On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

The aftermath of the Son Tay Raid had been a bitter experience for Simons. Although the Raiders had not brought back any American POWs, it had been a brave try, and Simons expected the American public to see it that way. Indeed, he had argued, at a breakfast meeting with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, in favor of releasing the news of the raid to the press. "This is a perfectly legitimate operation," he had told Laird. "These are American prisoners. This is something Americans traditionally do for Americans. For Christ's sake, what is it we're afraid of here?"

He soon found out. The press and public saw the raid as a failure and yet another intelligence foul-up. The banner headline on the front page of the next day's Washington Post read: U.S. RAID TO RESCUE POWS FAILS. When Senator Robert Dole introduced a resolution praising the raid and said: "Some of these men have been languishing in prison for five years," Senator Kennedy replied: "And they're still there!"

Simons went to the White House to receive the Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism" from President Nixon. The rest of the Raiders were to be decorated by Defense Secretary Laird. Simons was enraged to learn that over half of his men were to get nothing more than the Army Commendation Ribbon, only slightly better than a Good Conduct Ribbon, and known to soldiers as a "Green Weenie." Mad as hell, he picked up the phone and asked for the Army Chief of Staff, General Westmoreland. He got the Acting Chief, General Palmer. Simons told Palmer about the Green Weenies and said: "General, I don't want to embarrass the army, but one of my men is just likely to shove an Army Commendation Ribbon up Mr. Laird's ass." He got his way: Laird awarded four Distinguished Service Crosses, fifty Silver Stars, and no Green Weenies.

The POWs got a huge morale boost from the Son Tay Raid (which they heard about from incoming prisoners). An important side effect of the raid was that the POW camps--where many prisoners had been kept permanently in solitary confinement--were closed, and all the Americans were brought into two large prisons where there was not enough room to keep them apart. Nevertheless, the world branded the raid a failure, and Simons felt a grave injustice had been done to his men.

The disappointment rankled with him for years--until, one weekend, Ross Perot threw a mammoth party in San Francisco, persuaded the army to round up the Son Tay Raiders from all over the world, and introduced them to the prisoners they had tried to rescue. That weekend, Simons felt, his Raiders had at last got the thanks they deserved. And Ross Perot had been responsible.

"That's why I'm here," Simons told Coburn. "Sure as hell, I wouldn't do this for anyone else."

Coburn, thinking of his son Scott, knew exactly what Simons meant.

4___

On January 22 hundreds of homafars--young air force officers--mutinied at bases in Dezful, Hamadan, Isfahan, and Mashad, and declared themselves loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The significance of the event was not apparent to National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who still expected the Iranian military to crush the Islamic revolution; nor to Premier Shahpour Bakhtiar, who was talking about meeting the revolutionary challenge with a minimum of force; nor to the Shah, who instead of going to the United States was hanging on in Egypt, waiting to be summoned back to save his country in its hour of need.

Among the people who did see its significance were Ambassador William Sullivan and General Abbas Gharabaghi, the Iranian Chief of Staff.

Sullivan told Washington that the idea of a pro-Shah countercoup was moonshine; the revolution was going to succeed and the U.S. had better start thinking about how it would live with the new order. He received a harsh reply from the White House suggesting that he was disloyal to the President. He decided to resign, but his wife talked him out of it: he had a responsibility to the thousands of Americans still in Iran, she pointed out, and he could hardly walk out on them now.