SIX
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G-MONSTER
Lieutenant Commander Layne McDowell’s Dream
“I have proudly fought for my country in the skies over Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan without regret.”
JANUARY 2006
Naval Air Station, Lemoore, California
Layne McDowell was back in a combat unit, preparing to head overseas. More than four years after leaving the USS Enterprise during the opening attacks on the Taliban and al Qaeda, he was thirty-two years old and a lieutenant commander, newly transferred to VFA-97, a strike fighter squadron stationed in central California. Known as the Warhawks, VFA-97 had formed in the 1960s. For most of its existence it had flown the A-7 Corsair II, a subsonic attack aircraft dubbed by aviators the SLUF, for “short little ugly fucker,” owing to its dumpy appearance and inelegant lines. In 1991 the squadron scrapped its Corsairs and transitioned to F/A-18s, the supersonic fighter-attack jets that were also replacing the Navy’s fleet of F-14s. Its next rotation was to be a tour at an air station at Iwakuni, Japan, where it would work beside Marines from Okinawa and be part of the American forces arrayed near the Korean Peninsula. Its Pacific crossing was scheduled for February.
The squadron was grieving. In mid-January, its pilots temporarily relocated to Southern California and were flying practice bombing runs at the Navy’s complex of air-to-ground ranges at El Centro. One of McDowell’s peers, Lieutenant Commander Frank Carl Wittwer, had been on a night bombing run when his aircraft malfunctioned after releasing a practice bomb. Wittwer’s jet had been pointed at the ground when the malfunction occurred, putting him into immediate out-of-control flight. He ejected. The aircraft hit a farmer’s field. Wittwer’s chute only partially deployed. McDowell had fallen ill with food poisoning that night and missed the training flights. But he was the squadron’s safety officer, and was rushed by Marine helicopter in the morning to the crash site to begin the investigation and recover his friend’s remains, which he escorted to the air station and then to Wittwer’s hometown, DeRidder, Louisiana.
McDowell had lost peers before, including one of his closest friends, who had been in an F-14 that hit the ocean in 2001. He was adept at compartmentalization, at doing what needed to be done. Wittwer was married and had left three children. After the memorial ceremonies, the squadron’s calendar marched on. McDowell followed the pattern pilots use to survive. He focused on work. A pilot with a growing supervisory role, he had to plan a flight of six aircraft that he would lead across the Pacific. The F/A-18s would complete the journey in three legs, trailing an aerial tanker and taking turns refueling while McDowell plotted routes dodging storms. He turned his mind to this.
As the United States settled into its fifth year of war in Afghanistan and was about to mark its third year in Iraq, he personified American naval aviation success. He had graduated at the top of his class at Annapolis, earned pilot wings in an F-14, and served two tours on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean and North Arabian Seas. He had dropped ordnance on four countries in three different military campaigns, and wore the medals and ribbons that marked him as a member of his community’s seasoned core. He’d earned a master’s in aeronautical engineering and qualified as a test pilot. Recently promoted, he was in the small pool of Navy pilots being groomed for space shuttle flights or aircraft carrier command.
He and his wife, Jolene, had also started a family, timing the birth of their first son, Landon, in late 2002 with a seam in his fast-paced schedule that allowed more space for a home life. When Landon was born, McDowell was a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, working on his master’s—a routine that allowed him to be with Jolene almost every night. It had been a year to remember. He enjoyed academics, found the classwork satisfying, and rode a bicycle to and from class every day. Later, when he looked back at his time in Monterey, he realized it was the only year of his life in which he could not recall routinely being in either a cockpit or a car.
His period of study aligned with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which put McDowell in an unfamiliar position: watching the United States prepare for a war in which he was not involved. He had supported President Bush’s call to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and found the question of whether Iraq retained an active chemical weapons program a distraction. McDowell believed in consequences and in justice, and thought that credible deterrence was both an essential element of global security and the responsibility of a superpower. By his measure, the Baath Party was illegitimate and egregiously brutal, a criminal enterprise that ruled by violence and fear. Its repeated use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and then against Kurds, was grounds enough for removing it from power. The many crimes against Iraqis inherent in Baathist repression, he thought, strengthened the case. When the invasion seemed imminent, McDowell’s principal feeling was disappointment that he was not there. He yearned to be assigned to the first strikes, to be reviewing targets in a ready room and then catapulted toward them, where the threat would be real. This was not only what he had trained to do. It was consistent with his experience, which had conditioned him to a life in the center of the action.
He was busy with his engineering courses but closely followed the news, anticipating the opening attacks. When home, he studied in a walk-in closet in the apartment where he and Jolene lived. In the manner of a Navy pilot accustomed to confined spaces, he had converted it to a small office, a place where he could concentrate undisturbed.
About ten days before the invasion, McDowell was reading news online when he saw an article about Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, an alternative country band. A few days before, at a concert in London, Maines had spoken against the impending war and derided President Bush. “Just so you know,” she told the crowd, “we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” The outcry was swift. Fans renounced her, radio stations were refusing to play the Dixie Chicks’ music, and tour sponsors faced calls for boycotts. The uproar prompted Maines to release a statement. “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful,” it said. “I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers’ lives are lost.”
McDowell read the apology while studying in his closet. He felt stung. He and Maines came from the same part of Texas. They had been near contemporaries in school. He was a fan of the Dixie Chicks and considered Maines a local artist who had made good. He was astonished that she would be divisive just as American troops were about to go to war, and was irked that her apology managed to imply more criticism. He read news from Texas. The country radio station he had listened to as a child, KLLL-FM, was soliciting comments. It was all the invitation McDowell needed. In ten or fifteen minutes he had completed an open letter and sent it.
Earlier this week, while performing in London, you stated that you were ashamed that our President is from your home state. I wonder if you realized how many Americans would be listening. This American was listening. This Texan is ashamed that you come from my state.
I serve my country as an officer in the United States Navy. Specifically, I fly F-14 Tomcats off carriers around the world, executing the missions that preserve the very freedom you claim to exercise.
I have proudly fought for my country in the skies over Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan without regret. Though I may disagree wholeheartedly with your comments, I will defend to the death your right to say them, in America.
But for you to travel to a foreign land and publicly criticize our Commander in Chief is cowardice behavior. . . .
McDowell did not t
hink words alone were strong enough. His hometown radio station had pulled the Dixie Chicks from the air. He thought he could do more. “In a separate correspondence,” he wrote,
I am returning to you each and every Dixie Chicks CD and cassette that I have ever purchased.
Never again will I allow my funds to support your behavior. All you have done is to add your name to a growing list of American “Celebrities” who have failed to realize that they have obtained their successes on the backs of the American blue-collar workers such as our servicemen and women.
To Natalie Maines: This Texan—this American will continue to risk his life to guarantee your freedoms. What will you do to deserve it?
After KLLL posted the letter, it became a minor Internet hit, picked up by blogs and shared on forums. McDowell received emails from across the country thanking him for speaking up and for sharing the insights of an officer who had been to war and come home proud. One young man informed him that the letter inspired him to enlist.
McDowell’s words were sincere. But he had written impulsively to a small radio station and was not expecting a larger stage. He had neither the time nor inclination for politics or more public discussion about the commander in chief. Under the Navy’s traditions and rules, this was beyond a young pilot’s purview. He kept to his work and put the attention behind him.
The Iraq war joined the Afghan war in the aviation community routine. The Navy played the long game. Its personnel bureaucracy kept its own clock and continued to move officers step by step through the arcs of peacetime military careers. McDowell remained in a development phase, attending classes, filling stateside jobs, being readied for larger responsibilities in later years.
His next assignment, at U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, was so demanding that he saw little of his family. It was the hardest year of his life, rivaled only by his Annapolis plebe year. He practiced spin training, the process of recovering a jet from uncontrolled flight, on the way to qualifying on nineteen different aircraft, including two helicopters, three gliders, multiple jets, and an Albatross, a lumbering twin-engine floatplane. Among the jets he flew was the T-38 Talon, the aircraft he had seen over his farm as a child, attracting him to flight. The school lived up to its reputation as an exhausting grind, a test for even the highest achievers. McDowell absorbed the work and found it priceless. By the end of the course he could walk up to an aircraft, look at it, and anticipate how it would fly.
He graduated in mid-2004 and moved to VX-23, the Navy and Marine Corps’ strike aircraft test squadron, where he remained until late 2005. Iraq had slipped into intractable violence and sectarian war. He wanted to be there. But if the Navy had other designs for McDowell and deemed it too early to send him to a strike fighter squadron, test-pilot life was his ideal substitute. The squadron was used to evaluate the suitability of new technologies, ensuring that any avionics boxes or flight-control algorithms under consideration for the fleet could withstand carrier landings, catapult shots, and dynamic combat flight. Test pilots would deliberately make mistakes, like new pilots, jerking planes around, putting them through hard landings at nearly twice the angle of normal descent. Sometimes they broke aircraft in the process. McDowell, the fighter pilot with no regrets, was having so much fun that he was disappointed when the call came for him to rotate on.
The timing of his arrival to VFA-97 was good. The Navy’s F-14s were gone; he had to transition to F/A-18s for the remainder of his career. But the squadron was entering a six-week training exercise, the Strike Fighter Advanced Readiness Program, in which aircrews study the weapons and tactics associated with the F/A-18 and then hone skills at ranges and in dogfighting drills. The program gave him a chance to practice using the F/A-18 to fight. By the end, he felt ready. He was back.
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Before departing overseas, McDowell was in an unusual circumstance. He was not overwhelmed with work or school. Much of the intensity of his past years was lifted. His mind had time to roam. Sometimes he found himself revisiting one strike in Kosovo in May 1999, during his first tour. That day he had attacked the wrong place, hitting a building with a 500-pound laser-guided bomb. McDowell replayed the sequence in his mind, tallying the conditions that had contributed to the error. A low ceiling. Poor weather. Incomplete intelligence driving his unit’s decision to strike. He had been assigned a mission and performed it. He remembered his misgivings in the minutes after the explosion. He recalled reviewing the video of the strike back on the ship, on a large monitor, and discovering what he had not seen on the cockpit display: four bicycles parked in the carport where the ordnance hit.
An old question returned. Had he killed civilians inside?
The Navy had shown no interest in finding out whether anyone had been harmed. There had been no push to dissect the strike and tease out what had gone wrong. McDowell had been neither reprimanded nor suspended from flying, even for a few days. He had been told, simply, to prepare for his next flight. There was no desire to make sure that it did not happen again, he thought. The desire was to get back out and strike.
McDowell believed without qualification that the air-to-ground campaign against the Serbian forces had value. He understood that permissive rules could save lives. The faster that Western aircraft drove Serbian forces out of Kosovo, the sooner the war would end, and the fewer civilians might die. But he also thought mistakes should be examined, learned from, and, when appropriate, punished. He wondered who had parked those four bicycles there. Were they inside when the bomb struck? If they were, then he had killed them, and was responsible for their deaths. The Navy paid this possibility no mind. It was almost as if these lives did not have value, he thought.
Just as he believed that Saddam Hussein should be held accountable for his brutality in Iraq, McDowell thought his own errors merited examination, and perhaps punishment. He wished something had been done. He had not even been benched, even for a while.
One night, asleep in his apartment, McDowell dreamed that he was looking at the building just after the bomb had hit.
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Somehow the building was intact. He was standing outside, sure this was the place, wondering how its walls still stood. He stepped in, moving past four damaged bicycles by the door. Smoke obscured his vision as he walked through the rooms. Boards, blasted from walls, littered the floor. Insulation and wiring dangled from the ceiling. Dust covered the scattered debris.
Sorrow rose in him, and regret. Minutes before, from the cockpit of an F-14, he had struck this building with a 500-pound bomb. He had struggled to find the target, and after he released the bomb, while the ordnance rushed downward, doubt had registered in his mind. Still he had guided it, all the way to here.
Now he ached with a solitary wish: to turn back time. He needed only five minutes to do things differently. Given a second chance, he would not release the bomb. Or he would steer it harmlessly into the field.
This building would not be shattered and spewing smoke.
McDowell kept moving, searching, needing to know what the bomb had done.
He saw a child curled in the corner, a small boy coated with dust.
The boy was breathing but gravely wounded.
McDowell lunged to help, realizing as he moved that he recognized the child’s clothing, hair, and face. Then he knew it. It was Landon, his son.
He lifted the boy to his chest, tightly for a hug, cupping his hand behind the child’s little head, to hold it. The back of his skull was gone.
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McDowell woke.
PART III
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Counterinsurgency
Criticized by Congress and the public, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned in 2006. The generals commanding the conventional forces he had sent to war had pushed units off large bases and distributed them in Iraqi neighborhoods and along roads. Notions for defeating militants were reorganizing around an updated counterinsurgency doctrine, and its ambitions of protecting civilian
s and supporting governments in Iraq and Afghanistan until they could stand on their own. Special operations forces were engaged in targeted killing campaigns against insurgent leaders. The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, was killed in mid-2006. His followers fought on, as did insurgents in other militias and terrorist groups, including Shiite organizations supported by Iran. The war had a fresh urgency for all sides. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar remained at large. Al Qaeda’s militants in Iraq had taken a new name: the Islamic State of Iraq.
SEVEN
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ON AL QAEDA’S TURF
Dustin Kirby and the Route Chicago Shooting Gallery
“I thought it would be cool to save a life.”
AUGUST 2006
The Marines assigned to drive through Karma called it the Chicago 500, their nickname for running motorized patrols on the road connecting the small Iraqi city to the country’s highway network. At a glance, Alternate Supply Route Chicago, as the highway was labeled on American military maps, could seem unremarkable. It was two narrow lanes of asphalt running over farmland and small bridges and passing through the eastern edge of Karma’s business district, where it became a dusty slot between storefronts and auto repair shops. Marines weaved their gun trucks through civilian traffic, watching over the people they were told to protect with suspicion and an expectation of the worst. The Iraqis, for their part, generally ignored the Americans and often refused to acknowledge them. Their coldness was one of the indicators. The tired body language of the farmers beside the road’s shoulders, the sleepy look of the fields scorching under a desert sun, the bustle in the shops and crowds at the street corners—all of this was deceiving. For almost its entire length Chicago was a zone of ambushes, precision rifle fire, and hidden bombs, a gantlet of lethal traps coordinated by informants and spies, and aided, many of the Marines thought, by the Iraqi police with whom they lived. For the young Marines of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, the Chicago 500 felt like a pointless routine and a bloody lottery. They lived in two crude outposts beside the highway and drove it coiled, waiting for the blast or the shot.
The Fighters Page 14