Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

during the day or night if the weather was clear. If it wasn’t, then they were deconflicted
by altitude and wouldn’t hit each other. Lastly, with the Low tanker in
the lead, his jet wash, which could be considerable, didn’t affect the aircraft behind
him. Flying through invisible turbulence while you’re impaled on a boom twenty
feet from a jet filled with jet fuel isn’t much fun.
You had to find the tanker on your air-to-air radar and talk to him. You had to
run a three-dimensional intercept to wherever he was, watching out for the
remaining tankers and dozens of other fighters. It doesn’t matter how many times
you’ve done it; slowly sliding up behind the big plane and watching the boom come
down was always a thrill. Unless it was nighttime, or the weather was bad, and you
were running out of gas—then it was a sweaty nightmare, like a monkey fucking a
skunk.
But not this morning. This was a bright, clear day over an exotic corner of the
world that seemed even more beautiful because I’d survived my first combat
mission. After getting our gas, we slid back and pulled away low to the southwest.
Our home base was about 200 miles away on the Gulf of Iskenderun.
A half-hour later, we were overhead Incirlik Air Base. Normally, there were
well-established procedures for getting into and out of an air base, like overhead
patterns and instrument approaches for bad weather. There were also “minimum
risk” procedures, designed to get as many jets as possible off the ground or down to
land without exposing them to ground fire. In retrospect, it was fairly silly to worry
about shoulder-launched SAMs and small-arms fire. This being the first day of the
war, no one knew what to expect and, until sanity prevailed, we could do whatever
we wanted. Besides, it was fun to fly up the runway at 500 knots or do the “Stack.”
The Stack was basically a long glide in idle power down from 20,000 feet to the
overhead landing pattern. You could see everything below, and it kept your engine
cool to thwart an infrared threat. Besides, as I said, it was fun. Orca and I were
almost the last aircraft at the top of the stack. The two F-15s that had followed us
out of Iraq were somewhere behind us, and two KC-135 tankers were orbiting at
25,000 feet until all the fighters landed.
“TORCH One . . . High Stack.”
He made the call and went into a sharp, descending turn. I was supposed to wait
until he called “mid-stack,” and then I’d start down. Dropping the mask again, I
loosened my seat straps, wiped my face, and actually relaxed a bit. And why not
What else could happen
Under normal circumstances, that’s a risky thought to have. Under these
circumstances, it was downright cocky. And stupid.