During the third week of October, two-thirds of the way through the exercise, I was suddenly pulled away and told to report to 5th Group HQ. There I was instructed to assemble my gear and prepare for immediate deployment with 3rd Battalion. My gear included BDUs (battle dress uniform—heavyweight 60/40 cloth) with the “Elvis” collars, PASGT (personal armor system for ground troops) Kevlar helmet, PASGT body armor, mags, mag pouches, LC-1 pistol belt, 3-point LC-1 suspenders, first-aid pouch, M7 bayonet, M16A1 rifles, and M1911.
I reported to nearby Pope Air Force Base. Most of us believed this was simply another emergency deployment readiness exercise, even though we thought it odd that we were being called away in the middle of Robin Sage.
As we packed our rucksacks and checked our weapons, word started to filter through the barracks that we were going to a place called Grenada.
“Grenada? Where the hell is that?” I asked.
When we assembled at Pope a lieutenant colonel from 3rd Battalion briefed us, and we learned that Grenada was a small Caribbean island 1,500 miles southeast of Key West, Florida. It had a population of a little over 91,000 and covered a measly 220 square miles. The capital of Grenada, which happened to be the most southerly island in the Windward Island chain, was called St. George’s and boasted an estimated population of 7,500.
Most of us were scratching our heads wondering why we were going to a place none of us had ever heard of before that was a third the size of Maui. The lieutenant colonel announced in a booming voice that we were deploying to Grenada along with elements of the US Navy and Air Force in something called Operation Urgent Fury, ordered by our commander-in-chief, President Ronald Reagan.
My heart started pumping faster.
We learned that Grenada had a leftist government aligned with the Soviet Union and Cuba ruled by the New JEWEL Movement (NJM), headed by a Marxist, Maurice Bishop. Though he cooperated with the Soviets and Cubans, Bishop had sought to keep Grenada nonaligned. Apparently hard-line communists in the NJM felt that he wasn’t revolutionary enough and demanded he step down. Bishop refused, and on October 19, Prime Minister Bernard Coard and his wife, backed by the Grenadian military, deposed Bishop and placed him under arrest.
Pro-Bishop supporters weren’t having any of that. They took to the streets and freed Bishop, who was recaptured by soldiers and executed before a firing squad. Grenada’s new leader, Bernard Coard, imposed martial law.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Reagan administration officials were concerned about the safety of 140 US medical students at the True Blue campus of St. George’s University. They also worried about the presence of 700 Cuban military personnel and construction workers who were building a new runway at the Point Salines International Airport—a runway that President Reagan and his advisors thought could be used by the Soviets to expand their regional influence and to ferry arms and supplies to Central American insurgents.
This was a time when the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua, and leftist guerrillas were trying to overthrow the government of El Salvador.
It all seemed somewhat confusing to me. The long and short of it was that at 0530 hours on October 25, A and B Companies of the 1st Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment began parachuting from C-130s onto Port Salines International Airport and Operation Urgent Fury was under way. The Rangers were greeted by Cuban and Grenadian military fire from Soviet ZU-23 antiaircraft guns and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. They quickly knocked them out with the help of AC-130 gunships.
We landed that night after the Rangers had secured the airport and cleared Cuban jeeps and other vehicles that had been parked on the runway. Some were left conveniently with the keys inside. I remember numerous C-130s landing, lots of troops spilling out, klieg lights, sweat, generators growling, and officers shouting over them with megaphones. I overheard someone say, “One day I’m coming back here on vacation.”
We were directed to hump a half-mile to the beach and to start putting up tents. The only things we heard as we worked were the sounds of breaking waves and cawing seagulls.
Within two days, the US landed over 7,000 troops and had gained military control of Grenada. There had been skirmishes at the governor’s mansion, Richmond Hill Prison, the radio station, and outside the Cuban compound near the town of Calliste. Nineteen Americans died and over 600 Cubans were captured. My buddy, Ranger Staff Sergeant Joe Campbell, whom I had met in Egypt, was wounded in the leg while rescuing the US medical students from St. George’s University.
My team conducted night patrols in the bluffs above Port Salines Airport. With members of the 82nd Airborne, we camped on cots in a tent city set up on the beach near the airport and north of St. George’s. We passed the time playing hearts and blackjack and generally talking shit. Guys boasted about the loveliness of their girls back home and balls were busted.
A Grenadian-born sergeant I got to know in 3rd Battalion spoke the local language, which was a strange hybrid of English, Spanish, and Creole. So I hung with him a lot, and he helped me communicate with the locals, who seemed happy we were there to establish order and eager to sell us mangos, papayas, bananas, and guavas.
The island struck me as a sleepy, primitive Caribbean paradise. Probably still is.
The only real danger we encountered was from the mosquitoes and the bad jokes. A couple guys on my team got sunburns. We left five days after we arrived without having fired a single shot. Upon our return to Fort Bragg, we all received medals.
* * *
My five-year enlistment was set to expire at the end of ’84, which prompted Team Sergeant Fleming to get in my face. “We need you, Changiz,” he said. “Besides, where else are you going to get to do anything as fun as A-teams?”
Sergeant Fleming had a point. Maybe I was unusual, but to my way of thinking, running a gas station wasn’t nearly as exciting as jumping out of airplanes with a nuke strapped to my chest or deploying behind enemy lines. Even though I hadn’t seen any action in Grenada, I was proud to serve my new country as part of one of the most elite military units on the planet.
So I re-upped for another five years, was promoted to E-6 (Staff Sergeant), and continued to send most of my pay to my mother and sisters in California.
Around the same time, word reached me that 1st Group Special Forces was being re-formed and they were choosing guys from 5th Group and 7th Group to fill the ranks. Founded in 1957, 1st Group’s area of operations had been the Pacific theater. But in 1974, following the end of the Vietnam War, the group was deactivated. The decision had been made in DC to bring it back to life to support US strategic efforts in Asia and contingency operations throughout the world.
Intrigued by the prospect of deploying to East Asia, I was sent to see a Sergeant Major McCowsky, who was interviewing candidates for 1st Group.
Tall and dark, he looked at me and said, “Where are you from?”
I was thinking, Here we go again. I answered, “I was born in Iran, sir, but I’m a US citizen now.”
“So you’re an Arab.”
“No, sir. I was born in Iran, which isn’t an Arab country. People from Iran are Persians. But now I’m an American, sir, and very proud to be one.”
He frowned and cleared his throat. “I see that you’re a language specialist and speak Arabic and Farsi.”
“Look at my two-one, sir. There’s no mention of me being a language specialist in there.” DA Form 2-1 was essentially a personnel record that listed all deployments, specialized training, and education. One glance at that and he would have seen that I was much more than a language specialist.
Despite what my 2-1 said, McCowsky denied my application. Before I had a chance to get angry, another sergeant in 1st Group put my name in the system.
But prior to receiving orders to report to Fort Lewis, Washington, and help train the new battalions for 1st Group, I was selected with fourteen other Green Berets to go to South Korea to teach the South Koreans how to survive if captured. I had some expertise in this area because I was SERE qualifi
ed—meaning that I had endured three weeks of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training at Camp Mackall.
At the end of ’84, I was sent on a commercial flight to Seoul and then bused with my colleagues to a four-star hotel. Since we were on TDY (in official parlance, a “temporary duty assignment”), all our meals and expenses were covered. That meant no living on sea rations or mess hall food.
Days were spent at the nearby Yongsan (or Dragon Mountain) Garrison—a former Imperial Japanese Army base that now served as HQ for the US Forces Korea. It sat smack in the middle of Seoul and looked like the suburb of a major US city and boasted elaborate barracks, PXs, dining halls, movie theaters, restaurants, and golf courses.
In a dark basement room of one of the command centers, we taught groups of US and South Korean soldiers how to resist the harsh and abusive techniques they might encounter in a hostile situation—including prolonged constraint, exposure to extremes of heat, cold, or moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, solitary confinement, threats of pain, deprivation of sensory stimuli, and the use of physical pressure procedures like waterboarding.
I had a blast. During the day I was mock-torturing South Korean soldiers and at night I was drinking and partying with the same South Koreans in the nightclub on the ground floor of our hotel.
6
THE FAR EAST
By the mid-1980s, things had gone from bad to worse inside Iran. Though casualties continued to mount from the war with Iraq, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, called the conflict “a gift from God.” From his perspective that was true. Not only did the vicious fighting rally much of the country around his new Islamist regime, it also gave his supporters an opportunity to brutally suppress all internal opposition in the name of national security.
Through the early 1980s I heard reports of daily arrests, assassinations, disappearances, executions, and forced televised confessions throughout Iran. Meanwhile, the country went through a cultural revolution as the reforms of the Shah were turned back, opposition political parties banned, newspapers closed, and all universities shut down and reopened two years later after going through what was called an “Islamization.”
What had begun as a popular movement to depose the Shah had turned into a power grab by the mullahs that yielded a strict and brutal Islamist government. Fortunately, by the mid-1980s most of my immediate family had fled Iran and were living in the States.
The only one who remained was my father. Despite his long service to the country and enduring national pride, he too obtained a Green Card and was planning to join my mother in San Jose, California.
In January 1985 I was at Fort Lewis, assigned to ODA 174 and tasked with training new members of 2nd Battalion Special Forces. At around 1 P.M. one afternoon, I had returned to the team room and was cleaning my weapons, when I got a call from the duty sergeant.
He said, “Sergeant Lahidji, you have a family emergency.”
“What happened?” I asked as my blood pressure shot up.
“Come to the battalion day room and call your brother.”
I hurried there and called Iradj.
His voice was heavy with grief, “Changiz, my brother, I have bad news. Our father is dead.”
I felt the air go out of me. “Dead? How? What happened?”
“We don’t know for sure, but from what we hear so far, he was killed.”
“Killed? By who?”
Iradj had no answer. I was granted ten days leave and drove directly to my brother’s house in San Jose. Gathered there in mourning were my mother, aunts, uncles, and my brothers and sisters.
My uncle Alex pulled me aside and told me that he learned that my father had been pushed out of a window of his fifth-floor apartment in Tehran. His naked body was discovered in an abandoned lot at the back of the building. According to my uncle Yusef, who had found it, it had been lying there for days.
Mad as hell, I called Uncle Yusef in Tehran. Yusef had made it a habit to visit my father twice a week. The last time he went to my father’s apartment, he rang the bell, and no one answered. So he asked the building super to let him in.
Inside, he saw signs of struggle—a chair knocked over and a broken vase. When he went to the back bedroom and looked out the window, he spotted my father’s naked body lying amongst rubble downstairs. A neighbor described four men visiting my father’s apartment several nights earlier. He was almost certain that they were Revolutionary Guards from the people’s army formed by Ayatollah Khomeini to defend his government from internal and external threats. They were religious zealots who took orders directly from the Ayatollah and his close advisors.
My mind understood why they might regard my father as a potential enemy, since he had worked for the prior regime. But my emotions told me to hunt them down and kill them.
When I asked my team sergeant for permission to return to Tehran to attend my father’s funeral, my request was turned down. I understood that, as well.
My mother traveled there instead, held a ceremony in memory of my father, and made sure he was buried next to his mother.
It was a sad time for all of us. We loved America, but part of our hearts and many of our memories were in Iran.
My father’s death hit me hard. Although he hadn’t treated me well as a kid, I had forgiven him and grew to admire his mental toughness. I was the son who resembled him the most physically and personality-wise, which might have explained why he had been hard on me. We dislike in others what we fear in ourselves.
Even though he had passed, I often saw his face or heard his voice. He’d tell me what to do and how to behave the same way he had when he was alive. “Don’t eat too fast, Changiz. Always leave something on your plate.” He had instilled in me a love of people and public service, which I had brought with me to the US.
When I returned to Fort Lewis, I felt alone and isolated. It wasn’t that my teammates weren’t supportive. They were.
Three weeks later, when my team sergeant came to tell me that I was getting a PCS (permanent change of station) to go to Torii Station, Okinawa, and join ODA 134, I welcomed the news. I loved exploring new places and meeting new people, and needed a change. But I was concerned about my mother, who was living with Iradj and my two sisters in San Jose.
She was depressed about the death of my father and suffering from diabetes, and so I thought she might benefit from a change of scenery too. I requested permission to take her with me as a dependent, and it was quickly approved. But I hadn’t asked her yet.
So two weeks before I was scheduled to leave for Okinawa, I drove down to San Jose in my VW van accompanied by an SF friend named Ricky—who was also being transferred to Okinawa—his wife, and their two young daughters.
There, I posed the question to my mother.
She was shocked at first, and asked, “What happens if I don’t like it?”
“If you don’t like Okinawa, I’ll bring you home.”
She decided to come. We left the summer of ’85 on a charter flight to Okinawa—a 500-square-mile island at the southern tip of Japan, and the site of thirty US military bases including Torii Station, home to 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne). My mother and I were assigned a two-bedroom apartment a few miles outside of the base on Highway 58. Ricky and his family lived next door.
My mom liked it at first. The subtropical climate reminded her of Iran. But because of her diabetes she had to use a walker, which made it difficult for her to get around. Also, I had been assigned to ODA 134, which was a HALO-qualified hostage rescue team, led by Captain Barry Shapiro and team sergeant Larry Kramer.
Every month we traveled to Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, or the Philippines, where we spent a month training local security forces and practicing free-fall HALO and HAHO (high-altitude, high-opening) and static-line LALO (low-altitude, low-opening) parachute jumps. It offered an amazing aerial tour of Asia with incredible sights, excellent food, beautiful women, and some danger. All good from my point of view, but difficult for Mom, wh
o ended up spending most of her time alone.
My first mission with ODA 134 took me to Pattaya on the southern peninsula of Thailand. The locals were the gentlest, friendliest people I’d met so far. Even the fierce-looking Thai Special Forces we trained to be the personal security detail for the king always seemed chill and relaxed. Team Sergeant Larry Kramer explained that they were polite and kept their cool in the most difficult circumstances, because of their belief in Buddhism. Buddhism, I learned, isn’t a traditional religion in the sense that it doesn’t preach a particular doctrine or worship of God, but instead sets out a path for enlightenment.
Maybe that explains why there have been very few wars fought in the name of Buddhism.
Our training program was called Cobalt Blue and included CQC, helo jumps, and medical training. Our medics could not only expertly treat battlefield injuries but also walk into any village and set up a fully functioning clinic in a matter of minutes. They performed physicals, diagnosed and treated exotic diseases, administered vaccinations, set broken bones, cleaned infections, filled cavities and pulled rotten teeth, and delivered babies. They were also trained vets.
In other words, they helped us built rapport with the local people—one of the central goals of Special Forces, which we called “winning hearts and minds.” Wherever we went, we spent time in the local community hoping to make a positive contribution to their lives and villages and building goodwill.
At the end of the course, we did a couple of unloaded Hollywood jumps of our own. Then the Thais joined us for a full combat HALO jump from 18,500 feet. We let the Thai SF guys go first, because they tended to open their chutes quickly, which could pose a hazard to us since we liked to free-fall to about 4,000 feet.
Then the twelve of us in ODA 134 jumped next out of the back of a C-130, facing the tail and sit-flying on exit. I felt that lovely burst of adrenaline mixed with fear at the pit of my stomach and the wind in my face. Then a sensation of pure freedom and ecstasy. A patchwork of green fields stretched as far as the horizon. The sun warmed my back.
Full Battle Rattle Page 8