Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

“None of us have ever seen the burn marks from the cannon.”
With that, there were some flashes from the bubble turret beneath the tanker,
where the boomer lay. I squirmed my completely flat butt around and shrugged a
pair of very tired shoulders against the harness. A few minutes longer, I’d be full
up, and we could go home. I thought about the Marines in Nasiriyah and wondered
if they’d gotten out. I had passed the last target area coordinates to the AWACS,
and maybe a flight of night fighters could scope out the area.
As the tanker came around heading west, the last rays of sun were vanishing
and the ugly haze looked a lot closer than it had before. Above me, the sky was
already dark, but since we were still in Iraq we all kept our lights off. My jet was
comfortably heavy with fuel again, and when we rolled out, the boomer said, “All
full, sir.” He whistled softly. “Fourteen hundred and seventy gallons.”
I jotted it down and did the math in my head. More than 10,000 pounds of fuel.
Clicking the disconnect switch, I slid slowly back and down away from the
boom, and waved to the boomer. Closing the refueling door, I added a little power
and took up a loose formation on the tanker’s left wing. We’d stay with him until
he got back across the border then we’d head south to Prince Sultan Air Base near
Riyadh. I wanted a gallon of water to drink, and an enormous, hot meal. What a
day.
“ROMAN 75 . . . this is TENDON.” It was a different voice. Probably the
tanker pilot.
I clipped the oxygen mask back over my face. “Go ahead.”
“Ah . . . AWACS just passed that KKMC, al-Batin, and Rafha are zero-zero,
due to blowing dust.”
Zero-zero. Slang for “zero ceiling and zero visibility.” Another way to put it
would be complete shit. No way to land. Those were all bases in northern Saudi
along the border with Iraq. Glancing ahead of us there was nothing but a rolling
carpet of dust and I wasn’t surprised. All 1.4 million square miles of Saudi (about
one-third of the continental U.S.) could disappear under blowing sand in a matter of
hours, and I’d been busy that long. This was worse than I’d ever seen it; picture an
undulating, brown sea stretching as far as you can see. The haze generated by this
monster was so high that the stars were dimmed. It was like staring through a
brown frosted glass.
“TENDON . . . can you get the weather for Prince Sultan and Riyadh”
“Already got it. Riyadh is a quarter-mile vis, blowing dust. Prince Sultan is still
at one mile.”
“Good enough, TENDON. We’re RTB at this time. If you get any updates