My Share of the Task (10 page)

The task force did not deploy as part of the initial forces. Instead we planned and rehearsed for a mission to rescue American personnel held up in the U.S. embassy in Kuwait City. The Americans were not hostages in the strictest sense of the word. Iraqi forces had not taken control of the embassy, but their control of the city prevented the Americans' safe extraction, so we were ordered to devise a rescue.

Preparing for the rescue mission gave us something to do while conventional forces staged in Saudi Arabia. But when the embassy was evacuated and the Americans were repatriated on December 13, 1990, it looked as though our role in the crisis would be limited to reacting to possible Iraq-inspired terrorist attacks across the region.

Like others, I speculated on why the task force's part in Desert Shield, soon to be Desert Storm, was so limited. There were clearly challenges to incorporating its specialized skills into a huge conventional effort. Additionally, some leaders were uncomfortable with the force.

The experience helped to shape my belief about what this unique force must be, and how it must operate. We needed better organizational and personal linkages with conventional forces, as well as with other agencies of the U.S. government. We'd have to open up more, educate conventional leaders about what we did, and importantly, we had to avoid even the appearance of elitist attitudes or arrogance.

On January 18, the situation changed when Iraq launched eight Scud missiles against Israel, the first of forty-two eventually fired in an attempt to provoke the Israelis. Although when fired at such extreme range, the Scud missiles were inaccurate and limited in payload, Israeli counterstrikes were expected, and that reaction threatened to fracture the Allied Coalition. Preventing Israeli action became a priority.

In late January, I deployed with the first element of a task force directed to augment ongoing efforts by Coalition aircraft to locate and destroy Iraq's mobile Scud-launch vehicles in the expanse of Iraq's western Anbar Province.

Our concept of operations was to project small ground elements into Anbar, north of where British special forces had already begun to insert small teams. Omnipresent Coalition airpower would support the teams, as would special operations helicopters, which would insert, resupply, and exfiltrate the operators.

To focus our effort, we attempted to view the Iraqi Scud capability as a system. That system included personnel, truck-mounted launchers, missiles, rocket fuel, essential meteorological data, and launch approval, which would clearly require real-time communications. We analyzed the possible launch sites, the hide sites, the best times to operate, and what would trigger a decision to fire.

The approach was correct, but our intelligence simply couldn't generate enough clarity on Iraqi Scud operations to support an effective campaign to cripple the system. As a result, our efforts relied on thoughtful guesswork by intelligence teams and risky operations by forces on the ground. We were largely dependent on luck. It was a position I never wanted to be in again.

I was a staff officer at our base in Saudi Arabia, just south of the Iraq border, so for me the war was less excitement than simple hard work and a chance to learn. At one point in the conduct of an operation, a troop of about twenty Army special operators deep inside Iraq got into a firefight with Iraqi forces. The troop was able to break contact with the Iraqis and move a distance away, but danger remained. With a wounded operator, they requested extraction—a natural decision based on the assumption that the Iraqis now knew their location, and would likely send more forces to pursue them.

The troop's squadron commander, a veteran of high-risk reconnaissance operations in South Vietnam and Cambodia, came to our task force commander, then–Major General Wayne Downing, and recommended extracting the troop. Downing asked some relevant questions and then disapproved the request. The troop would remain on the ground. Downing's decision surprised me, but his calculus was courageous and instructive. He knew that if Iraqi forces cornered and destroyed the troop, he would bear responsibility. And that responsibility would weigh more heavily than if he had been on the ground sharing their risk, which wasn't possible. However, he also knew that if the troop was extracted, CENTCOM's perception would be that we were easily run off the battlefield; that perception would endanger the viability of our mission and our task force's freedom to operate. We'd be marginalized and unable to accomplish our strategic mission of preventing Israeli intervention.

Downing judged that U.S. airpower could protect the troop, but as nothing in war was guaranteed, he had to shoulder the risk. The troop remained on the ground in Iraq and was able to avoid being trapped by Iraqi forces.

As we teamed up with British special forces, I found myself paired for planning with an unconventional Scot, Lieutenant Colonel Graeme Lamb of the British Special Air Service. We quickly became close. I remember little about his appearance except that he was a bit disheveled and wore no socks, so that his white ankles showed between his combat boots and the drawstring of his pant cuffs. Senior to me and with more worldly experience, Graeme was more extroverted and self-confident in that environment than I was. While I often found myself consumed by the details of planning operations, Graeme was constantly thinking and talking about the wider strategy of the war—and he forced me to think.

At one point, when some aspects of operations were frustrating me, I came back to my desk to find a small yellow Post-it note stuck to my notebook with a single, appropriate phrase from Kipling's famous poem:
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . . .”

In the years ahead, Graeme and I would go on to two more wars together, and I never forgot the poem, or the Post-it.

I doubt our operations had much direct effect on Iraqi Scud operations. But in the end, Israel never intervened.

*   *   *

T
he war concluded on February 28, 1991, and I spent two more years in the task force learning the ins and outs of the special operations world. But it was the leadership of three commanders that I remember most. Where Gary Luck had demonstrated empathy by sitting on a rainy parade ground with a battalion of Rangers, and Wayne Downing had shown courage by accepting the frightening burden of responsibility for a small unit being hunted by the enemy, Major General Bill Garrison taught me trust.

In the spring of 1993, in the last months of my initial tour of duty at the task force, I worked for weeks on a long, detailed, real-world contingency plan for relief of a threatened U.S. position in Latin America. Garrison, a laconic Texan famous for once describing a dark evening as being “as black as my ex-wife's heart,” was required to brief the U.S. Southern Command four-star. I was to prebrief Garrison and then accompany him.

When I entered Garrison's office, one I would later occupy for almost five years, he invited me to sit in front of a coffee table. Onto it I promptly opened the large three-ring binder containing the plan and prepared to brief him. Instead of nodding for me to begin, Garrison, an unlit cigar in his mouth, leaned back and put his boots on the edge of the table.

“Stan, is it good?” he said, referring to the plan. I said I thought it was, leaning forward again to brief him on it.

“If you think it's good, I don't need a brief; I trust you. Let's talk about something else before we have to go to the airplane,” Garrison said, obviously more focused on developing me than on perfecting a plan.

If he'd taken the brief and changed something, or even just scrutinized the details, it would have become his. Instead, it was mine. His willingness to trust was more powerful than anything else he could have said or done. I spent that conversation, the flight, and the time before the meeting hoping I wouldn't let Bill Garrison down.

| CHAPTER 5 |

Preparation

May 1993–June 2000

S
oldiers die on sunny days as well as gray and rainy ones: Such was the tragic lesson one pleasant spring morning in 1994. On Wednesday, March 23, after a ten-mile run on the grounds of Fort Bragg with Steve Cuffee, my command sergeant major, I headed to a quarterly training brief. The brief was conducted every ninety days in the 82nd Airborne Division. In it, a brigade commander and his subordinate battalion commanders would review recent and forthcoming training with the assistant division commander for operations (ADC-O). At thirty-nine, I was a paratroop commander, and my unit—2nd battalion, the 504th parachute infantry regiment, known as the White Devils—had just finished a challenging but successful rotation at the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. After ten months in command of a battalion I loved, life was good.

I'd been lucky. Hoping to command in the 82nd Airborne, I had ended up in the same brigade I'd started in as a new lieutenant in 1977. I had returned to “the Division” the previous May with some trepidation. I'd been away from it for fifteen years. I knew that much had changed and that the proud unit could be insular. But I joined an organization that was well led and far healthier than the post-Vietnam 82nd I'd experienced fresh from West Point. My brigade commander, Colonel John Abizaid, had forged a close team of commanders yet led with a light touch. While he was my boss, he was also a friend.

When I had taken over ten months earlier, in May 1993, the White Devils were already a tight unit, and from the start I made teamwork a priority. In the 24th Mech, I'd learned to use technical skills like marksmanship to build confidence, expertise, and a sense of unwavering standards in our noncommissioned officers. We did the same with machine gunnery in 2/504. Likewise, the Rangers had taught me the power of shared physical challenges, so foot marching again became central to forging unit spirit. The paratroopers responded remarkably to my emphasis on cohesion. It would, that March morning, prove essential.

*   *   *

A
s I left our headquarters for the quarterly training brief, I glanced at paratroopers from my battalion who were loading vehicles for movement to Green Ramp, the marshaling site at Pope Air Force Base, a couple of miles away. There they would complete final refresher training before donning parachutes and taking off to conduct a routine daytime training jump. The jumpers were mostly new paratroopers or cooks, administrators, or other specialists who, although vital to the operation of the battalion, had other duties that kept them out of our larger mass unit jumps. I nodded and smiled at several sergeants I knew well. I envied that they could be outside while I sat in a meeting.

I was a few minutes early, and we gathered in John Abizaid's office talking informally before moving to the basement conference room. After a little while, through John's office window, we noticed a large plume of black smoke rising from the north, the direction of Green Ramp.

“That's got to be a huge fire, and down near Pope,” someone said. We assumed it was a controlled burn, and moved downstairs to the brief. A short time later the brigade executive officer, somewhat breathlessly, interrupted the meeting.

“Sir, there's been a big accident at Green Ramp,” he told John Abizaid as we all listened.

Brigadier General Mike Canavan, the assistant division commander for operations, said he would drive to assess the situation, and suggested John and I ride with him.

Each minute of the drive made it increasingly obvious that a major accident had occurred, as emergency and other vehicles moved toward the tower of smoke. Having seen my paratroopers next to our headquarters just a short time before, I hadn't considered the possibility they might be involved. But about 250 meters from the gate of Green Ramp we drove past a White Devil paratrooper I knew. Without equipment or a beret, he was walking somewhat aimlessly back in the direction of our battalion. Paratroopers didn't walk around like that.

*   *   *

A
t Green Ramp, because we were riding with Brigadier General Canavan, we were able to pass quickly through the military police cordon that had been established and into what we now could see was an aircraft crash site. Ambulances, fire trucks, military police, and vehicles from nearby military units that had moved to the site to help were everywhere. Soldiers, both injured and dead, were being moved as quickly as possible to Womack Army Hospital on Fort Bragg, a couple of miles away. I soon found several of my paratroopers and learned that my battalion had been the hardest hit. The accident ultimately
killed nineteen White Devils and left over forty injured, many grievously. A sister battalion, the 2/505, lost four of their own paratroopers in the accident.

It was a shock. In combat, losses are painful but rarely surprising. It's the nature of the beast. The scope and severity of this accident was akin to war but arrived with little of the mental preparation that girding for combat allows. The moment called for leadership of the kind I'd long studied and knew would one day be necessary.

We began to piece together what had happened, and over time details of the incident became clear. An in-flight collision of two air force aircraft, an F-16 fighter and a C-130 cargo plane over Pope Air Force Base had resulted in the fighter pilot losing control and ejecting. His aircraft had crashed onto the airfield, striking a parked C-141 aircraft. Pieces of both aircraft, along with a wave of fuel-fed flame, had swept over the adjacent areas of Green Ramp, where paratroopers gathered and prepared to load planes for the jump.

The size of the affected area was limited. Paratroopers fleeing the approaching narrow but hellish fireball who cut one direction escaped unscathed, while those in the direct path of fire and debris suffered terrible burns, or worse. It had ended quickly, but the process of rebuilding the battalion, and the impact on many people, would go on for a long time.

In an accident of this magnitude, as after a significant combat action, there were two immediate priorities. The first was providing medical care to the wounded. Young medics and leaders had to triage on the ground—deciding who would be given a chance to live by determining who would be treated first. At Green Ramp, medical assets arrived after the first few minutes, and relieved that burden.

The second priority was accountability. In combat, soldiers have a sacred responsibility to leave no one behind, yet in the confusion of an evolving situation, accounting for every comrade can be remarkably difficult. At Green Ramp, the mix of units and the rapid evacuation of many wounded soldiers before a firm system could be established to track them left us hustling to ensure we located every paratrooper.

I quickly realized that I needed to communicate a clear message to my battalion about what had happened. Inaccurate accounts or mixed messages would make it harder for us to focus on the tasks ahead. Almost immediately, I also decided that rather than allowing the unit to wallow in grief or self-pity, we would actively focus on honoring our dead, caring for our wounded, and doing everything we could for the families affected. From the airfield I moved to the post hospital.

Not surprisingly, Womack Army Hospital was a confusing whirl of motion. The emergency room entrance area was overwhelmed with arriving vehicles, yet the staff was operating with impressive calm. We set up a small command center to begin to establish accurate accounting for our paratroopers, and I moved to the morgue area to confirm the identity of one of them.

The scope of the event guaranteed immediate news coverage, and we worked to provide rapid notification to families of the paratroopers involved, so they wouldn't hear tragic news from public sources or spend anxious hours in fearful anticipation. Yet we balanced that with a need to ensure that haste did not result in misinformation that might produce anguish in loved ones or friends.

As we assembled and verified the list, familiar names of close colleagues appeared, like that of Staff Sergeant James Howard, only twenty-seven but a veteran leader of our personnel section. Annie and I would later stand by his graveside with his wife and two young children. Paratroopers I'd not yet met, like twenty-two-year-old Private First Class Tommy Caldwell from Senath, Missouri, another husband and father, perished as well. This would have been Caldwell's first parachute jump in the 82nd. I could imagine that he and his young wife would have celebrated it that evening.

As people gathered in a large reception room in the hospital, waiting for information or a chance to visit injured husbands or friends, a young wife from our battalion arrived. Jan Dunaway was married to Captain Chris Dunaway, my battalion personnel officer. Both were from rural Arkansas and had embraced army life, the 82nd, and our battalion with vigor. That day, having heard of the accident, Jan drove from her quarters to the hospital to see if she could help. She had no idea Chris had been involved.

Shortly before Jan walked into the room, I had identified Chris's body in the morgue and seen the distinctive airborne wings tattoo over his heart, a reminder of his passionate commitment. Army procedures dictated that formal notification of spouses include an army chaplain and a careful procedure. But I couldn't risk that she'd hear about Chris from an impersonal list or thoughtless conversation. So I pulled her aside and told her as compassionately as I could.

I'd never personally communicated that kind of news to a spouse, and although I knew Jan well, I wasn't sure what to expect. I think even if I had been a veteran at it, her reaction would have stunned me. Looking directly into my eyes, she drew herself up a bit straighter and thanked me.

“This is a difficult day. I need to see if I can help any of the other families,” she said quietly.

From the first, I realized that being organized was the key to real compassion. There was a natural tendency for Annie, me, and other key leaders to flock to the bedsides of injured paratroopers or spend time with grieving, frightened family members. But organizing and focusing the paratroopers and spouses of the battalion allowed us to have a greater impact. We found everyone ready to help, and natural leaders arose, many of them wives, to schedule the delivery of meals to families, provide almost constant child care where needed, and even to deliver 135 Easter baskets to children affected by the crash.

In the first days, Annie, Kathy Abizaid, and other unit leaders spent most of their time at the hospital. The hospital staff was terrific, but White Devil troopers and spouses provided essential support for people facing uncertain futures. Assisting parents and young wives in visiting badly burned, sometimes dying young paratroopers, then making difficult decisions on things like burial locations and insurance money, were searing experiences.

So, enabled by a chain of command above us that would not tolerate bureaucracy preventing us from doing the right thing for our paratroopers and their families, we buried our dead, visited our wounded, and simultaneously prepared ourselves to assume our planned rotation as the division's Ready Force-1 battalion. Immediately after the crash, John Abizaid asked me if, after the losses, I thought we needed another unit to replace us as the first in the division to deploy if needed. I said no. We both agreed that responsibility would help the battalion move beyond the loss.

On March 29, six days after the accident, at an 82nd memorial service for the fallen, I spoke to more than 3,500 people gathered inside the Ritz-Epps Fitness Center at Fort Bragg. The audience included a number of the injured, bandaged soldiers, some moving by crutches, others visible on the white hospital gurneys that had been wheeled in to allow them to watch. I tried to express how I felt.

“The depth of our loss does not mean we are beaten. As long as young men and women volunteer to jump, when no one would question the choice of an easier path, we cannot lose.”

While the first days were tough, my reactions were more mechanical than emotional. I grabbed onto the task of leading the battalion through a challenge, and to some degree that focus insulated me from more personal emotion.

Those feelings came later. In the weeks and months after the crash, we visited injured paratroopers at Duke Hospital, and at the Army's burn center in San Antonio. On one visit to Brooke Army Medical Center, in a ward of badly burned paratroopers, most lying flat with little clothing or coverage to avoid infecting sensitive wounds, I spoke with a young paratrooper I knew. I had to lean forward, straining to understand what he said.

“Sir, I'm trying to salute, but my arm doesn't work.”

My stomach knotted. I needed to salute him.

*   *   *

I
thought often about the risks that the paratroopers I led had accepted. Six months before the tragedy, I'd sat outside my battalion tactical operations center, a waterproofed canvas tent that held maps, radios, and selected members of the staff, with Mike Canavan. We were in a wooded training area on the western part of Fort Bragg but talked about a location some eight thousand miles away: Somalia.

A day or so prior, on the afternoon of October 3, 1993, U.S. forces had launched a raid into the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture clan leaders opposing efforts to bring stability to part of the tragically chaotic Horn of Africa. Although the daylight raid had begun well enough, the shoot-down of an MH-60 Black Hawk had begun a series of events that ultimately resulted in the loss of eighteen American soldiers, including Army special operators, Night Stalker crewmen, and Rangers.

Even from initial, incomplete accounts, it was clear that there had been a ferocious firefight in which the magnificent courage of the force had been apparent. But because Mike Canavan and I had both served in and would eventually command the task force that conducted the raid, the operation had special resonance for us. We knew that the losses, many of them friends, would be deeply felt in the small special operations community. In the days ahead, media coverage that included heart-wrenching photographs of American corpses, our former comrades, being dragged by raucous crowds through the streets of Mogadishu evoked anger and revulsion.