Dan Hampton - Viper Pilot

“Two is due north, five miles… tally SAM to your south.”

“Mark the launch point.”

“Done.”

Good kid. I rolled up and flew sideways up the river, watching for Triple-A. Suddenly, there was a tremendously bright flash near the intersection. Billowing up and out, a black mushroom cloud with dirty-brown edges completely obscured the area. As I keyed the mike to speak, flaming orange bits shot from all sides of the clouds. Then a thick, white plume shot up through the middle as one of the spare missiles cooked off. It corkscrewed wildly for a half second, then plowed into the military barracks south of the site.

“Cool,” someone said on the radio.

“Good hit AGNEW.”

I smiled but didn’t take my eyes off the target area. Sure enough, another SAM lifted off from the site that I hadn’t seen the first time. This one was headed east in my general direction, so they had an operable radar down there.

Shoving in the afterburner, I punched out more chaff and cranked the fighter over at the SAM site.

“AGNEW One… attacking SA-2, Tikrit.”

My eyes danced around the cockpit. The decoy was still intact, my jamming pod was transmitting, and the other Maverick was up. Using the HUD, I called up the BORESIGHT cross and simply dove straight at the SAM. As the Tigris disappeared beneath me, I stared across the pond at the launcher. Glancing at the video, men were plainly scrambling, and I blinked. They were swiveling the missile around by hand on its launcher. Maybe the motor had burned out or they’d lost power. I shrugged, refined my aim, and locked the base of the launcher. It wouldn’t matter in about forty seconds; as the missile swung around toward me, I hit the pickle button again.

The right-hand Maverick leaped off the rail, and I instantly pulled up and over to the right in a kind of half-barrel roll. More chaff… and I knife-edged over the pond on my left wing. For a long second, I saw the whole picture, and realized why we hadn’t seen this junk before. It was all concealed in the ravine. Launchers, transloaders, trucks, and missiles. They were hiding here until they were ready to fire—then they’d scoot out, let the missiles fly, and scuttle back into the ditch. That’s why there’d been no revetments. They weren’t needed, and, in fact, the Iraqis had figured out those were dead giveaways.

“AGNEW One… Rifle SA-2.”

Zipping past an island in the Tigris, I headed west over the town at a thousand feet and 500 knots. As I screamed over the outskirts of Tikrit and zoomed up in a left-hand climb, my missile hit. There were several explosions and lots of tracer fire. Must’ve hit an ammo dump, too, I thought, and pulled the power back. Leveling at 6,000 feet and 425 knots, I checked my gas and gauges and sent a data-link.

“AGNEW Two… request.”

“Go ahead.”

“Two would like to attack from the north. Tally a transloader at the eastern edge of the ravine.”

I looked at the MFD. He was about six miles northwest of the target.

“Say gas.”

“8.2.”

“AGNEW Two… cleared hot.”

He zippered the mike, and I took a deep breath. A couple good hits from two successful H-model Mavericks. Kanga would get a woody over this. There were a dozen brownish crop circles about six miles west of town, so I slowed down more and began an easy orbit. There might be other sites down there, and I wanted to watch Juice’s attack. Slewing the radar off to my right, I was rewarded with a lock.

And there he was. The F-16 was over the Tigris, heading south, and I began a gentle right turn to keep him in sight. Even though he was about eight miles from me, I plainly saw the Maverick launch beneath his wing. I caught a brief glimpse of his belly as Juice racked the jet up and away across the river to the east.

“AGNEW Two… Rifle… Tikrit.”

As I orbited, I saw his missile impact. It wasn’t a huge explosion, but the amount of smoke and fire suggested he’d hit one of the big transport trucks. He must’ve seen it, too, because he almost immediately said, “AGNEW Two, request a reattack to strafe.”

“On what?”

“Two is visual… uh… tally some missiles on a truck. At the far north corner near the road. I think they’re trying to pull out.”

“Cleared.”

“AGNEW Two’s in from the northeast.”

There wasn’t time to go back out and hit it with his last Maverick. The kid had good eyes. This should be interesting. There was now a lot of smoke over the target area from our previous attacks, and I never saw him come back in. To my horror, I saw a long, burning trail of fire smear itself across the ground where my wingman was attacking.

No… no . It couldn’t be.

Swallowing, I keyed the mike and watched the flaming mess spread out. Whatever was at the front was pointed and moving very, very fast.

“AGNEW Two… status?”

Nothing.

Ah, shit. I brought the Viper around just east of the road and stared through the smoke. He’d hit the ground. He’d fucked up his strafe pass and hit the ground. My eyes flickered up above the smoke, looking for a parachute. Maybe he’d ejected just before impact. Maybe—

“AGNEW Two is off west. Didja see that?”

I exhaled and squeezed my eyes shut for a second. Rolling back out heading south, I replied, “Good hit.”

Shaking my head, I managed a weak grin. I’d tell him about that later. We loitered around for ten more minutes while I strafed my cannon empty. I destroyed another truck that was trying to escape and got the FANSONG trailer.

“MUSKET, STAB… AGNEW flight is off for the tanker. SA-2 site south of the city is dead. Happy hunting.”

“AGNEW from MUSKET One… great work guys. And thanks!”

Zooming up above the burning city, we headed south. Passing 20,000 feet, I glanced back at the black fingers of smoke that rose, twisting and fading, from the brown desert far below. My wingman seemed motionless against the clear, blue sky as he hung in perfect formation off my left wing. Rocking him into close formation, I watched as he slid from side to side checking my jet for holes. I dropped the sweaty oxygen mask, took a long pull of warm, plastic-tasting water, and gazed down at Baghdad.

APRIL 13, 2003, WAS MY LAST COMBAT MISSION OF THIS WAR. In fact, my last combat mission as a military officer and fighter pilot. Baghdad had fallen on April 9 and, though I didn’t know it at the time, all major military operations would end tomorrow, on April 14.

During this war, 20,228 fighter sorties had been flown to employ 19,000 guided munitions along with 9,200 dumb bombs and CBUs. In a big, raised middle finger to those who’d believed strafing was obsolete (space clowns and UAV-lovers), we used 328,498 rounds of 20- and 30-millimeter ammunition. Flights over Iraq consumed an astonishing 612,891,043 pounds (90,131,035 gallons) of jet fuel. Sadly, some of this was used to drop 31,800,000 silly propaganda leaflets with more than eighty different messages. So many leaflets, in fact, that you could make a paper highway from Texas to Alaska out of them. (I remember a leaflet from the first Gulf War that said “SURRENDER AND DIE” instead of “SURRENDER OR DIE.” A PsyOps weenie actually wanted us to fly back to Baghdad to drop the corrected version.) Someone thought there was more value added to this than, say, Weasels getting H-model Mavericks. Makes you wonder.

More than sixteen hundred SAMs were launched during the Iraq War. Yet only one fixed-wing fighter and six helicopters were brought down. Just twelve years earlier, during Desert Storm air operations, we’d lost thirty-nine fixed-wing fighters and five helicopters. Better aircraft, training, and countermeasures all contributed to this success, but I believe there are other reasons: Iraqi confusion and tactics aside, Desert Storm tended to focus on jamming and suppression. Both are necessary but are basically defensive in nature.