Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

as he hung in perfect formation off my left wing. Rocking him into close formation,
I watched as he slid from side to side checking my jet for holes. I dropped the
sweaty oxygen mask, took a long pull of warm, plastic-tasting water, and gazed
down at Baghdad.
APRIL 13, 2003, WAS MY LAST COMBAT MISSION OF THIS WAR. In fact, my last combat
mission as a military officer and fighter pilot. Baghdad had fallen on April 9 and,
though I didn’t know it at the time, all major military operations would end
tomorrow, on April 14.
During this war, 20,228 fighter sorties had been flown to employ 19,000 guided
munitions along with 9,200 dumb bombs and CBUs. In a big, raised middle finger
to those who’d believed strafing was obsolete (space clowns and UAV-lovers), we
used 328,498 rounds of 20- and 30-millimeter ammunition. Flights over Iraq
consumed an astonishing 612,891,043 pounds (90,131,035 gallons) of jet fuel.
Sadly, some of this was used to drop 31,800,000 silly propaganda leaflets with
more than eighty different messages. So many leaflets, in fact, that you could make
a paper highway from Texas to Alaska out of them. (I remember a leaflet from the
first Gulf War that said “ SURRENDER AND DIE” instead of “SURRENDER OR DIE.” A
PsyOps weenie actually wanted us to fly back to Baghdad to drop the corrected
version.) Someone thought there was more value added to this than, say, Weasels
getting H-model Mavericks. Makes you wonder.
More than sixteen hundred SAMs were launched during the Iraq War. Yet only
one fixed-wing fighter and six helicopters were brought down. Just twelve years
earlier, during Desert Storm air operations, we’d lost thirty-nine fixed-wing fighters
and five helicopters. Better aircraft, training, and countermeasures all contributed
to this success, but I believe there are other reasons: Iraqi confusion and tactics
aside, Desert Storm tended to focus on jamming and suppression. Both are
necessary but are basically defensive in nature.
By the Iraq War, the offensive, hard-kill mentality of some of the Wild Weasel
squadrons made the difference. We went after critical command-and-control
nodes, radars, and SAM sites with hard ordnance right from the beginning. HARMs
were used to maybe make the Iraqis duck a bit, but the threats were killed with
precision munitions and cluster bombs—not suppressed. We were allowed to do
this by officers in leadership positions who didn’t presume to dictate weapons and
tactics to us. All they wanted were results, and how we got them was up to us.
The 77th Fighter Squadron alone killed more than fifty SAMs and vital air-