Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (17 page)

Yet.

A very gifted engineer named Gregg helped me rough out a design for what eventually became HTS R7. This would permit much faster targeting solutions with accuracies tight enough to employ precision-guided munitions. We actually drew this up on a napkin (no kidding) at a place called AJ’s on the beach in Panama City.

Then there were those of us who passionately believed in suppressing a threat by killing it. I mean, if the thing is in a million pieces on the ground, then it’s suppressed, right? Then it won’t be back to bother you tomorrow, next week, or in the next war. It’s dead. Some of us had seen this in combat and recognized the flaws in the anti-radiation, suppression-only mind-set. This would take almost a decade to change, but HTS was a step in the right direction and the system would undergo dramatic improvements. More to the point, it was all we had.

The pilot was the other reason the CeeJay concept was successful. There was now an entire generation of officers who’d always flown the F-16, and we were very comfortable with fourth-generation technology and doing everything ourselves. Sensor management was, and is, a huge part of a young F-16 pilot’s training. To be able to monitor and interpret radars, targeting pods, weapons, and all onboard systems while physically flying a Mach-2 jet is not a common ability. To do it at night, a hundred feet off the ground, while other men are trying to kill you, is extraordinary. I once took an F-15E WSO for an orientation flight in a two-seat F-16. He came back amazed (and worried) that I could do alone what it took his crew to accomplish in a Strike Eagle. Fighter pilots tend to rise to the occasion, whether it’s impressing young girls in the O’Club or mastering lethal technology.

So we rose.

A
MERICA’S ENTHUSIASM FOR WAR HAD BEEN FLAGGING DURING
the 1990s. The world saw through the Kosovo mess, and the general public was, frankly, not convinced that Hussein was much of a threat. Budgets were being cut and drawdowns were looming when the Twin Towers came down on September 11, 2001.

My squadron had rotated home from Southwest Asia two weeks earlier, and that terrible Tuesday morning was our second day back to normal stateside operations. There were mountains of paperwork to catch up on and a myriad of flying currencies to refresh. On September 11, I’d just landed from an early-morning mission when everyone began buzzing about the first plane strike. It was 0846, and I clearly remember wondering how some amateur pilot could end up over New York City and be so stupid as to fly himself into the Twin Towers. We all thought it was an accident. Turned out, it was a Boeing 767 that had the misfortune of being American Airlines Flight 11.

A little after nine
A.M
., as we stood staring at the enormous flat-screen picture of UA Flight 175 hitting the South Tower, it became obvious this was no accident. The military went through its standard procedure of locking down bases and recalling everyone within a day’s travel. Commanders and Weapons Officers were summoned to a hasty conference to get updates on the situation and formulate a reaction. President Bush, in an admirable and unexpected display of courage, continued to read
The Pet Goat
to some elementary-school students.

By 0945, the airspace over America was closed.

This had never been done before and was truly astounding, since normally there are about thirty thousand scheduled flights over the United States at any given time. This doesn’t count air cargo, military operations, or unscheduled flights, but by 1215 all aircraft were grounded, turned around, or diverted.

Everyone but military fighters, air tankers, and AWACS, that is. I was airborne by noon, leading a four-ship of armed F-16s over Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. There were no rules of engagement, no real idea yet of what had happened, and no one knew quite what to expect. Was this the leading edge of some sort of mass attack on the United States? Was it a prelude to a larger, nastier assault using chemical or biological weapons through, say, a port? Or was it all a diversion for something else?

No one knew.

So the few of us who were old enough to have been alert pilots during the Cold War were ordered to set up a similar program to cope with this new threat. Whatever “this” turned out to be. Never in a million years had I thought I’d be flying combat air-patrol missions over my own country. Usually the sky above America is a vast place filled with contrails, radio chatter, and aircraft, but now there was nothing. It was downright creepy.

The radios were initially very busy, because the five thousand or so flights that were airborne at the time didn’t take kindly to being directed to land. However, as the F-16s and F-15s got airborne all over the country, the airliners complained a lot less. One Delta flight that was a bit late in answering air traffic control got treated to the sight of my F-16 flying formation off its nose. Turned out, it was just having standard minor radio issues, but it got escorted down to final approach anyway. I’ll never forget the sight of a hundred faces pressed against the windows watching me watch them.

In hindsight, I think it was all handled as well as it could be. Remember, there was no procedure for this and no rules. Add to it the jumpiness of every air traffic controller in the country, and I believe we were fortunate that no one got shot down. It always surprises me how bloodthirsty the ground-pounders seem to be. One controller told me that he’d “give me clearance to fire . . .”—all I had to do was ask. Well, that wasn’t going to happen unless I saw an airliner roll over and dive for downtown. Even then, if we’d shot one, where would all the wreckage fall? The 20th Fighter Wing reacted admirably by only sending up flights led by extremely experienced combat pilots, and no mistakes were made.

When I landed and made it back to the squadron, there were messages from my sisters and, of course, my mother. Somewhat inured to my lifestyle by now, she wasn’t openly worried about me but she did say that my father was all right.

What?

It turned out that, unbeknownst to me, my father was in the Pentagon when AA Flight 77 hit. I mean, to survive everything he’d faced and then almost get whacked by a hijacked commercial airliner in his own country? That really
pissed
me off.

He was (and is) a prominent defense consultant, and was in the A Ring to see the assistant secretary of the Army. In an effort to be truly confusing, the building is set up in concentric rings, A–E, with the E Ring on the outside. My dad later told me:

“I’d been walking down the hall to the secretary’s office when I felt a tremendous, vibrating crash. I wasn’t worried about it, because most of the northwest side of the Pentagon was being renovated and heavy loads were routinely being dropped. However, when I got to the office, the secretary grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Come with me, young man . . . we’ve just been attacked. Look at your suit.’ Sure enough, I was covered with a fine gray dust.

“When we got outside, there was a huge column of smoke rising from the northwest side. Turns out that the terrorists had probably seen the helipad there and figured it was near the secretary of defense’s office . . . fortunately, their intelligence was as bad as their flying, because the secretary’s office is on the river side . . . and the point of impact was mostly vacant.”

Still, 189 people died in the Pentagon that morning, most of them trapped in the basement. I wasn’t used to worrying about my family—it was their job to fret about me. My dad had quit flying fighters when I was a kid, so I never really had to be concerned about it. I was even less thrilled when I found out that the remains of Flight 77 had penetrated all the way into the B Ring and missed my father by less than thirty yards. That feeling of helplessness sums up the day for me. The fighting end of the military is accustomed to living under threats. That’s what we do. America is supposed to be a nice, relatively safe place for folks to go about their lives, and suddenly it wasn’t. I felt somehow that we’d let everyone down because these attacks occurred. It’s a ridiculous thought, but then again, it was a strange day.

Later that night, a bit after midnight on September 12, the klaxon shook me out of my cot in the alert building at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina. Eight minutes later, I was rocketing down the runway in the rain and trying to wake up. As I got airborne in the pitch-black night sky and slapped up my landing gear, the radio broke out on the safety Guard frequency.

“All aircraft within range of this transmission, all aircraft in range of this transmission . . . this is Charlotte air traffic control . . . declaring a free-fire zone for twenty miles around Charlotte.”

I blinked. What?

“Repeat . . . Charlotte air traffic control declaring a free-fire zone for twenty miles around Charlotte!”

What the fuck?!

I was fully awake now.

“Charlotte . . . this is FANG 69 . . . flight of two Fox-16s out of Shaw. What’s up?”

“Thank God! FANG . . . this is Charlotte!” He sounded out of breath. “ . . . we’ve got . . . unidentified hostile aircraft . . . maybe terrorists . . . I’m declaring a free-fire zone for twenty miles around the Charlotte airport!”

I swallowed, blinked again, took a deep, deep breath, then keyed the mike.

“No you’re not.”

My air-to-air radar was scanning from the ground up to maybe 30,000 feet. And I saw nothing. “All aircraft on this freq disregard Charlotte’s last transmission. FANG 69 is now the on-scene commander in the Charlotte area . . . all aircraft on this freq check in.”

No one answered. Big surprise.

Then, on the intra-flight Victor radio, I said to my wingman, “FANG 2 . . . do NOT arm up.”

“FANG . . . this is Charlotte . . . we’ve got suspicious helicopters operating in our area!”

Helicopters? So al-Qaeda had helos now? Didn’t think so.

“
Why
are they suspicious?” Leveling off at 20,000 feet, I pulled the power back to hold 400 knots and glanced at the radar. A few days ago it would’ve been full of contacts, but tonight it was empty.

“FANG . . . uh . . . they’re not operating with lights . . . and they won’t answer our calls . . . and we’ve had reports of men . . . uh . . . jumping off to the ground.”

I thought I could see where this was going, and I needed to stop the madness. Quickly.

“Charlotte, did you bother calling Fort Bragg?”

The long, pregnant pause said it all, so I switched freqs and called up the Shaw AFB command post.

“Shaw, FANG 69 . . . request.”

“Go ahead.”

“Get on the landline and call Fort Bragg. Find out what kind of air activity they’ve got going tonight and don’t let ’em give you any covert-ops BS. Tell them there are armed fighters overhead and if they want their helos back in one piece then they need to ’fess up with locations and call signs.”

Fort Bragg, just east of Charlotte, happened to be home to the 82nd Airborne Division and the U.S. Special Operations Command. These people got paid to skulk around with no lights and no communications while performing suspicious-looking acts. At least suspicious to the uninitiated, which this guy plainly was. Turned out, that was exactly what was going on, proving again that we are our own worst enemy.

A few days later, the approach controller at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport asked me if I’d make a low pass over downtown Atlanta for morale. A show of force to reassure the folks that all was well. I was astounded. Downtown Atlanta? But we did, at a thousand feet over the skyscrapers, with the speed brakes out so we could plug in our afterburners and make more noise. He asked us to come around again and later told me people were crying and smiling in the streets.

That week affected me in an unexpected way. I mean,
we
were used to taking chances and were prepared, mentally and physically, to fight. But the average American is not, and I saw real fear on my neighbors’ faces. All my naive but generous, self-centered but well-meaning countrymen had gotten slapped in the face. Hijackers are cowards. In my opinion, true terrorists are all cowards. That’s what the label means: they inspire terror by preying on the weak and defenseless, as they have no chance in a stand-up fight against armed men. Every fighter pilot I knew was extremely angry about this and would’ve gone to war immediately, given the chance.

This passed. It obviously wasn’t our failure, and the wonderful American resilience to catastrophe began emerging quickly enough. The realization that we were not universally loved and admired sank in to our national consciousness, and America seemed to give a collective shrug. Okay, you don’t love us, and we don’t care. But you did awaken the sleeping giant and now you’ll pay for it.

American flags began flying everywhere, stores gave military discounts, and a countrywide “Support the Troops” movement gathered momentum. Many Americans still didn’t really understand the military or the larger world around them, but they were trying to learn and show their appreciation. Even those who didn’t believe in war protested the government and not those doing the fighting.

The ghosts of Vietnam were finally laid to rest. I think the realization dawned that we were not simply fighting an ideology, as with Nazi Germany or the Soviet version of communism. No, this time we were up against a religious fanaticism that was irrevocably and fundamentally opposed to everything we stood for or valued. Fanatics, of any creed, are dangerous, and there would be no compromise possible with the type of men who would kill helpless strangers. For the first time I could remember, America was more or less united against a common foe and motivated toward a shared cause of protecting the nation. This cause, right or wrong, would serve as the
casus
belli
for dealing with Saddam once and for all.

A
S THE
77
TH
F
IGHTER
S
QUADRON THUNDERED OUT OF OUR
base in South Carolina on Valentine’s Day 2002, more than a month before the invasion, we were ready. Bound for Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, we stopped overnight at Morón Air Base in Spain. Once there, we were sent to a hotel in downtown Seville to catch a few hours sleep. A public-relations officer, an officious little weenie who likely never left the base, told us to stay in our hotel—for our own safety. All thirty of us just looked at him and burst out laughing. What an idiotic thing to say to a fighter squadron on its way to war. Needless to say, late that afternoon I found myself wandering around this most charming of Spanish cities looking for the Cathedral of St. Mary. Strolling through the Alcazar Gardens, I noticed the city seemed remarkably quiet and relatively deserted. I thought I just got lucky. Coming around a corner onto the Calle Vida, however, I heard the sound of drums and the thumping of thousands of feet.