Afterburners (2 page)

    I stuffed my flight cap into my left leg pocket and checked the zipper on my green nomex flight suit. I had to look good; I was entering the ops building, going straight to the director of operation’s office. It was the first stop of many.

    The director of operations, Major James Abernathy, was an old-school pilot who’d flown in Vietnam. He could be an S.O.B. when pushed but was well-liked and good at his job. I said my good mornings, trying not to interrupt the major’s conversation with Chief Master Sergeant Dwight James Hancock, aka Old Jimmie, as I checked distribution. Checking distro was a part of the morning routine.

    Remembering my flight helmet, which was getting fitted with a new mask, I backtracked to Life Support, which was closed. Heck, it was early, so the wasted stop didn’t bother me too much. As I hurried down the long central hall of the ops building, I passed two large vaults that served as SCIFs. Mission planning and briefings were held in the SCIFs. No mission for me today, so the SCIF wasn’t one of my stops.

    I cut through the crew lounge, eyed the cases of Bischoff piled next to the cooler. Unlike some of the crewers who had come in several hours ago from a mission, I had the good sense to know that it was too early for beers.

    I filled a thermos with coffee. Took a quick sip. It was strong. No cream. No sugar.

    Outside the ops building was a long barbed-wire fence. Behind it were a group of buildings and the hardstands for the unit’s aircraft. I showed my flightline badge to the SP inside the guard shack; displaying an access badge was a requirement inside the flightline. The guard buzzed me in.

    A single four-engine turboprop, the great Herk, was parked on the second hardstand. The C-130 was one of the Air Force’s truly great workhorses. During its lengthy tenure in service, it had done and seen it all.

    It was a tactical aircraft that was readily modifiable to do any job. As an AC-130, it was the Gunship—one of the most deadly close-air support birds in the sky—and it had proved itself many times during attack, reconnaissance, and close-air support missions. As the KC-130, it was a capable aerial refueler. During Vietnam the C-130 had been used to drop the Daisy Cutter, a specially designed bomb used to clear landing zones for helicopters in dense jungle.

    A payload of bombs was nothing compared to the payload delivered by the EC-130—the great Gray Lady. The EC-130 was one of the Air Force’s most capable and trustworthy Electronic Warfare platforms.

    The grace of the Gray Lady wasn’t in her payload. She wasn’t a B-52 or an F-15. She didn’t deliver a payload of rockets or bombs. She was a silent killer and a giver of hope, just as powerful as the Mighty Buffs and just as lethal as a Screaming Eagle.

    EC-130’s had been in every major confrontation since Vietnam and were battle-proven in Beirut, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua and elsewhere, but few knew they even existed. She was a modern marvel. As the EC-130H, she could cripple anti-aircraft artillery batteries, surface-to-air missile units, ground troop movements and fighter pilots by blocking their communications and signals emissions. As the EC-130E, she conducted psychological warfare on the enemy, delivering a payload of fear to our enemies and hope to mistreated peoples. She was the one aircraft fascists and dictators feared more than the B-52.

    I glanced at the tail number of the EC-130 parked in the hardstand. It was the same specially configured bird I’d flown back from Nevada in after the combined exercises. In that bird, I was truly an airborne commando, combat crew through and through.

    We had tested out her new capabilities in the Nevada desert and raised more than a few eyebrows, but the invitation by General Kingston to come play war games in the desert had a hidden agenda. Washington brass wanted to shut down the EC-130 program in Europe. Modern warfare equipment was expensive; and the politicians didn’t always understand the need for high-tech, high-cost platforms like the specially configured Gray Lady I looked at as I stepped on by.

    The main question seemed to be what was an entire wing of air and support crew doing in Germany flying “training” missions. It was an excuse to close the base, save the Air Force and the good old U.S.A. millions each year. The Washington brass knew the “training” missions had little to do with training. Soviet fighters didn’t react to “training” missions and I had seen more than my share of Soviet fighter pilots out the window.

    My team had flown every day in Nevada during the exercise—sometimes jarringly, teeth rattlingly low to the deck as we raced into the mission zone, other times making the turboprops whine and screech as the pilot showed off countermeasures. By the time we made that final transatlantic dash I was more than ready to come home to Germany.

    Even as I entered the plain green prefab building that I worked in, I could hear and feel the roar of engines. The sensation that I was soaring at 30,000 feet hadn’t gone away. It was flyer’s lag, the feeling that you are flying even when both feet are planted firmly on the ground. It’d go away in another day or two—if I was lucky.

    All members of the group had day jobs that were different from their jobs in the air. My day job was to run Crew Scheduling. Key perk: I knew every flyer in the unit by name, grade and skill.

    I sat down, went through the papers in my inbox. A few newbies had come in since I’d been gone. They’d have to come back through scheduling if they wanted to fly. No one flew until they had a sit-down with me—it was a policy requirement and not because I had big brass balls.

    It was 09:00 by the time I got a chance to update the Big Board, a two-week planner that listed the unit’s missions and the crews assigned to each mission.

    A standard mission had five front-end and eight back-end crew. The front-end crew—pilot, copilot, navigator, engineer, and air maintenance technician—were responsible for the plane and its systems. The back-end crew—mission crew commander, mission crew supervisor, and six specialists—were responsible for executing the mission, whatever the mission might be.

    The Big Board was decidedly low-tech but I preferred it to computerized tracking. Crew assignment changed often. Flying the zone was stressful and sustained high-levels of stress meant people got sick more often than was normal. When crewers got sick, mentally or physically, they were put on the Duty Not Including Flying (DNIF) list until a flight medic took them off of it. And DNIFs were only one of many reasons crew assignments changed, which meant being able to see the status of every crewer at a glance was not only valuable, it was often a requirement.

    In the air I was part of the back-end crew. I worked as a mission crew supervisor or as a senior mission specialist, depending on the duty. On the Hot Sheet for the next week was a mobility exercise. Chief Hancock’s handwritten note asked for me specifically. I scheduled a different mission crew supervisor for the mobex anyway. I’d just been away for 5 weeks. My wife wouldn’t understand why I had to go off again, especially when I was the one running scheduling.

    Then I got to thinking about the Washington brass and their small-minded view of Electronic Warfare. EW platforms were like stealth bombers. Bureaucrats recognized the value of planes that were invisible to radar but often couldn’t justify the expense. And while they might be willing to pay for stealth fighters, stealth bombers at 2 billion and change each seemed way over the top—even if it meant the U.S.A. could get first strike.

    I wasn’t about to let them win. Like the chief, I had something to prove to the Washington brass. I penciled myself back in as the MCS for the mobex. No matter what Katie said, it’d be easier explaining to her why I had to go away for two weeks than trying to explain to Chief Master Sergeant Hancock why I shouldn’t go.

    The old chief was married to his job and the military. He didn’t understand what it was like to be a newlywed; or if he did, his memories of those days some thirty years ago just weren’t as clear as they once were.

    “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” is what the chief would say, if he said anything at all. My usual response of “or indifferent” would get a chuckle but wouldn’t really be heard. The chief wanted the best crewers on critical missions and I was one of the best—fortunately or unfortunately.

    Ten hours later, I was home, sitting in front of an ever-filling screen, pounding away at the keyboard, waiting for my wife to come home. I had a box of manuscripts that I was consistently piling higher and higher. Tom Petty was playing on the radio, and I stopped pounding the keyboard briefly to jot down a few notes in my journal and sip at my beer, a Bischoff. Then I turned back to the computer screen.

    Katie came home from work at 19:30. We made supper, made love, talked about the away mission—in that order—and the order of the events is what pissed Katie off.

    It was a typical Wednesday, ending with Katie slamming the bedroom door in my face and my sleeping on the couch.

04:00 came way too early. I showered, ate, and was out of the house by 05:00. I had an 05:45 show, 3 hours of pre-brief, 9 hours of flight time, and 2 hours of post-brief to look forward to. It was a Thursday. This was going to be an average day as fly days go.

    Wednesday’s flight had been a No-Go, so today’s flight was a Gray Warrior—in-flight training for chemical warfare. I lugged my chemical protective gear out of the car, entered ops and went straight to Life Support. I dropped my gear next to the O2 station, then preflighted my oxygen mask and helmet.

    At 05:29, I touched my thumb to the scanner on the secure vault door outside the flight briefing room. I remembered to slap on my green badge as the door closed behind me with a dull thud and a click.

    Check-in went quick. I initialed the flight orders next to my typed name while looking over the info to make sure it was correct. Then I sat down for the short wait.

    By 05:45, the pilot, copilot, navigator, and engineer were present as were the eight mission crewers. The only one missing was the air maintenance technician. The AMT, Sergeant Martin “Crow” Endwick, was prone to being late; and true to form he showed up flashing his hang-loose sign three minutes later. In crew time, late is late, whether it’s seconds or minutes.

    “You got beer after wheels down,” I whispered into his ear, slapping him on the back. It was a crew dog rule: late to fly, first to pay.

    Mission Planning for the flight, a standard training profile with the inclusion of chemical gear practice, didn’t take long. We’d wear our plastic bags to and from the plane, all right.

    We were waiting to fly when the messages started coming in. Iraq was invading Kuwait. At the time, the thirteen of us sitting in the ready room didn’t think much of it. Our concerns were centered on the flight and the mission ahead.

    The invasion of Kuwait progressed rapidly. Most of their units were caught in garrison, having been pulled back from defensive postures. No Arab nation believed an Arab would attack another Arab nation. In the end, Kuwait didn’t mount much of a defense at all. Iraq would have its prize in less than three days. That day, the thirteen of us departed on time, plastic bags and all.

    Five days later, early in the morning on Tuesday, August 7, some of us would be sitting in the same ready room waiting to fly. Over the weekend a lot had transpired. The fourth largest army in the world, the Iraqi war machine, had just stepped on a nuisance; and they had crushed it in less than three days.

    King Fahd of Saudi Arabia feared the next step might take Iraqi forces into Saudi Arabia; and on Saturday, August 4, he had called for U.S. military advice. Our intelligence indications supported his fears; Iraqi forces were setting up in a defensive posture along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border. President Bush had already agreed to send forces to the Gulf; the only thing he needed to do it was to get the approval of King Fahd. The matter was a delicate one, handled aptly by a delegation headed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that included a number of high-level VIPs and General H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

    By Monday afternoon Germany time, the United States was committed to the defense of Saudi Arabia, which would lead to Operation Desert Shield and ultimately to Operation Desert Storm.

    This day we didn’t fly though we did follow the incoming messages rather closely.

    U.S. and allied troops began arriving with regularity in Saudi Arabia. Within a week, five fighter squadrons and a brigade of the 82nd Airborne were poised for defense. For those of us at the tiny air base in Germany, the waiting game had begun only we didn’t know it yet.

    Over that next week, I watched three of our team go. They were Farsi and Arabic language specialists. Things were heating up in the Gulf; but for those of us that remained it was business as usual—well, almost business as usual. For a time we didn’t fly. For a time afterward we flew less and less. I thought about those in the Gulf a lot. The desert sands seemed somewhat closer though still very far away.

September was pretty uneventful. The days faded one into the other and are gone from my memory. Katie and I managed to get away for a few days, taking a long drive out into the German countryside. The castles along the Rhine River are strikingly beautiful and somewhat eerie in their majesty.

Flight bag in hand, I entered ops and looked around. It was rather deserted for the middle of the morning.

    “All flights have been cancelled for today,” warned the Watch Officer from behind his desk, “you should check in with the chief.”

    “Check in with the chief?” I asked. The Watch Officer shrugged his shoulders. Needless to say, I double-timed it to the DO’s office.