Two years after the Black September hijacking, the same group kidnapped and murdered the Israeli athletes at Munich. Over and over, global media broadcast the killings, shocking and terrifying the world.
Western European countries responded by forming elite counterterrorist units. The Germans formed Grenzschutzgruppe 9, GSG-9, led by Colonel Ulrich Wegener. The French formed the Groupe d’Intervention de la Grendarmerie National (GIGN). The Brits modified training for its already legendary SAS. But Americans had not yet been made targets. And internal debate over the separation of military and police power hampered U.S. military planners. One camp argued that hostage rescue was a police matter; others favored a military approach. While other countries trained, America talked.
Then in May 1972, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, a German Marxist group, bombed the U.S. Army officers’ club in Frankfurt and the U.S. Army, Europe, headquarters building in Heidelberg. The assaults underscored the need for an American military counterterrorist unit. Charlie Beckwith teamed with powerful Pentagon allies like Army Chief of Staff (and Rhodes scholar) Bernard Rogers and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Edward “Shy” Meyer to argue for a unit modeled on the British SAS. Beckwith’s quest was a ten-year slog through infighting, skepticism, power grabs, money grabs, and plain old bureaucratic foot-dragging. But in 1977, the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–DELTA, or Delta Force, opened for business.
Charlie’s blueprint called for us to build a unit that could be deployed in response to a terrorist crisis anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice. Delta would move in below the radar and work with local officials, military, and police to get the bad guys. Then, we would simply fade away, so that as far as anyone else knew the resulting counterterrorism action had been a local operation.
In some ways, this was a counterintuitive approach to military ops: no credit, no glory, no ticker-tape parades. There would be no public awards ceremonies or receptions. Our names would not appear in the newspapers. Success would be celebrated and war stories swapped only privately, among an inner circle of special ops and intel professionals already privy to information about SCI-level (Sensitive Compartmented Information) missions. In fact, the Pentagon did not even officially acknowledge our existence. After Delta began, a standard search of military personnel records for a “William G. Boykin” would reveal that no man with that name served in the United States Army.
But I did, of course, and here I was, one of thirty young hotshots reporting for training. Already, the selection course had forged a bond between us. In addition to being an assessment, it was a rite of passage. By the time we few emerged on the other end of it, most men had already fallen by the wayside. That in itself was enough to forge a strong connection. Each of us knew that the men beside us were cut from the same cloth we were.
Charlie put it this way: “If I’m going to put you in a spider-hole for a week and tell you that when a certain man walks out of a building, you’re going to shoot him, I have to know that you’re going to shoot him. I know this because I know that we’re alike.”
In nineteen weeks, Beckwith and an initial cadre of instructors would train us in marksmanship, room-clearing, close-quarters battle, hostage management, and forced entry at crisis points from hotel rooms to airliners, and much, much more. We would learn macro-functions like establishing and maintaining a command post and secure communications, to microskills like how to pick a pin tumbler padlock. We would learn how to drive anything from a Jeep to a track-vehicle to a diesel locomotive. Delta instructors would teach us how to blow stuff up and how to keep hostages safe from terrorists blowing stuff up. We would learn to live under a cover story, collect intelligence, conduct surveillance, and avoid it ourselves. We would climb and rappel, and learn to do it without making a sound. And perhaps most important of all, we would learn how best to disarm a hostile opponent—and if he resisted, how best to kill him.
Since we would be operating in small teams in faraway places with no backup, we would even go through emergency medical training to be able to save each other’s lives. (Once, when we had to learn how to start IVs, I practiced on this giant ginger-haired fellow from Boston whose muscles were so big we called him Popeye. He was really mad when I collapsed his vein.)
On the first day, we all headed down to the arms room, where a sergeant issued us each an M-1911 .45 caliber pistol. Even though it was the old Army standard, that gun would stop a man cold with a single round. He also issued us each a .45cal M-3A1 “grease gun,” a vintage automatic weapon that went out of production in the 1950s. Grease guns hadn’t been used much since, but it turned out their low muzzle velocity and slow rate of fire made them a perfect weapon for room clearing. Their heavy slugs would slam into, but not through, a terrorist, and assaulters could squeeze off single shots without disturbing their aim.
Our marksmanship instructor was Ginger Flynn, a ruddy, carrot-topped Irishman on loan from the British SAS. Ginger loved his beer, but during his time in the States, he also developed an affection for American sour mash whiskey.
“Awright, chaps, you’re not getting any prettier and I’m not getting any drunker,” Ginger would say on the firing range. “Move your asses so I can get to the pub!”
We all knew how to shoot straight, but we had to learn how all over again—now using instinctive fire techniques rather than aimed fire. Here’s the difference: In hunting or target shooting, you’re developing a sight picture with your feet planted, one eye closed, aligning the front and rear sights on the target. Instinctive fire is more like the Old West, the quick draw you see in all the movies. In a gunfight, John Wayne never raised his Colt, developed a sight picture, then pulled the trigger. Instead, he drew his pistol, pointed, and fired.
Some Army training manuals call instinctive fire the least desirable way to kill bad guys in close-quarters combat, or CQB. That’s because it is thought to be the least accurate, as the shooter does not develop a sight picture at all, but relies on muscle memory to tell him where to fire the kill shot. But in hostage rescue, the two seconds it takes to aim and fire are one more than it takes for a terrorist to kill a hostage. So for a month, we spent at least four hours a day on instinctive fire techniques. We started out with targets on stakes and hour after hour, reduced them to shreds. We learned to raise our weapons and fire in a single motion. We learned to fire, reload, and clear weapons jams on the run. Shooting at man-size silhouettes, we had to put two shots—a double-tap—in a “kill zone,” the head or chest, within certain time and distance standards. I can’t share what those standards were, but trust me: by the end of the month, accuracy wasn’t a problem.
Ginger developed and honed our skills relentlessly and we calculated that before moving on to CQB training, we expended more ammo in thirty days than the entire 82nd Airborne used in a year.
By June, we were able to get rid of the target cloth and move into the “House of Horrors,” a state-of-the-art CQB training ground. The four-room complex featured ballistic walls and portable, interchangeable target systems. One of the best things was the stop-motion projection target system. The instant you fired your weapon, the film froze on the screen so you could see exactly what you hit. Another system featured pop-up targets that allowed each operator only seconds to enter a room, identify hostile targets, and fire.
Ginger taught us to put two headshots into every terrorist—“Happiness is a headshot!” he’d say—to check to be sure they were dead, and to handcuff everyone, even dead guys. We practiced blowing doors and rolling flash-bang grenades, not only to gain entry but to stun the enemy, putting them on the defensive. We learned to hit terrorists with three spears that became Delta’s motto: surprise, speed, and violence of action.
During the half of the day when Ginger Flynn wasn’t teaching us to shoot straight, Wade Ishimoto was teaching us spy stuff, more formally known as “tradecraft.” Born and raised in Hawaii, Ish was a Japanese-American who, after finishing his baccalaureate degree, enlisted in the Army
and went to Vietnam. He served with the 5th Special Forces, a unit that was investigated after a double-agent mysteriously fell to his death from a helicopter. (The Defense Department suspected he was pushed.) Ish was one of those interrogated and later exonerated. In 1978, Charlie brought him into Delta to assist with intel and also convinced Pentagon brass that Ish, a detail oriented, no-nonsense man with a knack for planning, needed a commission. So Sergeant Ishimoto became Captain Ishimoto, and here he was with us.
From Ish, I learned “elicitation” and how to live under a cover story. Elicitation is the art of teasing information out of people without letting them know what you’re really after. Once during training, I had to travel to the National Guard Armory in Richmond, Virginia, with an NCO and fellow operator-in-training from Indianapolis named Mark Gentry. Our mission was to learn the exact location of weapons storage on the post, and to actually be shown the weapons and granted access to the space. Our cover story was that we were working with an Army unit that was relocating from Fort Bragg to Fort Dix, New Jersey. We were coordinating en route logistics for the entire unit, our story went, and would need fuel, billeting for twenty people, and a place to store weapons overnight.
Mark and I showed up at the armory, were ushered in, and went to see the commanding major to tell him our bogus story. He was very accommodating, said he’d be happy to oblige, and showed us where he kept a whole cache of weapons, including M-16s and M-60’s. I expected him to ask us for official Army orders showing this unit relocation, or at least for identification. I was astonished when he didn’t ask for either.
This is a lot easier than I thought. Frighteningly easy, actually, from a national security standpoint.
“We’ll be in touch,” I said to the major as we headed out the door with detailed information about his armory. I was lying, of course, and he never heard from us again.
As a Christian, I thought a lot about that. From the time I was a little boy, I’d known that the Bible teaches that God hates lies. How then could I rectify the biblical mandate for honesty with making up a story to elicit information or infiltrate enemy territory? But that led to a broader question: in time of war, are we required to tell the truth to people who are trying to kill us or others?
Deception is often foundational to battle planning. On D-Day, planners deceived the Nazis. Should the Allies have announced their plan to storm the beach at Normandy?
Here’s another example. During the Revolutionary War, women living at Bryan’s Station, a Kentucky stockade, risked their lives in a ruse designed to ward off an Indian attack. As a diversion, the women were to pretend they didn’t know the woods outside the fort were teeming with armed Indians, and stroll down to the spring carrying pails as they usually did each morning. That would distract the Indians and give the garrison inside time to post riflemen inside the walls. Terrified, but seeing no choice, the women agreed to the plan. And before they left the safety of the fort, they gathered to pray for God’s protection.
The plan worked. While the women were outside the stockade, the attackers held their fire. And when the Indians finally attacked, the hidden riflemen cut down the first wave of raiders, and were able to defend the fort until reinforcements arrived.
The women of Bryan’s Station not only deceived the enemy, but prayed to God before they did it. Was that wrong? Should they have instead cowered inside the station walls and resigned themselves to death? Were their actions un-Christian?
Those were the kinds of things I thought about as I wrestled with the deceptive aspects of clandestine work. In the end my philosophy boiled down to this: lying in the interest of defending others is different than lying for personal gain. As Winston Churchill said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
2
OUR TRAINING LASTED NINETEEN WEEKS. During that time, the dogfight continued between Charlie Beckwith and the Special Forces brass who opposed Delta on principle. In those days, Special Operations units fell under several tiers of command authority, including the John F. Kennedy Institute for Military Assistance, and (going north in the chain of command) the XVIII Airborne Corps, the U.S. Army Forces Command (FORSCOM), the Department of the Army, and the Joint Chiefs. But during his SAS training, Charlie had learned the killing nature of military bureaucracy.
Terrorists strike like lightning—hard, fast, and without warning. Time wasted coddling the sensitivities of turf-conscious generals with a penchant for paperwork meant hostages killed. So Charlie fought for, and won, the command-structure equivalent of a freeway bypass. Delta exited below the JFK Center and got back on at the Joint Chiefs. That made many, many people very, very angry.
As a direct result, a competitor to Delta was born: Blue Light, a 5th Special Forces unit under the command of Colonel Bob Mountel. Mountel was among those who felt Delta’s mission belonged to the Special Forces community, not the Department of the Army. When he stood up Blue Light, a temporary unit meant to bridge America’s counterterrorism gap until Delta got up and running, Mountel set out to make his unit Delta’s permanent replacement.
While the brass fought it out, Delta continued to train, essentially cramming most of the Special Forces individual qualifications course into six weeks, which was no small task. Next, we gelled as an operations squadron under the command of Bucky Burruss and began training as a unit, practicing assault and hostage rescue, stealth troop movement, parachute operations, and VIP protection.
As needed, Charlie made contact with private industry and government officials who could help make our training realistic. In the late spring of 1978, Delta traveled to New York City and practiced taking down passenger jets at John F. Kennedy International Airport, courtesy of the airlines. (Aviation officials saw the growing rash of terrorist hijackings, and were only too happy to cooperate.) With the help of certain Washington, D.C. officials, we traveled to the Beltway and practiced assaults on the Metro. Once, Charlie even managed to have an actual passenger train brought onto Fort Bragg via the railhead located on-post.
It was an exhilarating time, as we were developing new concepts, laying the foundation for Delta’s future—not only for how we were going to train and what we were going to train on, but also for the actual tactics we would use. We would plan an operation one week, and execute it the following week. Then we’d troubleshoot and document the results. But it wasn’t as though Charlie and company had a ready curriculum and were putting us through it. In fact, no U.S. military playbook on counterterrorist operations existed.
It was our job to write it.
On Friday afternoons, Pete Schoomaker and I would get everybody together in a makeshift classroom. We’d take a big piece of butcher paper and sketch out a rough diagram of the next week’s training operation. Then we would assign various operators to take pieces of the mission, both for planning and execution. The NCOs were very dedicated to making the training challenging and realistic. Once, we gave Sergeant First Class John Cupp the task of preparing a multi-day session on urban vehicle assault. But when he couldn’t find a suitable car for us to train on, he brought his own car out to the training ground. We promptly wrecked it.
Different guys got different assignments, but if any part of the mission called for the use of explosives, we gave that job to Sergeant First Class Eddie Westfall. A Special Forces engineer, he was a big guy—really big—who never did anything at half speed. We called him “Fast Eddie.”
Fast Eddie almost never stopped talking, but he was very engaging, so you didn’t mind. And the only thing he loved better than talking was blowing stuff up. Throughout our ops training, Fast Eddie was always leaving the stockade and going up to, say, the shipyard or the air station at Norfolk and hauling back various objects for his breaching experiments. One time, he brought back a bus, and systematically reduced it to a useless heap of melted metal. Fast Eddie always used the principal of P—meaning “plenty.” Once, the Army gave him an old building at Fort Knox to destroy. He dre
ssed it with so much dynamite that when he pushed the button, the roof flew up, the walls fell in, and some power poles blew over, knocking out the lights on a good portion of Fort Knox.
Fast Eddie learned not to use quite so much dynamite. And like him, all of us gained skills by great leaps. I soaked it up eagerly. The most exciting thing for me was that I began to develop tremendous confidence in my teammates as I learned how talented these men really were. Don Simmons, Dave Cheney, Jack Joplin, Bob Little, and many more like them were dedicated, quiet professionals who wanted only to be on the front lines when the bullets started flying. Not only were they physically fearsome and without an ounce of quit, I was amazed by their ability to tackle new problems and develop strategies to solve them.
The British SAS helped develop our tactics. In terms of basic breaching, assault, and rescue tactics, Delta also enlisted the support of the FBI and Secret Service. Sometimes we went up to the Secret Service Academy at Beltsville, Maryland; other times their agents drove down to Bragg and worked with us on techniques. We traded time and facilities with the FBI in similar fashion, and also wove in some SWAT team tactics. But whatever hostage-rescue techniques we learned from law enforcement, we took them as a starting point then adapted them for use in a military situation.
After all, if Delta became involved in a rescue, there would be no “hostage standoff.” And if hostage takers failed to surrender, we wouldn’t be arresting them.
3
ABOUT SIX MONTHS into Charlie’s two-year plan, Pentagon brass announced it was time for us to prove ourselves. But our training was far from complete. If we failed, the Pentagon could scrap Delta altogether, and that possibility loomed large when we found out that FORSCOM would conduct the evaluation. With Mountel and Blue Light under its umbrella, how fair would the evaluation be?
It turned out to be a hatchet job, the way Charlie saw it. I was less certain. As the evaluation unfolded on a hot, cloudless day in July, it appeared much of the time the evaluators simply didn’t know what they were doing.
Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Page 9