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

by Orr Kelly

  “About this time, in the FLIR system, we could see some of the low-level aircraft start to streak across the border,” Pulsifer recalls. “We saw a couple of the F-15 Strike Eagles, the low-level attack birds. Everybody else was coming in at high level. Our hit was twenty minutes prior to the start of the war. About twenty minutes after our hit, everything started to explode to the north. You could see tracer fire up in the sky. It looked like a wild Fourth of July up there.

  “We had gone to an HC-130 to refuel. As we headed north on the track, you could see all the explosions. Our follow-on mission was to go pick up any pilots shot down. The initial run-in was no big deal because we had rehearsed it so much. But as we were getting the gas and watching all the bombs going off and the tracer fire, I began to go: ‘Wow, I don’t want to go back up there. It looks pretty nasty.’ Then I started to get that tightening of the stomach. This would be pretty intensive if we had to go up there.

  “Not long after we got our gas, we were looking to the south, back over Saudi. And all of a sudden, all these strobe lights started coming on. As the guys came back across the border, they would come up with their anticollision lights. To me, that was probably one of the most spectacular sights I’ve ever seen. Just to see the sky fill up with all these airplanes coming back safely. Within twenty minutes of that, we got a call telling us to go ahead and come home. That was just an incredible feeling, that all those guys got in and out, and they weren’t going to need us at all.”

  Although planners of the air assault on Iraq had calculated that they would lose at least thirty-five planes in the initial assault, only one plane was shot down.

  But many of the planes coming back were in trouble, either because they had suffered battle damage or, in the great majority of cases, because they were running dangerously low on fuel.

  At Al Jouf, the Saudi airfield just south of the border, a special tactics team had set up shop, prepared to conduct a frantic aviation triage operation, sorting out the planes that were about to crash-land, those that were about to flame out for lack of fuel, and those that had just enough fuel to find a tanker or go on to a field farther south.

  For members of the special tactics team, it was a postgraduate course in combat control. They had already paid their way by taking over the uncompleted King Fahd airport and turning it into the busiest airfield in history during the buildup for the war. On some days, they handled as many as eighteen hundred aircraft. But nothing in their previous experience matched the urgency of the operations that night at Al Jouf.

  Sergeant Tully was in the tower at Al Jouf as the planes came streaming back from the attack on Baghdad and targets throughout Iraq. Plans called for refueling the planes in the air, but Tully and the other sergeants had told the brass that wouldn’t work—and they were right.

  “I had six battle-damaged aircraft simultaneously and eighteen emergency-fuel aircraft,” Tully recalls. “They can’t divert anywhere else. I don’t know how many minimal fuels I had.”

  His most pressing problem was a Navy A-6 bomber that was not only on fire but was still carrying bombs that the crew couldn’t release. Tully cleared the plane for landing. The crew made it onto the ground, stopped, jumped out, and left the burning plane on the runway. Hundreds of planes, many of them low on fuel and five of them suffering battle damage, were headed toward the field.

  Tully stacked the battle-damaged planes at two thousand feet apart. He broadcast that he didn’t even want to talk to planes with minimum fuel—only those with battle damage or those about to flame out for lack of fuel.

  One Navy F/A-18 pilot reported he had less than two minutes’ fuel remaining and asked for the best bail-out location. Tully told him to wait while he brought in a battle-damaged Tornado. The crew of the British Tornado said they were at twenty-eight thousand feet with neither engine working.

  The Tornadoes, flown by British and Saudi crews, had drawn one of the most dangerous tasks in the entire assault—low-level attacks on the heavily defended Iraqi airfields.

  “The Brit got a restart in one of his engines, so I put the F/A-18 pilot number one,” Tully continues. “Meanwhile, the runway is still blocked by a burning aircraft with hung ordnance—a cluster bomb. We tried to get the Saudi fire crew to push it off the runway with their fire truck. They couldn’t understand why we wanted to destroy this aircraft when their job was to save aircraft.”

  One of the Americans ran out, wrapped a chain around the burning plane’s landing gear, jumped in the fire truck, and pulled the plane out of the way.

  “I had already lined up the F/A-18 pilot,” Tully recalls. “I had him on his approach with the runway still blocked. If he couldn’t land, I was going to sidestep him to the parallel taxiway and start landing planes there, which is not a safe thing to do. He was three miles out when they started to move that aircraft. They got the aircraft off just before I had to sidestep him to the taxiway. And I had my other five battle-damaged aircraft coming in behind him. He landed on the runway and flamed out, ran out of gas. He took it off the end of the runway into the desert. Just to get out of the way.

  “The Brit Tornado came in right after him. He turned left at the end of the runway and ran off into the desert.”

  Four refueling points had been set up at both ends of the runway and taxiway, and there were two fuel trucks. As the fuel-hungry planes came in, a number of them were barely able to taxi off the runway before they ran out of fuel. At one point, six F-16 fighters flamed out while waiting in line on the ground for fuel. Trucks brought fuel to them.

  At the fuel stations, the planes kept their engines running, in a process known as hot refueling, so they could move rapidly out of the way and make room for the next plane in line.

  “We refueled hundreds of aircraft,” Tully says. “We saved a lot of people that night.”

  Although the Pave Lows were not called upon to conduct combat rescue operations on the night the air war opened, such a call came four days later, on 21 January 1991, when a Navy F-14 was shot down south of Baghdad.

  Two Pave Lows and four other rescue helicopters were on alert at the ‘Ar’Ar airfield near the Saudi-Iraq border. Captain Thomas J. Trask, his copilot, Maj. Michael Homan, and their crew in Moccasin 05 had been on alert since noon the day before. They had waited through the night, hoping that, if a plane were shot down, they would be able to make the rescue attempt under the cover of darkness. But it was after dawn when they received word that two Navy planes had gone down during the night. A daylight rescue mission deep into Iraq would be a highly risky venture.

  But, with a heavy fog limiting visibility to one hundred feet, the crews of the two Pave Lows decided to use the cover of the fog to make the rescue attempt. Theirs were the only helicopters able to fly in such conditions. They decided to split up. Trask and Homan would try to find the crew of the F-14, believed to be down in the desert some 60 miles northwest of Baghdad, 130 miles into Iraq. The other Pave Low would wait for more information and then go looking for the crew of the other plane. Only later did they learn that only one plane was down.

  “We were relieved we had all that cloud cover,” Homan says. “We figured the worst part would be going through the defenses right at the border. All the shots we had taken up to that point had been right at the border. You couldn’t ask for a better cloaking device than that fog.

  “We got up to the border, and that’s when the fog just cleared away. You felt like you were standing naked out in the street.”

  They continued north, at one point skimming past an antiaircraft position so fast the Iraqis did not have time to shoot. But they must have sounded the alarm.

  Suddenly, the AWACS plane, which was monitoring the whole area with its powerful radar, broadcast an urgent message: “Moccasin Zero-five. Snap one-eight-zero now!” An Iraqi MiG fighter was headed in their direction.

  The advice from the AWACS, to turn and flee toward the border, would have been useful if they had been flying a supersonic jet, but they were flyi
ng at only 140 knots, and they were already sixty or seventy miles from the border and the sheltering fog. Trask and Homan quickly decided that, if they turned around, they would just be shot down a few miles closer to the border. They continued north and then found a depression in the desert, where they hid as the jet passed by far overhead.

  A few minutes later, the AWACS reported more trouble: a “slow-mover”—an Iraqi helicopter—was headed in their direction. Two A-10 fighters were refueling, preparing to escort the Pave Low. Homan radioed for them to hurry up, but he wasn’t as worried by the helicopter as he had been by the fighter. The crew rather looked forward to taking on an enemy helicopter with their .50-caliber machine guns. But moments after the radioed request for the A-10s, the enemy helicopter returned to its base—an indication the Iraqis were listening in, monitoring the progress of Moccasin 05.

  The Iraqis were also, obviously, listening for signals from the downed crewman, later identified as Lt. Devon Jones. But there weren’t any signals. Jones was saving his batteries and trying to avoid detection, assuming he would have to wait until after dark for rescue.

  Trask and Homan searched as best they could. They checked out a number of discarded fuel tanks. They even found, and stopped to examine, an old Soviet-made ejection seat. Finally, they turned, disappointed, toward ‘Ar’Ar for fuel.

  As they sat in the hot-refueling pit, they heard a onesided conversation that sounded as though an A-10 pilot were talking to someone on the ground. As soon as their tanks were topped off, they headed north again, this time toward a spot twenty-five miles farther north than they had gone before. Their route took them skimming a few feet over a busy highway and so close to an enemy airfield that they could see the hangars and the parked planes. Everyone in that part of Iraq must have known they were coming.

  Because they were so low, the helicopter pilots couldn’t hear the downed pilot, but the A-10 pilots were in contact and knew where he was. Homan asked one of the two A-10 pilots to fly directly over the pilot and then go vertical, marking the spot.

  “We were headed right toward him when he popped right straight up,” Homan says. “We were about a mile and a half out when we spotted a vehicle. It was traveling real fast out in the desert. This guy was kicking up a pretty good dust cloud.”

  The truck was probably carrying soldiers with direction finding equipment, heading right toward the downed pilot. The helicopter crew didn’t want to take on the truck themselves because they still weren’t quite sure where Jones was. They moved out of the way, and Homan radioed a terse message to the A-10s: “Smoke the truck!”

  The planes hit the truck and set it ablaze. Then they told the Pave Low to head directly toward the column of smoke coming from the truck. That’s where the downed pilot was. As they approached, taxiing fast, Jones broke from the shallow hole he had dug with his fingernails and ran toward the helicopter. Ben Pennington, a pararescueman, jumped out to aid him, but Jones said later that he never even saw Pennington as he ran for the helicopter.

  Sergeant Timothy B. Hadrych, watching from his gunner’s position at the left window of the helicopter, saw that the truck was still rolling forward. He decided not to shoot because he was afraid of hitting Jones.

  “I was not about to put a lot of bullets out there and shoot the guy we were trying to rescue,” he says.

  Instead, Hadrych leaned out with a cheap little camera he had brought along and snapped two extraordinary pictures of Jones running toward the helicopter, with Pennington in the foreground.

  Jones survived his ordeal with only minor injuries. But he was extremely lucky, not only to avoid capture but to survive the downing of his plane in the first place. The F-14 was hit by a missile that knocked off the tail and sent the craft into a tight, flat spin. The spin was so violent that, when he was rescued, the whites of Jones’s eyes were still red from the G forces he had experienced just before his ejection. He and his backseater both managed to eject. The other crewman was captured several hours before Jones was rescued.

  The rescue was the first successful pickup of a downed pilot from Iraq. For their exploit, the crew received the Mackay Trophy for the most meritorious Air Force flight of the year. Trask and Homan were awarded the Silver Star, and Hadrych and the other crew members each received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Despite the initial reluctance at headquarters, the rule against cross-border commando-type raids was gradually eased. Eventually, the air commandos were involved in dozens of such operations, many of them attempts to find and knock out the elusive Iraqi SCUD missiles. For the Air Force special operators, it was a familiar role, reminiscent of operations in Europe and Burma half a century before.

  One of the most challenging assignments was to deliver Army Green Berets deep inside Iraq with vehicles and enough supplies to permit them to remain and move about for as long as ten days.

  The Army had rigged special all-terrain vehicles for the mission. They weighed ten thousand pounds or more. A Pave Low carrying such a vehicle, a team of Green Berets and their supplies, and a full load of fuel weighed close to fifty thousand pounds. At that weight, the helicopter could fly, but it couldn’t hover.

  Mike Homan was commander on the first two-aircraft mission carrying the heavy vehicles.

  “The technique we came up with was to find a good level area and then start our approach two or three miles back from the point where we intended to land,” Homan explains. “We would set up a single-ship approach, just ignore the other aircraft because we couldn’t stay in formation at those weights.

  “We’d take it down and roll it in to a landing. We’d try to hit about fifteen knots, twenty miles an hour. We’d touch down at that speed and hope we didn’t hit a rock, because we couldn’t slow it down anymore. You didn’t want to hit the brakes, either, because that would put additional stress on your gear.”

  On the first mission, Homan flew as commander in the second plane. Major Corby Martin led the way, freeing Homan to command the overall operation.

  Before takeoff, the crews had been told they would be landing in a large area of flat land. But when they got there, they saw rolling hills stretching out in front of them. The pilots of the two choppers picked out their own landing spots independently. Once committed to a landing, there was no chance for a change of mind because of the heavy weight they were carrying. The weight also meant they couldn’t hop over any obstacles that might suddenly loom out of the dark.

  “I was on Corby’s left rear, about three hundred yards back,” Homan says. “Corby spotted a rising sand dune right in front of him, which he didn’t see until he got right up on it. The last I saw of Corby’s airplane, it was flaring up like this [Homan gestures sharply upward], and there was a big cloud of dust. The last I saw, he was up there, falling. I thought he was a goner.

  “I was just a few feet off the ground myself. I actually closed my eyes because I was expecting a fireball. Just an unconscious reaction. Then I opened them right away and thought, Boy, was that stupid!

  When Homan opened his eyes, there was no fireball, just a big cloud of dust. In an amazing feat of airmanship, Martin had managed to regain control and land his plane.

  “I was glad to see dust over there, but I didn’t expect him to be able to fly out,” Homan says. “I figured he hit the ground too hard. We hit hard ourselves. The gunner in the back actually got his arm banged up.”

  The soldiers quickly streamed out of the rear of the helicopters, rolled out their vehicles, and prepared to depart on their mission.

  To Homan’s surprise, Martin’s plane lifted off and headed toward home.

  After a week or more, the helicopters flew back in to pick up the Green Berets. By that time, the soldiers had burned off fuel in their vehicles and consumed the rations they had taken with them, making the loads just a little lighter on the takeoff for the flight home.

  Although, on most of the missions, the role of the Air Force was to deliver the soldiers behind enemy lines and then pick them
up again, on several occasions, Air Force special tactics team members went along on operations to coordinate close air support if the troops came under attack.

  Sergeant Steve D. Jones, a special tactics air controller, volunteered to go in with two dozen British commandos to destroy a buried fiber-optic communications cable about thirty-five kilometers from Baghdad. Jones’s job was to coordinate air support if it was needed.

  Preparations for the mission involved an elaborate escape and evasion plan in case something happened to the helicopters.

  “A big part of the planning was the E&E plan,” Jones says. “Each man, in addition to team equipment, had a big rucksack full of survival gear, with food and water. There was a big lake nearby. Every man had fins and a mask and a wet suit so we could swim. If we started getting overrun, we could get in this lake and swim across it.

  “Our plan was to make it across the lake. Then they had specific areas, designated safe areas, where folks would link up. And we had specified contact times.”

  The two helicopters carrying the teams took off about 8 P.M. from a base just south of the border and skimmed the surface on the way north. At one point, they passed a few feet above a motorized convoy so quickly the Iraqis below didn’t realize what had happened.

  After a flight of about two hours, they touched down. The “dig teams” went to work with metal detectors and then pick and shovel to burrow down through the hard desert surface to the cable. They placed two hundred pounds of explosives in the hole—far more than enough to rupture the cable. While the diggers worked, the helicopters stood by a short distance away, their engines running.

  After about half an hour on the ground, the skyline over Baghdad lit up with the glow of tracers from the defenders’ antiaircraft guns.

  “We were just all amazed at that amount of triple A,” Jones says. “It was a pretty impressive light show.”