Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

  After this briefing, I would turn my chair around and face the back of the room, and the senior leaders from the U.S. Navy, Army, Marines, and the Coalition air forces, along with my senior staff—Tom Olsen, Randy Witt, Buster Glosson, John Corder, Bill Rider, Pat Caruana, Ed Tonoso, Glenn Profitt, and especially the four colonels, Crigger, Doman, Reavy, and Harr (two coming on and two going off duty)—would receive a purely speculative intelligence briefing from Chris Christon. (The briefing was not exclusive; anyone could stand around and listen; but as a rule, the duty officers had to get to work, now that the previous person manning their workstation had left for food and rest.)

  Here Chris would let his imagination roam and give a far more hypothetical assessment of what we were about to face than was appropriate during the changeover briefing. I wanted him to really guess. Why? Because I had to think ahead. I had to make decisions. And if I used the usual intelligence data, I didn’t have much to go on.

  Our peacetime-trained intelligence organizations are taught never to be wrong. They like numbers, and don’t like to talk about what the other guy is thinking. They don’t predict, they just give you the rundown, like TV news anchors. Yet, as a commander, I had to think about what the other guy was thinking. I needed to get inside the other guy in order to find ways to spoil his plans and make his worst fears come true. That meant Chris had to speculate, stimulate our thinking, and provoke the questions we needed to ask. Sure, he might be way off base, but that was expected. And of course, having reviewed all the intelligence derived from our own operations (pilot reports and intelligence reports published by his staff) and from other organizations, he always explained the reasons for his projections.

  In addition to providing insight into the enemy, these meetings expanded our collective thinking. For that reason, discussions always followed Chris Christon’s predictions, and these wandered wherever the various leaders wanted. Obviously, there were cultural differences that dictated how and when a particular commander spoke. The Europeans, for instance, were comfortable speaking openly, and they all felt free to take any position on any issue. The Arabs, on the other hand, were more reticent and circumspect. Nonetheless, if they thought we were missing anything important—especially if it concerned the Arab mentality of our enemy—they spoke up.

  Inevitably, issues came up that we discussed at length yet never really got a handle on. Some of these, like Scuds, came up frequently.

  Finally, these meetings made us a team. Our U.S. Air Force people were already working hard for harmony, side by side, throughout the TACC and at the various bases, on the ground and in the air. I wanted all the national air force leaders to have the same feelings of trust, respect, and unity of effort. That is why it was important for me not to act in charge; and that is why it was important for me to listen to them and actively seek their views. It also didn’t hurt to learn something new, and gain their perceptions, experience, and insights.

  We were fortunate in this conflict in that if we failed to accurately gauge the enemy, our strength was so overwhelming that we would still prevail. Nonetheless, our mistakes could cost the lives of aircrew, or later, the lives of airmen and soldiers on the ground. That is why so many people worked so hard at thinking about the enemy, our plan to fight, and our actual minute-by-minute engagement with him.

  “It all starts and ends with intelligence,” I like to say. In war, your intelligence has to be the departure point for your thinking or planning. And then, after you execute your actions, your intelligence estimates the results and the effects on the enemy, so you can plan the next move.

  War is not unlike chess. But in war, you do not have a clear view of the other side of the board.

  ★ Just before 2000 each evening, I left the operation to Tom Olsen and headed for the CINC’s meeting at the MODA building bunker. As I ran up the stairs, I usually heard Buster Glosson doing the same thing; he, too, had been busy getting ready, for it was his job to brief the next ATO. We’d both hit the glass doors and race out into the cold night to an armored Mercedes sedan, the back doors open and the motor running. Behind the wheel was Technical Sergeant Mike Brickert, a six-foot-three deputy sheriff from Chelan County, Washington, who was an air policeman in the Air National Guard and an Olympic-class marksman and athlete. His job was to get Buster and me safely and quickly to the MODA so I could be in my seat before General Schwarzkopf called the meeting together. En route, Buster and I would review his briefing.

  Most days, I had gone over this new ATO during the morning, when I would wander down to the Black Hole and discuss the infant plan. Buster and his people would then massage it the rest of the day, and from this would emerge a Master Attack Plan, which listed the primary targets we intended to strike. In the car, Buster and I would make changes based on how we felt the CINC would react to comments or targets. The key was to challenge him a little bit but keep him from overreacting. So we were careful to justify each target nomination.

  The one area we could not judge accurately—and didn’t really have to—was the number of sorties we needed to apply to the individual Iraqi divisions in the KTO. (All we knew for certain was that the Republican Guard was going to get more attention than conscript infantry units.) In the end, we were going to get them all, so the answer didn’t really matter. Each day we used Sam Baptiste’s and Bill Welch’s best guess (based on ground force inputs) about which units to hit, and then we distributed the rest, based on ARCENT estimates of unit strengths. Every evening, as was his privilege as CINC and land force component commander, Schwarzkopf modified this part of the plan.

  My strategy session with Buster usually ended as we hit the front door of MODA and ran to the elevator that took us to the underground command post. We were never late, but we were often in the hall only steps ahead of the CINC.

  The meeting that followed (like the changeover briefing we had just left) covered the weather, intelligence updates, the progress of the war, and logistics, communications, and overall support updates provided by the CENTCOM staff. Then came the main order of business—the plans for the day after tomorrow. For the first five weeks of Desert Storm, virtually the only subject discussed was the air war—in other words, Buster Glosson’s briefing. Though the daily plans tended to be an expansion of the previous day’s efforts, each also had to be coherent in and of itself and address any interim changes.

  When he came “on stage,” Buster would take out his rolled Plexiglas sheets with the proposed targets outlined and notes written in grease pencil. For example, there might be a circle, with the number 50 inside it, over the general location of the 18th Iraqi Armored Division in Kuwait—meaning that two days from now we intended to task fifty attack sorties against that division (the exact time of each strike would depend on details too numerous to brief, and was anyhow of little importance in the current phase of attriting the Iraqi Army before the ground battle started). Or there might be a green triangle overlaid on a series of bridges, showing how the effort to isolate the battlefield would continue. Or there might be red triangles overlaid on a nuclear research center, a tank repair depot, and a suspected Scud storage area.

  Buster would quickly, but in detail, explain the nature of each target and how its destruction fit in the overall campaign plan. Once that was done, he would briefly cover the AWACS tracks, CAPs, Scud patrols, and electronic-warfare packages. The discussion of army targets was left for last. At that point, Buster and I would take out our pencils, ready for the CINC to break in, point to a list of Iraqi divisions posted on the wall, and rattle off the divisions he wanted struck. He always did.

  It was the same night after night, never acrimonious, always professional and easy to follow.

  Afterward, Buster would roll up his charts and leave. He needed to hurry back to the Black Hole to input the latest guidance into the ATO (which was already starting to run late).

  The CINC would then poll the U.S. and Coalition commanders or their representatives to see if they had any pressing concerns
, and if the CINC had any special guidance, he gave it out. After the meeting broke up, Schwarzkopf would call Khaled bin Sultan with his update, while I rushed back to the TACC for the evening follies.

  BAGHDAD BILLY . . . AND SOME WINS

  The confusion of war breeds endless myths. Some bring laughs, others bring deaths. Ours, sadly, was the tragic kind. It was called “Baghdad Billy”—the Iraqi interceptor from hell.

  Soon after the start of air operations over Iraq, pilots flying the EF-111 electronic jamming aircraft began to report interceptions by Iraqi fighters, even when there was no evidence of airborne Iraqis. They claimed they’d seen Iraqi fighter radar signals on their warning scopes, spotlights from Iraqi interceptor aircraft, or even tracers and missiles being fired at them. Yet in no case could intelligence sources or AWACS confirm these sightings. Much of the time, there were no indications that Iraqi aircraft were even airborne. There was one constant: F-15s had been in the vicinity of the EF-111s during their mysterious sightings.

  In short, they were imagining things. We called their phantom “Baghdad Billy.”

  But that was headquarters wisdom. The crews knew what they’d seen with their own eyes; they knew that they had narrowly escaped death at the hands of an Iraqi fighter pilot.

  The sides were drawn. The fat-assed generals in Riyadh who didn’t believe the crew reports, versus the pilots and weapons systems operators who were out there night after night risking their lives.

  You don’t enter an argument like this and expect logic to prevail. But these were fighter pilots, and it was all good fun until somebody got hurt. That happened the night of February 13.

  Ratchet-75, an EF-111A tasked to support-jam Iraqi radars, was the third aircraft in a flight of three EF-111s crossing the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the vicinity of Ar’ar, a town in northwestern Saudi Arabia. At 1109 Saudi time, Ratchet-75 should have passed Ar’ar at 21,000 feet, four minutes behind the leader, Ratchet-73, and two minutes behind number two, Ratchet-74. At 1128, Ratchet-75 should have been ten minutes south of his jamming orbit, which was located due west of Baghdad halfway to the Jordanian border. He never got there. At 1129, two F-15Es heading south over southern Iraq at 31,000 feet saw an aircraft below them ejecting eight to ten flares. The night sky was lit up by the flares and the blaze of afterburners, as the aircraft rolled out of a hard left turn and began a series of “S-turns” as it descended sharply. Twenty seconds later, the F-15s saw the aircraft eject three more flares, soon followed by a huge fireball as the aircraft hit the ground. The lead F-15E, Pontiac-47, began an orbit over the crash site, while his wingman, Pontiac-48, went to the tanker track to refuel. A little over three hours later, a Special Operations helicopter, Sierra-43, arrived on scene and the rescue team examined the wreckage. They confirmed the loss of the EF-111, its pilot, and the WSO.

  Though we will never know what happened, it was reasonable to conclude that the crew of the EF-111, like other -111 crews, had radar warning signals or visual sightings that indicated an Iraqi interceptor approaching for a kill. Once again, the AWACS picture was clean of enemy aircraft, and once again, F-15 aircraft were in the immediate vicinity.

  It seemed that Baghdad Billy had finally achieved a shoot-down.

  Everyone in the TACC was upset; and—not surprisingly—there was blaming and finger-pointing.

  In the hall the next morning, Buster Glosson lit into Chris Christon, whose intelligence shop had passed unedited reports of the phantom interceptor to all the aircrews, thereby giving the story credibility. Chris fought back. As he saw it, his job was to get the word out. If the EF-111 aircrews had observed something, he reported it to the other units. And it was then the job of the local commanders to make sure the aircrews didn’t do anything extreme, like a low-altitude jink-out at night.

  Both Buster and Chris were right. It was Chris’s job to get the word out. And it was Buster’s job as the fighter division commander to worry about the lives of his aircrews.

  But the real blame was mine. I should have been more forceful about dispelling the Baghdad Billy myth right from the start. I should have seen that a crew would get so engrossed with defeating the apparently real threat that they succumbed to the ever-present killer, the ground. My failure meant two needless deaths and bitter tears for the families of the crew of Ratchet-75.

  The message went out to knock off defensive reactions to Baghdad Billy.

  The incident wasn’t a total loss. It inspired a song:

  BALLAD OF THE F-111 JOCK BY MAJ. ROGER KRAPF

  I’m an F-111 Jock, and I’m here to tell

  of Baghdad Billy and his jet from hell.

  We were well protected with Eagles in tight

  but that didn’t stop the man with the light.

  RJ and AWACS, they didn’t see,

  as BAGHDAD BILLY snuck up on me.

  Then I found a spotlight shining at my six

  and my Whoozoo said, “HOOLLYY SHEEIT.”

  I popped some chaff and I popped a flare

  but the Iraqi bandit, he didn’t care.

  I had tracers on my left, and tracers on my right,

  with a load of bombs, I had to run from the fight.

  I rolled my VARK over and took her down

  into the darkness and finally lost the clown.

  When I landed back at Taif and gave this rap,

  CENTAF said I was full of crap.

  I’m here to tell you the God’s own truth.

  That Iraqi bandit, he ain’t no spoof.

  You don’t have to worry, there is no way

  you’ll see Baghdad Billy if you fly in the day.

  But listen to me, son, for I am right.

  Watch out for BILLY if you fly at night!!!

  There were other—far less tragic—confusions and mix-ups.

  On one occasion, an F-15 pilot from our base at Incirlik in Turkey was lined up on an Iraqi jet ready to squeeze the trigger, when an air-to-air missile flew in from the side, turned the corner behind the Iraqi, and blew the target out of the sky. Chalk up one for the 33d TFW from Tabuk. Not the least bothered, the Incirlik-based F-15 turned his attention to the Iraqi’s wingman and fired an AIM-7 radar-guided missile. It zeroed in on its target and exploded; but much to the amazement of our pilot, the Iraqi jet emerged serenely from the fireball. The intrepid American then fired a heat-seeking AIM-9, which again engulfed the Iraqi in a fireball; and again the Iraqi emerged and flew across the border into Iran. Our pilot may have been luckier than he thought, however. The Iraqi aircraft was either damaged or it ran out of fuel, and the pilot ejected shortly after escaping.

  But more often the wins were clear-cut.

  Not all our potential aces flew air-to-air fighters. In February, the A-10s at King Fahd bagged a couple of Iraqi helicopters while looking to bomb Iraqi tanks and artillery. Captain Swain, on the sixth of February, and Captain Sheehy, nine days later, observed Iraqi helicopters flying very close to the earth. Bad tactic, helicopters close to the ground stand out clearly to a fighter pilot. Both A-10s used their 30mm guns to dispatch their targets. Up until then, it was normal for the Warthog community to take cheap shots from their interceptor brethren in F-15s. No more. To flag the change, sometime around the middle of February, the A-10 wing commander, Colonel Sandy Sharpe, called the F-15 wing commander at Dhahran, Colonel John McBroom, to offer his A-10s to fly top cover for the F-15s, in case they wanted to do some bombing. After all, it only made sense, now that the A-10s had two kills to the F-15 wing’s single victory. Boomer McBroom was not amused, but hundreds of A-10 pilots howled with glee.

  The last kills of the war took out Iraqis flying combat sorties against their own people. In late March, an Iraqi Sukhoi jet fighter and a Swiss Platus propeller-driven PC-9 trainer, pressed into dropping bombs, were flying in eastern Iraq, in violation of the Iraqi no-fly agreement reached at the end of the war. AWACS vectored two F-15s against the aircraft. The flight leader, Captain Dietz, rolled out behind the Sukhoi, fired his A
IM-9, and blew the target out of the sky. It was Dietz’s third kill (he’d bagged a pair of MiG-21s in early February). His wingman, Lieutenant Hohemann, also with two aerial victories (he got them the same day Dietz got his), rolled out behind the PC-9. Though our rules discouraged shoot-down of trainers or cargo/ passenger aircraft, and the PC-9 was a trainer-type aircraft, it had just completed a bombing mission against Iraqi civilians and wasn’t supposed to be in the air anyway. Should I shoot or not? Hohemann asked himself. While the lieutenant’s conscience wrestled with this question, the Iraqi pilot ejected! After seeing his leader blow up, the Iraqi wingman wasn’t going to wait around and take his chances. After jinking to avoid the Iraqi’s deploying parachute, Hohemann reached a decision: “It’s a fighter, not a trainer.” But just as he was about to shoot it down, the PC-9 rolled over and smashed into the ground.

  Coalition Aerial Victories by Unit

  Afterward, Jim Crigger awarded Hohemann credit for the kill, which brought his total to three victories, the closest anyone in the Gulf came to the five needed to become an Ace.

  The first and last kill scored by the CENTAF staff was racked up by Colonel John Turk from the Black Hole. A longtime fighter pilot, John had been one of our top F-15 instructor pilots at Luke and Tyndall. But to his great disappointment, he’d sat out this war in the Black Hole, hard work and no glory. After the shooting had stopped, Turk hitched a ride up to Tallil AB in southern Iraq. As he was touring the airfield, Turk found a MiG fighter parked on a road. Though U.S. Army troops had destroyed the cockpit, the jet was otherwise fully armed and fueled. Like every fighter pilot, Turk was always looking for a kill. Making sure no one was around watching him, he fired a shot from his 9 mm pistol into the MiG’s drop tank, hoping for a fire. Fuel streamed out but failed to ignite. Undaunted, Turk took out a cigarette lighter and applied a flame to the jet fuel. A second later, it occurred to him that he was standing next to a fully fueled, munition-laden jet that was moments from erupting into a huge fireball. I don’t know the world’s record for the 440-yard dash in combat boots, but I’m sure John Turk set it that day at Tallil.