Hostage rescue mission ends in disaster - Apr 24, 1980 - HISTORY.com

Thank you for sharing the sad reminder TSgt Joe C. that on April 24, 1980 that Desert One was the scene of carnage which took the lives of Delta and other hostage rescue personnel in the desert. I was a Senior USMA cadet just under a month away from graduating from West Point at that point.
This was a coordinated attack which used RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters which did not have sand filters since they were focused on sea operations.

Background from theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/the-desert-one-debacle/304803/
"Washington, D.C., April 11, 1980, Noon
The meeting began with Jimmy Carter’s announcement: “Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am seriously considering an attempt to rescue the hostages.”
Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, knew immediately that the president had made a decision. Planning and practice for a rescue mission had been going on in secret for five months, but it had always been regarded as the last resort, and ever since the November 4 embassy takeover, the White House had made every effort to avoid it. As the president launched into a list of detailed questions about how it was to be done, his aides knew he had mentally crossed a line.
From Atlantic Unbound:

Desert Rescue—Multimedia
See an interactive version of this article, with audio, video, photos, maps, and more.
Carter had met the takeover in Iran with tremendous restraint, equating the national interest with the well-being of the fifty-three hostages, and his measured response had elicited a great deal of admiration, both at home and abroad. His approval ratings had doubled in the first month of the crisis. But in the following months, restraint had begun to smell like weakness and indecision. Three times in the past five months, carefully negotiated secret settlements had been ditched by the inscrutable Iranian mullahs, and the administration had been made to look more foolish each time. Approval ratings had nose-dived, and even stalwart friends of the administration were demanding action. Jimmy Carter’s formidable patience was badly strained.
And the mission that had originally seemed so preposterous had gradually come to seem feasible. It was a two-day affair with a great many moving parts and very little room for error—one of the most daring thrusts in U.S. military history. It called for a nighttime rendezvous of helicopters and planes at a landing strip in the desert south of Tehran, where the choppers would refuel before carrying the raiding party to hiding places just outside the city. The whole force would then wait through the following day and assault the embassy compound on the second night, spiriting the hostages to a nearby soccer stadium from which the helicopters could take them to a seized airstrip outside the city, to the transport planes that would carry them to safety and freedom. With spring coming on, the hours of darkness, needed to get the first part of this done, were shrinking fast.
Unrolling a big map, General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, walked the president and his inner circle of advisers through the elaborate plan, pointing out the location of the initial landing and refueling site, called Desert One; the various hide-site locations; the embassy, in central Tehran; the soccer stadium; and the airfield. It was risky; but short of leaving the hostages to their fate or engaging in some punitive action against Iran that would further endanger them, the president had few options. Jordan could see the course of Carter’s reluctant reasoning.
To maintain appearances, the president sent Jordan back to Paris for a scheduled second meeting with Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister, with whom Jordan had secretly worked out the most recent failed agreement. Carter had at last severed all formal diplomatic ties with Iran; in this second face-to-face session with Jordan, Ghotbzadeh called the break in relations a tragic mistake that would drive his country into the arms of the Soviets. He also confirmed that peaceful efforts to resolve the crisis were at an impasse, and predicted that it would be many months before the hostages might be released. He was apologetic, but said that for him to take a “soft” position on the issue at that point was tantamount to political, if not actual, suicide. “I just hope your president doesn’t do anything rash,” he added. Ghotbzadeh didn’t know it, but his glum assessment clinched the decision to launch the rescue mission.
Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the creator of Delta Force, the Army’s new, top-secret counterterrorism unit, was summoned to the White House. He and Carter, both proud Georgians, swapped stories about their neighboring home counties. Beckwith, a brave and commanding soldier, was a big, gruff man whose energy filled a room—and he had flaws as outsized as his virtues. He was a difficult man, proud, tough, and at times arrogant and capricious; these traits were aggravated when he drank, which was often. But at the White House he was on his best behavior, impressing the president with his aura of blunt certainty as he presented the proposed mission in ever greater detail.
The colonel was an accomplished salesman. He had spent a career selling the idea of his elite unit, and now that it existed, he was eager to show what miracles it could perform. His enthusiasm was infectious. He and his men had been rehearsing the mission for so long that they could have done it in their sleep, and they were going to make history—not just cut this particular Gordian knot but write their names in the annals of military glory. In a sense, Beckwith’s long crusade to create Delta Force had been a rebellion against the mechanization and bureaucratization of modern warfare. He held to an old and visceral conviction: that war was the business of brave men. He loved soldiers and soldiering, and his vision was of a company of men like himself: impatient with rank, rules, and politics, focused entirely on mission. He had created such a force, choosing the best of the best and training them to perfection. They were not just good, they were magnificent. And now he would lead them into battle.
They were nearly ready. Two small teams had already been in and out of Iran to scout the landing site at Desert One, and to find the hide sites and the vehicles that would carry the raiding party to the embassy. Eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters and their crews were waiting below decks on the aircraft carrier Nimitz, which cruised in the Arabian Sea. Staging areas at Wadi Kena, an abandoned Soviet airstrip in Egypt, and on Masirah, an island off the coast of Oman, were being readied to receive Beckwith’s men and planes. Dick Meadows, the leader of the team that had prepared the hide sites, was packing his bags for a return trip to Tehran, where he would wait to meet with the rest of the force on the first night of the mission. Moving everything into position would take about two weeks.
Technically, Carter had not yet given the go-ahead, but when Beckwith left the White House, he was certain he had sold the mission. He flew to Delta’s stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and immediately assembled his top men. “You can’t tell the people; you can’t tell anybody,” he said. “Don’t talk about this to anyone. But the president has approved the mission, and we’re going to go on April 24.”
Gulf of Oman, April 24, 1980, Dusk
Through the failing light a lone plane moved fast and low over dark waters toward the coast of Iran. It was a big four-propeller U.S. Air Force workhorse, a C-130 Hercules, painted in a mottled black-and-green camouflage that made it all but invisible against the black water and the night sky. It flew with no lights. Inside, in the eerie red glow of the plane’s blackout lamps, seventy-four men struggled to get comfortable in a cramped, unaccommodating space. Only the eleven men of the plane’s usual crew had assigned seats; the others sprawled on and around a Jeep, five motorcycles, two long sheets of heavy aluminum (to wedge under the plane’s tires if it became stuck in desert sand), and a bulky portable guidance system that would help the other planes and helicopters find their way to Desert One. Their rendezvous was a flat, empty spot in the Dasht-e-Kavir salt desert, fifty-eight miles from Tabas, the nearest town.
Just after dark, the Hercules moved in over the coast of Iran at 250 feet, well below Iranian radar, and began a gradual ascent to 5,000 feet. It was still flying dangerously low even at that altitude, because the land rose up abruptly in row after row of jagged ridges—the Zagros Mountains, which looked jet black in the gray-green tints of the pilots’ night-vision goggles. Its terrain-hugging radar was so sensitive that even though the plane was safely above the peaks, the highest ridges triggered the loud, disconcerting horn of its warning system. The co-pilot kept one finger over the override button, poised to silence it.
The decision had been made to fly into Iran on fixed-wing transports rather than helicopters, and since then Beckwith had added still more men to “Eagle Claw,” as the rescue mission was now code-named. Most notable among them were a group of soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment, out of Fort Benning, Georgia, who would block off both ends of the dirt road that angled through Desert One and man Redeye missile launchers to protect the force on the first night in the event it was discovered and attacked from the air. A separate thirteen-man Army Special Forces team would assault the foreign ministry to free the three diplomats being held there: Bruce Laingen, Victor Tomseth, and Mike Howland. Also on Beckwith’s lead plane was John Carney, an Air Force major from the team that had slipped into Iran weeks earlier to scout the desert landing strip and bury infrared lights to mark a runway. He would command a small Air Force combat-control team that would orchestrate the complex maneuvers at the impromptu airfield.
Some of these men sat on and around the Jeep. The mood was relaxed. If there was one trait these men shared, it was professional calm.
They had taken off at dusk from the tiny island of Masirah. An hour behind them would come five more C-130s—one of them carrying most of the remainder of Beckwith’s assault force, which now numbered 132 men; three serving as “bladder planes,” each one’s hold occupied by two gigantic rubber balloons filled with fuel; and a back-up fuel plane carrying the last Deltas and pieces of sophisticated telecommunications-monitoring equipment.
Days earlier the entire force had flown from Florida to Egypt on big Army jet transports. His mission under way, Beckwith had been wound tight, at once anxious and arrogant. To the pilot’s question “Where are we going?” he’d answered, “Just shut up and fly, and I’ll tell you when to stop.” They spent a few days at Wadi Kena, which had been amply outfitted for their arrival, with two refrigerators and pallets full of beer and soda. When the refrigerators were finally emptied of beer, they were stocked with blood.
On the morning of the mission, the men had assembled in a warehouse, where Major Jerry Boykin had offered a prayer. Tall and lean, with a long, dark beard, Boykin stood at a podium before a plug box where electrical wires intersected and formed a big cross on the wall. Behind him was a poster-sized sheet displaying photographs of the Americans held hostage. Boykin chose a passage from the first Book of Samuel:
And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in the forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell on his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone …
They had flown from Wadi Kena to Masirah, where they had hunkered in tents through a bright and broiling afternoon, fighting off large stinging flies and waiting impatiently for dusk. They would make a four-hour flight over the Gulf of Oman and across Iran to Desert One. The route had been calculated to exploit gaps in Iran’s coastal defenses, and to avoid passing over military bases and populated areas. Major Wayne Long, Delta’s intelligence officer, was at a console in the telecommunications plane with a National Security Agency linguist, who was monitoring Iranian telecommunications for any sign that the aircraft had been discovered and the mission compromised. None came.
Not long after the lead plane departed Masirah, eight Sea Stallions left the Nimitzand moved out over the gulf in order to make landfall shortly after sunset. The choppers took their own route, crossing into Iran between the towns of Jask and Konarak, and flying even closer to the ground than the planes. Word of the successful helicopter launch—“Eight off the deck”—reached those in the lead plane as especially welcome news, because they had expected only seven. Earlier reports had indicated that the eighth was having mechanical problems. Eight widened the margin of error.
The men expected breakdowns. In their many rehearsals, they had determined that six choppers were essential for carrying all the men and equipment from Desert One to the hide sites. The load was finely calibrated; every assaulter had an assigned limit and was weighed to make sure he met it. Not all six choppers would be needed to haul the hostages and assaulters from the stadium the next night (two would do in a pinch), but some of the aircraft that made it to the hideouts were expected to fail the next morning. If seven were enough, eight provided comfort.
The final decision to launch had come earlier that day, after Dick Meadows, Delta’s advance man, broadcast a signal from Tehran that all was ready. He had returned to the city disguised as an Irish businessman, and had met up with “Fred,” his Iranian-American guide and interpreter, and with two U.S. soldiers who had themselves entered Iran as Irish and West German businessmen. They had spent that day reconnoitering all of the various hide sites, the embassy, the foreign ministry, and the soccer stadium.
As the lead plane pushed on into Iran, Major Bucky Burruss, Beckwith’s deputy, was on the second C-130, sprawled on a mattress near the front of the plane. Burruss was still somewhat startled to find himself on the actual mission, although there was still no telling if they were really going to go through with it. One thing President Carter had insisted on was the option of calling off the raid right up to the last minute: right before they were to storm the embassy walls. To make sure they could get real-time instructions from Washington, a satellite radio and relay system had been put in place at Wadi Kena.
Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.” And Carter had the idea that this vastly outnumbered force was first going to try holding off the city with nonviolent crowd control? Burruss understood the president’s thinking on this, but with their hides so nakedly on the line, shouldn’t they be free to decide how best to defend themselves? He had complained about the directive to General Jones, who had said he would look into it, but the answer had come back “No, the president insists.” So Burruss had made his own peace with it. He had with him one tear-gas grenade—one—which he intended to throw as soon as necessary; he would then use its smoke as a marker to call in devastatingly lethal 40 mm AC-130 gunship fire."

"28 April 1980: Jon Snow was the first Western journalist to report from the scene of a crash that killed eight people during a US mission to try to rescue hostages held in US Embassy siege in Tehran.
I was there: Jon Snow recalls Iran's 1979 revolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQib8qY2yWI

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Wayne Brandon LTC Bill Koski Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown Maj Marty Hogan MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SSgt Robert Marx PO1 William "Chip" Nagel MSgt Jason McClish AN Christopher Crayne SPC Tom DeSmet SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT (Join to see) SSG David Andrews

Such a nightmare. We were waiting for them in Frankfurt.

SGT Brian Nile SGT Robert George SFC Shirley Whitfield MSG Mark Million Christine C Cullinan COL Lee Flemming SFC George Smith SrA Christopher Wright LTC (Join to see) PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SSgt Harvey "Skip" Porter SCPO Morris Ramsey SFC William Farrell PO1 Tony Holland SGT (Join to see) Alan K. SPC Mike Lake SFC Anthony Beck Sgt Trevor Barrett LTC Greg Henning