This is the best story we know, and it is not about a mission. It is about what happened the day after one.
The mission
By April 1980, fifty-three Americans had been held hostage in Tehran for nearly six months. Diplomacy had not secured their release. The rescue required a joint force assembled from Army special operations, Marine and Navy aviation, and Air Force aircrew.
The operation was Eagle Claw. The plan required helicopters to fly a long low-level route into Iran, meet transport aircraft at a remote strip in the desert, refuel, and stage forward for an assault on the embassy the following night.
The strip was called Desert One.
The helicopter force arrived short of the number needed to continue. The National Archives timeline records equipment failures in three of the eight helicopters. The mission was aborted at Desert One.
During the withdrawal, a helicopter and a transport aircraft collided at the site. Eight American servicemen were killed.
The force withdrew with wounded personnel; eight servicemen had died, the hostages remained in Tehran, and the rescue had not reached its objective.
Oman
The route home ran back through Masirah Island, Oman, the airfield the C-130s had staged out of on the way in.
Two British personnel serving with Oman’s air force delivered two cases of beer after the crews returned to Masirah. The message was written on a cardboard case.
The message acknowledged the attempt:
"To you all, from us all, for having the guts to try."
What it means
Consider what it would have been reasonable to say instead.
The mission failed. It failed publicly, in an administration's worst week, and became a symbol of American capability at a low ebb. Eight men were dead and no hostage had been freed. Every available response — sympathy, embarrassment, silence, an opinion about whether it should have been attempted at all — was on the table.
The one they chose separates the attempt from the outcome.
That distinction is unfashionable and, in this line of work, structurally necessary. Operations that are worth doing are worth doing precisely because they might not work. A culture that only honors success cannot ask anyone to attempt anything difficult, because the downside of trying becomes worse than the downside of declining.
Our reading of the message is that it recognizes courage without requiring success. The words support that interpretation; the authors’ individual motives are not established here.
What came afterwards
The failure at Desert One was studied hard, and the examination of command arrangements and joint interoperability informed later changes in American special operations. The longer institutional history deserves its own treatment.
That is a longer story than this article, and we would rather point at it than compress it. But it is why the operation is taught, and it is a second sense in which the attempt mattered.
The design
The design pairs “For Having the Guts to Try” with an eagle, coordinates and the words “TABAS / IRAN.” The printed phrase is a shortened reference to the message discussed above.
Its meaning is resolve when the outcome is uncertain.
Sources
- The National Archives timeline records the April 24, 1980 rescue attempt, its abort, the collision and the eight American deaths.
- Jerry L. Thigpen, The Praetorian STARShip, p. 230 (PDF p. 255), documents the two British personnel, the cases of beer and the message written on the cardboard case.