Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (13 page)

As I got closer, I saw the big “HL” on each tail flash and recognized the 388th Fighter Wing, Hill Air Force Base, Utah. I’d never been stationed there but the fighter community was small, so odds were I knew some of these pilots. It didn’t matter. They were Americans, and these guys had just become my best friends—even if they didn’t know it yet.

I raced up in my four-by-four pickup and skidded to a stop ten yards in front of them. As I got out, twelve helmeted, dark-visored heads turned to stare. I walked over to the leader’s jet and stood just beyond the lethal range of the jet intake. The engine was powerful enough to pull a grown man through thousands of spinning turbine blades and turn him into shredded wheat. This has happened occasionally, by the way.

Looking up, I saw him raise his oxygen mask to his face and knew they were all talking about me.
Who is this guy? Should we shoot him now? Where the hell are we? Let’s shoot him now.

So I waved.

Nobody moved.

The high-pitched whine penetrated my earplugs, and I didn’t want to stay there any longer than necessary, so I made a cutting motion across my throat. This was the international signal to shut down the engines.

He shook his head slowly and they talked some more. I couldn’t really blame them. After all, they were on a foreign air base in the middle of a country none of them had likely ever visited. They could take off again if they had to, and this was, no doubt, part of what they were discussing. I had a thought then and trotted back to my truck, with twelve heads swiveling to watch. As I rummaged about in the bed, I could almost feel their fingers tightening on the triggers.

But I turned around, flashed a charming smile, and triumphantly held up both six-packs. I couldn’t see faces behind the visors but I absolutely had their attention now. Assuming they’d flown in from the United States, they’d been sitting in those cockpits for at least ten hours and a cold beer was a glimpse of heaven. Within thirty seconds, I heard the dying whine of a jet engine, then another and another. All down the line the big canopies yawned opened as the fighters shut down.

Booze wins again.

I dropped one of the beers in the ankle pocket of my flight suit, pulled a boarding ladder out of the truck and walked back to the lead jet. Carefully hooking the prongs on the left side of the cockpit, I seated the foam supports just forward of the gun and slowly climbed up the ladder.

Clearing the canopy railing, I leaned over and looked into the cockpit. The ejection seat took up most of it. On either side of the pilot were consoles about a foot wide, and every inch was taken. Most of the switches and knobs were things a pilot would set one time prior to takeoff and then leave alone. Radios, jamming pod, and the countermeasure controls were all here. The right side had cockpit lighting controls, environmental controls (air-conditioning and heat), and the sensor power panel for the various pods the F-16 carried. There was also the Data Transfer Cartridge (DTC) port. This was a VHS-tape-size cartridge that could be programmed by a special computer prior to the flight. Thousands of navigation points, threat data, weapons, and other useful stuff could be saved on this and then loaded into the fighter’s systems with the touch of a button.

During long combat missions or transoceanic flights, these consoles were cluttered with map cases, food, and water. This guy’s cockpit was no exception. Ever wonder how a fighter pilot wearing a G-suit, harness, exposure suit, and survival vest relieves himself while strapped into a tiny cockpit?

Piddle packs. Little tough plastic bags partially filled with absorbent sand. They had a sealable “neck” and were good for one toilet break of the liquid kind. Describing the mechanics of the
other
relief process in an F-16 cockpit would take an entire chapter. Anyway, this guy also had a few used piddle packs tucked against the bulkhead.

Speaking of the pilot, he was leaning as far back away from me as he could get. I noticed he was unstrapped from the ejection seat, and his G-suit hose was disconnected. But he couldn’t get out, because I was there.

“Hey dude!” I smiled and slapped the canopy rail. “Good to see ya!”

The pilot looked typical. About thirty years old, very fit, with sweaty black hair cut close on the sides. He was wearing oversize aviator sunglasses that looped behind his ears. His left hand was on the console just beneath the HUD so he could twist and face me. I then noticed his right hand was on the black 9-mm pistol in his vest. That made me blink. Suspicious was one thing but deadly force was another. I tried a different tack.

“How ’bouta beer?”

Dragging the perspiring can from my pocket, I carefully set it on the top of the ladder, and he slowly took his hand off the weapon. We stared at each other for a long moment, then he said, “Where are we?”

Actually, he shouted it at me like Americans do when they think volume overcomes language barriers. I leaned back, somewhat surprised.

“Wha . . .”

“WHERE . . . ARE . . . WE?”

I frowned a little but at least he was talking. I popped the beer and shoved it at him.

“Cut it out man . . . you’re in Beni Suef.”

He took the beer and nodded, pleased to have his suspicions confirmed. Taking a long swallow, he wiped his mouth with a gloved hand and said something I’ll never forget.

“YOU . . . SPEAK . . . GOOD . . . ENGLISH!” he shouted again.

“Wha . . .”

“YOU SPEAK ENGLISH VERY WELL!”

For the second time in an hour, my mouth dropped open. Then, as he stared at me, I saw my reflection in his big sunglasses.

Oh.

And then it all made sense. He thought I was an Egyptian. Seeing myself through his eyes, so to speak, I thought it was an understandable mistake. I was wearing an Egyptian uniform with Egyptian pilot wings and squadron patches. I also had a very bad mustache and was tanned like a piece of unshaven mahogany. Picture Pancho Villa in a flight suit and you’ve got it.

“Cut it out man . . . I’m an American.”

“YOUR . . . ACCENT . . . IS . . . VERY . . . GOOD!”

Anyway, we sorted it out.

Once they figured out that I wasn’t a terrorist who spoke East Coast Yankee English, everything was okay. They’d been on their way in country to Dhahran Air Base, Saudi Arabia, for a 120-day Southern Watch deployment. This was done through relays of air-refueling tankers, which started out in the United States. The fighters would then be “handed off” over the North Atlantic to tankers from bases in Europe. Sometimes they’d spend the night in Germany or Spain, but often, depending on the situation, they’d fly all the way in to Saudi or Kuwait. Fourteen hours in a cockpit the size of a desk was about as much fun as it sounded. In either case, the fighters would meet up over the eastern Mediterranean with U.S. tankers temporarily based in Saudi, called the Kingdom, that would take them the rest of the way in.

Apparently, there’d been a big dust storm, a khamsin, that kept these last tankers on the ground. Unable to make it to Dhahran and unable to return to Europe, the fighters had diverted into Beni Suef. Now, every such deployment was planned out to an amazing level of detail. Every leg of the trip, fuel numbers, divert bases, and radio frequencies are painstakingly arranged so when something like this happens, everyone knows what to do. These guys weren’t lost—no one gets lost in an F-16 crammed with electronic wizardry—they knew exactly where they were geographically, they just didn’t know
where
they were, if you follow. They were simply appalled by their surroundings. You don’t see burned-out aircraft, cratered runways, and donkeys on a U.S. air base.

I got the extremely nervous Egyptian maintenance officer and a crew of his minions to bed down the jets. This was done amid much supervision by the still-suspicious Americans. The Egyptians were shocked when each pilot pulled out everything needed for his aircraft from a big travel pod slung beneath one wing. Chocks for the wheels, intake and canopy covers, oil-sample kits etc. . . . The Arabs were even more surprised when our guys did all of this themselves. Egyptian pilots more or less shut their planes down, hopped out, and went to drink tea.

My new friends were less shocked when I led them over to the Oasis (as we called the General Dynamics compound) and into a few of the villas. They got positively enthusiastic when they saw the pool and the bar. I was so happy to have buddies again that, I confess, I didn’t work too hard on their logistical issues for a few days. Don’t get me wrong—Beni Suef wasn’t a bad place, and the two other officers with me were good guys, but I missed the camaraderie. Thirty other men who’ve survived the same screening, years of training, and the constant attrition are generally priceless to be around. Personal likes and dislikes aside, you know that you will count on them with your life. They’d die for you. There is no real equivalent to that in life beyond a fighter squadron. It’s like a fanatically loyal family with brains—and weapons.

I kept these guys around a few days while we worked out their flight plan and clearances to leave one Arab country and go into another. This would normally take about twenty-four hours, but I managed to cram it into three days. Hey, I had to be thorough, right? Right. They weren’t in any hurry, because no one—and I mean no one—liked Saudi Arabia. I called it the Great Hijacking.

T
HE
V
IPER BROKE LEFT OVER THE RUNWAY NUMBERS AND
pulled into a hard, six-G turn. Grunting against gravity, I closed my eyes and grabbed the “towel rack” that ran along the canopy in the back of the two-seat F-16D.

Every squadron had a few of these jets, and they were used for various types of “dual” training. That is, missions or events that had to be done with an instructor pilot physically in the same jet. Americans avoided them whenever possible, but the Egyptians used them a good deal—a relic of their Soviet training. I was always being thrown in the back for some sort of near-death experience that called for instruction.

I hated flying in the damn thing.

“WHUMP . . . WHUMP . . . WHUMP.”

What the
. . . my eyes popped open as the landing gear thunked down and the Egyptian rolled wings level. For a moment, I was speechless and the jet slowed as the guy up front prepared to turn to final.

“Hamad . . . wha . . . why did you put the gear down?”

“Sir?”

“Why is the gear down?”

“For to land, sir.”

I rubbed my face and took a deep breath. You never rolled into a six-G break turn and put the wheels down—it was a wonderful way to rip hydraulic lines and gear doors off the aircraft. Because of this, there was a strict airspeed limit of 300 knots.

So Hamad waffled through the final turn, scaring us both.

“Go around,” I directed, and he obediently raised the gear, added power, and off we went. Rather than stay in the pattern, we took the long way back to a ten-mile final, so we could talk a bit. Turned out, Hamad had flown MiG-21s and they always put the gear down in the break turn. This was okay, because a MiG-21 couldn’t pull six Gs, and it took about a minute for the crappy Russian hydraulics to get the wheels down anyway. In a patois of French, Arabic, and English, we decided that we were in an F-16 today and we’d do it my way.

He swore he understood.

But, just to make sure, I actually squirmed around enough in the back to wedge my boot under the gear handle. There was no way the sucker was coming down.

As the Gs hit during the break and my knee connected with my chin, I felt the handle bump against my boot.

“Heh, heh, heh,” I managed to gurgle from my pretzel-like position, feeling pretty proud of myself.

Then it happened.

“WHUMP . . . WHUMP . . . WHUMP.”

Sonofabitch. As we rolled out again, I saw that he’d
blown
the gear down with the Alternate Gear Handle. This was an emergency system only to be used when the wheels wouldn’t lower any other way. Doing it now could cause all sorts of problems. In fact, as I took the jet to land, my main hydraulic system failed.

Language was always an issue. Another day, in another D-model two-seater, I was trying to teach a kid how to land. The Egyptians conducted all their RTU-type training in their line squadrons, something we would never do. This was another Russian idea that didn’t work but they insisted on it anyway.

This particular pilot, named Moshen, had also come from MiG-21s and was doing his best to kill us both every time we came around to land. There’s a position in the overhead pattern, called the “Perch.” This occurs when you’re abeam the end of the runway about a half-mile away, and you begin to turn to final. In a fighter, this means dropping the nose and flying the jet around in a descending arc, so you roll out on a one-mile final. Every time is different, and you simply play the stick, throttle, and your eyes to make it happen. It’s a Zen thing.

This kid didn’t have it. He’d dive for the end of the runway with no concept of speed, distance, or death. Our conversation went like this.

“Moshen . . . pull your nose up.”

“Sir?”

“Pull the nose up . . . see the men on the ground running away? That’s bad.”

“Sir?”

“I got the jet.”

And I’d recover control, go around, and we’d have our three-language discussion. He’d swear he understood and I’d give him control back.

“Pull the nose up.”

“Sir?”

“Pull your nose up . . . we’re too steep and we’re going to die.”

“Sir?”

“Look at the fucking ground, Moshen!” I exploded in Arabic.

“Can’t see the ground, sir!”

“What?”

“Can’t see ground. My nose is up!”

And my mouth dropped open. Looking around the ejection seat, I saw him sitting with his head all the way back, staring up through the top of the canopy. I saved us again and discovered that every time I’d told him to pull his nose up, he did exactly that. He just hadn’t understood I was talking about the
aircraft
nose . . . not
his
nose.

Some days it didn’t pay to get out of bed.

L
IVING IN
E
GYPT AND TRAVELING THROUGH THE REGION GAVE
me insights into how some Arabs think and act. The sweeping generalizations made against them were as inaccurate as those about Americans. Finding any member of the U.S. military who knew much about Arabs was a rarity in 1992. Sure, we’d won the Gulf War, but after careers spent training for World War III, most military folks, myself included, sat back afterward and said, “What the Hell was that all about?” Iraq hadn’t directly threatened the U.S., after all.