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By Root 1340 0

saw action in World War II; the U.S. Army Rangers and the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams played vital roles in the greater war effort’s ultimate victory. Initially established in 1952 as part of the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, the fabled Green Berets, aka Special Forces (the name Special Forces, which refers solely to the Army’s Green Berets, is often incorrectly used as a substitute for the broader general term special operations forces) worked closely with Vietnamese fighters aligned with U.S. interests to aid America in the Vietnam War effort, with the ultimate goal of those native forces becoming completely self-sustaining. Green Berets, working in small units, embodied the concept of “economy of force” as they stood up fully capable South Vietnamese military units, obviating the need for larger infusions of conventional U.S. military forces. But the nonconventional mission of greatest consequence for modern U.S. special operations units—with massive ramifications for conventional forces as well—didn’t culminate in victory, but fiery disaster.

Having transformed Iran into a “populist theocratic republic” after ousting the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a cadre of fundamentalist Shiite Muslim clerics headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini fomented a mob of restive youths into attacking American interests in their country in late 1979. Angry that U.S. President Carter allowed the exiled shah to be treated for his advanced lymphatic cancer at a clinic in New York City, the mob—who called themselves the Imam’s Disciples—stormed the U.S. embassy and the Iranian Foreign Ministry in Tehran in early November of 1979, taking sixty-six American workers hostage—and refused their handover until the shah returned to Iran to face a trial. In early April of 1980, after months of feckless diplomatic negotiation attempts, the Pentagon put a small, newly formed counterterrorism unit on alert, the First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, led by U.S. Army Colonel Charles Beckwith, who developed the unit from a concept to an operational force. The soldiers of what would come to be popularly known as “Delta Force” prepared to embark on a complex hostage-extraction mission they’d been rehearsing and rerehearsing for months, Operation Eagle Claw.

As the last wedge of twilight succumbed to pitch darkness above the Middle Eastern country of Oman on 24 April 1980, six U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft roared into the sky off the island of Masirah. The aircraft carried 132 personnel (Beckwith and his force, Army Rangers, and support crew), food, water, weapons, and huge rubber bladders filled with jet fuel. Shortly after the Hercules took to the sky, eight U.S. Navy RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters lifted off the deck of the nuclear-powered carrier USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman. Both the Hercules and the Sea Stallion groups were destined for a secret rendezvous /refueling point in Iran’s Dasht-e-Kavir Desert code-named Desert One.

But equipment malfunctions exacerbated by a type of atmospheric phenomenon known as a haboob, where fine, talcumlike dust rises thousands of feet above the desert, led Beckwith to abort the mission, as these failures rendered three of the original eight helicopters mission-incapable. Upon maneuvering his Sea Stallion to return to the Nimitz after refueling at Desert One, one of the helicopter pilots became disoriented in a plume of rotor-wash-blasted sand and dust, and careened into an idling C-130, killing eight servicemen as the two aircraft erupted in flames. The unsuccessful mission, which Beckwith had hoped would be one of the most spectacular in the history of combat, instantly vaulted to the fore of the world’s greatest military disasters.

During the ensuing investigation—as America viewed images of the thinning, blindfolded hostages on their televisions—a number of factors emerged that, in aggregate, seem to have portended doom for the operation long before the aircraft launched into the Middle Eastern night. Chief among these factors was that while all four