Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent

by Never Surrender

  All of us bolted like jackrabbits, sprinting away from the drop zone, trying to outrun death. Close behind me, I heard splintering crashes as the pallets and blivets exploded against the hardpack. Glancing back, I saw aviation fuel spray skyward from the sand in great bursts that then showered down like flammable rain.

  Against the odds, no one was hurt. When the sky was clear of falling fuel bombs, we trotted back to the drop zone. The oily tang of aviation fuel hung thick in the air. In groups of five or six, we put our shoulders against the few surviving blivets, and began trying to heave their rubbery bulk across the desert floor. It was so primitive, I felt as if we were in an episode of The Flintstones.

  Bucky was heave-hoeing on my right. “We gotta talk to the riggers,” he grumbled through gritted teeth. “They’re gonna have to do better than that.”

  The riggers got the parachute trouble ironed out, and our next drop went a whole lot better. But in the end, we decided the blivets were too unwieldly and difficult to transport once on the ground. So the blivet idea was out.

  Then we looked at the potential of parachuting in, but decided the risk of injury was too high. Finally we settled on a combination of helicopters and fixed-wing planes. Air Force C-141 Starlifters would transport the mission elements from a base in Wadi Kena, Egypt, to Masirah, Oman, where the entire force would transload onto C-130 Talons, a combat configuration of the durable cargo plane. The Talons would then carry Delta, some Rangers for security, along with Navy helicopter refueling teams to Dasht-e-Kavir, our initial insertion point in a wide stretch of desert waste located sixty-five miles southeast of Tehran. We code-named the insertion point Desert One.

  While Delta was en route, the plan called for eight RH-53s to launch from the Nimitz in the Persian Gulf. Once we linked up at Desert One, Air Force crews would refuel the helos by pumping fuel out of soft “bladders” carried into Iran aboard EC-130 cargo planes. Then Delta would transload to the helos and fly in them to a hide site in the mountains near Tehran, while the Talons exfiltrated back to Masirah. The following night, from the hide site, Delta would load onto trucks driven by Iranians recruited by the CIA. Farsi-speaking U.S. soldiers would ride along in the cabs to disable and detain any checkpoint guards who made the mistake of failing to let us pass. The rest of Delta, organized into Red, White, and Blue elements, would ride in the truck beds, concealed by facades built to look like stacked cargo on its way to market.

  Then the violence would begin.

  Near midnight, a small team of Delta operators carrying silencer-equipped .45 caliber grease guns would kill the guards manning two permanent posts on Roosevelt Avenue. Once at the embassy, the Red and Blue elements would silently scale the wall and drop down the other side. Those teams would move across the compound, neutralizing any opposition along the way, and position themselves at the chancery and other buildings that might hold hostages. My team, the “LZ Party,” would secure the soccer stadium across the street, making it ready for the 53s—everyone’s ride out of there. Once the Red and Blue elements were in place, Fast Eddie would blow the embassy wall, opening the path to the stadium. The White element would set up road blocks on Takht-e-Jamshid and keep them clear with machine guns and grenade launchers.

  If the Iranians were able to quickly mobilize an armored assault, Bucky and Sergeant Major Forrest Foreman would call in covering fire from two AC-130 Spectre gunships that would by then be circling overhead. Meanwhile, my job was to call in the 53s. Because it provided extra protection for the hostages and rescue force, the stadium was to serve as the helo landing zone. Delta operators—two to a hostage—would shield them from hostile fire, hustle them from the embassy across Roosevelt Avenue and aboard the helos, rotors turning. To open the way, an operator nicknamed “Boris” would lay down clearing fire with an MAG-58 machine gun. A sniper by specialty and used to single-shot precision, Boris practiced for months with his new toy and fell in love with the MAG-58’s ability to wreak plain old havoc.

  During all this, a Ranger unit would fly into Manzariyah, Iran, where it would take and hold an airfield. Once the helicopters arrived there with their load of rescuers and hostages, Air Force Starlifters would carry everyone—including the helo pilots, drivers, advance DoD agents, and translators—back to Masirah.

  Five months of intensive scripting. Preparation down to the most minute detail. Dry run after dry run until Delta could have found its way through the embassy compound blindfolded. And still the plan bristled with contingencies. Murphy’s Law lurked at every turn.

  6

  AROUND CHRISTMASTIME 1979, another hostage, a woman, was interviewed on television. Her innocence struck me, the unfairness of her having her life stolen from her when she had done nothing wrong. Her interview brought into focus for me the plight of all fifty-three remaining hostages. To live in fear. To wonder if you’ll ever see your family again. To wonder if each morning is the last you’ll ever see.

  None of us in Delta believed the U.S. could successfully negotiate the release of the hostages. Backed by the Ayatollah, the Iranian students were now locked in a macho standoff with America, the big kid on the block. To blink first would’ve been, in the Islamic mind, unthinkable. As long as they held the global limelight, as long as they held American prestige in their hands, the student rebels would hold our citizens prisoner.

  Just after the embassy takeover, President Carter declared publicly that America wouldn’t do anything to endanger the lives of the hostages. What he should have said was: “We will go to any length to get our people back. All options are on the table.”

  At the Farm, it didn’t build confidence in us that Carter was unwilling to state that publicly. Most of us saw him as a weak president before the hostage crisis. Now, all of us interpreted his public comments as revealing that he didn’t have the stomach for armed conflict, even if it meant the global humiliation of the nation he meant to lead.

  It wasn’t just Delta who thought Carter lacked the mettle to order us in. Some intelligence agencies repeatedly told us, “You can rehearse all you want, but this thing is never going to go off.”

  As a result, I believe those same agencies didn’t go after intelligence as hard as they might have under a different president. Their resources were already stretched keeping up with the trench-coat intrigue of the Cold War. Then, in December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, further diluting the intelligence resources that could have been directed at Tehran.

  As we continued to refine the mission plan, anticipation burned in my heart. I truly believed Delta would storm the embassy and bring home fifty-three Americans. At the same time, though, I worried about the unknown. The complexity of the problem—and thus of the plan—was unprecedented. With so many contingencies, we pegged the chance that something, and probably several things, would go wrong, at about 100 percent. Still, from end to end, the strategy we hammered out accounted for every known detail. We had practiced for six months. Pete knew every inch of the embassy corridors. Fast Eddie blew up his replica of the embassy wall so many times Charlie was tired of going out to watch him do it. And Boris fell so deeply in love with the violence of the MAG-58 I started to wonder whether any woman would ever be able to compete for his affections. The attitude of the men was, If we’re going to do this thing, let’s go do it.

  At the Farm, the action officers were very concerned that Carter would draw out the embassy standoff until the Iranians executed a hostage. Then Delta would have to launch without the critical element of surprise. The Iranians would then have plenty of time to move the hostages, separate them into difficult-to-rescue groups, and harden more buildings in the embassy compound. We also worried that the hostages might attempt to escape, resulting in more American deaths.

  I was disappointed in Jimmy Carter. I knew he was a man of faith, and I didn’t understand his interpretation of his God-given responsibility to defend the defenseless. We believed that ultimately, it would be events—and not his own courage—that would force him to act.


  We were wrong. In the end, it was just the solar system.

  7

  IN LATE MARCH, a small CIA aircraft piloted by a legendary one-legged pilot named Jim Ryan flew secretly into Desert One to set up a covert landing strip. On board was another Special Ops veteran, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel John Carney. Landing under cover of darkness, Carney, Ryan, and a Vietnam Special Forces NCO named Bud embedded landing lights in the desert hardpack that could be remotely activated by the Eagle Claw landing force. With just the three of them flying, without cover or backup, deep into the Iranian interior, it was an amazingly brave act that impressed even the most hardened guys in the task force.

  The hostages had been seized on November 4, 1979. We went into Iran on April 24, 1980. Carter gave the order only because Charlie Beckwith told him we were running out of time. Delta needed as many hours of darkness as possible to execute the mission and, as spring ticked toward summer, the span between sundown and sunup had contracted to the margins of acceptability. The clock, literally, had run out on Jimmy Carter.

  On April 21, Delta rode C-141 Starlifters into the arid wastes of Egypt and bivouacked in the ramshackle remains of an old air base built in Wadi Kena by the Russians.

  We still didn’t know exactly where the Iranians were holding the hostages, so we planned for the worst case scenario—that they were scattered in several locations throughout the embassy compound. Pete’s Red Element would hit the highest percentage spot—the chancery—then take down other buildings until they found all the hostages.

  At the eleventh hour, we got a break. The night before the op was to launch, the CIA learned that the students were holding all the hostages in the chancery. In a scenario straight out of Hollywood, a Pakistani cook flying out of Iran told his seatmate that he knew the hostages were all in the main building. He worked at the American embassy, he explained as his seatmate listened with the wide-eyed interest of a tourist. But since the listener was actually a CIA agent (or so the story went) he also prodded gently at the edges of the cook’s story to test it for authenticity.

  I was in the hangar when Charlie made the announcement: “All elements, adjust your plans and let’s make the chancery our primary target. If we get there and they’ve been moved, we’ll adjust again.”

  The hangar hummed with the low rumble of men’s voices as the element leaders adapted to the new information. The Red and Blue assault elements would now converge on the chancery. If only part of the hostages were recovered there, the Blue element would move them to meet my element at the soccer stadium while the Red element hit other buildings.

  I didn’t believe the Pakistani cook story—it was just too convenient. More likely the CIA was guarding its real sources. It didn’t matter, though; that we had a better fix on the hostages was the important thing. In any case, it didn’t change things for my element. And as I listened to Pete and Logan detail the changes in their plans, I felt a surge of confidence: It’s coming together. We’re going to get these people and bring them home.

  8

  APRIL 24, THE MORNING OF THE MISSION. We all slept as late as we could, which was only until 5 a.m. Immediately, we began to ready our gear. Sitting on my cot, I double-checked my weapons to make sure the wind-driven Egyptian sands hadn’t scoured them into junk. I didn’t like the idea of a jam in the middle of a shootout with the Pasdaran.

  In the run-up to the mission, we all grew beards. We dressed in Levis and jump boots, field jackets dyed black and black watch caps to match. We wore no rank or military insignia of any kind. The only exterior sign that we were Americans was a small American flag sewn on the sleeve of each of our jackets. Those would remain covered with a Velcro patch until we reached the hostages. Then each operator would tear off the patch to show the hostages that their country had finally come to take them home. To comply with the Geneva Convention, we each wore our dog tags inside our t-shirts and carried our U.S. military I.D.s.

  Other than those few signs that we were on legitimate U.S. government business, we could’ve been a crew of especially well-conditioned longshoremen or a gang of inner-city thugs.

  At about 6 a.m., I was doing final checks on my gear when Charlie walked up to me. “Jerry, I’m going to get all these men together in a few minutes and I want you to say a prayer before we launch.”

  I was astonished. Not since he and I talked about our mothers had Charlie expressed any interest at all in religion in general or my faith in particular. In fact, most of the time, I was pretty sure he had no confidence in me at all.

  At least once during the planning of Eagle Claw, he had fired me. Of course, he had fired Bucky, too. We were overseeing air-drop operations at the Farm when Charlie got right in our faces: “You’re both incompetent and unprofessional! You’re fired!” He didn’t just mean off the mission. He meant out of Delta. Bucky and I looked at each other: Fired? Again?

  Charlie was always firing somebody then forgetting about it five minutes later. I was used to his bluster. But even after he put me in charge of the LZ Team when there were other, more senior officers available, I still wondered where I stood with him. Now he’d startled me with a side of himself I never dreamed existed: Charlie, who depended on Charlie and whatever parts of his vision he could instill in others, conceded that he and his men would do well this time to enlist the help of a Higher Authority.

  “Okay, Colonel,” I told him. “I’ll be ready.”

  About an hour later, Charlie gathered Delta in the hangar in a loose formation and climbed up on a makeshift wooden platform. I walked up to the front and stood off to Charlie’s left. Dressed like the rest of us and looking as grimly confident as I’d ever seen him, Charlie addressed the group. “We’re launching this operation to bring home fifty-three Americans and I don’t intend to come back until we’ve got every one of them.” His voice echoed slightly, amplified by the high contours of the hangar. “We’ve done all the preparations. We’re ready for this mission. I have confidence in every one of you that you’ll do your job and do it well.”

  Then he said: “I’m going to ask Jerry to come up here and say a prayer before we launch.”

  Before I could begin speaking, General Vaught stepped forward. “I want to quote some Scripture,” the general said. “In the book of Isaiah, the Scripture says, ‘And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And Isaiah said, “Here am I! Send me.”’ Men, your country’s counting on you. You’ve stepped forward and said, ‘Here am I, send me.’ God bless you.”

  Vaught’s words from one of my favorite passages of the Bible were a special blessing to me. And for the second time in less than an hour, I was surprised to find faith at work. I knew there were other men of faith in Delta, but no one really talked about it. We didn’t have an active Bible study and we didn’t have a chaplain. What we had—and what Special Forces had in general—was a culture of self-reliance.

  But now, faced with a mission in which obstacles and danger hovered over every phase, even the senior officers among us swept self-reliance aside and acknowledged God.

  Vaught nodded at me to begin. I looked out at Pete and Bucky, Jim and Logan, Ish and Jack, all of them. By that time, they were like family to me. They were my brothers. I fervently wanted God to protect them. “You know, about three thousand years ago right in this very desert where we’re standing,” I began, “God led the Israelites out of bondage. They traveled across this same desert to a new freedom. And I believe God has called us to lead fifty-three Americans out of bondage and back to freedom.”

  Then I asked them to bow their heads and pray with me. “Almighty God, we’ve placed ourselves in your hands. And we ask you to lead us and guide us so that we might liberate our fellow Americans. We ask for your hand of mercy to be upon us. We ask for wisdom and strength and courage. We ask you to keep us safe, and to keep safe the people we’re going after. Bring us all home to our families. And I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

  I rais
ed my head. Then Bucky stepped up on the platform and surprised me for the third time that afternoon. “Okay, men, we’re going to sing God Bless America.”

  And we did. With gusto. I looked out at Delta and didn’t see a single man with his mouth shut. After the last notes, a loud shout went up. Each man walked back to his cot, grabbed his gear, crossed the tarmac and marched into the back of the C-141.

  9

  IN THE STARLIFTERS, we flew from Wadi Kena to Masirah, Oman, which we immediately renamed Misery since we spent the whole afternoon trying to hide from the scorching Arab sun. The stopover also gave us plenty of time to think.

  I knew I might not make it back alive. But I was less worried about dying than, in the crush of a complex mission, being left behind in Iran. The Long Walk in the North Carolina woods was one thing, but I dang sure didn’t want to have to walk to Pakistan.

  I didn’t expect much resistance in my part of the operation. The Revolutionary Guard might have anticipated the Americans using the soccer stadium as a staging point, but our best intel showed they might post a couple of guards there at most. If those guards surrendered under our assault, we would flex-tie them and let them watch us evacuate the hostages. If they resisted, we would kill them. I didn’t have a problem with that. We hadn’t gotten all dressed up for nothing.

  At dusk, we transloaded our gear onto Air Force C-130 Combat Talons, barrel-chested, reliable birds that needed only a short roll to get airborne and could stop on a dime. These Talons were also equipped with the terrain following radar and special navigation gear. We needed both to fly in low over the coast, undetected by Iran’s defense radar, then hug the jagged walls of the canyons the pilots planned to use as their route into the interior.