Although I’d hoped to command an infantry company in Korea, I was assigned to the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjom, Korea. The JSA was a small enclave of neutral territory inside the DMZ where discussions between the two warring parties (North Korea and the United Nations) took place in austere one-story buildings that straddled the border. The North Korean soldiers wore hardened faces and glowered at us while we stared back. The area was rarely violent, but it was always tense. In 1975, when the two sides still intermingled within the JSA, a group of North Koreans tried to provoke an American major, knocked him to the ground, and smashed his larynx with their boots. A year later, North Korean soldiers killed two Americans who were in the DMZ trimming a tree that blocked the view from the South.
As I finished my uneventful year in Korea in March 1982, I had also completed my five-year commitment to the Army following West Point. Some of my experience thus far had been disappointing, and what I’d seen caused me to consider leaving. But I decided against it. I’d also seen some amazing leaders and experienced bonds with soldiers that I found fulfilling, and I sensed that changes were afoot in the Army.
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My sense was right. While I was experiencing the low point of my career in Korea, the U.S. military had begun its renaissance. A confluence of factors would move the Army forward. Much of the improvement that I would experience firsthand—namely, the revitalization of special operations—was set in motion by the military’s reckoning with the failure in the Iranian desert in 1980.
Operation Eagle Claw was designed to rescue fifty-three Americans held hostage at two locations in the heart of Tehran, an urban thicket of more than four million people. Planners decided that to penetrate Tehran and reach those targets undetected, they had to drive into the city. But once the alarm rang, there would be a firefight and they would need helicopters to escape. These helicopters would meet the rescue teams at a nearby soccer stadium within Tehran. The six hundred miles that separated Tehran from the Arabian Sea–based aircraft carriers the helicopters would launch from was beyond the distance that those helicopters could fly without refueling. Thus the need for fixed-wing aircraft. To shuffle teams and fuel between the planes and helicopters, the teams would need to use makeshift airfields during both the approach and escape legs.
To infiltrate the rescue force, two sets of aircraft would fly into Iran across its southern border. First, C-130 aircraft—carrying Army special operators, Army Rangers, and six-thousand-gallon bladders of fuel for the helicopters—would leave from a tiny island off the coast of Oman, one thousand miles from Tehran. Second, navy helicopters, empty except for the Marines piloting them, would be on their heels, taking off from the USS Nimitz. All would rendezvous at night on a desert airstrip, code-named Desert One, southeast of Tehran. To avoid detection at the airstrip, the teams would transfer and the helicopters would refuel without illumination. The ground teams would then travel by helicopter to the outskirts of Tehran—Desert Two—where the soldiers would spend the night hiding in advance of an early-morning assault.
When the convoys converged on Tehran early the next morning, Army Rangers would capture, secure, and hold a second air base southwest of the capital city. After the rescue at the embassy, the escape helicopters would fly from the soccer stadium to this air base, where a second fleet of C-141s would be waiting to ferry the force and the rescued hostages to freedom.
In all, the mission called for forty-four aircraft, thousands of gallons of fuel, a fleet of ground vehicles, and a hybrid force culled from the Navy, Army, Marines, Air Force, and intelligence agencies. It required securing a desert landing strip in darkness, seizing and holding a second airfield, striking two urban targets, engaging in a firefight to get out of Tehran, and exfiltrating to friendly airspace. At best, the plan was a series of difficult missions, each a variable in a complex equation. At worst, with an ad hoc team, it called for a string of miracles.
Launched on Thursday, April 24, 1980, 173 days into the hostage crisis, the mission faltered early. As with all operations, the plan had certain built-in criteria that, if not met, would require the mission to be aborted. In this case, if the number of operating helicopters fell below six—out of the eight originally launched—the operation would not continue. Five helicopters could not carry a team large enough to overpower the enemy at the embassy. Shortly after entering Iranian airspace, one was abandoned due to mechanical failure. The remaining seven helicopters, flying low to evade radar detection, flew into a series of haboob, vast milk-thick columns of suspended dust that form in the desert. The clouds were the size of mountains: A thousand feet high, they swallowed the speeding helicopters for hours, obscuring anything much farther than the cockpit windows. After one helicopter turned back, only six landed at Desert One.