by Orr Kelly
Clyde Howard, the combat controller who had operated in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, still recalls his dismay when he learned of one such “accident.” After the fall of Laos, the offset bombing devices that had been used in Laos were transferred to Cambodia. A number of them were used to direct B-52 attacks. At first, one of the offset devices was set up where it could be easily monitored, at the United States Embassy in Phnom Penh. But the Strategic Air Command was horrified: if a crew forgot to insert the offset into its system, the embassy would be obliterated.
The device was moved to a village in the countryside, and one of the technicians trained by Howard was assigned to monitor it, setting in the coordinates for strikes by the bombers.
“When they found out in Offut Air Force Base [Nebraska, home of the Strategic Air Command] we had a beacon on the embassy, they said, holy.… Get that beacon off that embassy! They didn’t trust their own crews. They were not required to check in with us, so there was no double check on them,” Howard recalls.
“We removed the beacon. Okay, you unprofessional yahoos. We moved it to one of our provincial locations, a village with about three hundred people.
“I came back to the States in June or July 1973. About two weeks after my arrival, I heard a B-52 had wiped out a village in Cambodia. I thought, oh, shit. Come to find out, the aircrew forgot to offset from the beacon. They dropped 108 five-hundred-pounders. They wiped out that little village, with my FAG [forward air guide].”
When the order came from Washington to go after the Mayaguez, the Air Force special operations teams knew they might encounter a good deal of hostility, not only from the Khmer Rouge but also from other Cambodians who had been armed and trained by the Americans but might now have reason to feel abandoned or wronged by the United States.
Aerial surveillance quickly found the captured ship anchored near tiny Tang Island, thirty-four miles off the Cambodian coast. It was assumed that the gunboat had taken the crew from the freighter to the island and that they were being held there. Since the island was far enough offshore that it could not be readily reinforced from the mainland, it seemed a relatively simple matter to overpower the gunboat crew, free the crewmen from the Mayaguez, take back the Mayaguez, and demonstrate that some little third-world country couldn’t push the United States around and get away with it.
The USS Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier, was in the vicinity and was ordered to proceed toward the island. A contingent of Marines was assembled at the royal Thai air base at U Tapao. A combination of special operations and air-sea rescue helicopters arrived and prepared to carry the Marines to the island.
For the helicopter crews, many of whom had been involved in the evacuation of Americans from both Phnom Penh and Saigon, often under hostile fire, in the previous few weeks, the rescue of the crew of the Mayaguez seemed almost routine.
But a glance at the map might have raised some concerns. If anything happened to any of the helicopters in the vicinity of Tang Island, the nearest dry land where they could expect a friendly welcome was two hundred miles away, back in Thailand.
The crews were assured that nothing would go wrong. At most, they were told, they could expect to find eleven lightly armed Khmer Rouge soldiers and perhaps a few fishermen on the island.
They did not learn until later that an AC-130 gunship had flown over the island the night before and counted at least fifty campfires.
The helicopters were the best the Air Force had for such an operation. They were either HH-53 Super Jolly Green Giants, of the type used in the Son Tay rescue operation, or a variant of the plane, known as the CH-53. They were large enough to carry a sizable contingent of marines, and they were equipped for aerial refueling so the four-hundred-mile round-trip from U Tapao did not pose a serious obstacle.
The flight to the island was uneventful except when they were fired upon by a ship as they passed overhead. None of the helicopters was hit, but it was not a good omen. As planned, two of the eleven helicopters pulled off and delivered their marines to the deck of a destroyer escort, the USS Holt. The Marines later went from the Holt to the Mayaguez, found the ship unoccupied, and took control.
Meanwhile, the rest of the helicopters proceeded to the island. One contingent of Marines was to land on the east side of the island, where there were some buildings and where the crew members of the American ship probably were being held. The rest of the Marines were to land on the west side of the island to act as a blocking force if the Cambodians tried to escape through the jungle with the captives.
Landing the Marines on the ship was a little tricky. Since the helicopters were so large and the destroyer so small, the helicopters had to hover over the water beside the ship, with one wheel on the deck, while the Marines jumped to the deck.
Gary L. Weikel, then a young lieutenant and now a colonel, was the pilot of Jolly Green 1-1, the lead helicopter, and one of the two landing the Marines on the Holt. This is his account of what happened next:
“After all the city evacuations, I felt pretty comfortable that this was really a piece of cake. As it turned out, we were pretty damn wrong on that, because there were about three hundred Khmer Rouge dug in on the island with heavy weaponry. This thing turned to a shit sandwich in a big hurry.
“The first 53s were blown out of the sky with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and recoilless rifles—the first two on the east beach. They were down in the water, on fire, while we were trying to put the Marines on the deck of this little destroyer escort. The CH-53s—Air Force, from the 21st Special Operations Squadron—bore the brunt of that on the east beach. The west beach became the alternative, where the remnants of the force tried to swing around and get in.”
But the welcome there was equally ferocious. All the helicopters were badly damaged. One crew tried to water-taxi away from the beach, but their engine quit and they sank offshore.
Only about fifty Marines managed to get ashore on the west beach, and they were in serious trouble.
“Right away, we realized something horrible was going on from listening to the screams on the radio,” Weikel says.
By that time, he had unloaded his Marines on the destroyer. But before he could try to help out in the developing battle ashore, he had to find a tanker flying overhead and refuel. Looking down and listening to the radio, Weikel and his crew could tell that the situation had turned to “absolute and utter chaos.”
They spotted a CH-53 with its load of Marines still onboard. The plane had been badly shot up and was trying to limp back toward Thailand on one engine. Weikel and another helicopter fell in behind the crippled craft as an escort.
Just as the helicopter passed over the Thai-Cambodian border, the other engine quit, and the pilot autorotated down to a safe landing. While one of the escorts hovered overhead, Weikel and his crew landed to pick up the Marines and the helicopter crew and ferry them back to U Tapao.
Pausing only long enough to refuel, the two escort helicopters loaded on another Marine assault force and headed back toward the west beach of Tang Island.
They successfully landed the Marines on the west beach and then swung around to provide gunfire support for an effort to land another helicopter on the east beach to extract the Marines pinned down there.
The rescue helicopter was badly shot up and limped away from the beach on one engine, fuel pouring out of holes in its tanks.
An HC-130 tanker dove down in front of the helicopter, ready to transfer fuel. But the single functioning engine didn’t put out enough power for the craft to stay in position behind the tanker to take on fuel. The tanker pilot pulled back his throttles, trying desperately to fly slow enough so the chopper could plug into the drogue trailing back behind his wing. He slowed so much, in fact, that the big plane stalled out and almost fell into the sea.
The situation seemed hopeless. The helicopter couldn’t refuel. It didn’t have enough fuel to reach the nearest safe landing place, two hundred miles away in Thailand. Shortly, it would have to land in the
sea. Chances of survival from such a landing are not good.
“He was going in the water if we couldn’t find a place for him to rest,” Weikel says. “In the fog of war, I’m not sure how this happened, but it seems to me we remembered there was a Navy aviation-capable ship heading that way. I asked the HC-130 if, on his weather radar, he saw anything out there that looked like a ship.
“The HC-130 said he saw a single large blob out there. It was either a ship or it was a thunderstorm. It was way out in the Gulf of Siam [Thailand]. We thought, well, if it’s a thunderstorm, that’s just too bad. If it’s a ship, we’ll take a chance on it.
“It turned out to be the USS Coral Sea. The Coral Sea turned into the wind and recovered that bird on a single engine. We landed behind.”
Weikel and his crew worked out a last-ditch plan to rescue the Marines and the remnants of the helicopter crews, who had been trapped on the east beach for twelve hours, trading hand grenades with the enemy. The plan reflected the lack of choices available: the helicopter would back in to the beach and stay there until the Marines were aboard, no matter how much damage the enemy inflicted. The chopper had three Gatling guns and a thousand pounds of armor plate, so they had a fair chance of carrying off the rescue attempt.
Even if they couldn’t fly, they would water-taxi out away from the island and hope that two small unarmed helicopters from the Coral Sea would be able to pick up everyone aboard before the helicopter sank.
As they headed in toward the beach, another helicopter suddenly appeared. It had raced back to U Tapao with a badly wounded Marine and then hurried back to Tang Island—a four-hundred-mile round-trip. The newcomer moved into position near the island to provide fire support for the rescue attempt.
To their surprise, still another Super Jolly Green Giant suddenly appeared on the scene. It was the chopper that had limped out to land on the Coral Sea. The ship’s crew had managed to get the damaged engine running, patch the holes in the fuel lines, and send the plane back into the battle.
With the other choppers providing support, Weikel used a destroyer that was standing offshore to mask their approach, then did a fast low-level dash toward the beach.
“The survivors popped the red smoke. We saw exactly where to go. We backed in, under some pretty heavy fire,” Weikel says. “We set it down in the water with the tail up in the trees. As we were loading, about five Khmer Rouge came out of the bushes and made a hand-grenade rush on us. One grenade rolled under the bird and blew up. It caused some sheet metal damage, rocked us pretty good.
“Our right gunner cut loose with the minigun and killed all five of them. This all happened in about two or three seconds. Just then, when the Marines were still trying to get their wounded up the ramp, a heavy gun opened up to the north of us. The left gunner cut loose. I saw a helmet full of holes roll out on the beach and that gun was silenced.
“We got everybody on and decided to get the hell out of there. We started to slowly lift out of there, and we got heavy cannon fire right under the bird, and there was a lot out in front of us.
“We headed back to the Coral Sea because we had a lot of wounded, chest wounds and things like that. Every one of them survived their ordeal.”
The rest of the Marines on the west beach were pulled out under darkness that night, with an AC-130 gunship overhead to provide fire support.
After all the agony on the beaches of Tang Island, it was learned that the thirty-nine crew members of the Mayaguez were not there after all. They had been taken to the mainland and were soon set afloat in a Thai fishing vessel, to be picked up by an American destroyer.
In Washington, it was announced that one Marine had been killed and that casualties otherwise were light. Defense Secretary Schlesinger declared victory, calling the affair “an eminently successful operation incorporating the judicious and effective use of American force for purposes that were necessary for the well-being of this society.” Later, it was acknowledged that fifteen men had been killed and fifty wounded and that three were missing.
By the time they landed on the Coral Sea, Weikel and his crew had been up for almost twenty hours and had flown for more than fourteen of those hours. They were ordered not to fly anymore and boarded an HH-53 for the flight back to U Tapao as passengers.
They were happy just to be alive. But, tired as they were, it was hard to rest. The plane was littered with ammunition casings, and it stank of blood and dirt after a day in the jungle. Weikel had time to think.
“The more I thought about it,” he says, “the more pissed I got. We had forgotten the lessons of Southeast Asia even though we were still in Southeast Asia. Where the hell was the dedicated helicopter escort we had all through the rescues in Southeast Asia? Example: when the HH-53s did the Son Tay raid, we had A-1 Skyraiders with them. On all our rescues, we had either A-1s or A-7Ds [jet fighter-bombers] dedicated to us for escort.
“Why did we forget that lesson when we were in the very end of the Vietnam War?
“I was also mad because the intel report on the island was so wrong. If we had any doubt as to where the crew of the Mayaguez was, we should have sent special operations forces, notably SEALs, in there to do a beach recon, which would have told us, one, they’re not on the island, and two, there’s a hell of a lot of bad guys on the island.
“They also ignored the AC-130’s report. They went down there a night or two before, and they counted fifty campfires on the island. That never registered at all. It was never briefed to us at all.”
In the long roller-coaster history of Air Force special operations, with each period of buildup followed by a rapid withering away, the Mayaguez incident was a chilling reminder of just how rapidly this delicately honed precision instrument can lose its edge.
PART 7
Hostage Rescue Efforts
CHAPTER 22
Operation Rice Bowl
It was early on the morning of April Fool’s Day—1 April 1980—when a small Twin Otter airplane flown by two Central Intelligence Agency pilots landed in the darkness of the Iranian desert more than two hundred miles south of Teheran.
While the pilots settled down to wait, Maj. John T. Carney, Jr., a former Air Force Academy football coach, unloaded a small motorized dirt bike from the cargo compartment of the plane and set off in the darkness to explore the surrounding desert as a potential landing spot for a fleet of transport planes and helicopters preparing to rescue fifty-three Americans who had been held captive in the American embassy in Teheran since the previous 3 November.
Carney was the commander of a small team of Air Force combat controllers who had been working with the Army’s Delta Force for some two years, training to combat terrorists or rescue hostages almost anywhere in the world. They were the forerunners of today’s special tactics teams. The secret Delta Force—earlier known as Blue Light—was commanded by Col. Charles Beckwith, a legendary Army Special Forces operator. Carney considered himself and his men Beckwith’s personal combat controllers.
As he prepared to set out on his scouting expedition, Carney packed onto his bike a small shovel and five small beacons to mark the landing zone. The lights had been specially developed by Carney’s team. Normally, a combat control team would set out some twenty lights to mark a landing zone. But Carney’s team had found they could get by with only five lights.
Carney adjusted his clumsy night-vision goggles over his eyes and set out to explore the landing zone. Stopping at intervals along the way, he plunged eight-inch lengths of pipe into the sandy desert floor and pulled out plugs of the soil to be analyzed to determine if the area could support C-130 transport planes heavily laden with fuel for the helicopters that would make the actual assault.
He dug shallow holes in the desert and buried four of the beacons in a square about ninety feet on a side. A fifth light, a flashing strobe, was placed about 5,000 feet away to mark the end of the landing zone. The five lights were known as a box-and-one. Only the glass dome of each light protruded above the surfac
e. The lights were designed to be turned on by a signal from the lead aircraft. Even then, they would be invisible to any passerby on the nearby highway, because the lights were both directional and infrared, visible only to someone with special glasses. Those five lights were all the guidance the pilots had. For all they knew, the Grand Canyon could lie just beyond the last light.
“Then I had to survey all this area to make sure there was nothing there, like a rock, that could hit a wing tip and cause us a problem,” Carney says. “We knew from overhead photography there didn’t appear to be any big obstacles. But you don’t need a very big one to cause your undercarriage a problem.
“Once I got my lights set up, I ran all around this area, just kept coming in to make sure there was nothing out there. I ran up and down. It was flat as a pool table. There was a curve in the road, and then it was straight as an arrow, and I used that for reference.
“The only obstacle was a road sign near the curve with an old piece of tin hanging from it. It spooked the hell out of me. It looked like some Arab standing out there. It kept my attention for a while, but it never moved.”
While he was at work, Carney saw several cars go by on the lonely road between Tabas, 58 miles to the east, and Yazd, 135 miles to the northwest. He was so busy he didn’t bother to count how many. He just flattened himself in the desert until they had passed.
Before taking off on his perilous mission, Carney was briefed on how he would be extracted if something had gone wrong with the airplane.
“If anything happened, they would come in and drop the Fulton recovery kit and snatch me out by a Combat Talon [MC-130],” Carney says.
The Fulton sky hook is the same system that was to be used years earlier to rescue Allen Pope from an Indonesian jail, as described in Chapter Fourteen.
“General Vaught [Maj. Gen. James Vaught, the commander of the Iran rescue operation] said to me one day: ‘John, we’re thinking about doing a live Fulton recovery. The crews need some confidence in picking up a live body.’ What did I think about that?” Carney recalled.