Dan Hampton - Viper Pilot

“FABLE One… Rifle.”

Holding steady a moment, I felt the cluster bombs kick off. Glancing over at my wingman, I saw a single CBU drop from under his left wing. Pulling straight up to the horizon, I rolled left to the north and snapped upright. FABLE Two floated past my tail as I twitched to the left. Bunting over, I popped a chaff bundle, came hard right, and stared back at the airfield.

For a second, all was quiet. A typical airfield with tin roofs shining in the weak sun and clusters of brown buildings against the tan dirt of Iraq. But then I saw the ground explode upward in dirty pillars of gravel and metal fragments. The plane, or something flammable, blew up. Red flames shot up through the dust and almost immediately turned into black smoke.

“Cool,” a voice said. My wingman, feeling his oats. This was my fifteenth combat mission in this war, and I was too jaded at this point to get excited. However, I did take a professional interest in destruction and noticed a smaller blast a hundred yards east of mine in the dirt next to the runway. He’d pickled late and missed the hangars. I zippered the mike and brought us around heading north.

“Two, at six miles turn back in for your re-attack. One will stay high, arc east, and keep you in sight.”

So he did. The other F-16 ramped down in line with the runway as I stayed over the Diyala River and looked out for Triple-A or SAMs. There were none, but I did find three revetments with aircraft. As Number Two came off, he pulled away to the west and began to climb. I continued to arc around the southern end of the runway and watched his CBU impact in the middle of the fire. We rejoined to the south, and my wingman remained high for cover while I dropped in and emptied the gun out after four strafe passes. A pair of aircraft blew up and burned in their revetments. I made a couple passes against the third one but never could get it to blow. Either it was a decoy, or its tanks were empty, or I missed. Twice. Personally, I’d go with options one or two. Still, anything’s possible.

Figuring we’d wrapped it up, Two and I went to the tanker and headed home. Chucky had a good mission, and together we bagged at least three aircraft, a hangar, and probably a bulldozer or two. What a Turkey Shoot. I remember thinking that the war was about over.

Wrong.

APRIL 13 DAWNED CLEAR AND BEAUTIFUL, FOR A CHANGE. No clouds, light winds, and maybe 200 miles of visibility. As AGNEW 21, I led the last two-ship of the morning Hunter Killer mission. We were originally fragged to work the new Highway of Death between Baghdad and Tikrit, deep in the Salahuddin Province.

With the collapse of Hussein’s regime, we were now dealing with die-hard military units and renegade fedayeen, sort of urban commandos. In a country that had required National Service and had fought, however badly, an eight-year war with Iran, there were plenty of Iraqis who knew how to handle weapons. In fact, more than a hundred thousand automatic weapons, along with grenades and MANPAD rocket launchers, had been handed out as the ground troops approached Baghdad.

Signs of this threat were everywhere. Off my right wing, dozens of smoky fingers rose for fifty miles up and down Highway 1. Like dead slugs, wrecked and stalled vehicles lay on either side of the roadway as the living crawled slowly north. Running my Maverick missile-seeker head along the pulsating jam, I searched for military trucks or tanks. Unfortunately, all I could see were bongo trucks, cars, carts, and bicycles. Then AWACS called.

“AGNEW 21 this is KARMA.”

“Go.”

“AGNEW… stand by grids.”

He passed the coordinates and I stared down at the map. They plotted out in Killbox 91 Alpha Romeo, west of Tikrit and nearly a hundred miles north of my present position. Unlike during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, everything north of Baghdad had been quiet throughout this war. Militia, irregulars, and fedayeen tended to vanish back into their villages, but remnants of regular military units were fleeing north to Tikrit, Mosul, and Kirkuk. Anticipating this—or, more likely, to secure the Mosul oil fields—a thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into northern Iraq. Still, there had been no “northern” front to this war, and generally anything beyond the thirty-fourth parallel was a Special Forces playland.

“AGNEW… say ETA and playtime.”

I looked at the estimated time of arrival readout in the HUD, my fuel, and did some quick math in my head. “Twelve minutes with a twenty mike playtime. If I hit the tanker first, I’ll be on station in forty-five minutes with a forty-five-minute playtime.”

“KARMA copies. You’re cleared to the DOG track at two-six-zero and contact TOGA 40. Contact KARMA when refueling is complete.”

I zippered the mike and peeled away left back to the south. This had become normal these days, as our planned missions were frequently changed in flight to solve whatever problems had come up. For a Weasel, it was no big deal, because we often didn’t have hard-and-fast missions anyway—besides killing SAMs, that is. Although the previous day someone had tried to get us to fly escort for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). After I finished laughing, I refused and went on with more important business. UAVs were becoming fashionable with the bespectacled computer-screen officers living in fortified operations centers. These little things, called Predators (which was also funny), were singularly useless in any kind of environment with SAMs, MiGs, and anti-aircraft artillery. In other words—a war.

Forty minutes later, my wingman and I slid off the tanker and once again headed north. Angling east of Milk Lake, we flew directly over Habbaniyah airfield about thirty miles west of Baghdad. There were still supposed to be five active SA-3 sites in this area, and we’d been trying to provoke them for several days. I think they were in heavy self-preservation mode, or just deserted, by this point. Think about it: if everyone you knew and everyone in your chain of command refused to communicate and/or disappeared, would you be motivated to fight?

Nothing showed itself, and we continued north up the east shore of Tartar Lake. KARMA passed us off to another controller, and we were given a holding point and altitude in the stack west of Tikrit. The city itself looked like a disturbed beehive. Fighters were everywhere, swirling, diving, and attacking. F-16s dropped like flashing darts and swept over the battered town. Distinctive, cruciform-shaped A-10s wheeled back and forth with their deadly cannons, spitting out shells as big as my forearm. Mushroom clouds blossomed every few minutes as a new target was destroyed.

“MUSKET 65… SAM in the air! SAM in… over Tikrit!”

“MUSKET Two defending.”

I woke up and stared out at the city. We were about ten miles due west at 20,000 feet, and fortunately the sun was almost directly overhead.

“STAB 74… second missile airborne and heading west. Heads-up, MUSKET!”

The Hogs were scattering as the missile shot up in the middle of their wheel. A third smoke trail shot up and headed east, so there were at least two active launchers down there. I supposed at least one Iraqi SAM crew had had enough of us. Maybe their women were watching. It was going to cost them their lives.

“KARMA, KARMA… AGNEW 21 is tally the SAM site.”

“AGNEW… can you attack?”

Can I attack? What else am I here for? I slewed my MARK diamond over the launch point and took the position.

“Affirmative. Clear all friendlies out to fifteen miles and above fifteen K. AGNEW is descending over the lake.”

“AGNEW One… this is MUSKET One.”

“Go.”

“There’s light Triple-A in addition to the SA-3.”