Rachel Maddow - Drift

WHEN THE REAR RAMP OF THE LEAD C-130 AIR FORCE TRANSPORT plane fell open, somewhere over the Atlantic, the jumpmaster for Navy SEAL Team Six got his first surprise. He and his teammates had been well briefed on their top secret mission. They were to be the phantom vanguard, the crucial eyes and ears, of the United States’ first major combat mission since Vietnam, in and out before anyone ever knew they were there. The sixteen SEALs, along with two eighteen-foot Boston Whaler patrol boats, were to make a 1,200-foot parachute drop into deep water well away from commercial shipping lanes, forty miles northeast of the still-under-construction Point Salines airfield on the edge of a Caribbean island few of the men could have found on a map a few days earlier. Once in the water, the frogmen would swim to the boats, meet up with an Air Force Combat Control team from the nearby USS Sprague , and, after darkness fell, motor forty miles to shore. The SEALs would suss out the situation at the airfield and radio back what they found: Were the runways complete enough for landing a couple of battalions of Army Rangers? Were the runways clear? Was the airfield defended by local soldiers? How big was the Cuban construction and engineering crew, and how many of the Cubans were armed? Did they know we were coming?

Intelligence about the airfield was spotty at best, which was why the SEALs were infiltrating the island a day and a half before the invasion was to begin, even before President Reagan had made the final decision on whether or not to launch the overall operation.

SEAL Team Six had been given to understand that there was nothing complicated about its reconnaissance mission. In fact, the SEALs’ commander had taken himself off the offshore drop so he would be available to lead a different SEALs mission: the rescue of the island’s governor general thirty-six hours later.

The SEALs approached their drop site right on schedule. Weather reports promised clear skies, low winds, and calm seas. And then the ramp dropped, and, well, it seemed the planners had forgotten to take into account the daylight saving time change, and a one-hour miscalculation is no small thing twelve degrees north of the equator, where the sun drops in a hurry. As the jumpmaster remembered it years later, “It was pitch-black outside. We couldn’t see a thing. I grabbed a flashlight off the air crewman and tried to stick it on the boat…. We had no lights rigged anywhere. We were told it was going to be a daylight drop.”

Secrecy. That was the controlling force in the planning and execution of Operation Urgent Fury, the October 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. When the SEALs commander had suggested, in the early planning stages, that it might be simplest to fly his men and their Boston Whalers directly to the Sprague , he had been waved off for reasons of “operational security.” The planning team, wrote the leader of the Air Force Combat Control team, “was afraid that word might leak of the pending operation.” Flying to the Sprague would let too many people in on the secret. In fact, the Air Force crews flying the SEALs south in the two cargo planes still thought this open-water drop was just another training exercise.

President Reagan’s national security team and his chief military advisers meant to keep this operation under wraps until the last possible moment. Reagan had stuck to his announced public schedule, making many of the crucial decisions about Urgent Fury from the Eisenhower Cottage at Augusta National during a presidential golf weekend. Less than twenty-four hours before the operation began, key planning officers gave up valuable hours to attend an annual military ball. Not going to the dance, commanders reckoned, would be a big red flag that something was up. At least one member of the Air Force planning team suspected that nobody had requested pre-invasion intelligence on Grenada from the National Security Agency, which monitored international phone calls and radio traffic (“probably the richest source of intelligence” on the island). Planners feared that operatives at the NSA, the most secretive agency in government, would leak. And apparently nobody in the chain of command had asked the Defense Mapping Agency for detailed tactical maps of Grenada, which is why planning teams were occasionally working with maps dating from 1895, and commanders on the ground ended up depending on fold-out tourist maps like “Grenada: The Isle of Spice.”

President Reagan did not even risk alerting British prime minister Margaret Thatcher of the operation until after Urgent Fury was under way, despite the compelling fact that Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth. And the American press corps? They were getting nowhere near Operation Urgent Fury. No provisions were made to attach pool reporters to the mission, a remarkable break from traditional US policy. And Reagan officials did more than simply evade the press. On the eve of the invasion, when asked point-blank to confirm an NBC reporter’s question about an impending military action in Grenada, Deputy National Security Adviser John Poindexter flat-out lied. “Preposterous,” he said.

Team Reagan also made the executive decision that it would be imprudent to bring Congress into the loop too early. Somebody on the intelligence committee was sure to leak if informed, the president and his closest advisers believed, and that would jeopardize the entire mission. As far as the White House was concerned, there was simply too much at stake. Secrecy!

As soon as the Boston Whalers went out the rear door of the lead C-130, eight SEALs followed into the unexpected darkness… and into a squall. Clear skies forecast notwithstanding, windswept rain pelted the jumpers, and they hit the water a lot faster than they had expected. A few later estimated that instead of their planned 1,200-foot drop, they’d gone out of the planes at a dangerously low height of about six hundred feet. The first eight SEALs hit the water so hard that fins and equipment pouches sheared off. The swells were as high as ten feet, and the wind on the water so stiff that the parachutes would not deflate.

“It… started dragging me through the water, almost from wave to wave, dragging me facedown, swallowing water rapidly,” one SEAL said later. “I reached up and grabbed the lines of the parachute and started dragging them in, trying to collapse the parachute…. I had a lot of lines all around me…. But I had time to get to my knife and start cutting lines and got enough of them cut so it didn’t start dragging me again.”

The second team of eight had been flung out of its C-130 well away from the assigned drop point, and the scattered men had trouble finding the Boston Whalers on the dark and stormy seas. After a long scramble through the dangerous waters, a few managed to get into one of the boats, but the other SEALs finally gave up and swam toward the lights of the Sprague . Twelve of the sixteen men were fished out of the Atlantic that night; they could hear one of their teammates shouting and firing off shots in hopes of bringing help. After hours of frantic searching for their lost teammates, the SEALs ceded the rescue operations to the crew of the Sprague and, along with the Air Force team, cobbled together enough men to attempt the shore landing near the airfield. But by the time they finally neared the coastline, Grenadian patrol boats were panning searchlights across the open water, forcing the SEALs to give up the mission and return to the Sprague .

When they got back early the next morning, the four missing comrades were still lost at sea. The men never would be found, and were likely pulled underwater by their parachutes. The death of four friends did not deter Team Six. They called back to base to request the drop of another Boston Whaler. They’d try again when the sun fell later that evening.