungle ambushes. War isn’t hell for all men; Marcinko truly loved it, and he missed it when it was over.

  But as he climbed the career ladder, he got farther and farther away from combat. By 1979, Marcinko was one of two Navy representatives for a Joint Chiefs of Staff task force known as the Terrorist Action Team (TAT). Thus, he had a front row seat to the biggest foreign policy calamity of the 1970s—the Iranian hostage crisis. Perhaps, in this national tragedy, there was an opportunity for him.

  * * *

  The crisis in Iran had been building for decades.

  Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini—known in the West simply as Ayatollah Khomeini—believed that democracy was irredeemably flawed because it allowed people to vote to make or unmake laws. Law, he said, should not be determined by elections—just as right and wrong cannot be decided by a popularity contest. Instead, clerics like him should rule and their law determined by the Koran and centuries-old scholarly interpretations. Since the Koran doesn’t mention jet planes or birth control, those matters would have to be decided by the clerics’ interpretations. Khomeini’s interpretations could not be questioned, even by other clerics. He wanted to be as infallible as the Pope and as tyrannical as Joseph Stalin.

  After years in exile in Iraq and France, Khomeini triumphantly returned to Iran on February 1, 1979. The Shah had fled almost a month before and a transitional democratic government was in place. Seduced by the alliance of Communists and Islamists against a middle-class democracy, a New Yorker writer traveled with Khomeini and wrote a laudatory article about how revolutionary the ayatollah promised to be. (Every rebel is a reformer when he is out of power.) In reality, Khomieni’s first goal was to overthrow the elected government. The ayatollah soon became the most brutal dictator in Iran’s bloody history. It would take years before the New Yorker and the European left conceded that it was wrong about the bearded ayatollah.

  Within a week of Khomeini’s return, violent demonstrations and bombings rocked the country. (Theaters and discos were popular targets.) Khomeini soon seized power.

  While in exile in France, Khomeini said he supported the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “We would like to act according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We would like to be free.” The Western press took the ayatollah at his word, without ever reading any of his books or tracts—which explicitly promised a religious dictatorship. Amazingly, Time magazine named Khomeini Person of the Year for 1979.3

  Once in power, Khomeini took a hard line against dissent, warning political rivals: “I repeat for the last time: abstain from holding meetings, from blathering, from public protests. Otherwise I will break your teeth.”4

  Khomeini introduced Sharia law, enforced by the Revolutionary Guards, a group akin to Hitler’s Brownshirts or Mao’s Red Guards. Women were required to cover their hair, and men were forbidden from wearing shorts. Men and women were banned from sunbathing in the same area. Alcohol was banned. Western movies were barred. The broadcasting of any music, other than religious singing without musical instrumentals, was forbidden. These bans, and the punishments they carried with them, would last for the remainder of Khomeini’s life.

  * * *

  Next
came the dress rehearsal for the embassy takeover.

  On February 14, 1979, armed gunmen stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 102 Americans hostage. While not directly attributed to his forces, the takeover had taken place within two weeks of Khomeini’s return to Iran. In events eerily similar to the recent invasions of U.S. embassies in Cairo and Benghazi, the U.S. embassy in Teheran was overrun by hundreds of militants, who climbed the walls and breached the gate. A Marine contingent of just nineteen guards opened fire into the air, as ordered, in an attempt to protect the compound. They failed.

  The U.S. ambassador, William Sullivan, ordered the destruction of all classified material and then, reluctantly, instructed the Marines to surrender. Amid wafting tear gas, embassy employees were led outside with their hands above their heads to be paraded for the Iranian press corps. Khomeini had won.

  Several hours later, Ebrahim Yazdi, deputy prime minister of the revolutionary government, arrived at the embassy and “convinced” the attackers to disperse.

  One Iranian employee of the U.S. embassy was dead, and a U.S. Marine was wounded. The embassy invaders were not punished under Iranian law, as the revolutionary government initially promised.

  Other than a White House statement documenting President Carter’s “disappointment,” the Carter administration did virtually nothing in response to the takeover of the embassy. Evacuations of American personnel, including thousands of oil-field technicians, accelerated.

  What no one in the Carter administration considered was the possibility that the February embassy invasion was a dress rehearsal for a bigger attack. Ten months later, the attack came. The second attack would result in fifty-two Americans being held for 444 days.

  Seemingly helpless to free the hostages through negotiation, the Carter administration ultimately instructed the military to draw up plans for a rescue mission.

  * * *

  Marcinko joined the planning for a secret mission to rescue the American hostages. Different options were debated: blockading the Iranian oilfields, mining its harbors, aerial bombardment, and a rescue attempt. The rescue mission was code-named Operation Eagle Claw.

  U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James B. Vaught was appointed Joint Task Force commander. Vaught turned to America’s special forces leaders including: Col. Charles A. Beckwith (founder of the Army’s new Delta counterterrorist group), Col. James H. Kyle (longtime U.S. Air special operator), and Lt. Col. Edward Seiffert (an experienced Marine night-vision flyer). From the beginning, the idea that all the services should have a “piece of the action” plagued the operation, producing poisonous compromises.

  Operation Eagle Claw called for three C-130 planes to ferry an assault force of some 120 troops from the island of Masirah, off the coast of Oman, to Iran. The troops were to land approximately two hundred miles southeast of Tehran at a desolate, uninhabited location code-named Desert One. The C-130s were to be accompanied by three EC-130s, which are refueling airplanes. After landing in the desert, the planes were to wait for eight RH-53 helicopters from the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier located in the Gulf of Oman.

  The choppers were to arrive at Desert One within thirty minutes of the landing of the C-130s. The choppers would then load the assault troops, refuel, and drop the troops at a remote oasis some sixty-five miles from Tehran, where they would rendezvous with agents coming from Tehran. After dark, the agents would escort six drivers and six translators to Tehran, retrieve trucks that had been acquired in the outskirts of Iran’s capital, and return to the oasis. The assault team would then climb into the trucks and drive into Tehran.

  Once in Tehran, the assault team would make two rescues, one at the embassy and the other at another location where an additional three hostages were being held. Once they had the hostages aboard, the assault team would then head to a soccer field in Tehran, await helicopters, and airlift all personnel to Manzariyeh, where an Army Ranger Team would be holding the airport until the helicopters arrived. The rescued hostages and assault team were then supposed to board onto military aircraft and be flown out of the country. All remaining material used in the operation was to be blown up at the airfield.

  It was a complicated plan with many moving parts. It didn’t take long for those parts to grind into each other.

  * * *

  After five months of planning and training, Operation Eagle Claw began on April 24, 1980. The first C-130 crossed into Iranian airspace and reduced its altitude to less than five hundred feet to evade enemy radars. As planned, at approximately halfway to the rendezvous point, the commander received a radio message indicating that the eight helicopters had lifted off from the USS Nimitz.

  After successfully landing the C-130 at Desert One, team members began unloading equipment. Then, the unexpected struck.

  As the Ranger team and Delta operators set up a security perimeter around the site, an Iranian city bus arrived. The bus was fired upon and it halted.

  Forty-five Iranians were then detained. Shortly thereafter, a fuel truck (likely smugglers) appeared on the road. It refused to stop. Delta launched an M72 LAW (a 66-millimeter “light antitank weapon”) at the truck, scoring a direct hit, and immediately creating a huge fireball. To make matters even worse, a small pickup truck appeared next, picked up the driver of the burning truck and fled the scene at what can only be assumed was the highest speed achievable by the pickup.

  Cover for the entire mission was blown.

  Killing a busload of Iranians would not have bothered Marcinko: “We’re helping ’em out. We’re the extended arm of the Iranian law. Same thing with the curfew violator with the pickup truck…”

  Despite the complications, the U.S. ground commander decided not to scrub the mission. The element of surprise was now gone. A second C-130 landed shortly after the first. The light from the burning tanker truck actually served as a landing beacon for the aircraft.

  At first, the helicopter part of the mission was running according to plan. Then, some two hours into the mission, a red warning light flashed inside one helicopter cockpit, indicating a main rotor blade spar crack. While a false reading for this was relatively common on the RH-53Ds, the crew landed the chopper and decided to abandon it after inspecting the rotor blades. Another chopper landed and picked up the crew. The rescue team was now down to seven helicopters on a mission that they had planned required a minimum of six.

  Then they met the haboob.

  The haboob is a dense dust storm that moves across the horizon like a black curtain on a stage. It is fast and reduces visibility, turning noon into midnight.

  As the helicopters moved deeper into Iranian airspace, pilots saw what they thought was a fog bank several miles ahead. As they neared it, they realized it was not harmless fog but a dangerous sandstorm. As the RH-53s flew deeper into the dirty skies, they suffered near hurricane force winds. Visibility dropped to less than seventy-five feet. And, unlike today, those helicopters did not have a GPS (Global Positioning System) or advanced avionics. They were flying blind over hostile territory.

  Back at the Pentagon, Marcinko followed the action through a secure radio transmission. Marcinko told us: “The one we missed, in Murphy’s Law, is the porosity or the density of when you have a sandstorm. So what happened, probably just as much a feature of the problem with the helicopter was there was a sandstorm and it clogged the filters. No one thought about changing filters to that degree to stop the flying, so you end up that you have a helicopter that’s not functioning up to par, plus the back blast, so it just turns to shit in a hurry. But my gut feeling is this is blown, so go. You know?”

  One of the helicopter’s pilots was forced to return to the aircraft carrier. Maintaining radio silence, the crew of the helicopter was unable to alert Kyle (the ground commander) or Seiffert (the helicopter mission commander) that the mission had lost another chopper.

  The mission was now down to its minimum number of helicopters needed for the rescue operation.

  Six helicopters from the original eight succ
essfully landed at Desert One. However, one of the helicopters that made it (designated Bluebeard 2) had a hydraulic system failure. After observing the condition of the chopper, Seiffert made the decision that the chopper was a no-go. Now the force was left with five helicopters to accomplish the mission, and most difficult portion of the mission was still ahead of them.

  Colonel Beckwith was forced to abort the remainder of the mission, as six helicopters had been the agreed-upon minimum needed for the operation. In reality, five may have sufficed, but the commanders in Washington knew the operation was below its bare minimum of required aircraft. Kyle radioed Vaught and reluctantly recommended scrubbing the mission. Conscious of the political fallout of overruling his military commanders, President Carter approved the request within minutes.

  With the rescue mission canceled, the worst was yet to come. As the force prepared to depart, one of the helicopters (Bluebeard 3) moved closer to the EC-130s to refuel. In the dust and spray from the rotor wash, the crew of the refueling helicopter got too close to the refueling plane. Its rotor blade smashed into the plane’s side, setting off a fireball.

  The explosion killed eight men and destroyed both aircraft. Marcinko still thought that the mission should go forward, but no one consulted him on the matter. “There was the explosion when the helicopter went into the C-130. My gut wrenched. And I thought: ‘All right, so somebody probably knows we’re here. Let’s just accelerate and go.’ ”

  The ground commander released the Iranian civilians, who had been detained from the bus, loaded the C-130s, and evacuated. The remaining helicopters were abandoned on the ground. Unfortunately, the helicopters had not been sufficiently sanitized. Classified material, including the names of the Iranians working for the Americans, fell into the hands of the Revolutionary Guard. Those Iranians were soon hunted and killed. The rescue mission was a perfect failure in every dimension.