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

by Orr Kelly

  Their amazement quickly turned to concern, however, when guns at a nearby town joined in the shooting. The commandos could see the tracers arcing toward them and burning out as the shells fell toward the ground—about where their helicopters waited. As soon as the explosive was buried and the fuse set, they hurried to the helicopters.

  Jones was on the rear ramp of one of the choppers when the explosive went off, creating a huge glow in the dark night.

  The commandos finished their job and took off about midnight, refueled in the air on the way out, and touched down back in Saudi Arabia two hours later.

  The air commandos were beginning to feel pretty good about their contribution to the war, far out of proportion to their small numbers. But then on 31 January, disaster struck. An AC-130 gunship—call sign Spirit 03—was shot down with the loss of its fourteen-man crew. It was the largest single loss of the air war.

  The plane, piloted by Maj. Paul J. Weaver, was one of three Spectre gunships involved in repelling a cross-border attack by Iraqi forces against a United States Marine outpost at the border town of Khafji. The other two planes had been above the battle scene for some time, knocking out a number of armored personnel carriers and trying to target several missiles that could be fired against the Marines.

  Spirit 03 arrived on the scene at 5:25 A.M. with orders to break off by daylight—about 6 A.M.—to return to base. Commanders didn’t want to risk one of the big, relatively slow-moving planes after it had lost the cover of darkness.

  A log kept by the crew of another gunship, included in a report on the loss of Spirit 03, indicates the crew of the doomed plane flew into an area the other plane had left because of heavy antiaircraft fire. Excerpts from the log tell the story:

  “… passed to 03 we encountered heavy triple A from [deleted] and recommended he not fly further east along the border than that. Fully explained the threats.

  “Blacklist [code name for the radar-control plane] offered us seventeen trucks at [deleted]. We refused due to triple A threat we had just left.

  “Then they offered FROGS [free rocket over-ground missiles] at [deleted] which we also declined due to same Triple A.

  “We left the area RTB [return to base]. We heard 03 accepting tasking to take out FROGS and was heading NE.”

  The official report of the loss of Spirit 03 records an increasingly urgent series of messages transmitted to the plane reminding the crew to leave the area by daylight and return to base. The first message was sent at 5:30 A.M., about the time the plane took up its station over the battle scene. Others were recorded at 5:45 and 6:05. At 6:10, the squadron commander told the AWACS plane, “I want Spirit 03 to RTB now.”

  At 6:19, the commander of the AWACS unit, call sign Jeremiah, stepped in and told the AWACS crew, call sign PONCA, to order Spirit 03 to return to base. The following dialogue was recorded.

  “PONCA: Spirit 03. Jeremiah directs you to refill.

  “03: Roger, Jeremiah directs us to refill.

  “[Voice of copilot. Analysis of database charts … suggests that Spirit 03 continued to engage targets and appeared to be evading/disengaging/reengaging for approximately the next three to five minutes. At about 0623, the following transmissions were recorded:]

  “PONCA: Spirit 03, confirm you know you are supposed to refill.

  “03: Roger, roger. [Copilot’s voice described by controller as hunky-dory voice or as calm, unconcerned.]

  “PONCA: Spirit 03, confirm you are in a left-hand turn to the south.

  “03: Roger, roger. [Same calm voice.]

  “[Immediately following this last transmission, a weak and panicked different voice was heard to say, ‘Mayday, Mayday.’ PONCA transmitted, ‘Spirit 03, radio check’ three times with no reply. Over the next two minutes, the data trail of Spirit 03 faded away. No further radio transmissions or radio beacons from 03 were ever received. Search and rescue efforts were initiated, but neither wreckage nor bodies were ever located or recovered.]”

  Months after that report was written and after the fighting was over, the wreckage of Spirit 03 was found on the ocean bottom off the Kuwaiti coast on 4 March, and remains of the crew members were recovered.

  Gray, who was the wing commander, says an examination of the wreckage indicated the plane had been hit by an SA-16 missile. The plane went into a spin so violent that none of the crew members could escape, and the plane hit the water’s surface so hard that it exploded into small fragments. The largest piece a diver saw when he examined the scene was only fifteen feet long, and most of the other pieces were much smaller.

  This is the way Gray assesses what happened:

  “This gunship, Spirit 03, was the third gunship that went up. They were basically told, when it becomes six o’clock in the morning, it’s time to disengage. We don’t want you up there after the sun comes up.

  “He was up there having a wonderful time, shooting the you-know-what out of the bad guys. He was bingo fuel. He was just about Winchestered on all of his ammunition. We had been asking specifically, through the AWACS, for him to disengage at 0600. We had made several phone calls to the tactical air control center. I would call there, say, ‘Get your controller to call AWACS. We want to remind Spirit 03 we want him off station and heading for home at 0600.’

  “He was on target, had no threats he was able to pick up. He got the call about 0623 to RTB from the AWACS. They got a roger.… Right after that, they got hit by an SA-16. They were on the way home.”

  Gray was asked if his account meant the plane had stayed twenty-three minutes after it was supposed to have headed home.

  “That becomes a judgment call,” Gray says. “I’m up there, I’m doing good work, I’m getting cheered on by the USMC, which he was. There’s nothing threatening me and my airplane. I probably would have stayed there myself.”

  The plane’s flight recorder carried the sound of a muffled thump and an indication of a fire in an engine while the plane was at eight to ten thousand feet.

  “I can almost guarantee a wing came off,” Gray says. “You wrap up fast when that happens. With any kind of controlled airplane, you would be able to get most everybody out.”

  Although the other gunships had reported 23mm antiaircraft fire severe enough to keep them out of certain areas, Gray says there was no intelligence indicating the Iraqis had SA-16 missiles of the type that brought down Spirit 03 until ten days later, when an A-10 landed with an unexploded SA-16 warhead in its wing.

  “We had no intelligence to indicate those kinds of systems in the area of operations,” Gray says. “None. Zero.”

  There was, however, plenty of warning that the Iraqis were equipped with shoulder-fired SA-7 missiles—an estimated one for each fifty soldiers. Unlike radar-guided missiles, such weapons are impossible to detect until they have been fired, and they are especially dangerous during the daylight hours, when the soldiers can see what they are shooting at.

  Not all the special operations involved shooting at the enemy. The Combat Talons carried out one of the most basic traditional duties of air commandos, dating back to World War II, by dropping 17 million leaflets over Iraqi defensive positions. The leaflets urged the enemy soldiers to surrender—which thousands of them did—and warned them what would happen if they didn’t.

  The “what would happen” involved intensive air strikes by fighter-bombers and carpet bombing by B-52s. But the Combat Talons also contributed their share by dropping eleven BLU82 Daisy Cutter bombs. The fifteen-thousand-pound bombs, too big to fit in the belly of a bomber, were carried in the cargo compartment of an MC-130 and then rolled out the big rear door as the plane passed over the target at sixteen to twenty thousand feet, above the range of most enemy antiaircraft weapons.

  The big bombs were used not only to crack the morale of the Iraqi forces but also to blast gaps in the formidable minefields along the border. Dropped at night, and often two or three at a time, the bombs made a noise that could be heard for many miles and created a mushroom cloud of du
st and debris similar in appearance to that from a nuclear explosion.

  One British special forces team located 110 miles from the site of the first Daisy Cutter explosion radioed to its headquarters: “Sir, sir, the blokes! They’ve just nuked Kuwait.”

  As the Iraqi forces retreated, four special tactics team members were among the first into Kuwait City. At the international airport, MSgt. Wayne Norrad climbed the stairway in the darkness to the top of the fourteen-story control tower, sweeping the area in front of him with the antenna of his hand-held radio to detect wires attached to possible booby traps.

  Equipment in the tower had been wrecked, and there was no electricity. Looking down, Norrad could see the field was littered with unexploded ammunition. The Iraqis had scattered vehicles and large baggage carts to block the runways.

  Sergeant Steve Jones and his teammates, along with a group of Marines, set about clearing the runways.

  “After we got the big stuff off, we got in line and went down picking up all the little stuff,” Jones says. “One of these unexploded cluster-bomb bomblets was lying on the taxiway. A buddy of mine, named Gus, reached down and picked it up and threw it off into the dirt. It didn’t explode, but I said, ‘Gus, if you ever do that again, make sure I’m not standing next to you.’

  “We’re trained in demolition. We can blow up unexploded ordinance. Moving it was the trick. We could have jury-rigged a stick and noose, behind some kind of barrier, and moved it. But it took time. We had airplanes coming.”

  Clearing the runways turned into a three-hour job. Jones then joined Norrad in the tower. While Norrad controlled the incoming planes, Jones supervised the ground crews, parking the planes so they did not block the taxiways.

  Even though it was only about 2 P.M., there was so much smoke in the air from burning oil wells that visibility was down to half a mile, and incoming pilots were given the choice of whether they wanted to land or not.

  After the fighting was over and most American troops began heading home, some of the air commandos were ordered to stay behind.

  “I went over on 20 September, and I was there until April 31 of 1991,” said Sergeant Hadrych. “We were there for Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and what we affectionately called Desert Shaft. I think they called it Desert Calm or something. It didn’t seem like we were ever, ever going to leave. I had 221 days in-country, straight. I was not happy.”

  But Hadrych concluded that one mission—the one in which he helped rescue Lieutenant Jones—made it all worthwhile.

  Other special operations units set up shop in southern Turkey as part of Operation Provide Comfort—helping to protect Kurds living in northern Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s forces. In both 1992 and 1993, Air Force special operations helicopter crews won the Cheney Award for the outstanding military humanitarian aircraft mission of the year. In 1992, two MH-60 helicopters—a smaller aircraft than the Pave Low—flew through heavy enemy fire in a futile effort to rescue a Turkish pilot whose plane had crashed. In the 1993 operation, a Pave Low flew through a blinding storm for six hours to evacuate a critically ill French soldier from a United Nations mission in Iraq.

  The operations in Desert Storm and northern Iraq were part of the strange new world created by the end of the Cold War. No longer was the Soviet Union the one big potential enemy to worry about, and no longer could the world be divided easily between the good guys and the bad guys. It was a new world in which special operations forces would be increasingly called upon to undertake urgent missions in unexpected parts of the world.

  On 3 October 1993, three members of the 24th Special Tactics Squadron—a combat controller and two pararescuemen—found themselves in such a situation and became embroiled in one of the bloodiest firefights involving American troops since the Vietnam War.

  The three were among a group of eleven members of the squadron attached to Joint Task Force Ranger, a two-hundred-man-strong Army unit operating in Mogadishu, Somalia, in support of a United Nations effort to quell the fighting between rival warlords.

  Sergeant Jeffrey Bray, the combat controller, was the first into action that afternoon. He accompanied a Ranger unit that fast-roped from a helicopter to the ground in a crowded section of downtown Mogadishu to capture a group of men believed responsible for attacks on United States troops. Despite coming under fire, they quickly rounded up the men and called for a truck to pick them up.

  Moments later, an Army Black Hawk helicopter was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed three hundred yards from Bray’s position. Bray and a Ranger platoon moved toward the crash scene under heavy fire, racing against Somali forces heading in the same direction.

  When the Black Hawk went down, the two pararescuemen—MSgt. Scott Fales and TSgt. Timothy Wilkinson-were in another Black Hawk circling nearby, members of a fifteen-man search and rescue security team. As their plane hovered above the crash scene, members of the rescue unit fast-roped to the street, forty feet below. As Fales and Wilkinson, the last two men, prepared to go out the doors, the helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The pilots held the plane steady while the two men slid down into the blinding dust cloud kicked up by the rotor blades.

  Fales and Wilkinson, with two units of Rangers, fought their way to the downed helicopter. They found it on its side, the two pilots dead. Moments later, Fales was shot through the leg. Wilkinson helped free a trapped crew member, and then he and Fales, despite his own injury, set up an aid station near the tail of the helicopter and began treating the wounded men.

  Bray had found a sheltered area nearby to treat the wounded members of his unit. But he needed help. In response to a radioed call, Wilkinson sprinted forty-five meters through heavy fire to Bray’s position. Later, he ran back to the helicopter for more supplies and then crossed again to Bray’s position.

  Bray, meanwhile, directed fire from helicopter gunships circling overhead.

  It was seven o’clock the next morning before a rescue force fought its way to the scene of the fighting to pull the survivors, the wounded, and the bodies of the dead out to a makeshift aid station.

  For his heroic actions, Wilkinson received the Air Force Cross. Fales and Bray were awarded the Silver Star. The eight other special tactics team members received the Bronze Star.

  The Americans had lost eighteen men killed. Another eighty-four were injured.

  It was a disaster that never should have happened.

  The Rangers had been sent into the worst possible situation—a crowded city in which gunmen mingled with crowds of civilians in an area bisected by streets and narrow little alleys. They had neither armored vehicles to protect them from gunmen wielding automatic rifles and grenade launchers nor an AC-130 gunship overhead to serve as an escort.

  A Spectre gunship, operating above the range of the Somali weapons, could have provided pinpoint support for the unit. But the gunships that had been stationed in Somalia earlier had been sent off to Italy in case they were needed to back up United Nations forces in Bosnia.

  In September 1995, a Senate Armed Services Committee report blamed political considerations for the failure to have AC-130 gunships available to back up the Rangers. Senate investigators found that senior officials wanted to hold down the numbers of Americans in Somalia and to avoid the appearance of unnecessary damage to civilians in Mogadishu. General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as saying that, when they were used earlier, the gunships “wrecked a few buildings, and it wasn’t the greatest imagery on CNN.”

  The report concluded: “It is difficult to understand the decision to omit the AC-130 gunships from the Joint Task Force Ranger force package. The AC-130s were part of all the force package options and were included in all of the training exercises. This decision is inconsistent with the principle that you fight as you train.”

  Veteran air commandos, while proud of the heroism of the men involved, were sickened by the failure of leadership that had put them in such an impossible position.

&n
bsp; Colonel Gary Weikel expressed what many of his colleagues felt:

  “We had a Holloway Commission after Desert One in 1980. But we lost a lot more people in this Mogadishu operation than we ever lost in 1980. Where was there someone in the government looking at what really happened? Nobody ever forced the military to look at what the heck it just did and account for it and try to figure out, is there a better, smarter way to do this to make sure we don’t do this dumb-ass stuff again?

  “They were just as happy to have this whole thing brushed away, hand out a bunch of medals, try to make everybody feel as good, in damage control, as possible, and then move on. As a professional military guy, I’m unhappy that we didn’t address how could we do that differently so the outcome would be different. Let’s face it, besides all those kids we got killed and injured, which far and away exceeded Desert One, we failed. And we caused a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy.”

  As Air Force special operations moves into its second half century, it has probably never been better off physically. While the military has suffered slashed budgets almost across the board, money has continued to flow to the Air Force Special Operations Command, as evidenced by the new buildings under construction at its headquarters at Hurlburt Field.

  A new unit—the 6th Special Operations Squadron—has been formed to specialize in helping other nations in their internal defense—a mission very much like that of the old Jungle Jim in the early 1960s. The command also operates an Air Force Special Operations School at Hurlburt, with students drawn not only from the Air Force but from other services, foreign countries, and civilian agencies.

  On the runways, the command can boast of a fleet of the most sophisticated aircraft in the world. There is a new gunship with radar-guided weapons that can be aimed and fired independently at two separate targets simultaneously and with electronic equipment so precise that the crew can follow an individual bullet to the ground. The Combat Talon transport plane and the Combat Shadow tanker have navigational equipment that permits them to fly closer to the ground in clouds and darkness than most pilots dare to fly in the daytime.