Navy SEAL Author Jack Carr on What We Learned from Operation Eagle Claw

How many seals are novelists? Is it common? It's not common. There are seals, obviously, who get out and write nonfiction. Richard Marcinko, who created... Dick Marcinko. I read those books. Those are the first books that I ever read on military. Oh, nice. Yeah, early 90s. And when that came out, I was so excited because I had read everything you possibly could on seals up until that point because I wanted to be a seal since I was seven years old. I knew I was going to be in the military even before then. When did those books come out? Those came out in the 90s, so I was... Did they really? Yep, early 90s. That was the first one I felt like a red... Yeah, a red World War. I felt like I read them before then, but I guess that makes sense. Yeah. I'm going to blend. You know, time's going to blend together. So when I found out, hey, there's an autobiography coming out about the guy that started this command damn neck on the East Coast, this counter terrorist unit, I was so excited to read that book. Wasn't there an issue too where people were kind of upset that he was telling these stories? I think so, but as a kid reading that, like you don't know any of that. You don't know any of that backstory. You're just like, oh, this is amazing. He must have had an incredible life to be able to write a book. And the first commanding officer of Delta Force wrote a book called The Delta Force in I think 1986, which really goes into the Iranian hostage crisis and what happened to Desert One in 1980. And that was a very formative time for me because I knew I was going in the military. And at the time, Walter Cronkite's on TV. We're watching it during dinner. He's counting down the days that US personnel have been taken hostage in Iran. And I'm seeing those click down. I'm everything or a quick up every single night. And I'm wondering, I see the pictures, black and white photos of US military and people from the State Department. I didn't know that at the time. I see a guy in a suit and a guy in a military uniform blindfolded in black and white photos on the cover of the newspaper. And I'm wondering why are why is the United States standing by and letting this happen, even though I'm six years old at the time? I'm like, why is this happening? Why don't we go in there and get those guys? And then Desert One happens. And of course, that's on the mind. It's still shades. Everything we do is a special in special operations. There's a big black eye for the country, special operations in general. Explain to people what happens. So about six months after the hostages were taken in Iran. So they were taken, I think in November of 1979. And about six months, they were eventually held for 444 days. But about five, six months into that, we made an attempt to rescue them. So they're being held at the embassy still in an adjacent building, I think. And it was the first use that most people know of what's called Delta Force. So our premier counter terrorist unit that is modeled after the British SAS. And the British SAS has been in service for a long time. So we had guys that went through their program in the 60s even. And they took those lessons and created ours because late 60s, mid 70s, there's a lot of hijackings. We have the Munich Olympics. We have all these terrorist events. And we don't really have a good way to counter them. And so Delta Force is created. And their first test was Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages in Iran. So it's just anniversary of it just happened the other day. So April 1980, we give it a shot. And it didn't work out. So what happened was we have Marine pilots flying these sea stallion helicopters off, I think it was the USS Nimitz, I think. So they're flying off an aircraft carrier. They're meeting the assaulters from Delta Force who are flying in on C-130s from an island called Masira in the Gulf of Oman, a place where we would then launch into Afghanistan years later. Interestingly enough, I spent a little time there. And they were going to meet up in the desert outside of Tehran and ran a few hundred miles outside the city. So the C-130s land, EC-130s land that have fuel, helicopters land from the aircraft carrier. They're going to refuel those helos. And the planes are going back to Masira. And the helicopter is going to get closer to Tehran. So they're going to get closer. They're going to land. They're going to get camouflaged during the day. And then some guys who have been on the ground in Tehran. This is the best part of the story that no one really talks about. We've had guys on the ground in Iran. We had an E-6 Air Force guy that spoke Farsi. We had a special operations legend, Dick Meadows, who was also on the Sante raid in Vietnam. And we have two Special Forces guys out of Germany. And then two CIA assets. I think one's called Bob. And one's named Muhammad. And they had to get vehicles out there to the hide site where the Delta Force guys are. And then they're going to assault. They're going to go in. They're going to retake the embassy. They're going to get the hostages. And then the helicopters are going to take back off, land in a soccer stadium next door. And they're going to extract from there, expel from there. So what happened was the planes land. Helicopters have some mechanical problems. A couple get lost in the sandstorm. They needed six to do the mission. They launched with eight. Less than six make it to that link up point in the desert. So they have to scrap. It's called no-go criteria. So it takes a decision essentially away from the ground force commander because ahead of time he knows that if we don't have, if we have four helicopters, we can't do this mission. So instead of being on the ground saying, okay, we have four. How many guys do you have? Can we do it with this? Those decisions have been made ahead of time in the planning process. So the helicopters land, not enough. They scrap the mission, they abort. And what would have happened is they would have gone back and they would have reconstituted and gone after the hostages a few days later. But one of the helicopters in refueling collides with one of the EC 130s. Huge explosion. Eight US servicemen die. And so they don't go take the hostages. They don't go back for the hostages again a few days later. Iran moves the hostages, different locations all over Iran to make it a lot more difficult if we had gone after them again. But the next day, President Carter makes an announcement, said we tried to get the hostages. Didn't work. They were in the desert. And it was a big black eye for his presidency and for special operations in general. But the important part, we took those lessons and we applied them going forward. So now we train altogether instead of having all these pilots and assaulters and all these people that have never really trained together up until that point. Well, now we do. Now we have a special operations command. We all train together. So pilots are trained. You're doing all this stuff together. So when 9-11 hit all those years later, we're much more prepared because of what happened to desert one. That's how we honor those guys that died. That's how we honor that mission is by taking those lessons and apply them going forward. And that's what you interestingly enough, that's what you do in life also when you have to learn these lessons and apply them going forward. It's all about how you apply them going forward. Well, that's a huge advantage for you as an author to have all that information, to have that legitimate background, like to be writing about these things like we're talking about guys were writing about taking safeties off clocks, people that really don't know what they're writing about. When they do, it's like, I mean, you can be creative and pretend you're a ballerina without ever ballet danced, but I don't think it's going to be the same. And there's an authenticity to the way you write and to the one book that I've read, at least Savage Son, where it just, there's a frequency that you tap into that is a frequency of a person that has experienced this stuff in real life. You're not imagining. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff where people write about things where they're imagining, you know, there's a movie called warrior where it's a, an MMA movie. Oh yeah. Yeah. They fight two days in a row. And when they, they fought two days in a row, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. I'm watching somebody. What are you talking? You can't fight two days in a row. You ever seen someone the day after a fight? They look like they're fucking elephant man. Her whole body's a mess. Everything's swollen. Like this is nonsense. But someone that doesn't know is like, so I'm gonna have this in the story. They're gonna, he's gonna lose the first night, but the next night he's gonna go in. He's gonna win. Exactly. Exactly. They do things that take you out of like you, it's a, it's a world they don't really know about and they're writing about this world. Whereas you're writing about a world that you were so deeply embedded in for all those years that when you're writing about it, it's just, it's really compelling. It's very interesting. Thank you. Yeah. I got, and I incorporate some real world stuff in there too, like a shot that I didn't take into Jaffarack and I fictionalize it by having a memory from Fallujah. And so I morphed it around a little bit, but the passion is there. The feelings and emotions behind it are there and it's woven into the first story. And then someone, and so it was very therapeutic. I get to take, and I was very lucky down range. Like you can do all the right things in combat. Like if you were to whiteboard something out here and we talk about tactics and all the rest of it, you could make those exact same right decisions down range and things can still go south and people can die. And the other is opposite truly. You can make all the wrong decisions, quote unquote, wrong decisions and things can work out just fine. Just like life, right? Yeah, like life. Yeah. So you can, so whether you made mistakes or not, point being, you're going to have a hard time dealing with them later. For whatever reason, whether it was luck or whatever else, I sleep very well at night because of the things that that was involved in down range, but I still got to tap into them and put them into the story.