by Tom Clancy
Downing had been both an armor brigade and a Ranger Regiment Commander, and brought some unique skills to the mission. As a Ranger, he emphasized surprise, agility, and cunning, but he also appreciated the speed and overwhelming firepower of armor. During the planning, he'd been assigned the mechanized infantry battalion for the assault on the Comandancia and Carcelo Modelo, and for that mission received the platoon of Sheridan light tanks and the Marine Corps LAVs. From this force, he tailored a quick-reaction element; LAVs and armored personnel carriers would carry his highly trained special mission forces — some of whom had never been in an armored vehicle. No problem, they were Special Forces and adaptable. Major Howard Humble, a former mechanized infantry company commander in Germany, and now an SF officer, got the force organized and moving into the streets of Panama City that night and led them with distinction for the next five days.
Downing called this force his "Panzer Gruppe" and positioned it as a reaction force at various places in the city. It could go faster than helicopters, hit places they couldn't, and could be broken up into several elements for greater flexibility (to find their way around Panama City, they used a map they got from a gas station). The APCs'.50-caliber and 20mm machine guns were small beer in a major war, but in fights against lightly armed forces inside a city, they provided tremendous firepower.
One of the Panzer Gruppe elements was sent to rescue Muse and his rescuers. Once they'd picked them up, they first took them to a junior high school for transloading to a helicopter, and then on to the field hospital at Howard Air Force Base for treatment. Here it was learned what had happened: The helicopter carrying Muse and his rescuers had been overloaded and caught a skid on a power line, causing it to crash in the street. Once down, the pilot had been able to move the helo to a parking lot, from where he'd attempted to take off. The hclo had gotten about thirty feet off the ground when it was shot down, landing on its side. Three operators had been injured in the crash, including one already shot in the leg. The'd formed a perimeter to protect Muse and had been engaged in an intense firefight until they'd been rescued.
At about the same time all this was happening, heavy fire at the Comandancia brought down a second special operations helicopter, which crash-landed inside the compound and slid up against the security fence surrounding the Comandancia headquarters. Though neither pilot was injured, they knew they couldn't last long in the withering fire. They jumped out of what was left of the aircraft, threw their flight vests on the fence, climbed over, and crawled beneath a portico that covered an entranceway.
As they huddled there, a PDF soldier — perhaps the first prisoner of the war — came crawling out of the grass with his hands over his head. "I want to go with you," he called out in broken English. They took him in.
A Panzer Gruppe squad rescued all three.
The following morning, a third light observation helicopter was shot down and went into the Canal on the Atlantic side. Unfortunately the crew was lost.
At H-hour, the four Sheridan tanks and an AC-130 pounded the Comandancia's main headquarters and the PDF barracks, while the lead hattalion of the 193rd Brigade moved down Fourth of July Avenue, turned left into a street dominated by high-rise buildings, and began its assault into the compound. The way ahead of them was blocked by heavy trucks and other obstacles, and most of the PDF they could see were wearing civilian clothes — mainly Levis. It was clear they'd been alerted in advance — they planned to fight for a while and then fade into the populace in civilian clothes when the going got tough.
Some of the heaviest fighting of the operation followed.
The lead battalion pushing through with their APCs instantly came under very heavy fire from windows, ledges, and rooftops, and from civilian vehicles sandbagged as fighting positions. For the next two hours, heavy fighting continued. By 3:00 A.M., the Comandancia was on fire, with smoke so thick the Sheridans could not see their targets, but the 193rd had formed a cordon around the compound and begun operations to clear each building.
As a result of a PSYOPs broadcast that designated a local street for safe passage, six truckloads of PDF had surrendered; but the three security companies remaining inside the compound were still putting up stiff resistance.
Since he had no idea what to expect once his troops got inside the Comandancia, Stiner decided to bring in a Ranger company the following afternoon to do the detailed search of the building. The company was from 3rd Ranger Battalion and had jumped the night before with the 1st Ranger Battalion for the H-hour assault on Torrijos-Tocumen International Airport.
As PDF and Dignity Battalions fled the area outside the cordoned compound, they set fire to the nearby slum of Chorillo to slow the advance of the U.S. troops.
At H-hour, another Task Force Bayonet battalion, the 1st Battalion, 508th airborne infantry, launched an assault against Fort Amador less than two miles away, with the aim of neutralizing the PDF's 5th Infantry Company. Since Fort Amador was a treaty-designated "joint use" post — with both Panamanians and Americans living or working there — this would be a delicate operation. The PDF occupied all the buildings on the south side of the facility, near the Canal, while American military families lived directly across the golf course fairway — among them, Marc Cisneros and his family. Cisneros was well-known and respected by most Panamanians, and for this reason Noriega hated him. Cisneros played a large part in the coming action.
"This was the first time in my military career," Carl Stiner recalls, "that family members of U.S. servicemen would find themselves without warning right in the middle of a combat environment."
Because it was the Christmas holiday season, the PDF had set up life-size nativity scenes near their barracks — but nativity scenes with a difference, with machine-gun positions established directly beneath each of them. The guns pointed directly across the fairway at the quarters of the U.S. military families.
The battalion commander's attack plan called for infiltrating most of his headquarters company onto the installation before H-hour. At H-hour, two rifle companies, augmented by a 105mm howitzer, would conduct an air assault directly behind the quarters area occupied by U.S. families. As they landed, they would immediately establish a security perimeter around the U.S. housing area and then attack the PDF barracks less than a hundred yards away, one company from the north, and the other from the south.
OPERATION JUST CAUSE
20 DECEMBER 1989-31 JANUARY 1990
Another company from the battalion would secure the Balboa Yacht Club on the south side of the peninsula and directly behind the PDF barracks. The Club was a frequent gathering place for PDF officers, and several boats of the PDF Navy were usually docked nearby.
Once the assault troops were in position, and the families warned to take cover, the battalion commander was ready to launch his operation. He decided to hold off on building-clearing operations, however, until he'd tried PSYOPs. From time to time, he fired the howitzer on vacant buildings — to make sure the PDF knew he was there and meant business — while his broadcast teams sent out a surrender message. At first light, building-clearing operations would police up anyone left.
It didn't take much persuasion. Moments after the howitzer started firing, PDF were bolting out of their buildings and down to the water, throwing in their weapons. A total of 140 PDF surrendered or were captured. Moments after that, the night was quiet — except for the broadcasts and the occasional firing of the howitzer.
The next day, clearing proceeded, punctuated by sporadic sniping. That ended at 3:00 P.M., when Marc Cisneros talked the last sixteen holdouts in the gymnasium into surrendering. Fort Amador was secure.
During interrogations, it was learned that most PDF officers had abandoned their troops even before H-hour and left them to defend themselves. On the whole, PDF officers were a bad lot. Most were on the take and skimming the pay from their soldiers.
Meanwhile, the company securing the Balboa Yacht Club launched its operation. In attempting to escape, many PDF tro
ops had disguised themselves as waiters, but their combat boots gave them away, and forty-seven prisoners were captured.
No one who knew anything at all about Manuel Noriega had serious questions about his character. He was a seriously evil human bcing-right up there with Saddam I Iussein in the bad guy department. Blessedly, accidents of birth had placed him in a small, weak country, which limited his evildoing opportunities. That said, no American involved in Operation JUST CAUSE had any idea how bad Noriega really was until searches of his residences and offices began to reveal the depths of his degradation.
At Fort Amador, Noriega maintained a set of offices, which U.S. forces searched at about noon. Marc Cisneros was there to make sure this was done properly. Carl Stiner describes some of the "delights it contained:
"In Noriega's desk, in the top right-hand drawer, they found some of the rawest, most hideously disgusting pornographic videos you can imagine. In the left-hand drawer were photo portfolios of PDF atrocities against political prisoners — pictures of tortures, castrations, beatings, flayings, executions, mass rapes, and much worse. On a wall was a life-size silhouette target — President Bush and Marc Cisneros with bullet holes through their heads.
"We found similar materials at the offices of many high-ranking Noriega henchmen."
TASK FORCE WHITE
Task Force White, commanded by Navy SEAL Captain "John," consisting primarily of Navy SEAL Special Boat units, was also carrying out its three major H-hour missions, to: take out of action Noriega's personal yacht and the PDF patrol boats in Balboa Harbor, at the Pacific Ocean entrance to the Canal; block the runway at Paitilla Airport in downtown Panama City; and isolate PDF forces at Flamenco Island, a mile or so out in the Bay of Panama.
Two hours before H-hour, a pair of dive teams in combat rubber raiding craft left Rodman Naval Station for Pier 18 in Balboa Harbor, where Noriega's yacht was docked. A fire support team, armed with.50-caliber machine guns and a 40mm grenade launcher, came along in another boat, just in case they ran into trouble. The boats moved slowly and quietly, without a wake, until they reached the drop-off point about 150 meters from the yacht. The divers entered the water carrying two twenty-pound charges in haversacks, then swam at a depth of twenty feet, following a compass heading. The two teams of four divers arrived beneath the yacht thirty minutes before H-hour, placed their charges on the two main propeller shafts, and connected them with det cord. They set the timers to explode at 0045—H-hour.
Just as they finished, the yacht's engine started; the divers raced away and hid behind the pilings at Pier 17. Moments later, their charges went off, and they had to hang on for dear life during the buffeting that followed. As soon as things got calm, they swam underwater back across the Canal to the rendezvous point. The yacht was out of action.
At H-hour, three platoons of SEALs-ninety-three men-were landing at the southern end of Paitilla Airfield in combat rubber raiding craft. Moving slowly and deliberately, covering each other as they went, two platoons headed north on the western side of the field; the third and a mortar section moved on the eastern side.
As they approached the hangar where Noriega's jet was parked, the lead team, on the western side, came under intense fire from the hangars, killing one SEAL and wounding others. Worse, they were in the open and exposed, and their supporting AC-130 gunship could not fire without endangering the wounded. The second platoon on the western side was ordered in as reinforcement. When it arrived, the PDF opened up again; the SEALs' M-16s had little effect against the PDF, who were firing from concrete block buildings.
The battle lasted for another thirty minutes, but by using 66mm LAWs and 40mm grenade launchers, the SEALs finally prevailed, and disabled Noriega's jet. In the process, three SEALs had died and several others had been severely wounded.
The third Task Force White mission was to isolate Flamenco Island, the home of the USEAT, Noriega's elite special operations force. The best way to keep the USEAT out of the fight was to block the causeway from Panama City to the island, which was done by special boat patrols.
The SEALs and special boat units accomplished other important maritime work as well, not only in the Canal but also in the anchorages in the Caribbean and Pacific where ships were waiting to transit. Several of these vessels were boarded in stirring fashion, as the SEALs chased down the Noriega infrastructure and Dignity Battalions.
On one raid, Captain "Rick's" special-mission SEALs were in hot pursuit of some Dignity Battalion thugs attempting to board a ship at anchor at the Colon dock. Supporting the SEALs were fast-attack vessels, and one of them caught the Dignity Battalion guys climbing the captain's ladder and calmly shot the ladder off its stanchion supports with highly accurate 40mm grenade fire. The thugs landed in the water and were quickly policed up by the SEALs.
TASK FORCE BLACK
Task Force Black was commanded by special forces Colonel Jake Jacobelly, an old hand in Latin America and Panama.
Major Higgins, a tall, thin West Pointer, who spoke fluent Spanish, with twenty-four special forces officers and NCOs, had the mission to secure the Pacora River bridge and block Battalion 2000.
As his troops were loading onto three Blackhawks at Albrook Air Base, intelligence came in that a convoy had left Fort Cimarron, headed for Torrijos-Tocumen. The team quickly finished loading and raced for the bridge. Fifteen minutes later, they could see the PDF convoy's headlights as the pilots swung around and landed about a hundred meters from the southwest end of the bridge. The team dismounted, climbed the bank up to the road, and ran as hard as they could to secure the bridge before the convoy began crossing.
When they reached it, the lead vehicle was no more than a hundred meters away. While the team rushed to establish security positions on each side of the road, an officer and two NCOs fired a 66mm light antitank weapon, a more powerful AT-4, and a squad automatic weapon at the lead vehicle, stopping it in its tracks.
Meanwhile, the Air Force combat controller called in the AC-130 gunship on station in their area, and it was overhead within minutes. The pilot had an easy time identifying the convoy, since it never occurred to them to turn their lights off; but even without lights, infrared equipment made the vehicles and personnel visible. Before engaging, the pilot warned Higgins that his troops guarding the southwest side of the bridge were in his marginal safety limits: Would he accept friendly casualties? Higgins told him to go ahead, and the AC-130 started blasting away. As it fired, it illuminated the area with its infrared searchlight, so the SF personnel could see with their night-vision gear.
The PDF soldiers scrambled out of the trucks and took up firing positions in a treeline.
By 0200 hours, the AC-130 was running low on fuel and had to go off station; another AC-130 immediately moved in.
In the meantime, the PDF, wearing gas masks and using riot-control gas, charged the bridge, but the fire from Higgins's men broke the charge, and a number of PDF jumped over the side in desperation.
By dawn, the fighting had subsided, and Higgins's little force were undisputed masters of the bridge — with no casualties. Meanwhile, a quick-reaction force (QRF) from Task Force Black arrived by helicopter and landed on the other side of the bridge to make a sweep of the destroyed convoy; the team that had been fighting all night remained in position as security.
On the bridge, they found eight dead and several others wounded, who were treated by Special Forces medics at the scene; they found and captured several other PDF hiding in a house off the road; and the few who escaped later ran into the Rangers and the 82nd Airborne Division at the airport.
During interrogations, it was learned that the convoy had been transporting more than fifty soldiers from Battalion 2000's heavy weapons company, led by the company executive officer, and armed with 81 mm mortars, 90mm recoilless weapons, and 30-caliber machine guns. According to the executive officer, they were on their way to Panama City to put down "some sort of civil disturbance."
Later that morning, a two-and-a-half-ton
truck flying a white flag arrived from Fort Cimarron to claim their dead.
At 3:45 P.M., a scout platoon from the 82nd Airborne Division on the way to Fort Cimarron linked up with Higgins and his men.
At 5:30 P.M., Higgins and his twenty-four Green Berets and twenty POWs were extracted by helicopter back to Albrook Air Force Base. Mission accomplished.
Jake Jacobelly's Special Forces teams from Task Force Black conducted three other essential H-hour missions or follow-on activities:
Tinajitas Recon for the 82nd Airborne: At 7:00 P.M. the previous evening, a four-man reconnaissance team had started cross-country on foot to place eyes on the Tinajitas Cuartel (Barracks), the 1st Infantry company, and the nest of sixteen mortars near Tinajitas. The team was in position by 1:00 A.M., and reported their findings to General Kinser at the 82nd command post for relay to Jim Johnson as he approached his airdrop. They passed reports on the mortars directly to Stiner's headquarters.
Cimarron Cuartel: At 9:00 P.M. the previous evening, another four-man reconnaissance team had been inserted by Blackhawk five kilometers outside the Cimarron Cuartel to report on Battalion 2000. This team reported the convoy movement toward the Pacora River bridge.
Cerro Azul TV 11 Antennae: The jamming and override broadcast beginning at 12:45 A.M. had successfully overridden all but one TV station — TV Station II, Noriega's primary media outlet. When attempts to jam it proved unsuccessful, an eighteen-man SF team was deployed just after H-hour to disable it temporarily.
The obvious way to disable a TV station is to knock down the antenna tower, but Stiner's people only wanted the station off the air for days, not months. For that reason, the team fast-roped from helicopters onto the station compound and removed a critical electronics module.
