Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

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important, it wouldn’t be threatening any of the American close air-support aircraft or helos working over the city as the fight for Baghdad intensified. Skirting the Abu Ghraib section west of downtown, I could see the twin parallel runways of Saddam International Airport. Smoke still rose from the area to the east of it and downtown. On a whim, I flipped over my comm card and typed in a frequency. “Baghdad Tower . . . Baghdad Tower, ELI 33.” A male voice with a Southern American accent immediately answered. “ELI . . . this is Baghdad. Go ahead.” “Afternoon Baghdad . . . flight of <strong>Viper</strong>s overhead, goin’ home. Just wanted to see if we’d won the war yet.” “Waal, y’all are talkin’ to me and ah’m sittin’ in their tower eatin’ ice cream and wipin’ my ass with their prayer rugs. Guess we’re winnin’,” he drawled. Air supremacy indeed.
11 ELI 33 April 7, 2003 1046 local time, Baghdad, Iraq “SON OF A BITCH,” I MUTTERED INTO THE SLIPPERY OXYGEN mask as sweat ran down my forehead, through my eyebrow, and into my left eye. Then I saw it. In front of a rolling cloud of dirty white smoke, the surface-to-air missile came up off the ground. The SAM was twenty feet long, weighed a thousand pounds, and was accelerating to 2,300 miles per hour. Its speed exceeded a half-mile per second, and it was locked onto me. There wasn’t much time. “BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .” The radar-warning receiver, called RWR, screamed into my helmet, telling me enemy radars had locked onto my jet. “BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEEP . . .” I hesitated a long moment to make sure the thing was actually tracking me. I shoved the nose of the F-16 down, my butt came off the seat, and I blinked rapidly as cockpit dust floated into my face. The long white plume behind the missile flattened out as it leveled off a thousand feet above the Baghdad rooftops. Not me, I briefly thought. It’s onto something else. Not me. But then it pitched upward and the smoke trail shortened as the enemy radar fed tracking corrections to the missile, and it turned to kill its target. Me. Shit . . . Flipping the <strong>Viper</strong> on its back, I deployed one of my towed decoys. This little thing would stream out 300 feet behind me on a cable and generate a nice fat signal for missiles to track instead of my jet. I hoped so, anyway, since the SAM was gathering speed as it arced around in my direction. Staring down at central Baghdad, I swallowed hard, counted two of my heavy, thumping heartbeats, and then smacked a bottle-top-size button on the bulkhead above the throttle. As bundles of radar-deflecting chaff shot out behind the tail, I pulled straight down toward the city. Instantly reversing the pull, I snapped the jet around to keep the missile in sight and pulled the throttle back. I dropped out of the sky on the tip of a wild corkscrew
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VIPER PILOT A MEMOIR OF AIR COMBAT
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Epigraph There are only two types o
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Author’s Note I WROTE THIS BOOK M
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Simple. Or not. The Second Gulf War
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But men were dying. Our men. I stra
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I was now truly on my own. But my w
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“CHIEFTAIN . . . ROMAN 75 is off
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ground every aircraft on the contin
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missions, though puny by modern sta
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extract ourselves from Vietnam, and
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LESS THAN TWO WEEKS AFTER FOBAIR AN
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In November 1965, the first five Wi
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many cases, from lives lost. With t
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2 Cold War and Hot Times “IF THE
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IT WORKED LIKE THIS. The first two
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loathed most FAIPs. So, Daddy Rabbi
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conjunction with some properly embe
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At least long enough for me to star
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We were taught the basics of our va
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Southeast Asia within the past twen
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typical Type-A FNG, I wanted to mak
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listen to a few seconds of the audi
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LEARNING THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESS
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search-and-rescue in the event a je
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I nodded, now an expert on all Span
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of passage and a tradition. So, dur
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eathing matched my heart rate as th
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Clouds of white-feathered brown dus
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Euphrates River was almost turquois
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Suddenly a thin, pole-shaped object
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firing solution and a visual on the
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As I watched the jets spiral down a
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ackup targets, weapons, and timing.
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“I—” “C’mon boy . . . spi
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clueless non-fighter type (male, th
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pilot who spoke up was called “Li
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“Well, he happens to be correct.
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nice quarters had to go to the tran
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extra flying time with no brief or
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the flight controls working. Everyt
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was still up, which was bad. Pullin
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Mubarak was very definitely in powe
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shaking their heads. I thought it w
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around. In fact, there was a wrecke
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disconnected. But he couldn’t get
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family with brains—and weapons. I
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“Sir” “Look at the fucking gr
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5 Patchwearer FIGHTER SQUADRONS, LI
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currencies, and upgrades, must also
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Where the commander is the personal
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weapons. In this case, barring a mi
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The point is, as a Target Arm, you
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6 Intermission SINCE I WAS ONE OF T
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societies. Restrictions upon these
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attlefield thinking, and they insti
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until the building shook and I sudd
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one of the rooftop sentries could d
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any event, neither worked out very
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looming when the Twin Towers came d
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iver side . . . and the point of im
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face. Hijackers are cowards. In my
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took off the next day for the bleak
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Photo Section Undergraduate Pilot T
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Inbound SCUD missile being destroye
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Self-portrait during a surface-to-a
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Beni Suef, Egypt, 1992. A shot of m
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Baghdad reeling from Shock and Awe,
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77th Fighter Squadron “Gamblers
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Like father, like son . . . Me and
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7 Shock and Awe March 19, 2003 0530
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wingman on a two-mile string, allow
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Even as I watched, the fiery plume
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could fly through the green world o
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problematic. And irrelevant. I coul
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17,000 feet, panting hard. The RWR
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8 Sandstorm SOUTH OF NASIRIYAH, I P
Page 155 and 156: “Loud and clear, ROMAN . . . we
Page 157 and 158: “None of us have ever seen the bu
Page 159 and 160: uneasiness poked up through my bell
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Page 163 and 164: “Ali Tower, ROMAN 75.” No reply
Page 165 and 166: There. I’d just created an instru
Page 167 and 168: “Five copies.” “Seven copies.
Page 169 and 170: There! White painted runway marking
Page 171 and 172: and burned bread—but it smelled h
Page 173 and 174: particular day he happened to be to
Page 175 and 176: no mass uprising of the people to t
Page 177 and 178: “WICKED 23, this is RAMROD.” Th
Page 179 and 180: Taking a deep breath, I pushed the
Page 181 and 182: SAMs or big stuff, I couldn’t tel
Page 183 and 184: own villages lined the banks and I
Page 185 and 186: This went on for a few minutes whil
Page 187 and 188: 10 SAMbush April 6, 2003 1104 local
Page 189 and 190: and— “BEEP . . . BEEP . . . BEE
Page 191 and 192: ombs. These things are terrific Wea
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Page 195 and 196: SA-6s, so we’d give it a wide ber
Page 197 and 198: well, which rarely happens, when th
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Page 201 and 202: on the way out.” I turned down th
Page 203 and 204: the boy. He didn’t have any HARMs
Page 205: I sent a data-link, turned hard to
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Page 211 and 212: The second missile had disappeared,
Page 213 and 214: clear of downtown. Sixty-one hundre
Page 215 and 216: 6.1 miles. I leaned back and center
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Page 219 and 220: His reply was instantaneous. “ELI
Page 221 and 222: 12 Endgame IT LOOKED LIKE A GIRAFFE
Page 223 and 224: us, we accounted for seven tanks an
Page 225 and 226: were two big runways that came toge
Page 227 and 228: moments. When they did open up, the
Page 229 and 230: morning Hunter Killer mission. We w
Page 231 and 232: “Affirmative. Clear all friendlie
Page 233 and 234: and stared down at the intersection
Page 235 and 236: eneath me, I stared across the pond
Page 237 and 238: as he hung in perfect formation off
Page 239 and 240: Epilogue SEVEN MONTHS AFTER THE GAM
Page 241 and 242: July parade. Her son, a young Marin
Page 243 and 244: Acknowledgments NO ONE WRITES A BOO
Page 245 and 246: FOX ONE/TWO/THREE: Air-to-air missi
Page 247 and 248: VUL: Short for “Vulnerability”
Page 249 and 250: Map of Iraq
Page 251 and 252: warriors in, 306 washing out of, 37
Page 253 and 254: Basra (Iraq), 145, 179 Battle Damag
Page 255 and 256: CONAN (Desert Storm call sign), 68,
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Eisenhower, Dwight D., 155 electro-
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F-117 jets, 179 FABLE (Iraq War cal
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generation gaps, among pilots, 47-4
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statue of, 285 U.S. attempts to kil
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Jackson, Mike, 155 jamming in Deser
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iefings about, 83 Desert Storm and,
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offensive jamming pods, 18 Office o
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Kosovo and, 155 low-altitude flying
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Sheikh Isa Air Field (Bahrain), 193
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U.S. invasion of Iraq as act of, 18
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U.S. casualties in, 27 U.S. pullout
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About the Author U.S. Air Force Lie
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Copyright VIPER PILOT. Copyright ©
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*For help along the way with acrony
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