The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  I had a long talk with God. I’m sure there is no problem hitting all the military targets we’ve been given; I just want to make sure that my bombs produce no collateral damage. I don’t want to live the rest of my life with the thought of having blood on my hands due to messing something up.

  When his chance came, the weather was poor and Serbian surface-to-air missile threats remained a menace, forcing him and his wingman to stay high above ground. The two F-14s were searching for four Serbian howitzers on a road near Djakovica, in western Kosovo. The intelligence photo they had been given was practically useless. What the analysts labeled as howitzers appeared as four small dots. McDowell flew lower for a closer look. He found the field but not the artillery.

  He noticed something the intelligence imagery did not show. One of the dots on the photograph was within 100 feet of a home. McDowell assumed any family living there would have moved away from an obvious military target. But he could not be sure and his orders were to strike. He circled back, peering through his targeting pod. He zoomed the optics in, tightening into a soda-straw view of the ground. Even then he could not find the artillery, trucks, and other equipment he’d expect to be part of a firing battery.

  He returned to the Roosevelt with his bombs, comfortable with his choice. “Even though we didn’t drop, and I’m sure the skipper felt like it was a failure for not dropping, I actually felt good,” he wrote in his diary. “I felt like we did it all right.”

  Several days later he had another chance. The Serbian military was basing Super Galeb light fighters and ground-attack jets at the Podgorica airfield in Montenegro. The Navy planned to attack with more than three dozen American aircraft and destroy the fleet on the ground. McDowell would fly with his squadron’s commanding officer in the backseat and in control of the targeting pod. They would carry GBU-12s, laser-guided 500-pound bombs.

  The formation reached the airfield. McDowell’s front-seat monitor was not working, but his commanding officer had a clear view:

  Skipper found a Super Galeb and put the bombs right on it. Right before impact I got the video back and saw our two GBU-12’s completely destroy the Super Galeb. What a great shot! We were just low enough to be below the clouds and so the video came out perfect. No doubt that one will make CNN. No one was around the aircraft, but it was definitely fueled because it had tremendous secondary explosions.

  Back on the carrier his commanding officer wrapped him in a bear hug. For the rest of the deployment, their aircraft was adorned with the silhouette of a Super Galeb: not a dogfighting kill, but still a hostile aircraft destroyed.

  The next day McDowell was assigned to work alongside F/A-18 Hornets and attack a bridge and highway overpass back near Djakovica. By the common line of thinking, the F/A-18 was considered more versatile than the F-14 and better suited to the post–Cold War world. It cost less to maintain and could carry a greater array of weapons. But for the war in Kosovo the F-14 possessed an advantage. A new targeting pod, retrofitted on the F-14, was not compatible with F/A-18s. This assured F-14 squadrons a busy dual role. Tomcats were not just dropping bombs in foul weather and at night; they were finding targets for F/A-18s and guiding the ordnance they released.

  That evening McDowell’s aircraft and his wingman converged with a pair of Hornets near a Serbian ammunition supply point that was being watched by an American special operations team. An American voice came over the radio, guiding the pilots in.

  High overhead McDowell picked up a target: vehicles with men standing around, some loading crates.

  From another Serbian position below, ground fire rose up.

  The aviators commenced work. They selected a vehicle with several men beside it and painted it with the targeting pod laser. One of the F/A-18s released a Maverick missile. It began following the laser’s reflection, downward toward the vehicle and the men.

  In the intricate system of carrier-based aviation, pilots are both overburdened and striving for perfection. Much of their attention is consumed by an unshakable desire not to screw up. McDowell was at the stick of an aircraft worth tens of millions of dollars. He needed everything to be exact, and until that moment he had not had time to think about where all of this coordination led. Now there was a lull.

  The targets were in the open, the ground fire could not harm him, his line of sight was clear. The missile was closing the distance toward the ground. Pilots have a word for missions that reach this stage. They are “suitcased.” There was not much more to do except keep the laser on the target—and watch.

  Ten or fifteen seconds passed. A few of the men beside the vehicle somehow sensed danger. They bolted for a tree line. McDowell perceived this as a smart move. Those men would live.

  A thought entered McDowell’s consciousness, different from any he’d ever had. It was about the men who stood in place.

  I’m watching these guys’ last moment on earth, and they don’t even know it.

  The missile struck.

  A green flash briefly obscured McDowell’s screen. After it passed, he saw that the men standing behind the vehicle had been blown backward and to the side. A few of them remained alive.

  The missile’s explosion had not been hot enough to bake the ground. Through the infrared sensor, McDowell saw human heat signatures superimposed over cold soil. They writhed. A wounded man crawled from the shattered vehicle. A few Serbs had dashed into a small building. McDowell shifted focus. His backseater redirected the laser and painted the building where they hid. A second Maverick hit it squarely.

  As the smoke drifted after, the F-14s loitered. McDowell scanned from spot to spot. The wounded Serbs had died. Nothing below moved. He began the process of shutting his feelings down.

  It almost felt like watching TV, yet I knew it was very, very real. It affected me in ways I did not expect. This is not the first time I’ve dropped a weapon in combat, or destroyed a target in combat, but it is the first time I’m certain that I’ve killed anyone, the first time I watched them die as a result of what I was doing. It feels different than I expected, part of me wants to spend some time tonight thinking it through, thinking about those men’s families and the life they had, but a bigger part of me wants to ignore it, stay numb, and get ready for tomorrow.

  On May 27, when McDowell was assigned to a midday strike on a radio-relay site in northern Kosovo, the intelligence imagery again was poor. It did not show the target clearly. Hoping not to alert Serbian forces, the pilots did not approach directly. They flew several miles to the south, then turned abruptly, giving anyone on the ground little chance to react. This tactic protected aircraft but came with a challenge: aircrews would have only seconds to find and verify a target.

  The aircraft completed their sharp turn.

  Serbian air defenses opened up. Incoming fire demanded McDowell’s attention, leaving less time to look through his targeting screen. He thought he saw the radio-relay site, and released ordnance.

  I felt good about the release, then clouds obscured the target until about 13 seconds to impact. At that time I began having doubts about the target. It didn’t look right, but in those 13 seconds, I didn’t say anything, and we took out what we were targeting with 2 GBU-12’s.

  The aircraft turned for the carrier. Freed from the demands of high-speed decision making, McDowell felt his doubts grow. It was a long flight to the ship, and he did a poor job of taking on fuel from a KC-130 aerial tanker. He flew the probe into the coupling so hard, it punched a hole in the basket. He was troubled and he knew it.

  On the ship McDowell removed the electronic cartridge that held the strike’s video footage with a growing sense of dread.

  Viewed on a large screen with higher resolution in the ready room, the footage confirmed his fear. His bomb had not hit the target. It struck a carport beside a house. McDowell looked closely and made out signs of civilian occupation, including four bicycles standing upright in a neat row, as if their owners might be inside. Two of the bicycles were child-sized.

>   He felt a chill. Have I killed a family?

  His analytical mind tallied factors: The intelligence had been poor, the imagery was bad, the tactics and the ground fire had compressed his decision window, drifting cloud deck had blocked his view. By his accounting these were not acceptable excuses. Doubt had registered in his mind during the bomb’s descent. He could have dragged the ordnance off target, into a field. He had not done that. He was responsible for whatever had happened in that house.

  Up to now, I could say positively that, while I have certainly killed Serb soldiers, I had not harmed a civilian. Now I don’t know. I hope the house was empty—evacuated by refugees or the family just not there. But I just don’t know . . . It concerns me . . . partly because we were sent after a target impossible to see and the imagery was bad, but also that I allowed it to happen. I can only pray that God made sure no one was there, I can only hope there is no innocent blood on my hands.

  * * *

  In the weeks after September 11, after the Enterprise linked up with the Carl Vinson in the Arabian Sea, the days seemed to drag on. The squadrons trained. McDowell was agitated. The waiting bothered him.

  On September 26 the senior officers on the ship called a meeting. The admiral who commanded the strike group was blunt. American air operations had for decades been risk-averse. One objective was to not lose aircraft or crews. That mind-set, the admiral said, had been suspended. Thousands of American civilians had been killed. The Pentagon would tolerate losses as the services struck back. The flights ahead would be difficult. Some targets were more than 1,000 miles away. To reach them, aircraft would refuel with aerial tankers on the way in, then again on the way out. No one knew whether the services would manage to coordinate this kind of traffic in the skies or if the weather would cooperate. And if tanker placement was not flawless or if flying conditions turned harsh, some planes might run out of fuel.

  These crews, the admiral said, would eject.

  McDowell took it in. He understood how combat flights could go wrong. The presence of tankers was no guarantee of a return flight. If an F-14 were to damage a fuel probe against a tanker’s trailing basket, it would not be able to refuel. Pilots would have to turn in the safest direction and fly until it was time to eject. Aviators parachuting into Taliban-controlled areas, his senior officers said, should not expect mercy. McDowell’s childhood had been unusual in a suburbanizing America. He had had access to firearms and often walked far from the farmhouse to stalk small game. If he was forced to parachute into a remote area, he was confident he could survive as long as he eluded his pursuers. “Any aircrew captured there will be executed within a day or two, so there is no chance of return,” he wrote in his diary. “I have no doubt that I am ready for all this and just wish that, if it is going to happen . . . we start it soon.”

  The wait continued. On October 2, he buzzed an Iranian tanker that ventured near the carrier group. When rigging a ship, as aviators called the maneuver, pilots approached a vessel from an angle at which they could read the ship’s name and country of origin without exposing the aircraft to danger. For all the rules imposed by the Navy, this was a circumstance when aircraft safety and tactics aligned to allow some fun. McDowell flew a bow-tie maneuver far behind the tanker and then rushed forward on a heading that would take him at an oblique angle across the stern. He came in just above the water, a human arrow traveling near the speed of sound, blasting the ship with jet noise.

  He did it a few more times, flying for flying’s sake. He returned to the Enterprise for a crisp arrested landingI and headed for his bunk, wanting something more.

  The next day the orders came in. The moving pieces the Pentagon required to begin attacks were in place. The carrier’s air group was to link up with aerial tankers and E-3 AWACS for a night rehearsal up an air corridor through Pakistan to the edge of Afghanistan.

  The flight was tense. The crews did not know what to expect from Pakistan. They flew in a defensive posture—radios silent, lights out, the pilots wearing night-vision goggles and emitting only radar. Nobody was permitted to talk, except within aircraft via the on-board intercom. The route carried them 400 miles into Pakistan, where they met tankers from Oman and took on fuel. They flew more than 200 miles farther, stopping near the Afghan border. There they patrolled, hoping Taliban pilots might challenge their approach.

  Nothing stirred on the horizon.

  The F-14s, out of time, retraced their route to the ship.

  On October 6 new orders arrived: The air strikes would begin overnight.

  Aviators gathered for updates. The beginning of the American retaliation would have many participants and parts. Targets were being divided between Tomahawk missiles, the Air Force’s strategic bombers, and strike fighters on the carriers. The plans suggested that the F-14s’ roles might end within weeks. McDowell wondered whether after a few days there would be much left to hit. Experience in Kosovo had taught him that air-to-ground combat in the era of infrared targeting pods and guided munitions was lopsided. That was against a Soviet-equipped and Soviet-trained army, and we wiped them out, he thought. Flights into Afghanistan would be harder logistically, but the Taliban was a third-world force with ancient equipment. Its fate, he assumed, would be quick.

  On the opening night, VF-14 would attack behind a wave of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The aircrews were given coordinates of Qaeda training camps and Taliban bases. By the next morning, they hoped, they would be killing the terrorists’ leaders. One item carried special resonance: a list of locations frequented by al Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden. There was the possibility that one of the senior Navy pilots might kill him and his entourage before sunrise on the first day of a new war.

  McDowell was particularly well-suited to imagine what might be in store for bin Laden. Several F-14s would carry the largest air-to-ground weapons on the ship: GBU-24s, 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs. In 1999, in Kosovo, he had dropped a bomb half that size into the entrance of a road tunnel in which a five-truck Serbian military convoy had taken shelter. His idea at the time had been “like trying to scare a rabbit out of an irrigation pipe,” he wrote in his journal. After the explosion, he circled overhead and waited for the rabbit. No one came out. He reviewed the strike video and concluded that the bomb’s effects had been concentrated by the tunnel’s narrow confines, which channeled shrapnel, pressure, and searing heat onto his Serbian victims, ending their lives in an overpowering flash. The detonation of an even larger GBU-24 in the mouth of an Afghan cave, McDowell surmised, could kill bin Laden by overpressure wave even if shrapnel and fire never touched him.

  For the first night, McDowell was assigned to be a spare for GBU-24 strikes on caves northwest of Kandahar. The operations officer drafted him to the planning team, which required hours of calculating the strikes’ parameters so bombs would land at cave entrances in a manner to maximize damage inside. But even as he worked, McDowell found himself hoping that he would not fly these missions. He wanted an air-to-air chance at a Taliban MiG, one of the dated Soviet-made fighter-aircraft in a rare jihadist fleet.

  He knew this might not make sense to anyone who did not appreciate the stubborn primacy of aerial dogfighting in the minds of pilots of F-14s. When he was a child in the late 1970s, and set himself on course to be a fighter pilot, the United States and the Soviet Union were squared off in the Cold War. A clash in which Navy pilots might dogfight against the pilots of a Soviet client, meeting above clouds for air-to-air battle, was more than conceivable. American fighter pilots drilled for it. By the time McDowell earned his wings, he was far more likely to participate in air strikes than to encounter a bogey. No Navy pilot had shot down an enemy fighter jet since 1991, when two F/A-18s from the USS Saratoga hit a pair of Iraqi MiG-21s in the first hours of the Persian Gulf War.II McDowell had flown in the conflicts of his time. But he had never encountered an enemy fighter plane in flight. Once he had a lock on an unidentified aircraft over Serb-held territory in Kosovo and cued a Sparrow air-to-air missil
e to down it. The rules of engagement cleared him for a kill. But something had not felt right. The target seemed too slow. He flew close for a visual and came up tight on an American Predator drone. It had not been on the flight schedule.

  His restraint that day had spared him a hassle. But he still considered himself a fighter pilot, no matter that bombs hung beneath his aircraft’s wings. And the Taliban, he knew, had a small fleet of MiG-21s and pilots who flew them. These pilots lacked the training and equipment to match American fighter pilots at night. But they flew by day, and some of them had been showing themselves in the skies since the attacks on September 11. When McDowell reviewed the latest briefings, he saw Taliban MiGs had flown that morning.

  Let them try that again, he thought.

  How easy would it be to shoot down a Taliban MiG? McDowell figured it would be simple. How difficult was it to thread antiaircraft fire at night, get a good parameter release, and guide a GBU-24 to the target nestled in a ravine? He’d done that before. It was hard. But there was nothing new there, and not much reward. Navy pilots knew the deal: Shoot down a MiG, earn a Silver Star. Smack a cave with a GBU? Go back and plan the next one.

  He was content to let his older colleagues lead the cave strikes the opening night. He hoped to be assigned to flights immediately behind them. That would put him over Afghanistan as the sun rose and the sky brightened—right when a Taliban pilot might dare to fly.

  * * *

  McDowell slept much of the day, getting the rest he would need for an all-nighter in the cockpit. He woke as ships accompanying the Enterprise fired the opening salvo of Tomahawks. This was a historic moment, the beginning of the retaliation for September 11. He did not head topside to watch. The missiles would hit what they would hit. He focused on his role.