Dan Hampton - Viper Pilot

“BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP…” The threat-warning receiver went ape-shit.

Blinking rapidly, I caught a glimpse of 6s and 8s and Triple-A on the little saturated screen. Flashes from thousands of guns lit up the ground like sparklers. Light gray fingers of smoke shot upward from all directions.

Mother of God!

Reacting instantly, I shoved the nose down, slammed the throttle forward, and slapped out more chaff bundles. The adrenaline shooting through me went straight up from my gut, through my heart, and out the top of my head. Shoulder-launched SAMs or big stuff, I couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter.

The ground was rushing up, so I reversed and began to pull as the jet bottomed out at a hundred feet over the highway. Looking back to the right as the fighter slowed, I instinctively shoved the throttle into full afterburner. Everyone would surely see me now. It didn’t matter—everyone already saw me. There is actually a difference in the way men shoot at you. It feels different if they’re merely reacting or frightened or defensive. Or angry.

This was very angry ground fire. These men were unbelievably frustrated that they’d been held back for five days and not allowed to fight. Now they had a target—me.

The Iraqis below were on the move with the intention of catching our ground forces with a surprise counterattack. They were thoroughly pissed off to have been spotted by this lone American fighter pilot. And they wanted me dead. It was like being rolled in honey and tossed into a hornet’s nest.

Green tracers shot past the cockpit; all around me the clouds changed color, from red to orange to pink, as lightning mixed with explosions. Then time compressed and I saw the vehicles. Patrol… my ass . There were hundreds of grayish-tan vehicles all up and down the road. A brigade or more, at least. I hadn’t seen them, because they were exactly the same color as the highway and they weren’t moving. In a moment of stark, unreal clarity, a few tank barrels swung around and I actually saw men in the armored carriers firing machine guns my way.

Dirty-white smoke trails lifted off from the throng of soldiers and snaked up at me. Shoulder-launched SAMs! Lethal little fuckers, with infrared seeker heads and very, very fast. With less than two seconds to react, I rolled back nearly inverted and pulled at the ground.

“Sonofabitch!”

I stabbed the countermeasure-dispense switch with my left thumb as fast as I could move it. This put out a sequence of chaff and flares that was designed to defeat infrared and radar-guided missiles. But it did nothing about Triple-A. Or about the fifteen thousand Abduls and Mohammads hosing their AK-47s at the sky.

Rolling wings level to the ground at less than a hundred feet, I pulled straight up. Grunting against the Gs, I forced my head around toward the SAMs and puked out a few more flares and chaff bundles. The jet was still fast, maybe 400 knots, but zooming uphill and slowing down. So I barrel-rolled back toward the road, eyes straining against the dust, and tried to see the missiles.

Then the horizon disappeared!

I had a moment of sheer terror that only a pilot knows when all his visual flying cues suddenly vanish. For an eternal half-second, I didn’t know which way was up, down, or sideways. This wasn’t good, a few hundred feet above the ground in a dusty cloud over thousands of angry enemy soldiers.

Get out of the damn cloud, my brain screamed. Over-pulling and slicing back toward the earth was the only way to do it, so I tugged the throttle out of afterburner and did just that. Problem was, without a horizon, at that altitude, I was about three seconds away from becoming a permanent part of Iraq.

Suddenly the dust peeled back, and I had a face full of earth. Scrub brush, tires, and even an old car chassis registered in my head as I dropped out of the clouds.

Holy shit!

Instantly pulling back hard on the stick, I felt the F-16 mush toward the ground. Shoving the throttle into burner, I caught sight of the road about a hundred yards off my left wing. I was more or less heading northeast, away from that mess.

They saw me.

Once again, everything that could shoot swung in my direction and opened up. Green tracers arced through the dark air like whipcords. Orange blobs from heavier anti-aircraft pieces floated past, and ground fire sparkled all around me. But the F-16 responded, and as I came up through the horizon, rolling away from the threat, I hit the pickle button and felt the cluster bombs kick off.

Immediately snapping the jet hard over to the right, I avoided the clouds this time, pointed east, and dove back toward the relative safety of the earth. Passing a hundred feet, I twitched my tail to the left, pulled out of burner, and raced away northeast. Looking back, Highway 8 was still lit up like Times Square. In fact, so many vehicles were shooting at me that the column appeared as if it was burning. More SAM trails streaked out beneath the clouds, and I snapped back right and plugged the burner in. I did this three or four more times, until the road disappeared.

Throttling back to mil power, I swallowed hard and realized that I’d been thumbing the countermeasures switch the entire time. It was empty, of course, and, glancing at the HUD, I saw that all my towed decoys had been shot away.

Thank you, Raytheon.

I also saw that Highway 1 was eight miles behind me and receding fast. Easing up to a hundred feet, I stared through the HUD. Off to my right, somewhere in the gloom, was the Shaykh Mazar MiG base, but they’d never fly in this crap. It did have SAMs and Triple-A though, so I angled away to keep clear.

There.

Straight ahead was the metallic gray-green snake of the Tigris River. Little brown villages lined the banks and I saw boats in the water. The men in the boats had seen and heard me. They were standing up, shaking their fists, and grabbing their undersized crotches, so, with a touch of bravado, I waggled my wings as I flashed past.

“I should’ve kept the cluster bombs,” I muttered, rolled up on a wing, and gave them the finger.

Once the Tigris disappeared, I began a smooth pull up through the dust and turned away from Baghdad toward the south. Initiating a data-link, I heard the little cricket noise as it found my wingman and displayed his position on my MFD. Passing 2,000 feet, I glanced at the display and saw WICKED 2 was actually about twenty-five miles due south of me.

Angling southeast to give Shaykh Mazar a wide berth, I broke into the clear at 8,000 feet and stared up at the sun. Taking a deep breath, I dropped the mask and leaned my head back against the ejection seat. I had the same feeling I’d had a few days earlier, at Nasiriyah, when I broke out safe above the mess. It was beautiful. For a few seconds, as I continued to climb away from the city, I just stared up at the powder-blue sky.

But even at only 400 knots there isn’t much time for reflection, so I ran the air-to-air radar out and locked onto my wingman.

“WICKED Two, One is Bull’s-eye one-five-zero for fifty-six… passing ten thousand for twenty.”

After a few seconds, I saw the familiar F-16 radar spike on my RWR.

“Two is contact.”

“Cleared to join… fighting wing. One is 5.1, tanks dry.”

“Two is 8.7… feeding.”

So, I had about 5,000 pounds of fuel remaining, and my wing tanks had been sucked dry. I glanced at the digital time in the HUD. From the time I’d passed the shoreline of the lake headed inbound, the entire thing had lasted less than six minutes and taken almost 7,000 pounds of fuel. And four towed decoys and 120 chaff and flare bundles. And two cluster bombs. And a partridge in a pear tree. I wondered if I hit anything. Sighing, I pulled out my gloves and wiped my face. It didn’t matter. They hadn’t hit me.