Dan Hampton - Viper Pilot

Toward us.

The Mission Commander, an F-16 squadron commander from Torrejon Air Base, calmly replied. I heard the F-15 Eagle flight lead acknowledge and the contrails got longer as they lit their afterburners and raced south to fight the MiGs.

“Lucky bastards…” I muttered. But we were certain we’d have enough fighting of our own in a few minutes, when we got within range of the surface-to-air missiles around Mosul.

Everything got quiet for roughly thirty seconds. The Eagles were working out among themselves who would kill which group of Iraqis, and everyone else was listening. Then it all came apart as the strikers broke through the SAM engagement zones.

“CONAN One… spiked south.” The F-15 flight lead radioed that an enemy fighter had locked onto him.

“RAZOR Three… Mud… SA-2… southwest!” One of the F-16s up front was locked by an SA-2 somewhere south of him.

“TRON… Music on!” Somewhere an EF-111 had activated his jamming systems.

“CONAN Four! Missile in the air… Mosul.”

I didn’t know if he meant a SAM or had picked up the inbound contrail of an enemy air-to-air missile.

“SAM off the ground… missile in the air from… Mosul… I…” Whoever it was had picked up a missile from the SA-2 batteries around Mosul.

“TORCH One… Magnum SA-2!”

That was us! Snapping my head left, I saw fire shoot out from beneath my flight lead’s wing. The big HARM missile nosed over for a second then leveled off and accelerated. I watched, fascinated, as it abruptly zoomed up, trailing thick, white smoke. I’d never witnessed one actually launched. Managing to look out ahead of me, I was amazed to see three or four long, gray trails reaching up from the ground like disembodied fingers.

SAMs!

Four of them that I could count. Even as I watched, they began to arc around in our direction. I glanced at my warning display and saw several big “3” symbols overlapping each other in the middle of the scope. A sharp, cold spear shot up from my belly, through my chest, and I tried to swallow but couldn’t. I had just caught my first glimpse of the Elephant.

Seeing the Elephant, a symbol of combat since Hannibal crossed the Alps, is looking Death in the face. Your first real glimpse of your own mortality.

It hadn’t really sunk in until that moment that all of this was very real. The distant black smears against the pale sky had been aircraft with men inside, a few moments ago. Those smoke trails coming up at me were live SAMs. High-explosive warheads traveling at three times the speed of sound and coming directly at my butt …

My skin felt prickly and, as time slowed down, my awareness increased. I noticed that the cockpit smelled like a wet dog—we had sheepskin covers over the ejection seats, and this one had gotten wet and mildewed. The big engine vibrated through the floor and I felt it throbbing against my heels. There was a fly crawling across the HUD. I had just seen the Elephant. No amount of training can prepare a man for that first realization that other men are actively trying to kill him. Hopefully, you don’t freeze; ideally, you just react.

I did.

“TORCH Two… SA-3… south…”

Clouds of white-feathered brown dust rolled across the ground as the missiles lifted off.

My flight lead was a big, gruff pilot called Orca. He calmly zippered the mike and pulled sideways to put the missiles off his left wing. This should’ve given the missile’s tracking radars trouble but they kept coming. Chaff blossomed behind the F-4, and I groped for my own dispense switch. The big Phantom flipped over, pulled down toward Iraq, and I followed. Being shot at while inverted at 20,000 feet over enemy territory was definitely a new experience. As the earth spun around beneath me, the Phantom lumbered upright, and I snap-rolled the F-16 to follow.

Looking south, I could only see one contrail left. My RWR was still cluttered with “3” symbols, and the audio warning was screeching in my helmet. But Orca pulled straight up in a classic last-ditch maneuver. White vapor trails streamed off his wingtips as we came up through the horizon and pointed at the sun. Almost simultaneously, we both rolled in the direction the missiles had to be coming from. More chaff spit out behind him as we zoomed up and continued to roll until we were upside-down again.

He came through the horizon inverted, then sluggishly leveled off. I found myself between the Phantom and the SAMs, so I instantly barrel-rolled over his tail to about a mile behind him. My face was sweaty and I was breathing hard, but it occurred to me that the maneuvers and chaff had worked. At least three SAMs had been shot at us, and we’d survived. And those were three SAMs that hadn’t been shot at the strikers.

“Two Dogs… Slapshot SA-2 bearing two-zero-five…”

My personal call sign penetrated the noise, confusion, and fog of combat, and that was precisely why we used them. A “Slapshot” was a quick-reaction HARM fired along the given bearing. It was supposed to force the SAM radar off the air or, if he stayed up, it would theoretically go right down its throat.

Almost of their own accord, my hands moved, and I pulled the F-16 to a heading of 205 degrees and stared at the HUD. The big pointing cross symbolizing the HARM’s nose hovered over my heading display. My eyes flickered to the bottom of the HUD and I confirmed, again, that my weapons were armed. Swallowing once, hard, I mashed down on the red pickle button and held it. For a long half-second, nothing happened. But as I looked out at my left wing, the jet shook violently and the HARM snaked off the rail.

“Sonofabitch…” It actually worked.

“TORCH Two, Magnum SA-2!”

I immediately pulled up and away from the launch. We did this at low altitude, because the HARM left quite a trail and the enemy was quite capable of doing to us what we did to him. That is, following the smoke back to the aircraft and shooting it out of the sky.

Then the radios went batshit. The F-15s were talking about splashing MiGs, more SAMs were off the ground, and several strikers in front of us jettisoned their bombs as they reacted to an air threat behind them.

Behind them?!

My head swiveled like it was on rollers. I tried to calmly scan the sky in sections, as I’d been taught, but my eyeballs just bounced around. If there were MiGs behind the lead group of our jets, then they’d be… here.

Suddenly, I knew what had happened. Some Eagle driver had seen our HARM launches and thought they were air-to-air missiles! I chuckled, but it was understandable. We’d never fired those things off in peacetime, and it must’ve looked suspicious.

I quit looking at my air-to-air radar.

“RAZOR One… rolling in from the north… RAZOR Three, arc southeast for the roll-in.”

The Mission Commander’s calm voice came over very clear—a true professional. His flight acknowledged, and I glanced forward long enough to see a whole flock of F-16s flip over on their backs and dive toward the ground.

A surface attack like they were doing was fairly straightforward. There would be a route and separate altitudes, usually in 4,000-foot blocks, into the target area. These would keep you clear of other flights attacking the same target. Theoretically. The Initial Point (IP) was like the doorway. Systems would be checked one more time, air-to-air radars would sweep for enemy fighters, and countermeasures activated. Past the IP, a pilot would fly a specified heading and distance to his “action,” or “roll-in” point. Here, he’d put the jet into whatever weapons delivery parameters were needed to release, fuse, and detonate his ordnance. It was all planned in advance and relatively predictable.

Wild Weasel attacks weren’t like that for the very good reason that air defense sites were unpredictable, and mobile SAMs were just that—mobile. You can’t plan specific attacks without fixed targets. So we needed something that could work “on the fly” against most any threat.