More Than Courage (40 page)

Keenly aware of all of these diverse elements, Delmont found that he had to force himself to focus on only those items for which he was responsible. On a notepad he listed in order of priority the questions that he would be expected to answer.

1. Is Fanfare still a viable option given anticipated Syrian opposition?

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2.

Is the 3rd of the 75th Ranger Battalion ready?

3.

Is there an optimum window of opportunity, and when will it be?

4.

What are the projected casualties that will be suffered by 3rd of the 75th?

5.

Is it worth it?

Pausing, Delmont leaned back in his seat and studied his list.

Number five, he decided, didn't belong there. Someone else many grades above his would have to make that call. Yet he could not escape the fact that the manner in which he answered the other four would have an effect on number five. A negative response to any of the other four that were within his sphere of i influence would most likely be seized upon as an excuse for not

going forward with Fanfare. Even a hint of hesitation on his part could be viewed as an excuse for rethinking the military option.

And while it was true that others would weigh in on the subject and render their opinions before the final decision was made by I the Commander in Chief himself, every nudge this way or that had an effect.

He was still sitting there staring vacantly at his list when the phone on his desk rang. Reaching out, he took up the receiver and gave the perfunctory greeting, "Lieutenant Colonel Delmont.

This line is not secure." i

"Well, Colonel. Are you waiting for an engraved invitation?"

General Palmer's voice jerked Delmont out of his solemn reflections and back to the here and now. "I was just going over the issues, sir."

"Cease your ruminations. Gather up whatever you need and get in here pronto. I have a meeting in twenty minutes and I need your input."

Without hesitation, Delmont stood up. "On the way, sir."

Palmer hung up before Delmont was finished. As Delmont laid the receiver back in its cradle the special ops plans officer 310

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looked back at his list. He already knew how he would answer each item on it. He even had an answer for question number five.

Whether anyone further up the line shared his opinion remained to be seen.

Fort Irwin, California

19:35 LOCAL (02:35 ZULU)

The roar inside the cavernous cargo bay of the C-17 Globemaster III transport made conversation with anyone who was not seated right next to you nearly impossible. Equally futile was any attempt to navigate one's way from one hurayee to another through the tangle of nylon webbing used to cross-lash the ten vehicles to the floor of the transport. This left DeWitt little to do but remain seated in the lead humvee staring at the aircraft's rear ramp. The experience was not unlike being on an old time New York City express subway. The seats were uncomfortable, the view was nonexistent, the racket was barely tolerable, and the lingering stench of military equipment, diesel, aircraft hydraulic fluid, and sweaty bodies was only marginally superior to that of a subway car. Even the end of the ride had some interesting parallels. After a protracted period of boredom during which one could do little but hang on and sway with the pitching and rolling of the conveyance, exiting the Globemaster, like the subway, was a mad dash that tended to border on sheer panic.

The idea of using humvees to whisk the Rangers the nine kilometers from the airfield to the military prison where the surviving members of RT Kilo were being held became a necessity as soon as Fanfare ceased being a deception plan and became a real-world contingency operation. In the concept of operation for Fanfare as the deception plan, elements of Delta Force, flown in by Task Force 160's helicopters, had the responsibility of securing the prisoners. The third of the seventy-fifth Rangers was tasked with doing little more than seizing the airfield to which Delta, Task 312

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Force 160, and the liberated hostages would be taken and evacuated from. When Fanfare ceased being a deception plan Delta and Task Force 160 were dropped since someone in their chain of command determined that neither of those elite units could be readied in time. So the Rangers had been handed the entire ball of wax and instructed to find a way to do it all.

At first Lieutenant Colonel Shaddock had tried going without any sort of mechanized ground transportation. "We're Rangers,"

he had boasted. "We can cover the distance from the airfield to the prison in no time flat." This theory was quickly shot to hell as attempt after attempt to do so in training exercises met with complete and utter failure. Even when Alpha Company encountered no opposition en route while abandoning all pretenses of a prudent and militarily sound advance, by the time DeWitt got his people to the building that had been configured to resemble the Syrian prison, his men were winded and the OPFOR was locked, cocked, and more than ready.

The next less-than-brilliant idea thrown out for consideration and trial was to seize whatever trucks were already at the airfield, load Alpha Company into them, and blitz on into Damascus.

Immediately the DIA and CIA were tapped to provide an assessment of what sort of transportation was generally available and where it was most likely to be found. With this information in hand, vehicles that matched the descriptions were rounded up by the S-4 of the 3rd of the 75th Rangers and planted at appropriate locations throughout Dust Bowl International. The result of this trial was nearly farcical. Not only did DeWitt lose total control of his command within minutes of landing as search parties scattered to scrounge up their transport, but half a dozen friendly-fire incidents occurred when those who had successfully found a vehicle they could hot-wire were gunned down by personnel from other companies manning the battalion's perimeter when the newly procured transport tried to return to the company rally point.

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Eventually Shaddock was driven by these dismal failures to the conclusion that they had no choice but to take their own ground transportation in with them as Delmont had originally planned.

In developing their concept for this new twist, Shaddock, major Lawence Perry, the operations officer for the battalion, and DeWitt took a page out of the history books. When the Israeli Army was confronted with a hostage situation in 1976 at Entebbe, Uganda, not at all unlike the problem the 3rd of the 75th now faced, the Israeli commandos flew in a number of gun jeeps. This expedient had allowed them to roll off the C-130

transports straight into the attack. While no one was particularly wild about adding more and more moving pieces to an already complex operation, the fact that the' addition of humvees was a necessary evil could not be denied.

Of course, that did not mean that someone didn't try. Even before Delmont was finished explaining his idea of landing two transports carrying Alpha Company mounted in twenty humvees, the Air Force liaison officer had a conniption fit. With the Air Force already skittish about its role, the prospect of setting two of their valuable C-17s down even before the area had been secured horrified each and every Air Force officer who heard it. Armed with diagrams, charts, and tables of all sorts, the Air Force liaison officer and his staff took great pains to explain to Delmont and Shaddock that in order to meet the timetable they had established, the transports with the humvees would have to land on a section of the airfield that, in all likelihood, would not yet have been secured by the elements of the 3rd of the 75th that had parachuted in. "We run the risk," the Air Force officer pointed out, "of rolling right through a firefight."

Neither of the Army lieutenant colonels showed their blue clad counterparts any sympathy. "Look at it this way," Shaddock commented dryly. "If your pilots play it right, they may be afforded an opportunity to run some of the bastards over." In the end, it took a dozen phone calls and something akin to divine 314

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intervention from the Sec Def himself to decide the issue in favor of the humvees.

Resolution of that issue was only the beginning of Delmont's and Shaddock's problems. To minimize the number of vehicles taken into Syria and maximize the number of Rangers in the mounted strike group, the two senior officers on the ground determined that the troop carrier version of the humvee was the preferred model. The 3rd of the 75th, however, had only a limited number of these available. Faced with a very real time crunch, Delmont again appealed to Olympus on the Potomac in order to secure an order to the commanding officer of Fort Irwin to hand over whatever vehicles the 3rd of the 75th required. As galling as this was to the post commander, a corollary to those instructions gave Shaddock and his maintenance people the option to reject any vehicle offered by the troop units stationed at Fort Irwin that were, in the opinion of Shaddock's people, unacceptable.

Already peeved at having to put up with a unit that did whatever it wanted whenever it wanted, the post commander lost it. At one meeting he reached into his pocket, pulled his wallet out, and threw it on the floor in front of Delmont and Shaddock quickly followed by his car keys. "Here! You might as well take it all now and save us both the time and trouble of robbing me blind bit by bit."

With a calm demeanor that belied the anger he felt welling up inside, Shaddock bent down, picked up the car keys and studied them for a second. "If you don't mind, sir," he coolly asked the enraged post commander, "just what sort of car do you drive?"

What little revenge could be extracted for both the highhanded procurement of his humvees and Shaddock's comment came when it was time to sign over those vehicles selected to be handed to the 3rd of the 75th. On the express orders of the post commander every vehicle relinquished to the Rangers would have to be signed over in accordance with every military regulation MORE THAN COURAGE

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pertaining to the transfer of property from one command to the next, using every form and procedure called for by those regulations.

While this irritated everyone involved, Shaddock did his best to keep his people in check. "I know this seems petty as hell, especially at a time like this," he told DeWitt, who ultimately had to sign for the humvees. "But, remember, you cannot expect a zebra to change its stripes overnight. The folks here at Irwin are not facing what we are. Even if they have a pretty good idea what we're about it's unreasonable for us to expect them to respond with the same sense of urgency that we do.

Even though they're wearing the same uniform they're only human, afflicted by all the pettiness and personality quirks that all humans labor under."

t

His colonel's words did little to soothe DeWitt's anger, for the true source of the first lieutenant's ire was not the paperwork that he was forced to deal with but the attitude his former colleagues were currently displaying. When he had been with the OPFOR and part of the Fort Irwin establishment DeWitt had viewed himself as something special, a cut above the rest. Now, finding himself on the receiving end of what he considered little more than an arrogant and mean-spirited hissy fit, the young officer began to have second thoughts about just how special those belonging to the OPFOR really were.

Time did not permit DeWitt to dwell upon trivial issues such as this. With the humvees finally in hand, the next chore was to reconfigure them so that they were useful. Even while the paper wars between the battalion supply officer and the Fort Irwin folks were being waged, the ops officer of the 3rd of the 75th and DeWitt were trying to figure out what crew-served weapons, if any, should be affixed to the newly procured vehicles. The natural inclination was to add some sort of weapon to each and every vehicle, whether it be an M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, an M-60D

7.62-mm machine gun, or a TOW ATGM. This was quickly seen as impractical and unnecessary. In the end, only one out of every 316

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two of the humvees was assigned some sort of additional firepower.

All the others would have to rely upon the weapons carried by the Rangers themselves if they ran into serious opposition going to or coming from the prison.

In tandem with this problem was the loading and securing of the vehicles within the giant transports. Adhering to peacetime regulations the Air Force demanded that the humvees be lashed down to the floor in a manner that made quick and easy egress nearly impossible. "This is an assault landing!" DeWitt kept yelling every time the loadmasters added another tie-down. "We need to get out of your bloody damned planes as quickly as we can once we're on the ground."

To this the Air Force NCOs countered that it would do no one any good if after a transatlantic flight the ramp was dropped only to reveal a jumbled heap of humvees, mangled Rangers, and twisted gear. The loadmaster on DeWitt's transport didn't budge.

"My job is to get you and this airplane there in one piece, ready and able to do a job."

In the end a compromise was struck. At the takeoff and during the majority of the flight the Air Force insisted upon using the prescribed number of tie-downs on each humvee. Only when they were on final approach would all but the absolute minimum number of tie-downs be removed. And to satisfy their guests, the Air Force loadmasters promised that once they were on the ground, they would slash the nylon tie-downs rather than waste time unhooking them. "The sooner I get you people outta here,"

the gruff Air Force master sergeant told DeWitt as he was explaining this plan, "the sooner those people out there have something more interesting to shoot at than my plane."

Bit by bit, issue by issue, all of the problems with this new wrinkle in an ever-changing Fanfare were identified, addressed, and resolved. After the first rehearsal it was decided that all interior lights within the cargo bay would be extinguished twenty minutes prior to landing. Everyone within the cargo bay, to include the loadmasters, would switch to night-vision goggleS