by Tom Clancy
★ The air-superiority efforts (under Glenn Profitt) are planned in the next room of the Black Hole, but I don’t have to spend much time there after the first days of the war. By now, the folks there mostly make sure the CAPs are in the right place at the right time, with emphasis on MiGs fleeing to Iran. They also frag the Wild Weasels, EF-111s, and EA-6Bs for support jamming; but that is easy, as our flights in the KTO consume most of the current effort, and about all they have to do is make sure there is coverage. Still, a few special flights require detailed support planning, such as the B-52 raid on the industrial complex north of Baghdad, or F-16s going after a nuclear R & D facility, but for the most part their work has become routine.
On my way out of the Black Hole, I pass the Scud cell, which is now empty. About all we can do is chase Scuds in real time with SAS and special forces on the ground and F-15E/F-16C LANTIRN-equipped patrols in the air. So planning consists of fragging the jets to provide coverage throughout the night, making sure we have maximum coverage at the most likely times for Scud launches. Because we have no idea where the Scuds are hiding, we have to dedicate significant resources—forty-eight jets—to work the problem.
If we were in the same boat today, I suspect we would use more human intelligence assets on the ground (such as paid Bedouin spies wandering around in places that are too hot for Westerners), and better technical solutions (such as Joint STARS with automatic target recognition programs in their onboard computers, which would mean that controllers on the Joint STARS would not have to dig the target out of the maze on their scopes).
The automatic target recognition program would work like this: When the Joint STARS radar picked up a stationary Scud (using its synthetic aperture radar mode, SAR) or a transporter erector launcher (TEL) in transit (using its moving target indicator mode, MTI), the computer would recognize the target as a Scud or a TEL and alert the controller, who would then arrange for the target to be entered into the command-and-control system, and struck.
Between 1000 and 1100, I come out of the Black Hole and stick my head in the weather shop across the hall to get a detailed feeling about the weather over Iraq and our bases over the next few days. When you have a good sense of what might happen, then you better understand what people are telling you about what is happening. That is why you want to be close to the action, listen to what Intel and weather and logistics all tell you, and get a broad idea of how they reached their current solutions. So, for example, I would give the weather guys points of interest to look out for, as I described for them what I thought we would be doing the next few days. That way, they knew where to concentrate their attention when they looked over meteorological events.
After the weather shop, I hit the Marines and Navy rooms. These are built out of plywood and located in a dead-end hall next to the weather shop and across from the Black Hole. Now I am hungry and in a cookie hunt, and these guys always have some really good ones squirreled away. The Marines and Navy guys feel like part of the team and understand airpower, since most are pilots or weapons systems officers (or Naval flight officers, as the Navy calls them). I don’t spend long there, because I want to get upstairs, either to clean up my desk or get a nap.
★ 1100 In my office three people are waiting to see me—Colonel Randy Randolph, my chief medical officer; Colonel Chaplain Hanson; and Colonel George Giddens, the “Mayor” of Riyadh for U.S. forces.
The doctor, Randy Randolph, wants to talk about inoculations for anthrax and botulism. He tells me what he thinks we should do with our limited number of injections and what the CENTCOM SG has put out for guidance. I go along with his advice, because he has his head on straight about everything else (from where to locate hospitals to which doctors and nurses to put in charge).
Colonel Chaplain Hanson, a Mormon, wants to know how I’m holding up, but I would rather learn his views about how everyone else is holding up. There are no surprises: we are pleased with the success we’ve had, but we are sick and tired of killing and having our guys shot down, and are all very tired and want to go home. It is good to meet with him, and he knows that I appreciate just talking about how God might be looking at what we are doing and about what he might want us to do—not that I believed we were any more important in God’s eyes than a sparrow. Nonetheless, these higher-level questions do rumble around in your mind, and this guy gets training, time, and money to think about such things.
Last is George Giddens. Schwarzkopf instituted a “Mayor” wherever Americans were stationed, so the locals could have a single contact point where they could address concerns and get problems solved. When Schwarzkopf asked the Air Force to appoint the Mayor of Riyadh, George got the job. He is responsible for the care and feeding of U.S. residents in his city, and he works with the local Saudi civil and military chiefs; he has done a wonderful job.
George is here today because he is having a problem with some of the residents at Eskan Village and is going to take action. (I don’t remember what the problem was—probably something like our guys were giving the Saudi guards on the gate a hard time, or else our guards were giving the Saudis delivering food and water a hard time, since anybody in Arab dress was looked on as a terrorist.) Since some of the troublemakers are Army guys, he wants me to know what he’s doing in case I want him to back off. As usual, he is thoroughly on top of things and will get the problem solved. It is a great comfort to have such a mature, thoughtful, yet disciplined Mayor running things in my name. If he were less capable, I might find myself caught up in his job. Even though it is important to the war effort that the various staffs and troops about town have hot food to eat and a decent place to stay, I really shouldn’t have to get into the hows and whens of any of that.
★ 1145 In the small dressing room next to the bathroom Tom Olsen and I share behind our office, there is a stuffed couch that looks like the finest king-size bed right about now. I sneak in for a quick nap, while George Gitchell sits outside the door and screens calls and callers. In seconds I’m into a deep sleep, but I will wake up according to an internal alarm clock in my brain. I have always been able to wake up after whatever time I choose—fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, or 6:00 A.M. the next day. As it is, I will sleep between half an hour and an hour. After I wake up, I will go downstairs to lunch with the troops—another chance to find out what is going on and what they are thinking or worrying about.
★ 1300 Up with cold water in the face and a toothbrushing to remove the remainders of the owl who slept in my mouth. I head downstairs to the Saudi cafeteria. The cook is an American Muslim who now lives in Riyadh after retiring from the USAF. Guess what fills my plate? You got it—grilled chicken, steamed rice with gravy, and boiled vegetables. It is tasty, but always the same. There is a salad of finely chopped, dark green lettuce mixed with finely chopped vegetables that might be green and red peppers, or might be stems of some exotic plant. Not so good, but keeps you regular. Dessert is usually a cake with crushed pistachio nuts on top. Water and a Diet Coke on the side.
I walk past the cash registers. The food’s on the house, thanks to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Now I search for a place to sit. I’ve got two criteria: (1) an empty chair, and (2) the people around it still have lots of food on their plates. Otherwise, when the general sits down, they will blush and mutter, “Got to go now.” No one wants to sit with me.
I like to hit different groups—sometimes lower-grade airmen; sometimes Saudis (they freak out when I sit down, but then get over their fear because they are curious); sometimes foreign officers or enlisted men; and sometimes my own longtime Ninth Air Force staff. I will get different information from each group. The longtime companions are the most open. They tell me what they really like and don’t like. They are my “emperor has no clothes” meter, and I try to hit them whenever possible for a reality check. The foreign officers and men tend to give me different angles on what we are doing and why we are doing it. Sometimes they give me information that can be useful in planning future operations
, but often they are so indirect that I miss what they are trying to tell me. The GIs are full of questions and are an excellent source of the rumors that fill the air, most of which they believe. In some ways they represent all of America—filled with wonder about what we are doing and certain that very simple answers will handle the complex problems we face. Though most of them seem amazed that the general is sitting with them, after they get over their initial shyness, they open up in a hurry. Like all Americans, they stand in awe of no one for any length of time. I love their self-assurance, the absence of fear—they’ll ask me anything that’s on their minds. I love it that they think they are as good as I am. These qualities are perhaps our greatest strength as a nation. We really believe in ourselves—not in the sense that we arrogantly think we know everything, but that we are as good as the next person, and if we don’t know the answer to a problem that plagues us, we are capable of understanding a good one when we get it.
★ 1345 Lunch is over, and I go back downstairs to the TACC, stopping by the computer room to check how the ATO is coming. I always have one question: “Are we going to get it to the units on time?” The answer is always “yes”; the reality is usually no. Colonel Rich Bennet, the one responsible for getting the ATO published after the Black Hole guys give him the master target list and packages, is pulling his hair out, because Buster wants to make last-minute changes that will screw the whole thing up. People are busy fat-fingering in the 100,000 details that go into any ATO—takeoff time, tanker orbit points, munitions, call signs, code words, IFF squawks, no-fly zones, fly zones, coordinating points, lines on the ground, air routes in the air. I get out of there quickly, as people are very busy and working at a frantic pace, and I hate computers.
★ 1400 I sag back into my chair in the Current Operations section of the TACC, watching the AWACS picture—yellow icons streaming into and out of Iraq. One of our aircraft has been lost, and Jim Crigger has just filled me in on what they appeared to be doing and what caused the shoot-down. As always, I hate these moments.
As I sit there, weary, I let the noise and chaos of the TACC voices, announcements, reports wash over me—the sights and sounds of my war, not the war I experienced in Vietnam. There the action was intense—sweat running into your eyes from under your helmet, your head twisting and turning, trying to see everything, from the MiG closing on your rear to the SAM trying to hit you in the face. But there you were better-rested than here, and when you got down from your mission, you were through for the day. You could go to the bar and get mindlessly drunk and fall asleep, until the next morning’s briefing started you on another day of boredom punctuated by an hour or so of sheer-ass terror. In this war, there is little boredom and almost no terror, except maybe the fear of screwing up and getting someone killed.
Meanwhile, it is important for me to sit and listen when the troops talk at me about what they are doing and what is important to them. Moreover, their energy is contagious, their intelligence brilliant. It’s exciting to listen to them when they come up to Crigger or Volmer with suggestions about making this or that mission more effective or making up for the bad weather over target XYZ by going to target ABC. (Colonel Al Volmer was one of the four colonels who ran the war from the TACC.) Crigger or Volmer listen to what they have to say, then tell them how to implement their brainchild without screwing up the bigger picture.
People visiting the TACC stop by, and we chat. Later, the BCE team chief and some of his people gather around the table behind my chair and they talk about the ground war, which is bound to unfold soon. Joe Bob Phillips has come in early, and I give him a task to solve, usually about finding Scuds or avoiding friendly casualties.
It’s hard to describe the tension, boredom, highs and lows that occurred in that room. When CNN went off the air on the first night, we were sky-high. The tension of anticipating everything that could have gone wrong that night was erased. But then there were the moments when someone was shot down, and we watched the futile efforts to pick up the survivor. There were also the long hours of routine, coffee breath, and sand in the eyes. I often pressed a can of cold Diet Coke into my eyes to make the swelling go down. Sometimes the pain and irritation would make me tear up so much that I couldn’t read reports or pay attention to the unfolding battle. There was also the anxious excitement when “Scud ALERT” was screamed out, especially during the first few days of missile attack, before we became overconfident that they wouldn’t hit us. Blind trust. There was the preparation, about 2100 or 2200 each night, when we tried to anticipate what was going to happen that evening—usually Scuds or Al-Khafji type things. There were good times, stopping by the coffeepots to tell war stories about the good old days. There were times when you wanted to cry, as when Lieutenant Colonel Donnie Holland was shot down at Basra and there were no beacons, meaning that in all likelihood he was dead. Holland had been my executive officer when I was the two-star planner at headquarters Tactical Air Command. When he wanted to get into the F-15E, I arranged it; and he was a first-rate weapons system officer. That night he was flying with a flight surgeon who was dual-rated as a pilot, and they flew into the ground. Though we gave the Iraqis credit for shooting them down, Donnie was in the rear cockpit because the doctor’s work in the hospital kept him from getting as much flying time as the other pilots. So Holland, the old head WSO, was crewed with the doctor/pilot who was low on flying time.
There was lots of shared joy and shared pain, often with people who’d been strangers until we came together for the war. There was lots of serious talk and some joking around, especially with the guys who were old Ninth Air Force friends or other longtime acquaintances like John Corder. It really was a living organism; it reacted to stimuli—pain, joy, and loneliness. Too often, we in the military draw our little boxes that explain how we are organized, who commands whom, who stands where on the command food chain. That’s all fine and rational and necessary, but in reality, while we try to create these hierarchies with the power to command others to go out and risk their lives in battle, we are actually a team of fallible humans who do our best to find the best course of action. But then people have to put on G suits and try. If they succeed, we all bask in the glory. If they fail, we try to learn why and perhaps have another collective go at it again. If they are wounded, captured, or killed, then the guy in the G suit suddenly gets the whole enchilada, and those of us who are ancillary to that event are left with feelings of pain and sorrow, and a somewhat guilty sense of relief that it wasn’t us who paid that price. Fortunately, I had been shot at and had taken pretty extreme risks, which gave me a fairly good understanding of the folks who strapped on the jets and headed for danger. In my view, anyone who sends others off, perhaps to die, needs that kind of understanding. As much as this thing we call command and control is about modern computers, communications, planning tools, and satellite photography, it is also about people wandering around in partial ignorance, trying to do good by doing evil, and feeling—sometimes all at once—joy-pain-fear-uncertainty-fatigue-love-and-grief.
★ 1600 I have appointments with the press—first with a newspaper writer, and then with TV people. The newswoman meets me in a trailer in the parking lot out back; the air conditioner hum keeps out the noise of planes and people. As she takes out her tape recorder, I sneak a peek at her legs. It’s been over six months, and I am no priest. She asks me about how the war is going, what is the matter with BDA, and when the ground war will start. I want to answer “Good,” “Nothing,” and “You have me confused with somebody who gives a shit”; but instead I try to be as open as I can.
My PA, Major Oscar Seara, is with me. At 1645, he steers the lady to the gate and me to the Airlift TACC tent, closer to the building. Here the camera and mikes are set up, and I meet ABC’s Sam Donaldson (or someone of that ilk). This is a love-in. The war is going well, and they need about three minutes with me on camera so they can give their audience an orgasm. The lady reporter had asked some difficult questions because she had done her ho
mework and wanted to write an insightful piece. How can you get real information from two-minute TV slices? On the other hand, the TV reporter is real good at stroking people’s egos, and I like having mine stroked in front of millions of people.
★ 1730 I finally get out of there and reenter the RSAF headquarters at the door near the mosque. The turnout is better than it had been this morning. The wail of the prayers and the sun dropping low in the horizon put me in an oriental mood, so I guess it’s time to drop in on Behery. I visit him at his office because this honors him, it’s a nicer place than mine, and his staff will serve gaua and tea.
Anytime we are together, I do my best to pick his brain about today’s problems and crises. I want to know his thoughts about how things are going and what we ought to do. But he is operating on a very different plane. He wants to give me instruction about his land, his culture, his religion, and his people. His words are often about the tenth century, and I am thinking in the twentieth. And yet this is not wasted time.