Birth of the Night Stalkers

Monday, September 2nd, 2013

After the stunning Israeli raid at Entebbe, US Army helicopter pilot Mike Grimm realized that American forces couldn’t do what the Israelis had done:

Once he had become the Divisional operations officer in 1977, he decided to use the Division’s entire budget for training on a single exercise. He called it an Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise (EDRE) and in the training scenario, his men and pilots would have to fly 200 miles to the island of Hawaii where a select group of soldiers playing terrorists were holding hostages. Grimm’s men would have rescue those hostages with minimal losses. The tactics he developed for the exercise would be the blueprint for all future missions to come, even to this day.

Men from the First and Fifth Infantry Battalions at Schoefield Barracks on Oahu were selected to be the “raiders.” Their helicopter element consisted of 10 Bell UH-1H Hueys and two Bell AH-1G Cobra gunships from A Company of the 25th Aviation Battalion. After an alert and planning period, the men and their helicopters flew from Schoefield Barracks to Hickam AFB to be loaded aboard USAF Lockheed C-141A Starlifters to simulate strategic deployment. The men were flown to Hilo Airport which would function as the “intermediate staging base” for the exercise. On 14 November they arrived in Hilo where the helicopters were readied for flight and they flew onward to Bradshaw AAF in the Pohaku Trainng Area in the center of Hawaii. This would be their “forward operating base” for the mission exercise.

The “hostages” were being held in the fire station of Waimea-Kohala Airport just 30 miles north of their forward operating base. The raid would be carried out at dawn as no night vision equipment was available. At ten miles from the target, the “terrorists” heard the team coming and “executed” the hostages. When Grimm’s raiding force landed, they were wiped out to the last man.

The next day at Bradshaw AAF the After Action Review took place and everyone but Mike Grimm thought their Army careers were over when the Division commander, Lieutenant General Willard Scott arrived. He began the debriefing with the statement “This exercise was a really bad idea.” As he continued for several minutes on the inappropriateness of using helicopter-borne infantry on anti-terror operations. “Our Army will never enter into this area. This is NOT our role.”

And then, Mike Grimm stood up and interrupted his commander.

“Respectfully, sir, that is NOT correct.” Here he was, a newly minted major, holding a two-star general to task. “Not only do we need to create this capability, sir, but if we don’t, we are going to find ourselves at some point in our history embarrassed as a nation!”

Three years later, on the morning of 25 April 1980, in the Iranian desert, that embarrassment took place. The wrecks of five Marine RH-53D Sea Stallions and one USAF C-130 Hercules lay smoldering in the desert with the bodies of eight American servicemen. That year Mike Grimm was the commander of A Company of the 229th Aviation Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division where he was working with a handpicked group of men to transform the Hughes OH-6 “Loach” into what would become the MH-6/AH-6 “Little Bird” for night time special forces missions. On the night of 7 October 1981, Mike Grimm was flying one of the unit’s MH-6s at low level over the Cumberland River when he hit the side of a power line tower and was killed instantly. One week later, in memorial to Mike Grimm, the new 160th Aviation Battalion uncased its colors. It was the birth of the Army Special Force’s aviation element (Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or SOAR), the “Night Stalkers”.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Fear of Extinction

Sunday, September 1st, 2013

Assad’s is a dying regime, the War Nerd says — and you don’t want to be the one to send it into extinction:

Why not, you ask? Isn’t Assad a bad guy? Isn’t his regime evil? I don’t really understand those questions as well as everybody else seems to. The Alawites have reason to expect the worst, to stick together, and to fear Sunni domination. Those fears go way back to Ottoman rule.

Under the Ottomans, Alawites were kaffir, “heretics.” That meant, basically, “fair game.” At the moment, there’s a lot of nonsense going around about how sweet and tolerant the Ottoman Empire was from people who read Said’s Orientalism, or at least got the gist from the back cover, and went from the old European cliché “Ottomans — evil” to a new one, “Ottomans — good.” It makes me tired, this binary crap. If you can’t handle anything more modulated than that, stick to tweeting “Miley Cyrus: Saint or Sinner?”

Yeah, the Ottomans were occasionally considerate of minorities who had powerful connections abroad, like Western Christians (not Armenian, of course) or who performed useful state functions, like some Jews (not all) — but groups like the Alawites, without powerful foreign connections, huddled in the coastal hills hoping not to be noticed, were prey in the Ottoman view. The Alawites only survived by sticking together, fighting the Sunni when attacked, and above all, hoping not to be noticed. If the local authorities were kindly, they’d just be taxed to death for their heresy. If the Pashas were in a bad mood, troops would descend on Alawite villages and carry off all likely-looking women and children to be sold as slaves.

Like a lot of weak tribes, the Alawites were in a better position to benefit from a new set of masters than the formerly strong tribe, the Sunni. The French came in 1920 and saw the usefulness of a tightly-organized, warlike group like the Alawites. The fact that these coastal minority people were despised by the Sunni majority just made them less likely to conspire with the Sunni against the French, more loyal to their new masters.

The Alawites, ruled for the first time in their history by people who didn’t despise them, took to modern military service eagerly, like hundreds of other minority tribes all over the French and British empires. The Army was their way out of those miserable paranoid villages in the hills. They outperformed other groups and filled the officer corps by the time Syria got its independence from France in 1946.

The post-war years were full of wild experiments in the Arab world. The only constant was that military coups were the rule. Leaders came from the army — Nasser, Ghadafi, Saddam. So when an officer with coup-making skills happened to come from a tightly-knit community, he was almost sure to end up in charge. Saddam had his Tikrit clan in Iraq; Ghadafi had his academy buddies in Libya; Hafez Assad had his Alawite kin in Syria. The Alawites were perfectly placed to take advantage of this coup-centered polity. T. E. Lawrence said about them, “One Nusairi [Alawite] would not betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever.” With Alawite officers filling the armed services in Syria, it was inevitable that an Alawite would come to power, as Hafez Assad did in 1970. From that point, they did what they had to do to remain in power. When killing was necessary, they killed. And in Syria, it was necessary fairly often. But I don’t know of any records showing that the Alawites were particularly cruel by the standards of the time and place. In fact, from the start of their rule in Syria, the Alawites have tried, via Ba’ath Party secularism and a long-term attempt to make Alawite ritual and doctrine closer to Sunni norms, to integrate with their neighbors.

I don’t see simple evil in that story. Good luck, historically, turning suddenly into precarious luck, then, maybe, very bad luck. That’s all I get from that, or from most tribes’ stories. No good, and very little you’d call “evil,” though a lot of suffering and blood.

Maybe I’m missing something. But what I think a lot of people like John Kerry are missing is what drove the Alawites’ grimmer measures: the simple fear of extinction. It’s a risk to go, as they did, from total obscurity to power in a place as fierce as Syria. Because when you fall, it won’t be to go back to Texas to paint puppies like Dubya. You and your whole tribe can reasonably expect massacres, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, the works. When the Sunni revolted against Alawite domination in Hama in 1982, one of the slogans of the Syrian Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood was “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the graveyard.” The SAA dealt with the revolt by blasting rebellious neighborhoods with artillery, killing thousands.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Helicopter Medical Evacuations

Sunday, September 1st, 2013

The first helicopter medical evacuations came years before they became common in Korea:

For a six-week period in the summer of 1945 as fighting raged between American and Japanese forces on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, six helicopter pilots flew the first rotary-wing medical evacuations under enemy fire in history. Although the helicopter had been used in combat in the Burmese theater of operations in April 1944, the Luzon airlift was first to take place under enemy fire. And here’s the really crazy part of the story — the six American pilots were there not for medevac flights, but for repair and supply work!

Project Ivory Soap began as concept to use Army-owned supply ships as floating repair depots that could move with the US forces during the Pacific island-hopping campaign. Early in the campaign, it could take weeks, even months, for replacement parts to arrive at front-line units from the United States. Under Project Ivory Soap, USAAF aircraft could be turned around more quickly with the floating depot ships nearby. By December 1943, the program had evolved into using six Liberty ships and eighteen smaller vessels. The ships had helipads constructed on them so that Sikorsky R-4s could shuttle between the ships and airfields ashore with critical parts.

In June 1945 the campaign to liberate the Philippines from Japanese occupation was underway and three of the Liberty ships were deployed to Luzon with the Fifth Air Force while the other three Liberty ships were deployed to the Marianas to support B-29 Superfortress operations with the Twentieth Air Force. On 15 June, R-4 pilot Louis Carle received a request to pick up two soldiers with head injuries 35 miles east of Manila. With only 25 hours of helicopter time and no medical training, Carle arrived at the designated spot but they couldn’t locate the two soldiers needing evacuation. Men at the scene who greeted Carle had him fly out a platoon leader with a hip injury instead but they couldn’t fit the stretcher into the R-4. Carle ended up removing the other seat and laying the injured soldier on the floor.

News traveled throughout the area of the successful helicopter evacuation and soon Carle and the other pilots of the repair ships were getting requests for additional medevac flights. Given the primitive state of helicopter technology of the day, the flights into combat zones were grueling and often the six pilots were flying as many as six to seven medevac missions a day. Often the pick up points were near front line areas and the helicopters were attractive targets to Japanese units. Mortar and artillery rounds often impacted near the landing zones as well, and adding to the stresses, the pilots were the only crew aboard and they had to load the injured, make sure they were secured, and then fly their flimsy machines out of the combat zone to a field hospital near Manila. As the American forces pushed into the highlands of Luzon, performance of the R-4 and later R-6 helicopters suffered and often Carle and his men had to overspeed the piston engines to get enough rotor lift to get airborne, all while avoiding enemy gunfire.

Carle and another pilot survived crashes of their respective R-4s after ten days. Both men were escorted out of the jungle highlands by appreciative Army units.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

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