Charlie Beckwith was a Georgia farm boy who played football well enough that the Green Bay Packers drafted him, and turned them down for a commission instead. In 1962 the Army sent him to England on an exchange with 22 SAS, and the year changed his life. The British were selecting men rather than training them — running candidates over the Brecon Beacons until they broke, and taking the handful who did not — and they trusted sergeants to make decisions that an American colonel would have kept for himself.
He fought in Malaysia with the SAS, then in Vietnam commanding Project Delta, where he was hit in the stomach by a .50-calibre round from a helicopter and given no chance of living. He lived, and spent the next decade telling anyone who would listen that the United States needed a unit selected the British way. The Army's answer, repeatedly, was that it already had the Green Berets and the Rangers.
He wore them down. On 19 November 1977 the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta was activated with Beckwith in command, and the selection course he wrote took men into the mountains of West Virginia with a rucksack and a map and no encouragement of any kind. The pass rate was brutal from the first course and has stayed that way.
Then came Iran. In April 1980, Delta's first operation was Eagle Claw — the attempt to rescue fifty-three American hostages from Tehran. It ended at a desert strip code-named Desert One, with helicopters down to below the minimum, a sandstorm, and a collision between a helicopter and a C-130 that killed eight men. Beckwith had to recommend aborting, and then stood in front of the cameras and took the blame in public.
The failure produced the Holloway report, and from it the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, Joint Special Operations Command and eventually US Special Operations Command — the architecture every Western special operations force now copies. Beckwith retired in 1981 and died in 1994. He is remembered less for Desert One than for the fact that everything built afterwards was built because of it.
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