Every Man a Tiger (1999)

by Tom - Nf - Commanders Clancy

  Hundred of miles away, Captain Paul Johnson and his wingman, Captain Randy Goff, were flying up from King Fahd Air Base to King Khalid Military City in their A-10 Warthogs, call signs Sandy 57 and 58. When they landed, they’d sit ground-alert for combat search-and-rescue tasking—not a happy prospect. Their day promised to be wasted on the ground while their squadron buddies were shooting up the Iraqi Army in Kuwait.

  The day turned out to be more interesting than they expected.

  On a routine check-in with AWACS, Johnson and Goff found that they had new “tasking”: They were to head north to help two other A-10s and a super Jolly Green Giant MH-53J (call sign Moccasin 05) find a downed F-14 pilot somewhere west of Baghdad. That was a big “somewhere,” and it was a long way north of the Saudi border—and a lot farther north than A-10s usually flew. (Up there, their primary fear was to run into a MiG when no F-15s were around. On the other hand, they had little to fear from AAA and SAMs, since the desert was pretty barren.)

  Before they headed north into “Indian country,” they pressed west along the border looking for a tanker to fill their fuel tanks. Though the weather was terrible and thunderstorms were all around, they spotted a KC-10 tanker in a clear spot and picked up their gas.

  Meanwhile, since the other searchers had so far had no luck, AWACS sent the two Sandys off to check out a suspected Scud hiding place, which turned out to be Bedouin tents. An hour and a half later, after reporting to AWACS, “No luck on the Scuds,” they got vectors to a tanker for another refueling.

  Next, they headed north to a new search area, over a hundred miles west of Baghdad. Though fatigue had started to set in, Johnson and Goff really wanted to find and rescue the downed pilot. As they flew deeper into Iraq, Johnson repeatedly tried to contact Slate 46 on the rescue frequency. Just as he was beginning to think he was on a wild-goose chase, he heard Jones calling him with his survival radio. The signal was weak, but still strong enough for the A-10 pilots to take a radio bearing with their direction-finding needles.

  On the other hand, they had to wonder if Jones had been captured and an English-speaking Iraqi was leading them into a trap. Better to be sorry than safe, however, in this case. When guys were on the ground, you had to take risks.

  As they flew deeper and deeper into bad-guy territory, the radio signal grew louder and louder, telling them they were on the right track. The original searchers had been looking too far to the south.

  Now the A-10s were over the downed F-14 pilot, and it was time to hang it all out: they popped down under some clouds on the deck to eyeball Jones’s actual position. The big, ugly Warthogs screaming over his hideout proved to be quite a shock to the Navy pilot, but he still had enough presence of mind to call them on the radio.

  The A-10s deliberately did not orbit the site, lest they give away the location to Iraqis in the area. But Johnson did let Jones know that he had seen his location and memorized the surrounding terrain features.

  Meanwhile, they had a problem. The Sandys were again nearly out of gas. It would be their third in-flight refueling of the day. As they flew away, they promised Jones they’d be back after they filled up.

  No problem, the Navy pilot thought. He’d already been hiding for six hours; occasional Iraqi army trucks had passed by on a nearby road, and so far he hadn’t lost his cool. Now that the A-10s had his position, rescue couldn’t be far away. He knew those A-10s would not let him down.

  As it happened, they almost did.

  Heading south, Johnson and Goff ran into headwinds. These—and their gritty determination to find Jones—had left them too low on gas to make it back to Saudi Arabia and a tanker aircraft (for obvious reasons, tankers stayed on the Saudi side of the border). When AWACS put them in contact with a tanker, Johnson asked it to fly north to rendezvous with him; the tanker pilot refused. The rules said no tankers in Iraq, and this tanker pilot was going to follow the rules.

  Now desperate, Johnson pointed out to the tanker pilot that he just might fly over to him and transfer a full load of 30 mm ammunition into his KC-135. Of course, he wouldn’t do such a thing—and actually he couldn’t. He didn’t have enough gas to fly that far south. For whatever reason—fear, or more likely conscience—the tanker pilot headed across the border and into Iraq for a rendezvous with the nearly empty A-10s. Either way, just then he became a hero to the A-10 drivers.

  Though by this time Moccasin 05 (the Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopter, flown by Captain Tom Trask) had returned to its forward operating base at Ar’ar just south of the Iraqi border, its crew had not totally given up the search, and they were monitoring their radio when Sandy 57 made contact with Jones, and later with the tanker. While the A-10s sucked gas out of the KC-135, they launched and headed north. Soon they were joined by the two A-10s.

  On the flight north, AWACS controllers vectored them around Iraqi SAM sites in their path. Before long, they were talking to Jones.

  The Moccasin 05 crew were going over rescue procedures with the Navy pilot when Johnson and Goff spotted an Iraqi radio direction-finding truck racing toward the pilot’s hiding place; and as Sandy’s 57 and 58 turned their attention to the Iraqi truck, Moccasin 05 swooped down on the pilot, his arms waving like mad. The A-10s rolled in and strafed the Iraqis with their 30 mm cannons, and, in Jones’s words, “the truck vaporized.” It had been close.

  As Johnson pulled off the burning truck, Jones was jumping out of his hole in the desert less than a football field away and running to the waiting helicopter. It was a sight Johnson would never forget.

  Though many people deserved praise that day, in the end it was the determination and guts of Captains Johnson and Goff that made the mission successful. Nearly nine hours after they’d climbed into them, the two exhausted pilots climbed down from their A-10s.

  Months later, their country would reward Paul Johnson and Randy Goff for their efforts on what had started out as a boring day sitting combat search-and-rescue alert. Johnson received the Air Force Cross, the Air Force’s second-highest medal, and Randy Goff was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  The Jones rescue was difficult, but it worked. Too many CSAR missions did not come off so well. The most notable of these failures occurred on the night of January 19, when an F-15E hunting Scuds was shot down by an SA-2 missile.

  THE ODYSSEY OF TOM GRIFFITH

  Tom Griffith was a weapons systems officer, assigned to the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, flying F-15Es, and first deployed in the rushed chaos of early August to Thumrait Air Base in Oman.

  Still locked in his memory is the anxiety of mobility processing, when no one knew where they were being sent or what to expect when they got there. This was swiftly followed by the greater anxiety of imminent war, when he was handed a real gas mask and a real atropine injection pen (which protected against nerve gas).

  In Oman, he endured the hot August days and nights, putting up tents in a dust storm, eating MREs until the kitchen tent was set up, sitting alert in a jet loaded with wall-to-wall cluster bomb units. August became September, and he endured that, too.

  But when September became October, he was needed back home at Seymour Johnson AFB. So he left Thumrait and went home to train new crew members and spend Christmas with his wife and four young children. Or so he thought.

  In December, when the wing was moved up to Al Kharj and a second squadron of F-15Es was deployed into the theater, Tom was at the top of the list to rejoin the unit. Later in December, the call came.

  Leaving quickly, he discovered, was a hell of a lot easier than leaving slowly. In August, he just said goodbye and raced off. This time there were days to take last looks at his wife and children. This time there were hundreds of awkward moments when “we don’t talk about it,” until the actual leave-taking finally brought painful release.

  Al Kharj—known to Americans as Al’s Garage—was a desolate place. The recently erected neat and orderly tent city did not improve its charm. But when Griffith arrived, he at least had the advantage
of experience. The truly new guys, fresh from warm beds, Little League baseball with their kids, and Friday-night beer call, had to endure the barbs and hazing of the old heads, who’d suffered through the desert summer and fall. But not Tom Griffith.

  Then December became January, and Griffith, like every aircrew member facing his first combat sortie, had to come to grips with a question that lay heavy in his heart. It was not, Am I going to die? but much more terrible, How am I going to do? Will I screw the pooch? Christ, I hope I don’t screw up!

  On Tom’s first mission, he and his pilot, Colonel Dave Eberly, the wing DO, hit a radio transmission tower used by the Iraqi air defense system. It wasn’t pretty, but the strike went okay, and the Iraqi bullets missed them. Other F-15Es hit a nearby airfield, and he watched the seeming miracle of their escape from the waves of tracers thrown against them. Though the naysayers had predicted drastic losses, all the F-15Es came home that night.

  After that the confidence swelled their hearts. “Hot shit! We did it! Everybody came back!”

  Relief and confidence made everyone bolder . . . which instantly evaporated when one of the jets was lost following an attack on Basra. He was shaken again when a Wild Weasel tasked to support Griffith’s second mission was unable to find the tanker. It tried to land at fog-shrouded King Khalid Military City, but ran out of fuel and ideas. The crew ejected safely.

  Though the losses put a chill in the aircrews, their worst fears had still not been realized. Thus, when a rushed, all-out strike was called against the Scuds in western Iraq, Griffith took in stride the inevitable confusion that accompanied this last-minute change in the ATO, and went about the job of planning his attack while briefing with Dave Eberly.

  As usual when higher headquarters threw planning changes at operational people, confusion reigned. This wasn’t helped when the WSOs feverishly crammed in last-minute target and route studies, which made the crews late getting to their jets. After all, it was their reputations on the line. They had to find the target and put them on it.

  The pilots only had to work their machines.

  That is, a pilot only had to get off the runway without breaking anything, lift the gear handle, avoid hitting the KC-135 during refueling rendezvous, hang on to the boom while gas was pumped, then follow the WSO’s orders and put the jet into a small piece of sky at a speed and heading that would enable the bombs to hit their mark. Once that was done, he could fly back to a tanker, and then home.

  During most of the mission, the WSO had it easy. That meant he could do busywork checking out systems or helping with the tanker join-up (if the pilot gave him control of the radar). Later he’d feed the route coordinates into the navigation system, which gave the pilot steering orders in the form of a small circle on his HUD. The hard part came when he took control of the radar and searched ever-smaller pieces of landscape below. When he’d found the target area, he’d work out where the bombs must impact by making a radar picture of the area (this looked like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph), and comparing that with the materials he had studied before takeoff or with drawings or pictures he’d clipped to his kneeboard. Then he would delicately manipulate the tracking handle to place the crosshairs of his radar display directly over the spot representing the target’s location.

  No debate. There wasn’t time. The success of the mission, the payoff for this flight into harm’s way, came down to how well the WSO operated his radar, made sense out of the information displayed on his cathode ray tubes, and placed hair-thin bars that showed the pilot how to place the aircraft into that point in the sky that was the right place for releasing the bombs.

  In the F-15E, the glory or failure went to the WSO, and it was pass/fail. Either you hit the target, or you didn’t. That night, Tom Griffith never got to try.

  Things started to go bad as Eberly and Griffith’s F-15, Buick 04, was finishing with the air-to-air refueling and the flight was sitting in formation with the KC-135s, waiting for their EF-111 electronic jamming and F-4G Wild Weasel SAM attack support aircraft to arrive. But these aircraft called in miles out from the rendezvous: “We’re going to be late” (again, the cost of last-minute changes to the ATO). This put the F-15 flight leader in a bind. He had to leave the tanker now if he expected to make the time over target listed in the ATO. If he was early or late, he would risk interfering with other aircraft. If he went in without the protection of the EF-111s and F-4Gs, he’d risk sending the F-15Es naked into the target. It was a tough call, but he made the best choice he could. The flight left the tanker at the appointed time, and he radioed his EF-111 and F-4G helpers to refuel and join them in the target area as soon as they could catch up.

  Sometime later, Buick 04 was somewhere near the Syrian border, just seconds away from weapons release, their F-15 speeding as fast as they could push it. At over 600 miles an hour, time went quickly, especially for someone trying to build a radar picture of an ill-defined target; the tension was building. As Griffith fine-tuned his radar picture, gently moving the crosshairs fractions of an inch, the steering commands in Eberly’s HUD offset ever so slightly, and Eberly smoothly brought his aircraft to the new heading. All of this had been practiced hundreds of times before—except for one never-trained-for factor: Hundreds of people on the ground, equipped with a vast array of weapons, were intent on killing them. They pursued this purpose with passionate intensity.

  The F-15E’s warning receiver started to chatter, then displayed the symbols that told both crew members they were being tracked by surface-to-air missile-guidance radars. Griffith tore himself away from his radar and activated the switch that fired an explosive squib on the belly of the jet. This caused thousands of chaff filaments to blossom in the air and—it was hoped—blind and confuse the radar operators on the ground.

  Whoosh, whoosh. A pair of guided missiles, probably Vietnam-vintage SA-2s, streaked toward their jet and exploded below and to their left. Putting aside the attack, Griffith dispensed more chaff, and Eberly turned the jet to avoid more missiles. Suddenly there was a flash, and the jet shuddered as if it had struck a wall of water. Surprisingly, they heard no noise.

  A microsecond later, a grim but bemused Tom Griffith wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to wait for the EF-111 and F-4G support. A microsecond after that, he moved his right foot to a switch on the cockpit floor that would transmit to the rest of the flight the news that Buick 04 had been hit and would probably abort the attack. But to his sudden amazement, he failed to reach the switch; his feet were lifting off the floor and his ejection seat was traveling up the steel rails that held it in the cockpit. Eberly was ejecting them!

  How Eberly accomplished that will probably never be known, for he had suffered a neck wound and lost consciousness. He did not wake up until he was on the ground.

  Now Griffith was falling through the night sky, with no sense of up or down, only that he was cold and falling and still in his ejection seat. His mind raced through his emergency training procedures, trying to recall how to free himself from his seat and get his parachute deployed. But then, just as his mind filled with the terrible image of his mangled body in the desert, still attached to the seat, all the magic worked, and at the proper altitude, the tiny explosive charges fired according to schedule and Tom found himself floating beneath his open parachute. Now he knew where the ground was. It was the place where the angry red tracers were coming from, all arcing up toward him. Images of hundreds of bullets striking his parachute flashed across his mind, swiftly followed by the more frightening thoughts of red-hot projectiles ripping into his flesh. Just then, he involuntarily clamped his flight boots together to give some protection to his more precious parts. That lasted until he realized that the explosion of one projectile would remove everything from his navel down, so he might as well be comfortable during the ride to earth.

  Always thinking, Tom dug his survival radio out of his vest and, tearing off a glove, set out to flip the switches that would let him broadcast to the others. However, befor
e he could complete the procedure, he was distracted by a large explosion on the ground beneath him. His aircraft, he imagined. Then it hit him that unless he could maneuver his parachute, he was likely to descend into the burning wreckage, not a happy thought. Meanwhile, he discovered that his radio was useless. His cold, numb fingers could not operate the switches. As he was trying to slip it back into its pocket in his survival vest, he hit the ground like a two-hundred-pound bag of fertilizer thrown from the roof of a two-story building.

  The impact twisted his left knee. Worse, he was near the fire of his burning jet, its light a beacon to the Iraqis, who would surely come looking for him. Worse still, bombs began exploding nearby, shaking the earth under his feet and filling the air overhead with deadly pieces of red-hot steel.

  At that point his survival training took over, and he grabbed a small packet of essential items, called a “dash pack,” from his survival kit. It contained items like a radio and water, and it was small and light enough to be easily portable if an aircrew member had to run from the spot where his parachute might mark his location to enemy soldiers. With his dash pack under his arm, his sore knee sending bolts of pain up his leg, and gallons of adrenaline pouring into his arteries, Griffith stumbled away from the blazing wreckage of his jet.

  The terrain quickly became a series of gullies in the hard-packed gravel desert. As soon as he felt hidden in darkness, he sat down and took stock—survival training 101. Aside from the sore knee and pounding heart, he was in pretty good shape, except for one small fact: he was hundreds of miles inside enemy territory, on foot.

  Now the guns and the bombs had quit their chorus, and it was quiet. The lights of trucks headed his way as the Iraqis made their way through the desert toward the fire of the crashed F-15E. With no time to worry about his missing front-seater, Griffith began a rapid withdrawal, trying to put as many gullies as possible between himself and the plane wreckage. A plan started to come. He’d walk to nearby Syria and turn himself in to the police or army. Then he reviewed the ATO’s survival procedures. It was time for him to broadcast in the blind on his survival radio. He keyed the mike and sent a mayday call. To his surprise, he was answered by the familiar voice of Dave Eberly. The conversation that followed was comically inane: