Journey

by Norty Schwartz

  Dad and I stayed out of sight around the corner as the bridesmaids sauntered down the aisle, Dad looking surprisingly dapper girdled into his Air Force mess dress. Then the music transitioned to Wagner’s classic “Bridal Chorus” (a.k.a. “Here Comes the Bride”) and Dad took my arm to begin our stroll down the flower-draped center aisle of the chapel. I leaned over to him and whispered my final words as a single woman: “Dad, do you think they’ll be able to see the sweat rolling down my back?”

  “Honey, no one is going to see anything but how beautiful you look, you’re fine,” he kindly lied. But I’m sure that he was thankful not to have anyone behind us who might slip in the puddles of perspiration I was leaving in my wake.

  Then I looked up and spotted Norty and his groomsmen (best man Bob Munson, Dave McClure, and Chris Lauderdale), immaculately decked out in their formal mess dress, looking like movie stars fresh off the cover of Esquire. Had the Air Force trained them in some secret new technique to counteract the body’s natural reaction to extreme heat? None of them showed the slightest signs of discomfort from the heat.

  It wasn’t until well after the ceremony that the chaplain came up to me and apologized for not having repaired the broken air conditioner in the women’s dressing room. Mine was the only room without it!

  The ceremony itself was nondenominational—not really by design, but more because in those days no priest would perform the ceremony since Norty is Jewish, and we couldn’t find a nearby rabbi to officiate because I’m Catholic. So I did miss the festivity of seeing a priest in all of his finery when I walked down the aisle, and I also missed having Norty smash the glass at the conclusion of the ceremony with everyone shouting “Mazel Tov!”

  It was a very lovely ceremony and the reception at the officers’ club served as my first opportunity to see that yes, the man really did have friends. By the way they swapped stories like a bunch of frat boys, they appeared to be a warm, close-knit group. In the course of the reception, I think at least twenty of them came up to me and declared, “You just married a future general.” And remember, he was just a captain at this point.

  My parents and the Navases instantly sparked with one another, laughing and carrying on like they were lifelong friends. This thrilled Norty and me to no end.

  Norty and I actually slipped out early so that we could catch a few hours of sleep at a Little Rock hotel before awakening with the sun and departing for Florida. As we said our goodbyes and thanked everyone for coming, my mother—seldom one to be sentimental—pulled me aside for a private mother-daughter moment. This was so out of character, it truly touched my heart.

  She took both my hands and looked me straight in the eyes. “Suzie, through the years, your dad and I have shared a lot of advice with you, but what I am about to say is more important than all of it put together …”

  “Is this really my mother?” I thought, probably starting to tear up a little in anticipation of her benevolent guidance.

  She nodded over toward Norty, who was sharing some final laughs with his posse. “That man is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, so don’t mess it up. If there’s a problem, recognize that it’s your fault, so suck it up and don’t call me!”

  Now that sounded more like Mom.

  That night, as our heads hit the pillows, I reached over and extinguished the tiny lamp atop the nightstand by my side, then opened up to Norty with a full disclosure. “There’s something you should know … I will never be your puppy dog.”

  “Understood,” he acknowledged, with a firm, efficient brevity to which I’d already grown accustomed. As I lay there, I thought that perhaps that band of brothers were on to something—Norty certainly did sound like someone I could picture as a future general.

  The drive to Hurlburt took about twelve hours, and by six o’clock the following morning, Norty was already at the office—happy as a clam embarking on his new career in Special Ops. What I felt, on the other hand, were emotions that I’ve shared through the years with spouse groups at bases all over the world. Those feelings are so common to newlywed military spouses, thrust into totally unfamiliar lifestyles, often in new and unfamiliar locales: I was in a house that I didn’t buy, and didn’t like. I was in a city that I didn’t know, and I didn’t know a soul. I had no car because we left mine back in Arkansas, and even if I did have a car, I really didn’t have anywhere to go. I had no idea where he worked (other than “at Hurlburt”), and no clue how to get a hold of him.

  For weeks, I spent every afternoon gazing out the picture window in the dining room, surrounded by the world’s most hideous flocked wallpaper. I left my job, I left my friends, I left my car, and my life consisted of looking out that window and staring at the palm trees. And every day I would hark back to Mom’s advice and just suck it all up and have a nice meal waiting for Norty when he got home. I would smile, I would laugh, but inside I kept asking myself, “What have I done?”

  That self-pity lasted for a few weeks. Then I had an epiphany.

  I was standing in the same dining room in front of the same window looking at the same palm trees, when suddenly a strange vision popped into my head. Instead of me standing there looking out, I saw a younger version of Diane O’Malley—the general’s wife who was so kind to us at the Friday Night Parade. Here was someone who was polished, well respected, completely at ease in any situation, yet I could tell that she had a real strength about her. She was a woman with a purpose—not only the eyes and ears of her husband—but someone driven to further her own independent causes. She was the first military spouse that I could see myself emulating one day, particularly if those prognosticators were right about Norty becoming a general. It struck me that long before she was the general’s wife, she, too, must have experienced the same frustration that I was feeling—Captain O’Malley’s young bride, dropped off to fend for herself in completely unfamiliar waters. And how many other military spouses had the same experience?

  That single realization that I was not alone was enough to break me out of my funk. And who said that being the perfect officer’s wife precluded my making independent strides on my own? I was determined to do both.

  Major General Dick Scholtes was the first commander of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), the Special Operations component that oversees top-tier special operations mission units. Driven by his passion and belief in the “mission,” he retired from active service so he could candidly testify before Congress about the pressing need for a separate special operations command.

  Then Senator William Cohen (later secretary of defense) described Scholtes’s testimony as vital in the decision of Congress to create the United States Special Operations Command.

  “General Scholtes has a reputation for integrity and principle. He would tell it like it was. That was important to the Armed Services Committee members,” Cohen said. “The Pentagon was waging a frontal and rear assault in opposition to the creation of a special operations command. Without his testimony, USSOCOM might not have happened, or we might have created a command with only two or three stars.”

  Many years earlier—in fact, not too long after Desert One in Tehran—General Scholtes spoke with us in the theater at Hurlburt Field (in the Florida panhandle, where Air Force Special Operations is based), offering these prophetic words about our embryonic special operations efforts: “What we have now is a diamond in the rough, y’all. And we are going to polish this diamond until it shines.” And we did.

  He was a source of inspiration for everything that followed; for me personally, his words were the fuel that lit the fire which continued to burn in me for the next thirty years.

  * * *

  Almost immediately after the failure of Operation EAGLE CLAW, all bets were off and the checkbooks were open. Finding a viable way to rescue the hostages and safely extract the rescue team became an urgent noncompete situation of the highest priority at the Pentagon. Under the name HONEY BADGER, the Joint Test Directorate worked to develop and validate a range o
f potential scenarios. High atop the list was a joint undertaking of the USAF, U.S. Navy, and Lockheed-Georgia designed to remedy the primary deficit of the previous attempt, the heavy-lift helicopter. Code-named CREDIBLE SPORT, the Top Secret mission was to create a large “Super STOL” (Short Takeoff and Landing) fixed-wing aircraft that was designed to perform some incredible feats of airmanship—an aircraft that required so little distance to generate lift, it was more akin to a helicopter than an airplane at the time. A highly modified C-130 was selected for the task, and three Talon crews were formed to fly it—one from the 1st SOS (Special Operations Squadron), one from the 7th SOS, and one from the 8th SOS, which was based at Hurlburt Field in the Florida panhandle, where much of the late-stage testing would take place. Additional flight-test crews were provided by Lockheed-Georgia, the company that would actually be making the modifications.

  To achieve such a dramatic performance enhancement, aircraft modifications included the installation of thirty rockets in multiple sets: eight forward-pointed ASROC (antisubmarine rocket) motors mounted around the forward fuselage to stop the aircraft upon landing, eight downward-pointed Shrike rocket motors mounted on the fuselage above the wheel wells to brake its descent, eight MK-56 rocket motors (from the RIM-66 Standard missile) mounted on the lower rear fuselage pointing rearward for takeoff acceleration boost, two Shrike rocket motors mounted in pairs on wing pylons to correct yaw during takeoff transition, and two more ASROC motors mounted at the rear of the tail to prevent it from striking the ground from over-rotation. These rockets provided significant propulsion boost to accelerate takeoff, and radically slowed the plane on landing. Just watching a behemoth the size of a Herc perform with rocket assist was a sight to behold!

  Other features included aerodynamic and control modifications to further assist with performance and in-flight refueling, sophisticated new electronics to bolster navigation and self-defense, and a tailhook for landing.

  The rescue plan called for the modified Combat Talons to depart from the United States and fly directly to Iran by employing five in-flight refuelings, penetrating Iranian airspace at low altitude under the cover of darkness to evade Iranian air defenses. It would land on the grass field inside the Amjadien soccer stadium, located directly across the street from the American Embassy where the hostages were being held. The stadium had previously been designated the exfiltration point for the Delta Force and freed hostages in the original EAGLE CLAW rescue mission. The CREDIBLE SPORT was specifically designed to land inside the stadium, retrieve its priceless cargo, then subsequently take off, within a distance of about a hundred yards (approximately the length of the soccer field)—a far cry from the three-thousand-foot minimum required for standard variant C-130s at the time. The aircraft would then proceed directly to a recovery airfield positioned in the Arabian Gulf region. There has been much speculation that the tailhook was intended for landing on an aircraft carrier, but the truth is that it was augmentation for the airland mission in the soccer stadium. After testing, it would not likely have been used.

  Three C-130H aircraft were sourced for the program, with two to be fully modified to the CREDIBLE SPORT configuration, and the third to be used for rocket testing and control modifications while the other two were being modified.

  From the initial concept to partial modification of the first aircraft, CREDIBLE SPORT was flying three weeks after the program began. Within sixty days a fully modified aircraft had been delivered to the test crews. The first fully modified aircraft (tail number 74-1683) was delivered on October 17, and between October 19 and October 28, a number of flight tests were performed at Wagner Field (Auxiliary Airfield #1), an auxiliary airfield in the Eglin Air Force Base range complex, not far from Hurlburt in Florida—the same remote airfield used by Doolittle Raiders in preparation for their raid on Japan. One by one, systems and procedures were checked, tested, and retested. The results were outstanding. The one and only glitch (an aileron flutter problem caused by modified expanded ailerons) was corrected within two days. It was determined that the aircraft could be flown at eighty-five KIAS (Knots Indicated Air Speed) during final approach for landing, with an eight-degree glide slope—a vast improvement from the standard 130s. A final, full profile test was set for October 29.

  On the morning of the twenty-ninth, adrenaline flowed like floodwater as the Lockheed flight-test crew strapped themselves into the cockpit of CREDIBLE SPORT aircraft 74-1683, fully cognizant of the fact that some seven thousand miles away, the fate of the hostages could very well hinge on the results of their tests. If all went well, they could become a significant part of military aviation history.

  The commander engaged the throttle control levers and the four Allison turboprops roared to life, supplemented by the eight Mark 56 rocket engines igniting right on cue. The modified Talon lunged forward, and within the first ten feet of takeoff roll, the nose gear lifted six feet off the ground. One hundred and forty feet later, the 150,000-pound rescue craft was airborne. By the time it reached the length of a soccer field, it was thirty feet off the ground at an airspeed of 115 knots.

  The takeoff was essentially flawless, setting a number of short takeoff records.

  If only such success had continued through the landing. The crew had to activate the manual input for the rocket firing sequence for landing, since the automatic sequence was not yet tested or validated. The first (upper) pair of forward-facing ASROC deceleration rockets successfully engaged; then the flight engineer mistakenly believed they had already touched down (his cue to fire the Shrikes), and he manually ignited the lower set of rockets. This premature ignition was catastrophic. Forward flight jolted to a halt, and the aircraft dropped to the runway like a seventy-five-ton brick, ripping off the right wing and bursting into flames.

  Note the eight ASROC rockets extending from the front of the Credible Sport aircraft.

  Mark 56 rocket motors point rearward at a forty-five-degree angle on each aft side.

  USAF photos

  Thanks to the lightning-fast response of the emergency crews (who had the fire extinguished within eight seconds of the plane coming to a stop), the entire crew survived without injury. The same could not be said about the CREDIBLE SPORT rescue mission. Between an Algerian-brokered hostage release plan that was announced a few days later and Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter in the November presidential election, the program was terminated. On January 21, 1981, at the very moment that Ronald Reagan completed his inaugural address, the hostages were released into U.S. custody.

  Many of the tactics and equipment developed under HONEY BADGER formed the foundation for modern-day U.S. special operations forces.

  I arrived at Hurlburt for Talon School in November of 1980, right around the time that all this was playing out. But it was far from my focus at the time. I arrived as a reasonably well-qualified C-130 tactical pilot. I knew the airplane and basic airdrop tactics. Frankly, I was pretty confident that I would complete the process of picking up whatever enhancements were a part of the Combat Talon (MC-130E, special operations variant of the Herc) that we’d be flying. It took about ten seconds inside the cockpit to realize that mastering the intricacies of piloting the Combat Talon would require all of my attention and then some. Unlike the C-130E/Hs I’d flown previously, the CT was a specialized aircraft designed for our specialized mission: a low-visibility, long-range aircraft capable of worldwide low-level infiltration/exfiltration in denied airspace.

  It took me weeks to fully adapt to the terrain-following/terrain-avoidance (TF/TA) radar that allowed us to fly as low as 250 feet above the ground—safely and for extended distances.

  Later, I found the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system (STARS) equally as challenging. STARS is a tactic/technology that provides a means of retrieving personnel or equipment from the ground using an aircraft in flight. Picture a five-hundred-foot, high-strength, braided nylon lift line with a balloon in the sky at one end, and an individual or cargo harnessed to the line on the ground a
t the other. As retrieval pilot, our job was to fly the aircraft upwind directly toward the lift line, so that it was caught between two V-shaped arms of a yoke that extended from the nose of our plane, simultaneously snatching the individual from the ground and releasing the balloon. The crew in the back of our plane engaged a winch to reel in the “package,” who at this point was being towed behind the plane at upwards of 150 KIAS. This is one of many tactics where failure was not an option.

  Add in mastering day and night assault takeoffs and landings, airborne intercepts, and low-level evasive tactics—all utilizing the specialized TF/TA systems—and you have a demanding period of training that led to that all-important check flight.

  From the first day that I arrived, the notable leadership and splendid squadron-mates of the 8th SOS were entirely supportive; they made me feel at home. That’s not to say they didn’t expect results. It was—and hopefully will always be—a business where performance trumps every other consideration. Lee Hess, Tom Bradley, Ray Turczynski, Bob Meller, George Ferkes, Jerry Thigpen, Sam Galloway, Thom Beres, Bob Almanzar, Buff Underwood, Ray Doyle, and Taco Sanchez among many others—they had already stepped up to the plate and shone on multiple missions. A desire to prove myself worthy of their acceptance became my driving motivation.

  Schwartz personal collection

  By this time I had demonstrated a proficiency in all the requisite skills except two—NVG (night vision goggle) airland and aerial refueling. NVG usage in fixed-wing aircraft was still in its infancy, with blacked-out landing operations having recently been perfected during the preparation for the Desert One mission. Before this, Combat Talon crews required overt illumination to mark the runway during night flight operations—visible lights that could be readily seen by the flight crews, and by enemy forces. That all changed when Colonel Kyle (Desert One air mission commander) tasked the planners to develop a capability for the Talons to land without any visible lighting—none on the runway and none on the aircraft.