Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  For the first time that anyone on the task force could remember, the US Army gave the men alcohol free of charge. Each man was allotted two beers per day, though some seemed to get their hands on considerably larger quantities. Spending several days in reinforced concrete hangars that could have passed for avant-garde sculptures in a Soviet museum of people’s art, the troops relied on the beer and soda to compensate for a shortage of drinking water from the facility’s overtaxed potable-water system. Once the canned beverages had run out, the medics filled the refrigerators with bags of blood.

  One part of the task force flew to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman. Already on board the Nimitz were the eight RH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters that would make the six-hundred-mile journey to Desert One. The largest helicopter in the US inventory, the Sea Stallion had been selected for the mission because it could haul thirty passengers and their equipment with the imperturbability of a pack mule. The rest of the task force went to Masirah, a small desert island off the coast of Oman, whence six Air Force C-130 transport planes would carry the ground element and the fuel bladders to Desert One.

  The task force aircraft lifted off from the Nimitz and Masirah on April 24. Within half an hour, the mishaps began. The C-130s were supposed to reach the Iranian coast after dark so they would not be seen, but when the first C-130 made land there was still light in the sky. Two hours later, a warning light flashed in the cockpit of one of the Sea Stallions, signaling that the rotor blade was losing pressure. The pilot, Major Bill Hoff, landed the helicopter in the desert to verify the cockpit reading. He could not see damage to the rotors, but his years of flying Sea Stallions for the Marine Corps led him to conclude that the rotor had suffered a hairline crack, an affliction that would make the aircraft unsafe for flying. Hoff and his crew abandoned the helicopter and hitched a ride aboard another. Unbeknownst to Hoff, aluminum rotors of the sort on the Navy Sea Stallion he had been flying had never cracked, whereas the titanium rotors on the Marine Corps model had cracked thirty-one times in preceding years. Had the task force possessed dedicated air assets, instead of a hodgepodge of aircraft and pilots thrown together after the crisis erupted, the pilot would have known that the aircraft could have continued to fly.

  Three hours into the mission, the airmen in the remaining helicopters were surprised to find dust storms, hundreds of miles deep and wide, swirling in their path. Because the operation had been highly compartmentalized for security reasons, the pilots did not have regular contact with weather specialists, but instead received all their weather information from an intelligence officer. Somewhere along the line, the information about the storms had been lost.

  Surrounded by dust, their eyeballs overstressed by prolonged use of night-vision goggles, the air crews lost sight of the ground and their fellow helicopters. In the words of one airman, it was like “flying in a bowl of milk.” The pilots had to fly on instruments for several hours, trying the mental endurance of even the most resilient of men. When the gyroscope in one of the helicopters failed, the pilot lost his only sure means of avoiding a crash into one of the region’s mountains, so he had to turn back to the Nimitz. The number of helicopters was down to six.

  The sandstorms compelled the helicopters to fly more slowly than planned, such that each of the six remaining helicopters reached Desert One well behind the appointed time in the operation’s carefully scripted forty-hour schedule. The first helicopter to land was piloted by Jim Schaefer, an exceptionally skilled flyer whom the Delta operators would have most expected, of all the pilots, to triumph over adverse flying conditions. After five hours in the air, the first thing Schaefer did was walk behind his aircraft to urinate. While he was still in the act, Beckwith and other Delta officers rushed up to him.

  “What the hell’s going on?” demanded Beckwith. “How did you get so goddamned late?”

  “First of all, we’re only twenty-five minutes late,” Schaefer replied. “Second of all, I don’t know where anyone else is because we went into a big dust cloud.”

  “There’s no goddamned dust cloud out here,” Beckwith insisted, pointing into a sky that appeared devoid of dust.

  “Well, there is one,” Schaefer said. He informed Beckwith that he had never flown through such perilous weather in all his years. His helicopter might have been damaged during the flight, he said, and he was not sure that they could continue with the mission.

  To Beckwith, it appeared that Schaefer’s spirit had been trampled by the ordeal. “I’m going to report this thing,” Beckwith growled. Slapping Schaefer on the back, Beckwith said that he and the other air crews would have to suck it up.

  Beckwith counted the helicopters as more came in. When the sixth arrived, the task force men cheered and exchanged high fives, for six was considered the minimum number required for the flight to the outskirts of Tehran. Delta Force began loading gear into the bellies of the Sea Stallions.

  As the men were stacking MP-5 submachine guns, ammunition boxes, and backpacks on the choppers, the helicopter flight leader informed Beckwith that one of the six remaining Sea Stallions had suffered the loss of one of its two hydraulic pumps. If the other pump failed during flight, the pilot would lose steerage of the helicopter and the resultant crash would likely kill all aboard. The flight leader recommended that the chopper not be flown.

  Beckwith believed that the problem was not a mechanical one but a loss of nerve among the pilots. If any individuals deserved blame for the helicopter shortage, though, they were to be found among the aviation planners at rear-echelon headquarters. Heirs to the “Whiz Kids” of the Vietnam-era Defense Department, these planners prided themselves on the use of statistical analysis in solving difficult problems. Forecasting helicopter breakdown rates by crunching numbers from past Sea Stallion flights, the planners had decided to assign Eagle Claw only two helicopters above the minimum requirement.

  The performance data that the number crunchers had used came from flights operating under normal conditions, and hence their analysis did not take into account the impact of desert heat and sandstorms on helicopter attrition. The planners also had hurt themselves by disregarding the history of heliborne operations. Over time, military practitioners had learned to include twice as many helicopters as the minimum required for mission completion, on account of the susceptibility of helicopters to mechanical breakdowns and their vulnerability to enemy fire.

  The task force notified Washington that only five of the helicopters could fly. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, sent word back that the operation could proceed if the commanders on the scene thought they could accomplish the mission with five helicopters. Beckwith, who had been saying for months that the mission could not succeed with only five helicopters, reiterated that judgment now in recommending that the operation be aborted. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown phoned the White House to relay Beckwith’s recommendation. Listening to Brown on a secure phone, Carter learned that officers up the chain of command concurred with Beckwith. After a brief moment, Carter said quietly, “Let’s go with his recommendation.”

  Rather than flying the helicopters back to the Nimitz through the sandstorms, the task force leadership decided to destroy the helicopters and fly everyone out on the C-130s. To make way for the big transport aircraft on the improvised desert landing strip, Jim Schaefer lifted his helicopter a few feet off the ground and steered it under the guidance of a combat controller. When the desert wind kicked up a cloud of sand, however, Schaefer did not see that the controller had stepped back. Disoriented, Schaefer flew his Sea Stallion into one of the C-130s.

  The Sea Stallion’s rotors caught the top of the plane, and then the helicopter’s torso plunged into the cockpit of the C-130, igniting both aircraft. Men piled out of the flaming wrecks and ran as fast and far as they could, their sense of urgency fortified by the knowledge that the fuel bladders inside the C-130 could ignite at any moment. Eight men who had been injured or killed in the collision were still ins
ide the aircraft when the fuel exploded. Casting out heat and yellow-orange light like a small sun, the wreckage burned so hot that the survivors who attempted to recover the bodies of the eight men could not get anywhere near them. The task force had to leave the dead behind.

  The would-be rescuers flew back to Wadi Kena, arriving just thirty hours after they had left. As other men sat down in dejection, Beckwith erupted into a fit of rage, hurling insults in all directions. He called the helicopter pilots cowards. Learning that men had fled the two burning aircraft without taking their weapons or other equipment with them, he yelled, “You guys, as you came off, should have reached up and grabbed something. Goddamn, a lot of money burned up in there.” When one officer refused to pay attention to Beckwith’s ranting, Beckwith went over to him and barked, “If we ever do this damn thing again, I’ll make sure people like you don’t come along!”

  Once Beckwith had stomped away from the scene, an angry troop sergeant went to speak with him in private. The sergeant expressed the collective belief that the men in the flaming Sea Stallion and the C-130 had not had time to think about saving equipment. No one had known how soon the fuel-laden C-130 would blow. The sergeant ultimately persuaded Beckwith that the criticism had been unfair, and that he should issue an apology.

  Beckwith soon accepted the fact that at least some of the blame lay with him. At a meeting with President Carter at Camp Peary, Virginia, a few days after the operation, Beckwith broke down at the sight of the commander-in-chief. Carter described the encounter: “His chin was quivering and tears were running down his cheeks. I opened my arms and we embraced and wept together.” Beckwith said through the tears, “Mr. President, I’m sorry we let you down.”

  Eagle Claw dealt Beckwith’s seemingly immortal self-confidence an irreparable blow. After Desert One, Beckwith “was never the same,” recalled Delta Force veteran Eric Haney. “The failure of the operation seemed to completely deflate him. I never again saw a flicker of that fabulous internal fire of his. It fled his being, never to return.”

  For critics of SOF, Desert One proved that the special operators were not as good as advertised, and that special operations could not solve strategic problems. For proponents of SOF, it showed that the special operators had been thwarted by the military’s reliance on an ad hoc organization with poor internal communications and inadequate aviation assets. A review group of six senior military officers, commissioned by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Jones, agreed with the latter assessment, and as a remedy to the disease of ad hockery, the review team proposed the creation of a Counterterrorist Joint Task Force with permanently assigned staff and forces.

  This proposal caused the service chiefs to form into a phalanx, with the aim of protecting their elite units from the clutches of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The regional military commanders opposed the joint task force because they thought it would operate in their areas without their knowledge or consent. Secretary of Defense Brown, who favored the proposed task force, decided to cut short the opposition of the generals by issuing an executive fiat to the service chiefs. Summoned to what they had thought would be a meeting to hear their views on the matter, the Joint Chiefs were enraged when they learned of Brown’s fiat halfway through the briefing. The new organization, dubbed the Joint Special Operations Command and abbreviated as JSOC, thus became the newest entry on the list of special operations forces pushed down the throat of the rest of the military, and hence the newest to incur the resentments of the military establishment.

  AT THE BEGINNING of September 1980, General Jones pulled Brigadier General Dick Scholtes from the 82nd Airborne Division to command JSOC. Establishing a new headquarters at Fort Bragg inside the Delta Force compound, Scholtes took control of Delta Force, the Army’s two Ranger battalions, and the Air Force’s 1st Special Operations Wing. Higher headquarters notified Scholtes that JSOC should prepare to launch another mission to rescue the hostages in Iran.

  JSOC planned and rehearsed for several months. The victory of the hardline Republican Ronald Reagan in the November presidential election convinced the men of JSOC that they would be unleashed as soon as the White House changed hands. JSOC was going through the final dress rehearsal on the day of Reagan’s inauguration when word came that the Iranian government had agreed to release the hostages in return for the unfreezing of financial assets.

  The evaporation of a chance at redemption in Tehran left Scholtes and JSOC bereft of overseas tasks for some time. Their next challenge was internal, the result of a directive for Scholtes to take the Navy’s newly formed SEAL Team Six into his brood. SEAL Team Six was conceived and commanded by Commander Richard Marcinko, a burly thirty-nine-year-old who had risen from the enlisted ranks to become a SEAL officer. Marcinko had served two tours in Vietnam, during which he had received a Silver Star and four Bronze Stars. After the war, he had worked for several high-flying naval officers, whom he so impressed that they hoisted him up the promotion ladder ahead of his peers.

  The two admirals who did the most to put Marcinko in charge of SEAL Team Six were James A. “Ace” Lyons and William Crowe. Both of them eventually attained the rank of full admiral, the highest rank in the peacetime Navy, and Crowe went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Marcinko’s autobiography, the admirals were drawn to him not only by his hard work, but also by a shared predilection for locker-room banter. Marcinko wrote of Lyons, “I found it reassuring when he called me ‘asshole’ and came to realize that I was making progress when that sobriquet changed to ‘shithead.’” With respect to Crowe, Marcinko wrote, “Despite his courtly manner with subordinates and soft Kentucky accent, he was one of those admirals I could say ‘fuck’ to.”

  SEAL Team Six was ostensibly a maritime force like the other SEAL teams. Marcinko, however, sought to make it a super-elite unit that could do anything Delta Force could do, and more. In the manning of the unit, the Navy granted Marcinko permission to cherry-pick SEALs from the other SEAL teams. Marcinko took full advantage of this license, and did so with a bravado that twisted the knife in the psychological wounds of the SEALs whose teams were plundered.

  A heavy drinker, Marcinko tested prospective Team Six members for their aptitude in the consumption of alcohol. One recruit was offered a beer at 7 a.m., and when he declined, Marcinko warned him that unwillingness to drink in the morning might make a man unsuitable for the team. SEAL Team Six seldom finished field exercises, because, in the words of the team’s executive officer, “as soon as things got tough, Dick would step in, abort the exercise, and take the troops drinking.” At Virginia Beach, the venue for vibrant nightlife closest to the Team Six headquarters at Dam Neck, the police department was kept busy responding to reports of drunken brawling and hijinks at the bars along the boardwalk. If junior officers objected to Marcinko’s encouragement of drinking and fighting, or to anything else Marcinko did, they were kicked out of the unit. A Team Six veteran recounted that Marcinko’s intolerance of dissent “brought out the worst of deadly ‘group think,’ a sort of collective megalomania, where a Team begins to think that they are too good to fail.”

  Scholtes, a creature of the regular Army, was not amused by Marcinko’s fraternity house antics. The JSOC commander’s forbearance was extinguished on the night of a promotion party at Marcinko’s headquarters. Marcinko, unable to suppress his inveterate urge for bragging, informed the visiting Scholtes that they would be dining on Maine lobsters following the promotion ceremony. When Scholtes asked how the SEALs had obtained the lobsters, Marcinko replied, “I flew them down.” Whether Scholtes was more appalled by Marcinko’s use of government aircraft to fly the lobsters or by his self-congratulation was unclear. Marcinko had also arranged for the delivery of cases of alcoholic beverages, from which he and his team quaffed so tenaciously that by the end of the evening they had difficulty standing up. Scholtes watched the drunken revelry with the revulsion of the Theban King Pentheus observing his subjects debauched by the wine and carousing
of Dionysus.

  The next day, Scholtes called Marcinko onto the carpet. “Last night was an absolute disgrace,” Scholtes barked at the SEAL commander. After enumerating the offenses, Scholtes notified Marcinko that he would receive a letter of reprimand for the escapade. Marcinko most probably would have been stripped of his command for this incident, and others that were to follow, were it not for the fact that his guardian angels in the naval chain of command protected him from afar.

  Marcinko remained in his charmed position for three years, until finally his luck ran out. On a night of partying near Dam Neck, Marcinko directed his driver to take him for a spin in a Mercedes sedan that was supposed to be used solely for overseas operations. It was by no means the first time Marcinko had taken the vehicle out on the town, and it certainly would not have been the last had the driver not rear-ended a car in a manner serious enough to require the ministrations of the police. When details of the misadventure reached JSOC headquarters, Scholtes decided to issue Marcinko an unsatisfactory fitness report, a career-ruining event for a naval officer. By this time, Marcinko’s friends in the upper ranks of the Navy had moved out of positions from which they could protect him. Marcinko was relieved of command of SEAL Team Six and sent to work at the Pentagon.

  In his most incredible feat yet, the enterprising Marcinko managed to get the unsatisfactory fitness report removed from his personnel file. Then he obtained a promotion. When word of the promotion reached the SEAL community, however, several SEALs contacted the Naval Investigative Service with allegations of misconduct that would, if proven true, be serious enough to sink Marcinko once and for all.

  The investigators who dug into Team Six’s records discovered that Marcinko and others had been reimbursed for lodging at an address where no lodging had ever existed. They learned that one of Marcinko’s subordinates had used bogus travel and schooling claims to buy Marcinko a Smith and Wesson Model 56 pistol with handles of elephant-tusk ivory, onto which Marcinko’s face had been scrimshawed. After further probing, the Investigative Service determined that Marcinko had received a kickback of over $100,000 from a company in Phoenix that had sold the Navy 4,300 grenades on Marcinko’s instructions. In March 1990, a court sentenced Marcinko to twenty-one months in prison and fined him $10,000.