Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (16 page)

The war ended but the infidels remained. The presence of non-Muslim soldiers in the holy kitty-litter box of Saudi Arabia began to cause great offense throughout the Kingdom and the Islamic world. It was fine for us to fight and even die for them and their oil, but now that the danger was past they wanted us out. Even though Saddam was a genocidal, homicidal butcher, he was, after all, a Muslim and therefore preferable to the bacon-loving degenerate soldiers who had just saved the day.

The temporary solution was to house us someplace out of the way and relatively discreet. Dhahran was chosen, and the 4404th Combat Wing (Provisional) took up permanent residence in the Bedouin compound outside the city.

It was called Khobar Towers—and it was as good as it was going to get.

One humid, sticky night in June changed all that. As the faint mournful echoes of evening prayer floated over our compound, the lights flickered and for a fraction of a second I felt an overpressure in my ears. My brain didn’t process the cause until the building shook and I suddenly found myself on the floor in the next room. The glass picture window that made up the exterior wall was gone. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was sitting on most of it. More was in my hair and stuck through my skin in various places. But not my eyes, thank God. As I lay there, legs spread and sticky back against the wall, it occurred to me to inventory my critical body parts.

Testicles first.
Thanks again.

Then feet, legs, hands, etc. . . . As I was doing this, my suitemate (each officer got his own room in the four-bedroom suite) appeared in the doorway. The blast had knocked him out of bed and he stood there a moment, scratching himself and peering at me through one open eye.

“Hey . . . I think that was a bomb.”

No shit, Sherlock.

In fact, it was an enormous bomb.

Twenty-five thousand pounds of TNT had been packed into a sewage service tanker truck and driven up to the perimeter on the northeastern corner of the compound. A USAF Security Policeman had actually seen the truck and its getaway car approach the fence. Two local Saudis had jumped out of the truck into the car and sped off. Recognizing it for what it was, the cop tried to evacuate Building 131, the closest to the truck—but was too late.

All the American pilots had just finished our nightly fun of cracking skulls during games of roller hockey. I slowly limped upstairs and was heroically drinking milk in my kitchen on the top floor of Building 133 when the bomb went off. Minutes later, as I lay there in the puddle of glass and blood, I remembered a similar blast in Cairo five years before. It had felt more or less the same, just much smaller, and I’d been a bit farther back than the fifty yards that had separated me from the explosion. Staring at my feet, I realized I was still wearing my skates. The other captain saw it, too, and we both laughed.

The laugh of the terminally crazy.

I ditched the skates as sirens began to wail and the shouting began. We made a quick tour of the tenth floor, kicked a few people out, and I limped toward the stairs. I’d gotten a piece of glass stuck in my face and wasn’t seeing so well, but eventually we got downstairs and emerged into chaos. All the compound lights were out, but the lights from the surrounding Saudi housing area were shining brightly. Dust hung in the air, thick and nearly motionless. Buildings were burning, people were running, and there was lots of shouting. You see, most of the Air Force is made up of support folks. Essential, of course, but they weren’t trained for combat and most of them had no idea what to do. Also, no one except pilots and police had weapons.

Fortunately, the security force reacted quickly, and so did the medical folks. As we rounded the corner, there were already armed cops gathering around the shattered gap in the fence. The wounded were getting triaged on the street. Others were heading toward the tottering building to see if they could help pull bodies out or assist the injured. The police realized the danger and eventually cleared everyone away.

Nineteen Americans died that night. Scores of others were wounded.

“We will pursue this,” President Clinton declared. “Those who did this must not go unpunished.”

Right.

Well, that didn’t happen. The 4404th Wing Commander, Brigadier General Terry Schwalier, eventually even got a second star. Not at first, of course. Someone had to be held accountable, and, quite correctly in my opinion, the blame fell on Schwalier, the man ultimately responsible for the safety and security of the Wing.

Even though this was 1996 and long before 9/11 made bin Laden and al-Qaeda household names, there’d been obvious signs that the situation was deteriorating and that American servicemen in Saudi Arabia were at risk. The previous November, for instance, a car bomb detonated in Riyadh outside the office of the Program Manager for the Saudi National Guard. Five Americans had been killed and another thirty people wounded. All through the winter and early spring of 1996 there had been bombings and violence in Bahrain. In January 1996, an Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) report specifically mentioned the threat of vehicle bombs along the Khobar perimeter.

Despite these warnings, Khobar remained exposed and vulnerable in June 1996. Two sides of Khobar were bordered by a Saudi housing area. The north end (where the bomb would explode) was an open park for locals. Schwalier did conclude that the threat of a car bomb necessitated enhanced security so the single gate into Khobar Towers ended up looking like the Maginot Line. Pillboxes, wire, armed guards, etc. . . . all very impressive but what about the
miles
of exposed perimeter around the rest of the complex? Even a simple-minded Saudi terrorist is smart enough not to attack the strongest part of a fence.

Eventually thirty-six of the thirty-nine AFOSI recommendations were implemented at Khobar, but it was too little and too late. For instance, a “Giant Voice” public-address system that could’ve been used to warn of attacks was incomprehensible to anyone
inside
a building on the Khobar complex. Also, even if one of the rooftop sentries could detect an attack (and one did see the tanker truck pull up on June 25) there was no quick way to sound an alert. There was no siren that could be activated by the sentries, because the wing leadership decided it would offend the local Saudis. Any information or suspicious activity had to be called in to Central Security Control, then passed to the Wing Operations Center and finally to the Wing Commander before a decision could be made. The “system” was, in a word, useless.

I freely acknowledge it was a tough security situation and the likelihood of Saudi cooperation was pretty small, but I never saw evidence that Schwalier tried to press the issues with them. Or with the American chain of command. I contend the root problem was his failure to take a hard line with our so-called hosts to ensure the security of the U.S. servicemen at Khobar. Both the military and civilian leadership seemed to me more concerned with not offending the Saudis than they were with the safety of our people.

Ultimately, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah al-Hejaz (Party of God) was found responsible for the attacks. Thirteen Saudi nationals and one Lebanese man were indicted by the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia, but there has been no justice to date. These terrorists remain on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Although Schwalier was eventually cleared and his actions found not to be culpable for the attacks, my opinion of him remains unchanged. Doing everything possible to protect your people is a fundamental command principle. It can’t always be achieved, especially in combat, but a good leader would fall on his sword over conditions like this, and I don’t believe Schwalier made the necessary efforts. He didn’t make any waves in the interest of our security that I could see, and the result was nineteen dead Americans and hundreds more like me who live with their injuries every day. Remember, we’re not talking about a civilian company that makes computer chips or sells fast food. This is the front-line military, deployed on foreign soil. Not doing enough doesn’t damage a corporate bottom line—it gets people killed.

More broadly, the Khobar bombing was a warning of just how ominously unprepared the military leadership was to face the post–Cold War security reality, where extremist groups can pose as much of a threat as state-sponsored fighters. (This new state of affairs would, in time, change everything—from training to weapon systems to tactics.) In August 1996, a month after the attack, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa titled “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” referring to the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (home of the Muslim holy sites Mecca and Medina). While bin Laden’s “declaration of war” aroused far too little interest among the public and intelligence circles, those who were in the Khobar Towers on June 25, 1996, and were exposed to the savage violence of terrorism knew the road ahead had just become far darker.

5

U
NFORTUNATELY, THE
1990
S GAVE RISE TO SCORES OF CAREERISTS
who filled all the squares, went to the correct staffs and knew all the right people. The problem was that they couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Our own squadron commander, who bravely ran away from the Khobar fence, had never held any field-grade squadron leadership positions prior to being given a command. And it showed. There are guys who fly fighters and there are fighter pilots. This guy was definitely
not
a fighter pilot.

Some of these men were on decoration quests—either for vanity or career enhancement. Personally, I think most decorations are absurd. Even some of the respected ones can be given away for horseshit reasons. I knew of a major (now, unbelievably, a major general) who put together PowerPoint briefings for generals during Desert Storm and got a Bronze Star for it. He would always say that he’d gotten it during Desert Storm, which was true but disingenuous. Someone would inevitably ask which squadron he’d been with or how many combat missions he’d flown and this guy would always manage to change the subject. The Air Force also permits combat flying time to be logged if you are physically in a designated combat zone, even if there is no fighting going on. This is how some men, like Schwalier, are able to log combat time without ever actually fighting. Again, to me, disingenuous.

My point is not to necessarily pick on men like Schwalier but to illustrate the weaknesses of the system that created them. Loyalty is a fine thing and one of the cornerstones of any combat profession—but so is accountability. I’ve seen officers fired because their subordinates were having affairs, or had drinking problems or for a score of other things completely beyond a commander’s control. It is wildly hypocritical and inconsistent to then permit a commander to be exonerated for loss of life that may well have been preventable.

Anyway, as the 1990s waffled on, we saw more and more of this. Kosovo and Operation Allied Force seem to have been wholly fought to deflect national attention away from Bill Clinton’s perennially open pants. That, and General Wesley Clark’s narcissistic dream of being considered a latter-day Eisenhower. In any event, neither worked out very well. Clark actually ordered his subordinate commanders to attack Russian soldiers at Pristina airport. Fortunately, the senior British officer, General Sir Mike Jackson, refused point-blank. In fact, he replied, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.”

Out of the 120-something kills claimed on Serbian armor, we could only find a dozen vehicles destroyed. We did find a lot of destroyed decoys—plywood tanks with little kerosene stoves inside to provide heat signatures, or old World War II relics without treads. The Yugoslavs simply lit fires under the bellies to heat up the metal so we’d see them with our infrared systems.

After the war, a battle-damage assessment team was told to go back in and “find” the correct number of wrecked tanks. The Air Force major in charge of the team came back with twelve confirmed tank kills and refused to inflate the numbers to help Clark’s entry into politics. This didn’t do the major’s career any good, so he transferred to the National Guard. Guys like that get a scotch from me on sight.

As time rolled on, the Vietnam-era pilots eventually retired, and most of us who’d fought the First Gulf War slowly staggered up the ladder. We became flight leads, instructor pilots, and commanders. A very few of us became Weapons and Tactics Officers. We’d spent the years between the wars over Iraq occasionally getting shot at, working out system limitations, and deriving tactics. There were tireless efforts by many talented guys to improve our systems and weapons.

For the F-16CJ, the HARM Targeting System (HTS), thankfully, evolved into something that had less and less to do with lobbing anti-radiation missiles and more to do with precision-targeting. HTS was initially fairly inaccurate, since the HARM didn’t require a very tight firing solution. The missile was supposed to “see” the radar signal, called a “beam,” and follow that beam back to impact. Think of standing in a dark room with a pistol and shooting at pulsating flashlight beams, and you get the idea. However, shooting at the beam doesn’t mean you have much of a chance of hitting the source. You might scare it though, and force it to turn off. That’s okay for the moment, but the flashlight is still alive and may get you another time.

So, lobbing HARMs at radar beams and calling it Weaseling is an extremely dangerous notion. Threats rarely do what you expect, and that early version of the HARM, in many opinions, was really a very crappy missile. If the threat didn’t emit, then the HARM had nothing to guide on and went “stupid.” The concept had worked in the 1960s and 1970s, when SAMs had to actively emit to shoot missiles, but by the 1990s SAMs utilized optics, infrared, or other guidance sources.

The Texas Instrument marketing folks were obviously very good, because I thought, as did many others, that the missile was generally a waste of a weapon station. I shot over thirty of these things in combat and have no idea what they hit except the earth or maybe some poor Iraqi jabbering on a cell phone at the wrong time. So HTS was only initially designed with enough accuracy for the HARM, and the end effect was a targeting solution that wasn’t good enough for precision weapons.