By lex, on June 11th, 2007

Well, I think I’ve strung you along for long enough. I told you what we dream of, a day cat shot loaded for bear, a shack hit on a defended target, a MiG kill on the way home and an OK-3 wire (day) landing with maybe a bacon cheeseburger at midrats to help lull you to sleep. The bombing and the landing would almost be a matter of routine after a while, but the opportunity of a MiG would be something else indeed – no one ever comes out to play anymore. Put them all together, and that’d be a pretty good day.

You could write a book about a day like that.

But you already know how the story ends – and that I didn’t get my MiG. Trust me, if I had, you’d have heard about it long ago – I would have found a way to work it subtly in to every other post or so. Like, “Did I ever tell you about the time I flamed that Flogger? I did? Do you want to hear it again?”

When the no-fly zones were first instituted following Saddam’s brutal suppression of the Shia in the south, Navy and Air Force fighters filled the counter-air lanes more or less continuously – a needlessly wearing pace of operations, especially after 1992 when the Iraqi Air Force stopped tempting fate by trolling around below the 32nd parallel. By the late 90′s, operations had become routinized, almost to a fault, with large force packages of anywhere between 8 and 20 aircraft assembling for fixed lengths known and “vul windows” and then returning either to airbases in Saudi or back to the aircraft carrier(s) at sea in the Arabian Gulf.

At first we used to have two dedicated lanes of defensive counter-air (DCA), plus a strike package of four to eight jets milling about in the middle supported by at least one EA-6B Prowler for electronic warfare support. To that Prowler would also typically be attached a two-ship of FA-18′s in close escort, while an E-2 patrolled just south of the Iraqi border to provide long range radar search and command and control. Bucket brigades of S-3′s came off mission searching the northern gulf for oil smugglers long enough to bring gas to thirsty mid-cycle fighters in Kuwait, while lumbering USAF tankers filled air refueling tracks in the gulf and KSA as well. In time we dispensed with the dedicated DCA almost entirely, since – apart from the closely protected Prowler – all of the TACAIR in country had a robust self-defense capability.

In the weeks and months immediately following Operation Desert Fox, above and beyond emplacing surface-to-air missile batteries in the southern No-Fly zone, Saddam had taken to randomly launching a fighter or two at the end of each vul window. They would trail the exiting force packages out of “the box” in order to give Saddam the propaganda victory of claiming that his invincible air force had once again chased away the “cowardly ravens” of the coalition. Much thought and no small amount of jet gas was spent pondering ways to catch these bandits in their poaching across the line, but to no avail – the MiG launches were not frequent enough to justify a level of effort operation, and having no real tactical or strategic impact were ignored by the heavies.

But not by us, we few, we happy few, we band of box hoppers. We avidly devoured the after action reports of these sorties with glittering eyes, imagining. Visualizing the tactics that would put us in position to shoot. Seeing the kill.

The Good Wingman

When I was a plebe midshipman at the Severn River Trade School, CAPT Dick Stratton came to speak to us one fine day in the fall. We were always tired in those days, always harassed and always getting “motivational” speeches from officers so senior to us that there was no real frame of reference to their experiences. We often dozed off.

Captains were, after all, unspeakably old men. Ancient.

But Stratton was different, we knew of him. We’d seen him over the summer during leadership courses, in grainy video clips and photos, wearing the gray and black, vertically striped sack that was issued to guests of the Hanoi Hilton prison system.

He’d gotten bagged – or, to use his own words “shot himself down” – on an H&I mission over a northern canal system in January, 1967. He’d unloaded a salvo of 2.75″ FFAR – folding fin rockets – on a hostile convoy of barges bringing supplies to the Viet Cong down country. Some of the rocket fins didn’t open, they interfered with each other and the next thing he knew he’d taken debris down the intake of his single-motor A-4E Skyhawk. It ran rough for a bit even as he turned for the coast, but he punched out when the motor quit. He was treated roughly after capture and more roughly still over the next 6+ years of his captivity. As a POW, he courageously endured the worst forms of physical and mental torture imaginable and survived – like almost every one of them – with his honor intact.

There are no heroes in lost wars, we are not permitted them, not at least for many years afterwards. But the POWs were the next best thing to heroes that we were allowed from what was still a suppurating wound of national disgrace in the fall of 1978 – it had only been three years since the fall of Saigon, and the bad memories, shame and blame-casting were still fresh.

We stayed awake for Dick Stratton. We listened to him.

Continued:

By lex, on June 7th, 2007

Every strike fighter pilot worth his salt has a dream, a very simple one: In this dream he will launch from the deck of an aircraft carrier at sea loaded for bear. Having marshalled the forces at his disposal – the dream is scaleable by experience and qualification: The forces at a wingman’s disposal are himself, his jet and the weapons he is carrying, while a strike lead may have 18-20 other aircraft attuned to his every whim – he will navigate his craft towards a target, acquire the target successfully and deliver his ordnance precisely. He will capture the moment of the target’s destruction on video tape in his cockpit, a kind of scalp-taking for the digital age – call it: Proof of death. Having successfully cleared the defenses around the target – if it was worth attacking, it was worth defending – he will regain situational awareness to his team members, reset the formation and head back to the ship, making good time.

And then it will happen: Having transitioned out of air-to-ground mode and back to air-to-air, he will dig something out of the ground on the margins of his radar, something that doesn’t make sense, not one of us, moving fast, climbing – heading our way. Or else the watchful eyes of an E-2 NFO will report a pop-up contact between his group and the ship, altitude low, identity unknown. Or maybe even something at six o’clock, moving fast. Moving very fast. Closing.