Dan Hampton - Viper Pilot

Fifteen hundred feet and about a mile away at 440 knots. If my timing was right, then ELI Five would be around four miles from the target. I came over the outer fence at a thousand feet and saw tiny figures of men scurrying over the berms. There were three revetments in the north cluster, with equipment and people in two of them. Kicking the rudder, the F-16 slipped sideways and lined up on the center of the three emplacements.

“Stand by, Five.” This would be close.

“ELI Five is four miles… TD box is on the north corner.”

I slid through 500 feet and let the green pipper settle on the base of the revetment. Pointed missiles were plain to see, and there were men running back and forth. Flashes suddenly caught the corner of my left eye, and I knew we’d missed some of the Triple-A pits around the complex. But it was too late to worry about now, so I held the pipper rock-steady and squeezed the trigger.

“BURRPP.”

The fighter shuddered as the cannon spat shells at the revetment. I let up for a half-second to let the symbology settle out, bunted over, aimed again at the missile launcher, and squeezed the trigger again.

“BURRRPPPP.”

The picture froze in my mind for another half-second when I stopped firing. The first burst of a hundred cannon shells hit a bit short and chewed up the entrance into the berm. Men were scattering left and right as the second burst hit the dirt inside the revetment that held the missile launcher. Everyone around it disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Rolling violently away from the emplacement, I shoved the nose back down in a wild-porpoise maneuver. This banged my head against the canopy but got me clear of any frag and spoiled the aim of anyone stupid enough to have his head up.

But there must’ve been at least one gunner with some balls down there, because streams of bright dots arced over my canopy. Sideways to the ground, facing back toward the SAM complex, I also saw half a dozen dirty-white popcorn puffs from 57-mm Triple-A. Spitting out some chaff, I snap-rolled upright, savagely pushed the nose down again, and headed west like a striped ape in a jungle fire.

“ELI Five is visual your smoke!”

Bright orange fire suddenly lit up the ground behind me and I twitched my tail to see. Twisting in the seat, I flipped the visor up and saw a black cloud envelop the emplacement I’d just strafed. Flaming bits of metal burst out in all directions followed by a SAM that shot out of the top. I was keying the mike to call it, when it fell over and dove into the Baghdad suburbs just across the canal. I’ll bet my wingman sees the damn thing now, I thought. Yanking the Viper around to the north, I said, “Drop on the revet just north of the explosion.”

“ELI Five, Rifle SA-3…”

I sent a data-link, turned hard to the north, and threw up the SLEWABLE mode of my radar. Looking back again over the seat at the SAM complex, I saw more Triple-A from the center area, but it was anger-management, not the tracking type. My radar didn’t lock but the RWR lit up with an F-16 spike from behind me.

“ELI Five is tied, visual.”

“Join to fighting wing. ELI Four, come south above ten K and you’re cleared to join to one-mile trail. LAPEL Three, the target area is yours. Stay east of the Tigris for five minutes till we get clear.”

“LAPEL copies… nice mess you made back there!”

I chuckled. “The scraps are all yours. Heads-up for at least two active Triple-A pits.”

He zippered the mike as I hit the Tigris and headed southeast between the river and Taji.

PASSING 15,000 FEET, I SLOWED TO 350 KNOTS AND PUT THE LONG brown ribbon of Highway 1 on my tail. A beautiful gray F-16 appeared a mile off my left wing, and ELI Four was dutifully a mile behind me and a little high. I waggled my wings to bring them both in and unclipped my sweaty oxygen mask. Wiping my face, I called up the steerpoint for the DOG South refueling track and stared down at Baghdad.

While my two wingmen slid into formation, I idly noted that my second decoy had disappeared somewhere over the SAM site and my chaff buckets were nearly empty as well. After battle-damage checks and fuel checks, we loosened up and headed down to refuel. The weather was getting worse, so I was happy to be done for the day. By my tally, we’d expended six cans of CBU cluster bombs and at least five hundred rounds of 20-mm cannon shells. And four HARMs, if you can count them. I passed all of this to LUGER as we checked out, and he replied, “A relay from JEREMIAH… shit-hot work today for ELI and LAPEL.”

Well, I thought, doesn’t that just put the cherry on the parfait. But I was nice and thanked him. JEREMIAH today had to be Kanga Rew. He was the only guy who bothered to talk to us.

“By the way, ELI… Air supremacy has just been declared over all of Iraq.”

I also found out later that the SA-3 complex was indeed a brigade-level headquarters and had contained at least four missile batteries along with twenty anti-aircraft guns for support. ELI and LAPEL had destroyed all four batteries plus the early-warning and search radars. Our attack had rendered the site useless. More important, it wouldn’t be threatening any of the American close air-support aircraft or helos working over the city as the fight for Baghdad intensified.

Skirting the Abu Ghraib section west of downtown, I could see the twin parallel runways of Saddam International Airport. Smoke still rose from the area to the east of it and downtown. On a whim, I flipped over my comm card and typed in a frequency.

“Baghdad Tower… Baghdad Tower, ELI 33.”

A male voice with a Southern American accent immediately answered. “ELI… this is Baghdad. Go ahead.”

“Afternoon Baghdad… flight of Vipers overhead, goin’ home. Just wanted to see if we’d won the war yet.”

“Waal, y’all are talkin’ to me and ah’m sittin’ in their tower eatin’ ice cream and wipin’ my ass with their prayer rugs. Guess we’re winnin’,” he drawled.

Air supremacy indeed.

April 7, 2003

1046 local time, Baghdad, Iraq

“SON OF A BITCH,” I MUTTERED INTO THE SLIPPERY OXYGEN mask as sweat ran down my forehead, through my eyebrow, and into my left eye. Then I saw it.

In front of a rolling cloud of dirty white smoke, the surface-to-air missile came up off the ground. The SAM was twenty feet long, weighed a thousand pounds, and was accelerating to 2,300 miles per hour. Its speed exceeded a half-mile per second, and it was locked onto me.

There wasn’t much time.

“BEEP… BEEP… BEEP…” The radar-warning receiver, called RWR, screamed into my helmet, telling me enemy radars had locked onto my jet. “BEEP… BEEP… BEEP…”

I hesitated a long moment to make sure the thing was actually tracking me . I shoved the nose of the F-16 down, my butt came off the seat, and I blinked rapidly as cockpit dust floated into my face. The long white plume behind the missile flattened out as it leveled off a thousand feet above the Baghdad rooftops.

Not me, I briefly thought. It’s onto something else. Not me.

But then it pitched upward and the smoke trail shortened as the enemy radar fed tracking corrections to the missile, and it turned to kill its target. Me.

Shit…

Flipping the Viper on its back, I deployed one of my towed decoys. This little thing would stream out 300 feet behind me on a cable and generate a nice fat signal for missiles to track instead of my jet. I hoped so, anyway, since the SAM was gathering speed as it arced around in my direction. Staring down at central Baghdad, I swallowed hard, counted two of my heavy, thumping heartbeats, and then smacked a bottle-top-size button on the bulkhead above the throttle. As bundles of radar-deflecting chaff shot out behind the tail, I pulled straight down toward the city.