SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (5 page)

SEALs themselves will tell you, “It ain’t for everybody.”

Team members are hardwired with an aversion to publicity. With the exception of spokespersons specifically authorized by the secretary of defense, no active-duty SEAL has ever granted an interview. Though the Navy has allowed some parts of SEAL training to be filmed, it has done so reluctantly. The goal was to get more civilians to volunteer. If the decision had been left to the Teams, nothing at all would’ve been revealed. There are still a few old frogmen who remember the days when the Navy denied even the existence of the SEAL Teams. As far as they were concerned, if a young man wants to become a SEAL, the first test is to figure out how to get in.

The secrecy under which SEALs live is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, it contributes to an incredible sense of esprit de corps. Airtight operational security also cuts Team members off from what they call “the regular world.” These men train together, operate together, and deploy together. In their free time, they run marathons, skydive, climb mountains, surf, dive, kayak, and ride dirt bikes with friends who are almost always other SEALs. The world may be their operational area, but their personal lives would fit into the palm of your hand.

If, unsuspectingly, you were to meet a Navy SEAL you would find him to be confident, personable, and perhaps even glib. Though he would seem outgoing, you would find it curiously impossible to know him well. SEALs are wary of strangers, and it takes a long time, a very long time, for a civilian, male or female, to gain their trust or confidence.

SEAL operations depend upon stealth and technical innovation. SEALs keep their own secrets, and have done so for more than fifty years. They are bound together not only by sworn oaths, but also by the obligations of their brotherhood.

AN INVISIBLE EMPIRE

The Birth of the Joint Special Operations Command

THE FIRST MULTISERVICE SPECIAL OPERATION
in military American history was carried out in November 1970. At the height of the Vietnam War, U.S. intelligence identified a prisoner of war camp twenty miles north of Hanoi. Reconnaissance flights by top secret “Buffalo Hunter” drones and SR-71 Blackbirds confirmed that a walled compound outside the North Vietnamese village of Son Tay was being used to hold American prisoners of war. The major prisons in Hanoi, Ly Nam and the infamous Hanoi Hilton, had been pinpointed, but were judged to be too heavily defended to raid. Decades before Saddam Hussein made “human shields” famous, the North Vietnamese stashed dozens of American prisoners of war into its largest power plant, to prevent it from being bombed. Hanoi’s prisons were ringed with fighter bases, surface-to-air missiles, and radar-controlled anti-aircraft artillery. But Son Tay was another matter. It was isolated, it had no major air defense units around it, and it was ripe for the picking.

An operation was quickly planned to strike the camp, neutralize the guard force, liberate the prisoners, and fly them to safety.

Placed in command of the rescue was a gruff, cigar-chomping Special Forces colonel named Arthur D. “Bull” Simons. Simons was Army all the way, and insisted that his assault force be comprised of Green Berets. He got his wish, and training started at once.

Code-named Barbara, a full-size replica of the compound was built in a remote area of Offutt Air Force Base in Florida. Working in stringent secrecy, Simons trained his men, and drove his planners crazy by insisting they provide for dozens of contingencies. In early November, the force was airlifted to a CIA base in Thailand and waited for a go.

At approximately 1:00 a.m. on the twenty-first of November, four Air Force HH-53 “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters delivered the assault force to Son Tay prison.

The North Vietnamese had no idea what hit them.

The first helicopter over the target, call sign Apple 3, popped over the tree line and opened fire with a quartet of Vulcan miniguns. What had been a quiet night exploded in a torrent of tracer fire. High above the prison, a C-130 E Combat Talon pumped out a series of “night sun” magnesium flares that lit the surrounding country as bright as day. A second Jolly Green, call sign Apple 2, also took the buildings under fire, raking them with deadly, concentrated firepower. In fifteen seconds, the two aircraft expended more than five thousand rounds that cut down the watch towers and raked the guards’ headquarters, reducing parts of the building to kindling. The guard force ran for their lives or shot blindly at each other. The assaulters had achieved near total surprise.

But then things started to go wrong.

The helicopter carrying the first group of rescuers, call sign Blue Boy 1, plowed directly into a pair of one-hundred-foot pine trees. These trees had been marked on the Americans’ maps, but the photo reconnaissance guys had estimated their height at twenty feet. They were almost eighty feet taller.

Survivors say that when Blue Boy 1 hit the ground it looked like a tornado tearing through a trailer park. The helicopter’s giant rotors hacked through the tree trunks, blasting bark and branches into a violent cyclone. The helicopter pitched down and slammed into the dirt just outside the prison walls. The impact broke the aircraft in three pieces. Miraculously, it did not catch fire, and only one person was injured, an Air Force gunner whose leg was broken when one of the rotors ripped through the fuselage.

Aboard the crashed helo, Special Forces captain Richard Meadows calmly unfastened his safety harness, stood up, and ordered his assault team out of the wreckage.

As his men swarmed into the prison, Meadows’s calm voice came over a bullhorn, saying, “We’re Americans. Keep your heads down. Get on the floor. We’ll be in your cells in a minute.”

Meadows and his team quickly fanned out, cutting power and communications lines to the camp. As one of his assault elements battled the guards, Meadows sent another group to lay an ambush along the road, a hundred yards from the front gate.

Gunfire crackled overhead. Some of the guards fanatically defended every inch of the camp. Meadows found cover and returned fire. He looked up into the sky, now hung with dozens of flares. His own helicopter was a smoldering wreck. He was now fighting it out with a guard force of undetermined size and he had no idea where the rest of the rescue party had gone. Bull Simons, the mission commander, and a second helicopter full of assaulters was nowhere in sight.

Where was the rest of the mission? Where was his backup?

It turns out that they were lost. And worse, they were now in a firefight of their own.

Simons and his team, call sign Greenleaf, had been inserted almost five hundred yards south of the prison, at a stone-walled, tile-roofed compound known as the “secondary school.” Simons and his team sprinted down the tail ramp of the helicopter and spread out. As his insertion platform lifted off, Simons realized at once that he had been put down south of his objective.

To his horror, Simons discovered that not only had he been put down in the
wrong
place—it was a very
bad
place, too. The secondary school was swarming with North Vietnamese soldiers—hundreds of them. More than three companies of Chinese military advisers and North Vietnamese engineers had been billeted at the school, and Simons and his team had landed right on top of them.

Simons’s tactical options were limited. He could run away, or strike the enemy hard before the NVA figured out that they outnumbered the Green Berets ten to one. Simons did what any good officer would do—he attacked.

In a swirling, close-quarters battle, Simons’s team waded into the barracks, throwing grenades and sweeping the rooms with automatic fire. Within five minutes, more than a hundred Chinese soldiers were killed. The rest fled in confusion. Simons quickly radioed for extraction, reembarked his assault group, and landed at the main prison compound.

By the time that Greenleaf arrived at the main camp, the prison guards had scattered and the firing had died down. Meadows ran to the helicopter and found his boss.

“Bad news,” he said. “There’s nobody here. They moved them. They’re all gone.”

There had been American POWs at the camp, but they had been moved sixteen weeks earlier. Alerted by the two firefights and the blazing galaxy of flares, the entire countryside was now swarming with North Vietnamese troops. Simons ordered the damaged helicopter to be blown up, withdrew his forces, and flew back to Thailand.

The entire raid had taken twenty-eight minutes.

The following morning, when the North Vietnamese returned to the prison at Son Tay, they found the wreckage of an HH-53. Its broken tail unit jutted up like a monument in the front yard of the commandant’s office.

When and why the American prisoners were moved from Son Tay remains a mystery. After the war it was learned that the prisoners had been moved four months previously to a satellite camp called Dong Hoi. No American prisoners had been freed by the Son Tay raid, but it sent a message. The North Vietnamese moved all American POWs to Hanoi, and their treatment began to improve. Morale among the prisoners sky-rocketed when the news spread that a special operation had been launched to free them.

The Son Tay raid was a watershed in U.S. special operations planning. It was to become one of the most often studied missions in spec ops, and would teach valuable lessons that would be used decades later in Neptune’s Spear. The assault team had been inserted deep into North Vietnam, struck their target, and extracted without loss—even though one of the helicopters crashed during insert. It’s a monument to both the skill of the planners and the steadfast valor of the operators that not a single American lost his life in a raid that killed or wounded more than five hundred of the enemy.

The operational plan for the Son Tay raid was worked on by Green Berets, Air Force Special Operations officers, and a cadre of Navy SEALs led by a blunt, outspoken, sandy-haired former linebacker named Marvin Krupinsky.

Krupinsky’s oft-stated opinions had made him some enemies within the SEAL community, but his genius as both a planner and a tactician were quickly recognized. Krupinsky was to have an important effect on the training of SEAL Team operators, especially junior officers. After graduation from BUD/S, SEAL officers were put through an intense six-month special warfare operations and planning course. Graduates have said it was every bit the academic equivalent of BUD/S. Krupinsky’s salient points were these: 1) One is none—always have a backup, whether it’s a gun, a helicopter, or a plan. 2) Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment. Prepare for the unexpected. 3) The men must not only survive the plan, the plan must survive the blunders of men.

These maxims would pay dividends in a series of meticulously planned SEAL Team operations carried out in the eighties, nineties, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The concept of a joint, multiservice special operations force would seem like a no-brainer. But it took almost twenty years after the success of Son Tay for the Joint Special Operations Command to come into being. And it took a military disaster to get the admirals and generals to finally work together.

On November 4, 1979, a mob surged over the fence of the American embassy in Tehran. On October 23 of that year, the United States had granted refugee status to the deposed shah of Iran, admitting him to California for the treatment of terminal cancer. Outraged, the government of Ayatollah Khomeini organized a massive demonstration targeting the American embassy. Using the demonstration as cover, armed members of the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, broke into the embassy’s safe rooms and took fifty-two diplomats, embassy workers, and U.S. Marines prisoner. Negotiations for the return of the hostages dragged on for months.

Frustrated with Iranian intransigence, and fearing for the safety of the hostages, President Jimmy Carter ordered Operation Eagle Claw, one of the first deployments of the Army’s newly formed Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta.

The operation was complex, and its lines of authority, command, and control were vague. The operation ended in disaster when a Marine Corps CH-53 helicopter collided with an Air Force C-130 tanker aircraft at a desert refueling site deep inside Iran. The fiery crash killed eight service members, burned four others, and led to the destruction of two aircraft and the abandonment of five intact helicopters as well as their communications and cryptological equipment and a dozen copies of the rescue plan.

The debacle contributed to the electoral defeat of President Jimmy Carter. The Iranians kept the American hostages for a total of 444 days, releasing them only after the election of Ronald Reagan. With the failure of the Iranian rescue mission in mind, the Joint Special Operations Command was formed in December 1980.

Until JSOC’s creation, the special forces of every service had to carve their budgets out of regular service dollars. Within the special operations community, operators tended to triumph over politicians. While this created good working conditions at the unit level, it left the special forces, especially the SEAL Teams, open to attack from above.

The SEALs suffered under another handicap: they were not particularly loved by the Navy. For many years it was nearly impossible for a Naval Academy graduate to become a SEAL Team officer. It was somehow seen as beneath the dignity of an Annapolis man to become a snake eater. The SEALs may have recruited from their own, but it made them vulnerable in places where they couldn’t fight, like Washington, D.C. This meant that the community was underrepresented among the Navy’s flag officers, the admirals who made the decisions and cut the checks.

Not many SEALs wanted to serve at the Pentagon, so they tended to retire before they were too senior to be sent into the field. On more than one occasion after Vietnam, the United States Navy considered disbanding the SEAL community completely. At least one training class graduated from BUD/S but was sent back to the fleet—there was no room in the Teams for new operators.