Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (17 page)
While Bucky paced, I scoured the map for a better alternate hide site. Charlie stalked off to be alone.
When the helos were forty-five minutes late, Vaught popped up on the radio. “The choppers are ten minutes out!”
Bucky’s face bloomed into his familiar grin. “Boys, we’re still in business!”
Five minutes later, I heard the first rotor blades beating the air to the south. Across Desert One’s moon-lit surface, the men of Delta rose to their feet. The rotors’ steady drumming grew louder until, one by one, the helos appeared over the horizon. We counted only six. It was enough.
I watched as Charlie jogged over to meet the first one as soon as it touched down. As each bird landed it was guided to a tanker to begin refueling. Hustling to make up for lost time, the Delta elements began muscling the cargo nets and equipment toward the helos. I was standing on the road with Bucky and Don Simmons, one of the command sergeant majors, when Charlie walked up, his eyes narrow and his jaw set.
“Well, we only have six helos here, and Ed Sieffert says one of them is down with a hydraulic problem,” he said. “We’re going to have to scrub the mission.”
His words hit like a punch in the gut. My mind flashed to the hostages, our six months of planning and training, the grueling trip from Wadi Kena. Instantly, I knew if we didn’t go forward now, we’d never go at all. There were just too many moving parts. I turned to Simmons. “Don, I think we need to try and go on with five.”
Don agreed. “If we don’t go now, we’ll never get another chance.”
Just as I turned to tell Charlie what we thought, he said to Bucky, “I’ve talked to Vaught. Start getting everyone loaded on the C-130s.”
I knew it was a waste of time to say anything else.
Analyzing it afterward, I knew Charlie was right. The decision to abort was made during planning, as it should be, when the planners’ veins were less charged with anger, bravado, or unreasoning hope. We had calculated the possibility of losing helos and agreed that fewer than six meant we had to abort. The word was written in big capital letters on the mission’s contingency matrix: “Fewer than six helos—ABORT.”
But at the moment Charlie made the call, I was deeply, deeply disappointed. I looked at Pete and Bucky and could see sorrow and frustration written on their faces, too. We had been close enough to grab the prize, and now, in an instant, we felt crushing defeat.
Thrumming props and rotors filled the air with noise, the fuel truck still blazed in its full glory, and underneath it all, the bus women wailed. Now that the mission was off, all the noise and light suddenly seemed like beacons for Iranian fighter planes. That was no truer than it had been five minutes before, but now, urgently, we all wanted to leave. Bucky mustered the element leaders and assigned us each an aircraft for exfiltration. Having lugged the massive cargo nets to helos, some of the men now had to lug them back, three men to a net. I saw Logan and his sergeant major, Dave Cheney, begin shepherding B Squadron into the back of one of the tankers. There was a lot less room than there should’ve been, because the floor was still layered with partially full fuel bladders.
Behind the C-130 I could see Jim Schaefer’s helo, still refueling. When B Squadron was all aboard, the loadmaster raised the rear ramp and secured the troop doors. In a hurry-up abort status, in a propeller driven sandstorm at night, we had to be careful to take the time to account for every man. I began walking toward Logan’s bird to confirm that all forty-five of his men were with him. Up ahead, I could hear Schaefer’s helo turning up and through the airborne grit, dimly saw its dark form begin to shift. New dust clouds churned off the Talon’s tail and I figured Schaefer had finished refueling and was moving his bird out of the C-130’s way.
At that moment, I heard a noise that didn’t sound right: a loud popping. Then: a great rushing
whump!
A giant fireball bloomed where Schaefer’s helo had been, swallowing the tail of Logan’s C-130. A wall of savage heat raced thirty yards to where I was standing and snapped at my face, pushing me back. Flames cloaked the entire rear half of the Talon, trapping Logan and his men inside with thousands of gallons of aviation fuel. I couldn’t see what had happened. I didn’t know then that in the darkened dust storm, vertigo caused Schaefer to fly his helicopter slightly up and over into the C-130. Now the RH-53 was embedded by its rotor blades in the Talon’s upper fuselage, burning like the fuse on a bomb.
The fuel bladders would detonate any second. Instinctively, I turned to run, take cover. But after a few steps, I stopped, filled with shame.
What are you
doing? I thought.
Logan’s in there!
I turned to charge in, but the violent heat forced me back. I was dimly aware of others around me, shocked, staring, straining forward, but beaten back by the ferocious blaze.
In that moment, I knew two things: That my brothers were going to die in that fire, and that the only thing I could do for them was pray. “Father, please don’t let these men die!” I said. “We put ourselves in your hands and now they’re all going to die unless you perform a miracle!”
The Talon’s starboard troop door burst open, and I saw men begin to spill out of the inferno and hit the desert floor at a dead run. I learned later that Logan and his men had opened both the port door and the rear ramp only to find walls of flame. The starboard troop door was jammed shut and the Talon crew chief couldn’t budge it. But big Dave Cheney had stepped past the crew chief and rammed the door open. Then he and Logan stood on either side of it, shouting, “Don’t panic! Keep moving! Single file!”
One by one, like jumpers at a drop zone, the men of Delta had crept forward inside the aircraft. Fire licked down into the fuselage. The overhead burst into flame. The cabin temperature spiked higher and higher. With each step toward the door, each man felt certain that in the next second the plane would explode with him inside it. Staff Sergeant Chris Abel later told me, “I felt the flames coming right down the tunnel of the fuselage from the cockpit direction. AVGAS fumes filled the fuselage. I didn’t know where the fire was coming from, but I knew, sitting on all that fuel, it wasn’t going to be long before it would explode.”
Abel said that Cheney, in his booming voice, kept yelling, “One at a time! Don’t panic!”
By the light of moon and fire, I saw Logan’s men running toward me, away from the flaming plane. As they approached, I could see that the heat inside the fuselage was so intense that the webbing on many of their load-bearing vests melted into their field jackets. With the other element commanders, I began directing traffic, shouting, “Go get on one of the other C-130s!”
Several gave me a look that said I was crazy: getting on another fuel laden Talon was the last thing they wanted to do. But the
very
last thing they wanted to do was to be left behind in Iran. The men of B Squadron quickly distributed themselves among the other C-130s and climbed aboard.
A couple of the Talons had already begun to taxi. I ran to the nearest bird, but as I started to climb aboard, the loadmaster blocked my way.
“We’re full. We can’t take anymore,” he said.
A little shocked, I backed away into the sand. Quickly, I scanned Desert One’s moonlit surface. I saw no one else on the ground. My heart began a steady gallop as my worse fear seemed to be coming true. I spotted another C-130 about a hundred yards away, but as I bolted toward it, the pilot began to taxi away from me. I ran faster, sending up a flare prayer:
Lord, don’t let me be left behind
.
The C-130 accelerated, but the soft dust covering the desert hard pack prevented the pilot from gaining too much speed. My legs pounded the sand. My lungs threatened to burst. Suddenly, the Talon stopped and I could hear its props turning faster as it prepared for takeoff. Lunging forward, I closed the distance, threw my hands up and grabbed the open door frame. Just as I thought the pilot would begin his takeoff roll with my butt hanging out over Iran, someone grabbed my arm and pulled me into the plane.
INSIDE, THE TALON was packed wall to wall with black-clad men, dusty and dejected, sitting on and wedged in among partially filled fuel bladders. Logan and Ed Sieffert were already onboard. I picked my way through them to the cockpit and got the pilot’s attention.
“See if you can get a fighter cap to escort us out of here,” I told him.
“Roger that,” he said.
I knew
Nimitz
had been standing by, ready to launch F-14 Tomcats to destroy the Ayatollah’s F-4 Phantoms if they tried to mobilize during the rescue operation. Now we needed the Tomcats to cover our exfiltration on the overloaded C-130s, which would make juicy targets as we limped back to Masirah.
Turning back to face the cargo area, I started counting people. Then I gave the pilot a number and told him to relay it to the C-130 that carried Charlie and Bucky.
Logan called to me, “We need to get some fighter cover.”
“It’s already done,” I said.
Wading back into the cabin, I wedged myself in between Delta operator Rudy Rodriguez and another man, and sat down near J.J. Byers, one of the crewmembers who had been on the burning C-130. Even in the low red light, I could see that the fire had scorched his olive-drab flight suit black. His face and hands were badly burned, the scalded skin scarlet and already erupting in blisters. He began to moan, then cry out, then scream as pain drove him toward hysteria. Delta medic Glenn Nickle and Mike Vinning, an explosives specialist with medical training, picked their way through the bladders and squeezed in beside the airman to help. Suddenly, J.J. stopped screaming and I could see him descending into shock. As Glenn and Mike administered water and painkillers, I reached over and put my hand on his boot and asked God to ease his pain and spare his life.
During the flight, the fuel bladders sloshed beneath us. I sat on the edge of one of them, across from a Farsi-speaking former Iranian general, an ex-pat who escaped Iran after the Shah went into exile. He went on the mission with us to run interference with Iranian air traffic control if they picked us up on radar. As I watched, the general began shuffling his feet, kicking at something between the bladders beneath him. In the humming dark, I peered into the crack between the bladders and saw the tip of a familiar shape.
“Stop!” I shouted and reached forward, grabbing the general’s foot with my left hand. Leaning in, I slid my right hand between the fuel bladders and extracted a LAW rocket. Somehow, in the scramble to get aboard, the LAW got separated from its owner. When Rudy Rodriguez saw the rocket, his face turned completely white, and he started crossing himself.
The flight to Masirah was a dismal trip, heavy with the lead blanket of a failure that could not have been more complete. Not only had the mission not made it past Desert One, but we’d left Fred and Dick Meadows in potentially fatal circumstances in Tehran. Also, six Navy helicopters now sat on the desert floor, four of them in perfect working order. Worse, I learned later, the helos contained detailed A to Z descriptions of Operation Eagle Claw.
In the dark chill of the Talon cabin, amid the steady propeller drone, men who had not slept in more than twenty-four hours now dropped off. Those who remained awake didn’t say much. As we flew through the night, I wondered how many men had died. I later found out we lost eight: Five C-130 crewmembers and three men from Schaeffer’s aircrew, including one who’d been with him since Vietnam. Eight Americans who put themselves in harm’s way for others.
Why, Lord?
I prayed for their families.
I also worried about the hostages: The odds were sky high that when the Iranian terrorists discovered our brazen incursion, the murders would begin.
Three hours later, we landed in Masirah, and immediately set up a small medical facility. Glenn and Mike, using just the supplies they had in their kits kept J.J. alive, staying right with him all the way back. Now we put bigger treatment teams on him and the rest of our wounded. After a short time on the ground, we transloaded to Starlifters and flew back to Wadi Kena where a fully outfitted surgical unit took over.
The landing in Egypt brought good news. The Iranians issued a statement: Even though the Americans invaded their country, they would not retaliate against the hostages. For a third time since the disaster, I had reason to say a prayer of thanks.
The hostage crisis, including our failed rescue attempt, sank Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Seven months after Eagle Claw, Ronald Reagan beat Carter in the 1980 elections. And two months after that, literally minutes after Reagan was sworn into office, the Iranians unconditionally released all the hostages.
Our failure at Desert One created conflicting emotions for me. I was torn between my grief over the deaths of eight good men, disappointment that the hostages were still hostages, and my elation that God saved so many who would tell you today they thought they were going to die.
Some folks have asked me, if God is so benevolent, why didn’t he save them all? I’ve wondered the same thing. I cannot say why those eight men died. All I can say is fifty lived.
Sudan 1983
THE MOMENT THE 737’s NOSE WHEEL rotated off the Heathrow runway, the tray table on the seat in front of me broke off and landed in my lap. Sitting next to me, Navy Commander Larry Bailey chuckled. “Looks like it’s going to be a great trip.”
Out the window, I could see London falling away beneath us as we headed for Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The Sudanese had asked the American military to help it stand up a special operations/hostage rescue force. The Pentagon responded with a team of five including a two-star general, a pair of lieutenant colonels, Larry, and me. I was a major by then, but on this mission, still the junior man.
This multi-service team was a direct outgrowth of the disaster at Desert One. After the failed rescue attempt, the Pentagon appointed an investigative panel led by Admiral James L. Holloway, a former chief of naval operations. The Holloway Commission blamed much of the mission’s failure on the ad hoc nature of the Eagle Claw force, patched together with people from every service, some of whom were necessary and others who just wanted a shot at glory. None trained together long term. None had confidence in the others. Within weeks of the Holloway Commission’s report, DoD began forming a permanent joint special operations task force with elements from the Army, Air Force, and Navy. Delta became part of that task force.