Donna,
I served on a Special Forces A-Team for many years duing the Sixties, and so I am familiar with their tactics. Fortunately, we have an American former Special Forces officer, John Gudick, who was on the scene to report accurately what happened. Gudick wrote his book,
Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools. Gudick is fluent in Russian and very familiar with Spetsnaz tactics. I will include an excerpt from the book, which will show the character of the men involved, and later post my comments regarding the remarks Spanalot made.
The Assault Day Three
Dear God, where do we get such men?
What loving God has provided,
that each generation, afresh,
there should arise new giants in the land.
Were we to go but a single generation
without such men, we should surely
be both damned and doomed.
- Anonymous military officer as quoted by
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Combat
Morning dawned on the third day with little change in the situation. Bright sunshine basked the members of the Special Forces in a gentle glow. The air was cool, the sun warm. "It does not seem right:” they thought, "that such ugliness could be unraveling on so glorious a morning." It was a morning that would have served as a reaffirmation of the existence of God, but for the evil inside the building before them.
As was becoming commonplace, the terrorists - under the influence of their morning doses of narcotics - began shooting out of the school windows at the surrounding soldiers. No one was immune. Even local police and citizens were shot at anytime one of them showed his head round a corner or over a vehicle. The government forces extended their outer perimeter, attempting to move everyone back another hundred yards in some places. By this point the townspeople were demanding something be done, to save the people inside. No one - it seemed - could take much more. The terrorists, despite the failing physical state of the children, continued to refuse food, water and medicine. The sun, so gentle to those outside, would shortly return the gym to its greenhouse-like state. The heat was unbearable; and intolerable humidity rose off the bodies of those packed inside. The stench was unbearable.
At approximately 12:50 that afternoon the terrorists agreed to allow the command post to send four representatives of MChS, the federal emergency services department, to remove some of the bodies inside the school, as well as those that had been lying in a twisted heap in the west yard, below the second story window from which they were flung more than a day before. These were the rotting corpses of the many men and boys they had murdered, some of which were still stacked inside the school on the second floor. The deal was that the terrorists would drop the remainder of the bodies into the western yard, from which MChS personnel would remove them. Despite the courage necessary to walk out into the open, into the crosshairs of the killers, the MChS high command was inundated with volunteers. Still, they had to be careful; the terrorists had unobstructed views of the yard and could shoot all who entered beneath them. There was no door along that entire side of the building. One van carrying the MChS members - all from its "Leader" special response group - entered the fenced yard on the west side of the school along the railroad tracks. As agreed, they were unarmed and wearing the clearly identifiable blue and orange uniforms of their agency. None of them wore body armor. They exited the vehicle and prepared to remove the bodies thrown from the second story windows. News accounts that the terrorists sent an observer into the yard during this body recovery effort are incorrect. The school’s western side was almost a football field long, and there was no way in or out of the building from there. All of the first floor windows were heavily barricaded. To place an observer in the fenced yard with MChS men, one of the terrorists would have had to walk out the heavily barricaded main entrance on the north side and proceed thirty feet to the opening in the fence. A long way under the hundreds of troops and berserk citizens. Unlike the men MChS special unit, the terrorists were not that brave. This barricade was never removed, however. Not even during the assault. On September 4, long after the dust had settled and the smell of gunpowder cleared from the air, the door remained completely fortified. The next closet exit point by which the terrorists could have sent an observer was more than a dozen yards away. The terrorists guns trained downward, simply watched the MChS men from the upstairs windows.
At 1:05 p.m. witnesses said the terrorists began pushing more bodies out of the windows to the men below. According to one of the MChS men, just as the first body was loaded into the truck, there was an explosion. Seven seconds later it was followed by another. Everyone in the yard froze. The terrorists at the windows even seemed startled. They didn't know what had caused the bombs to go off, but appeared to believe that they had been duped. It was clear that they quickly concluded the government had used the retrieval of the bodies as a diversion to begin its assault. From their vantage point in the upstairs western windows, the terrorists were a long way from the gym - at least 45 yards - and on the wrong floor. They could not possibly know what was happening there. Some raced out of the classroom they were in and across the eight foot wide upstairs hallway to look out the windows down at the gym. Later reports from hostages in the gym would conflict as to the cause of the explosions. Those who seemed to be looking in one direction, say one of the bombs simply fell from the basketball backboard and detonated an accident. Others insist one of the terrorist's feet slipped from the pedal detonator he was standing on. It is most probable that the falling bomb caused the other terrorist's foot to slip off of his device, resulting in the two explosions in rapid succession heard by a crowd of people that had feared this moment - feared it every minute - for two days. Whatever the cause, it started a chain reaction of events.
Hostages began panicking, leaping out of the windows decimated by the blast. Some had been blown clean through the windows on both sides of the gym. They streamed out into both the southern and northern courtyards, as terrorists began to shoot them. The terrorists who had been watching the MChS men, and who had then moved to the windows on the other side of the building overlooking the courtyard and the gym, started shooting into the mass of hostages racing for freedom, and life. They had what, in military terms, are called clear fields of fire and open kill zones. Everything below them was a target; they could shoot indiscriminately. Some of the fleeing children stopped once they were a few meters from the gym, confused and believing that once outside they were safe. They A mowed down with ease. Others, escaping out of west side wind ran toward the small emerald-painted single story classroom to north. Haggard from thirst, they stopped at an outdoor faucet quench the thirst that had tortured them for two days. They, made easy targets and died gulping life sustaining water. Some of terrorists on that west side of the second floor also began shooting down at the MChS men. Of the four, one was killed and another wounded before they could be withdrawn. At one point one of terrorists leapt from the west side second story window, landing in the fenced yard. He is believed to have escaped in the melee.
When the explosions occurred that incited panic among the hostages and the assault by government troops, the terrorists' reaction exacerbated by the conflict that had already been ongoing among them. The mercenary group used this opportunity - and the resulting chaos - to attempt to escape, while the rest sought the honor dying for Allah, taking as many of the hated infidels with then they could. The fact that the hostages who were left - after the heinous executions of the men - were mostly horror stricken child whose lives would be forever destroyed, and sobbing women, m; wretched by the days of torture and abuse, did not matter. They should all die.
The Russian Spetsnaz units were reported to have opened fire immediately. Certainly, the Rus and Alpha snipers began taking out any terrorist who showed his head in a window. But assaulting the build: was another matter. One of the great axioms of war is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. But with no one in comma and government officials paralyzed by the unexpected turn of events the commandos were left with no orders. The civilians in the crowd, however, suffered from no such affliction. Hundreds of angst-ridden fathers, uncles, grandfathers, brothers and friends, as well as many local police and security, engaged in panic fire, fueled by three days sleepless, gut wrenching fear over the plight of their loved ones and neighbors. One general on scene was reported as having fretted that all these people merely "got in the way."
Within 30 minutes the four Mi 8/MT "Hip" helicopters, split between the distant vodka factory near the Terek River and the Vladikavkaz airport some eight miles away, were in the air. But with no teams in them to be inserted into the school or onto other areas of the roof, their pilots could only watch, impotent to use their mighty cannons or the rockets that hung ominously from their sides. The most they could do was attempt to direct fire at the school building, but in the roiling mass of people below, even this was fruitless. BTR 80s, Russian armored personnel carriers, maneuvered toward the north courtyard. The southern courtyard, too narrow for the bulky tank-like vehicles to negotiate, was left to the men of Alpha and Vympel to move through on foot, with no cover. Valeriy Andreyev, the FSB spokesman, was quoted as saying, "To save their lives, we retaliated." This statement would attach a level of organization and purpose to the government's plan that was scarcely justified.
In ten short minutes the interior of the gym ceiling fell in, a burning kaleidoscope raining timber, metal, glass and fire down on the helpless victims. It took but a few more minutes for the fire to burn in earnest, and the rest of the roof - the outside structural part - to collapse. Many were struck and killed, others trapped or buried alive, burning to death amid the heart wrenching screams of almost a thousand other souls. Outside, the Spetsnaz units of Alpha and Vympel held off entering the building, continuing to wait for orders. When all of this happened it was mostly Vympel that was on duty at the school. The rest of Alpha - those not on stand-down - were 18 miles away training at the building in Vladikavkaz. It took them until 1:50 p.m. to receive word of the events, leap into transports and arrive back at the school. Men from both of those units not on the perimeter when the fighting began grabbed the nearest weapon and raced to the school. With the sounds of combat erupting all about them, and the screams of dying children in their ears, most did not take time to retrieve body armor or helmets.
It was 1:40 p.m. before Vympel began to assault the school, but seemingly not according to any real plan. They merely reacted to events as best they could, drawing on every bit of training and experience they possessed. Those already on station attempted to move quickly to their previously assigned assault positions. Once joined by backup, the forward Vympel teams began working feverish untangle the intricate and delicate web of wires set to detonate explosives at the doors to the school. They had no success at the eastern door of the south wing. Eventually Vympel had a tank had been on station to the west move up. This monstrous clan vehicle had been brought in under the order of FSB General Sot the same man who authorized the two BTR 80 armored personal carriers that had been standing by. Vympel team leaders h; approach the entrance to the narrow alleyway from the west. Taking the best position it could for an angled shot, it fired a non-exploding shell into the doorway just inside the alley, blowing a hole more sufficient for the teams to enter. The shell, however, did not there but took out several interior brick walls separating classrooms on the south side of that wing. It was a risk for any hostages inside that section of the building, but the commandos had no choice. Those inside were going to die anyway if they didn't get inside building quickly.
Under a hailstorm of bullets from the south side second windows, Vympel raced along the south wall and through the newly opened door on the main floor, just inside of which was a stair leading to both the second floor and basement. The gaping hole resulted was proof that they were prepared to bring to bear maximum violence against anyone and anything in their way. The Vympel troops succeeded in entering from the south, the court to the north remained awash in a hailstorm of bullets, from both volunteers and terrorists. Nothing could move, and many escaping hostages were shot down in the few yards they had left to cross, many dying within scant feet of loved ones and safety. Many of the Special Forces men I met with said that everyone realized this was no longer a military operation; they were just trying to rescue children.