Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

The second night, October 24, the Special Forces again failed to get the small boats ashore in rough surf. This stung the American commanders. A flotilla of a dozen ships, in­cluding an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault ship loaded with helicopters along with the thousands of soldiers and sailors, stood waiting in the dark off Grenada, held up by the failure to land sixteen (now down to twelve) soldiers on a beach. The Grenadans were winning… and they didn’t even know they were fighting.

The result of this small failure was that the invasion would have to start during the day of the 25th, a Tuesday. And in­stead of landing on the massive airstrip at Point Salines, the first wave of invasion troops would have to parachute in. A daylight jump meant no cover, spoiling the element of sur­prise. Conversely, the only element of surprise for the Ameri­cans was how many enemies lurked below.

Fortunately for the Rangers, the Cubans defending the airstrip were more afraid of Castro than the Americans: they held their fire, just as ordered by the maximum leader. This saved the day for the Rangers, who floated down well within range of the Cuban gunners, most of whom were actually construction workers armed with AK-47s, which carried only about one hundred rounds each. Grenadan gunners manning the antiaircraft guns were held at bay by U.S. air-power. The Americans had landed.

The Rangers’ goal was to capture the airfield and secure the True Blue campus. By 7:30 a.m. the Rangers rescued the students-who-would-be-hostages from the invisible people-who-could-be-hostage-takers. The Rangers’ glee was cut short when they discovered more students living at the Grand Anse campus, between the airport and the capital. Darn! The empire for a campus directory.

The soldiers at the airstrip moved out and captured the Cuban positions around their work camp. At one point the Rangers’ advance stalled under the fire of a single recoil-less rifle. Pausing to smash the enemy with an overwhelming dis­play of technology, they called in an air strike but were be­deviled by the miscommunication that was quickly proving to be endemic. Four Marine Cobra gunships, and small two-man helicopters raced in but could not contact the army or air force planes to confirm their targets. Two of the Cobras were finally able to contact a ground air controller but then discovered they had different maps. They finally pinpointed the enemy rifle by a ground soldier using a broad-spectrum photon beacon deflector, known as a shaving mirror in non-military parlance. Unfortunately for the invaders, the parade of ineptitude was just getting started.

In the south, two battalions of the Eighty-second Air­borne, the main invasion force of about one thousand troops, finally landed in the afternoon. Meanwhile, marine amphibi­ous units landed in the north, capturing the small, unde­fended airfield there. But coordination between these groups and the Rangers at Point Salines never materialized. The Rangers found themselves cut off from the commanders on the USS Guam as well as the Marine units in the north. Why? Because in the rush to deploy, they had left behind their vehicles containing long-range radios. The radio-free Rangers lingered, reduced to waiting for orders to arrive by telepathy.

Later in the afternoon, the Grenadans boldly counterat­tacked at the eastern end of the runway in three APCs. With­out any air or artillery support, the Rangers easily beat back the attack. American commanders, still lacking firm intelli­gence on the size of the enemy, worried that many more at­tacks awaited them.

By the end of the day, when the invasion was supposed to be wrapping up, the radio-free Rangers and Eighty-second still struggled to break out from their positions around the air strip, bogged down by their commander’s lethargy. The Grand Anse campus, only a couple of miles away, still con­tained students-who-could-easily-be-hostages. Assessing his troops deployment before his tiny enemy, the commander of the Eighty-second came to a worried conclusion: he needed more overkill. He sent his sweat-stained word up the chain of command: “Keep sending battalions until I tell you to stop.”

The war saw the emergence of the U.S. Army’s newest weapon, the Black Hawk helicopter. Offering a significant upgrade over its prede­cessor, the Black Hawk allowed the army to transport an entire eleven-man squad right into the fighting, while also pulling out the wounded. And as it proved in Grenada, the chopper can take multi­ple hits from enemy fire and keep operating. It features an armor-plated cockpit and a cabin that can withstand crashes. Because it’s so tough, pilots are not reluctant to fly it into places others would never consider. It even features twin engines in case one is knocked out. This ruggedness has turned the Black Hawk into an international star, and it is the standard helicopter for much of the world’s military.

The other attacks on the first day all shared disturbing signs of nonsuccess. The invaders had three crucial D-Day targets, excluding the newly discovered students not living at the True Blue campus. All these targets were handed to the Special Forces, the cream of the crop of the mighty techno­logical superpower.

The first target was a radio station near the capital. A crack team of Navy SEALs successfully occupied it. But they were quickly counterattacked, by one solitary APC. The SEALs desperately needed an infusion of a massive techno­logical advantage, but unfortunately no air support was as­signed to them. The outgunned SEALs, products of some of the most arduous training in the military world, designed to hone them to the hardest edge of military steel, blew retreat and scampered back to the beach to hide. That night, under cover of darkness, the retreating SEALs redeployed farther afield by swimming out to a ship to snuggle under the safety of naval armor. The navy tossed its biggest five-inch shells at the transmitting tower but missed. It didn’t matter anyway. The Grenadans were transmitting from their old radio sta­tion closer to town.

The second target was the rescue of Sir Paul Scoon, the is­land’s governor general, a well-tanned and glorified ambassa­dor who served as an official representative of the Queen of England. A different team of Navy SEALs was sent to rescue him at the Government House on the outskirts of St. George’s. Facing intense ground fire, the brand-new Black Hawk heli­copters withstood a baptism of fire but could not land. On the second try they lowered twenty-five soldiers down ropes onto the roof of Government House. The SEALs also found themselves quickly outgunned by more frisky Grenadan sol­diers in an APC. Fortunately the SEALs had a Spectre gun-ship on call, a massively armed cargo plane, which held the APCs at bay. The soldiers, however, could not escape like their brethren. A rescue plan was cobbled together featuring troops still bogged down at the airstrip. What was supposed to be a lightning raid turned into a long siege. At noon the SEALs were still pinned down, the governor general huddled under a table without any relief in sight.

The third target was the Richmond Hill prison, perched atop one of the innumerable hilltops on the island. A tag team of army Delta Force and Rangers was sent to capture the prison and free the political prisoners — without adequate intelligence, planning, or preparation. Once they located the target, five Black Hawk helicopters zoomed into the small mountainous valley to drop the soldiers into the prison until they realized, belatedly, that no landing areas existed. Worse, the ridge right next to the prison was actually higher, topped by Fort Frederick (where the RMC leadership was hiding in their communications-free tunnels) and dotted with anti-air­craft guns, which had clean, level shots at the helicopters.