A Watershed Event

[thedrifter]

DefenseWatch "The Voice of the Grunt"
04-25-2005

Hack's Target

A Watershed Event





By David H. Hackworth



April 24 and 25 marked the 25th anniversary of “Operation Eagle Claw,” Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to salvage his presidency by rescuing 53 Americans held hostage in Tehran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. It’s also the date of one of the U.S. military's worst self-inflicted public humiliations.



By the time the joint mission was canceled, eight American warriors – five from the Air Force, three from the Marines – had been killed, and dozens were wounded.



The after-action reports were unsparing in their criticism of everything from poor training and planning to leadership by committee and inter-service rivalry to all-around shockingly bad intel, commo and heroic-but-faulty execution – including the inexplicable abandonment of top-secret operation orders and supporting intelligence documents in U.S. Navy choppers that were supposed to be torched but instead were allowed to fall into Iranian hands.



Carter’s never-tell-a-lie administration insisted that the commando raid was aborted after the number of helicopters available for the mission fell below six – apparently the agreed-upon magic minimum number. But like most misadventures involving the U.S. military, the whole truth – which would have caused even more embarrassing headlines than those that couldn't be avoided – might well have been hidden under the usual Pentagon/White House spin of unpleasant events.



According to then-Marine Maj. Roger Charles, currently president of Soldiers for the Truth (SFTT.org): “Within a day of the disaster, before any cover-up was in place, a Marine major attending Command & Staff College with me phoned a Marine pilot pal in a naval hospital and was told the injured pilot received the ‘abort’ order before his aircraft reached the refueling site” – that is, before the birds were down to just six – “because the commando mission had been compromised by the Soviet Union telling the Iranians we were coming!”



Charles was hanging with several classmates when the shocked major returned from his call and immediately shared this startling skinny. Everyone’s reaction at the time, he recalls, was a big so-that's-what’s-really-going-on. “The news was full of the claim that the mission-abort order was due to our being one helicopter short for the rescue plan. It didn’t make sense to any of us that such a critical mission would be canceled because we were just one helo short of some number ginned up by some Washington staff weenie.”



Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Jack Anderson, the premier investigative columnist back in those days, disclosed that once U.S. intelligence learned – almost too late – that Soviet Union snitches had warned the radical mullahs running Iran about the raid, the entire rescue force was ordered to land, refuel and return ASAP to the U.S. Navy carrier they’d launched from.



As Bill Corson, a veteran spook of some of the Cold War’s most sensitive counter-Soviet Union ops, put it: “Telling the American public that the commie thugs in Moscow had queered the raid would have aroused passions at home for strong action against the Soviet Union. Carter didn’t want to be forced into a face-off with the Soviet Bear. He wanted to keep relations with the Sovs within ‘acceptable’ limits. The solution was to blame the failure on a bad hydraulic pump on a Navy bird.”



Whatever version you go with, the hard lessons learned from Eagle Claw and the haunting images of the charred corpses with clearly identifiable U.S. aircrew helmets were seared into the consciousness of a generation of our Special Operations warriors – who vowed to do whatever it would take to produce a valid commando capability for our country.



U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, formerly Special Operations Command CINC, commented in 1997, “I participated in the ... hostage rescue attempt in Iran in 1980, and that became a watershed event.” Some years later, he said: “I keep a photo of the carnage that night to remind me that we should never confuse enthusiasm with capability. Eight of my comrades lost their lives. Those of us who survived knew grief ... we knew failure – but we committed ourselves to a different future.”



Operation Eagle Claw may have literally crashed and burned, but as they so brilliantly proved in Afghanistan and Iraq, Special Ops warriors – married up with 21st-century technology – emerged from the ashes and showed the world that America had the capability to control the new face of war.



--Eilhys England contributed to this column.



Col. David H. Hackworth (USA Ret.) is SFTT.org co-founder and Senior Military Columnist for DefenseWatch magazine. For information on his many books, go to his home page at Hackworth.com, where you can sign in for his free weekly Defending America. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831. His newest book is “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts.” © 2005 David H. Hackworth. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.




Ellie

[thedrifter]

04-25-2005

For the Record: Operation Eagle Claw



By Ed Offley



Editor’s Note: This account of the failed Iranian rescue raid was compiled from numerous histories and subsequent news media accounts of the operation. A selected reading list is included at the end of the text.



Five months and three weeks after an Iranian mob stormed the U.S. Embassy complex in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, the U.S. military 25 years ago yesterday launched “Operation Eagle Claw,” an ambitious and complex rescue mission to free 52 Americans held hostage at the compound and another three diplomats detained at the Iranian foreign ministry building several miles away.



Less than 13 hours later, the operation ended in a fiery collision between a helicopter and Air Force EC-130 that killed eight U.S. military personnel and injured several dozen others.



Famed military strategist Karl von Clausewitz once wrote, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Operation Eagle Claw did not even get that far before it collapsed from its own deadly flaws, and Iran’s revolutionary government did not even learn that it had been invaded until news accounts of the mission appeared. The disaster on Apr. 25, 1980 came to symbolize how far the U.S. military had fallen after the end of our participation in the Vietnam War. And it rightly sent shock waves through the U.S. armed services, stunned the American public and political establishment, and further emboldened America’s enemies around the world.



A quarter-century after the fact, Operation Eagle Claw has faded from memory for most Americans. But for senior military officials and Americans who study military affairs, the tragedy marked a major turning point in the post-Vietnam renaissance of the U.S. armed forces.



This is how it happened.



When the mob came over the wall that Tuesday morning in late 1979, the U.S. Army did have a new counter-terrorist organization. After two years of bureaucratic struggle and intense preparation, the Army just several days earlier had formally certified Special Operational Detachment – Delta, or Delta Force, as operationally ready. Based at Fort Bragg, N.C., the Delta command staff immediately began drafting plans for a possible rescue mission as the hostage drama escalated.



The problem, they quickly found, was how to get Delta to the scene of the action. As veteran military reporter Otto Kreisher described it in a 1999 article in Air Force magazine:



“The first obstacle was the location. Tehran was isolated, surrounded by more than 700 miles of desert and mountains in any direction. This cut the city off from ready attack by U.S. air or naval forces. Moreover, the embassy was in the heart of the city congested by more than four million people.”



As the days turned into weeks, and passed into months, Delta Force commander Col. Charles Beckwith and his staff spent long hours trying to hone their plan to storm the embassy compound, disable or kill the Iranian guards, and retrieve the hostages. At the Pentagon, a more difficult debate raged over who would command the overall operation and which military units would undertake the myriad of tasks needed to get a 120-man Delta assault force from Bragg to the embassy wall.



Pentagon politics then intervened, setting the stage for one of the crucial failures of Operation Eagle Claw. DoD officials ultimately decided on a daring plan that would involve all four combat services. Because there were no operational long-range helicopters that could be aerially refueled, the plan was itself held hostage by what planners call “the tyranny of distance.”



Thus, a fleet of C-130 and C-141 aircraft were brought in to support the key aviation element, a force of eight stripped-down Navy RH-53D minesweeping helicopters that would ferry the Delta troopers from the initial rendezvous site called Desert One, a barren spot in Iran about 200 miles southeast from the capital city, to their staging point for the ground assault on the embassy. A small covert team of CIA agents that had slipped into Iran would provide trucks and a staging site inside the city for that critical phase.



The first night, three MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft and three EC-130s carrying massive fuel bladders to refuel the helicopters were to fly from a base in Oman to Desert One. There, they would offload a force of 132 men, including the 93-man Delta assault force, a small group of Combat Controllers, and about a dozen Farsi-English translators who also would serve as truck drivers. Three EC-130s carrying large aviation bladders would follow the Combat Talons to Desert One, where they would to refuel the RH-53Ds flying in from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea.



Once refueled, the helicopters would then fly the commandos to a spot near the outskirts of Tehran and meet up with the CIA agents already in-country who would take them to a safe house in the city to await the assault the next night. The helicopters, meanwhile, would fly to another site in-country identified as Desert Two and hide until called by the Delta operators to retrieve both the assault force and hostages.



Also on the second night, the C-130s would re-enter Iranian airspace carrying a force of 100 Army Rangers, whose mission was to make an airborne assault to capture the unused airfield at Manzariyeh, about 50 miles north of Tehran.



Delta would then carry out its mission of assaulting the embassy and freeing the hostages, then rendevous with the RH-53Ds in a nearby football stadium. They and the hostages would be flown to Manzariyeh Airfield and the waiting C-141s. The Rangers would hold the airfield until the helicopters arrived with the commandos and hostages, who would board two C-141 transports. At the same time, three AC-130 gunships would hover overhead providing close-air support. Once Delta and the hostages had flown out on the C-141s, the task force would destroy the eight helicopters and all hands would then leave.



But the operation never got past the first phase at Desert One.



A month before the planned assault, on March 31, 1980, a CIA Twin Otter flew into Desert One, where an intelligence operative offloaded a light motorcycle to bury remotely-controlled landing lights in the ground and take core samples of the soil to ensure the unpaved strip could handle the weight of the C-130s and RH-53Ds. “It was amazing,” one former commando told DefenseWatch. “He flew in with a commercially purchased dirt bike, rode around the site taking core samples, then they flew out again.” The intelligence operative later returned to the United States on a commercial airliner “with bags of sand hanging from the insides of his suit jacket,” the colleague said.



continued.........

[thedrifter]

Twelve days later in a White House meeting of his senior advisors on April 11, President Jimmy Carter abandoned months of fruitless diplomatic attempts and told Task Force 1-79 leaders they were going in. In his memoirs, Carter recalled, “I told everyone that it was time for us to bring our hostages home; their safety and our national honor were at stake.” On Apr. 16, 1980, JCS Chairman David Jones, mission planner Army Maj. Gen. James Vaught and Beckwith formally briefed the president on Operation Eagle Claw. A week later, the Army commandos, Air Force aircrews, Navy and Marine Corps helicopter pilots and other personnel had gathered at several secret sites in the Middle East preparing the final elements of the raid. Along with their aircraft, commo gear, weapons and ammo, they brought the deadly flaws in the operation plan with them.



Mission planners had calculated the absolute minimum capability required to retrieve the hostages and Delta commandos from the embassy compound: The operation required no fewer than six RH-53D helicopters to be able to lift the entire group of the assault force and freed hostages from Tehran to Manzariyeh. Beckwith had wanted ten helicopters in the force, but the Navy insisted that only eight could be stashed in the Nimitz’s hangar deck away from prying eyes. Because of an unexpected dust storm and various mechanical problems that ensued, only six of the eight helicopters made it to Desert One, and the number of available dropped below the minimum when one of them suffered a hydraulic failure at the abandoned airfield.



Meanwhile, the “fog and friction” of war arrived with a vengeance: In the stressful minutes while this was going on, two civilian Iranian vehicles approached the site on a dirt road and were stopped by a Ranger security patrol, including a gasoline tractor-trailer that exploded in a massive fireball when it was struck by a shoulder-fired rocket after failing to halt. Those on the ground recalled a growing sense of chaos, confusion and urgency as they scrambled to transfer their weapons, ammo and comm. gear from the C-130s to the helicopters amid the howling of aircraft engines and a man-made dust storm kicked up by the helicopter rotors and propellers.



After tense consultations with Washington, Beckwith ordered a mission abort, and the troops hastily began loading back aboard the C-130s. As reporter Kriesher described it in his 1999 article, at that moment disaster struck:



“Now [Desert One site commander Air Force Col. James] Kyle was left with the unrehearsed job of getting everyone out of Iran. Because of the extended time on the ground, one of the C-130s was running low on fuel and had to leave soon. To allow that tanker to move, Kyle directed Marine Maj. James Schaefer to reposition his helicopter. With a flattened nose wheel, Schaefer could not taxi and tried to lift off to move his bird, stirring a blinding dust cloud. As Kyle watched in horror, the helo slid sideways, slicing into the C-130 with its spinning rotors and igniting a raging fire. Red-hot chunks of metal flamed across the sky as munitions in both aircraft torched off.”



Three Marines and five Air Force crewmen perished in the inferno. Several dozen others were wounded.



The rescue force beat an undignified retreat out of Iran aboard the remaining C-130s. In the near-panic that followed the collision, several RH-53Ds were left with their engines still running and rotors turning. A number of personnel failed to destroy top secret mission documents, which would fall into the hands of the Iranians. It was up to a somber and ashen-faced Jimmy Carter the next day to announce to the nation that the mission had ended in tragedy. The hostages would linger in captivity for another nine months until they were finally freed.



In the months that followed, an official investigation into the raid – supplemented by numerous news media probes and later, memoirs by a number of the operation’s key leaders – revealed that the failure of Operation Eagle Claw was no fluke, but worse, an almost inevitable byproduct of flaws in the leadership, organizational structure and operating policies of the U.S. military itself. Writing six years after the event in his study of the military, The Straw Giant, veteran military reporter Arthur T. Hadley concluded that the primary reason for failure was that the U.S. military was simply unprepared to carry out a long-range mission of this type:



“This multi-unit complexity was dictated by two factors. First, the United States did not possess a military organization that had the planes, helicopters and other equipment necessary to conduct long-range antiterrorist operations. So when the hostages were seized in Tehran, such a force had to be hastily cobbled together from bits and pieces obtained all over the armed services.”



But simple lack of preparedness does not address the deep structural flaws in the military five years after Vietnam that sent the mission on its march to disaster. Hadley and other writers, including Delta Force commander Col. Charlie Beckwith, compiled a distressing list of institutional weaknesses that had all contributed to the self-destruction of Operation Eagle Claw, including:



* The leadership-by-committee structure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – where any one service chief could veto any actions of the group – prevented the creation of a dedicated, multi-service task force under one commander that would train for and carry out all aspects of the rescue, including the transport aircraft and helicopters, refueling planes and close-air support; the ground force, including the Delta assault team and various security and transportation units.



As Kreisher noted, with the individual services contributing components of Task Force 1-79 and no one in full charge, the rescue force never once even practiced together as a complete team: “While the helicopter crews worked out of Yuma, Ariz., the members of Delta Force did most of their training in the woods of North Carolina. Other Army personnel were drilling in Europe. The Air Force crews that would take part in the mission trained in Florida or Guam, thousands of miles away in the Pacific.”



In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Beckwith himself later admitted that key point, saying: “We went out and found bits and pieces, people and equipment, brought them together occasionally, and then asked them to perform a highly complex mission. The parts all performed, but they didn’t necessarily perform as a team.”



* Excessive secrecy concerns prevented various members of the operation from receiving key information vital to mission success. In several instances, personnel assigned to participate in the raid were not informed for months what the operation entailed or even what their specific roles would be. And their superiors – being unaware of the operation’s goals and missions – had no idea what personnel to select or what skills they should have.



For instance, the Marine helicopter pilots flying the RH-53Ds from the carrier to Desert One struggled while flying at extremely low altitude in the dust storm, believing that they would be detected on Iranian radars if they flew even several hundred feet off the ground where the dust was significantly lighter. In fact, the routes assigned to them passed through known gaps in Iranian radar coverage allowing higher flight altitudes – only no one eve bothered to tell the Marines.



* Interservice rivalry, rather than mission focus, dictated the composition of the operation’s members. The selection of under-qualified Marine helicopter pilots to fly stripped-down Navy minesweeper helicopters using a flight regime they had never trained for came about solely because a senior Marine general in the Pentagon demanded and obtained a role – any role – for Marines in the raid.



* A general hostility within the U.S. military leadership to Special Operations forces had prevented the formation of an effective multi-service commando force. This created a situation where the Pentagon had to order the formation of the ad hoc force to carry out the hostage rescue.



* Deep cuts in the post-Vietnam DoD budget had precluded procurement of Air Force long-range SOF helicopters that could be refueled in-flight. The absence of this capability thus dictated the complex and hazardous design of the mission itself. Operation Eagle Claw was forced to rely on ground refueling of the helicopters at secret sites within Iran that created an overly complex mission. Its phases included (1) insertion of the ground force at Desert One to rendezvous with the RH-53D helicopters and their refueling on the ground; (2) movement of the assault force to a hide site and concealment of the helicopters at a site identified as Desert Two, (3) the simultaneous assault on the embassy to free the hostages and airborne Ranger seizure of Manzariyeh Airfield 50 miles north of Tehran, and finally, (4) the movement of the assault force and freed hostages to Manzariyeh for extraction from Iran aboard Air Force C-141s.



* Lack of “actionable intelligence” on the hostages’ situation due to the slashing of CIA manpower and budgets in the wake of the intelligence scandals of the mid-1970s, including the termination of a human intelligence network inside revolutionary Iran.



Correcting the flaws exposed at Desert One would take years to accomplish, and some of the problems that afflicted Operation Eagle Claw still trouble military planners today, a quarter-century later.



It took Congress six years to enact meaningful reform of the paralyzed DoD bureaucracy with the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act in 1986. This historic legislation ended the “leadership-by-committee” dysfunction at the JCS, creating a powerful JCS Chairman and Joint Staff with the authority to mandate and execute effective programs. It also beefed up the authority of the multi-service military commands and reformed the military personnel system to ensure that “joint” duty, once a career dead-end, would now be mandatory for promotion to senior rank.



The next year, Congress passed the Cohen-Nunn Act that created the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as a separate military headquarters. The new command had training and budgetary authority over the various commando units that had long suffered from hostility and neglect at the hands of the various service bureaucracies, but it would take another national disaster – the 9/11 terrorist attacks – before SOCOM would fully come into its own. Following 9/11, the United States opted to execute a worldwide offensive counter-terror campaign terrorism, and SOCOM was changed from a “provider” to a combatant headquarters command, further streamlining the nation’s capability to use these elite personnel against our enemies.



In Afghanistan in 2001 and two years later in Iraq, tens of thousands of SOF troopers played central roles in liberating both countries from their tyrannical regimes.



One Army officer who endured the agony of Desert One in 1980 recently described it this way: “I stood ... in the Iranian desert on a moonlit night at a place called Desert One. I keep a photo of the carnage that night to remind me that we would never confuse enthusiasm with capability. Eight of my comrades lost their lives. Those of us who survived knew grief ... we knew failure - but we committed ourselves to a different future.”



Twenty-three years later that officer, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker – who had risen to command the U.S. Special Operations Command several years before the world changed on 9/11 – came out of retirement to become the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. The photo from Desert One hangs on his office wall in the Pentagon.



continued...

[thedrifter]

In a 25th anniversary commemoration of Operation Eagle Claw on Sunday night in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., Schoomaker told a gathering of nearly 900 current and former special operations community members that the failed mission “had become a watershed event for this nation.”



Selected Reading List:



Delta Force, by Charles Beckwith with Donald Knox, Dell Books, 1984

Inside Delta Force: The Story of America's Elite Counterterrorist Unit, by Eric Haney

Best Laid Plans, David C. Martin and John Walcott, Harper & Row, 1988

The Straw Giant, by Arthur T. Hadley, Avon Books, 1985

Military Incompetence: Why the U.S. Military Doesn’t Win, by Richard A. Gabriel, Hill and Wang, 1985

Delta: America’s Elite Counterterrorist Force, by Terry Griswold

The Illustrated Guide to the World's Top Counter-Terrorist Forces, Concord Publications, by Samuel M. Katz

Air Commando, Inside the Air Force Special Operations Command, by Philip D. Chinnery

“Desert One,” by Otto Kreisher, Air Force magazine, January 1999.



Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2005 Ed Offley.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

04-25-2005

A Special Night for Special Warriors



By Ed Offley



FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. – Even the balladeer was a decorated Special Operations warrior.



When nearly 900 current and former members of the elite Special Operations community gathered here Sunday evening to commemorate their eight comrades lost in “Operation Eagle Claw” at Desert One in Iran 25 years ago, organizers did not have to look past their own ranks to find the best person to evoke the special bonds of comradeship and service in song.



Rising country-and-western singer Keni Thomas, after all, is one of them.



Twelve years ago, Thomas was a 27-year-old U.S. Army Ranger fighting with his comrades in the mean streets of Mogadishu where Rangers and Delta Force commandos battled a numerically superior mob of Somali fighters in the now-famous “Black Hawk Down” battle. Last night, he brought tears to the eyes of grizzled commando veterans when he sang his new song, “Hero”:



“I’m here to tell you,

a hero is a scared man

who doesn’t run away.”



A quarter-century after Desert One, military officials and defense analysts agree the debacle was a major turning point leading to the rise of today’s multi-service Special Operations Command, the U.S. military’s most elite combat organization. Yet as they came together here to celebrate and mourn, these distinguished warriors and their comrades also represented a cross-section of the broader American community they are pledged to defend.



When a young New Orleans physician stood to thank the nonprofit Special Operations Warrior Foundation for its help in providing collegiate scholarships for the children of all Special Operations soldiers killed in combat or training accidents since 1980, members of the audience stood and emotionally applauded one of their own.



Dr. Jim Lewis, after all, is the son of the late Capt. Hal Lewis, an Air Force C-130 pilot who was one of eight servicemen who perished at Desert One, where his last act was to order his crewmen to save themselves from the disastrous fire following a collision on the ground with an RH-53D helicopter. A nine-year-old boy at the time of the raid, Lewis was later able to attend college and medical school with the support of the foundation.



Noting that “part of me will always be nine years old,” Lewis said the support of the Special Operations community to his grief-stricken family a quarter-century ago provided “immeasurable” comfort. “In the chaos of learning that her children had lost their father and that she had lost her husband, there was one bright spot,” Lewis recalled. “She was told that all of the children of the sight servicemen who died at Desert One would have their college education taken care of.”



A civilian doctor currently working in a New Orleans trauma center, Lewis recounted the recent shooting death of a young college student despite intense efforts by his medical colleagues to save her. “There is nothing more tragic than a senseless loss of life,” he said, then drew a stark contrast with the loss of his father and seven other comrades in Iran: “The eight men we honor tonight did not die in vain.”



Relying on private and corporate contributions, the foundation’s chief mission is to provide scholarship grants, educational programs and financial aid counseling to the surviving children of Special Operations members killed in the line of duty, said retired Gen. Carl W. Stiner, a former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command who is the foundation’s current chairman.



Since 1980, 453 Special Operations personnel have been killed in combat or training accidents, leaving behind 538 surviving children. This includes the highest-ever casualty roster in a single year in 2004, where 35 of these warriors died in the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving behind 58 children. “It is these children to whom we have pledged to provide a post-secondary education,” Stiner told the gathering. “For your support, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” The foundation raised an estimated $500,000 in Sunday night’s event, he said.



And while the tough selection process and arduous training regimen of the Special Operations community foster a command that is exclusive in its demand for the best soldiers, sailors, airman and Marines, the warriors who gathered here took special pleasure in honoring one civilian business leader who by his unstinting support and financial generosity has helped the Special Operations Warrior Foundation succeed at its mission, and whom they proudly claim as one of their own as well.



The foundation presented its new “Spirit of the Warriors Award” to Texas businessman H. Ross Perot for his years of support to all American military personnel, beginning with his highly-publicized campaign in the late 1960s to call attention to the plight of our POWs in Vietnam. Perot was an early backer of the Col. Arthur D. “Bull” Simons Scholarship Fund, the predecessor to the foundation, which was named for the renowned Army Special Forces officer who led the Son Tay Prisoner of War rescue operation in 1970 (and who in retirement led a private rescue team that succeeded in freeing two of Perot’s employees held by Iran).



And finally, the warriors assembled at the Emerald Coast Convention Center stood and cheered the current Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker. After a recitation of some of the zanier moments of the long training and operation that had the audience (including about 90 members of the actual raid) rolling in the aisles, Schoomaker somberly affirmed that the Special Operations community today has built on the harsh lessons of the past. “I have to say to you that if we had to do it today, It would go very well,” the general pledged.



He should know: As a 33-year-old major, Schoomaker was on the ground at Desert One with the Delta assault force. He too is one of their own.



Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2005 Ed Offley.


Ellie