Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  “It was pathetic. They’re firing weapons. I did see one pin flare. We’re trying to pick these people up. The current’s washing some of them away. It was pathetic, absolutely pathetic. It takes a herculean effort to stay afloat out there. I was absolutely shocked when I saw this thing coming down.”

  Carney and the surviving SEALs made two unsuccessful attempts to reach the island. Even though he never made it ashore, he was able to see enough through binoculars to tell that at least a small airport-seizure team of Army Rangers would have to parachute in to try to clear the runways and provide enough protection for subsequent planes to land. He even heard broadcasts over the island radio station urging people to hurry to the airport to repel the invaders.

  By this time, five MC-130 Combat Talons carrying the Rangers were already airborne. Lieutenant Colonel James L. “Jim” Hobson, Jr., commander of the 8th Special Operations Squadron, was at the controls of one of the Talons. He was supposed to be the third plane in line, coming in to land thirty minutes after the first two planes had dropped the initial runway-seizure team.

  “We were told the cloud cover would be five thousand feet broken, with five miles visibility,” Hobson recalls. “We were holding about seventy-five miles west of the island, stacked a thousand feet apart. There was lightning, all kinds of shit. We were using night-vision goggles to maintain separation from each other. Every time there was a bolt of lightning, you couldn’t see shit for five minutes.”

  While the big four-engine planes circled, praying there would be no midair collision, they received word that all the Rangers would be parachuted. The troops in the back of Hobson’s plane had expected to step out of the plane onto the runway, so they were not wearing their parachutes. Hurriedly, they donned their jump gear and prepared for the jump.

  As the first Combat Talon approached the airfield, its inertial navigation system malfunctioned. The aircrews had been warned, “Whatever you do, don’t drop the Rangers in the water.” Without his navigation system working, the pilot of the lead plane decided to pull off. Hobson received radioed orders to fly to the island as quickly as possible and drop his Rangers.

  In the hurried preparations for the invasion of the island, the Air Force crews and the Army commanders received separate, and quite different, intelligence briefings. The soldiers were told to expect significant resistance. The aircrews were told there were only two 23mm guns on the island, and neither was at the airport. It sounded almost like a routine training drop.

  Because of the briefing they had received, the Rangers said they wanted to jump from five hundred feet altitude. That would give them only about ten seconds of “hang time” between the moment their chutes opened and the time they hit the ground.

  “About a mile off the end of the runway, a searchlight came on and shined on the airplane,” Hobson says. “I’ll never forget this: the copilot looked at me and he said, ‘This ain’t going to be a surprise!’ Right over the end of the runway, we called, ‘Green light’ [indicating the troops should begin jumping].”

  The loadmaster, watching out the cargo door, said, “They’re firing rockets at us!” Every time he keyed his mike, the other members of the crew could hear the weapons firing over the intercom. Actually, what looked like rockets to the excited loadmaster were 23mm tracer shells—a familiar sight to an earlier generation of air commandos, flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  Even in the brief time the Rangers were suspended in their chutes, they could hear bullets whizzing through the risers that connected them to the canopies overhead. Remarkably, none of them was hit.

  As soon as the last chutist cleared the door, Hobson broke right and dove toward the water. The guns turned to zero in on the plane, following him down the runway, inflicting several hits.

  “I radioed back and said, ‘Hey, you better get a gunship in here. There’s a lot of resistance down there.’ It doesn’t make sense to lose an airplane with all those guys in the back as long as you can get a gunship in here,” Hobson says.

  Under the rules of engagement, the Americans were not supposed to fire unless they had been fired upon first.

  “But once they unloaded on me and the guy behind me, it was open warfare,” Hobson says. “The gunship came in and took care of it.”

  For the crew of the AC-130 Spectre gunship, it wasn’t quite that simple. As engineer aboard the plane, CMSgt. Mike Hozenbackez was sitting between and just behind the pilots, looking out the windscreen as they approached the airfield about dawn. During the night, the defenders on the ground had heard the plane but could not pinpoint it with their searchlights. As soon as daylight broke, they could see where to shoot.

  “We were told there was only one triple-A site,” Hozenbackez says. “When we got there, we counted six. The tracers were coming past the windscreen. We wondered why we didn’t get hit. I could see the triple A coming up on both sides of the windscreen. It was 23mm, orange and red tracers, coming up at us. When you see it come past the windscreen, you know it’s close, but we didn’t get hit.”

  The job of the gunship crew was to suppress all the antiaircraft fire so the Rangers could get in safely. The last gun refused to be silenced. The gunship poured both 20mm and 40mm shells in his direction, but he kept shooting right back.

  “We kept raining down on him, and he kept raining back up at us. I wondered, Are we going to shut this guy down or not?” Hozenbackez says.

  The crew saw another AC-130 gunship orbiting nearby and called for help. But the other crew said they didn’t want to get in the same orbit with another gunship.

  “When we all landed at Barbados, those other guys came over,” Hozenbackez says. “We said, ‘How come you guys didn’t come give us a hand?’ One of them said, ‘Man, you should have seen that from where we were. Fire was going down, fire was coming up. Like two guys dueling it out.’”

  As soon as all the guns appeared to have been put out of business, the Combat Talons began landing. But some of the enemy gunners were just playing possum. With the big transport planes on the ground and vulnerable, they opened up again.

  “One of the Talons got pinned on the runway, and a 14mm started firing at him, shooting across the runway,” Hozenbackez says. “We told him to take off. We marked along the runway as he took off. We gave him an armed escort right down the runway.”

  After the Rangers landed, the gunships continued to provide fire support for them.

  One group of Rangers radioed that they were pinned down, hiding under a cement truck, taking fire from a group of Cubans barricaded in a nearby house. They asked for help.

  The gunship crew fired at the house with their 105mm cannon, but the shells burst as soon as they hit the house rather than penetrating. They then set the shells on delay so they penetrated the house and went off in the basement. That quickly ended the threat to the Rangers.

  At another point, the gunship crew knew they were taking fire, but they couldn’t see where it was coming from. Finally, the right scanner spotted the gun. The pilot called him to the cockpit to point it out. Where he pointed was a house, and the pilot was reluctant to fire.

  “Then the guy made one mistake,” Hozenbackez says. “He fired while we were looking at him. We rolled in there and took that out. We Winchestered [fired off] all our bullets.”

  By the time the crew landed in Barbados to pick up another load of bullets, they had been in the air for thirty-one hours.

  While Hozenbackez and his crew members were clearing out opposition at Salines, other gunships were busy protecting a small group of SEALs who had been delivered by helicopter to the governor’s mansion on a hill overlooking the capital city of Saint George’s. Their job was to escort the governor-general, Sir Paul Scoon, and his family and aides to an airfield in the city below. But they found themselves cut off and outgunned by Grenadan forces who circled the mansion with armored personnel carriers.

  The gunships fired within a few feet of the SEALs guarding the perimeter of the compound, knocking out the per
sonnel carriers with pinpoint fire and repelling at least one determined infantry charge against the defenders.

  For the air commandos and for the military’s special operations community generally, Grenada was a test under fire of the lessons learned since Desert One three years before. Many of the forces performed as expected. The Air Force gunships probably saved the day at both Salines and the governor-general’s mansion. Hobson won the Air Force’s Mackay Trophy for the most meritorious flight of 1983.

  But it was also clear that there were many lessons yet to be learned. The nation’s special operations forces were, to put it charitably, not quite ready.

  Intelligence information was incomplete and contradictory, if not totally lacking, as demonstrated by the conflicting information about the defenses at Salines provided to the Rangers and the Air Force crews.

  Communications among Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine units were sometimes impossible. Even members of the same services had difficulty talking to one another.

  In Washington, the invasion was declared a victory. In a sense, it was. On very short notice, the military had gathered a formidable force to descend on Grenada. Within days, the defenses had been neutralized and the endangered medical students had been removed to safety.

  But many of those who took part in the operation were deeply disturbed.

  Shortly after the operation, John Carney, then a lieutenant colonel, retired from the Air Force.

  “I was disturbed just how it got so screwed up and messed up,” Carney says. “I just didn’t like identifying with it. Here we’ve got all this money put into this, and things are starting to come along, and we pull off what was really stupid. It was just dumb. It was insidious. It just bothered me. I never could live with it. I said, ‘Let’s get the hell out of the community.’”

  To those involved and to key members of Congress, the Grenada operation demonstrated just how far the military’s special operations community had to go, both in terms of their capabilities and especially in terms of being able to work effectively together.

  For the air commandos, this meant the rest of the decade of the 1980s would be a difficult, contentious, and eventually rewarding experience.

  Within sixty days of Carney’s retirement, a general with whom he had worked closely in the past had talked him into coming back on active duty. In the next few years, the small cadre of combat controllers Carney had at the time of the Iranian hostage rescue attempt was expanded into three special tactics squadrons based in the United States, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan. In the process, one of the most serious deficiencies of the special tactics teams was corrected.

  The combat controllers thought of their basic job as going in with the Rangers on an airfield-seizure operation, making sure that the runways and taxiways were clear, controlling the flow of aircraft bringing in additional troops, and marshaling the planes on the ground. All this would be done in the dark and possibly under fire.

  But what about those who were injured or wounded in the original drop or subsequent firefights?

  Even before Grenada, Carney had been mulling that question in his mind.

  “It was apparent to me we didn’t have a dedicated rescue force,” he says. “We, the controllers, didn’t have the capability to be fixing broken legs on the runway. That’s not our job. We had to clear the runway and get this airflow going in there.”

  The Air Force Rescue Service had trained a number of men to give medical treatment to an Air Force crewman shot down behind enemy lines, help him aboard a rescue helicopter, and stabilize him on the flight back to a friendly base. But, as part of one of the military’s frequent reorganizations, plans to purchase newer helicopters to carry the rescue forces were canceled in favor of buying more fighter aircraft. The Air Force ended up with eighty-six pararescuemen—known as PJs—with only antiquated helicopters to take them to the war.

  Carney blended them with his combat controllers into the new special tactics teams and then trained them all to do one another’s jobs—as well as to help out other units in the field.

  “Some of the senior NCOs and I realized we had to be trained to fill in wherever we had to,” Carney says. “You can’t be a burden to these guys you’re going in with. Charlie Beckwith always told us, ‘We’re not going to drag your knuckles through the streets.’ What he meant was, you’d better be able to help if we ever need it. I started sending the guys to some of these esoteric weapons schools, field trade–type schools.”

  They learned to swim like a SEAL, jump like a paratrooper, fight like a Ranger. Plus, they were good communicators and aircraft controllers.

  “The whole idea was that we would never be a burden to any force that was sent anywhere in the world to do a job,” Carney says.

  “A classic example: We were on an exercise. They had a Brit who was the commander. It was an airfield seizure out West. They were clearing buildings. He ran out of people to clear buildings. He walked up to one of the special tactics guys, and he said, ‘Mate, I want you to take your men over there and clear that building.’ My guys says, ‘We’re not Army. We’re Air Force people. We know how to do that, but that’s not our job.’ But this young guy, he takes his guys, and they go clear the building.”

  While Carney was busy building the special tactics teams into a highly trained combat controller-rescue force, the whole Air Force special operations capability seemed to some of those involved in danger of disappearing.

  In the mid-1980s, the chief of staff of the Army and the chief of staff of the Air Force agreed to transfer the Air Force’s helicopters to the Army. If that happened, how long would it be before the Army also took over the tankers needed to refuel the helicopters, the Combat Talons needed to carry the Army Rangers, the gunships needed to provide firepower—in effect, all of Air Force special operations?

  At the time, Gary Weikel had recently been assigned to the air staff at the Pentagon after flying the Pave Low. He decided to do something to prevent what seemed to him a disastrous abandonment of special operations by the Air Force brass. He thus inserted himself at the center of a battle that could have been just as dangerous to his career as his role, as a young helicopter pilot, in the Mayaguez affair had been to his life.

  “The Air Force generals don’t like helicopters in general because the Air Force fighter-pilot leadership believes the service’s destiny lies in higher, faster, and further, not the dirty ground wars in Southeast Asia and the stuff that special operations gets involved in,” Weikel says.

  “They view that whole Vietnam era as a tremendous delay in the destiny of the Air Force. They did not like to have to buy all those goddamn helicopters and those AC-130 gunships, and AC-47s and AC-119s and A-1 Skyraiders that were piston engined. In their view, that delayed introduction of newer generations of fighters, diverted their resources. They don’t like to even think about wars like that, and they do not like special operations. To a certain extent, they think it was the special operations community that got us embroiled in Southeast Asia in the first place.”

  Weikel “went over the hill” and asked a friend in the office of the secretary of defense for advice. The friend gave him the name of a staffer on Capitol Hill who had been an Army Special Forces trooper and who might be able to do something to block the plans of the Army and Air Force chiefs. But he warned Weikel, “You’d be taking your career in your hands to do something like that. If the Air Force found out about you doing this outside their direction, you’d be toast.”

  Weikel decided to do it anyway. He and the staffer hit it off. Together, they worked to draft legislation that would protect Air Force special operations. Meanwhile, civilian officials in the Pentagon also set up roadblocks to the plans of the top generals in the Air Force and Army.

  Their resistance was well timed. Key members of Congress were deeply disturbed by what they had heard in classified briefings about the Grenada operation and were searching for ways to strengthen the nation’s ability to deal with hostage taking, hij
acking, and other small-scale emergencies in various parts of the world.

  The result was legislation creating the United States Special Operations Command, a separate military organization, combining Army, Air Force, and Navy commando forces, with its own budget and headed by a four-star officer. It began operations in April 1987. Air Force special operations was upgraded, becoming the Twenty-third Air Force—but it still reported to the Military Airlift Command as well as to the new joint command. It was not until 1990 that the separate Air Force Special Operations Command was created.

  The setup was not exactly what Weikel and his co-conspirators had envisioned, but it was much better, in their view, than the disastrous direction in which things had been headed.

  With the reorganization came money for a new Combat Talon transport plane and a new gunship. Of special interest to Weikel, it also authorized the conversion of all the Air Force’s HH-53 helicopters to the Pave Low configuration.

  As the legislation was moving toward final approval, Weikel, somehow having survived his part in the insurrection, was assigned to command the 20th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt, getting the Pave Low force up to speed for the next call to action, wherever that might be. And Hobson was being groomed to become commander of Air Force Special Operations, the first true air commando to hold that post.

  CHAPTER 25

  Panama—Getting It Together

  When Major Clay McCutchan set off for Panama on 17 December 1989, it was his fortieth birthday and he had the bittersweet feelings of anyone passing life’s halfway milestone. But he was happy nevertheless, looking forward to a welcome break from the cool winter weather in his home in Florida’s northwest panhandle. What he didn’t realize was that, before the week was over, his country would be at war, a war from which he would emerge court-martialed and disgraced—or a hero.

  McCutchan is the pilot of an AC-130 gunship in the Air Force reserves. A bachelor, he had volunteered at the last moment for a training assignment in Panama, relieving the crew of one of the active-duty gunships assigned there over the holidays.