Delta Force (30 page)

“There are shepherds living over there. You better keep on course. They are more used to hearing the crowing of the morning cock than they are of helicopters.”

An Iranian, who will be known as Al, was young, fit, and very well acquainted with Teheran, having been one of the Shah's bodyguards. He spoke nearly perfect English. Because Delta needed someone with his expertise the intelligence community handed him over to us. He fit in and was well liked by the operators. He made it clear time and time again that he could not afford to be taken prisoner in Iran. I supposed he may have worked for the National Intelligence and Security Operation known as SAVAK. He had a price on his head. It was peculiar that he would want to go back to Iran with an American rescue force. There were specific areas in the plan which Al was not permitted to know. If, in fact, he was captured, it was prudent not to have him know too much. When his feet were put to the fire, would he really accompany Delta on its mission?

Another detail caught my attention. It came under “old business.” I received a letter from Stuttgart. It was marked URGENT! Written by some numb-nuts from the U.S. Army Europe transportation office, it informed me that they could no longer afford to store my furniture and if I didn't collect it they were going to auction it off. I called General Vaught.

THIRTY-EIGHT

IT WAS MID-MARCH
.

The rehearsal scheduled for that afternoon was out at the range where the operators had laid out and built an area to the embassy compound's scale. Every distance had been marked out and a section of wall had been built for the men to climb over.

I would have gone out to the rehearsal with the troops except I got tied up on the phone. When I hung up I walked through the Stockade. Maybe someone there who had been left behind needed a lift. Something told me to check S & T, the Selection and Training area.

No one was in sight. The room was empty. But lying on the floor was something that angered me. There, without a soul around, were thirty or forty pounds of high explosives. Fast Eddie had been using the area for his workshop. On the table were mounds of blasting caps. Nearby was a pair of crimpers and a galvanometer. In other words, left out, completely unattended, were all the makings necessary to build a large explosive charge.

I jumped into my pickup and raced out to the range. Red, White, and Blue Elements had ridden out to the range in trucks, gone over the wall, taken down the embassy mock-up, withdrawn to another area representing the soccer stadium, and there, lined up into helicopter loads. Delta had run this exercise a hundred times at least. It had become drudgery. In mid-March, people began to say, “Aw shit, not again!”

At the range I skewed to a halt and began looking for three
people. There were no excuses for what I'd found at the Stockade. I grabbed Buckshot.

“You've left a mess in S & T and I'll not tolerate leaving explosives unattended. You know the rules. Go back now and straighten it up!”

I grabbed Sergeant Major Shumate. He had nothing to do with leaving the explosives, but he was responsible for that area.

But this was nothing to what I did to Fast Eddie.

“You're stupid! Do you know what you did? You don't? You left forty pounds of explosives laying in the middle of the floor in the Stockade—unattended!”

“Yeah, but Boss—”

“I don't give a rat's ass. Now you get yourself up there or you're going out of this unit. A sergeant, no less, and in this unit!”

“Boss, it was just a mistake. I didn't think it would make any difference.”

“You run off half-cocked. You don't think things through. Just get your ass up there!”

Buckshot, when he came back to the exercise, was muttering, “Well, this makes the twenty-second time I've been fired.” It fell off him like water off a duck's back. But I'd gotten his attention.

Walt Shumate, on the other hand, was really bent out of shape. Before he went over to see me, cunning devil that he is, he stopped by to see Ish.

“What's wrong with the Old Man?”

Once he'd gotten the lay of the land, he walked over to me. He said, “I don't think you were fair to me. I wasn't a party to that and I don't think I deserve what you gave me.”

“Sergeant Major.” I didn't even call him Walter. “Sergeant Major, I don't want to discuss the matter with you.”

Fast Eddie stayed away from me entirely. He really screwed up and now he was a very concerned citizen. He was afraid I'd lost confidence in him and that now I'd change tasks and give his wall responsibility to someone else. To get back in my good graces, he wanted to do something extraordinary,
something that would prove why I shouldn't lose respect for him.

In mid-March there was nothing else happening that could be called exciting or dramatic or even mildly interesting. My chewing out subordinates was the only action at hand. It was a down time, a time of lethargy, of mild depression.

Six full-blown rehearsals had been conducted—C-130s, choppers, Rangers, the whole bag—six of them and another had been scheduled for the end of March.

A hundred times the embassy mock-up on our back lot at the range had been assaulted. Hundreds and hundreds of times the nine-foot wall, which had been built right in the Stockade, had been climbed and dropped over. The days of March were dead days.

Life for Ish had become a lot more livable because 90 percent of the questions that had bedeviled him in November had been answered. We now believed that the hostages were being kept in four buildings: the DCM's residence, the Ambassador's residence, the chancellery, the staff cottages. We knew which way the doors opened, the location of the keys and other unlocking devices. We had a track of the routines the guards kept to, and where they stayed. The workbooks were thick with detail.

No one knew precisely where those ZSU-23-4 Light Armored Chassis were, but in the event they should rumble up to the compound, we were working on something that would neutralize them.

The dumps, which still came in twice a day, were shorter, and didn't contain much new information. Ish, however, continued to work toward the ideal—trying to determine, room by room, where each of the hostages was, and how precisely they were being guarded.

The Red, White, and Blue Elements were out shooting in the morning. They were getting ready to go back to Yuma for their seventh complete rehearsal. The comment most often heard was, “We're finally going to learn how to get on a C-130.” No one would laugh.

Buckshot would arrive before me, around 8:00
A.M
. He'd
be back in the SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility) reading the night's traffic when I'd come in. He'd ask whether we should respond to a certain request he'd read and in most cases he'd have already drafted something for my approval. Then he'd go down and spend the morning watching the troops.

Boris could wait until the afternoon before he'd go to the range to work on a modification he'd made on the HK21's mount.

In the morning, to help him with his language skills, he'd have read several Russian language newspapers and journals.

Allen, who is a very serious individual, would be in at 7:30
A.M
. studying the model. He was a troop sergeant in Blue Element and his time was spent double- and triple-checking the plan, trying to find if he'd missed anything.

Then he'd hold a troop meeting where everyone would discuss his role and tasks. If anyone had a new idea this would be the time when it was discussed.

Allen would then go down to the range where he'd run into me and side by side we'd bust caps until shortly before lunch.

Walter Shumate would call in, “Say, Country, something has come up with my old car. I'm going to take it down to the shop and get it fixed. I'll be in around noon.”

Fast Eddie was very, very busy. He'd have come in to see me the day before.

“Boss, tomorrow I want you to come out and see the last shot on the wall. I've got it all designed. Want you to see it.”

I'd seen his wall come tumbling down perfectly ten times. This time I would have declined his offer and he'd be really let down. I'd send Buckshot.

At lunch, on this day in March, Buckshot would come back from Fast Eddie's demonstration full of praise.

“Boss, you should have seen it. It went down beautifully.”

This would make Fast Eddie very happy.

In the afternoon Walter would come in and work on his locks. He'd sit back in his area fumbling with them, taking them apart, putting them back together again.

I'd go back to him and we'd sit chewing the fat: talk about
Ron Terry getting killed in 'Nam, talk about Operation Masher, about trouble we'd had with the First Cav, about Plei Me and about living out in the jungle.

Allen, after chow, would grab one of the guys from B Squadron and they'd go out and run five miles. When he came back he'd grab some guys from his troop and from another one and they'd go out and play a very competitive game of volleyball.

Buckshot would conduct a meeting that afternoon about the Yuma rehearsal. He would convince me that he needed to go up to the Pentagon to help the planners coordinate the exercise.

Then he'd go out and play in Allen's volleyball game.

After he showered and cleaned up, he'd grab me, “Let's go have a couple of beers with the troops.”

Country would already have gone home. So would Sergeant Major Shumate. He'd have left before Country.

Buckshot and I would have an informal session with some of the operators over a couple of Buds.

An operator would grouch about one of the rules he didn't like. “You know, Boss, those special weapons, every time we want to use them we got to get official permission.”

I'd gone out and purchased seven or eight exotic handguns, Walther PPKs, HK P7s, Colt Pythons, and I'd learned if you let everyone use them they were going to get torn up.

Buckshot, who would have had two beers by then, would get a laugh. “You guys know you gotta see Daddy to get permission. You know how he is with his new toys. Come on, Boss, we're all grown up. We know how to handle—”

“Bullshit!” I'd say. “I've done some checking back there. I tried you guys out. Those weapons got screwed up. I had to go out and buy some new ones, so I ain't changing that policy.” Some eyes would roll.

“We know you feel strong about the shooting house.” This would be from another operator. “I know the last time we tried it we blew out all the fluorescents, but this time we've got a new tactic and a smaller charge. We'd like to show it to you in the morning.”

“I'll be there. What time do you want to do it?”

Someone in the back would speak up. “Boss, why in hell do we need another rehearsal out at the range tomorrow? Come on, lighten up. We go over that damn wall as fast as we're ever gonna.”

“Speed for its own sake,” I'd explain for the hundredth time, sounding each time more and more like a professor, “is the worst thing we can do. The object is to work on method. It'll be done faster when it's done more methodically.”

If the truth was known, I, too, was tired of climbing up and down that bloody wall.

It would go this way for an hour or so. Usually, at the end, we'd end up talking about the mission. For some questions there were no answers. “When is the President going to decide about the STOL flight?” “When should we darken our hair?” “When are we going to go?”

On the way out of the Stockade. Buckshot and I would walk past a quiet intel shop.

Ish would have left around 6:00. He was back to getting eight hours of sleep a night.

I'd arrive home disgusted with the Administration for not having the guts to use us. Over a drink, if there was anything decent, I'd watch television, if there wasn't I'd read. Anything to prevent myself from thinking about the mission. Sometimes I'd find myself grinding my teeth. “Fuck it. They ain't gonna send us!”

The first of the year had been too early, but February or early March would have been an ideal time to go. The news photographs for that period showed the armed guards spending a lot of time warming themselves around fires they'd laid in 55-gallon drums. It was cold in Teheran. When a guard's cold he is less alert. He has other things on his mind; his bed, his woman, a hot meal. He doesn't want to waste another freezing night, stomping his feet to keep warm, shuffling monotonously up and down the deserted, windswept streets around the embassy. This was good for the planned mission. It was better to go into Iran when the weather conditions favored us rather than them.

For Delta, mid-March was not only monotonous, it was damned frustrating!