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

by Orr Kelly

  The Air Force put the situation in bureaucratic language:

  “… there was an urgent requirement for an integrated system to enable a rescue vehicle to penetrate hostile territory at low level and perform search and rescue under conditions of total darkness and/or adverse weather in all geographical areas including mountainous terrain.”

  As the program developed, another requirement was added:

  “Additionally, the rescue vehicle must have a low-level capability to penetrate hostile territory against radar-directed weapons.”

  Colonel Frank Pehr, who later joined the program as the chief test pilot, recalls talking to fighter pilots, who were incredulous about requirements for the new helicopter.

  “We went to the fighter community, and we said, ‘You go in and attack targets, and we’ll come rescue you if you get shot down.’ And they said to us: ‘You think you can survive in areas where we are attacking targets? We can’t survive there.’

  “And that’s a good point. We are taking an aircraft that has very limited dynamics compared to a fighter, in terms of speed and velocities and maneuverability, and we’re supposed to go into this high-threat area where they have been shot down—and survive. Well, that’s a big issue. I’m not claiming we can do that, but that was our charter.

  “So we were very concerned about what it would take to survive there, not to attack anything, but just to survive there. What we would like to do is go there and come back without anybody knowing we had been there. This helicopter is not the best vehicle to do that. But a stealth airplane doesn’t hover very well, and it is difficult to pick up a survivor. Right there, you have a compromise. You need hover capability to get in there and do the job. How are you going to do it without someone seeing you, knowing you are there, and shooting you down? It’s hard.”

  As the Air Force struggled with the problem, the solutions remained elusive—and the cost kept going up. Two programs were canceled in the face of technical failures and rising costs. Finally, Ronald Terry, by then a colonel, heard of the Pave Low program. Terry and a small team of dedicated engineers and fliers had developed the gunship, from the early AC-47 to the AC-130 Spectre, with its sophisticated electronics and powerful 105mm cannon. Terry was looking for new challenges—and the rescue helicopter was just about the biggest technological challenge the Air Force had to offer.

  Terry and his team took over the program and immediately began looking for devices already in service that could be adapted for use in the Pave Low instead of asking industry to invent new systems—“reinvent the wheel,” as Terry put it. Even so, adapting existing equipment to the exacting demands of the rescue helicopter posed some very difficult problems.

  A key requirement was the ability to fly very low in the dark. This meant some kind of terrain-following radar to look out ahead and warn the pilot before he ran into a mountain or a cliff. Texas Instruments had developed such a system, and it was used in the A-7 fighter-bomber.

  But when the A-7 pilots were questioned, they admitted they didn’t really trust the system to guide them in the dark, close to the ground. So the system would not only have to be adapted to the very different demands of operating in a helicopter, as opposed to a much faster jet fighter, but it would also have to be made so reliable that aircrews would trust it to do the job.

  Texas Instruments officials agreed to try.

  Then Pehr drew on his combat experience, flying Jolly Green Giants out of Da Nang, to add a new demand. Instead of the two-hundred-foot clearance the Texas Instruments experts were aiming for, he said he wanted to fly safely at one hundred feet. They told him, no way! They would never trust their radar to fly at one hundred feet.

  Terry put the radar in a test helicopter, and Pehr took it out to see how low he could fly. They proved that they could operate safely, in the dark, at one hundred feet.

  Special navigation systems were adapted for use in the Pave Low. They were so accurate that it was possible for a pilot to find a downed flier and hover overhead while a cable was lowered to pick him up—all without the pilot ever being able to see the ground.

  Subsequent tests went so well that the go-ahead was given to modify eight of the fifty-some HH-53 helicopters in the Air Force inventory into the new Pave Low configuration. To hold down costs, the job was given to the naval air rework facility at Pensacola.

  The first production model was rolled out on 13 March 1979—thirteen years after the need for such an aircraft was first officially recognized.

  Ironically, by that time serious questions were being raised about whether the Air Force really needed such a super flying machine.

  “We had a system that was so good I felt it was too good for the rescue mission and would not last in rescue,” Pehr explains. “The rescue mission is a humanitarian and a morale mission. We’ve done studies, and we’ve determined that it’s cheaper to train new pilots than it is to save pilots. Rescue doesn’t get funds for its mission. You have to try to justify it from a morale standpoint or a humanitarian standpoint. But it is not necessarily going to win wars.

  “This aircraft was developed to satisfy a combat rescue mission which at that point in time did not exist. But it was so good it had a number of applications that should be exploited. One of those was a tremendous special operations role. It was something they could use. But they didn’t seem to be very interested.”

  That all began to change in a dramatic way immediately after Desert One. At that time, there were the eight Pave Low helicopters that had been modified, plus another one that had also been modified with a little money left over from the work on the original eight. Not all the helicopters were fully fitted out with all their new equipment. The Pave Lows were all based at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, along with the first class of experienced pilots learning to fly the new plane.

  Abruptly, the unit was ordered to report to Hurlburt Field in Florida, the longtime headquarters for the air commandos, as soon as possible, with helicopters, maintenance people, and the pilots in training. The order came on a Friday. On Sunday, they flew to Hurlburt.

  At that time, Hurlburt was a kind of sleepy backwater. The wing commander was a maintenance man without combat experience, and Secord was underwhelmed, to say the least, by the whole operation. Suddenly, things changed. The frantic pace of operations reminded old-timers of the days in the early 1960s when Jungle Jim was gearing up.

  The pilots who had been in training soon found themselves checked out and upgraded to instructors. Pilots found themselves flying lower in the dark than they normally dared fly in the daytime.

  This was all part of something with the code name of Honey Badger. Although that was the overall designation for the huge rescue operation then in preparation, the helicopter crews still think of Honey Badger as their own special operation. In fact, they didn’t know what all the excitement was about or even who was in charge. This, of course, was all part of the secrecy that surrounded the whole renewed rescue effort.

  One of the unusual demands on the Air Force pilots was that they learn to fly their planes in formation. While Army helicopters often fly in large formations, this was not a skill the Air Force felt a need for. The Air Force pilots were happiest when they were as far as possible from any other object, especially another flying object with big rotors twirling around.

  The pilots were told they not only had to fly formation, but they had to do it at night. To make it a little easier at night, they were issued the first generation of night-vision goggles, known by the initials NVG. They were big cumbersome contraptions, weighing seven or eight pounds, and designed for a tank driver, not an aircraft pilot.

  John F. “Jack” Kelly vividly recalls one of the first times he used the night-vision goggles. When he arrived at Hurlburt, he was a second lieutenant, but he also wore command pilot wings. He had been an Army warrant officer, with many hours of flight time, and had recently switched over to the Air Force and been commissioned. Flying formation was, for him,
nothing new. But doing it at night was still a challenge.

  “We were in formation,” he says, “heading southeast down over the panhandle of Florida and then across the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa. I was copilot to a fairly high-time instructor pilot. We were number-two aircraft in a formation of seven or eight helicopters.

  “It was just sunset when we left. The sun went down, and we started flying across the gulf. As it transitioned from sunset to dusk to night—I think I had one previous mission using NVG—I told the instructor I would put on the NVG and pilot the aircraft.

  “I turned my head from the aircraft I was following, and, of course, with the NVG, I couldn’t see anything in the cockpit. When I turned back to look outside, all that was out there was lights. That’s all you could see with the NVG. They were poor quality in those days.

  “I picked up these lights and started flying on them. I see the formation’s turning to the right. I’m starting to descend and turning to the right, trying to pick out the lead aircraft. The guys behind me are doing the same thing, following me around. Finally, I asked my flight engineer, ‘What’s my altitude?’ He said, ‘About a hundred feet.’

  “At that time, I realized I was flying formation off a shrimp boat. I had the whole rest of the formation behind me trying to join up on the shrimp boat. By that time, the lead aircraft was about five miles down the road. Those are the kinds of things we learned, experimenting with NVGs.”

  The intensive Honey Badger training continued through the fall until, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president and the likelihood of the release of the hostages (they were actually released moments after he was sworn in), preparations for the rescue effort were called off.

  Miraculously, the crews survived their demanding training and dramatically realistic practice sessions without the loss of a single aircraft or crew member. Ironically, on their return to their base after a final rehearsal, one plane became unbalanced because of a faulty fuel-transfer system, went into an uncontrollable spiral, and crashed.

  While the Honey Badger training was in progress, the Air Force set in motion another even more audacious plan for a possible rescue of the hostages.

  Instead of a massive operation involving thousands of troops and scores of airplanes, this plan called for a single C-130 to land in the soccer stadium adjoining the United States Embassy in Teheran to deliver a rescue force and then fly away with the hostages and the rescuers—a total of more than a hundred people.

  As anyone familiar with airplanes would quickly realize, landing a four-engine transport plane in a soccer stadium—which is about the same size as an American football stadium—and then taking off again fully loaded is contrary to the laws of physics.

  Ron Terry, who had done the impossible with the gunships and again with the Pave Low helicopter, was called in to do the impossible again.

  The project was given the code name of Credible Sport.

  Lockheed Aircraft, which manufactures the C-130, put its most experienced people on the job, working around the clock, seven days a week, to modify several planes at its plant in Marietta, Georgia. The flaps on the wings were taken apart and reworked so the plane could make its final approach into the stadium at eighty knots, rather than its normal landing speed of more than one hundred knots. A special refueling rig was attached to the top of the plane.

  Colonel Ron Jones, who was still with the 7th Special Operations Squadron in Europe, was the leader of one of three crews brought in from Europe, Hurlburt, and the Far East to train to fly the specially equipped plane.

  “It was truly an amazing thing to see,” he says.

  The plane was fitted out with eight motors from a rocket system, known as ASROC, used by the Navy to fire torpedoes at distant targets. They provided eighty thousand pounds of decelerating force to stop the plane. To cushion the landing, the plane was also fitted with eight Shrike rocket motors, which were fired straight down just before the plane touched the ground.

  For takeoff, rocket motors provided 180,000 pounds of thrust for the first four seconds and 20,000 pounds of thrust for another twenty seconds.

  In a test in October 1980, the plane set a record for short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. Within ten feet of the point where the brake was released, the nosewheel was six feet off the ground. The entire plane was airborne within 150 feet, and, by the time it had gone the length of a soccer field, it was 30 feet in the air and flying at 115 knots. A small rocket motor in the tail pushed the tail up to help the pilot level off from the steep climb out of the stadium.

  The plan was for the plane to dive in steeply, clearing the stadium wall by eight feet, land, taxi to the other end of the stadium, turn around, and prepare for takeoff. With the power of its rocket motors, there was no reason to worry which way the wind was blowing.

  Jones asked what would happen if the nose gear had been damaged on landing.

  “The engineer says, ‘Don’t worry. When you hit that switch, it doesn’t make any difference. You’re going out of there.’ You just pointed it wherever you wanted to go and hit the button. Once you cooked those things off, you were going where you pointed.”

  Inside, the plane was braced with a massive steel box frame to absorb the violence of the landing and takeoff. Special aluminum seats were designed so the hostages could be strapped in quickly, braced for the takeoff.

  The first prototype was completed and ready for testing in six weeks, and the test program was wrapped up in another three weeks.

  A final full-scale test of the system ended with a disappointing accident. The test plane had taken off from one of the auxiliary fields at Eglin Air Force Base, gone through its paces, and returned for a landing. The flight engineer, sitting between the pilots, had the job of firing the rocket motors to stop the plane after it had landed. Unaccountably, he pushed the button while the plane was still about fifteen feet in the air. It stopped right where it was and smacked down onto the runway, breaking off a wing. Fortunately, a fire engine was standing almost at the scene of the accident. The aircraft crew escaped without serious injury, and the plane was spared further damage from fire.

  Thought of using the Credible Sport system in an actual rescue was dropped at about the same time those involved in Honey Badger stopped their preparations.

  Further tests on the plane were conducted in the following months, but it was never used in an actual operation. This was in contrast to the Pave Low helicopter system. By the time the Honey Badger exercises were completed, the Air Force had this new weapon in its arsenal along with crews highly trained to get the most out of the new machine. It was the beginning of yet another period of renewal and the beginning of the modern era in Air Force special operations.

  CHAPTER 24

  Not Quite Ready

  When the United States decided to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983, the first thing that was needed was a “pair of eyes” on the ground to check out the condition of the Point Salines airfield.

  Was the airfield, which was under construction, suitable for landing large troop-carrying aircraft?

  Was the field defended? If so, how many guns did the defenders have and where were they located?

  The obvious choice to provide that “pair of eyes” was John Carney, the same combat controller who had scoped out the desert landing area for the hostage rescue effort three years earlier.

  To Carney, this sounded like a piece of cake. No landing in the desert in the dark; no scooting around on a motorcycle; no worry about getting back out again.

  The United States was still at peace with Grenada, even though the prime minister had been killed in a leftist coup and there were grave concerns for the safety of a group of American medical students studying on the island.

  As he pictured it, Carney would take a tourist flight to the island, slip into penny loafers and a pineapple shirt, perhaps sip a piña colada, and casually take a look at the airport. A brief telephone conversation would suffice to pass on his assessment.
Then he would catch the next flight home.

  Somehow, what should have been a simple one-man reconnaissance foray turned into a big and, eventually, disastrous military operation—one that failed in the end to get any close-up look at the situation at the airport.

  Carney was ordered to report aboard a Navy vessel and then proceed with a group of SEALs in a small boat to the island, where they would creep ashore to report on whether planes could land at the airport or whether troops would have to be parachuted in.

  He and a couple of other combat controllers flew to a nearby island, took a taxi to the dock, and boarded a Navy vessel, which then took up station off the Grenada coast. Even this looked to Carney like a two-man job, but that was not the way events unfolded.

  To help the combat controllers get ashore, the Navy sent two planeloads of SEALs from SEAL Team Six. The special antiterrorist unit was created after the failed hostage rescue effort had drawn attention to the possibility that, with international terrorism on the increase, rescue operations might be required in unpredictable parts of the world on short notice.

  The SEALs had expected to parachute into calm seas in the daytime, climb into boats that had been dropped with them, and join up with Carney on the ship. The air drop was delayed, and the weather report was wrong: the SEALs were dropped at night into wind-whipped waves topped by whitecaps. Four of the SEALs disappeared into the dark waters and were never found.

  “I’ve jumped in the water at night, probably over a hundred times,” Carney says. “It’s probably one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever done. First of all, you have the difficulty of finding the boat that dropped in with you. If the sea state’s high enough, you can’t see a guy swimming four yards from you.

  “Then, it’s pitch black. You get to the boat, and it’s not easy to navigate out there, to know where you’re going. The recovery of the people is the most difficult. They don’t jump in a neat little package. They get dispersed a hundred yards apart, probably.