by Orr Kelly
“The lesson from Desert One was that there wasn’t enough communication. Now they’ve got too much talking. The dedicated special operations community was always trained that you only communicate by exception. If you’re out there and everything is going according to plan, you aren’t going to say anything. The only time you’re going to come up on the radios is when something is not going according to plan or you need something. That did not seem to be adhered to, and that is another legacy of Desert One we inherited in our own force.”
For the 1720th and 1724th Special Tactics Teams, their support of the Rangers in simultaneous nighttime jumps to seize two airfields was the first test in combat since the para-rescue PJs had been melded in with the combat controllers more than two years before.
Sergeant Gordon W. Tully was with the Rangers in the second plane over the Rio Hato military airfield that night. Each of the two lead planes carried a five-man special tactics team, to provide redundancy. First out was the “bike chaser,” whose job it was to follow a small motorcycle, with its own chute, to the ground and then set out to check the condition of the field. Then came the team leader, an air traffic controller; a command and control communicator; and finally a PJ whose job was to place an infrared strobe light at the far end of the runway. Other members of the team set out the same kind of box-and-one, with five infrared lights, that Carney had placed for the Desert One landing.
“As we came inbound, about an hour out, we were notified that yes, the runway was blocked,” Tully says. “Ten minutes out, we open the doors, a little earlier than normal. As we ran in towards the airfield, the F-117s [Stealth fighter-bombers in use for the first time] made their strike. They struck the airfield. We had two AC-130 gunships overhead, giving us extremely close air support.
“As I came under the canopy, I saw the runway was blocked. There was no shooting yet. Even though they knew we were coming, we still took them by surprise, due to the tactics we used, running without lights. Fifteen aircraft dropped, one minute in trail.
“The first team dropped three hundred yards right. I dropped right next to the runway. I was derigging my equipment as Chalk Three flew over. [Chalk is a term used to distinguish aircraft loads.] There was still no shooting. I was putting on my rucksack when Chalk Four came over. The triple A started hot and heavy.”
Before the mission, the crews had been told to expect fire from four antiaircraft guns. After the battle, Tully took pictures of twelve antiaircraft guns, all of which had been firing.
“Chalks Four through Fifteen all were hit by triple A, some of them quite heavily,” Tully says. “I remember 130s going over with cones of three or four tracers on them. People were shot inside the aircraft, but not a single 130 went down.
“You could only see the planes when they were right over the airfield. Running in and out, you couldn’t see them. As they passed over, the triple A guns would fire. As they passed off into the darkness, the triple A would go up and down the sticks of jumpers. As they reached the ground, they’d use grazing fire across the airfield.
“When they did grazing fire, I would have to get down flat. It is quite intimidating having a machine gun do that. But then the next aircraft would come over, they’d go right back up, and I could jump up and move forward.
“One of my jobs was to assure the approach end of the runway was clear. I had to drag a few friendly casualties off the runway. One guy had a broken hip, probably a jump injury. He was being given buddy care by one of his mates. We grabbed his load-bearing equipment and dragged him off the runway, much to his distress. We did that more than once. We had to get those reinforcements in or people would die.”
The PJs, meanwhile, set up aid stations to treat wounded and injured—both Americans and Panamanians. During the airfield operation, they helped 146 wounded or injured soldiers.
Even after the airfield was seized by the Rangers, hostile fire continued. Despite the gunfire, two Combat Talons brought in supplies for the Rangers and then remained on the runway, refueling Army helicopters from their own fuel tanks.
The invasion of Panama came after the creation of the United States Special Operations Command in 1987 by a Congress angered by problems revealed at Grenada. But the air commandos were still in the Twenty-third Air Force—a part of the Military Airlift Command. On 22 May 1990, the unit was transformed into a command of its own—the Air Force Special Operations Command, reporting to the overall United States Special Operations Command.
When the brief, intense operation in Panama was reviewed, it was clear that Air Force special operations had made impressive strides. The Spectre gunships had proved invaluable in supporting troops on the ground. The Pave Lows, flying around the clock, had proved themselves in combat. And the combat controllers and pararescuemen had worked smoothly together in their new special tactics teams.
The operation also emphasized once again the importance of well-trained and well-equipped reserves, quickly available to support the active-duty units. The 711th Special Operations Squadron, the reserve unit of which McCutchan and his crew are members, added to the number of gunships available. The 193rd Special Operations Group of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, a unit that specializes in psychological warfare, added a capability that would otherwise have been lacking in the operation.
There were, of course, still problems to be worked out. Communications needed a lot more discipline. Techniques for telling friend from foe to prevent “friendly fire” incidents were still far from perfect, as the incident involving the gunship at the Commendancia and McCutchan’s narrow decision not to fire demonstrated. There were still no dedicated fixed-wing fighter escorts for transport planes and helicopters.
Crew fatigue surfaced, as it does in every conflict, as a major problem. McCutchan’s crew was finally grounded and forced to rest, and one man—the scanner, whose job it was to lean out into the slipstream to watch for antiaircraft fire and other planes—had to be hospitalized. Only units, such as Weikel’s Pave Low squadron, that had trained extra crews were able to keep their planes in the air around the clock.
And, for many air commandos, there was a new worry about their independence now that they were part of the Army-dominated United States Special Operations Command.
A problem that hardly anyone foresaw was about to make its appearance in a new theater of combat in Southwest Asia.
As the buildup that preceded the war with Iraq began, special forces units were among the first to arrive in Saudi Arabia. But Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Desert Shield-Desert Storm commander, displayed a good deal of doubt—to many it seemed outright hostility—about the role the special forces would play in the war. For a while, it seemed as though they might throw a war and the air commandos would not be invited.
PART 8
New Challenges
CHAPTER 26
The Gulf War and Beyond
Colonel George Gray, commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing, was gloomy and frustrated as he flew back to his base from a meeting with General Schwarzkopf late in 1990.
Gray and the other special operators reporting to Schwarzkopf had come up with what they thought was a workable, if not elegant, solution to one of the most serious problems facing those planning the imminent air assault on Iraq.
No matter how they looked at the map, there was no way to approach Baghdad without penetrating a ring of radar stations in position to give timely warning of an attack. Eventually, the defenses could be destroyed, but the losses in the first wave of attacking aircraft would be painfully high.
The plan seemed a simple one to the special operators: Pave Low helicopters, skimming over the desert under the cover of darkness, would deposit teams of Green Berets close to two key radar stations commanding the southern approaches to Baghdad. Striking without warning, the Army Special Forces troops would hit both radar sites at the same instant, putting them both off the air moments before the first aircraft roared through the gap.
It was not a routine operation
, but it was the kind of thing the Air Force and Army had long trained for. It was precisely the kind of surprise attack behind enemy lines they had prepared, during the long years of the Cold War, to carry out in Europe.
But Schwarzkopf said no, there would not be any cross-border operations by special forces: “There isn’t going to be anybody on the ground prior to H-hour!”
Perhaps it was partially the ingrained suspicion of special operators on the part of the traditional Army and Air Force. But there was also reason behind his refusal. By their very nature, small-scale operations behind enemy lines, once they were launched, slipped out from under the control of commanders back in headquarters. And there was always the danger that such a small unit might get into trouble and have to be rescued.
Other possibilities for breaching the radar barrier ran through Gray’s mind. Bombers might be used to hit the radar sites. But how could they be sure, flashing by in the darkness at high speed, that the job had been done—and done right? Pave Lows could find the radar sites in the darkness, but their machine guns were designed for defense, not for blowing away an installation as large and complex as a radar site.
Looking out the plane window, Gray noted a line of Army Apaches. The Apaches were heavily armed helicopter gunships, but they didn’t have navigation equipment good enough to find a precise target at long range in the dark. The answer to the problem suddenly came into Gray’s mind: use Pave Lows as pathfinders to lead the Apaches to the targets, where they would crush the radar sites with missiles and guns and then hover long enough to make sure the installations had been destroyed.
This was an elegant solution. It did not risk a small, elite force on the ground. It promised to open a gap in the radar net moments before the first attackers flashed through. And it held out the hope that aircraft losses in the first strike would be kept to a minimum.
Schwarzkopf liked the plan. He authorized training of the crews. But he told them they could not fire any Hellfire guided missiles for practice. The weapons were expensive, and he would need all he had in the upcoming ground battle to knock out enemy tanks.
Gray told him: “With all due respect, sir, I can’t take the mission unless I can rehearse with Hellfires. Most of these kids have never shot a live Hellfire before.”
Schwarzkopf agreed: “Okay, you’re right. But you call me every time you shoot a Hellfire.”
The plan called for a total of twelve aircraft to carry out the attack, with four Pave Lows leading two flights of four Apaches against each target. Although only one pathfinder was needed to find each radar site, an extra Pave Low went along on both flights just to be on the safe side.
They were following the successful model of the Son Tay raid, and not the example of Desert One, where too few helicopters were dispatched.
Major Bob Leonik, who was tabbed to fly one of the Pave Lows, along with Lt. Col. Richard L. Comer, commander of the 20th Special Operations Squadron, was reminded of his high-school days. As a teenager, Leonik was a trumpet virtuoso, so skilled that he had an offer from the Dallas Symphony and had to decide, when he finished high school, whether to go to college or embark immediately on a career as a professional musician. He chose to go to college, but his instincts as a musician stayed with him.
“My father taught me that being able to play a musical instrument is the basis of everything else you do in life.” Leonik says. “If you could master a musical instrument, you could apply that to other things in life. That’s what the Pave Low was, a musical instrument. I had hoped to go from being a performer to becoming a conductor. Being an aircraft commander was the closest thing to being a conductor, especially when you’re working with a Pave Low crew. I saw the same things you see in an orchestra.”
Even flying in the desert reminded Leonik of his experience as a musician. In pilot training, the emphasis was on flying in places like Vietnam, with jungles, rivers, and bodies of water to use as landmarks. But here in the hazy, featureless desert, there was little to go by.
“In the desert,” Leonik says, “you have to be concerned with subtle changes. It was like reading a piece of music.”
For four months, the crews trained for the mission, with special emphasis on what to do if any of a long list of things went wrong. Although they weren’t told their actual targets until just before the attack, they had a pretty good idea of the role they would play in starting the war.
Leonik didn’t use musical terms in talking to his crew, but that’s the way he thought.
“If I used those terms, they would think I was crazy,” he says. “I didn’t use the word staccato, but I defined it. I told them to make their calls ‘crisp, clean, clear.’”
There was something very appropriate and traditional about a trumpet player leading the charge. It was reminiscent of the way the bugler signaled the attack by a squadron of horse cavalry.
“We had a graduation exercise, simulating all the distances we were going to fly,” Gray says. “We went to a Saudi range and shot off something like four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Hellfires in our graduation exercise.”
Gray and several other officers crowded into Schwarzkopf’s office. He was on the couch. Gray sat on the floor. The others stood behind him. They explained the plan to Schwarzkopf again.
Schwarzkopf listened quietly and then turned to Gray and demanded: “Can you guarantee me 100 percent?”
“I thought about that a bit. It was obvious I was thinking. He had just put an awful lot of heat on me right there,” Gray recalled. After a long pause, Gray replied: “Yes, sir, I will.”
“Okay, Colonel, you can start the war,” Schwarzkopf replied.
The two sites to be attacked were about eight to ten miles inside Iraq and about fifteen miles apart. Since one was a little further from the border than the other, the six-ship formation led by Leonik and Comer took off about twenty minutes early.
As they headed north, the Apaches tucked in as close behind the Pave Lows as they dared. Flying without lights, the Apache pilots relied on their forward-looking infrared to fly tight formation on the Pave Lows.
For Leonik and his crew, it was just like a training mission. But it was a little chilly. Someone turned on the cabin heat. Suddenly a stray current ran through the electrical system and knocked out the alignment of their inertial navigation system.
“The very thing we were up there to do was just dropped off the line,” Leonik says. “So now what do you do? You’re sitting there in the middle of a piece, and your bow just broke. Or you just lost a string. Or the middle valve on your trumpet locked up. Is there a way you can get through the piece without a middle valve? That’s where all the training paid off.”
The crew used their radar to pick out a known landmark up ahead and then updated their navigation system as they passed over it. They were back in business.
For Maj. Ben Pulsifer, flying another Pave Low leading the second flight of Apaches to the other target, everything went smoothly.
“The ride in was uneventful,” Pulsifer recalls. “We just headed north toward a point. It just seemed like another practice run. But as we approached the border and the mileage counted down, we sat back as a crew and thought, Wow! We’re about to penetrate Iraq and kick off a war involving a million people on both sides! It was quite daunting to do that. It was just overwhelming to start something like that.”
As planned, the lead Pave Lows in each flight dropped a bundle of chem lights [small marker lights that use a chemical reaction to cause a greenish yellow glow when activated] at a predetermined point. The Apaches used the lights as a reference point to update their own navigation systems and turn in for the attack.
The Pave Lows swung away and flew back toward the border, still close enough to rescue crew members if any of the Apaches were shot down.
As he pulled away to the west, Pulsifer’s tail gunner, who was crouching on the ramp at the rear of the plane, spotted a SAM launch.
Pulsifer broke abruptly toward the SAM. Such a
maneuver causes the missile to turn so sharply that it stalls out or loses its lock on the target. The crew members were wearing night-vision goggles, but it was still hard to see, hard even to make out the line between earth and sky in the hazy darkness.
“We punched off our countermeasures,” Pulsifer says. “That one, obviously, didn’t get us, didn’t come near us. The danger we found was that we were flying about eighty feet at the time. It was just pitch-dark. As I made my break and rolled out level, I rolled out about forty feet off the ground. We survived the missiles but almost impacted the ground. There was a good lesson to learn there about making a break.”
But there wasn’t time for the lesson to sink in.
“As we came back to our holding point, my right scanner suddenly yelled out, ‘SAM, four o’clock!’ I made a break. He actually saw, from one of the Bedouin camps out there, saw the launch of the missile and saw it coming at the helicopter. We made a break and defeated the missile, this time not more than, oh, two feet above the ground. So we decided to move our orbit point a little bit because we didn’t like orbiting there right above the SAM launchers.”
From what they could see, the missiles appeared to be SA-7 shoulder-launched missiles.
Orbiting near the border, the Pave Low crews were close enough to see the explosions at the two radar sites, where the Apaches had struck within ten seconds of each other. But they weren’t close enough to confirm that the targets had been destroyed. They began to receive messages demanding a report, but they had to wait themselves for a report from the Apaches.
At one point, Colonel Comer, flying in Leonik’s plane, came on the air and told everyone to shut up—“We’re trying to get something done out here.”
Finally, the word came that the targets had been destroyed so thoroughly that they never came back on the air. The Pave Lows flashed the code word California, indicating the gap in the radar barrier had been created.