“You’re the United States of America. How could you let this happen?” The question was passionate, like the officer who posed it. I had no good answer, either for Lieutenant Thawachi, a Thai Army officer with whom I’d developed a close relationship, or for myself.
It was April 1980, and photographs in the media of wrecked U.S. aircraft and burned bodies in the Iranian desert were stark reflections of a failed attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in Tehran. Despite my respect for President Jimmy Carter’s courageous decision to launch the operation, it was clear to me that my nation was struggling with feelings of frustration and impotence.
At the time, I was a first lieutenant in the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group conducting a mission on the tidal edge of the Third Indochina War. Five years earlier, after U.S. troops had completed their withdrawal from Vietnam and Saigon had fallen, deep historical and fresh political animosities had ignited a complicated “East-East” contest involving the Soviets and Chinese, as well as the Vietnamese, who then controlled most of Cambodia. I deployed to neighboring Thailand to lead a four-man Special Forces team in teaching the Thai Army how to use the shoulder-fired Dragon missile system against any Vietnamese tanks that might cross the border. Four years after graduating from West Point, I was a seasoned lieutenant and excited to be in the field, leading a small but important mission far from oversight. This was not practice on a barren military range, and my anxious Thai counterparts reminded me of the urgency.
But my discussion with Lieutenant Thawachi that muggy morning on the Thai Army base near Pran Buri carried my thoughts far away from Southeast Asia, to the desert of Iran.
Thawachi was a muscular officer with obvious energy held in check as we sat drinking tea in a small coffee shop. He was one of the first four Thai soldiers selected to train on the notoriously difficult Dragon because of his skills in marksmanship and English. He was pro-American, and his face reflected pain when he excitedly asked me, “Have you heard?” I had. President Carter had told the world that he had aborted the rescue mission, and the news and images moved rapidly, even to Pran Buri. “There was no fighting,” Carter had said, “there was no combat.” But eight men had died, he explained, when “two of our American aircraft collided on the ground following a refueling operation in a remote desert location in Iran.”
I pictured American aircraft smoldering in the desert. And I thought about the men who had perished.
Like most Americans, I had watched Iran closely since Tuesday, January 16, 1979. On that day, after facing more than a year of volatile public opposition, the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled Iran. Two weeks later, the Shah’s longtime opponent, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returned to Tehran from his fourteen-year exile. Inspired by the Ayatollah, a mob of more than five hundred Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy on Sunday, November 4, 1979, and seized sixty-six Americans. Many Iranians believed the embassy had been the headquarters for the 1953 coup that first reinstalled the Shah—a point Khomeini and others hammered in their anti-American diatribes—and many saw the takeover as a necessary step to prevent an impending American intervention. The American public reacted emotionally. Yellow ribbons were hung; nightly newscasts ended with somber declarations of the number of days since the crisis started. Many asked: Why is this happening to America? What were we going to do?
Thawachi pressed the same questions. He had high expectations for America’s role in the world. So my initial answers, explaining the complexity of hostage rescue operations and the ever-present chance of failure, didn’t satisfy him. His question was far broader. He repeated himself, emphasizing, “You’re the United States of America,” as though I might have forgotten. His reaction reinforced to me that the cost of failure was far higher than just the immediate loss of life. In years ahead I would see more times when the confidence, hopes, and prestige of the nation rested on the shoulders of a small group of committed professionals.
The cost of any failed special operation is high. President Carter bravely accepted responsibility for the failure, but even so, it stung. This felt like a humiliating demonstration of our inability to execute difficult missions like hostage rescues, especially in comparison with recent successes by our allies. I’d been impressed in July 1976 when Israeli commandos had reached deep into Africa to rescue passengers from a hijacked Air France flight being held at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. Two years later, as a paratroop lieutenant, I had watched on the news as French Foreign Legionnaires parachuted into southeastern Zaire and saved thousands of French and Zairian hostages from anti-Mobuto rebels. And just ten days after our failed mission in Iran, the British Special Air Service (SAS) had freed nineteen hostages held by Arab separatists at the Iranian embassy in London. Eagle Claw—as the failed operation was known—was more tactically complex and difficult than these raids. But we made it look impossible.