Hunter Killer

by T. Mark McCurley

  Fortunately for the captain, time for the video teleconference (VTC) ran out and cut off the forum. He never got to respond, and I had no idea how he had received my criticism. It was harsh, but the Predator community wasn’t to blame. I watched the screen for a moment, my sails slowly deflating. On the one hand, I felt a total rush from the experience. My pulse raced in my throat. In just a few minutes I had released pent-up frustrations resulting from watching the Army lay blame on us in public forums.

  The captain represented all that was wrong with how the Army employed air power at the tactical level. I just didn’t get why they didn’t understand that. I walked away feeling vindicated. Sure, I metaphorically fell on my sword by addressing the issue in such a manner. The general officers wouldn’t let that outburst go without repercussion.

  I found out a couple of days later that my deployment was cut short. I was going home at the end of the month. None of my leadership would admit that my rant was the reason. It didn’t matter really.

  The denial of my orders at Al Udeid forced me to find an assignment. There is a funny rule in the Air Force. If an officer is assigned to one post for too long, he or she is moved to a new location. I had been in Las Vegas for nearly four and a half years when I returned early from Qatar.

  It was a year beyond the Air Force’s comfort zone.

  I’d worked out the one-year assignment to Al Udeid to reset my clock at Nellis Air Force Base. I wanted to stay in the RPA community. Cutting short my orders nullified that deal, so I called the Air Force Personnel Center and asked what was available. I couldn’t pull g’s anymore, so nothing fast. I had a lingering neck and back injury that was quite painful and didn’t let me sleep at night. After a few queries, they told me going to a combat aircraft squadron was impossible.

  “You’ve been out of those aircraft for too long.”

  There also weren’t staff jobs available. At the time, manning was so short in the combat units that the Air Force simply wouldn’t release me for a desk job. I had to go to a flying billet.

  “Is there a T-1 available?”

  I was referencing the Hawker T-1A Jayhawk, a trainer derived from the Beech model 400 business jet.

  The assignment was a long shot—I had never flown the plane before. The tanker and transport community had the lock on that squadron and the benefits were too good, but I could get three aircraft-type ratings for my pilot license and valuable business-jet time if I could land the job. If my career were to stall at this point, those qualifications would help me land an airline job.

  “Air Combat Command has a slot that doesn’t always get filled,” he said.

  “I’ll take it.”

  —

  I was reassigned to Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio as an instructor teaching new T-1 instructors in the 99th Flying Training Squadron. The 99th was one of the original Tuskegee Airmen squadrons and the only one still active. They were the famous Red Tails.

  After four years in a GCS, it felt good to be back in an airborne cockpit.

  On my first flight, I took in as much of the scenery as I could. Randolph Air Force Base had always been at the top of my list of places to serve. Built in the 1930s, most of the original hangars, homes, and buildings remained. Two massive runways bracketed the base. A single main road ran up from the main gate. As I climbed into the blue sky on a warm fall afternoon, the base roads looked like a lollipop clutched between a child’s dirty fingers.

  After my two-hour flight, I walked up to the squadron proper and moved through the swinging glass door that led to our duty desk. I felt good. All the stress of the staff time was gone. If my rant forced me to finish my career as an instructor, I was happy because there was still no better feeling than flying. I’d accomplished most of my goals. I’d flown in combat and did my part during the war.

  The commander stood there looking grim while I turned in my post-mission paperwork.

  “Squirrel, we’ve got to talk,” he said.

  He didn’t sound too happy.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  I had an idea what was coming. One of the guys back at Creech had warned me. The commander sat on the edge of his desk.

  “I’ve got to pull you from training.”

  I said nothing. He handed me a letter.

  “The secretary of the Air Force is sending you back to Creech.”

  The Joint Staff had announced an “all-in” surge in Iraq to help General David Petraeus finally suppress the insurgency. I had hoped to be safe in training.

  In the Air Force culture, no one could remove an airman from a formal training course once it had begun. Each course billet was tied to money predesignated for that training. An early departure meant the money was wasted.

  “Is there anything we can do?” I finally asked.

  “I’m sorry, Squirrel. We got trumped.”

  The four-star general in charge of Air Education and Training Command was told to shut up and color when he cried foul.

  I moved out of my house I’d owned for thirty days and headed back to Las Vegas.

  —

  I checked in to the new Wing Operations Center (WOC) at Creech Air Force Base a few weeks later. The base had grown massively in the little less than a year I’d been gone. We had gone from borrowing space at Nellis Air Force Base to owning the whole base in Indian Springs. A new wing headquarters was under construction near the hangar in which I worked. For now, I was in a closet attached to the construction area. The WOC had just enough room for four desks, associated computers, and a few plasmas on the walls above.

  We were a mini ops cell, only our mission was greater than ever. As a WOC director, I’d be doing the old mission commander job but on a grander scale. Gone were the days when only one squadron had flown the conventional lines. Now we had three Predator, two Reaper, and one British squadron operating in theater, and more were on the way.

  “This is your job,” Knobber said.

  Knobber was an old F-117 pilot who transferred to Creech for a sunset tour, his last tour in the military. He had the sharp, aggressive personality typical of fighter pilots and perfect for this type of job.

  “Love the broom closet,” I said.

  “It’s only temporary.”

  “How many WOC directors are there?” I asked.

  “Three. You, me, and Alley Cat.”

  I had expected as much. The three of us were really assigned here as a deployed position, which meant little time off.

  “So what do we do?”

  Knobber sighed.

  “We are the oversight for anything flying. When nothing is going on, we are building the programs that run the WOC.”

  “Seriously? Can I at least fly?”

  Knobber laughed. He patted me on the shoulder.

  “Good luck with that.”

  The job was better than staff work, since I was still involved with the missions. It wasn’t perfect, though. I was now one of the graybeards in Predator. The community had grown so fast that many of the positive changes Mike and I had worked toward had fallen into misuse. Professionalism slipped as fatigue wore down the crews. My goal was to try to bring back to the community some of the professionalism Mike and I had struggled to instill. But I was only one person in a nonleadership job.

  By early spring 2008, I had sunk into a routine of working twelve-hour WOC shifts. For us, flying the line was tantamount to working in the salt mines. Crews were having trouble overcoming the constant drudgery of repetitive sorties, seeing the same targets, and watching American soldiers being killed and not being able to do anything to stop it. Worse, the rules of engagement kept changing so that no unit, epecially Predator, could actually fight the enemy. Our own leadership was hamstringing us.

  Winter weather in Iraq and Afghanistan tapered off and the fighters came out of hiding. The workload increased significantly,
even if I could do little of it. Most of my shift was spent behind a raised desk. A bank of monitors allowed me to watch the feeds and chat rooms. As I had in my staff job, I mostly put out fires or answered questions. I did my best to keep the absurdity and bureaucracy from getting into the cockpit.

  I was well into my shift when one of my Predators sent me a warning.

  RE27> WOC, taking shot soon.

  A rarity, I thought.

  It wasn’t necessary to tell me he was going to shoot. Only his supervisor needed to know, but some of the crews, in the stress of combat, felt compelled to tell everyone about it. I brought up their feed. A small house with a car in the front yard filled my screen. A couple of military-aged males, or MAMs as we were now calling unidentified personnel, were milling about the yard. They appeared to be deeply involved in a discussion.

  “What’s that in his hands?” the weather troop asked.

  She was a young airman who had little experience dealing directly with operations beyond briefing crews on their way to fly. A bright spot blazed in his hand. Occasionally, the MAM would lift the hand to his mouth and the bright spot would flare.

  “That’s a cigarette,” I said.

  “Really?” she said. “That seems too bright.”

  “Compared to everything else, it is.”

  Smokers at night often looked as if they held a miniature sun in their hands.

  Since there was nothing else going on, I monitored the conversation in the mission chat room. The collection managers were discussing the targets and what to do. They wanted to kill the guy leaning against the hood of the car. I started to go through the steps in my head. Collateral damage estimate was complete. Rules of engagement checklist was complete. The JTAC was working final clearance from the ground commander. I watched the string of data as it posted in the chat room.

  The target finished his cigarette and ground it out with his foot. Then he got into the car and drove off. At first the car wound through a couple of streets before it turned onto a divided four-lane highway.

  BY41> Shoot, Shoot, Shoot, Shoot now.

  What was that all about? I thought. The JTAC wanted the Predator to shoot, but I didn’t remember seeing a 9-Line or clearance to fire. I scrolled back through the chat room. Nothing. At least, there was no written record. The vehicle had long since moved out of the target area, making any previous clearances moot.

  The whole situation stank.

  RE27> In from the south, 1 min.

  The Predator pilot was lining up the shot. But from what I saw, he clearly had no business doing so. Worse, this crew was not trained for a moving-target shot. There was no telling what would happen or who would be injured if the missile missed.

  My mind flashed to 1994 and my friend Laura Piper. She was an air operations intelligence analyst stationed in Ramstein, Germany. She was riding in a helicopter with NATO dignitaries surveying northern Iraq during Operation Provide Comfort, the humanitarian mission to aid Kurdish refugees after the Gulf War.

  A pair of F-15 Eagles were vectored in to investigate when the pair of Black Hawk helicopters squawked codes meant to identify themselves as friendly, but they were the wrong codes. The fighters were within a week of leaving for home and they had not shot at anything during their tour. Their fangs were through the floor as they buzzed the pair of helicopters and then shot them down. The fighter pilots never identified them as friendly despite the choppers’ American markings. In their minds, they were only targets.

  Their incompetence cost a lot of people their lives, and cost me a friend.

  I never forgave the F-15 community for that shot. I never understood how they could misidentify a helicopter painted green instead of tan like an Iraqi helicopter. They acted unprofessionally and incompetently and then blamed AWACS for it.

  In a way I harbor a bit of survivor’s guilt. Laura and I interviewed for the same interrogator job early in our careers. We were neck and neck going into the final interview. I eventually won. As a consolation, she was offered a job in Europe. I often wonder whether I would have been on that helicopter had she won the interrogator job instead of me.

  It felt like I was watching the same debacle unfold on-screen. I knew that I had to act.

  WOC-D> RE27 ABORT ABORT ABORT.

  BY41> Say Reason.

  WOC-D> Invalid ROE, invalid clearance, shot is not legal.

  The pilot called me seconds later on my desk phone. He was mad and cursed me for calling off his shot.

  “I’ll be by after my shift,” he said.

  I looked forward to the conversation. I was growing tired of poor decisions. It’s one thing to deal with non-aviators attempting to direct operations well outside their expertise. I could no longer tolerate bad decisions from the marginally trained pilots. I had seen the community start to break down and something needed to be done.

  —

  “What the hell was that?” the pilot spit at me in the WOC doorway.

  I had never met the pilot before he came to the WOC. He was one of the faceless reserve pilots who spent little time on the line and flew only occasionally to keep their qualifications. It didn’t help that I had been away from the squadrons for almost a year at this point. I no longer knew many of the faces.

  “I saved your ass,” I said calmly.

  “Saved my ass?” he said. “You ruined my shot.”

  “No, I kept you out of jail.”

  He stared at me. I stared back.

  “Everything was in order,” he said. “The shot was legal.”

  I shook my head.

  “No, it was not,” I said in a flat tone.

  I ticked off my fingers.

  “First, there was no 9-Line passed. The important pieces of information used to pass a target were never issued by the JTAC or validated by you. Second, ‘shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot now’ does not qualify as a shot clearance. The chat logs clearly show you engaging without a legal clearance. Third, CDE was invalid once the vehicle moved. He was more than a mile away from the house before you rolled in. You had no way of knowing what lay between you and the target. The missile could have landed anywhere or hit anything. I don’t think the JAG would take kindly to you putting a missile into an innocent’s house.”

  The Judge Advocate General, the military lawyers, analyzed every shot to ensure that all the rules were met. The JAG would have charged the pilot had he shot and killed an innocent.

  The pilot eyed me angrily for a long time.

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” he finally said.

  I shrugged.

  “Fine, disagree all you want,” I said. “Just remember that you get to sleep in your own bed tonight, not in jail, because of me. Agree or disagree, I don’t care.”

  The pilot spun on his heel and walked out of the WOC without another word. I am sure he complained about me, but his squadron leadership never called to hear my side of the story. Their silence told me that they had looked at the chat logs and agreed with my assessment. I was not going to let anything slip. We’d become sloppy and I knew the only way I could truly effect change was getting command of a squadron.

  I couldn’t bring Laura back, but I’d like to think I saved a life on her behalf that night.

  CHAPTER 15

  Command

  Colonel David Krumm, the 49th Wing commander, thrust his hand at me.

  “You’re now commanding the 60th.”

  The commander’s executive officer had called to warn me that Krumm was en route to my office. I had no idea why he wanted to speak with me, or why he hadn’t asked me to come to his office. Wing commanders don’t drop by the squadrons to chat with a squadron’s director of operations.

  I was in charge of operations for a training squadron preparing the next generation of RPA crews for combat. It was a leadership job offered to me after my second tour at Creech and a
brief stint helping Air Education and Training Command build their RPA pilot production program. I’d been there for two years when Krumm came into my office.

  I shook his hand without any idea what to say. I managed a quiet “Thank you, sir.” The response did not invoke the presence expected of a commander. I felt shock, joy, relief, and pride rolled into one powerful emotion that threatened to burst from my chest. Most of all, I felt surprise. I was sure that incident at Al Udeid had ended my dream.

  As I took Krumm’s hand, it dawned on me that I’d finally reached my goal—to command a squadron in combat. All my sacrifices seemed trivial once. I became the first commander of the newly activated 60th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron and only the second officer from the RPA community to take command. Mike stood up the 33rd Special Operations Squadron at Cannon Air Force Base in 2009. He got the job about a year before I took command of the 60th.

  “The 60th is brand-new and deploying to Djibouti,” Krumm said. “An advon is already on the ground.”

  The advon, or advanced echelon team, erected the hangars, installed the equipment, and cleared the diplomatic and technical hurdles to fly the first mission.

  They also cleared out a bunch of African asps.

  “You’ll be flying the MQ-1B Predator,” Krumm said.

  I had been flying the newer MQ-9 Reaper as an instructor at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The Reaper was taking over for the Predator as the older bird was phased out of the inventory. It was larger than its older sister—about the size of an A-10—and carried a larger payload. It had space for four Hellfire missiles and two five-hundred-pound bombs. I participated in the early operational testing of the prototype and had been with the program for some time. The Air Force had offered the squadron the right to name the aircraft, and I had submitted “Vulture,” choosing the name according to the current Air Force convention of naming fighters after birds of prey, like the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon.