by Orr Kelly
Although there had been rumblings of trouble between the United States and Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian strongman, war was far from McCutchan’s thoughts as he approached Howard Air Force Base, the big United States base in the Canal Zone. He considered himself a very ordinary pilot and reasoned that a more skilled flier would have been sent in his place if war were imminent. He looked forward to a pleasant couple of weeks of nighttime training flights, with swimming and tennis filling his days.
What he did not know was that a highly successful full-scale rehearsal for the invasion of Panama—secretly developed under the code name of Blue Spoon—had been held at Hurlburt Field, a few miles from his home, only a couple of days earlier—on 14 to 16 December. And then President Bush had given his approval for the operation, to be known publicly as Just Cause.
As soon as he arrived at Howard, McCutchan noted the steady stream of aircraft descending on the airfield and sensed that something was up. In recent days, a Marine had been killed and a Navy lieutenant and his wife had been held and mistreated by Noriega’s men.
On Monday, McCutchan and his crew were let in on the secret plans for the invasion. Seven AC-130s from the active-duty Air Force would fly in from Hurlburt to knock out key defensive positions. But at the moment, the two reserve planes were the only AC-130s in Panama. If the conflict occurred ahead of schedule, the reserve crews would lead the way. That night, they flew over the Commendancia, the nerve center of any opposition to the American operation, and photographed it in case they were called on to attack.
When they returned to Howard about midnight, two active-duty gunships had arrived from the States. Five more were scheduled to arrive shortly. The invasion was scheduled for the night of 19–20 December—Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
Although McCutchan later referred to Operation Just Cause as the “all-time great gunship war, a gunship war from beginning to end,” it was really a broader affair, drawing on the full range of Air Force special operations: Combat Talons dropped Rangers to capture airfields; an Air Force special tactics team accompanied Navy SEALs in the attack on another airfield; Pave Low and Pave Hawk helicopters backed up the forces on the ground; nine special operations tankers circled endlessly, keeping other planes in the air.
The task of the special operations forces was to spearhead an invasion whose goal was to oust Noriega from his position, return him to the United States for trial on drug charges, and install a new government.
The operation would be the first large-scale test of how well the Air Force had learned the lessons of Desert One and Grenada.
Unlike Grenada, where the entire operation had been carried out on the spur of the moment, planning for the Blue Spoon invasion had been lengthy, and there had been time for intense training and elaborate rehearsals. On training assignments in the Canal Zone, aircrews had had the opportunity to fly over, drive by, and walk around their targets, studying them at their leisure.
Active-duty gunship crews had, for months, practiced firing at mock-ups of the targets, such as the Commendancia, that they would hit in the opening moments of the invasion, although the crews considered them routine training exercises and doubted they would ever be called on actually to attack those targets.
With the arrival of the active-duty gunships, the two reserve crews were shifted into a backup position. McCutchan’s assignment was to stand by to protect Howard if it came under attack. One of the fears of those planning the operation was that a mortar attack, if not a full-scale assault, on Howard could shut down the base or so disrupt operations that aircraft involved in the invasion would not have a safe place to land.
Sitting in his plane, strapped in and ready to go on a moment’s notice, McCutchan’s big worry was not the Panamanians but all the American aircraft milling about in the dark. Howard was completely blacked out, and so were the planes. Crew members relied on their night-vision goggles to help avoid running into one another. It was the first time anyone had ever conducted a major military operation in total blackout conditions. McCutchan was especially sensitive to the possibility of a taxiing accident. Several months before, he had run over a fire extinguisher and had been demoted from aircraft commander to copilot. Only after a hurried check ride had he been reinstated as an aircraft commander in time for the Panama assignment.
Surprisingly, Howard did not come under the kind of attack that had been feared. McCutchan and his crew were ordered into the air to respond to calls for help from troops on the ground. As they took off, they could see tracer bullets from machine guns fired by the Panamanian defense force arcing clear across the city.
“There was a terrific firefight at a police station just north of Howard,” McCutchan says. “We could see the enemy and the Marines, but we couldn’t join in the fight because we couldn’t establish radio contact. The frequencies weren’t correct.”
In an attempt to make up for the lack of communication during the operation in Grenada, the military had burdened the aircrews with more radios and separate frequencies than they knew what to do with. One pilot described the documentation for the multitude of radio frequencies as looking like “the Bronx phone book.” In the AC-130s, with their large crews, three men shared the task of monitoring the radios. In the helicopters, with their smaller crews, the copilot became totally occupied with trying to maintain communications, leaving all the flying to the pilot.
For most of the night, McCutchan’s crew flew in circles and waited for assignments while watching tensely for the sight of other planes in the dark—especially other gunships shooting down. Flying at forty-five hundred feet, they were the lowest gunship.
“This meant everything above us was shooting down, and everything below us was shooting up,” McCutchan says.
They finally received an assignment to aid a group of civilians pinned down by a sniper. They quickly silenced the sniper with four rounds from their most accurate gun, the 40mm weapon.
“The whole night was very frustrating,” McCutchan says. “We didn’t really get to shoot that much. We only put four rounds down.”
Finally, when he had only about an hour’s worth of gas left, McCutchan was directed to the Fort Amador causeway. Looking down, the crew could see a big firefight in progress. They could even tell the good guys from the bad guys. But they couldn’t establish radio communications to get permission to fire in support of the Americans.
“It was just so frustrating I couldn’t believe it,” McCutchan says.
To compound the situation, the crew of McCutchan’s plane suddenly became aware there was another gunship above them, shooting down through their orbit. They got out of there in a hurry.
As they turned away, they saw several armored cars. This time, they established radio contact and were given permission—in fact they were ordered—to fire on the armored cars. McCutchan gripped the trigger, eager to shoot.
“That’s when my sensor operator and fire-control officer saw about thirty or forty people show up around these armored cars,” McCutchan says.
Looking through their infrared and television sensors, the experts on McCutchan’s crew became convinced the men they saw around the armored cars were friendly troops. But the orders from the ground were explicit: “They’re enemy, and you’re cleared to kill ’em.”
The crew decided to use their 20mm guns on the troops and hit the armored cars with their 40mm. But the fire-control officer continued to insist he was seeing friendly troops.
“I’m leaning forward, and I wanted to get the job done, and I wanted to shoot so bad I could taste it,” McCutchan says.
“The FAC is shouting at us to shoot. We go back to the command post and they’re telling us: ‘You are ordered to shoot. Confirmed enemy.’
“I would have shot. But based on what my fire-control officer was telling me, I had to trust him. And I did. So I didn’t shoot. I was convinced I was going to get court-martialed because we disobeyed a direct order to fire.”
The plane had been in the air fo
r five and a half hours. McCutchan figured it was time to get on the ground before someone made a serious mistake. As he parked the plane, he looked out and saw his squadron commander waiting on the apron.
“He said, ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’ We said, ‘We thought they were friendlies, we weren’t sure.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re either in a lot of trouble or you’re a hero.’”
The exhausted crew members tumbled into bed. Sometime after noon the next day, the squadron commander awakened them. “You guys are heroes,” he said. “They were friendlies.”
Army Green Berets had stopped and captured the personnel carriers, and it was American troops gathering around the vehicles that the sensor operators in the gunship saw.
Members of the crew all received medals. McCutchan and three other officers were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross—for having the guts not to shoot.
How difficult it is to tell friend from foe, even with the sophisticated equipment carried by the AC-130 gunships, was demonstrated in another incident that same night.
One of the active-duty gunships backing up troops at the Commendancia was told of the approach of an enemy armored personnel carrier in the dark. The crew of the gunship spotted the vehicle with both television and infrared sensors and fired.
Several days later, the commander of the gunship unit visited the Commendancia to examine the damage done by his men. An infantry officer mentioned damage to one of his vehicles.
It was an American personnel carrier that had been hit by the gunship. There were no deaths, but there were several injuries from this “friendly fire” incident.
General George A. Gray III, who was then a colonel commanding the 1st Special Operations Wing, says American troops and vehicles were supposed to be marked with special “gun tape” visible to the gunship crews. But in this case, trying to penetrate the smoke of the battle down below, the crew was switching back and forth between their television and infrared sensors. The special marking tape can be seen on the TV screen but not on the IR display.
Gray later looked at the recorded images of what the crew members were seeing. “Whenever I see the trigger getting ready to be pulled, there’s no gun tape,” he says.
The incident was not discovered until several days after it occurred and was not made public until six months later. When the official records of the incident were requested under the Freedom of Information Act, the Air Force replied that all the records, except for a small collection of newspaper clippings, had been destroyed.
One other incident that night spoiled an almost perfect record for the gunships as they rode shotgun for the troops down below. In several cases, Panamanian troops surrendered, even though they outnumbered the Americans, when they were told a gunship was overhead.
One of the gunships was assigned to circle overhead as Navy SEALs attacked the Paitilla airfield to prevent Noriega from escaping in a jet parked there. Two special tactics combat controllers went with the SEALs, landing at the foot of the Paitilla runway in rubber boats. The Air Force men stayed with the command unit while one of the SEAL platoons advanced up the field toward the hangar where the jet was kept.
Suddenly, the SEALs came under murderous fire from a small group of Panamanians hiding in the darkened hangar. Four SEALs fell mortally wounded, and nine others were injured.
The special tactics controllers called for help from the gunship but could not make contact. They could hear the Spectre continuing to circle frustratingly overhead during the brief firefight. Whether the gunship could have helped in any event is doubtful. By the time the gunship could have fired, the SEAL platoons had already been badly mauled. And, by that time, the SEALs were so close to the hangar that the gunship could not have fired without risking hitting them as well as the Panamanians.
Looking back on the incident later, Gary Weikel, commander of the 20th Special Operations Squadron, a Pave Low helicopter unit from Hurlburt, was frustrated that he had not been able to have one of his Pave Lows accompany the SEALs on their mission.
With their ability to see in the dark, the crew of a Pave Low would have been a perfect escort for the SEALs, peering ahead and telling them exactly what kind of resistance they could expect to encounter as they approached the hangar. And if they saw trouble ahead, they could have provided a withering curtain of support with their guns.
But Weikel was short of helicopters to carry out all the assignments his unit had that night. He blames the shortage on inter-service rivalry.
Months before the actual invasion, Weikel foresaw that his unit might be called upon to go into action in Panama. He put special emphasis on training down there.
“I wanted to lull them into complacency,” he says. “It was like a page out of the Egyptian attack on Israel in the 1973 war. The Egyptians, for interminable days and weeks, practiced Suez Canal crossing exercises, bridging exercises. The Israelis got desensitized to it and didn’t pay any attention to it. And one day, they came. That’s kind of what I was doing, grabbing a little bit of the element of surprise to ourselves, to have this aircraft appear in some numbers down there, particularly since it’s such a unique airplane, with the blisters and the bubbles and the guns all over.”
While stepping up training in the Canal Zone, Weikel tried to find out what kind of military operation was planned.
“For six months, I had been trying to query the system to find out what other special operations forces were down there so I could provide support to them,” Weikel says. “I was rebuffed at every turn. I was told I was going to take only five Pave Lows down there, even though I had twelve available at Hurlburt that were ready to go.
“I was given a lot of cockamamy excuses. It turned out, if we had known SEAL Team Four was going to be down there, I could have brought down a couple more Pave Lows to provide support for them. When they got in trouble, they could have had immediate fire support and extraction capability. As it turned out, I broke one of the five Pave Lows loose and sent him over with an Air Force MH-60 Pave Hawk to support the SEALs, to reinforce Team Four, and to evacuate the casualties and the wounded.
“I detailed a Pave Low to provide almost full-time fire support, sniper suppression, all during the next few days. Every time the Pave Low would go away, the SEALs would catch fire. Every time the Pave Low would come back, all the firing would stop.”
One of the four SEALs who lost their lives at Paitilla might have survived if he had been evacuated and received prompt medical attention. But the “golden hour” in which his life might have been saved was lost because there was no helicopter immediately available to evacuate him.
Weikel credits the Army helicopters with doing an extremely good job during Operation Just Cause. But he adds:
“I was very unhappy we didn’t have more Pave Lows down there. We could have covered all these other special operations units involved. Army aviation has been jealous of the Air Force helicopter community. There has been very bad blood between them over the years. After 1984 [when the plan to transfer the Air Force special operations helicopters to the Army was blocked], they were pissed that the Air Force had gotten all these superb helicopters and had gotten all this attention. And they didn’t want any more Air Force helicopters invited to the war than what we had.”
Weikel’s five Pave Low helicopters flew nonstop from Hurlburt to Panama, a grueling fourteen-hour ordeal with aerial refuelings along the way. The Pave Low, unlike a fixed-wing airplane, has no automatic pilot. That means hands-on flying every moment the craft is in the air. The crews had earned a long rest when they landed at Howard.
But Weikel, remembering his fourteen-hour combat day during the Mayaguez incident, had insisted on training extra crews. Counting crew members assigned to squadron headquarters, he actually had enough men to provide two-plus crews for each plane. Almost as soon as they arrived at Howard, the Pave Lows were ready to go into action. And the squadron was able to keep its planes in the air around the clock, unlike Army units, which had to ground their helicop
ters while the crews rested.
Although the Pave Lows had special targets to hit when the operation began, they were put on standby at Howard because the shooting started earlier than expected. In the next few days, the unit flew more than three hundred combat sorties, crisscrossing over the fighting down below.
Weikel was disturbed by the lack of fixed-wing escorts for the troop-carrying helicopters and Combat Talons—another lesson from the war in Southeast Asia that had been forgotten.
After dawn on the first day of the operation, the Pave Lows were assigned to move a unit of soldiers across the city.
“The sun is up now, and we were concerned,” Weikel says. “Here we are in the daytime with absolutely no fighter escort, with an elite Army force onboard. Here we are flying across skirmish lines in the daytime. We had forgotten all our lessons from Southeast Asia. We forgot about the tactical side of the house. Where was the escort? When the MC-130s went in to do those drops, they were unescorted. Why? Would we ever have done an unescorted mission into Khe Sanh [site of a bitter battle in 1968]? No way! Those missions into Laos and North Vietnam with helicopters? No way!”
The helicopter crews also had the same kind of difficulty with communications experienced by those flying the gunships.
“Communications were completely screwed up,” Weikel says. “The problem was that, even though we had excellent radios and communications gear, we had so many people talking on the radios, lots of people just routinely asking situation reports from their forces, that they were stepping on each other and not enabling key communications to pass through.
“Another problem was that, sometimes in the excitement of battle, guys forgot some portion of their call sign. For example, there was a call went out that Five-one’s hit and going down. Trouble is, there’s an Alpha through Zulu Five-one out there. Everyone who has a Five-one out there is going to come up on the net at the same time. When they’re all doing that, you can’t use that radio to find out what happened to the Five-one that’s in trouble.