On April 28, 2006, to remember the sacrifice of those Airmen and Marines who gave their lives at Desert One, the painful effort to rescue the 52 American hostages in Iran, more than 100 Airmen, dressed in flight suits, battle dress uniforms, and chemical warfare suits gathered at the Hurlburt Field, FL, the HQ of the 8th Special Operations Command, for a formal ceremony of honor.
We want to thank John Burtis for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
You can review our ‘Op-Ed Guidelines‘ on the FAQ Page.
“In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent the Army’s Delta Force to bring back fifty-three American citizens held hostage in Iran. Everything went wrong. The fireball in the Iranian desert took the Carter presidency with it,” said Mark Bowden in The Atlantic. Amen, Mark.
President Jimmy Carter ordered the U.S. military to attempt a rescue mission – known as Operation Eagle Claw – using the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz CVN-68 and the USS Coral Sea CV-43, which were patrolling in the waters off Iran.
The failed attempt on April 24, 1980, resulted in the death of one Iranian civilian and the deaths of eight American servicemen after one of the Sea King helicopters, said not to have been equipped with the needed dust filters on their engine intakes, caused a loss of power on take-off, crashed into a C-130 four-engine transport aircraft, immolating those aboard in a colossal military and political fireball. U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned his position following this abject military failure adding to the out-of-control fire engulfing the benighted Carter Administration, where a US president and an Annapolis-trained nuclear engineer were prone to micromanage operations.
A close friend and former CIA operator wrote me today, “Sad and humiliating beyond belief, JB, and totally unnecessary. It was the hardest thing for me to witness, the failed raid in 1980 (‘Desert One’) to free our Tehran Embassy diplomats being held, hostage. That included having to watch on TV the ‘Hanging Ayatollah’ desecrate in the courtyard of our embassy the remains of an Air Force pilot, Capt Lyn McIntosh. That, for me, was the lowest point, even lower than 9-11.” I agree with my collegiate classmate’s assessment.
Today, Jimmy Carter is said to slipping away from this life wherein he will be glorified for his failures. Like today’s seemingly feckless president, Joe Biden, his administration was noted for gaffes of the very sort the foregoing describes and with similar ongoing and consistently grim economic news, from autos lined up hours before gas stations opened because of our then failure to remain an oil and coal exporting country to the unheard of interest costs so high that numerous states had to change their laws governing usury.
The reason that my chum and I were trading emails earlier today was that the blog, America First Report, published the tally* on the items President Joe Biden abandoned in Afghanistan when he suddenly, without any of the micromanaging which characterized Jimmy Carter, demanded an immediate withdrawal as in “right now.” It was a pull-out so poorly planned and so haphazardly executed that the following was left for the Taliban and the other terrorists who eventually seized this entire nation in record time in our vehicles and began imposing their despotic will.
The scale and scope of this abandonment, to say nothing of the inability of the units involved in this wholesale “run for it”, that there seems to be no accurate count of the American citizens and the allies whom Biden abandoned and who may still be wandering the Afghan mountains.
Unlike the pull out from South Vietnam, where lines of Vietnamese friends waited patiently in line on the steps at the Saigon US Embassy to board helicopters which were quickly pushed overboard when their missions were completed, Biden ordered a “mad mad rush for the big oak doors” (from an apt line in Jan & Dean’s ‘Little Old Lady from Pasadena’) was a cross between an irresponsible and heedless gaffe and a chaotic and ineffectual abandonment. So quickly did we run that we allowed thousands of complete and utter strangers to be sent to our homes in America ahead of our own citizens and employees?
While the Carter “Desert One” debacle cost a presidency and Cyrus Vance’s job, think for a few moments about the stockpiles of all manner of weapons, commo gear and munitions left in the warehouses and revetments in the “Graveyard of Empires”, the AFG, Afghanistan.
At some unannounced time in the near future, the Taliban, most likely in cahoots with the terror-loving and blood-soaked mullahs of Iran, will pull off some type of a major and deadly caper, as we termed most major undertakings when I was in. Their ability to hack the DOD with our latest electronics, thanks to the gear we left on the shelves, combined with their new ability to listen in to our military communications, will be brought into a sharp diamond-like focus when the dreaded patè hits the big electric fan sometimes coming up.
Today, replete with an arsenal larger than that possessed by many countries, the idea that these weapons left for the Taliban to drive, and fly, which they are doing in order to toss the troubled out of a helo door from a thousand feet, launch and fire should not surprise us when they are turned on us as they inevitably will be.
Sometime soon, when we least expect it and while Joe Biden is “busily” working from home, chocolate chip ice cream piled in a tub on his lap, his presidency, unlike that of Jimmy Carter’s, may be consumed in a fireball of his very own making, and where his cheerleaders in the media and in the Democrat Party quip that Biden is our martial Julius Caesar. And Caesar’s “Gallic Wars,” which I read in my Latin II class, would’ve turned out far different had Sulla bequeathed Vercingetorix with what Joe Biden has given the Taliban.
The leading fops and blow-hards in the new woke Biden Pentagon, JCS Chief, and Princeton educated General Milley prominent among them, should’ve taken Cyrus Vance’s well-traveled road out of town when they were confronted with the easily recognized horrors to come when Biden said: “outta there tonight!” Instead of playing at armchair generalship, running war games against Lesotho, and chatting with their pals in Beijing, they could have demonstrated a bit of moral backbone and left the field to those who value country more than self.
