Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

“ELI Three, attacking.”
With my right thumb, I called up the SMS display and checked the CBU settings
one last time. The CBU-103 was a vast improvement over older cluster bombs. It
could correct for winds, and in Iraq the wind was a very real variable that could
easily mean the difference between an effective attack or a miss. Fins on the tail
would also cant to spin the canister, and once it reached a preset rate, the canister
would open and the bomblets would deploy. I confirmed all these settings, pulled
the power back to hold 425 knots, and kept a slight descent as I passed 10,000 feet.
Black smoke continued to rise from the south and east, and my radar was
speckled with contacts. Occasional flashes along the river caught my eye; it looked
like the downtown fighting was still very heavy. Farther west, I saw the hanging
gray fingers from more SAMs but hadn’t seen them launch. The RWR was
saturated and useless, so my eyeballs were everything at the moment. The Strike
frequency was alive with close air-support chatter, so I turned the UHF radio down.
At seven miles, I was in the sweet spot. The jet was throbbing perfectly, I was
dead on-target, and everything was working. The HUD symbology for this
particular weapon was called a “staple,” because that’s what it looked like. The top
and bottom represented the maximum and minimum release ranges for the CBU
based on my altitude, airspeed, and winds. There was a smaller staple for the
optimum zone, and this is usually where we tried to release—situation permitting. I
watched the little caret slowly slip down the staple and squinted through the HUD.
The TD box was sitting firmly where I left it, but I was still too far away for finetuning.
“ELI Three . . . break right. Now!”
My throat clutched, but my hands instantly moved. Instinct and training habits
took over again and I shoved the throttle forward, over-pulled to the right, pumped
out chaff, and yanked the fighter sideways back toward the north. I was directly
over some shitty little town on Highway 5 with a perfect four-way canal-road
intersection. Rolling out directly over the road, I slammed the stick forward, felt my
helmet smack the canopy, and blinked as the cockpit dust floated into my face.
“Missile in the air! Missile . . . ah . . . north Bull’s-eye ten.”
I twisted in the seat and looked back over my left shoulder, bringing the jet
along, too. There! I picked up the smoke trail as it cleared the horizon line.
Actually, there were two.
“ELI Three’s tally two missiles. Left eight o’clock . . . they’re climbing
eastbound and correcting north.”
That’s why I hadn’t seen them. They’d come from the edge of the city just past