Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

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