No Room for Error by Carney John T. Col; Schemmer Benjamin F

Author:Carney, John T. Col; Schemmer, Benjamin F. [Carney, John T. Col; Schemmer, Benjamin F.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307416230
Published: 2012-02-18T18:13:55+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Grenada in a Rearview Mirror and “Shoot-out” in a Nuclear Power Plant

Looking back, it’s easy to spot many things we did wrong on Grenada—and very few that went right. This was true through every level of the chain of command. The incompetence unveiled by the planning behind Urgent Fury and the lives unnecessarily lost had a profound impact on me, and I decided to quit the Air Force and retire early. To this day, I cannot honestly explain why. Perhaps it was because I had been so personally involved in two seriously failed missions or I had lost confidence in myself. Perhaps I was just worn out emotionally.

Two days after returning from Grenada, I told General Scholtes that I had decided to put in my retirement papers— but first I told him why the operation was a textbook case of how not to employ special operations forces. I didn’t need to tell him, of course; Scholtes already knew. The screwups weren’t his fault; Urgent Fury turned his gut as much as it did mine. But the American public, indeed the world, was told this was a classic example of American joint operations. They were told how brave American soldiers had saved six hundred medical students from peril and how swift intervention had saved Grenada from becoming another bastion of communist influence, spreading mischief throughout Central America and the Caribbean. President Reagan later called the operation a “textbook success” and Defense Secretary Weinberger labeled it “a complete success,” as if both men were equating success with perfection. But that is not how most of its participants would describe Urgent Fury: We did succeed in rescuing the students and restoring Grenada to democratic rule, but not with the precision we had been trained to expect.

What were the lessons of Grenada?

My own mission, for one, was grossly ill conceived. I never understood why the SEALs’ boat drop was initially laid on forty miles away from the island.1 There isn’t a place on earth where the radar horizon extends more than twenty-four miles. I never understood why the SEALs jumped from the C-130s loaded down with combat gear when they could have stowed most of their equipment in the Boston Whalers and retrieved it once the boats were on their way to the island. Some SEALs were not even wearing lifesaving vests (LPUs, or life preserver units); others never got to inflate theirs. They were so weighted down by web harnesses, weapons, and ammunition one can only assume that they were unable to hit the quick-release mechanisms on their parachute harnesses. Thus, they were towed underwater when their parachutes collapsed in the gusty winds and sank as the parachutes’ wet nylon acted as huge anchors.

We learned other costly lessons. We needed special waterproofing for our communications gear, especially the MX-360s and PRC-68s. We needed better ship-to-shore radios so we wouldn’t have to rely on hard-to-come-by satellite communications systems. We needed more dependable engines for our boats, and more dependable boats as well. The

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