Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (67 page)

“Ninety-four percent,” said his copilot Les Petty.

Then Schaefer heard and felt a loud, strong, metallic whack! It sounded as if someone had hit the side of his aircraft with a large aluminum bat. Others in the desert heard a cracking sound as loud as an explosion but sharper-edged somehow, more piercing and particular, like the shearing impact of giant unmoored industrial tools. The marine pilot’s rotors had clipped the top of the plane, metal violently and loudly cracking into metal in a wild spray of sparks, and instantly the helicopter lost all aerodynamics, its cushion of air whipped out from beneath, and it fell with a grinding bang into the C-130’s cockpit, an impact so stunning that Schaefer briefly blacked out. Both aircraft were engorged with fuel and the sparks caused by the collision immediately ignited both with a powerful, lung-emptying thump! that seemed to suck all the air out of the desert. It formed a huge blue ball of fire around the front of the C-130 and then rocketed a pillar of white flame three hundred feet or more into the sky, in a split second turning the scene once more from night into day.

Beckwith pivoted the moment he felt and heard the crash and started running toward it. He pulled up short the length of a football field away, stopped by the intense heat, and thought immediately with despair of his men, Fitch’s entire White Element, trapped.

Inside the C-130, Fitch had felt the plane begin to shudder, as though the pilots were revving the engines for takeoff. There were no windows and he couldn’t tell if they were moving yet. Then he heard two loud, dull thunks. He thought maybe the nose gear or landing gear had hit a rock or a divot, but when he looked toward the front of the aircraft he saw flames and sparks. His first thought was that they were under attack.

He had removed his rucksack, and leaning against it was his weapon, an M203. He grabbed it and stood in one motion. Beside him the plane’s loadmaster, responding wordlessly to the same sight, pulled open the troop door on the port side of the plane. It revealed a solid wall of flame. Fitch helped him slam it down and push the handle in to lock it. He and the men were sitting and standing on a thousand gallons of fuel, and they appeared to be caught in an inferno.

“Open the ramp!” Fitch shouted, but it lowered to reveal more flames. The plane was going to explode. Loaded as it was with fuel, it was an enormous bomb, and it was enveloped in fire. The only other way out was the starboard troop door to the rear of the plane above two-thirds of the distance to the tail, which had been calmly opened by three of the plane’s crewmen. That doorway proved blessedly free of flames. Men were piling out of it before it was completely opened.

One of them was the Hercules crewman Walton, who had been trying to walk to the front of the plane to get a cup of coffee, picking his way through the crowd of men while keeping his balance on the shifting fuel bladder, when he heard the collision and felt the plane tilt forward and then shake from side to side. He fought his way out of the door and dropped six feet to the desert floor. Men were raining on top of him so fast he couldn’t stand up. He rolled until he found himself under the plane, surrounded by fire. Then a marine grabbed him beneath both arms, hauled him into the clear, and shouted, “Haul ass, brother!”

Still inside the plane Cheney, a bull of a man with a big deep voice, kept shouting, “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” as the men crowded toward the only escape. Flames spread rapidly from the ceiling of the plane and were wrapping down on both sides. Fire ignited a primitive flight instinct that none of the men could control. One of the junior air force crewmen was knocked down and was being trampled by the aggressive, fleeing Deltas, when Technical Sergeant Ken Bancroft fought his way to the man, picked him up, and carried him to the doorway and out. Cheney’s natural authority and clarity helped avoid a complete mad scramble and kept a steady flow of men out the door. They were used to filing out this way on parachute jumps, so the line moved fast. Still, it was torture for the men at the rear of the line. “Don’t panic!” Cheney kept screaming. Fitch stood opposite him in the doorway, regulating the flow. In their haste, many of the men stumbled when they hit the ground, which created pileups just outside the door. They scrambled to get to their feet, run, and clear the way.

Ray Doyle, a loadmaster on one of the other tankers standing more than a hundred feet away, was knocked over by the force of the initial explosion. Jesse Rowe, a crewman on another of the tankers, felt his plane shake and the temperature of the air suddenly shoot up. Burruss saw the plane erupt as he stepped off the back of his C-130. He was carrying incendiary explosives to destroy the disabled Sea Stallion, coming down the ramp, and the sight of it buckled him. He sat down, watching the tower of flame engulfing the plane, and thought, Man, Fitch’s whole squadron gone, those poor bastards. But then he saw men running from the fireball, as if they were fleeing hell itself.

Pilots quickly spread the word to their crews that they had not been attacked, which eased some of the initial confusion.

Still inside the burning plane, Haney was near the end of the line of men trying to get out. He and the men around him had been jarred alert by the noise and impact outside the plane and saw blue sparks overhead and toward the front. Then the galley door at the front of the plane blew in and flames blasted out along the ceiling.

“Haul ass!” shouted the man next to him, leaping to his feet. Captain Smith, who had dozed off, woke up to see men trying to gain footing on the shifting surface of the fuel bladder and at first thought it was amusing, until he saw flames. He and the others at the front of the plane began running as well as they could, fearing they would never outrace the flames around them, acutely aware that beneath their feet were thousands of gallons of fuel. Ahead, men were jammed in the doorway. Haney threw himself out when he finally reached the door and dropped down hard on the man who had jumped before him. They both scrambled up and ran until they were about fifty meters away, then turned to watch with horror.

One of the soldiers, Frank McKenna, had fallen asleep before the commotion and awoke to flames and to men lining up to jump from the plane. He ran to join them, assuming they had been attacked in the air and were now evacuating a burning plane. He looked around frantically for a parachute, didn’t see one, and when it was his turn to jump he just flung himself out the door belly-first, in arched skydiving position, and collided hard with the earth a split second later. It had all happened so fast he didn’t have time to consider the folly of free-falling without a parachute. As he later told his buddies, “One problem at a time.”

Fitch felt it was his duty to stay until all the men were off, but it was hard. As the flames rapidly advanced he realized that not everyone was going to make it. Instinct finally won out and both he and Cheney leapt out the door, falling when they hit the ground. Other men crashed on top of them. They helped each other up and out to where the others were now watching, brightly illuminated by the enlarging fire.

Staff Sergeant Joe Byers was one of the last struggling to escape. He was a radio operator on the plane’s crew and his seat was in the front of the aircraft behind the cockpit. As soon as he realized the plane had been hit by something, he started moving toward his evacuation door, which happened to be the starboard troop door in the rear, the only way out. When he dropped down the small flight of stairs from the flight deck, he was shocked to see the inside of the cargo hold ablaze and nearly empty. He started crawling across the fuel bladders toward the door, scarcely able to breathe. He thought he was going to die. The door looked miles away, fire was all around him, and he was crawling across tons of fuel. But he kept going.

Fitch ran to what appeared to be a safe distance, then turned around, lifting his weapon, still assuming they were under attack, looking for the enemy and instead seeing an awesome and ugly sight. Crouched like a huge dragonfly, its rotors still turning, a helicopter was mounted on top of the plane. He realized it wasn’t an attack, it was an accident.

He saw two more men jump out, one of them Byers, whose flight suit was burning. Other men rushed to put out the flames and to drag him clear. Then ammunition started cooking off—all the grenades, missiles, explosives, and rifle rounds—causing loud cracking explosions and throwing flames and light. The Red-eye missiles went off, drawing smoke trails high into the sky. Then the fuel bladder finally ignited. A huge pillar of flame shot skyward in a loud explosion that buckled the fuselage. All four propellers dropped straight down into the sand and stuck there, like somebody had planted them. One last man came flying out of the open troop door, Sergeant James McLain, blown out by the force of the blast. He hit the ground so hard it damaged his back. His flight suit was in flames. Sergeant Paul Lawrence ran back toward the fire to grab him and pull him to safety. McLain was badly burned.

In the cockpit of the chopper, set now on top of the C-130, Schaefer had blacked out on impact. He awkened from his blackout sitting crooked in his seat, the chopper listing to one side, with flames engulfing his cockpit.

“What’s wrong, Les? What’s wrong?” he said, turning to his copilot, but Petty was already gone. He had jumped out the window on his side.

Schaefer heard a scream behind him and turned to grab the arm of Dewey Johnson, his crew chief, who had been with him since Vietnam. He took his helmet off and pulled on Johnson’s arm again, and then heard his friend scream once more in agony and drop away from him.

The pilot shut down the engines and sat for a moment, certain he was about to die. Then for some reason an image came into his mind of his fiancée’s father—a man who had always seemed none too impressed with his future pilot son-in-law—commenting during some future family meal about how the poor sap’s body had been found cooked like a holiday turkey in the front seat of his aircraft, and something about that horrifying image motivated him. His body would not be found like an overcooked Butterball; he had to at least try to escape. He ejected the window on his side and, as fire closed over him, burning his face, he threw himself into the flames.

He dropped a good distance to the ground, landing hard, and he lay stunned for a long time, badly burned and half blind. When he saw pillars of flame shooting up around him—patches of fuel-saturated sand were catching fire—he forced himself to his feet and ran from the erupting wreckage.

He and Petty escaped, badly scorched. One of the backup C-130 pilots got out, but the two main pilots, two navigators, and one crewman were not so fortunate. They and all three of Schaefer’s crewmen, including Arkansas-born George Holmes, perished.

The exploding plane and ammo sent flaming bits of hot metal and debris spraying across the makeshift airport, riddling the other four working helicopters, whose crews promptly began climbing out and moving to a safe distance. Most of the men had no idea what was going on, just that a plane and chopper had exploded. The air over the scene had been heavy with the odor of fuel, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that all the other aircraft were going to burst into flames as well. The three remaining C-130s began taxiing in different directions away from the exploding wreckage. There was chaos on the ground. One of the Delta medics kept shouting over the engine noise and wails of the wounded, “Look in your E and E kit and get me some Percodan!” which was misheard by one group of men who huddled over a map on the ground.

“What are you guys doing?” they were asked.

“Didn’t you hear? We’re going to E and E to Percodan,” one said.

Word of the calamity reached the command center in Wadi Kena with the following hurried report: “We have a crash. A helo crashed into one of the C-130s. We have some dead, some wounded, and some trapped. The crash site is ablaze. Ammunition is cooking off.”

Jerry Uttaro, piloting one of the tankers, started taxiing away from the blaze when he heard debris raining down on top of his plane. Desert One was lit up like a homecoming bonfire rally, complete with fireworks. He got only a few feet when some of the Delta operators, fearing that he was leaving without them, ran out in front of his plane to stop him. Uttaro told his radio operator to go down and explain to the idiots in front of his airplane that he was just trying to avoid being the next log on the fire and that he wasn’t going to strand them.

Fitch saw one of the other C-130s move away and then turn back. He ran to it and began banging on its starboard troop door. It taxied on a bit farther and then came to a stop. The door slid open.

“I’ve got to get some people on here,” he shouted. The crewman objected at first that they were already full but quickly relented.

“Load as many as you can,” said Fitch. Some of his men climbed into that plane, then it taxied on and took off.

He turned to look back and saw two of the helicopters with their rotors turning. He was impressed. He figured they had stayed on the ground to see if anyone else needed to be picked up. The only people he saw remaining on the ground were Carney and his combat controllers, which was reassuring, because clearly they had some way out. He assumed the helicopters had stayed behind to do that.

Then Jessie Johnson, another member of Delta, pulled up in the jeep.

“What are you doing?” he asked Fitch.

“Well, I’m making sure everybody is out of here and then I’m going to get on this helicopter,” Fitch said.

“Look up in the helicopter, dummy,” said Johnson. Fitch did and saw immediately that it was empty. After the collision the pilots had hastily abandoned ship and boarded the C-130s. Fitch thought all the planes had taken off, but with Johnson and Carney and his men still on the ground he realized he must be wrong. Johnson pointed out the last C-130, waiting for them.

“Get in the jeep, we’re pulling out,” he said.

Beckwith was in the cockpit of the last plane, talking to Vaught at Wadi Kena, explaining the new calamity. There was thought given to leaving a small force behind in some low hills to the north to keep an eye on the scene—there was still a small chance all this would go unnoticed and they might be able to return and complete the mission—but that idea was quickly nixed. The only answer now was to clear out, and fast. The plane was low on fuel and they were running out of darkness. Burruss took charge of making sure everyone was accounted for, the able-bodied and the injured. There was some thought given to retrieving the bodies of the dead, but the fire was still raging and there wasn’t time. After consulting with Vaught, Burruss was told to turn loose the Iranian bus passengers. The Delta officer ordered one of his men to rip some wires from the bus engine to make sure it was disabled and, after locating one of the Farsi speakers, he boarded the bus and addressed the passengers.