On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

He would laugh at someone for nursing a drink: when he was thirsty he would fill a tumbler with water and drink it all straight down, saying: 'I didn't pour it to look at it.' He showed them how he could shoot, one time: every bullet in the center of the target. Once Coburn saw him with his shirt off: his physique would have been impressive on a man twenty years younger.

It was a tough-guy act, the whole performance. What was peculiar was that none of them ever laughed at it. With Simons, it was the real thing.

One evening at the lake house he showed them the best way to kill a man quickly and silently.

He had ordered--and Merv Stauffer had purchased--Gerber knives for each of them, short stabbing weapons with a narrow two-edged blade.

'It's kind of small,' said Davis, looking at his. 'Is it long enough?'

'It is unless you want to sharpen it when it comes out the other side,' Simons said.

He showed them the exact spot in the small of Glenn Jackson's back where the kidney was located. 'A single stab, right there, is lethal,' he said.

'Wouldn't he scream?' Davis asked.

'It hurts so bad he can't make a sound.'

While Simons was demonstrating, Merv Stauffer had come in, and now he stood in the doorway, openmouthed, with a McDonald's paper bag in either arm. Simons saw him and said: 'Look at this guy--he can't make a sound and nobody's stuck him yet.'

Merv laughed and started handing round the food. 'You know what the McDonald's girl said to me, in a completely empty restaurant, when I asked for thirty hamburgers and thirty orders of fries?'

'What?'

'What they always say--'Is this to eat here or to go?' '

Simons just loved working for private enterprise.

One of his biggest headaches in the army had always been supplies. Even planning the Son Tay Raid, an operation in which the President himself was personally interested, it had seemed as if he had to fill in six requisition forms and get approval from twelve generals every time he needed a new pencil. Then, when all the paperwork was done, he would find that the items were out of stock, or there was a four-month wait for delivery, or--worst of all--when the stuff came it did not work. Twenty-two percent of the blasting caps he ordered misfired. He had tried to get night sights for his Raiders. He learned that the army had spent seventeen years trying to develop a night sight, but by 1970 all they had were six hand-built prototypes. Then he discovered a perfectly good British-made night sight available from the Armalite Corporation for $49.50, and that was what the Son Tay Raiders took to Vietnam.

At EDS there were no forms to be filled out and no permissions to be sought, at least not for Simons: he told Merv Stauffer what he needed and Stauffer got it, usually the same day. He asked for, and got, ten Walther PPKs and ten thousand rounds of ammunition; a selection of holsters, both left-handed and right-handed, in different styles so the men could pick the kind they felt most comfortable with; shotgun-ammunition reloading kits in twelve-gauge, sixteen-gauge and twenty-gauge; and cold-weather clothes for the team including coats, mittens, shirts, socks, and woolen stocking caps. One day he asked for a hundred thousand dollars in cash: two hours later T. J. Marquez arrived at the lake house with the money in an envelope.

It was different from the army in other ways. His men were not soldiers who could be bullied into submission: they were some of the brightest young corporate executives in the United States. He had realized from the start that he could not assume command. He had to earn their loyalty.

These men would obey an order if they agreed with it. If not, they would discuss it. That was fine in the boardroom, but useless on the battlefield.

They were squeamish, too. The first time they talked about setting fire to a car as a diversion, someone had objected on the grounds that innocent passersby might get hurt. Simons needled them about their Boy Scout morality, saying they were afraid of losing their merit badges, and calling them 'you Jack Armstrongs' after the too-good-to-be-true radio character who went around solving crimes and helping old ladies cross the road.

They also had a tendency to forget the seriousness of what they were doing. There was a lot of joking and a certain amount of horseplay, particularly from young Ron Davis. A measure of humor was useful in a team on a dangerous mission, but sometimes Simons had to put a stop to it and bring them back to reality with a sharp remark.

He gave them all the opportunity to back out at any time. He got Ron Davis on his own again and said: 'You're going to be the first one over that fence--don't you have some reservations about that?'

'Yeah.'

'Good thing you do, otherwise I wouldn't take you. Suppose Paul and Bill don't come right away? Suppose they figure that if they head for the fence they'll get shot? You'll be stuck there and the guards will see you. You'll be in bad trouble.'

'Yeah.'

'Me, I'm sixty years old. I've lived my life. Hell, I don't have a thing to lose. But you're a young man--and Marva's pregnant, isn't she?'

'Yeah.'

'Are you really sure you want to do this?'

'Yeah.'

He worked on them all. There was no point in his telling them that his military judgment was better than theirs: they had to come to that conclusion themselves. Similarly, his tough-guy act was intended to let them know that from now on such things as keeping warm, eating, drinking, and worrying about innocent bystanders would not occupy much of their time or attention. The shooting practice and the knife lesson also had a hidden purpose: the last thing Simons wanted was any killing on this operation, but learning how to kill reminded the men that the rescue could be a life-and-death affair.

The biggest element in his psychological campaign was the endless practicing of the assault on the jail. Simons was quite sure that the jail would not be exactly as Coburn had described it, and that the plan would have to be modified. A raid never went precisely according to the scenario--as he knew better than most.

The rehearsals for the Son Tay Raid had gone on for weeks. A complete replica of the prison camp had been built, out of two-by-four timbers and target cloth, at Eglin Air Base in Florida. The bloody thing had to be dismantled every morning before dawn and put up again at night, because the Russian reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 355 passed over Florida twice every twenty-four hours. But it had been a beautiful thing: every goddam tree and ditch in the Son Tay prison camp had been reproduced in the mock-up. And then, after all those rehearsals, when they did it for real, one of the helicopters--the one Simons was in--had landed in the wrong place.

Simons would never forget the moment he realized the mistake. His helicopter was taking off again, having discharged the Raiders. A startled Vietnamese guard emerged from a foxhole and Simons shot him in the chest. Shooting broke out, a flare went up, and Simons saw that the buildings surrounding him were not the buildings of the Son Tay camp. 'Get that fucking chopper back in here!' he yelled to his radio operator. He told a sergeant to turn on a strobe light to mark the landing zone.

He knew where they were: four hundred yards from Son Tay, in a compound marked on intelligence maps as a school. This was no school. There were enemy troops everywhere. It was a barracks, and Simons realized that his helicopter pilot's mistake had been a lucky one, for now he was able to launch a preemptive attack and wipe out a concentration of enemy troops who might otherwise have jeopardized the whole operation.

That was the night he stood outside a barracks and shot eighty men in their underwear.

No, an operation never went exactly according to plan. But becoming proficient at executing the scenario was only half the purpose of rehearsals anyway. The other half--and, in the case of the EDS men, the important half-- was learning to work together as a team. Oh, they were already terrific as an intellectual team--give them each an office and a secretary and a telephone, and together they would computerize the world-- but working together with their hands and their bodies was different. When they had started, on January 3, they would have had trouble launching a row-boat as a team. Five days later they were a machine.

And that was all that could be done here in Texas.