In other OPEVAL II tests, two VMX-22 Ospreys each carried twenty-four Marines with packs and weapons in the back while making two round trip flights to an unimproved landing zone onshore from the deck of the Bataan as it sailed more than fifty miles off the Atlantic coast. The Marines were cramped, but they fit in the cabin. Two Ospreys also carried twenty-four Marines each on a flight of more than two hundred miles from California to an unprepared landing zone in Nevada. When VMX-22 flew night missions with their Ospreys, though, they carried sand bags in the back to simulate the weight of troops. The Marines weren’t going to risk another Marana.
Walters briefed reporters on the results of OPEVAL II during a “media day” at New River on July 13, 2005, a steamy, at times stormy day on North Carolina’s coast. In VMX-22’s ready room, Walters showed video clips of various tests. There were shots of an Osprey refueling in-flight from a KC-130 tanker, shots of an Osprey hovering while Marines “fast-roped” to the ground from its back ramp, shots of an Osprey landing in the desert amid a cloud of dust and sand. Walters said the Osprey had passed all of its “key performance parameters.” It had flown as fast and far as required. It had carried twenty-four Marines. It had exceeded all but one of its goals for the “ilities”—reliability, maintainability, availability.
To illustrate how much confidence they now had in the Osprey, the Marines invited the two dozen or so reporters who had come to New River for the briefing to ride in one. The pilot for the first flight was six-foot-five Lieutenant Colonel Seymour, whose radio call sign was “Mongo,” after the hulking Alex Karras character in the comedy film Blazing Saddles. Seymour, the son of a Huey pilot who had flown in Vietnam and later piloted helicopters for Gulf Coast oil companies, had been flying the Osprey for ten years. He was eager to show the reporters that the “doctors of doom,” as he called the critics, simply didn’t know what they were talking about when they said the Osprey couldn’t fly hard.
Once crew chiefs got the reporters strapped into passenger seats along each side of the fuselage, Seymour taxied his Osprey out to a runway and kept it rolling. A few seconds later, he lifted it half a dozen feet off the ground into a low hover. Suddenly the engines roared, the nacelles swiveled upward, and the Osprey began to climb—so fast the reporters were slung toward the back ramp, their bodies pushed hard into their seat belts and shoulder harnesses. Seymour put the Osprey’s nacelles all the way down into airplane mode and climbed to 500 feet, then banked away from the airfield and began following the New River toward the North Carolina coast twenty miles away. Looking out the open back ramp, the reporters could see boats and a bridge whisk by below and a second Osprey with another group of journalists flying a few hundred feet behind them. When he reached the coast, Seymour banked his Osprey left, leveled off, then cruised over Onslow Beach, where Marines from Camp Lejeune practice amphibious landings. A few minutes later, he dipped the left wing down and whipped his Osprey into a tight turn, pushing the reporters on the right side of the fuselage against the bulkhead and those on the left against their harnesses with two times the force of gravity. The Osprey flew south a bit, turned inland over marshlands, then slowed abruptly, as if someone had slammed on the brakes, as Seymour tilted its nacelles upward. He came to a hover over a grassy field edged by pine trees, let the Osprey settle down to the ground, then took off again vertically and brought it into a hover. He turned it in a circle, then made it scuttle left and right with the fuselage level. Now the fuselage tilted up, the engines whined, and Seymour put the Osprey into another steep climb. As it rose, the reporters could feel their ears pop. Some looked at each other and grinned. The flight ended when Seymour brought the Osprey down in a “roll-on” landing at the air station with the nacelles angled up at about 60 degrees.
Several more flights of reporters went up that day, and the effect was exactly what the Marines had hoped to see. For the first time in years, there were positive stories about the Osprey in the media. The Osprey camp loved headlines such as the one that topped a Copley News Service account of the briefing: “After Decades of Tragedy, Osprey May Be Ready for Combat.”
Media coverage of the Osprey since 2001, even after flight testing had laid the vortex ring state issue largely to rest, had often focused on problems with the aircraft. There were headlines when a leak drained the oil from an Osprey engine at Patuxent River, leading Navair to suspend flights until the cause had been investigated. There were headlines when Navair fired a company after it made hydraulic tubes for the Osprey that failed inspections. There were headlines when a nacelle access panel flew off a new Osprey and damaged its tail as it was being delivered to Pax River. There was seemingly no end to such incidents. Critics said they were evidence the Osprey still wasn’t ready and might never be. The Osprey’s advocates said failures had to be expected in a machine with tens of thousands of parts, and that mechanical problems weren’t unusual in a military aircraft. The problems wouldn’t have come to public attention if the Osprey weren’t under such extraordinary scrutiny, they argued. There was truth in that. Given the Osprey’s history, its problems were newsworthy. Detailed coverage of such problems, however, couldn’t help but reinforce and solidify the conventional wisdom established by 60 Minutes years earlier, before the Osprey had been redesigned and retested. In the public mind, the Osprey remained notorious.
After the HROD tests, Pete Aldridge’s conversion, and OPEVAL II, however, the momentum was all on the Osprey’s side within the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The Marines still wanted the Osprey as much as ever, and finally they were going to get it.
The Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation issued a report on September 27, 2005, declaring the Osprey “operationally effective” in “low- and medium-threat” areas, meaning combat zones where it might come under sporadic fire from small arms, many large-caliber weapons, and older models of shoulder-fired missiles. The report also found the Osprey “operationally suitable,” saying it had met all but one of its maintenance performance goals during OPEVAL II. The next day, the Defense Acquisition Board approved Full Rate Production, Milestone III. By 2012, the Pentagon was expected to be buying as many as 48 Ospreys a year. The Marines would get 360, the Air Force Special Operations Command 50, and the Navy had a long-range plan to purchase 48. They were going to be expensive. Until Navair and Bell-Boeing could make Ospreys more cheaply, as they vowed to do, the price for the Marine Corps version would be $71 million and for the Air Force version $89 million apiece. Adding in the more than $20 billion spent developing the Osprey, the cost per plane would average out to more than $100 million. The price tag was huge—similar to the cost of a modern jet fighter, far more expensive than a Black Hawk helicopter. The Marines were more than willing to pay it. With Milestone III at last behind them, the door was open to field the machine their leaders and aviators had fought relentlessly to have for twenty-three years. The time and money and lives spent getting it had been mind-boggling—far beyond what anyone could have imagined when the project began. Now the Marines wanted to prove the struggle had been worth it.
* * *
Six years after he decided to gamble his career on the Osprey, life looked entirely different to Paul Rock. By 2007, Rock was a lieutenant colonel, commanding officer of his own squadron. His career was back on the rise. So was the Osprey.
Mid-morning on October 4 of that year, Rock and nineteen more of the twenty-four pilots in his unit, Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263, climbed into ten MV-22B Ospreys on the flight deck of the USS Wasp. The amphibious assault ship had been home to them and roughly sixty other squadron members for seventeen days as it sailed over the Atlantic Ocean, through the Mediterranean Sea, down the Suez Canal, and into the Gulf of Aqaba, off the coast of Jordan. Now, four of the Ospreys, lined up nose to tail on the Wasp’s deck, nacelles pointed straight up, gave off a whine as their auxiliary power units awoke the big turbine engines on their wingtips. Their rotors began spinning, groggily at first, then in a blur. One after another, the first f
our Ospreys, their back cabins stuffed with baggage and Marines, tilted their rotors forward a few degrees and began rolling down the gray, gently swaying deck. After a few dozen feet, they vaulted into the air and muscled into the sky. Over the next two hours, the rest of the squadron, known as VMM-263, boarded the remaining Ospreys and followed, executing a departure they had practiced over and over prior to their cruise. Once aloft, they tilted their rotors into airplane mode, climbed to 8,000 feet, and winged toward Iraq, where U.S. troops had been at war for more than four years. After a quarter century of struggle and sorrow, at a cost of $22 billion and thirty lives, the Marines were sending the unorthodox flying machine they had staked their future on into a combat zone for the first time.
The Marines in the back of the Ospreys were mechanics and other members of VMM-263 who had accompanied the aircraft on the Wasp. This wasn’t an amphibious assault—on paper a key Osprey mission— just a deployment from sea to shore, a way to get the Ospreys and the Marines who would fly and fix them into Iraq. As always when a Marine Corps Osprey flew, crew chiefs were riding in the back cabins. One, an airframes mechanic with a puckish sense of humor, carried a digital camera whose memory card held photos taken during the voyage. After the squadron set up its computer network at Al Asad, the sprawling air base one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad they would fly from for the next seven months, the crew chief uploaded his photos to a shared drive reserved for morale-boosting items. Everybody loved one image in particular, and someone made a letter-sized print and tacked it to the bulletin board in VMM-263’s ready room. The photo showed a silvery Osprey, captured in midair against an azure sky as it angled toward the Wasp’s flight deck to land, rotors upward. In the foreground stood a member of the ship’s crew, head and eyes hidden by a drab brown helmet with a green-tinted visor, face and torso obscured by a large rectangle of cardboard held toward the camera with both hands. The cardboard had been cut from a box, judging by creases in it, and turned into a hand-lettered sign. In large block letters, neatly printed in indelible marker, the sign read:
FUCK-U
MARK THOMPSON
There was a story behind that message.
* * *
Two months before VMM-263 flew into Iraq, at a little before seven o’clock on the evening of August 9, 2007, several dozen young men and women, many carrying boxes of popcorn and soft drinks in cups, some clutching babies or towing toddlers by the hand, filtered hesitantly into a movie theater at New River Marine Corps Air Station. Most wore shorts and T-shirts. Only the crisp, high-and-tight haircuts most of the men wore identified them as Marines. Some took seats down near the stage. The majority settled shyly into rows farther back. Small knots of single men were sprinkled among the couples. The mood was cheerful but apprehensive. In a few short weeks, the roughly 180 Marines of VMM-263 would take their MV-22B Ospreys to Iraq, where American troops were dying and being maimed in combat and by insurgent bombs every day. A good portion of the squadron was gathering tonight for a “Family Readiness Meeting,” called to tutor their spouses in what to expect during the seven months their Marines would be away. For many of those left at home, VMM-263’s deployment would be a new, and scary, experience.
A little cheer went up as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Rock stood up in the gap between the theater seats and the stage. Projected on the movie screen above and behind the squadron commander was a caricature of a fierce-looking rooster with the muscular torso of a man, a thunderbolt gripped in each hand. A banner above the rooster’s crown bore VMM-263’s incongruous nickname: Thunder Chickens.
“This is a very important night leading up to a very important event—VMM-263’s first combat deployment,” Rock began in his timbrous voice. “There is a war going on. I’m sure everybody knows about that. This squadron is going over there to take part in that war.” VMM-263 would go to Al Asad, Rock said, and replace an assault support helicopter squadron. “Assault support is what this squadron does,” he said. “We provide assault transport of combat troops, supplies, and equipment, wherever they have to go.” That could mean carrying riflemen, “the best weapon the Marine Corps has,” into fights with “the bad guys,” Rock said. One of VMM-263’s main jobs, though, would be simply to carry Marine ground troops from base to base. “What does that do? It keeps them off the road,” he said. There was no reason to add that the roads were where the infamous homemade bombs called Improvised Explosive Devices had taken many of the more than three thousand American lives lost in Iraq over the past four years.
“In one sense, it’s been a long fifteen months,” Rock said, referring to the time VMM-263 had spent preparing to deploy. Rock and a handful of officers and enlisted Marines had reconstituted the former helicopter unit as an Osprey squadron on March 3, 2006. Training began a couple of months later, after Ospreys and enough pilots to fly them began arriving. The squadron had flown their Ospreys at New River, flown them across the country and back with aerial refueling, flown them in mock combat exercises at MAWTS-1, the weapons and tactics school at the Marine Corps air station in Yuma, Arizona. To get ready for Iraq, they had sought out the sandiest, dustiest landing zones in the Mojave Desert and practiced landing their Ospreys in brownout conditions. To get ready for the voyage over, they had flown to an amphibious assault ship and practiced the departure they would make in the Gulf of Aqaba.
A squadron, like most groups of people brought together for a purpose, is an organization but also an organism, a living body that grows, matures, blossoms if nurtured correctly, and has a personality. By 2007, VMM-263’s personality was an uneven mixture of experience and eagerness. The unit was top-heavy with seasoned officers and enlisted maintainers in their late thirties or early forties, a number of whom had spent more than a decade flying and fixing Ospreys. Rock and a few noncommissioned officers in the squadron were veterans of the MOTT, of VMMT-204, and of VMX-22. Half of VMM-263’s pilots, however, were new to the Osprey. The years when VMMT-204’s Ospreys were grounded had created a gap in the training pipeline. When VMM-263 was created, there were no captains available who had flown the Osprey. Six of VMM-263’s pilots were captains in their early twenties who had joined the squadron as first lieutenants and never flown any other type of aircraft with any other squadron. Six were older captains who had joined the squadron after flying CH-46 helicopters. The six who had flown the CH-46, like a couple of the majors, had served in Iraq during the first years of the war. They had been shot at by insurgents, ferried wounded Marines from combat to medical care, in some cases had friends killed there.
Four months before the family meeting at New River, General James Conway, the commandant since January 2007, had announced that the Osprey was indeed going to Iraq and would be based at Al Asad Air Base. Al Asad was the nerve center of flight operations in Anbar Province, a territory spanning western Iraq whose 53,208 square miles made it almost precisely as large as North Carolina. The Army was in charge of combat operations in the rest of Iraq; the Marines were responsible for Anbar, where some of the bloodiest battles of the war had been fought. In early 2007, Anbar was still arguably the most dangerous place in Iraq for U.S. forces. It was the heartland of Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, who had enforced and thrived under Saddam Hussein’s rule, suppressing the country’s Shiite Muslim majority for decades. Anbar was the hotbed of the Sunni insurgency that erupted after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Anbar was also the headquarters of Al Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization that had infiltrated hundreds of foreign Islamic fundamentalist fighters into the province early in the war. Led by the notorious Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda in Iraq had used kidnappings and beheadings to take control of Fallujah, Anbar’s largest city. For months, the group enforced its pitiless brand of Islam on the city’s residents and dispatched hundreds of suicide bombers to attack U.S. troops and Shiites in other parts of Iraq. At a cost of 153 American and thousands of Iraqi lives, the Marines liberated Fallujah in late 2004 after a battle marked by the most diff
icult house-to-house fighting U.S. troops had seen since Vietnam. A U.S. air strike killed Zarqawi in July 2006, but Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency were still active in Anbar when Conway announced the Osprey would go there.
Two months before the Commandant’s announcement, on February 7, the Marines had lost their seventh helicopter of the war. Sunni insurgents used a surface-to-air missile to down a CH-46 piloted by Captain Jennifer Harris, killing her, four other Marines, and two Navy corps-men. Captain Elizabeth Okoreeh-Baah, one of two women and the only African-American among VMM-263’s pilots, had graduated with Harris from the Naval Academy in 2000. They were friends. Okoreeh-Baah had flown CH-46s around Fallujah and other hotspots in Iraq in 2004. She was glad to be flying the Osprey now. She felt guilty, though, that joining VMM-263 had kept her from serving a second or third tour in Iraq, as Harris and Okoreeh-Baah’s other peers already had done. The pilots of VMM-263 were proud to be taking the Osprey to war, but the mission was their focus.
Rock wanted it that way. At the Family Readiness Meeting that August evening, he spoke for more than half an hour without ever mentioning the Osprey. For the generals and others at Headquarters Marine Corps, and for the media and the Osprey’s numerous critics, VMM-263’s deployment was seen as a test of the aircraft. Rock had spent months trying to crowd that idea out of his squadron’s heads. Rock and his senior pilots were eager to “sell” the Osprey to other Marines by showing them that its speed and range could make a dramatic difference in how they did their missions. Rock stressed to his Marines, though, that their purpose in going to Iraq wasn’t to prove the Osprey, it was to support their fellow Marines on the ground.
The Dream Machine Page 48