It is 1980. The world was really shitty. A bunch of “students” had taken Americans hostage in Iran.
The day after we heard that the embassy in Iran had been stormed, again, my friend Steve was nowhere to be found. He was a Tomcat driver. All the Tomcats that use to fly over our house were missing from the sky.
Weeks later Steve reappears. “Where were you?” “I can’t say.”
Steve was very very bitter. What happened is they launched refueling aircraft and headed them out over the Atlantic. They launched the Tomcats from the base. They refueled once they were at altitude and headed east. They refueled again somewhere over the Atlantic. I know that those Tomcats were on station within 24 hours. Steve never said as much, but from things I learned later that’s what likely happened.
Their ship arrived later after crossing the Atlantic.
Jimmy Carter, may his name be dust on our peoples lips, had just fumbled a rescue mission. The papers were reporting that the White House had gotten a call, in the clear, from the Israeli’s saying “Get some f’ing radio discipline, everybody knows you have launched a rescue mission, here’s where your team is.”
Seems, following standard Democrat military policy, Jimmy, was yapping with the mission commanders the entire time.
Gas prices looked as bad then as today. I watched gas double, then triple in price. There were lines for gas everywhere.
And the news counted the days of our embarrassment.
And then this guy, I knew him for his song The Devil Went Down To Georgia, was going to be performing on live TV. I remember it as the CMA awards but I can’t find a reference to the performance.
And Charlie stood up and sang this song. And my heart soared. This was my America. This was what I felt about America. This was a man talking to me and mine.
May your heart take flight again.
I remember reading Beckwith’s book, Delta Force, and one of the things he ascribed the failure of Eagle Claw to was politics — specifically, interservice politics. Everyone wanted to get in on the action and it made planning very chaotic.
It didn’t help that the U.S. had ZERO humint assets anywhere near Iran (let alone IN Iran) at the time.
I read that book as well. IIRC, Beckwith’s opinion on Carter was that he genuinely wanted the operation to be successful, but lacked the backbone to Commander-in-Chief up and tell his general officers, “No, the plan’s already been approved, you and your people are not going to be involved in this one. You don’t like it? Tough peanuts.”
The fact that nobody rehearsed anything other than the actual assault on the Embassy (not the refueling at Airstrip One, not the infil into Tehran, not the exfil, nothing) only made the operation that much more doomed to failure.
Carter couldn’t command a good, healthy shit. I don’t care if his habitats for whatever built me a mansion, fuck him.
In my opinion, the actions of Jimmy Carter are the reason why we have the world terrorist shit we have today.
One of the issues with democrats is that they have no problems being the people in charge, but if the person in charge of that country over there isn’t a communist monster, they need to be removed.
The Shaw of Iran wasn’t a great person, but he was busy bring his 5 century country into the 20th. He had modernized education and social norms to the point where you couldn’t really tell the difference between walking down the streets of Tehran and Paris. It was mostly safe. He had stopped executing people with political differences, instead kicking them out of the country.
I put “students” in quotes above because it turns out that all of the students were hard core communists and marxist with ties to some of the worst people in the world.
Jimmy just let our Embassy be overrun, multiple times. And his answer, each time, was to reduce the chances of the Marines guarding the Embassy to be able to defend the Embassy. He showed weakness to a pack of animals.
And because of that, the world learned that it is entirely possible to strike these United States when and where they want and we would not have the will power to strike back from a position of strength.
Good choice for Flag Day!