Finally, the Talons launched from Misery. Charlie, Bucky, and Logan went out on the first bird. Jim Knight, Wayne Long, and I sat near the front of the second. For four hours, we flew through the night “dark-horse”—no external lights—our faces lit only with the red lights that glowed inside the cabin. All the jump seats were removed from the aircraft to make room for Delta and our gear. But the Air Force had been kind enough to line the floor with mattresses to block out the cold and give us at least some cushion against the hard ride.
There were no pep talks or last-minute tactical reviews. The only sound I heard was the propellers’ drone as we sat quietly against the bulkheads, each man tending his own inner fires.
We skimmed low across the coast of Iran then climbed through known gaps in Iranian radar to navigate the maze of desert gorges leading to Desert One. Packed in shoulder to shoulder, Jim, Wayne, and I rolled and leaned in unison as the pilot flew “nap of the earth,” clinging to the dark canyon contours like a shadow. Soon I heard the engines throttle back and felt landing gear thump into place.
The Talon’s wheels slammed down hard on the desert floor, bottoming out the hydraulics, and rattling my teeth. We bounced once and got briefly airborne before hitting the deck hard again. The pilot reversed thrust. We taxied to a stop and the loadmaster dropped the rear ramp.
I expected to look out and see only a wide expanse of moonlit desert. Instead, I saw that the world was on fire.
10
FROM INSIDE THE TALON, I could see a giant fireball blazing about a kilometer away. My mind flashed to the worst-case scenario: the Iranians somehow discovered the mission and had been lying in wait. I listened over the prop noise for the rattle of automatic weapons, but it didn’t come. Because we rode up near the cockpit, I was among the last to deplane. Bucky and Logan were waiting for me. Logan had a bloody gash on his nose, which was already muddy with the fine dust that covered his face.
“Welcome to World War III!” Bucky said, grinning.
Behind us, the four tanker birds began landing in sequence, each one multiplying the noise and sandstorm that now swirled around us.
“What’s going on!” I asked Bucky, yelling to be heard.
He grinned. “Ish and the Rangers fired up a fuel tanker!”
The rest of the story came out in bits and pieces. As the first C-130 approached Desert One, the pilots spotted a fuel tanker rolling down the dirt road that bisected the landing area. Trailing it was a small pick-up. The Talon circled once, landed, dropped the ramp. Ish jumped on a Yamaha motorcycle and a Ranger named Rubio, armed with a light anti-tank weapon, jumped on behind him. They raced down the ramp, followed by a Delta/Ranger security team in a Jeep. As soon as Ish pulled within range, Rubio fired the LAW and the tanker burst like a supernova.
“They chased the other truck, but it got away!” Bucky shouted.
We agreed there wasn’t much to worry about. A fuel tanker with an escort rolling through the Iranian wastes at midnight? Smugglers, probably. They wouldn’t be likely to alert authorities. Even if they did, we’d be long gone before the Iranians could mobilize to investigate.
The moon glowed bright, but with the tanker shooting flames three hundred feet into the night, Desert One was lit up like a Midnight Madness sale at a used car lot. Now, as Delta operators began the heavy work of dragging a massive cargo net off the second Talon, their shadows flickered off the white desert floor. The net would be transloaded to the helos, then used to cover them at the hide site. Dust devils twisted up off the desert floor as the C-130s parked and kept their props turning. Eddies of fine sand stung my eyes and I moved away from the Talons’ deafening thrum. Then, strangely, I could have sworn I heard the high faint sound of . . .
Women.
Crying women.
I was surprised to find out that the smugglers weren’t our only visitors. Before Ish’s security team could finish setting up a perimeter, a passenger bus—a passenger bus!—also trundled across our landing site. The security team popped off warning shots then had to fire into the engine to stop the bus. Onboard were about forty-five people, mostly women, old folks, and kids. A Delta operator now guarded them closely, but the women, naturally, were terrified, and every now and then one would cut loose in hysterical wails.
We picked Desert One for its remoteness. I mean, the place was the definition of bleak. Now, past 9 p.m. on what should have been an unremarkable date in April, we had encountered something in the neighborhood of fifty people. It didn’t matter, though, because we planned for this problem. Anyone we encountered at Desert One would be hauled out on the C-130’s then returned to Manzariyah the next night. People have suggested the mission planners were such buffoons that we hadn’t dreamed we might encounter interlopers at the landing site. That’s simply not true. We expected the unexpected, and it materialized.
I was discussing this with Bucky when Charlie walked over. “On our way in here, Vaught called about the helos. Eight off the deck, he said.”
Excitement surged through me. All eight helos had launched successfully off the Nimitz. Most of us weren’t as worried about the Iranians as we were about the helos. Vietnam proved that the rotor driven birds were notoriously cranky. For this mission we needed six working RH-53s. So far, we still had eight.
Now Charlie radioed Vaught in Wadi Kena: “What’s the status on the helos?”
“Fifty minutes out and low on fuel,” came the reply.
A little late, but not too bad.
Delta began to break into our element groups in preparation for onloading to the helos. Boris and Fast Eddie were with me. They sat down with the rest of the LZ element to wait for their ride to the hide site. The fire-lit sandstorm swirled around us all. Every man had extra pockets sewn into his jacket lining and we all bristled with extra clips, rope, carabiners, water, and assorted widgets. Prior to leaving Wadi Kena, I weighed every man to make sure we didn’t overload the helos. Fast Eddie packed so many explosive goodies into his jacket he tipped the scales at three hundred twenty-four pounds. Now, sitting in the desert, he looked like the Michelin Man.
Soon the tankers were set, the cargo net was set, the onload groups were set, and there was nothing left to do but wait. And the helos were now officially late.
We didn’t worry much at first—they’d even arrived late during rehearsals. Still, time was critical: we had to get off the deck here soon in order to reach the hide sites before sunrise. Hedging our bets, Bucky searched me out. “Jerry, if we get too far behind schedule, we’re going to need a different hide site,” he said. “Get the map out and start looking.”
I did, poring over the pictured wasteland until I found a little niche in the side of a mountain that looked flat enough to land the helos. I wasn’t comfortable with it. We had no way to recon it, the way Dick Meadows had reconned the approved hide sites. There was really no way to know whether we’d find ourselves landing on top of some kind of goat-herding village. But it was our only option.
I circled the site on the map and showed it to Bucky.
He looked at it then stared off to the south. “I wish to hell they’d get here,” he said.
11
DELTA SPENT THE NEXT HALF HOUR straining to hear the faintest chop of helo blades over the collective roar of the Talons and refueling birds. Minutes ticked away, compressing the mission timeline. If we waited much longer the helos wouldn’t be able to refuel and reach the hide site before first light. That increased the odds that our armada of CH-53s would be spotted from the ground and reported to Tehran. It wasn’t hopeless by any means. Somebody in the Eagle Claw task force had repainted the helos in the same colors as the Iranian chopper fleet. Still, arriving under cover of darkness was the highly preferred option. Now that was going to be a squeeze play at best.
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.
12
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.
Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent Page 13