The Gulf War From A Soldiers Point Of View

OPERATION DESERT STORM |The story of the Gulf War as told by the U.S. fighting men who were |ACTUALLY THERE! |Please Note: The names of the participants have been changed |to protect themselves and their families from any possible |terrorist reprisals. |PART ONE - THE BATTLE FOR AIR SUPREMACY :"HISTORY OF THE WAR" |BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WAR IN THE GULF From 1980 to 1987, Iraq and Iran fought a devastating and costly war. Iraq was the aggressor and invaded the area around Basra in order to take oil wells from Iran and a seaport terminal for itself. Saddam Hussein lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in this war because Iran outnumbered him five to one, and the Iranians would attack in Human waves. After several of these attacks, however, the Iraqi command countered with tactics that leveled the playing field considerably. They used poison gas and nerve agents delivered by artillery shells and jet bombers. With these terror weapons, Saddam was able to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, both civilian and military. In this way, victory see-sawed back and forth, until the advantage lay with Iran. At one point, it looked as though the Iranians would take Baghdad and have the head of Saddam Hussein on a stake. But the leadership of Iran was now in the hands of a one Ayatollah Homeini, as you may recall, and so this holy Imam fella, in his great wisdom, decided, at this most fateful juncture, that the Iraqis had had enough. He then ordered his troops to withdraw just at the very moment of victory and then, he executed or imprisoned all his top military commanders. Of course, this was the sign that Saddam had been praying for. He sprung back to attack Iran, and a kind of uneasy peace was finally established between the two countries. Neither side could really claim victory since nothing had been settled except that both sides had suffered massive destruction to their economies and massive losses to their citizenry. The most significant thing to happen during this conflict, from the United States' point of view, was not the war itself, but the fact that a certain United States Army Colonel, one Oliver North, was very busy in the basement of the White House, using his connections to see to it that plenty of arms and ammunitions went to Saddam Hussein. We even looked the other way while the Germans sold Saddam the ability to manufacture the horrible chemical weapons he would use on the Iranians and almost used on us. Why? Well, the United States, it appears, was more afraid of a possible Islamic Revolution in the region backed by the Ayatollah, than we were of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. So, we sold him some very sophisticated weapons and with them, he was able to stalemate the Iranian military machine. It may go down in history as one of the most ironic of wars. American soldiers would be subject to very grave dangers originating from what is has now become known as 'The Iran-Contra Affair'. Even President Reagan has admitted publicly that 'We pulled a boner!'. Luckily, it was not a fatal one. In fact the United States recovered from it all very nicely by winning the war with Saddam in record time, and with minimal loss of American lives. For the Iraqis, however, the cost was considerable, over 100,000 soldiers killed or wounded, and the loss of 3,000 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces and 2,500 armored vehicles. There is no way to measure the loss of prestige, spirit etc. the Iraqis have suffered. It is estimated that it will cost them 500 to 800 billion dollars to reconstruct their country. And they will very probably have to make some kind of reparations to Kuwait for the destruction done to them by Iraqi soldiers. For the Americans, it would become a war to finally shake the 'spectre of Viet Nam,' as President Bush would put it. It would be the cornerstone in a 'New World Order'. It would set a very powerful precedent that the United Nations would no longer tolerate this kind of 'naked aggression', and the fact that they would have the teeth to back up this New World Order. It might even lead to a new kind of global village in which the leadership will remain steadfast in the hands of the American version of democracy. If this is so, may God grant us the strength and the wisdom to preserve the peace and to promote the brotherhood and understanding so necessary for this planet to survive! The following is an account of the historic Gulf War, (which may someday become known as the operation to rescue the Iraqi soldiers from their own leaders') as told by American combatants who were there and who lived through these terrible days. The book is divided into two parts, (as indeed the war was) - Part One - The Battle for Air Supremacy and Part Two - American Blitzkrieg. |CHAPTER ONE I never had any idea that war could be such a kick in the ass! Everything that I had been told, everything that I had studied, everything that I felt deep down told me that war is hell and that in volunteering my services to the United States Air Force, I might be placing myself in an eerie, gory and macabre kind of reality. Instead, what I found in the air war with Iraq was a kind of computer game in which the results would be much deadlier but the outcome would always be the same. I would win. With a superior airplane to anything the enemy could put in the sky, with superior firepower and with superior skills and support from my Command and Control units telling me exactly where my enemy is at any given moment, I could not fail but to win each and every air battle that I was placed in. I'm Air Force Colonel John K. Hunter. I've been an officer in the Air Force for nearly twenty years. I graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1971. I flew 139 missions over Viet Nam. I am based in a city on the West Coast of my country. I'm connected to the United States Air Force 415th Tactical Fighter Squadron, also known as 'The Ghost Riders'. I love my country very much and I jumped at the chance to defend our freedom in the war now known as Operation Desert Storm. And I'm very glad to say that the only hardship for me so far in this war has been the boredom and the longing for my family. I don't think that anyone in the history of war has ever been prepared for the ease and the overwhelming superiority that we have enjoyed in this theater of war. Yes, a few of my compatriots were shot down by enemy 'AAA' or Anti-Aircraft & Artillery, but for the most part, and after my first mission, I never worried about it. I personally saw only one SAM* missile flying out of control several hundred yards away from my plane on one of my early sorties. After my buddies successfully knocked out 95 percent of all anti-aircraft batteries in the first few hours of the war, I never received any more flack from the enemy and I flew in total confidence in all my missions. What was my most memorable mission? By far and away, my most memorable mission was one of my first. I was flying a Stealth fighter, the "F-117"*. I was one of the first guys to go into Iraq. My mission was to destroy the enemy's radar sites in Baghdad* so the rest of my strike force could come in with as little 'AAA'* as possible. I was going in at night so we would be using our FLIR*, detection unit. This would be the first real engagement that would test the stealth capability integrated into this new line of invisible fighter. The plane would be required to get in under complete cover from the enemy radar and in so doing be able to see the enemy radar facilities and then destroy them. I was a bit on the edgy side, on my first mission, which means that I was alert to everything. All my training was intended to get me in and out safely, but I have to say that I was worried. We had no idea whether or not the Iraqis would be ready for us. We had no hard experience in actual battle conditions as to whether all this super sci-fi technology would work. Thankfully, it worked beyond our wildest dreams. The day began like any other. We had been given a briefing on the morning of the fifteenth of January in which we were basically told what our missions would be, when, and if the order to attack was given by the President. I knew for twenty-four hours that I would be in the vanguard or the spearhead of the attack. I didn't care very much for my chances, to tell the truth, and I spent that night not getting very much sleep. Several times I woke up and wrote out a will and several other letters to friends and family that I fully believed would be my last. At the very best, I expected to be shot down and taken prisoner only to spend several very boring and unhealthy months in detention listening to Iraqi propaganda* until I was released. I wasn't a happy camper, however, I love my country, I was very much aware of my oath and I knew that I would do my very best to fulfill my mission. I woke up, in the wee hours of the sixteenth, to my operations sergeant shaking me out of the rack. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and a big smile on his face. He told me the order had been given and we were ordered to scramble all our planes. This was apparently the day we had worked so arduously for the last five months. My first thought was that I was going to be killed or captured today. Then, I realized that this was the most important day of my life in regards to positive thinking. All of a sudden, I realized that I had to start thinking very positively and that I would not come back unless I mastered this skill quite quickly. After my first cup of coffee and after I'd pulled on my flight suit, I sat down and visualized myself finding my targets, killing them and then flying home safely. I saw some anti-aircraft fire, but the traces zoomed past my cockpit and sang out to me in praise and admiration. I saw Saddam Hussein sitting inside his protective bunker and he was so angry at me he wanted to kill me, but he couldn't because I was now hundreds of miles away. We ran to our planes. There were four Stealth fighters in my squadron. I knew that this scene was probably being duplicated all over Saudi Arabia. We had spread our planes out over several dozen fields in case the Iraqis had a fix on us with their skud missiles. Stealth pilots would be jumping into their cockpits, their ground crews struggling to make sure that the weaponry was all loaded and armed properly. As I made my final check of the instruments*, I saw my ground chief signaling to me that everything was ready and I had clearance for take off. I pushed the throttle stick in my lap and I felt the engines growl as I revved up enough thrust to get the fighter rolling. Then I pulled back and the engines purred beneath and behind me. I took my slot on the runway and looked behind me to see a couple dozen other planes, mostly "F-15's"* being readied. I guessed that these guys would be just minutes behind me, but they wouldn't survive in great numbers unless our stealth missions were a total success. My primary target was the central radar control tower in the heart of Baghdad. It would be the most protected target in Iraq, but if I could put it out of action, it would seriously degrade the enemy's ability to respond to the rest of our attack following right behind me. I was third to take off in our squadron. It always amazed me how these composite* machines could fly at all. The stealth fighter is not very aerodynamic. It would not be used in air-to-air combat. It's mission is to bomb high priority targets in the vanguard of a full scale attack. We have no radar, and we have no air-to-air missiles. We have only 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs*. If we are detected we would be sitting ducks especially if they sent up the Soviet "Mig-29's"* against us. We would have several F-15's flying cover to protect us, but we did not expect to be detected. All my training told me we would not be detected until it was too late. The F-117A, Stealth fighter plane is designed with weird, oblique angles all over it so that it will reflect radar waves up into the sky and down into the ground, away from the transmitting source. This is why it is so hard to pick up. Add to that the top secret materials that they laminated in between the layers of the skin of the ship to absorb the energy from the enemy radar and you have an almost invisible plane. Because of all this super reflective technology, the Stealth fighter cannot be flown without the aid of a highly advanced computer system to translate the commands of the pilot into instructions that would make the planes flight surfaces understand and follow those instructions perfectly. At least that was the way it was supposed to work in theory. Fortunately for me, it would work that way in practice in this first real test of the stealth fighter. When I pulled back on the stick*, with just an almost noticeable delay, the aircraft would begin to climb, several dozen flight surfaces* of the ship working in unison to guide the plane as I instructed. It was still very dark at three in the morning. We would be over our targets in about an hour, and with a little luck we'd be back before dawn. We formed up and off in the distance I could see a half dozen more stealth's flying off in the direction of Iraq but slightly further South. Because we were a stealth squadron, none of us had radar because this would tip off the enemy of our arrival and so we could not know if the enemy had spotted us until it was too late. We were relying totally on the radar of the AWACS* planes flying overhead somewhere and helping to coordinate the attack and give warning of any incoming enemy planes. We do have infra red night vision and so I kept scanning my FLIR (Forward looking infra-red) screen for any indication of enemy planes coming toward us as well as for landmarks that would help guide us to the target. I was commander of the squadron and it was therefore my job to tell my wing pilots when to veer away toward their own individual targets. We all would hit targets in Baghdad, but we would be several miles away from each other during the battle and so I radioed to them to keep in contact at all times. If any of us were hit and had to eject in the heart of enemy territory, I wanted to know exactly where my guys landed so that I could direct a rescue mission to pick them up even before he hit the ground. It wasn't much, but it was better than acting too late. I knew that no matter how fast we reacted, the Iraqis had the advantage and would probably capture any one of us who had to bail out. This is what I personally feared the most. I didn't worry about being killed, because I probably wouldn't even know what hit me. The thought of being captured by these monkeys and having to spend several months being 'entertained' by them and worrying about my family worrying about me was the most loathsome and creepy feeling I'd ever had in my life. Everything was quiet so far, however, and I relaxed and tried to enjoy the flight. We bantered back and forth over the radio channel trying to keep ourselves from thinking about anything nasty that might be waiting for us. There was nothing but good news from the AWACS planes. They had not spotted a single plane in the Iraqi skies. I felt Euphoric for a moment and then I worried that there should be something up there if only commercial traffic. Why was there no sign of anything. Surely they would have a couple planes on patrol. It was the day after the deadline that the President had given them quite publicly. Were they merely waiting for us in secret shelters*? Did they have their fingers on the triggers? Wouldn't they find out about us taking off from spies sitting in the desert near our base? The simultaneous scramble of hundreds of jet planes was hardly the kind of event you could keep secret for very long. They must be hiding from our radar somehow. Maybe they have acquired stealth fighters too from the Soviets and they have not told us about them. I thought about all this when we weren't prodding each other on the radio. I guess we all had these thoughts and this is why we were so talkative. I was really glad we did not have to maintain radio silence with our new stealth frequencies just being assigned. "Jimbo, this is going to be a turkey shoot, don't you think?" I said. "Absolutely, Colonel! They have no idea what's coming at them. Saddam is probably snoring away and grabbing on to his teddy bear right about now. What a surprise he's going to have," Jim replied. "I can't believe he would put his people to the torch like this. He must be a really great leader," I said, sarcastically. "Yeah, I bet he's eating his Kurds and way," Jim joked. We all laughed. Then, I could see that we were just a few minutes from Baghdad from my navigation screen* which constantly displayed a map of Iraq in front of me. I looked at the bright green television picture of the ground underneath us and the landmarks were confirming our location. We had just crossed the Tigris* river and on the other side I spotted the railroad lines leading into the Iraqi capital. At our flight speed, "Mach 2.5"*, we would be over our individual targets in just a few minutes. It was time for us to split up. I gave the command to break and four black shapes knifed through the sky slashing their way toward the city lights just now glowing over the horizon. "Good luck, God bless, and stay alert," I said. Secretly, I wondered how many of us would get back. The city lights were much brighter now and my NAVCOM* was zeroing in on the target for me. I had very little to do. I would allow the ships' computers to take me the rest of the way to the target. I sat back in my seat and let the ship fly itself. I knew that I could not respond fast enough to reach the target in the least amount of time. This would be left to my co-pilot, a silent mass of silicon chips, relay switches, and programming up in the nose of my plane. He would be analyzing millions of pieces of instructions, sorting them into logical bits of information and making all the necessary course corrections. He would also inform me of any problems with the integrity of the plane. So far, so good. We were not under attack. The sky was empty except for the red-orange exhaust of my buddies flying just a few miles away, heading for their own targets. Together, our squadron would knock out most of the SAM missile sites and the related radar installations that guide them. But if this stealth technology didn't work exactly right, we'd be their first kills. The generals told us over and over that they would not see us, they would not pick us up and they would not therefore be able to shoot at us until we had blinded them pretty badly. I picked up my first target visually, a radar and SAM missile site on a small hill and just a few blocks from a very tall building. It looked like a Western hotel, probably a Hyatt or a Holiday Inn. I thought to myself that a few of my countrymen were going to be woken up rather rudely. I hoped they didn't mind too much. I took hold of the stick signalling the computer to let me have control of the plane which it did immediately. I had to maneuver a bit to avoid hitting the hotels and other buildings. I looked all around me for signs of a SAM missile being launched and I studied my instruments. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. We'd caught them completely unprepared. They had their radar on, but they had not the slightest idea we were flying over their city. The technology was working to its ultimate specifications. I was elated. But I was also very busy. I had the SAM missile battery in my sights. I kept the crosshairs of my missile sights right in the very middle of the launchers even while I rolled and pitched at Mach 2 to avoid all the buildings. I felt like I was driving down main street in my home town. It was a very warm and friendly feeling. I made a mental note to thank the people at Lockheed for building this thing without any defects. At least none I could detect so far. Then, before I had time to think about it, my weapons system buzzed a loud claxon signifying that it was releasing the two, two thousand pounders. I used my laser sights in my eyepiece to keep the crosshairs on the target. I moved the stick sharply up and to my right. In this way I could keep the target in my sights, keep the laser light firmly affixed to it, guiding the bomb to the target and I could avoid all the buildings on main street as I did so. Then, there was a blinding flash of light as the bombs hit their target exactly where I wanted them. I turned the television camera off to save the tape for the next run just a few miles South. I continued to climb and I looked all around for any AAA of any kind. Then, I finally saw what I had expected all along. The sky lit up with anti-aircraft fire. There were streamers of light going up into the sky in almost all directions except directly toward me. I was very happy about that. The Stealth technology was working perfectly! The enemy gunners couldn't see me. I felt like I had been blessed with super-human powers. The sky was filled with missiles and flack but none of it was going to hit anything! I climbed into the star-filled sky and headed the ship toward my next target, another SAM site just a few miles south of the one I had just destroyed. Off in the distance, I could see the explosions of light indicating that the rest of my squadron was having the same success I had. I yelled into the radio-mic for my buddies to report in. They were all excited about the same discovery I had made. The city was alive with 'AAA' and none of it was finding a target. They were going to find several buildings damaged by the falling debris they were shooting up into the sky. We were hitting only military installations and hitting them with absolute accuracy. I approached my next target with a great deal of relief and much less anxiety. I now felt invincible. American know-how had won the day. I wondered if the taxpayers would ever realize what a wonderful bargain they'd gotten. In peacetime it was easy to point out how expensive these planes were and everyone wondered if they would ever be used. Here was the evidence that all our military planning was paying off in huge dividends. We might just as easily be flying over Moscow and taking out their radar systems instead of Iraqi defenses. With this technology and the Star Wars defenses, we could whip any nation on Earth! I was feeling pretty cocky at the time. It was the adrenalin of the moment making me feel this giddy. Normally, I think of war as something to be avoided at all costs. You want to avoid it because I would probably be the first to die. I was always ready to give my life for my country, but I didn't want to give it away cheaply. All during Viet Nam, I was convinced that my number was up with each mission. I saw many of my buddies get shot down and I've never seen most of them again. I fully expected to join them someday, but as luck would have it, I never did. I learned during that war that it wasn't funny. It wasn't a game and you didn't want to go into a war without exhausting all other avenues of discussion. The Viet Nam War was avoidable and when I think of all my brave compatriots who were sacrificed there, it makes me angry, not with my country, but with Human Nature itself, because it's the kind of trap that many nations have fallen into in the past. But I think that a great country such as ours is entitled to make a mistake once in a great while. This time, this war was no mistake. We had the backing of the United Nations. I felt that if we had treated Hitler the same way, there would never have been a second World War. As I approached the second SAM site and released my bombs, I was thinking about all these things and I was trying to the best job I could do. If I messed up a great many civies would be killed and no one wants that. A few degrees to the left or to the right and I was going to pulverized several apartment buildings along the way. I hoped that the most damage I would do was to their nerves as they were rolled out of bed by the shock of the bombs hitting just a few yards away. I was amazed, even after all the practice runs, as to just how accurate my ordinance could be. Then I realized the most accurate and most terrifying of all weapons would be coming in just behind me. As I climbed towards my third SAM site and watched all the gunfire, tracers and rocketry blaze into the sky harmlessly all around me, I felt like there could be a terrific traffic accident if I didn't move my butt out of there. Another technological wonder, the Tomahawk cruise missiles*, would be coming into town flying low and slow and carrying their bombs to within a few yards of their targets. I marveled at how a guided missile could be so accurate with no pilot on board. It occurred to me that someday, there would be no pilots to do this dirty work. It would all be done by computer guided weapons. Soon, there would be no need for fly-boys like myself. Mine might be the last mission of its kind. I hit my fourth target on the way home, another radar and communications tower on the outskirts of the city. Again, there was no warning of my attack and no indication that they could find me in the night sky. They were shooting in all directions at once. I couldn't help but marvel at well armed they were. They just weren't going to hit anything, at least not tonight. All I had to do was be careful not to fly into anything by accident. I kept a watchful eye at my course away from the city and back towards Saudi Arabia. When a barrage of tracers* lit up the sky in front of me, I made a minor course correction by tilting the stick a little either right or left and was never in any real danger. I felt sorry for the housewife or the farmer sleeping in his bed when a spent shell landed nearby. There would be a great deal of damage and many people killed from their own 'friendly fire'. Then, I realized that some of our own people would be killed in the same manner. War is not a nice thing for Human Beings to be involved in. I tried to think of another way to rid the planet of this insane maniac, but I could think of none. My squadron formed up with me a few minutes outside of Baghdad and everyone was full of elation and we jabbered all the way home with the sights and sounds of what had happened. One of my wing men had never been in combat before. He was highly recommended for the job due to his very high scores in training missions. I often wondered how well he would hold up during the real thing when they shoot back at you. He held up fine. He couldn't wait to get back, get refueled and re-armed so that he could fly another mission. I told him to hang loose and not be in such a hurry to die. If I wasn't the squad leader, I believe he would have cursed me for telling him that. I cursed myself. I didn't want to jinx him or to think I was trying to jinx him in any way. I apologized to him and he accepted it readily. This first mission had been a piece of cake. I told them that they should all go even easier from now on, since our squadron had probably taken out their best and most effective radar sites. I found out later that I was right and that we had also gotten about 80 percent of their SAM missile sites. The only way they could shoot us down now would be by our accidentally flying into some of their wild shooting. The cruise missiles and the F-15's flying in waves just behind us would have taken out even more of their most dangerous weapons. As we flew our missions over the next several days, I kept trying to spot some evidence of Saddam Hussein. If I found his limousine driving along, I was going to attack it and try to end this damn war before he decided in his fogged-up brain to send more of his people to a terrible death. I knew that the Iraqi soldier was more afraid of their own leader than they were of us and that was the worst kind of a soldier. This kind of soldier would surrender or desert at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, Saddam had thought of that and he had a battalion of soldiers trained to shoot the deserters. It seemed like this guy was determined to as many people as necessary to kill one of us. I didn't care for his tactics very much. I'm glad to be home now. My wife seems very beautiful to me. My kids are the best kids in the world. Even the family dog is a wonderful sight to me. There isn't a day goes by that I don't thank God for getting me home without any scratches. As I said before, I'm always prepared to give my life for my country, but I'm not real anxious to give it up cheaply, and I want to live to see that crazy Saddam get what's coming. I pray that the army grunts who have to fight the worst part of this war on the ground will help me see this dream come true! |CHAPTER TWO My name is Captain John Thackery. I'm part of the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing. I fly the F-4g Phantom, also known as the 'Wild Weasel'. We were supposed to fly into Iraq and Kuwait in waves right after the Stealth fighters flew their missions. I knew that the my brother Stealth fighter pilots would do a great deal to knock out enemy radar, but it would mainly be their central radar systems and communications batteries that they would get. The enemy also had hundreds of sites of search radar situated all over the desert and they were going to be in a higher state of readiness because the Stealth fighter's laser guided bombs and the cruise missiles would have already taken their toll and probably woken up the whole country. We would definitely not have the easiest of missions. Some of us were going to be shot down, even if by accident. I was a little concerned when I learned of the impending attack in the early hours of the sixteenth of January, but I knew that we were going in with all our forces at once which would greatly reduce the casualties. All the planes were going to be supporting each other in many different ways. It was a very interesting strategy that Air Command was using. I believe it would be the first time in History that one Commander would have so many different types of military weapon under his control. General Norman Schwartzkopf, or 'Stormin Norman' as he is affectionately called, would be in charge of the Naval forces, Air forces, Army and Marines belonging to the United States and on top of that he had the resources of all 24 of the allied nations' forces as well. I don't think Eisenhower had that much control of Allied Forces in World War Two. So, it would be one hell of a fight and when my C.O. spelled it all out for our Phantom Squadron in the ready room, I think we all began to feel more and more comfortable. The F-15's initially would fly air cover and take on any enemy interceptors that came up to greet us. The Stealth fighters would eliminate much of their radar and communications capability, as well as the SKUD* sites. We would take out the rest of the radar sites and SAM missile batteries that might threaten later missions, and then, after the top priority targets were taken out, we would go back in again to destroy the enemy airfields, take out their hard shelters in which they housed their best airplanes and so on. This was the part I was waiting for. I wanted to take out as many of the enemy's "MIG-29's"* as possible on the ground because once they got in the air, they were the only aircraft that any of us were even remotely afraid of. They could match us on speed and they had the air-to-air missiles that could catch us. We had better pilots and better air support, but they could do some damage if they got after us in any great numbers. Lucky for us, they never did. We all wanted to avoid any dogfights with their best MIGs. The other stuff they could fly against us, like the MIG-21's and their Mirage jets, we had total confidence we would blow them out of the sky before they even saw us coming. But the Soviets had supplied Saddam with a couple hundred of their top of the line fighter and that meant that they had the eyes and ears to see us coming at about the same time that we could spot them, approximately ninety miles away. That meant that whoever spotted the other guy first would probably set off a missile and these could catch a few of us by surprise. There's not much you can do when a missile is about to fly up your tail. Many times, you wouldn't even have time to eject. You had to keep your wits about you. So, when we finally took off for our mission over Iraq, I think we were all a bit apprehensive, but when we saw the damage the Stealth guys had done and not a single Iraqi jet had come up to challenge them, we knew that were going to have a good day. The first thing to do was to go get their SAM sites. These things can be as dangerous as a well-piloted MIG-29. If their radar was all working properly, they could get a few of us with them. We had all turned on our jamming equipment and so most of the SAM missiles were drifting up into the sky and running out of 'oomph' at about 60,000 feet. It was fun to watch them zoom up past you, start to slow down as they ran out of fuel way up above you, then turn around and slowly fall back to earth silently. I had to laugh every time I saw one. I used to say to myself, 'Here's to shooting yourselves in the foot, you stupid 'b......s'!' I think most of the damage done to their civilian sites was due to their own SAM missiles falling back on them. I think that when God* created Man, He said, 'Come forth and receive they brains!'. I think the Iraqi's came fifth and they got the leftover stuff. Well, anyway, I remember feeling quite good when I saw my first target, a SAM missile site just South of Baghdad. I had to watch out a little bit because there was a ton of flack all around. They really lit up the night sky with their tracers. It was very beautiful in a terrible sort of way. I believe that they were told to just fire up in the air in all directions and eventually all the American planes would fly into the stuff. Well, of course, this is very foolhardy. All our F-4 Phantom jets have radar jamming equipment and we also have night vision FLIR (Forward looking Infra-Red). So, we can see many of their anti-aircraft batteries, even at night, miles away. It's just a matter of a flick of the wrist on the stick and the plane will avoid all of that kind of fire. Plus, we're flying no more than two hundred feet off the deck. They'd have to practically shoot right at each other to get at us. I guess a couple of our guys got shot down this way, but it had to be pure luck on the part of the Iraqi gunners. I'll bet they spent twenty million dollars worth of ammunition to shoot down each one of our planes. War is hell and it's also very expensive. This much I can tell you. I was one of the lucky ones, however, and I managed to weave my way between all of their 'AAA' batteries. I was saving my bombs for the largest of their sites. When I finally went in, I got the SAM site on the first pass. My mapping and navigation information was perfect and so I knew exactly what the thing would look like on my screen as soon as it came in range. All kinds of alarms went off in the cockpit anyway, just to remind me that my main target was dead ahead. I put my head down so I could see the sights better in the middle of my canopy and dead ahead of me. My cross hairs wandered a little, so I maneuvered the plane with my right hand and armed the bombs and laser targeting control with my left. Then, I had it in my crosshairs. By now it was just about one thousand meters ahead. The sky was like the fourth of July on both sides of me. I saw a flash of whitish-green light flare up past me about 20 or 30 feet away. It was a wild SAM missile they'd shot up at me in total desperation. They were nearly blinded by the earlier attacks and so were impotent, I thought to myself. Then, I almost flew into a bunch of their flack to my right, but I maneuvered perfectly just after I dropped the first of my bombs. Then I pulled back on the stick and watched the target out of my rear camera. I was climbing at about a thousand feet per second. It felt like a great ride in a carnival. I just kept pulling on the stick and struggled to concentrate on the target in my rear-view* gunsite. Then, just before I thought I was going to black out*, the SAM site went up in a blast of billowing black smoke and white light. Oh, man, what a feeling! I was quite a target just spinning up and away from the target like that so I immediately pushed back down on the stick and dove for the relative calm and safety of the deck. I felt a slight vibration in my descent and I knew that I'd taken some kind of a hit, but everything kept on working just fine, so I figured I'd been hit by a bit of shrapnel in the fuselage or the tail somewhere. It was a close call, but nothing that a fighter pilot worries about. If you're alive and the plane's capable of flying you back home, you pretty much don't care about any little thing like a bit of shrapnel. We expect to bring some of the enemy's weaponry back home with us anyway, like taking a souvenir. We like that kind of stuff. You can show it off to the kids when you get home. My ground crew was the best and they'd patch us up in no time and I'd be back in action before I could shower and shave. I flew the plane through a couple of victory rolls just to make sure that everything was really OK, and it was, so I proceeded to my second target. It was on the way home and it was as important as a SAM site because it was a suspected ammunition dump. We had information that this building was a storage facility for things like SKUD missiles, SAM missiles, artillery shells and that there might even be a couple hundred shells with chemical or even nuclear warheads. It was a great target - very high priority. And if it was as carelessly defended as my last target, I knew I would have no trouble with it. I looked at my Navigation screen and I changed course about 90 degrees to the North for this ammo storage depot. I knew from my briefing earlier that it would look like a very innocent factory. The Iraqi's even built a false facade around it and claimed that the whole thing was a 'baby milk factory'. They even went so far as to bottle a few hundred bottles of the same white liquid over and over again and showed it to reporters. You had to admit, for being overall stupid like they were, the Iraqis could still be clever. I guess the 8-year war with Iran taught them a few tricks like this. I want to iterate right here that I call the enemy 'stupid' not because I'm a racist in any way. I just happen to believe that any people who would side with a maniac like Saddam has to be stupid, or mentally deficient in some way. I don't know what it is exactly. I'll leave it up to the historians when this is all over, but I've had several months to do damned little else than get my plane ready for war and watch TV to see what the enemy is like that I'm going to be facing and I have to be honest with you, when I saw how stupid they seemed to be to allow this turkey to lead them into an 8-year war with Iran which they barely won. The only reason they won is because the Ayatollahs over there in Iran are even more mentally deficient than the Iraqi leadership. Believe it or not, but the Iranians were actually winning the war with Iraq because they outnumbered the Iraqis by four to one. But just as victory was at hand, the Ayatollahs decided that they ought to arrest all of their top military leaders and execute them or put them in jail. Now, this is roughly equivalent to arresting Eisenhower just before D-day and claiming he was a spy or something. I mean, their mentally deficient, all of them. Do you see what I mean? Well, enough jawboning and let's get back to my first sortie. I had to evade lots more of their 'AAA' all along the way, and I had to pass up plenty of big, beautiful targets too, let me tell you. That depressed me. My only consolation was that I would probably be back in the next few days to take them out. I was flying over railroad stations, what looked like army depots. I saw dozens of airfields with planes sitting all along the runway like little ducks following their mommas. I have to admit here and now that I couldn't resist this target. I made a second pass and I used my machine gun to render as many planes as possible out of commission. I wasn't supposed to do that, but I just couldn't help it. We carry about 2000 rounds of 20mm gattling gunfire. It shoots at about 400 rounds per second. So, in sum total, we have about five seconds of gattling gunfire to spread around. In this pass over about five of their MIG-23's, I fired off about four seconds of fire. So, I had about one second left. I couldn't tell how much damage I did, but I didn't think these planes were going to get into it right away. This wasn't alot of protection if I was attacked by an enemy plane which had managed to take off and get behind me. But I saw nothing on my screen and none of the rest of the squadron had seen anything up in the air that was not friendly, so I figured I was pretty safe and it might save my life or someone else' life if I took the initiative. Don't forget, besides the second or so of cannon fire, I still had both my sidewinder missiles on my wingtips. These are the deadliest weapons for air-to-air combat in the world. But don't tell my commanding officer, he might not see it exactly as I did. Anyway, I could have made a second pass at the second row of planes, but I decided to remember my orders were to take out these two targets tonight. With one down, there was one to go and I was ready. There was still no sign of enemy fighter planes anywhere. The radio was alive with the exuberance and celebration of one target after another being blown away. There was nothing coming to me about any dogfights anywhere. I found that extremely unusual and I thought for a minute that maybe Saddam had some kind of a trick up his sleeves. What if he blew up all our bases in Saudi Arabia with some kind of secret weapon. He'd been hinting all week long prior to the deadline that he had a secret weapon of some sort. I hoped that it was just a big bluff. If it was, this guy was going to go down in history as one of the biggest bluffers of all time. I just hoped that I could get in a poker game with this jerk some day. I flew along for several minutes watching the landscape light up all over the place from explosions that my colleagues were dropping all over the place. It was turning out to be one of the greatest successes in military history. I felt very proud to be part of it. Someday, my grandkids would be sitting on my lap and the story about what I was doing would come on TV and they would ask me what it was really like and I would tell them all about it. I only hoped that I could remember every last detail. I wanted to memorize everything. Lucky for me, my plane was taking all the important flight information down through its two video cameras, one in the nose and one in the tail. I made a mental note to make a copy of the video tape and send it home so that I would never forget it all. I knew that the planes' cameras could not capture the sight of all the cruise missiles going down main streets of Baghdad and it couldn't capture the bright flashes of light all over the darkened landscape, nor could it capture the surprise the Iraqis must have been feeling, but I knew that I would live to tell about it and I guess that's what I'm doing here. I had to dodge several anti-aircraft batteries throwing everything but the kitchen sink, all of it wandering around the skies harmlessly. It was more and more obvious to me that the Stealth guys had rendered the enemy almost totally blind. He still had a few thousand pairs of eyes down on the ground searching the darkness for us, but these were no match for the electronic eyes, the radar sites that my friends had obliterated earlier. I was very glad to be on the American side of this fight. I think if I was an Iraqi citizen I would have some very nasty things to say about my commander-in-chief and the very callous and careless way that he exploited his own people. I guess that's what dictators do best, isn't it. I was at the point where I almost wished that an Iraqi MIG-29 might take to the sky to challenge me. Anyone who followed this guy Saddam, deserved everything we dished out, but then I remembered some of my Christian teachings. You know, the one about, 'do unto others, as you would have them do unto you,' and then I realized that it would be best for all concerned if I didn't have to shoot anyone down. If there was only a way that I could warn the enemy pilots to eject just before my missiles hit. That's how I'd want to be treated. But this was war and no one had any right to expect such humane consideration. I thought that it was a terrible shame that war ethics had evolved to such a low state on our planet and as I gazed up at the field of stars above me, I wondered if there might be any other planets out there where they had evolved such a gentle set of ethics as my Sunday School teacher might like. I didn't have more time to wonder such thoughts because at that moment, my radar screen screamed about my secondary target approaching. I was just a few minutes from the 'milk factory'. I had no idea that it was to become famous due to the large amount of press reporting that CNN was giving it. To me, at that moment, it was merely a target with a very high military priority assigned to it and that was the kind I was trained to take out and take out with all the power given me. And so, I armed a maverick missile underneath and two 2,000 pounders. I got the center of the factory in my cross hairs, rolled a couple times, in an evasive maneuver, to make a smaller target of myself to the enemy gunners below, and then pressed the button that released the maverick missile. Two seconds later, I released the two bombs and guided the pack of projectiles to within a few feet of each other. Then, I nosed the plane into a spiraling climb and looked through my rear camera, keeping the crosshairs on the very same spot on my target. I climbed a few seconds more and then I saw the factory collapse under a huge explosion. Mission accomplished! I headed for home. I made a rapid dive for the safety of a low flight pattern and let my navigation unit point me home. I put the ship on automatic and basically just watched below for any other targets of importance that I could report back about. I saw several military looking vehicles trundling along the roads and I saw a couple columns of trucks heading away from the city. I made a note of their exact location for headquarters. Then, I realized that I had another maverick missile and one more bomb. I radioed back to HQ for permission to take out the truck column since this was most likely a detachment of troops trying to get out of harm's way. I was granted permission. I was very excited. I already had a very successful sortie and this would cap it off nicely. I rolled around almost 180 degrees, pushed the stick down hard and pulled back on the throttle so that I would lose a little speed and sink down closer to the enemy trucks. I surveyed my radar and infra-red systems and so nothing of any importance other than my own friendlies* moving around and doing the same kind of thing I was. I surveyed the background and made sure there were no hotels or hills in the way of my escape. I lowered the flaps to bleed off a little more speed and picked up the convoy in my sights. At night, and through my infra-red scope it looked like a ghostly sight out of some kind of bad horror flick. A few scenes from my favorite war movies flashed through my brain. I thought that they would be making movies about this little war soon. I suddenly thought about President Ronald Reagan* and all the acting jobs be had concerning World War II. I wasn't in a movie, however, and I wasn't acting, and those weren't actors out there who were going to die. I felt very sorry for them. Then I squeezed off the rest of my cannon fire at the lead truck. It exploded immediately. I must have hit the gas tank. It was such an explosion, it destroyed the truck behind it. I only had a couple hundred rounds left, but in that second of firing, I nailed the third and fourth truck and blew them all to kingdom come! I launched my other maverick missile and guided it straight to the fifth truck in line. It exploded and took out the sixth and seventh one as well. Then, I dropped my remaining bomb on the eighth truck and this explosion rolled right through the next several trucks. I couldn't tell exactly how many, but I figured the entire column was pretty well gone. I heard a couple of bullets thud into my fuselage just underneath and behind me, and so I figured a few of the soldiers had survived, got out and were taking pot shots at me. I knew that their small arms fire would not penetrate very far into the craft and my seat had a sufficient amount of flack armor around it that I didn't have to worry much. But just in case, I pushed the throttle all the way forward, pulled back on the stick and got out of there as fast as I could. They could always damage a fuel line or hydraulic line and cause me some real difficulty, but they weren't that lucky that night. I headed for home, all my ammo used up. I felt very good. I just hoped that there were no surprises on the way home. I knew the Iraqi planes that I shot up were not going to bother me tonight and that made it even sweeter up there knowing that most likely the only planes flying the friendly skies of Iraq tonight were our own. I made it home without any further incident. I landed without a problem and looked for the bullet holes on the underside of the plane with my ground crew. There were a couple of small holes, but nothing vital was damaged. They'd patch up the skin of the plane within a matter of minutes, just enough time for me to have a quick breakfast, a cup of coffee, get debriefed by my Commanding Officer, and then climb back aboard and head for the next set of targets. In a debriefing session, I am supposed to tell everything that happened on my mission. I describe the damage done to the targets and I report any sightings that might be militarily significant. Then they tell me about any other information that I might need to know about. So, it was here that I learned that no other Iraqi planes were challenging us. Some had been seen taking off, but in all cases they were running away. They apparently knew that they were no match for our superior technology and practical skills. This made me feel much better. A couple of planes were missing in action, but one had suffered engine failure over Iraq and the other was not known. I figured some damn Iraqi gunner got lucky. I knew that a special unit of helicopters and commando's had been formed to search for and rescue any of our downed pilots, so I said a little prayer for them and as it turned out, most of them were recovered before they became POW's. But a few were captured and tortured and put on display for the American people. I just want to state for the record that I think that any political or military leader who would do that kind of thing to combatants like myself is lower than pond scum and I hope more than anything that this Saddam guy is captured after the war and then put on trial for his war crimes. He's using terrorism, military action, even ecological terror to have things his way. If the world is going to survive the next several hundred years, we're going to have to treat these power-hungry dictators for what they are, war criminals. It's the only way to make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen over and over again. I just wish that the kids demonstrating at home would realize that we're doing this for them. |CHAPTER THREE My name is Lt. Captain Mike McCormick. I've been in the Air Force for about ten years. I'm part of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing out of Lakenheath, England. We fly a very versatile and effective fighter/bomber, the F-111, also known as the 'Aardvark'. This is a very beautiful plane. It's the only one in our Air Force that have swing-wings. This means, they can be swept forward for an easier take off and landing and better control in bombing missions or they can be swept all the way back for air combat and maximum speed. With this very effective design we can be used for very important and precise bombing missions. We have a night flying capability and an infra-red imaging system that gives us a clear, magnified view of our targets in day or night and any kind of weather. We can carry conventional or nuclear bombs. We have the best radar systems in the world and we're powered by two 25,000 lb thrusters, the Pratt & Whitney TF-30-100. The plane seats two, the pilot and the WSO, weapons systems officer. This way I concentrate on flying and my WSO can concentrate on hitting the target. We're the same group that put that other two-bit dictator in his place, Moammar 'Quadafi Duck', as we used to call him. We have an even more daffy leader, Saddam Hussein who were going after today. This guy, of course, makes Moammar look like Florence Nightingale. I want to say up front that I'm glad there are protesters in our country making all that noise about peace. I love peace too and I hope someday that we do really 'Give Peace a Chance', to quote the popular song. I think that this world can use a little more peace and prosperity. I hate the fact that some of my bombs are killing or injuring a few Iraqi children or innocent by-standers. I can't help that. I don't lose sleep over it. I just hope that someday we can all learn to solve our problems through some other less destructive means. History teaches, unfortunately, that men like Saddam Hussein don't have the same attitude about the sacredness of life that we have in this country and, therefore, if left to his own devices, people like him will bring this kind of pain, suffering, destruction on many more of us if there is no force like ours to stop him in his tracks. The great part of our country is that there are others who see the situation differently and they have the right to voice their concerns and opinions. But the vast majority of people on the planet, at least for the time being, approve of the way we're handling the situation. I just hope we continue to handle it properly and continue to have this kind of support. We spent the first five months of this war just sitting around at the base, waiting for the order to attack. In the time we had to shine up our equipment, drill, train, play cards, eat, sleep, etc, we all had a great deal of time to think about the war that we knew would probably come eventually. And when you sit in a God-forsaken country like Saudi Arabia, you begin to really appreciate your own country. The Saudi's wouldn't allow us to drink any alcoholic beverages. They wouldn't allow us to watch the movies that anyone can watch back home. They wouldn't even allow the bible to be on their soil. I thought about all this and I wondered just who or what we were risking our lives to save. It's a strange state of affairs when the United States is required to commit money and lives to save the likes of these filthy rich Sheiks of Arabia. It seems to me that they're nothing more than camel herders who happened to find themselves sitting on billions of barrels of a substance that is sorely required in country's like ours - and that is obviously why we were here. I didn't like it much, but I was willing to do my job, because war is never pretty. It's never very much fun. It's very rarely for a cause that means anything in the long view. World War II was different. We were saving great nations like France and Italy and Britain and many others from a true homicidal maniac, Adolph Hitler. But in all the thousands of wars throughout history, this is the only one I can think of that was worth the cost of all those lives and all that money and all that damage to the environment. This was not that kind of a war. It was being justified because Saddam threatened our way of life, but I have to agree with the protesters to the extent that they say that it's a war so that we don't have to pay 2 dollars per gallon. It's a damn shame, but in reality, maybe we should be paying 2 dollars or even 3 dollars per gallon, because this would stimulate the discovery and development of what they call 'alternative energy sources*, and there's lots of these believe me. Like I say, I would never object like this to my superior officers. Indeed, the only reason I'm saying it now is because the publisher has sworn to use fictitious names in these articles. I like that anonymity because it allows me to speak my mind without fear of ruining my career in the Air Force. Yes, I'll stay in the Air Force because I'm looking forward to taking the great retirement benefits when I'm about forty years old. I'll be able to work at another job and collect my retirement pay from the service which is very attractive. I love my country, but I honestly don't know what I'd be doing right now if it weren't for the great benefits they give the veterans of the four services. There's no other country in the world who is so generous. But even if it weren't for the benies, I would probably still be sitting here in the war zone doing what I'm doing. Why? Because I've always been a lover of adventure and I don't think I could stand to spend my adult life behind a desk in a more peaceful type of business. The war is very popular right now, probably because there have not been many casualties. I think Saddam* is correct, however, in assuming that the war would be much less popular once the news coverage starts to display hundreds and then thousands of body bags. I hope for the sakes of my friends in all the services that this never happens. I hope that they find another way out of this mess. They say that if we keep up the air war, there may never be a need to send in the ground troops which is where there would be the highest number of casualties. I'm willing to fly until I drop if it means that I will be saving the lives of my fellow servicemen. I will stay and make the sacrifices that are necessary. I would gladly forego seeing my family and being in my beloved country for another year, maybe even two years, if it meant that no American ground troops would have to be killed in combat. But, I'm not so sure that this is the best kind of motivation to be here. I'm beginning to think that there has to be a better way to solve our problems in this world. We never see the real damage that we cause from several thousand feet in the air, but we're aware of what happens to the poor innocent people of Iraq. I don't believe that the average Iraqi citizen truly supports a maniac who would kill every last one of them for his own personal gain. I don't think they are getting the kind of a deal we get in our own country. I just wish the average American would really appreciate the great amount of freedom that they do enjoy comparatively speaking. And at times like this, it truly irritates me that less than half of the registered voters ever bother to go to the polls and exercise their greatest freedom. Everyone in the world has to demand more control over their governments. The Iraqis have to take responsibility for the jerk they have leading them to their deaths and we, in the Western nations have to take more responsibility for the leaders we have. We have to do more than just give lip service to our great country in great patriotic times like this. We have to participate in the process. We have to give them notice that we are watching and monitoring and thinking about what they do in our name around the world. Well, that's all from my soap box. Every time I shoot my mouth off like that, I stop and thank God that I live in a country that allows me to shoot my mouth off like that. When you've spent a few days in a country like Saudi Arabia, you really appreciate all of our American freedoms. If you had something like published in Saudi Arabia and speaking about the Saudi government, you'd have your tongue cut out, and I'm not kidding. I personally witnessed a be-heading a few months ago. The poor guy was accused of stealing a camel, and he couldn't afford an attorney. The trial was very brief, one day, in fact, and the poor 'b......d' lost his head in a public square. It was truly appalling. I lost my lunch after watching this spectacle. They actually use the same kind of execution technique they used hundreds of years ago. A very large fellow walked over with a huge, razor-sharp sword. He took one big slice in the air and cut the man's head without severing the neck completely. This way the head didn't roll away unceremoniously littering the street. Well, despite all these questions, I'm still here doing my job. I give thanks that this war is not as bad as the Viet Nam War. In Viet Nam, we had no business dropping bombs on people who were fighting to overthrow French Colonialism. We were once a colony of Britain. For some reason, our government decided to fight on the side of the French way back in 1960 after the French began to lose their colony of South Viet Nam. Now, this was an obvious mistake on the part of our government. I allow them one mistake of this magnitude, but I wouldn't want to allow them another! I hope this Gulf War is not another. Well, that's war. War is hell! It's never fun, never glamorous. It's not like it is in the movies. In the movies, people die with a grunt or a groan and that's it. In real life, people die, usually after several moments or even hours of extreme pain and suffering. I've watched many war movies and it makes me mad the way they show how great and how exciting it is to be in a war. I already said that I enjoy the adventure of it, but you have to realize that I'm a jet pilot. I have to face no real danger. If I'm killed, it will be an instantaneous type of thing. I'll die from an artillery explosion near my cockpit or from a missile up my ass. I don't have to worry about dying from stepping on a mine or from a bullet in the chest, or from any number of ways that I don't even want to think about. I just wanted to get that off my chest because I know that a great many people may think that the story of this war may seem like glorifying war and that's the last thing I want to do. Like I say, we sat around for months before the war and thought about stuff like this. Few of us ever wavered, however, from doing our duty and I think that's because we come from a nation of very great people. We endure. We do our duty. You can depend on the American citizen. This is why everyone wants to live in America and they're killing themselves to try to get into the United States. Well, one day, all of a sudden, we had to stop thinking about all this and we had to commit ourselves to the battle. I was ready for this because of the greatest training of any military organization anywhere in the world. Much could be said about being prepared for anything, and this country certainly is. We received our orders and were debriefed on the morning of the sixteenth of January. We discovered that we were going to be the arm of the military that would attempt to render the enemy's Air Force totally ineffective. My mission was to fly to three different airfields in Iraq and bomb them so that the Iraqi Air Force would not be a factor in the upcoming battle. I liked this strategy. I knew that if we could neutralize the enemy Air Force, our ground troops would have a much easier time of it later on. I liked hearing what I was hearing. I knew that we would have a very difficult task, but if we could surprise the Iraqi Air Force and destroy them on the ground we would be victorious. It was as simple as that. I knew that our technology was much more advanced than theirs and I hoped that we would indeed catch them by total surprise. We did! We flew over Iraq and we could tell that they were totally surprised. Our Stealth fighters had been highly successful, weren't even detected, and obliterated their largest air warning systems. Our F-4 Phantom jets had gone in behind them and they were not shot down in any great numbers, because of the Stealth missions and so they were in turn able to destroy more of the enemies radar stations. And now it was our turn. The guys who had gone before had taken out much of their ability to see us and shoot us down, so I knew that we would not be in as much danger as the previous waves of jets. And it would now be our very great pleasure to shoot up the enemy's Air Force so that we would have complete air superiority and then be able to do just about anything we wished over there. Our Squadron had a total of ten ships in it. We were dispersed all over the desert so that the enemy could not make a big score on our resources with one of his SCUD missiles. (By the way, I heard that 'SCUD' stands for Saddam Cowering Underneath Debris.) We had to circle the base a few times so that our ten planes could form up in the now familiar wings like the way geese fly in formation. We flew in two wings of five jets. I often wonder what a great sight we must have been from the ground and what a terrible sight for the enemy to see hundreds of these formations flying unchallenged over his skies. At any rate, we chattered back and forth about the kind of celebrations we would have when we got back to base. Of course, none of this included alcohol or women due to the Saudi objections, I've already stated. About half an hour into our mission, we got within sight of our targets, three enemy air bases scattered in and around Baghdad. Each wing would take on a base. Two of my wingmen would stay high in the sky to fly cover and make sure we were not surprised by enemy jets we couldn't see. We were being very careful not to lose any of our friends. This meant that these guys were armed mostly with air-to-air missiles which would not be very effective on ground targets. The other three of us were armed with 2,000 lb laser-guided bombs and Rockeye anti-armor cluster bombs. These two munitions would prove to be very effective in knocking out the hardened shelters in which they placed their best fighters, and in rendering their airfield inoperable for several days or even weeks. I remember thinking about how happy I was to be flying this kind of mission, but I was also very desirous of finding any evidence of Saddam Hussein himself. I wanted to be the guy who dropped a big surprise on him and put him out of the decision loop in his poor unfortunate country. I kept an eye-peeled for anything that might give us some information about his whereabouts, but alas there were no cars driving around with a neon sign spelling his name. If there were, I'm sure one of us wouldn't have been able to resist taking it out. I think if they had sought Mr. Hitler out later in the 30's and assassinated him, this would have saved the world a great many million lives and so much devastation. My main problem with war, I thought, as I approached my target, was that it took away from the peaceful pursuit of happiness. What I really wanted to do was to get back to my family and get my life back on track with my family. Well, my Weapons Systems Officer, Lt. Jim Curry, yelled at me that our targets were now approaching over the horizon. Our two wings split up as planned and my group headed for the airfield designated as 'Duckpond 13'. The other wing went after 'Duckpond 12'. If we had ammo left, and were unopposed, we could hit 'Duckpond 14' as well. We were flying just a couple hundred feet off the deck and were very comfortable at this height because we all had what's known as FLIR, or forward-sensing infra red. This displayed the landscape like an eerie moonscape on our instrument panel. The plane's controls were tuned to keep a specified distance over this landscape at any speed. We were in contact with the flight of F-111's up at higher altitudes and they kept telling us not to worry since there was no sight of enemy planes. Some had been spotted on the edge of our radar's range or about a 100 miles away and they were flying away from the battle. The airfield came up much faster than I'd imagined. I had to quickly give my wingmen their instructions to go in after me. We split apart and I sped up while my buddies slowed their approach just a little. In a matter of seconds the airfield was just below and I had to maneuver with all my skills to get my sights lined up on a row of jets lined up at the side of the runway. They weren't manned by anybody. I poured several hundred rounds of cannon fire at them and I believe I hit most of them. Then I heard Jim, my MSO, drop our laser guided bomb on the hangar at the end of the runway. Then, I yanked back on the stick and pushed the plane to its vertical limit. I watched as the crosshairs on my windscreen wandered to the center of the hangar and within a fraction of a second, it went up in a big black cloud. You can't hear the sound of the explosion traveling at this speed until several seconds after you see the smoke. It rocked my plane and nearly jolted me out of my seat. These bombs were extremely powerful. It almost seemed like a small nuke hit the place. As I continued rocketing straight up, over my shoulder I could see a plane just taking off on the runway below and behind me. If I didn't do something quickly, he might be able to get off a few shots in our direction and I wasn't going to let that happen. You had to admire his pluck. He was the only enemy pilot who had any that day. Here he was trying to get up to take on at least five American planes who had him in their sights. I gave him a mental badge of courage or stupidity, I wasn't sure which. I pulled all the way back on the stick and then hard over to the right so that I barrel-rolled over the loop and flipped over at the top so that I could come down behind the plucky little fellow just getting off the ground at the other end of the airfield. I had the advantage of a few hundred feet even though he was pushing his nose up into the sky as hard as he could. It was a MIG-29 and I was happy to have the chance to get in behind him so quickly because a MIG-29 is the only plane we knew could match us pound for pound for maneuverability and firepower. I was so close I could see the back of his head in the cockpit. It took me a split second to decide whether to hit him with cannon fire or an AIM 9-L missile. In that split second, I hoped that he might eject, but he was too low and I knew he could just as easily pull out either left or right and evade my attack. I don't know why he didn't do either. To this day, I wonder if he knew I was behind him or perhaps that he simply didn't have the training and experience to make the necessary maneuvers. I worried that it might have been some fifteen year old kid in that cockpit. There are many nights when I wake up in a cold sweat over this question. At the same moment, I figured I was so close to him the resulting explosion of his ship could damage mine if I used the missile, so I pushed the button on the top of the stick and I saw the shells tear through the tail and then the forward part of the fuselage. I cringed as I saw his head turn into a crimson fountain coating the interior of his cockpit with blood. I yelled for him to eject, but it was too late. There would be nothing left of his brain to make that decision. At least it was quick and he probably never felt a thing. One minute he was in this world a part of a strange thing called war, and the next moment he was united with his God. The debris of the MIG-29 drifted down to Earth in a silent splash in the sand. My wingmen were yelling at me and congratulating me for the 'kill'. They were just finishing up their bombing run and between the three of us, we had splattered five or six jets all over the runway and then we'd completely obliterated all the hangars and outbuildings connected with the airfield and now we would make one more sweep over the field and I watched as Jim dropped our cluster bombs. I always watched these things in total wonder. It was almost beautiful, the way they made a neat little pattern of explosions on the ground. They made hundreds of small craters and I remember thinking that it looked like the surface of the moon down there. If any planes took off from that airfield in the next month or two, I would have been very surprised. We made one additional pass and poured a few more hundred rounds into the hulls of the planes sitting on the tarmac. We wanted to make sure that few if any of these planes would ever be used in combat. I don't believe that the enemy has the spare parts available to repair these planes. From what I saw, even our ground crews would have trouble getting them back into operation within a month. We didn't waste any more bombs on them because we felt we could do more damage on the second airfield with them rather than pound the rubble below into dust. It would not be the most efficient use of the munitions. To put it another way, we would be more cost-effective in battle if we saved the ammo for the next batch of planes. The ones at 'Duckpond 13' down there were certainly not going anywhere in a hurry. I heard over the intercom that our other squadron was having the same basic level of success at 'Duckpond 12'. They did not have the added fun of shooting down a plane trying to take to the air, however. I was very happy for them. I was not truly thrilled at having to kill a fellow airman even if it was the enemy. It was much nicer to have a nice clean mission destroying planes, unmanned and sitting out in the open and a few hangars that were probably deserted at the time. If they weren't deserted, there would be a few very slow and stubborn people in that rubble. I radioed HQ about all our success, sent the other squadron back to base and told my guys that we had enough ammo left to take out 'Duckpond 14'. I asked them if they were game and they all yelled an enthusiastic affirmation of my plan. We were all pretty excited at the smooth way things were going. HQ still had no evidence on any radar system of enemy aircraft attempting to take us on in combat. In a way, I had to marvel at Saddam's intelligence gathering ability. He had obviously been briefed correctly in that none of his pilots were a match for any of us hotshots of the USAF. He must have decided that it was better for him propaganda wise to look like he was the underdog and that's how he arrived at the decision not to fight. It just would have confirmed what we all knew about his military forces. They were not up to snuff with a truly modern and effective force. I just barely had time to get permission for the next stage of our attack, when the target came up in our scopes. 'Duckpond 14' was just like the other two with all their ducks lined up in a row on the side of the runway. I knew they were not decoys because they reflected our radar beams just like the real thing. Decoy's made of wood or anything other than fighter plane materials would echo back in a strange pattern that our radar system was 'intelligent' enough to detect. These planes were the real Mccoy. We strafed them by flying in one after the other just like the last time, with two of our wingmen flying cover at altitude just in case. Jim had just dropped our last laser-guided bomb when I noticed something very strange a way off in the distance. I had to turn my attention away for a few seconds while I watched my partner guide the laser pulse at the hangar and watched as it blew itself to smithereens. I told my other two wingmen to finish off the rest of the targets on the ground and I flew off in the direction of the twin lights I had seen moving off in the distance. I radioed in that I was in pursuit of two 'unfriendlies'. I pressed a button on my panel that electronically asked for verification that the targets in my sights were not friendly planes. We have what's known as IFF, 'If Friend or Foe' in our planes. But before I got angry at these guys and gave them a taste of my missiles, I wanted to be certain. The signal came back verifying my own instrumentation. Indeed, they were enemy planes, two of them, flying fast and low towards the Eastern horizon. They had probably escaped from 'Duckpond 14' and it meant that the hangar I had just trashed was probably empty of its valuable weapons. This made me angry, but then I realized that I could probably get them both anyway with a little creativity and stealth. I told Jim to shut off our radar so that they wouldn't pick it up on their own systems. I pushed the throttle all the way forward. They did not have the advantage of the terrain following equipment I had and so they would be forced to fly much slower than I would. And sure enough, within a few minutes I could tell that we were closing the gap. I checked my fuel tanks. If I caught them within the next five or ten minutes, we'd have enough fuel to get home. After that, we'd have to ditch in enemy territory. We didn't want to do that. I turned on all afterburners and I thought I could feel the desert turn to glass under the heat of my engines. I felt great even though we had no air cover over us now. And my buddies were just finishing off the last airfield and would be heading home by now. Jim and I were all alone deep in enemy territory and we both sat back and enjoyed the sensation we would probably never have again in our lives. We both felt invincible. Here we were in the best all-around attack fighter in the world. Oh sure, all the hotshot F-15 pilots thought they had the best plane in the world, but they did not have the same feeling for being a warrior as I did. I had always felt that the F-15 was overly committed in its design for air-to-air combat. My 'Aardvark' was just as comfortable in the air combat role as it was in attacking ground targets as we had just proven. I flipped a switch on my panel and the wings of my beautiful plane slowly and elegantly swept themselves all the way back for maximum speed. Airplanes, to me, are like ladies. Some of them prefer to be with just one kind of man. I always felt that my little 'Aardvark' could 'get it on' with just about anything that came her way. I was pondering all kinds of mysteries of love and war when I realized that we were almost within missile shot of the two Iraqi jets. Our Aim-9L missiles can travel for about forty miles before they use up all their fuel. Jim let me know that we had them in our sights and he requested permission to fire. I gave it to him with a nod and I watched intently as the two triangular shapes on my radar screen were rapidly being followed by our missile shapes. They hit home at the same time and there were two large circles of light on our screens. We'd gotten them both. They didn't even know we were coming up behind them. I had hoped again that they would eject in time, but they didn't. Jim and I hollered about the successful double kill and we chattered excitedly all the way back to base. When we got there we were greeted by the rest of the boys in our wing. They had heard that we had the most kills of the day. I was quite relieved to be back by now. Suddenly I felt that I had taken all the risks I wanted to that day. But it was early yet. We would take a few hours nap and be back at the attack twice more that long day. |CHAPTER FOUR My name is Captain Ben Benjamino. I've only been in the Air Force for about 8 years. I'm assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Base in North Carolina. I'm lucky enough to pilot the most superior military plane in the world. The F-15E Strike Eagle. My jet is equipped with the best radar in the world, the APG-70. We also have the LANTRIN system, (Low Altitude Targeting for Night) as well as FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red). We also have something called TSD*, (Tactical Situation Display). This is a lot of complicated equipment and so to run it all we have a second crewman, the Weapons Systems Officer (WSO) seated behind me. The combination of the APG-70, LANTRIN, and the TSD gives my plane a remarkable capability to find and strike ground targets with great precision, day or night, and in adverse weather conditions. The F-15 can also carry additional weapons on the stub pylons on its external conformal fuel tanks. It can carry almost any weapon in the Air Force inventory. Strike Eagle crews like to say, "If they make it, we can carry it!". Our mission was to take out part of Saddam's NBC, (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) war making apparatus. We were given six factory sites in the Southern portion of Iraq and two near Baghdad that our wing would be responsible for eliminating. You couldn't be flying a better plane for this kind of mission. We are the fastest plane in the air so none of Iraq's fighters were going to be able to shoot us down. In fact, we were all kind of hoping that we would be challenged by a few MIG-29's, the best of the Soviet fleet, so that we could have some fun. Unfortunately, the Iraqi pilots knew that it would be suicide to try and take on any American plane. If they did, we would swarm all over them. We would have early warning of their direction and location. We would have them in our sights long before they even knew where we were. If they did surprise us we could jam their radar systems so that their weapons would be almost totally ineffective against us. And with our superior flying skills, even if they got past all this, we would still win in any kind of a dogfight. The only tough part of my mission was the long wait. We'd gotten here just after Saddam invaded Kuwait, in early August and here it was January when we finally got the orders to go. Now, that it's over, I'm glad we had to wait so long because the President wanted to wait until he had all his forces in place. All throughout history the road to ruin is lined with military men who moved too quickly. Most people don't realize that even in these modern times, an army moves on its stomach. This actually means that you have to have the means to feed and supply an army with food and ammunition in order to be certain of victory. If we had invaded any earlier, we probably would still have the victory, but it would be much less certain. The waiting was murder. Let me emphasize this. We had very little diversion. Because of the Moslem restrictions on living the kind of life I would call, a 'wholesome American lifestyle', we couldn't drink. We couldn't read, we couldn't watch TV. Of course we didn't have our wives either. It was miserable for me. Back home, I had the ideal life. I missed it very much. We would fly and talk about flying all day long and then I had the luxury of going home to my beautiful wife and kids. It's amazing how much you appreciate things when they're not available to you. I had never been on such a long, lonely mission like this one before and I hope that I never have to again. I'm real glad it's over. There was one compensation for it all. I got to be a part of history. I think that as a result of what we did over there, the Nuclear threat in the area is postponed for a decade at least and perhaps much longer if we can get Saddam out of there for good. anything. The peace of this planet depends on our ability to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. A crazy idiot like Saddam is likely to rear his ugly head many, many times in a century and with nuclear capabilities, we could have a real problem. Imagine what the world will be like when dozens of countries get this terrible and awesome weapon. The ones we unleashed on Iraq, conventional weapons were terrible enough. There were many innocent women and children killed in this war and I regret that very much, but 'War is Hell'. Everyone knows that and when you live in a country with a crazy man for a leader you take the risk of being killed in either of several different ways, none of them very pleasant. I've heard stories of this crazy tyrant jailing and torturing children and then killing them, sometimes with his own hands. He even held many prisoners in this way until a ransom was paid by the family. He's nothing more than a terrorist. He's no leader. If there only a way to guarantee that people like this could never take over a whole country. A city, a town, a village, something without an army, would be acceptable, but never an entire country. I don't how to do that but I hope somebody is working on the problem, because without a solution, we're going to go the way of the dinosaurs. It may seem strange to hear a military man like me talk this way, but the greatest military leaders were constantly warning people of the horrors of war because they knew about them first hand. General Patton felt like me, so did the great General Eisenhower. Well, you want to hear about our mission to Iraq. It was fun, I must say. We knew that it would difficult for the Iraqis to put up a strong defense because the Stealth guys had taken out much of their central nervous system and the F-4 phantoms had taken out many of their nearest and best airfields and many of their planes had been destroyed on the ground. We did not know that it would be such a cake walk, however. But it was. We took off and we immediately were in touch with the AWACs planes circling high above and keeping an eagle-eye out for enemy planes. Whenever they spotted some, they were always heading in the opposite direction from the action. That's how we knew that they were smart enough not to take us on. If Saddam had given the order not to engage us, it was the only smart thing he'd done since starting this war. We flew for about a half-hour, maybe less and we came up on our first target, a chemical weapons factory out in the middle of the desert. It was protected by anti-aircraft batteries which circled the entire complex. As soon as we got in range, they put up a hell of a show. I decided that we should render them as ineffective as possible, so being the wing leader, I ordered everyone to follow me and to strafe all their gun positions. We had the advantage of them because we could see them, every single one of them. We could even see their people running back and forth and loading the ammo into the guns. They, however, could not see us. We were often past them by several hundred meters before they realized that they were being blown apart by our bombs which floated down behind us. Most of their missile batteries were so exposed that all we needed to do was shoot a few hundred rounds of cannon fire in on them and it was enough to blow the missile sky high. Since they were made of solid propellant, this served as a great explosive for us to ignite very easily with our tracers from the gattling gun. I loved taking their 'AAA' this way even though this was not part of our battle plan. As soon as I saw that it worked so well, I decided that I was putting it into my battle plan. If the brass didn't like it, they could relieve me and send me home. I didn't much care for bureaucratic bullshit. If I felt I had an advantage over the enemy that the brass in the Pentagon had not counted on, I was going to use it and I'll be damned if they were going to tell me how much risk to take. If these gun batteries were out of the way, then we were much safer in the rest of the mission. So, this is how it went. For the next several minutes we flew in low and continued to destroy every missile and anti-aircraft battery within striking distance of our attack. There about twenty of them, and we nearly used up all our cannon rounds taking them out, but it was worth it. Now, that we had complete safety in the sky, I directed my wing to form up again for a bombing attack on the weapons factory. We flew up to about ten thousand feet and, one by one, we dropped our laser guided bombs down on the site. I didn't care about how many people might be inside because we had given them plenty of time, with our previous attacks on the gun batteries, to clear out of the factory. I mean, they must have known that this was our main target. If they weren't bright enough to realize this, I couldn't really sympathize. Once the laser guided bombs are dropped, it's just a simple matter to float around up there and watch as the thing is guided to its target by the laser beam we have glued to the target. There's nothing can stop the inevitable destruction of what we want to destroy, especially if you don't come up to take us on with airplanes. I couldn't help but feel how surprised they must have been to see us come in on them in the middle of the night, pick out all their most effective defenses and eliminate them without taking a scratch ourselves and then just taking our precious time to destroy their factories. It was really something. In World War II, a bomber pilot had very little chance of coming home alive because the enemy flack was very effective and the bombers were so slow, they were sitting ducks up there. In our speedy little fighter/bombers, it would take a very lucky shot to get us, and of course a few of them got lucky once in a while and they have about eighteen of our pilots as prisoners. Out of thousands of sorties, eighteen planes is not a very significant percentage. And that's pretty much all there was to it that first day. We followed this factory up by visiting a Nuclear weapons plant on the North side of Baghdad and I used the same tactics of taking out their 'AAA' batteries before dropping our bombs. We had run out of cannon rounds by this time, so I directed my guys to use their maverick missiles, great for this kind of shooting, and when we had run out of these we used our Sparrow Air-to-Air missiles. This left us pretty much defenseless if we were attacked by Iraqi jets, but there was no evidence of any intent to do so on their parts and even if they had, we could still out run them. I knew we could stay away from them long enough until I could call a few of our friends in to take them off our backs, if that should become necessary. Needless to say, it never did. Since they had no intention of attacking us, they had no way of knowing our defensive condition. On the next run, we had a biological weapons research facility just a few minutes away on the Northern side of Baghdad. This presented us with a bit of a problem since it was right in between two buildings that were dormitories or apartment buildings, probably for the staff who were there to manufacture a weapon of incredible cruelty, death by a terrible disease. This weapon would presumably be dropped on our men on the ground and could conceivably turn the tide of war. If several thousand of our men were to die from this weapon, American public opinion may have turned away from the President's desire and we might be forced to withdraw. We in the Air Force did not intend for these terrible events to take place. We knew that we would have to be very careful not to take out the civilian targets just a few hundred feet away from the research lab. For these reasons, we were equipped with GB-15 smart* bombs. They are 2,000 lbs of high explosives with a TV camera in the nose. We can watch the glide path of the bomb from our cockpits and maneuver the bomb with instructions from our plane until we guide it right exactly to the target designated. I flew the plane to within a few miles of the research lab and then let my WSO take over. At this point, all I had to do was to fly the plane near the target so that my WSO could guide the bomb the rest of the way. This, in my opinion, was the best military invention in recent history, because even though the area around this research lab was heavily defended with 'AAA' batteries, we did not have to get very close to it. Our bombs could glide in silently to their target while we watch it and guide it from a safe distance. It was also true that we could take out the 'AAA' batteries, however, since these batteries were on the top of hotels and in the parking lots of office buildings, we would have killed innocent civilians and we were not prepared to do that. We managed to hit all our targets that morning in much the same manner. When we got back to the base, we looked the plane over and we found a half dozen small holes in the fuselage which were repaired before our next scheduled sortie some four hours later. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the folks who build our weapons systems. I'm alive today because my plane is reliable, effective and it does exactly what it was designed to do without putting the pilot and crew in any unnecessary danger. I think that our country is one of the very few who considers the safety of its fighting men. Life to our way of looking at things is sacred and very precious. No other military system in the world treats its military people this way and I think this is why we are usually successful in all the many military campaigns that our nation has found it necessary to engage in. I've never been much of a 'rah-rah' kind of wild-eyed patriot, but I am very proud to be an American and proud to have the opportunity to fly the best fighting aircraft in the world for the best country in the world. I wish that there didn't have to be wars like the one we have recently fought in, but that's the kind of world we live in. As long as war is considered to be a viable option for governments, we'd better be damned sure that we are always on the winning side and that the winning side is the correct side. |CHAPTER FIVE My name is Colonel Harry Jacobs. I fly an Air Force A-10, Thunderbolt, affectionately known as the Warthog*. We're part of the 23rd Tactical Fighter Wing out of Englund Air Force Base, Louisiana. We fly the most dangerous aircraft in the world if you are enemy troops deployed in and around armored vehicles. This plane is the last of the 'stick and rudder' airplanes and we like it that way. It was mainly designed around our main weapon, the General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger. This is a 30mm Gatling gun. Many modern jet fighters and attack planes carry 30mm cannon, but none of them approach the GAU-8/A's power. It fires a .78 pound, 30mm armor piercing projectile at a muzzle velocity of 3,500 feet per second. This is a very heavy projectile for an automatic cannon, and that is a very high velocity. And these are not ordinary armor piercing projectiles. The armor piercing penetrators are fabricated from depleted uranium, an extremely dense material with outstanding armor piercing capability. And what happens after the armor has been penetrated has to be seen to be believed! Heated by the tremendous energy of the impact, the depleted uranium oxidizes rapidly and violently, spraying the inside of the armored vehicle with flaming metal fragments which ignite fuel and detonate ammunition. The A-10A carries 1,174 rounds of this ammunition, and the pilot can select one of two rates of fire, 2,100 or 4,200 rounds per minute. Impressive as that is, the A-10A can also carry 16,000 pounds of weapons. These can include standard Mk 82, 83, and 84 bombs, Maverick missiles, laser guided bombs, Rock-eye anti-armor cluster munitions, Mk 82 Snakeye retarded bombs, many types of antipersonnel cluster munitions, quadruple U.S. Army Hellfire anti-tank missiles, and multiple 2.75 inch rocket pods. The A-10A is designed to fly off the deck at altitudes of 50 to 100 feet. Low altitude maneuverability is critical, and the A-10A has it. Ground attack at low altitude is not the safest mission in the world, but this plane is designed to be hit and survive it. The pilot's seat is surrounded by a titanium armor "bathtub" which is designed to withstand Russian 23 mm cannon shells. Fuel is carried in special tanks filled with reticulated foam to reduce the chances of serious fuel loss or fire if one of the tanks is hit. And in an emergency, an A-10A can fly back to base with one engine out. If a squadron of A-10a's is mad at you, you're really going to know it! Our first missions were relatively unexciting. We were deployed to take out stationary ground targets that might impede the progress of the main attack wings of our Air Force. This means that we hit several anti-aircraft batteries, artillery positions, communications and command centers as well as any large troop concentrations that were moving around at night. Since the Iraqis were mostly dug in at this time, there weren't many moving targets for us to hit and I like to go after moving targets because they represent much more of a challenge. Also, because the A-10A is not a very fast plane, only 450 miles per hour, we were not give very high priority targets at this time. We found ourselves being shot at, and that was exciting, but we were not being shot at by anything really impressive. If I'm going to risk my life in a war, I like to risk it for something of great military importance, therefore, these first days of the war were not my best. I kept looking up at the guys flying the F-15's and the F-4's and wishing that I had one of those. Thankfully, in the final, more important days of the war, we were being looked upon by the other flyboys as having the most fun because the A-10A was designed for supporting ground troops in battle. The ground troops need to be able to call in a plane such as mine whenever they feel threatened by enemy tanks and armored vehicles. The Iraqi military, even after the many weeks of heavy aerial bombardment by the coalition forces, still possessed many thousands of these kinds of weapons and they would have been a terrible threat if it weren't for the A-10A's. The most memorable mission I flew was the day that several battalions of our troops found themselves surrounded by Iraqi forces. There had been a few days of bad weather and so our air forces were not a factor. The enemy took this opportunity to move some of his tank battalions. Our soldiers found themselves walking into an ambush for which they were not fully prepared. The fighting was fierce. From our position a few hundred feet up, it looked like a very bloody battle was underway. We had been called in by one of the guys down there and so our squadron of five Warthogs went in with full battle dress. When we arrived at the battle field deep in the Kuwait desert, we found that about a thousand of our troops were nearly out of ammunition and almost completely surrounded. They could not retreat and there were no other units in the area to come to their rescue. Many tanks and armored vehicles, from both sides, were littering the sand and the smoke clouds they were emitting were making visibility very difficult in spots. From the looks of things, I'd say that our boys were giving much more than they got. There was a ring of destroyed Iraqi tanks lined up for miles in all directions. I think that our Bradley fighting vehicles and the M1A1 tanks must have taken out ten to twenty enemy vehicles for every one of ours that were destroyed. Finally, out of ammunition, our remaining tanks, approximately twenty five to thirty of them, were parked in a circle and in a small natural abutment of sand dunes, they were making their last stand. From the North, mostly and partially from all other directions, the Iraqi tanks were advancing on our position. We had a few self-propelled howitzers in the middle of the circle and they were peppering the Iraqi tanks coming toward them and making many good shots. The enemy was still coming with about fifty tanks and almost as many armored personnel carriers. I flew over the battlefield in a huge circle so that I could take in everything that was happening. By radio, I learned from an army lieutenant down below that they were almost totally out of ammo and were desperate for some kind of relief. They had lost about half of their people and they could see the enemy approaching with hundreds of fresh re-enforcements. This lieutenant was not very pleased with his situation and blamed intelligence for getting him into this mess. I told him to relax and that help had arrived. He didn't think five ugly planes like ours could do the job, but I assured him that he would be back at his base in time for supper. My wing aircraft were close enough to see me gesture for attack formation. We went in slow and easy and we fired our gattling guns at the lead tanks in the enemy column. I'd say that we put out of commission about fifteen of the enemy's T-72* Soviet tanks and BMP's. They quickly realized that we were up there and began to break up into smaller groups so as to make smaller targets for us. I instructed my wingmen to follow me on our second pass and to use our radar homing missiles on the remaining tanks. It's truly amazing what happens when you hit a tank with one of our missiles. It not only blows itself to bits, but the fifty-ton hunk of junk actually leaps off the ground about five feet. The gun turret pops off like a piece of popcorn jumping out of the frying pan. The gun itself melts like hot butter. I was never prepared for this. It made me real glad that I was on the giving end of these weapons. They are truly awesome! We made pass after pass over the enemy's tank column and we used up all of our missiles and all of our cannon fire. We even dropped a few bombs on them as well. We saw one tank after another become engulfed in flame and boiling smoke and fire. It didn't appear to me that they had any armor at all on them at all. They seemed like they were made of paper. It was sad, in a way, for the Iraqi troops inside these things. One of the enemy got lucky, however, and he shot a stinger missile up at my wingman in the plane right behind me. I remember feeling the shock wave as it blew his plane apart. We had all kinds of defensive systems, but in this kind of a close battle it was difficult to react to every situation as fast as you must and yet keep up the offensive pressure on the enemy positions. The pilot ejected, Major John Allworthy. We tried to protect him when his parachute hit the ground, but the enemy's infantry swarmed all over him and we couldn't shoot anything at them without hitting him. We had to let him go. I could tell that he was all right, but it looked as though he was in a state of shock. We radioed into to Search & Rescue and gave them all the necessary information about the capture of Major Allworthy. We knew that these Special Forces Commandos would be airborne within minutes of our call for help. If there was anyone who could help the Major on the ground, it was this squad. They flew Apache helicopters and they were armed to the teeth. When I saw them train near their base in Tennessee, I remember thinking that fifteen or twenty of these guys in World War II was probably all we needed. They were mean and they themselves took no prisoners even though they were trained to go retrieve ours. I tried to guess what their tactics would be in trying to find Major Allworthy. By the time they got to the scene, he would be many miles from here. I wished him luck and did a victory roll high over head so he could get the message that help was on the way. After about half an hour, it was all over. The remaining tanks turned and headed off to the North. I would have pursued the rest of them and pounded them into the sand, except that we were practically out of ammo by now. In all, I believe we destroyed about forty tanks that day and dozens of armored personnel carriers and several artillery pieces. The sand actually ran red with their blood. Needless to say, my lieutenant down below was extremely grateful. Just as I had promised, they were back to base by dinner. We had suffered some losses, but these paled in comparison to the enemy's losses. I found out later from the lieutenant that he had suffered only a half dozen killed or wounded. The Iraqis must have suffered several hundred, or perhaps as many as a thousand casualties that day. I felt sorry for the dead and wounded, but in the final analysis, they had made the choice to be there that day. Yes, I know that there have been stories about execution squads in the rear areas of the Iraqi army, killing any soldier who tries to desert or to run away. Even so, these people had allowed themselves to join Saddam's death squad at some point earlier on. I think it's very important for all of us on this planet to take responsibility for our actions in life. These people were dead, not as a result of our bullets and missiles and cannons, but because they had made the fateful decision to align themselves with death itself. They had chosen to place themselves in front of our bullets and missiles and cannons. I did not make that choice for them. Indeed, I had made a similar choice for myself, but I was not faced with the decision of joining an army headed by an insane dictator. In their place, fighting for that lunatic Saddam, I don't believe that any sane person, or anyone with a conscience could make that kind of choice. I know this may sound a bit hard and cold, but I honestly believe that if everyone who thinks about joining any military organization would think about the true significance of what he or she is doing, the world would be far better off for it. Glossary: :SAM The SAM missile, (Surface to Air Missile), was supplied to the Iraqis by the Soviets. It is about ten feet long and speeds to its target, US planes, guided by radar beams. American planes, however, are supplied with radar jamming electronics that confuse the guidance system of the SAM missiles which is why very few American planes have been shot down by these missiles. :"F-117" The F-117 Stealth Fighter is designed with very oblique angles, is painted with a radar resistant paint, and has a special composite skin all to reflect radar waves up into the sky or down into the ground and away from the originating source of the waves, so as to render the plane almost invisible to enemy radar. :BAGHDAD The capital of Iraq is in the Northern half of the country. It is the city that Saddam Hussein uses as his Command headquarters and is therefore a legitimate target of the war to enforce UN sanctions to get Iraq out of Kuwait. In Baghdad, Saddam has built several underground bunkers that are built so strongly they could take a direct hit by an Atomic Bomb. He changes his position every night so that U.S. forces can not know with certainty exactly where he is. AAA is the term American pilots use to describe the entire range of anti-aircraft and artillery fire that is fired into the sky to deter them. It has been very ineffective up to date because our planes are attacking at night and they are systematically going after radar guidance sites that help to aim these weapons. >.PAUSE >.MACRO [^HS] :FLIR FLIR or Forward Looking Infra-Red, is a system of electronic sensor and monitor similar to the technology used in many common everyday video camera's, AND MAY BE THE ONE TECHNOLOGICAL EVENT THAT WON THIS WAR WITH SO FEW AMERICAN CASUALTIES. With it a pilot can see an image of the ground underneath him even during dark, moonless nights. The pilot can guide his missiles and rockets to several targets by placing them in the crosshairs of the FLIR gunsite on his forward screen which keeps him looking 'heads-up' at the target. The Iraqis, if attacked at night by American forces are almost at our mercy since most of their troops do not have this system, while all of ours do. Fighting against our forces equipped this way is similar to trying to fight a gang of 50 vicious attackers while being blindfolded. I would not want to be an Iraqi soldier in this war! :PROPAGANDA There has been much propaganda on both sides as there is in any war. It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth. Iraqi propanda is put out to make Arabs think that the war is fought for some lofty goals. American propaganda is put out to make Americans think that the war is for even loftier goals than those of the enemies. In reality, there has never been any lofty goals achieved by any war in all of Human history. War is only a terrible waste of lives and a wanton destruction of the environment. The truth is, we, as a civilized world, must find an alternative to war before we destroy the Earth! This is the only truth about war. :INSTRUMENTS Modern aircraft have what's known as 'Heads-Up' instruments. This means a radar picture of the enemy up to 100 miles away, is projected onto the front windshield, allowing the pilot to pay attention to flying and targeting the enemy without having to lower his gaze to the instrument panel below. This comes in very handy in a dogfight. :"F-15'S" The F-15E, Strike Eagle, is the world's fastest and most maneuverable fighter plane. It is armed with the best radar equipment enabling it to see enemy fighter planes as well as ground targets. It is equipped with air to air missiles that can locate an enemy plane up to 100 miles away. It can drop bombs of any kind, including nuclear. With radar guided bombs and missiles, it is capable of pinpointing a target and destroying it without taking out civilian targets just a few meters away. Then, it can rise up and counter act enemy fighter planes. :COMPOSITE Composite materials are made up of graphite materials that are non-metallic similar to the material used in tennis rackets. This product is then laminated into a strong skin which absorbs some of the radar energy aimed at it by the enemy. The shape of the Stealth fighter or bomber, then reflects the rest of the radar waves up and away from the originating source, thus rendering the plane practically invisible. Radar jamming equipment is also used to further confuse the enemy radar. :BOMBS Laser guided bombs are extremely accurate because the pilot, or the WSO merely aims a laser beam at his target and while maneuvering the plane, strives to keep the laser on the target. The bomb has a laser sensor in its nose so that it can actually follow the beam to the target as if it were on a wire. :"MIG-29'S" The Mig-29 is the best fighter plane in the Soviet Air Force and they sold hundreds of them to the Iraqis. Still no match for the American Strike Eagles, it can present a grave threat. If piloted by an experienced pilot, it can use similar techniques that we would use to locate and shoot down the enemy. It is not as fast as the F-15, however, and Americans have the advantage and shot down many of these in this and other wars. :STICK The stick is the control shaft that the pilot holds in his hand. Moving it forward directs the plane down and pulling back on it pushes the plane upward. It is also furnished with several triggers so that the pilot can control the plane and enter into a dogfight without really thinking about it. :SURFACES There are literally dozens of small panels on the wings and the fuselage of the Stealth fighter that must open and close in a certain harmonic pattern to maintain a certain flight path. The shape of the Stealth fighter makes this necessary because they are not designed for aerodynamics, but for stealth. They are very difficult to fly and pilots undergo many hours of special training. A very powerful computer must be used to direct all of these surfaces to produce the desired effect from the pilot's control. :AWACS The Awacs plane was very instrumental in this war because, filled with highly sensitive and top secret radar equipment, it can "see" for several hundred miles into enemy territory and direct our pilots to their targets as well as warn them of enemy planes that might be in the sky. :SCREEN Most U.S. fighter planes are equipped with 'Heads-up' instruments which projects the radar information on the windshield directly in the line of sight of the pilot so that he can watch his flight path and see his targets on his screen even though they may be as far as 100 miles away. He can also watch the progress of his missiles in flight as they seek the enemy plane and then destroy it. :TIGRIS The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are the location of the most ancient civilization that we know of. In the rich and fertile valley of what is now Iraq, the Mesopotamian civilization flourished thousands of years ahead of the ancient Egyptian Empire and may be the very birthplace of all other modern civilizations including our own. Most of our modern law and ideas about government is founded on the Code of Hammurapi, an early leader. :"MACH 2.5" Mach 2.5 means two and one half times the speed of sound. Sound travels at approximately 750 miles per hour. Therefore, Mach 2.5 would be approximately 1,875 miles per hour. The top speed of an F-15 is classified but is thought to be higher than this. :SHELTERS The Iraqi command placed many of their best jet fighters in hardened shelters, hoping that our bombs would not be able to destroy them. They were very misinformed. We were able to drop 2,000 lb high explosive bombs that were laser guided, found their target, sometimes right down the ventilation shafts, and blew the whole thing sky high. Saddam lost hundreds of planes this way. :NAVCOM American planes have a top secret little black box inside them that tells the pilot where he is (NAV) and allows for communications with Headquarters (COM) who also knows where all our pilots are. :TRACERS Anti-Aircraft shells have a tracer shell with an incendiary device every ten or twenty shells so that the gunners can see where they are shooting from the paths the tracer shells make in the sky. During this war, the tracers were a spectacular sight more awesome than any Fourth of July celebration ever known! :MISSILES The cruise missile is guided to its target via a computer and a map placed inside it. With an air-breathing jet engine, it flies to its target and actually follows roads and rivers and other landmarks fed into the computer from satellite photographs. When it reaches its target it then detonates with devastating results. This missile is so accurate it was launched from ships several hundred miles away from Baghdad. The missiles flew at about 100 feet off the ground and could be seen by many Iraqis. Then, when it reached a military target it would simply fly right into it and detonate. This is an awesome weapon. It took the Iraqis by complete surprise. :SKUD The Skud missile was purchased from the Soviet Union. But they sold the Iraqis only missiles that would be capable of flying a few hundred miles. The Iraqis, however, with the help of the Germans adapted them so that they could fly to Israel, some four hundred miles away, but with only a limited payload of explosives. This is why the SKUDS that fell in Israel were so wimpy. Given a bit more time, however, the Iraqis were ready to put a nuclear warhead in this missile and the entire outcome of the war may have been much different! :GOD Saddam Hussein publicly claimed that God was more powerful than than the Coalition forces and he also said that God would be on the side of Iraq. Well, God is obviously more powerful than any Earthly force, but it would appear now that he was wrong about the second part of his new religion. :OUT The modern jet fighter is so fast that when it makes any kind of a turn at full speed, it produces 'G' forces on the pilot. Most men can take a force of about 7 or 8 G's. But sometimes the force can get to 10 which can cause unconsciousness in the pilot. This has led many people to believe that in the future, no jet planes or bombers will be piloted by Humans, but by computers who are not effected by this force. :"REAR-VIEW" The pilot does not actually have a rear-view mirror as we do in our cars. This view is actually produced by a camera placed in the tail of the plane, but it is viewed up front on the 'Heads-up' display. :reagan President Ronald Reagan was responsible for the largest military build-up in the history of this nation. At the time, during the 1980's, he thought we would be fighting the Soviets. In reality, we needed these weapons to keep the peace in the Gulf, AND THE SOVIETS WERE OUR ALLIES. Kind of ironic, isn't it? :FRIENDLIES American planes are equipped with a sensor system that tells the pilots whether he is tracking a 'Friendly' or an 'Enemy' plane. :SADDAM Saddam Hussein made his bones in the 'Bath' party as an assassin. It is known that he killed his first Human being at the ripe old age of fifteen. Later, he became known as a reliable source for political assassinations. Then, during the sixties, he became very powerful by being appointed the head of the Secret Police. In this role, he began a plan to become the most powerful man in Iraq by eliminating his opponents. It is no wonder that, absence any form of democratic institutions, this kind of unbridled evil will prevail. :SOURCES A senator from Hawaii said it best. He said, "If we spent the amount of time and energy on researching alternative energy sources as we spent in this war, there wouldn't have been a war!" :tsd The TSD or Tactical Situation Display, is a screen that looks much like a computer screen. It shows the pilot the ground targets that are approaching and it gives radar in a form that pilots have to be trained for many weeks before they can understand it all. It's a very effective way for the pilot to find his target and to destroy it once he's near it. :SMART These bombs are known as smart bombs because they have sophisticated electronics built into them so that they can be guided to their target either from a laser beam or by a radar beam. Some of the laser-guided bombs and missiles can be guided to their targets by a soldier on the ground who places the laser beam on the target and the bomb does the rest. :WARTHOG The plane is nicknamed thusly because it is designed to fly slow and to destroy the enemy. With its weapons, it can lay waste to a an entire city within minutes. It is highly effective in destroying tanks and armored personnel carriers as well as destroying entire army's. The coalition forces had the benefit of about two hundred of these planes in the KTO, or Kuwaiti Theatre of Operations. :"T-72" The T-72 is the Soviet Union's most advanced tank. It doesn't compare to an American A1M1, however. There is not as much heavy armor, and the cannon is not as large, nor is the laser sighting as good as ours. This puts the Soviet tank crew at a distinct disadvantage..