Delta Force (28 page)

How to use the choppers best? Now, with Pittman on board some answers began to emerge. These RH-53Ds could not fly from the Gulf of Oman to Teheran without refueling. How should it be done? “Could the helos be carried in on C-130s?” “No, they are too big.” “Could they be disassembled and then reassembled?” “Not within the mission's time frame.” The riddle would not go away. The answer that finally emerged, at least until its practicability could be tested, was to drop the fuel in the desert and let the helos fly to it. The fuel would be loaded in huge 500-pound rubber blivets and parachuted in. The bigger question remained—where? But, at least if the blivets proved workable, the Sea Stallions could refuel in the desert and the landing field which the EC-130 tankers would have required, could be discarded. And so another piece of the puzzle was laid down on the board.

Life's lighter side began to emerge from the tedium of everyday training. Once Coyote was rehearsing his people in room clearing, trying to get everyone synchronized. “This thing has got to be like a ballet,” he said. “We've got to have this choreographed just right, got to know what steps you're taking, and those of your buddy. We've got to do this in concert.” That night, on the blackboard in A Squadron's hootch there appeared a wonderful cartoon of Delta operators armed
with MP5s and wearing tutus, toe dancing into the embassy.

The operators often invented ingenious ways of getting into the embassy safely. After one lecture about Moslem customs and taboos, someone had the idea of parachuting a battalion of pigs into the compound. The only discussion was whether No Lips should dress up in a pig costume and be sent in ahead of everyone else.

Life was not without its small problems, too. I received a letter from Stuttgart, Germany, informing me in very complicated Army prose that the U.S. Army Europe was continuing to store my furniture in a warehouse, but they would not do so much longer without an official pronouncement about my duties with SOTFE (Special Operations Task Force Europe). I asked General Vaught to help me, and as he had done after the December 2nd meeting at Camp Smokey, he had my command of Delta extended. Poor Katherine remained in our quarters at Fort Bragg, sitting on folding chairs and eating off paper plates.

The Marine pilots who had been doing some flying around Camp Smokey and Newport News were commanded by a straightforward Marine lieutenant colonel by the name of Edward Seiffert. He was a no-nonsense, humorless, some felt rigid, officer who wanted to get on with the job. Some of the Delta operators felt he was aloof and hard to read.

It was decided by General Vaught that Seiffert's unit should go out to the southwest and do some night desert flying without lights. General Gast accompanied them to Yuma, Arizona, to oversee the training. A week later, it was shortly after the Thanksgiving weekend meeting, Delta loaded on C-130s and joined them.

At this time Delta had ninety-two operators at Camp Smokey, and I decided that all of them would go out west. The staff and each squadron commander believed the assault force should be increased from the seventy-two, which had been agreed to on December 2nd, to ninety-two. As the plan had grown, so had the need for more men. So much more was known now than was known earlier in November. As each
day passed and as problems were uncovered, it became apparent that a force of seventy-two would not wash. If the intelligence analysts, for example, were correct in deducing that many of the hostages were being held in the chancellery then that building alone might require the better part of an entire squadron to assault and secure it.

To facilitate all the tasks that needed to be accomplished in the 27-acre compound, it was necessary to reconfigure slightly Delta's basic organization. Accordingly, the two squadrons were broken down into what were called Red Element, White Element, and Blue Element.

Red was basically A Squadron. Its mission was to free any hostages from the compound's southwest quarter, which included the commissary and four staff cottages, and taking down the guards at the motor pool and power plant. As an area it was a mess. There were alleyways and lanes, and the buildings contained a lot of square footage, much of it filled with equipment and supplies. If Major Coyote's Red Element was going to do its job without getting a lot of people killed, then they'd have to go through each of the buildings room by room, floor by floor. With two guard posts in the vicinity, there was also the potential of a very nasty little firefight breaking out there.

Blue Element, which by and large was B squadron, commanded by Major Fitch, had the task of clearing and releasing the hostages found in the two residences, a warehouse known as the Mushroom, and the chancellery.

Thirteen operators, taken from the Selection and Training element and from the headquarters section, made up the White Element. They would be responsible for supporting the assault force and securing and holding the streets around the compound.

From everything I knew about the mission, from working with the model and reading the intelligence data and Bob's reports, I didn't see how Delta was going to do the job without
all
of its operating personnel. I'm not sure that at this time General Vaught was convinced of this. But hoping he could
be convinced, I sent Red, White, and Blue Elements, all ninety-two operators, into Yuma.

Delta based out of a large prefab building located in the desert. The weather was great; the bright sunny days, not too hot, the nights, very cold. The food consisted of one hot meal a day and C Rations. Small cooking fires were laid and hot sauce and jalapeño peppers were added to the C rations. Outsiders, if they could have seen us, would have thought Delta was a construction crew waiting to undertake a building project. We trained at night and slept in the daytime.

The Marines lived in billets at the Yuma Army Airfield. Delta infrequently trucked to those quarters to use the hot showers.

Most of the flying was done at night. It was obvious the Marine pilots had a lot of work to do. They knew it, too. The task they had been given was unusually hard. It was one that called for an altered mind-set. The transition from flying one helicopter to another, a Chinook to a Sea Stallion, for example, was handled very smoothly. That wasn't the problem. The real difficulty was in acquiring—and then developing and polishing—new, more complicated mission skills. These leathernecks were being asked to do something extraordinary. Before this time, flying a helicopter at night was unusual. When it was done, it was always in ideal conditions. Now these pilots were being asked to fly right off the deck through rough canyon country, not at 1,500 feet, but down in the canyons where radar couldn't detect them, and do it without lights!

It sure as hell scared me to death flying out there. I admit it. I'd been shot down three times in helicopters in Vietnam. I've taken dead troops out of crashed choppers. Flying helicopters is not a thing I enjoy doing.

The pilots wore PVS5s, night vision goggles. The glasses could only be worn for thirty minutes at a time. Then the copilot, who'd been reading the map and the instruments because they couldn't be seen with the goggles on, would switch with the pilot and he'd wear them. It was tough. Seiffert and his pilots flew various routes each night to improve their proficiency.

Knowing what I now know, I would have proposed providing General Gast with some help at Yuma. I considered it, but I didn't do it. Delta had at least a dozen people who had been deeply involved in helicopter operations in Vietnam. They knew how to plan and execute them; they knew when an operation was a good one and when it was a bad one. Master Sergeant Franklin (No Lips), for example, had a tremendous amount of experience in helicopters. I should have left two of these men out with General Gast.

Gast was no fool and he was a quick learner. He knew all there was to know about navigational systems, but he didn't know how to fly a helicopter. He'd been a jet jockey. I could have left two of my best men in Yuma to help and assist him. I didn't want to give up those two guys, though. They had critical parts to play in the take-down of the embassy, and I felt I needed them. I may have made a mistake. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe I was. I don't know. Hindsight is hard to live with.

THIRTY-SIX

WHILE IN YUMA
I took part in the first fuel blivet parachute drop.

Those huge round rubber containers, along with their hoses and pumps, had the capacity of carrying 500 gallons of fuel each. They could be rolled along the ground by eight or ten men, or pulled by small wheeled gas-powered tugs called Mules. At 2000 hours, General Gast and I, along with staff officers, prepared ourselves for the first run-through of the proposed refueling operation. The desert night was cool and fully illuminated by a large white moon. The choppers were lined up in a row, neat as pins. General Gast, who knew nothing about parachute operations, was feeling uncomfortable with what was about to happen. His instincts were correct. I took one look at the row of parked RH-53Ds and the map showing the path the C-130 aircraft were taking and knew we had trouble. I asked General Gast if he'd let me be responsible for the drop, a request he happily acceded to. With a grin he said, “If this gets screwed up, you and I are going to Mexico.” If the C-130s maintained their original track, they'd fly on an axis directly over the parked choppers. Any malfunction in the drop and the blivets from the aircraft would wipe out one or all of the Sea Stallions.

The approach lane was changed by radio and the C-130s banked in a half circle and came in at a ninety-degree angle to the helos. It proved to be a fortunate change of plan. Twelve blivets were shoved out of the C-130s, but only two parachute
canopies opened. What a mess. These huge blivets burst on impact like ripe pumpkins dropped from a twenty-story building. It was like striking oil. And it was a disaster. An investigation showed the Army parachute riggers had improperly loaded the blivets. There was enough embarrassment to go around for everyone to share. A lot of experimentation followed. The next rehearsal ran smoothly and the blivets landed softly and intact. Once on the ground, these enormous rubber gas tanks posed new problems. First, they weren't as easy to move as we had thought, particularly if they landed in depressions or on rocky ground. Secondly, and worse, pumping the fuel from them to the helicopters took a very long time—time, in Iran, the mission would not have. The door was left open to explore other possibilities.

The approach of Christmas surfaced another problem, one on which General Jones and I did not agree. Delta left Yuma on December 20th and returned to Fort Bragg where everybody stood down for the holidays. 1 thought this was a mistake and that we should have returned to the isolation of Camp Smokey. I couldn't see how we were going to maintain operations security if the troops went home. There were now a heck of a lot of people involved in this effort—Marine pilots, helicopter crews, Air Force pilots, maintenance and mechanical people, Pentagon staff officers, Rangers' command staff, Delta. There was no way of knowing what someone would say when he was in the sack with Mama or out at a party with a couple of glasses of eggnog keeping him festive.

I recommended to General Vaught that Delta base at Camp Smokey and that the pilots stay out west. Most of my people were angry with me. They claimed they would keep their mouths shut. General Jones overrode my recommendation. Delta came back to the Stockade. A contingency plan was welded together to get everyone back at short notice. Delta trained half a day during the Christmas holiday period. I do not know what the other units did.

Because in Washington it was thought more convenient, Delta did not return to Camp Smokey after the holidays, but instead remained at its Stockade location in Fort Bragg.

Right after New Year's, on Friday and Saturday, the 4th and 5th of January 1980, a crucial meeting of the Joint Task Force commanders was held in Fort Bragg. In attendance were General Vaught, General Gast, the CIA liaison officer, Colonel Pittman, Lieutenant Colonel Seiffert, some of the helo pilots, the Ranger Battalion's CO and key staff, Delta's commanders and staff, planners representing intelligence, operations, communications, weather, logistics, and administration for the Task Force.

On Friday Chuck Pittman and I got off to the side and discussed the number of helicopters necessary to accomplish the mission. We readdressed the number of Delta operators and support personnel such as drivers and Farsi translators and considered the new figure of nearly 120 men and how their body weight and equipment could be distributed. With this figure and in view of start-up problems, maintenance, fuel requirements, and loads, Colonel Pittman thought the mission could not leave from the desert refueling site, which was now being called Desert One, with fewer than six flyable helicopters. He pointed out that if you needed two helicopters, because of their undependability, you actually had to have three.

This was one of the key lessons the military learned in Vietnam. Helicopters are unreliable and backups must always be included in plans which use them. The RH-53D helicopter doesn't start up by simply turning a key and having a battery kick the motor over. These monsters crank hydraulically. In Iran, at the hide-site, there would be an additional twist. Normally, when it's parked on a carrier or airfield, an RH-53D is started by an auxiliary power unit. It connects to the helicopter and gives power until the engine catches. In Iran, however, there would be no APUs available. Instead, each Sea Stallion would carry two canisters of compressed air, which would do the same job as the APU, that is, crank the turbines which drive the generator that supplies the voltage necessary to fire the plugs which ignite the fuel. Unlike the APU, however, once the pilot exhausts all of his compressed air, there is no more power for him to use. Once the compressed air was used
up, the helicopter might as well be a boulder. It sure as hell wasn't gonna fly.

Colonel Pittman said, “We should talk to General Vaught and say now, that without six flyable helicopters at the refueling site, Desert One, we cannot go forward.”

In the early afternoon, Pittman and I discussed with General Vaught the entire helo-insertion plan, starting from the carrier in the Gulf of Oman to a refuel site somewhere in the desert, on to Teheran and a hideout location, ending with the move to Manzariyeh. We reappraised the number of personnel and before we had finished, the total number of personnel needed to fly to Teheran had grown to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120.

Toward the end of this discussion, I told General Vaught that Pittman and I were now convinced that because the airlift requirement had increased to nearly 120 men and their equipment, a minimum of six flyable helos would be required to go on from Desert One. It was a matter of weight. Without six helicopters the load at Desert One could simply not be lifted to Teheran. General Vaught listened carefully to us and accepted our findings and endorsed the recommendation.

To assure us of having six helicopters able to fly from Desert One, the staff planners added two additional choppers as backups to the six already on board
Kitty Hawk
. These two additional helicopters would eventually be onloaded to the carrier
Nimitz
(CVN 68), which was sailing to replace
Kitty Hawk
in the Indian Ocean.
Nimitz
would also receive the six Sea Stallions carried by
Kitty Hawk
. When I asked if there was a chance of adding more backup helos to
Nimitz
, General Vaught, Chuck Pittman, and their planners stated that only eight of the kinds of choppers we were going to use, RH-53Ds, would fit on her hangar deck. It was also pointed out that it would be imprudent, because of salt water corrosion problems, to park them on the carrier's flight deck. Another planner pointed out that Soviet photo interpreters would spot the presence of so many choppers on the flight deck and determine they were there for one reason and no other.

Another item had me edgy. After the embassy had been
stormed, Delta would move with the freed hostages across Roosevelt Avenue, which ran the entire length of the embassy's eastern wall, to await the arrival of the helos in a soccer stadium. It was important that the helo pilots practice flying into a stadium setting. We knew of one at Fort Carson, Colorado, which could be used for this purpose. General Vaught thought if we did it we'd run into a large security problem.

I said, “Well, I think it's a mistake if we don't do it.”

“Maybe if we have the time we'll do it, but I just don't see us taking the time to run in and out of a ballpark.”

“Yes, sir.”

On Saturday we began where we had left off on Friday. The hostages would be flown out of Manzariyeh first, followed by Delta and the Ranger unit. The size of the entire force, including released hostages, it was pointed out by one of the air planners, now posed a lift problem for the C-130s. Consequently, these aircraft would be replaced by larger C-141 StarLifters.

A wide range of issues surfaced.

The meteorologists, who had been selected from the Air Force's Air Weather Service, presented their long-range forecast for the region. They pointed out that throughout Iran there were several small weather stations, which were, during the reign of the Shah, fully staffed. Information gathered by them had been shared with the rest of the world. With the chaos that spread across the country following the Shah's departure, these stations, except for ones in the larger cities, had been abandoned. It was therefore going to be very difficult to get an accurate fix on the weather any mission into Iran would face.

Although crucial questions remained—the exact locations of Desert One and the hideout—I left the conference feeling very good. The scheme appeared sound. Its various threads were being slowly and carefully braided together.