Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (12 page)
Mark and I showed up at the armory, were ushered in, and went to see the commanding major to tell him our bogus story. He was very accommodating, said he’d be happy to oblige, and showed us where he kept a whole cache of weapons, including M-16s and M-60’s. I expected him to ask us for official Army orders showing this unit relocation, or at least for identification. I was astonished when he didn’t ask for either.
This is a lot easier than I thought
. Frighteningly easy, actually, from a national security standpoint.
“We’ll be in touch,” I said to the major as we headed out the door with detailed information about his armory. I was lying, of course, and he never heard from us again.
As a Christian, I thought a lot about that. From the time I was a little boy, I’d known that the Bible teaches that God hates lies. How then could I rectify the biblical mandate for honesty with making up a story to elicit information or infiltrate enemy territory? But that led to a broader question: in time of war, are we required to tell the truth to people who are trying to kill us or others?
Deception is often foundational to battle planning. On D-Day, planners deceived the Nazis. Should the Allies have announced their plan to storm the beach at Normandy?
Here’s another example. During the Revolutionary War, women living at Bryan’s Station, a Kentucky stockade, risked their lives in a ruse designed to ward off an Indian attack. As a diversion, the women were to pretend they didn’t know the woods outside the fort were teeming with armed Indians, and stroll down to the spring carrying pails as they usually did each morning. That would distract the Indians and give the garrison inside time to post riflemen inside the walls. Terrified, but seeing no choice, the women agreed to the plan. And before they left the safety of the fort, they gathered to pray for God’s protection.
The plan worked. While the women were outside the stockade, the attackers held their fire. And when the Indians finally attacked, the hidden riflemen cut down the first wave of raiders, and were able to defend the fort until reinforcements arrived.
The women of Bryan’s Station not only deceived the enemy, but
prayed to God
before they did it. Was that wrong? Should they have instead cowered inside the station walls and resigned themselves to death? Were their actions un-Christian?
Those were the kinds of things I thought about as I wrestled with the deceptive aspects of clandestine work. In the end my philosophy boiled down to this: lying in the interest of defending others is different than lying for personal gain. As Winston Churchill said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
OUR TRAINING LASTED NINETEEN WEEKS. During that time, the dogfight continued between Charlie Beckwith and the Special Forces brass who opposed Delta on principle. In those days, Special Operations units fell under several tiers of command authority, including the John F. Kennedy Institute for Military Assistance, and (going north in the chain of command) the XVIII Airborne Corps, the U.S. Army Forces Command (FORSCOM), the Department of the Army, and the Joint Chiefs. But during his SAS training, Charlie had learned the killing nature of military bureaucracy.
Terrorists strike like lightning—hard, fast, and without warning. Time wasted coddling the sensitivities of turf-conscious generals with a penchant for paperwork meant hostages killed. So Charlie fought for, and won, the command-structure equivalent of a freeway bypass. Delta exited below the JFK Center and got back on at the Joint Chiefs. That made many, many people very, very angry.
As a direct result, a competitor to Delta was born: Blue Light, a 5th Special Forces unit under the command of Colonel Bob Mountel. Mountel was among those who felt Delta’s mission belonged to the Special Forces community, not the Department of the Army. When he stood up Blue Light, a temporary unit meant to bridge America’s counterterrorism gap until Delta got up and running, Mountel set out to make his unit Delta’s permanent replacement.
While the brass fought it out, Delta continued to train, essentially cramming most of the Special Forces individual qualifications course into six weeks, which was no small task. Next, we gelled as an operations squadron under the command of Bucky Burruss and began training as a unit, practicing assault and hostage rescue, stealth troop movement, parachute operations, and VIP protection.
As needed, Charlie made contact with private industry and government officials who could help make our training realistic. In the late spring of 1978, Delta traveled to New York City and practiced taking down passenger jets at John F. Kennedy International Airport, courtesy of the airlines. (Aviation officials saw the growing rash of terrorist hijackings, and were only too happy to cooperate.) With the help of certain Washington, D.C. officials, we traveled to the Beltway and practiced assaults on the Metro. Once, Charlie even managed to have an actual passenger train brought onto Fort Bragg via the railhead located on-post.
It was an exhilarating time, as we were developing new concepts, laying the foundation for Delta’s future—not only for how we were going to train and what we were going to train on, but also for the actual tactics we would use. We would plan an operation one week, and execute it the following week. Then we’d troubleshoot and document the results. But it wasn’t as though Charlie and company had a ready curriculum and were putting us through it. In fact, no U.S. military playbook on counterterrorist operations existed.
It was our job to write it.
On Friday afternoons, Pete Schoomaker and I would get everybody together in a makeshift classroom. We’d take a big piece of butcher paper and sketch out a rough diagram of the next week’s training operation. Then we would assign various operators to take pieces of the mission, both for planning and execution. The NCOs were very dedicated to making the training challenging and realistic. Once, we gave Sergeant First Class John Cupp the task of preparing a multi-day session on urban vehicle assault. But when he couldn’t find a suitable car for us to train on, he brought his own car out to the training ground. We promptly wrecked it.
Different guys got different assignments, but if any part of the mission called for the use of explosives, we gave that job to Sergeant First Class Eddie Westfall. A Special Forces engineer, he was a big guy—really big—who never did anything at half speed. We called him “Fast Eddie.”
Fast Eddie almost never stopped talking, but he was very engaging, so you didn’t mind. And the only thing he loved better than talking was blowing stuff up. Throughout our ops training, Fast Eddie was always leaving the stockade and going up to, say, the shipyard or the air station at Norfolk and hauling back various objects for his breaching experiments. One time, he brought back a bus, and systematically reduced it to a useless heap of melted metal. Fast Eddie always used the principal of P—meaning “plenty.” Once, the Army gave him an old building at Fort Knox to destroy. He dressed it with so much dynamite that when he pushed the button, the roof flew up, the walls fell in, and some power poles blew over, knocking out the lights on a good portion of Fort Knox.
Fast Eddie learned not to use quite so much dynamite. And like him, all of us gained skills by great leaps. I soaked it up eagerly. The most exciting thing for me was that I began to develop tremendous confidence in my teammates as I learned how talented these men really were. Don Simmons, Dave Cheney, Jack Joplin, Bob Little, and many more like them were dedicated, quiet professionals who wanted only to be on the front lines when the bullets started flying. Not only were they physically fearsome and without an ounce of quit, I was amazed by their ability to tackle new problems and develop strategies to solve them.
The British SAS helped develop our tactics. In terms of basic breaching, assault, and rescue tactics, Delta also enlisted the support of the FBI and Secret Service. Sometimes we went up to the Secret Service Academy at Beltsville, Maryland; other times their agents drove down to Bragg and worked with us on techniques. We traded time and facilities with the FBI in similar fashion, and also wove in some SWAT team tactics. But whatever hostage-rescue techniques we learned from law enforcement, we took them as a starting point then adapted them for use in a military situation.
After all, if Delta became involved in a rescue, there would be no “hostage standoff.” And if hostage takers failed to surrender, we wouldn’t be arresting them.
ABOUT SIX MONTHS into Charlie’s two-year plan, Pentagon brass announced it was time for us to prove ourselves. But our training was far from complete. If we failed, the Pentagon could scrap Delta altogether, and that possibility loomed large when we found out that FORSCOM would conduct the evaluation. With Mountel and Blue Light under its umbrella, how fair would the evaluation be?
It turned out to be a hatchet job, the way Charlie saw it. I was less certain. As the evaluation unfolded on a hot, cloudless day in July, it appeared much of the time the evaluators simply didn’t know what they were doing.
Delta trained in a highly unorthodox form of warfare, a violent strike hybrid of guerilla and law enforcement tactics. Though Charlie and Bucky sent FORSCOM a letter detailing Delta’s training standards so they could design appropriate tests to measure us, it seemed that letter wound up at the North Pole.
For example, in the room-clearing portion of the evaluation, exercise controllers put terrorist targets behind hostage targets, so that when Delta stormed the room, they had to move around for several seconds in order to find and fire on the hostile targets. In a real-life hostage scenario, targets wouldn’t stand still, but would move to engage us. The way it was set up, the hostages were dead meat before the “rescue” began.
I knew Mountel and Blue Light had been lobbying FORSCOM hard to keep their mission. Between the hostage-rescue demo and later, an equally impossible scenario designed to test our snipers, I began to wonder if the evaluators wanted us to fail.
Later in the day, after a Delta NCO sent the FORSCOM martial-arts evaluator to the hospital with a concussion, a key part came in our test: a double-hostage scenario. South American terrorists had seized both a building and an airliner. Delta assault teams were tasked to take down both—and rescue the hostages—at the same time.
As I mentioned, we’d been training on real commercial airliners, the kind actually in use in modern times. But FORSCOM was doing this evaluation on the cheap. They raided a bone yard somewhere and dragged in a Lockheed Super Constellation, a WWII vintage aircraft on which the last recorded passenger flight had occurred when Lyndon Johnson was president. On the day they gave us the scenario, they gave us the Super Constellation. I was to lead F-1, the element that would take down the aircraft. I had a great team, including Popeye; Cheney, a big-hearted bear of a man; Joplin, a Special Forces medic who earned a Silver Star during the Son Tay Raid; and Mike Kalua, a huge, delightful Samoan, who spoke rapid-fire, island-accented English and always called me “Boss.”
When they gave us the Connie, we knew we’d have her only for a few hours. So we had to work fast, learning the location of all the doors, hatches, locks, and how they worked, as well as the interior layout of the aircraft and every possible rat hole that might conceal a terrorist. Ish and Delta’s intel staff inundated the evaluators with questions: How much fuel is aboard? How much baggage? Who are the passengers? What does the flight crew look like? And on and on. The answers were mostly “We don’t know” and “We’ll get back to you.” That made planning difficult, but also highlighted the nitty-gritty detail of our training. The evaluators were impressed.
While my team planned the aircraft assault, Pete and a separate element laid out a plan to take down the building.
“L-1 window open.” That meant the first window on the left side of the plane.
“T-1 in the cockpit.” Every terrorist had a number.
“H visible at L-1.” “H” was the code for hostage.
As night fell, we split into assault elements and headed toward our separate targets. Each operator wore black coveralls, black gloves, and an assault vest full of spare ammo magazines, flex cuffs, a first-aid kit, and various signaling devices. Black balaclavas covered our heads, revealing only our eyes. Underneath the balaclavas, each of us wore a MX-360 earpiece and push-to-talk mike hooked onto our vests. All of us carried .45s and six magazines, but ten men also carried grease guns.
In addition, some operators carried specialty items. Jack carried his medical gear. Popeye carried the Chem-Lights he’d use to string a glowing walkway along which assaulters would lead the hostages from the aircraft to Jack’s treatment area. Mike Kalua had a PRC-77 FM radio strapped to his back; that linked us with Beckwith and Pete.
During our study of the target, we had learned that, in addition to its main door, the Super Constellation had two emergency hatches over the wings. So we carried three ladders with us, one for each entrance, each lightly padded so that they could be laid silently against the bird in preparation for the assault.
Silence was a critical part of our training. Operators not only learned to recon, breach, climb, rappel, rig explosives, and take out sentries by approaching them from behind and snapping their necks, we learned to do it without making a sound. Absolute stealth increased the chances of success in real hostage rescue. But it was also critical during an exercise, because the way you fail an exercise is to be discovered and have the terrorist/actors start mock-murdering hostages.
Now, my team of twenty-five men crept toward the airfield under cover of darkness. The low night sounds of the Carolina woods were enough to drown any hint of our approach. Observers later said we blended into the landscape like shifting shadows, indiscernible. Moving slowly because of the ladders, we finally reached a stand of high grass near the edge of the tarmac about 150 yards off the Connie’s tail. Our assault plan called for us to address the plane from the rear, where it had no windows. From our distance, we couldn’t see any movement aboard, and heard only the high hum of the auxiliary power unit that pumped electricity to the aircraft. As fireflies sparked in the warm, swampy air, we hunkered down in the grass for an hour, watching.
