The Sea Stallion is one of the most muscular choppers in the U.S. military inventory. It can carry thirty people with a maximum load of fuel and forty or fifty if its tanks aren’t full. Its massive, six-bladed titanium and fiberglass rotors are more than 72 feet in diameter, about a fourth as long as a football field. They can lift tons of people and cargo. The Sea Stallions, however, would be unable to make the 900 miles from an aircraft carrier deck in the Gulf of Oman to Tehran without refueling. For this reason, the mission template for the first night called for Schaefer and his fellow pilots to fly to a rendezvous in the desert 265 miles southeast of Tehran. To do so, they would have to navigate through the darkness wearing eye-straining, first-generation night-vision goggles that distorted their depth perception. At the desert landing zone, they would meet six Air Force C-130 cargo planes carrying Delta Force, a company of U.S. Army Rangers, and giant rubber bladders of aviation fuel. The helicopters were to refuel from the bladders in the C-130s, then load the troops and fly them to a “hide site” sixty-five miles southeast of Tehran. The choppers would then take off again and fly another fifteen miles to hide themselves through the next day in the hills near Garmsar, a village sixty miles southeast of Tehran. On the second night of the mission, the assault force would drive into Tehran on trucks, bust into the embassy, and free the hostages. The troops would wear Levi’s, dark blue Navy watch caps, and field jackets dyed black. They would uncover a taped-over U.S. flag patch on their sleeves when they reached the embassy.
When the troops had freed the hostages, the Sea Stallions—painted in Iranian army colors—would fly into the city. One or two would land near the embassy, if no obstructions prevented it, or on the field of a soccer stadium across the street. A third would set down near the Foreign Ministry building, where other hostages would be freed by a separate team of Army Special Forces troops. The helicopters would then transport everyone to the airfield at Manzariyeh, where all involved would board the C-141s and fly out of Iran. Operation Eagle Claw’s planners dubbed the first night refueling site “Desert One.”
Schaefer’s helicopter was the first to land at Desert One, where Beck-with, his troops, and the crews of the Air Force cargo planes had arrived more than an hour earlier and were waiting impatiently. Everything depended on completing the mission’s initial stage in what military planners call “one period of darkness,” meaning after sunset one day and before dawn the next. They were already behind schedule.
When Schaefer climbed out of his Sea Stallion and walked around front to take a leak in the sand after his five-hour flight, Beckwith rushed over, expecting to find Marine Lieutenant Colonel Ed Seiffert, the commanding officer for the eight Sea Stallions. He was surprised to see Schaefer—and even more surprised at Schaefer’s state of mind. Beck-with wrote three years later in his book Delta Force that he told Schaefer he was glad to see him. As Beckwith reported it, Schaefer just looked at him and replied, “It’s been a hell of a trip.” Then, according to Beckwith, Schaefer uttered “words to the effect that if we had any sense we would move the helos out into the desert and load everyone on the C-130s and go home.” With that, Schaefer got back into his RH-53D.
Schaefer recalled the scene differently.
Beckwith greeted him by growling, “Where the hell is everybody?” Schaefer told me. “And I said, ‘It’s been a hell of a night.’ I said, ‘They’re either going to be here or they’re on the side of a mountain.’ That’s what I said.”
The flight to Desert One from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz had been wretched. Less than 200 miles into Iran, one of the eight Sea Stallions had broken down with a cracked rotor blade and been abandoned, the crew climbing aboard another that landed to help. Then the choppers had run into what Iranians call haboobs—clouds of powdery white sand suspended in the air for miles by shifts in the atmospheric pressure above the desert floor. The talcum-like dust from the haboobs had penetrated every nook and cranny of the aircraft, seeping into the engines, the cockpits, and the thousands of moving parts and raising the temperature inside the machines. In the murk of the haboobs and under orders to stay off the radio, the pilots had lost track of one another. Their formation had fallen apart and they had lost valuable time trying to get back together. After the loss of the first helicopter, the cockpit warning lights for various pieces of equipment in a second had lit up and its pilot had turned back to the Nimitz while the others struggled on. These pilots had been chosen for their moxie and coolness under fire, but by the time those remaining got to Desert One, after hours of flying nearly blind in the heat and the haze and the vertigo induced by the night-vision goggles, they were frazzled and exhausted. To make matters worse, as Schaefer made a rolling landing at Desert One, his front landing gear hit a rut in the sand and turned sideways, knocking the tires off their rims and deflating them. He could no longer taxi. Instead, he would need to move his Sea Stallion around the rendezvous site by using its rotor to lift the giant’s nose gear off the ground.
The six choppers necessary to continue the mission had made it to the rendezvous point, but Beckwith would write that he found Schaefer and another of the pilots “pretty well shattered,” and that shocked him.
Beckwith was so shocked because he knew Jim Schaefer was one of the best and ballsiest helicopter pilots in the Marine Corps. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in the San Fernando Valley of California, Schaefer had joined the Corps in 1966, after graduating from St. Martin’s College in Olympia, Washington. He wanted to fly jets, and he had the “right stuff, ” as test pilots called it. He got his wings in 1968 after finishing basic flight school in an uncommon seven and a half months instead of the usual eighteen. His flight school scores would have qualified him for jets easily if he’d been in the Navy, but the much smaller Marine Corps’ quota for fixed-wing pilots was already filled that year, so Schaefer became a CH-53 pilot. He was soon sent to Vietnam, where he flew five hundred combat missions in fourteen months—cargo resupply, search and rescue, troop insertions and pickups. CH-53s were pretty new then and weren’t supposed to fly into “hot” zones where they would take fire. Hueys and Cobras and CH-46 troop transports did that, but they were assault aircraft. The H-53, as pilots called it, was the Marine Corps’ airborne tractor-trailer, a heavy lifter whose main job was to haul beans and bullets in big loads to troops in the countryside. Vietnam being what it was in those days, though, H-53s came under fire, too. Schaefer learned how to keep his cool with bullets flying around and even through his cockpit.
Schaefer’s reputation as a “good stick” got him assigned as the first director of helicopter tactics and operations at a new aviation school the Marines opened in Yuma, Arizona, in June 1978. They called it Marine Air Weapons and Tactics Squadron One, abbreviated MAWTS-1 and pronounced “moughts one.” MAWTS-1 was a pet project of the deputy chief of staff for aviation of the day, John Glenn’s friend and World War II squadron mate Tom Miller, now a lieutenant general. Over the years, the Marine Corps’ use of fighter jets and helicopters to support ground troops had gotten more and more complicated. Miller saw a need for better training to allow all the moving parts of what the Marines call the combined air-ground task force to work together. Schaefer was at MAWTS-1 in November 1979 when the organizers of the Iran hostage rescue attempt turned to him to help plan Operation Eagle Claw and train the mission’s helicopter pilots.
Shortly after Schaefer’s and the other helicopters arrived at Desert One that night in Iran, the crew of one discovered that a hydraulic pump on their aircraft had broken down. The chopper was out of action, at risk of its controls seizing up if the remaining hydraulic pump went. That left the mission with only five helicopters—one less than the minimum. After heated discussion on the scene and calls via secure radio up the chain of command to Washington, where President Jimmy Carter and top aides and advisers were monitoring the mission, Delta commander Beckwith declared Operation Eagle Claw an “abort.” He ordered Delta and the Rangers to load up on the C-130s so they could f
ly out of Iran.
Schaefer’s helicopter was sitting next to the C-130 he had refueled from when a ground controller came over to his cockpit and told him he needed to move the chopper so the plane could turn around and take off. The controller ran out into the night to guide Schaefer as he repositioned his helicopter. Desert One was a maelstrom of noise and dust. All the rotors and propellers of all the aircraft were whirling. Soldiers were piling aboard the C-130 as Schaefer lifted his Sea Stallion up into a hover of about fifteen feet. As he did, his rotors blasted so much sand into the air that all he could see was “just a signalman out there,” Schaefer recalled. The controller moved back toward the C-130 to escape the sand. Schaefer was so focused on his own aircraft that he didn’t notice the man had moved. “As you took off, all you could see was that lone dark figure, and that was the only reference we had for the ground,” Schaefer said. “I guess we ended up drifting in the general direction of that particular guy and we ended up clipping the wing of that 130 that night. I wouldn’t say clipped—we hit him pretty good, and I don’t remember too much after that.”
Schaefer’s helicopter crashed into the cockpit of the C-130, igniting the fuel in both aircraft. The concussion from the explosion knocked him out for a moment. The soldiers scrambled out of the C-130 before the flames consumed it, but five members of the cargo plane’s Air Force crew and three Marines in Schaefer’s Sea Stallion died in the inferno. Schaefer barely got out alive. When he came to, the window next to his seat looked like the only way to get out. Schaefer opened it inward. Heat and flames gushed into the cockpit, scorching his face and choking him. Still groggy, he managed to eject the window back outward and dive out, tumbling to the sand. When he got up, he was surrounded by a wall of flames. He dove through. He got up and saw another C-130, already moving. Other survivors had piled into the remaining airplanes, which were getting ready to take off. Schaefer staggered toward the plane, unable to run, barely able to walk. He fell a couple of times. Then someone saw him. The C-130 stopped and a door opened. Someone helped him in and propped him up on one of the big fuel bladders. A bunch of other guys were sitting on the bladders, including Schaefer’s copilot. The planes took off and flew to Egypt, leaving behind the dead, the burnt-out C-130, and the five helicopters that had made it to Desert One and were still intact. Left with too little time to set off incendiary explosives in the helicopters to render them useless, Beckwith radioed a request for an air strike to destroy the helicopters. When he arrived in Egypt, he was told the White House had vetoed the strike for fear of harming Iranians in the area.
The next day, a disheartened President Carter went on television and took full responsibility for the debacle. The disaster reinforced the post-Vietnam image of the U.S. military as a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It also contributed mightily to Carter’s defeat a few months later by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
Desert One would haunt America’s military for years and inspire profound changes. One was a restructuring Congress imposed on the armed services to foster “jointness”—cooperation among the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines—instead of the interservice rivalry and insularity that had characterized their relations forever. Another was a new emphasis on training troops and pilots for special operations. A third was new interest in the Pentagon and Congress in buying equipment for such missions: better night-vision goggles, special radios, new radars and other electronic gear to make it easier to operate in darkness, and new weapons and aircraft. What the U.S. military already had, it was now clear, wasn’t adequate. For defense contractors like Bell Helicopter and military marketers like Dick Spivey, that added up to a sales opportunity.
Well before Desert One, Spivey had been one of many company reps who often showed up at MAWTS-1 in Yuma to talk about their products. MAWTS-1’s job was to develop aviation tactics for all Marine aircraft, not just helicopters, and to work with defense contractors on new concepts. Spivey came to talk about Bell Helicopter’s new experimental tiltrotor, the XV-15, which had started flying in 1977. He would tell Jim Schaefer and other pilots at MAWTS-1 about the latest test results on the XV-15 and ask them what a tiltrotor for the Marine Corps might need to be able to do. “We’d talk about what they’d want in an airplane like that,” Spivey said. “We were basically asking their advice. ‘Do you want this radio? Do you want that radar?’ That gets them involved in the design. It also gets them interested.”
Schaefer invited Spivey and other industry reps out a couple of times a year for what he called “Technology Week,” and Spivey always looked forward to his trips to Yuma. He’d never been in the military and wasn’t a pilot, but he and Schaefer had become friends. Schaefer was single then and liked to have a good time. So was Spivey. Most guys liked Schaefer. Girls liked him a lot. He was laid-back and had a sardonic sense of humor. He was fun to be around. To kick off Technology Week, Schaefer always threw a party at the Spanish-style stucco house he and another pilot shared in Yuma. Spivey and the other industry reps were invited, and the instructors and student pilots of MAWTS-1 would show up with their wives and girlfriends. They’d eat Mexican food and “do things we shouldn’t do—jump in swimming pools and drink way too many beers and worry about it the next day,” Schaefer remembered wryly.
When Spivey visited Yuma in November 1979, a couple of weeks after the Iran hostage crisis began, Schaefer and two other Marine pilots Spivey was used to seeing were absent. Nobody seemed to know where they were, but with TV broadcasters Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel telling the nation every night how many days those American hostages had been held in Iran, it wasn’t hard to guess. Schaefer and the other pilots were fifty miles away in the desert, practicing for their mission to Iran.
Schaefer always enjoyed talking to Spivey about the potential of the tiltrotor. “It was refreshing to see someone go beyond the box that helicopters live in,” Schaefer said. “We were looking for airspeed. The least amount of time you’re in there with the enemy, mixing it up, the more survivable you are. Get in, get out. Get the job done and get out of there. This was a refreshing way to consider it.” Schaefer also was drawn to the tiltrotor because it held out the promise of lifting Marine Corps helicopter pilots out of what he and others felt was their second-class citizenship. As the smallest service, the Marine Corps also has the smallest military budget. There’s never enough money to pay for everything its leaders want to do. In those days, the way Schaefer saw it, when it came time to write the aviation budget, the lion’s share always seemed to go to the jet jockeys. Fighter pilots were seen, and saw themselves, as dashing, white-scarf, right-stuff guys. Helicopter pilots were treated like bus drivers. Fighter pilots and helo pilots kept apart. They had separate officers clubs and drank amongst themselves. Schaefer saw the tiltrotor as a machine that might lend a little glamour to the helo pilots likely to fly them. He liked that idea.
Two days after Desert One, a Saturday, Spivey and his oldest son, ten-year-old Brett, were watching TV at Spivey’s house in Fort Worth when they saw a news report on the mission’s aftermath. The story showed one of the injured being brought on a gurney into Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, one of the military’s premier burn units. Spivey sat bolt upright. He recognized the wounded man, though his face was partially bandaged. It was Jim Schaefer.
“I know him,” Spivey told Brett.
Spivey and others at Bell talked about the mission at work all day that Monday, and that night, Spivey stayed up until 3 a.m. creating a new tiltrotor briefing. It showed how the hostages might have been rescued successfully if only the military had been able to use tiltrotors instead of helicopters. With tiltrotors, Spivey’s briefing argued, the mission could have been done without Eagle Claw’s complex choreography and risky timeline, which required the U.S. force to spend two nights and a day in Iran. With tiltrotors, there would have been no need for the deadly refueling rendezvous at Desert One. Delta Force, or whatever troops were chosen, might simply have climbed into tiltrotors aboard an
aircraft carrier or on the territory of some friendly Middle Eastern country, flown directly to the vicinity of Tehran, infiltrated the city, taken down the guards, freed the hostages, met the tiltrotors outside the embassy or even on its grounds, loaded everybody aboard, and flown straight back to the ship. Time from incursion to extraction: no more than eight hours. One night. Or the classic “one period of darkness.”
A month after Desert One, Spivey’s marketing colleague Rod Wernicke went to Yuma and showed their new tiltrotor briefing to a major he knew there. “He liked it,” Spivey noted in his work diary. A month after that, Spivey went to Yuma himself to try out the new briefing on other pilots at MAWTS-1, including Jim Schaefer. After weeks of painful treatment in San Antonio for burns on his face, hands, back, and legs, Schaefer was back on the job.
On his way to Yuma, Spivey picked up a copy of Newsweek in the airport and read it on the plane. The June 30, 1980, cover story was about the revolution in computer technology, which was “producing a new generation of ‘smart’ machines that magnify the power of man’s brain and can be used even by untrained laymen,” the magazine reported. What caught Spivey’s eye was an article inside titled “New Light on the Rescue Mission.” It was a detailed analysis of what had gone wrong at Desert One, including a discussion of Schaefer’s helicopter hitting the C-130. “The chopper’s pilot, Maj. James Shaefer [sic], was ordered to bank left and away from the C-130 and fly to a refueling position behind another of the transport planes,” Newsweek reported. “Shaefer acknowledged the order and started to bank left. Then he apparently became disoriented. He reversed his course, banked right and crashed into the C-130. Both craft burst into flames.” The article was accompanied by a photo of Schaefer on the gurney as he was wheeled into the San Antonio burn center two days after the failed mission.
The Dream Machine Page 9
