The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  “These were the kind of things that you could do sitting on your chair in your room, but when you have an airplane strapped to your back and you’re sweating and you’re pulling g’s, then it’s another matter,” he said. “You had to do the math in your head.” Needless to say, some people were better at this than others. Some pilots seemed to be able to do it intuitively, by the seat of their pants. Rodriguez was not one of them. But patient instructors and long hours in simulators, combined with a kind of desperation to succeed, eventually earned him a chance to fly the air force’s hottest jets.

  Only then did his real training begin, in Tucson and at Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, and finally at the air force’s “top gun” school, Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada, where he flew training missions against a faux enemy, a dedicated force of experienced pilots trying hard to shoot him down. Technology is only part of what gives American pilots their advantage. As hugely expensive as it is to design, produce, fly, and maintain vanguard fighters, it takes far more effort and money to hone pilots’ skills, to keep squadrons of pilots like Rodriguez constantly flying, practicing, and getting better. Even if other nations had the know-how, few could afford to build a fleet of advanced modern fighters, and fewer still could afford to sustain an up-tempo environment for the men and women who fly and maintain it.

  Being the best means learning to fully inhabit that screaming node, high above the slow curve of the Earth, strapped down in a bubble where the only real things are the sound of your own breathing and the feel of sweat rolling down the center of your back. You are alone but not alone. You cope with constant, multiple streams of data, everything from basic flight information—airspeed, altitude, attitude, fuel levels—to incoming radar images displayed on small, glowing green screens stacked in rows before you and to both sides. In your helmet are three or four radio links: with the AWACS, with the ground, with your wingman, and with your flight leader. It is a little bit like trying to navigate at high speed with four or five different people talking to you at once, each with a slightly different set of directions. It is not for amateurs. By the time Rodriguez first flew into combat, he had hundreds of hours of training behind him, and being in the jet was second nature. With him were his wingman, his formation, and the superhuman reach of America’s technological eyes and ears.

  Hurling a few dozen jets into the sky against this, as Saddam did in 1991, was most unwise.

  “Fox!”

  Rodriguez and his wingman, Craig “Mole” Underhill, confronted their first Iraqi MiG-29s early on the third morning of the war that took back Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. They were leading a helicopter assault on Saddam’s early warning radar sites on the border with Saudi Arabia, clearing the way for devastating bombing runs on Iraqi airfields.

  The air battle in this conflict was brief, decisive, and more intense than most Americans realized. By the time the Pentagon began showing off publicity videos of “smart bombs” pulverizing Iraqi targets, America and its allies owned the sky, but in getting there, thirty-eight allied aircraft were destroyed. On this early sortie, Rodriguez and Underhill were flying out of Tabuk, an air base in northwestern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Jordan. As often happened in this fast-moving arena, they were initially tasked with one objective and then reassigned when they were airborne. They moved out at the head of a thirty-six-aircraft strike force bearing down on a target forty miles southwest of Baghdad. As they approached, several MiG-29s came up to challenge them.

  The MiG-29, like the F-15, is considered a “fourth-generation” fighter. (Since the first jet fighters started flying, there have been four great evolutionary advances, each representing a significant leap in technology.) The Soviet Union began deploying the MiG-29 about nine years after the F-15s went on line, and the plane itself is comparable to its American counterpart. But given all the other advantages enjoyed by the allied pilots, the brave, outnumbered Iraqi pilots launching themselves at the approaching juggernaut might as well have been committing suicide. “From western eyes, it’s a suicide mission,” Rodriguez told me. “From the eyes of the guy being invaded, he’s protecting the homeland.”

  Even greatly disadvantaged, the Iraqi fighters were dangerous, and as it happened the large American force made a potentially fatal mistake that Saturday morning. The incoming MiGs were spotted, of course, but in the confusion of the moment either tactical errors were made by the strikers, or the Iraqi pilots exploited a seam in the American defenses. The AWACS command had spotted the MiGs immediately when they took off, and had handed them on to a navy formation of F-14s, which failed to intercept them. When Rodriguez and Underhill were alerted to the approaching threat, it came as a jolting surprise. The MiGs were just thirteen miles out and closing at a speed of more than a thousand knots. Both pilots immediately began evasive maneuvers.

  Rodriguez dived steeply, getting below the lead MiG, where he would be harder to find on its radar—pointing down, the radar’s signal can get confused by all the signals bouncing back up from the ground. Then Rodriguez began flying in a low arc, keeping the MiG on his wing line, making himself “skinny,” presenting as small a radar target as possible. Within minutes the two fighters would be in a visual turning fight, a situation familiar to many experienced pilots from earlier wars, but one that is not supposed to happen in modern air warfare. The biggest difference between this fight and the old ones was speed. It would unfold not in minutes but in seconds. Rodriguez’s posture was strictly defensive: he could not target and shoot at the Iraqi plane, but it could shoot at him.

  A cockpit alarm warned him when the MiG’s radar locked on him. The threat was still just a blip on his screen; he hadn’t actually seen it yet. He was frightened and thinking furiously when in his headset he heard Underhill shout, “Fox!”—the code word for I have just fired a missile.

  Rodriguez looked back over his shoulder, following the smoke trail of Underhill’s missile, and then, looking out ahead of it, caught his first and only glimpse of the MiG. This is the precise instant captured from the Iraqi pilot’s perspective in the photo on Rodriguez’s wall. It turns out that the picture preserves—not a moment of personal triumph for him, as I had originally supposed—but a moment of intense fear and vulnerability. Rodriguez’s little F-15 in the distance was not predator but prey, trapped and awaiting a kill shot that would never come, because in the next instant the MiG became a huge fireball in the sky. The whole encounter lasted a little more than ten seconds.

  “Mole saves my bacon because he kills this guy before he can take a shot at me,” Rodriguez said as we sat in his office.

  There was no time to celebrate, because the destroyed MiG’s wingman was now closing in on them, just seven miles out. Underhill and Rodriguez split their planes wide apart and assumed different altitudes. That way, the incoming MiG might spot one of them, but probably not both, and they improved their chances of eyeballing it. Before shooting at it, they had to make sure it was Iraqi—many planes were in the air that morning—but they wouldn’t have time to run the normal electronic matrix used to distinguish friend from foe.

  They both saw the MiG at the same time. It had an Iraqi flag painted on it. Rodriguez passed the enemy fighter about three hundred feet off its wing.

  “He notices that I am there,” Rodriguez said. “He also notices that Mole’s about twenty thousand feet above us. But at no point do I think he correlates the two of us as a formation.”

  If the MiG pilot went for Underhill, then Rodriguez could shoot him down; if he came for Rodriguez, “then Mole eats him up.” Confused, the angling MiG started up, and then down; this gave Rodriguez time to fly inside the MiG’s turning circle, putting himself into roughly the same attack position the earlier MiG had had on him.

  The Iraqi pilot, no doubt hearing an alarm telling him that an F-15 had locked him in its radar, attempted a classic split S maneuver, which is the quickest way to reverse direction in the air. Flying parallel to the ground, he flipped his aircraft upside down an
d then attempted to fly a half circle, diving down, pulling up, and leveling off to head in the opposite direction. It was the right escape maneuver for an altitude of at least five thousand feet, but the pilot, in his alarm and haste, neglected to compute one vital bit of data: he was only six hundred feet up. He flew his jet straight into the desert floor.

  “He had lost his situational awareness,” Rodriguez explained. “He was trying to perform a maneuver that he can do comfortably at five thousand or ten thousand feet, and doesn’t realize that the fight, which started at eight thousand feet, had degraded and degraded closer to the desert floor. It’s a lack of training, a lack of experience, but given the situation he was in against two F-15s, my argument is that no one would have done much better. He’s already seen his flight lead explode. He might not have hit the desert floor, but he was going to die anyway.”

  These air kills were among the first by American pilots since Vietnam. An entire generation of fighters had come and gone without encountering an enemy in the sky. Three dozen Iraqi jets were shot down in the war, and Rodriguez was one of six pilots in his squadron who got two.

  The second of his aerial kills was what he called “more routine,” more typical of modern aerial combat. A week after the first episode, he was flying in what the air force calls a “wall of Eagles,” a formation of four F-15s spread out in the sky over roughly five to eight miles at thirty-three thousand feet to maximize their visibility and radar range. Beneath them was thick undercast, a carpet of clouds opaque to their eyes but transparent to electronic surveillance systems. At that point, the remaining Iraqi air force was so vulnerable that the AWACS plane assisting the F-15s picked up the enemy jets the minute they started their engines, while they were still on the ground. Rodriguez and the other pilots watched three radar blips form on their screens as the MiGs took off and climbed. Rodriguez assumed that the planes were, like the rest of Saddam’s air force, escaping into Iran.

  “They were basically running scared,” he says. “Extremely scared.”

  It took a few moments to identify the jets as MiG-23s, and then the wall of Eagles began preparing to launch missiles at them.

  “We think we’re going to have to stay above the clouds and we’re never going to see the missiles do their job, and all of a sudden there’s a big sucker hole, an opening in the clouds below,” he says. “The F-15s dived to about thirteen thousand feet. The fleeing MiGs were hugging the terrain, flying just three hundred to four hundred feet above the ground, when we started launching AIM-7 missiles at them.

  “And, sure enough, the missiles did their job.”

  The Iraqi flight leader took the first hit. An American missile sliced through his plane, taking out the engine but leaving the shell of the plane intact. With the plane trailing a thick cloud of smoke, the pilot began turning to the north, apparently trying to return to his base. Rodriguez’s flight leader fired a Sidewinder, a heat-seeking missile that lit up the sky when it hit, turning the unfortunate Iraqi pilot and his plane into an enormous fireball.

  Rodriguez’s missile ripped straight through his target. The MiG apparently flew right into it. There was no large explosion. The missile just tore the jet to pieces, turning it into what Rodriguez called “a ground-level sparkler,” scattering debris across a wide swath of desert.

  Rodriguez’s third and last kill came eight years later, on March 24, 1999, when he flew his F-15 as part of the NATO force attacking Serbian positions during the Kosovo campaign. Rodriguez’s squadron was assigned to lead an attack on a Serbian SAM site in Montenegro. On the way they would pass over an airfield in Pristina, Kosovo, where the Serbs had carved out hangars for their fighters inside a mountain. No one was sure what kinds of planes, if any, were hidden there.

  Rodriguez took off from Cervia, Italy, on a clear night. As he ascended, he could see the Italian coast to the west, lit up like a throbbing discotheque. He was pointed east, toward what was then still called Yugoslavia.

  “It was pitch-black,” he recalls. “You know, here’s a region of the world that has been at war, and where every light at night is a potential target. So everything below was just pitch-black. You go, ‘Man, it’s two different worlds here.’”

  The plan was for the multinational formation to fly lights-out, but the different levels of training and experience began to tell. American pilots fly black all the time, so when the order came to turn off lights, it was just another night’s work. But for some of the Dutch, German, British, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish pilots, this wasn’t so easy.

  “The first time we tried it, as I looked, I could see a train of fighters spread out over a hundred miles behind me, and when the ‘lights-out’ order came, they all went black,” said Rodriguez. “Then, sure enough, the comfort factor for some of these guys started to go. They started getting a little antsy and then, all of a sudden, pooh, pooh, pooh, the lights started coming back on. And we go, ‘OK, guys, we really need to do this completely lights-out. If we don’t do this, we’re not going to be ready.’ But we got everybody into the train.”

  A measure of confusion persisted, however. When the target was reached, the squadron commenced an air assault that would have taken an all-American unit five to eight minutes. This one took nearly an hour. Feeling increasingly vulnerable to attack by ground or air threats, Rodriguez circled and waited, trying to make his flight pattern unpredictable. As Rodriguez and his wingman, Bill Denham, turned back toward Italy, they picked up an aircraft coming up from the airfield in Pristina. At first it bore north, away from them, but then it turned.

  The American planes began to conduct the standard series of checks to identify the plane. The F-15 is equipped with a full range of instruments to, in effect, interrogate an unidentified plane in the air. They were coordinating with an AWACS, working through some language difficulties (the controllers spoke accented English). A process that would normally take twenty seconds took three times as long, which is a huge difference when you’re traveling hundreds of miles per hour. Rodriguez and his wingman were rapidly approaching the weapons engagement zone, where they would lose the advantage of their longer-range missiles.

  They were on the edge of the WEZ as the ID was completed, and Rodriguez launched an “advanced medium-range air-to-air missile,” or AMRAAM, a new element of his arsenal added after the Gulf war. In the air force, they call it the Slammer. One advantage it affords is a “fire and forget” feature; because the missile has its own homing and guidance system, the pilot need not stay pointed at the target. He is free to turn and evade the incoming jet in case his shot for some reason misses. Rodriguez stayed with his missile for as long as he could.

  “It all went into slow motion, and I felt like the missile and I were kind of flying in formation for a while,” he recalls. “It just seemed to stay there for a couple of seconds and then, whoosh! It disappears. You see that glow [the missile’s exhaust], and that becomes just a little ember, and then it’s gone. And of course at night you can’t follow it anymore. The smoke trail goes away. But I could see it start to curve, and I go, ‘OK, it looks like it’s doing the right lead-pursuit tracking.’ And the missile did everything it was advertised to do. We have a little counter display inside the cockpit that ticks down the time to intercept, and when the counter said zero, I looked outside through my canopy to the general vicinity of where I knew the target was going to be. I mean, that fireball was huge.”

  Rodriguez said it was as though three or four giant sports stadiums had turned on all their lights at the same time.

  “The reason it was so magnificent,” he said, “was that everything was covered in snow. So the fireball reflected off the snow, causing an even bigger illumination of the sky and everything around it.”

  It was the first air kill of the Kosovo campaign, and the last of Rodriguez’s career. He gave little thought to the person he had just incinerated.

  “I’m sure he had been a Yugoslav air force pilot, which was a good air force for what they have,” he sa
id. “I don’t personalize the war. He was doing what I was doing for my country.”

  “Eye-Watering”

  Manufactured by McDonnell Douglas starting in the early 1970s, the twin-engine, supersonic F-15 was the first aircraft built with the understanding that a plane’s avionics, or electronic guts, were as important as its aeronautics, its flying capabilities. It was designed and built around an enormous radar disk.

  “When it came on line thirty years ago, it had the best radar, the best weapons-employment displays ever, and the best maneuverability of any aircraft out there,” Brigadier General Thomas “Pugs” Tinsley told me when I visited him in Alaska last spring, a few weeks before his death. At the time, Tinsley commanded the air force’s Third Wing out of Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Anchorage. “The F-15’s thrust-to-weight ratio was way ahead of anything else, and its flight-control system was much smarter and more stable. It could go out there and just fly circles around the F-4 [the Phantom, its immediate predecessor] and have its way with MiG-23s [the Soviets’ best fighter], just eat them up.”

  For more than a quarter century, the speed and sound of a formation of F-15s or F-16s have made a commanding statement about American power, as anyone who has ever stood under such a formation can attest. You feel its approach before you can hear or see it, a low vibration that starts in your toes and rises until the gray jets flick past overhead. Only then comes the roar. They are gone before your eyes focus on them, leaving behind the orange glow of their afterburners and a wash of energy that hammers your ears and rattles your spine. As a patriotic display it is impressive, something to stir pride and admiration—but imagine being on the receiving end of such power, to have it shooting at you. It is one of the most convincing arguments ever made for surrender.

  Despite the romantic legend of the fighter pilot in his leather helmet and silk scarf, aerial combat has always been more about engineering than flying. When we consider that the Wright brothers’ first tentative flight at Kitty Hawk took place just over a century ago, the evolution of aerial combat has been astonishing. Within forty years, from World War I to the Korean conflict, pilots went from shooting at each other with pistols from propeller-driven biplanes to dueling with cannons and missiles in jet aircraft moving faster than sound. At the start of World War II, American fighter and bomber pilots were adapting their tactics to cope with superior German and Japanese fighters, and by the end they had aircraft that could fly so high, so fast, and for so long that few enemy fighters could even get close enough to shoot at them. Saburo Sakai noted, sadly, that the B-29 Superfortress was simply “insuperable.” By the time of the conflict in Korea, “air breathers,” or jets, had replaced the finely crafted propeller-driven fighters of lore, and aerial duels between American F-86 Sabres and Soviet-built MiG-15s were fleeting visual encounters where the biggest challenge was to get close enough to fire.