Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

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 Viper 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