On Gonzo Station, Part Six

Gentle Readers, Doctor Hayes, current minion of Papa Doc Anderson, freed me from captivity at Walter Reed Medical Center yesterday. “You are not completely healed, but there is nothing further that we can do for you here in the Cast Clinic. The rest you have to do yourself. Papa Doc said 84 days to recuperate. We got it done in 76. Let’s take a look at Christmas of 1979, which features your Midway roustabouts and Indian Ocean Rangers confronting the Iranian hostage-takers and the Adventures of the Soviets in the Great Game. 

(Soviet IL-38 May overflies Midway Maru (CV-41) in 1979 while under escort by Navy fighters. Photo USN.)

CHRISTMAS, 1979

The crisis played itself out over the holidays and got weirder, if that was possible.

The Navy tried their best for us. They brought out little shoeboxes from the families back in Nagishi Heights Housing Area back in Japan filled with baked goods and gimcracks.

For some reason best known to themselves, they wouldn’t allow them to be sent to the single guys, but c’est la vie, you can only eat so many stale Christmas cookies anyway. The popular hit was the rum cake that almost collapsed in the basic liquid ingredient.

They even arraigned for the shipment to arrive on Christmas Eve, and it coincided with a massive letter-mail delivery that brought an astonishing effusion of greetings and support from the States. It was comfort for a generally depressing time.

The Iranians continued the little carrot & donkey ploys they have become so adept at. They invited the delegation of clergy- men from the States to minister to the spiritual needs of the captives- remember, Khomeini is a holy guy- and of course that jerk William Sloan Coffin was included. I didn’t like his sanctimonious prattle during the Vietnam War, and his initial pronouncements from Tehran reduced me to slavering rage.

“Mr. Coffin, do you think this visit will be used to further Iranian propaganda?”

“Well, I don’t mind being used in a good cause….” Jesus! At least he is an honest tool.

NBC had joined in the media spectacle, providing the Followers of the Line of the Imam with a free, uncut forum for the students to expound their views to the States. It was starting to cloy a bit, but the networks are only the creatures of popular demand, I suppose, and the news was anything but exciting. I could feel us drifting off page one back home, even though all the media we could get was at least days old, if not weeks.

Newsweek came out with a pretty analysis of the situation and had a marvelous color picture of Midway (CV-41) labeled “Kitty Hawk Underway.”

Fear and Loathing on Gonzo Station.

It was during the mid-Christmas period that we began to get inklings of other events in the wind. Evidence was beginning to pile up of a massive Soviet buildup on the Afghan border. The Muslim insurgents had made steady gains against the Amin regime, which had so recently taken over where the Soviet-backed Taraki government had failed.

An odd pressure has been exerted by the Soviets to go ahead and make a military move against the Iranians. “Go hit them” they said, “Don’t pay any attention to our public pronouncements.” It seems sort of tit-for-tat: they encouraging us to act in order to justify action of their own.

We will acquiesce to anything but a permanent military occupation of Afghanistan. During the early phase of this evolution I was all in favor of a strike of some sort to assuage our impotence over the situation. We were getting bizarre indications from the Indians, too. New Delhi had publicly condemned the taking of the hostages, privately told the Iranians they supported them, and also told the U.S. that they wanted us to make a military move. It was all very strange.

In the heat of the moment, I could only agree the crisis makes for unlikely bedfellows.

Frank Oxsen, one of the two VA-155 A-6 Air Intel guys, was in his element in MSI. He was the first to come out with a wild assessment that had the Soviets moving in force against the Pakistanis, It sounded incredible, but he had some good facts to back It up. Curiouser and curiouser. What were the Soviets up to? We pondered the matter over coffee and cigarettes each morning before the cyclical briefs began.

Frank freely admits he is a paranoid type, but also adds the corollary “just because you are paranoid it doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.”

I had to take it very much to heart, after all, my private timetable had the Soviets on the move for a major confrontation in the early ’80s, and the longer I was in Asia, the more it seemed like the first target would be the Indian Ocean area, the path to a warm-water port that was the essence of The Great Game. Their consistent moves In Africa, flanking the oil lines. The reinforcement of the Malagasy Republic: the odd port visits to the Seychelles in the Spring, and the dramatic transit of the helicopter carrier Minsk (CVHG-117) escorted by two KARA-class cruisers, Petropavlovsk and Tashkent, along with  amphibious assault ship Ivan Rogov (LPD 132), and the T-AOR Boris Butoma.

(Soviet CVHG-117 Minsk, a Kiev-class helicopter cruiser, transits the Indian Ocean. A YAK-38 Forger VSTOL fighter is spotted near the ramp. Photo USN).

Still, with all the fanfare about Hanoi’s big New Year’s offensive to wipe out the last of Pol Pot’s boys in Kampuchea, and my visceral concern for the ladies of Patpong Road in Thailand, I had thought the pressure might come in the Far East.

I had to admit that the events, when they began to play, were stunning. It was the Great Game after all, nothing new under the sun. The Soviets were classic. A violent coup left Amir colder than a Mackerel, with his son and his mother joining him in the funeral pyre. The assault on Radio Afghanistan followed, with broadcast of a pre-recorded broadcast of Karmel’s conciliatory take-over address as soon as the studios were occupied.

Evidence that the same broadcast was being played from clandestine stations in the Soviet Union came in, just in case the action at the radio station was held up. Within minutes, the troops began rolling out of the bivouac areas around the International Airport in Kabul to key points in the city. According to Frank, about 80% of the entire Soviet airlift capability was being utilized to bring in more. It wasn’t Pakistan, not just yet, but it was the largest military action by the Soviets since Czechoslovakia in 1968,

It was great. The propaganda that began to flow was outstanding, and it made me long that we had such an asset at our command. Immediately, Amin became a puppet of the CIA; the incursion was aimed at “outside forces” trained by the U.S. in Pakistan; adventure-was completely-in accord with Article 51 of the UN Charter and Article 6 of the Afghan-Soviet Friendship Treaty.

That, and the entire evolution was provoked by U.S. Warships, conducting training operations in international waters off Iran. In other words, us. 

You have to stand back and be amazed by the Soviets. The Cold War has not ended for them, and a case can be made that the hot war never did either.

The bald-faced effrontery of the rhetoric was nothing short of superb.

The Iranian reaction to it ell was just as delicious. Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Foreign Minister was utterly sublime. Examine this bit of pretzel logic for a moment: the Soviet Intervention “…hurts the struggle against U.S. Imperialism.” Dig it, the largest Asian atheist power moves armored divisions against a contiguous neighbor, whose Muslim guerillas the Iranians have supported with food, shelter and weapons, and it “Hurts the struggle against U.S. Imperialism.”

I said it over and over during the cvclical air ops briefs: Something was seriously wacko with the Iranians at the leadership level. Or was it more than that?

Thinking it through, I was struck one morning in the shower (it was early, and no one was around, so I was consciously wasting hot water) by the notion that had run though my mind before. The Soviets were running the show in Iran, too, Marxist students, professing a conservative religious line, were part of the group at the Embassy, The Students had sent apologies to the Soviets when Afghan students had the temerity to assault the Russian Embassy in Tehran, and rip down the Hammer and Sickle,

Advisors around Khomeini were known to have KGB links. The Russians wanted us to make a military move against Iran. The whole hostage taking was orchestrated to radicalize the Iranian Revolution, and to force the Great Satan (that’s us, fans) to make the first move against a Muslim nation,

I very nearly dropped the soap, which despite my fondness for my shipmates is not anything you want to do if you have been this long at sea.

Running over one of the morning briefs I gleaned the following interesting notes. The Governor of Kandahar Province had received a note from the rebels demanding that he join them against the foreigners- Ferengi– who had invaded the homeland. He locked up his desk and turned over the government to them.

Rumors are that the Soviets were planning at least ten garrisons for Afghanistan, with a Division sized unit at each. That would amount to over a hundred thousand deployed combat troops. They are going to reach Vietnam-sized proportions in a hurry. They had occupied Jalalabad, a strategic city in the Kyber Pass and were moving down towards the Pakistani border.

The troops they had used for this operation were primarily from the Asian SSRs, and the Soviets were counting on the fact that this would alleviate some of the traditional xenophobic reaction of the Afghanis to ferengi of any stripe. They had even instructed the troops to go down to the Bazaar and speak the local Pashtun language. Better yet, they sought to eliminate the financial base of the rebels by changing the currency.

Henceforth, all assets were frozen, and the new currency was going to be the Ruble. God almighty, any illusions that this was going to be a short stay went up the chimney.

The only thing that made me smile about the whole thing was the suspicion that one hash smoking hill-tribesman with an AK-47 was better prepared to deal with the snows of winter than a Motorized Rifle Division. The fact that no one since Alexander the Great had been successful in bringing the country underfoot may also apply. I believe that the Soviets have bit off more than they are going to be able to chew on this one; and I hope that the Muslim world will take note of the Bear and his avaricious eating habits. At least some of them have anyway.

Gold closed on the London Exchange at $635 an ounce. It makes me weep that I didn’t

buy Thai gold bhat chains at a paltry $200 an ounce last year in Bangkok. Jewelry you can spend on the way to the airport to get out of town ahead of the tanks.

But what is it the good old United States is supposed to do about this one?

Our delay in the Iranian crisis was a two edged sword. I was glad that our delay- hesitation- in the Iranian crisis made the Soviets take the first move in Afghanistan. Things are out in the open now, I suppose, though, that perhaps a junior British intelligence officer of the Indian Army might have felt very much the same way in 1933 or so.

I was talking to one of the Flag guys about the situation, and we could come up with no answers except the unpleasant ones. It seems like a bad LSD flashback from the old days. Disoriented and helpless; an inestimably odd feeling on a weapons platform that carries enough Silver Bullets to lay waste to the entire nation of Iran,

There have been casualties here already, though they are peacetime deaths, of course. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori“ right? Kitty Hawk has lost eight air-crew already. I mentioned the four guys who died in the EA-6B down by Diego Garcia. They had lost two before ever arriving in the Indian Ocean. Last week they lost two more in an A-6.

A squadron skipper was involved in the mishap, thought that is sort of a tame word for the accident. We have heard a cat malfunction was involved; a couple of the enlisted guys were on the Kitty when they showed the video-tape of the evolution. In any event, they got out of the jet but died anyway as they came down in the drink.

That makes Bucks and Chief who lost one of our Phantoms off the cat the only successful ejections in the Indian Ocean in 1979. The thought of losing that many guys on a seven-month cruise is almost unbelievable here. Corporate memory barely lingers back to our last fatality, knock on steel bulkhead.

It is a business with some inherent dangers built-in, but I can’t help thinking that a permanent bunch of Asiatics such as ourselves have more resilience to the frequent “bad deals” of the forward-deployed Overseas Family Residency Program (OFRP).

Spirits were subdued over the holidays, but it was still very much business as usual. There is a level of professionalism that is difficult to duplicate in any other environment. Mixed with a certain fatalism, naturally, as we always know that if there is a bum deal, we will get to it first,, and get back last. Nothing personal, you understand just part of the business.

Bend over, here it comes again. BOHICA.

At 1603 on the Seventh of January we had a stunning example of precisely what I am talking about. It was our 56th day on The Gonzo, and things were going along just like usual.

Loud noises, tremendous hangings and smashings radiated through the ship. One catapult was down for something or other, and A-7Es were parked along the forward stretch of the port cat track. The flight schedule had been adjusted with the delicacy for which Strike Ops is noted. I was not briefing on that particular day; I was in the Planning spaces to catch up on the shrewd political analysis of my compatriot, Dean “The Dream” Whetstine.

The news was about usual. Iraqi Naval units looked like they were going to deploy and maybe assault a couple islands contest with the Iranians. Heavy fighting continued in Afghanistan; in the west of the country the Soviets were building with ominous force near the Iranian border. The Soviet generals, perhaps with the Order of Lenin dancing before their eyes, were calling for more reinforcements. It sounded so much like Vietnam I had to laugh. “Just another hundred thousand troops and we will have this one licked!”

Or, as the Admiral says,  “Just another couple of cycles of air operations today and we will really past those characters,” Plus ca chang and all that shit.

(Soviet MI-24 HIND Gunships engage Afghan targets, 1979.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com