Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat
Read Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat Online
Authors: Dan Hampton
VIPER PILOT
A M
EMOIR OF
A
IR
C
OMBAT
DAN HAMPTON
To my brother fighter pilots—and all who have seen The Elephant.
Nothing can compensate my family for the constant worry and sleepless nights my profession caused them; but I thank them all, especially my parents and beautiful wife, Beth, for their patience and forbearance.
Contents
I
WROTE THIS BOOK MYSELF
. R
ECONSTRUCTING THE COMBAT
scenes in
Viper Pilot
wasn’t difficult—they are forever etched in my memory. However, I confirmed every date, time, and call sign against actual flight data cards, mission reports, and intelligence summaries. These events have all been declassified and can usually be found, in one form or another, in open sources.
Classified information is not directly discussed, for obvious security reasons. This includes technical specifications about weapon systems, tactics, and aircraft capabilities. Where essential, real names of pilots do appear, always with the express permission of the individuals involved. Otherwise, pseudonyms or call signs are utilized.
Lastly, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force has conducted its own independent review of this book and approved it for publication as originally written.
—D.H.
March 24, 2003
Nasiriyah, Iraq
“C’
MON . . . C’MON . . .
” I
GRITTED MY TEETH
. F
ORCING MY
aching jaws to relax, I pulled the throttle back further and dropped the F-16’s nose a few degrees toward the ground. As the Viper slid down into the dusty brown mess below us, I felt unaccustomed anxious twinges jab through my gut.
“All Players, all Players . . . this is LUGER on Guard for Emergency Close Air-Support. Any CAS-capable flights report to LUGER on Indigo Seven . . . repeat—any CAS-capable flights report to LUGER on Indigo Seven. Emergency CAS in progress. LUGER out.”
I stared at the stack of mission materials on my knee. I’d never heard of Indigo Seven, but I had a comm card that was supposed to have every frequency in the galaxy on it for a given mission.
Fuck it.
Another fucking freq I don’t have. I swore at the idiots who’d done the mission planning in the
six
months before the war. They drank coffee, sat on their butts, and generated an enormous amount of material, 90 percent of which was useless.
I knew some of them. Smart guys, but so utterly convinced they were correct that they’d failed to heed anyone else’s suggestions. The results spoke for themselves. I didn’t even have a decent large-scale map of Iraq, and no provision had been made at all for Close Air-Support missions (CAS).
*
I was a Wild Weasel, a surface-to-air missile killer—close air-support wasn’t our primary mission. But those of us who’d fought the First Gulf War or Kosovo knew better. When troops on the ground needed help, any fighter available was supposed to be there—fast.
FUEL . . . FUEL
. . . the green symbology flashed in the center of my Heads Up Display (HUD). Toggling it off, I quickly typed in a new minimum fuel number. A much lower number. It might keep the warning signal from bothering me, but it wouldn’t put another pound of JP-8 in my fuel tanks. It was also a cardinal sin. If you didn’t have enough fuel to finish your mission, then you returned to base. Simple.
Or not.
The Second Gulf War was in its fifth day, and a unit of the Third Battalion Second Marines had gotten cut off north of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. They’d called for Emergency Close Air-Support, which meant any fighters able to respond were to scratch their existing missions and race to the scene. It was literally life or death.
Operating under the call sign ROMAN 75, my four-ship (a flight of four fighters) had been immediately rerolled to try and save the Marines. Unfortunately, the biggest sandstorm in recent history was headed this way, and two other flights of fighters had been unable to get down through the stuff and find the grunts.
So I wasn’t optimistic.
But this was war, and you did what you had to do.
“ROMAN . . . ROMAN . . . this is CHIEFTAIN . . . say . . .” CHIEFTAIN was the Marine unit that called for close air-support. The crackling radio erupted with the unmistakable popping of automatic weapons in the background.
I swallowed, hard. I knew what he was asking.
Where the hell are you? What’s taking so long? You’ve got to get here NOW or we’re all dead.
I licked my lips, feeling my tongue rasp over cracked skin that hadn’t tasted water in nearly eight hours. “CHIEFTAIN . . . CHIEFTAIN . . . ROMAN 75 is attacking from the south . . . sixty seconds.”
Southern Iraq is ugly. No two ways about it. As I stared out over the vast Mesopotamian plain, I wondered, not for the first time, why we never seemed to go to war in pretty places. Lichtenstein or Ireland maybe. Bermuda.
Today it was just a tan mess. The jagged blue-green scar of the Euphrates River was muted, like someone had thrown a sheer brown cloth over it. Usually the earth east of the river, toward the Iranian border, looked green and relatively fertile. Now it was blanketed in shades of mud. The horizon worried me, since it had disappeared into a dirty-brown wall boiling up from the southwest, covering Iraq in an ominous shadow. Farther west, the sky had turned a dull black from the ground up to 50,000 feet. The sun was a faded orange smear, barely visible through the curtain of sand.
I glanced around the cockpit again. Adjusting a setting here, rechecking one there. Along the right console, way in the back, I had a canvas bag about the size of a shoebox. This held the aircraft’s data cartridge and classified tapes. Once they were loaded, I used the bag for my water bottle, extra piddle packs, and some food. I unzipped it so, hours later, I could get inside with one hand. I always looked forward to snack time. Sort of a reward for surviving.
My fighter dropped through 7,000 feet, and I stole one more look at the ominous sky around me. The sandstorm was almost here. The front edge of it had rolled up from the southwest, obscuring everything in a tan haze. I’d split off my Number Three and Four aircraft and just kept my wingman orbiting above the target area. There was no need for both of us to be down here.
“ROMAN . . . RO . . .”
There was panic in the Forward Air Controller’s voice, and I fought back the nearly overwhelming urge to shove the nose forward and dive into the fight. I wouldn’t help them by getting myself killed. If I could see the ground, it would be different, but the dust made an immediate attack impossible.
I keyed the mike and spoke clearly and unemotionally. I hoped a calm, confident voice would do them good, even if I hardly felt that way myself. Fighter pilots are great actors.
“CHIEFTAIN . . . confirm no friendlies are on the road. Repeat . . . confirm no friendlies are on the road.”
“Affirmative! Affirmative . . . all friendlies . . . road . . . west of the road . . .”
I zippered in reply, and as the dust swallowed the jet, I called up my Air-to-Ground weapons display and selected one of the two AGM-65G infrared Maverick missiles slung beneath my wings.
They were big. About 600 pounds each and able to precisely guide by tracking contrasts in the heat, or lack of heat, around a target.
“Sonofabitch . . .”
I was staring at my display, seeing what the Maverick saw, and it was crap. Completely washed out, like a TV station that had gone off the air in a cloud of brown static.
Four thousand feet . . . and five miles to the target. Not much time.
I quickly switched to the other missile. Same thing. “Bastard . . .”
The blowing sand wasn’t helping, but it wouldn’t do this much damage, and I thumped the glare shield in frustration. I’d been so busy that I’d forgotten that the sun was going down. IR missiles worked fine at night, because they basically tracked contrasts, not a visual picture. But for a few hours on either side of sunset or sunrise, everything was the same temperature unless it was heated internally. Called diurnal crossover, it was unavoidable, and it nearly always destroyed the infrared picture. This was exactly why we used other weapons during those times. But the only other tool I had was my cannon. That meant getting very low and very close.
But men were dying. Our men.
I strained forward against the ejection-seat harness and continued down.
Three thousand feet. Four hundred eighty knots and descending. I was riveted to my radar altimeter, which gave me a digital readout of my actual height above the ground. A lifesaver at night or in bad weather. Like now.
Maybe the dust will thin out lower down
. I took a breath and ignored my thumping heart. It truly was hammering against my chest. No kidding.
“ROMAN . . . ROMAN . . . the Rags have crossed the road . . . they’re . . . they’re . . .
stand by!
”
“Rags” was politically incorrect shorthand for
raghead
. Meaning the Iraqi Army, in this case. I tried to lick my lips again but gave up. Pulling the throttle farther back, I fanned my speed brakes to slow the F-16 down as it passed 2,000 feet.
There!
I blinked several times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Darker brown. Rocks and the ugly, stunted green bushes that dotted Iraq. Ground!
Immediately staring forward through the HUD, I centered the steering cues toward the only position I’d been given.
3.3 miles.
I quickly glanced at the Radar Warning Receiver. Happily, it was empty of any signals from radar-guided missiles or antiaircraft artillery. Of course, it wouldn’t pick up infrared missiles or the few hundred AK-47s down there, but I’d take what good news I could find.
Leveling the fighter at a thousand feet, I closed the speed brakes and pushed the throttle enough to hold 400 knots. This gave me speed to maneuver without sucking down what little gas remained.
“ROMAN . . . they . . . position . . . between the road and the hill . . .” The transmission was garbled and riddled with static.
Hill? What hill?
His radio was breaking up badly. Something else to blame on the approaching sandstorm.
“ . . . anything on the road . . . repeat . . . kill anything on the road!”
“ROMAN 75 copies.” So, nothing friendly was on the road, and I had a license to kill.
And there it was.
A winding gray ribbon running north to south. The edges were irregular and dust swirled over most of it as I angled in from the southeast. Cranking the jet over, I lined up the steering line on the target. Staring down at the display above my left knee, I was seeing what the Maverick missile saw.
Nothing. Not a fucking thing.
As I raised my eyes, the Iraqi column suddenly appeared out of the muck. Instantly flicking the dogfight switch, I called up my cannon symbology and shoved the nose forward.
But it was too late.
I saw enemy vehicles, several armored personnel carriers, and lots of running figures as I flashed overhead. What I looked like to them I couldn’t imagine, but the whole area disappeared behind me in about three seconds.
Jabbing the
MARK
button on the keyboard beneath my HUD, I banked up hard to the west.
“CHIEFTAIN . . . CHIEFTAIN . . . ROMAN 75 is off west . . . re-attack in ninety seconds . . . from the north.”
He didn’t answer.
Swearing slowly and fluently, I put the target directly behind me and headed due west. The visibility sucked, but I thought I saw a rounded bit of higher ground and some movement. It must be the Marines.
Hang on, guys . . .
The
MARK
point was just that. When I hit the button, the F-16’s computer wizardry marked the point on the earth I was flying over, like a pin on a map. It generated a latitude and longitude with steering and distance to the exact position I’d overflown. That particular function had been created for just this type of situation. I now knew precisely where the Iraqis were—and how to attack them.
At four miles from the target, I pulled up to 2,000 feet and swept north. I’d fly an arc until I found the road and then attack the rear of the convoy with my cannon. They’d never see me coming out of the dust.
“ROMAN Two . . . One on Victor.” I pulled the throttle back and looked at my dwindling fuel readout.
“Go ahead One.” My wingman was still up there somewhere, thankfully.
“Call LUGER and have him bring a tanker as far north as possible. You meet the tanker and stay with him.” LUGER was the orbiting AWACS. Theoretically, he knew where all the fighters and tankers were operating at any given time. Theoretically.
“Two copies.” Good man. No questions or chatter. All he added was, “It’s getting a little shitty up here.”
“One copies . . . I need to re-attack. Get the tanker. You’re cleared off.”
I was now truly on my own. But my wingman was carrying anti-radiation missiles, utterly useless in this situation, so he might as well go get gas. I didn’t expect the tanker to cross into Iraq, but it was worth a try. Unhooking my sweaty mask so it dangled against my cheek, I glanced outside.
What I wouldn’t give for a drink of water.
“ROMAN . . . ROMAN this is CHIEFTAIN . . .” The radios exploded to life again. “ . . . moving . . . vehicles . . . the road. APCs and trucks . . . battalion strength . . .”
He was breathless, and as he broke off, I could hear the clanging of a heavy weapon firing. One of ours, I hoped.
4.2 miles.
The target was now back over my left shoulder and completely obscured by dust. I was also getting bounced around a bit by the turbulent winds on the front edge of the storm. Oh, and the ground had disappeared again.
Fucking terrific.
But I couldn’t wait any longer. Racking the fighter up, I pulled a hard, quick five-G turn and came around heading southeast. I knew I’d be angling in over the road, but maybe if the Iraqis saw me, they’d leave the Marines alone for a few minutes.
Rolling out, I called up the gun symbology and rehooked the oxygen mask.
“CHIEFTAIN . . . ROMAN is in from the north . . . thirty seconds.”
“ROMAN . . . God’s . . . hurr . . .”
And he broke off again
. For God’s sake hurry.
I’m coming buddy . . . hang on.
Anger lanced through me and my fatigue vanished. There were American Marines down there fighting for their lives. Guys like me from towns like mine. Men with mothers and girlfriends and kids of their own.
Fuck it.
I shoved the throttle and the nose forward.
At a thousand feet I still couldn’t see the ground, since the weather continued to deteriorate. Nudging the jet slightly left, I dropped down to 500 feet and slowed to 400 knots. Brown crud whipped past the cockpit and sand was caking into any part of the jet that wasn’t slick. Like ice. Brown, dry ice. What a weird place.
In 2.7 miles, I nudged the fighter down to 200 feet, praying there were no towers or cables to hit. The gun was up and I . . .
there it was!
The road.
Holding rock-steady, I craned my neck sideways to see around the HUD and lined up on the road.
“ROMAN . . . ROMAN . . . more trucks . . . from the north . . . we . . . overrun.” The Marine sounded like he was right next to me. He sounded scared.
“C’mon . . . c’mon . . .” I muttered, straining to see.