“Hey Frank. Hey Bob,” I called.
“Changiz, what the hell you doing up there, buddy? And who’s the babe with you?”
Anya invited them up, and after some shots of vodka, proceeded to get it on with the three of us at once. No shame, no inhibitions.
* * *
Having graduated SF scuba school, I was classified as Whiskey 9, which put me in the rare company of being Ranger, scuba, and HALO qualified. Due in part to my enhanced skill set, HQ transferred me from ODA 562 to ODA 564, which was a Green Light (HALO) team. My job was 11 Bravo—junior weapons man.
Each SF A-team boasted two officers, two medics, two commo guys, two intel, two engineers, and two weapons specialists. That way if one specialist went down in combat, the other could take his place. Or, if need be, the team could split into two units. Teams were structured to wage unconventional warfare and were capable of working independently in a decentralized manner.
In other words, we had a lot of flexibility and were given a high degree of responsibility and independence.
Green Light team’s mission was to deploy behind enemy lines and destroy infrastructure and matériel. We were also designated a Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM) team, which meant that one man was chosen to carry an eighty-five-pound tactical nuclear weapon.
Guess who volunteered to carry it?
Our team sergeant, Bob Fleming, explained, “It’s a dangerous job, Changiz. But you’re perfect, because you’ve had extensive HALO training.”
After passing DOD’s personnel reliability program to make sure I was trustworthy and mentally stable, I was selected, but didn’t really understand what I had signed up for.
During training, I learned that one strategic reality of the Cold War was that Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact forces woefully outnumbered our US and NATO Pact counterparts in terms of manpower and armaments. The US had addressed this gap with the massive development of nuclear weapons. According to the doctrine of “massive retaliation” first expressed by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, any Soviet military aggression, especially in Europe, would be met with a nuclear onslaught of massive proportions.
Because it was a potentially suicidal strategy that could result in the death of millions of people, the US in its search for alternative options developed the concept of limited nuclear war. So, if Warsaw Pact forces launched a blitzkrieg on Western Europe, smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons could be used to delay the communist assault long enough for reinforcements to arrive.
The B-54 SADM (or backpack nuke) that I had been chosen to carry was one such weapon. It had entered the US arsenal in 1964, stood eighteen inches tall, and packed a maximum explosive power of under 1 kiloton—or the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT (roughly one-fifteenth the blast yield of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima). It had a bullet-shaped cone on one end and a twelve-inch control panel behind a plate secured with a combination lock on the other. The lock had phosphorescent paint on it to help us unlock the bomb at night.
Our mission in Green Team was to parachute behind enemy lines at night and use the B-54 SADM to destroy enemy airfields, tank depots, antiaircraft installations, and transportation infrastructure. We conducted our initial HALO training with the bomb at the Sicily Drop Zone at Fort Bragg. Our team sergeant, lean Vietnam vet Bob Fleming, did the first jump from 13,500 feet with the bomb held in a rucksack strapped to his chest. I was one of four men who volunteered to jump with him.
I was curious to see how this would work. The five us were standing near the rear of a four-engine turboprop C-130 checking our equipment, when our company commander shouted “Stand by!” He tapped each of us out with the order “Go!” We jumped and started falling at twenty feet per second with the cold wind in our faces. I loved that sensation of falling and looking down at the green earth below.
We’d been instructed to land six feet apart, scurry to a predetermined rally point behind some trees, unseal the special bomb jump container (which looked like a metal garbage can), and inspect the bomb to make sure it was intact and not leaking radiation. Then we were supposed to slip the SADM into a rucksack, bury our chutes and the container, and carry the nuke to the detonation site, where an inspector would go through a dozen procedures to arm the bomb.
We trained with a dummy SADM that weighed and looked exactly the same as the real thing. During our first jump, Sergeant Fleming came down so fast that he lost consciousness at 4,000 feet, failed to open his chute, and started spinning. We screamed at him from above, “Bob! Bob, wake the fuck up!” to no avail.
“Sarge!” I screamed over and over until my lungs hurt. “SARGE!”
I thought Bob was a goner. But when his reserve chute opened automatically at 3,500 feet, it jolted him awake.
“Bob, you son of bitch. Look out!”
He was still disoriented. We called to him and helped guide him in safely. As soon as we touched down, the four of us ran over to Bob and found him in bad shape, woozy as hell, and his eyes completely red because the blood vessels had burst from the g-force of the jolt of his parachute—a medical condition known as subconjunctival hemorrhage.
The other three guys loaded Bob into a jeep and drove him to Womack Hospital, while I slipped the nuke into a rucksack and carried it to the detonation site. It took Bob forty-five days to recover.
A week later, it was my turn to do a static-line jump in full gear from 4,000 feet, holding an M-16 and with the dummy B-54 SADM in a rucksack strapped to my chest. Because my chute was attached to a line to the aircraft, it opened automatically. So that wasn’t a problem. At 1,250, I pulled a cord that released the rucksack from my chest, causing it to tumble to my feet. That way, the container with the bomb could land first and wouldn’t crush me.
But when I released the combined weight of the bomb and container—which amounted to more than ninety pounds—my body jerked back sharply and threw me off-balance. I steadied myself with the lines and used them to guide away from bushes and other obstacles. The bomb landed on the grassy field and I did a parachute landing fall (PLF) beside it—touching the ground balls of the feet first, then outer side of the calf, outer side of the upper leg, side of butt, and side of back.
Three of my teammates did PLFs nearby and helped me up.
“Good job, monkey,” one of them said.
I wasn’t insulted. The guy on the team who carried the warhead was affectionately known as “the monkey” because of the bent-over posture he had to assume when carrying it.
“Monkey this,” I growled back.
My lower back barking like an angry dog, we buried the container and slipped the bomb into a rucksack, which they lifted onto my back. My teammates carried my food and ammo, while I broke into a trot with the nuke strapped to my back. Two teammates mirrored me on either side to keep me from falling, because the solid-metal nuke was awkward as hell to carry.
While I ran, I asked myself, What the fuck were you thinking when you volunteered for this job?
Military regulations required that no one individual service member had the ability to arm a nuclear weapon. So the code to unlock the B-54’s cover plate had to be divided between two Green Light team members. Nor could we ever let something so lethal fall into enemy hands. For that purpose, one of our demolition guys carried the appropriate amount of explosives to destroy the bomb without triggering a nuclear explosion. Or so we were told.
Since the SADM had been built largely devoid of electrons to make it resistant to electromagnetic pulses, it relied on mechanical timers, which weren’t very accurate. So we had to get close to the target.
Once we reached it, the code men would unlock the cover plate, remove it, and set the timer. Then they would reach into a small compartment at the top left of the control panel, pull out the hand-sized explosive charge used to trigger the bomb’s nuclear chain reaction, place the charge in the armed position, and flip the switch. Now that the bomb was armed, we had roughly forty-five minutes to beat a retreat before it went off
.
In a real war, our orders called for us to watch the device from a distance to assure that it didn’t fall into enemy hands. We knew that if we weren’t vaporized by the nuclear blast, we’d almost certainly get scorched by the hot wind or exposed to serious radiation. Not a fun prospect either way.
The long and short of it was that if our Green Light team was ever called upon to deploy the SADM in combat, we would only have a general idea of when it would explode, which probably didn’t matter, because it would almost certainly be a suicide mission. Even if we were fortunate enough to survive the bomb’s detonation and radiation, we’d probably be trapped behind enemy lines with slim odds of slipping out without being captured or killed.
I did at least three HALO jumps with the dummy bomb each month. And once a week, I had to jog five miles with that heavy bastard strapped to my back.
One rainy night during a three-day exercise at Camp Mackall, I was carrying the B-54 SADM and its metal container strapped to my back and wearing a bulky chemical suit, gas mask, helmet, rain paints, rain jacket, and holding an M16. The rain came down hard so I couldn’t see shit, and as I was running I fell into a four-feet-deep hole and smashed my face.
Stars spun in my head. When I tried to climb out, I slipped and slid in the muddy hole, and couldn’t get any traction. My plight elicited peals of laughter from my teammates. Eventually they helped me out, and we continued on our way.
Before the night was over, we had to clear four checkpoints. After we reached the camp and handed over the SADM, we were showered with chemicals to wash away the radiation. It reminded me of a scene out of my favorite James Bond movie, Dr. No.
I read somewhere recently that the US military had as many as 300 SADMs in its arsenal at the height of the Cold War. The last of them were declared obsolete and destroyed in 1988. At least one SADM parachute container survives and is currently displayed at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
If you ever get a chance to see it, picture yourself running with that thing for five miserable miles, and then imagine the damage it’s done to my back!
* * *
While I was lugging the SADM around Camp Mackall, things were going from bad to worse in the Middle East. The new Iranian government of Ayatollah Khomeini finally freed the US hostages on January 20, 1981—the last day of President Carter’s term in office. The radical change in Iran’s relationship with the United States, from close friend to foe, encouraged Iraq’s military strongman Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in a bid to annex the disputed oil-rich Khuzestan and achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf.
Saddam Hussein’s full-scale offensive with airpower and six divisions of ground troops and armor was met by strong Iranian resistance and quickly bogged down. The war between the two countries dragged on until August 1988, making it the longest conventional war of the twentieth century and inflicting massive human and financial damage on both sides—including at least a half million Iranian and Iraqi soldiers and an equivalent number of civilians.
But the conflict that seemed to get the most direct US attention wasn’t the Iran-Iraqi War, it was the civil war in nearby Lebanon. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, France had assumed control over Lebanon and Syria under a mandate of the League of Nations and created Greater Lebanon as a safe haven for Maronite Christians. In 1943, Lebanon gained independence.
Maronite Christians controlled the presidency and much of the economy, and the large Sunni and Shiite Muslim populations were guaranteed a quota of seats in the parliament and certain positions in the government. This unsteady political balance lasted through the 1960s and early 1970s and allowed the country to prosper. Its capital, Beirut, became the commercial, intellectual, and banking center of the Middle East.
The influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon from what had once been the Palestinian territory, which started with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and continued through the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Jordan, slowly started to tip the political balance. In the mid-1970s the PLO, supported by Lebanese Sunni Muslims, established a stronghold in western Beirut and gained control of large swaths of southern Lebanon.
Fighting between militia groups representing the various political factions in Lebanon broke out in 1975 and quickly escalated. In January 1976 over 1,000 people were killed when Maronite militias overran the PLO-controlled East Beirut slum of Karantina. In reprisal, PLO units attacked the Maronite town of Damour.
As sectarian violence spiraled, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad brokered a truce that essentially split the country in two, with Maronite Christian groups controlling northern Lebanon and Palestinian militias dominating the south. Beirut remained divided: fighting continued there between the PLO and Muslim-based militias in the west and between the PLO and Christians in East Beirut and Mount Lebanon. The demarcation between the two groups became known as the Green Line.
Meanwhile, PLO raids across the border into Israel and the PLO’s attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London caused Israel to retaliate with attacks on the PLO in south Lebanon and with bombing raids in West Beirut. With civilian casualties mounting in and around Beirut, the US brokered a truce in August 1982 that called for the withdrawal of PLO fighters and Israeli troops from Beirut and a multinational force of US Marines and French and Italian units to ensure the departure of the PLO and protect defenseless civilians.
But the country remained in chaos. In early 1983, I was selected with thirty other Green Berets from 3rd Battalion to deploy to a Lebanese army base in West Beirut. Our MTT (mobile training team) mission was to instruct Lebanese soldiers how to combat Iranian-backed Hezbollah rebels who occupied the Syrian-controlled Bekka Valley northeast of Beirut and were aggressively pushing into the eastern sector of the city, which had recently been abandoned by the PLO.
My job as the 11 Bravo weapons man was to teach SF patrol tactics—much as I had done with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. I was selected in part because I spoke Farsi and some Arabic. We also had a Lebanese American SF guy in our group who was fluent in Arabic. About half of the Lebanese soldiers had some English and French. We overcame other language barriers with hand signals and hands-on instruction.
The atmosphere in and around the base and especially in the western part of the city was tense with daily battles between Hezbollah rebels and Maronite militia units. I got used to falling asleep at night to the sound of small arms and mortar fire. We also maintained a safe house in the city that we used when fighting around the Lebanese army base grew too intense.
I was about to climb into a 2.5 ton truck to run field drills with the Lebanese soldiers at around 1 P.M. on April 23, when a huge explosion ripped through the air and literally lifted me and the truck off the ground. My startled Lebanese American teammate turned to me and asked, “What the hell was that?”
“Don’t know, but it wasn’t good.”
Minutes later we received word via emergency radio that the US Embassy had been attacked. Most of us in the MTT had received combat medical training, so we grabbed our medical kits, fired up the trucks and jeeps, and sped down pitted, potholed streets, past destroyed and damaged buildings, homes, and apartment towers two and a half miles to the embassy.
The scene we encountered there was horrifying. Black smoke and dust rose from the seven-story horseshoe-shaped building. When the smoke partially cleared I saw that the entire front bay and central facade had been destroyed. Layers of rubble and collapsed balconies clogged the blackened entrance. Nearby sat a crater and the charred, smoking chassis of the van that had carried 2,000 deadly pounds of explosives.
We had arrived approximately twenty minutes after detonation, but judging from the sights, sounds, and smells around the embassy it seemed like it had just happened. Everywhere I looked I saw death, pain, destruction, and chaos.
A handful of freaked-out Marines in full combat-readiness
guarded the gate as though they were expecting a new wave of attacks. We had radioed ahead, so when they saw us, they let us through and one of the Marines shouted at our backs, “It’s fucking hell. We’re undermanned and totally vulnerable. God help us.”
The first order of business was to clear the road leading up to the gate so emergency vehicles could get through. Then half of us grabbed our M16s and secured a perimeter around the embassy. The rest of us shouldered our medical kits and got to work. There were so many embassy employees—both locals and Americans, emerging from the damaged building, some completely disoriented, others staggering and bleeding from wounds to their heads, faces, and various parts of their bodies—that we didn’t know where to start. The white dust that covered many of them made them look like ghosts.
We stepped over and around rubble, fragments of metal, and shards of glass that covered a large swath. I set down my kit and started wiping blood off of people’s faces and out of their eyes and then applying bandages. Most were in some form of shock, and many of them were suffering from lacerations.
Two of my teammates joined me and we worked together, looking for the most seriously wounded and trying the best we could to stop the bleeding and calm them down. We moved from body to body. If they were dead, we’d turn them over. Body parts we covered with abandoned clothing, paper, or anything we could find.
I was so hyped up on adrenaline, I didn’t notice the passage of time. But I became aware that ambulances and fire trucks had arrived and emergency workers had set up a temporary triage area on the side of the embassy. We moved the wounded there, helped them onto stretchers, and loaded stretchers into ambulances.
People passed us cups of water.
We worked through the night. When the sun came up the next morning, I noticed that the dead and wounded had been cleared from the grounds. Now began the grim and dangerous task of clearing the damaged building.
Sometime during the afternoon of the 24th, we returned to our safe house for a few hours of rest. Then we returned to the embassy to help clear rubble and guard it against a follow-up attack.
Full Battle Rattle Page 6