Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

clear of downtown. Sixty-one hundred pounds of fuel. That gave us a bit more than
two thousand pounds to play with before he was BINGO (out of fuel) and we’d
have to return to the tanker for gas.
I pictured it in my head as if I was looking down from above. God’s-eye view,
we called it. If the target was the center of a clock face, I was at six o’clock and my
wingman was at four o’clock. I’d turn north toward twelve o’clock and attack.
Number Two would circle up toward three o’clock and then turn in for his own
attack. The time it took him to do that would keep him clear of my frag. (“Frag”
was short for fragments—the bits of my bombs and whatever I’d hit that were on
their way back down after being blown up. It was critical not to fly through the
crap, since engines didn’t agree with pieces of metal passing inside them.)
“ELI Two . . . arc east at ten miles and call in from the east.”
Hopefully, this would work. With any luck, the Iraqis would be looking in the
direction I’d come from and my wingman would hit them from the side. You never
both attacked from the same direction if you could help it.
He zippered the mike, and then said, “Check cameras on . . . Green it up.”
I checked my switches again and made sure the camera was filming and the
master arm was on, or “green.” That was another advantage to flying with another
highly experienced pilot. He was thinking ahead, too. Zing was a good man. It
made things easier when you didn’t have to keep track of several young,
inexperienced wingmen.
My headset gave me a cricket-like chirp, and I glanced down at the right-hand
display above my knees. Multi Function Displays (MFD) were an amazing bit of
situational awareness. As the name implied, they could be set up to show almost
anything related to the jet, the weapons, or the area you were fighting. On the right
MFD, I had a screen up that presented known SAM rings, several routes of strike
aircraft, and my current target. The left display was used for my air-to-air radar.
A tiny symbol appeared, accompanied by another chirp, as my wingman datalinked
me his position. He’d avoided the unmarked SAM and Triple-A belt that I’d
found and was angling around to attack from the east.
I looked down and saw the northeast Baghdad suburbs disappearing beneath the
left wing. It was time.
“One is in from the south.”
Rolling and pulling, I brought the fighter around to the north and shoved the
throttle up to full non-afterburning power. The F-16 surged forward immediately,
and I checked the HUD.
9.1 miles to the target.