Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  Knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of the navy’s new strike fighter grew rapidly during the Connie’s cruise. But the cruise also demonstrated the value of the kind of meticulous training that preceded and continued throughout the deployment.

  All this preparation was put to the test one very dark night, as the carrier sailed in the western Pacific about 400 miles from the nearest land.

  Lt. Rodger Welch came in out of the dark, touched down on the deck, then boltered and took off again for another pass. The second time around, he made a perfect landing—”right in the spaghetti,” as the carrier crews say of the cables crossing the deck—and kept right on going. There weren’t even any sparks where his tail hook scraped the deck. The startled landing signals officers took one look and saw the problem: On the previous pass, the tail hook had hit the catapult track and been knocked off to the side. Later tests revealed that the spring that is supposed to snap the hook back into place was not strong enough for the job.

  Vaughn was in air ops when the word came from the flight deck.

  “There was no way to get him on board,” Vaughn recalls. “We scrambled the tankers and figured how much gas it would take to get to Cubi [an American base in the Philippines about 450 miles away.]”

  Welch rendezvoused with the tanker, took on about 4,000 pounds of fuel, and turned onto the course for Cubi. The ship told him he would pick up the beacon from shore about 300 miles out, and from there in it would be an easy, although lonely, flight.

  Officers in the operations room began drifting off to other parts of the ship. Suddenly Welch radioed an alarming message: “I have a low fuel light.” He turned back toward the carrier while deck crews frantically refueled a tanker to try to meet him before he went into the sea. A helicopter was sent out to be on hand for the rescue.

  Vaughn called his friend, Lt. Comdr. Bill Shepherd, the squadron operations officer, and they began puzzling out what had gone wrong. Comdr. Craig (“Panda”) Langbehn, the squadron commander, arrived, sized up the situation, and concluded: “He’s going to have to eject.” In the backs of their minds, everyone was aware of the reaction in Washington if a $30 million Hornet fell into the sea on its first deployment because it had run out of gas.

  The cause of the problem quickly dawned on the group in the operations room: As a safety measure, the fuel in the plane’s drop tank can’t be pressurized with the hook down. The load of fuel Welch had taken on had, naturally, gone to the lowest point, the drop tank. So, while he had plenty of fuel aboard, he couldn’t pump it up into the plane.

  The tanker, finally refueled, was launched and headed outward. Welch radioed that he had the tanker in sight, but he was down to 400 pounds of fuel in one feed tank and zero in the other—both within the gauge error. At any moment, he would radio that his engines had flamed out, and he was ejecting into the dark Pacific.

  Suddenly, Shepherd grabbed the microphone and gave him crisp instructions: “Hey, Rodger. Pull the hook circuit breaker, raise the handle, and go to override on the pressurization.”

  The operations room fell silent. Then Welch’s voice crackled over the radio. The fuel was flowing up into his feed tanks: 500 in one, 200 in the other … 600 and 300. He was going to make it.

  Shepherd later explained the source of his sudden inspiration. Days before, a group of pilots had gathered for one of the “emergency of the day” discussions frequently held during the cruise. One of the questions discussed that day was what prevented the transfer of fuel from the drop tank into the plane. Shepherd remembered the conclusion: It is not the position of the hook, but the position of the hook handle in the cockpit that controls whether the external tank can be pressurized. Thus, even though Welch’s tail hook remained useless, he was able, by moving the hook handle, to trick the plane into feeding fuel up into his internal tanks. He took on a load of fuel and landed safely later that night at Cubi.

  Broken tail hooks caused several other pilots to fly to shore bases later in the cruise. One pilot twice landed at a British base and returned to the carrier to regale his comrades, who hadn’t had a drink for months, with accounts of the hospitality provided by his hosts.

  The Constellation returned to the West Coast on 23 August 1985, and the pilots flew their planes ashore to Lemoore. Even as they were reunited with their families, navy pilots on the East Coast and marines at El Toro were preparing for the Hornet’s maiden voyage aboard the U.S.S. Coral Sea. They did not know it then, but they were headed for the F/A-18’s first test in combat.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “It Starts Raining F/A-18s On You”

  For two ear-splitting days in the middle of April 1986, two carrier battle groups put on a typical American show in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily. Planes roared on and off the carrier decks. The air waves crackled with radio messages and the beams of high-powered radar. The crews of the three Soviet radar picket ships north of Sicily and those of the trawlers assigned to shadow the individual carriers could have kept track of the Yankees in their sleep.

  Then, as soon as it was dark on the night of 14 April, the U.S.S. Coral Sea (carrying three squadrons of Hornets and a heavy squadron of A-6 bombers) and the U.S.S. America (carrying a more traditional mix of F-14 fighters and A-6s plus A-7 light bombers) headed south toward Libya. With all their electronic equipment shut down, they steamed through the narrow Straits of Messina, between the boot of Italy and Sicily, in total EMCON [Emission Control], at thirty miles an hour.

  Ships in the two battle groups stayed at least twenty-five miles away from each other. To the sailors aboard the Soviet ships, the American fleet seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  Chief Petty Officer Kurt Benson, in the Coral Sea’s aircraft control center, recalls: “We just blowed the horn and everyone got out of the way. We weren’t slowing down for nothing.”

  As the ship cleared the straits and sped south into the Mediterranean, Benson heard the voice of Capt. R. H. Ferguson, the skipper, come over the 1 MC, the general announcement system: “We’re gonna go south and kick some ass.”

  As the Soviet trawlers and picket ships reported they had lost contact with the two carriers, a Soviet Sovremennyy-class guided-missile destroyer, stationed south of Sicily, began a frantic search. Even with the help of long-range surveillance planes, it milled around for seven hours without making contact.

  As soon as darkness shielded the ships from prying eyes, conveyor systems began disgorging bombs and missiles from the magazines, deep in the bowels of the ship, to the hangar deck. They were loaded onto dollies and then lifted to the flight deck on the aircraft elevators. Crew members, excited with the knowledge their ship was going into action, took time to paint messages on the bombs: “FROM NICKI” … “FROM JEFF” … “THIS ONE’S FOR RHONDA” … “FROM UNCLE CHARLIE” … “DIAL 911” … “JULIE” … “FROM MEMPHIS.”

  To most crew members, this sudden transformation from peacetime exercises to war was a real surprise, even though planning with the air force for a joint attack on targets in Libya had begun in January after terrorist bombings at the Rome and Vienna airports. In all, 162 contingency targets were considered, with attacks involving one or two carriers, with and without air force planes, and both day and night. But all of this planning had been kept a deep secret—up until the time for action in retaliation for the bombing of a discotheque frequented by American troops in Berlin.

  Rear Adm. Jerry Breast, commander of Carrier Group Two, aboard the Coral Sea, insisted that all information be classified at least Top Secret and compartmented. This meant that even the skippers of some of the ships in his battle group were kept in the dark. But, in the days immediately before the operation, leaks from Washington turned into a deluge.

  “It seemed the press stayed ahead of us darn near the whole time—about two or three days ahead,” Breast reported later.

  I’d be holding something very, very close, and it would come out in the Washington Post or CNN or ABC. They seemed to be way
ahead of us. It hurt our morale, it hurt our security efforts. It hazarded us operationally if the Libyans had really been listening or reading or believing what they were hearing. I conjectured it might have been a purposeful effort to prepare the American people for those things we might be going to do over the mainland of Libya or convince the Libyan people what would happen if they didn’t get their act straight.

  As the two carriers sped south, there was good reason for concern that their fliers might be heading into defenses alerted and primed to knock them down. That was an especially unnerving thought because the whole affair had been planned to avoid American losses. On several occasions earlier, when the U.S. fleet carried on operations inside the so-called “line of death” in the Gulf of Sidra, Adm. Frank Kelso, commander of the Sixth Fleet, visited the Coral Sea to speak personally with the ship’s pilots to make sure they knew the rules of engagement. As preparations for the Libyan raid intensified, Kelso tapped Breast forcefully on the chest and insisted: “I don’t want any U.S. aviators walking through the streets of Tripoli with a noose around their neck.”

  Aboard the Coral Sea that night, there was a more immediate question. Down in the humid, 120-degree engine compartments, shirtless crewmen sucked on ice cubes as they monitored the temperature and fuel-flow gauges and checked the long nozzles that feed oil into the white-hot furnaces. The engineering plant, with its twelve boilers and four main engines capable of turning out 212,000 horsepower, had been designed in 1929 for use in a battleship, and sent to sea in the Coral Sea in 1947, more than twice a lifetime ago to the young sailors. When ordered to take part in the Libyan raid, the Coral Sea had been at sea, sailing hard, for most of the previous 200 days. The ship and her crew were tired. Would the “Ageless Warrior,” as she had been dubbed, get there in time?

  The whole operation would be imperiled if anything went wrong. But that ancient engineering system ground out the knots, hour after hour. Right on schedule, the Coral Sea reached its assigned position 180 miles off the coast north of Bengazi, fifteen minutes before the 1:30 A.M. launch time. Both the position and the timing were critical because strikes by planes from the Coral Sea and the America, further west, off Tripoli, had to be meshed precisely with those of F-111 bombers flying all the way from England, seven hours away.

  At the appointed hour, the Coral Sea turned into the wind and began launching its strike force, including 20 F/A-18s, into the dark Mediterranean night. Breast took a chance. He ordered a destroyer, twenty-five miles away, to turn on a radio beacon to make it a little easier for the pilots to form up in their battle boxes before heading toward the beach. They were careful to stay below 5,000 feet—beneath the beams from the Libyans’ shore-based radar.

  There are two ways to suppress enemy defenses. One way is to make enough noise on the way in so the defenders will turn on their radars and send their fighters aloft—and then knock them out. The second is to rely on total surprise.

  Breast decided on a combination of the two—with heavy emphasis on surprise.

  Leading the raid were the carrier’s EA-6B Prowlers. The Prowler is an expanded version of the A-6, carrying four crew members and loaded with powerful electronic gear to search out and jam enemy radar. As they approached the coast, some degree of surprise was lost, and the Libyan air-defense radar reacted. But the Prowlers immediately blanketed the radar with their jamming devices.

  This gave a margin of safety for the F/A-18s following close behind to swoop in along the shoreline and launch their new HARM missiles to home in on the emissions from the air-defense radars and surface-to-air missile sites. Two missiles apiece streaked down toward a dozen installations, opening a hole in one of the world’s densest and most sophisticated air defense systems for the heavily laden A-6 bombers. The defenders fired more than fifty missiles without a single hit.

  Other F/A-18s, carrying both air-to-air and antishipping missiles, were aloft to guard the attacking force from both enemy airplanes and missile-firing surface ships. The A-6s from the Coral Sea hit the Benina Airbase outside Bengazi, destroying a number of aircraft and damaging several hangars. Other A-6s from the America hit the Jumahirayah barracks in Bengazi. At the same time, the F-l11s, which had flown around France, Portugal, and Spain from their bases in England, hit targets in the Tripoli area, including the tent compound where Col. Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, was believed to be.

  The whole operation took less time than it takes to read about it. From the moment the first bomber crossed the shoreline until the last one cleared the coast, the elapsed time was only thirteen minutes. As one pilot involved put it: “It was all designed to happen at once. The bombers are there, the HARMs come down, the bombs come down, and everyone gets the hell out of there.”

  Qaddafi, who moves around frequently, was not injured, although an adopted child was killed. One of the F-l11s crashed, and its two-man crew was lost, but all the other aircraft returned safely to their bases or carriers.

  Back on the Coral Sea, an anxious quiet had settled over the ship. The launch had been almost exactly like a normal exercise except that a few more planes had been launched, and all their weapons were armed. Benson, in the aircraft control center, responsible for the placement of planes on the deck before and after the strike, was reminded of Vietnam: “You wonder whether the same number that went off are going to come back. Will the same faces be seen tomorrow? More importantly, are they going to find what they’re looking for and get it done? We were pretty excited.”

  Probably no one aboard the ship was more interested in the performance of the F/A-18s in this first venture into combat than John Lockard, the ship’s executive officer. He had worked on the F/A-18 program in the early days in NAVAIR, was one of the pilots who had helped introduce the plane at Lemoore, and was soon to become program manager. He monitored the operation from the dimly lit Combat Direction Center, just above the hangar deck and two decks below the flight deck. This is the large room from which the crew manages combat operations.

  In many ways, the operation was for Lockard a gratifying demonstration of the performance of the Hornet. After all the agonizing over the plane’s range, the F/A-18s flew that night without tanking. Instead, it was the longer-range A-6s that were refueled in the air, permitting them to carry a heavier bomb load.

  Earlier in the Coral Sea’s deployment, Breast had experimented to see how the F/A-18 could be used to protect the carrier against air attack. He found he could keep seven planes, each carrying a full combat load of 8,000 pounds of fuel and four missiles, on station in a grid about 150 miles from the carrier, without refueling. But, he concluded, once the shooting started, he would have to supply them with fuel.

  Fortunately for the Americans, the Libyans did not get their fighters into the air the night of the raid. If they had, Breast was counting on the Coral Sea, with more than a score of Hornets in reserve, to launch its planes quickly to deal with the threat from enemy fighters. As a result of their earlier exercises during this deployment, crew members had begun to boast that their ship, one of the oldest and smallest in the fleet, could put more fighters in the air than the much bigger, nuclear-powered, Nimitz-class carriers.

  Lt. Comdr. Dave Jones, one of the pilots flying fighter cover for the strike that night, says pilots from other ships complained to him: “When you get within 200 miles of the Coral Sea, it starts raining F/A-18s on you.”

  In preparations for the operation, the F/A-18 pilots were specifically ordered not to fly over land, and all of the navy bombs were dropped by two-man A-6s and not by Hornets. One of the criticisms later made was that the operation had demonstrated that the navy’s two carriers had relatively little offensive capability and needed the help of the air force to carry out the raid.

  The navy bombing force could have been significantly increased, however, by using F/A-18s as bombers and sending them to hit targets on land. The F/A-18 is designed to fly under the weather at night, over relatively flat terrain, and Hornets often carry out such nighttime
missions in training. But sending a one-man plane on a low-level attack in the dark is somewhat more hazardous than it is for a two-man plane, and the admirals’ concern about avoiding losses led to the decision to keep the Hornets offshore and to supplement the bombing force with F-111s.

  Although the navy’s part of the operation took little more than an hour from launch time to recovery of the returning planes, the attack, together with earlier operations off the Libyan coast, provided a major test of new weapons—the F/A-18, HARM and Harpoon missiles, and the Lamps Mark III helicopter—and of the way the navy goes to war.

  During the raid, Lehman and Admiral Watkins, the chief of naval operations, waited in the Navy Command Center at the Pentagon until word came that the planes had returned safely to their carriers. Lehman later termed the operation “an overwhelming success.”

  This was in sharp contrast to what had happened two and a half years earlier, when planes from the U.S.S. Independence and the U.S.S. Kennedy attacked targets in Lebanon. The operation was poorly conceived and poorly coordinated. Two planes were lost, one pilot was killed and one officer was captured. Immediately afterward, Lehman found money to create a new school at Fallon NAS in the Nevada desert. Known as the Strike Warfare Center, or Strike U, the school runs senior officers through an intensive two-week course that teaches them how to plan and coordinate the ships and planes involved in an attack by an air wing. Each air wing also practices there before deployment.

  When the navy is ordered into action, decisions on how to carry out the operation are made by commanders on the scene—and not, as in the case of Lebanon and often during the Vietnam War, by military officers far from the scene or even by politicians in Washington.