Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign sic-2

by Tom Clancy

  The bottom line in war is you are always operating with half the story.

  My first knowledge of the tragedy came from CNN, with pictures of bodies being carried from the smoking shelter. In a way, I was glad we had to endure those terrible scenes. Too often, we look on war as a game or a noble adventure. Certainly war can pursue noble objectives — stopping the murder, rape, and torture in Kuwait being a prime example. Certainly men and women undergoing the most stressful battlefield conditions rise to unheard-of selflessness. But war is still, when you get to the bottom line, killing, maiming, and wanton destruction — humans at their lowest, trying to impose their will on others. War may be necessary, but it must always be detested.

  During the 1700 changeover briefing, I told the troops in the TACC: “Nobody needs to feel bad about the bunker incident in Baghdad, but we all should feel bad about the loss of life, anybody’s life, because every life is precious. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Iraqi soldier or a kid in a bunker in Baghdad, we should feel bad about the loss of one of God’s creatures. On the other hand, from a professional standpoint, we have nothing to be ashamed of. The mission was planned and executed flawlessly. The intelligence was as good as there is available. As for the people who don’t understand that war is groping in the dark trying to do dastardly things so the war will be over with, well, I don’t have much time for them. You would sure think modern, educated people would understand that truth, but many choose not to, so to hell with them. We’ll have a lot of ‘weak willies’ to worry about now. They worry about whether they’ll get up in the morning, so to hell with them. You just continue what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is right and you’re doing it very well. We’ve got to get Kuwait back to the Kuwaitis.”

  Maybe if I’d had more time to think about it, I wouldn’t have made such a hard-assed speech; but I was worried that people would be overconcerned about the political cost of civilian casualties and try to shut down the air campaign. I was not wrong to worry.

  Targeting in the Baghdad area all but stopped, and General Schwarzkopf began to anguish over every target we nominated, denying approval of most of them. Okay, this change was not in fact hard to accept. Most of the known high-value targets had already been destroyed or heavily damaged, and by then our main thrust had turned to destroying tanks, artillery, and lines of communication in the KTO. But a notion sticks in my throat that someone above the CINC had issued guidance based on fear of public opinion polls. This is not a fact, it’s a suspicion, and yes, civilian policy-makers must guide the warriors; but it sends trembles through me. War is political. So be it.

  We eventually went back to Baghdad.

  The lesson must be that war is not antiseptic, that innocent lives will be lost, that commanders in arms will kill one another. It is important that leaders at all levels do their utmost to minimize death and suffering. It must be an obsession with the commanders and planners, and of everyone who has a finger on the trigger. On the other hand, survival on the battlefield and success in war require decisive action in an ill-defined environment while using the most lethal weapons ever devised. That’s the rub. When the laser-guided bomb slips its release hooks, someone is going to die.

  Let the deaths of American, Saudi, and British troops, let the deaths of Iraqi civilians, remind each of us that war is a hateful thing.

  10

  Lost and Found

  IN combat operations, aircraft will be shot down; and in any air operation, equipment can fail. When an aircraft is shot down or its engine fails behind enemy lines, surviving crew are perilously exposed — and the people they’ve just bombed are hardly in a welcoming mood. This means, simply, that these crews expect a chance to come home before anyone can give them the welcome “they deserve.” That chance for rescue is a fundamental covenant between combat aircrews and their commanders. Aircrews’ confidence in that covenant is a function of the actual numbers rescued.

  In Desert Storm, the numbers rescued, as compared with the numbers downed, was very low: Eighteen men and one woman became prisoners of war as a result of aircraft shoot-downs. Seven combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) missions were launched, resulting in three saves. That’s one saved for every six lost. Not an inspiring record.

  It is therefore no surprise that the confidence of aircrews in the fundamental covenant was not high.

  To discover the reason for the scarcity of CSAR missions in Desert Storm, one has to go back a few years.

  In military doctrine, the rescue of soldiers, sailors, and airmen was originally a service responsibility — that is, the Air Force was responsible for organizing, equipping, and training the forces needed to pick up pilots who were shot down. For years, the Air Force did just that — its Air Rescue Service trained Pararescue Jumpers (PJs), enlisted men ready to parachute into enemy territory, perform emergency medical treatment on downed pilots, and fight off the enemy while the rescued airman was being winched up to a helicopter overhead. During Vietnam, PJs became the most decorated heroes of the war. Pilots admired no one more highly.

  In 1983, the Air Rescue Units were transferred en masse to the newly created Special Operations Forces Command. Since the air movement of Special Operations soldiers to and from behind enemy lines is the same function as combat search-and-rescue, this change made great sense. There is one important difference, however, between SOF operations and air rescue. In SOF operations, there is some control over timing. This difference had serious consequences.

  Meanwhile, the assets the Air Force had acquired to take people to and from behind enemy lines were placed under SOF command (or CINCSOF — before Goldwater-Nichols, air rescue forces had been assigned to Military Airlift Command). Among these were various helicopters and the HC-130 command-and-control aircraft. This version of the Hercules transport provided a platform for an on-scene director to orchestrate the rescue. Vietnam-era MH-53 Jolly Green Giant helicopters were now called PAVE LOW IIIs, and equipped with devices that permitted low-altitude flight at night. Later, a newer and smaller rescue helicopter was introduced for the SOF, the MH-60G Pave Hawk; it was also equipped for flying at treetop level at night. Though PJs were disappearing, new enlisted crews, called “Special Tactics Personnel,” were being trained to ride the SOF-penetrating helicopters. STPs performed the same functions as Vietnam-era PJs, and trained just as hard.

  The monkey wrench in the works was the change in command lines that accompanied the 1983 changeover. The new SOF airmen now worked for an Army colonel whose primary focus was on glamorous missions behind enemy lines. He wanted his “air force” available to support his missions behind enemy lines and not tied up chasing after downed aircrews.

  Some basic presuppositions made matters even worse: In their own private view, special forces fight alone, in isolation from other land, sea, air, and space forces. Therefore, for the most part SOF airmen trained for terrain-hugging night flights, which was considered the safest way to enter enemy airspace. In consequence, they felt they were ill-trained to conduct air rescue operations in daylight.

  During the Gulf War, as it turned out, SOF airmen operating in Kuwait and southeastern Iraq[61] owed their survival in enemy airspace, not to their night training, but to the grounding of Iraqi fighters by Coalition airpower and to the vastness of the desert, which was so large and inhospitable that Iraqi air defense forces could not cover all of it. And when Iraqi ground forces did locate Special Operations units, these units as often as not had to be picked up and returned to safety during daylight hours — SOF bias notwithstanding.

  Meanwhile, reflecting post-Goldwater-Nichols realities, the CENTCOM air force was not the USAF; it was the USAF plus sizable numbers of aircraft from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, plus thousands of aircraft from other nations operating under the command of the Joint/Combined Force Air Component Commander, Chuck Horner. In other words, the individual service responsibility to conduct search-and-rescue had grown to include a great deal more than the U.S. Air Force. To handle this new
situation, General Schwarzkopf set up a unique combat search-and-rescue organization. While retaining command of CSAR plans and operations in his own staff, the CINC placed his subordinate commander, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joe Stillwell, and his rescue cell in Horner’s Tactical Air Control Center. The TACC would likely be the first to learn when an aircraft was shot down and if the aircrew was alive; in the TACC, the CSAR cell could maintain contact with rescue forces in Iraq using the AWACS aircraft to relay commands or information; and the TACC controlled the air-to-air, air-to-ground, and Wild Weasel defense suppression forces needed to protect CSAR forces during a rescue. Finally, pilots orbiting overhead could best determine if a helicopter could survive local enemy defenses and make their pickup.

  These sensible command-and-control procedures did not sit well with Colonel Jessie Johnson, the Special Operations commander. To Johnson, it appeared that the CSAR commander worked for Horner (a situation Johnson did not like). Stillwell did not work for Horner. He worked for Schwarzkopf.

  For obvious reasons, Schwarzkopf tasked rescues in northern Iraq to the air forces operating out of Incirlik, Turkey.

  The mission of combat search-and-rescue in central and southern Iraq and Kuwait went to Jessie Johnson. Colonel Johnson’s MH-53 and MH-60 helicopters were based at King Fahd Air Base in eastern Saudi Arabia, where all SOF aircraft were based. When possible, however, they were placed on alert at forward operating locations at airfields along the Iraqi border, such as those near King Khalid Military City, and the towns of Rafha, Ar’ar, and Al Jouf, where A-10s were also operating in their Scud-hunting mission in the western Iraqi desert.

  Unfortunately, for reasons already stated, the air rescue mission was never a top special forces priority. Thus, while the CSAR missions were directed and controlled by the joint recovery coordination cell in the TACC, the SOCCENT commander retained final mission approval and refused to okay a CSAF launch until a survivor could be confirmed on the ground. Yet, as always, the SOF airmen of the Air Force Special Operations command were eager and ready to rescue downed airmen anytime anywhere.[62]

  The opportunity came early to test this system. On January 21, 1991, a Navy F-14 pilot, Lieutenant Devon Jones, was picked up in a daring rescue.

  Jones’s F-14, call sign Slate 46, was flying over western Iraq looking for Iraqi fighters to shoot down, when an Iraqi SAM slammed into the jet and forced him to eject. Jones came down in the desert, which proved to be blessedly empty of Iraqis. He immediately took out his survival knife and hacked a hole in the hard ground big enough to crouch in. Then he hunkered down on top of his parachute and pulled a scraggly bush over his head. Since he knew the shoot-down had been reported to the AWACS, all he had to do was wait for rescue or capture, whichever came first.

  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. T
he 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).